So far, virtue was with the Greeks what it must inevitably be with all men at first, chiefly self-regarding, a refined form of prudence. Moreover, other-regarding virtues gave less scope for reflection, being originally comprehended under obedience to the law. But there were two circumstances which could not long escape their notice; first, that fraud and violence are often, at least apparently, profitable to those who perpetrate them, a fact bitterly remarked by Hesiod;50 and secondly, that society cannot hold together without justice. It was long before Governments grew up willing and able to protect their subjects from mutual aggressions, nor does positive law create morality, but implies it, and could not be worked without it. Nor could international obligations be enforced by a superior tribunal; hence they have remained down to the present day a fertile theme for ethical discussion. It is at this point that morality forms a junction with religion, the history of which is highly interesting, but which can here be only briefly traced. The Olympian divinities, as placed before us by Homer, are anything but moral. Their conduct towards each other is that of a dissolute nobility; towards men it is that of unscrupulous partisans and patrons. A loyal adherence to friends and gratitude for sacrificial offerings are their most respectable characteristics, raising them already a little above the nature-powers whence they were derived. Now, mark how they first become moralised. It is by being made witnesses to an oath. Any one who is called in to testify to a promise feels aggrieved if it is broken, looking on the breach as an insult to his own dignity. As the Third Commandment well puts it, his name has been taken in vain. Thus it happened that the same gods who left every other crime unpunished, visited perjury with severe and speedy retribution, continued even after the offender’s death.51 Respect for a contract is the primary form of moral obligation, and still seems to possess a peculiar hold over uneducated minds. We see every day how many persons will abstain from actions which they know to be immoral because they have given their word to that effect, not because the actions themselves are wrong. And for that reason law courts would be more willing to enforce contracts than to redress injuries. If, then, one person inflicted damage on another, he might afterwards, in order to escape retaliation from the injured party, or from his family, engage to give satisfaction, and the court would compel him to redeem his promise.52 Thus contract, by procuring redress for every species of wrong, would gradually extend its own obligatory character to abstinence from injury in general, and the divine sanctions primarily invoked on behalf of oaths would be extended, with them, over the whole domain of moral conduct.
Nor was this all. Laws and justice once established would require to have their origin accounted for, and, according to the usual genealogical method of the early Greeks, would be described as children of the gods, who would thus be interested in their welfare, and would avenge their violation—a stage of reflection already reached in the Works and Days of Hesiod.
Again, when oracles like that at Delphi had obtained wide-spread renown and authority, they would be consulted, not only on ceremonial questions and matters of policy, but also on debateable points of morality. The divine responses, being unbiassed by personal interest, would necessarily be given in accordance with received rules of rectitude, and would be backed by all the terrors of a supernatural sanction. It might even be dangerous to assume that the god could possibly give his support to wrong-doing. A story told by Herodotus proves that such actually was the case.E There lived once at Sparta a certain man named Glaucus, who had acquired so great a reputation for probity that, during the troublous times of the Persian conquest, a wealthy Milesian thought it advisable to deposit a large sum of money with him for safe keeping. After a considerable time the money was claimed by his children, but the honesty of Glaucus was not proof against temptation. He pretended to have forgotten the whole affair, and required a delay of three months before making up his mind with regard to the validity of their demand. During that interval he consulted the Delphic oracle to know whether he might possess himself of the money by a false oath. The answer was that it would be for his immediate advantage to do so; all must die, the faithful and the perjured alike; but Horcus (oath) had a nameless son swift to pursue without feet, strong to grasp without hands, who would destroy the whole race of the sinner. Glaucus craved forgiveness, but was informed that to tempt the god was equivalent to committing the crime. He went home and restored the deposit, but his whole family perished utterly from the land before three generations had passed by.
Yet another step remained to take. Punishment must be transferred from a man’s innocent children to the man himself in a future life. But the Olympian theology was, originally at least, powerless to effect this revolution. Its gods, being personifications of celestial phenomena, had nothing to do with the dark underworld whither men descended after death. There existed, however, side by side with the brilliant religion of courts and camps which Greek poetry has made so familiar to us, another religion more popular with simple country-folk,53 to whom war meant ruin, courts of justice a means invented by kings for exacting bribes, sea-voyages a senseless imprudence, chariot-racing a sinful waste of money, and beautiful women drones in the human hive, demons of extravagance invented by Zeus for the purpose of venting his spite against mankind. What interest could these poor people take in the resplendent guardians of their hereditary oppressors, in Hêrê and Athênê, Apollo and Poseidôn, Artemis and Aphroditê? But they had other gods peculiar to themselves, whose worship was wrapped in mystery, partly that its objects need not be lured away by the attraction of richer offerings elsewhere, partly because the activity of these Chthonian deities, as they were called, was naturally associated with darkness and secresy. Presiding over birth and death, over seed-time and harvest and vintage, they personified the frost-bound sleep of vegetation in winter and its return from a dark underworld in spring. Out of their worship grew stories which told how Persephonê, the fair daughter of Dêmêtêr, or Mother Earth, was carried away by Pluto to reign with him over the shades below, but after long searching was restored to her mother for eight months in every year; and how Dionysus, the wine-god, was twice born, first from the earth burned up and fainting under the intolerable fire of a summer sky, respectively personified as Semelê and her lover Zeus, then from the protecting mist wrapped round him by his divine father, of whom it formed a part. Dionysus, too, was subject to alternations of depression and triumph, from the recital of which Attic drama was developed, and gained a footing in the infernal regions, whither we accompany him in the Frogs of Aristophanes. Another country god was Hermês, who seems to have been associated with planting and possession as well as with the demarcation and exchange of property, and who was also a conductor of souls to Hades. Finally, there were the Erinyes, children of night and dwellers in subterranean darkness; they could breed pestilence and discord, but could also avert them; they could blast the produce of the soil or increase its luxuriance and fertility; when blood was spilt on the ground, they made it blossom up again in a harvest of retributive hatred; they pursued the guilty during life, and did not relax their grasp after death; all law, whether physical or moral, was under their protection; the same Erinyes who, in the Odyssey, avenge on Oedipus the suicide of his mother, in the Iliad will not allow the miraculous speaking of a horse to continue; and we have seen in the last chapter how, according to Heracleitus, it is they who also prevent the sun from transgressing his appointed limits.54 Dêmêtêr and Persephonê, too, seem to have been law-giving goddesses, as their great festival, celebrated by women alone, was called the Thesmophoria, while eternal happiness was promised to those who had been initiated into their mysteries at Eleusis; and we also find that moral maxims were graven on the marble busts of Hermês placed along every thoroughfare in Athens. We can thus understand why the mutilation of these Hermae caused such rage and terror, accompanied, as it was rumoured to be, by a profanation of the Eleusinian mysteries; for any attack on the deities in question would seem to prefigure an attack on the settled order of things, the popular rights which they both symbolised and protected.
Here, then, we find, chiefly among the rustic population, a religion intimately associated with morality, and including the doctrine of retribution after death. But this simple faith, though well adapted to the few wants of its original votaries, could not be raised to the utmost expansion and purity of which it was susceptible without being brought