The Formation of Christendom, Volume II. Allies Thomas William
hundred years by Hadrian, and as “guardian of the city” distinct festivals. Yet more manifold was the invocation of Apollo, as the Pythian, the Delphic, the Lycian, as the ancestral god of the Ionians. The multiform Artemis had her temples and worshippers as the Tauric, by the name Brauronia; as the port-goddess, by the name Munychia; as the goddess of the hunt, by the name Agrotera, who had the credit of the victory won at Marathon; as presiding over birth, she was called Chitone, while Themistocles had built a temple to her as the Counsellor. Heré had only a doorless and roofless temple on the road to Phalerum; but the god of fire was worshipped in Athens abundantly. Hermes had his peculiar statues in every street, irreverence to which might be fatal even to an Alcibiades, the city's darling; while Aphrodité had a crowd of temples and shrines whose unchaste worship found but too many frequenters. Poseidon had to content himself with a single altar in his rival's city, and with games in its harbour; but Dionysos had three temples, with brilliant festivals; Mars was not without one; Hestia was throned in the Prytaneum; the Earth, Kronos, and Rhea had their temples and festivals, as also the Erinnyes, who were worshipped only in two other places in Greece. Here alone in Greece was a sanctuary and a rite to Prometheus; while the Asiatic mother of the gods had a splendid temple where the archives of the state were kept. Besides, there was the worship of the Hours and the Graces, of Eileithyia, goddess of victory and of birth, of Æsculapius and Themis, of the Kabirian Anakes, the Arcadian Pan, the Thracian Cotytto and Bendis, the Egyptian Serapis. Mercy and Shame, Fame and Endeavour had their altars; and the hero-worship numbered Theseus, Codrus, Academus, Solon, the tyrant-slayers Harmodius and Aristogeiton; and Hercules, originally a hero, but here and elsewhere widely honoured as a god.4
Athens, if the most superstitious as well as the most intellectual of cities, may be taken as the type of a thousand others of Hellenic race scattered over the Roman empire from Marseilles to Antioch. Say that she had twice as many deities and festivals as her sister cities, enough will remain for them wherewith to occupy the soil with their temples and to fill the year's cycle with their rites.
The lively Grecian imagination impregnated not with stern notions of duty, nor with reverential devotion to those whom it worshipped, but regarding them as objects of æsthetical satisfaction,5 and yearning for a serene and confidential exchange of relations with them, had in process of time spun out a complete web of idolatrous worship which encompassed heaven and earth, the whole domain of nature, every state and act of human life. Rain and sunshine and the weather stood under the ordering of Zeus; the fruitfulness of the soil was Demeter's care; countless nymphs of field, of fountain, and of river, offered to men their gifts; the vine and its juice was under the protection of Dionysos, and Poseidon was lord of the sea. The flocks had their defenders in Hermes and Pan; the Fates ruled the lot of men. Kings and magistrates had in Zeus their prototype and guardian. Athené held her shield over cities; the hearth of each private home and the public hearth of the city were in Hestia's charge. Marriage was secure under Heré's care. Demeter was entrusted with legislation; the pains of childbirth were recommended to Eileithyia, or Artemis. Music, archery, divination, were Apollo's attributes; the art of healing claimed him and his son Æsculapius as patrons. Athené and Ares swayed the issue of war; the chase was the domain of Artemis; smiths and all workers in fire saw in Hephæstus their patron; whilst Athené the Worker protected the gentler trades, and Hecate watched over the roads.6
Yet Rome itself, whose own Capitoline Jupiter claimed a certain superiority over all these gods, would scarcely have yielded to any Grecian city, even were it Athens, in the number or variety of her deities, the frequency and solemnity of her festivals; while in the costliness of victims offered to her gods, and in the strictness of her ceremonies, she probably far surpassed that and all other cities. Her sterner worship of originally shapeless gods, presiding over the labours of a simple agricultural life, had long yielded to the seductions of her dangerous Grecian captive. The rude block Terminus, and Jupiter the Stone, ceased to satisfy those who had beheld the majesty of the father of gods and men embodied by the genius of a Phidias; and she had ended by going farther in breaking up the conception of one god, and in the personification of particular powers, operations, physical functions, and qualities, than any nation of antiquity.7 But though the beautiful forms of the Hellenic gods, as expressed by the skill of unrivalled sculptors, had carried her away, yet the nature of her worship was in strong contrast with that of Greece. Her religion had rested originally on two ideas, the might of the gods friendly to Rome, and the force of ceremonial over these gods;8 and still when she accepted the gods of conquered nations for her own, it was to secure the possession of their might, and to have them for friends instead of foes; while her own worship was a matter of routine and habit jealously guarded by unchanging ceremonies, and prosecuted not out of affection, but for the material security of daily life, which, according to the deeply-rooted feeling of the people, could not go on without it.
The individualised and humanised Latin and Hellenic gods, if they had much in common, still could not be thoroughly amalgamated; but Rome, as the mistress of Western Asia and Egypt, came upon Oriental religions of a very different stamp. Instead of this wide Pantheon of gods, each of whom had his occupation, these Asiatics generally regarded the deity in a sexual relationship, as one male and one female god, representing the active and passive forms of nature,9 and worshipped with a mixture of fear and voluptuousness. Such were Bel and Mylitta, Moloch and Astarte, and by whatever different names the same idea was presented. The worship of the great mother Cybele, so widely spread through Asia Minor, approached in many respects in character to that of this female goddess. But it is needless to go farther into the specific differences of these various idolatries; only bear in mind that they in their several countries occupied the domain of public and private life, as the worship of which I have given the details did at Athens. So it was before the influence of external conquerors reached them. After this a certain change ensues. The Roman empire was accomplishing in the west as well as in the east what the progress of Grecian rule and thought had commenced three hundred years before10 under Alexander and his successors, the bringing together and in some sort fusing the multiform and often contradictory worship of the nations surrounding the Mediterranean Sea. Not merely in Rome, but in all the chief cities of the Empire, the Asiatic, the Egyptian, the Libyan deities, and many others of subject nations under the Roman sway, were worshipped side by side. Accordingly, in the time of Augustus, and at the year of Rome 750, where we are taking our stand, there prevailed all over the hundred millions of men ruled by him a polytheistic idolatry bewildering by its multiplicity, internal contradictions, fluctuations, and mixtures, yet imposing by its universal extent and prevalence. The only exception seems to have been the Jewish worship of one God, whether in its chief seat, the small province of Judæa, or as it was seen in the lives of Jewish settlers scattered throughout the empire. It must be remarked that this Jewish worship of the true God was sanctioned as that of a national god belonging to the Jews, and sacrifice was perpetually offered for Augustus in the Temple at Jerusalem. But the Jews did not, as a rule, make efforts to convert the Gentiles to their religion, nor seek to exhibit it as antagonistic to the prevailing idolatry, and as claiming to subdue and cast it out. They were content to keep their own worship to themselves, and with the toleration which the Roman law thus allowed them. Yet even so in every place where they dwelt in any numbers some of the better heathens were found to be attracted to their worship by the intrinsic beauty of their belief in one God.
2. But such an exception as this hardly made a perceptible break in that continuous mass of evil and falsehood which then surrounded young and old, learned and ignorant, rich and poor, in its grasp. The sea stands in Holy Writ as the well-known image of the world's disobedience to the divine promptings, of its impetuosity and lawlessness. What image is there in nature so striking and awful as the long waves of the Atlantic bearing down in storm upon a helpless ship, and sweeping it upon an iron-bound coast! So broke that wild sea of human error over the individual mind of man. The observer looked round upon all the nations, and it was everywhere the same – a multiplicity of gods filling up the whole circle of human life, many-named, many-natured, but all without truth, purity, and justice; full of violent and sensual deeds, and still viler
From
Ibid. pp. 468, 480.
Ibid. p. 312.