And not only would it have been difficult to give adequate expression to the essential ideas of Greek religion, but there was no motive for attempting the task. Those of the philosophers who dealt with religion wrote and taught for the reason that they had some new idea, some fresh doctrine, to advance. Plato certainly abounds in references to the popular beliefs of his age: but his object is not to expound them for their own sake: rather he utilizes them as illustration and ornament of his own philosophical views: his treatment of them in the main is artistic, not scientific. In fact there was no one interested in giving to popular beliefs an authoritative and dogmatic expression. There was no hierarchy concerned to arrest the free progress of thought or to chain men’s minds to the faith of their forefathers. A summary of popular doctrines, if it could have been written, would have had no readers, for the simple reason that the people felt their religion more truly and fully than the writer could express it: and few men have the interests of posterity so largely at heart, as to write what their own contemporaries will certainly not read. Thus it appears that there was neither motive nor means for treating the popular religion in literary form: to formulate the common-folk’s creed, to analyse the common-folk’s religion, was a thing neither desired nor feasible.

But because we observe an almost total absence of distinctively religious literature, we need not for that reason be surprised at the constant presence of religious feeling in all that a Greek wrote or sang. Rather it was consistent with that freedom and that absence of all control and circumscription which we have noted, that religion should pervade the whole life of the people, whose hearts were its native soil, and should consequently pervade also the literature in which their thoughts and doings are recorded. For religion with them was not a single and separate department of their civilisation, not an avocation from the ordinary pursuits of men, but rather a spirit with which work and holiday, gaiety and gloom, were alike penetrated. We should be misled by the modern devotion to dogma and definite formulae of faith, were we to think that so vague a religion as Greek polytheism was any the less an abiding force, any the less capable of inspiring genuine enthusiasm and reverence. It is not hard to imagine the worshipper animated for the time by one emotion only, his mind void of all else and flooded with the one idea incarnate in the divine being at whose altar he sat in supplication. It is impossible really to misdoubt the strength and the depth of Greek religious sentiment, however multifarious and even mutually contradictory its modes of display. A nation who peopled sky and earth and sea with godlike forms; who saw in every stream and glen and mountain-top its own haunting, hallowing presence, and, ill-content that nature alone should do them honour, sought out the loveliest hills and vales in all their lovely land to dedicate there the choicest of their art; who consecrated with lavish love bronze and marble, ivory and gold, all the best that wealth could win and skill adorn, in honour of the beings that were above man yet always with him, majestic as Zeus, joyous as Dionysus, grave as Demeter, light as Aphrodite, yet all divine; such a nation, though it knew nought of inspired books and formulated creeds, can be convicted of no shortcoming in real piety and devotion.

Their gods were very near to those whom they favoured; no communion or intercourse was beyond hope of attainment; gods fought in men’s battles, guided men’s wanderings, dined at men’s boards, and took to themselves mortal consorts; and when men grew degenerate and the race of heroes was no more, gods still held speech with them in oracles. Religious hopes, religious fears, were the dominant motive of the people’s whole life. It was in religion that sculpture found its inspiration, and its highest achievements were in pourtraying deities. The theatre was a religious institution, and on the stage, without detriment to reverence, figured the Eumenides themselves. Religious duties were excuse enough for Sparta to hang back from defending the freedom of Greece. Religious scruples set enlightened Athens in an uproar, because a number of idols were decently mutilated. Religious fears cost her the loss of the proudest armament that ever sailed from her shores. A charge of irreligion was pretext enough for condemning to death her noblest philosopher. In everything, great and small, the pouring of libations at the feast, the taking of omens before battle, the consulting of the Delphic oracle upon the most important or most trivial of occasions, the same spirit is manifest. Religion used or abused, piety or superstition, was to the Greeks an abiding motive and influence in all the affairs of life.

It is chiefly of these definite doings and customs that literature tells us, just as art depicts the mise-en-scène of religion. Yet it would be inconceivable that a people who displayed so strong and so abundant a religious feeling in all the circumstances and tasks of life, should not have pondered over the essential underlying questions of all religion, the nature of the soul and the mystery of life and death. Literature tells us that to their poets and philosophers these problems did present themselves, and many were the solutions which different thinkers propounded: but of the general sense of the people in this respect, of the fundamental beliefs which guided their conduct towards gods and men in this life and prompted their care for the dead, literature furnishes no direct statement: its evidence is fragmentary, casual, sporadic. Everywhere it displays the externals, but it leaves the inner spirit veiled. Literature as well as art needs an interpreter.

It is precisely in this task of interpretation that the assistance offered by the folklore of Modern Greece should be sought. It should be remembered that there is still living a people who, as they have inherited the land and the language, may also have inherited the beliefs and customs, of those ancients whose mazes of religion are bewildering without a guide who knows them. Among that still living people it is possible not only to observe acts and usages, but to enquire also their significance: and though some customs will undoubtedly be found either to be mere survivals of which the meaning has long been forgotten, or even to have been subjected to new and false interpretations, yet others, still rooted in and nourished by an intelligent belief, may be vital documents of ancient Greek life and thought.

§ 2. THE SURVIVAL OF ANCIENT TRADITION.

There may perhaps be some few who, quite apart from the continuity of the Hellenic race, a question with which I must deal later, would be inclined to pronounce the quest of ancient religion in modern folklore mere lost labour. The lapse, they may think, of all the centuries which separate the present day from the age of Hellenic greatness would in itself disfigure or altogether efface any tradition of genuine value. Such a view, however, is opposed to all the lessons that have of late years been gained from a more systematic study of the folklore of all parts of the world. Certain principles of magic and certain tendencies of superstition seem to obtain, in curiously similar form, among peoples far removed both in racial type and in geographical position. It is sometimes urged by way of explanation that the resources of the primitive mind are necessarily so limited, that many coincidences in belief and custom are only to be expected, and that therefore the similarity of form presented by some superstitions of widely separated peoples is no argument in favour of their common origin. But, for my part, when I consider such a belief as that in the Evil Eye, which possesses, I believe, an almost world-wide notoriety, I find it more reasonable to suppose that it was a tenet in the creed of some single primitive people, of whom many present races of the world are offshoots, and from whom they have inherited the superstition, than that scores or hundreds of peoples, who had long since diverged in racial type and dwelling and language, should subsequently have hit upon one uniform belief. Indeed it may be that in the future the study of folklore will become a science of no less value than the study of language, and that by a comparison of the superstitions still held by various sections of the human race it will be possible to adumbrate the beliefs of their remotest common ancestors as clearly as, by a comparison of their various speeches, the outlines of a common ancestral language have been, and are being, traced. The data of folklore are in the nature of things more difficult to collect, more comprehensive in scope, and more liable to misinterpretation, than the data of linguistic study; but none the less, when once there are labourers enough in the field, it is not beyond hope that the laws which govern the tradition and modification of customs and beliefs may be found to be hardly less definite than the laws of language.