HOMERIC GODS

It is an idle question what Greek religion would have become if it had been compelled to develop solely out of what we have hitherto considered, without the upheavals it underwent when new gods, and the old in a new conception, crossed over from Asia into the motherland. This occurred first through the rhapsodes, who disseminated the Ionic epic. Through it the Homeric gods attained general recognition, and this contributed in a most essential way to making a politically fragmented and spatially far-scattered nation conscious of its spiritual unity.¹ Our next task, therefore, is to come to know the gods of Homer. Only now is the time; in antiquity, and long thereafter, the understanding of religion was obstructed by beginning with Homer, because literature starts with him. But he belongs, after all, to Asia. Hence in him we find not only gods of whom the emigrants had known nothing, but even the long-familiar figures appear in an entirely different guise, and the conception of the whole divine world is transformed. The epic treats stories handed down from of old; in much it therefore archaizes and tells us little about outward life as it was in Homer’s own time. But inwardly, in their feeling and thinking, in religion and ethics, the poets reveal themselves, involuntarily, entirely as men of their age; and in the fact that they do so without scruple, in a manner that later provoked strong offence, they are already true Ionians.

How the transformation of the divine world was accomplished step by step will always remain unknown to us; yet it suffices that we make clear to ourselves what the emigration into a new land entailed. The gods had in large part been bound to the soil upon which they lived and acted with men; because they were there, they were worshipped. On the new soil there were new gods, and they demanded worship. So long as the gods operated merely in the elements, this brought about no other attitude of belief: there were only other nymphs in forest and spring, other rivers. But there had been great gods who had hitherto held men together in family and tribe. Now the tribes were scattered, and often the families too will have been scattered; thereby the individual became as rootless as a ἀτίμητος μετανάστης. The moral bonds in which society had held him from birth were torn asunder; the blessing of the ancestors was lacking; and he who felt himself abandoned by them could no longer trust the gods. Even if an Earth-Mother dwelt here too in the depths of the soil, reason might say that she must be the same as at home, yet for feeling she was not. When, then, a new city arose, it had once more to acquire divine protectors, had also to acquire new clans and lineages, and a founder as well, who in time received the dignity of a primeval ancestor. They again celebrated Apaturia, possessed phylai and phratries; but what thus came into being never overcame the fact that it was something made, and the founders of cities were not seldom foreigners, at best turned into Hellenes by reinterpretation, as Poikes of Teos, who was made into an Ἄποιχος. Νείλεως of Miletus, too, can only have been a Carian, whose transformation into Neleus drew the Pylians to Miletus, over which Colophon nonetheless had older rights. But the equation was early accomplished, at a time when Neleus was still far more lord of the depths of the earth than the father of Nestor, corresponding to Anax, in whom one saw the oldest lord of the soil, whereby the barbarians were eliminated.²

Since the Iliad recounts the deeds of ancient heroes, of a campaign into a foreign land, and since it was intended for recitation before the ruling class, we find scarcely anything of urban or rural life, and of women’s life nothing at all. Hence Demeter hardly appears, neither as bestower of the fruits of the field nor as a γυναιχεία θεός. Hera does not show herself as guardian of marriage. Nymphs are mentioned only in passing³; of the male denizens of the woods only the ‘beasts’, the Centaurs, and even these only as opponents of the Lapiths in the motherland. A Hestia the Achaeans in the ship-camp cannot have. Even Hermes appears only once in the role of διάχτορος. In the Odyssey he, together with the Nymphs, receives worship as soon as it descends to the rural folk. This must be kept in view, lest one suppose that these ancient gods had altogether vanished; one should rather take to heart that the strata of society and the estates, according to their mode of life and its needs, have different gods and also stand in a different relation to those generally worshipped, and thus think different things under the same name. For a long time the settlers were not in a position to erect stately sanctuaries for their gods. Yet no single old-Hellenic god in the cities has an ancient cult that achieved lasting renown, except Hera of Samos, and she took the place of a Carian goddess.⁴ Poseidon Helikonios was generally worshipped, but the federal sanctuary that he received after the destruction of Melia was not imposing, and the god himself soon lost his former importance. Athena πολιάς may have been worshipped on all citadels: as a city-goddess she became such nowhere except in the newly founded little Priene. The long-established gods were too powerful. Something like the Artemis of Ephesus, the Apollo of Claros and of Didyma had never existed at home, for behind the god there stood a politically significant priesthood. The gods demanded worship even when at first they stood on the side of the enemies. As these submitted and gradually became Hellenised, the gods became protectors of the present lords of the land and themselves also became Hellenised to a greater or lesser degree. But the poet of the Theomachy was still fully conscious of the opposition, and therefore introduces on the Trojan side only gods who confront the Achaean ones as foreigners: Apollo, Artemis, Leto, Ares, Aphrodite; Hephaestus⁵ had previously been employed by Hera against the river-god, and is therefore absent here, although he has a priest in Ilion, Ε 10. The victory, of course, lies with the Achaean gods. It is characteristic of the inadequacy of modern understanding that Zenodotus, with his athetesis springing from religious scruple, has found much credence, although the poet had prepared the battle of the gods already in the proem of Υ. We find here almost all the Olympians later generally recognised. Dionysus, who never became wholly at home among these, had to be absent, for the Iliad knows him only on Thracian soil; he was therefore not recognised, although he had certainly already penetrated at least to the Lydians, whose neighbours he thus was known to be. Hephaestus, whom the Ionians knew from the islands, attained through Homer only late and very sporadically to a cult in the motherland, and in spite of his craftsmanship is not taken quite seriously in the epic. Aphrodite had come into the motherland directly from Cyprus and Cythera, thus not first encountered in Asia, where, however, the connection with Cyprus continued. Homer treats her throughout without reverence; the Ε, which makes her as an Olympian a daughter of Zeus,⁶ still takes pleasure in her son Aeneas and she herself being wounded by Diomedes. Aeneas, however, is here and elsewhere, next to Hector, the strongest warrior, and the Υ promises him and his lineage dominion. Evidently Aeneadae ruled in the Troad,⁷ independently, yet already accessible to Hellenic poetry, as they remained when the Hymn to Aphrodite glorified the begetting of Aeneas. In him Aphrodite has assumed much of the Asiatic goddess who loves Attis, of whom Homer still knows nothing.

In vain have the etymologists laboured to interpret the name Ares; and even if an explanation from Indo-European were to succeed, he would still belong to no Greek, but would remain the Thracian, as Sophocles calls him and as many have already recognised in him. We have already seen that he displaced the Carian Enyalios, who in the Iliad is identified with him. The μιαιφόνος ἀλλοπρόσαλλος Ἄρης is in truth nothing other than the ξυνὸς Ἐνυάλιος, the ἀνδρειφόντης. But the Thracian was so powerful that the Ionians elevated him to be a son of Zeus. The violence of the immigrating Thracian tribes was first experienced by the Aeolians in Asia, where Ares even possessed an oracle (Herodotus VII 76), and then by the Ionians, especially when they attempted to settle on the Thracian islands and on the coast of the Black Gulf. The Aeolians adopted the foreign name as “Ἄρευς”, the Ionians as “Ἄρης”; hence in the epic the two declensions are intermixed, and the quantity of the α fluctuates. Just as Hephaestus is at times used simply for fire (Β 426), so Ares frequently stands for war and slaughter; he can even be lodged in a hurled spear (Ν 444). Later this metonymy is extended still further.⁸ Once the Homeric god had gained general recognition, he could appear in oath-formulae, especially in treaties; but no city has taken him as its special protector.⁹ Homer has the names Ἀρηίθοος and Ἀρηίλυχος; since he does not yet know theophoric names, ἄρης is war, more precisely the Aeolian ἄρευς, ἄρηος. Only in later times does a name Ἄρειος appear.¹⁰ Not the defence of one’s own land, but the assault of the enemy comes from Ares. Thracians, Phlegyans, above all Amazons, are his peoples. The evil kings Oinomaos and the Thracian Diomedes are his sons; the dragon too whom Cadmus must slay springs from him, because from its teeth warriors arise who murder one another. Heracles complains in the Alcestis 502 how hard it is for him to cope with the sons of Ares.¹¹ The hill of Ares threatens the citadel of Athens; hence it is named after Ares, whose daughters, the Amazons, encamped there. In the legend there will already be preserved a memory of ancient conflicts. Later one thinks only of the place of the homicide court that is held before Ares, and then the god must receive his temple. Thus the nature of the god presents no difficulty. Only his association with Aphrodite still requires a word. The Iliad knows nothing of it, and the tale of Demodocus merely continues to play with the invention of a hymn to Hephaestus, which years ago I was able to reconstruct in substance. In it Hephaestus received Aphrodite as wife, evidently in the same sense in which in Σ he has Charis, as representative of the charm and grace of his works. Ares then appeared, as a strapping warrior, called to make the cripple a cuckold. It is possible that already then Ares and Aphrodite were united as parents of Harmonia, whom Cadmus took to wife. With this marriage, for the Thebans, human civilisation began; for Κάδμος (pronounced Κάσμος, as the Athenian vase-painters also write; more exactly Κάζμος) was for them, rightly or wrongly, χόσμος, and ἁρμονία arose through the union of martial spirit with the aphrodisiac, which the πάνδημος bestows. For where the stern is joined with the tender, where the strong and the gentle are paired, there is a good harmony. That is pretty and profound, but it is already symbolic, poetry; religion has nothing to do with it. This holds of the association of the two gods in general, on the Chest of Cypselus just as on the Pompeian paintings or in Aeschylus Supplices 663. The double temple of the two before the gate of Argos¹² (Pausanias II 25,1, founded by Polyneices, because he brought with him the necklace of Harmonia) is rightly referred to the heroic deed of Telesilla, in which the Ἄρης γυναιχῶν revealed itself (Ps.-Lucian Ἔρωτες 30). Ares among the great gods is utterly incomprehensible if one fails to recognise the Thracian in him. The Greeks of Asia had experienced his strength upon themselves; therefore he was for them, like Apollo, a son of Zeus. But to the poet of Ε it was repugnant that he had to introduce him on Olympus; he therefore treats him with mockery, lets the clumsy giant be struck down by Athena, and Zeus confesses that he is intolerable to him. Indeed, the Ares of Ε cannot be a Hellenic god, and when he drinks blood, Χ 267, he is a barbarian.

Apollo, Artemis, and Leto are already united as a triad at Ε 447; they tend the wounded Aeneas in the temple which Apollo has in Ilion. This triad is later also generally recognised, in Delos and Delphi as well; yet it has no religious significance. Lord of both places is Apollo, and Artemis has beside him her own temple and cult. Thus it is everywhere. Leto everywhere and always recedes entirely into the background; in Hellas she has only quite isolated cults,¹³ but in Crete a city is named after her, and in Lycia she bore the twins,¹⁴ and there too she has a great sanctuary, Λητῶιον. Of her later worship in the interior of Asia Minor I pass over, since I cannot assess the value of the testimonies; it will stand in the same relation as the cult of Apollo. The equation of her name with the Lycian lada, “woman”, can scarcely be rejected. Since in Delos one speaks only of the birth of Apollo,¹⁵ in Ephesus only of that of Artemis,¹⁶ the birth of the twins and thus the triad must inevitably stem from Lycia, though it may also have been taken up into more northerly Apollo cults from which the Greeks adopted it. That the name Artimis is Lydian is now established. The Greeks preserved the i only in originally Lydian names such as Ἀρτίμμας; otherwise they put ε or α in its place—α, in order to find in the name “the Slaughterer”. In the same way they say Ἀπόλλων Ἀπέλλων, on Cyprus Ἀπείλων, in Thessaly Ἄπλουν, just as the Etruscans aplu.¹⁷ Here, however, we do not know the genuine form, and every attempt at interpretation is hopeless; those attempted from Greek in earlier or in modern times are equally senseless. The Lycians called the god differently, and presumably so did the Lydian Artemis. It is self-evident that the god whom the Greeks call Apollo, because they believed they encountered the same one among the various peoples from the Troad to Lycia, was not everywhere invoked under the same name; what they heard as Apollo may perhaps one day emerge again, but at present this is impossible. His cult-places in the Troad, besides Ilion, are enumerated in Α; Thymbra appeared in other epics. In Mysia lies Gryneion, mentioned only later by chance; then the most famous Claros and Didyma; around that of Cnidus gathers the Dorian Hexapolis; on Cos the cypress-grove belongs to him, into which Asclepius only late pressed his way, Halasarna and Isthmos. In most Ionian cities and on the islands, too, he has ancient and powerful cult. It cannot be otherwise than that the various peoples also had other names, whether they equated their own gods with Apollo, or named the god after a place, or euphemistically avoided the proper name. Φοῖβος Ἀπόλλων can be conceived in no other way than Ἄρτεμις Ὀρθία, Ἄρης Ἐνυάλιος, Παλλὰς Ἀθήνη.¹⁸ The same holds for Ἕχατος, which belongs with Ἑχάτη, partly taken over by the Greeks, partly, in order to interpret it, expanded to ἑχατήβολος, then to ἑχήβολος—forms that cannot be explained from Greek. Of Artemis we have earlier seen that she united under her name many Hellenic goddesses who scarcely differed in essence, and who often, despite the foreign name, remained the old ones. That elsewhere the Lydian brought something of her own nature into her could not fail to happen; yet it was not adopted that she should give women sudden death, as in Homer. The Carian Hecate will have been akin to the Ephesian, and in Hellas is often equated with her. At least it is not possible for me to say anything about the proper nature of the Asiatic goddesses who for us bear the name Artemis (Perge, Icarus), not even about the Lydian of Ephesus. Apollo appears in Homer likewise as a sender of death: together with Artemis he shoots down the children of Niobe—the only occasion on which the siblings act in concert. He also sends the plague¹⁹ and will slay Achilles. In Ilion he has his temple and repeatedly intervenes in the fighting on behalf of the Trojans. Yet he stands nearest to Zeus together with Athena, and the poets always treat him with the highest reverence. In this lies sufficiently the fact that the Hellenic immigrants learned to venerate a god who was at first hostile, whom they found everywhere. To discover the root of belief in this god is impossible, for the Greeks encountered him as a finished divine person, who was essentially bound neither to any elemental force of nature nor to any particular sphere of human life. He is too distinctive and too great to fit properly into the circle of the Olympians; in the faith of the Hellenes he has continued to grow ever greater, so that they often called him simply ὁ θεός, and already their earliest theologians saw in him the sun, because he was πάντων θεῶν πρόμος like it.

They opened their hearts to the god of Claros and Didyma because he was there and first taught them to feel his power. In Delos they came to know his birthplace—if this belief did not rather arise from the fact that the cult spread from here to the Cyclades, to the Dorian islands, and to the motherland. Delia, filial sanctuaries of which there were so many, had already arisen when the tiny island was still Carian²⁰; it gained significance only through its god, and that the service there was Carian is beyond doubt, for, as in Didyma, alien formulas that had become unintelligible were preserved in the ritual songs²¹; the poet was the Lycian Olen; the altar of horns, too, was not Greek.²² That the god passed from Delos to the motherland, and precisely also to Delphi, has always stood firm, as has the fact that he there took the place of Ge and of Poseidon, who in the χρηστήριον of Apollo always retained his altar. In Thebes the Ismenion lies before the city; in Athens the Delion and the later Pythion—before whose construction the god had only a cave outside the fortifications of the citadel. In Gortyn the highly archaic temple is called Pythion; its Apollo is therefore introduced from there; in Argos the god is Πυθαεύς. In Arcadia there is no Apollo cult that can lay claim to great antiquity.²³ Where in Hellas is there at all an Apollo sanctuary that can be shown to be independent of Delos or Delphi? Whoever derives Apollo from the Greeks of the motherland sets himself against the totality of the facts and against the ancient tradition, precisely that of Delphi. Otfried Müller did this, and given the knowledge and views of his time he could declare him to be the Dorian god. Had he returned from his journey, he would, as his letters show, have overcome the one-sidedness of his Dorians. It is merely a facetious inversion when Ed. Meyer declares the god to be at once Ionic and Greek. Priest Chryses and the prophet Branchos will have learned to know him among Aeolians and Ionians, and Homer, in poetic play, made him the enemy of the Achaeans. In truth the sanctification of the number seven in the service of the Ἑβδομαγέτηςα ought alone to suffice as proof that he cannot be a Hellene, cannot be Indo-European.

Apollo shows himself as an intruder also in that he displaces from his possession an older god, who had to yield to the noble Olympian brother already because he belonged to the earth. In our Hymn to Hermes there lies a well-devised tale which comes to this, that Hermes hands over the lyre to Apollo and in return receives care of the herds. In this lies that Apollo does not remain the νόμιος, as he is sometimes called and must therefore once have been regarded, but did not prevail; it no longer suited him as he had become in Delphi, where indeed one knew how to recount the wonders he had wrought as shepherd of Admetus, yet only when he had been banished from Olympus. On the other hand, Hermes has entirely lost music to Apollo, so that his invention of the lyre alone informs us that it originally belonged to him. The invention of the syrinx, which a later portion of the hymn ascribes to him, is a poor substitute. He plays it on nymph-reliefs, for he remained their chorus-leader, and yet Apollo too is Νυμφηγέτης in the Theogony 347, on the Thasian relief, on Samos (Bull. Corr. Hell. IV 335). Apollo ἀγυιεύς competes with Hermes before the doorway, and in Thessaly he has even become χερδοῖος (IG. IX 2, 521 and elsewhere). To complete the demonstration that Apollo migrated into Europe, a connoisseur of inner Asia Minor could show from the inscriptions that he was not merely one of the most worshipped gods in the Hellenised coastal regions, but deep into the peninsula itself. I cannot do this; yet it will suffice that Sir W. Ramsay has expressed himself emphatically, Journ. Hell. Stud. 1928, 47.

These foreign gods have all found admission into the circle of the Olympians, with the exception of Leto, who has significance only through her children. The circle was very early in Ionia gathered together and delimited in the “Twelve Gods”. Place and time are determined by the fact that Hephaestus is included—of whom elsewhere no one could have thought—while Dionysus is still absent. That Hestia and Demeter lay only beyond the horizon of the warriors of the Iliad, while the people remained faithful to them, is shown by their inclusion. The cult of this association of the great gods is above all attested in the Ionian cities and will have spread from there; so too the designation of their sanctuary as Δωδεχάθεον, for example on Cos and Delos, which served as a model for the Hellenistic Πάνθειον.²⁴ From Athens everyone knows the altar on the market founded by Peisistratus, which received right of asylum and therefore deserved the name ἐλέου βωμός, from which only late did a cult of Ἔλεος arise; intelligible, but also significant, that the people swore by the Twelve.²⁵ Such worship is sparse in Hellas itself²⁶; one could also alter somewhat the names gathered into the Twelve. But when the farmers’ calendar of Eudoxus had made the Twelve into gods of the months—a fact presupposed by Plato in the myth of the Phaedrus and in the Laws 828—the Twelve came to Italy, and Ennius (Ann. I 37) compressed their Latin names into two familiar hexameters.

The standing of these great gods, as they appear in the Iliad, is very unequal. Beside Zeus Hera steps forth with power, often resisting him; she can compel Helios to plunge swiftly into Oceanus. Poseidon too comes into opposition with Zeus when he aids the Achaeans, but must yield to the elder brother. Closest to Zeus stand Apollo and Athena, and as such Agamemnon invokes them beside Zeus (Δ 288), as indeed they are also most highly honoured by men. Apollo, it is true, stands wholly on the Trojan side; Athena, in compensation, is helper of the Achaeans and of their individual heroes. That she dwells in their citadels we infer from the fact that she herself has a temple even in Ilion. As ἐργάνη she has no occasion to appear. It is these three old-Hellenic gods who once rose in revolt against the sovereignty of Zeus (Α 400). Athena was evidently the goddess in whom the warrior most trusted; yet Apollo was no less mighty, at that time still more feared than loved. Diomedes, who attacks Ares and Aphrodite, at once yields before him. Over them all stands Zeus; he commands like a housefather over his family, and on distant Olympus—whose location in the long no longer Hellenic Pieria has become somewhat mythical—stands his hall, in which the family gathers for the meal. With this belief the conception of the divine world is transformed from the ground up. In Homer we find the new order complete; nowhere is any instruction about it given—it was thus as self-evident to poets and hearers as the existence of the gods themselves. We therefore do not lose sight of how belief was transformed under the pressure of new impressions and experiences. Without doubt individual leaders—poets rather than prophets—exerted a decisive influence; yet the poets themselves say only what the Muse imparts to them. They give utterance to what others accept because they feel it in the same way, though more dimly; for the new environment, life in the new land, works upon all in the same direction. The gods bound to a particular place had not come with them from the homeland; they had to be summoned from afar to the sacrificial meal. Only slowly did most of them receive sanctuaries here as well; even the Hera of Samos, who had come from the Argolid, the once most powerful and intellectually advanced land, had taken the place of a Carian goddess.²⁷ Athena, the shield-maiden, worshipped by princes and warriors, was therefore indeed mistress of the citadel, but not bound to any particular citadel; thus only among the Ionians did she become πολιοῦχος, now a city-goddess, and remained for the warriors as helpful, as close, as we find her in the Iliad. She and Hera, alongside Poseidon, are the faithful protectors of the Hellenes even against the Asiatic gods now honoured no less highly. Zeus sits upon Ida in Homer often enough, and that there a god was strongly worshipped by the natives admits of no doubt, just as Aeolians too ascended thither²⁸; yet the Hellenic Zeus must still come over from Olympus, which, though by no means his only seat, had been his preferred one because of its far-visible summit. Conversely, the gods settled in Asia had now been adopted and had to be made Hellenic, that is, also transferred to Hellas, inserted into the society of the old gods—or rather into a great society with them; for only the living together of men of the most diverse origins has also brought together the gods whom they now all worshipped. Many of these, with inner agreement, had borne different names; the result was that they now passed under one, which itself could be foreign. The task is solved through the family bond in which Homer’s gods stand: Apollo and Artemis and Ares become children of Zeus, Hephaestus a son of Hera, without a father.²⁹ By this they are all raised to the rank that Athena had occupied, because she was closely bound to Zeus and was already perhaps regarded as his motherless daughter, as she is in Homer.³⁰ Aphrodite too is called in Ε his daughter by Dione, who otherwise has completely vanished; this genealogy, doubtless an invention of the moment, did not maintain itself. To these children of Zeus are added his wife Hera and Hermes, indeed a son of Zeus, but here rather his servant: so low has he now fallen; Iris is a handmaid; Υ mentions Ganymede as cup-bearer. Thus already here the πρόσπολοι of the great gods are not lacking, who later become so numerous. Poseidon must be reckoned among them, yet he does not appear above in Homer, and in Ν has his palace in Aigai. This is significant. Aphrodite indeed goes in Γ back to her Cyprus, and the Charites await her there; but Hera encounters her in Ξ on Olympus. Α shows us at once a banquet of the assembled gods with music and dance. Thus the μάχαρες lead their light life, ῥεῖα ζώοντες, in which at the same time lies that for men it is hard. They all possess a beautiful human body, differing only in degree of beauty; the cripple Hephaestus is laughed at; his own mother would have liked best to dispose of the newborn. Disturbance of divine bliss is wrought only by men, for to them the gods devote wholly personal love and hatred—all of them, even Zeus, who has the power to command all gods, as befits the housefather, πατὴρ ἀνδρῶν τε θεῶν τε; yet the course of nature the will of a god may indeed delay, but cannot prevent. The sun’s course may be hastened or postponed, but night and day still come in their eternal alternation, and Zeus must resign himself to the fact that Hector must one day die. Strife and battle arise even among the gods for the sake of men. The poet has made the gods into immortal men; thereby their bliss too is clouded—they also know the tear. It is indeed poetic invention: the wounding of Aphrodite will not trouble her worshippers, nor the tryst on Ida impair belief in the majesty of Zeus; yet between truth and deception in the words of the Muse there is no fixed boundary—through Homer mythology is not separated from belief in the gods. This was the doom of Hellenic religion; yet Homer cannot be reproached for the fact that the Hellenes, because they yielded to the enchantment of his poetry, also accepted the deception of his Muse as truth. Of what is true he had said enough in his image of human life, of inner life as well; and precisely in his boundless freedom, which also played with the gods, there already breathes the spirit that was to lead the Ionians to science. Nor are the threads lacking that lead to the god of Plato; and he in turn had to banish Homer, because he himself had now become the Homer of the true religion, which in God had found truth together with beauty.

Father and lord of gods and men has Zeus become. The god who made the weather acted most tangibly over all lands and seas. The irresistible thunderbolt he bore in his hands, thus granting victory and defeat. In his name, too, there may from of old have lain so much that he could be ὁ θεός, as afterwards his son Apollo became. Thus his ancient seat in the clouds of Olympus became the palace that housed all his divine children, in whose hall Υ gathers together all the gods of the world. At first it may have been no momentous step when Olympus was equated with heaven, for already in Homer the gods come οὐρανόθεν and are already called at Ε 373 Οὐρανίωνες, which one may perhaps take genealogically, as at Ε 898. Whether the houses of the gods stand upon the highest mountain peak or upon the brazen sphere of heaven makes little difference, and how they descend from there does not concern the poets.³¹ But thereby the lord of heaven becomes the lord of the universe, so far as this is conceived—thus a universal god; and already in Homer he is not a god of the Hellenes like Athena, Poseidon, Hera, but no less well disposed towards the Trojans. The Zeus of Olympia, who admitted only Hellenes to his games, would have become national,³² but he did not determine the general belief, so that the god of the philosophers was in truth already present in Zeus. Nationally the Hellenes suffered from the fact that they recognised the universal god too early. It is familiar to us from childhood that God sits in heaven, because the Jews, the caelum metuentes, preserved the mythical localisation and bequeathed it to the Christians, however much that is Hellenic has also been taken up into the conception of God the Father. It was the great deed of the Jewish prophets that the old earth- and place-bound Yahweh³³ was transferred to heaven and became lord of human destinies. But since they were patriotic speakers, Yahweh remained the national god, and the national gods of the other peoples remained gods alongside him, only they were to be weaker—something that did not prove true in history and thus generated the eschatological myths of the future. Precisely through this limitation Yahweh preserved the nation, whereas the god proclaimed by Jesus truly became Father of all men and therefore could very well unite with the god of the Hellenes, whom already the Homeric Achilles had addressed as Father, and with the Zeus of Cleanthes, although he concealed under his mythical language something altogether different. The gods who now dwell under Zeus in heaven are, to be sure, not mere πρόσπολοι of him, but autonomous powers. Yet the fact that they are removed into the distant height will soon abolish their personal intercourse with men.

Zeus in heaven, Zeus as world-god—this signifies a rupture with the primordial Hellenic conception. There, the gods too were on earth, and precisely those already felt not merely as local but as universal dwelt in the earth, from which all life wells and springs: the Earth-Mother and her consort. Now Ge appears only in oath-formulae; Demeter as a person not at all in the Iliad; below lies the realm of Aïs, to which the dead fall,³⁴ and deeper still Tartarus for gods who cannot die but are finished. The Hellenes, who were compelled to part from their native soil, lost belief in the gods who ruled from its depths; even among those who remained behind, the Homeric divine world displaced it; only as the realm of the dead will the underworld become more important than before.

Poseidon, however, is stripped of his ancient dignity, of his very essence. His name has long ceased to be understood. Whereas in the motherland he had been almost everywhere γενέθλιος, πατήρ, or however else one designated his supreme rank, Zeus is now πατὴρ ἀνδρῶν τε θεῶν τε and becomes, for example in Chios and Lindos, also in Ephesus,³⁵ πατρῶιος, in the motherland only in isolated cases.³⁶ Poseidon had crossed over still in his old dignity, worshipped in all Ionian cities,³⁷ even chosen as protector of the Ionian League, and there too he was still called “the Helikonian,” who could not be a sea-god. When he came to be regarded as such alone, one sought Helice in the name.³⁸ The Homeric Hymn 22 connects Helicon with the Aigai of Ν.³⁹ At first it was only an extension of his activity when the ἐννοσίγαιος and ἀσφάλειος stirred and smoothed the waves; the sea had now become more important than the land for the inhabitants of islands and coasts, the ship more important than the horse. Only his restriction to the sea, as Homer expresses it, has depressed the all-embracing god. As he appears in Homer and through him later in poetry, he does nothing but raise storms, on the homeward voyage from Ilion, against Odysseus.⁴⁰ When a month is assigned to him, it falls in high winter. The consort he now receives in place of Dê, the Oceanid Amphitrite, smooths the waves (Hesiod, Theog. 254). Deliverance from peril at sea is effected by other gods. There are no longer individual deeds of his, save the begetting of sons,⁴¹ and even these for the most part belong to older legend. Noble cults of the new Poseidon do indeed arise at places of sea-trade, above all at the Isthmus, where he displaces older possessors. New foundations beyond the sea are named after him: Poseidonia, an Achaean; Poteidaia, a Corinthian; Potidaion on Carpathus, a Rhodian colonial city. Promontories are gladly named after him, where he then also receives an altar, as at Didyma on Cape Monodendri; but for cult the θαλάττιος Ποσειδῶν (Aristophanes Plutus 396) never equalled the old γαιάοχος γενέθλιος, whose ancient worship endured, and the ἵππιος, who had arisen from the ἵππος, maintained himself even more vividly, even if he scarcely meant anything any longer for religion. He did not derive from the sea-god, although moderns have marshalled desperate artifices in order to find waves in the horses. One would not credit this late Poseidon with being a brother—according to Hesiod even an elder brother—of Zeus, and with contending with him as suitor of Thetis. In ΝΞΟ this emerges most clearly: it is hard for him to follow the admonition of Iris, who brings home to him the prerogative of Zeus, who here is the first-born, and his overpowering might. At that time he was still a great god, before whom the Apollo of the Theomachy yields; then he could be nothing less than brother of Zeus. But the poet of the Διὸς ἀπάτη has subordinated him as such under Zeus and, in the division of the three realms of the world, has introduced Hades as a third brother. Yet he is shadowy, like the dead who come into his realm in Homer—no acting person at all; he becomes one only as ravisher of Persephone, who then actually exercises dominion below. How could such a figure be set on a level with the other two? Above all because the underworld demanded a lord; but had not the consort of Earth dwelt below with her—did he not even later still send the earthquake, he who from Taenarum yet served the Spartans?⁴² Homer, Ε 397, tells that Heracles wounded Hades ἐν Πύλωι ἐν νεχύεσσιν; there Πύλος is still the entrance to the realm of the dead, placed in the West, whence the Pylians originate. Pylos is in fact no city-name at all; only later was it arbitrarily localised here or there. In this same Pylos Heracles, as the Iliad too knows (Λ 690), slew the brothers of Nestor, and in later accounts Neleus as well. These things have been combined; in truth they are doublets. Heroes have taken the place of gods; but Neleus is unmistakably the pitiless one, and the Νηλήιαι ἵπποι with which Nestor drives (Α 597) are those of the χλυτόπωλος. The chief opponent of Heracles, Periclymenus, is a son of Poseidon; his father too fought against Heracles (Pindar Ol. 9.30) and bestowed on him the gift of transforming himself into all manner of beings (Hesiod fr. 14). Is it not transparent that Poseidon is lord of the underworld, though not lord of the dead? He can act; Hades in truth cannot. Yet Hades was drawn in when in the depths of the earth only the realm of the dead was still believed. For Poseidon it is significant that he possesses the magic power of granting metamorphosis; he did so also for Mestra in the comic tale of Erysichthon.⁴³ This side of his being still lives on in the fact that the Athenians cried Πόσειδον! when something surprising or incredible was told them—very frequently in Aristophanes alongside the strong asseveration νὴ τὸν Ποσειδῶ. That must go back very far. If we look at the story of Neleus, we recognise through its many transformations that Hades, and thus also Neleus, now a son of Poseidon, are transformations of the lord of the depths of the earth, who was originally conceived as the consort of Earth.

Thus the poet of the Διὸς ἀπάτη sought in the distribution of the three realms to balance the claims of Zeus and Poseidon and added Hades to them, without Hades being a living, worshipped god. This is, so to speak, theological construction. The same poet, however, also reports incidentally of Cronus and the Titans and their overthrow.⁴⁴ There must have lain before him a poem which told how Zeus, the son of Kronos, wrested sovereignty from his father and from an older race of gods, and how he divided the world among his brothers.⁴⁵ This was further elaborated, for Kronos had a wife, Rhea, and himself doubtless sprang from Uranos. How the poet arrived at these names has hitherto eluded our knowledge. We can only establish what is of the utmost importance: there existed a theogony and cosmogony, and it lay before Homer and Hesiod in some form. Not everything had been devised by this poet himself, for Zeus is everywhere in the Iliad the son of Kronos, and Kronos is called ἀγχυλομήτης, thus had a definite character. Hence in Ionia the step was taken very early to arrange the gods in a genealogical stemma, and thought was directed also to the origin of the world and of the gods. This seems to us a necessary part of Greek mythology, whose modern treatment begins with Boccaccio’s Genealogia deorum; and it does indeed belong to mythology. Yet precisely for that reason it is of fundamental importance for the understanding of religion to recognise that it is only mythology, alien to the original faith. For the union of Poseidon and Demeter is at most a beginning in this direction, and with Athena as daughter of Zeus it stands on its own peculiar footing. One need not look to Indians and Germans; the Italic peoples suffice to show that gods can exist alongside one another without contracting marriages and begetting divine children—always invented for the sake of the children—also without fighting one another. Thus we found it among the proto-Hellenes. The Ionian thinkers and poets arrived at these constructions when the foreign gods were taken in—mighty gods, yet they were not to exalt themselves above the native ones. Thus they entered into family relations with these and under the sovereignty of Zeus, who thereby became the highest god. Poseidon, who had been adopted as the foremost god of the sea, had to be restricted. These, too, were religious transformations. Now the thought arose: how did Zeus attain his lordship, which he had not always possessed? In Α we still hear the vanished tale that Hera, Poseidon, and Athena would not acquiesce—precisely the foremost Hellenic gods. That offended the religious feeling of a more deeply thinking poet: the opponents had to be those who had held dominion before Zeus, and thus Kronos and his following, the Titans, came into being. It was unavoidable that Kronos should then become father not only of Zeus but also of the other greatest gods who could not be made children of Zeus—thus also father of Hera. In this way the marriage with Zeus, already arisen in the motherland, became a sibling-marriage, and Hesiod posited the derivation—offensive in itself and therefore not penetrating general consciousness—of the goddesses Themis and Mnemosyne from Uranos, of Hestia and Demeter from Kronos. Whence the genealogy of Kronos and of the Titans cast by Zeus into Tartarus was taken unfortunately remains indeterminable; and since the names Kronos and Rhea are opaque, fresh invention is not credible. But that gods should have been thus eliminated who were known to the poet as active powers is absurd: so long as they did anything, they were not removed from the world. Least of all is it to be supposed that they had existed in the motherland; this belief rests on an overestimation of Olympia, which by virtue of its very location could not, before the emigration, have exercised any religiously determining influence; it never possessed such.

In the Διὸς ἀπάτη Hera declares that she wishes to visit Ὠχεανόν τε θεῶν γένεσιν χαὶ μητέρα Τηθύν. Thus the gods do not spring from earth and sky, but from water; the “mother” is added merely because a mother had to be there—of itself she is entirely indifferent. Both names are not Greek: to the former belongs ὠγύγιος, likewise the island Ὤγυλος and the ὠγήν of Pherecydes. ὠχεανός is always treated as a river; whether here he already encircles the disk of the earth may be left open, but the inner sea too will have belonged to him for those who devised this cosmogony— islanders, to whom this primordial power lay nearer than the earth. In the poem that told of Kronos, Okeanos as primeval father of the gods is offensive, for the Titans can hardly be descended from him; thus the poet has probably drawn upon the foreign genealogy, in which he himself did not believe, for Hera’s speech of deception, without noticing or fearing the contradiction. It found no acceptance; with the Syrian Pherecydes Ogen played a role, otherwise Okeanos became merely father of rivers and springs, as we have already seen in Hesiod.

Genealogical–cosmogonic poetry is therefore ancient, even pre-Homeric. Hesiod came to know it in some form, and his Theogony has consigned all earlier attempts to oblivion. His poem became canonical like Homer, yet, despite its adoption of epic form, it is a work of quite another kind. Here an individual man speaks in his own name. The poet of the Διὸς ἀπάτη had indeed been individual enough, but he did not wish to be so; whereas Hesiod in his proem not only recounts how the Muses bestowed consecration upon him, but also how in heaven they sing of the first race of gods and of the second, those about Zeus. He was no longer a shepherd, but a rhapsode; only if he was already held in esteem could he permit himself to treat this material with such boldness. His calling, however, led him chiefly into the houses of the rich and powerful, who styled themselves kings. Hence in the proem stands a glorification of the righteous king, which now seems inexplicable to many beside the attack on the δωροφάγοι βασιλῆες in the Works and Days. By then his personal position as a great poet was secure. It will be difficult for us—indeed in part impossible—to draw a sharp boundary between what in the Theogony belongs to him personally, since we possess it in a fairly early reworking. Yet what he intended and how he set about it are unmistakable. He was born a Boeotian, it is true, but his father came from Aeolian Cyme and thus possessed knowledge of epic mythology, and doubtless imparted something of the epic also to his son, who was thereby seized by the impulse to become himself a poet, that is, a rhapsode. The rhapsode lives essentially from the Homeric epic; thus Hesiod introduces his countrymen to the Homeric world of gods. No longer Poseidon but Zeus sits upon Helicon, and the grounding of his sovereignty is the goal toward which he strives. The epic showpiece is the struggle with the Titans, which Zeus, supported only by uncouth powers of the primal world—whom he then banishes from the earth of men—decides by his own strength.⁴⁶ The gods who now, under him, rule the world of men, he has begotten with various goddesses. Not all could be fitted in thus; but the poet has taken care to provide them with a place in the older genealogies, especially since he did not neglect to give due consideration also to deities who were acknowledged in his own surroundings but occur in Homer not at all or inadequately (the Horai, for example, and the Charites). How the gods under Zeus now govern nature and mankind he did not wish to depict; rather, how they came to be and attained this power—whereunto belongs the removal of the πρὶν πελώρια (Aeschylus, Prom. 152), and of many a monster. Thus he gave the people a canonical theogony, a succession of generations: Ge as primordial potency, then Uranos, Kronos, Zeus. We indeed recognise that he introduces Eros immediately beside Gaia because Eros was a principal god of his city Thespiae; yet for all that it is a profoundly thoughtful conception that before the earth there is only Chaos, empty space, and that the earth can bring forth only when the procreative impulse emerges in Eros: now she can first bring forth heaven from herself. If one wishes to express it materially, the solid vault of heaven rises up from the earth. Chaos, now the space between earth and sky, can still, as it were, beget negative powers: Night and Darkness, from which nevertheless bright powers emerge—Daylight and the pure, shining Aether, which under our sky we never behold and can only name by its word. It was one day to become the sensible bearer of the divine spirit. Whether the castration of Uranos—a truly magnificent image—is an original invention or a parallel to the overthrow of Kronos that came to Hesiod from elsewhere (both cannot have been devised by the same poet) remains uncertain; but he required the two generations in order to accommodate all the divine powers. For that was his aim: systematisation lay at his heart, and he pursued it in earnest, introducing a person in everything that he knew or felt to be operative. This was not new: Dream and Sleep were persons already in Homer, the latter in the Διὸς ἀπάτη; Deimos, Phobos, Kydoimos too. But no one drove it so immoderately as Hesiod; and then it runs through all poetry, Greek and Roman, and through the latter much further still—profound and shallow, pallid allegory and personification, and yet often a revelation of religious feeling. Added to this was Hesiod’s passion for inventing names—nymphs and sea-maidens—also by dissolving triads into single persons; he introduces the nine Muses at once in the proem, and with this play he achieved particular success. Even more than through Homer, religion was overgrown by mythology through him, especially since he also incorporates into his stemmata monsters which he took from the heroic legend of Heracles and Perseus.

Years will have passed when Hesiod, now an esteemed and prosperous poet, composed his other work, which was even more personal. Ionian elegists may already have ventured something of the kind; he adhered to epic form, but his special merit lies in this, that in contrast to the noble warrior society he depicts the broad stratum of the working and acquiring population in its life. In our Odyssey, which is no older than Hesiod, related passages are found, but interwoven into heroic narrative. Here the mythical content is no longer theogony or heroic deeds, but the history of mankind from its beginnings down to the present, with its economic and moral afflictions. How men came into being we are not told; if asked, Hesiod would have answered that they sprang, like plants and animals, from the earth—no less than the gods themselves, for he posits a common origin of gods and men. Woman, however, was created by the gods, and not for the blessing of men; this already stood in the Theogony, and once again he makes use of the same poem about Prometheus. Hesiod has placed him among the Titans as an opponent of Zeus, which has often led to seeing in him an ancient god. Yet the Πρόμηθος, who was worshipped by the potters in the Kerameikos as their patron and only late displaced by Hephaistos (the artists of the Dipylon vases will have sacrificed to him), has little more in common with the opponent whom Zeus crucified than the name. The old poet who took up the name “Forethought” (if he did not first interpret it so himself) and added to him a brother Afterthought, thought very pessimistically about human life, and still more about the gods: they gave man woman, and her curiosity released from a pithos the countless evils shut up within, which now fly over the earth. Most remarkable, especially at so early a time: the enemy of the gods is in truth the poet himself. Yet he was hardly fully conscious of this; one should no more read that into him than into Aeschylus, or Goethe, or Shelley. He had aimed not at the gods but at women, and that was entirely in Hesiod’s vein. He did not notice how ill it fits the Zeus to whom he pays homage that he should crucify Prometheus because the latter’s cleverness had been able to deceive him.

This god, who has ensured—and paid for it—that we men receive for ourselves the best portions of the animals we sacrifice to the gods, has nonetheless become the benefactor of mankind; for he procured for them fire, which the gods had reserved to themselves, and that without fire humanity would have perished we readily acknowledge. Now the benefactor is impaled and tormented.⁴⁷ Whoever truly believes this must see in Zeus a tyrant and will hope that one day a liberator of Prometheus will yet come, as indeed a later addition to our Theogony already reports. We readily acknowledge the pious impulse that could not rest until Zeus and Prometheus were reconciled, and that the hero and son of Zeus accomplished this is the fairest solution. Yet it must be clear that this is a violent solution by a poet; the creation of woman and the punishment for the theft of fire had also been such. Religion, insofar as it is in any way connected with cult, is nowhere here; but there is rather the same valuation of human life that Hesiod also expresses in saying that the gods have hidden βίος from men. Thus thought those who had to win it with bitter sweat; that too one may call pessimism—but then Hesiod overcame pessimism through ἐργάζευ.

Hesiod also propounds another doctrine, which is more than myth: the succession of world-ages compared with metals. He has expanded it, but it came to him from Ionia, and there it even entered into cult.⁴⁸ What is significant in it is the belief in a paradisiacal golden primeval age, which among the Ionians—and only among them, yet also in Athens—led to the festival of the Kronia. The burden of toilsome life imagines the wish to have it easier fulfilled in the past; and since the gods who now ruled the world made life so hard for men, others must then have held the government of the world, whereupon Kronos, the Homeric father of Zeus, offered himself of his own accord. Thus we learn how the λαοί felt in relation to the ἥρωες of Homeric society; the enserfed peasants of Attica felt likewise, and conditions were similar pretty much everywhere. To the dream of a blessed primeval age not only those who laboured in hardship later clung; Dicaearchus did so, in a certain sense even Posidonius. The opposite view—that humanity gradually works its way up to civilisation—Aeschylus developed out of the Prometheus story, and the age of the Sophists carried it further.⁴⁹ By contrast, the other dream—that the blessed age lies in the future, beyond the destruction of this world—has remained foreign to the Hellenes. Hesiod has elaborated the world-ages in a very characteristic way. The heroes of epic would not fit into the brazen age, since he assumed a humanity sinking ever deeper in moral terms. Hence with him appears the conception of the semi-divine heroes, this new understanding of the notion, which will occupy us later. In the present, however, he finds so strong a moral degeneration that he virtually holds out the deserved destruction of this race of men. This passionate outburst of his moral indignation does not prevent him from showing man the path by which he can live contentedly in this world. Nor does the fact that the gods have hidden from man his βίος, his livelihood, so that he must wrest it from the earth with toil and labour. For labour is no disgrace—only idleness is. Steep is the path to ἀρετή, to prosperity and honoured standing in society. “Bitter weeks, joyful festivals” is to be your future watchword. And injustice will not prevail in the world, for Zeus lives. Countless guardians, unseen spirits, observe on earth the doings of men and bring him tidings. Dike herself comes lamenting to his throne when she is wronged. The all-powerful Zeus can indeed do what he will, but we believe that he wills what is just and punishes injustice even in the offspring of the sinner. The moral demands are entirely detached from cult, from religious observance; there it is only required that these duties be regularly fulfilled, the σέβεσθαι θεούς, as it has been demanded at all times. Here one may learn that the moral does not have its roots in worship; the gods did not teach it—one may say that they had to learn it from men. In the Works and Days Dike, Horkos, the thirty thousand guardians of Zeus appear; these are not for cult but for the poet persons, as he has so many in the Theogony. The Olympians do not appear; Zeus alone does, and here he is no longer the cloud-gatherer—he is God; and if his omnipotence is especially extolled, Hesiod nevertheless also believes in his justice.

With this a great advance beyond Homer has been made. Since this is an advance even beyond the Theogony, it may be that Hesiod arrived at the deeper conception through his own experiences. But that his faith should first have exerted its influence upon the Ionians of the East is improbable. Archilochus is no religiously inclined man and intends to say nothing new when he says: Ζεὺς ἐν θεοῖσι μάντις ἀψευδέστατος χαὶ τέλος αὐτὸς ἔχει (84 D.). Since he is the τέλειος, he alone can with certainty declare what the outcome will be.⁵⁰ And again: ὦ Ζεῦ πάτερ Ζεῦ, σὸν μὲν οὐρανοῦ χράτος, σὺ δ’ ἔργ’ ἐπ’ ἀνθρώπων ὁρᾶις λεωργὰ χαὶ θεμιστά (94). Quite the same in Semonides: τέλος μὲν Ζεὺς ἔχει βαρύχτυπος πάντων ὅσ’ ἐστὶ χαὶ τίθησ’ ὅχηι θέλει. Thus from the god who made the weather there has become the god who makes everything, who allots to world and man what he wills, and the person of whom the myths tell recedes entirely into the background. The single personal will, the one god as originator of all that happens in the human world, is attained—the one we then find in the faith of the devout poets, Solon and Pindar, Aeschylus and Sophocles, but which also lives, alongside many other religious moods and their exponents, in the belief of the whole people. The asseveration νὴ Δία stands beside νὴ τοὺς θεούς; there is no νὴ θεόν or τὸν θεόν, because in Ζεύς “god” is heard. The name Zeus now becomes so comprehensive, and thereby so little distinctive, that epithets must be added. πολιεύς can still be the god who sat upon the mountain peaks; ἑρχεῖος he already is as protector of the homestead, but whose ἕρχος was analogous to the wall of the citadel, so that the name at first was perhaps still conditioned by this analogy. But then he becomes protector of landed property and, for the inhabitants of rented houses, appears as χτήσιος, whose name naturally also acquired a wider meaning.⁵¹ A beautiful inscription from an estate south of Pangaion is illuminating: Διὸς ἑρχείο πατρώιο χαὶ Διὸς χτησίο (Sylloge 991, with Dittenberger’s explanation). The dedicator has the estate from his fathers, but has also acquired further property; the χτήσιος is attached to the ἑρχεῖος. Epithets such as φράτριος ἀγοραῖος ὁμόγνιος⁵² ἀπατούριος concern the protector of right in its various relations⁵³; as ξένιος ἱχέσιος φύξιος προστρόπαιος χαθάρσιος he demands the fulfilment of specific moral duties.⁵⁴ All these are names wholly or predominantly from the Ionic linguistic sphere, for in Ionia the advance was made to call the divine—that which in so many different ways bound and at the same time protected men—by the one divine name. And even if most did not make clear to themselves in conceptual terms what consequences were to be drawn for the unity of deity in this person, the poets who did so and spoke it out in full found powerful resonance with their words. In cult, of course, Zeus remained what he had been, perhaps the highest, yet still one among many. The Zeus who differs from θεός only by the proper name, as Jehovah does among Lutherans, belongs to another religion than that practised in the cult of the states. The Jew meant Yahweh when he said God; the Greek meant God even when he said Zeus. Thus early already this rift opened, which was not to be bridged.

Because everything that existed as it did did not stem from men and therefore had somehow to be referred back to a divine power, while the figures of the mythical cosmogonies were now regarded as poetry, Zeus could be designated as the originator. In Semonides he has fashioned the individual characters of women. An allegedly Delphic oracle forbids the cutting through of the peninsula on whose tip Cnidus lies: Ζεὺς γάρ χ’ ἔθηχε νῆσον, εἰχ ἐβούλετο (Herodotus I 174). In the admonition to εὐσέβεια—not so much sophistic as popular—Xenophon (Mem. I 4) speaks of the wise δημιουργός who has made men. From this one must not derive a Zeus as creator of men or of the earth, neither such a creator-god nor the concept of a creation of heaven and earth. Even in play the Hellenes seldom said such things.⁵⁵ The crude notion of a creation out of nothing ran counter to their inherited piety, which, so long as they remained true Hellenes, never failed to recognise in nature the uncreated revelation of God—that is, the divine within it.

If Zeus watched over the moral conduct of men at least in some grave cases, one must expect that he punished transgressions; thus the story of Ixion exists in order to introduce the ἱχέσιος and χαθάρσιος as founders of these duties; the punishment of Ixion strikes the ungrateful man and thus inculcates another human obligation. Solon (fr. 1 D. 17–32) sets forth how he, who πάντων τέλος ἐφορᾶι, takes vengeance upon the guilty man or upon his lineage. Of a judgement after death he knows nothing; into the underworld Zeus cannot come, and if there is there an equally mighty judge, that is another Zeus (Aeschylus, Suppl. 231), though he is also called Hades (Eum. 274). Even when the lord of the dead is euphemistically called Μειλίχιος and Zeus is often added to this name, it is not meant that it is the Olympian; Ζεύς is only an intensified θεός. Far less is said of the avenging Zeus than of him who allots to men their lot, and there he is also the giver of evils: τὰ χαὶ τὰ νέμει, says Pindar (Isthm. 5.52). Mimnermus complains (2.16) that Ζεὺς χαχὰ πολλὰ διδοῖ; among them is old age, which θεός has made so grievous (1.10). It lies plainly before us that θεός and Ζεύς say the same thing. What befalls a man, what lies in the general order or in his own particular nature and must therefore be accepted as it is, comes from a stronger power—hence from something divine, from a god; conceived personally, from Zeus, since he has become the universal god.

This belief in a personal god who determines the destinies of men (μοῖρα Διός), who lays down moral demands and punishes their violation, has arisen from the elevation of Zeus to father of gods and men, that is, as a development of the Homeric Zeus. It was formed in Ionia. Hesiod did most to ensure that it spread also in the motherland; great poets deepened the faith. The gods who stood beneath him were not thereby displaced; many of them were worshipped more strongly in cult and by devout men, because they stood nearer to them and the old religious practice persisted; yet he remained the highest. “When the unity of all natural life was grasped by the philosophers, the unified power that ruled it could retain the name God and Zeus; but in doing so the person was lost, so that he was equated with Aether. What was lost absolutely was his connection with moral demands, which were no longer traced back to the duties of the individual towards society from which they had arisen, but to the moral feeling in the soul of man.”

We have had to descend deep into later times in order not to tear apart the connections. Now we must return to Homer and consider how his men conduct and evaluate their lives, whether they possess a free will, whether they feel themselves free or bound—whether by an alien will, divine or human constraint, or by considerations to which they consciously submit themselves.

The poet often says that he is telling of a race that could do more than his own present. Yet even in those men he emphasises the contrast of θνητός with the ἀθάνατοι, and still more the ὀιζυρός with the μάχαρες. Zeus himself says that οὔτι ὀιζυρώτερον ἀνδρός (Π 446), and this and similar epithets—ἐφημέριοι, χηριτρεφεῖς, and the like—later become fixed. More beautifully Apollo says to Poseidon in the Theomachy (Φ 465): “It is not fitting that we gods should fight one another for the sake of men, who now blaze with pride (ζαφλεγέες), now perish spiritless and powerless,” ἀχήριοι, heartless, for in the heart dwells courage. But this transience does not oppress the heroes themselves; they feel free and follow their inner impulse, their θυμός, their self, without regard for others. A god may intervene to restrain them—such resistance is impossible—and Achilles also submits so far to the recognised commander, the βασιλεύτερος, that he allows a captive woman to be taken from him, just as the other kings disapprove Agamemnon’s action yet do nothing against it. So far extends military subordination; into battle, however, Achilles does not go. We are in a camp; there is no civic state order there—though such cannot have been lacking in Mycenae—and we learn nothing else about it.⁵⁶ Of the unwritten laws later called the χοινοὶ νόμοι Ἑλλάδος only a few are observed. He who has committed a killing must leave the land, but whoever’s hearth he sits at must receive him. Blood-vengeance threatens, although many will also accept compensation even for a brother’s blood, and the gain of a θεράπων is welcome to him who receives the exile.⁵⁷ To kill an enemy who yields lies in the victor’s discretion; and even if we see the office of the herald respected, wild passion might well have laid hands on him too. Achilles believes of himself that he could lay hands on Priam, whom he has received at his hearth (Ω 570).⁵⁸ For man does whatever he desires, so far as he is not prevented by one more powerful, as Achilles is held back by Athena from laying violent hands upon the king of the host. When Agamemnon must afterwards reconcile himself with Achilles, Odysseus prescribes to him what he is to do and adds σὺ δ’ ἔπειτα διχαιότερος χαὶ ἐπ’ ἄλλωι ἔσσεαι (Τ 181), the only passage in the Iliad in which δίχαιος is said of an acting man; ἄδιχος is not yet formed.⁵⁹ Agamemnon had in Ι 119, the model for Τ, admitted that he had wronged the φρεσὶ λευγαλέηισι πιθήσας. Here he excuses himself by saying that the daughter of Zeus, Ate, had seized him—ἣ πάντας ἄαται, even Zeus himself. We thus see what the introduction of such a transparent person signifies. She is a goddess because she is powerful, so powerful that she springs from Zeus; what such a parentage means is clear enough. But we also see that man cannot shift responsibility for his action from himself by appealing to the compulsion of Ate, and that no more is implied than that all men—or rather gods and men alike—commit such misguided and self-punishing acts, which may excuse the individual. In this light we must judge it when the poet ascribes the impulse to an action to a god who determines the man. In doing so, the gods sometimes appear in another form, sometimes without such disguise. The belief still operated that the gods truly mingle among men; Athena beside Diomedes in Ε is the most brilliant example. That he may wound Aphrodite is justified by her command. Here there is no question of any psychology. Otherwise with the beautiful apparition of Athena when she restrains Achilles who is about to draw his sword against Agamemnon. Ancient interpretation turns the goddess into φρόνησις, thus abolishing the goddess and destroying the poetry; yet the error lay close at hand. The poet knows the feeling of a man who confesses to himself: I should have done it, had not a good spirit, or my guardian angel, or God’s hand mercifully restrained me. θυμός and λογισμός contend within his soul; he feels a χρεῖττον, which suddenly thrusts his sword back into the scabbard; he knows also his protectress—she has seized him by the hair. Thus sensuously does the poet conceive it; if we do not believe him, we are not worthy to read him. In many cases only the poet knows that this or that god has done something to a man for good or ill, or has inspired him how to act. That the δωτῆρες ἐάων also bestow evil follows from the fact that they love and hate, and is as familiar to men as to the poet; only men must for the most part leave undetermined who is harming them. When Teucer’s bowstring snaps at Ο 467, he can only hold a or some δαίμων responsible; the poet knows that Zeus has done it. At Ι 121 Ajax recognises that Zeus is against the Achaeans; he is, after all, the guide of battles. At Π 630 he recognises the same; there Zeus has raised the mist—this can only come from the weather-god. But when a hero deliberates what he is to do, he does not think of a god who might disapprove or hinder his action; he thinks of no law either, not even a moral law, which he would transgress. He decides, like Odysseus at Α 404, for what befits him—thus for the command of personal honour. He must not be χαχός. We admire Hector’s εἷς οἰωνὸς ἄριστος ἀμύνεσθαι περὶ πάτρης; the poet wills that we admire it. There he casts from his mind the warning of the sign, because a higher duty calls him. Yet the sign is not deceptive: Ajax will strike him down. Precisely for this reason he is the great hero, that he sacrifices himself to his fatherland. There lives in him the feeling of a moral duty. And yet here he sets at naught a bird-sign sent by the gods. The gods in general cannot be bearers of morality, for as yet nothing binds their own actions. The solemn oath sworn in Γ is broken by Pandarus, but Athena impels him to it. The same Athena hastens Hector’s death—though he is indeed doomed to it—by a deception; naturally the poet allows the gods to act only as he knows that men too act without scruple. Hector remains before the gate, where Achilles will reach him, and speaks out why he does so: αἰδέομαι Τρῶας, Χ 105. Reproaches even from the mouths of cowardly men he cannot endure; he would rather fall with honour. αἰδώς is the sole moral force within man, it is no goddess⁶⁰ that comes from without. Even when Hesiod says that mankind will perish when Aidōs and Nemesis leave the earth, this is only cast in personal form in accordance with epic style. Later times no longer valued αἰδώς in the same way. Aratus had to replace it with Dikē when he took up the Hesiodic picture, and already Protagoras in Plato (322c) links αἰδώς and δίχη. Plato⁶¹ and Aristotle⁶² see in it only a kind of fear, in accordance with the usage of their time, which by the fifth century already employed αἰδώς and αἰδεῖσθαι only rarely; Bacchylides, for example, no longer has it. It is striking that Aristoxenos⁶³ still understood the old αἰδώς far more correctly: he sees it in the reverent recognition of every excellence in another. It is reverence, not fear.⁶⁴ One sees this best in the adjective αἰδοῖος, which after Aeschylus himself disappears from poetic language. It is said of all persons before whom one feels αἰδώς,⁶⁵ and reaches further still than Aristoxenos indicates; for even the ἱχέτης is αἰδοῖος, precisely through his helplessness, yet also through the bond inherent in his plea, later symbolised by woollen fillets. Alcaeus casts his eyes down before Sappho (the vase-painter has well understood the verses): there αἰδώς is the awe before the woman whom he fears to wound. This αἰδώς shows itself in the eyes (Aristoph. Wasps 447); hence χυνὸς ὄμματα Α 225, for the dog is ἀναιδής.⁶⁶ But αἰδώς is also the sense of honour that compels the warrior to stand fast: αἰδομένων ἀνδρῶν πλέονες σόοι ἠὲ πέφανται (Ε 531), and so repeatedly in the Iliad. Here we have a divine force working within man, which the poet designates with a single word. It works in different directions, but always curbs αὐθάδεια—to use the later term—self-will and self-love. The designation itself recedes later, yet the disposition lives on in the warning against ὕβρις and in the demand for σωφροσύνη. αἰδὼς σωφροσύνης πλεῖστον μετέχει, Thucydides makes the genuinely Spartan king Archidamus say (I 84). It dwells within man himself—that is the chief point. No god has demanded it; no god has given it. Man looks to himself, and his heart tells him how he must conduct himself; it remains a human demand when society prescribes the same attitude and punishes its violation with νέμεσις⁶⁷—disapproval and contempt. From the gods man could not learn αἰδώς. They do not need it, but may act wholly according to their whim. The gods may love a man, φιλεῖν; a man loves no god. He wishes to be or to become θεοφιλής; θεόφιλος may exist as a proper name, but θεοφίλος does not live on as a predicate.⁶⁸ Nor is the god lord over man, unless the latter stands in a special relation of service, as the craftsman is δμῶιος Ἀθηναίης (Erga 430), Teiresias δοῦλος of Apollo (Soph. Oed. 410). The free man stands in his actions under no divine supervision. The poet may know that this or that god inspired a man with a resolve; the man himself acts as deliberation or passion impels him; afterwards, according to the outcome, he may think that a daemon had determined him—therein lies the fact that he does not know the author. Not a cold or blind fate determines men and gods, but men act freely, and so do the gods, according to their caprice, which nevertheless has its limits, as the outcome shows. Only when this outcome, as future, is known to them beforehand does the future seem determined by an overpowering force. Least of all do the gods exercise a control over human action in the sense of punishing sins. When Apollo sends the plague because Agamemnon does not return Chryses’ daughter, the god enforces this as protector of his priest, not in order to punish the king’s injustice. And when Zeus sends a flood because kings by crooked judgements have driven away Dike (Π 387), they were in his service and have poorly fulfilled their charge. Here there is an approach to the elevation of Zeus as protector of justice; Hesiod therefore used the verses. But it is only an approach, and we cannot grasp sharply enough the relation of man to the gods as detached from all morality; for so it must have been before Homer, and despite all religious transformations it has never wholly changed in relation to the gods of cult.

That everything which befalls him ultimately comes from the gods is conscious to man. Cult rests upon this—to render them gracious, so that they may hear petitions. Homer indeed speaks rarely of cult, and prayers too are not numerous. Yet how piercing is the proud cry of Ajax to Zeus, who has spread mist over the battlefield: ἐν δὲ φάει χαὶ ὄλεσσον, Π 647. And how movingly Achilles beseeches Zeus that he grant Patroclus victory and safe return. The Father, as the poet here calls Zeus (Ζ 250), grants only the first. The gods are called δωτῆρες ἐάων; yet they also give what is grievous. Apollo has shot down Achilles and Meleager. Such incalculable interventions may always occur; man knows this, yet he still regards the life he has led since birth and continues to lead as a unity, a coherent whole conditioned in and through itself. Since it has become thus or thus, it had to become so; and if an alien power cuts it off, that too was a part of the connected whole that constituted his life. Achilles knows of his early death; it does not disturb him, and the day of death will for him be an αἴσιμον ἦμαρ, as it is for Hector, Χ 212. Although this death is violent, it is nonetheless his death,⁶⁹ which was right and fitting for him; that is precisely the meaning of αἴσιμον, as the derivation αἰσιμνήτης and the phrase χατ’ αἶσαν show. αἶσα, in which the root of ἴσος lies, is a word of the oldest stratum of immigrants, who long continued to use it in the sense of μερίς—an equal share of sacrificial flesh.⁷⁰ Whether it had been preserved among the Dorians, as in Argos, also in Sparta, or whether Alcman borrowed it from the epic, cannot be decided. In his Partheneion Αἶσα χαὶ Πόρος θεῶν γεραίτατοι overcome all the Hippocoontids. Poros is not securely graspable⁷¹; Aisa is scarcely anything other than the later Moira, thus the same as αἶσα πάνδωρος in Bacchylides fr. 20 J. Already in Homer (Υ 127) she spins; in the Odyssey (η 197) she is connected with the spinners, the Κλῶθες. She lives as a person only in poetry down to the tragedians, and spinning or even weaving⁷² does not in truth suit her. But this is so natural an image for a life that runs in a line, that is gradually spun off, that one or more spinners are introduced by the poets; at first they are simply called χλῆρος; spinning Moirai appear first in Callinus I 9. They are all nothing more than poetic inventions. Still closer lay to the Greek the notion of life as a lot which a man receives at birth, just as he inherits the κλῆρος, the land-lot—λαγχάνει. Hence the allotter Lachesis is a goddess of the Greeks of the motherland corresponding to the Ionian Κλῶθες, and is linked with Eileithyia.⁷³ With Pindar too Πότμος is an ἄναξ (Nem. 4.42), thus literally chance; more often he calls it συγγενής, deciding by χλαροῖ, and one can say τύχαι Πότμου (Pyth. 2.56), of that οὗ διὰ τὸν Πότμον τυγχάνομεν, where abstract and concrete are not distinguished. In substance it is scarcely anything other than μοῖρα.

Μοῖρα⁷⁴ and Μόρος are the share and can be conceived as allotting only by a complete reversal of meaning. μόρος⁷⁵ has not become such an active distributor, and for μοῖρα in the Iliad there is at first only an isolated approach, when it is said ἔλλαβε πορφύρεος θάνατος χαὶ μοῖρα χραταιή, where μοῖρα is no more a person than death, but merely sounds so through the epithet.⁷⁶ Here too it is the μοῖρα belonging to the particular man, the portion of life that was allotted to him, and that is what the word everywhere means. The plural occurs at Ω 49, but there the portions of all men are meant; yet it becomes entirely clear how the plural came to signify the allotters. Very frequently beside the μοῖρα stands the one who assigns it, μοῖρα θεῶν or Διός; it can become almost synonymous with δῶρα θεῶν (Solon 1.63 D.). Proofs are superfluous. So too Hesiod means it when, alongside the Horai in whom he finds lawfulness and its blessing, he makes the Moirai daughters of Zeus and Themis.⁷⁷ One must not believe that only through him did they become a triad of goddesses and receive their names. Precisely Atropos, whom he did indeed invent, long failed to establish herself; before Plato I have observed no trace of her except the imitation in the Aspis. There is, moreover, in Athens a very peculiar cult of the Moirai. They are invoked at weddings,⁷⁸which is as appropriate as their association with Eileithyia. Then we learn from Pausanias (I 19.2) that by the Aphrodite ἐν χήποις there stood a stone pillar which represented her and was at the same time designated both as οὐρανία and as πρεσβυτάτη Μοιρῶν. This formation in herm-form and this cult were older than the temple whose cult-image Alcamenes made.⁷⁹ If, however, these Moirai, to whom the heavenly Aphrodite belonged, were worshipped “in the Gardens” and at the same time invoked at weddings, then they were the spirits of these gardens, like the Agraulids and the Charites in the garden at the north foot of the citadel, and to them the foreign Urania fitted as leader as aptly as Artemis elsewhere as ἡγεμόνη. There they all exercised their power in nature.

Indeed, if one will only take the trouble to look at what μοῖρα and μοῖραι are in Homer and Hesiod, the bottomless perversity becomes apparent which again and again attributes to the ancient Hellenes a belief in a cold fate to which gods and men alike were supposed to be subject. Anankē and Heimarmenē are much later abstractions, which have nothing at all to do with cult. The chief blame for the error lies with late mythology in poetry and the visual arts, and with the moderns too since the Renaissance dependent on the Parcae. Misunderstanding of the Kerostasia in Χ was added to this, but Christian tendency is not innocent either: with the Providence it borrowed from the Stoics, where it stands beside εἱμαρμένη, and with the “inscrutable counsel of God” or the Augustinian and Calvinist doctrine of election by grace, it explains the injustices of human destiny no better than did the will of the Hesiodic Zeus and the μοῖρα of each man. Simple, devout faith in God, which allows itself to be disturbed by nothing, ought rather to be acknowledged here as there. And when the incomprehensible occurs and must appear as mockery of justice, no age and no man should be reproached for feeling himself the helpless slave of a blind Anankē or of a cruel God.

ὦ μάχαρ Ἀτρεΐδη μοιρηγενὲς ὀλβιόδαιμον.
“Blessed son of Atreus, thou who hast received at birth as thy portion a fortunate daimōn.” Γ 182. The last two vocatives must be taken together. All men are born with a μοῖρα; Agamemnon’s distinction, which makes him μάχαρ like the gods, lies in the fact that he has an ὄλβιος δαίμων—more precisely, that a daimōn allots him ὄλβος as his μοῖρα. It is so artificial, almost affected, an expression as one would welcome in choral lyric, while in epic it startles. It places μοῖρα beside δαίμων. Thus I come at last to this word, which, because of the multitude of meanings it has acquired down to the present day, one may call a daemonic word. Whether it is older than epic cannot be determined with certainty, and therefore neither whether the conception it bears in Homer reaches back into primeval times. We can only begin where we have it and trace its life from there. It is not the case, as many suppose, that the Greeks had two words for god, of which daimōn is supposed to be the older, while others again declare it a loan-word. Let us instead bear in mind a few facts. Cult never calls its gods daimones, and a cult of daimones is exceedingly rare.⁸⁰ Gods have their particular names; daimones do not. θεός is used predicatively, and in truth a predicative concept lies within it. δαίμων cannot be employed in that way. When therefore the epic, and poetry following it, call the gods in the plural δαίμονες, these are not two synonymous words: they are θεοί, and they are called δαίμονες just as they are called μάχαρες or δωτῆρες ἐάων; and this points the way quite directly, for δαίμων is the allotter, ὡς μνήμων ἴδμων τλήμων, a substantive like γνώμων. The grammarians knew this and adduced δαιμόνα, ὡς Μναμόνα, from Alcman.⁸¹ The gods as a whole are δαίμονες just as well as δωτῆρες. When a single god is called δαίμων, that may be an improper inference from δαίμονες = θεοί; it is not frequent in good early usage, and sometimes the occasion is perceptible.⁸² To understand the δαίμων who remains personally indeterminate, one must examine a number of passages. At Η 291 εἰς ὅ χε δαίμων ἄμμε διαχρίνηι—there the διαιτητής is evident.⁸³ At Λ 480 he sends a lion; at Φ 93 he drives Lycaon into Achilles’ hands; at Ο 418 he has led Hector before the ships. At Ο 468 Teucer says, when the string of his bow snaps, that the daimōn (or a daimōn) is thereby destroying the power of defence. The poet knows that Zeus has broken the string (Ο 461). It is therefore something unexpected, mostly unwelcome, that is ascribed to an indeterminate allotter.⁸⁴ It is not to be chance: a divine will stands behind everything that happens, but we do not always discern more; sometimes the Muse tells it to the poet. Thus the δαίμων is by no means a god alongside the others; he could indeed become one, or more than one, since such diverse things were referred to a δαίμων. This usage then continues, and it is not merely banal imitation of epic. The Odyssey speaks very frequently in this way of the δαίμων who allots a fate, but goes beyond the Iliad in that it can also be a χαχός or στυγερὸς δαίμων, which was later bound to lead to the assumption of personal daimones of different kinds. Yet the δαίμων as the Odyssey has him long maintained himself.⁸⁵ Significant in the Iliad is that at Ρ 98 and 104 one is to fight χαὶ πρὸς δαίμονά περ, thus also against the allotter, against what must come by divine will; in substance it is the same as ὑπὲρ μόρον. Conversely, what is done σὺν δαίμονι succeeds (Λ 792). At Τ 188: οὐχ ἐπιορχήσω πρὸς δαίμονος. As witness of the oath and avenger of perjury the δαίμων is not invoked, but named gods. Yet the consequence of perjury lies in what befalls the guilty man. In content it corresponds to our “by my life”; the paraphrast rightly says χατὰ θεῶν in the plural—“by the godhead” we may translate. Only a blunder of a late poet is Θ 166, πάρος τοι δαίμονα δώσω; he has made the δαίμων into the μόρος, just as after Homer the μοῖρα became an allotter.⁸⁶ Striking may be Ε 438, where Diomedes rushes δαίμονι ἶσοςδαίμονι ἶσος against the wall, from which Apollo repels him with a single word. The scholia take δαίμων as θεός, which precisely there it cannot be, where the god shows himself superior. But the poet wishes to denote an uncanny intensification of human will and reaches for the word that was in use for such a power. To this is added the frequent form of address δαιμόνιε,⁸⁷ which is used when the person addressed says or does something one would not have expected of him, something that thus contains an intensification of his being—usually spoken not merely in wonder but in disapproval. This was so worn by use that Zeus can address Hera as δαιμονίη (Δ 31). At Γ 399 we found it significant. One curious later passage still needs explanation, Aspis 89. To Iphicles φρένας ἐξέλετο Ζεύς, so that he went over to Eurystheus. Afterwards he lamented much ἣν ἄτην ὀχέων, ἣ δ’ οὐ παλινάγρετός ἐστιν. He had to carry his ἄτη; it was his false step. That he felt excused by the delusion because it came from Zeus, the poet does not believe. He uses the old formula, Ζ 234. Of himself Heracles says ἐμοὶ δαίμων χαλεποὺς ἐπετέλλετ’ ἀέθλους. There he does not name Zeus; he cannot name a determinate agent, but he knows: this was imposed upon him, it was his μοῖρα, his portion, and then there was one who allotted it to him. He must do what is his.

Hesiod avoids calling the gods δαίμονες, but in the Works he lets the men of the golden age become daimones, who from the earth bestow riches upon men and are made by Zeus guardians over mankind.⁸⁸ Popular notions will have been used by him, and even if his daimones were not departed human beings, his presentation nevertheless encouraged the belief that favoured dead could become daimones.⁸⁹ He thus began to use this name for divine beings of lower rank, while keeping it away from the Olympians. In the appendix to the Theogony (991) Phaethon, as temple-guardian of Aphrodite, becomes a δῖος δαίμων. This presupposes that πάρεδροι of great gods are designated as daimones. The separation of the Olympians pressed towards such a distinction, and the name daimōn met that need. In Theognis 1348 Ganymedes on Olympus becomes a daimōn. Parmenides and Empedocles use this name for the divine beings they invent.⁹⁰ Theology too made use of it. It is hardly a piece of popular belief to which Socrates appeals in the Apology 27d, when he says that daimones are “νόθοι τινὲς ἐχ Νυμφῶν ἢ ἔχ τινων ἄλλων”; but daimones as a rank-class beneath the gods were recognised,⁹¹ and without doubt also the oft-mentioned triad: gods, daimones, heroes. It may be mere chance that I cannot from early times produce the designation “daimones” for the πάρεδροι of a god. From this doctrine, which has no anchorage in popular belief, Plato introduced daimones as mediators between gods and men. His immediate successors, Xenocrates above all, took these intermediary beings with full seriousness, and they were ultimately employed to free the true gods from the myths that clung to them—since in popular belief there did indeed exist harmful, evil daimones (and heroes as well). Christianity, which retained belief in the existence of these spirits, then found it easy to degrade the gods as a whole to daimones.

A malignant daimōn, an allotter of evil, had existed since the Odyssey, and he could hardly appear more dreadful than when Clytaemestra invokes him after her deed of murder (Agam. 1476). Here, where he is the hereditary curse of a house, one sees most clearly that he has grown out of the allotter who also reveals himself in Theognis in the disposition of men. From the deeds he brings about it has arisen that he appears like an infernal spirit, a ἀλάστωρ παλαμναῖος. For Aeschylus, he is the sensuously poetic expression for the perpetuating force of the primal guilt. When in the Persae 353 the messenger is to recount the ruse of Themistocles, he begins: “ἦρξε τοῦ χαχοῦ φανεὶς ἀλάστωρ ἢ χαχὸς δαίμων ποθέν.” Themistocles himself is not the daimōn, at most an instrument of it. Aeschines (3.157) warns the Athenians against the δαίμων and the τύχη that accompany Demosthenes, because everywhere he has misfortune in his train. When a house or a man δαιμονᾶι, they are in the power of an evil daimōn; in the individual this becomes possession, madness. The daimōn is not here a person; even poetry seldom conceives him as truly acting, as when he laughs over the man whom his hybris leads to ruin (Aesch. Eum. 560). When the blinded Oedipus steps into the open, 1311, he cries: ἰὼ δαῖμον ἵν’ ἐξήλου. There the daimōn is the power that has carried his action and destiny so far. But this power works within him. Men have now reached the point where they feel their wholly personal destiny as their daimōn. Yet only a few, though they do not clearly grasp what Heraclitus so beautifully and briefly sums up in ἦθος ἀνθρώπωι δαίμων,⁹² nevertheless sense that no personal daimōn from without impels them. In popular belief this produced the individual feeling of a personal daimōn who takes charge of each man at birth, as the well-known verses of Menander express—or there are two of them, as a malignant daimōn appeared to Brutus.⁹³ This then leads further to the daimōn who is within the man, a development that comes close to the Latin genius, while alongside it runs the conception, originating with Plato and further with Xenocrates, of countless daimones, which in the end replace or displace the old personal gods. This need not be expounded here in detail; but I had to go thus far in order to make clear how the allotter, in his formless personality, stood beside the gods as givers of good, how he then, almost inwardly identical with moira, designated the general and also the personal destiny of man, losing more and more personal force as belief either confronted chance or allied itself with it, while the daimones, because the meaning of the word had been forgotten, became from an almost equivalent name for the gods another class of superhuman beings. The ebb and revival of belief in the personal daimōn, and the transformation of gods into daimones, is an extraordinarily remarkable phenomenon, the understanding of which is indispensable if we wish to penetrate from the outward form of usage to the content of belief. Events in which an intention seems to reveal itself—mostly wondrous, often harmful—are δαιμόνια (already Aeschylus, Suppl. 97); for χατὰ δαίμονα one also says δαιμονίαι (Pindar, Ol. 9.110); but to designate the deity with δαιμόνιον, as has been done since the fifth century, was previously unheard of. The δαιμόνιον of Socrates is an inner admonition, in some way coming from the daimōn or from his daimōn—unexplained, yet real.

Only one word still requires some comment, εὐδαίμων. After the explanation of Euripides Heracles 440 I can be brief. χαχοδαίμων is first formed in Athens thereafter and denotes both the unfortunate man and one in whom an evil daimōn dwells, indeed even the δαιμονῶν himself. εὐδαίμων, by contrast, stands beside ὄλβιος as a synonym in the Ἡμέραι 826 and in the Theognidea 1013, and does not lose this meaning either (e.g. Aeschylus Agamemnon 336; the εὐδαιμονία of a fair and fertile land is always praised). But it was destined to designate quite another goal of life, the highest that is attainable for a mortal, if he does not dream of becoming a god or of reaching some Isles of the Blessed or elsewhere a sensuous bliss. This turn was made in Attic, though it already stands in a saying of the Theognidea, perhaps therefore in an older Ionian; but I can hardly believe that—it does not sound so.

653 εὐδαίμων εἴην χαὶ θεοῖς φίλος ἀθανάτοισιν,

Κύρν’ · ἀρετῆς ἄλλης οὐδεμιῆς ἔραμαι

He desires no other prosperity than θεοφιλὴς γενέσθαι, which Diotima holds out to him who has advanced to the vision of the truly Beautiful. It is a premonition. For this εὐδαιμονία to be rightly recognised, the daimōn had to find his οἰχητήριον in the soul, as Democritus (170–171) expresses it. With his soul man ascends to the height where true beauty becomes visible to him and he receives true eudaimonia. Even now a daimōn leads the way, the mediator between the earthly and the divine, Ἔρως ὁ Διὸς παῖς. By our own power we do not reach the goal. There, to be sure, the daimōn has become something quite other than he was in Homer. The soul which he led in this beautiful myth had likewise become something other than when it went down to Hades ὃν πότμον γοόωσα λιποῦσ’ ἀνδρότητα χαὶ ἥβην.

When did the Hellenes become conscious that man has within himself a living, ultimately a divine soul, his other self, which thinks within him and rules his body? Homer does not yet know this ψυχή, nor does Hesiod. ψυχή with them is the breath of life, the breath that escapes in death; ψυχή is life.⁹⁴ The verse just cited is translated by Virgil, Aeneid XII 952, as vitaque cum gemitu fugit indignata sub umbras. With his θυμός the Homeric man can converse, as Archilochus still does; but to address his φίλα ψυχά as Pindar does (Pyth. 3.61) or Euripides (Ion 859), that he cannot. For that it first had to become what lives within him. It is not yet even the air that he breathes and thereby lives, but only the cold breath of death; ψυχή belongs to ψύχειν. It was no short path from here to the soul which is the true man. The hot θυμός, fumus, a μεγαλήτωρ power, which in man both thought along with him and shared all his passions, had a far stronger claim to become the soul, and indeed retained its predominance over the ψυχή down into tragedy, only then becoming, alongside nous, a part of it—and that only among the philosophers, for in life it was at most still anger. That the ψυχή became the soul can be explained only in this way: first, the individual life passed over into Hades, and now these individual ψυχαί endured there in a bodiless, lifeless existence. This corresponds to the disappearance of the cult of the dead in Homer; in the motherland, where that was not the case, this belief could not arise. Patroclus appears to Achilles in a dream; he is not yet buried and therefore cannot enter the realm of Hades—the εἴδωλα χαμόντων prevent him. Achilles intends the burial, and what else Patroclus asks will accord with his own wish. The poet therefore knows that he is dreaming, and only in his dream can the ψυχή of Patroclus beg him to extend his hand for a final farewell (Ψ 75). That is in fact impossible, since Patroclus has no bodily hand, although he appears to his friend entirely as in life, even in his clothing. Thus the attempt fails when the waking Achilles makes it, and the ψυχή vanishes into the earth with a shrill sound. Achilles is astonished that he has convinced himself that in Hades there still exists ψυχὴ χαὶ εἴδωλον, though without μένος, ἀμενηνός. He had therefore known nothing of this before. The poet treats the apparition as a dream-image, yet reckons with the εἴδωλα, which, though bodiless, can nevertheless τρίζειν. But only because the body is still unburied can the departed life still appear. ⁹⁵
Still more sharply does the mother of Odysseus speak, after her εἴδωλον has drunk blood and thereby recovered awareness. The body has been destroyed by fire:

ἐπεί χεν πρῶτα λίπηι λεύχ’ ὀστέα θυμός,

ψυχὴ δ’ ἠύτ’ ὄνειρος ἀποπταμένη πεπότηται (λ 222).

These are very remarkable verses, for they show how the θυμός animated the body, while the ψυχή possesses no true existence, and yet how closely θυμός and ψυχή already stand to one another for this rhapsode. This oldest portion of the Nekyia is a necromancy; ψυχαγωγοί was the title of the tragedy of Aeschylus that treated it. The blood-offering, which was customary at burial and was meant for the gods of the underworld, will in fact have been interpreted in this way by necromancers. Here it serves to enliven the dead for the purposes of the action; this is an exception—or rather, it is myth.⁹⁶ In belief, the dead are for the living absent and dead, and do not act back upon them. That remains the prevailing view. The feeling of transience and the pain that life is too short does not rob life of its value, but only urges one to enjoy it. Aeschylus still lets Darius say as much, though he is king even in Hades. Aeschylus also said that Prometheus rendered humanity the benefaction of not knowing its death beforehand, so that men might give themselves over to the present. A man wishes to live on in his children and grandchildren; for himself he can do so only in memory, if possible like the heroes in song. χλέος ἐσθλόν is even a more precious good than life. Thus Achilles decided and gave his life for it. Sappho (fr. 58 D.) says to an enemy: after your death no one will think of you, no one will long for you, for you are no poet, ἀλλ’ ἀφανὴς χἢν Ἀίδα δόμοις φοιτάσεις πεδ’ ἀμαυρῶν νεχύων ἐχπεποταμένα. She, by contrast, lives in her songs.⁹⁷ When Pindar again and again insists that heroic deeds—that is, athletic victories—preserve the victor’s fame only through his poems, the same conception underlies it, for only in song does fame live on, and with it the victor.

The next step beyond Homer, for whom ψυχή, life, is named only when it departs, is that a man gives up this life, or loves it too much to give it up, or stakes his life.⁹⁸ Thus ἄψυχος, lifeless or fainting, becomes “spiritless,” and this remains in Ionic, so that one can speak of those who are χαχοὶ τὴν ψυχήν, who possess no courage, no longer merely when death is at issue.⁹⁹ The attestations for this stem only from the fifth century, when man is generally conceived as consisting of body and soul. Yet a few passages from earlier times already know the soul within the man, just as we are accustomed to think of it: Anacreon (fr. 4) says to his beloved boy, τῆς ἐμῆς ψυχῆς ἡνιοχεύεις; and already Semonides (fr. 29.13) speaks of one who ψυχῆι τῶν ἀγαθῶν χαριζόμενος. This is little,¹⁰⁰ but given the scant remains of early Ionic poetry, and the mutilation of the Lesbian tradition,¹⁰¹ that is no wonder; Simonides too fails us.¹⁰² Bacchylides (11.48) has the Proetids go into the temple of Hera παρθενίαι ἔτι ψυχᾶι, “while their soul was still childish.” The Ionic physicists are lost, and one must not trust doxography too quickly, since it often imputes to the ancients concepts that were self-evident only to the doxographers themselves. Yet it does seem to emerge that the soul was indeed that which in the body brought about life, sensation, and thought, but that it was itself corporeal—air or ether, or whatever substance the particular physicist chose. Of Thales Aristotle (ψυχ. 405a) knows only by hearsay that he ascribed a soul to the magnet, and infers from this that for him it was the moving principle; accordingly, it could always be something material.¹⁰³ In Anaxagoras (frs. 4 and 12) we read: ἄνθρωποι χαὶ τὰ ἄλλα ζῶια, ὅσα ψυχὴν ἔχει. At least in human beings there will also be νοῦς, something imperishable, but at least just as much material, so that the soul can be called both airy and immortal (A 93).¹⁰⁴ Yet there is still no individual soul that continues to live on as such after death. Diogenes states outright that the soul is air and perishes at death. Thus everywhere it appears that in life it is the bearer of life, the spiritual man—unlike in Homer—but that after death it does not even persist as an εἴδωλον. How, where, and when this transformation took place I dare not say more than that it occurred in Ionia. But then the thought had to arise that the soul-power which had animated the body did not deserve, after separation from the material body that dissolves into the elements, to become an inert shadow or to evaporate into air; after all, it had been a moving force. Thus the Ionian Pythagoras concluded that it was eternal; but it did not belong to the human being whose body it had animated. He possessed it not mancipio but only usu, to speak with Lucretius. It now passes into another body.

Heraclitus is the first to have reflected deeply on the soul within man and to have said many things about it. He also expressed himself about its life after death; he knew Pythagoras. But what he thought remains for us wholly enigmatic, and we should beware of fantasizing. In Parmenides ψυχή does not occur; in Empedocles it appears once in the Homeric sense. He saw instead a god within man, which can be understood only as a development of hero-belief; thus the Dorian reshapes the doctrine of the Ionian Pythagoras.

I have found it impossible to discover any instance of the word ψυχή that would suggest it was known to the Greeks of the motherland otherwise than through Ionic poetry. Nor have I found any trace that they divided the human being in any way. Just as in their primitive conception he continues in another life in bodily form, eating and drinking, so later the hero appears in full corporeality like the gods, usually fully armed. When he assumes the form of a snake or a bird, the gods do the same. On this belief rests the cult that provides the dead with food and drink, and offers such sacrifices also to the hero. This cult died out in Asia; Homer knows nothing of it. Here there is only the ψυχή, the life that departs from the body, which as the εἴδωλον of the human being leads a null and empty existence in Hades. Then the ψυχή becomes the soul that gives life to the body, its spiritual self. But this soul, like the Homeric ψυχή, vanished in death, and the human being was simply gone. The Nekyiai changed nothing in this, even when they displayed the shades and allowed the heroes the privilege of continued existence—a continuation that in its shadowy nature must have been torment to Achilles, as he movingly declares in the second Nekyia. When the epic first spread the ψυχή of the Iliad and then the ψυχαί of the Nekyiai everywhere, and especially when the soul in iambic verse and song opened up to the Hellenes of the motherland a new world of the spirit, the oldest conceptions mingled with the very newest, and new religious shocks were added as well. This alone led to contradictions, some noticed and many unnoticed, which are unavoidable in a realm that remains closed to knowledge.

The visual arts preserve the form of the εἴδωλον, which does not differ from the living human being. In representations of the underworld by Polygnotos and even earlier—for example when Sisyphus rolls his stone—nothing else was possible. Darius and Protesilaos on the stage could not appear otherwise either. Alongside this, however, we already see on vases of the sixth century the little winged human figures, whether in Hades carrying water in the perforated pithos,¹⁰⁵ or fluttering about the graves. These are the bodiless souls, as well as art can make something bodiless perceptible. What is decisive is the wings. ἐχπεποταμένα already says Sappho (58). Polydoros hovers thus above his mother; the poet has united the εἴδωλον with the form of the dream into a single figure. But for the mother who sees him in the dream, he is not Polydoros. These souls have no personality. From them the butterfly came to be called “soul”; it cannot have happened otherwise. We encounter this designation only in zoology from Aristotle onward; but is there any other? The butterfly-wings of Psyche are, at least to my knowledge, unknown in early art, so that I must regard them as Hellenistic. She acquired wings only after she had bestowed her name upon the butterfly.

The prevailing opinion will resist these conclusions. Let it see whether it can eliminate the evidence of linguistic usage or set against it counter-evidence of equal force; generalities and the violent “it must have been so” will not suffice.

The belief in the ψυχή, which rises from the Homeric sense of “breath of life” to the soul familiar to us, yet excludes any activity of the soul once separated from the body, requires supplementation if we are to grasp the Hellenic religion of early times and understand its subsequent development. This is the belief of the motherland in the heros, a being elevated from mortality and death to a form of continued existence that acts within earthly life. This is far more than the preferential treatment of kings in Hades, though it may well have been transferred from them. These two conceptions, ψυχή and heros, collide as soon as the epic crosses over. It would be natural to treat the heros in this connection; yet the contrast will emerge more clearly if I defer it to the following section. I shall cite only a single monument that places this opposition before our eyes, if it is rightly understood. It is a so-called lekythos from the treasure of Hera on Delos (Delos X fig. 546). A charioteer stands upon the chariot to which Hector’s corpse is bound. Achilles has dismounted and stands, with two spears lowered in his hand, facing the lofty burial mound of Patroclus. Above it there appears in the air a small winged warrior, rushing forward with spear poised. Beside the chariot stands a tall, splendidly clad winged woman, raising her arms defensively against Achilles and the winged warrior. The painter has rendered the action of the Iliad with remarkable fidelity in his own language. The winged goddess can only be Iris, who in Ω goes to Priam; she enables us to recognise the command of Zeus to surrender the corpse more clearly than would have been possible had Thetis been retained. What is new is the appearance of Patroclus, who wishes to resist the granting of an honourable burial to the enemy who slew him. So the painter thinks; for to him Patroclus is not utterly dead, as he is for Homer, but lives on as a heros in his tomb. Is this not instructive, is it not an advance, that this Athenian feels the conflict which must exist in Achilles’ soul when he is required to desist from what he believed he owed to his dead friend, whereas in Homer he does not contradict the divine command with a single word? What the poet himself truly intended lies deeper; no such understanding can be demanded of the painter. To him it appeared necessary that Patroclus should not wish to renounce his claim to vengeance upon his enemy; for that was what it meant to be a heros.

FOOTNOTES

1. 1. ↩ The Catalogue of Ships, which was inserted into the Iliad at a late date, teaches the Greeks this unity of the nation by enumerating the heroes of the Iliad as lords of the cities of the motherland and thus, as it were, leading them back into their ancient home. But Asia, now occupied by the Hellenes, is also meant to be taken into account. Here the Doric islands are assigned to the Achaeans, because Tlepolemos appears in the Iliad and Nireus in its continuation. Otherwise the Asians have to be placed on the Trojan side, yet care is taken that the cities which are now Greek are nevertheless enumerated. The islands, however, are conspicuously neglected.

2. 2. ↩ Proceedings of the Academy 1906, p. 67. Beside Anax, Βασιλεύς stands in Ephesus, whose cult Agamemnon was said to have founded (Strabo 642), naturally belonging to the same sphere as the Βασίλη of Athens, the wife of Neleus. In Themistagoras (Et. M. Δαιτίς) there is a misguided rationalization, but Basileus has a daughter Klymene, and Klymenos is often the name of the lord of the underworld, while Periklymenos is the son of Neleus. The lineage was called Βασιλεῖδαι, and only later was this reinterpreted as referring to the king and to the Codrid Androclus (Strabo 633); it also produced a tyrant (Aelian fr. 48) and retained its claim to a priestly honor, if Diogenes Laertius IX 6 can be trusted in the case of Antisthenes. Βασιλείδης occurs as a personal name in Ionia. Βασιλεῖδαι are also found in other Ionian cities.

3. 3. ↩ In Υ 8 all the nymphs of groves, springs, and meadows come up to Olympus—an invention contrary to their very nature. Yet it is beautiful that the mountain nymphs make elm trees grow on the grave of the slain lord of the land, Ζ 419.

4. 4. ↩ That she had come from Argos was remembered, and even her priestess Admeta, the daughter of Eurystheus, was said to have come with her. At the same time, however, it was acknowledged that the Carians had possessed the sanctuary; Hera herself was even said to have been born on Samos (Pausanias VII 4, 4), and the sacred lygos-bush that was preserved there (Schede, Second Report on Samos, p. 11) belonged to the Carian goddess (Menodotus in Athenaeus 672).

5. 5. ↩ Through the Samian Hera this comical cripple made his way onto Olympus. Yet he is not Samian; nor is he likely to come from Lemnos, where the earth-fire of Mosychlos drew his forge—rather he is probably Naxian; on Chios his companion Kedalion appears. My treatment of the god (Gött. Nachr. 1895) was greatly expanded by Malten (Jahrb. XXVII), but I cannot believe in a “fire-god,” even though the metonymic usage already occurs in Homer; for a divine person reveals his essence in what he does. Hephaistos is a smith; he is a cripple, because the craft falls to those who cannot become warriors. A crippled god is in itself entirely un-Hellenic. That I once attributed such a god to the Hellenes proves that at that time I had not yet grasped the reception of a foreign deity; many still fail to grasp it even now. That painters also introduced the god among the Olympians in a dignified form need not surprise us (J. Hell. St. 24, 301).

6. 6. ↩ The poet needed a goddess to speak words of comfort to the weeping Aphrodite; for this purpose a mother was best suited—and she therefore had to be invented. The poet seized upon an old but vanished name, Dione, just as later at Dodona the goddess worshiped together with Zeus Naios was so called. From her cult on the Athenian acropolis one may infer nothing more than that she and Naios, the Dodonaean deities, once received altars there (Dragumis, Δελτίον 1890, 145).

7. 7. ↩ Other such dynasts traced themselves back to a son of Hector, Skamandrios, whom they took from Ζ, but distinguished from Astyanax. These dynasts explain why the Troad did not become Hellenic. By race they can only have been Thracians, for Ainos is not formed from Aineias as Aineia is, but the reverse. The formation is Aeolic; Stheneias is the name of an Aeolian of the Troad (IGA. 503). Ἑρμείας, Αὐγείας show the formation in the motherland.

8. 8. ↩ Whoever is no longer fit for war has no Ares within him, Aeschylus Agam. 78; Sophocles even makes him send the plague, banishes him to his Thracian homeland and calls him τὸν ἀπότιμον ἐν θεοῖς θεόν, Oed. 190, 215.

9. 9. ↩ If in Lamia and in some neighbouring places a month is called Ἄρειος, then the months are named after the Twelve Gods. By contrast, the Ἄρειος of the Bithynian calendar is significant: there it is the Thracian god.

10. 10. ↩ It is curious that in the third century a Spartan king is called Ἀρεύς, and after him a Spartan lyric poet as well.

11. 11. ↩ He names a wholly unknown Lycaon, Diomedes, and Cycnus. In the Hesiodic Shield he fights with Ares himself, but that is a reflex of Ε. The hero “Swan” here has nothing more to do with the bird, but this is still the case with the Cycnus whom Achilles overcomes. Plainly he first did so at home, and there the swan will still have meant something. Now Achilles had been replaced by Heracles, who fought in the service of Apollo from Pagasae—this too an innovation. But a connection with King Ceyx, likewise a bird, is scarcely accidental; his wife Alcyone is known to the Iliad Ζ 562.

12. 12. ↩ The Ares of Knossos, Schwyzer 83, may derive from Argos.

13. 13. ↩ In Argos: Pausanias II 21, 8; Herzog, Philologus LXXI, 13. Dedication by a Corinthian: Simonides 134 Bgk. At Delphi she receives at the Theoxenia the epithet γηθυλλίδες, Knoblauch, Athenaios 372.

14. 14. ↩ Inscription from Sidyma, TAM 174 = Benndorf, Reisen in Lykien I, 80, 14.

15. 15. ↩ That Pindar can speak of the Delian birth of the twins proves nothing against the Homeric Hymn, fr. 88, Oxyrh. 1792.

16. 16. ↩ The place of birth, the true Ortygia, has been established by J. Keil, Österreichische Jahreshefte XXI–XXII, 113. To be added is Hesychius: Κηρύχειοι ὄρος τῆς Ἐφέσου, ἐφ’ οὗ μυθεύουσι τὸν Ἑρμῆν χηρῦξαι τὰς γονὰς Ἀρτέμιδος. Theognostos, p. 129, adds: Διὸς προστάξαντος. This is the mountain mentioned by Keil alongside Solmissos. When, in Didyma, the great new building was undertaken, the priests—who needed money and were making propaganda for the cult—invented that in the innermost sanctuary the union of Zeus and Leto had taken place, since they could not claim the birth of their god there. It is unfortunate that this, in essence frivolous invention born of embarrassment, is not recognised for what it is.

17. 17. ↩ In Chios the god, so far as I can see, is called only Ἀπόλλων, but in the derived personal names Φοιβ- predominates; the Ephesian painter, too, is named Ἀπέλλων.

18. 18. ↩ All interpretations of φοῖβος are arbitrary, derived from the supposed nature of Apollo; φοιβάζειν, φοιβάς concern the mantic ecstasy, φοῖβος in the sense ‘pure’ probably only the Delphic god.

19. 19. ↩ Very characteristic is the fact that in Oedipus Sophocles can no longer attribute the plague to Apollo himself, but rather hopes for its removal by him. It is caused by an unexpiated blood-guilt, whose atonement is demanded precisely by the Pythian god, who is therefore asked for counsel and help. To him Oedipus ascribes his misfortune.

20. 20. ↩ In the Delion on Paros, Rubensohn found a number of pre-Greek elements, which is hardly surprising. When Hellenes settled on Paros, Ἀθηναίη Κυνθίη also received a place there (IG XII 5, 210). Compare my review of Plassart’s Delos XI in Göttingische Anzeigen 1929.

21. 21. ↩ This follows from the Delian Hymn; cf. Homer und die Ilias p. 451.

22. 22. ↩ Callimachus, Hymn 2.60, has Artemis weave the altar from the horns of the αἶγες Κυνθιάδες. Once there may indeed have been wild goats on the uninhabited island; but that the same poet, in Epigram 62, can address these Κυνθιάδες and tell them that they now have rest because Echemmes has dedicated his bow to Artemis stands in a strange contrast to the overcrowded Delos and the Kynthos. Was this contradiction not yet clear to the poet, or did he imagine all wild goats as deriving from those of Kynthos? I no longer object to the poem, but I do not understand these Κυνθιάδες. By chance, at the very time of Callimachus an Ἐχέμας was living on Delos (IG XI 2, 203 B 7).

23. 23. ↩ A statue cannot do this at all, and the Βασσίτας, who later as Epikourios received the magnificent temple (IG V 2, 429), or the Κερεάτης in the Aigytis (Pausanias VIII 34, 5), lie on the edge of Arcadia proper, and no one will place them in primeval times. I leave aside everything later. Only in Tegea does the god sanctify the four ἀγυιαί that lead to the villages from which the city grew together (Pausanias VIII 53). The aetiological story proves nothing, but the sanctification of the roads points to the god’s presence at the founding of the city. When that was is unknown, but it cannot be set before the general reception of the god. On Mount Lykaion the god has a sacred grove (Pausanias VIII 38, 8), but alongside Pan and Zeus he is clearly an immigrant and was also called Πύθιος.

24. 24. ↩ Welcker, Götterlehre II 166, has collected more than enough passages. Naturally such a cult was regarded as immemorial. Deucalion was said, according to Hellanicus (6 Jac.), to have founded it. Down to the latest period the number twelve retains its significance in theology; cf. Sallustius 6.

25. 25. ↩ Aristophanes Equites 235. Menander Kolax fr. 1: θεοῖς Ὀλυμπίοις εὐχώμεθα, Ὀλυμπίαισι πᾶσι πασαις, where Jensen could not retain Ὀλυμπίασι, for “Olympian” would be nonsensical. In the formula Menander allows himself the full dative form, exactly as Aristophanes does in Thesmophoriazusae 331. In the fifth century an athletic victor dedicated a monument to the Twelve; the inscription has perished (IG I 829). Amphis, Γυναιχομανίαι, Ath. 642a, has a number of delicacies enumerated, whereupon the listener says ὀνόματα τῶν δώδεχα θεῶν διελήλυθας. However amusing it might be, I will not reproduce what someone has made of this.

26. 26. ↩ At Olympia Heracles built the twelve altars; this is how Pindar Olympian 10.49 has always been understood, adding that with them Alpheios too received honour and that the hill was named after Kronos. Around 400 six pairs of victims were sacrificed on six altars, according to Herodorus in the scholion on Olympian 5.10. Here four of the Olympians had to give way, to make room for Alpheios, for Dionysus with the Charites (a well-known Eleian cult), and for Kronos with Rhea. In Pindar’s time it was otherwise, since he assigns different honours to two of these. Thus we grasp the change, connected with the claim of Zeus’ birth, which might be inferred from the Ἰδαῖον ἄντρον in Olympian 5. — It is disconcerting that in the scholion on Apollonius 2.532, in an enumeration of the Twelve, Hades appears and Artemis is absent, which cannot be right. The frequent error of ascribing this to Herodorus has been avoided by Jacoby (fr. 47). Hera too is missing in Λ, and in ΦΡ she is inserted in the wrong place. Hades, however, also receives a month in Plato; there Hestia will have been omitted, as is explained in Phaedrus 247a. — In the Hymn to Hermes 128 the god makes twelve portions of the sacrifice; this is rightly referred to the Twelve. That he himself belongs to them the poet does not consider; indeed one does not understand at all what this slaughter is meant to be.

27. 27. ↩ How old the Demeter of Knidos was remains undetermined; that women in general continued her cult seems self-evident. The Athena of Lindos is equated with a pre-Greek deity; that of Ilion was created only on the basis of Ζ.

28. 28. ↩ For evidence see Griechische Verskunst 169. Later the Mother of the Gods took this place. The Lesbian dedication to an Ἀθηνᾶ Ἰδηνά (IG XII 2, 476) shows that the Hellenes associated their goddess with Zeus, just as on Delos they did with the Cynthian.

29. 29. ↩ Verse Ξ 338 is fashioned from 166, and only for that reason does it appear as though Zeus were the father—something the poet did not intend. Hera’s “bedchamber” had been made by her son for Zeus as well, when he wished to visit her. The corrupt passage in Harpocration αὐτόχθονες is of no value; compare Schroeder on Pindar fr. 253. It is clear that Samos associated the Hephaistos venerated on the islands with its own goddess; there he will have been treated with more reverence than in the Iliad. That Hera gives birth to him without male begetting, as Hesiod states in Theogony 927, shows that Zeus could not be the father of a cripple. This fatherlessness is later mentioned just as little as Zeus’ paternity.

30. 30. ↩ This is incontrovertibly stated at Ε 875. In the scholia A, supplemented by BT on 880, Aristarchus vainly disputes it and claims that Hesiod invented the birth from the head through a misunderstanding of the Homeric verse—characteristic of his critical method. What matters is only that the epic poet avoids the head-birth, which was offensive to him. He retains, however, the notion that Zeus himself brought Athena forth.

31. 31. ↩ Apollonius has very charmingly invented, at Argonautica III 162, that there is a descent where two mountains rise up to the vault; if one goes down through the aether there, one sees the earth with its cities, also mountains and the sea which encircles the disk of the earth. He deliberately ignores what the physicists now know. The verses are intelligible; one need only write in 164 and 165 ἄλλοθι, and in 166 αἰθέρα.

32. 32. ↩ Dio in fact calls him in the Olympikos 42 the πατρῶιος of all the Hellenes.

33. 33. ↩ It cannot be otherwise than that this god once rose to be a federal god over the gods of the individual tribes, thus through a historical event, the formation of the Israelite nation.

34. 34. ↩ At Ε 398 Hades goes up to Olympus because he has been wounded by Heracles and wishes to be healed. There he is, for once, an acting person. This remains an exception. Υ 61 excludes his participation in the assembly of the gods. It is in fact only a momentary invention of the poet of Ε, for the lord of the underworld can no more leave his realm than the Olympians can enter it.

35. 35. ↩ Rock inscription Ζανὸς πατρώιο, Österr. Jahresh. 23, Beibl. 257, 259. The α is of course short; Ζαντός and Ζηνός also stood beside it. Hieratic, let alone Eleian, influence is a mad fancy. Such a thing does not exist at all, and certainly not in Ephesus.

36. 36. ↩ The Delphian Labyadai have a Ζεὺς πατρῶιος, but he ranks behind Apollo and Poseidon φράτριος, that is, he was added later. Xenophon must name gods whom Cyrus already worships at home; for this he chooses a Hestia πατρώια and a Zeus πατρῶιος, thoroughly Hellenic, even if Hestia did not in fact bear that epithet (Cyrop. I 6, 1). When Cyrus withdraws into the dignity of Great King, VII 5, 57, he sacrifices to the same gods, but Zeus is now called βασιλεύς; beside him the Persian gods are dismissed with the words “those whom the Magi prescribed.”

37. 37. ↩ Among the Aeolians his cult is only accidentally attested late; games called Ποσίδαια still existed on Lesbos in the third century A.D., IG XII 2, 71, and rare epithets occur, μύχιος, ἐλύμνιος, ἐλύτιος (the last in Hesychius). In epigram 95, at the latest from the fourth century, Paton has in fact restored the name wrongly; Kaibel is better, Epigr. 780 Ποσείδ[ιππος]; the poem cannot be securely reconstructed, but παιάν occurs and is therefore probably Asclepius, if he was already then the principal god of Mytilene. Of the highest value is the ancient dedication from Pergamon, 642 Schwyzer, Ποτοιδᾶνι Ἀνδρομέδες […]ολείο. This, despite Bechtel’s doubts, is certainly Aeolic and agrees with Boeotian. If Herodian dict. sol. I 10 found Ποσειδάν in the text of Alcaeus, and he himself may have written it so, that proves nothing for the Aeolians of the mainland.

38. 38. ↩ The Heliconian was brought by emigrants from what later became Boeotia; Helike was chosen by the Ionians of Aigialos.

39. 39. ↩ On the Euripos, where the grammarians seek Aigai, the Homeric site cannot have lain, but rather at the Αἰγαῖον πέλαγος, which is named after it together with the sea-giant Αἰγαίων, who is equated with Briareos, which points to his seat in Euboea. The grammarians were right in feeling that Aigai lay on the seaward coast of Euboea, had they only possessed real proofs; but there is no island Aigai, nor any evidence for an ancient name of Karystos.

40. 40. ↩ Archilochus 11 D. χρύπτωμεν δ’ ἀνιηρὰ Ποσειδάωνος ἄναχτος δῶρα. This will denote everything that the sea gives up after a shipwreck, above all the corpse of the drowned man.

41. 41. ↩ They are often transgressors, by which they become akin to the γίγαντες γηγενεῖς. The god of the sea did not suit their begetter.

42. 42. ↩ Aristophanes Acharnians 510; Xenophon Hellenica IV 7, 4.

43. 43. ↩ Hellenistische Dichtung II 34.

44. 44. ↩ Here too the χατειβόμενον Στυγοσύδωρ first appears, Ο 37, which, alongside heaven and earth, represents the underworld; for earlier, Ξ 278, Hera had called upon the gods imprisoned in Tartaros as witnesses. It follows that a perjury sworn by the Styx brings the guilty god into the underworld—a fate from which Hera herself does not shrink. This water likewise represents the underworld at Θ 369. As W. Schulze (quaest. ep. 441) has shown, in Homer στυγοσύδωρ is still a single expression; there is hardly any need to assume a Styx as a person. Hesiod introduced her as the eldest daughter of Okeanos, Theog. 361, and she brings Zeus her children, Zelos and Nike, Kratos and Bia, when he sets out for the battle with the Titans. The poet then also had to report what place was assigned to her after Zeus’ victory. She shares the fate of the Hundred-Handers, who had likewise stood by him. She too must depart from the earth, for she is στυγερὴ ἀθανάτοισι. Her dwelling is a cave whose heaven-high roof is borne by silver pillars. From the rocks of the cave trickles the water of her father Okeanos, and from this Iris draws, when a dispute arises among the gods that is to be decided by an oath. The perjured god is banished from the company of the gods for a year and must endure torments. All this hangs together: since she descends from Okeanos, her water comes from his stream; ὠγύγιον 806 points back to this. Verses 783 are wrong, for the god is first to swear, 796–97; both points were seen by Guietus; and 799–804, though interesting, replace the single year of 795 with a “great year”, an ennaeteris, and are therefore later than the fixing of the calendar. The rest cannot be taken away from Hesiod. He, then, made the Styx into a person, retained στυγοσύδωρ as such, a spring of the underworld, from which in Κ 515 the Kokytos, in Β 755 the Titaresios, flows. The Peloponnesians discovered such a ἀπορρώξ in the waterfall (if one may so call the narrow trickle) near Nonakris; and here it was a poisonous water, which could very well be called στυγοσύδωρ.

45. 45. ↩ I am as brief as possible here, because I have recently treated “Kronos and the Titans” in the Sitzungsberichte of Berlin 1929.

46. 46. ↩ That this passage was wholly or in part athetised was perfectly clear to me when I briefly elucidated it; the repetition of the athetesis in Jacoby’s edition can therefore not disturb me. It goes so far that Zeus does nothing at all. In that case the entire Theogony has no meaning, and Hesiod has no faith.

47. 47. ↩ It is of the greatest importance that a crude little ivory plaque from the sanctuary of Orthia (Pl. C) depicts the bound Prometheus, into whose breast the eagle hacks. This must derive from the Theogony.

48. 48. ↩ I shall not repeat what is set out in the commentary on the Erga and in Kronos und Titanen.

49. 49. ↩ Euripides, Hiket. 201. Protagoras in Plato’s dialogue.

50. 50. ↩ τέλειος will already earlier have been used in the sense that he gave the decision in battle. Clytaemestra understands him in this way, Aeschylus Agam. 973.

51. 51. ↩ Nilsson, Ath. Mitt. 33, 279, has attached a fine and learned essay to a Thespian stone on which, beneath Διὸς χτησίου, a snake is depicted. The Ionic χτήσιος already shows the imported god. Certainly the snake is the same that lives in the ground as the house-snake; here it then belongs to the god named. But the time when it itself was the god is long past. Nor can I admit that Zeus took the place of a snake-god; for it is not the animal that receives the cult, even if it feeds on the buried πανσπερμία in which all χτήματα are consecrated to the god, but the god, whose protection the acquired property demands, first appears himself in this form. What matters is not the sensuous expression of religious feeling, but this feeling itself, which remains while its expression changes. References for χτήσιος are given by Nilsson. μειλίχιος, which very often stands without Zeus and belongs to the underworld, must be kept entirely separate. He may assume the form of a snake.

52. 52. ↩ Drolly the slave Xanthias cries in Frogs 750, ὁμόγνιε Ζεῦ, when he discovers in Aiakos a kindred slave-nature.

53. 53. ↩ As supreme lord of justice he stands beside Ἀθηνᾶ φρατρία μορία, which represents the state; he protects the clans as ἀπατούριος, the peace of the market as ἀγοραῖος, and so forth. ὁμάριος sanctifies the union of the Achaean cities.

54. 54. ↩ In the Adrastos novella (Herodotus I 44) Croesus invokes Ζεὺς χαθάρσιος ἐπίστιος ἑταιρεῖος and explains the epithets. The purification of the προστρόπαιος was performed by Zeus upon Ixion; there the paradigmatic story is still independent of Apollo. In Solon’s laws there stood somewhere an oath by an ἱχέσιος, χαθάρσιος, ἐξαχεστήρ, apparently without the name Zeus. The context cannot be recovered from Pollux VIII 142.

55. 55. ↩ Callimachus, Hymn 4, 29, can in this way let Poseidon fashion the islands, but he merely splits them off from the mainland. In Pindar, Olymp. 7, 69, Zeus sees how the island of Rhodes grows up from the depths; in the same way the pillars rise and make Delos firm when Apollo is born upon it, fr. 88.

56. 56. ↩ The judicial scene on the Shield of Achilles is of value to us because it presents a dispute over ownership before an arbitral court. That such proceedings occurred in the Ionian cities, however imperfect their constitutional order may have been, is self-evident.

57. 57. ↩ In the sacred laws of Cyrene § 17 there stand very archaic, yet entirely intelligible, provisions concerning the admission of a man who wishes to withdraw from his kin-group and enter another. I have explained them and can concede to no other interpretation, either linguistically or in substance, even the slightest possibility.

58. 58. ↩ The subtle poet wishes to show what an effort it costs Achilles to yield to the suppliant. He shapes the narrative in such a way that Achilles would grant mercy even without the command of Zeus. This accords with epic style; yet the mission of Thetis is dispatched briefly, quite unlike that of Iris to Priam, where divine intervention was indispensable.

59. 59. ↩ Chiron is διχαιότατος Κενταύρων Α 832; the Ἄβιοι are so beyond all other men Ν 6, outside the society in which we move. The Odyssey is familiar with δίχαιος.

60. 60. ↩ An altar on the Athenian acropolis signifies nothing more than that its power was once felt so strongly that it appeared as a person; this even befell the Γέλως, which actually possessed a ἀγαλμάτιον (Plutarch, Lycurg. 25). The Aidos of the altar, however, was so incomprehensible to later generations that they devised a trivial explanation. This and more that I do not repeat at Eurip. Heracl. 557. Only a statue of Aidos, thirty stadia from Sparta, remained enigmatic, even for the inventors of an αἴτιον, Pausanias III 20, 10.

61. 61. ↩ Euthyphr. 12 misconstrues the saying of the Cypria ἵνα γὰρ δέος, ἔνθα χαὶ αἰδώς, which explains why someone does not wish to reproach Zeus, αἰδεῖται διότι δέδιεν, Zeus would not tolerate it, hence the man refrains. Reversed, as Socrates turns it, this does not apply to the old age: Alkaios does not fear Sappho when he hesitates to propose to her. At O 657 the Achaeans withdraw from the ships, but they do not scatter, ἴσχε γὰρ αἰδὼς χαὶ δέος, two distinct things: a sense of honour forbids them flight, and fear seizes each man when he alone leaves the protection of the compact ranks. For Plato the αἰδώς is at least still a θεῖος φόβος, Laws 671d.

62. 62. ↩ Nicomachean Ethics 1128b. αἰδώς cannot be a virtue, because it is not a ἕξις but a πάθος; blushing belongs to it, and αἰδεῖσθαι is appropriate only to youth. Stoic ethics, which luxuriates in distinctions among virtues and vices, scarcely takes any notice of αἰδώς at all. The brief definition φόβος επὶ προσδοχίαι ψόγου, Arnim Stoic. fr. III 5.101, is taken over from the Peripatos. Dion, in the first Kingship Oration (25), rightly distinguishes between φόβος and αἰδώς: before what one fears one wishes to flee, whereas the αἰδούμενος remains standing and gazes in admiration at the αἰδοῖος. Most beautifully Democritus, fr. 264: ἑωυτὸν μάλιστα αἰδεῖσθαι χαὶ τοῦτον νόμον τῆι ψυχῆι χαθεστάναι.

63. 63. ↩ Ammonius, p. 6 Valck.: Ἀριστόξενος ἐν πρώτωι νόμων παιδευτιχῶν. αἰδὼς πρὸς ἡλιχίαν, πρὸς ἀρετὴν, πρὸς ἐμπειρίαν, πρὸς εὐδοξίαν, ὁ γὰρ ἐπιστάμενος αἰδεῖσθαι πρὸς ἑχάστην τῶν εἰρημένων ὑπεροχῶν προσέρχεται οὕτω διαχείμενος... διὰ τὸ σέβεσθαι χαὶ τιμᾶν τὰς εἰρημένας ὑπεροχάς.

64. 64. ↩ In Ι Priam has said to Helen that he lays the blame not upon her but upon the gods for having brought the war upon Ilion. She replies at 172: αἰδοῖός τέ μοί ἐσσι φίλε ἑχυρέ δεινός τε. If only I had chosen death for myself when I followed your son. Now I waste away in tears. It is precisely the kindly words of the venerable king that make her start in the consciousness of her fateful transgression. αἰδώς and δέος are quite different feelings. The former she had always felt before her father-in-law; now a shudder seizes her—better dead than stand thus before him. Aeschylus, Eum. 516, 698, demands a δεινόν in the state before which a man should be afraid as before the Erinyes. θεουδής in the Odyssey is used in a good sense for ‘god-fearing’; the form shows that it is an old word; δεισιδαιμονία is young—by that time fear of the gods was already for the most part something at least excessive; δεῖσθαι is in any case uncustomary in this relation. What belongs here is σέβας; σέβας μ’ ἔχει is an intensification of αἰδοῖός μοί ἐστι.

65. 65. ↩ αἰδοῖος is occasionally said also of those who inspire αἰδώς: the αἰδοίη ταμίη who serves at table in the Odyssey is “respectable”, in contrast to the dissolute girls. But when the council on the Areopagus is called αἰδοῖος ὀξύθυμος (Eum. 705), it is to exercise αἰδώς no less than to pursue ὕβρις with severity. This is connected with the αἴδεσις demanded of avengers of blood in certain cases, where out of αἰδώς they must come to terms with the man they have attacked from the λίθος ἀναιδείας.

66. 66. ↩ In the old language ἀναιδής is said in a very special sense, often of a stone; at A 521 the good Aristarchan explanation is άνένδοτος, he has no αἰδώς, he takes account of nothing and no one. The λᾶας ἀναιδής of Sisyphus, known to all, makes this clear, for he ought at some point to have shown indulgence to the poor Sisyphus; σχληρός in the scholion is a false interpretation for the individual case. θάνατος ἀναιδής Theognis 207. πόντος άναιδής in the old Corinthian epigram of Dweinias, IG IV 358. Euripides, Medea 28, hears ὡς πέτρος ἢ θαλάσσιος χλύδων, which fits well. χάπρος ἀναιδομάχας Bakchylides V 105. πότμος (or νόμος) ἀναιδής at the end of Pindar, Ol. X, has no scruple before the youthful beauty of boys; most beautifully the ἐλπὶς ἀναιδής Nem. 11, 45, which binds us all; that says far more than “shameless”, which is all the word later means.

67. 67. ↩ At Ζ 351 Helen says, “Would that I had obtained a husband ὅς ἤιδη νέμεσίν τε χαὶ αἴσχεα πόλλ’ ἀνθρώπων.” The passage helps to understand Ν 122, ἐν φρεσὶ θέσθε αἰδόα χαὶ νέμεσιν: they are to think of what they ought to have, and of what befalls them if they do not have it. Thus also A 649 αἰδοῖος νεμεσητός of Achilles is explained, towards whom one must act according to Ν 122. οὐ νέμεσις concerns only human judgement, not a goddess. On Hesiod Erga 200. νέμεσις always belongs with νεμεσᾶν, which later disappears. Only the Νέμεσις of Rhamnus must originally have belonged to νέμειν, but her nature is already clouded by the other Nemesis when she becomes mother of Helen, and so she was felt when Themis was worshipped beside her.

68. 68. ↩ Aristotle, Rhet. II 1391b, says that men who fare well, εὐτυχεῖς, are φιλόθεοι χαὶ ἔχουσι πρὸς τὸ θεῖόν πως, πιστεύοντες διὰ τὰ γιγνόμενα ἀγαθὰ ἀπὸ τῆς τύχης. He coins the word for his sarcastic judgement of this sort of piety. He could not say εὐσεβεῖς, because that is a civic duty.

69. 69. ↩ W. Schulze, Berl. Sitz.-Ber. 1912, 694; 1918, 331.

70. 70. ↩ In Arcadia IG V 2, 265, 269. Cyprus GDI I 73. Argos: Hegesandros in Athenaeus 365d. Callimachus, 8, 15 Pfeiffer, says ὕδατος αἶσαν, and thus knows this usage through the then already cultivated collection of dialect words. The late poem Theognis 907 even says αἶσα like μόρος of the destiny of death. A scarcely intelligible verse stands in the Hymn to Demeter 300, which the commentators pass over as though it were perfectly clear, at most referring to 235. Here, of Demophon, whom Demeter tends, it is said ὃ δ’ ἀέξετο δαίμονι ἶσος, “like a child of the gods.” Very well; but now 300. A temple is built for the goddess, ὃ δ’ ἀέξετο δαίμονος αἴσηι. Already the echo is disconcerting; ἀέξετο of a building is also unsuitable. Is the aloa of the goddess now to bring this about? Then αἶσα is used in an unheard-of way, and δαίμων for θεά is not what one expects either. But what else is the dative to mean? Or is it supposed to mean “in wondrous fashion,” as a periphrasis for δαιμονίως? That may be what is meant; but the verse has clearly arisen through remodeling of 235, and that is crude bungling. For the tragedians αἶσα is synonymous with μοῖρα. Most peculiar is Aeschylus, Choeph. 927: Orestes to Clytemnestra, πατρὸς αἶσα determines for you your μόρος. Both words denote destiny, but moira is at the same time death, and in αἶσα lies at the same time the talio. αἶσα φασγανουργός, Choeph. 647. Later the word disappears.

71. 71. ↩ As Plato invented his Poros as the counterpart of Penia, he knew nothing of the Alkmanic one; that is the πόρος χρημάτων.

72. 72. ↩ The “weaving” is what the poet of the beautiful hymn (adesp. 5 D.) said of the Moirai, whom he calls Aisa, Lachesis, and Klotho—assessors of Zeus, and thus dependent on his will.

73. 73. ↩ Pindar, Oxyrhynchus 1792, 1, 27. Correspondingly, at Ol. 6, 42 Eileithyia is linked with the Μοῖραι, and at N. 7, 1 she is called πάρεδρος Μοιρᾶν (“assessor of the Moirai”). In the hymn of Isyllos, Lachesis is actually herself μαῖα. Awkwardly, in the prophetic saying in Herodotus IX 43 ὑπὲρ Λάχεσίν τε Μόρον τε; Olen in Pausanias VIII 21, 3 calls Eileithyia εὔλινος, by which she herself becomes a Κλωθώ, and he pushes her back before Kronos, thus among the primeval powers, as mother of Eros (the Hesiodic one), IX 27, 2. The poem was not old, but it belonged to Delos (I 18, 5), into the cult of the pre-Greek goddess.

74. 74. ↩ As a “share” of the sacrificial meat, μοῖρα still often stands; later one says μερίς. In general, the original meaning remained alive for a long time. Remarkable is Semonides 7, 104: ἀνὴρ δ’ ὅταν μάλιστα θυμηδεῖν δοχῆι χατ’ οἶχον ἢ θεοῦ μοῖραν ἢ ἀνθρώπου χάριν, “and whenever he is most eager—either at home without any special occasion, or at a sacrifice where he gets a μοῖρα from the gods’ banquet, or when someone χαρίζεται him, invites him.”

75. 75. ↩ μόρος as χλῆρος, “plot of land”, which Hesychius also gives among other explanations, is still alive in Lokris (Sitz.-Ber. Berl. 1927, 15) and on Lesbos (IG. XII 2, 74). For Athens it is attested by Ζεὺς μόριος, who watches over the μόριαι ἐλαῖαι, the olive-trees planted by the Areopagus on private land. Sparta has the μόρα as a τάξις στρατοῦ. Just like μοῖρα in the epic turns of phrase ὑπὲρ μόρον; then μόρος, like μοῖρα θανάτου, has become synonymous with θάνατος, hence it appears as son of Night in Hesiod, Theog. 211, together with this and the Κήρ. μόριμον and μόρσιμον are πεπρωμένον, usually said of death, and designate what belongs to the μοῖρα of the person concerned. At Ο 117 Ares says: “I will avenge my son, even if it is my μοῖρα to be struck down by Zeus’ thunderbolt.” Nothing else is meant than “even if it should turn out that …”. Aeschylus, fr. 288, plays on the sound of the words: δέδοιχα μῶρον χάρτα πυραύστου μόρον, “I fear the foolish death of the moth that flies into the light itself.” Heraclitus 20: men wish to live and (what follows from this) μόρους ἔχειν, to die. This is already strangely phrased; but παῖδας χαταλείπουσι μόρους γενέσθαι is not made intelligible by Diels’ translation “that they too should suffer death”.

76. 76. ↩ At ΙΙ 849 Patroclus μοῖρ’ ὀλοὴ and killed by Apollo. Here one sees clearly that the god gives the death to which Patroclus was destined by his μοῖρα.

77. 77. ↩ Theog. 904–6. Jacoby excises these verses, not without an apparent reason. For if we reject Metis as the first wife of Zeus, because Pindar fr. 30 expressly names Themis as the first consort, a contradiction with Hesiod arises: in Pindar the Moirai lead Themis to Zeus, whereas in the Theogony they are born of these parents. That seems compelling — unless Pindar meant to say that the union of the divine ruler with the goddess of eternal right makes the Διὸς μοῖρα, which governs all things, into everlasting justice. He does not consult the Theogony; rather, he retains in memory the first marriage because it accords with his religion, and he shapes the rest in accordance with that same religion — for everything is mythical for him. Jacoby, however, whom even a triad among triads does not deter, achieves the result that his Hesiod knows Moros but no Moirai at all. For he also expels vv. 217–22 (of which 218–19, transferred from the other passage, would in any case fall away), even the Hesperides in 215–16 — something no one will approve who knows these beings sufficiently. This passage has been discussed above, p. 270.

78. 78. ↩ Aeschylus, Eum. 958. Interpretationen 227.

79. 79. ↩ Had one reflected on what this Aphrodite was, one would never have interpreted the so-called genetrix as referring to her.

80. 80. ↩ τοῖς δαιμόνεσσι Schwyzer 482, a communal cult at Thespiae, around 300. In Hesiod’s own homeland his daimones could well have been worshipped, like the “Hesiodic Muses” (Sylloge 1117). δαίμων μειλίχιος occurs exceptionally at Lebadeia (Δελτίον 1917, 422), whereas Meilichios, as lord of the dead, is usually called Zeus.

81. 81. ↩ Scholion AD on A 222: διαιτηταί εἰσι χαὶ διοιχηταὶ τῶν ἀνθρώπων. The verse of Alcman δαιμόνας τ’ ἐδάσσατο fr. 45 D (it is printed δαίμονας!). Plato’s derivation from δαήμονες, Cratylus 398b, ought never to have been taken seriously; only δαήμων does he call an old word. Archilochus 3, 4 D. is restored.

82. 82. ↩ When Helen is compelled by Aphrodite to go to Paris, I 420, and the poet adds ἦρχε δὲ δαίμων, it is precisely Aphrodite who advances as the apportioner who has assigned Helen her fate. Helen herself has called the goddess δαιμονίη, 399: she feels in her the uncanny power under which she stands. In Sophocles Oedipus at Colonus 1480 the thunder resounds repeatedly. There the chorus cries ἵλαος ὦ δαίμων. This implies that it first perceives a δαιμόνιον τέρας (Antigone 375). Recognition of who the thunderer is comes only afterwards. The strophes conclude with ὦ Ζεῦ. At the end of Philoctetes he sets out for the place to which he is led by the great Moira, by the decision of his friends, and by the πανδαμάτωρ δαίμων ὃς ταῦτ’ ἐπιχραίνει. This is not Zeus directly, but “the all-compelling divinity.” — In Seven 106 Ares is addressed as ὧ χρυσοπήληξ δαῖμον, because θεός has no vocative.

83. 83. ↩ Aeschylus, Agamemnon 1663; Choephori 513, before the decisive combat: δαίμονος πειρώμενος.

84. 84. ↩ Nilsson, Daimon, gudemakter og psykologi hos Homer, Copenhagen 1918, p. 28: “It is not a wholly or half philosophical construct, but has grown upon the ground of popular belief, in order to create an expression for the feeling that higher powers, or a higher power, are at work—felt only vaguely and in general terms, and neither capable of being individualised nor characterised.” True and beautiful; the book has been of great assistance to me. Yet in some way one had to characterise the power that one felt, for one had to designate it. Its intelligible name does that; it has not individualised it.

85. 85. ↩ The nuance is, of course, different in each case. I select examples from the Theognidea and from Bacchylides, because these poets rarely have anything particularly idiosyncratic. Theognis 149: the Daimon gives wealth even to the bad; only a few possess a ἀρετῆς μοῖρα. Immediately afterwards, in 151, it is θεός who is the giver. In 161 many people have a base disposition but a good δαίμων—used just as in Hesiod, Erga 314. In 166 the Daimon acts upon both good and bad conditions of life. In 403 the Daimon leads a man who wishes to rise high into a false speculation. Peculiar is 638: ἐλπίς and χίνδυνος are alike called χαλεποὶ δαίμονες, so named because hope and risk bring, that is, apportion, good and bad alike. He will not call them gods. Bacchylides 17.46: τὰ ἐπιόντα δαίμων χρινεῖ. 5.113: δαίμων χάρτος ὄρεξεν. At 135: missiles strike or miss οἷσιν ἂν δαίμων θέληι. Even Thrasymachus (fr. 1) can still speak in quite archaic fashion: “εἰς τοιοῦτον (τοσ. codd.) ἡμᾶς ἀνέθετο χρόνον ὁ δαίμων; he certainly no longer thinks of it personally. It is evident that in some cases τύχη could stand for δαίμων. Aristophanes, Birds 544, already says χατὰ δαίμονα χαὶ χατὰ συντυχίαν ἀγαθήν. Diagoras (fr. 2) had even said χατὰ δαίμονα χαὶ τύχαν, which was anything but pious. Euripides, fr. 901, thinks sharply and says: εἴτε τύχη εἴτε δαίμων τὰ βρότεια χραίνει—divinity or accident. For Pindar’s piety, what happens δαιμονίαι is given by the god (Ol. 9.110); he knows a τύχη δαίμονος, by which a victor attains success (Ol. 8.68); we already know τύχα πότμου; and Zeus steers the Daimon of the men whom he loves (Pyth. 5.123). Here the apportioner has almost become μοῖρα. Something quite special appears in Menander (Genethlios p. 33 Burs.), that Simonides Αὔριον δαίμονα χέχληχεν, taken over by Callimachus, Ep. 14, whose poem makes the sense clear: it is the apportioner of the coming day, though we do not know what it will bring. “Bright King To-Morrow,” as Anatole France lets the English poetess say at the end of Le Lys rouge IX.

86. 86. ↩ In Euripides, Phoenissae 1650, Creon asserts that Polyneices is rightly left unburied. Antigone replies that this right is ἄνομον, that it violates the νόμοι χοινοί, ἄγραφοι. Creon justifies his position: Polyneices was a perduellis, which is indisputable. Antigone answers: οὐχοῦν ἔδωχε τῆι τύχηι τὸν δαίμονα. Creon: then he must δίχην δοῦναι that is, remain unburied as a traitor. Whereupon she adduces by appealing to his right to claim his inheritance, a reason to which Creon has no reply. What does the quoted verse mean? He committed his Daimon to Tyche, to the outcome of the duel. And what was his Daimon? Not death, as in Θ 166, nor his fate in general, for that did not lie in his own hands. His δαίμων was precisely what Creon has just stated, πόλεως ἐχθρὸς ἦν οὐχ ἐχθρὸς ὤν—the status that was in question. The decision in this dilemma he left to the duel. δαίμων is used here in exactly the same way as in Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus 76, where the δαίμων of Oedipus is his blindness and also his beggar’s existence.

87. 87. ↩ Plutarch (Isis and Osiris 361) finds the same thing in the address δαιμόνιε and in the expression δαίμονι ἶσος. How differently nuanced the form of address is—especially in Plato, and evidently also in everyday speech, as comedy shows—need not concern us here. Only this much: the frequent comic ὦ δαιμόνι’ ἀνδρῶν points back to δαίμονι ἶσος.

88. 88. ↩ Text and explanation in my edition.

89. 89. ↩ Alcestis is revered in her tomb as a μάχαιρα δαίμων (1002); Darius is summoned from his grave as a Daimon, yet is immediately also called Περσᾶν θεός (Aeschylus 641, 44). Isocrates (Panegyricus 151) says of the Persians that they θνητὸν ἄνδρα δαίμονα προσαγορεύοντες τῶν δὲ θεῶν ὀλιγωροῦντες, where δαίμων is chosen because the antithesis excludes what would otherwise be correct, namely divine worship.

90. 90. ↩ Plutarch (De tranquillitate animi 474b) calls the beings who, in Empedocles, receive the newly re-embodied human being μοῖραι χαὶ δαίμονες. The beings who appear in the proem of Parmenides are δαίμονες. (Only this gives sense to 1.3; ὁδὸς δαίμονος, “road to the Daimon,” is not Greek.) In 12.3 one of his own fictions appears, akin to the Aphrodite of Empedocles, a δαίμων. In Empedocles fr. 59, in his catacrestic manner, even his two primal forces are called Daimones. In the Katharmoi he calls himself θεός when he wishes to emphasize the dignity of the position he has attained, and at the same time δαίμων, because he is still a god excluded from heaven.

91. 91. ↩ Sophocles fr. 511: οὔτε δαίμων οὔτε τις θεῶν. Euripides, Helen 1137: θεὸς ἢ μὴ θεὸς ἢ τὸ μέσον; to this middle class belong Daimones and Heroes.

92. 92. ↩ Fr. 119. When in fr. 79 he sets the Daimon over against the human being in the same way that a child stands over against an adult, he deliberately chooses the name that reaches farther and is not so lofty as θεός.

93. 93. ↩ Already Phokylides (16 D) distinguishes between Daimones “who deliver men from evil circumstances and those who inflict evil upon them”—a supplement that is justified because Clement, who cites the passage, equates the two classes with good and fallen angels. As soon as the Daimon became bound to the individual human being, its duplication followed of necessity. In a very peculiar way Xenophon duplicates it in Cyropaedia VI 1.41: he divides the soul—something familiar to us, but perhaps unique among the Greeks—into a conflict between desire and sense of duty, θυμός and λογισμός, which for the Greeks become parts or powers of the soul.

94. 94. ↩ Hesiod, Erga 686: χρήματα γὰρ ψυχὴ πέλεται δειλοῖσι βροτοῖσιν. Money becomes as dear to men as life itself. This is the only occurrence. Heraclitus 85, where θυμός purchases what it desires at the cost of the ψυχή, is entirely the same. On the Homeric usage see my appendix to The Return of Odysseus. Even in Herodotus III 130 τὴν ψυχὴν ἀπέδωχε is said of the physician who “saved a man’s life”.

95. 95. ↩ It is worth comparing the prologue of the Hecuba. The εἴδωλον of Polydoros speaks—he is still unburied, yet has nevertheless “left the gates of Hades.” He was waiting before them for admission. For three days already he has been hovering over his mother. One might expect him to announce himself, that is, to have appeared to her as Polydoros. But she has not seen him; she has seen only a dream-image with black wings, as she herself says at lines 71 and 705, where she first learns what that apparition meant, once the corpse has been found. The εἴδωλον was therefore winged, unlike that of Patroklos. This is how people now imagined the ψυχαί. Euripides had Ψ before his eyes; for him too the apparition is only a dream, yet it had to speak as Polydoros and retain its wings, because it was a ψυχή, a soul of a different kind from the θεία ψυχὴ Ἑλένου, who interprets Hecuba’s dream at line 87. Achilles, however, does not rise from the grave as an εἴδωλον, but himself, in the splendor of his arms, and demands Polyxena (37, 110). He is, after all, a heros—he still lives. Everything is intelligible; the tragedian makes use of the different conceptions, and the Athenian spectator will feel no contradiction. The appearance of Achilles was familiar to him from the Polyxena of Sophocles. Later actors have nevertheless inserted mediating additions, which I have identified (Hermes 44, 446).

96. 96. ↩ Since Teiresias, who οἶος πέπνυται, must first drink blood, Antikleia ought not to regain consciousness; the poet nevertheless allowed it for the sake of the action. In the continuation the heroes possess self-awareness, precisely because they are heroes.

97. 97. ↩ And yet it has been possible to assert that Sappho was thinking of her own heroisation! Whoever says such a thing has never understood the true Hellenes.

98. 98. ↩ ψυχέων φειδόμενοι and φιλοψυχεῖν Tyrt. 6, 14. 18, ἐχθρὴν ψυχὴν θέμενος 8, 5. This has been taken over with the Ionic language. In the much later poem 9, 18 ψυχὴν χαὶ θυμὸν τλήμονα παρθέμενος. ψυχή and θυμός are thus linked, φ 154, 171; ψ. παραθέσθαι γ 74; παραβάλλεσθαι Ι 322.

99. 99. ↩ ἄψυχος πόθωι Archilochos 104. ἀψυχία, where one later says λιποψυχία, Hippocrates ἀρχ. ἰητρ. 10. ἄψυχος ‘spiritless’ Aeschylus Seven 192; the corresponding εὐψυχία is first attested in Attic, accidentally, for εὔψυχος occurs in Hippocrates ἀέρ. ὕδ. τόπ. 23, τὴν ψυχὴν χαχοί 24. It is no longer a matter merely of dying, but of ταλαιπωρεῖν, and when the souls of the Asiatics are δεδούλωνται through slavery, these really are souls. σῶμα χαὶ ψυχή are already linked. In Herodotus V 124 ψυχὴν οὐχ ἄχρος means cowardly, III 14 διεπειρᾶτο τῆς ψυχῆς, he put his self-mastery, his temper of soul, to the test. This continues further. Herodotus of course knows the doctrine of an immortal soul, though only as something foreign.

100. 100. ↩ Immisch has now provided the welcome proof that for the verse of Archilochos 83 D τοιήνδη δ’ ὦ πίθηχε τὴν πυγὴν ἔχων no variant ψυχήν exists. Then let us also blow away all learned vapour and leave the ape his πυγή; the Venetus of Aristophanes is trustworthy, and the ape’s πυγή shines like the truth.

101. 101. ↩ Sappho 66, 8 ψυχὰ ἀγαπατά is, like the whole short poem, still not understood; but a “beloved soul” will surely mean a beloved person. In Alkaios 109, 32 only ψυχάν has been preserved. Archilochos 21 ψυχὰς ἔχοντες χυμάτων ἐν ἀγχάλαις may have meant “their lives” in a literal sense, though in context perhaps more than that. In Simonides 29 the γλυχεῖα ψυχά is simply the life of Archemoros.

102. 102. ↩ At any rate, I do not dare to rely on Albericus (Mythogr. Vat. III 27 = fr. 195 Bgk.), who depends on the late scholia to Statius, Theb. VIII 736. It would otherwise be of great importance if Simonides had really said animam non deserere corpus, cum potius corpus animam deserat, for then the soul would continue to live on.

103. 103. ↩ That Anaximenes fr. 2 is not an authentic saying has been proved by Reichardt (Kosm. u. Sympathie 210). Anyone should have recognised this already from a word such as συγχρατεῖν.

104. 104. ↩ In Euripides, Hiketides 532, in death the body returns to the earth, the πνεῦμα to the aether, from which they came. This differs only in that the breath of life is designated as αἰθήρ. Exactly the same in the epigram for the fallen at Potidaea: αἰθὴρ μὲν ψυχὰς ὑπεδέξατο, σώματα δὲ χθών. Here a dualism of aether and earth prevails, as it is expressed in Melanippe fr. 484 and by the chorus of the Chrysippos. This is not the doctrine of Anaxagoras or Diogenes, as it is usually represented. Aether is also called “heaven,” precisely when it is conceived materially, for from it the phantom of Helen is made (Hel. 34), for which νεφέλη is also said (705). But αἰθήρ is at the same time Zeus, fr. 941. Of the origin of the world from αἰθήρ and γαῖα Amphion sings, fr. 1023. Here αἰθήρ is at once material and spiritually divine; it is not νοῦς. Euripides anticipates the Stoic doctrine.

105. 105. ↩ Polygnotos saw in these water-carriers ἀμύητοι, for he followed the interpretation of his native Demeter mysteries. Who first taught people to see in them the Danaids, who had deprived themselves of the τέλος of marriage, is unknown. It is hardly credible that any serious belief condemned all girls who died unmarried to eternal punishment in Hades.