OLD HELLENIC GODS

Only now do we come to what we are truly seeking: the primeval Hellenic gods. To go further back to Indo-European antecedents is impossible—and also unnecessary; for in the case of the oldest gods we can still apprehend the feelings which led men to confer upon this or that power, recognised as efficacious, the predicate “god”, that is to say in plain terms: what is contained in this god. We seek the belief which created the god; name and cult follow only afterwards. The path of research, it is true, most often runs in the opposite direction; and since cult and name are known to us only from a time when the Hellenes are already in Hellas—indeed we must often rely on even later testimonies—it leads at best into early Hellenic times. Yet we must penetrate to the belief; only then do we understand the god.

The experiences of his life lead man to belief in his gods. We must therefore form for ourselves a picture of the life which the Proto-Hellenes led in the valleys of the central Balkan peninsula; so far did their own memory reach back. We proceed in exactly the same way when we investigate their primitive social and political conditions, from which the forms of life of the historical period arose—conditions very powerfully determined by religion.¹

The nature amid which the Proto-Hellenes lived was very different from that Hellenic landscape which, at Parnassus, in Attica, in the Peloponnese, brings their gods close to us, and which on the Asiatic coast and the islands teaches us to understand the natural imagery of Homer—differences from European Hellas that are easily overlooked and yet are by no means slight. The Proto-Hellenes lacked the sea; and what would Homer be without the sea—what would Chalcis, Athens, Corinth be? Hence there is in the mountainous land of Arcadia so much that is archaic. In the valleys of Upper Macedonia many trees and plants were lacking to them which we can scarcely imagine away. The winters were harsh, the summers fiercely hot. Forest spread far and still harboured the wild bison, bear, wolf and boar; even the lion, according to explicit testimony, was not absent. Much thus appears to us un-Greek. Yet there was one thing that nature displayed which we too can name only by its Greek name, and must know in order to feel wholly Hellenic: the αἰθήρ, in which Zeus—already he of Dodona—dwells, and who at the same time is χελαινεφής. One must have looked upward when everything above is filled with flickering light, when, as Lord Byron once says, God alone is visible in the sky. This is an element other than the air, it is the atmosphere, beyond which in the North we cannot see and with which we must content ourselves under a blue sky. Hence it remains inadequate when we can render αἰθήρ only as “air” or “sky”; at times, by its etymology, it is “fire”. “ὦ δῖος αἰθήρ” begins Prometheus his lament (88); the aether is certainly divine, but not a god; a natural philosophy that dispenses with personal gods made it into a primal substance, which then, in contrast to the heavy earth, could also be conceived of as a spiritual principle. Whoever has truly looked upon the aether and followed the usage of the word will also see how senseless all talk of a “light-god” is: such a one would have to be called Αἰθήρ; but he who does nothing and does not come among men cannot be a god at all.²

The Proto-Hellenes live by agriculture and still more by stock-breeding: cattle-rearing is far more prominent than it would be later. Raiding is added. They live divided into numerous small tribes; the tribe is the political unit. Settlement is in individual farmsteads, grouped into villages that are unfortified, χωμηδόν. πόλις is a stronghold in which a tribal chief has secured himself with his own; refuge-fortresses such as those among Italic and Germanic peoples seem not to have existed.³ If the outer ring of walls at Tiryns has been designated as such, and the Cadmeia too may be so conceived, these are extensions of an already existing lordly citadel. But an enclosure, ἕρχος, every homestead possesses. Within it the house-father rules with full authority over his family and the free retainers; slaves are captured enemies; dispossessed men of the same rank from other tribes, who have given themselves into the hand of a lord, enter as θεράποντες. There will also be dependants—often from a subjected population—who cultivate their own special farms; and thus even free tribesmen may stand under a powerful lord, while in their own homestead they in turn are masters of a household. The sum of the free men constitutes the tribe, divided into families, yet all hold themselves to be of common blood, even when no line of ancestors can be produced. From among the free men of rank rises the nobility, the ἥρωες, resting upon divine blood; and usually a king stands at the head of the tribe, primus inter pares—this even where a prerogative of birth permanently secures the dignity to a single house. King and community, that is, the host in arms, are bound to one another by mutual oaths. He is limited by the heads of families, who themselves call themselves kings or princes; many a tribe will also raise one of these by election to be king, or they rule without such a leader until war makes his choice necessary; for the most apt designation of the Greek king is “leader of the host”. For martial enterprises several tribes also unite, in which case one of the kings assumes the command.

Even if etymology fails us, ϝάναξ must nevertheless be an ancient Hellenic word from the language of the first stratum. Ζεῦ ἄνα Δωδωναῖε, the Ἄναχες precisely in Argos and Athens, also the Anaktes, that is, princes and princes’ sons on Cyprus, all bear witness to this. The Dorians and Thessalians seem to have possessed this word as little as the foreign term βασιλεύς, which the first stratum of immigrants borrowed from outsiders and passed on to the second. It is not often, and only late, that it is applied to gods.⁴ Upon the tribal king there rests no priestly—still less any divine—consecration, even though he offers the sacrifices for the tribe and formally concludes the treaties that are bound up with the oath-sacrifice. It is quite possible that the sacrifices later called “ancestral”, for which a nominal king was appointed, were originally the family sacrifices of the royal house; yet the tribe for the most part placed itself under the protection of one of the great gods. It is of the greatest importance that those curious forms of kingship which Frazer has pursued in connexion with the rex Nemorensis are alien to the Hellenes. The tribe has its gods, to whom it celebrates common festivals; accordingly it appoints priests, who do not form a closed estate, but are officials of the tribe. In his own homestead every master is king, and the daily worship of the household is more important than that of the tribe; here too gods may be venerated who have come from elsewhere, even together with their priests; gradually they find admission among the gods of the tribe, whose number thus increases. The male youth is often mustered by the tribe in order to be trained in the art of arms,⁵ and then also stands at the disposal of cultic dances. Within the body of citizens estates will differentiate; correspondingly, gods too will differentiate. Warrior, farmer, and herdsman require very different protection. So too the seer and the poet and the craftsman—wandering folk, who already existed in primeval times—will have their divine patrons. Above all, however, womanhood. The woman is indeed no subject of right; she has her value like other property and brings the father considerable profit through the bride-price—Ἀλφεσίβοια expresses it well.⁶ Spartan custom has preserved, in very crude forms, remnants of a condition in which there was as yet no true marriage; in the migrating war-bands women were few, and capture-marriage, polyandry, and pederasty were the consequence. We must not transfer this to the settled tribes, but reckon rather with the wife as mistress of the house and mother of legitimate children, however many bastards may grow up alongside these and personally suffer scarcely any disadvantage. Women require for their sexual life a special divine assistance; hence there have always been particular women’s goddesses, γυναιχεῖαι, whose cult was not confined to the house but received its own sanctuary, inaccessible to men and administered by the women of the tribe. Other female deities likewise received priestesses, and choirs of maidens were by no means lacking precisely in those states which held fast to ancient customs; this led to the appearance of poetesses who, though they never formed an estate as the itinerant singers did and are therefore known to us only from later times, must not on that account be regarded as without influence—above all in the cult of the female divinities. Where these, however, attained general veneration, as befell Earth in her various forms, the deepening of religious feeling is owed to feminine souls.

The small tribes dwelling side by side will indeed worship gods like in essence, since they speak the same language and live, at much the same cultural level, under similar conditions of life. Yet differences exist even here, as a village lies accordingly in a secluded forest valley, or by a river. Above all, each village worships its gods at a place belonging to its own territory, or at least lying within its horizon—perhaps on a high mountain which serves the inhabitants as a watch for weather. For only very few divinities have already become so fixed in form that they are everywhere invoked under the same name, a name that must be immediately intelligible, like Ge and Hestia, or a name once intelligible and now universally valid, like Poseidon and Hermes. In many cases, however, it sufficed for the inhabitants of a village to name the god after the place where he dwelt for them or manifested himself, as we shall find especially with the goddesses later gathered together under the name Artemis. When such a god spread, he could retain this name, either in his own designation or in that of his festival (Ἰτωνία Ἰτώνια, Λαφρία Λάφρια, Ἐλευσίνια, Ὀλύμπια, and so forth). Here we have a highly characteristic contrast with Italic custom, where a considerable number of individual gods have received their names from the clan in whose hands the cult first lay—something unheard of among the Hellenes.⁷ In the epic formula-language, therefore, many a place-name has been preserved that meant nothing at all to poets and hearers, such as Ἰχναίη Θέμις, Ἀλαλχομενηὶς Ἀθήνη, or else obtained in itself a wholly unwarranted diffusion, like Κυλλήνιος Ἑρμῆς. Thus the number of gods that were only apparently different increased, or else they differentiated themselves in cult, in name, and in their very nature. In the same way the festivals—even when they were dedicated to the same gods—differed from tribe to tribe and even from neighbouring village to village, if only because the tribes had chosen different great gods as their particular protectors. But even festivals that arose from the same natural occasion did not fall on the same day; the very variation in determining the phases of the moon, by which reckoning was made, sufficed to produce this.⁸ An annual rite of expiation will scarcely have been lacking anywhere, yet it could be fixed quite differently. It is quite possible that neighbouring villages welcomed it when opportunity offered to attend here and there a festival identical in content, as happens today with the village fair in certain regions. This intercourse, over which divine peace prevailed, strengthened the feeling of national cohesion and increased the number of divine persons.

Gods are everywhere; they belong—speaking in modern terms—together with man to the nature in which they all live, of one stock with mankind: ὁμόθεν γεγάασιν, as Hesiod says. If the question were already raised whence both derive, the answer could only be: from the earth; and so Hesiod also represents it. For upon the earth all the gods are active who have concern with men. They come to the sacrifice, to table-fellowship with those who offer; they also consort with the daughters of men and beget children by them. It is indeed a great difference that they do not taste death, yet they too can suffer pains and wounds. They thus have a body; but that this is a human body does not follow from the fact that we must say that the gods are wholly human in their soul. As they become visible to the eyes of men, the gods assume every possible form; yet these too change, and therefore experience can at first say only in what shapes they are wont to appear, differing according to their will. Their true form is not determined by their manifestation, the epiphany—even when they are perceived in only a single shape.

It is their great advantage over Orientals and Egyptians that the Hellenes conceive their gods in beautiful human form, untouched by the distortions of age; but this was first taught them by Homer. Semi-animal formation has persisted—apart from monsters, which are of no religious consequence—only in lower divine beings who remain dwelling on earth or in the sea, while the gods, again through Homer, are transferred to heaven. The use of wings entered from the Orient into the visual arts, and thus only at a late date: at first even for the great gods, later restricted to certain beings of lower order for whom it seemed appropriate, such as the Winds, then readily transferred to new gods; and in so far as it extends in poetry and the visual arts, it is often the mark by which one recognises the god as such in a painting—but it has never been more than mythology. It is beyond dispute that the Minoan Cretans had attained the human form of the gods and the composite form of lesser divine beings before the Hellenes; yet since the mixed forms differ and no connection can be demonstrated, this can scarcely be more than a parallel development, at most a general model. From the Homeric poems one would not infer that the Hellenes predominantly imagined the epiphany of their gods in animal form. Hera βοῶπις and Athena γλαυχῶπις in themselves in no way compel the conclusion of an appearance as cow or owl; indeed the poet is not in the least conscious that anything of the kind might lie in the inherited epithets.⁹ If we hold this to be probable, it is because of the animal form that we still often find in the motherland, while in Homer it appears only sporadically; I must repeat the evidence. In the Iliad the gods for the most part assume the form of men when they wish to have direct dealings with mortals¹⁰; yet Apollo and Athena also sit as vultures upon a tree (Η 59). In a late interpolation in the Odyssey (χ 239) Athena flits up as a swallow onto a roof-beam of the hall—for there, in fact, swallows are wont to nest. Thus a man could believe that in a swallow which he saw alight above him at a decisive moment the god of the house was looking down. Particularly characteristic is the appearance of Leucothea in ε: she seats herself upon the raft in her own shape, speaks to Odysseus, and gives him her veil; but then she vanishes αἰθυίηι εἰχυῖα into the waves. Odysseus has not recognised her; only, it must have been a divinity. We perceive what lies behind it: once a sailor discerned in the appearance of the white gull the nearness of the White Goddess. On the whole the Ionian epic has here, as in so much else, risen above the belief of the fathers, which long remained current in the motherland and will also have persisted among the mass of the Ionian people.

The dolphin accompanies ships, as still delights us today in the Mediterranean. When a perilous voyage succeeded, the companion had been a god. So the Pythian Hymn to Apollo¹¹ describes it; and in the time when the Pythian bade so many colonists fare forth over the wide sea, he became δελφίνιος.¹² We may believe Callimachus that the Theraeans saw in a raven Apollo (Karneios), who appeared to them on their march to the spring Kyra, where they built the new city and for the god a temple. The raven was not a sacred animal of the god, nor did it become one.¹³ Aphrodite is neither the dove, which is sacred to her among the Semites, nor the swan that bears her in pictorial representations, serving merely to make her πελαγία recognisable. In the ravenous beasts of their forests the Hellenes very rarely beheld gods—never in the boar, which was the most dangerous foe of hunters.¹⁴ The bear, in whose shape Callisto—that is, Artemis—once appeared to the Arcadians, remained an exception.¹⁵ Lions still existed in the forests of the central Balkan lands; hence Heracles and Alcathous¹⁶ subdue them. Yet their extensive use in the visual arts comes from the Orient; nevertheless the lion remained permanently in imagination the mightiest and bravest of beasts, after which men gladly named themselves. It is set as guardian upon the grave; the lions upon the ridges of temples, and even as waterspouts or mouths of fountains, only gradually became merely ornamental. But only Dionysus, who comes from Asia, assumes the form of a lion and has the panther as his companion, an animal that exists only in Asia; the visual arts must have taken it over from there and employ it like the lions upon the pediments, even on the pediment of Corcyra.¹⁷ The wolf was still so common in Attica that Solon offered bounties for its destruction. It was repugnant to the Hellenes on account of its cunning.¹⁸ As a proper name it is later not uncommon; but its heroic bearer comes as a tyrant from Euboea to Thebes and, as the son of Pandion, rules the Euboea-facing part of Attica. As a wolf he is to stand at the door of the Heliaia.¹⁹ In Arcadia, Lycaon is the ancestor of a tribe because this dwells about Mount Lykaion; but he is an impious man, and here the belief in the werewolf has been preserved. Proper names such as Lycurgus, later Lycortas, belong to this stock. Lycomedes of Skyros too is an evil king. A god in wolf-shape is therefore not to be found. Only this is remarkable, that the wolf is the emblem of Argos, and that the Argives are therefore designated as wolves (Aeschylus, Suppliants 760). Since Apollo Lykeios enjoys quite special veneration, they must once have regarded the wolf as the god’s animal²⁰; later, however, he was rather conceived as a wolf-slayer (Sophocles, Electra 6), or another aition was devised (Pausanias II 19, 3). It was, to be sure, a false interpretation; the light is introduced by the moderns, which is still more erroneous, and even the “Lycian” cannot be regarded as certain, which Sophocles discovered in Λύχιος and Euripides expressly utters in Ion.²¹

No god appears in the form of a fish save Apollo as dolphin, already mentioned—though it would have lain so close at hand for sea-gods; Nemesis, in the Cypria, had also attempted to escape the pursuit of Zeus by transforming herself into a fish. Even later, metamorphoses into fish are not favoured.²² And if a fish such as the πόμπιλος is ἱερός and is not caught, the reason lies in its behaviour towards men. Bird-form, on the other hand, the gods must have been especially fond of assuming; we have seen how strongly this persists in Homer and how several gods have particular birds as their companions. From this there developed bird-divination, so universally practised that οἰωνός came to mean “omen”. There may indeed have been, even later, men who claimed the power to announce the meaning of the flight of birds, as Teiresias does in myth²³; but in general everyone knew how to interpret what he observed. Hence the state never troubled itself with auspices in the Roman fashion. Two methods seem to have existed. At Ephesus the rules were inscribed upon a public building (Schwyzer 708, sixth century). But this is exceptional, scarcely Greek. What mattered rather was which bird appeared or raised its voice—something that presupposes that astonishing familiarity with individual birds and their habits which we find in Aristophanes. This reaches back into epic. In Aeschylus, Prometheus is said to have taught this art as well (489). There existed a Hesiodic poem on the subject, an appendix to the Works and Days, which perished as a result of athetesis by Apollonius Rhodius.²⁴ Then—hardly before the fourth century—there arose in the Delphic circle a poem by a Boio or Boios, which found in the individual birds transformed human beings²⁵: rather foolish, to be sure; yet the metamorphoses found favour, and moderns have betrayed their scant feeling for genuine Hellenic belief by taking these empty jeux d’esprit seriously, even admiring them. Such play arose because faith in bird-divination had died. We may admire only the ancient tales in which the effect of particular bird-voices upon a receptive imagination has found expression: the transformation of Alcyone into the kingfisher already in Homer; Procne and Philomela, nightingale and swallow, in Hesiod, and whatever else is told of Aedon.²⁶ Of this kind there may well have been other individual instances.²⁷ This is something entirely natural—just as natural as that the appearance of the first swallow, or of the first flock of birds migrating northward, was greeted with passion, and children sang their swallow-songs. The greeting is addressed not to the bird as such, but to the approaching spring; and the cry of the swans on the Hebrus is indirectly the same, for it greets Apollo when he returns from the Hyperboreans.²⁸ When Helen or the Dioscuri, and likewise the Molionids, spring from an egg, one may only later have asked which bird laid it; and then the swan of Leda, the transformation of Nemesis in the Cypria, came into being. If Pan is the son of Penelope, then she must once have been a duck; the custom of giving women bird-names scarcely reaches back far enough to explain this. The “soul-bird” has been discredited by modern exaggeration, yet it once possessed its full validity, before it was displaced by the little winged human figures and later still by the butterfly as the bodily manifestation of the soul; nevertheless the bird or moth as the soul of one who has just died has been preserved in Greek belief down to the present day.²⁹ Alongside this stands the serpent, because it dwells in the earth, as the appropriate form for the dead, the ancestral spirits³⁰; but even the Erinys may be called δράχαινα (Aeschylus, Eumenides 128). Art has produced in great number composite beings with bird-heads in order to make it intelligible that they are not birds; in the original conception they will not have been birds, but will have appeared as birds.

The capacity for transformation is elaborated in the later epic in Thetis and Proteus; it is extended also to the great gods, and in the figure formerly called Typhon, art has attempted in a special way to represent it. The river-god has the form of a bull³¹; only art, in imitation of the Orient, has given Acheloos a human head. To Poseidon ταύρειος too the bull-form has been transferred, in so far as he was confined to the sea,³² and his attendants are called ταῦροι. The maidens who serve at the Brauronia, and the priestess of Artemis at Cyrene, are called “bears”; and the mother of Ἀρχάς is a bear and is named Callisto, like Artemis. The same goddess is called Ἐλαφία; and even if this may be taken as an abbreviation of Ἐλαφηβόλος and the hind that accompanies her be understood in the same way, yet she appears as a hind among the Aloadae,³³ and the hind that belongs to Artemis and is pursued by Heracles is a goddess—originally, no doubt, Artemis herself. We have already encountered the ram Karnos, and with him Hermes as ram. When Dionysus entered, this belief in animal form received special reinforcement, for the god appeared predominantly as a young bull, but also as a kid,³⁴ and he transformed himself into all manner of beasts of prey.³⁵ Not to speak at all of the semi-animal formation of gods who did not attain Olympus.

Most widespread and most significant is the horse-form. It was the Greeks who first brought the horse into the Balkan peninsula. Before this they must have dwelt in regions that showed them wild horses in abundance, some of which they succeeded in harnessing to their carts. Presumably they then also consumed horse-milk and flesh, like Scythians and Germans. But we know them only in the stage in which this consumption appears unnatural, while the horse is the most precious possession, attainable only by princes. They had not yet learned to ride; as a draught-animal in the mountains the noble horse found little employment. Naturally the gods too did not eat horse-flesh; instead they received living horses as a particularly precious offering, which one preferred to sink in a river, later in the sea.³⁶ The belief that gods appeared in the form of horses arose before the migration, for only then could horses be observed moving in freedom. Yet this belief was so firmly rooted that it did not vanish; centaurs and sileni still inhabited the forests, and the greatest gods assumed this form. The Italic peoples seem to lack this belief, and probably the Etruscans as well³⁷; the Celtic Epona, whom we know only as protectress of horses, will originally herself have been a divine mare, just as Artio was a bear. The Germans relinquished with great difficulty the consumption of horse-flesh from their sacrifices; they know rivers in horse-form, set horse-heads upon the gables of their houses, and—so far as one may judge from what has been preserved—the horse was even more important in their belief than among the Proto-Hellenes; in the forests of Central Europe there seem also still to have been wild horses. The influence of Homer, who indeed still lets the horses of Achilles speak³⁸ and conceives Zephyrus, who mounts mares, in horse-form, thrusts the old conception in literature almost wholly into the background, so that it appears nearly as a mere metaphor.³⁹ Yet Euripides can, in the Wise Melanippe, even display upon the stage a horse-shaped Hippo as a deus ex machina; and in his day the Boeotian women still believed that a goddess so formed dwelt in the mountain forests and came to their aid in sickness. Euripides can also, in the Antiope, still call the Theban Dioscuri λευχὼ πώλω, where the epithet compels us to understand two white horses.⁴⁰ Later, only the horse upon grave-stelae and upon vessels⁴¹ destined for the cult of the dead is an image of the deceased or a symbol of the realm of death; riders too occur.⁴² And the lord of the depths of earth, who at first was also lord of the dead—Poseidon, and then Hades—is himself conceived as a horse; the Earth-Mother must assume this form when he is to beget with her the phantom-horse Areion.

As anthropomorphism advances, the stallion becomes the χλυτόπωλος; from the ἵππος arises the ἵππιος, who himself was born as a horse (Pausanias VIII 8, 2), or a Ζεύξιππος; from λευχὼ πώλω Διός the Dioscuri. To these must be added the transformation of the black mare into the heroine Melanippe, of the white horse that guided many colonists into the founder Leukippos, of the wind Αἴολος into the king of the winds and further into a hero. Alcman compares Agido to a victorious horse τῶν ὑποπετριδίων ὀνείρων; here dreams seem, like the winds, to dwell in a cave and to possess horse-form, because they appear and vanish so swiftly.⁴³ The matter cannot be exhausted.⁴⁴

How then does the belief in the animal form of the gods arise? It cannot spring from the nature of the animals themselves. The horse has not differentiated itself into so many forms. Certainly primitive man stands very close to his animals; even today this may develop into a relation of comradeship. Even domestic animals are in many respects superior to man; but that does not suffice, otherwise the dog would have lent his form to gods—and yet he is merely often called god or man’s “dog” to denote servility, not to speak of the term of abuse χύον ἀδεές.⁴⁵ Here too perception alone is decisive. When a man in the wild forest encounters a bear, or a buck of the wild goat, or a hind, it may often be nothing but game; yet at times the apparition becomes uncanny: that was no bear, no hind—that was a god. Who he was was not inferred from the nature of the animal; rather, man already brought with him belief in a named god and now beheld him in this form—for it still lay in the god’s own choice how he would manifest himself. Or else a new god has appeared bodily in the animal and retains the form of his epiphany. Leucothea and the gull, Athena and the swallow have been cited above. Pan has remained the he-goat beside the herd of satyrs. I myself have experienced an epiphany of him, when I was riding in a hollow way of Arcadia and suddenly above my head, in the branches of a tree, a venerable billy-goat appeared and, without stirring, looked down upon horse and rider beneath him. If one reflects on this and considers that in their later abodes the Greeks encountered no wild horses, the recognition forces itself upon us that these conceptions arose in the steppes and forests of the North, and that precisely for this reason they were able to develop and transform themselves in various directions, because sensory experience no longer intervened.

Since we wish to reach belief, and thus the primal generation of the gods, we must seek men where they live and where, for the flourishing of that life, they require divine aid. Outside, everything is foreign to them; and the foreign is at first in every respect hostile. They will have cleared themselves a field, planted fruit trees; these prosper only if blessing from below causes the grain to sprout and the ears to ripen, and the blessing from above must not be lacking either—rain and sunshine must come, neither hail nor scorching heat. River or brook provides drinking water; with this in view the dwelling-place will have been chosen. In the mountain forest the cattle graze; there beasts of prey threaten, and the peace of the house is pressed upon by the lawless outside world. This opposition determines the gods upon whom we encounter, even before we enter. There stands at the door a sacrificial stone: upon it the uncanny mistress of the outside receives her offering, that she may remain outside and not cross our paths out there. And a pillar stands there, in which for us the kindly god dwells, who is to guard us and our cattle beyond; only under his protection do we venture forth ourselves. Within the house is the centre about which all the members of the family, together with the household servants, gather at mealtimes—the hearth: there dwells with us the deity who protects the peace of the house. Even the stranger, the suppliant, is secure when he seats himself at the hearth. Sacrifice is offered here also to other gods, but the goddess of the hearth always receives the first and the last offering.⁴⁶ In accordance with the gender of the word, Hestia⁴⁷ is a goddess; yet mythology can scarcely tell more of her than that she is a virgin, because she cannot enter into union with any god: the household stands upon itself. By this she does not acquire an individual being, nor does the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite confer one upon her when it sets her beside the heavenly virgins Artemis and Athena. The hearth is always present for the family; therefore Hestia has no parents. The way in which Hesiod inserts her into the genealogy of the gods expresses this—both in her case and in that of the other daughters of Kronos. To place an image of the goddess beside the hearth, which she herself is, would be self-contradictory; the designation “Hestia Giustiniani” was already erroneous for that reason. That, for example, she appears in the procession of the Twelve Gods on the François Vase is no exception. The painter could not omit her; and even Plato gives a reason why she does not accompany the procession of the gods in the Phaedrus: there she is already the χοινὴ ἑστία⁴⁸ of the universe, and the centre of a sphere remains at rest while it revolves. This is the end of a necessary development. First the household hearth is the centre of the family; then the hearth in the house of the tribal king, at which he offers sacrifice for the community, sanctifies the unity of the tribe; the communal hearth of Athens, or that in Tenedos (Pindar, Nemean 11), stands in the Prytaneion—there the guests of the Athenian state and its highest magistrates dined. When the democratic council assumes authority, it creates for itself a Ἑστία βουλαία; and in like manner it will have been almost everywhere. The demes and clans of Athens too have their communal cult and their Hestia, as individual testimonies attest.⁴⁹ When Delphi wished to be the centre of the world, its Ἑστία could lay claim to a special sanctity, as is done in the hymn of Aristonoos (Gr. Verskunst 496), composed for a chorus. Already the Homeric Hymn 24—timeless though it is, yet not therefore without value—pays homage to the Delphic Hestia.⁵⁰ On Delos and in Camirus⁵¹ she receives dedications from the highest magistrates, but there together with Apollo, here with Ζεὺς τέλειος (the god of ἐν τέλει). More recent gods step beside her and cast her into the shade, yet still carry on under her name the consecration of the civic hearth. Thus she persists only as χοινὴ ἑστία, because men of the Hellenistic age were for the most part estranged from homeland and family, and in the tenement houses of the great cities a private hearth-cult was scarcely any longer practicable, so that the feeling died away. The hearth had been the centre in the old square (or rounded) house; the smoke was endured, and one was content even to slaughter a calf⁵² indoors, or at least to roast it. Advancing civilisation outgrew this⁵³ and moved the cult-place into the courtyard, where it is then consecrated to the great god who now assumes the protection, as of the citadel, so also of the individual enclosed homestead. Ζεὺς ἑρχεῖος stands in the courtyard of Odysseus and in the Persae in the courtyard of Priam; and whoever in Athens wishes to become archon must possess a Ζεὺς ἑρχεῖος, that is, a private courtyard—this demands more than a private hearth, as befits a farmer; in a town-house there was only a ἑστία.⁵³ The charming Homeric Hymn 29 presupposes that Hestia  has her place of honour in every house of gods and men, receives a libation at every meal at the beginning and at the end, and is closely bound to Hermes. We may assume this also for primeval times. The high significance of so primitive a deification of a sensibly present work of human hands, the elevation to a divine virgin, and the fading of the goddess with the waning importance of the hearth are here so evident that one may regard it as exemplary. In her elevation to a deity there once found expression the most sacred feelings that bound men to the parental home and the family, then to the tribe and the fatherland. The Delphic Hestia may have embodied the common hearth of Hellenism. The Hestia of Plato’s myth is the hearth of the universe, because divinity has become universal. She needs no cult any longer, and the consecration of individual hearths perishes with the feeling that once made her a goddess.

One further word on Hestia and Vesta. It is hard to believe that the names have nothing to do with one another; yet in substance the goddesses have not the slightest connexion. Hestia is the hearth; Vesta is the hearth-fire. Hestia is in every house; Vesta is only the one of the populus Romanus. Around the hearth gather the members of the household and their guests; Vesta is served only by the virgins who maintain the fire. Perpetual fire has also existed in very many Greek sanctuaries, but no god dwells in it. The consecration of the Roman house is provided by the Penates, later also by the Lares⁵⁴; the Greek house lacks the lararium familiar to us from Pompeii, to which correspond the holy images of the Roman and of the Orthodox Church. Thus belief and custom diverge completely in the two peoples.

The Homeric Hymn 29 links Hestia with Hermes; this is entirely correct and holds for the whole early period. Here too we have a god who in his very name proclaims that something fashioned by man is the bearer of the divinity in which men believe. One can scarcely comprehend how modern mythologists could seek an element in him. Ἑρμείας, Ἑρμαῖος, Ἑρμάν, as he is called in different regions, all point to the ἕρμα contained in the name, long since recognised by O. Müller; and even our ugly deformation herme points to the stone which originally stood as his image at the gate of courtyard or house and guarded the entrance. But outside as well he received a ἕρμα, when in his honour the stones that impeded the paths were thrown into a heap—welcome alike to the heavenly and to mortal wanderers.⁵⁶ Among all tribes his cult is widespread and popular; the mythology of the poets has not produced or heightened it—if any god is primeval Hellenic and purely Hellenic, it is he. When later he was equated with foreign gods, wrong was always done him; for it was always through exaggeration of a single aspect of his nature.

We must start from the heap of stones and the stone pillar. If the former becomes the seat of a god who protects travellers on their ways through the lawless outside world, the pillar protects the house before which it stands against the intrusion of what brings harm; and so too does the image of the god wherever it is set up. It is so simple that one cannot understand how the notion could ever arise that belief had its origin in the cult of the dead—as though τύμβος τε στήλη τε, τὸ γὰρ γέρας ἐστὶ θανόντων had anything to do with a god,⁵⁷ and the ψυχοπομπός were the original Hermes. It is only apparent, not correct, to proceed from the fact that the Herms of Athens—and certainly not of Athens alone—were ithyphallic, a circumstance at which Herodotus⁵⁸ marvelled, and that in the Eleian Cyllene⁵⁹ a phallus was the cult-image of the god. One then says that he cared for the fertility of the herds, although every testimony for this is lacking; or one regards the phallus as apotropaic, which it indeed became in ages that sought to avert the evil eye and similar harms by means of the obscene—as though the Athenians had found the sight of a phallus offensive, among whom an entire procession of phalli moved through the streets at the Dionysia, and where even later on Delos the god himself, ὀροὸς ἐσφυδωμένος,⁶⁰ pressed through the crowd. Even in Hellenistic times, ithyphallic images of gods or Herms stood in many places in the countryside, Hermes-statues⁶¹ as well, which will scarcely still have been ithyphallic, since he had become a more dignified god; but then the ithyphalli were called by other names. The Lampsacene Priapus had become fashionable, and with what punishment he threatened fruit-thieves is well enough known; yet the Athenians will hardly have expected such things from their Hermes. We must recognise that it was Hellenic to represent δύναμις—not merely generative power, but manly potency in general, even in a god—in a phallus; how this was at first entirely earnest and natural and received the most varied forms; how it later came to seem offensive and was somehow ennobled or veiled; how on the other hand it was played with lasciviously, while superstition greedily seized upon the obscene and impotent ages tickled themselves with it—of all this a useful book might be written. In the good old time we find unnamed phallic gods and also named ones—Phales, Orthannes,⁶² Konisalos, and others—which theology later grouped together as πριαπώδεις. In the workshops of craftsmen, in the bakehouse, by the potter’s kiln, there stood little ithyphallic images of gods, sometimes grotesque in form, which could receive their own particular names. For illustration one may look at the obscene little fellow on a Corinthian pinax⁶³ and read the Homeric Κάμινοι: there the poet invents for himself the amusing names of the goblins that are to be warded off.⁶⁴ It is not the obscene that does this, but the god, and his power expresses itself in the intensification of his sense of manly strength—coarsely, if one will, brutally.⁶⁵ We are moving here in the deeper strata of the people; yet Dionysus has taken the ithyphallic into himself and drawn Phales into his retinue. At one time no scruple was felt in fashioning Hermes likewise in this way; and our task is to understand that the Athenians tolerated the Herms in their streets in this ancient form, while painting represented the god in noble human shape. The outrage of the Hermokopidai struck off the phalli; and even if this was felt as sacrilege, they will scarcely have been restored. Beneath the head of the προπύλαιος made by Alcamenes one can no longer imagine an ithyphallus; in any case it is an entirely soulless head—very different is the Hermes from the Persian debris (Schrader, Antike Plastik pl. 18). Let the form interest archaeologists; as a cult-image that Hermes is indifferent and proves only what is everywhere confirmed, that Alcamenes made pretty things but had nothing to say.⁶⁶ Hence every attribution of significant works to that name must be mistaken.

In the heaps of stones by the wayside and in the Herms of Athens we have the god before us. That he was retained in the peace of the city is explained by the fact that the custom, derived from the individual farmstead, persisted even in the town, in which at that time many such courtyard-like properties still existed.⁶⁷ When a τριχέφαλος⁶⁸ or τετραχέφαλος Ἐρμῆς stood at a crossing of roads, it served as a signpost; and so too he stood along the country highways. Hipparchus could call it his own μνῆμα when he set up such Herms, because he added guiding inscriptions. He also stood on the frontiers of the land,⁶⁹ thus comparable to the Terminus. One must grasp this inwardly: the images stand there because the god is present and guides and protects the traveller—now through peaceful country, but once through primeval forest or at least through foreign land and therefore full of dangers. All the more, then, was his aid needed; and thus we see him in Homer guiding Priam through the enemy outposts and granting Odysseus the μῶλυ. These are our oldest testimonies, and there the mythologists go seeking him in the phallus, in the wind, or in some Indian cur. Homer also shows how he helps—not by force. He bears the magic wand, with which he lulls dangerous men to sleep; he commands enchantments. Suddenly he is there, suddenly gone; he also awakens Priam at the right moment. The incantation-song of the Choephoroi depicts his working: it sounds uncanny, not merely because he is summoned for a dreadful deed, but because this sudden appearing and vanishing is in itself uncanny. It is charming that the Greek says “Hermes has entered” when the conversation of a larger company flags, where we put an angel in his place.⁷⁰

This guide of wanderers⁷¹ is designated by cult-epithets—ὅδιος, πομπαῖος, ἡγήτωρ—better still by the old epic διάχτορος, which the ancient grammarians understood more rightly than the modern.⁷² But his help is always only clever ruse, and therefore magic—never force.⁷³ Here it becomes clear that he is not the protector of knights; if we often see him beside Heracles, where he denotes divine assistance, he nevertheless never intervenes actively. He is rather the god of herdsmen and of the δημιουργοί, the travelers, who could not defend themselves. In truth he has not even ascended to Olympus, for all his activity belongs to the earth of men; above he appears as a servant, mostly in order to receive commissions that lead him back again to earth. For this he needs the winged sandals, already described by the Iliad, and on his feet he may also bear wings. They have not grown upon his back, as upon Iris and many other gods—evidently because the winged sandals were already established when winged form entered from the Orient. Only later art placed the wings upon his hat, which every traveller wears, or upon his head, indicating his flight merely as a superseded old conception. On Olympus too he performs services like Hebe⁷⁴ and himself receives no goddess as wife; Odysseus owes it to him that he understands every skill of a servant (Od. o 319). He becomes himself a herald, and his magic wand a herald’s staff. There he must also be able to deliver a message with intelligence and understanding: ἑρμηνεύειν is surely derived from his name.⁷⁵ This is the root from which the later λόγιος and finally the τρισμέγιστος could grow. But this elevation touched rather the Egyptian Θωυθ; for Hermes it was more fitting that the fourth day of the month be assigned to him, on which servants were to be born. He fulfils merely a command of Zeus when he brings the little Dionysus to the nymphs; even on the coins of Pheneos he carries the little Arcas—he is in no sense a χουροτρόφος. In the Plutus Aristophanes makes him bitterly lament his servile condition. Great festivals are not celebrated for such a god⁷⁶; though in many calendars he has given his name to a month, and in all regions many men are named after him since the rise of theophoric names, and heroic descendants are not lacking to him either—though none very illustrious.⁷⁷ Only in Tanagra did he become the foremost city-god, evidently because in a war he proved himself as πρόμαχος and retained that name.⁷⁸ Naturally he was then supposed to have been born there. Elsewhere he finds veneration for other reasons. He stands before every homestead and out on many roads; and the herdsmen who must dwell with their cattle in the wild forest through the summer likewise place these under the protection of the νόμιος. It is not a question of the fertility of the sheep, but of their being kept—that the sheep do not stray or otherwise come to harm. If one reads modern Norwegian and Icelandic tales which vividly depict that life, one encounters precisely these anxieties, for which a Hermes would assuredly be very welcome to the farmer. We shall now no longer find it strange that the Arcadian shepherds conceived the god who guarded their sheep in the form of a ram, that of the tame animal; the divine he-goat Pan was of quite another temper. The Hermes χριός is not indeed directly attested by name, but especially after Eitrem’s demonstrations⁷⁹ it is beyond doubt; and a bronze from Methydrion⁸⁰ shows dancers disguised as rams, who are doubtless daemonic companions of the god, belonging to him as the goats, the σάτυροι, belong to Pan—before Dionysus drew these over to himself. Archaic art seldom shows the god upon⁸¹ or beside the ram; more often he bears it beneath his arm, sometimes upon his shoulders—just as the earliest Christians adopted him for their Good Shepherd. What is meant here is neither an earlier ram-form of the god nor the carrying of a sacrificial victim, for that belongs only to him who is about to sacrifice, as with the calf-bearer on the acropolis. When one looks at a fine old Arcadian bronze such as Perdrizet illustrates,⁸² one gains the impression that the god is truly the good shepherd who has rescued the strayed sheep. The Christians interpreted this rightly, and in the mind of the shepherds it will have been so as well. It is important that here once more agreement appears between Greeks and Thracians. On the beautiful coins of Ainos the head of Hermes stands on the obverse; on the reverse, however, not the ram but the he-goat. And on Imbros and Samothrace this Thracian Hermes has a considerable cult and even experienced an epiphany in honour of Hadrian.

To sheep-breeding on the Balkans there belongs even today the theft of rams; it occurs also in the North. And the ram-thieves too attached themselves to Hermes, who understood χλέπτειν in the good sense so admirably, and χλέπτειν in any case comprised many things. That merchants thanked the god who granted them profit, without troubling themselves much as to how it was gained, is self-evident; and thus he was χερδῶιος. And he was τύχων as well; hence a lucky find is a ἕρμαιον, and even two men could come to terms with a χοινὸς Ἑρμῆς when the matter was not entirely clean.

The Homeric Hymn, in the mutilated form in which we now read it, ascribes to him dominion over all beasts, even beasts of prey, even lions (569–71). This does not accord with what precedes, for there Hermes is spoken of in the third person, whereas Apollo had previously addressed him. Yet nothing has dropped out; for Zeus, whom one might suppose, cannot be introduced as speaking, since in 575 he merely assents to what Apollo does for his brother. Thus an interpolating rhapsode has intervened and arbitrarily magnified the power of Hermes.⁸³ We possess the poem in a hopelessly disfigured form; Sophocles still read it in a purer state. In him, as in the Hymn, Hermes is born in his cave, which still exists on Cyllene and was a distinguished cult-place. To this belong Maia, the daughter of Atlas—whom Sophocles replaces by the nymph Cyllene—the tortoise (there are turtles in abundance in Arcadia), and the theft of the cattle. But the cattle already graze on Olympus. In Alcaios Maia bore Hermes χορυφαῖσ’ ἐν αὐταῖς of Cyllene, secured by the address Κυλλήνιε. Yet Philostratus (Imag. I 26) paraphrases: τίχτεται ἐν χορυφαῖς τοῦ Ὀλύμπου χατʹ αὐτὸ (αὐτοῦ codd.) ἄνω τὸ ἕδος τῶν θεῶν. Then the swaddled child had no far way to go and drove the cattle into his cave. Thus alone is the story coherent. But Olympus did not stand with Alcaios, Philostratus has inserted it. The story is just as good if it plays wholly on Cyllene—and that is the original form, told in the Peloponnese, when its gods still dwelt upon the native mountain. When Olympus displaced this, the cattle belonged there; Maia remained with her father, and Hermes had to run up to Olympus. The cave of Pylos was introduced only much later. What mattered to the Peloponnesian poet was the merry invention: how his native god Hermes, scarcely born, is already cunning enough to steal and conceal the cattle of the presumptuous new god Apollo, who would be νόμιος. In the end he may get them back, but νόμιος remains Hermes. It could not fail that this should later be reworked in gloriam Apollinis; that has repeated itself again and again in various directions. One genuine feature still remains: the invention of the lyre,⁸⁴ which Sophocles has magnificently elaborated. For the ancient Hellenes Hermes was in fact the inventor of music, as befits the shepherd and the companion of the Nymphs; and if now the Asiatic Apollo plays the Ἀσιὰς χιθάρα, he has nevertheless received it from Hermes.

Hermes and the Nymphs, the Charites,⁸⁵ the Agraulids,⁸⁶ have remained united in the living belief of the rural folk, and there too he for the most part still makes music when he leads their dance. Apollo has displaced him here only in the noble poetry; as the Odyssey still knows the ancient association (ξ 435), so many reliefs display it. The Hermes before the courtyard gate, the crafty guide with his magic and herald’s staff, the playmate of the divine maidens—this coheres well, and this god becomes familiar to us in his power and in his limitation. It is natural that he should guide Heracles on his journeys, and thus also into Hades, when he is to fetch Cerberus. From this there then developed Hermes as guide of the dead; but it is doubtful when. The second Nekyia and the conclusion of the Hymn are very late; the Thessalian dedication to Hermes Chthonios later still. Herms on Hellenistic grave-reliefs⁸⁷ are difficult to interpret, but for the earliest period they prove nothing. Yet the conception dominant since the sixth century must be several centuries older, since the Attic festival of the dead at the Anthesteria is connected with Hermes,⁸⁸ and this is older than the intrusion of Dionysus. Thus one will assert no more than that Hermes could become guide of the dead only when belief had gathered them in a distant realm. And we must hold fast that the guide never assumed sombre traits; for he does not bring death, even if Aeschylus (Choeph. 622) says of the dying man, χιγχάνει νιν Ἑρμῆς. Even when he is called χθόνιος, he still belongs always to the realm of life.

I must now make a detour in order to reach an ancient Hellenic goddess, Enodia, who in a certain sense stands in opposition to Hermes, who is himself ὅδιος, since he leads men through the lawless outside world. To Enodia, however, I can arrive only if Hecate is treated first, of whom epic knows nothing at all; she was therefore not disseminated by Homer, but was already venerated in other circles than those for whom he composed. Southern Ionia in general lies farther from him, and from there the cult of Hecate must have proceeded.

She is a principal goddess in Caria—and only there. That her sanctuary at Lagina, with mysteries and games, the Ἑχατήσια, comes to our knowledge only in later times is of no consequence. The dynast Hecatomnus, with his Greek name but un-Greek self-designation as slave of Hecate, and the numerous personal names derived from her in Miletus and Cos, suffice.⁸⁹ In Miletus a dedication to her is probably as early as the seventh century; her sanctuary lies before the city gate,⁹⁰ which is essential for her function. The cult extends further. At Colophon she receives dogs in sacrifice (Pausanias III 14, 9); Cynossema on the Hellespont refers to her dogs, for there Hecuba is transformed into a dog, Ἑχάτης ἄγαλμα⁹¹—she therefore has dogs in her retinue. Farther west lies Zerynthos on the coast; the place-name is Carian, thus older than the Thracian invasion. On Samothrace she possesses a cave, likewise called Zerynthos,⁹² and receives dogs as sacrifice.⁹³ This Zerynthian Hecate also has mysteries, and Poseidonius (Strabo 468) reckons her among the orgiastic gods. How she with her dogs sweeps over the graves of the dead and over the blood of the offerings for the dead is described by Simaetha of Theocritus on Cos (2.12). There she is called δασπλῆτις, like an Erinys, and teaches the mixing of poisons, as she taught it to Medea. Here she has a spectral nature; she possessed it as the goddess of Medea,⁹⁴ that is, already when the Argonaut legend was formed in Miletus. It becomes clear how she could be equated with Persephone.

Quite otherwise does she appear at Athens in the age of Aristophanes. There stands before almost every house an altar for her, thus beside the Hermes-pillar.⁹⁵ Superstitious women inquire of the Hekataion what they are to do, and maidens arrange a παιγνία in her honour (Lysistrata 64, 700). Women gladly swear by Hecate. But the offerings laid upon the altar are not to be eaten, even if poor folk help themselves to them. The goddess or her retinue are therefore to take them. Even the un-Hellenic sacrifice of dogs occurs (schol. Theocritus 2.12d). Already very early Hecate is identified with Artemis, finally even in the Hekataia before the house (Diphilus, Ath. 168c). Then Artemis-Hecate becomes helper in childbirth, already in Aeschylus (Suppliants 676). Women in labour in the New Comedy therefore call upon the goddess who stands before their house. This may be specifically Athenian. As before every house or courtyard, Hecate stands beside Hermes before the entrance of the citadel; evidently the state commissioned Alcamenes with both when the Propylaea were built.⁹⁶ Thus Hecate had her sanctuary at the gate of the sacred precinct of Eleusis; Pausanias calls her Artemis, which the Homeric Hymn corrects. This corresponds to Milesian usage; the island of Hecate likewise lies before the harbour of Delos.⁹⁷ IG I 310, 192 lists among the gods who possess a treasury Hermes and Artemis-Hecate; wherever the temple stood, it guarded an entrance. Only a single dedication has been preserved (IG I 836), a small clay figure of a dignified seated goddess—thus no attempt at individualisation. If Hermes provides protection for the house and, outside, for the traveller, there is added the offering to a goddess who threatens from without and is to be appeased so that she may not enter. She, too, as Artemis, did not originally come to aid the woman in labour, but to kill her or the child—thus still the Homeric, purely Asiatic Artemis. She has her dogs; and the superstitious man of Theophrastus (16) fears her ἐπιπομπή.⁹⁸ To her, as is rightly assumed, belong also the stones at the three-way crossings, which the superstitious man anoints with oil.⁹⁹ The τριοδῖτις later passed to the Italic peoples as Trivia; yet it must be assumed that there she appropriated an older cult of the crossroads.

Only in the vicinity of Athens do we still encounter temples of Hecate—on Aegina and in Argos; for Megara the descendant city Selinus bears witness, where she sat before the sanctuary of Μαλοφόρος in the suburb beside a cemetery, as the excavations of Gabrici have confirmed; a dedication is preserved (IG XIV 270). Sophron, who perhaps in a mime Ἄγγελος made her the subject of fiction and served as Theocritus’ model,¹⁰⁰ may testify for Corinth. In sum, however, we find Hecate only in the cities of the eastern coast, those most open to Asiatic influence. In the whole north of Hellas and in the inner Peloponnese she is absent.

Now at last the testimony of the poets. First stands the interpolation in Hesiod’s Theogony; for that he has nothing to do with verses 409–52 is settled. Whoever has not yet seen this understands nothing of style, and nothing of Hesiod’s gods either. He did not know Hecate at all, and such an all-powerful goddess she never was in Hellas: one may attribute that to the Carians. Hence I regard the old reworking, in which the Theogony already lay before Aeschylus and Pindar, as the work of a rhapsode from Asia Minor. In this Theogony the passage is firmly embedded; it is not a hymn, as anyone must see who concerns himself with the structure of hymns, and to call it Orphic is to speak at random; it is far older than Orpheus. Moreover it influenced only ancient theologians, and no one else.¹⁰¹

In the Hymn to Demeter Hecate is called daughter of Persaios, who must be identical with the Perses of the Theogony (Perseus in Lycophron 1175). From her cave she has seen the abduction of Persephone and reports it to Demeter, σέλας ἐν χείρεσσιν ἔχουσα—bearing torches like Artemis; for both roam through the forests by night. A cave is her dwelling, as on Samothrace and at Zerynthos; here, of course, Hecate is invoked because of her Eleusinian sanctuary, but her relation to Demeter and also to Persephone is thereby given. Sophron must in some form have known the Hymn. Adespota Tragica 375: ἀλλʹ εἴ σʹ ἔνυπνον φάντασμα φοβεῖ χθονίας θʹ Ἑχάτης χῶμον ἐδέξω
Here the Chorus asks a distraught person after the cause of his condition, much as in Euripides’ Hippolytus 142 it asks after the ground of Phaedra’s sickness, not without also naming Hecate. Here, then, she has burst into the house with her clamorous retinue. Menelaus in the Helen takes her for a spectre (569) and cries: ὦ φωσφόρʹ Ἑχάτη πέμπε φάσματʹ εὐμενῆ—whereupon Helen replies: οὐ νυχτίφαντον πρόπολον Ένοδίας μʹ ὁραῖς.

Here Ἑχάτη is at once Ἐνοδία. Hesychius records Ἐνοδία ἡ Ἄρτεμις, which is the same. But in Sophocles’ Antigone 1199 Ἐνοδία is Persephone, the mistress of the dead; νερτέρων πρύτανις was Hecate in Sophron. Sophocles fr. 492 must belong entirely here. Medea is engaged in her work with the Chorus of root-diggers; the Chorus invokes their mistress. Helios is first named as Medea’s ancestor:

Ἥλιε δέσποτα χαὶ πῦρ ἱερόν,

τῆς Εἰνοδίας Ἑχάτης ἔγχος,

τὸ δι’ Οὐλύμπου πωλοῦσα φέρει,

χαὶ γῆς ἀνιοῦσʹ (ναίουσʹ cod,) ἱεράς τριόδους

στεφανωσαμένη δρυὶ χαὶ πλεχταῖς

ὠμῶν σπείραισι δραχόντων

Here we have her epiphany: serpents in her hair, like the Erinyes, whom Aristophanes too mentions in the Daysistenes (schol. Frogs 293), and the torch of the φωσφόρος, σλασφόρος (the scholion to Apollonius III 861 says λαμπαδοῦχος). Mythologists of old and new times grossly misunderstand both language and thing when they discover “light-bringer” in these words and indulge their lunar fantasies; they are equally unwilling to understand πυρφόρος. Once again Hecate is Enodia. But in the Ion 1048 the Chorus begins a song that wishes success to Creusa’s attempted murder, thus: Εἰνοδία θύγατερ Δάματρος, ἅ τῶν νυχτιπόλων ἐφόδων ἀνάσσεις. There Enodia is Persephone, but the ἔφοδοι belong to Hecate.¹⁰² Such passages, which equate Hecate and Persephone, while Hecate is far more often Artemis, make it intelligible how Aeschylus could make Artemis the daughter of Demeter—what Callimachus (Hecale 104 K.) repeats after some theologian.

The temple of Hecate in Argos, mentioned by Pausanias (II 22, 7), must have belonged to her as Ἐνοδία; for in Stephanus of Byzantium s.v. ἐν τῆι ὁδῶι Inachus finds her as a child by the roadside and therefore names her Ἐνοδία. The inference is compelling that Ἐνοδία was the older name, displaced by the Asiatic Hecate; and it becomes certain if there exists a Hellenic Ἐνοδία.¹⁰³ And she does exist.

In Thessaly Hecate is unknown; Enodia, on the other hand, enjoys a powerful cult.¹⁰⁴ From Larisa we possess a ϝαστιχὰ Ἐνοδία (IX 2, 575, a poem of the early fifth century) and a σταθμία (577). This may correspond to a Ἑχάτη at the city gate and one before a fold, or whatever σταθμός may mean; but the dedications are made for children, and if in 575 a man vows and a woman performs, and in 577 likewise the mother is the dedicator, it will concern the successful birth of a child. Enodia has thus assumed the same function as Artemis-Hecate in Aeschylus. The dedication from Pherai (421) is likewise made by a woman; there the tyrant has also placed her image with her name upon his coins.¹⁰⁵ She is therefore recognisable on the coins where numismatists speak of Hecate—most importantly in that she brandishes her torch while riding on horseback; Hecate does not ride. A quite different sphere of activity of the goddess is disclosed by her association with Ζεὺς μειλίχιος (578 A),¹⁰⁶ who points toward the underworld; and here the epiphany on horseback is appropriate.¹⁰⁷ At Pherai there is added the fact that an Artemis Φεραία also found cult in other cities and is equated with Hecate¹⁰⁸; in that case she cannot be separated from Enodia. Hecate, however, is also made daughter of Pheraia, who is then a mortal daughter of Aeolus (after whom the city is named, corrupted to Φερά in Stephanus¹⁰⁹), but who conceives Hecate by Zeus and exposes the child at a three-way crossing. This is not to be taken seriously and certainly did not hold in Pherai. But it is important that a third name enters: Βριμώ, whom Lycophron (1176) equates with Hecate and Pheraia, and Apollonius (3.861) unmistakably with Hecate, as νερτέρων ἄνασσι with Persephone. The scholia to Lycophron (taken up in Etymologicum Magnum s.v. Βριμώ) relate that Hermes in vain attempted to violate her; Propertius (II 2.12) proves that she finally yielded. Here she has become a mortal, like Hecate as granddaughter of Aeolus. Finally there is added Ἀδμήτου χόρη· Ἑχάτη, τινὲς δὲ τὴν Βένδιν, Hesychius. Bendis concerns the Hecate of Thracian Zerynthos. Admetus leads us back to Pherai, and the Unconquered One has the Lady of the Dead as his wife, who is Brimo in Apollonius. O. Müller had already perceived this, and after him I have further pursued the transition into heroic saga and tragedy.¹¹⁰ The identifications show that at Pherae in a single goddess the kindly χουροτρόφος and the Wrathful One (properly, no doubt, the Roaring One) were united, so that the foreign names Hecate, Artemis, Persephone were appropriate. Enodia is her cult-name.

Plato (Laws 914b) knows the Ἐνοδία δαίμων, to whom belongs whatever a man loses on the road; therefore no one may pick it up and appropriate it—an opposite to the ἕρμαιον which the god grants to the fortunate finder. Later, when Ἐνοδία had become only an epithet, Cleitomachus could deny the existence of Artemis by arguing (Sextus adv. phys. I 185): “εἴγε ἡ Ἄρτεμις θεός εστιν χαὶ ἡ Ἐνοδία τις ἂν εἴη θεός· ἐπίσης γὰρ ἐχείνη χαὶ αὕτη δεδόξασται εἶναι θεά, ἡ Ἐνοδία χαὶ ἡ Προθυριδία.”¹¹¹ Evidently no one believed in an Ἐνοδία any longer; only the sceptic denied Artemis. Her nature had been utterly forgotten; from the name one inferred merely that she protected the traveller, as in Antiphilus (Anth. Pal. VI 199), and Herodes Atticus could place his estate under her protection because it lay on the Via Appia (IG XIV 1390). All that is late must be rigorously excluded if one wishes to grasp the real belief. Hence the Hecate of the Orphic Hymn, which begins with εἰνοδίην Ἑχάτην, and the spectre, down to the Mistress of the Witches in Macbeth is here disregarded.

It will now have become clear that the ancient Aeolians possessed a belief in a “Goddess of the Ways”, which they imparted to the Thessalians and carried with them also to Erythrae; she was also worshipped in Argos, and probably in Athens as well, since her name there remained current.¹¹² What we know suffices to make it intelligible that the Asiatic Hecate could press into her place, and in turn be absorbed into the more powerful Artemis, who likewise came from Asia and made so many ancient goddesses into mere epithets. Enodia too was uncanny, and stood in, or entered into connexion with, chthonic divinities, and was equated, like Hecate, with the pre-Greek Persephone.

Finally, a backward glance at Hecate herself. Her name inevitably aligns itself with Hekatos, as Apollo is called in the Iliad¹¹³—a word unintelligible to the Greeks, so that Simonides played with hekaton (26a Bergk), the rhapsodes devised for themselves an ἑχατηβόλος and ἑχήβολος, in which indeed they, but no grammarian, can find ἑχάς or rather ἑχάθεν. Hekatos and Hecate must then be so named as brother and sister: thus Hecate is an Artemis from the outset and shares much with the Homeric Artemis. These siblings correspond in substance to the Lycian twins, but bear different names. The origin and early development of Hecate should now be wholly intelligible; of the others it will be shown later.

In Enodia there appeared a Mistress of the Outside, who under this name was venerated chiefly by the ancient population of Thessaly, where her uncanny side later showed itself less, though it is unmistakable in the Brimo of Pherae; perhaps for that reason Brimo was differentiated from Enodia. We have also seen that concern for childbirth and the rearing of children accrued to Enodia; later she was equated with Hecate and Artemis, and besides with Persephone. Names do not lead to true understanding. Let us return to the opposition between Within and Without. Man has made for himself house and courtyard, a place of peace, whose divine soul lives in the hearth. Outside lies the primeval forest, the hostile wilderness which man has not yet subdued, into which he must nevertheless venture daily. There everywhere is life that confronts him independently, often overpoweringly. Life is in the trees, springs, and meadows, in harmless and in savage creatures; it rustles and murmurs in breaking thickets, sounds eery and sweet. Will-o’-the-wisps flicker over the marshes. Sudden brightness bursts through nocturnal darkness. There must be beings there whom we do not know, do not see; yet in many a wild thing—the hind that no foot can overtake, the bear from which we flee—there is more than they seem. At times a fleeting glance believes it sees a wild horse of which ancient tales speak, even though it no longer appears in the neighbouring forests or on the desolate slopes. Certainly there are dwellers of the woods who are not human, who bear animal or half-animal form, perhaps can also assume human shape, now friendly, now hostile. And in trees, springs, and meadows dwell divine maidens; many a one has seen in the mist that rises from rivers and mountain lakes how they perform ring-dances in dim light. Manifold is this life; yet it is also grasped as a unity—not at once universal, for that comes only through reflection upon the experience of the same life in many places, but at least as the life in our forest—and then we soon know where the mistress of this life dwells. Thus the same feeling in different villages, tribes, and regions will at first create and name many divine persons, which yet in essence embody the same religious conception and therefore have bestowed upon their exponent essentially the same traits. Here the Hellenic soul reveals itself. In Asia—we do not yet know more precisely among which people first—natural life is gathered into a mighty maternal goddess; but this Mother of the Gods is not maternal towards men. She dwells unapproachably upon mountain peaks and at the same time destroys; lions are her servants, and the youths whom she seizes in her heat perish, die, or waste away, like Anchises and Attis. To the Hellene the Mother is Da, Demeter, the earth made peaceful by human labour, which thus nourishes men and also founds the peaceful and lawful life in the community of homestead and tribe. It seems that between the Hellenic Mistress of the Outside and the Asiatic—more precisely Lydian—Artemis there existed a similar contrast, harder to grasp because the name Artemis has seized upon all those Hellenic goddesses which were created side by side by the same feeling; yet she has also brought in something of her own nature. The case is simple with the πότνια θηρῶν, the Mistress of Wild Beasts: over these the Hellenic Artemis indeed rules, but by no means over the tame animals, as that Asiatic goddess shows herself on the monuments.¹¹⁴ Here a pictorial representation has been taken over from without, which portrayed the goddess’s power only on one side, yet sufficed the believer for the whole; only the image is foreign, not the goddess. The well-known Boeotian relief-vase shows by the dismembered bodies of animals that the Boeotians—probably other Greeks as well—interpreted the foreign name as that of the slaughterer ἀρταμίς, which scarcely applied to their goddess. The Artemis of the Iliad is πότνια θηρῶν, teaches the use of the bow and thus is herself a huntress, and is called by Hera λέων γυναιξίν, because she gives women sudden death; only the Odyssey adds to this purely Hellenic traits. Everything that unites her with Apollo and Leto is foreign; for the triad is Asiatic, and in Hellas it is only externally adopted. Not only in Delphi, but even on Delos Artemis is independent; nothing depends upon the sibling relationship.¹¹⁵ The forest is her realm. In the ancient tale of Meleager she sends the wild boar against the orchards of Oeneus, who has failed to honour her: he has diminished her domain. The forest trees themselves do not concern her, but she delights in flowers, and these men bind into garlands and adorn with them altars, images, and whatever else represents the goddess. All the creatures of the forest stand under her protection, yet she tends them like a true forester, who also bears the gun. Thus the bow belongs to her, the ἐλαφηβόλος, and one imagines her on the hunt. But once she also showed herself in the form of forest animals—as hind, and also as bear. Beside the bow she bears the torch, with which Sophocles (Oedipus 206) lets her rush through the Lycian mountains; hence she is called φωσφόρος.¹¹⁶ When the night-wanderer perceives a glimmer of light through distant gloom, he knows that the Mistress is traversing her realm there. Virgin is this Mistress, inviolable; giants and forest-monsters have learned it; slender and beautiful. She is not solitary, for all the maidens, the nymphs, of her realm are her retinue; with them she storms, she leads her dance in the round (ἁγεμώ, ἡγεμόνη), as the Odyssey depicts the Arcadian Artemis. By a head she towers above the others, a heightened nymph; many of her names belong equally to nymphs, or could do so. This virgin, who cares even for the young of the beasts of prey, also takes charge of little girls (hardly of boys¹¹⁷ who bid her farewell with special offerings when, in marriage, they are to surrender their maidenhood. When this is threatened, the maidens of tragedy often invoke her protection. In Athens all womanhood swears by Artemis. Yet according to later belief she stands, as λοχία, beside women in childbirth, so that she has almost everywhere displaced the foreign Eileithyia. This function is not a youthful one; in Cyrene it has made her almost a γυναιχεία θεός. But here difficulties arise. According to the evidently oldest legend, Iphigeneia had to be sacrificed,¹¹⁸ because, as the fairest thing born in the year, she belonged to the goddess. It is intelligible that the Καλά, the Καλλίστα, laid claim to such offerings, even to human sacrifice, if she had bestowed the blessing of offspring. Such sacrifices were received by the Laphria, who is but one manifestation of this goddess. Yet the same Iphigeneia is in Brauron a divine being who receives the garments of women who have died in childbed; an Ἰφινόη in Megara (Pausanias I 43, 4), to whom brides offer their hair, is the same. Artemis herself is called Iphigeneia in Hermione (Paus. II 35), and in Aigeira as well (Paus. VII 26, 5) she has displaced an older Iphigeneia. Once Ἰφιγένεια stood in opposition to Καλλιγένεια; then difficult birth, perhaps with the death of the mother, came under her domain. Complete clarity is not to be attained here, yet one recalls the Artemis λέων γυναιξί of the Iliad. The Brauronian goddess is not a kindly deity; she is also called ταυροπόλος, which assuredly denotes nothing gentle; in Sophocles she sends madness (Ajax 172).¹¹⁹ Obscurities and contradictions must remain when the Lydian Artemis and the Carian Hecate intermingle with Hellenic conceptions which themselves were not everywhere identical, even though sprung from the same root.¹²⁰

If we detach the name Artemis—which in the oldest dedications often does not yet appear at all—we obtain in appearance an overabundance of goddesses; yet this merely proves that belief was everywhere the same and a very powerful belief, but demanded no proper personal name. παρθένος χαλά,¹²¹ ἡμέρα,¹²² ἄγρα,¹²³ φωσφόρος τοξία,¹²⁴ ἐλαφία sufficed. Particularly beloved was designation from her dwelling-place, especially in Arcadia and in the lands earlier occupied by that tribe: λιμνᾶτις χαρυᾶτις (among the walnut-trees), δερεᾶτις χορυφαία, χναχεᾶτις or the like from a yellow, pale mountain; in the territory united into the city of Sparta, λιμνᾶτις, ὀρθία, whose meaning is unclear¹²⁵; ἰσσώρα, pre-Greek, also Ἰσσωρία; οἰνωᾶτις ἀλφειώα in Attica, ἄγρα μουνιχία¹²⁶ βραυρωνία, as offshoots from Euboea Ἀμαρυσία and χολαινίς, of unknown significance, to which that of Aulis belongs. In Boeotia such names are lacking; in Thessaly Ἐνοδία and Φεραία have developed in similar fashion, yet in Enodia the Mistress of the Outside is unmistakable, and Hecate mediates the transition to Brimo. From Phocis to Aetolia Laphria predominates, wholly the Mistress of the Outside. Thus it becomes clear that in the many and wholly different names and in the ambivalent nature which these goddesses at first display, in truth one and the same divine power has taken form; precisely in the apparent fragmentation the strength of belief and veneration reveals itself. Everything is still in flux, and even when Hecate and Artemis arrived, and especially when the latter name displaced most of the older designations, no uniform rigidity yet arose. When the months received names, she was much considered, though by no means always under the new name; she commonly rules in spring. In many Peloponnesian places (not in Athens) choruses of maidens dance especially in her honour, corresponding to the nymph-choirs that surround her. Where she was chief goddess, she also assumed functions originally foreign to her, becoming in Troezen and on Thasos (Bull. Corr. Hell. L 243) Σώτειρα even for navigation. The Munichian goddess experienced the same when the harbour came into being. To treat all the individual cults and names would lead into infinity; may what has been adduced suffice to recognise the belief that brought them forth. It is a natural inward affinity which enabled all these locally determined goddesses to place themselves under the foreign name Artemis. That the Thracians possessed a similar goddess, usually called Artemis by the Greeks, designated by Herodotus (IV 33) as βασιληίη, and under the name Bendis in the fifth century strongly venerated by the Athenians; that the Cretan Britomartis and Diktynna could likewise be equated with Artemis—we have seen earlier. Of them all we know too little to assess likenesses and differences. They must not, however, distract us from grasping as purely as possible the Hellenic feeling in the ancient Hellenic cults. One thing is of particular importance: all these goddesses operate upon the earth and belong to the earth, just like Hermes. Callimachus says that Artemis only rarely comes into a city; still less does she belong upon Olympus.

I cannot explain how a goddess Εὔχλεια could be equated with Artemis—a goddess who was venerated in Pherai, Boeotia, Locris, Delphi, Megara, Corinth, and, associated with Eunomia, in Athens¹²⁷; who had festivals and gave her name to a month.¹²⁸ She later receded completely and was even supposed to be merely a heroine; that must not diminish her significance in earlier times. Her sanctuaries in the Boeotian and Locrian cities, and probably also in Corinth, lay on the agora, which points to a relation to the state. On Paros—which is in itself remarkable—the strategoi dedicate something to Aphrodite (there called Pandemos), to Zeus Aphrodisios, to Hermes, and to Artemis Eukleia; the inscription points to the early third century, and she is still written Εὐχλείηι (IG XII 5, 220). In Athens the cult unites Eukleia and Eunomia, attested only in the Imperial period; yet one of the fine youthful vases, which so often inscribe upon their maidens the names of such divine beings, places the two beside Harmonia and Aphrodite¹²⁹; and Bacchylides (13.175 J.) says that Arete, together with Eukleia and Eunomia, guards in peace the cities of pious men. He is doubtless thinking of Hesiod’s Horai, among whom Eirene and Eunomia belong. But Eukleia is added—the good repute which the lawfulness of the city brings with it. In Thebes, the city of Harmonia, such a deity of Hesiodic stamp is not surprising; yet it is already contrary to our expectation that her cult should extend over so wide a circuit, and how one could find in her an Artemis I cannot comprehend. Callimachus, to be sure, devotes a longer passage of his Hymn (122–35) to such a εὐνομία and εὔχλεία-preserving activity of Artemis, and one might also adduce the σώτειρα; but that is isolated, and where it appears it is intelligible. I can only state the aporia.

The multitude of nymphs of various kinds are the divine individual powers of nature in the Outside, corresponding to the Mistress of the Whole.¹³⁰ Just as the Hellenes earlier designated foreign goddesses simply as Parthenos or as Artemis,¹³¹ so this designation also comes to be applied to nymphs; the same thing is meant. Wherever in the forest outside there is life—in the trees, in pools and springs—there dwell and act these gracious maidens.¹³² Other related peoples too know similar figures; yet it is something distinctive that to the Hellene the untouched, silent life of the forest—whose magic even for us awakens reverence—embodies itself in gracious maidens, in the everlasting bloom of youth.¹³³ For they are not only θεαὶ ἀθάνατοι, but also ἀγήρω; and though they sport with their male companions of the wild, their youth remains forever fresh. They have no parents; for when Achelous or Oceanus is called father of the nymphs, or at least of the water-nymphs, no personal relation is meant, but the whole kind is indicated—exactly as when Iliad Ζ 420 calls the tree-nymphs daughters of Zeus, which merely designates their divinity, just as it does the river-god Scamander when he is called ἀθάνατος τέχετο Ζεύς, immortal, because the river too never dries up. Were it otherwise, we should hear of a mother or of the birth of a nymph; but they are eternal, because they are beings of a kind, and the kind does not die out. They have no proper name, unless a spring bears one, in which case its nymph is called the same; one would not say fons Iuturnae or Bandusiae.¹³⁴ With Arethusa there must be something special, since the name recurs more than once.¹³⁵ Artificial fountains have no nymph—Callirrhoe, Enneakrunos. The Italic peoples understood in the νύμφη only the water, lympha; they throw coins into the stream, with which the nymphs could do nothing. Among the “other gods” of Athens none possesses a treasury. The state offers them no cult.¹³⁶ The trittys of Marathon (IG I 190, 17) sacrifices Νύμφαις χαὶ Ἀχελώιωι—with that they are all disposed of. They live in the open country; they do not belong in the city.¹³⁷ Only when spurious civilisation has laid waste the countryside do townsmen seek to force the goddesses within and build themselves pretentious, profane nymphaea. In the good age, by contrast, the land is full of their modest sanctuaries; and if a farmer expends something upon them, as Archedemus—originally from Thera—did (IG I 778–800), he enlarges their cave and lays out for them a dancing-ground and a garden. For they love to dwell in caves: in the Corycian cavern of Parnassus, as μύχιαι on Naxos (IG XII 5, 53). Hence the poet of the Odyssey invents for them a cave far from the city; Eumaeus lives near them and offers them from his meal, and Odysseus too has often gone out to them. In the cave the maidens also have their looms; yet they will have woven only their own garments, for they have no labour—rather, their very being in their realm immediately brings that realm its flourishing. Thus one imagines the dear maidens playing and dancing. Their friend Hermes plays for them and leads the round; father Achelous, lord of the sweet waters, looks on; when Pan has been admitted among the gods, he too may be present. That they impart the fertility which they bestow upon forest and meadow also to the cattle that graze in their domain is a conclusion that comes readily to the shepherd; thus nymphs become Ἐπιμηλίδες. They can also grant a woman her desire for a child, who is then called Νυμφόδωρος or the like; but they do this far more rarely than the male river-gods. Thus a woman of Magnesia dedicates something Ὀρειάσιν πὲρ γενεᾶς (Schwyzer 606). From this it passes on to the care of children, which Hesiod (Theog. 347) emphasises; so in her Hymn Aphrodite entrusts her child to the nymphs. Yet this never becomes a widespread conception. That they carry off a handsome youth is familiar to us from Hylas; but this is not Greek, it is Bithynian.¹³⁸ νυμφόληπτος rather means “inspired¹³⁹ we see in the Phaedrus how this comes about, and we also know from experience how the magic of the forest works; yet the nymph herself no more prophesies than she makes music.¹⁴⁰ Lovers she finds among her woodland companions, Sileni and Satyrs, especially since Dionysus has entered Hellas.¹⁴¹ Hence there are children of nymphs. But we must beware of attaching weight to the many nymphs in heroic genealogies; genealogists were often at a loss for mothers, and the invention of a nymph lay ready to hand. Their own love-affairs with mortals, such as those of Daphnis and Rhoikos, are isolated tales which must not be generalised.

Woodland nymphs dwell in a grove; that a single tree should be consecrated to them is not in my recollection. Yet already in the Hymn to Aphrodite it is said that the nymph lives in a tree, is born with it and dies with it. There, for the first time, stands the complementary pairing of δρῦς¹⁴² and ἐλάτη, broad-leafed tree and conifer (264). Thus every tree has a soul—properly speaking only the naturally grown, not the planted.¹⁴³ This is therefore a different belief from the usual one in the divine nymphs, who do not die. In it lies the reverence of men, who must indeed destroy the life of the beautiful trees, yet spare and hallow some for that very reason. The characteristic word Ἁμαδρυάς already stood in Pindar, fr. 165; one need only read the passage closely.¹⁴⁴

Since Callimachus there have been books which distinguished classes of nymphs—δρυάδες, ναπαῖαι, ὀρειάδες, ἐπιμηλίδες, and so forth. We may disregard these; but the classes which Hesiod enumerates must not be passed over. He first names (240) the daughters of Nereus, fifty in number, who belong among the sea-gods; then comes Oceanus, the Stranger, who in Hesiod replaces the Hellenic Achelous, whom the Iliad (Ω 616) associates with the nymphs, as later tradition also did. Oceanus is father of the rivers, of which a number are named. Fifty daughters follow, who χατὰ γαῖαν ἄνδρας χουρίζουσι; but those named are only the πρεσβύταται. There are thirty thousand θεάων ἀγλαὰ τέχνα, and so it is also with the rivers: those who dwell by one know its name.¹⁴⁵ Here the name “Nymphs” does not occur; θεαί and Ὠχεανῖναι suffice for the poet. He had named Nymphs earlier, at line 130, where Earth, out of herself, brings forth heaven and the mountains as a lovely dwelling-place for the divine Nymphs. When she did so, there were as yet neither gods nor nymphs. It is an almost incredible perversity to strike out line 130, with the result that the gods receive the mountains as their abode. Yet that is the realm of the divine maidens; we cannot conceive the ὄρη without the ὀρειάδες. Are we to require Hesiod to say “where now the Nymphs dwell”? The verse stood there before line 128 was inserted, because the seat of the gods seemed to be lacking. Only at line 187 does it become puzzling: there the Nymphs arise from the drops of blood that fall upon the earth from the mutilated Uranus—“those whom one calls over the boundless earth Μελίαι, Ash-nymphs.” This is therefore an older class. The scholia, wretchedly abbreviated as they are, still say: “ἐχ τούτων ἦν τὸ πρῶτων γένος τῶν ἀνθρώπων.” That accords with Works and Days 143, where, as the first of the races arising under Zeus, the bronze race ἐχ μελιᾶν; and in Theogony 563 the men must be concealed in the strange dative μελίηισι, as the scholiast again explains. From an unknown poet Hesychius records: μελίας χαρπός · τὸ τῶν ἀνθρώπων γένος.¹⁴⁶ Melia accordingly appears as mother of the progenitors of whole tribes.¹⁴⁷ It is unmistakable that mankind—or the primal man—sprang from the ash-tree. It must have been a very ancient belief, for after Hesiod it is no longer explicitly stated, and it contains something more determinate than the general notion that everything that exists, gods and men alike, derives from the earth; for that requires no further question as to how it came about. The ash-tree, it is true, provides Achilles with his spear through its long, straight shoots and later also serves as worked timber; yet ash-trees are neither numerous in Greece nor characteristic of its arboreal growth, as the oaks are among the deciduous trees above all, and also the poplars, and now the plane-tree. One may therefore conclude that the ash, as the tree from which mankind arose, was chosen in a more northerly land,¹⁴⁸ already in pre-Greek times; and as at least a parallel one gladly reads in an interpolation of the Völuspá that man was made from the oak, woman from the hornbeam.¹⁴⁹

Not only under the colourless designation “maidens,” or as in Hesiod, “divine maidens,” θεαὶ νύμφαι, has the life-bestowing power of nature taken form; other names and shapes express that they make beauty bloom and ripen, and for that they themselves must be beautiful. “Ὥρα πότνια χᾶρυξ Ἀφροδίτας,” begins Pindar, Nemean 8, a song upon a beautiful boy. There he grasps as a unity the divine power that causes him to blossom into manhood. Ὥρα is not merely the time that brought him to maturity; she has made him ὡραῖος, and thus she—thus the πολυγηθέες ὧραι, (Φ 450)—make all things at once ripe and beautiful; one need only feel what lies in the word. And one must keep wholly remote the four Seasons, so often represented in Imperial times and thence adopted into poetry and art. One must feel with the peasant who plucks his first ripe fig and thanks the φίλαι Ὧραι.¹⁵⁰ The younger names—yet in all likelihood valid at Athens—Θαλλώ, Αὐξώ, Καρπώ¹⁵¹—say clearly what they effect; no wonder that Dionysus has insinuated himself among them.¹⁵² The Iliad (in the late book Θ) introduces them only as handmaid deities upon Olympus. Hesiod (Theog. 903), who does not distinguish between ὥρα and ὤρα, can set them to oversee the works of men, gives them the names Eunomia, Dike, Eirene, and then allows Themis to be their mother. These are powers that maintain on earth the lawful order prepared for men under the rule of Zeus; later poets attach themselves to this, Pindar, Olympian 13.7. But he avoids the name Horai, which fits those three poorly; here Hesiod did not prevail, for to later ages the ὧραι could not be separated from Time.

The Charites, too, are ill treated by Homer; one sees how intent he is on reducing the other gods to πρόπολοι of the Olympians. When Hera promises Sleep a Charis who even receives a proper name, there must be many of them. When Charis is the wife of Hephaistos, who fashions such delightful works, she must be one. As attendants of Aphrodite they are again a company. In the Hymn to Aphrodite (95) they are even said to be the companions of all the gods.¹⁵³ Hesiod makes them daughters of Zeus by an arbitrary Oceanid, Eurynome, and decisively fixes their number at three; he gives them names which for him signify joy, splendour, and bloom. How much more could be read into them is shown by Pindar’s song to them (Olymp. 14).¹⁵⁴ But he is there composing for Orchomenos, where they were the city-goddesses and thus dispensed blessing in all things.¹⁵⁵ He himself held these goddesses in high esteem, who bestowed grace upon his poetry and were to preside over his relations with his patrons. Simonides, whom Theocritus’ Charites follow, knew how to turn their many-meaning name differently. Euripides (Hipp. 1147) reproaches them that they did not protect the innocent from exile. The youth, with all his charms, has previously been portrayed; the Charites ought to have loved and protected him—incidentally a rare invocation. Aristophanes (second Thesmophoriazusae) proudly allowed himself to say that there was no need to call upon them, since they were present in his songs. I mention this only in order to trace even the poets’ play back to their ancient, wide significance. Their association with Hermes in Attic ritual,¹⁵⁶ with the Nymphs on the Thasian relief and before the cave at Vari (IG I 780),¹⁵⁷ their cult in Sparta¹⁵⁸ and in many places, including Asia, shows that they stood as close to the Horai as χαρίεις does to ὡραῖος. Hence the three names given among the Horai—Θαλλώ and the like—could also suit the Charites. As the Horai, by being confined to the four seasons, have been alienated from their ancient dignity, so the group of the Gratiae who “loosen the knot” has reduced these goddesses to pleasing bodies without a divine soul.¹⁵⁹

On the northern slope of the Acropolis and further below lie garden and field, to which a stair leads down from above, from the house of Athena and at the same time from the ancient royal palace. In this district rule the maidens of the fields, the ἄγραυλοι; when they are named, the eldest is called Ἄγλαυρος, with the corrupted collective name, the other two after the dew, Herse and Pandrosos. They too dance; Hermes leads them (Herse also has a child by him); since Pan has received his cave, he provides the music. Euripides describes this most clearly, Ion 492. No one can fail to recognise that these maidens are in essence nothing other than Charites, Horai, Nymphs—below in the gardens even the Moirai. But because of their connexion with the citadel they have become daughters of Cecrops.¹⁶⁰

In artistic representation we have found among the Nymphs the triad as the expression of an indeterminate multitude. It prevails also among the related goddesses. Yet alongside the three stands a single Charis, Hora, Aglauros, Moira. Hecate becomes a union of three dancing maidens. When Artemis or Aphrodite or some other leader stands out, the retinue may consist of two or of three. Predominantly these are female divinities, but Hesiod also has three Cyclopes, three Hundred-Handers, where we may be surprised at the small number. One must bear in mind that language itself sets plurality immediately beside duality; anyone who has observed children must have learned that they think in this way: two is still graspable; three is already “many.” The childlike creators of the gods were far removed from profound notions that the three signifies completeness, and from similar number-mysticism which ultimately draws in the Christian Trinity. If the process from multiplicity to the single person were to be understood, one might see in it an advance of thought towards monotheism. In fact it proceeds in the opposite direction: Muse and Moira become many persons and receive proper names that stamp upon them a particular character—mostly because finer observation finds the generic name insufficient, but also simply because a poet felt the need to name the individual figures, as Hesiod in particular did. Not infrequently, too, one aspect detaches itself from the being of a deity and becomes a new god, at first a servant or companion—Eros beside Aphrodite, Nike beside Athena, Hebe beside Hera. Thus we see here a path that leads to a multiplication of divine persons; nor is it abandoned once the limited number of the great Homeric gods has been set apart, only that the new creations remain on a lower level and penetrate the public cult only sporadically.

In another fashion we encounter unity and plurality among the male dwellers of the woods, who do scarcely anything for men, neither good nor ill, and therefore receive no cult. One can hardly imagine that the forest was ever without such inhabitants—animals of the wood raised to divinity—especially since they are not lacking among other Indo-Europeans; yet Homer and Hesiod are silent about Sileni and Satyrs, and we in fact know both only after the foreign Dionysus has taken them into his retinue. It must therefore be shown that they did not first arrive with the new god. The Thessalian Centaurs and the Ionian Sileni are equine in form. Homer calls the former by their Thessalian-Aeolic name Φῆρες; the latter are still called θῆρες in the satyr-play, whose satyrs have Silenic form. The Centaur never laid aside his horse-shape; rather he became ever more horse. The Silenus retained only the ears, tail, and hooves of the horse, yet for a long time he could still be called ἵππος.¹⁶¹ If ancient Macedonian coins depict the Centaur, and Thasian coins the Silenus, as ravishers of women (nymphs), it becomes evident that they were originally identical—the Silenus merely assimilated more closely to human form in Asia; there too he will have received his name, which, like χένταυρος, is uninterpreted, and likewise σαυάδαι σαῦδοι σευίδαι,¹⁶² the Macedonian name of the Sileni. But that the Macedonians also possessed these woodland spirits weighs heavily for their antiquity. There is no reason to assume borrowing from the Thracians, though this does not exclude the presence of such beings among them as well. Since Homer the Centaurs are confined to the wooded mountains of Pelion and fight with a vanished tribe of men, the Lapiths. Evidently local border conflicts between Phthiotians and Magnetes have intruded and altered the nature of the Centaurs, for they have become mortal; they exist no longer.¹⁶³ The second wave of immigrants, through whom the Aeolids came into the Peloponnese, also brought the Centaurs and settled them on Pholoë, but again has them exterminated, now by Heracles, because belief in their continued existence has vanished; a wedding, as fatal to them as that of Peirithoös, was also found.¹⁶⁴Nessus is, as his otherwise attested name shows, in truth a river-god; so he also was in the story of Deianeira, which did not then play upon the Euenus. But on the old Attic Nettos-vase he is the representative of the Centaurs, in whom Heracles also destroys these monsters; Deianeira must not be introduced χατὰ τὸ σιωπώμενον. In contrast to the wild Centaurs there dwells in the forests of Pelion the just and wise Centaur Chiron, interwoven with the ancient saga of Thetis and Achilles, which southern Thessalian emigrants carried with them to Aeolis. He is still immortal, and therefore later is made a son of Kronos¹⁶⁵; his wife Chariclo has human form on the François vase. In him we see that the spirits of the woods could also be friendly to men, before neighbouring feuds turned them into mortal monsters. Chiron too could have a cult; the rock-inscription of Thera (IG XII 3, 360) points to this, whither he will have come from Sparta.¹⁶⁶ Yet even this Centaur was no longer endured as a god, and he was allowed voluntarily to go down to Hades.

The Sileni and the Silenus we encounter first in Asia, where the Hymn to Aphrodite (262) introduces them as companions of the Nymphs and of Hermes, with no mention of Dionysus; and there exist in fact enough early vase-paintings on which Sileni appear with Nymphs without anything Dionysiac being present. The wise Silenus whom Midas¹⁶⁷ causes to be captured, and who disappoints the king’s expectation by his famous answer, is an invention of the seventh century, when the memory of the power of the Phrygian kingdom was still unforgotten. It can scarcely have been told anywhere but in Aeolis, where Homer composed the epigram for a tomb of Midas. The human skin¹⁶⁸ that hung in Phrygian Celaenae and was attributed to Marsyas may have meant something quite different to the natives (their river-god was named Marsyas); to the Hellenes it was the skin of Silenus,¹⁶⁹ who had entered into a contest with Apollo’s lyre-playing by means of his flute, and at the same time was the teacher of Olympus, from whom the sacred melodies of Hellenic worship were derived. The musical woodland god Silenus has nothing to do with the Thracian Dionysus. Olympus can have received his name only when it was that of the god of the mountain of the gods: there the sacred melodies had first resounded. It is difficult to grasp the meaning of the Silenus-masks that are found in graves, as antefixes in architecture, and elsewhere, where one can hardly delimit the point at which purely ornamental use begins. The popular catchword “apotropaic” says too little. Gorgo and Phobos are means of terror; nothing further lies in them. Silenus is a living divine being from a realm removed from human activity. The Silenus-head on vase-paintings, for which he had become Dionysiac, places the drinking-vessel under his protection, and thus also the drinker¹⁷⁰; he does not wish to frighten. Thus he must originally have been a kindly protector of the house and then also of the dwelling of the dead, whose mask one had in houses even before there were Dionysus-masks; but how the woodland spirit came to this I cannot understand, even if one appeals to the ἵππος, whose connexion with the cult of the dead is established. Proper cult he did not receive.¹⁷¹ He became father of the Satyrs, Papposilenus, and foster-father of Dionysus only through the Attic satyr-play.¹⁷² The Sileni are Ionian, yet not exclusively so; the form σιλανός proves this—several Megarians bore the name Σιλανίων—and the Romans adopted silanus, probably from the Oscans, just as νύμφη became lympha and was referred only to water. From which Greeks the so-called Doric form came to them cannot be determined.

The σάτυροι are goats; the τίτυροι—no longer directly intelligible to us—are the same. We are bound to trust the firm tradition of the ancient scholars in this matter, and with it the question of the “goat” in τραγωιδία is also decided.¹⁷³ We know Satyrs only in the Peloponnese, where there are no Sileni; and a Hesiodic poem names them beside the Nymphs, just as the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite names the Sileni.¹⁷⁴ Woodland beings in goat-shape can cause no surprise where Pan was the chief god, nor dancers who represent them, where we have the rams of Methydrion and other evidence for such disguising. From this there arose at Phlius the satyr-play, and at Corinth Arion’s “goat-dithyramb¹⁷⁵ but the Athenians had to substitute for the Satyrs the Sileni familiar only to themselves, from which the later transformations are intelligible. Yet the single Satyros is not lacking either: he stole the Arcadians’ cattle and was slain by Argos the πανόπτης (in truth, of course, by the eponym of the land); here, then, he is a monster comparable to the Centaurs,¹⁷⁶ and certainly pre-Dionysiac. It is striking that woodland spirits were conceived in different regions in wholly or half-animal forms of different kinds; one is tempted to think that they once appeared side by side as horses, rams, and he-goats, and that only later did different lands make different selections.

On the basis of numerous vase-paintings, especially Corinthian, it has often been assumed that figures of human form, but marked by protruding belly and buttocks and sometimes by an enormous phallus, are not men but daemonic beings, and that in these ruffians one should see the chorus of a primitive comedy. One is then tempted to draw the Spartan masks into the same circle; but these δείχηλα cannot be separated from the δειχηλίχται, and these represented human beings—there was no chorus. Whoever weighs the important notices in Athenaeus (621) cannot fail to see that similar, always human, masked or otherwise costumed performers appeared also in other places of the Peloponnese and in Doric colonies.¹⁷⁷ The Tarentine φλύαχες are best known to us; and here, where a comic performance arose, nothing Dionysiac ever forced its way in. There is no chorus. But in Sicyon these performers were called φαλλοφόροι, from which the important conclusion follows that phallic dancers had existed earlier, and that it was a transformation of an older cult when the Delian phallophoroi no longer bore a phallus upon their own bodies, but carried instead that gigantic representative of the god Dionysus, who had subjected the ancient rite to himself. And when the actors of Old Comedy so often wear the σχύτινον χαθειμένον, this is not a borrowing from Megara or Corinth, but derives from Attic phallophoroi of old. The cultic dances that led to masking, once they represented daemonic servants of the god being worshipped, can scarcely be brought into relation with the caricatured human figures of the vase-paintings. The life of riotous revellers with the women who shared their banquets is a degeneration of older dances which still united the two sexes—something later abolished by the seclusion of women that pressed in from the Orient. In the Delian Crane-dance of the children freed by Theseus, the memory of that ancient custom was still alive, although in practice only Delian girls danced. It is therefore likely that the figures distinguished from other komastai by belly and buttocks are merely a mocking caricature of drinking-companions, a costume anticipated by the Phlyakes. When Dionysus arrived, his companions—or rather the woodland spirits whom he made his companions—took the place of the human dancers; for ritual dances in his service were by no means lacking.¹⁷⁸

We must confess that we know the conceptions of the many Hellenic tribes concerning the woodland beings, male and female, quite inadequately; it is no different in the case of the phallic goblins, and we shall encounter the like again more than once. There are some that grant protection, others that work harm if one does not appease them. Yet even these have very little to do with religion; and in the Sileni and Satyrs the most important point is that they receive no cult at all. From them one learns best that supra- or infra-human beings are believed in which strongly occupy the imagination, but not the religious imagination—far more than the divinity to which we now turn.

In the fact that the Proto-Hellenes venerate the Earth, and in the manner in which they venerate her, the most distinctive trait of their religion is revealed; hence it is of especial importance that it be properly appreciated. For here the divine is already apprehended, more or less consciously, in universal terms. The Earth is for them not the soil on which their house or village stands, but the ground upon which the feet of men and animals tread—and those of the gods as well, for they too all dwell upon the earth and spring from her, like men. Therefore the Earth is All-Mother. She is such, whether she is worshipped under her name Γαῖα Γῆ, gladly invoked with the epithet μᾶτερ, or as μήτηρ θεῶν, embracing the lesser creatures as well, or as δᾶ μάτηρ, in a more sharply distinguished Δαμάτηρ Δωμάτηρ. This latter form existed in Thessaly and hence in Asiatic Aeolis, and Demeter calls herself Δωίς in the Hymn, line 122, when she introduces herself in disguise—Demeter, when she reveals herself. Under this name she had already come everywhere with the first immigrants; where δᾶ was said for γᾶ can therefore no longer be determined with precision. But it remained preserved in the invocation φεῦ δᾶ and the like; and in Cyprus the Nymphs were called ἐνδαίδες, Ἐννοσίδας stands beside Ἐννοσίγαιος. Whether Euripides understood the linguistic identity is immaterial; in substance his word is correct, Phoen. 685:
Δαμάτηρ θεά, πάντων ἄνασσα <Γᾶ>, πάντω δὲ Γᾶ τροφός.

Long afterwards in Athens the asseveration ὦ Γῆ χαὶ θεοί was still in use; it implies that she stands above them. The Homeric Hymn XXX¹⁷⁹ no longer depicts the All-Begetter, but only the τροφός, who makes all things thrive, bestows ὄλβος; and delightfully, joyous maiden dances form the final image, ἄφθονε δαῖμον the last greeting: there is no φθόνος in her, therefore she gives abundantly. In Euripides’ Heraclidae 748 the Chorus at the beginning of the first strophe directs its prayer to Earth and Sun: they are to report to Athens what has been resolved at Marathon. The second strophe entreats the “Mother,” to whom the land and the polis belong, to divert the hostile host elsewhere.¹⁸⁰ These later utterances show how vivid the feeling for the goddess Earth still was even then, and in how many different directions her power was experienced. Solon bears witness that the merit of his remission of debts belongs to Γαῖα μήτηρ μεγίστη δαιμόνων Ὀλυμπίων.¹⁸¹ The North-Germans lack such a maternal goddess. Among the Sicels¹⁸² and the Celts, a triad has taken the place of the single Mother; but they seem closer to the Quadriviae, Triviae, since they receive local epithets, and thus the All-Mother Earth is lacking. The Roman Tellus concerns herself with the fertility of the field and thus corresponds only to Demeter; maternal goddesses there are among the Italic peoples in abundance, but they seem detached from the element itself, like the Κουροτρόφος. By contrast, the Asia Minor Mother of the Gods, the Mountain Mother, the “Great Mother”¹⁸³ and whatever else she is called, is universal, yet she does not give birth: she loves her Attis or whatever he is named, who must die young; this is a wholly different conception of natural life. It could not fail, however, that contact between Greeks and Asiatics should lead to an identification of these so different Mothers, so that the cult-image of the Athenian μήτηρ in her temple beside the Council House attached itself to the already existing form of the Asiatic goddess¹⁸⁴ and adopted attributes from her, which theology then further elaborated (Euripides, Helen 1301). Sophocles, Philoctetes 392, calls Zeus the son of this Asiatic Ge. It is barbarian women who in Aeschylus, Suppliants 892, cry ὧ πᾶ Γᾶς παῖ Ζεῦ; yet the poets would not have said this had it not been that for them the all-ruling god—what Zeus was for them—still sprang from the element from which he had raised himself into heaven. In this there persists the most ancient Hellenic sense of the divine and at the same time a view of nature, so that it had to be adduced already here.¹⁸⁵ Cosmogonic poetry—Hesiod, Pherecydes—has developed this in various ways. From the Earth, then, must also spring those primordial powers with whom the gods who now rule have to contend—the Titans of Hesiod and the Giants, to whom she herself comes as an ally, very differently from Hesiod, where Ge counsels Zeus and thus is already only poetry, though poetry that does not detract from the dignity of the Earth-Mother. When she is so exceedingly often invoked in Homer and at all times alongside the all-seeing Sun as a witness to oaths, that is, as omnipresent, the element itself has become a deity; hence this oath could continue to be employed and understood even after the goddess had faded from living belief. In the motherland she received sacrifices everywhere in cult, and thus also altars,¹⁸⁶ though more rarely temples. In truth she is too elemental for a fully anthropomorphic form.¹⁸⁷ Her rising from the ground in the Gigantomachy is demanded by the action, but it is meant to make this bond with the soil visible. Aeschylus brought her onstage in Prometheus Unbound; there she was Ge-Themis.

Incubation was doubtless the oldest and most widespread way of seeking divine counsel; and thus it lay close at hand to receive that counsel directly from the soil of the earth on which the inquirer slept. So it had been at Delphi before Apollo forced his way in; the place where Ge was consulted lay close beside Apollo’s house and thus determined the siting of his temple. At Olympia, too, the oldest oracle belonged to her; there Zeus pushed himself forward through the Iamids. Earth-oracles survived in Achaea.¹⁸⁸

The dead go into the earth, but one does not say “earth to earth.” Ge never became a mistress of the dead, even though she is later invoked in such connections and sometimes at festivals of the dead. This is not to be used to characterize her original nature—no more than the epithet χθόνιος is to be used for that of Hermes. The oft-repeated sit tibi terra levis, which arose in late Hellenistic times, is the clearest proof that for belief she was no longer a goddess. In cult she retained only isolated epithets in which the former omnipotence of the primal mother found expression: πανταρέτα in Thessaly (IG IX 2, 491), μάχαιρα τελεσφόρος in Thebes (VIII 2452)—the latter the dedication of a sanctuary from the fifth century, the former a private dedication, to which a statue of the goddess belonged, of which the head has been preserved, something entirely exceptional. Both may refer to the fulfilment of dream-oracles. We may sum up by saying that the ancient religion recognized in the Earth the all-generating nature, and that is something great. But that she at the same time governs, in an eternal cycle, both becoming and passing-away—this was grasped only by much later reflection. No one has expressed it more beautifully than Electra’s prayer in Aeschylus’ Choephori (127), who after invoking the mediator Hermes calls upon:

Γαῖαν αὐτὴν ἣ τὰ πάντα τίχτεται
θρέψασά τʹ αὖθις τῶνδε χῦμα λαμβάνει

Early, however, Mother Earth took under her protection the lawfulness, the order of justice in human society, and this is no less significant for Hellenic religiosity. It finds expression in her union with Themis. Aeschylus identifies the two (Prom. 210), though he adds that Ge bore many names—an addition that may already be theological interpretation. In Athenian cult, Ge Themis is attested only in imperial times; this may just as well be a later identification as Ge χουροτρόφος, who according to Pausanias had a temple on the south slope of the Acropolis. That, however, had been an independent Κουροτρόφος; the care of children lay remote from Ge’s original sphere.¹⁸⁹ At Olympia Themis has an altar close beside the sanctuary of Ge (Pausanias V 14, 10); this proves only their close relationship. At Delphi she is interposed between Ge and Apollo (Phoebe), in order that the transfer of the oracle to the younger god may appear lawful¹⁹⁰; but she has no cult there, neither alongside Ge nor as Ge herself. In Homer she is raised to a divine person, for at Zeus’ command she summons the assembly of the gods (Y 4, O 87). Hesiod counts her among the primordial powers, children of Uranus, and she becomes the first consort of Zeus.¹⁹¹ It accords with this—though it is a later invention—that Zeus in the Cypria takes counsel with her at the beginning, as in Hesiod he does with Ge. Her power consists in this, that the θεμιστοπόλοι βασιλῆες exercise justice in their θέμιστες.¹⁹² Still further reaches the frequent phrase ἣ θέμις ἐστίν, which embraces everything that appears as a natural right, even the union of man and woman (Z 134). Hence the association of the goddess of this right with the primal mother lay close at hand. In Thessaly Themis has an actual cult, attested by the month Θεμίστιος, by a dedication Θέμιστι from the land of the Perrhaebi (IG IX 2, 1236), by names such as Θεμισταγόρας and especially Θεμιστώ in South-Thessalian legend; and there lies Ἴχναι,¹⁹³ from which the goddess is called Ἰχναίη (Hymn to Apollo 94). That the place later all but vanished is no stranger than the fate of Alalkomenai, after which Athena in Homer is called Ἀλαλχομενηίς. Now the etymology must be brought in: Θεμιστ- is the stem shown by the old inflection, thus belonging to two roots θεμ-, related to θέμελθον, θεμείλιον, and ἵστημι. Thus θέμις is, and the θέμιστες of the θεμιστοπόλοι are, “establishments of the ground, foundations.” As the goddess has laid the foundation, so thereafter do the judges; and it is natural that she belongs to Zeus and bears him Eunomia, Dike, and Eirene, the foundations of his rule and of order upon earth. These are foundations which we ourselves still designate metaphorically in the same way. That in the literal sense it is Ge who laid the ground is evident. It is therefore intelligible that she could be Θέμις; and if the two were distinguished, Themis became daughter of Ge. In this way she is a goddess in a wholly different sense from Aidos, Deimos, or Hypnos, and could receive cult; and Ge, in becoming Themis or in bringing forth Themis, thus developed as Demeter did when she became θεσμοφόρος.

In Demeter the earliest age had already set apart an earth-goddess of another kind from Ge: the earth which demands from the farmer labour upon the soil and in return bestows upon him the blessing of the harvest. That does not concern Ge at all. The Iliad knows Demeter at least once (E 500), in connection with the harvest, and employs the scarcely any longer understood formula Δημήτερος ἀχτή for grain.¹⁹⁴ Once again it is confirmed that the society for which the rhapsodes recount the deeds of its ancestors concerns itself little with the gods of the tillers of the soil; for it flesh is the principal nourishment, whereas later σῖτος is porridge and bread, the rest mere relish, ὄψον, sacrificial meat a rare enjoyment. Hesiod prays to this same Demeter. She is so much venerated precisely in Arcadia that she must have belonged to the very first immigration. Because settled life rests upon agriculture, and this in turn requires a lawful order, Demeter becomes Θεσμοφόρος; this may indeed be a later advance, but it had to be made everywhere. The epithet does not of course mean that she once gave laws, but that she ever φορεῖ, bears them, just as Artemis σελασφόρος bears the torch; she is ever concerned for the θέσμια. Vgl. γῆ πυροφόρος and δασμοφόρος.

Demeter became still more important when the nature of the Earth-Mother was deepened in another direction. Vegetative life—seed and germ and ripening ear—leads to the maturing of the conceived germ in the mother’s womb, to birth and the nurture of the helpless human child. The Earth-Mother becomes the goddess of mothers and, in general, of female sexual life: οὐ γὰρ γῆ γυναῖχα μεμίμηται χυήσει, ἀλλὰ γυνὴ γῆν (Plato, Menexenus 238). She seems to have entered wherever in the name of a place or of a goddess the root of Eleusis was present; but nothing points to the adoption of more than the name, which probably merely offered the opportunity for the settlement of the native goddess. Eileithyia, who maintained herself, could not become a Demeter; conversely Demeter was not a helper in childbirth or in the rearing of children. For these functions special goddesses were widely revered—Καλλιγένεια, Γενετυλλίδες, Κουροτρόφος—who never became true persons, and in the end disappeared or were reduced to epithets of other goddesses, above all of Demeter. It was doubtless the order of the most ancient society that brought it about that the women of a village worshipped their common goddess, because their sexual life required a protectress in whom the men had no concern; and the consequence was that men were excluded from the cult, so that it became a mystery-cult. The sanctuaries of Demeter even later are apt to lie outside the city, or at least originally to have done so. It is no wonder that we learn little—and still less that is reliable—about the secret cult; in heroic epic we shall not even expect a mention of it. Nor should we be surprised if women, untouched by theology and philosophy as they were, preserved ancient usages and symbols down into late times, hurled obscene jests in men’s faces at processions, and discussed among themselves all that concerned sexual life without false shame. If the phallus spread everywhere, Baubo might well show herself within the closed temples of Demeter.

The Mother did not wholly satisfy what belief in a protectress of womanhood demanded. The maiden was lacking. Hence here it was not so much a division of the divine into several co-ordinate persons that occurred, as that, by way of completion, the daughter was set beside the mother—not as an object of maternal care, but almost as an equal, as is expressed in the dual τὼ θεώ; they are also called δέσποιναι, and in the cults we see now the one, now the other predominating. The name χόρη prevails above all in Athens, though not exclusively.¹⁹⁵ The further development must not yet be pursued here. But the very peculiar conception of the Earth as an uncanny, dark power ought properly to be treated at this point—Earth as Erinys, from whom only subsequently a beneficent mistress arises as daughter, also called Themis, while beside her stand the Erinyes, who in turn are transformed into Eumenides. This, however, demands so much space that it must be relegated to an appendix on Erinys.

As Erinys, the Earth-goddess has a different nature from Ge. It corresponds to this that poetic language possesses two words for “earth”; but χθών, which in the poets becomes synonymous with γῆ, can have done so only because it belonged to the immigrants of the first stratum, more precisely to the Ionians, established itself first in their poetry, and with that poetry was taken over by the other Greeks, so that it remained alive in all verse, although it had everywhere vanished from living speech. Originally the two words cannot have meant the same thing; the difference is best grasped in the adjective χθόνιος. It is foreign to epic, but appears in cults that seem particularly archaic. In Hermione there is an entrance to the underworld. Its lord is euphemistically called Κλύμενος, its mistress Χθονία, even when she has become Demeter and brought Kore with her. The festival is called Χθόνια. This renaming had already taken place in the fifth century, and the whole region is full of sanctuaries which we know only as Demeter’s. On Mykonos the same underworld gods are called Ζεὺς χθόνιος and Γῆ χθονίη¹⁹⁶; evidently the ordinary divine names are added, while Demeter alongside has her women’s cult. Nothing could show better how little Γῆ and Χθών coincide, though both mean “earth”. Pherecydes teaches us to understand the distinction. In him, as the preserved fragment of his book shows, Χθονίη becomes Ge only through marriage with Zeus. The earth must be fertilised if it is to be motherly and beneficent; before that it was the cold, dead soil of the depths. Zeus is then not Klymenos, but the life-creating power; Hesiod calls him beside Demeter χθόνιος (where the word first appears; χαταχθόνιος in Homer), in the prayer before sowing. For him, and likewise for Pherecydes, Zeus is lord of the sky, and therefore receives this epithet because he here acts exceptionally from the depths. The uncanny character of Chthōn still clings to it later in highly significant tragic passages. Along with the grave-mound the chorus of the Choephori invokes her on the night of murder (723). She is called mother of the Titans in Prometheus 205, mother of the Titaness Phoibe in Eumenides 6. In both cases she is not different from Gaia, but the Titanic points towards this name. Dreadful dreams she sends in Euripides’ Hecuba (70),¹⁹⁷ sirens for a song of lament in Helen (168). Above all, χθόνιος regularly corresponds to this Χθών, the earth-depth of the realm of the dead, or at least designates, as it were, an older Ge; in this sense αὐτόχθων is formed.¹⁹⁸ When modern scholars, who speak so much of “chthonic” cults, think thereby of agriculture and what in Demeter belongs to that sphere, they have not yet trained their ear to the undertones of Greek words.¹⁹⁹

The divine power that works in the soil of the earth is feminine, the womb of all life. It can give birth without our asking after a begetter. But this changes as soon as reflective thought begins. Then we demand a begetter; yet in the depths there are also forces at work that are not maternal at all. Down below there must be the consort of the Earth. The sky, which lies nearest at hand, does not suffice, for seed does not germinate without the fertilising rain. Such was the later perception of Hellenic feeling for nature; the oldest mode of thought could not reach it, for the sky—which never received a cult at all²⁰⁰—was for it merely a stony hemisphere. The “husband of the Earth” was Poseidon; that is what this name signifies, as Hoffmann and Kretschmer have shown.²⁰¹ He dwelt below in the depths of the ground, universal in so far as Ge herself is, the γαιάοχος ἐννοσίγαιος who shakes the earth, the ἀσφάλειος who guards against collapse. Earthquakes still bring his uncanny power vividly before the Hellenes’ minds; they had no need, like Goethe in the Classical Walpurgis Night, to invent a Seismos. Poseidon possessed ancient cults throughout Hellas and the islands that reveal his nature; not infrequently it also emerges that he appeared in horse-form; and that he entered into no personal relation with his worshippers was only to be expected of the lord of the depths of the earth. It is not necessary to exhaust everything here, but the principal sites must at least be adduced. Thessaly’s chief god was the Πετραῖος, “he who dwells among the rocks”. He had cut the bed of the Peneios through the encircling mountains and was the father of many great heroes. He had caused the horse, named Σχύφιος, to spring forth from a rock.²⁰² Hellenic gods do not create out of nothing; the horse came from the depths, itself an uncanny being. Hades too is χλυτόπωλος. As we hear the story, it is hardly ancient: for the god himself had once borne the shape of a horse. In Boeotia he begot the eponym of the tribe upon Melanippe, the black mare; in Onchestos by Lake Copais stood his ancient sanctuary, in which races were already held when Apollo set out for Delphi.²⁰³ On Helicon his hoof caused the Horse’s Spring to burst forth,²⁰⁴ and “all Boeotia belonged to him”, as Aristarchus expresses it in explaining the Homeric-Ionic epithet Ἑλιχώνιος. At Eleusis he is called πατήρ,²⁰⁵ although other gods have thrust themselves forward. On the Athenian citadel it was his thunderbolt, not his trident, as people later said, that took possession, for the clefts might not be roofed over; Poseidon Erechtheus was only separated from Erichthonios, with his transparent name, once Athena had moved in. At Delphi he belonged together with Ge; he not only retained his sanctuary close beside Apollo’s precinct, but also had an altar within the χρηστήριον itself.²⁰⁶ At Troezen he was βασιλεύς, πολιοῦχος, φυτάλμιος,²⁰⁷ γενέσιος at Lerna, and in Sparta γενέθλιος,²⁰⁸ where races were also held for him as γαιάοχος. Whencesoever it derives, genuine must be what Nonnus relates (39.80), that in Argos he created springs by the stroke of his hoof. At Taenarum he had a seat of peculiar sanctity; there too was an entrance to the Underworld, thus originally into his own realm. Arcadia is full of his cults; one ἱερὸς λόγος alone need be singled out, that Rhea hid him from Cronos by giving him a young foal to swallow.²⁰⁹ Here indeed the Hesiodic story has been drawn in, yet it must always have been his preservation that was in question, not, as elsewhere, that of Zeus. In the single city on the western coast that bears a Carian name, which after its destruction survived in the mountain stronghold of Samikon, a cult of Poseidon endured until the particularly holy image was transferred to the young city of Elis.²¹⁰ Of Neleus and Pylos, where Periclymenus had received from Poseidon the gift of transforming himself into any shape (Hesiod fr. 14), we shall speak later. In Achaea lies Helice, which must in any case have possessed a cult of Poseidon, if the Ionians were to derive their god from there. Thus Ephorus (Diod. XV 49) is right to say that “δοχεῖν τὸ παλαιὸν τὴν Πελοπόννησον οἰχητήριον γεγονέναι Ποσειδῶνος χαὶ τὴν χώραν ὥσπερ ἱερὰν τοῦ Ποσειδῶνος νομίζεσθαι.” Of the islands I mention only two important cults, because here one might be inclined to think of the sea-god—on which account I have also not listed Euboea.²¹¹ On Mykonos one would take the Πος. φύχιος, on account of the seaweed, for a sea-god; and of course he received that name once he had become such. But what he had been before is shown by the fact that Demeter receives a sacrifice on the same day (Syll. 1024, 8). On Tenos the chief cult was that of Poseidon and Amphitrite, that is, of the sea-gods; yet Poseidon there was ἰατρός (Clem. Protr. II p. 26 P. from Philochorus), and he has transmitted this power to the Panagia, who now works the miracles. Such a function, however, cannot belong to a mere sea-god; it befits the lord in the depths of the earth, just as Ge in Patrae gives healing oracles. With Poseidon this activity is exceptional. In general it is difficult to say in what manner he was helpful to men. Spring-water comes from the ground, hence it is occasionally said that he bestows it. Hippocrene and Amymone have already come before us; we may add the spring Alope at Eleusis,²¹² and of Dirce Aeschylus says as much.²¹³ Yet the lord of sweet waters is primarily Acheloos. Hesiod, Theogony 732, makes Poseidon fashion the gate in the wall that shuts in Tartarus; there he is still lord of the underworld, though as a builder, as later at the walls of Ilios. Did he help in building upon earth as well?²¹⁴ Poseidon Hippios extends far and wide, yet all this is too particular. The god who is worshipped as father or ancestor of an entire people, who as γαιήοχος ἐννοσίγαιος is a universal power, can help his own in everything; and they will, according to their belief, turn to him in everything. In the form in which we know his worship in the motherland, he had far greater claim to become the highest god than Zeus, who displaced him in Asia; for he too, like Zeus, wielded the thunderbolt—out of which the trident was only later fashioned²¹⁵—as the stylised representations of both in vase-painting make plain. This is also intelligible, in the belief of this people, for the lord of the depths: they heard subterranean thunder often enough, and believed that they saw lightning as well; it flashes from the ground at the close of the Prometheus, when the Titan sinks into the earth.

If Poseidon was not the lord of the sea, who then was so in Urhellenic times? We have encountered a foreign sea-goddess in Ino and have seen that she was identified with Leukothea. She was strongly venerated in Ionia in the period in which the Odyssey introduces her,²¹⁶ so that the month Λευχαθεών belonged to her; later she receded. In Boeotia she too has her seat, but not on the sea, rather on the Kopais; and the theophoric name Leukodoros attests the goddess.²¹⁷ Ordinarily she bears the name Ino and is a heroine, wife of Athamas; the Athamantian plain lies on the Kopais. White birds swarm there as well²¹⁸; in the shape of a gull she appears upon the raft of Odysseus. At Chaeroneia, in Plutarch’s time,²¹⁹ she still possessed a temple which only on a single festival day might be entered by a woman—thus a women’s cult. A solitary dedication at Pherai (IG IX 2, 422) is preserved. The white goddess of the Kopais could be identified with Ino only when people who knew her began to sail the sea, that is, in Asia. Boeotians not only reached Lesbos, but also the Mycale, where there was a Thebes and where Pherecydes knew of Cadmeans. When the Boeotians then heard that their Leukothea dwelt in the sea as Ino, she had to be transferred thither. This was effected by the story which has her pursued by her maddened husband until she leaps into the sea at Megara. It will have helped that near Megara there lay a “white” plain.²²⁰ But then she must have been called Ino in life. With her she took a son into the sea, who likewise became a sea-god, Palaimon. He existed; not far from the Isthmus he possessed an ancient adyton which still endured in later times.²²¹ One believes one recognises him on a Corinthian pinax,²²² where he rides a sea-horse. Elsewhere he is not attested, except that the scholia to Lycophron 229 know of child-sacrifices for him on Tenedos, evidently from good tradition.²²³ Naturally he must have borne another name in life; that was Melikertes, which could not prevail in Corinth. Only when the games which Periander had founded in honour of Poseidon were, after the model of the Nemean, carried back into heroic times, were they supposed to have been founded by Sisyphus in honour of Palaimon-Melikertes, whose body had been cast ashore on the Isthmus. Thus Pindar has related it in an Isthmian ode, though elsewhere he assigns the games to Poseidon. Here the name Melikertes appears for the first time; that of Palaimon cannot have been absent. It therefore does not belong to Corinth at all and has nothing to do with the cult there. With this, the modern fables about a cult of Melkarth are disposed of.²²⁴ How a sea-god could be called “Wrestler” is incomprehensible. Once again, close by the Kopais there was a Palaimon, who, like his neighbour Charops, was later made into a Heracles.²²⁵ Here are riddles that I cannot solve. For the transformation of Ino into Leukothea we have no need at all of Ino the daughter of Cadmus; yet she already is such in the Odyssey (ε 333), and thus she must have become so in Asia. In Boeotia, however, very many stories then attached themselves to her—partly through her association with Athamas, with whom she is also carried into southern Thessaly. She need not be a daughter of Cadmus there, but she also has nothing intrinsically to do with Leukothea. As a daughter of Cadmus she became the nurse of Dionysus and is therefore pursued by Hera and driven even into the sea²²⁶—everything in this reshaping poetical fantasy is particularly characteristic, because the goddess herself has wholly vanished; yet the tradition is too fragmentary for the tangled threads of invention to be disentangled. None of this concerns us here.²²⁷

The Corinthian Palaimon has only a local cult; nothing speaks for its great antiquity, and nothing against its having been brought into relation with the sea only through Corinthian seafaring. For at the Isthmus, where his sanctuary lay, there is no harbour, and the secret rites point in another direction. Yet the Theogony enumerates sea-gods in abundance. There is Okeanos; but he is a Carian and has displaced the archaic Hellenic lord of fresh waters, Acheloos, since his children are also the rivers and springs, as well as the nymphs who dwell on earth and in the deep sea. Then Hesiod has interposed Pontos as father of Nereus, who has never been a person. The word always means “sea”, but it is difficult to sever it from pons, since πόρος is also said of a river²²⁸; thus it will only have acquired its narrower sense when the sea truly became for the Hellenes the πόρος. Nereus himself has significance only as father of the Nereids; he nowhere possesses cult, Homer does not name him, and he will not differ from the ἅλιος γέρων (Ξ 141). This indeterminate name is older and more widespread; it too has, here and there, a cult,²²⁹ and on the old Argive bronze plaque (Inschr. Olymp. 693) he fights with Heracles in the place of Triton, whereas he is usually distinguished from him and then gladly receives from the vase-painters the Hesiodic name Nereus²³⁰; in the saga of Heracles (Pherecydes 16 Jac.) he once, after the model of Proteus in the Odyssey, undergoes transformation when he is to prophesy. Which of the two names one assigns to the triple-bodied figure whom Buschor has definitively recognised in the former so-called Typhon pediment of the Acropolis is of little consequence. That such a sea-greybeard dwelt somewhere in the depths and could appear everywhere in his realm the Greeks of the eighth century—and doubtless earlier—believed, even though he received no worship. More important to them were the Nereids, his daughters, to whom Hesiod gives fifty names in rivalry with Homer (Ξ 49), where a host accompanies their sister Thetis. Νηίδες, “swimmers”, is the more telling designation.²³¹ Already the vase-painters gave them sea-horses for seats, because they did not know how to depict swimming. Aeschylus in the Prometheus calls them Okeanids; the father’s name is of no consequence. The rich and charming play which later poetry and art made with them, once they had become purely mythical, must not deceive us as to the fact that even earlier they did not act²³² and possessed no cult, with the possible exception of Thetis.²³³ She, like Melusine, became the wife of a man, the hero of Pelion, who in the Polyphemus’ cave overcame her despite her transformations; after bearing Achilles she returned to her own element. This saga is Magnetian, brought into Aeolis by emigrants.

Alongside her appears Eurynome, an Oceanid, in Homer (Θ 398). She was therefore no arbitrary Oceanid, and the name “the wide-ruler” can hardly be without meaning. Perhaps the poet of Θ knew something akin to Apollonius I 503, where Eurynome is the consort of Ophion; that probably derives from Pherecydes of Syros. Hesiod lists her merely among the Oceanids (Theog. 358), because he knows her so from Homer, yet at 907 she bears the Charites to Zeus; for Hesiod this is the same figure, and it matters little that the scholiast to Θ ingeniously detects an allusion to this in her Homeric mention. But homonymy may be involved. That in Orchomenos the goddesses were derived from a “Wide-Ruler” is very plausible, yet this would then be another than the sea-maiden. We know of no other mother of the Charites, but Callimachus fr. 471 says: “Τιτηνιὰς Εὐρυνόμη”; this was not the Oceanid, so there existed a tradition that preserved the name but not the Oceanid—what Callimachus meant will have been the consort of Ophion, though she too does not suit as wife of Zeus. Amusing and instructive is what Pausanias (VIII 41) relates about a temple of Eurynome, situated where the Neda received a brook named Lymax, in a wild region among ancient cypresses. It was opened, and presumably visited, only once a year. Pausanias will not have ascended to it, since he did not reach Phigaleia on the festival day, but he heard there that Eurynome was Artemis. This astonished him greatly, for “ὅσοι αὐτῶν παρειλήφασιν ὑπομνήματα ἀρχαῖα” knew that she was the Eurynome of Θ. He pretends that this information was given him by Phigaleians who possessed old archival material. From them he also claims to have heard that the cult-image was a woman with a fish’s tail and bound with golden chains, proof that she could not be Artemis. And yet the people believed her to be Artemis, and therefore could know nothing of a fish’s tail. It is clear that the ὑπομνήματα were the book he carried with him. We shall find, at Thelpousa, a contradiction between his own inquiry and alien erudition. The book from which he derived the marvel had invented everything; and the Phigaleians, who yearly went in procession to the temple, were right when their “Wide-Ruler” had become Artemis, like so many ancient goddesses of their land. The name has a scope so wide that it can be applied to any goddess.

Another Oceanid is Amphitrite, whom Hesiod at 930—or more probably a continuator—assigns to Poseidon as wife, and this was thereafter universally accepted: a triumph of the authoritative poem. Her name is chosen because Triton is the son of the pair, a δεινὸς θεός who dwells with his parents on the sea-bed. He matters only as the adversary of Heracles, who by overcoming him pacifies the sea for mankind. The Tritons belong to the later, playful mythology that has forgotten that combat. Only the Argonaut saga has retained Triton at Benghazi, where he kept a lake or river. There, even in Apollonius, the Hesperides still sit, although the Pillars of Heracles have meanwhile been moved far to the west. The Argonaut saga, already as Pindar gives it, could not have arisen before Triton had his seat at the Syrtis and its shallows were known. Then Heracles, who wished to reach the Hesperides, must have conquered him there; and when Heracles in Pindar (Nem. 3.23) has pacified the sea for men by overcoming the τεναγέων ῥοαί, the Syrtis is described just as in Apollonius. The combat with Triton²³⁴ was once—long before the founding of Cyrene—transposed to the Syrtis by sailors; Odysseus among the Lotus-eaters likewise presupposes an involuntary visit to those coasts. Belief in Triton is older still. But is he a Hellenic name? Hardly, since it eludes any transparent explanation. Tritogeneia does the same, though it seems to contain the word.²³⁵ Thus riddles remain; but Triton is no more than a sea-dweller dangerous to men.

Hesiod then introduces Πόρχω παῖς of Nereus, and gives him a Keto of his own invention as wife, because she is to produce a brood of monsters. In Alcman Φόρχυς means as much as “Nereid”; the name cannot be separated from πόρχος. Elsewhere πόρχος is a fish-trap, πορχεύς fishermen. That does not lead to a sea-god, though such a figure could extend his sphere. As Φόρχυς one told tales of him at Achaean Rhypes and on Cephallenia, which gave a poet familiar with the region occasion to assign him a harbour on Ithaca. The Odyssey has brought Proteus with his seals to the Egyptian coast and bestowed upon him the shape-shifting power of Thetis. His home was originally at Athos on the Chalcidice, where Heracles fights with his sons and founds Torone. That, then, was first invented at the colonisation of the Chalcidice, and the “First” is the primeval inhabitant. The sea, with its χήτη, of which Herodotus (VI 44) knows, could therefore from the beginning be thought to possess such a lord—and with him a shepherd—though a local sea-god to whom the land also belonged. Briareus is a name for various “mightily strong” beings; so the Iliad (Α 403) calls a sea-giant who is also named Αἰγαίων, that is, after the Sea of Αἰγαί where Poseidon dwells.

This survey shows that the Hellenes knew no lord of the sea until Poseidon became such, when they themselves had become seafarers in Asia. What we encounter is precisely for that reason a multitude of names, because none possessed general validity: Palaimon, Proteus, Phorkys have a very narrow range; Nereus and his daughters have no cult; Ino, and probably Triton as well, are foreign. Did the Hellenes possess an ancient word that corresponded in meaning to the European mare? They had lost it; πόντος does not suffice, πέλαγος is Homeric and therefore remains permanently alive in poetry, but apart from Herodotus—who does not guarantee living usage—it is employed almost only in poetry or in contexts where dependence upon it is perceptible; and it is striking that one can say ἁλὸς ἐν πελάγεσσιν (Od. ε 335): it will thus, like ἅλς, mean merely the surface, perhaps like the German word. Then hals is the Greek translation of the foreign word θάλασσα, which at first denotes sea-water. That there is a sea the inhabitants of the inner Balkan peninsula naturally knew, and they will have named it; but it did not concern them. They could not assign it a divine lord or tell of its inhabitants. They might have Νηίδες, a Πόρχος Φόρχυς. When they advanced to the sea, Νηίδες dwelt in the sea too, and Peleus caught one. To the foreign sea-gods whom they encountered, such as Ino, they added their own; but these remained local. Only when they sailed over the sea did the foreign Okeanos no longer suffice them, and Poseidon became lord of the sea. But let us also observe how sailors relate to the gods of whom the poets tell. Leukothea still aids Odysseus; later one trusts in the Dioscuri, who extend their help to the sea, or in the foreign gods of Samothrace, and one even carries the alien Pataikoi on board. The lovely sea-maidens merely play; the νεραΐδες of the Christian Greeks are far more active. It would have been natural for the drowned to come into the house of Amphitrite, into which Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus 195, wishes Ares to descend. Nothing of the sort occurs. Bacchylides lets Theseus dive down to her, but that is embellishment of a given tale. How utterly different is the way in which the North-Germans, far bolder seafarers, inwardly conceived their life and death upon the “sea-dragons” and shaped them in the images of their imagination. Had a like disposition been inherent in the Greeks, Heracles would not have set up his pillars at the Strait of Gibraltar, but would have subdued Triton in the Caribbean Sea. Alexander, who drove Nearchus upon his unrepeated voyage of discovery and wished to continue it, might perhaps have bestowed such power upon the people from his own soul, though he was a Macedonian. Pytheas was still his contemporary, the last Ionian in whom the daring of the ancient Milesians and Phocaeans yet lived. After that it is over. It simply was not in the blood of the Hellenes; and the Romans were and remained landsmen, who even let the inheritance of the Hellenes decay.

The gods whom we have hitherto considered act upon the earth or rise up out of the earth. This holds just as truly of Zeus, and it did not change when, in Homer, his nature became a different one; for he still dwells upon Mount Olympus. That mountain lay outside the horizon of the Asiatic Greeks; they therefore carried with them the conception that had been formed when they had drawn down into Pieria and farther south.²³⁶ Up there he dwelt αἰθέρι ναίων, where he also gathers the clouds from which he sends forth lightning and rain. At first men believed the god to be seated upon the mountain from which they watched the coming weather. The dwellers about the Saronic Gulf looked to the Oros of Aegina; the Messenians to Ithome; those of the valleys of Kleonai and Nemea to Apesas; those of Argos to Arachnaion; the Arcadians of the west to Lykaion (unless Pan there had older rights); sailors and islanders of the northern archipelago to Athos, Ζηνὸς αἶπος, as Aeschylus calls it (Agam. 285); and the Iliad is wont to let the god come from Olympus to Ida, where the Trojans worship him, just as the Greeks had worshipped him when they became settled within his circuit. His weapon is the thunderbolt, which he always has at hand; beside it he bears a magical goatskin, the αἰγίς, surely the begetter of the raging storm, the χαταιγίς. The eagle, which dwells in the mountains, is his messenger; in that form he may have appeared in primeval times, but he also descended in the lightning itself.

The name Zeus—Ζεύς, Δεύς, Ζάς, Ζήν, Ττήν (in Crete)—was unintelligible to the Greeks, and therefore inherited from the most ancient time; and it is by no means self-evident that it always preserved the particular essence that once lay within the name. If the North-Germanic Týr truly bears the same name, one sees how completely the etymological meaning may fade away. The root διϝ- may once have meant “to shine^”; the Greeks no longer heard that in it,²³⁷ neither in δῖα θεάων nor in διογενής—which does not concern Zeus at all²³⁸—but the god; and thus for them Zeus may have meant something akin to “θεός”, heightened above the enigmatic deus. For that reason alone the prevailing view goes astray which, starting from the etymology, declares Zeus to be a god of light,²³⁹ in which the theological dualism of gods of light and dark “chthonian” powers plays a part—a dualism which Zoroaster brought into Judaism and Christianity. It misunderstands the χθόνιος (which Zeus himself can perfectly well become) no less than the so-called light-gods, which a few decades ago were still thought to include almost all Greek gods. What, after all, is light, τὸ φῶς, this neutral abstraction, not even an element in physical theory? Fire would have to inhere in the gods, or the luminous heavenly bodies. The thunderbolt of Zeus is not fulgus but fulmen. Only when Zeus is no longer merely raised upon or into the sky, but, more precisely, has been made by philosophy into the aether, can one say πέλει αἴθριος (Theocritus 4.43). When he is ἔλαχʹ οὐρανὸν εὐρὺν ἐν αἰθέρι χαὶ νεφέληισιν (Ο 192), he rules over clear and over cloudy weather alike. Later, in manumission formulae and in oaths ὑπὸ Δία Γῆν Ἥλιον the sky will have been understood; originally the god was meant: ἴστω νῦν Ζεὺς πρῶτα θεῶν ὕπατος χαὶ ἄριστος, Τ 258; and in the oath of Γ103 Earth and Sun, who as witnesses are always present, receive a white and a black sheep, Zeus a third, plainly as the highest god—which he is in Homer. ὕπατος or ὕψιστος he already was earlier, because he occupied the highest heights; ἄριστος one could also call the wielder of the thunderbolt, because he was irresistible, so that warriors might revere him as the bringer of victory. He bore within himself the capacity to become the highest god; but as yet he was by no means so.

Even in the later period, when Homer’s influence spreads back into the motherland, festivals of Zeus are not frequent,²⁴⁰ nor therefore months named after Zeus. The decisive impulse came from the Pisatans, who, in place of the Olympios too remote for them, created an Olympia on the Alpheios, which the god appropriated by the thunderbolt when he destroyed the lordly house of Pelops. Here the Iamidae conducted a successful policy: they transferred to Zeus the oracle of Ge, which they now administered, and they founded the Games. Yet their Zeus remained always the god of the thunderbolt, down to the time of Pheidias; religion played a lesser part than politics when Peisistratos transferred the Olympian cult to Athens. Of the Athenian cults we still know most; here too they are characteristic. The Διειπόλια show that the god has moved from the mountain summits onto the ἄχρα τῆς πόλεως, that is, has become a citadel-god; this is a general development. At one time there were in Athens Πάνδια in the plural, pointing to a community of several tribes or villages and thus to political significance, to which the king Πανδίων also corresponds, whose sons represent regions. But since the Panathenaea existed, the importance of this festival had waned, and the diminished celebration was reinterpreted. Finally we have the Diasia²⁴¹ and the Maimakteria, after which a month is named. They belong together²⁴²; and if the Diasia fall on the 23rd of Anthesterion,²⁴³ the Maimakteria (a name nowhere else applied) at the end of their month,²⁴⁴ it is immediately evident that the weather-god receives his special sacrifices, once when spring begins, and again when the winter storms set in. The latter is already expressed in the special name; in spring it may have been matched by μειλίχιος, as Thucydides already calls the god. Yet the Meilichios elsewhere is an independent god and belongs to the cult of the dead, even if perhaps not to the realm of the dead itself. It is therefore more probable that in earlier times he was identified with the Zeus of the Diasia, because to this god a rite of expiation with ἁγνὰ θύματα was offered. It is precisely these Zeus-festivals that had already, in the fifth century, been greatly displaced in esteem.²⁴⁵

Quite apart stands the Zeus of Dodona, of whom the Thessalian emigrants still remembered after centuries, as the Patrocleia shows, when the sanctuary already lay wholly among barbarian, half-Greek tribes. Here the god dwelt in an oak, whose rustling, or the chirping of the wild doves that nested in it, or the ringing of a sounding-vessel hung among the branches, proclaimed the god’s will to the priests; he might have been called δενδρίτης or ἔνδενδρος: one sees what such a tree-cult signifies. Through the oracle, that is, through the priesthood, the cult maintained itself as Hellenic; changes were inevitable, such as the different σύμβολα by which the god gave answer, and the introduction, presumably later, of virgin priestesses. Beside him stood a companion of Zeus otherwise almost vanished, Dione; whether as consort from the beginning, no one knows. But the epithet νάιος²⁴⁶ must be ancient. The length of the alpha points at first to ναός, which was not there, or ναῦς, but the sea is far away; yet antiquity attempted both. There then remains “flowing”, as in the ναιάδες; and modern scholars postulate a spring-god, although no spring has hitherto been found, and Zeus as a spring-god is scarcely conceivable. We do best to wait until Dodona is excavated. If nothing emerges, the riddle will remain. The fine small bronze from Dodona shows the wielder of the thunderbolt.

I am well aware that people will resist recognising a pre-Homeric Zeus who in cult stood far behind Poseidon and was neither father of gods nor of men, even if, like the other gods, he himself had no father. Because Jovis became Jupiter, Zeus need not therefore have been πατήρ, which he first becomes in the Iliad and in Archilochus. Perhaps the impression will be strengthened if the cults of Zeus in Arcadia together with the three peninsulas once belonging to it are surveyed; foundations of later date, such as those in Megalopolis, and obvious epithets of the post-Homeric Zeus such as πάσιος χτήσιος (IG. V 2, 62, third century) must of course be set aside. He is seated on Ithome and on Lykaion, but on Taygetos only as Ταλετίτας (IG. V 1, 363); here we have found a pre-Greek solar cult which he has displaced. In Arcadia he does not even possess the mountains of the east and north. He bears local names: Krokeatas at Gythion (Paus. III 21, 4), Λεχεάτας at Aliphera (VIII 26, 6; cf. Λέχαιον), where they even wished to appropriate the birth of Athena, evidently only through faulty etymologising. The weather- and lightning-god is present, as he must be: χεραυνός (IG. V 2, 288), στορπαῖος (V 2, 64), χαβάτας (V 1, 1316), χαππώτας (Paus. III 22, 1), χαταιβάτας (Paus. V 14, 10)—this is the lightning with which the Zeus of Olympia seized possession—εὐάνεμος (Paus. III 13, 8). An σχοτίτας has an oak-grove immediately behind the Herms which here too mark the boundary between Arcadia and Laconia (III 10, 6); nearby he has a temple, but originally he will have dwelt in the darkness of the grove. Since we hear no more, I shall say no more.²⁴⁷ Where here is the lord of heaven, the king of the gods? What do these corner-cults signify in face of the Arcadian-Laconian Poseidon? Is it permissible, by a petitio principii, to project the Homeric Zeus back into the earliest age? Rather, religious progress first rises to its true stature when one sees what sort of Zeus the Greeks of the mainland still possessed beyond the age of Homer. That Zeus, because he holds in the thunderbolt the weapon of victory, was a god especially honoured by kings and warriors is an inference that cannot be proved, yet cannot be avoided, from his later position. Of the heavenly pair of twins this is beyond all doubt, and they are present in the belief of Celts and Germans,²⁴⁸ Balts and Indians alike. It is striking that they are absent from Ionia and therefore from the epic, which knows the brothers of Helen only as dead. Their simple name Ἄναχε²⁴⁹ they have preserved in Athens and Argos; in Boeotia their horse-form appears as the pair of white steeds. Elsewhere they have acquired particular proper names, either remaining wholly a pair, like the Μολίονε of the Eleans (properly of the Epeans), or else becoming individualised as separate persons, as in Sparta, Messenia, and Boeotia. This came about in such a way that heroes already in existence took their place within the divine pair and retained their own distinctive stories: Castor, of whom one had a tomb (Paus. III 13, 1); Idas, who in Aetolia had fought against Apollo; Amphion, the husband of Niobe.²⁵⁰ How matters stood with the others may be doubtful, since their legends may have been lost to us; Lynceus, who employs his lynx-like sight only in the final combat, is surely the invention of a poet. In the struggle of the Spartan with the Messenian twins the victory of Sparta is reflected; here we possess splendid evidence for genuinely Spartan myth-making, and the epic elaboration must at least have begun in Sparta. These stories, even when they acquired general currency—such as that of the horseman Castor and the boxer Polydeuces, or the heteremeria of the brothers (which was necessary in order to allow the dead Castor still to act as a god)—do not alter the common and equal appearance and operation of the twin gods. Their bond is expressed by birth from a single egg, in the case of the Spartan Dioscuri and of the Molionids, who are moreover represented as grown together. In the general conception only the Dioscuri persist, and that together with their Spartan names. There arise tales which introduce them as exemplary rescuers—tales that sound with particular force when the rescue is rendered to a helpless woman: to their sister Helen of the Spartans, with whom they were associated because her sanctuary lay at Therapne, beside the Menelaion, where Helen had dwelt with Menelaus.²⁵¹ The Boeotian Dioscuri, in Euripides, rescue their mother; this is probably an older legend; but when Tyro and Melanippe are likewise rescued by their sons, who are by no means a divine pair of twins, one grows suspicious: the tragedians may have transferred the motif. In truth, even the oldest of such stories are inventions of poets, even if not yet of epic poets; we therefore treat them as unauthored legend.

The essential point is that the Dioscuri appear, in living belief, among men. The Epizephyrian Locrians believed in their aid in the battle by the river Sagra, and in Sparta too, wonder-stories attached themselves to this—genuine popular faith. Thus it prevailed in Italian Hellas and spread widely. By way of Etruria and Tusculum, which bears the Etruscan name, the Castores reached Rome; and their appearance in the battle at Lake Regillus will scarcely be a mere literary transference of the Greek miracle, even if such a transference later supervened. But the Dioscuri also came to the banquet when they were invited. Pindar, Nemean 10, recounts such a case from Argos. Theodektes, later Sidektes in Sparta, is a name that presupposes such hospitality offered to the gods; Herodotus VI 127 reports it of an Arcadian, Laphanes. Theoxenia were indeed frequently celebrated; at them the gods in general were invited, but from none others did one still expect their personal appearance. Thus people in Pindar’s day, in the circles of the nobility for whom he composed, still thought. The heavenly horsemen are, after all, men of the same rank—divine comrades. In Ionia, where the nobility no longer existed, this belief had long since died out. If we think back centuries, the intercourse of the gods with men must be called almost everyday; at least they can always come, and when they are invited to sacrifice and feast this is meant in all seriousness. They also come in the guise of beggars, says the Odyssey ω 485; there are indeed individual tales enough. And their appearance in animal form, their invisible presence that nevertheless makes itself felt, is added to this. We are compelled to descend into later times, because only they provide direct testimony; yet the imagination must again and again attempt to transport itself into the life of the primordial age, when belief still ruled absolutely the hearts in which it had arisen.

That ancient time seems even at the delivery of women to have hoped for the help of the Twins; for the Laconian group that was at once so interpreted can scarcely intend anything else (Ath. Mitt. X, pl. VI). The treatment in Ath. M. XXIX 16, which otherwise loses itself in the fantastic, may be right in this—that the woman is no mortal; but that alters little, for the group remained a votive offering for a happy delivery, even if it represented an exemplary aid rendered by the two gods to a goddess. Of the same kind appear to be the Καλοί of the Messenian inscription 72 in Schwyzer, perhaps also other related pieces on p. 99. The horse-shaped Hippo from Euripides’ Melanippe, who will have come among women also as a helper in childbirth, shares her form with the Boeotian λευχὼ πώλω²⁵²; yet that male helpers should be invoked here is nonetheless peculiar—perhaps the Dorians may be held responsible for this.

The Dioscuri, as gods, also possess the power to harm,²⁵³ yet they are conceived only as kindly and helpful. When the sea comes to be navigated and men so often fall into mortal peril, the Dioscuri come to the rescue here as well.²⁵⁴ Horses and riders no longer suit this sphere, so that the beautiful Homeric Hymn 33 equips them with wings. This did not prevail. But when sailors, amid storm-clouds, saw a star flare up, or when St Elmo’s fire appeared,²⁵⁵ the saviours were there. Thus arose the belief that they appeared as stars.²⁵⁶ Hence on late monuments they bear stars upon themselves or beside them, and from this there came those worthless “catasterisms” in the sky. It is shameful that modern scholars could seek in these stars the origin of the Dioscuri, and even so crudely misunderstand the heteremeria—which exists precisely to keep the brothers always thought of as a pair—that they made of them the morning and evening star. That is the false path: to force upon the tradition an interpretation conceived in advance. The right path leads from the white horses to the Dioscuri of Monte Cavallo, who care nothing for the fact that only the mortal Castor was ἱππόδαμος. Precisely because he alone was mortal, while the twins always come together, the beautiful tale of the heteremeria was devised. Finally, a word on the Λευχιππίδες, who are made brides of the Dioscuri and receive the names of two goddesses, Phoebe and Hilaeira—already, no doubt, in the Cypria, where, however, their father was not Leucippus but Apollo. The goddesses possessed a sanctuary (Pausanias III 16), and their service was performed by one of those companies of maidens which Alcman brings vividly before us and which were themselves called Leucippides. Beyond this one can conclude little unless one knows how the goddesses themselves were thought to act. The proper names are in any case secondary. With the θεαὶ λευχιππίδες one might think of white mares. In Hesychius under pōlia we read—ultimately from Sosibios—πωλία· χαλχοῦν πῆγμά τι, φέρει δὲ ἐπὶ τῶν ὤμων τὰς τῶν Λευχιππίδων πώλους, δύο δὲ εἶναι παρθένους φασίν.” Were these two indistinct maiden-figures, or two foals of which it was said that they represented two maidens? The Boeotian Hippo provides an analogy. These white mares lead on to the many Λεύχιπποι who appear as mythical city-founders, and with whom one may readily connect the riders on archaic coins. Since they appear singly, they are indeed not the Ἄναχες; yet the leader too was conceived as a similar white horseman, and the thought readily suggests itself that he has arisen from a divine white horse.

Athena bears a name that cannot be explained from Greek,²⁵⁷ even though the derivational suffix sounds Greek. There must therefore be a foreign goddess contained within her. Nilsson and I have traced her back to the Cretan goddess who appears on monuments under the symbol of a shield—of an ancile²⁵⁸—but also as an armed goddess. I have referred her birth from the crown of Zeus’ head to an original rising from the summit of a mountain, something that cannot be a genuinely Hellenic conception. The reinterpretation as a birth from the head is, however, Hellenic, and it shows a close relationship to Zeus, who was never a mountain-god, so that there must be something special in this. The shield-goddess was venerated by princes in their citadel; from this a πολιάς could arise, and the armed goddess must have made use of her weapons—thus she aided in battle. Both accords with the Homeric Athena; and even if she already bears other traits there, and still more so later in Hesiod and in the Odyssey is far more than a mere shield-maiden, this could be a free development that arose once the goddess no longer belonged solely to princes but also to other estates of the people. It is, however, by no means excluded from the outset that the Hellenes possessed a similar goddess whom they equated with the Cretan Athena; much points in that direction. In south Thessalian Itonos there was a goddess later called Athena, who in Strabo (435) is simply named Ἰτωνία; Ἰτώνιος is a Thessalian month, and Ἰτώνια are games that also occur on Amorgos.²⁵⁹ This Ἰτωνία is the federal goddess of the Boeotians, whom they therefore brought with them from Thessaly, as also did the Phocians. The Itonia likewise came to Athens and possessed her sanctuary, with a treasury of its own, beside the gate leading to Phaleron (IG I 310, 216). It is difficult to imagine that the tribes which broke in comparatively late from the north should have chosen the Minoan goddess as their protectress. Homer, E 908, names, beside the Hera of Argos, the Athena Ἀλαλχομενηίς, after a village later fallen into insignificance, Alalkomenai, south of the Copais.²⁶⁰ Here, then, there lies a reminiscence of emigrants from that region; and that the goddess did not become negligible is proved by the Boeotian month Ἀλαλχομένιος. This reaches back beyond the Boeotian migration, yet it does not look like the Cretan citadel-goddess, even if the assertion that Athena was born here may be understood as an interpretation of the Homeric epithet.²⁶¹ It is, however, very intelligible that the Boeotians should have equated their Itonia with the Athena whom they found in their new neighbourhood. When the plastic arts had advanced so far as to bestow form upon the gods, they possessed for Athena two types: the seated female figure and the standing warrior; we know both from Athens, where she had her sanctuary upon the Acropolis and below at the Palladion. Only the images of the warrior bore the special name Παλλάδια.²⁶² To this corresponds the formula Παλλὰς Ἀθήνη.²⁶³ In this παλλάς is an intelligible Greek word, “the maiden”. Thus a goddess could be so named just as well as χόρη or παρθένος; and the derivation παλλάδιον suggests that it was once a proper name, and therefore argues for the identification of a Hellenic Παλλάς with the Cretan Athena. The ancient Attic place-name Παλλήνη, which is derived from the goddess, likewise points to her independence, perhaps also to a male Πάλλας, for me an unintelligible figure. Thus one may venture the conjecture that the proto-Hellenes possessed such a virginal, martial goddess, who as a warrior stood close to the thunder-god who bestows victory. Hence it lay near at hand that the princes should believe they recognised her in the Cretan shield-goddess and should invoke her by the foreign name. But other men too placed themselves under her protection when they pursued a special craft. It seems to answer to the feeling of the true man that, for all his self-confidence, he should desire a friendly aid from a female heavenly companion, who must remain virginal if she is to share in men’s work and not mother him. The δημιουργός likewise had his pride as a free man, who could do so much more than the lords for whom he fashioned weapons and adornments for their women. Thus he dared to see in the heavenly helper who guided his hand the same maiden who stood by the warrior in the spear-fight, even though in the workshop he did not conceive her as a παλλάδιον. He was δμῶιος Ἀθηναίης (Hesiod, Works and Days 430), and she had assisted Epeios in the building of the wooden horse no less than her favourite Odysseus. When women too placed their work under the protection of Athena Ergane is uncertain; that it had to happen is immediately evident.²⁶⁴

A goddess who was held in very high esteem by the immigrants of the first stratum, but was lacking among the later arrivals, is Hera. Her name, which soon became opaque, is in fact transparent. It belongs with ἥρως, and since this in Homer means only the noble lord, she is the lady of the house, the Frouwa²⁶⁵—in sense the same as δέσποινα. Homer himself calls her Ἀργείη, and in Ἄργος lay her most eminent sanctuary. The place had originally been called Prosymna (a pre-Greek name), but it lost that name when the Dorians made Argos their capital and took over the cult, so that not even the priestess dwelt by the temple.²⁶⁶ Down to the sixth century this was the most distinguished sanctuary in the Peloponnese, and the predominance of Argos spread the worship of its land-goddess. In Sparta she is simply called Ἀργεία (Pausanias III 13, 8); by way of Stymphalos (VIII 22, 2) the road leads to the Ἡρϝαῶιοι, who, after their συνοιχισμός, named their city Heraia, and thence on to Olympia, where she becomes the mistress of the place before Zeus. Thus it was the now Dorian Argos that carried her also to Sikyon and Corinth, where the priestess became eponymous for the reckoning of years; by the admission of heroic names the list reached back into heroic time. There existed, however, another cult of Hera, which went back to the population of the first stratum, on the island of Euboea²⁶⁷ and in the upper Asopos valley, which belonged to her before the Boeotian conquest; from there the cult may have spread to the islands and certainly westward, as far as Delphi, which had a month Heraios, and as far as Ithaca.²⁶⁸ In Athens the month Gamelion belonged to her, Ἥρας ἱερός (Hesychius s.v.), thus named from her marriage. Above all Samos revered her no less than Argos and did not forget that she had come there from Argos; the Samians brought her to Arkesine on Amorgos. On Cos, where she was much honoured, she was also called Ἀργεία.²⁶⁹ She has likewise come from Argos to Knossos (Schwyzer 83). On Delos, at the foot of Kynthos, her cult is also very ancient, but it does not derive from Samos, for it concerns women above all. On Euboea she held her bridal union with Zeus on Ocha (Steph. Byz. Kaphoros); even if she was called Διρφύα there (Steph. Δίρφυς), this mountain will have advanced the same claim. She was called Ἀχραία in Corinth,²⁷⁰ and likewise in the city of Argos below the Larisa. Here the epithet does not fit; the union must once have taken place on a mountain, and in fact on the Arachnaion there were altars of Zeus and Hera (Pausanias II 25, 10), and for Hermione on the Cuckoo Mountain (Pausanias II 36, 2; schol. Theocritus 15, 64); for there too, and in Tiryns and other places of the region, the goddess had cult. It already emerges that her marriage with the god who dwells upon the heights—thus with Zeus—was the principal thing. The bridal union on Ida in the Iliad is an echo of this. A little further on we shall be led to the corresponding story from Cithaeron; but for this it is unavoidable to treat the two accounts that are found in Pausanias IX 3 and in Plutarch in a dialogue on the Daidala of Plataea, from which Eusebius (Praep. evang. III 83d) has preserved some portions.²⁷¹

Plutarch derives the stories together with their allegorical interpretation from one and the same book; of the rite of his own time he does not speak in the extant passage; that may have occurred elsewhere in the dialogue; nor do we know how he himself judged the festival and understood the practices. For us only the myths are of concern, not the interpretations. In the first (ch. 3) the virgin Hera is carried off by Zeus to Cithaeron. The mountain-god himself points out a hiding-place for them and deceives her nurse Makris,²⁷² who wishes to seek her charge above, with the pretext that Zeus lies there with Leto. When, after this pre-nuptial union, the marriage is publicly celebrated, Leto receives a μυχία altar and a πρόθυμα, and Hera is worshipped in Plataea as τελεία and γαμήλιος. The pre-nuptial union we know from Iliad 14.295. Leto is conceived as Ληθώ; naturally the foreign goddess is a later addition²⁷³; it was not necessary that the pretended beloved be named.

The second story (ch. 6) the interlocutor himself designates as childish; it alone concerns the Daidala. Here Hera is married, but withholds herself from her husband and hides upon Cithaeron. Zeus seeks her in vain, encounters Alalcomeneus,²⁷⁴ the autochthon of Alalcomenae,²⁷⁵ and he aids him. From a beautiful oak trunk he fashions a puppet, called Daidalē, dresses it as a bride; the nymphs of the Triton (which flows by Alalcomenae, Strabo 407) bring the bridal bath; the wedding procession goes with much music through Boeotia. Then Hera’s jealousy can endure no longer: she descends from the mountain, the women of Plataea escort her. Reconciliation. She takes the place of the puppet, allows that in its honour the festival be called Daidala, but the puppet must be burned. Here Hera’s sojourn on Cithaeron is motivated by a marital quarrel; the reconciliation likewise takes place there. Whereas the first story concerns only Cithaeron and Plataea, in the other the Plataean women appear only at the end; the wedding procession with the Δαιδάλη comes from distant Alalcomenae, and the puppet exists only here. Thus only here does the name of the festival fit. If, as must be assumed, each story corresponds to a valid ritual, then at different times the rite was not the same; and if the festival was called Daidala, the form that said nothing of a puppet and concerned only Plataea was the later. One can readily imagine that in the period of its hostility toward Thebes Plataea neither wished nor was able to hold the great celebration.

Pausanias first reports that in the Plataean Hera-temple there stand two statues, one standing, the τελεία, and one seated, the νυμφευομένη; of the latter there was a story. Hera had gone in anger to Euboea; Zeus goes in perplexity to the king of Plataea, Cithaeron, who advises him to dress a wooden puppet as a bride and to say that he is marrying Plataea, whereupon Hera at once comes, convinces herself that the bride is only a puppet, and is reconciled. This is the second story again, now wholly tailored to Plataea, and that Hera is not even on the mountain where the celebration takes place is absurd. We then receive a description of the festival. There are great and small Daidala. Of the small, which are celebrated at Plataea, we learn only that at them the fourteen δαίδαλα are made. For there are now fourteen puppets, distributed among Boeotian cities, which are enumerated; the northern ones, already including Akraiphion, are lacking. The wood must be fetched from a grove near Alalcomenae; this has been retained, although the place existed at most as a village and Alalcomeneus is absent from the story. The individual puppets are conveyed at the great Daidala in a procession that sets out from the Asopus, thus near Plataea, to the summit of Cithaeron, where a great pyre is erected upon which the slaughtered sacrificial animals and the puppets are burned. Cities and private persons, poor and rich, take part. It is obvious that the entire meaning of the festival is destroyed if there is no single Δαιδάλη. The participants all wanted their own puppet; they were not thinking of the myth. Now it is very important that Pausanias himself took part in the celebration of the great Daidala, for at IX 3.8 he breaks out of the description, which is couched in the present tense, into the aorist: “αὐτὸν τὸν βωμὸν ἐπιλαβὸν τὸ πῦρ ἐξανήλωσε· μεγίστην δὲ ταύτην <τὴν> φλόγα χαὶ ἐχ μαχροτάτου σύνοπτον οἶδα ἀρθεῖσαν.” This festival, his ἐξηγητὴς τῶν ἐπιχωρίων told him, is to be celebrated only every sixty years, the small one every seven, though this in fact occurs more often. “We, however, were not able, by reckoning back from festival to festival, to calculate the intervals exactly.” Here we have the certainty that his report rests solely upon autopsy and upon the information of the Plataean cicerone, who knew only rather confused things to say about the myth.²⁷⁶ It was thus a quite rare opportunity to witness a special festival, which Pausanias encountered on his journey and made use of. The time of the festival can be determined so far as that there must no longer be snow upon the summit; it requires, in general, settled weather. We are not learning of an immemorial religious ceremony, but of its reproduction in the archaistic manner of the age of Marcus and Commodus, when at Plataea the Eleutheria also were again celebrated. It is self-evident that in the five centuries long periods had elapsed in which the Eleutheria were not celebrated at all and the Daidala at most as a civic festival. If the exegetēs spoke of fixed intervals of sixty years, this was at most correct in so far as that, at that moment, so much time had elapsed since the last great Daidala. At that time—or perhaps already somewhat earlier—a resourceful Boeotian unearthed the second myth which we read in Plutarch and carried through the renewal of the festival; now one was again in a position to take pleasure in the strange ceremony. One may imagine, in consequence, the jealousies by which the single Daidalē became fourteen Daidala. Only from Plutarch, whose accounts are centuries older, do we obtain the myths corresponding to the rite; and the fact that one of them disregards the Daidala and fits only a single Ἥρα νυμφευομένη allows us to infer differences in the ritual according to the political situation of Plataea. The material is now purified; from it the meaning of the celebration must be won. Here the paths diverge. The historian of religion suspects in the puppet something like a May-pole; it and all the sacrifices are burned as magic in favour of vegetation. I leave aside the fact that the Greek summer is a poor season for this, but that Hera should be a vegetation-goddess—that is for me no better than the ancient etymology ἥρα=ἀήρ. Or else the vegetation-magic was primary, and Hera only later attached to it. Suppose that were so: it is completely indifferent to me. For the Hellenes, of whom alone I can know and wish to know anything, knew only of Hera; what lies beyond that is unknown even to the historians of religion, who merely say to the Greeks: “you are mistaken; this is not Hera at all, it is vegetation-magic—you simply did not understand it.” The festival is devoted to the bridal union of Hera with Zeus, which here, as on the other summits named earlier, is enacted and everywhere demands the same explanation. The belief is very ancient, for it reaches back to the time before the Boeotian penetration into the valley of the Asopos. On the meadow of Hera of Cithaeron Oedipus is exposed (Euripides, Phoen. 24). To her and to the Sphragitic Nymphs, whose cave lies fifteen stades below the summit (Pausanias IX 3.9), the Pythian god commands sacrifice before the battle of Plataea. The puppet and all the offerings are burned; the same happens at Patrae for the Laphria, and there too it is no vegetation-magic, but everything is offered to the mighty goddess. Men have not invited her to partake of their meal; rather, they come in order to appease her by their gifts. When sacrifice is made to Poseidon, he too receives the entire victims, which are cast into the sea. What is peculiar here is the puppet, carved from the wood of a distant oak-grove and, adorned as a bride, led through the land as though to a wedding. It is not the goddess—she is above—and precisely because it is not she, it has served its purpose once the spouses are united; then it belongs on the pyre. In the first myth no Daidalē appears, nor is any festival described; rather, the custom of the bridal procession together with the nuptial union on Cithaeron is explained, though Zeus is said to have another amour. In the second story his wife has withdrawn from him and is brought to reconciliation by the feigned report of another love-affair. In the first she is still virgin; in the second she withholds herself from her husband. Consider her cult at Stymphalus (Pausanias VIII 22): there she is worshipped in three forms, as παῖς,²⁷⁷ as τελεία, and as χήρα—this last being what she was when she had quarrelled with Zeus. Pindar, Olymp. 6.88, exhorts the Stymphalian for whom he is composing to sing to Ἡρα Παρθενία, that is, to intone the ritual hymn to the local goddess. The scholia cannot make sense of the epithet; they conjecture Samos, where the river Παρθένιος flows by Hera’s sanctuary,²⁷⁸ or the Arcadian mountain Παρθένιον, which lies remote and has nothing to do with Hera. But if one thinks of the παῖς and learns from the scholia that Hera on Euboea was called Parthenos (which accords well with the Daidala), and in Argos, it seems, Παρθενία, the epithet is understood. In the two Plutarchan stories we have first the παρθένος and the τελεία, bridal procession and marriage; in the second, τελεία and χήρα. We know the bridal procession from Samos and Naxos.²⁷⁹ From Argos we know some details of the ritual,²⁸⁰ which teach us nothing here, but also that Hera by bathing in a rather remote spring becomes a virgin again each year (Pausanias II 38.2).²⁸¹ There we have the parthenos and the teleia. Alongside this, however, Hebe was detached as Hera’s virgin daughter and, when the temple was rebuilt after 424, received a statue by Naukydes beside the cult-image of Hera by Polycleitus. She was then long regarded as the wife of Heracles,²⁸² now reconciled with Hera, and as Hera’s daughter; in the Iliad she is a handmaid or house-daughter on Olympus, even harnessing Hera’s chariot for her departure (E 722). Whether she was already Hera’s daughter there remains uncertain; of a cult for her there can be no question. She will always have been split off from the Παρθένος Ἥρη, if she did not come to a cult merely as the wife of Heracles. In the new Argive temple stood a χλίνη Ἥρας; that is nothing commonplace, but it had become necessary, for the bridal union had to be enacted in this cult, though one no longer ascended the mountains; the procession from the city to the Heraion sufficed. This Argive cult is the cult of the “Lady” that has arisen out of the cult of the woman—a women’s cult, which represented the woman’s destiny in so far as it consists in virginity and the τέλος of marriage. This was repeated annually. The birth of a child did not fall within this cycle. Zeus has no son by Hera; for the Thracian Ares he first received in Asia, a connexion that does not go beyond the genealogical statement. Hephaestus too is a foreigner, and in truth Hera has borne him from herself alone (Hesiod Theog. 927). Eileithyia, whom Hesiod counts at line 922, is likewise foreign; and even this genealogy has never been universally accepted. We have just seen how matters stand with Hebe. This must be taken seriously. The wives who founded such a cult did not experience themselves as mothers; rather, they consecrated marriage as such. They also pursued within it the woman’s destiny in marriage itself: estrangement and reconciliation between spouses. We do not find this at Argos—at least, we no longer find it there; for the way Zeus and Hera stand opposed to one another in the Iliad becomes all the more intelligible when one adds the χήρα of Stymphalus, the Hera who fled to Cithaeron in the Daidala.²⁸³ In that light it is also understandable that the Daidalē should be introduced as a rival and burned, since reconciliation is what is to be celebrated here; and only afterwards did the interpretation arise that it was “really” nothing but a puppet. Yet I would not pronounce upon this with certainty.²⁸⁴

A women’s cult that venerates the same goddess as virgin and as wife, and only later splits her into mother and daughter, is quite different from the far more widespread women’s cult of mother and daughter, Demeter and Kore. One must not derive both from the same root, but should rather take to heart that this consecration of marriage is found only among the earliest immigrants. Demeter comes to hallow marriage only together with all the other θεσμοί; and the Dorian Spartans did not hold marriage to be sacred at all—at least not until they adopted Hera Ἀργεία. This Hera, however, is the consort of the weather-god who dwells upon the mountains, in contrast to the “husband of the Earth” below, who as a stallion mounts the Erinys. Thus among those Hellenes who in the Argolid attained the greatest power and the richest outward culture, and among their kinsmen on Euboea and in southern Boeotia, a twofold advance has been achieved: the creation of a goddess of marriage and her union with Zeus. Thereby Zeus too acquires the claim to become the father of the gods, which he will indeed attain in Homer.

The daughters of Proitos, priestesses or at least attendants, are punished by Hera with madness. They imagine themselves to be cows—more probably they were first transformed into cows—and wander about until Artemis, at first the Argive Οἰνωᾶτις, heals them.²⁸⁵ Io, priestess of Hera at Prosymna, is turned by Hera into a cow; Argos Panoptes keeps watch over her until Hermes slays him. Zeus mounts her in the form of a bull. The further story is known to us only in the form enlarged by her wanderings.²⁸⁶ Io might already have provided a motive for the jealous Hera’s estrangement from Zeus; but that remains a mere conceit. The transformation into cows which Hera inflicts can readily be interpreted to mean that her handmaids were called “cows”, just as ἄρχτοι and πῶλοι are in other services. Cows draw the priestess’ wagon—but she did so only when she dwelt far off at Argos, and such a team is by no means surprising. To infer from the epithet βοῶπις that Hera herself once had bovine form is at first sight attractive; yet when she came to Samos she was no longer a cow, and the epic epithet cannot be allowed to force that interpretation. In any case, the Hera whom we alone know—the consort of Zeus—has long since left every animal shape behind.

No doubt here and there yet other gods were worshipped whom we do not know at all; they may also lurk beneath names that are later mentioned only occasionally, where their bearers are diminished or estranged from their original nature. Hardly, however, would they teach us anything essentially new about the sensibilities of the earliest age. One god entered the circle of generally recognised gods so late that in this Homeric society he always remained a stranger, yet for that very reason preserved form and character as he had possessed them from the primeval age that created him: the Arcadian Pan. He could do so because the Arcadians themselves preserved the ancient mode of life; on the high plateau with the cities of Mantineia and Tegea, and all the more in modern Megalopolis, he therefore had already to recede. Those who worship him are the shepherds and hunters and small farmers of the Arcadian forest-mountains, the same men who venerate the virginal mistress of woodland and wild, who watches over the thriving of the young of men and beasts, and who in Mother Earth, in her daughter Σώτειρα Δέσποινα, and in her consort Poseidon, revere beside the dark also the beneficent primal power of nature. The spirit of their mountain forest, more like themselves and therefore more familiar to them, is Pan, in many respects something like what Rübezahl was to the Silesians. Since the god is to be found nowhere else, they cannot have brought him with them, and must therefore have understood the name that he received through them, even though we cannot reach certainty in the matter.²⁸⁷ He appeared to them in the form of a goat; the ἀγρίμια will surely not have been lacking, and this shape he retained. Whether the multitude of he-goats, τίτυροι and σάτυροι, belonged to him before Dionysos drew them to himself can no longer be decided; that he was associated with the Nymphs will not be doubted. The god who reigned in the high mountains was a mighty lord, so that Aeschylus, who witnessed his admission into Athens, names him alongside Zeus (Agam. 56). The leaps of a goat seemed ill to accord with such majesty; hence Aeschylus once distinguished two Pans: one a son of Kronos—whether as one of the Titans or as a noble brother of Zeus remains uncertain—and another a son of Zeus and brother of Arkas.²⁸⁸ The latter may have been the goat and shepherd-god, the dancer whom Pindar, when he introduced him at Thebes, made a servant of the Mother of the Gods. The shepherds will also have known that he could turn malignant, and then strike terror into cattle and men.²⁸⁹ What later poetry and art made of him, however unbinding it may be, nevertheless suggests that the naïve Arcadians united in the image of their god traits which otherwise were borne separately by Hermes (later usually taken as Pan’s father²⁹⁰ by the Satyr or Silen, and by Zeus, the lord of the mountain peaks. When we read in Pausanias (VIII 38, 5) that beside the Zeus of Mount Lykaion—who had appropriated the whole Cretan birth-legend—Pan possessed a neglected sanctuary at which the Lykaian games had once been held, the suspicion arises that Pan was once the lord there and that Zeus displaced him. Had the Arcadians succeeded in forming themselves into a single tribe, Pan would have become their tribal god; when they attempted it, it was already too late, for he bore too much that was primitive—precisely that which makes him so important for us.

A god who once exercised his power among the Hellenes of the first stratum in very different directions—so that we are scarcely able to grasp his true nature—is Aristaeus, whose very name bears power within it. We hear an echo of this when Pindar²⁹¹ says of him that the Nymphs who reared him called him Zeus and Apollo and Agreus and Nomios. The last two designations concern only his activity as hunter and shepherd, but the first two raise him to the highest rank. Apollo displaced him at Karthaia on Ceos, where at least his name remained. A Zeus Aristaeos is said to have existed in Arcadia.²⁹² He lived on only in Cyrene, where he was made the son of the city’s goddess and of Apollo,²⁹³ and individual arts of the farmer and the hunter—above all the keeping of bees—were regarded as his “inventions.” Only by force can these three seats be brought into relation with one another.²⁹⁴ Cyrene can hardly have received him by way of Laconia and Thera; at least, no evidence survives, although Arcadian elements are plentiful enough in Sparta. He will therefore have reached Cyrene only in the sixth century, when the lawgiver Demonax from Mantineia was summoned thither. Thus he is demonstrably present for us among the Ionians of Ceos and among the Arcadians—circumstances which guarantee his antiquity. That powerful and intrusive poet who fixed the story of Cadmus and his daughters and made the goddess Ino a daughter of Cadmus gave Aristaeus another wife, Autonoe: there he is only a hero; where he dwelt is not handed down. Ἀγρεύς and Νόμιος are names by which Aristaeus was called according to Pindar. They could be fitting epithets, yet they are also epithets of Apollo, with whom he was assimilated—though this surely occurred in such a way that the new god displaced him in these functions. Apollo ἀγρεύς is invoked by Heracles when he shoots the arrow at Prometheus’ eagle (Aeschylus, Prometheus Unbound), and the schoolboy in Herodas (3.34) is to recite a well-known ῥῆσις that begins Ἄπολλον ἀγρεῦ. The chorus of the Bacchae lays claim to this name for Dionysus after Pentheus’ death (1192). Whether Dionysus already bore the name Ζαγρεύς at that time cannot be established with complete certainty—for before Callimachus fr. 171 it is not attested, and in Euripides’ Cretans only Ζαγρεύς occurs—but it is overwhelmingly probable. In the Dionysiac mysteries the god bears this name when he is torn apart. There the etymology has already been forgotten, although it denotes the perfect hunter and thus cannot originally have differed from ἀγρεύς. ζα- = διά- in this sense is Lesbian, but can hardly have been exclusively so; if Pan in Athens was called ἀγρεύς (Hesychius), this points back to Arcadia. Remote, yet very beautiful and ancient, is Ζαγρεύς as a name of Hades, or of a παῖς ἅιδου, that is, of Death, who hunts down all.²⁹⁵ This later disappeared. It seems as though a “Hunter” once worshipped somewhere, when only his name survived, was assimilated to various gods.

In Homer the Muses are called, in a formulaic verse, the Olympian ones, and in A they sing at the banquet of the gods on Olympus to the lyre-playing of Apollo. This creates the impression that they first came into being in Asia together with the Homeric epic. When Hesiod leads them to Helicon and lets them bathe in its streams, that might seem his own invention, since it was there that they appeared to him. But this will not do. He makes them the daughters of Mnemosyne, who was ’Ἐλευθῆρος μεδέουσα; and even if we do not fully understand the epithet, it cannot be separated from Ἐλευθήρ. There must therefore have existed a belief which knew them on Mount Cithaeron, in a region occupied by an Aeolic–Ionian population. The same holds for Troezen, where there was a sanctuary of the Muses, and where the goddesses were called after an ancient musician Ardalus; in contrast to the Ἀσιὰς χιθάρα long held in honour in the Argolid, they played the flute. They can hardly, then, have been taken over from Homer. The Olympus with which they remain inseparably associated through Homer is the Pierian mountain: Sappho (fr. 58 D.) calls them αἱ ἐχ Πιερίας; the Aspis (206) has Πιερίδες; Epicharmus (fr. 41) names their mother Πιμπληίς, and thus knows of Pierian Pimpleia.²⁹⁶ Local memories, therefore, have been preserved here, for the Macedonians of the sixth century were not yet Hellenised. It follows that the Muse, or the Muses, were already invoked by singers before the migration—hence that singers themselves already existed. The later immigrants, to be sure, did not possess them; only in those flourishing times when a splendid courtly life existed in the palaces of kings had a class of singers arisen. Alcman adopted the Ionic μοσα, since he says μῶσα, whereas in his Laconian dialect it would have been μοῖσα. One might also reverse the inference: the matter of epic poetry—for example, the expedition of the Seven against Thebes—could have been preserved down to Homer only through song, and in that case a deity would not have been lacking whom the singers revered as their protectress. There can be no doubt that in the name Μοῖσα, Μοῦσα there lies the sense of pondering and remembering, as those felt who gave Mnemosyne to be their mother; the Muses themselves must somewhere have been called μνεῖαι.²⁹⁷ This divinity was created by the pious feeling of the rhapsodes, who felt bound to thank a giver for their own gift, and for the inspiration of their imagination an all-knowing god. Thus there arose a goddess who stood to the poet as Athena stands to the hero. She naturally understood herself the craft she protected, and then multiplied into that chorus which in A and in the proem of the Theogony sings and dances. This deity concerned only the estate of the rhapsodes and, later, of poets in general; she could not receive a civic cult, and in fact did so only in the rarest instances, but remained reserved for small circles—down into the ἀμουσία, which became schoolrooms, and into the philosophical schools. And yet the Muse—more than the other ancient gods—has remained alive in imagination, precisely because she stood with human beings in a spiritual rather than bodily intercourse, had no temples and received no bloody sacrifices. She protected for her people all intellectual activity and the culture grounded upon it. It is due to Roman provincia that musica came to designate only that art which Orpheus had learned from the Muse in Pieria. But one must also bear in mind that only the estate of poets has its own wholly particular goddess. Hephaestus did not become such a patron for sculptors, nor Athena—who otherwise protects many crafts—and painters have no heavenly patron at all, so that Goethe in Künstlers Erdenwallen had to invent a Muse of painting; Saint Luke did not appeal to him.

The gods who existed in the earliest period and received cult have now, in all likelihood, been enumerated. Almost all of them dwelt very near to human beings; but once it was recognized that it was the same god who inhabited all the Hermes-pillars, the same who thundered from every summit, it became natural to thought to assign them, alongside the places where they acted, a common dwelling. To assume a land of the gods corresponding to that of human beings lay close at hand. The belief in a land of the dead accords with this, and both were first conceived upon the disk of the earth. Where these realms were located was determined by geographical knowledge. In the interior of the Balkan peninsula the Hellenes knew that sea was not far to east and west; from the south they learned it readily. But towards the north they saw only broad and lofty mountain ranges; that they themselves had once crossed them was forgotten. Beyond those mountains, from which the north wind blew, there could lie a land of the gods—the land of the Hyperboreans, the just and blessed people. Dodona stood in connexion with it (above p. 103); there later the Delphic Apollo sojourned in winter, there he had his garden.²⁹⁸ So far, according to Pindar (Olymp. 3), Heracles pursues the hind and is received by Artemis. Such a conception could arise only in the Balkans; in Asia the “Ἄβιοι, διχαιότατοι ἀνθρώπων,” are confused with the horse-milking Scythians—there one knew too much of the north. In the Heracles-saga, as Hesiod presupposes it and Pherecydes (fr. 16) first narrates it, the garden of the gods lies in the far west. For if the tree guarded by the Hesperides stands there, and if Earth caused that tree to grow, with the apples of immortality,²⁹⁹ when Zeus and Hera celebrated their wedding, then that wedding was held there; this has been obscured by the Homeric transference of the seat of the gods to Olympus.³⁰⁰ This conception will have arisen only in the Peloponnese. The realm of the dead likewise lies now in the north among the Cimmerians, now in the west, at Pylos, at Erytheia. These are half-faded tales, so that we can only conjecture; yet they demand explanation and seem to fit together in this way.

There are, moreover, in elemental nature great and mighty phenomena which reveal themselves immediately to human beings as divine, thus also acquire personality, and yet receive no cult, because they do not come down to earth among men and therefore remain inaccessible to them. To grasp and to appreciate this distinction is one of the most important prerequisites for understanding the ancient, genuine religion. Sun and moon, and likewise the morning and evening star, must attune every receptive human being who lives with nature and beholds it—above all at rising and setting—in its own beauty and in the power of its light, to reverence and to the immediate intuition of the divine. How we rejoice, in Catholic regions, when the bell sounds for the Ave Maria, that the Church has known how to sanctify anew the eternal revelation. Plato’s testimony (Laws 887e) reveals in its full significance the Hellenic custom of greeting the sun at its rising and setting. And when Attic children, when the sun hid behind a cloud, called out to it, “ἔξεχʹ ὦ φίλʹ ἥλιε”, our own children might invoke the dear sun in just the same way. These greetings were so everyday and so self-evident that they were not even mentioned. The great heavenly bodies have always been, and will always remain, ἐπιφανεῖς θεοί. Yet what Aristophanes says (Peace 406) holds equally true—that sun and moon stand on the side of the barbarians, because only among them do they occupy in cult the well-known pre-eminent position.³⁰¹ Everyone knows it of Egyptians and Semites, but it holds also of the peoples of Asia Minor³⁰²; and it is particularly important that the Thracians too possess a powerful solar cult.³⁰³ That such a cult existed in the Peloponnese before the Hellenes we have already seen earlier (p. 115). From Homer onward, the Hellenes at all times have invoked the sun, because it sees everything, as a witness in oaths. But when Homer calls it Ὑπερίων, it does not thereby become an acting person.³⁰⁴ It befits the horse-loving Hellenes to let it traverse its course in a chariot; that in Stesichorus it returns by night from west to east in a boat will rest on Egyptian suggestion. But these are myths. Homer gives Helios the epithets ὑπερίων and ἠλέχτωρ. The former may be a patronymic, but need not be. Formations such as the comic ἐμβαδίων μαλαχίων, the Κηδαλίων Μελανίων of old saga, and the like, show that it can designate simply “the one who is above,” just as Ὑπερεία is the name of a spring. Hesiod interposed a Titan Hyperion, whose son Helios is, so that the latter should not fall among the Titans; thus Helios becomes Ὑπεριονίδης, which means no more than Ὑπερίων. ἠλέχτωρ must be a Carian loanword, since the Elektra of Samothrace is either a Pleiad or (in the Aeolian poet Sminthes) a comet, and the Alektrona of Ialysos likewise such a goddess. These epithets do not prove a cult of Helios. To build a temple for the sun, that is, an earthly house, is absurd and altogether not to be attributed to the ancient age.³⁰⁵ Apart from a few cults in the neighbourhood of Corinth, where we have conceded a pre-Hellenic solar cult, even priests and altars of the god are rare and insignificant³⁰⁶; no trace points to the earliest period, and even the Rhodian Helios attained no wider diffusion. Eclipses, which veil sun and moon, have filled men with dread of impending calamity; but they fear, so far as we can see, not for the heavenly bodies or for the gods in them. Pindar’s poem on the solar eclipse asks only the ἀχτὶς ἀελίου why it hides itself,³⁰⁷ not the god. The heat of summer can be ruinous enough; thus Archilochus calls Helios by the name of the Dog-Star, Σείριος, to which one preferred to ascribe the scorching power. Modern scholars, when they can unearth no evidence for an original Greek cult of the sun, are apt to decree that such a cult must gradually have declined. The very opposite is the case; but here an entirely new religious sensibility is at work. Stimuli will have come from the Orient and from Egypt, yet this is not the decisive factor. It is not theological, but rather physical speculation that leads to the living power of sunlight and solar warmth—alongside, to be sure, also the searing blaze—being felt as divine, yet inadequately apprehended in the person of Helios. There had to be a living, great god; Apollo had to be interpreted as the sun, as was already known to Aeschylus,³⁰⁸ and as Euripides expressly states (Phaethon 781, 12)—and this precisely in a tragedy that introduced Helios as an acting figure, because the subject was Rhodian. Oenopides (fr. 7) referred Λοξίας to the obliquity of the ecliptic. This theology, of course, did not affect cult, nor did it appreciably shape popular conceptions of the gods and of the sun. That occurred rather through astronomy, when the planetary courses, in their regularity despite the appearance of πλανᾶσθαι, were recognised. Then these heavenly bodies became gods all the more, because they set before the eyes the eternal order and beauty of the χόσμος. From the νοητά into this order Plato derives the veneration of the heavenly bodies as the foundation of belief in the gods now worshipped (Cratylus 397d). For him there was added the recognition that the sun calls forth all life upon earth, so that he assigns to it in the realm of the sensible that ruling position which the Good holds in the realm of the intelligible; and in the city of his Laws he gives the principal temple to Helios and Apollo, evidently because he accepts this equation. The beauty which he profoundly felt in the natural phenomenon also played its part; the sensuous χάλλος corresponds to the χαλόν. A new piety speaks in this, such as Byron’s Manfred utters before death at the sight of the setting sun, and such as the aged Goethe was ready to express in the worship of the sun. To follow out these thoughts and moods was, of course, granted to few. It was rather the Orient whose solar cult finally drew the entire world of gods into itself. It was against this that Julian fought Christianity at the very moment when the Roman bishop instituted the feast of Christmas—thus in truth teaching men to venerate Christ in the Sol Invictus. One must look back from this final phase of Hellenic religion, through the Stoa, whose popularised doctrine lies before us in Cornutus, and through the theology of the sixth century, to early times, if one is to master the astonishment which leads so many to misconceive and deny the facts. Sun-worship is not originally Hellenic. The god who above in the ether runs or traverses his regular course was, precisely because of this constancy—which once made him the All-god—not a deity intervening in human life. The gods who loved and hated, helped and harmed, were on earth, belonged to the earth, and appeared among men. Into their company ὑπερίων does not belong.

Still less did the moon. It was indeed important as a measure of time, and the Indo-Europeans had named it accordingly. It was so often absent from the sky that one could believe the Thessalian witches were able to draw it down. To be sure, many influences upon weather and growth were attributed to it; precisely its changing phases led to this, and such belief still proves today its tenacious vitality. Yet precisely because it grew old and new each month, it did not attain the dignity of a cult-god. Characteristic is the pretty tale which tells how Selene begs her mother for a new garment and receives the answer: “How can I make it for you, when it must be longer or shorter every day?”³⁰⁹ One must always beware of taking poetic utterance and the corresponding language of the visual arts as expressions of religious belief. The feeling for nature, and the specifically Hellenic manner of giving form in human figures to sensible phenomena that cannot be painted, must first be sympathetically re-experienced. Then one admires Selene when she rides upon a mule and the stars leap as boys into the sea; one understands it when Alcman (fr. 43 D.) ascribes the quickening power of the nocturnal dew to Herse, daughter of Zeus and Selene; and one learns to appreciate the individuality of Sappho, who knows how to express her feeling for nature, as evoked by a clear full-moon night, without such mythical transposition (fr. 98 D.). When, according to Musaeus,³¹⁰ the Nemean lion was hurled down to earth from the moon, popular belief may have meant by this that such a monster could not possibly have sprung from the earth; the moon then became, as it were, another earth. That Musaeus himself wished to be descended from Selene is a very strange way of designating superhuman origin. None of this proves any cult, or even a living belief, in the goddess Selene; even two Homeric hymns to Helios and Selene³¹¹ carry no weight. Of Endymion and Pasiphaë we have spoken earlier (pp. 114, 116). As with the sun, the earliest theology already set itself in opposition to the belief expressed in cult, and traced many goddesses back to the moon—Artemis, sister of Helios-Apollo, first among them. Moon-struck modern mythologists have then carried this to the point of the most extreme absurdity.

Night plays a significant role in cosmogonic systems; the Erinyes of Aeschylus call her their mother,³¹² which sounds wholly convincing; poets and artists even make her ride in a chariot. Andromeda begins her great aria with the address ὦ Νὺξ ἱερὰ ὡς μαχρὸν ἵππευμα διώχεις, where yet ἱερά alone suffices to show that she is no goddess. It is unnecessary to multiply examples: the figure as a creation of poetic imagination is familiar to us ourselves. But she is no more than that, even as mother of Sleep and Death in Hesiod (Theog. 212, 756), and thereafter on the chest of Kypselos, to whom the Dreams are added, for which in Homer (Il. B) a Διὸς ἀπάτη appears, who is evidently able to assume various forms. This is charming and intelligible, but it is poetry. Of Death we shall speak later. Homer in the Iliad has elevated Sleep into a fully human-like personality; he can even perch in the form of a rare bird upon a tree, in order to observe the success of his enchantment. But who can fail to see that Homer, together with the myth, invents the person, and that, if anything had been told before him about Hypnos, it was nothing else? Equally beautiful is the artistic invention of Leochares³¹³—if we may trust the name—who fashioned the wondrous statue of Hypnos softly striding over the earth. Sophocles in Philoctetes 827 adjures Sleep; Statius (Silvae V 4) laments to him his sleeplessness: this is no different from Egmont in prison addressing him. It only seems otherwise to many because they believe in the real gods of the Hellenes no more than in Sleep and Night. They will appeal to the fact that at Epidaurus there are votive offerings to Hypnos. These belong to a later period, in which genuine belief coincided with personifications and with superstitious demonology. Even if in earlier times an altar had been erected to Hypnos, and perhaps a smoke-offering kindled upon it, this meant no more than that divine help in sleep had been granted to the dedicant. This freedom to apprehend the divine separately in each particular manifestation is Hellenic religiosity. But only cult—that is, the belief of a community—makes a god.

It is quite otherwise with Eos, for whom Hemera is also used.³¹⁴ True, there is no question of any cult, and the fact that poets occasionally give her a chariot or a mount (Euripides, Phaethon, Berl. Klassik. V 2, 81) signifies nothing; yet in Homer she has a husband, from whose bed she rises in order to bring light to gods and men. It is the Trojan king’s son Tithonos, whom she has carried off, just as his kinsman Ganymedes was borne away by the gods to Olympus as cupbearer.³¹⁵ She has likewise taken to herself other beautiful youths, whom she encountered at their pastoral labour in her ascent—Orion (Il. Ξ 121), Cleitus (Od. ο 250), and the most famous of all, Cephalus. By Tithonos she has a son, Memnon; this means nothing more than the king who comes from the East to aid his Trojan kinsmen, and Emathion, whom we do not understand.³¹⁶ From Cephalus Phaethon is derived (Hyginus, Astr. II 42), whom in the appendix to the Theogony Aphrodite carries off—without doubt the Morning Star. These locally conditioned individual tales are inessential for the goddess Eos; so too is the fate which Tithonos, as the mortal consort of a goddess, incurs already in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite—mere poet’s work. But the carrying off of a beautiful youth is attested so often and from so early a time that something more must lie in it. The epithet ἠριγένεια is immediately intelligible, and one must not seek more in it.³¹⁷ εὔθρονος refers to her variegated garment that gleams in the morning sky.³¹⁸ The enchantment of the brightening dawn, which every receptive human being feels with double force under more southerly skies, does not suffice as an explanation. Here rather an older, inherited divine person among the Hellenes is preserved only in myth. This seems to be confirmed by the significant role which the goddess Dawn plays among the Indians. Aurora is not an Italic goddess, yet the name sounds as though she too once was one.³¹⁹

Hesiod has also given to Eos the stars and the winds as her children. If she was ἡμέρα, daylight, the lights of the nocturnal sky could well derive from her. The stars, which are fixed upon the stony—or rather brazen—sphere of heaven, are nothing divine; even the scorching Dog-Star is only a σῆμα (Il. Χ 30), and Aratus still conceives them thus. When Aeschylus (Agam. 5) speaks of the “venerable lords who bring to men summer and winter”, nothing else is meant. They rendered this service to the farmer: the flock of doves, the Πελειάδες, by their rising summoned to harvest, by their setting to sowing; when navigation became important, the doves were transformed into the Πλειάδες. The bright star beneath the Seven marked the beginning of spring and autumn—the Bear-Watcher, ἀχτοῦρος, or the Charioteer, βοώτης, according as the Seven were conceived as Wain or Bear; Homer (Il. Ξ 487) sets both interpretations side by side. Where these arose we do not know; one may be pre-Greek—probably the Bear, upon whom Orion lies in wait, for his name is foreign. This wild hunter is most firmly rooted among the Graian population of Boeotia. The Hellenes perhaps added to him the Dog, and certainly the Doves. The keen eye of seafarers then distinguished, as a sign of storm, even the faint stars of the Asses at the Manger; and various other figures, such as the Crown³²⁰ and the Goat with her two kids, were observed early.

The linking of a series of constellations with heroic legend was first undertaken by the poet (or storyteller) who transferred the figures of the Perseus saga to the sky—this before the Babylonian zodiac arrived, whereupon fabulation truly began, with greater or lesser wit and success. With religion all this had nothing to do. Only through astrology do these constellations acquire influence upon the destinies of men; yet in essence even there they remain mere σήματα. Of the planets only Morning and Evening Star possess a story—Hesperos, it seems, only because on Lesbos his rising on the wedding-day delivered the bride to the bridegroom; Sappho addresses him thus. Of any act of sacrifice there is no report, and even if one had kindled incense for him, as Callimachus demands an offering of perfume for the new star of the Lock, he would not thereby have become a real god.

The Locrians were divided, as western and eastern, into two tribes and accordingly set stars upon their coins, which does not necessarily imply their cult. But the Morning Star has here and farther south, in Attic Thorikos, a pre-Greek town, not only received progeny—which may be poetic invention, though hardly of very recent date³²¹—but is the son of Eos by Cephalus; for there can be no doubt that he is identical with the Phaethon whom the appendix to the Theogony enumerates, where he is made by Aphrodite the guardian of her treasures. Hesiod himself knows the Morning Star as a son of Eos (381), yet need on that account have known nothing of his person. The saga made famous by Euripides and thereafter further developed, of Phaethon, the son of Helios—of his betrothal to Aphrodite, of his drive and his fall into the Eridanus—points to Rhodes; and there the pre-Greek population revered Helios and Alektrona, so that this star-cult is appropriate. Thus it may well be that among the Locrians and at Thorikos memories of pre-Greek star-worship were preserved in local legend: Cephalus was Greek only in name, originally not different from the pre-Greek Orion of Hyria. Be that as it may: this Morning Star too received no Hellenic cult; and if in art he becomes the forerunner of the sun’s chariot, or otherwise assumes human form like the other stars, he is for all that no acting god.

Homer knows how to describe magnificently the sensible appearances of clouds, in order thereby to render visible the moods of men. He can do this because the clouds contain nothing divine. And yet Aristophanes can make them Oceanids when he wishes to bring them upon the stage in maidenly form. The violent invention cost him effort enough, and the cloud-nature of the chorus is soon abandoned.³²²

The rainbow Homer (Il. Π 547) calls a sign in heaven that announces to men something unwelcome, whereas we rejoice in it because it proclaims that the rain is ceasing.³²³ It is strange how little the men of antiquity concerned themselves with it, apart from the physicists, who from Xenophanes onwards endeavoured to explain the natural phenomenon. On the corselet of Agamemnon (Il. A 27) dark-blue serpents coiled—ἴρισσιν ἐοιχότες³²⁴; the interpreters hesitate whether the resemblance lies in the curvature or in the colour. The word has no ϝ. The name of the goddess is written in Thermos (IG IX 1², 86) and spoken in the Iliad, where she is the messenger through whom Zeus makes his will known to gods and men; never is there a rainbow present. This Iris then lives on in poetry and the visual arts. One would like to separate her from the rainbow; for the Odyssey (ο 6) calls the beggar Arnaios “Iros” because he performs messenger services, and in a chronicle from Erythrae a courtier of the king bears the same name (Athen. 259). Hesiod (Theog. 266, 780) connected the rainbow with the goddess, whom he knew only from Homer, since she is sister of the Winds and messenger of the gods. A cult of the goddess may be suggested by the Theraean rock-inscription Βῖρις (IG XII 3, 365), though this is not compelling. Likewise her name stood beside the goddess on the Amyclaean throne (Pausanias III 19, 3). Beta for digamma is strange in early times, but one must accept it. On the island of Hecate near Delos Iris received a special sacrificial dish, called βασυνίας,³²⁵ evidently of un-Greek name. This points to Carian origin. Later Iris is only a poetic, Homeric figure; she never became a Greek goddess. How matters stand with the names cannot be decided from this material, nor what Alcaeus intended when he gave Eros Iris as mother and Zephyrus as father. Wind and rainbow went well together, and we knew them from Hesiod as siblings; but how are we to guess what Eros had inherited from such parents? One readily finds something appealing—but more than one thing.

In the winds one can see particularly well how variously poets are able to conceive them. Their father Aiolos can shut them up in a sack: there they are formless. Zephyrus begets the chariot-horses of Peleus with the Harpy Podarge (Ζ 150): there both parents are equine in shape; for the horse runs like the wind. But the winds can also carouse as boorish fellows in the house of Zephyrus (ο 200); there they will have some approximation to human form, whenever, like Boreas and his sons,³²⁶ they come into contact with men; and they could easily be distinguished by wings, once these had entered the repertory of art. And even then, on the chest of Kypselos one could fashion Boreas like the snake-footed Typhon, in whom one thus still saw the wind-god that he is in Hesiod (306), and who sprang from the earth, so that he might have serpentine feet. As birds, as aquilo and volturnus to the Romans, the winds did not appear to the Hellenes; the gigantic Zephyrus in Aeschylus (Agam. 692) is a giant. Proper names in fact belong only to Boreas and Zephyrus; sailors distinguish far more than the four Homeric winds.³²⁷ They will have addressed them with prayers and offerings before a voyage³²⁸; in distress they called upon helpers against them. Iphigenia was sacrificed as an expiatory victim to the wrathful goddess who had stirred up the storms, not to the storms themselves, although that too is said. How Boreas, on account of his services in the Persian War, obtained a state cult—first at Athens, then at Delphi³²⁹—teaches excellently how such isolated cults are to be assessed, even when the aition is unknown, as, for example, in the case of an altar of the Winds at Coronea (Pausanias IX 34, 3). By a vow the Tempestates in Rome likewise acquired cult.

The whirlwind stands apart—the τυφώς of the Athenians—which comes up out of the earth. It can hardly be separated from the τυφάων whom Hesiod (Theog. 306) calls a wind, yet connects with the otherwise largely vanished Echidna, who bears monsters to him. He is likely to belong to a Boeotian mountain.³³⁰ A wholly different being is Typhoeus in the interpolation of the Theogony³³¹: the most dangerous enemy of Zeus, whom the Catalogue of Ships (782) places in Lycia among the Arimi, while the Theogony already sets him beneath Etna. Pherecydes of Syros too knew of him.³³² The interpolator did not invent this tale; but only because it was taken into the Theogony did it become authoritative, already for Aeschylus, and much else attached itself to it. It cannot be asserted with certainty that the eruptions of Etna lie at its basis. The whole appears as a variant of the Titanomachy, arisen in Asia, yet remains enigmatic.

Another kind of winds are the ravishers, the Ἀρέπυιαι,³³³ whom Hesiod (Th. 267) limits to two—almost certainly already with an eye to the two Boreads, their pursuers; for elsewhere three appear, and in Homer they are conceived in an indeterminate number. When Hesiod says of them αἵ ῥʹ ἀνέμων πνοιῆισι χαὶ οἰωνοῖσʹ ἅμʹ ἕπονται ὠχείηις πτερύγεσσι,³³⁴ he indicates their nature both as winds and as bird-like beings. The rhapsodes set them almost on a level with the θύελλαι, which never became persons.³³⁵ But the Patrocleia still knows them, like the winds, as horses; for from them comes Achilles’ team. What they do is the carrying off of human beings³³⁶; from this they take their name. Whither those carried off are taken is not determined; one must by no means call the Harpies daemons of death. There is added the story of Phineus, whose food these birds render inedible by their filth. But this is already invented in order to make these beings harmless; for they are banished into a cave, later even slain. Their pursuers are the Boreads; the North Wind is stronger and drives them as far as the edge of the Hellenic sea, which at that time was Crete, for it cannot be regarded as their home.³³⁷ Thus even in a legend it is already reflected that belief in these beings had waned. Utterly estranged from the sense of the word they are when, in Acusilaus and Epimenides, they guard the golden apples in the garden of the gods (Philodemus π. εὐσεβ. 43 G.). They thus correspond to the Hesperides, as Epimenides himself also declared. We are accustomed to think in these only the kindly nymphs of that garden, into which they have become in the Heracles saga—very characteristic of the transformation in Hellenic imagination, which humanises and eradicates what is ugly. But for Hesiod they were not kindly beings, since he derives them from Night (Theog. 215), and deep within the earth coils the dragon (ibid. 335) who guards the apples which the Hesperides tend—in which two originally independent functions have doubtless been fused. At the same time he calls them λιγύφωνοι. They are thus birds that sing upon the tree of the gods, yet will at the same time have claws like the Harpies. One might just as well have called them Sirens.

The Sirens bear in their very name—one which cannot be separated from Σείριος—something baneful, even if etymology does not lead us to a fully satisfactory interpretation. As they appear in the Odyssey, they are likewise treacherous beings who lure the mariner to them by their song, where he then finds death. The unpictorial narrative gives no image of them; the rhapsode may no longer have expressed what nevertheless persisted in art—that they are birds, who, in order to mark these divine bird-beings, are given a human head. In this single story they possess no general significance,³³⁸ are only two in number, and it is entirely consistent that, when Odysseus does not allow himself to be seduced, they cast themselves into the sea: these two no longer exist. Yet popular belief held fast to them. When in archaic terracottas such a man-bird holds a little human figure in its arms, one does not know whether it is meant to be a Harpy or a Siren. And when, moreover, two such figures stand beside a pair of combatants, are they not Κῆρες? (Böhlau, Aus ionischen Nekropolen pl. IV 1). We find them on Attic grave-stelae in the familiar hybrid form, sometimes with musical instruments; even in antiquity they were called Sirens—whether always with justice is uncertain, for the Siren on the grave of Sophocles is also, and more properly, called Κηληδών³³⁹, and such Κηληδόνες stood upon the ridge of the old Delphic temple.³⁴⁰ There they exercise the protection of the building, as sphinxes, lions, and panthers do as well, yet they are especially fitting for Apollo and for Sophocles. These singing Sirens come so close to the Muses that Alcman (fr. 10 D.) can say ἁ Μῶσα χέχλαγʹ ἁ λίγεια Σηρήν, which I formerly objected to wrongly. Pindar in the Partheneion for Agasicles (33) ventures σειρῆνα χόμπον μιμήσομαι, and the Epidaurian hymn to Pan (IV² 1, 130) calls the syrinx a “ἔνθεον σειρῆνα.” Euripides can summon them from the underworld for a song of lament and call them daughters of Chthon; yet he can also put on their wings when he rises to heaven on the pinions of song.³⁴¹ Now we understand what they signify upon graves: they confer protection and at the same time correspond to the earthly women of lamentation whom we also encounter. It is very charming that together with Erotes they serve at a symposium on a Spartan cup,³⁴² a divine substitute for the flute-girls who in life provided the music. They are thus divine bird-beings who understand χηλεῖν in both good and evil.³⁴³ Plato (Rep. 617b) sets one upon each heavenly sphere and makes them all together sing the song of eternal harmony. Plutarch (Symp. qu. 745c) wonders at this, because he no longer knows the χηληδόνες.

Because of their similar mode of action, the Sphinx must be mentioned here. She received her form from Egypt, perhaps also from Asia, yet retained the female sex because she was Hellenic. In art there are, if I am not mistaken, even bearded sphinxes. At one moment she is a man-slaying monster that dwells on the Phikion north of Thebes,³⁴⁴ a wise singer (ῥαψωιδὸς χύων, says Sophocles, Oed. 391) whom Oedipus must overcome. She also seizes human beings on vase-paintings of the sixth century, and even on the throne of Olympian Zeus; there the interpretation restricted to the Thebans is too narrow. She is thus another, but equally destructive, winged being like the Siren. On the throne of Bathycles sphinxes appeared beside panthers and lions beneath the horses of the Dioscuri, evidently to signify the saving power of the heavenly riders (Pausanias III 18, 14). Alongside this, however, a sphinx appears—often with a dignified and beautiful countenance—as a guardian in sanctuaries and tomb-enclosures. Lions are likewise found on graves; today they too are sometimes interpreted, for variety’s sake, as daemons of death, and then perhaps the sphinx is meant to be such as well—as though one would still need to state upon a grave that the person within had died. The making of the sphinx into a guardian may have been suggested by her use in her Egyptian homeland. For the Siren, the Hesperidean Harpies offer an analogy.

On vases of the earliest styles birds with human heads appear so frequently that it often remains uncertain how they are to be named. When they fly above scenes of combat, where even a bird is hardly mere space-filling, one may call them Keres. A turgid description in the Aspis (249) paints these in the most lurid colours, as they contend to suck the blood from the fallen. But Homer knows only the Ker as the death to which a man is once for all destined—most clearly where Achilles has the choice between two χῆρες (Il. Ι 411); and even where Zeus determines Hector’s fate by weighing the χῆρες of him and Achilles, they are nothing else. Yet they must appear in some form which the poet deliberately does not define, and perhaps could not define; Kydoimos and Deimos likewise had none. This Ker is therefore akin to Moira, and thus Hesiod (Th. 217) gives, together with the Hesperides, the Moirai and the Κῆρες νηλεόποινοι, as daughters of Night, who pursue the transgressions of gods and men.³⁴⁵ These Moirai must be distinct from the daughters of Themis (904), to whom Hesiod gives the names later customary.³⁴⁶ When in Homer each man has his μοῖρα and his χήρ, yet the rhapsode who composed the Θ calls the Achaeans χύνες χηρεσσιφόρητοι (527), he thereby betrays his lateness. It amounts to no more than when a Christian says, “the devil brought them into the land.” Far more beautiful is Hesiod’s expression (Works 418), where he calls men χηριτρεφεῖς, because we all nourish ourselves upon the Ker, upon the suffering and evil of our life. For all χαλά in the world are, as Plato says (Laws 937d), οἷον χῆρες ἐπιπεφύχασιν αἳ χαταμιαίνουσί τε χαὶ χαταρρυπαίνυσιν αὐτά. Without imagery he could have said χηραίνουσιν αὐτά. It needs no long exposition to show that from Homer’s Ker, which has not yet become a true—that is, corporeal—person, there have arisen on the one hand the bloodthirsty Keres, because the Ker tended toward death and in art assumed the same or a similar form as Harpies and Sirens, and on the other hand the χαχά with which our life is filled. Empedocles (121) sets upon the meadow of Ate Φόνος τε Κότος τε χαὶ ἄλλων ἔνθεα Κηρῶν. There they still remain without form. Now Aeschylus, in the Psychostasia, replaced the Keres in a weighing modelled upon that of the Iliad by ψυχαί. These are not the souls of Achilles and Memnon, for they are still alive; rather, the poet gave their representatives, in place of the Keres—no longer familiar to him and his audience—the form of souls as they fluttered about graves in the art of his own time, little winged human figures: these were ψυχαί. To indicate the primordial meaning of the Keres never occurred to him. Further, at the end of the day of the Anthesteria on which the dead roamed and received their offerings, one cried out³⁴⁷: θύραζε Κῆρες (or also, with the old vowel, Κᾶρες), οὐχέτʹ Ἀνθεστήρια.³⁴⁸ “Away with you, ghosts!” By this it was not said that the Keres were souls, but at most that the souls were ghosts—perhaps harmful, certainly uncanny—which one therefore wished to get rid of. On the previous day, when their food was set before them, they will not have been called Keres. But when the gate of the underworld stood open, the Keres too could have come forth. Modern ingenuity reverses the evidence, lets Homer be instructed by the Athenians, rejoices in having made the Keres, like the Sirens, into souls, and finally arrives at equating τὸ χῆρ, cor, “heart”, with ἡ χήρ, χάρ—whereupon heart and soul become the same, opening a vista of profound psycho-physiological insights that have not yet been articulated.

There is no doubt that in ancient popular belief there existed and were named far more such mostly harmful beings than we know and can distinguish upon the monuments.³⁴⁹ Against them one had to protect oneself, by all manner of magic or by the invocation of a helpful great god. Gods all these beings were not; they enjoyed no cult, and happily they were not all immortal. Thus the Ποινή, in truth a pestilence, which seems to have appeared in canine form and in Argos caused the death of lambs and children: Coroebus struck her dead. In the epigram beneath a supposedly archaic monument that represented Coroebus slaying this Ποινή, she is called Κὴρ τυμβοῦχος.³⁵⁰ Men like to hear that their heroes have mastered such dangerous beings, which therefore can no longer harm. Gradually belief in them fades, sinking perhaps to old women and the nursery. Once Empusa and Lamia,³⁵¹ Gello, Mormo,³⁵² and Strinx³⁵³ will have been taken very seriously. So too the nightmare that leaps upon the breast, ἐφιάλτης, ἠπίαλος—as also a burning fever is called—were once conceived as personally acting agents of definite afflictions; certainly many diseases as well, such as οἶστρος, which means both gadfly and madness. Hesiod indeed incorporates much of this kind into his genealogies of the gods, and Λιμός and Λοιμός will certainly have been grasped in wholly personal fashion.³⁵⁴ All this, however, receded at an early date, and the essential point is that one did not seek to placate these bringers of χαχά by veneration and sacrifice, did not grant fever, as in Rome, an altar, but expected the great gods to show themselves ἀλεξίχαχοι. Whom one trusted for this changed over time. Once Hermes protected at the gate; later one no longer trusted him with this and warded off evil by invoking the name of Heracles. Magical apotropaia were set up alongside, and even here new ones were always required. In essence it is the same whether an ithyphallos is erected in a vineyard or a psalm is written on lead and buried, as once occurred. Once this is understood, one will readily grant to the individual practices and also to the individual harmful and helpful powers in which people believed their value for the history of morals; but for what I am pursuing as religion, this detail may be left aside.

Only two apotropaia more I will not pass over. The one is a frightening male mask, which appears especially as a device on shields, but also elsewhere for the same effect, in archaic times with some frequency, and is certainly to be recognised as Phobos. The oldest mention of such a use stands in Iliad Ε 139–42; but precisely on this Furtwängler has recognised the spuriousness of the verses, which must also be condemned on grounds of style. Homer knows Phobos with his brother Deimos only as companions and servants of Ares. As Deimos causes dread, so Phobos puts to flight; the word must be taken in its Homeric sense. The Zeus τροπαῖος later took over his function. Yet Aeschylus (Seven 45) names beside Ares and Enyo the φιλαίματος Φόβος. It is intelligible that sacrifice is offered to him before battle, and that the Selinuntines in the well-known inscription also thank him for victory; likewise that in Sparta he possessed a small sanctuary which in times of peace was always closed (Plutarch, Cleomenes 9). Plutarch’s reasoning and all later applications and reinterpretations in accordance with the change in the meaning of the word and also of belief do not concern us here. One can therefore scarcely speak of a cult, still less that he was ever an ancient god of war. Such a concept as “war-god” belongs to a modern mythological theology; apart from which, a god called “Flight” would be something exceedingly strange.

Phobos thus accomplishes much the same as the Gorgon’s head, which found far wider application, before whose apparition Odysseus in the realm of shadows is afraid; it belongs to the armed Athena and became the Athenian emblem. The Gorgon paralyses by her glance: that is what the name says; it is only an intensification when her head turns to stone; the image of Phobos imitates it. A story had almost to arise that told how the head was struck from its bearer, and we delight in the colourful tale of the hero Perseus, who performed the great deed with the help of the gods, readily believing that sisters of the Gorgon came upon him, pursued Perseus, and were disposed of by his escape. All the further stories that attached themselves and were still invented when no one any longer believed in the Gorgon present no difficulty; but precisely in the central matter there lies something that contradicts the nature of the Gorgon and points to something quite different. She is called Medusa, “the Ruling One”; Poseidon loved her when she was not yet a monster; in death she gives birth to a horse, and on the well-known Boeotian vase she herself is represented as a horse; this form Poseidon too bore. The horse, called Πήγασος, of the colour πηγός, whatever that may have been, now bears the weapons of Zeus, plainly harnessed before his chariot (Hesiod, Theog. 286). At the same time Medusa bore Chrysaor, “Golden-Sword,” of whom nothing further is known.³⁵⁵ The “Ruling One,” who by Poseidon in equine form receives Pegasos, resembles the Erinys who from the same union bore Erion–Areion, who carried heroes, yet led Adrastos to his mother.³⁵⁶ Pegasos bore Bellerophon in the combat with the Chimaera—hardly to his own benefit.³⁵⁷ It can scarcely be denied that there is an inner connexion between these tales. But little more can be established, and the enigmatic contradiction remains that lies in the mortal Gorgon Medusa. Here, in very early times, we encounter a phenomenon to which attention must be paid: that myth does not shrink from taking over and reshaping divine tales which had arisen from religious imagination and were held as sacred truth. This was possible only because both the one myth and the other—even the begetting of Erion and the beheading of the Gorgon—were in the last resort poetic creations of individual men, which then lived on in popular belief and popular speech and could continue side by side in altered form. Thus there is no doubt that the roaring Γαρυϝόνης with his dog and his cattle—that is, his treasures—corresponds to the lord of the underworld with his dog and his treasures (Plouton–Ploutos). But this is wholly forgotten; the story can stand in the Dodekathlos beside the descent of Heracles into Hades, and Hesiod has taken Geryones into the genealogy of monsters which have nothing divine about them, but are slain by heroes, yet must nevertheless be sprung as χρείτοννα from gods and are very much alive in imagination. It may perhaps be impossible to prove of any of these beings that they existed in the proto-Hellenic age; but something akin to them can hardly have been lacking, presumably in forms yet more dreadful. The three bodies of Geryones, which heighten his dreadfulness, have their analogue in the conjoined Molionidae; and precisely these divine twins the Ionic rhapsode of Ψ 642 must strip of their wondrous nature, because the epic will recognise only human form—at the end Heracles slays them. The Hundred-Handers Hesiod still introduces, but takes care that they are banished beneath the earth. It was a great surprise that in Pindar’s Paean VIII the pregnant Hecabe does not in a dream give birth to a torch, but to a πυρφόρον ἐριβρεμέταν Ἑχατόγχειρα. These beings occur nowhere else, and it is idle to conjecture anything.³⁵⁸ Of the ἐγχειρογάστορες or γαστρόχειρες as something similar one will no longer speak after Knaack’s illuminating essay (Hermes 37). It is a remarkable Old-Ionic word for people who feed their belly with their hands—artisans—first attested in Hecataeus fr. 367 and in the Cyzicene chronicle of Deilochus (Schol. Apollonius I 989).³⁵⁹ The Cyclopes, who forge Zeus’ thunderbolts, are called, as builders of the Cyclopean walls, ἐγχεγδοτόρες, plainly from Old-Ionic mythography (Schol. Euripides Orestes 965). It is not transparent why skilful smiths should be one-eyed; χύχλωπες in itself does not mean that, though it has always been so understood. These giants might have become the tutelary powers of craftsmen, especially of artists, but in their stead the foreign Hephaestus assumed that role, whom the Ionians raised among the Olympians. Malicious these Cyclopes are not; they even appear in genealogies and therefore in isolated cases receive cult.³⁶⁰ But the Ionic epic could not tolerate even these giants and banished them to a distant shore, where they became savage man-eaters. The same happened to the Giants, whom Hesiod knows only as armed children of Uranus—armed, plainly, because he was aware of their struggle against the gods³⁶¹—a struggle that was to play a great role in art and poetry and, even when it was understood only as myth, to acquire a profound significance. Later gigas came to mean simply an earth-born giant; of such beings many local tales are told, and in some cases—Tityos, Alkyoneus, the Libyan Antaeus—the monstrous size is indeed essential³⁶²; yet on the whole the Greeks tell remarkably little of giants, especially in connexion with men. The Odyssey likewise banishes the Giants as an evil race from the known world, and does the same with the γηγενεῖς of Cyzicus, since that land was by then inhabited, by turning them into Laestrygonians.

With dwarfs it is no different. They too vanish early from popular belief. The Iliad knows the Παγμαῖοι, the “Fistlings,” and, if not referring to an epic Γερανομαχία, at least presupposes its subject-matter; and this theme remained popular, though Egyptian elements became intermingled— the gigantic phallus will hardly always have belonged to the Pygmies. Nor must one forget the Pataikoi. Yet the Pygmies are always only a distant people. Living Greek has no word for “dwarf”; nanus lives only in Latin, and yet appears as a proper name in earliest times on Thera (IG XII 3, 583). How this is connected is to me enigmatic. Does not Nanno in Alcman belong here, and then perhaps that of Mimnermus as well? Difficult and obscure remain the “Thumblings,” the δάχτυλοι. Strabo (473) reports the embarrassed combinations of antiquity, and Kaibel’s posthumous essay (Gött. Nachr. 1901, 488) shows how scholarship runs into the void when, from a single point, it proceeds step by step into infinity: the apt explanation of a verse (Apollonius Rhodius I 1131) leads to the phallus, and this seems to become something like a primal god. The Dactyls beside the Dindymene of Cyzicus are not Hellenic; Konisalos³⁶³ and Orthannes, who are there named as Dactyls, are not otherwise attested as such either. The Phoronis, which gives the oldest and fullest account of the Dactyls, calls them Phrygians; there they are the skilful dwarfs of Germanic belief, and one may compare the helpers of Hephaestus, such as Cedalion.³⁶⁴ They are always called Idaean Dactyls, although at Cyzicus they cannot have been such, do not appear on the Trojan Ida, and are drawn to the Cretan Ida only because of the name, in order to connect them with the Corybants. They will therefore first have dwelt in the ἴδη, in the forest; whether in Hellas cannot be asserted, but neither can the possibility be denied. Heracles as one of the “Thumblings,” of whom there is occasional mention, even at Olympia, can only be reinterpretation; yet the meagre notices do not even permit conjecture about them. The child at Olympia beside the mother—who could only be Earth—is there older than Hera and Zeus; but was it a Dactyl, was it Hellenic? We shall in any case beware of making the Hermes of Cyllene, as the Hymn portrays him, at once a phallus and a Dactyl. It is quite conceivable that the phallus, when it, like all divinities, received human form, was made into a dwarf who retained a superhuman phallus; the Baubo of Priene offers an analogue. Of the Dactyls, so far as we know, no pictorial representation has survived. It is quite possible that gods and heroes in child-form, such as Nilsson collects (Feste 213), were originally dwarfs; but this can no longer be elucidated.

Dwarfs and master-smiths are the Telchines as well; and even if the latter function is demonstrably theirs only on Rhodes—where Hephaestus and the Dactyls are absent—it may nevertheless have belonged to their nature when they were still in Hellas. For that they originate there is shown by their occurrence in Boeotia, Ceos, and Sicyon, by the epithet Τελχινία of an Athena at Teumessos, and by a festival Τελχίνια at Delphi (the Labyada inscription). And they were treacherous fault-finders with evil eye and evil arts, as Callimachus was later to make them famous, not only on Rhodes, where Pindar hints at this, but Stesichorus could equate them with the Keres. Origin from the earliest stratum of immigrants is evident; hence they early disappeared from Hellas; on Rhodes something alien became intermixed.³⁶⁵

We may therefore conclude that giants and dwarfs lived far more vividly in the imagination of the proto-Hellenes than in historical times, which no longer even knows a word for “dwarf.” Men will also have told themselves of many other divine, or at least super- or sub-human beings, and of monsters of every kind. Yet the intellectual tendency that leads in Homer to the full humanisation of divine manifestation was already present earlier: the gods appear in animal form, but only in such as is familiar to the believer; and the attempts to suggest divine power by the multiplication of arms and ears in an Apollo at Amyclae, or by a third eye in a statue of Zeus at Argos,³⁶⁶ remained isolated. The half-animal formations of the male woodland gods perhaps arose only when one attempted to represent the divine θῆρες, because in wholly animal shape they could not be recognised as such.

We are now in a position to leave behind the bewildering mass of figures and to single out what may rightly be claimed as proto-Hellenic. Most of it is very primitive and still reflects the earliest religious experiences and moods, yet it already bears a definite stamp; it is not the belief which, by a petitio principii, all men are supposed first to have generated out of themselves, nor is it Indo-European belief, although such must underlie it and in places reveal itself: it is already Hellenic belief, equally characteristic in what it possesses and in what it lacks.

The gods whom the tribe and the individual household venerate, that they may grant protection and aid, or that those whom one fears may spare them, live close beside men upon the earth and draw near to them personally, visible in certain forms or recognisable through the effects of their presence. They are the elemental powers upon which the life of the village depends—in brook and spring, in field and meadow and tree: there they dwell; and even the weather-god dwells upon the mountain, about whose summit one sees him gather his clouds. Yet gods are not found only in the elements. The peace of house and homestead is guarded by the goddess who dwells in the hearth; the peace of the tribe she guards in the hearth of the king’s or the communal house. In the stone pillar before the gate dwells the god who wards off the onrushing evil; he also guides his protégé through the uncanny Outside, where along the paths a dark goddess roams. The wild forest contains, besides the beasts of prey, in which nothing divine inheres, and the game which man gladly hunts, many a half-animal divinity; one is never certain, when a roe-deer or a wild goat or even a horse or a bull appears, whether one of the woodland beings is not present in it, or a creature from the underworld, or even the virgin mistress of the forest herself. In her that feeling of reverent awe and gentle relief has taken shape which the enchantment of a still woodland peace awakens. She is “the Maiden,” “the Fair One,” but also “the Wild One”; for at night lights may flicker afar through the bushes—then she storms with burning torch through her domain. Each village most gladly names her after the nearest of her favourite places, which it knows. That everywhere it is the same goddess—this one will tell oneself, as soon as the thought is once raised. Beside her and beneath her stands the innumerable host of divinities who nourish elemental life: always conceived as lovely maidens, and at times even seen, when they dance in the evening mist. Here too the names vary, whether of the kind or of the individual, but the apprehension of nature is the same, and within it lies the distinctive religious feeling. The virgin hearth-goddess and the pillar-god who plays for the woodland maidens and leads their dance accord well with this. The weather-god from his mountain seat intervenes mightily in earthly life, more powerful than the other gods; irresistible is his lightning, and even if at first—according to the situation of the village—he is imagined as dwelling upon many heights, yet the weather he sends passes over the whole land; it presses itself upon the mind that everywhere it is the same god, and thus he advances to the highest mountain that one knows.

Still more evident is the fact that the earth upon which gods and men walk is everywhere the same, and that from the earth comes all vegetative life, from it spring the fountains, from it grows what nourishes men and beasts; from it therefore men and gods too must spring. To recognise and to venerate, in the earth that is called by her name, a universal divinity is the most momentous feature of ancient Hellenic religion. Already in the gender of her name lies that she is conceived as mother; this therefore is inherited. Yet she appears in two forms, which increasingly become separate goddesses, although their name differs only dialectally and the Earth-Mother is always understood in Demeter—as could not be otherwise, since to her was entrusted the flourishing of the fruits of the field that spring from the mother’s womb of earth, and likewise in the cult which women render her as something wholly particular, the flourishing of human fruit. While Ge remains the All-Mother and with her no generating consort is thought of at all (a notion only later supplied by cosmogonic speculation), Da has her “consort of Da,” who in this very name at first proclaims that she is the principal figure, for she brings everything to light, while he dwells with her in the depths. Yet at the stage of development that alone we know, he has already attained a great and even universal standing. It is acknowledged that he is father or begetter, or however one may express it, and thus he enjoys the widest veneration. He is a cosmic power, for he both holds the earth firm and shakes it. To him too the lightning is at command. He dwells below in the depths of the earth; therefore he is uncanny and appears upon earth in the form of a horse, like the spirits of the woods and the winds and other powers no less untamed. As he came more strongly to the fore, the conception of divine agency was broadened. He becomes the forefather of mankind—not as Ge was, the All-Mother, but as one who begets races of men with mortal daughters, among them savage giants, but also the ancestors of royal houses; and he begets divine children too with Demeter. This may sound abstract, yet it is best made clear if one sees in the Erinys—whom one later even directly called Demeter—in the “Wrathful One,” that nature which (as the poem of the Days says, that are evil and good) ἄλλοτε μητρυιὴ πέλει, ἄλλοτε μήτηρ, which here is stepmotherly, yet in equine form receives from the equine Poseidon, beside a ruin-bringing horse, a daughter who then becomes beneficent nature; the Arcadians call her “Mistress” or “Saviour.” This conception of universally believed divine persons, already shaped into a story yet still wholly religious, may rest upon a special development, as it remained local and soon disappeared. Yet something very ancient has been preserved in it. Alongside it stands the differently oriented distinction of mother and daughter in the Demeter-cult of women. Beside the one Erinys there stand in other regions a plurality of “Wrathful Ones”; but these rage only when men are guilty towards their neighbours of the gravest violations of piety, while as Eumenides they bless. And beside Ge—often identified with her—stands a Themis, who, as we alone know her, signifies Right, so that in the Earth-Mother there has already arisen a guardian of custom and of a piety conceived as a law of nature. Alongside very primitive notions, religion has thus already taken its first steps toward sanctifying the obligations which society lays upon its members, toward making them demands of the gods. A development of far-reaching consequence is the sanctification of marriage in the Argolid. At its basis will lie a cult of women such as that of Demeter; but now not only is the Lady Hera venerated as a mighty sovereign of the land, but her marriage with the weather-god Zeus upon his mountain is celebrated—the exemplary heavenly marriage.

Natural powers such as sun and moon, though great gods and in their elemental manifestation ever present, yet as persons entering into no relation with the human world, must indeed be reckoned with if we are to grasp the imagination and cast of mind of the earliest Hellenes; but for religion they are inessential. Of consequence, on the other hand, is the fact that femininity possesses its own particular deities and that these are also venerated for the whole tribe, and thus not exclusively as protectors of female sexual life. Conversely, the warrior estate has its virgin helper and in distress hopes for the divine twins. Particular callings too have their own gods, as poets have the Muse. For every god, once apprehended as a real person, has the capacity to extend his sphere of action, and thus in cult as well the circle of his worshippers. Only when a divine person has attained so firm a shape that no single χρεῖττον exhausts his being, is he a god who acts with personal will in hatred and love, and suffers; only then can stories be told of him: he must become human, if he is to come truly near to the human heart. Hestia and Ge and Themis have not achieved this, nor have the Ladies of the Outside except within their narrow circle; Demeter, Hermes, Poseidon, Hera, however, have done so. The same will hold of Zeus, although I cannot adduce proof. It must be emphatically stressed that not only is every notion of a primordial monotheism excluded, but that even alongside the concrete gods something like a formless highest being is altogether alien to Hellenic feeling and thought. If in every case what acts is a god, a corporeal god, then countless gods stand independently side by side. To gather them together in thought, to place them beside and beneath one another, will lead to a society of gods analogous to that of men; then it too will have a summit, a father and lord of gods and men. But this advance is first made in Asia, and only new experiences have led to it.

The gods who have attained personality bear names by which they are invoked; only in part are these at the same time designations of the element itself, like Γῆ Δᾶ (or Δώ) and Ἑστία, or generic names such as νύμφαι παρθένοι; or else the same divinity conceals itself beneath appellations taken from the place where it dwells—Ἰτωνία, Φεραία—or under names of endearment, χαλή, σώτειρα μεγάλη. Ἑρμείας is named after the pillar that represents him. Ποσειδάων perhaps is no longer understood, Ζεύς Ζάν likewise—names brought from an earlier homeland. All is Greek; yet it may be that names once existed which for us have been displaced by the foreign names adopted in later Hellas. There is no doubt that stories—myths—were told about the gods, but they are beyond our grasp; genealogies of the gods, marriages of the gods, can scarcely have existed, save for the few beginnings that we have encountered.

There are enough harmful powers, warded off by all manner of magical means, but they do not become persons to whom worship is rendered; rather the gods are to help against them—at most one might so regard Enodia. The gods themselves, however, are incalculable in their hatred and in their love, and of both men feel the effects.

The gods who intervene personally in the world of men—only those who dwell upon the earth or within it do so—demand from man reverence, or rather: he must revere them, because he needs their aid and must render them favourable, lest they become hostile and harm him. Hence the duty of θεραπεία θεῶν. To it belong other marks of honour as well, but above all sacrifice, of which the slaughter-offerings are only the most conspicuous part; for other food too is offered, drink as well—milk, wine—also honey, then cereals³⁶⁷ (πανσπερμία), all manner of adornments and whatever else is laid before the god, ἀνατίθεται. The saying holds absolutely: δῶρα θεοὺς πείθει, δῶρʹ αἰδοίους βασιλῆας; the epithet shows that no disparagement lies in it. The slaughter-offering has become so preponderantly important that at the word θύειν one thinks first of it. Theophrastus has sacrifice in view when he gives as the grounds for the worship of the gods that we seek the warding off of evils and the attainment of benefits, whether because we have already experienced something good, or because help is to be granted us, or because we wish especially to honour the goodness that inheres in the gods.³⁶⁸ He sees in the worship of the gods nothing other than what we also practise toward ἄνδρες ἀγαθοί. This is very rationalistic, but precisely for that reason characteristic of the mode of thought of so early a time. Yet it also contains too much. For mere reverence on account of a god’s ἀρετή concerns the traditional festivals and sacrifices at which no particular occasion is any longer operative; the Homeric Hymns can elucidate the mood of the participants in such celebrations; corresponding sacral formulae will have existed. Thanksgiving festivals of the whole community are at least very rare, are absent from the annual festal calendar, and are therefore exceptional. Individuals, to be sure, have very often brought χαριστήρια, and have also frequently made vows to the gods in case of their aid, which they fulfilled with the designation of their εὐχαί. But nothing exists like what we find in Rome, where a general utters vota to a god and afterwards builds a temple.³⁶⁹ Thus there remains only what stands at the head of this exposition, if we seek what called forth the whole cult. That had quite another meaning in the time when men were still near to their gods, indeed lived with them. Before the libation of every drink had become a symbolic act that could even be dedicated to a man,³⁷⁰ the god received the good gift; it was also prescribed what pleased him—milk or honey, and the like—he received the porridge, πελανός, which was retained from primeval times after baking had been invented, the cakes that he liked; on these one might write a new perimatologia sacra. Cakes and porridge require a table upon which they are laid. Libations sink of themselves into the earth, where so many gods dwell,³⁷¹ who receive only ἁγνὰ θύματα. The earliest age had lived predominantly on flesh; that led of itself to the slaughter-sacrifice. This, however, proves most clearly that the decisive fundamental conception was the table-fellowship of the god with the sacrificing men—a conception which indeed already in earliest times led to men’s keeping the edible flesh for themselves, a fact against which the Prometheus myth protests. Table-fellowship too is no longer maintained once the gods, from Homer onwards, withdraw into the distance, into heaven; yet Θεοδαίσια and Θεοξένια long continued to mean what their names imply. Once one has grasped what sacrifice originally was, and what the intention of the sacrificer has always remained, one will not allow oneself to be misled by modern interpretations that rest upon ignorance of the Greeks. Otherwise it could not be asserted that whoever ate of the animal wished that its power might pass into him, or even that the Maenad in the fawn she rends devours Dionysus.³⁷² I am well aware that the earliest Christians compared their Lord’s Supper with Greek sacrifices³⁷³; but transubstantiation, or whatever manner of divine power entering into the believers one may conceive, is incommensurable with the original sense of the Greek sacrifice. Of other peoples I pass no judgement; the Greeks I know. Cases in which the god is to receive the offering in its entirety, without the human receiving any part of it, are not lacking; this was appropriate when ἀπαρχαί were brought to the dead; burning as a ὁλοχαυτοῦν—significantly also called ὁλοχαρποῦν—was then the usual form, and immersion in the sea was added.³⁷⁴

On his own estate the householder himself is the priest. In the hearth the goddess of the house is present, at the same time the flame that consumes what thus belongs to the gods. Other gods too may be sacrificed to here. The household participates in the domestic worship, even the unfree.³⁷⁵ The rural Dionysia of Dicaeopolis give a good picture of a household celebration, in which even the procession is not lacking; only a cake is sacrificed.³⁷⁶ Plutarch’s description of the old πομπή (φιλοπλουτ. 527d) accords well with this. In corresponding fashion the king, or whoever else represents the tribe, will perform the “ancestral” sacrifices. To the other gods one must go to their sanctuary, which is designated by τέμενος simply in so far as it is cut out from the communal land as ἱερόν; most often it is an ἄλσος. Thus even later one often says—when the trees have made way for cult-buildings and votive offerings, as in the Altis of Olympia and the sacred precinct of Delphi, where once laurel-bushes stood. Yet we also find on rocks the names of gods in the genitive, sometimes even in the nominative; evidently the god can be venerated there.³⁷⁷ The sacrifice is now performed by the priest, who alone knows the ritual—that is, the will of the god. ἱερεύς, alongside ἱερεύειν and ἱερεῖον, shows that “hallowing” consisted essentially in the slaughter of the sacrificial animal. When the Odyssey designates every slaughter in this way, it presupposes that it should always be accompanied by a certain consecration, always be in some sense a sacrifice. A hearth, ἐσχάρα, may suffice, upon which the ash will accumulate; a stone upon which the portions allotted to the gods are laid will in time become an altar, and finally a high structure, with the fire-place above, to which the priest ascends. He receives for his exertions certain pieces of the roasted victim; the rest the sacrificers must often still consume immediately in the sanctuary—a reminiscence of the old table-fellowship with the god; later they take the meat home. For the god a seat is prepared, or there is a tree or stone or post in which he is thought to be present. From this there later arises the cult-image. For sacrifice, of course, only animals are suitable that men themselves eat.³⁷⁸ Fish do not belong among these³⁷⁹; in the Iliad they are likewise disdained by men, as the Syrians of certain regions still do today. Later they become the cheapest and most popular relish (ὄψον, whence now ψάρι for fish) to bread; that in sacrificial service the old custom remained is very noteworthy. Of poultry the cock appears only rarely, perhaps not at all, as a food-offering. The dove occurs only as an expiatory sacrifice in the cult of Aphrodite, and is therefore un-Greek. Where dogs are sacrificed, they are at least in later times not eaten³⁸⁰; the offering belongs to the foreign cults of Enyalios and of Hecate. The horse can never be a food-offering. That the gods have different tastes—that Demeter in particular loves the pig, while most gods disdain it, and that goat-sacrifice is confined to a few³⁸¹—I pursue no more than most other details. Naturally the sacrificial animal should be flawless, yet here too exceptions occur.³⁸² The sex, which even language often distinguishes, frequently, though by no means always, corresponds to that of the deity; pregnant animals will have been offered only to maternal goddesses. The distinction between the adult and the young animal, τέλειον and γαλαθηνόν (the latter not always truly a suckling), extends far. A mass-sacrifice such as the hecatomb is already in epic not to be taken literally, yet it must in the cattle-rich primeval age have occurred and was repeated whenever the whole people was to be fed. The combination of different animals, τριττόα, is not rare, but only when it is βούαρχος does it correspond to the suovetaurilia.³⁸³ The poor man who could not offer an animal presented it in small clay or leaden figures; these cannot be distinguished from the anathēmata that are to be discussed later. In historical times the use of boughs and garlands in worship is very widespread and in ordinary life likewise signifies consecration—when the wreath³⁸⁴ marks the magistrate and belongs to the symposium, which begins with prayers and libations; in a sense also when the θαλλοῦ στέφανος is something like an order, later replaced by a golden crown.³⁸⁵ Homer, however, knows nothing of this. Yet it is scarcely credible that only foreign gods should have brought their wreaths with them—Apollo the laurel, Dionysus the ivy. Demeter has the νάρχισσος, a flower with a pre-Greek name. The olive does not belong to Athena’s cult; it is later sacred to her because she planted it. Hera of Argos has the star-flower,³⁸⁶ because it grows by her; at Olympia the wild olive crowns the victor for the same reason (Pindar 209). Only at Dodona does Zeus have the oak-wreath, because he once dwelt in the oak. The lilies upon the golden robe of the Olympian Zeus coincide only accidentally with later symbolism.³⁸⁷ That the great altar of Apollo at Cyrene is adorned with flowers throughout the year is regarded as something exceptional.³⁸⁸ The use of foliage and flowers must once be investigated as a whole, also in the visual arts.³⁸⁹

The god must be invited to the meal; that he is to eat is no longer believed later, but that he should come still is. The invocation must employ the correct name and the correct forms, and thus falls to the priest. Yet it later became a poem, indeed an entire genre, called χλητιχοὶ ὕμνοι or, more precisely, χαταευχαί,³⁹⁰ which a singer or a chorus performed—without thereby excluding the priestly formulas. Flute-music belongs to every sacrifice, even the domestic one, as well as to the symposium and the komos. It is probably not original that in Ionia (as in Nanno) this music fell chiefly, and in Athens entirely, to hired female flute-players, slaves and courtesans. The ancient melodies are ascribed to the Phrygian Olympus,³⁹¹ and the flute itself is called Phrygian. When the dithyramb demands flute accompaniment, artists have to be brought to Athens from Boeotia and Argos; in Sparta the piper belongs to the army. Evidently this music had once been genuinely Hellenic. It was summoned at Delphi to represent in music the dragon-fight of the god, before there were choral singers; and precisely this sacred story had not come from Asia. The participation of the community reaches its highest intensity in the choral songs, in which a commissioned poet works together with the singers who represent the community; the solo song may have preceded this. Rhapsodic recitation was an ornament of the festival, but not part of the actual divine service. To that belong the ritual cries of the community—not only formulaic words, but also meaningless, or no longer meaningful, ἐπιφωνήματα such as τήνελλα,³⁹² ἰὼ παιάν εὐοἷ, and the like. These cries, and still more the songs, will have arisen in processions—the march to the sanctuary, which in early times often lay far away, when men still sought the weather-god upon his mountain to beg for rain, when his bridal union with Hera took place aloft, and when Arcadian Artemis received at particular spots the cult-dances after which she was named. On such a march some gifted participant would improvise a verse to a familiar melody, and the crowd would take up the refrain; jest and mockery would then be added. The γεφυρισμοί are traditional in the procession to Eleusis. Coarse raillery belongs, in the service of female divinities—Demeter, Damia, and Auxesia—at Athens at the Στήνια directly to the cult, whether women hurl it at one another or direct it against the men, who in turn repay them.³⁹³ In these cults even physical scuffles occur—βαλλητύς, λιθοβολία It also happens that men and women exchange garments.³⁹⁴ Processional songs predominated in Pindar’s poetry; for besides the προσόδια and at least many παρθενεῖα, the paeans belong here—now addressed only to Apollo, most often to the Delian or Pythian.³⁹⁵ Yet the Iliad already calls παιήων the improvised song with which the Achaeans march home after Hector’s death. In these, and still more in the songs, we must see their origin in the processions—the march to the sanctuary, which in early times often lay far away, when one still sought the weather-god upon his mountain to beg for rain, when his bridal union with Hera took place aloft, and when the Arcadian Artemis received at particular spots the cult-dances after which she was named. On such a march some gifted participant would improvise a verse to a familiar melody, and the crowd would take up the refrain; jest and mockery would then be added. The γεφυρισμοί are traditional in the procession to Eleusis. Coarse raillery belongs, in the service of female divinities—Demeter, Damia, and Auxesia—at Athens at the ἀπορρήτα directly to the cult, whether women direct it against one another or against the men, who also retaliate. In these cults even physical scuffles occur—βάλλησις, λοβοβολία. It also happens that men and women exchange garments. Processional songs predominated in Pindar’s poetry; for besides the προσόδια and at least many παρθένεια, the paeans belong here, which now belong only to Apollo, most often the Delian or the Pythian. Yet the Iliad already calls παιάν the improvised song with which the Achaeans march home after Hector’s death. In that case no god is addressed at all; yet they will have cried ἰὼ παιῆον³⁹⁶ or something similar. A procession without songs is that of the Panathenaea. At the fetching of fresh laurel from Tempe, in Plutarch’s time a boy represents Apollo; was that original? At the corresponding Daphnephoria in Thebes the laurel itself enters, and in it once the god will have come.³⁹⁷ In general it is hardly conceivable that in a time which invited the gods themselves to the meal and did not think of them merely in human form, a man should have played the god³⁹⁸; the polos did not pass from the gods to the priests, but the reverse.

Male choruses seem to have advanced to singing only with the rise of poetry; they danced or moved in a round in Ionia, for that is at first the μολπή, after which the widely attested μολποί are named, whose leader at Miletus is raised to give his name to the year. Boys as dancers are found in the ancient rock-inscriptions of Thera, and the rock belonged to Karneios. Yet it is scarcely probable that their dancing was sacral; and if the Athenian boy who danced ὀρχηστῶν ἁπαλώτατα (IG I 919) also seems to have belonged to an association, this need not have been one for the state cult, though the later boys’ choirs of the Thargelia do speak in that direction. Maiden-choirs are lacking among the Ionians, because they adopted the oriental seclusion of women; but they were preserved especially in the Peloponnese,³⁹⁹ and we must regard them as proto-Hellenic—the nymphs dance too. In Sparta the girls’ songs of Alcman and the thiasos of the Leukippides bear witness to this. The dancers for Artemis of Caryae are shown by sculpture as modestly as the basket-bearers of the Parthenon frieze; yet it is intelligible that girls who practised gymnastics performed leaps at which Ionic-Attic taste took offence, and there will not have been a lack of coarseness.⁴⁰⁰Something quite different are the dances of masked, or at least disguised, men who represent the divine retinue of the god to whom the festival belongs, and do so in animal form, as we infer in Arcadia from the bronze of Methydrion, from the embroideries on the robe of the Despoina of Damophon, and from many terracottas. Without doubt such things reach back into primeval times, and they attained the highest significance when the Dionysiac cult in the Isthmian states took possession of these goat-dances, and Athens adopted them and transferred them to its Sileni. In another direction point the clay masks of Spartan Orthia, the χυρίττοι of Tarentum, the δειχηλίχται. The tradition is too scant to disclose the connections.

It is neither possible nor necessary to present the many different rites that existed here and there in divine service, especially since everything that does not reach back to primeval times lies outside our concern. Thus Theophrastus concerned himself especially with the Attic Bouphonia, because they regarded the killing of the ox as a homicide that demanded expiation—something that suited his own opposition to bloody sacrifice. But that corresponds only to a later age, in which the ox, as compared with heroic times, had become precious, the βοῦς ἀροτήρ, so to speak a housemate of the small farmer. The ἀγείρειν, the gathering of gifts in honour of a divinity, must once have stood in high esteem, whereas we know the ἀγυρτής and still more the ἀγύρτια only as despised beggars and impostors; it will then have been practised only for foreign gods. Children were still permitted to do it, as in some places among ourselves at Martinmas or other old feast-days. The χελιδών of the Rhodians came in Badromios–Elaphebolion, somewhat late for the beginning of spring, which the first swallow marks. In Samos, according to the Homeric novella 33, children sang a similar song at the new-moon festival of Apollo—properly at the beginning of the year—which was called εἰρεσιώνη; the connexion with the swallow is obscured. They will have carried something similar to the εἰρεσιώνη, the harvest-wreath, with which children in Athens went about at the Oschophoria and Pyanopsia; the farmers hung it up before their door, as we do. At least, I grew up so. It is a beautiful pious custom; whether a god is invoked thereby, and which, matters little. Alongside sacrifice the individual offers his reverence to the gods by gifts which he deposits in their sanctuary, ἀνατίθησι, through which the god acquires rich possessions. The intention of the giver is to win the god’s favour, but here very often also to render thanks. The small animals of the cheapest material must be distinguished: the poor man’s substitute for the slaughter-sacrifice. Yet there are also objects which the god can use—garments, such as Athena already receives in Ζ, adornments, ointments in little pots, all manner of vessels, even combs for a goddess, weapons and tools for a god—both the real objects and small replicas. That the human form is presupposed already shows an advance beyond primeval time; yet all manner of animals that the god loves are not lacking either. Images of the gods themselves reproduce not only the cult-statue of the temple, where one already existed, but also other forms; a glance at the votive offerings to Orthia at Sparta suffices to make this clear. More difficult to interpret are the human figures, ranging from tiny dolls to the costly statues distinguished by the terms ἀνδριάς and χόρη as male and female images; they are meant to be youthful and beautiful, or of dignified beauty. The sex of the god is not decisive; even Poseidon may receive a χόρη (IG I 706), and Athena many a boy, even as a horseman. Nor is the sex of the dedicator decisive. Temple-slaves cannot be the χόραι of the Acropolis, nor the little old warriors either. The origin of these votives—which moreover disappear in the fifth century—is therefore obscure. When the image of a particular person is set up on sacred ground, this is done in his honour. The Pericles of Cresilas bears no dedicatory inscription, but names the person represented. Later, in countless cases, dedications are added, yet this is an empty form; what is intended is only the commemoration of men and their vanity. Very ancient is the practice of dedicating captured weapons, which preserves the memory of a victory, already in Κ 571. The numerous hoard-finds of discarded objects deposited in sacred ground, and later the inscribed inventories of treasures, show in abundance what accumulated in the sanctuaries. This tempted theft, so that ἱεροσυλία became a special crime. Money too came in; many voluntarily gave a tithe of their income, so that certain gods became capitalists and even lent money—for example those of Delos—especially when they also possessed or acquired landed property, as Athena did in the time of the empire. In this sense the gods are legal subjects, whose affairs are conducted by the individual community to which they belong, or by the collective community in the case of state gods; for the state is master over the property of the gods, just as it is master over their cult. I do not pursue this further, nor how it is affected by the fact that private θίασοι are as a rule formally cult-associations, even when in reality they pursue quite different aims, as for example the Academy.

Sharply distinguished are all acts of worship that seek to appease an existing or feared wrath of a divinity, especially when a pollution, a μύσος, lies upon the community. This is manifested above all in sacrifice; for here there is no table-fellowship between god and man. There are indeed also the already mentioned cases of the ἀπαρχαί, which a man gives to the gods from his gain, in which he himself therefore has no further share. According to the oldest legend Iphigeneia was sacrificed to Artemis as χαλλιστεῖον of all that the year had brought; thereafter animals of the herd were to be treated in the same way⁴⁰¹—thus to pass wholly in the fire to the god. Here the meaning of sacrifice is fundamentally different from that of the oath-sacrifice and the expiatory sacrifice, even though the practice is the same. The conclusion of treaties takes place through the swearing of oaths by both parties. In this, certain sacrificial animals are slaughtered. The Iliad shows us in Γ the conclusion of a treaty. In Τ Agamemnon alone swears to a fact, in order to appease the wrath of Achilles; in this case a boar is slaughtered and thrown into the sea. In the first instance it is expressly said that the animals are slaughtered for the gods who are witnesses of the oath (Γ 103); but they are not the avengers of perjury—that role belongs to the Erinyes, whom Agamemnon invokes in Τ 259. Here too the self-curse is not lacking, which in later oath-formulae is either spoken or at least understood, and the sacrifice appears as its ratification. Most impressively is the oath of the Athenian archons administered⁴⁰²: they must swear upon a particular stone, upon which the cut sacrificial animals, the τόμια, lie. Thus the reconciled Erinyes will withdraw as σφαγίων ὑπὸ σεμνῶν into the cave in which they are to dwell as Eumenides (1006). Between them and Athena a covenant has been concluded. The designation σφάγια, which here had to be used instead of τόμια, distinguishes such offerings from the food-sacrifices, θύματα; in particular so are called the sacrifices offered before a battle—though here they must be interpreted by the seer whom the commander must have with him. If a diviner is lacking, a prayer for good outcome will suffice.⁴⁰³ These sacrifices are offered with regard to the future. Expiatory sacrifices presuppose that divine wrath has already been aroused. Crop-failure and pestilence are the consequences by which it is recognised. In such a case animal sacrifices, appeasing songs, and processions no longer suffice; one must proceed to the utmost—to human sacrifice—if it proves impossible to seize the person who has polluted the land. The opening scenes of Sophocles’ Oedipus elucidate this. A historical example is the banishment of the Alcmaeonidae on account of the murder of Cylon and his accomplices. Here no seer’s oracle is mentioned as demanding the measure, because the sacrilege was notorious and the sacred law acknowledged; yet this law of blood had been established by the Pythian god, whom Sophocles himself allows to intervene. The purification of the whole land for the outrage against Cylon is finally effected by the Cretan expiatory priest and prophet Epimenides—at least such a legend formed. And seers are accustomed to demand the sacrifice of Iphigeneia (according to the familiar later version),⁴⁰⁴ of the daughter of Heracles, of the daughters of Leos or of Erechtheus or Aristodemus, and the like; Achilles himself demanded Polyxena. In this lies, first, that a human sacrifice may now be offered only on the basis of a special expression of divine will, which only a seer can discern; and secondly, that it belongs solely to the ancient age. To the religious sensibility already of Pindar’s time, such cruelty on the part of the gods appeared unthinkable.⁴⁰⁵ The appearance of expiatory priests, τελεσταί, and the τελεταί cast in verse and attributed to famous names are important for their own time; the feeling of the individual that he has in some way become polluted and must seek means of purification has remained widespread, even when it had already become sheer superstition. That no longer concerns the ancient religion. All the more important are the regular ritual acts of expiation. For just as the sacred fire was renewed, the cult-images washed and newly clothed each year, the festivals recurring in the course of the year, so it had to seem necessary to expiate once for all the omissions and transgressions that had been committed within the people without atonement. In Ionia we encounter the regular human sacrifice of the φάρμαχοι, whose very name bears witness that they are remedies. If criminals were employed for this purpose, that was already a marked mitigation. In Athens too, it is evident that with the adoption of the cult of Apollo the human sacrifice of the Thargelia was introduced together with the ἀπαρχαί of the new harvest; how long it remained in use cannot be determined. There is no doubt that in other regions human sacrifices continued to be offered for a long time, especially as they confronted the Hellenes in the cults of foreign peoples and in part persisted, as in the Kronia of Rhodes, whose Kronos points directly to the Semites.⁴⁰⁶ How matters stood in the individual states with the annual festivals of expiation is a difficult question, into which I do not enter. In this survey so much detail has already been adduced—much more could just as well have been brought in—that the danger can scarcely be avoided of obscuring what alone matters: to grasp the ideas that from the beginning determined Hellenic cult. They are simple and clear; that alongside them some magic and some sorcerous practice was exercised does not impair the religious attitude of the Hellenes.⁴⁰⁷

It will, however, be well to consider to what extent the cult afforded its participants an inward elevation and edification. When we look at the votive reliefs on which a man with his family, often also with the sacrificial animals, stands before the gods and raises his hand in homage,⁴⁰⁸ this expresses beautifully the intercourse between man and god. But the march to the temple with a little flute-music was not edifying⁴⁰⁹; and before the cult-image the believer stopped at most for a silent prayer within the temple; and when outside before the altar he witnessed the slaughter of the animal by the sacrificial servant, the dismemberment of the victim and the burning of the portions allotted to the god, how was edification to arise for the bystanders and even for the sacrificers themselves? At most in the brief interval during which the injunction to silence of the εὐφημία prevailed. Even a public sacrifice such as that in Ψ of the Odyssey reveals nothing of the kind; yet there the poet has other things in view than the sacrificial act itself. Only when a community gathers for the same act of worship does the common feeling awaken the right mood. The great state sacrifices, the festivals of the state gods with their varied ritual, the processions that gave all an active share, then ceremonies that demanded a preparatory consecration,⁴¹⁰ the night-festivals, of which there were not a few—all these did not fail to make a deep impression even upon those who thought otherwise about the personal gods and their myths. Yet the word came off poorly, even when prayer-formulae, at times also litanies, and the ritual cries of the community were added to the actions, the δρώμενα, and in the Mysteries also the δεικνύμενα. This must be borne in mind in order to appreciate the religious effect of the dances and choral songs that were added in the highest flowering of the cult. That they die away is the strongest symptom of the fading of the religion whose expression the cult remained. And yet one should hear how Plutarch—academic philosopher and at the same time high priest at Delphi—can speak: “It is not the abundance of wine and roast meats that delights us at the festivals, but a cheerful hope and the belief in the presence of the god, who is gracious and accepts what is offered with satisfaction” (De Epicuri beatitudine 1102). Even now the pious feeling can express itself just as in primeval times, which conceived the god as appearing bodily and sharing in the sacrificial meal. The god no longer dwelt in his image; the sacrifices as such meant nothing any more to the educated man—and not only to him; the myths were myths; and yet the long-familiar act and the sense of belonging with the community awakened the feeling of sensing the nearness of the divine in the soul. That is what cult must produce; if it does not, it loses its justification. Already in Plutarch’s time this will often have been the case, so that foreign cults such as that of Mithras exerted strong attraction. Julian’s sacrificial festivals were mocked; the Christian Church triumphed already for the reason that it had created for itself a cult that won hearts. One must not forget that in the Holy Mass the ideas of the ancient sacrifice live on—both the table-fellowship of god and man and the expiatory sacrifice.

In historical times a general festival of the dead can hardly have been lacking anywhere, even if it was not a common festival of the community, but was celebrated in the houses or at the graves by the relatives. Since death was regarded as a pollution, it lay near at hand not only to expiate this in the individual case and to give the dead their due, but once in the year to provide in a general way for the fulfilment of these two duties. But the celebrations of the dead bear different names—νεχύσια, ἀγριώνια, χύτροι—and do not fall at the same time; and the belief in intercourse with the dead and in their continuance in another world has not always been the same. Thus a festival of the dead must not be presupposed for primeval times; rather, the belief itself must be investigated.

Many readers will have been waiting impatiently for this question, because to them—however it be answered—it is a principal element of religious belief, so that they take it for granted that it must always have been so. Erwin Rohde’s Psyche is an imperishable book, and to many it seems to have treated conclusively the Greek belief in the soul. Precisely because it is imperishable, I deliberately refrain from engaging with it directly. The most important archaeological discoveries were still unknown to Rohde; monumental evidence lay altogether farther from him. What is beyond question is that among the Greeks there once arose the belief that man, in his perishable body, possesses a soul—his true self—through which he lives and feels and thinks, and which continues to live after separation from the body, however this may be conceived. When this occurred we shall see later. Psychology thereafter remains a principal component of philosophical thought, even among those who deny the soul’s survival, and philosophical religion exerts its influence upon the wider circles that are inaccessible to philosophising. This Hellenic belief in the soul passes into Christian religion when philosophically educated Hellenes elaborate the doctrine in scientific form. But it did not belong to the heritage of Judaism. For ancient Hebrew—indeed, probably Semitic—religion had known no survival of the dead; and what was later added under foreign influence and taken over by the earliest Christians was the resurrection of the dead man. This was entirely intelligible in the case of Paul, for he expected the end of the world and the Last Judgement in the immediate future, and therefore also the revivification of the recently deceased brethren—a bodily revivification, to which reflections and imaginings concerning the future body necessarily attached themselves. The multitude, however, conceived the resurrection as a renewal of the body; they were unwilling to renounce sensuous pleasures in the future blessed life; Jesus himself had reckoned on drinking wine again on earth after the coming of the βασιλεία θεοῦ. The Church incorporated the promises of this belief into its Creed⁴¹¹ and maintained them even as the soul came increasingly to be conceived in a wholly Hellenic manner. One thing, however, has remained for it a central article of faith: the persistence of the individual person. To many it therefore seems necessary to assume that some such belief in the soul must be present in every religion. But this is an axiom that must not be allowed to obstruct historical inquiry; and such inquiry can proceed only from the way in which men comport themselves toward their dead. Nor may we allow ourselves to be misled by the hypothesis that belief in the gods in general arose from belief in the power of the dead—a variant of primus in orbe deos fecit timor—a hypothesis which, for my part, I do not at all understand how it can even appear debatable to serious scholars. For the men whose belief we are investigating were accustomed to the sight of the dead (and indeed also to killing) in a wholly different manner from today, when many shrink from the sight of a corpse and only very rarely see one. War has, for its participants, restored the conditions of primeval time—also in the care for fallen comrades and for enemies who, through death, have become comrades; for so the true warrior feels, at least the German.

Here too we shall proceed safely only if we approach the ancient Hellenes without preconceived opinions—neither as if we know how matters truly stand with life and death, nor as if we know how the primitive man must have thought about them simply because he is man—but if we establish the facts, so far as that is possible, in them the belief we seek finds expression.⁴¹² It would therefore be premature if we were to assume from the outset that man resists regarding the dead person, who only just lived and acted, as annihilated because his body perishes, and therefore supposes that he has merely passed into another form of life,⁴¹³ in which he somehow continues with the same bodily needs, or at least persists as his own shadow. Still more must we set aside the question whether it is believed that certain favoured individuals can be snatched away by the gods into their realm or elsewhere in order to continue living there. For these remain exceptions, and in the presence of the dead such a belief cannot arise. The first thing from which we must proceed is death itself, which turns the man into a corpse. What happens to it?—and in doing so we must even consider what can happen to it. Right at the beginning of the Iliad we hear that many warriors become food for dogs and birds; only a late interpolation in Η speaks of a truce for the burial of the dead. The mass, therefore, does not receive what the dead man has a claim to—barrow and grave-marker, which in any case are soon forgotten and cannot preserve the memory of him who lies beneath. So that his son Sarpedon may receive this last honour, Zeus has the body carried home from the battlefield. Patroclus’ corpse is fought over with fury and receives a splendid burial. Achilles’ will receive the same, and in our Iliad Hector’s body too is not eaten by dogs but handed over to his people for solemn burial. That was not always so: dogs devoured them; evidently the enemy was to be utterly annihilated through the destruction of his body. The murderer who hacked the corpse to pieces (the so-called μασχαλισμός) did so for the same purpose: the man is the corpse. Everything therefore depends, for the dead man himself, upon solemn burial: he is in his body. Only apparently does cremation contradict this, though it is decidedly preferred by the nobility; it was always more costly and therefore unattainable for very many.⁴¹⁴ For the continued existence of the man, however, the burning of his corpse has never mattered; it sufficed that his bones were gathered and solemnly laid to rest. Hector’s funeral is conducted in his homeland by his kin and thus accords with the custom by which even one who had died in his bed was buried; here the poet follows the life he knows. With Patroclus everything is different; here the poet lingers over the burning and the accompanying sacrifices and evidently follows a tradition that reaches far further back, while he himself already knows something quite different.⁴¹⁵ At all times the solemn laying-out of the corpse was the first act; the gold masks of the princes were intended for this and show that it then lasted a long time.⁴¹⁶ Visitors came and brought gifts that the dead man was to take with him. A solemn funeral feast is held in Homer before the burial, later after it.⁴¹⁷ At Hector’s bier ἀοιδοί sing what is evidently a ritual song, into which the wailing of the women falls in. The epic poet does not transmit the song itself, but he does give the laudatory lament of the nearest female relatives; each time the wailing of the women joins in, and finally that of the whole people. Lament for the loss, praise of the dead, dominate everything: nothing of a future life or even of future activity. The poet deliberately keeps at a distance all the more violent features which we must supply for ourselves—not only the cutting of the hair by the relatives,⁴¹⁸ the mourning dress of the women, but also their expressions of grief, beating of the breasts, tearing of the cheeks. It should go without saying that these are signs of wild excitement, such as genuine passion produces, even if at times they occur because custom demands it; for this purpose professional mourners were also hired, and even singers, corresponding to the ἀοιδοί of the Iliad.⁴¹⁹ Whether blood flows from the scratches is immaterial. King Priam rolls in the dust and befouls his head with it (Ω 163). That is no less a wild—though bloodless—outburst of grief. The disfigurement of the body, the rending of garments, and then for the whole period of mourning the laying aside of customary dress, mean the same thing. Upon this domestic rite follows the funeral procession, the ἐχφορά to the place of burning, that is, as a rule, to the grave, as is already depicted on geometric vases; then the burning itself, the gathering of the bones by the relatives, the burial with all that is given to accompany them, the raising of the mound. It is the labour of many hours, indeed of whole days, at which of course not the entire train of mourners is present. There will not have been a lack of farewells, of the ὀλολυγή of the women.⁴²⁰ We see it in the paintings which, since the geometric period, gladly depict scenes of the cult of the dead, because plaques and vessels are intended for it. The burial of Patroclus gives us a picture that corresponds perfectly with the findings of the Mycenaean graves; in real life the poet had seen nothing of the sort any more. Patroclus is a θεράπων; he has no property of his own, but his lord and friend gives him everything that the warrior needs—arms and clothing and provisions, dogs and horses and captive enemies for service. He himself performs the slaughter; evidently he, who represents the absent family, is bound to undertake the heavy task. There will have been other ritual acts as well, which the poet passes over, but which we can supplement from what the fortunate care taken in the Swedish excavation of the untouched grave at Midea has brought to light. Human bones are not lacking there and were to be expected, in the same sense as those of the horses and dogs. The Egyptians of the Old Kingdom, the Germans, and the Slavs went far beyond this in the slaughter of a retinue for the dead. It is highly plausible that there was a time when the Hellenes acted in the same way; but that lay in the past—later it was wholly forgotten. One should therefore beware of inferring from the find at Midea, where husband and wife seem to have been buried together, the sacrifice of the widow. That a slave-woman, perhaps one of his concubines, was given to the dead man will often have occurred. The small stone or terracotta naked female figures already found in pre-Greek graves, which were formerly taken for goddesses, point to this: they replace the woman whom the dead man is not to lack even in the new life. But for the sacrifice of a free woman, let alone of the wife, there is not the faintest indication anywhere in the tradition.⁴²¹

After the cremation Achilles arranges funeral games, for which he sets out rich prizes. The introduction of these games stems from another poet, who thus missed them at so noble a celebration, doubtless because in his own time they were expected. It is very likely that the more popular funeral games of Pelias in painting served him as a model. We must therefore not refer this honouring of the dead back to primeval times. In the Thebais there were also funeral games for the child Archemoros, of which we know only the chariot race. Here modern misinterpretation again intrudes and seeks to distort the facts so that blood-offerings to the dead are to be seen in them, as in Etruscan-Roman gladiatorial combats (if those were intended as such). But it is the most distinguished guests who compete, and careful measures are taken to prevent the contest from becoming serious. Hesiod as a poet won a tripod at the agōnes in honour of a deceased prince and boasts that the heirs distributed all the promised prizes. They therefore expended a portion of the inheritance that fell to them on the games, and the competitors were once more guests of the dead man. Achilles celebrates with those for Patroclus his own funeral games; he knows that he himself will soon die and rejoices to bestow his wealth upon his comrades instead of taking it with him into his grave. The games do not belong to the cult of the dead at all, but to the feast which the heir gives in honour of the dead; they are also celebrated on other occasions, in honour of gods who are rich enough to provide them, and when a prince wishes to display his wealth he will make use of a god’s festival. Alcinous holds agōnes for his guest.

The shaft-graves of Mycenae already contain traces of a cult of those buried in them. Later, when the citadel was enlarged, the whole precinct was enclosed and hallowed. The old royal house thus received a cult from the heirs of its power, who were not necessarily heirs of the body. They themselves built the far more splendid tholos-tombs, and their vassals adopted this custom as well; in the Argolid and other regions, even in Crete, tholos-tombs arose in imitation of Mycenaean practice; who their builders were has perhaps not yet been determined with certainty. In any case, this tomb-cult does not come from Crete but is Hellenic. This has found striking confirmation in the gold masks of Trebenishte; for this custom, which persisted in the north down into the sixth century, can be connected with Mycenae only in such a way that the immigrants brought it with them; the masks placed upon the princes— not upon their wives—at the prothesis will not always have been of gold. At Midea there has also been found a grave that contained no bodies,⁴²² but two stones which from a distance recall a human form, beside them an offering-table and even a slaughter-table, with abundant traces of fire and blood. The corpses, then, were not present, yet they nevertheless received the offerings; the stone represented them, just as elsewhere it represented a god. Where there is a grave, the dead man is there also, or can come and enjoy his sacrifice like a god. One must not speak of a soul; souls do not eat, and the Mycenaeans knew nothing of souls. Such cenotaphs have always been erected; how else, for example, could one proceed in the case of those drowned?⁴²³

The construction of a dromos is calculated for a permanent cult and often also for later burials of the same family. In Mycenae this did not occur after the immigrants of the second stratum had broken the citadel; most of the graves were forgotten, the most splendid one at some point discovered and declared to be the Treasury of Atreus. At Acharnai, which retained its pre-Greek name, the tholos-tomb of Menidi was later reused by another family or by several; for an unbroken cult of the original occupants of the tomb is inconceivable. Later the hero’s grave is preserved as such and held sacred; this will often have occurred and contributed to the hero-cult of later times. Then people believed that heroes wandered about and thus acted upon this world. Whether this was already believed in Mycenae is in no way implied by any belief in the survival of the dead in another world. Thebes is punished with pestilence because the murder of Laius remains unexpiated and his murderer is in the land; but Laius himself does nothing toward this. Such is the belief even when a powerful hero-cult exists alongside it. It is a very strong ancestor-cult of the royal house that brought about the lavish splendour of the Mycenaean graves; the prosperity of the lineage must have depended upon it. But whether the dead themselves, and not rather the gods, avenged the neglect of the cult, cannot for us be decided. That the epic knows nothing of any continuing power exercised by the dead, indeed nothing at all of a permanent cult of the grave, must not be underestimated. Above all it must be noted that the graves of the broad mass of the people show nothing comparable, so that Karo has come, precisely on the basis of the shaft-graves, to the conclusion that the princely tombs differ not merely quantitatively through the splendour of their construction and their gifts, but that only the princes survived, and that the later, widely diffused general cult of the dead extended only gradually to other strata of the population. So many crouched burials are found without any grave-gifts at all. It will be of the greatest importance to gain certainty here, which presupposes the dating of the graves and the possibility of distinguishing between Hellenes and pre-inhabitants; the Carian graves of the islands contain grave-gifts. It is in any case highly significant that Agamemnon, because he had been a king in life, has become in the underworld a friend and πρόπολος of its lords and rules over those who have died in honour (Aeschylus, Choephori 355), and that the heroes in the Nekyia possess consciousness and converse with Odysseus without drinking blood. At that time, however, the hero-belief was alive.

The later, yet still very ancient custom corresponds to what the princes of the Mycenaean age believed and practised, though on a more modest scale. The dead man takes with him food and drink, household utensils, adornment and weapons, in so far as his heir renounces the movable goods; the klēros is not his property but belongs to the family, ultimately to the tribe; he inherits only the usufruct. If the heir cannot do better, he gives small replicas of what he would gladly give in reality; thus he also acts toward the gods. When money exists, a coin replaces the money left behind or its value.⁴²⁴ Only irreligious rationalism sees in this a buying-off or a deception; it is the same as with the little pots and the small weapons. To sacrifice χαδʹ δύναμιν is all that is required. That usages once full of meaning later become mere forms preserved by habit, and even undergo reinterpretation—as in the case of the Charon’s obol—is self-evident. The continuance of care for the dead is practised by families; Aeschylus (Choeph. 483–88) expressly has the children acknowledge the cult of the grave—yet this is in a royal house. Solon requires from the candidate for the highest office proof of a family grave, which will lie upon his own land. It was not forgotten that burial had once taken place within one’s own house—better said, within the peace of one’s own homestead. But dependants, once the λαοί, later the mass of the people, could not possess hereditary graves; and how could a grave, even if marked by a stone, receive permanent cult? Death brings pollution into the house so long as the corpse lies within it, and pollutes all who enter it.⁴²⁵ The Iliad knows nothing of this, but Patroclus—and Elpenor too—beg for swift burial, otherwise they cannot enter the house of Hades. Then they will have rest and no longer trouble their kin. Later there are ordinances concerning the duration of pollution, concerning the funeral rites and the grave-gifts, mostly in order to curb luxury. For the first period after death, offerings on the third and ninth day after burial are customary—retained even by Oriental Christians in their commemorations of the dead; yet precisely in early times other dates also occur. The institution of a general festival of the dead will have sufficed for many. One must always distinguish between the funeral rite, which frees the house from the corpse and brings the dead to rest, and the cult of the grave. Apart from the purifications of the survivors, everything is done for the sake of the dead; no return is expected. The offerings are ἐναγίσματα, from which the living eat nothing; and if they hold a περίδειπνον, he does not share in it—at least I know of no trace of this.⁴²⁶ He is not annihilated together with his corpse, but has “passed over into another form of life.” Here two conceptions mingle which in truth exclude one another. On the one hand, the dead are imagined as dwelling in their grave and there receiving food and drink from their kin—at least at first—because one believes that they continue to have the same needs; and at the same time they are conceived as existing in a common realm of the dead, the abode of all who have departed. We should remind ourselves that modern belief tolerates the same contradictions.⁴²⁷ Insofar as the dead man has departed from this life and entered another, his bond with the realm of the living is dissolved. For this world and for those who live in it he is gone forever. With later notions of the immortality of the soul one must not approach the early period—indeed, not Hellenic popular belief at all—even though the mythic names and stories outwardly persist, so that an appearance of continuity arises.

The realm of the dead is the house of Aïs, or Hades.⁴²⁸ Sovereignty there belongs to his consort, who has received and retained the pre-Greek name Persephone. Nor is there lacking testimony that calls her in Greek ἄνασσα or βασίλη. Like the dwellings of the gods, the house of Hades is at the edge of the earth; yet its location within the earth’s interior has prevailed, as was natural. True, not Ge, but Chthon might have taken back the human beings who sprang from her. But this did not occur; and if the Iliad (Ξ 457) once calls the lord of the dead Zeus χαταχθόνιος, that cannot be original—Ζεύς there signifies only an intensified θεός, as befitted the master of another world. As a cult-name, in very many regions μειλίχιος was used, euphemistically. His realm is now dark and dreadful, and the lot of those who have departed is sad and pitiable; now again they fare well with Plouton or Ploutos, “ὅχου βοῦν χολλύβου πιπρήσχουσιν,” as Callimachus mockingly says of this popular notion, which is by no means late nor born of a pessimistic judgement on earthly life, but rather rests on the thought that, if the dead man comes among gods, he will receive in abundance what the grave-gifts and offerings only scantily provide or wish for him. Access to the underworld is through caves, as at Tainaron and Hermione, later at Pontic Heraclea, or through a spring, like the Kynadra at Argos, the Avernusian Ἄορνος at Cyme. Yet these entrances belong only to the tales that lead heroes into the underworld. No deceased has ever come back through them. As the oldest dwelling-place of the gods on earth lay in a remote land beyond the sea, so too the dead dwell beyond a lake or river, the Oceanus, once this Carian name had been adopted. From this there later arose the subterranean rivers with their dreadful names. Odysseus now sails across in the Nekyia in order to summon the dead from their realm, but he then himself looks into that realm. Originally the legend had led him to the lords of that realm themselves.⁴²⁹ Heracles later descends through a cave in order to fetch the hound of Hades, Cerberus⁴³⁰; yet in the Iliad he fights the gods “ἐν πύλωι ἐν νεχύεσσι,” and this Pylos is to be conceived as lying upon the earth; in order to carry off the cattle of the roaring Γαρυϝόνης he must sail over the sea to the “red island.” Here the transformation of Aides into a three-bodied giant with his hound and the herdsman of his cattle, the wealth of Plouton, is wholly transparent. This is legend—fairy-tale, if one prefers—yet it discloses popular conceptions. The scene lies at the edge of the earth, not within it.

The old belief does not know Death as a god. Dying was for the ancient Hellenes the natural process that it is, unless violence brought life to an end. In battle a god might do this, but such were exceptional occasions. That Apollo and Artemis shoot men in Homer, and later only in imitation of Homer, as in the case of Coronis, plainly marks them as foreign gods. The Ker does not kill, even when she represents the divine power that brings about violent death through human hands. The Harpy carries men off; she does not kill. The Sphinx—more properly the Φίξ—is a monster that must be overcome, like the Ποινή whom Coroebus subdues. Whether the grim Charon (χαροπός) ever slew men is doubtful; he will have fetched them away as an unfriendly ψυχοπομπός. Thanatos is no figure of belief—neither as twin brother of Sleep, nor as the henchman of Hades from whom Heracles snatches Alcestis, nor as the comic personage in the tale of Sisyphus. Not even the cutting of a lock from Alcestis’ brow by Death, as from a sacrificial victim, may be taken as general belief.⁴³¹

The dead are the χαμόντες,⁴³² powerless, incapable of intervening in life. How they fare over there alters nothing in this respect. Even if at the feast of the dead they return to their houses and eat their porridge, they do no harm; dangerous are only the evil beings that may come forth when the gates of the underworld are open. What falls from the table belongs to them; how they obtain it need not concern us. One must accept contradictions. Man has experiences which bring him into intercourse with his dead. He sees them in dreams, hears their voice; he feels himself still guided by persons who once cared for him and advised him, not only in dreams. We know no different even today.⁴³³ He has also seen them bodily in the form of a bird or a snake; for such forms are also assumed by gods. Thus the house-snake has become the embodiment of the ancestors; in Athens the progenitor of the people lives in it. The avenger of blood will not doubt that the slain man aids him in his work of vengeance. Thus there later developed the belief that favoured dead possess the power still to act upon this world, in a manner akin to the gods. This is the hero-belief, which arose in the motherland and became very powerful. Yet far more momentous is the discovery in Ionia of the soul as the true, bodiless, immortal man, which then leads onward both to the highest philosophy and to the grossest imposture of necromancy. On the other hand, belief in divine justice takes offence at the prosperity of the unjust and demands a balancing after death, reward and punishment, and thus also a judgement of the dead. But all this arises only in the course of development over many centuries.

Footnotes

1. ↩ For this reason my account of State and Society begins with a similar description, with which I am here necessarily in contact.

2. ↩ In Hesiod, Theogony 124, he springs from Night just as Day does. The poet did not have a personal being in mind.

3. ↩ The city of Mantineia, like Tegea, was founded late through the amalgamation of several villages in the plain. To its north lies a πτόλις. This was too small to serve as a refuge-fortress, and must therefore once have been the stronghold of a lord who probably exercised authority over the surrounding villages. But the memory of this condition has not been preserved. The later designation πόλις must not mislead us into thinking that Arcadia, Messenia, and Elis—indeed essentially Laconia outside Sparta—were not inhabited down to the fifth century in χωμηδόν (villages), which does not exclude the existence of individual πόλεις in the older sense. Sparta itself was unfortified and therefore, in this sense, not a πόλις at all, though it was the seat of government and the residence of the ruling class.

4. ↩ In cult the title Ζεὺς βασιλεύς occurs only sporadically among the Ionians, at Erythrai (Syll. 1014, 110) and on Paros (IG XII 5, 134, 234). The later celebrated Zeus βασιλεύς of Lebadeia, together with a Hera βασιλεία, is of recent origin. More important is Ποσειδῶν βασιλεύς at Troezen, originally Ionian (Pausanias II 30.6). In poetry, too, Ζεὺς βασιλεύς is rare; in Aeschylus, Agamemnon 355, it stands with emphatic force.

5. ↩ In Sparta and Crete this developed into a fixed institution of boy-love; among the Eleans, too, it was recognized. In these tribes, which had arrived latest, it had been preserved from the period of migration, when they were accompanied by only a few free women; the Germanic migrations offer parallels (Ammianus 31.9 on the Taifali). The tribes that had settled earlier in Hellas lacked it, as did the Epirotes and Macedonians, and the Thracians likewise; it is also absent from the Homeric epic. Only later was the position of Ganymede interpreted in this sense, and Apollo came to love boys, because Sparta set the tone for the panhellenic aristocratic society, and because oriental customs exerted influence upon the Asiatic Greeks. The Greeks observed widespread boy-love among Etruscans and Celts, whereas it remained foreign to all Italic peoples. This difference deserves far greater attention than it usually receives.

6. ↩ In early times daughters were valued; this changes once they are required to receive a dowry. Hence the exposure of female infants comes to be practiced on a very large scale—something we can document only in later periods, when differing economic conditions and moral restraints produce further variations. But the exposure of children was never treated or regarded as a sin or a crime.

7. ↩ F. W. Otto, “Römische Sondergötter,” Rheinisches Museum 64, 449 — a most illuminating essay.

8. ↩ It is striking that harvest and vintage, which we are inclined to think of first, are comparatively foreign to the Greeks. The Thalysia do not extend far, and in Theocrit they are celebrated by the individual household. Instead, the festival of the first ripe ears (Θαργήλια) and that of broaching the new wine (Πιθοίγια) are observed; yet precisely the Thargelia are not of Hellenic origin. The name Θαλύσια is, of course, learnedly borrowed by Theocrit from Iliad I 534; neither did the Coan festival bear this name, nor is any harvest festival designated in Homer. Yet it was once a familiar festival-name among the Ionians, since a man could be called Θαλύσιος because he was born on it (A 458), just as Ἑόρτιος, Ἐροτίων, Νουμήνιος, and the like.

9. ↩ There is no evidence whatever for Hera as a cow, for she is not Io; and if a beautiful silver cow’s head has been found at Mycenae, this concerns Hera only if one assumes precisely what is to be proved.

10. ↩ When the god does not wish to be recognized, he is, for the person addressed, simply a man. The poet knows better, and his audience believes him. Modern rationalism, to be sure, credits them with having regarded the god’s appearance as a mere poetic fiction.

11. ↩ It is the grossest distortion to find in this the introduction of the Delphinios, or even of Apollo from Crete. In Delphi the god is not called δελφίνιος at all. What the derivation of the priests from Crete is meant to explain is made clear by Pindar (fr. 73). Whether there is a connection between Δελφοί, Βελφοί and δελφίν, βελφίν, I do not venture to decide—no more than whether the mountain Δίρφυς belongs here, which is now called Delphi.

12. ↩ It is transparent that the god is called δελφίνιος (in Crete δελφίδιος) wherever he has entered from the sea. Thus in Crete; for the Dorians had known him just as little as the Eteocretans. This is especially clear in Miletus. There the pre-Greek god of Didyma had remained overwhelmingly powerful, but was gradually Hellenized. In the city, however, they did not wish to have a mere offshoot of Didyma (just as in the harbor of the Hellenic city of Ephesus there stood a sanctuary of the Ἐφεσία, Strabo–Artemidorus 639), and therefore founded on the seashore a Delphinion.

13. ↩ Apollo has the raven as his messenger in the Eöe of Koronis (fr. 123). This is a poet’s invention, which is then playfully extended so that the raven first receives its black plumage as a bearer of ill tidings.

14. ↩ Entirely un-Greek is the notion that in Prasos a sow suckles the divine child.

15. ↩ Only bad etymology discovers in Ἀρχείσιος a she-bear who becomes the mother of Laertes. What truly belongs here are, of course, the ἄρχτοι as priestesses of Artemis.

16. ↩ Even Leonidas of Tarentum still knows of lions in Epirus (Hellenistic Poetry II, 31).

17. ↩ The jackal, too, is absent from Europe; hence θώς must be a loanword and will presumably be connected with the Phrygian δάος, even if that is said to mean “wolf.” It must likewise be a loanword in Phrygian–Thracian.

18. ↩ Aeschylus, Choephori 421: “λύχος γὰρ ὥστʹ ὠμόφρων θυμός.”

19. ↩ This is attested by Eratosthenes, by Harpocration δεχάζων, and by Zenobius V. 2 (under the text). From Wasps 389–94 it follows only that the image was enclosed by a fence of woven straw; nothing is said about its form. At 819 a statue of the hero—who after all “was in the wolf”—is to be brought out; Bdelycleon brings in some male clay figurine, and Philocleon is satisfied.

20. ↩ Aeschylus, Seven 145: Λύχειʹ ἄναξ λύχειος γενοῦ στρατῶι δαίωι — “Lord Lykeios, show yourself to the host as one of wolfish kind.” In this way the name could be justified and will have been meant in proper names as well, insofar as they did not carry an evil sense. The wolf as the animal of Apollo at Argos: Plutarch, Pyrrhus 32; as that of the Pythian Apollo in the wonder-tale in Phlegon 3.13. There was also a Lykoreia on Parnassus, whence the god is called Λυχωρεύς.

21. ↩ Oedipus 203: Λύχει’ ἄναξ, corresponding to Artemis in Λύχια ὄρη. Euripides, Telephus 700: ὧ Φοῖβ’ Ἄπολλον Λύχιε. Beyond this nothing belongs to the tragedian, but to Aristophanes, as the resolutions show, even though the scholiast says ὁ στίχος ἐχ Τηλέφου.

22. ↩ The amusing Ovidian fable of the origin of frogs must of course not be taken as evidence of a Lycian belief—unless one is prepared also to regard it as “belief” that the toad, with its cry, laments having come into the pond as an old maid.

23. ↩ Although he is blind, he possesses on the citadel of Thebes an οἰωνοσχοπεῖον (Pausanias IX 16, 1; Euripides Bacchae 347; K 274 with the scholia; cf. on Euripides Heracles 596).

24. ↩ Philochorus, in Athenaeus 393e, knows the Boio; nothing more can be inferred from the passage. The poem which is here attributed to Boios therefore need not be so old; the stories do not sound like it. But Philochorus must have known a doctrine. The name is taken from the Dorian village Boion.

25. ↩ How foolish, in truth, is the transformation of the Megarian Scylla into a χεῖρις: Scylla means “dog,” and this name suits a parricide.

26. ↩ That the song of the nightingale then awakened quite different feelings from those it does for us, and even for later antiquity, is shown by Reden und Vorträge I, 194.

27. ↩ In the call of the guinea-fowl someone, somewhere and at some time, heard the name Μελέαγρος, which led to the notion that the birds were lamenting for him—so Aelian, Hist. an. IV 42; from this there later arose the metamorphosis of the sisters of Meleager. Sophocles, however, says nothing of this, but only mentions their lament, transferred from the tale that amber was said to have arisen from the tears of the Heliads (Euripides, Hippolytus 738): amber is now supposed to arise from the tears of the birds. He places them in the farthest East, whereas the Heliads were imagined in the West. Of any transformation of the sisters of Meleager he says nothing: one need only read Pliny 37, 40. That he spoke of this in the Meleager is neither attested nor likely, since only a deus ex machina could have proclaimed it. By such a method one would have to assign the passage of the Hippolytus to the Phaethon. Guinea-fowl were still rare in the fifth century; they were on the island of Leros, in or near the sanctuary of Iokallis Parthenos, and were protected (Photios s.v. weisayoldes; Aelian V 27; Athenaeus 655e from Klytos of Milet). Clearly someone had presented the rare birds to the goddess, and they multiplied because they were spared. Thus the first peacocks had come to Hera at Samos (Menodotos, in Athenaeus 655a). It is only for this reason that the peacock is associated with Hera, a connection that generated further fables; the most recent is that the peacock reveals the very essence of the goddess—something for which she would scarcely thank us. Cocks in the Athenian Asklepieion are well known. According to Photios, guinea-fowl were once also on the Acropolis; if ever so, they did not persist there.

28. ↩ Aristophanes, Birds 769; Reden und Vorträge I, 191.

29. ↩ Very remarkable evidence from the present day is provided by Th. Boreas in the Πραχτιχά of the Athenian Academy, 19 May 1927, which I owe to his kindness.

30. ↩ The ἀγαθὸς δαίμον of the Alexandrians must of course not be confused with the Hellenic belief.

31. ↩ Φ 237 is important. Scamander throws the corpses of the Trojans up on the land, μεμυχὼς ἠύτε ταῦρος. This is not a reminiscence of a bull-form, which Homer does not know; rather, the bellowing teaches how men perceived that the roaring river was a divine bull.

32. ↩ Hesychius: ταῦρος ταύρεια ταῦροι; this from Amerias, Athenaeus 425 c. ταύρειος is an Ionic month-name. When the Aspis 104 introduces ταύρειος as protector of Thebes, no local cult may be inferred from this. The rhapsode knew the epithet and knew Poseidon as a generally Boeotian god. In Thebes he had no special significance.

33. ↩ Thus in the oldest version of the legend, Schol. Pind. Pyth. 4, 156a.

34. ↩ Hesychius s.v., where it is indeed easy to restore Ἐρίφιος, but in substance this will scarcely make any difference.

35. ↩ In the longer Homeric Hymn to Dionysus, and likewise still in Horace, Carm. II 19, 23, Rhoetum retorsisti leonis unguibus horribilique mala, which betrays ignorance. The visual arts cannot represent the transformation otherwise than by giving the god the animal as a companion.

36. ↩ Homer Φ 132 has such horse-sacrifices offered to the Scamander. But the river itself is conceived neither by Homer nor elsewhere as a horse, as among the Germans. The Illyrians shared the custom. Festus s.v. Hippius from a learned Greek source.

37. ↩ The sacrifice of the October Horse to Mars cannot be claimed for the primordial period. Later the Romans consecrated the ass to Vesta, because it turned the mill, a task which earlier had been performed by the household servants (thus presumably also by a daughter of the house), as in the household of Odysseus, where the millstone—previously the pot in which the grain was ground—stood beside the hearth. In Pompeii many houses still possessed their own mills. In the Athens of Aristophanes the woman no longer bakes the bread herself, but buys it from the ἀρτοπώλιδες; only in the household of Athena does a noble Athenian child serve as άλετρίς (Aristoph. Lysistr. 644), but at ten years of age she will not have been set to the mill.

38. ↩ My conjecture that the speaking horses imitate a speaking Arion in the old Thebais has been so strongly supported by Malten (Arch. Jahrbuch 29, 203) that one may rely upon it.

39. ↩ This is χαθιππάζεσθαι in Aeschylus, Eumenides 779, said precisely of the great gods in relation to the Erinyes, whose equine form the poet does not know either; there is no occasion to think of a horse in particular when encountering an ἐνάλλεσθαι. The χηλή of the daemon, Aeschylus Agamemnon 1660, does indeed belong to the horse, and it was a great pleasure to me nearly fifty years ago to vindicate it against the prevailing textual criticism and mythology. But it does not prove that the daemon—who in any case has no definite personality—is conceived in equine form; rather, that the poet, accustomed to horse-shaped beings of the underworld, gives him a hoof, more vividly than at Persae 516, δαῖμον ὡς ἄγαν βαρὺς ποδοῖν ἐνήλου. The sensuous imagination which once bestowed forms upon the gods is still alive. Malten, Jahrb. 29, 201, has assembled many such passages.

40. ↩ πῶλος (more rarely also μόσχος) is said of young persons; πῶλοι Δήμητρος, Ἀφροδίτης can be titles of maidservants of goddesses. Cf. π. Δήμητρος 72 Schwyz., and still quite late at Patrai, CIG 1449; Dessau, Inscr. sel. 4042. The Aphrodite πωλώ on Thasos will designate the πῶλος that has many πῶλοι beneath it. Polos and Moschos are also human names.

41. ↩ It seems to me that vases with horse-heads are to be understood as intended for funerary cult and as grave-gifts—this holds also for the Tarentine “Underworld” vases.

42. ↩ The dead could ride only once the living did so. I cannot dismiss a reference to a knightly estate as readily as Malten does, when I recall how the aristocratic mother of Pheidippides insisted upon the ἵππος, and how in names such as Euxenippos, Hipparmodoros, Euarchippos (Ephoros in Xenophon, Hellenica II 3, 10) the horse is added, almost unorganically, to a complete personal name.

43. ↩ Even in Book B of the Iliad the Dream comes at Zeus’ command and approaches Agamemnon’s bed; only then does it assume the form of Nestor.

44. ↩ With the richest learning L. Malten has treated the horse in the Jahrbuch des Instituts 29, for the most part in a manner convincing to me. I myself have set forth similar points in Sitzungsberichte Berlin 1920 (Melanippe).

45. ↩ The dogs in the sanctuary of Asklepios at Epidauros and in some of its offshoots show how quite primitive notions could still break through—notions which, if we look at the whole, must already be called superstition.

46. ↩ Zenobius IV 44 preserves an Ionic proverb, Ἱστίηι θύει (probably from Hipponax): ἐπὶ τῶν μηδενὶ ῥαιδίως μεταδιδόντων, because the παλαιοί contributed nothing from the sacrifice made for them. The custom struck later ages as strange and was no longer understood by the paroemiographer. It may rather have meant that a sacrifice at one’s own hearth concerned only one’s own household. In Diogenian IV 68 a different turn of phrase appears: that one ought not to take anything away from the sacrifice, a rule which applied in many cults. Hence the saying was uttered ἐπὶ τῶν πολλὰ ἐσθιόντων, which has been corrupted into ἑστιώντων and not corrected. This explanation is wholly mistaken.

47. ↩ In Italic Heraclea the name on a dedication seems to read “Ἱστιαία ὡς Ἀθηναία,” but this is by no means certain (IG XIV 646). The city-name Ἑστιαία is secure; Ἑστιαιῶτις, however, cannot derive directly from ἑστία and remains problematic also in its sense.

48. ↩ It is very remarkable that already Euripides, fr. 944, propounds as a doctrine of the wise that the earth is Ἑστία ἡμένη ἐν αἰθέρι; and the Neoplatonist in Macrobius I 23, 8 is justified in comparing this with Plato.

49. ↩ IG II² 1214 (Peiraeus), 1229 (the Krokonidai). Among the ἄλλοι θεοί there is no Hestia—naturally, since she possessed no temple and therefore no treasury. In the Imperial period the Roman Vesta, as Ἑστία Ῥωμαίων, has a priest (IG III 322, 365). In individual cases an altar may of course be set up for her, e.g. on Thera, IG XII 3, 424; the occasion cannot be determined. A dedication on Thasos, Ἑστίηι Ἀφροδίτηι Ἑρμῆι (Bull. Corr. Hell. L 244, 23), unites with the ancient pair Hestia–Hermes a goddess much venerated on the island, whom the family in question had presumably chosen as its particular protectress.

50. ↩ The five verses are so pieced together that lines 1–3 derive from a Delphic hymn, while lines 4–5 transfer the turn to the private house in which the rhapsode is performing. Line 3, “From your locks oil ever drips,” once introduced a laudatory personal description.

51. ↩ Bull. Corr. Hell. 29, 225; IG XII 1, 701 ff. A dedication to Ἱστίη δημίη, XII 5, 238, of the fifth century.

52. ↩ Callimachus, Hymn 6, 108, has the mother of Erysichthon rear a calf for Hestia—one of those charming inventions by which the metropolitan poet delights in characterizing primitive heroism. In Athens a piglet was raised for her, Aristoph. Wasps 844.

53. ↩ It is very important that in the high-archaic temples at Prinia in Crete, which directly continue the Minoan cult, there is inside a ἐσχάρα; that is, burnt offerings were made there as well. The god had his hearth in his house just as men did. The inference of a cult such as that later accorded to the Laphria seems to me, however, too hasty.

54. ↩ It is characteristic that in Ionic ἐπίστιον means “family,” Herodotus V 72—not in the sense of lineage, but of the household, where Attic would say οἶχος.

55. ↩ When in Choephori 800 the chorus calls upon the σύμφρονες θεοί of the house of the Atreidae to aid Orestes in his vengeance, these are not merely the ancestral spirits, as I once translated it too narrowly in order to be intelligible, but all the gods who share his feeling—the whole tradition attached to the ancient ὄλβος of the house, which a pious sensibility experiences as divine powers without being able to name them. So too the returning Heracles in Euripides (609) wishes to enter and greet the θεοὶ χατὰ στέγας, the homeland and its peace, in the same devout spirit and without any specific gods being meant.

56. ↩ Wiedemeyer, Unter der Sonne Irans 285, has observed the same custom in present-day Iran, and similar observations have earlier been made in various parts of the world.

57. ↩ If in Phrygia phalloi really stood upon graves, I believe neither that they represented a god nor that they represented the dead man, but rather that they marked the grave of a man. For the same reason I cannot persuade myself to see in the finger on an Orestes-grave (Pausanias VIII 34) Hans Carvel’s “eleventh finger.”

58. ↩ Herodotus II 51 derives it from his Pelasgians. In 49 he traces Dionysiac phallagogy back to Egypt, in accordance with his general theory. If Melampus is supposed to have transmitted the latter, there must have existed τελεταί of this seer as of Orpheus—cultic prescriptions in verse.

59. ↩ Pausanias VI 26, 5. When late writers simply name Kyllene as the cult-place of the phallos, they are thinking of the mountain; but they have never been there and are misconstruing the literary tradition.

60. ↩ Delian cult-song, Athenaeus 622 c.

61. ↩ Hellenistische Dichtung I 87. In the second volume several related epigrams are explained.

62. ↩ Thus the Athenians called the god of Imbros (IG. XII 8, 52), who in fact bore the still Carian name Imbrasos, exactly as a river on Samos was called; yet the god is not Carian, but belongs with those of Samothrace, whom Herodotus (II 51) calls Pelasgian. The Lydians had a Kandaules, who was identified with Hermes; the word meant “dog-strangler,” and since χύων seems to be contained in it, it belongs to the Indo-European element in Lydian.

63. ↩ Pernice, Festschrift für Benndorf 75. Beside the αἰσχρουργῶν there stood no more than what we read. λαι suffices, λαὶ χατ’ ἀποχοπὴν ἐπὶ τῆς αἰσχρουργίας, Hesychios–Photios; or λᾶι, Straton, Anth. Pal. XII 187. Unnamed phallic daemons, e.g. in Winter, Typenkatalog I 213 ff. How these could pass over into the Sileni may be clearly seen. Something quite special is the cult of phallic twins in a rural sanctuary near Chalkis, where, besides a small bronze image of these gods, many little bronze cattle were found, as well as a Mycenaean seal, though the rest belongs rather to the geometric period. The editor Pappabasiliu calls the beings Διόσχουροι Κάβειροι, Πραχτιχά 1912, 147. So much is true in this, that for the herdsmen they are what the twin riders are for warriors; we cannot name them. Perhaps I ought to have classed them among the dwarfs. At Olynthus (II 34) two small ithyphallic Herms were found, one of them with a female head—something to me unheard of.

64. ↩ Aristophanes (Pollux VII 108) says, evidently in order to mark an ugly man as unsaleable, πλὴν εἴ τις πρίαιτο δεόμενος βασχάνιον ἐπὶ χάμινον ἀνδρὸς χαλχέως. He is therefore thinking of the φθόνος.

65. ↩ Originally the fascinum which Roman boys wore in the bulla was likewise the symbol of the divine power meant to protect the child until manhood. That was pious religion. The innumerable little bronze phalloi of late times are amulets of superstition; they have as little to do with religion as do the often elegant lascivious representations of play with the phallus, which are also not lacking and are merely play.

66. ↩ Whoever would judge otherwise should look at Procne: she is supposed to be a mother who kills her Itys and then laments him for ever.

67. ↩ A story, certainly taken from an older Socratic source, in Plutarch, De genio Socratis 580e, brings a herd of swine into the streets of Athens.

68. ↩ Harpocration s.v., taken up as an epithet by Lycophron 680.

69. ↩ For example between Argolis and Arcadia, Pausanias II 38, 7.

70. ↩ Plutarch, De garrulitate 502 f.

71. ↩ In the little epic of Heracles (Theocritus 25.5) Hermes requires that a question about the right way be answered—just as the curses of Buzyges also enjoined.

72. ↩ The transformation from διάχτωρ has in the Homeric scholia, Pap. Oxyr. 1017 (VIII p. 103), received so many parallels that it is assured. To drag in the χτέρεα, as modern etymology has attempted, is once again devised without any insight into its nature. The ancient epithet ἐριούνιος remains unexplained; I cannot find Bechtel’s attempt (Lexil. Hom. 138) any more credible than the ancient ones. How the Φορωνίς (Et. M. s.v., certainly from Apollodorus) could discover the χλεπτοσύνη in it is not apparent. The epithet σῶχος, Y 72, appears in A as the name of a Trojan and can everywhere be read as contracted from an anapaest. Connection with σώιζειν in no way fits; hence I have interpreted it as σόϝαχος.

73. ↩ Very beautiful is the epithet ἀχάχητα; he harms no one, for that he slays Argos arises from the interpretation of the unintelligible Ἀργειφόντης. Originally matters stood thus: Hera sets the πανόπτης Argos as guardian over Io; but Zeus sends Hermes, who has the magic wand, lulls Argos to sleep, and steals the cow, whom Zeus transforms back into Io. So still on the Munich vase-painting, Wiener Vorlegeblätter 1890, pl. 12. In Hesiod fr. 188 (not from the Aigimios) it is expressly said that Argos did not sleep, in order that Hermes may become Ἀργειφόντης.

74. ↩ Sappho fr. 135 D, at a wedding-feast, evidently that of Heracles.

75. ↩ It is very strange that in Ionic names the elements are inverted, so that the divine name is relegated to the second position: Πύθερμος Χρύσερμος, Διονύσερμος; Latycheus (Inscr. Ponti 226) is a Herm with the head of Dionysus, the reverse of Ἑρμαφρόδιτος. The same occurs with the divine name Μάνδρος discovered by Letronne: Ἀναξίμανδρος, and the like. The Doric μάνδρα has no place in Ionia.

76. ↩ The Ἑρμαῖα of the gymnasia belong to a later period.

77. ↩ Thus, for example, Pindar (Pyth. 4.178) names two sons among the Argonauts of whom nothing further is ever known. Noble—though no longer of the heroic age—is the ancestor of the Eleusinian family of the Kerykes. This Keryx could only have received a daughter of Cecrops as his mother once Eleusis had become Athenian; his father Eumolpos (Pausanias I 38, 3) is evidently the more original figure.

78. ↩ Pausanias IX 22 gives the story in modern colours; an older feature is preserved in the scholion on Lycophron 680, where the Eretrians are also named as the defeated enemies. From them, or rather from the Graeans, the Boeotians had taken the territory on which they founded Tanagra.

79. ↩ Proceedings of the Norwegian Academy 1910.

80. ↩ Hiller von Gaertringen, Arkadische Forschungen, pl. XIII.

81. ↩ Thus he is still known to Artemidorus II 12. Thracian relief, Archäologischer Anzeiger 1929, 426.

82. ↩ Bulletin de Correspondance Hellénique XXVII, plate 7.

83. ↩ The hymn has reached the collection in as mutilated a state as we read it; beside it stands the well-preserved Hymn to Aphrodite. One sees how chance alone preserved the ancient poems in a single exemplar. Somewhere the collection was made, somewhere it was then multiplied. Grammarians never concerned themselves with it. We must therefore be content to remove only those corruptions which the hymn later suffered within the collection itself, and otherwise to disentangle the motifs. Thus one may here excise vv. 569–73; the χθόνιος is also inappropriate. There is still an error in the verses, which their author could only have arranged as follows:

                        571
πᾶσι δ’ ἐπὶ προβάτοισιν ἀνάσσειν χύδιμον Ἑρμῆν

                        569
χαὶ χαροποῖσι λέουσι χαὶ ἀργιόδουσι σύεσσι

                        570
χαὶ χυσὶ χαὶ μήλοισιν, ὅσα τρέφει εὐρεῖα χθών

84. ↩ For the rhapsodes Λύρα and χιθάρα make no difference; they always say χιθαρίζειν. Thus in Euripides’ Antiope Amphion plays the lyre which he has received from Hermes, and Hermes in turn from Apollo as ransom for the cattle (fr. 190).

85. ↩ The Charites are connected in cult with Hermes ἐναγώνιος (IG I 5; Aristophanes, Thesmophoriazusae 295). In IG V 2, 95, however, the Charites arise from an over-hasty restoration.

86. ↩ They must be meant on the relief published in Bulletin de Correspondance Hellénique XIII, plate 14; for one of the three carries a child—thus Hersē with Keryx, whom she bore to Hermes. Here he is playing the flute.

87. ↩ Pfuhl, Archäologisches Jahrbuch 20, p. 79.

88. ↩ Scholia on Aristophanes, Acharnians 1076; Frogs 218.

89. ↩ Nilsson (Griechische Feste, p. 397) has rightly discerned here the homeland of the goddess; only he failed to draw the full consequences. These were drawn by Sittig, Nomina theophorica (Halle 1911), p. 68, with a penetrating critique of the Hecate episode in the Theogony. He is wrong only in taking Ἐνοδία to be a mere epiclesis.

90. ↩ Inscription no. 129 in the Miletus volume; Delphinion, Molpoi inscription = Sylloge 57, 28.

91. ↩ Euripides fr. 968, which can only come from the Alexandros. Aristophanes parodied the verse; the gloss is preserved more fully than in Eustathius on Odyssey 1491, 33, in Bekker’s Anecdota p. 336: “Dogs are sacrificed to Hecate, or she herself is represented with a dog’s head”; hence the expression. A foolish fable then attaches itself, according to which she herself had once been a dog.

92. ↩ Lycophron at v. 77 names Hecate after Zerynthos; at vv. 449 and 958 he knows an Aphrodite Ζηρυνθία, striking and incapable of control. At v. 1178 he identifies Hecate with Brimo, that is, with Φεραία.

93. ↩ Expanded scholium on Aristophanes, Peace 277, in Suidas A 1164.

94. ↩ Sophocles, Ῥιζοτόμοι 491–92, gives the finest picture of this ἐνοδία Ἑχάτη and of the practices of the sorceresses.

95. ↩ Theopompus (Porphyry, De abstinentia II 16) relates, in an edifying tale, how a man of Methydrion every new moon crowns Hermes and Hecate. In Methydrion no one had ever thought of such a thing; Theopompus transfers to Arcadia a usage native to Chios or to Athens.

96. ↩ Alcamenes created an agreeable work, the three figures dancing round a pillar, the τρίμορφος τριοδῖτις. But the Lady of the Crossroads did not belong at the ascent to the citadel; she became three-formed just as Hermes became τριχέφαλος, and what he fashioned might just as well have been Charites or Nymphs or Agraulids. His heart was not in the task.

97. ↩ The first two Orphic Hymns are in truth a single one, addressed to Hecate προθυραία, as an introduction. This is evident also from the fact that after II the θυμίαμα is given, which properly belongs before I. In I.9 Kroll has restored λισσόμενος, in II.3 θηλειῶν σώτειρα μόνη belongs together; in 4 ὠχυλόχεια παροῦσ’ ἀνίαις θνητῶν, but not all mortals beget, therefore νέαις. In 13 λυσιχηδέες is right; one need not trouble here about the metrical offence; equally right is III.6 ληθιμέριμνα. In II.12 I wished to change the senseless ἡ σεμνή into εὐσέμνη, although the word is unattested; then I saw in Hermann that he had already found it.

98. ↩ It is, however, gross arbitrariness to make Hecate a Kourotrophos merely because in the Homeric novella of the so-called Herodotus (30) the women, celebrating the Kourotrophos, are met by Homer in the city at a τρίοδος.

99. ↩ Harmodios (Athenaeus 149c) relates that in Phigaleia one takes from the banquet the ἀπομαγδαλιαί on account of the νυχτερινοὶ φόβοι; these are thrown to the dogs of Hecate, as the passage has rightly been interpreted. Such φόβοι also seize the sick in their beds, and Hecate sends them: Hippocrates, ἱερὴ νοῦσος 1.

100. ↩ To the fragments collected by Kaibel there must be added one edited by Cohn, Zu den Paroemiographen p. 71, Hermes 34 (1899), p. 208.

101. ↩ Musaeus fr. 16 Diels (Schol. Apollonius Rhodius III 467 and 1035; the first passage was overlooked by Diels) makes Hecate the daughter of Zeus and Asteria; Zeus hands her over to Perses.

102. ↩ A passage of the Bellerophon, into which Enodia had been introduced by an erroneous conjecture, has been disposed of in Hermes 64 (1929), p. 462.

103. ↩ An archaic dedication from Nemea, IG IV 484, ending in ‒ι ἐφοδίαι, I consider it advisable to keep at a distance.

104. ↩ In Polyaenus VIII 43 a story from the Ionian migration is told which, though modernized, contains material of real value. The conquest of Erythrae succeeds through the magic of a priestess of Enodia. That she is expressly summoned from Thessaly at the command of the Delphic god is an addition in the later manner, which everywhere operates with oracles, and shows that the narrator knows Enodia from Thessaly, but no longer from Erythrae. We, however, know that in Erythrae and Chios the language itself still bears traces of an Aeolian population, so that the Ionians here, as later in Smyrna and Phocaea, encountered Aeolians—more precisely, Aeolians from Thessaly. These had brought Enodia with them, and from the legend of her establishment this feature has been transformed and preserved.

105. ↩ The coin writes ἐννοδίας, and such doubling occurs more often, finally even in the name of the bishop Ennodius; but in the choice of this signum the goddess no longer stood as patron.

106. ↩ A third god was added, of whose name older copies preserve ΠΟ; the piece is now broken. πο is unintelligible, but the supplement πόλει is inadmissible, since it would have to read τῆι πόλει.

107. ↩ A stone from Oreos, IG XII 9, 1193, is restored as [Ἀρτέμιδι, Ε]νοδίαι, but the available space does not admit Artemis. One would like to know what actually stood there; most likely Ἑχάτηι alone.

108. ↩ Hesychius: Boeala: “Φεραία· Ἀθήνησι ξενιχὴ θεός, οἳ δὲ τὴν Ἑχάτην.” The cult of Φεραία also appears in Argos and Sicyon in Pausanias, and I should think elsewhere as well.

109. ↩ Scholium on Theocritus II 35. We have encountered a similar “exposure” in the case of Hecate Enodia at Argos. That Hecate is a daughter of Zeus and Demeter appears in a now-destroyed story from the Ὑπομνήματα of Callimachus (fr. 556), which he must have excerpted from a rare source. The genealogy also stood in the Orphica (fr. 41), though that does not entail the story itself. Kalligeneia has the same parents (above p. 100). An Ephesian tale subordinating Hecate to Artemis appears in Callimachus fr. 100 h 4.

110. ↩ I have no reason whatever to capitulate before interpretations which may ingeniously combine many attractive notions, but stand helpless before the Greek evidence and the Greek sense. The verse ἱερὸν ἔτεχε πότνια χοῦρον Βριμὼ Βριμόν is metrically sound, but that does not guarantee even its antiquity. To believe, on the authority of the theological work excerpted by Hippolytus (Elench. V 8, 40), that the Eleusinian hierophant, after castrating himself with a draught of hemlock, publicly proclaimed it, I leave to those who can also tell us who the son of Brimo was, and to whose pleasure she yielded despite her name. In Clement (Protr. 13 P.) Brimo is Demeter. Why do they not believe him?

111. ↩ There follow Ἐπιμύλιος and Ἐπιχλιβάνιος, goddesses who seemed ridiculous to Cleitomachus; as epithets of Artemis no one will have regarded them as the protectress of mill and baking-oven. They appear nowhere else, so far as we know; προμυλαία in Pollux VII 180.

112. ↩ The feeling of keeping evil from entering is natural and ancient. At Cyrene, before the city gate, there stood an ἀποτροπαῖον, where, according to the menace in question, specific ἀποτροπαῖα were sacrificed, as is shown by the correct restoration in the Sacred Laws, I. In the course of time this leads to the ὁ τοῦ Διὸς παῖς χαλλίνιχος Ἡρακλῆς ἐνθάδε χατοιχεῖ upon the threshold, and thence further to the wholly profane cave canem.

113. ↩ I have already described the two as siblings in Hermes 21 (1886), p. 609.

114. ↩ On the Asiatic ivory relief (Athenische Mitteilungen 50, pl. VII) and on others of similar kind, fishes are likewise represented; the dominion of the goddess is thus extended to the waters. The Hecate of the Theogony might be conceived in such a form. A great number of such representations occur at the Orthia of Sparta. She often holds birds: she embraces, in fact, the whole of nature—but among barbarians. For the Hellenes the forest belongs to her, for in it they lived in primeval times, and they willingly assign to her the moist meadow on which flowers still flourish when the fields are parched.

115. ↩ Homeric Hymn 9 makes her journey from Smyrna to Claros to her brother; it will have arisen in that region. That she travels like the most august of the gods Pindar also says (Ol. 3.26; fr. 8). In place of horses the frieze of Phigaleia introduces deer, a feature taken up by Callimachus. I cannot regard it as an ancient conception; it is represented in the procession of the Laphria which Pausanias describes. Hymn 27 belongs to the Delphic circle. She appears first on the hunt, then goes to Delphi and leads, together with the Muses and the Charites, dances in honour of her mother Leto and of her children. The high-archaic vase in Pfuhl, Malerei no. 108, shows Artemis coming with her hind to her brother, who on a griffin-car plays the lyre, two Muses or Charites behind him—exactly corresponding to the hymn.

116. ↩ Eratosthenes (ap. Steph. Byz. s.v. Αἰθόπιον) thought that she received the torch from Hekate; Callimachus adhered instead to the theological interpretation which referred it to the moon. The matter is better understood from the fact that Thrasybulus, when he marched with his men from Phyle to free Athens and advanced against Munychia, was guided by a fiery light with which the goddess of Munychia showed him the way; in gratitude he set up on Munychia an altar to the Φωσφόρος. Thus Clement reports (Strom. 418 P.). The specification of place guarantees that we are here truly informed of the αἴτιον, which will have been recorded in an Atthis. The Phosphoros receives sacrifice before a meeting of the ekklesia, most recently in a not fully preserved list of gods, IG II² 902 from the year 182/1. She may very well have been inserted into this series in 403.

117. ↩ The offering of hair upon entry into the ephebate is normally associated with Apollo, and Hesychius, χουρεῶτις, names only Artemis in connection with the hair-cutting at the Apaturia; but the gloss may be abbreviated. In Sparta the nurses must go with the boys at a festival called the Τιθηνίδια to Artemis χορυθαλία (Athen. 139). This belongs to the state’s supervision of the upbringing of the Spartiates. λεχώ on grave-stones is not a divine name, but denotes death in childbirth. The scourging of the children (they are called παῖδες and pueri) seems only later to have been generally carried out; for in Xenophon, Lac. Pol. 2.9, after the permission to steal and the punishment of those caught, there follows—if one leaves the text as it stands—quite aptly the statement that it was accounted a fine achievement to steal as many cheeses as possible at the Orthia, but whoever did so might be whipped by the others: in exchange for brief pains he gained the joy of lasting renown. Thus cheeses lie on a table or altar; the boys are let loose upon them; whoever takes the most receives blows—presumably from the others (<τοῖς> ἄλλοις). But he gains honour. Only the next sentence would fit better before the theft at the Orthia: that must be endured in Xenophon’s text. In Plutarch, Aristides 17, a poor αἴτιον is told for the Λυδῶν πομπή at the festival of Orthia; it too turns upon the stealing of food, and without further justification the πληγαὶ τῶν ἐφήβων are also mentioned. They therefore must likewise have taken part in the theft.

118. ↩ Sophocles, Electra 563, invents a personal arrogance on Agamemnon’s part, just as he invents a similar one for Ajax; the goddesses are to be provoked, and he does not consider that in doing so he lowers them. The ancient religion must not be burdened with this. The older view is given by Euripides, Iphigenia among the Taurians 22. At Brauron only a bear could serve as a substitute for the maiden; so Phanodemos (Etym. Magn. ταυροπόλος). That the poets, and after them the general conception, speak of a hind is due to the fact that Homer fixed the sacrifice at Aulis; there such a belief will have prevailed. The goddess of the Taurians the Ionians simply called Παρθένος, Herodotus IV 103. It is solely the phonetic resemblance to ταυροπόλος, as the goddess of Brauron was called, that brought Iphigenia to the Taurians—an invention of an individual, doubtless Euripides. In any case he determined posterity: all stories of the Taurian image at this or that place have arisen thereafter and are therefore devoid of substance.

119. ↩ Clearchus, in Athenaeus 256e, tells of flatterers who corrupted Macedonian princesses: μαγευόμεναι χαὶ μαγεύουσαι ταυροπόλοι χαὶ τριοδίτιδες . . . . ἐνένοντο. Thus the handmaidens of Tauropolos and of Hecate had become witches. Ecstatic dances in the service of these goddesses must have preceded this development.

120. ↩ A late dedication from Lebadeia to Ἀρτέμιδης πραεῖαι, IG VII 3101, I do not venture to exploit as evidence for a triad in place of a single Artemis, although that would in itself be conceivable. More probably Eileithyiae or similar beings were renamed after the λοχία.

121. ↩ Aeschylus, Agamemnon 140, a principal passage. The Kalliste at the Dipylon is a women’s goddess, a healing deity; her image is not Artemis at all: Roussel, Bulletin de Correspondance Hellénique 1927, p. 164.

122. ↩ Here the name is determined by the believed efficacy of a spring; Artemis has thus displaced an older spring-goddess.

123. ↩ This name is evidently older than Agrotera.

124. ↩ τοξία beside Artemis in Gortyn, 179 III 9 Schwyzer.

125. ↩ She is of all the most widely diffused, reaching as far as Byzantium, Herodotus IV 87, even in Athens in the Kerameikos, schol. Pindar Olympian 3.54. (The fluctuations in the names Ὀρθία Ὀρθωσία, Ἡμέρα Ἡμερασία, and the like ought once to be examined together.) Artemis is never her name here. Of the Orthia of Sparta we now know that she was first settled by the Spartans on the marshy meadow of the Eurotas, and was therefore taken over from Arcadia. The Toroa was of course in the old period another goddess. Ἰσσώρα is for the Spartan Orthia an inexact designation.

126. ↩ The genuine cult-legend is preserved in Appendix proverbiorum II 51, in truth in Zenobius (I 8 Athous); to this must be added what Eustathius has preserved from the Lexicon of Pausanias, in the Göttingen edition beneath the text.

127. ↩ IG IX 2, 420; Plutarch, Aristides 20; Sophocles, Oedipus 161; Pausanias IX 17; Schwyzer 323 D 7 (beside Ἀρταμίτια and Λάφρια). For Megara the month-name in Byzantium bears witness, Xenophon Hellenica IV 4, 2; in Athens, Pausanias I 14, 5 (not in the market-place). Seat-inscriptions from the theatre and elsewhere.

128. ↩ Unless the month was in fact named after Ζεὺς Εὐχλεῖος—but I know that epithet only from Bacchylides 1.6 (Jebb), p. 116.

129. ↩ Heydemann, Vasensammlung Neapel, no. 316.

130. ↩ Theodoridas, Anthologia Palatina VI 156, composes a delicate poem for a woman who dedicates her son’s hair to the χούραις Ἀμαρυνθιάσιν. The Artemis of Amarynthus is famous and even possesses a filial shrine at Athens; to her a boy would not dedicate his hair. But how close to her stand the local nymphs who have hitherto protected the child and from whom he now outgrows.

131. ↩ Παρθένος represents Thracian Neapolis on the relief in Schoene, Griechische Reliefs, pl. 7. The Thracian goddess is usually called Artemis; she is not Bendis, who would be a huntress. The goddess of the Taurians has always been called Παρθένος; cf. Latyschew, Inscr. Ponti 377, 399; “Artemis” is first introduced by Euripides. The island of Leros is still called Παρθένι after its goddess.

132. ↩ Παρθένοι are the cypresses of a grove near Psophis, Pausanias VII 24, 7. Ibycus fr. 1 transfers blossom and irrigation, the gifts of the nymphs, into the garden of the Παρθένοι; so too Sappho and Simonides fr. 122. It is Hellenic spring-mood.

133. ↩ Flowers have no nymphs; the stories of Hyacinthus, Narcissus, Kissos, Leucothoe, Clytie are late—mere playthings, or at least without religious content.

134. ↩ In Pausanias VIII 12, 7 one must therefore write Ἀλαλχομενεία πηγή, not -νείας.

135. ↩ On the Syracusan coins their fishes guarantee that the nymph is meant. Dirce and Alope are named after heroines—Dirce, it is true, not always. These are exceptions; in the case of the Macaria of the Tetrapolis and the Glauce of Corinth such inventions are later, as is the metamorphosis of the Syracusan Cyane; originally the names concerned the spring as such.

136. ↩ The inscription of the Nymph Hill, IG I 854, was correctly read by Hiller as ἱερὸν Νυμφῶν δήμο, in sense the same as the earlier restoration δημόσιον. The sanctuary once lay outside the city; when it came within the walls, the state secured to the goddesses their rock.

137. ↩ It is a gross perversion when female heads on coins are supposed to represent the “nymph of the city”. Is the Antiochia at whose feet the Orontes lies a nymph? She is a θεά, as θεὰ Ῥώμη too became for the Greeks a divine power. Whether, indeed, on the older coins the city appears as a beautiful woman, as a goddess, may be questioned. Whatever this woman may be called: men desired the beautiful image, and what is so beautiful is divine. Cyrene is the city and is named after the spring Kyra. The city is a goddess, and because she wishes to be Hellenic, she comes from Thessaly; the rhapsode invents her father Peneios.

138. ↩ The familiar story may echo on in late sepulchral epigrams, Kaibel 570–571. And when Callimachus, Epigr. 22, says of a Cretan youth that a nymph has carried him off and that he should now be sung as a second Daphnis, there is too little warrant for assuming that, in the case of one lost in the forest, anything of the sort was truly believed.

139. ↩ Lymphatus merely means “mad” for the Romans.

140. ↩ Prophetic nymphs—those of Διὸς χαὶ Θέμιδος on the Eridanus, Pherecydes fr. 16—belong to fairy-tale, not to belief. Spring-water can heal μανία, but it does not arouse θεία μανία. The Pythia does not drink from the Castalian spring. To explain the Muses as spring-nymphs on the basis of the name Πιμπληίς is a modern folly.

141. ↩ The Iliad already knows them as τροφοί of this god, and this most noble function of χουρίζειν remains theirs. Aeschylus in a satyr-play represented how these nurses, together with their husbands—naturally Sileni—had grown old, and how the god appointed the sorceress Medea to make them young again. This must have been a principal delight for the satyr-chorus. But it is, of course, free invention. Kaibel’s notion (Hermes 30, 88) hangs in the air. In Hyginus, fab. 182, this story is combined with Pherecydes in Eratosthenes, Cataster. 14, on the Hyades, and teaches us nothing further.

142. ↩ In individual tales δρῦς may be the oak; but δρυάς is the tree-nymph, and the δρύες who lament Daphnis in Theocrit 7.74 are the trees. When Erysichthon in Callimachus fells a black poplar, Demeter’s favourite tree, the poet is individualising and does not trouble himself with the ancient belief.

143. ↩ Hence it is striking that in the Hymn to Demeter the olive trees lament at the abduction of Persephone: those precious fruit trees, not long since brought under cultivation, appeared especially divine. Pausanias (IX 24.4) marvels that the farmers at Hyettos had planted fruit trees around their Nymph-sanctuary. But these were not trees in which Nymphs dwelt; they were an adornment of their sacred precinct. Xenophon did the same at Scillus (Anab. V 3.12).

144. ↩ Of the long yet finite lifespan of the Nymphs a Naiad spoke in a Hesiodic poem (fr. 171), without any justification being placed among the Χίρωνος ὑποθῆχαι. The word μαχραίωνες in Sophocles (Oed. 1099) is ambiguous, but probably means the same. Most striking is Apollonius Rhodius IV 1425, where the Hesperides appear at once as trees and as maidens. He conceived them as tree-nymphs; but this is Hellenistic play. What they originally were will become clear later.

145. ↩ Hesiod’s intention is unmistakable: among the rivers he introduces the distant ones—especially the rare names in Homer connected with the Troad—while the nearest, Asopus, Ismenus, Cephisus, could be left unmentioned as familiar. With the springs it is the same: no well-known source is named, for Europe belongs to Asia. Calypso, a Nymph in Homer, could of course not be omitted; Styx is the most ancient of all and prepares her own story at line 776.

146. ↩ Musaeus, fr. 5, inserts into the Homeric image which compares the transience of men with leaves the μελίαι, hardly without thinking of the descent of mankind from them.

147. ↩ Mother of the first man Phoroneus, Apollodorus (Bibl. II 1); of Haimon on a stone from Larisa, IG IX 2, 582—thus ancestress of the Αἵμονες, who have vanished, but have given their name to the land Αἱμονία. As a Nymph of the most ancient order she is, in Pindar, mother of Tenerus; in Apollonius II 4, mother of Amycus; mother of Dolion of Cyzicus in Alexander of Pleuron (Strabo XIV 681).

148. ↩ In the phrase οὐχ ἀπὸ δρυὸς οὐδ’ ἀπὸ πέτρης it remains unclear whether what is meant is that the first men, or men in general, are supposed to have sprung from trees or from rocks—a notion which in itself is disconcerting.

149. ↩ Of a class of nymphs βρῖσαι βρεῖσαι βρῆσαι (the correct form is uncertain) we know only that they were associated on Ceos with Aristaeus, on Lesbos with Dionysus, who bears the epithet Βρεισεύς; Βρήσα was a place from which a slave woman came and was therefore called Βρισηίς by Homer as a proper name; its meaning he no longer knew.

150. ↩ Aristophanes, Peace 1168. What the title of his comedy Ὧραι signified can no longer be determined.

151. ↩ Robert is evidently right in his contribution to the Commentationes Mommsenianae in holding that the three names belong together; Usener’s polemic is entirely unjustified and misses the sense of the names. One may doubt only whether the three names originally belonged to the Horae or to the Charites, since they suit both alike. How the displacement in the source of Pausanias IX 35.2 came about I cannot say; but that does not decide the matter.

152. ↩ Philochorus, Athenaeus 38c. The location of the sanctuary is unknown. Temples of the Horae are not common; striking is a principal temple at Attaleia (Inscr. Brit. Mus. 1044).

153. ↩ Still more objectionable is the addition χαὶ ἀθάνατοι χαλέονται; I do not know what it is meant to convey. The Nymphs follow immediately, and of course Anchises is thinking of those of his own woodland (v. 98). Yet the critics reject this verse, although it is composed precisely for the situation, and instead retain vv. 97 and 99, which are copied from Υ 8–9 and thus betray themselves.

154. ↩ Pindar fr. 152.

155. ↩ In the Geoponica XI 4 there appears a pragmatic metamorphosis: the daughters of King Eteocles fall into a well and are transformed into cypresses. This must conceal the notion that the Charites were originally conceived as dwelling in such a grove as the παρθένοι at Psophis; in essence the goddesses were the same. The spring is the Acidalus, whose name is pre-Hellenic.

156. ↩ Aristophanes, Thesmophoriazusae 295; IG I 5; likewise on the relief of Socrates before the Propylaea.

157. ↩ It is striking that the dedication Χάριτος is in the singular.

158. ↩ The names Cleta and Phaenna, which they bore in Alcman, Pausanias found in the mythological book which he excerpts in IX 35. From there he inserted them in III 18, 6, where he describes a sanctuary of the Charites at Amyclae; for it is quite incredible that, in his own time, the dual number and the names were still in force. The two names, which say nothing in particular, Alcman will have invented with Hesiodic freedom.

159. ↩ I shrink from making use of the statement that three Charites with musical instruments stood upon the hand of the Delian cult statue of Apollo, although Apollodorus (fr. 98, 13 Jac.) reports it; for Ps.-Plutarch, De musica 14, who describes the instruments, names Anticles and Istros as his authorities—that is, Istros appealed to Anticleides, who is not to be trusted. It suited Apollodorus’ theology. What matters most to me is that I cannot see how one could know what the artist intended. To represent the god as lord of μουσιχή and of τοξιχή was his task, and that everyone understood. But the Charites did not make music. By what sign, then, was it recognised that they were not Muses?

160. ↩ Should one not recognize, on the Munich vase (Pfuhl, Malerei no. 288), in the serpent-footed female guardians who threaten the goats in a vineyard, the daughters of the serpent-footed Cecrops? The composition of the painting demanded a group of four. Wolters identifies Hamadryads, but that very name speaks against separating the nymph from her tree, and the serpent form would in that case be difficult to justify.

161. ↩ Rumpf, Chalkidische Vasen, pl. 29. Curious is Ἱππαῖος on pl. 3, the son of a Hippe. ἵπποι means “servants” in the Iobacchic inscription (IG II² 1368) and in another late Orgeon inscription (CIA III 1280a). Horses also appear worked into the splendid garments of tragic costume with which later vases clothe the heroes.

162. ↩ Hesychius, s.v., from Amerias; Cornutus 30.

163. ↩ Pindar, Pythian 2, gives the rationalistic origin of the Centaurs through the mingling of man and mare, yet already calls the father “Kentauros” and makes him a son of a cloud—who in truth could only ever have been a phantom.

164. ↩ The wedding of the daughters of Dexamenos, so called because he received Heracles. If the vase published by Robert in Monumenti antichi IX names the Centaur “Dexamenos,” this is nothing but a thoughtlessness on the part of the painter; he ought to be called Eurytion. It is to this saga that I refer the western pediment at Olympia. I do not doubt in the least that many viewers believed they saw Theseus and Peirithoos, but the temple belonged to the Eleans, who could scarcely have thought of depicting the Thessalian Centauromachy on their own temple, since they had Centaurs close at hand on Pholoë. Even if they had done so, their countrymen would nevertheless have believed that they were seeing their own local story.

165. ↩ Cronos must assume the form of a horse—so Vergil, Georgics III 93, though the source is unknown. The mother was always called Philyra, that is, the lime-tree. These are contradictory notions, carelessly combined. The lime-tree is the older element, comparable to the ash-trees from which mankind sprang; in that Chiron had her as his mother, he perhaps at first had no definite bodily form at all, a god who merely liked to appear as a horse.

166. ↩ Compare the supplement Malea. In Clement, Protrepticus 36 P., there stands, from the Θαυμάσια of an unknown Monimos, that “ἐν Πέλληι τῆς Θεσσαλίας an Achaean would sacrifice to Peleus and Chiron.” The false localisation of Pella may be an error on Clement’s part (Cyril, who copies him, says “τῆς Θράιχης”), but the story and the author have the sound of a χατεψευσμένη ἱστορία, of Ptolemaeus Chennus or the pseudo-Plutarchan Parallela.

167. ↩ This name shows that it is a transference when the Macedonians moved the capture of Silenus to the rose-gardens of the Thracian Balkans (Herodotus VIII 138). The captured Silenus already appears on a fairly early Attic vase, Wiener Vorlegeblätter 1888, pl. 4.

168. ↩ That, indeed, will have been her character: ἀσχὸς δεδάρθαι, Solon 23.7 D.

169. ↩  Plato, Symposium 215b, calls Marsyas σάτυρος in contrast to σιληνός in Herodotus VII 26—another effect of satyr-drama. As for Athena’s encounter with Marsyas, it is certain that this was devised at the time when the Athenians considered flute-playing unworthy of a cultivated citizen, in contrast to Boeotia and Argos, and when the flute was regarded as Phrygian. The story will have been authoritatively invented in a satyr-play, already before Myron. In Tragicorum fragmenta adespota 381 a satyr speaks to Athena, not Marsyas, declaring flute-playing inappropriate. The verses contain the Ionic form λάζευ, which Euripides can scarcely have used, although λάζυμαι is attested only for him. Where he might have mentioned Celaenae is not apparent, fr. 1085; but the story does not require it. Thus Michaelis’ pleasing hypothesis remains in suspense, according to which he wished to see in this material the one unknown satyr-play of Euripides.

170. ↩  Böhlau, Ionische Nekropolen 158, remarks that the masks he found in Samian graves were not made for burial, since they were intended for hanging. They had therefore hung on or in houses, presumably those of the deceased. We shall encounter them again with Dionysus and his masks.

171. ↩  Pausanias VI 24.8 mentions a temple of Silenus in Elis. The city was young; the cult-image associated with him a Μέθη who poured for him—this will be even younger. Some particular occasion must have led to the cult. Pausanias enlarges upon mortal Sileni, knows of a grave in Pergamon and one in Palestine, which prove nothing for early times. Later people also explained the satyrs as a half-animal race of men who were supposed to live somewhere; likewise the Tritons, who had grown out of the one great Triton, were taken for sea-creatures, of whom one even wished to possess a specimen, or at least the bones, as a curiosity.

172. ↩  I have dealt with these matters in a review of the Ἰχνευταί in Ilberg’s Jahrbücher 1912, p. 464, and there also with the origin of tragedy. Enigmatic remains Δευχαλίδαι σάτυροι in Hesychius.

173. ↩  Nothing is more characteristic than the interpretation of Pan in Plato’s Cratylus 408c. His lower part is τραχὺ χαὶ τραγοειδές and corresponds to the τραχύ and τραγιχόν in the τραγιχὸς βίος of mankind, in which ψεῦδος rules. This τραγιχός βίος is, after all, the τραγωιδία τοῦ βίου.

174. ↩  Fragment 198: since the mother is a daughter of Phoroneus, it belongs in the genealogy of Argos. Were the name Hesiod not attached, one would place it in the Phoronis. The father of the satyrs is called Ἑχατερός: how did the name enter the verse? The satyrs are ἀμηχανοεργοί, they do what throws men into ἀμηχανία.

175. ↩ In vain does one attempt to eliminate the goat-dancers of the Pandora-vase by calling them Pans, who as a chorus would be unheard of. Old Comedy frequently bears the title Σάτυροι; what this meant we do not know. Nor should one invoke the enigmatic Τιτανόπανες of Myrtilos.

176. ↩  Apollodorus, Bibliotheca II 4. This Argos is a rival of Heracles, since he too overcomes a bull and an Echidna—of great importance, for we see that the poet of the Dodekathlos made use of existing legends which were by no means peculiar to Heracles.

177. ↩  Hesychius: χυριττοί· οἱ ἔχοντες τὰ ξύλινα πρόσωπα χατὰ Ἰταλίαν χαὶ ἑορτάζοντες τῆι Κορυθαλίαι γελοιασταί. They are especially valuable because their association with Artemis excludes the Dionysiac element. Perhaps it is premature to equate the Κορυθαλία with Artemis merely because this was done in Sparta; for after the χορυθάλη, a laurel or myrtle twig (Et. M. s.v.), a distinct goddess might be named. But in that case the cult is only the more original. χυρριτοί butted with the head like goats.

178. ↩  The view at which I had arrived has now been set forth and substantiated by A. Greiffenhagen on the basis of vase-painting: “Eine attisch-schwarzfigurige Vasengattung und die Darstellung des Komos im sechsten Jahrhundert”, Königsberg 1929. I can add a further important inscription from the deme Xypete, published in the Πολέμων 46 by A. A. Palaios: a register of komarchs and komasts who were victorious in the year 330, rightly referred by the editor to the τετραχωμία to which Xypete belonged, and probably also to its cult of Heracles. Here, then, a komos, a ritual dance, has kept itself free from Dionysiac character. In earlier times it must have been far more widespread. Ps.-Plutarch, De musica 4, lists among the aulodic νόμοι a χωμάρχειος. How the enigmatic komos in the law of Euegoros (Demosthenes, Meid. 10) and the komasts of Ameipsias are to be related to this cannot be quickly determined.

179. ↩ In v. 14 the maidens dance merrily χοροῖς περεσανθέσι—so runs the tradition. One reads φερεσανθέσιν, which readily suggests itself, and the formation, even as a monstrosity, might be endured; but flowers would be borne by the maidens, not by the dances, and if they were intending to present flowers to the goddess, they would not be dancing. The flowers are precisely what is suspicious, for in the next verse ἄνθεα stands beneath. Incurable.

180. ↩  On the text, see Griechische Verskunst 452. The prayer, as I now first perceive, has an immediate topical significance, for the drama belongs to the period of the Peloponnesian incursions into Attic territory. At that time the Mother was to defend her οὖδας. To see in her Athena is, for my feeling as well as for my knowledge of Attic usage, nothing less than blasphemous.

181. ↩  She herself is no Olympian goddess, but the mother even of the Olympians. The particular genealogies are of no consequence, for she is the mother of all that lives; she stands, after all, at the beginning of the Theogony. The Γῆ Ὀλυμπία of Athens is that of Olympia, not of Olympus—a foreign cult by which Zeus of Olympia was introduced.

182. ↩  The Sicilian Mothers are represented by a fine early Hellenistic relief from Camaro near Messina, Archäologischer Anzeiger 29, 204. These are not nymphs.

183. ↩ Gaia is designated by Callimachus (Delos 266, 321) as Μεγάλη. He knew this appellation, for example from Lemnos, and understood by it the Earth.

184. ↩  No orgiastic cult follows from this; such a cult did not exist, Attis was not adopted. If devotees of the Asiatic Mother appeared, they had to found a separate Τhiasos of their own, IG II² 1327, 28 and others.

185. ↩  Aristotle, Metaphysics I 8, observes that none of the philosophers who posited a first principle had found it in the Earth, although the conception was ancient and popular, that “all things are earth” (πάντα εἶναι γῆν). He did not reckon Hesiod among them, and with justified restraint left entirely aside the substance of the myths. We must supply what he omitted.

186. ↩ Pindar speaks of agōnes of Gaia in Pythian 9.101, which we understand as little as did the ancient exegetes; Didymus speaks of Athenian ἇθλα Γῆς, of Gaia which in fact never existed. The Olympic contests mentioned by Pindar at the same time are equally indeterminable.

187. ↩ On the Kadmeia Demeter in the Thesmophorion was represented in the manner of Gaia rising from the ground, Pausanias IX 16.5. At Patrai, Pausanias VII 21.11, she sat between Demeter and Kore, who were standing—certainly no ancient work. There was an old ξόανον at Aigaira, Pausanias VII 25.13.

188. ↩ Pausanias V 14.10, and in the two Achaean places just mentioned. At Patrai only the sick consulted the oracle—very archaic in that no healing hero had intruded himself.

189. ↩ ἱερίας Γῆς Θέμιδος, CIA III 318, 350. Κουροτρόφος appears independently in the ritual in Aristophanes, Thesmophoriazusae 295, where she belongs within the circle of Demeter; the sanctuary of Gaia χουροτρόφος in Pausanias likewise lies beside the Eleusinion. An ancient Kourotrophos stood on the Acropolis, IG I 840.10; to her the ephebes sacrifice, IG II² 1039.58. Suidas, s.v. χουροτρόφος, refers to her, for it is to her that Erichthonios sacrifices on the Acropolis; Ge is added by way of explanation. In the corresponding entry in Hesychius stands “ὑπ’ ἐνίων Δημήτηρ.” This association appears on the seats of two priestesses, CIA III 372, 373. Kourotrophos is also independent on Delos, IG XI 2, 203B 100, on Samos, Vita Homeri 30 in Herodotus; I believe she occurs elsewhere as well. Mysterious are the σύμβολα from the mysteries of Ge Themis in Clement, Protrepticus 19 P., but Γῆς will rightly have been made from τῆς.

190. ↩ Besides Aeschylus, Eumenides 2, and Pausanias X 5.6, Plutarch, De defectu oraculorum 421c.

191. ↩ Mysterious is Θέμις Ἡλίου, Lycophron 129. Pherecydes 16, in the saga of Heracles, knows Nymphs called Θεμιστιάδες, daughters of Zeus and Themis. This is a poet’s invention.

192. ↩ Hence an altar of the Θέμιδες, founded by Pittheus, at Troezen, Pausanias II 31.5; the form Θέμιδες instead of θέμιστες shows it to be late.

193. ↩ Strabo 435 attests the cult at Ichnai, and it is not likely that this derives from Apollodorus, who disapproved of explaining such epithets from cult-places. That the later age should have known the Ἰχναίη Θέμιςfrom the Hymn is improbable, since the Hymns were scarcely read. We possess only by chance no other ancient testimony. Confusions with a Macedonian “Ἴχνη” or “Ἄχνη” are easily seen through.

194. ↩ The Odyssey recounts a tale, later lost, of her love for Iasion, of which at least this much remains intelligible: that it was bound up with agriculture.

195. ↩ Very remarkable is a fairly early dedication, IG IX 2.140, which I formerly read incorrectly. It simply reads χοροτέρα[ı], with only the rho written in reverse.

196. ↩  Sylloge 1024.

197. ↩ Iphigenia in Tauris 1263 bears witness that the Chthon gives the dreams of the Delphic earth-oracle, where Apollo presses himself into the place of her daughter Themis. She is none other than Ge, yet she has here a different character, a χθονία μῆνις (1272); that at 1267 Gaia could not be named is obvious; in Murray’s edition there stands a conjecture of mine.

198. ↩  A bold formation coined for the moment is αὐτόχθονος for αὐτῆι τῆι χθονί at Agamemnon 536. Sophocles, Ajax 202, uses χθόνιος for αὐτόχθων. In both passages the roots of the people reach down into that depth from which the primeval powers of an earlier age, the Titans, arose. Anacreon knows the χθόνιον ὄνειρον (30 D), but he also calls a dark, incompatible demeanor χθόνιοι ῥυσμοί (65). I know of nothing similar.

199. ↩  Since χθαμαλός forms the bridge to χαμαί, the Χαμύνα of Olympia is a χθονία, later assimilated to Demeter. What follies were invented because the name was not understood may be seen in Pausanias VI 21, 1. At Hermione he recounts analogous things.

200. ↩ How Proclus (in Tim. III 176) knows that Attic laws commanded Οὐρανῶι χαὶ Γαίαι προτελεῖν τοὺς γάμους, and in what that was supposed to consist, is very doubtful. Immediately thereafter follows the suspicious υεχυε. The sacrifice in any case does not belong to the old custom.

201. ↩  Many years ago, when the significance of this god had become clear to me, I asked Wilhelm Schulze to demonstrate for me “the lord of the depths of the earth” in the name itself, which he at once did in precisely the same way.

202. ↩  Wentzel, “Aus der Anomia,” p. 134.

203. ↩  Pythian Hymn 230.

204. ↩  If a hoof-stroke created the spring, and Pegasos was only introduced later, who else could have done it but the god who appears in horse-form and who in Ionia is named after Helicon? On Helicon Zeus displaced him—did Zeus, then, bear a horse’s shape? Aganippe below is herself the spring-nymph; one really ought to understand the difference between ἵππου χρήνη and a “spring-nymph”.

205. ↩  Pausanias I 38, 6. Hence he is present on the vase-painting in Furtwängler–Reichhold 161 at the departure of Triptolemos.

206. ↩  Pausanias X 24, 4. Plutarch, Quaestiones convivales 741a, counts Delphi among other cult-sites which Poseidon had to cede to other gods. Eustathius on the Periegete 498 has something similar and cites from a collection of proverbs the verses about such an exchange:

“ἶσον τοι Δῆλόν τε Καλαύρειάν τε νέμεσθαι,
Πυθώ τ’ ἠγαθέην χαὶ Ταίναρον ἠνεμόεντα.”

            I do not know that these verses recur elsewhere.

207. ↩  The last name is frequent; what it means the Etymologicum Magnum has explained well by φυτάλμιος πατήρ in a verse of Sophocles (fr. 720). Modern scholars speak of φυτά, misled by Hesychius φυτ. φυτιχός, which in today’s fashion could produce a vegetation-god. According to Plutarch, Quaest. symp. 730e, all who are descended from the ancient Hellenes are to sacrifice to him as πατρογένειος, which I do not wholly understand.

208. ↩  Pausanias II 38, 4; III 15, 10. Euripides, Phoenissae 188: the Thebans are to become servants Λερναίαι τριαίναι and Ποσειδανίοις Ἀμυμωνίοις ὕδασιν; this goes back to Poseidon’s association with the Danaid Amymone, for whose sake he created the spring—so in the satyr-play of Aeschylus. Originally she was the spring-nymph whom the god loved; in that case both could bear horse-form, or he could pursue her as a horse. Such a pursuit appears on a Zürich vase (E. Müller, Drei griechische Vasenbilder, Zürich 1887); naturally the name itself is of no consequence.

209.  Pausanias VIII 8, 2. Etymologicum Magnum s.v. “Ἄρνη.” Festus Hippius. It is foolish that the child should be hidden among sheep merely in order to explain the spring-name Arne. Hardly is this a genuine name of a spring; it is rather the pre-Greek word, preserved in Lycian, meaning “city.”

210. ↩  Pausanias VI 25, 6; strangely enough the image is said to have been renamed later. Samos is the place to which belong the tholos-tombs of the supposed Pylos, of which no trace was known in antiquity, Pindar fr. 489.

211. ↩  Little weight is to be placed on Aigai on the Euripos; the Γεραίστιοι χαταφυγαί(Euripides, Cyclops 295) are to be left to the god who raised the storm at Caphereus. And yet the name itself is questionable. Sparta has a month γεραίστιος γεράστιος, likewise Troizen, and if it recurs in Cos, then it cannot have been lacking in the other places of the Argolid from which the Dorians of Cos came. It is not named after Poseidon of Geraistos; what it referred to we do not know. Now, however, there are also in Gortyn Γεραιστιάδες νύμφαι, who are said to have reared Zeus, and in Arcadia a place Γεραίστιον, where Zeus is said to have been swaddled as a child (the glosses in the Etymologicum Magnum evidently belong together). And recently, in the Attic inscription which I discussed in Hermes 61, 281, Γεραισταὶ νύμφαι γενέθλιαι have become known. Quite incomprehensible is a Cyclops Geraistos, at whose grave the Ὑαχινθίδες were to sacrifice (Apollodorus, Bibliotheca III 212). All this fits together badly; γεραίρειν has nothing to do with the name.

212. ↩  The spring in Hesychius. Its nymph bore Hippothoon to Poseidon; we know the story only as a tragic fable.

213. ↩  Seven 308, where “ὕδωρν Διρχαῖον, εὐτραφέστατον πωμάτων ὅσων ἵησιν Ποσειδὰν ὁ γαιάοχος Τηθύος τε παῖδες,” is named. Thereafter all springs come from him, but also from the Oceanids, the mistresses of the individual springs. That these can then also be conceived as his beloveds is intelligible.

214. ↩  In truth he could help in everything, without its being his own proper craft. The miners on the Corinthian πίναχες worship Poseidon and Amphitrite—that is, the sea-gods—simply because these had become the principal gods at the Isthmus.

215. ↩  As leader of the Achaeans he bears in the Iliad (Ε 385) a long sword—striking in a god, yet the spear would not have suited him, since he does not himself fight, nor would the staff which he carried at Ν 59; the trident, which appears at Μ 27, is no weapon, but it is fitting for the Earth-shaker; compare τριαινοῦν, συντριαινοῦν.

216. ↩  On Lesbos there were Λευχοθέαι—Mytilos in the Etymologicum Magnum s.v.

217. ↩  Pindar fr. 21. Sappho and Simonides fr. 33.

218. ↩  They made upon me, on the island of Arne, where Athamas may have dwelt, an indelible impression (Erinnerungen 215).

219. ↩  Aet. Rom. 16. Slave women were excluded from the celebration; wives did not wish to see their husbands’ concubines. Likewise Aetolian women were excluded; this will originally have been directed against the encroachments of the Aetolians in the third century. Comparable is the exclusion of the Dorians from Athena of the Attic Acropolis and from Paros, IG. XII 5, 225.

220. ↩  The passages collected by O. Schneider after Callimachus, Adesp. 192. Since Nonnus knows of it, it must have stood in Callimachus or Euphorion. The field with Leukothea is always mentioned.

221. ↩  Pausanias II 2; IG. IV 203. Plutarch, Theseus 25, says that Melikertes had no games, but secret τελεταί. There he is named instead of Palaimon, as these notices show.

222. ↩  Antike Denkmäler I, pl. VII, 26. Palaimon is mentioned by Euripides, IT 271, where the barbarians believe they perceive Palaimon in Orestes. Plautus, Rudens 160 (thus Diphilus): sed o Palaemon, sancte Neptuni comes, qui Herculei socius esse diceris. The corrupt verse has already been brought into connection with Palaimon by Leo, of whom we shall speak presently.

223. ↩  The sister of the eponym of Tenedos, Tennes, is usually called Hemithea, also Amphithea, but in a thoroughly confused narrative of the mythographus Homericus on Α 38 she is called Leukothea, which would suit the cult of Palaimon, but little weight is to be placed on it. Tennes is of course un-Greek, whereas Kyknos comes from the region where later Herakles overcomes him in place of Achilles, in favour of Apollo, after the latter has established himself there.

224. ↩  Fr. 5, 6; Pindar fr. 206, where I still judged Melikertes incorrectly. He had no cult; cult belonged only to Palaimon, and the son of Athamas had nothing to do with Corinth. E. Maaß rightly discovered in the name the “honey-cutter,” but this is not an arbitrary hero’s name; it must have had significance in the region of the Kopais, where there was also a Palaimon who had nothing to do with the Corinthian sea-god. To drag in Melkarth merely because of the similarity of the name is a good example of how one should not proceed. Has the city-king anything in common with a drowned boy or with a sea-god in the form of a child?

225. ↩  Dedication to Ἡραχλῆς Παλαίμων, IG. VII 2874; Pappadakis, Ἀρχαιολ. δελτ. II 243, in the excellent essay on Charops, who, like Palaimon, was later identified with Heracles. In Diphilus this identification may not yet have been completed.

226. ↩  Euripides, Medea 1284; there she leaps with both children into the sea—probably only because Medea is to murder two children. The fragmenta tragica 100 and 101 in Athenagoras come from the speech of a deus ex machina who promised the elevation of Ino and Melikertes to sea-gods. If the Ino of Euripides in Hyginus 4 were a reliable hypothesis, those verses would belong there. But the end of the Ino is hard to reconcile with an action set in Thessaly, and the concluding sentences of Hyginus’ tale are not trustworthy. The numerous fragments of the Ino give no indication of the plot; moreover, a deus ex machina does not suit a tragedy of the earliest period.

227. ↩  Euphorion fr. 163 gives a βύνη the epithet αὐδήεσσα, thus meaning not the sea but a goddess; Lycophron 107 adds θεά. This, then, was a sea-goddess, whom the grammarians call Leukothea. Nothing more can be said; the word is Greek and need not be a proper name.

228. ↩  Especially clear is Aeschylus, Choephoroi 72: “πόροι πάντες ἐχ μιᾶς ὁδοῦ βαίνοντες.”

229. ↩  At the entrance to the Pontus, Dionysius of Byzantium 49 (Güng.), and at Gythion, Pausanias III 21, 9—if one may infer this from the obscure report. The cult at Byzantium is traced back to an oracle, and thus seemed to require a special justification.

230. ↩  His consort is an Oceanid with the enigmatic name Doris. Wherever she appears elsewhere, she derives from Hesiod. It is futile to seek the meaning of her name—that is, the intention of its inventor.

231. ↩  Thus are they called who, on the Chalcidian vase (Rumpf 15), equip Perseus; the Bibliotheca II 38 calls them νύμφαι.

232. ↩  Sappho, fr. 3 Lobel, entreats the Nereids to guide her brother home from Egypt, yet only alongside Aphrodite, who is indeed Euploia, but above all is Sappho’s own goddess.

233. ↩  According to X, Thetis, together with Achilles and the Nereids, had a modest cult at Erythrai, Sylloge 1014, 76, which brought little profit to the priest. In the Iliad one gains the impression that she dwells in the sea not far from the Troad; hence Lycophron 22 can call the Hellespont παρθενοχτόνος Θέτις. Alexander repeatedly sacrifices to the Nereids together with other sea-divinities, Berve, Alexanderreich I 85. The Macedonian still holds the belief that he can render the sea favourable; he takes the names from Hellenic mythology, which offers him no comprehensive one, for Pontos and Thalassa are not gods, and Poseidon does not suffice, since he does not denote the element itself.

234. ↩  That the Dodekathlos, in no variant, contains either a combat with Triton or a subjugation of the sea is a striking proof of its origin in the Peloponnese. In Rhodes, that is, in the milieu of Peisandros, this would have been impossible, unless he had merely transmitted an already fully formed saga as he found it. Euripides, Hippolytus 744, avoids naming the god who bars the sailors’ passage into the boundless West and says only ὁ ποντομέδωνs. The coins of Itanos display a sea-being; precisely in the far east of Crete one cannot expect a Hellenic figure, so that the otherwise attractive connexion with the pilot Korobios (Herodotus IV 151) becomes improbable; in such a case no interpretation can be demonstrable.

235. ↩  The brook Triton at Alalkomenai received its name when the place laid claim to the birth of Athena, which can scarcely be earlier than the Libyan river.

236. ↩  We are therefore compelled to conclude that it was not Peloponnesians, not Ἀργεῖοι, who carried Olympus over into Asia, but men from Phthia and from what later became Thessaly—the Aeolians whom we encounter at Kyme, precisely those who brought Achilles with them.

237. ↩  If δίες among the Cretans really meant “days,” then this was not a plural of Zeus, but a word corresponding to the Latin dies that had been preserved among these Dorians.

238. ↩  It is striking that the only son of Zeus before Ilios is the Lycian Sarpedon, and that Idomeneus, his grandson, has very un-Greek relatives. The list of Zeus’ loves in Ζ 317–27, which Aristophanes rejected, has certainly been at least expanded; for Semele is impossible for the Iliad, others such as Perseus and Heracles are doubtful, whereas Peirithoos is surely very old, since he is still called θεόφιν μήστωρ ἀτάλαντος.

239. ↩  I have set out my view of the gradual elevation of Zeus to the status of universal god in the Vorträge der Bibliothek Warburg, vol. III.

240. ↩  The Nemean Games were founded by Kleonai only quite late, and the Zeus of Apesas, to whom they were dedicated, receded in men’s imagination behind the funeral games of the Seven for Archemoros, which the epic had made famous.

241. ↩ Διάσια points to a place-name, like Ἀναγυράσιος, Φλειάσιος, Πτελεάσιος. Thus the eastern district that even Themistocles did not draw into the city, extending as far as the Ilisos, must have been called after the ancient sanctuary of Zeus Δία or something similar; and Peisistratos therefore established his Olympian temple of Zeus, with its appurtenances (Gaia and Kronos), here.

242. ↩  Hesychius: μαιμάχτης· μειλίχιος χαθάρσιος. Lysimachides in Harpokration: μαιμαχτηριών· ὁ ἐνθουσιώδης χαὶ ταραχτιχός, which hints at the true meaning but already deflects it. Plutarch, De cohibenda ira 458, expounds that a king must not be irascible, “διὸ χαὶ τῶν θεῶν τὸν βασιλέα μειλίχιον οἱ Ἀθηναῖοι χαὶ (δέ codd.) μαιμάχτην οἶμαι χαλοῦσιν.” Since μειλίχιος is specifically Athenian, δέ is impossible here. Plutarch saw in μαιμάχτης the same sense as that given by Hesychius. A Parian dedication to him, IG XII 5, 47. Nothing can be made of Μαιμαχτῆρες on the Lesbian block XII 2, 70.

243. ↩  Scholium on Clouds 408: “ὀγδόη φθίνοντος Ἀνθεστηριῶνος.”

244. ↩  Under the lemma διοπομπεῖσθαι, a lexicon preserved in Eustathius on the Odyssey states: φθίνοντος Μαιμαχτηριῶνος, a πομπή is held for Ζεὺς μειλίχιος.

245. ↩  “ἀρχαῖα γε χαὶ διπολιώδη,” Aristophanes, Clouds 984.

246. ↩  On the stone from Karthaia, IG XII 5, 551, ναωι is uncertain.

247. ↩  A χλάριος in Tegea, Pausanias VIII 53, 9, is no older than the συνοιχισμός of Tegea. A πλούσιος near Sparta, III 19, 7, bears a by-name that is too ambiguous. The μέγας θεός of Thisoa (this is evidently the correct spelling) is conceived as Zeus, for the thunderbolt is the emblem of the village, which for a time was independent, IG V 2, 510–511. But the indeterminate name remained—welcome testimony to autonomous gods with inadequate names, just like those that are nothing more than place-names.

248. ↩  Timaeus in Diodorus IV.56. Tacitus, Germania 43. In the North they are absent.

249. ↩ The name is ambiguous. At Knidos they are underworld gods, Inscr. British Museum 804, like the Anax in Inscr. Magnesia 94 (not Magnetian). The Ἄναχτες παῖδες at Amphissa, Pausanias X.38.7, probably belong here as well. Nilsson groups them with two—or even three—dwarf- or child-like gods in southern Laconia who wear caps like the Dioscuri, Pausanias III.24.5 and 26.3. The pair were taken to be these, but the triad resists such identification.

250. ↩  For him an Ἀμφι[ό]να in Gortyn is important, GDI 4952a; the o must be short. Ζῆθος was Ζέαθος, Pindar in the paean at the solar eclipse, v. 44.

251. ↩  Menelaus had his tomb, for he had died, yet had passed to the Isles of the Blessed. The Telemachy knew this cult, as indeed it is well informed about Sparta in general, which helps to date it. Helen, as daughter of Zeus, had become a goddess and possessed a temple in the city; this must therefore have been built by the Dorians, near the plane-tree grove, and one plane tree received from the maidens a cult paid to Helen, Theocritus 18—evidently her dwelling before she received a temple. Thus she was not yet a tree-nymph; rather, the Achaeans and Dorians still knew no god-houses and therefore let the goddess dwell in a grove. The beams in which the Twins dwelt will likewise have been inherited by the Dorians: they represented the gods, just as the tree did. It was no more tree-cult than beam-cult. But this Helen was not taken from epic; rather, the Helen who in epic became a heroine—just as her brothers in Homer in Λ—was originally a goddess. I hold it impossible to determine what she properly was, for in Sparta she is Doricized and thus estranged from her essence, and in Homer likewise, though in a different manner. Added to this is the daughter of Nemesis of Rhamnus, whom Theseus abducts. There too an ancient belief lies at the root, but it has been overgrown by Homeric tradition. Only this must stand fast: the daughter of Zeus and Nemesis must necessarily be a goddess.

252. ↩  Sitz.-Ber. 1921, 77 (Melanippe).

253. ↩  IG V 1.919 records that someone dedicates something to them μᾶνιν ὀπιδδόμενος; this implies no more than that they grow angry if he neglects a vow or a debt of thanks—by no means that they are wrathful gods by nature.

254. ↩  Once again they recede in Asia; there Leukothea, and later the Samothracian gods, take precedence, unless one attempts a theological identification of these with the Dioscuri.

255. ↩  Helen would then have to be a deceptive, baleful apparition of light, a notion that never gained currency; see Griechische Verskunst p. 219 on the interpretation of the Helen, v. 1452.

256. ↩ ἄστροις ὁμοιωθέντε, Euripides, Helen 140.

257. ↩  What is this but empty play, when names are adduced that begin with αθ and are equally unintelligible, Ἀθάμας and Ἄθμονοι? Why not, for a change, also ἀθάρη?

258. ↩  Particularly important is that a geometric sherd depicts how a shield set up on a high pedestal—an ancile—receives votive offerings from both sides. Miss Harrison, Themis p. 77.

259. ↩  IG XII 7 occurs frequently. This testifies that Hellenes were present on the island even before the settlement of Naxians and Samians in the seventh century, as was to be expected, while the name Minoa bears witness to Cretan rule. Historical memory of both had been lost.

260. ↩  That the place possessed importance in pre-Boeotian times is still shown by the role it plays in the Daidala of Hera, which will be discussed next. The Alalkomeneion, Sylloge 366, also points in this direction.

261. ↩  The notion that Athena’s cult originated in Alalkomenai would strike me as monstrous, even if the fable were not so transparent. If her birth was transferred thither, a river Triton was found there just as readily as, opposite Tegyra, a Delos was found for Apollo’s birth (Plutarch, Pelopidas 16). In the end, an Athens and an Eleusis sank in the Kopais, and Kekrops founded the cult of Athena there (Strabo 407, 413; Schol. A 8), which more sensibly was ascribed to an Ἀλαλχομενεύς (Paus. IX 33.5). The Athenian fraud is hardly older than the shameless acquisition by Athens of Haliartos in the year 167.

262. ↩ Athenaion is not said; in a grammatical text (Oxyrh. 1802 III 2) we find Ἀθηνάδιον: evidently the statuette was of such a kind that παλλάδιοι did not apply—seated and unarmed.

263. ↩  Or Παλλὰς Ἀθηναίη, as need required. There is no longer any reason to dispute the derivation, contrary to grammar, of Ἀθήνη from Ἀθηναίη conceived as an Athenian.

264. ↩  A painful riddle remains the Homeric epithet Τριτογένεια, for it must once have been meaningful, yet no one has understood it. The Athenians transferred the Panathenaea to the τρίτη φθίνοντος, thus understood it as “born on the third”; something of the sort may indeed lie in it, but the fixing to a definite day of the month can hardly be ancient. It is widespread to see in the first element not the sea-god Triton but the Libyan river; there the natives seem to have worshipped a goddess who appeared to the Hellenes to be their Athena, so that they even derived her from that place (Herodotus IV 189). The Triton at Alalkomenai was only invented afterwards. Democritus, in a special treatise, read into the name “that which gives in threes” (fr. 2). The quality of the i cannot be determined; this renders the interpretation still more uncertain, whether its author was the Τρίτος or someone whose name could be connected with Τρίτων. It is not worth while to pursue further ancient and modern follies.

265. ↩  I am glad that this interpretation has now occurred to others as well and finds more credence than it did forty years ago, when I put it forward (Herakles II, p. 296).

266. ↩  Only as a priestess could the mother of Kleobis and Biton ride in the procession; only then was her timely appearance indispensable.

267. ↩  In the Heraion at Argos a place was called Euboia (Pausanias II 17), no doubt in order to ward off the rivalry of the island. On that island there was likewise a “Cow Cave” (Strabo 445), where Io was supposed to have given birth to Epaphos; and the Hesiodic Aigimios let this entire story take place on Euboia—evidently a borrowing from Argos. In the catalogues Io also appeared among the heroes of Argos, and that poem lay closer to the mythographers; hence one must not insert into the Aigimios more than is expressly attested for it.

268. ↩  IG IX 1, 653. The stone must be read anew.

269. ↩  Inscription 38, 5 Paton. Slaves are excluded from the festival, Makareus, Athen. 639d. In this one may recognize that it was originally restricted to the Hellenic immigrants from the Argolis; the natives were not permitted to participate. A considerable slave population did not yet exist at that time.

270. ↩  Hera as protectress of the Argonauts can scarcely derive only from the Corinthian epic, for she already helps in the Odyssey μ 72, and there the Ionian epic must underlie it. It was into southern Thessaly that she will have drawn Jason.

271. ↩  The text can be restored better than Bernardakis has done in his Plutarch VII 43. F. Decharme has shown convincingly in the Mélanges Weil that the theological content contradicts Plutarch’s own belief, and has acutely concluded that a participant in the dialogue is speaking. The dialogue belongs to the class of the Pythian and related works.

272. ↩  The old name Euboias, which in Plutarch Symp. qu. 657e and Pausanias II 17, 1 is replaced by the later one.

273. ↩  That some identify Leto and Hera is a worthless syncretism.

274. ↩  Here he seems to be called Ἀλαλχομένης, as occurs elsewhere as well. Correct can only be Ἀλαλχομενεύς, as in Pausanias IX 33, 5.

275. ↩  In the third century a state treaty is recorded at the Poseidon of Onchestos, at the Athena of Koroneia, and Ἀλαλχομενείωι (Sylloge 366). The place itself seems no longer to have existed, yet one did not wish to abandon the eponym. Thus the site must once have been of great importance. It is strange that Athena no longer represents it.

276. ↩  He naturally also had periegetic material for Boeotia with him; in it there was nothing about the Daidala, because at that time they did not exist.

277. ↩  The little silver tablet from Poseidonia, Schwyzer 435, is still referred to Hera on the strength of this cult. But τᾶς θεῶ τᾶς παιδός cannot apply to her, since with her this aspect appears only in conjunction with others, so that she could not receive a dedication on that basis alone. In Kos the Κόρη is always a person alongside the mother. The παῖδες of Akrai, GDI 5256 ff., beside a goddess Αμ– or Αν–, are Sicels and could prove nothing even for a παῖς. Moreover, these, like other Sicilian new finds, must be revised in their readings.

278. ↩  It is readily intelligible that the Hellenes called the Imbrasos Παρθένιος, because their Hera bathed in it and became a virgin again. Varro (Lactantius I 17.8) derives the name Παρθενία for Samos from the fact that she was born and reared here, and was therefore also married here; as νυμφευομένη the cult image represented her, as at Plataiai.

279. ↩  Scholium T on Iliad Ξ 296, with the Callimachean verse from the Cydippe, P.Oxy. VII, p. 60.

280. ↩  In itself it is valuable that we come to know Hera’s flower, the ἀστέριον, learn what the priestess was not permitted to eat, and the like. Collected by Nilsson, Feste p. 42, and by Eitrem in the Realencyclopädie under Hera. Foreigners were not allowed to enter the temple, Herodotus VI 81; likewise at Arkesine, Sylloge 981.

281. ↩  There, indeed, her image burned in 424 will have been bathed, and then it received a new garment. One may refer to this the festival of the ἐνδυμάτια, Ps.-Plutarch De musica 1134c—though just as well to the λουτρὰ Παλλάδος. At Malla there was a corresponding festival, the περιβλημάτια, of an unknown goddess, GDI 5100, 21, to be restored thus.

282. ↩  Very peculiar is the cult at Aixone, IG II² 1199. There Hebe has a temple and a priestess together with Alcmene; the Heracleidae have a priest; Heracles is not mentioned, but he cannot have been absent, for the gods and heroes named are merely his appendages.

283. ↩  At Thebes there are three ancient carved images of Aphrodite (Pausanias IX 16, 3): Οὐρανία, Πάνδημος, Ἀποστροφία. The epithets were assigned later, for at first a triad was worshipped instead of a single person, as with the Charites, Moirai, Muses, and the like. But “She who turns away” is scarcely to be understood as one who turns away ἄνομοι ἐπιθυμίαι; rather, it is a love that withholds itself. Still, the comparison is worth making here. She will also have had female devotees who knew that amantium irae amoris redintegratio.

284. ↩  It must be borne in mind that such interpretations are not binding, since they may have been invented as explanations of a ritual practice, which in turn could then be altered by the myths. Yet I refrain from hypotheses.

285. ↩  Friedländer, Argolica 31 ff., has distinguished these legends with admirable clarity and has also recognized Io as the priestess. This follows as well from the gloss Ἰὼ Καλλιθύεσσα in Hesychius; Kallithyia is the first priestess of the Heraion in Plutarch (Eusebius, Praep. ev. III, p. 99—probably from the treatise on the Daidala, which is mentioned later in the same book), in Aristides (De rhet. II, p. 3 D ff.), and in the Chronicle of Eusebius; in Jerome (1643 H) the name is corrupted, while Syncellus preserves it as Κ. ἡ Πείραντος ἐν Ἄργει πρῶτον ἱεράτευσε τῆι Ἥραι (the manuscripts read τῆς Ἥρας).

286. ↩  Epaphos does not occur at all in the Argive saga; therefore his birth cannot form the conclusion of the story of Io. On the other hand, he cannot have been invented for the Egyptian Apis. Strangely enough, an Ἆπις Ἰοῦς is said to have been murdered in an Arcadian contest (Oxyrhynchus papyrus 1241, col. III, 31). But this Apis is called Ἰάσονος by Pausanias (V 1, 8) and comes from Pallantion. The ἔφαψις Διός was fashioned only from the name.

287. ↩  Alongside Πάν stands Πάων in IG V 2, 556, just as Ἀλχμάν stands beside Ἀλχαμάων. No one who knows him will derive him from pastor, from pasco, a verb which the Greeks had lost; he would sooner drive the herd like a Böcklin figure than tend it. To regard him as primevally Greek and to equate him with the Indian Pūṣan is inadvisable in view of his narrowly limited sphere. It lies far closer at hand to invoke the Thracian and Scythian Papas, Papaios: Πᾶ is “father” in the most archaic invocation in Aeschylus, Suppliants 892.

288. ↩  Apollodorus, π. θεῶν X 135 Jac., from the scholium on Rhesus 36, which is very corrupt. It seems that Aeschylus is there credited with almost the same thing as Epimenides, that is, with an Athenian poem of roughly the same date. The comic poet Myrtilos formed a chorus of Τιτανόπανες, and thus appears to have multiplied the Κρόνιος Pan for the chorus. Πᾶνες as gods who inspire terror and are therefore invoked by one who is frightened are named by Aristophanes, Ecclesiazusae 1069, alongside the Corybantes.

289. ↩  Pan whose midday sleep must not be disturbed appears first in Theocritus; likewise the impropriety of the Arcadian boys when they receive too small a portion of the sacrificial roast (7, 108). He is clearly transmitting what valuable local research offered him. The “panic” terror that seizes an army occurs first in the poet of the Rhesus 36 and in the Stymphalian Aeneas 27. Earlier, it was Dionysus who acted in this way, Euripides, Bacchae 304. A Pan who looks almost like a Phobos: Archäologischer Jahrbuch V, 130.

290. ↩  The mother is then a nymph Penelope—thus “duck,” which points to birth from an egg—or she is called Sinoe, which in Apollodorus’ text has been corrupted into Οἰνόη. What Wentzel assembles (Philologus 50, 388) leads in that direction, though too timidly in view of the double forms.

291. ↩  Pythian 9, 63. Pindar 268.

292. ↩  Servius Auctus on Georgics I 14. Vergil excels here and in his treatment of beekeeping; he must certainly have read more about him in a Hellenistic poet.

293. ↩  Luisa Vitali, Africa Italiana VII, 17. The London statue, fig. 10, can only be Asclepius, and the transfer of the same posture and dress to Aristaeus is far more credible than that Aristaeus himself should have become a healing god. The popular catchword “chthonic” is wholly inapplicable to the Agreus and Nomios. Otherwise, the attribution of the many Cyrenaic monuments to Aristaeus is probable, though not certain.

294. ↩  Pindar avoids saying anything about this. In Apollonius Rhodius II 520 it becomes clear; he passes over it quickly. In the scholium on Apollonius III 467 the father of Aristaeus is said to be Παίων, unintelligible and incredible; yet I cannot emend it, for Πάωνος = Πανός would be too learned, though it would suit the Arcadian well. A Παίων in Homer A 339 is no Thracian, so one must not think of the Paeonians. Παιονίδαι is a clan-name in Argos, and the Attic clan that gave its name to the deme was supposed to come from Argos, Pausanias II 18, 9. Παιήων must therefore be kept entirely out of consideration.

295. ↩  Aeschylus, Aigyptioi fr. 5; Sisyphus fr. 228, where Hermann has rightly supplied from the explanation Ζαγρεῖ τε . . . χαὶ πολυξένωι <πατρὶ> χαίρειν.

296. ↩ In the scholium on Apollonius Rhodius I 25 some speak of a spring Pimpleia; but the notion that drinking from a spring of the Muses bestows the gift of poetry—just as in certain places it conferred the power of prophecy—is a Hellenistic invention, which also made the river Achelous their father. All the more decisively must one reject the idea that the Muses were from the outset spring-nymphs. If they had been, they would have had to be so for Homer; but he would never have raised “water-girls” to Olympus.

297. ↩  Plutarch, Quaestiones convivales 743d. The name of the place is contained in ἐν λείωι: that is Χίωι, an ancient seat of rhapsodes. There can be no thought of Dion; when that was created by the Macedonian kings, there were only the Muses.

298. ↩  Sophocles fr. 870: Oreithyia is carried off by Boreas “ἐπ’ ἔσχατα χθονὸς νυχτός τε πηγὰς οὐρανοῦ τ’ ἀναπτυχάς, Φοίβου παλαιὸν χῆπον.” The well-known ass-sacrifice of the Hyperboreans belongs to Apollo. Perseus had been among the Hyperboreans—certainly an old saga, older than the visit of Heracles.

299. ↩  One would like to connect the δρῦς ὑποπτερος of Pherecydes with this tree; but that remains a mere conjecture.

300. ↩  To Olympus doves must bring ambrosia for the gods and fly through the Planctae (Od. μ 62). Since these derive from the Argonautic saga—are in truth the Symplegades—the doves fetch the food of the gods from the North.

301.  Plato, Cratylus 397d, knows that only barbarians worship the heavenly bodies, yet assumes that all men, the Hellenes included, had originally recognized gods in them.

302. ↩ Herodotus I 216 mentions horse-sacrifice among the Massagetae; Xenophon, Anabasis IV 5, 35, finds among the Chalybes a horse sacred to Helios.

303. ↩  Sophocles fr. 523 calls him the highest god of the φίλιπποι Θρᾶιχες. If Alexander frequently sacrifices to Helios (Berve, Alexanderreich 86), Macedonia thus accords with Thrace.

304. ↩  In an oath Sophocles can call him πάντων θεῶν πρόμον (Oed. 660). Not without the irony of the enlightened man, Menander says (Clement, Protr. 6, p. 59 P.): “Ἥλιε, σὲ γὰρ δεῖ προσχυνεῖν πρῶτον θεῶν, δι’ ὅν θεωρεῖν ἔστι τοὺς ἄλλους θεούς.” Sophocles fr. 1017 adduces the doctrine of the σοφοί, that is, of theologians, who call Helios the begetter and father of all gods. This is important for the earliest theology; it has nothing to do with popular belief. Yet even Sophocles did not shrink, on occasion, from drawing upon such learning.

305. ↩  Pausanias II 34, 10 mentions at Hermione a temple of Helios; but beside it stands one of Sarapis, so that it will hardly have belonged to the Homeric Helios.

306. ↩  That in the scorching heat of Skirophorion a priest of Helios walks in the procession at the Σχίρα is easily understood. The scholion on Aristophanes, Knights 729, states that at the Thargelia sacrifice is made to Helios and the Horae; this is now connected with the εἰρεσιώνη of Pyanepsion, and in Thargelion one expects Apollo, so that Helios, as often, seems to have been written in place of Apollo. There are still a few similar mentions of no consequence. On Thasos there is a priest of Helios (IG XII 8, 354), but in connection with a sanctuary of Apollo.

307. ↩  The Macedonians of Alexander still took fright at a lunar eclipse, and the king had special sacrifices offered to Ge, Helios, and Selene (Arrian III 7.6). The Greeks at that time no longer did so, even though many among the people will not yet have laid aside the old fear.

308. ↩  This will be treated more closely later, in connection with Aeschylus’ entire stance toward religion.

309. ↩  I cannot find the passage in Plutarch that I have so firmly fixed in my memory.

310. ↩  Diels, in his note on Epimenides 2, has recognized that Aelian (Hist. an. XII 7) has confused Epimenides with Musaios.

311. ↩ The Homeric Hymns 31 and 32 stem from a rhapsode who handles epic language awkwardly. If, for example, in Hymn 31, 7 Helios is called ἐπιείχελος ἀθανάτοισιν, this is protected by Iliad A 265; yet in that case he is in truth no god—perhaps he was meant to be a Titan. The mother Euryphaessa will derive from older poetry. In the Hymn to Selene, after the description of the full moon, it is said that she bore Pandia to Zeus. Presumably the rhapsode recited at the Πάνδιαι, which were celebrated in Attic villages (in Plotheia, IG II² 1172). The goddess is named after the festival, just as King Pandion is. For the festival can only denote a common feast of Zeus, like Παναθήναια and the like. It was probably a full-moon festival. When Allen and Sikes argue strenuously for the itacistic reading πανδείην, they betray the narrowness of their philological horizon. Both hymns proclaim that they introduce a Homeric recitation.

312. ↩  Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus 40, can name Σχότος and Earth as the parents of the Erinyes—so little binding are such genealogies; the conception itself remains the same.

313. ↩  Schrader, Berliner Winckelmannsprogramm 85, 1926

314.  In Hesiod, Theogony 124, Hemera—distinct from Eos—is Day as the child of Night; this is entirely natural and appears also in Aeschylus (Agamemnon 265). At 372 she herself, alongside Sun and Moon, is born of Hyperion and Theia—Hesiodic inventions—and receives as husband the equally invented Astraios, and bears, besides the Winds, the Morning Star. Her significance thus outweighs that of Sun and Moon.

315. ↩ Homer, Iliad A 1, Υ 237. Euripides, Troades 849, depicts the abduction in parallel with that of Ganymede; he calls her Hemera.

316. ↩  It is of no use to discover Tithonos in the Thracian Σίθων, merely because Emathion belongs in Macedonia. We know Tithonos only as a Trojan, and it is empty fancy to declare him a god, where precisely the essential point is that not even immortality can help his humanity.

317. ↩  In itself, Ἠριγόνη as a human name need mean no more than Manius or Lucius in Latin; but the Attic Erigone is connected with the rite of the Attic festival Αἰώρα, which was already Minoan (Nilsson, Minoan Religion 267). The daughter of Aigisthos may be a mere poetic invention.

318. ↩  Proceedings of the Berlin Academy, 1910, p. 376.

319. ↩  On a Τιτώ identified with Eos: Kronos und Titanen 8, 17.

320. ↩ She was bestowed early upon Ariadne, probably on Naxos, and there may already have been a sign of her divinity even before the coming of Dionysos.

321. ↩  Through Philonis, the grandfather of Philammon (Conon 7), who belongs to Parnassus and in early times was a famous citharode, whom the Delphians included in their fictitious lists of Pythian victors—later forgotten, yet important, for he bears witness to the cultivation of poetry in the circle of Delphi, a fact as unmistakable as it has been overlooked by modern scholars. Autolykos too, who belongs to Parnassus, is for that reason derived from Heosphoros (scholion on Κ 267). The scholion on Dionysius Periegetes 509 brings Kephalos, a son of Herse, to Cyprus, where besides Paphos he has as son the Ἑῶιος or Ἀῶος; in both is contained the Morning Star, who in the Etymologicum Magnum s.v. Ἀῶος has Eos as his mother. These stories deserve to be followed up. The Dionysian scholia in general have been quite neglected.

322. ↩ Proceedings of the Berlin Academy, 1921, p. 738. The cloud which Ixion believes he is embracing as Hera is an invention like the phantom Helen in Stesichorus, which in Euripides is formed from aether. Beside Ixion this cloud stands on the painting in the House of the Vettii with sympathetic participation, in a posture as strange as its characterization as a cloud is strange, yet neither is displeasing. Another, but likewise Thessalian, Nephele is the mother of Phrixos and Helle. Of this story, so often treated in tragedy, we know so lamentably little that one cannot even construct a tragic plot from it, let alone recover what was original. It is merely the language of poetry when Pindar in Olympian 11 calls rain-showers children of the cloud, and the language of painting when the painter Python lets heavenly maidens pour down the rain that extinguishes the pyre of Alkmene. These are not clouds; the painter merely wishes to say: it is raining.

323. ↩  Empedokles fr. 50: “ἶρις δ’ ἐχ πελάγους ἄνεμον φέρει ἢ μέγαν ὄμβρον.” This comes from Tzetzes, who names as author “Ἐμπεδοχλῆς εἴτε τις τῶν ἑτέρων,” and is therefore in itself uncertain, so that P. Maas regards the verse as a popular weather rule, of which there are many. Thus the rainbow was taken as a sign of lasting rainy weather, for it was thought to draw water from the sea, Ovid Metamorphoses I 270.

324. ↩  Zenodotus had ἐρίδεσσιν in the text; this was meant to signify the same thing. Hesychius glosses: ἔριδας τὰς ἐν οὐρανῶι ἴριδας Ἀττιχῶς—the last word highly perplexing. The Etymologicum Magnum goes still further astray: ἶρις . . . σημαίνει χαὶ φιλοσοφίαν χαὶ ἔριν χαὶ φήμην.

325. ↩ Semos, in Athenaeus 645b. Hesychius’ gloss ἶρις ποπάνου εἶδος belongs here as well, even if the recipe in Semos points to no cake; it is a porridge, cooked from wheat flour, suet, and honey, together with the so-called χόχχωρα, ἰσχά<δε>ς χαὶ χάρυα τρία. The plural may already have stood in the epitome. We must accept the name as it stands.

326. ↩  Boreas had to be the chief wind over the Archipelago because of the Etesian winds and therefore had to dwell in Thrace. On the Boreads see Sitzungsberichte der Berliner Akademie 1925, p. 227. It was natural to conceive the storm in the plural; the dual, however, is strange. βορεαῖος on Thera, IG XII 3, 357, is ambiguous.

327. ↩ The names, apart from numerous purely local ones, are given from the center of the Archipelago, roughly from Delos: Ἀργέστης from Argos (in Hesiod an epithet of Zephyros, evidently taken without reflection from Asiatic epic), Καιχίας from the Caicus. Θρασχίας is so old that it still appears as Θράσιχες, later Θρᾶιχες.

328. ↩  A black lamb is sacrificed in the conjuration of the τυφώς: Aristophanes, Frogs 848.

329. ↩  Sappho and Simonides 207. In Athens there existed a clan of the Εὑδάνεμοι, who venerated their eponym, who in some way was connected with the Eleusinian rites. Töpffer, Attische Genealogien p. 110, aptly places beside them the Corinthian ἀνεμοχοῖται. One must infer a magical appeasement of storms. It is a mistake of Demon to explain the Attic τριτοπατρῆς or τριτοπάτορες as winds, on the basis of an Orphic doctrine that survives only in later transmission. They were primeval ancestors, as the inscription 500g ὅρος ἱεροῦ τριτοπατρέων Ζαχυαδῶν (Syll. 925) had always shown, and as is now placed beyond all doubt by the Cyrenean ἱερὸς νόμος.

330. ↩  The Τυφαόνιον ὄρος lies between Olympus and the Φίχιον of Boeotia according to the Eoeae (Aspis 32). In Hesychius it is called Τυφίον and is placed in Boeotia. To this then belongs Τυφάων, the son whom Hera bears to Zeus in defiance in the Pythian Hymn 352, for he is reared by the Delphic Delphyne. One must infer a Boeotian local legend.

331. ↩ The author had to come to terms with Hesiod 379, and he did so badly; for to explain the three Hesiodic winds as such simply as μέγ’ ὄνειαρ for mankind is senseless—how destructive they are to men in Homer. Because Typhoeus had been transferred in the Catalogue of Ships to the Arimi, verses 304–5 about Echidna are interpolated.

332. ↩  Fragment 4. If the reporter is to be trusted, Typhon had already become the Egyptian Seth for him.

333. ↩  This form ought long ago to have been restored in Theognis 715; the elegists avoid a molossian hexameter close. The poet is familiar with the struggle between Harpies and Boreads.

334. ↩  The following words μεταχρόνιαι γὰρ ἴαλλον were unintelligible to the grammarians and remain so.

335. ↩  In ν 66 and 77 both words are synonymous. The same holds in ἀνηρέψαντο θύελλαι, θ 727. Both passages are by the reviser.

336. ↩  Cf. Malten, Archäologisches Jahrbuch XXIX, p. 238, where archaic Harpies are depicted.

337. ↩  The figures of the so-called Harpy Monument belong to Lycian belief; we therefore ought not to name them.

338. ↩  It is understandable that Sophocles (fr. 777) makes Phorkys their father. How Achelous could become their father is incomprehensible; the mother Sterope, Apollodorus Bibliotheca I 63, shows that the Aetolian river is meant. They must therefore first be transformed, which proves the late origin of this genealogy.

339. ↩ Life of Sophocles 15, corrected by Huschke from χελιδόνα.

340. ↩  Pindar, Paean 9. Philostratus, Life of Apollonius VI 11, p. 114, calls them ἴυγγες in the form of Sirens; this will be an interpretation of the lost χηληδόνες.

341. ↩  Helen 169 and fr. 911, as we now know, from the Antiope.

342. ↩  Bulletin de Correspondance Hellénique XVII, 238. And this is supposed to represent a symposium of the blessed dead, thus also chthonic Erotes. From such a cup the Spartans would hardly have drunk.

343. ↩  Can anything more absurd be imagined than the notion that the Siren on a grave is a soul-bird, the soul of the person lying in the grave, who as a blessed spirit makes music? Is the angel on many of our modern graves also such a soul-bird?

344. ↩  In Hesiod 326 φίγγα is the variant recommended by Plato, Cratylus 414d; the scholia give this and φῖχα, and in the entirely very young codices one or the other stands—it is immaterial; what Hesiod wrote is of course indeterminable.

345. ↩  The passage is very difficult; the thought of spuriousness readily suggests itself and yet is inadmissible, since the beings enumerated here do not occur again later. Only the verses 218–19, repeated from the later passage 905–6, fall away. If Hesiod himself distinguishes these Κῆρες χαὶ Μοῖραι from the Ker named at 211 and from the Moirai whom Zeus begets with Themis, yet here so combines them that they have the same activity, then these Κῆρες and Μοῖραι are not merely different from the homonymous figures, nor are they two kinds, but unite in themselves the nature of Ker and Moira, so that they bear both names together: they are cruel like the Ker, yet they cannot bring death upon the gods; instead they allot to men and gods the evils they have incurred, and for that reason they are called Moirai. Hesiod’s sense of justice required that the gods too should pay for παραιβασίαι, not only for perjury by the Styx. For this, divine primeval beings had to provide—older than the gods, daughters of Night—what later became the Erinyes. Thus he hit upon the introduction of these Moira-Keres. Precisely their strangeness, together with the wholly Hesiodic belief in divine justice, guarantees the authenticity of the verses.

346. ↩  He invented only Atropos, for Κλῶθες (n 197 in the correct reading) and Lachesis existed independently. The three names of the Moirai were read not only by the poet of the Aspis 258, but already by the maker of the shield, for the poet distinguishes the size of the figures whose names the artist had added. Since these Moirai can derive only from Theogony 217, the interpolation must already have stood in the text at that time. The verses of the Aspis are incurably corrupt.

347. ↩  Photios and Hesychios: μιαρὰ ἡμέρα.

348. ↩ Zenobius IV 33, beneath the text, as usual in the Göttingen edition.

349. ↩  Late antiquity is scarcely trustworthy in its interpretations of such formations. I doubt the Sirens on the hand of an archaic wooden statue of Hera at Koroneia, Pausanias IX 34.3, for which he gives a trivial explanation that is hardly of his own invention. Of course, in any sanctuary a Siren might stand as a guardian, and one might therefore offer a Siren of clay as a votive gift, since this interpretation of a bird with a human head is not compelling; but on the hand of a goddess the bird-woman must in some way be connected with the nature of that goddess herself. I do not venture to propose a specific interpretation.

350. ↩  Sitzungsberichte der Berliner Akademie 1925, 231.

351. ↩  Unfortunately Dionysius, Thucydides 6, does not indicate in which ancient local writer he found Λαμίας τινὰς ἐν ὕλαις χαὶ νάπαις ἐχ γῆς ἀνιεμένας. We do not otherwise know them in the plural at all, nor any story set in Hellas that takes them seriously. They still appear in modern Greek folk-songs. I consider the interpretation of the vase-painting (Athenische Mitteilungen XVI, pl. 9) as Lamia very probable, even in face of Buschor’s new proposal (Mitteilungen LII, 230). Neither the rationalisation of Satyrs as a people on an island in the world-ocean, nor the introduction of some arbitrary barbarian woman, seems conceivable to me in an old satyr-play. The victim of the half-animal woodland gods cannot be an ordinary human child, and Lamia, who ἁλοῦσα ἐπέρδετο, Aristophanes Wasps 1177, seems to fit. How her name relates to the city Lamia is unknown, but Λάμος, the king of the Laestrygonians, will belong to her; the distinguished family of the Aelii Lamiae did not shrink from the name, because they came from Formiae, where the Laestrygonians were supposed to have dwelt. That a Lamia spoke the prologue of Euripides’ Busiris, fr. 922, may be regarded as certain.

352. ↩  Now brought to light in the Erin papyrus; the context is still unclear.

353. ↩  Hermes LX, 303. Strabo I p. 19 deals with these beings.

354. ↩  Even Plutarch, as archon of Chaeroneia, conducted a ceremony in which a slave was driven from the door with rods of ἄγνος (which, like willow-switches, did not strike too harshly) amid the cry: “ἔξω Βούλιμον ἔσω δὲ Πλοῦτον χαὶ Ὑγίειαν.” Plutarch adduces a parallel from Old Smyrna, where a bull was burnt for the Βούβρωστις, with whom one was thus reconciled (Symp. qu. 694).

355. ↩  The Χρυσαορεῖς of Caria, who possess a Zeus χρυσαορεύς, might be adduced, if the whole story, like that of Bellerophon, were at home in Asia. But the Gorgon together with Perseus is found not in Asia, but in the Boeotian Hesiod, in Athens, in Selinus—that is, in Megara—Corinth with Corcyra, and moreover on a Melian clay relief whose provenance is uncertain: in short, in no very extensive region. Even the assumption that Mycenae must necessarily be included on account of Perseus is by no means self-evident, since Perses, as a primordial god in Hesiod, is not understood, and the name-forms fluctuate. Reference may be made to the wide-ranging treatment of the Γοργὼ ἢ Μέδουσα by Gerogiannis, Ἀρχ. Ἐφημ. 27/28; yet the vase-painting on p. 155 depicts a Harpy resembling a Gorgon. The Rhodian piece on p. 154 gives the πότνια θηρῶν goddess a Gorgon’s head and could therefore well be a Μέδουσα; but I am unable to reach any certainty.

356. ↩  On Erinys and Erion see the appendix Erinys.

357. ↩  The Iliad does not yet know Pegasus in combat with the Chimaira, although it already derives the Lycian Bellerophon from Ephyra–Corinth. When in Pindar Olympian 13 he captures Pegasus and sacrifices to Poseidon δαμαῖος, this is meant to signify the taming of the horse with the aid of the ἵππιος, and is therefore a late reshaping. Euripides, Bellerophon 312, must rid himself of Pegasus after the fall of Bellerophon and falls back upon Hesiod.

358. ↩  Tzuntas, Ἐφημ. ἀρχ. 1898, 199, reports interesting things about octopuses and conjectures, like others before him, that the Hecatoncheires were in a sense gigantic octopuses. It is scarcely necessary to seek a special motivation. If even the earliest art could give divine images four arms, several eyes and ears, in order to express their superhuman power, then an older age could give a monster a hundred arms; of its shape it formed no concrete idea.

359. ↩  Athenaeus 4d τὸν βίον εὐσταθεῖς οὐχ ἐγχειρογάστορες is a rhetorical flourish of Athenaeus which the epitomator has excerpted, not something belonging to Clearchus or even Cleanthes, who stand in the preceding extract.

360. ↩  For example, a Cyclops appears in an Attic genealogy as son of Zeuxippos, that is, of a god of the underworld, and grandfather of Myrmex, and so on: Photius, Μύρμηχος ἀτρ. The ant as grandson of a giant is disconcerting. This Myrmex was also father of Melite, Harpokration s.v. Μελ. There was a cult of the Cyclopes on the Isthmus beside the Palaimonion, Pausanias II 2, 1.

361. ↩  I regard him as the true original which Hesiod replaced by the battle of the Titans; Sitzungsberichte 1929, 35.

362. ↩  Pindar, Isthmian 4, 49: over against the giant, the moderate stature of Heracles is emphasized. Antaios, a speaking name, at first receives only Poseidon as father, like so many transgressors; when later Ge becomes his mother, we must no longer think of her ancient bond with Poseidon. She is the mother of the giant, in whose case no one asks after the father.

363. ↩  Konisalos was known to the Athenians as a δαίμων πριαπώδης. Hesychius knows him as the name of an ithyphallic satyr-dance. In the Theraean rock-inscription IG XII 3, 540 — Κρίμων πράτιστος χονιάλωι Σιμίαν ἴανε τὸ[ν τοῦ δεῖνος [or was ἱάνετο medial?] — it is again the dance, not the αἰδοῖον. The supplement of the Coan inscription 39, on which only a place-name Ko- and -σαλον is preserved, was given by Paton himself merely as one possibility.

364. ↩  Göttingische Nachrichten 1895, 243.

365. ↩  After my treatment in Göttingische Nachrichten 1895 and Blinkenberg in Hermes 50, there is nothing more to be said. The name was already derived from θέλγειν by the person who placed Τελχίν and Θελξίων in genealogical relation in the Sicyonian king list. That is linguistically questionable, but less so than the— as Blinkenberg shows, not only phonetically offensive—combination with χαλχός that I had in mind; yet Blinkenberg’s hypothetical form Τϝελχ- is itself unthinkable, for no ϝ-consonant could have stood there, nor could it have disappeared without trace.

366. ↩ The two heads or the eyes distributed over the whole body of the πανόπτης Argos are attempts by painting to render his epithet. Poetry could then follow the lead of painting. In the Imperial period, characteristically, Apollo τετράχειρ becomes popular again, IG V 1, 259. 683.

367. ↩  Barley is predominantly used—ὀλαί, οὐλαχύται—as Plutarch notes in Aetia Graeca 6, just as the πελανός is a legacy of the most ancient age.

368. ↩ Porphyry, De abstinentia II 24. He has previously enumerated the three motives, among them τιμή, this corresponds to the final member of the translated sentence. χάρις and χρεία τῶν ἀγαθῶν correspond to the first two of the three members that are summed up by ἤ ἢ; what precedes them indicates in general what our τιμή always seeks to attain, even by means of a thank-offering and by homage before the gods for their ἀγαθὴ. Thus the Peripatetic designates their ἕξις. The text is in order as soon as one deletes II 152, 22 Nauck, whereby the three motives are subordinated to the general intention and the required correspondence with the previously stated triad is achieved. Heavy-handed interventions are thereby excluded. Finally, Theophrastus must have written ἐχτίμησιν, because he found the τιμᾶν here in all three forms, not merely in the last.

369. ↩  Votive offerings such as the Delphic Serpent Column or the Nike of the Messenians are of the same kind as private χαριστήρια. The introduction of the cult of Pan, the founding of altars for Boreas, the cult of Ζεὺς σωτήρ and of ἐλευθέριος show yet another attitude. The recognition of the Tempestates as gods is an analogy, but it occurred on the basis of a vow. The celebration of εὐαγγέλια culminates in the enjoyment of the sacrificial meat, unlike the corresponding supplicationes of Rome (Aristophanes, Knights 656; Plutarch, Praecepta rei publicae gerendae 799f., on Stratokles). Such a thing is degeneration.

370. ↩  Something of this sort is customary at a symposium: the precondition for Theramenes’ final libation for Kritias—ultimately the same as our drinking to someone’s health and our toasts. The ἀγαθοὶ ἄνδρες receive symbolically what the gods once received in no symbolic sense at all. In England the first glass is still pledged to the king, as we once did as well; there was still something religious in it. In Athens the draught Διὸς σωτῆρος was never lacking.

371. ↩  The invocation of Earth and of the dead is accompanied by blows struck upon the ground.

372. ↩  Modern nonsense goes so far as to claim that Tydeus bit into the head of his slain enemy in order to suck his strength into himself, thereby forfeiting immortality. Then Hera too would have needed a supplement of strength, when Zeus reproaches her with wishing to devour Priam and his people raw (Iliad A 35), and Hecuba, who wants to gnaw out Achilles’ liver (Iliad Q 212).

373. ↩  Lietzmann, Messe und Herrenmahl, p. 180.

374. ↩  Oath-sacrifices and expiatory sacrifices belong in another context.

375. ↩  Clytaemestra emphasizes it as a special privilege (Aeschylus, Agamemnon 1036). At the Eleusinian initiations, too, Hellenic or Hellenized slaves could take part. From the public cult of the people, slaves and foreigners are of course excluded; but as attendants of the participants they might accompany them—for example, to drive along the sacrificial animal of a private individual. Individual cults have their own particular regulations, as in all things.

376. ↩  The act of slaughter is passed over; hence no sacrificial animal is led in the procession. The sacrifice in time of peace also reveals much of the ritual.

377. ↩  Especially numerous on the citadel-hill of Thera, on the rock of Leto and Athena ἐργάνη at Kynthos, and in Athens on the Hill of the Nymphs.

378. ↩  Theophrastus (in Porphyry, De abstinentia II 25) discusses the matter in detail. He counts deer among the victims as well, and it is natural that the hunter should dedicate something from his quarry. The Elaphebolia must once have required the sacrifice of a deer; this also follows from the fact that later a cake called ἔλαφος was baked as a substitute (Athenaeus 646e). I recall a deer-sacrifice only from Apollonius II 698, where the Argonauts must first hunt down the victim. Other game animals do not seem to have been sacrificed; the wild boar probably belonged among the harmful and hostile creatures that were simply to be exterminated.

379. ↩  The exceptions in Athenaeus 297d prove the rule, which Plutarch, Quaestiones convivales 729c, admittedly states only for the Pythagoreans.

380. ↩  The Hippocratic writings at least prove that such things did occur. The treatise περὶ διαίτης II 45 (VI 546 L.) discusses the digestibility of dog’s flesh, but alongside it also mentions fox and hedgehog, and even horse. One may have learned this among the Scythians.

381. ↩ Because goat-sacrifices were permitted, a Zeus was called αἰγοφάγος (Etym. Magn.); Hera in Sparta likewise (Pausanias III 15, 9). But she also received goats in Corinth, Zenobius I 27 and elsewhere.

382. ↩  This is stated by Callimachus, fr. 76, of Artemis of Amarynthos. In the same poem there must have stood at 82b a passage praising an Aphrodite because she did not disdain pigs. Choliambics therefore cannot be reconstructed.

383. ↩  IG I 5 and 76, 37. Aristophanes, Plutus 820: “βουθυτεῖ ὗν χαὶ τράγον χαὶ χριόν.” The verb points to a βούαρχος, but even that is still too expensive for Chremylus.

384. ↩  “Wreathing” renders στέφανος imprecisely; twigs are inserted into the hair. There can therefore be no talk of a symbolic “binding” such as modern enthusiasts for magic imagine in wreathing.

385. ↩  Pericles received the θαλλός after the victory over Samos, according to Lycurgus in the Patmian lexicon (Bull. Corr. Hell. I 190). In Valerius Maximus II 6, 5 this has become the claim that this was the first instance of such an honor.

386. ↩  Frickenhaus, Tiryns I 123.

387. ↩  Bernays, Kleine Schriften II 283.

388. ↩  Callimachus, Hymn 2, 81.

389. ↩  In contrast to the delight in flowers characteristic of the Cretans, it is striking that among the Greeks this appears only late, and that the flowers later most beloved do not enter cult—rose and violet. In architecture the Egyptian lotus exerts influence first, then the acanthus, which plays no role in life, then the Dionysiac ivy; the olive branch recedes, and it was not originally Hellenic either. But the palm of victory presses forward. σέλινον was once very popular, a token of victory at the Isthmian and Nemean games; later one hears nothing more of it, and at the Isthmus it is replaced by the pine, because it grows there.

390. ↩  The rhetor Genethlius calls most of the gifts of early lyric poetry χλητιχοὶ ὕμνοι and distinguishes others, only partly important for ancient cult; χατευχαί is an older expression, genuinely cultic. It was the title of a book by Simonides (Sappho and Simonides 152). That it designates the summoning of the god follows from inscriptions: Syll. 589, 21 (Magnesia), 695, 42 χατευχὴν χαὶ παράχλησιν παντὸς τοῦ δήμου ποιεῖσθαι—then follows the call to the people and within it εὔχεσται δέ etc., therein the content of the prayer. The χατευχή is therefore not directed to the people. 671A 20: οἱ ἱερεῖς χατευχέσθωσαν τὰ Εὐμένεια. Dittenberger, Orient. Inscr. 309, 7: μετὰ τὸ συντελεσθῆναι τὰς χατευχὰς χαὶ τὰς σπονδὰς χαὶ τὰς θυσίας. Apollonius, Mirabilia 13: after τῶν χατευχῶν συντελεσθεισῶν follows the sacrifice. Plutarch, De superstitione 169d, uses the word in the general sense of χατεύχεσθαι, so that χατευχαὶ θεῶν are all invocations of the gods. Alciphron IV 19 Sch. has Menander’s Glykera amuse herself ἐν ταῖς χατευχαῖς at the Kalligeneia; the Atticist has picked up the word just as thoughtlessly as he has the Kalligeneia.

391. ↩  Pseudo-Plutarch De musica 7 and 29. In the first passage Bernays’s p. 493, 22 Μαρσύου must be deleted, for the first Olympus, the inventor of the νόμοι, is the παιδιχά of Marsyas; the second is a descendant of the first and introduces the χρούματα among the Hellenes only, ch. 5—everything taken from Alexander Polyhistor.

392. ↩ The most important testimony for this cry is in the scholion to Aristophanes Birds 1764: “δοχεῖ δὲ πρῶτος Ἀρχίλοχος νιχήσας έν Πάρωι τὸν Δήμητρος ὕμνον ἑαυτῶι τοῦτο ἐπιπεφωνηχέναι.” From this it follows that the cry belonged in the cult of Demeter on Paros and was used by Archilochus in the poem that stood among his Iobacchic songs. This led to the ritual little victory-song being ascribed to Archilochus, though it belongs to the motherland. Because of it, in turn, a victory of Archilochus was invented—something in fact inconceivable.

393. ↩ The iambus of Semonides only acquires sense if it is a reply to the scolding speeches of the women at the festival of Demeter, which we do not know because they never took poetic form. It accords with this that the manner in which the women are characterized is not peculiar to Semonides. Phocylides has something similar, only shorter and more skilful, because the mockery is absent, which produced exaggerations and prolixity.

394. ↩ The Hybristika in Argos, the Skira in Athens: Buschor, Archäologisches Jahrbuch 38 (1924) 129. Especially important is Plutarch Solon 8.

395. ↩ It is therefore too narrow when the grammarians connect the paean only with Apollo. The χρητιχοὶ παιᾶνες will at first have concerned the measure, which in fact still governs the Athenian paeans in the second century. Likewise, the way in which the tragedians use παιών and παιώνιος does not concern Apollo alone. Nor can ἰὴ παιῆον refer to the god Παιήων, whom the Iliad mentions once as physician of the gods.

396. ↩  Paean 1 is a New Year festival, for the Eniautos and the Horai make their entry; the goal will be the Ismenion. Apollo must then be νουμήνιος, as in the Odyssey. New Year celebrations can of course be older than the fixing of the calendar. In Athens only a sacrifice to Zeus σωτήρ closes the year. Originally, however, it can only have been the beginning of spring that, in feeling, gave rise to a festival.

397. ↩ The χωπώ, in which the laurel is brought in, is carried—if not in fact, at least for the sacred action—by a παῖς ἀμφιθαλής, who by his innocent age and his origin is ἁγνός, and therefore worthy to bear the god in the laurel (Pindar 433). This is a ceremony of the service of Apollo; to him also belongs the bringing in of new fire from Delphi, whereas other cults, such as that of Hera at Argos, maintained an eternal fire. Such a fire also burned at Cyrene (Callimachus, Hymn 2.83); it had to, for where else would they have obtained fresh fire?

398. ↩  It is a false interpretation when a priest is supposed to “play” Demeter because he puts on a mask, from which the goddess is called Κιδαρία (from χίδαρις; it was a kind of polos). Everyone knows the cult-image, and everyone knows the priest; in the image is the goddess, not in the man who bears it (Pausanias VII 15.3). Yet here, in this Arcadian corner, an old practice has been preserved, from a time when the mask as image of the goddess sufficed.

399. ↩  In the cult that Pindar founded for the Mother of the Gods and Pan, girls too sing, as they do at the Daphnephoria. The same holds for Aegina (Bacchylides 13.94). In Elis there is a chorus of Thyads. From Sparta we know an Artemis song cited by Dicaearchus (Athenaeus XIV 636d; Greek Metrics 359); Alcman cannot be meant—these verses are not so old. Spartan cult songs were numerous; Xenophon knows of a paean to Poseidon at an earthquake (Hellenica IV 7.4). We even know the names of poets and poetesses of early times; only “Αρεύς with a ἆισμα Κύχνος” (Schol. Antoninus Liberalis 12) cannot be ancient, perhaps dating from the third century. Many songs and dances are mentioned in the treatise on ancient music excerpted by Athenaeus at 632.

400. ↩ Hesychius: Aduphera: “λόμβαι· αἱ τῆι Ἀρτέμιδι θυσιῶν ἄρχουσαι ἀπὸ τῆς χατὰ τὴν παιδιὰν σχευῆς· οἱ γὰρ φάλητες οὕτω χαλοῦνται.” The place is not given, but it is rightly regarded as Laconian, or at least Peloponnesian—remarkable though it is, in an Artemis cult, that the priestesses should costume themselves as men, as one must probably understand it.

401. ↩  The festivals of the Laphria and the Boeotian Daidala provide examples of such sacrifices.

402. ↩ Aristotle, Constitution of the Athenians 55.5. Plato, Laws 753d, ordains that the voter for the archons, at the final ballot, shall cast his vote “διὰ τομίων πορευόμενος.” He too bears responsibility, just as the man elected does; in a sense he is thereby put under oath.

403. ↩ Aristophanes, Lysistrata 204. The comedian has chosen a wineskin as the sacrificial victim; all are supposed to drink of its blood. He calmly accepts the contradiction, especially since it never comes to drinking. At T 273 those who are bound by the oath at least receive hairs of the sacrificial animal in their hands. The director whose adaptation of Euripides’ Heraclidae we read has transformed the sacrifice of Heracles’ daughter into σφάγια βρότεια, 822, because he omitted the act that dealt with the sacrifice itself. That was a grave blunder, for the seers had demanded a sacrifice to Kore-Persephone, 408. The σφάγια, for which animals had already been prepared, 399, concern the outcome of the battle and must be interpreted accordingly; Kore cannot possibly belong among the gods to whom a general sacrifices. I do not doubt that this absurdity too will be laid at Euripides’ door.

404. ↩  Whether Artemis is angered or the winds (Aeschylus, Agamemnon 1418) is a secondary matter. A god is free in loving and hating; it is only later reflection that seeks motives.

405. ↩  For this reason Phainias (Plutarch, Themistocles 13) deserves no credence when he tells of a human sacrifice as σφάγια before the battle of Salamis. The name of an otherwise unknown seer and the detail that the slaughtered captives were relatives of Xerxes are traits no one will believe. It is then sheer uncriticality to discard these and yet retain the human sacrifice itself.

406. ↩  In the compilation in Porphyry, De abstinentia II 54–56, most human sacrifices are barbarian; but Theophrastus, cited there at II 27, attests their occurrence at the Arcadian Lykaia. Yet when he continues that, in memory of the practice, “ἐμφύλιον αἷμα” was sprinkled on the altars, this excludes any actual slaughter.

407. ↩ Only in late times did people set about bringing sacrificial rites into a system. This should not deceive us, though it often leads to a similar kind of systematization. Thus in Eusebius, Praeparatio evangelica IV 145, there stands a long poem taken from Porphyry on the oracles.

408. ↩  Kneeling is oriental; hence the Phoenician chorus kneels in Euripides, Phoenissae 293. Proskynesis is Persian; therefore the chorus of the Persians performs it. γουνοῦσθαι means to grasp the knees of the person one implores for mercy, later simply “to entreat,” but it is originally Ionic.

409. ↩  Pfuhl, De Atheniensium pompis sacris, Berlin 1900.

410. ↩ τελεταί, and thus also μυήσεις, existed in many places; it is wrong always to think of Eleusis. Even Apollo of Cyrene has his τετελεσμένοι.

411. ↩  Tatian, who can be called an apologist only in a very euphemistic sense, plays the trump card in his clumsy polemic against the Hellenes claiming they had τὸ άθανατίζεσθαι μόνην τὴν ψυχὴν, ἐγὼ δὲ χαὶ τὸ σὺν αὐτῆι σαρχίον (p. 27 Schw.). The same in Pseudo-Justin, π. ἀναστάσεως p. 246 Otto. They have no inkling that this resurrection of the flesh is a relapse into a “paganism” far cruder than the translation of heroes to the Isles of the Blessed. Even Luca Signorelli, through his art, merely made palpable the absurdity of the resurrection of the flesh.

412. ↩  If only we knew what Democritus taught περὶ τῶν ἐν ἅιδου. The fragments deal with apparent death and with foolish fear of dying. He must surely have sought in man and in his state of mind the explanation of the myths.

413. ↩  Medea says in Euripides 1039 that her children are to pass εἰς ἄλλο σχῆμα βίου. Iphigenia’s farewell words are, at 1507, ἕτερον αἰῶνα χαὶ μοῖραν οἰχήσομεν. χαῖρέ μοι φίλον φῶς. That is surely not empty phrasing.

414. ↩  It is always people of a higher social standing whose graves and gravestones we find. Where have all the slaves gone, the mass of the metics? Even among the citizens of Athens many owned no land; and even if they could acquire a place for a grave, the cremation itself could not be carried out on the spot. For that, space had to be provided, especially near the city. Hence the unexplained πυρχαιαί seem to me to be understood as ustrinae, such as the speaker in Lysias π. σηχοῦ 7 §24 has on his plots of land and may not plough up. Only the collegia funeraticia of the Roman imperial period secured a lasting burial even for freedmen and slaves.

415. ↩  I attempted to make this contrast clear in my interpretation, Homer und Ilias p. 113.

416. ↩  The women receive no mask: understandably, the corpse is not displayed for long.

417. ↩  In a comedian Hegesippos, probably only from the third century, Athen. 290b, the guests arrive at a sumptuous περίδειπνοι straight from the ἐχφορά. They have not waited for the time-consuming cremation. This is intelligible, and yet characteristic of the change in custom. In Menander’s Andria it was otherwise (Terence 130).

418. ↩  Patroclus is given the hair along with him; corresponding to this is Orestes’ laying his lock upon his father’s grave. Aeschylus, to be sure, has in the prologue the Iliad Ψ in view.

419. ↩  Plato, Laws 800e, calls the funeral songs of the wailing women Carian; Aeschylus calls the χομμός Persian, and yet Electra performs it, as does also his Persian chorus, not that of the Seven. To the Athenian, since Solon, the old savagery had become alien. It must have seemed Persian at that time; and the public mourning ceremony of today’s Persians for the sons of ʿAlī, with the self-laceration of the participants, is a grotesque degeneration of the χομμὸς Ἄριος; the Κίσσιαι ἰηλεμίστριαι are lacking.

420. ↩  The Athenian memorial festival for the fallen betrays its late introduction by the absence of all cultic features from the ritual; yet at the end of his speech Pericles calls upon the community to perform the final ὀλοφύρεσθαι for their kin, Thucydides II 46.

421. ↩  It is a gross misinterpretation when evidence is sought in myth. Laodameia did not die in Thessaly for her husband who fell before Troy; rather, by her grief she compelled him to rise from Hades for a single night, and only thereafter had she herself to die. Εὐάγνη received her name (Eödyvn) because she voluntarily followed Capaneus into death, although, struck by lightning, he could not receive an honorable burial. So we hear it in Euripides’ Suppliants; it will be older, to be sure, but still secondary, for the Thebaid had his body shattered by the thunderbolt and its pieces scattered to all the winds (Eurip. Phoen. 1183, still rejected despite the relief from Trysa, Benndorf p. 193). After the capture of Troy the foremost heroes receive the principal spoils: Odysseus Hecuba, Agamemnon Cassandra, Neoptolemus Andromache. Then Achilles rises from his grave and demands a victor’s prize as well; Polyxena can be granted to the dead only through slaughter upon his tomb. Thus the Persis will already have told it. None of these stories can be compared, even remotely, with widow-burning. Penelope counts as a widow, and all agree that her kinsmen will marry her again. Later, second marriages are common, and where divorce exists, death must always have dissolved the marriage.

422. ↩  Persson, Archiv für Religionsgeschichte 27, 385.

423. ↩ The Corinthian grave-stone Δϝεινία τόδε σᾶμα τὸν ὤλεσε πόντος ἀναιδής stood upon such a cenotaph.

424. ↩  I failed to recognize this when I discussed the Charon’s obol (Herm. 34, 228), though I was right to deny the idea of “buying one’s way across.” The first appearance of Charon in the Minyas remains established. Whether that poem or an earlier one made the grim henchman of the lord of the Underworld into a ferryman cannot be determined—and is in any case unimportant. That he is the invention of a poet is beyond doubt.

425. ↩  The addendum to Hesiod’s Works and Days forbids sexual intercourse after returning from a burial.

426. ↩ Yet the name denotes a meal at the grave, and in that case the dead person could not be excluded. In the Balkans, Christians still hold such a meal today, and the deceased receives his share; I have seen this myself. But this need not go back to Hellenic custom.

427. ↩  This is shown very beautifully in F. W. Otto’s book Die Manen.

428. ↩ Ἀίδης is no more a patronymic than Ὑπεριονίδης beside Ὑπερίων. Which etymology is correct—whether from ἀϝίδης or, with Wackernagel, from αἰίδης—makes no difference in substance.

429. ↩  Now the Phaeacians are inhabitants of a blessed land, near the Isles of the Blessed, where Rhadamanthys dwells. But they are still called “the Grey Ones” and once were ferrymen of death. Now the king and the more powerful queen are drawn as wholly human; once it was the queen of the underworld who took pity on Odysseus, as she does in the other tales. Thus we see the transforming art and power of several poets, of several ages. The last and fairest step was that beside the queen there appeared a lovely daughter. The land of the Phaeacians displays the abundance of that Hades–Plouton who bears the cornucopia.

430. ↩  A poet happily bestowed his name: in it one hears the growling of a snappish cur. He lies at the gate and will not let the dead out, nor the living in. Odin too encounters a dog at the gate of Hel (Vegtamskviða, Baldr’s Dreams, Thule II 24). The three or more heads make him more dreadful; Orthos of Geryon does not yet have them. The herdsman Menoites is in Hesiod a son of Iapetos, Menoitios, whom Zeus must subdue. The red island belongs to the world-ocean, to unknown remoteness; it corresponds to the meadow by the Cimmerians. It is impermissible to rationalize it into a concrete locality, as Hecataeus began to do—or rather Stesichorus, who happened to have good fortune with his placing it at Gades.

431. ↩  That was appropriate in the case of a human sacrifice, but Iphigenia is merely crowned and sprinkled with lustral water, Iphigenia in Aulis 1477, and thereafter by the later poet 1567.

432. ↩  IG II² 1358, 32: after the τριτοπατρεῖς the ἀχάμαντες receive a sacrifice. Beside the ancestors they can only be heroes—those who, after death, still retain their power.

433. ↩  Very beautifully the orphaned boy says in Euripides’ Suppliants 1153: “Father, my eyes think they see you, but the admonitions of your voice have vanished into the air.” In Aeschylus, Choephori 829, the avenger is to act as a living image of the dead man. Through him the father speaks and takes vengeance by means of him.