The Greek View of Life | Page 6

continuance were due. The sailor who saw, on
turning the point of Sunium, the tip of the spear of Athene glittering on
the Acropolis, beheld in a type the spiritual form of the state; Athene
and Athens were but two aspects of the same thing; and the statue of
the goddess of wisdom dominating the city of the arts may serve to sum
up for us the ideal of that marvellous corporate life where there was no
ecclesiastical religion only because there was no secular state.
Regarded from this point of view, we may say that the religion of the
Greeks was the spiritual side of their political life. And we must add
that in one respect their religion pointed the way to a 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