The Greek View of Life | Page 6

higher political achievement than they were ever able to realise in fact. One fatal defect of the Greek civilisation, as is familiar to students of their history, was the failure of the various independent city states to coalesce into a single harmonious whole. But the tendency of religion was to obviate this defect. We find, for example, that at one time or another federations of states were formed to support in common the cult of some god; and one cult in particular there was--that of the Delphian Apollo--whose influence on political no less than on religious life was felt as far as and even beyond the limits of the Greek race. No colony could be founded, no war hazarded, no peace confirmed, without the advice and approval of the god--whose cult was thus at once a religious centre for the whole of Greece, and a forecast of a political unity that should co-ordinate into a whole her chaos of conflicting states.
The religion of the Greeks being thus, as we have seen, the presupposition and bond of their political life, we find its sanction extended at every point to custom and law. The persons of heralds, for example, were held to be under divine protection; treaties between states and contracts between individuals were confirmed by oath; the vengeance of the gods was invoked upon infringers of the law; national assemblies and military expeditions were inaugurated by public prayers; the whole of corporate life, in short, social and political, was so embraced and bathed in an idealising element of ritual that the secular and religious aspects of the state must have been as inseparable to a Greek in idea as we know them to have been in constitution.
Section 5. Religious Festivals.
For it was in ritual and art, not in propositions, that the Greek religion expressed itself; and in this respect it was closer to the Roman Catholic than to the Protestant branch of the Christian faith. The plastic genius of the race, that passion to embody ideas in form, which was at the root, as we saw, of their whole religious outlook, drove them to enact for their own delight, in the most beautiful and telling forms, the whole conception they had framed of the world and of themselves. The changes of the seasons, with the toil they exact and the gifts they bring, the powers of generation and destruction, the bounty or the rigours of the earth; and on the other hand, the order and operations of social phenomena, the divisions of age and sex, of function and of rank in the state--all these took shape and came, as it were, to self- consciousness in a magnificent series of publicly ordered fetes. So numerous were these and so diverse in their character that it would be impossible, even if it were desirable in this place, to give any general account of them. Our purpose will be better served by a description of two, selected from the calendar of Athens, and typical, the one of the relations of man to nature, the other of his relation to the state. The festivals we have chosen are those known as the "Anthesteria" [Footnote: This interpretation of the meaning of the "Anthesteria" is not accepted by modern scholars. It is not, however, for typographical reasons, convenient to remove it from the text, and the error is of no importance for the purpose of this book.] and the "Panathenaea."
The Anthesteria was held at that season of the year when, as Pindar sings in an ode composed to be sung upon the occasion, "the chamber of the Hours is opened and the blossoms hear the voice of the fragrant spring; when violet clusters are flung on the lap of earth, and chaplets of roses braided in the hair; when the sound of the flute is heard and choirs chanting hymns to Semele." On the natural side the festival records the coming of spring and the fermenting of last year's wine; on the spiritual, its centre is Dionysus, who not only was the god of wine, but, according to another legend, symbolised in his fate the death of the year in winter and its rebirth at spring.
The ceremonies open with a scene of abandoned jollity; servants and slaves are invited to share in the universal revel; the school holidays begin; and all the place is alive with the bustle and fun of a great fair. Bargaining, peep-shows, conjuring, and the like fill up the hours of the day; and towards evening the holiday-makers assemble garlanded and crowned in preparation for the great procession. The procession takes place by torch-light; the statue of Dionysus leads the way, and the revellers follow and swarm about him, in carriages or on foot, costumed as Hours or Nymphs or Bacchae in the