Sf \0 ^ Bib: W!aj: SF.)^ T)66 CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY HEBREW CULTURE FOUNDATION FUND l3 / CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 3 1924 092 286 172 DATE DUE PRINTED IN U.S. A Cornell University Library The original of tliis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924092286172 ^ C-fo^ lis: Maj: S.FX ''^^c". <• d A n ^/T- /// 1/^ /v- /r^^ 3 /- This Translation was undertaken with the exclusive sanction of the Author, THE GENTILE AND THE JEW IN THE COUETS OF TKE TEMPLE OF CHEIST: AN Jtntroliurtton to tt)e |istort) of QLJinstianitt). FROM THE GERMAN OF JOHN J. I. BOLLINGER, PROFESSOR OF ECOMSLiSTIOAL HISTORY TO THE UNIVERSITY OP MUNICH. ET N. DARNELL, M.A. LATE FELLOW OF NEW COLLEGE, OXFOBD. .^^ V-y^ '^<" T* — -^ ^ IN TWO VOLUMES. VOL. I. LONDON : LONGMAN, GREEN, LONGMAN, ROBERTS, AND GREEN. 1862. u/0 -yiiS-^ 5-7 LONDON : PRINTED BY ROBSON, LKVEY, AND PRANKLYN, Grent New Street and Tetter Lane. PREFACE OP THE AUTHOR. This work is, I believe, the first attempt that has been made to represent the Paganism of the period previous to our Lord, with at least an effort at completeness, the sketch embracing the heathen religious system, heathen modes of thought and speculation, heathen philosophy, life, and manners, so far as they were severally connected with the religion, were determined by it, and reacted upon it in their turn. The title of my work indicates the point of view from which the sketch is taken. The history of Christi- anity necessarily presumes, for the bare understanding of it, an acquaintance with the history of the Pagan and the Jew. The questions, — what soil did Christianity find to build on? to what doctrines and systems of thought could it attach itself? what circumstances paved the way for it, and forwarded and facilitated its expan- sion? what obstacles, prejudices, and errors had it to overcome? what adversaries to encounter? what evils to remedy ? how did Paganism react on Christianity ? — all these questions, on the importance of which it were superfluous to waste a word here, admit, as it appears to me, of a satisfactory solution only through an exposition, penetrating as deeply beneath the surface, and of as wide an horizon, as the present. Here, then, are the circumstances preassigning its limits to the work before us, whether chronological or ^^ PREFACE. geographical. In the latter point of Yiew, the Paganism of Eastern Asia, Brahmanism and Buddhism, were ob- viously excluded J for both, after many centuries, still stand so completely aloof from the Christian Church, as to put out of question all contact that might have left behind any trace on the side of Christianity. As regards time, it seemed not only to the purpose, but even imperative for the due fulfilment of my task, not to stop short at the period of Augustus and of the Founder of the Christian religion, but to continue the picture of Grseco-Eoman Paganism down to the time of the Anto- nines, or a.d. 150-160. Up to that date, it progressed in course of development, unimpeded by pressure from without ; only from the middle of the second century after Christ were Christian influences observable upon it. After that date, the Greeco-Pagan soil produced but one intellectual fruit of importance, the doctrine of Plo- tinus, with its developments and modifications' by the later Neo-Platonists. This school and its teaching are, how- ever, no real product of heathenism pure ; Christianity exercised no inconsiderable influence on its development in its religious aspect. The phenomenon of Neo-Platon- ism generally is only to be grasped through the medium of antagonism to Christianity. This fact I allude to here simply because it helps to prove my assertion that the internal history of old heathendom, up to the commence- ment of the process of its dissolution, really came to a close at the epoch mentioned. If I be not mistaken, there is in the agitation of the Pagan intellect throughout the century before, and the century and a half after, Christ, amid much that seems accidental, a certain regularity discernible, an entering of that spirit into forms of ever-progressive precision. PREFACE. The genius of antiquity essayed, exhausted, and used up, so to say, every combination possible of the prin- ciples once intrusted and handed down to her, the entire of the plastic power that dwelt within her^ It was only after she had become completely incorporated, after each one of her doctrines, forms, and institutions, her sum of vital power, had been sifted and consumed, that with the period of the Antonines a mighty revolution com- menced, not visible, indeed, to those who were contem- porary with it, suspected by but a few; and a leaf in the history of the human mind was turned over. This is one of the impressions presented to my mind's eye with a peculiar brightness and life, as a result of my iuquiry ; a conviction which I trust the reader will share with me, if I have not fallen utterly short of the height of my task, and below its requirements. J. DOLLINGER. Munich, 6th April, 1857. CONTENTS OF VOLUME I. PAGE BOOK I. GENEEAL "VIEW. STATE OF THE WOELD. I. The Roman Empire. Extent and census of the Roman Empire 3 Ootavian sole ruler 3 Splendour and population of the city of Rome . . . . • 5 Administration and state of the provinces in general .... 6 Depopulation and desolate condition of Greece 7 State of Italy 9 „ Sicily 10 „ Sardinia . .11 ,, Corsica . 11 Provinces of Asia Minor, the Western 11 „ „ the Northern 11 ,, Asia anterior. Greek spirit 13 Lycia 14 Phrygia 14 Galatia 15 Pisidia 15 Isauria 15 Cilicia 15 The Greek islands 16 Egypt, character of the country and people 17 Syria, Hellenic 19 PhcBnicia also Hellenised 21 Palestine 21 „ Judaea, resumg of its history 22 Northern Africa 24 Spain, character of the people 25 ,, division of 26 ,, cities of 27 Gaul, conquest of ... . ... 27 ,, population of, and its character 27 TIU CONTENTS OF VOL. I. Gaul, Romanising of . ,, division of . . . Germany, Upper ,, Lower Conquest and inhabitants of Britain Rhsetia Noricum Pannonia IlljTia Macedonia Thracia . Moesia Dacia Romanising of the different people Spread of Greek and Roman tongues . II. The People and Countries not included in the Roman Empire. Armenia ..... The Parthian Empire . Assyria Mesopotamia and Babylonia . Arabia . . . . .Ethiopia India ..... „ Rise and fall of empires in . „ System of castes China „ Character of empire and people „ The doctrine of Confucius . Germany, extent of German tribes .... ,, confederations Mode of life among the Germans Sarmatians ..... Slave, Finnish, and Lithuanian races PAGE , 29 , 30 , 33 , 33 . 33 . 35 . 35 36 36 37 37 38 39 39 40 42 44 44 45 47 48 49 49 51 55 55 56 68 59 59 61 62 62 BOOK II. EELIGIONS : THE HELLENIC EEHGION. I. The Origin of Greek Polytheism. Polytheism due to the deification of nature . Pelasgic deities Fetichism . . • . Two primitive deities ... . . 65 68 69 70 CONTENTS OF VOL. I. IX II. The Gods, Demons, and Heroes of the Hellenes. Origin of the Greek system of gods The twelve Olympic deities Zeus Hera Poseidon Pallas Athene Apollo . Artemis Hermes Hestia Ares Aphrodite, Ourania ,, Pandemos Hephaestos . Demeter Pluto Dionysos Inferior deities Demons Heroes Heracles the national hero . Multitude of objects worshiped Confusion of worship . Geographical survey of the different worships PAGE 74 77 . 77 79 . 80 81 . 82 87 88 88 90 91 91 93 93 96 103 104 107 109 109 113 BOOK III. THE MYSTERIES AND THE ORPHIC RELIGIOUS DOCTRINE. Contents of the mysteries 125 Gods of the mysteries 129 Opinions as to the value of the mysteries 130 Orpheus first originator of the mysteries 138 Traditions of the death of Orpheus 139 Orphic worship of Dionysos 140 The Orpheus of jSlschylus 142 Relation of the Orphic Dionysos Zagreus with Attys and Osiris . . 145 Qsiris-Zagreus 147 Orphic mystery-school 160 Connexion of the mysteries with the cultus of Dionysos . . . 154 The Orpheo-telestai and their consecration 158 The Phrygian cultus an element of the mysteries .... 159 The Samothraoian mysteries, the Cabiri, and their gods . . . 163 Lemnian and other mysteries 170 The Eleusinian mysteries 176 „ lacchos or Dionysos, their chief god .... 180 CONTENTS OF VOL. I. Order of and proceedings in the Bleusinian mystery rite . . .182 Demeter and her daughter, the centres of the Bleusinian mystery action 185 Symbols and formute ^^^ Admission to initiation, and exclusion from Attraction of the mysteries .... Hopes of bliss held out in them . Various effects and impressions of the mysteries The Thesmophoria, dedicated to Demeter and Themis 192 195 196 197 200 BOOK IV. PRIESTHOOD DIVINATION— OEACLES—SACEIFICE AND PEAYERS — FES- TIVALS — TEMPLES AND IMAGES — WOESHIP OF HOUSE-GODS. I. Priesthood and Divination. Office and powers of the Greek priests 203 Vast number of officials 205 Different methods of soothsaying 206 II. Oracles. Necessity of oracles for the Greeks 209 Oracle at Delphi 210 The other oracles 214 Causes of their decay . 217 III. HeUgioics Pwrifications. The notion of purity a physical one ... ... 219 Modes of purification ... . . . 220 IV. Prayers. Their character theurgic and not moral 221 Their object external goods . . ' 223 Attitude in worship . . 224 V. Sacrifices. Meaning of the bloody sacrifice ........ 225 „ human sacrifice 227 Later modifications or abolition of human sacrifice .... 228 Animals and kinds of sacrifice 229 Rite and banquet of sacrifice 236 VI. Festivals. Religious character of the Greek festivals 235 The great national festivals . 236 VII. Temples amd Images. Designation and use of the temples ....... 239 Images of the gods ; their form . 240 CONTENTS OF VOL. 1. Images of the gods, principle of their invocation . House-idols XI PAGE . 240 241 VIII. Tramsgresdons against Edigian, and their Punishment. Many religious crimes punished with death .... 243 Prosecutions for impiety • 244 BOOK V. GEEEK PHILOSOPHY, AND ITS INFLUENCE ON THE RELIGIOUS SENSE AND CONDUCT OF THE PEOPLE. DEVELOPMENT OF RELIGIOUS IDEAS AMONG THE GEEEKS FEOM THE SIXTH CENTUEY BEFOEE CHRIST. I. Up to Alexander the Great. Rise of philosophy out of the cosmogonies . The Ionic school Heraclitus and his school Pythagoras ..... The Pythagoreans ,, their leading doctrine of the migration of the soul The Eleatic school, its teaching pantheistic Pantheistic system of Empedocles The Atomic school .... .... The Sophists, their rhetorioo-sceptical bias „ censure of Plato Materialism and Atheism Socrates, his personal appearance and vocation .... ,, his ethics ,, views of God and the soul ... ,, his holding with the popular religion .... , , his impeachment and death ...... 247 250 262 253 254 258 259 262 266 269 270 271 273 275 276 277 278 DEVELOPMENT OP RELIGIOUS CIVILISATION AMONG THE GEEEKS UP TO THE DEATH OP SOCRATES. RELIGIOUS ASPECT OP THE LEADERS OP GREEK LITERATURE. SOME OP THEIR MORE IMPORTANT RELIGIOUS IDEAS AND DOCTRINES. Allegorical interpretation of goda and myths Immoral effect of myths Popular belief in myths Pindar Herodotus in a religious point of view Thucydides .... Epicharmus Aristophanes ridicules the gods . ReUgion and gods in the dramas of Euripides Sophocles, his religiousness 281 283 284 284 286 285 286 286 287 290 Xll CONTENTS OF VOL. I. PAGE Greek notions of the jealousy of the gods ^^^ „ destiny ^^'■ evil 293 ,, the comfortlessness of life 294 the faU 295 Saga of Prometheus 296 Views of the state after death 300 THE SOCBATICS^PIATO AND HIS FOLI/OWEBS. Cyrenaic school 304 Cynic and Megarian school 306 Plato, his universal intellect 307 „ his doctrine concerning God and ideas 308 „ „ the creation of the world . . . 310 „ ,, the world-soul 311 „ „ the star-gods . . . . • • • 313 ,, anthropology . 314 „ psychology 315 ,, proofs of immortality 319 „ migration of souls 320 „ matter the seat of evil . . . . . . . . 321 „ his doctrine concerning virtue 322 „ his ideal republic 323 ,, his relation to religion 325 ,, relation of his teaching to Christianity 328 ,, his scholars; the Academy 330 AKISIOILE. His opposition to Plato 333 ,, teaching about God, and his relation to the world .... 334 ,, view of the stars a link between his teaching and the popular re- ligion 337 ,, psychology . . 338 „ ethics .... 340 II. Philosophy omd Religion mnong the Greeks from the time of Alex- amd&r the Great to the first cerdury after Clirist. Fusion of East and West 341 . 341 . 343 . 344 . 347 Blending of religious worships Apotheosis of the living and the dead . Hostility between philosophy and religion Materialism, and decline of philosophy STOICISM. Zeno, and bis relation to the Cynics 348 The Stoic view of the world materialistic . .... 348 Determinism 351 Position in regard to popular religion . 354 CONTENTS OF VOL. I. xm Paiderastia . Suicide among the Stoics PAGE . 366 . 357 THE EPIOUBEAN SYSTEM. Epicurus and his " canonic" or doctrine of thought Atomistic cosmology of Epicurus .... Materialistic pyschology Ethics : groundwork in freedom of the will . His doctrine of pleasure and repose of soul . SCEPTICISM. Happiness its starting point and aim . A production and a symptom of the times . Carneades and his antitheistic dialectics Materialism in the ascendant under Stoic influence Decline and impotence of philosophy 358 359 360 362 363 365 366 367 369 370 BOOK VI. THE BELIGIONS IN ANTEEIOE AND MIDDLE ASIA, AND IN AFEICA. I. Ada Minor. Various worships in Caria and Phrygia 373 Orgiastic cultus of Cybele, and its accompaniments .... 374 Rites in Cappadocia and Pontus : Worships of moon and fire . . 375 II. Persia and the other Iranian Countries. Zoroaster and the Zendavesta „ distinct from Zaratus Mixture of Cushite magism and Arian dualism in Media Reaction in Persia against the Magians Ormuzd and Ahriman The doctrine of Zervan only a later addition Good and evil spirits : Amschaspands, Izeds, and Ferwers Worship of elements, particularly fire .... The great world-year : Ahriman's struggle with Ormuzd Man, his origin and destination . The Pall and Paradise Prayers and sacrifice . The Homa as sacrifice and sacrament The priesthood, the Athravas, and the Magians Morality . Marriage . Essence of purification Treatment of corpses . State after death 380 381 383 384 385 387 390 391 394 396 397 399 400 403 404 405 406 408 409 XIV CONTENTS OF VOL. I. Doctrine of resurrection Mithras, the creed and mysteries of PAGE . 410 , 412 III. Heathenism in Mesopotamia, Babylonia, and Assyria. The Chaldeans the dominant priestly race 420 Bel and Mylitta 422 Astrolatry 422 IV. Syria, Phcenida, and Arabia. Syro-Phcenician cultus of Baal . . .... Sacrifice of children Astarte, and the worship of unohastity paid her .... Debauchery and cruelty in the rites of the Syrian goddess . Blagabalus and Adonis ........ Heathenism at Carrae Arabian worship of the gods . ..... V. Egypt. 1. System of Gods. General character and development of the Egyptian system of gods Sun-worship Ammon, Kneph, and others Myth of Isis and Osiris Horus, or Har . Harpocrates Thoth ... Female deities . Typhon, the dark destroying principle 2. Worship of Animals. Origin of animal worship . ... Different species of sacred animals The sacred bulls and their cultus 3. Tlie Lower World, and fate cf Man after Death. Immortality and migration of souls connected The judgment of the dead, and bliss . . . . Punishments beyond the grave . . ... 4. Festivals, Priesthood, and Sacrifice. Number and object of the different festivals Festivals of Osiris „ Isis .... ,, Pascht The priesthood and its ordinances Sacrifice of animals, how selected 425 426 428 429 431 433 434 436 438 440 444 447 447 448 449 452 454 456 458 460 461 465 467 468 468 468 470 474 CONTENTS OF VOL. I. XV PAGE Meaning of this sacrifice 474 SuUenness and exclusiveness of Egyptian character .... 476 Disciplina arcani among the priests 479 Threatening the gods 481 Phallus worship ... ....... 482 5. Fate and course of development of the Egyptian Religion. Introduction of strange deities ........ 482 Influence of Persian supremacy . 484 „ Greek supremacy 48.5 Deification of kings ' . . 486 VI. Ca/rthage. Carthaginian worship, with sacrifice of children 488 PAET I. THE GENTILE. Books I. to VI. Encore que les philosoplies "Soient Ics protectcurs de I'crreurj toutefois ils ont frappi; a la porte de la veritC {Veritatis fores pulsant. TertuUian). S'ils ne soiit pas entres dans sou sanctuaire, s'ils non pas eu le bonlieur de le voir et de I'adorer dans son temple, ils sc sent quelquefois priSsentcs a. ses povtiques, et lui ont rendu de loin quelque liommage. BossuET, Pam'f/, de Sin. Catherine. BOOK I. ERRATA m VOL. I. p. 12 1. 26 for Comana, for instance, Poutica read Gomana Pontica, for instance 50 „ 19 „ Bikramaditya read Vikramaditya 80 „ 5 „ of the Tritons „ of Triton ,440 ,17 „ Teutyra „ Tentyra „ 447 „ 20 „ Har-Hat „ Hor-Hat, and toties quoties. 449 „ 18 „ Harpi-Mou „ Hapi-Mou on the north and north-eastj the sacrifices presented themselves, which the conquest and maintenance of such countries would have entailed, with their desolated cities and a rural population, for the most part poverty-stricken, — sacrifices in no proportion whatever to the advantages accruing. In the west, too, the island of Hibernia alone was left for conquest, and it could offer no very inviting prospect ; while on the east, the Parthians, from the situation of their kingdom as well as from their style of warfare, so destructive to the Eoman legions, were neighbours BOOK I. I. THE EOMAN EMPIRE. Twenty-one centuries had passed away since the great Deluge, the period at which the human race began to spread afresh over the earthj and the fairest portion of it, the countries, belonging to the three quarters of the globe, which encircle the Mediterra- nean Sea, were then united to one vast world-wide empire, the Roman. Erom the small beginnings of a community on the banks of the Tiber, this kingdom had grown up, long unheeded or despised by the rest of the world. At last, after seven hun- dred years of existence, it had won for itself by conquest that gigantic form, which now stretched from the Atlantic Ocean as far as the Euphrates, and from the northern shores of Gaul and the German Danube to Africa's sand-deserts and the cataracts of the Nile, and embraced a population of nearly a hundred millions. At this point the empire had reached the limits assigned to it by nature. Attempts to make new conquests halted nearly every where, in the face of physical difficulties almost impossible to surmount. On the south the great African desert set a boun- dary-line to Roman domination; on the south-east, the Ethio- pians and Arabians proved hard of access ; and here, as well as on the north and north-east, the sacrifices presented themselves, which the conquest and maintenance of such countries would have entailed, with their desolated cities and a rural population, for the most part poverty-stricken, — sacrifices in no proportion whatever to the advantages accruing. In the west, too, the island of Hibernia alone was left for conquest, and it could offer no very inviting prospect ; while on the east, the Parthians, from the situation of their kingdom as well as from their style of warfare, so destructive to the Roman legions, were neighbours ■1 STATE OF THE WORLD. not assailable with impunity. Hence the principle already enun- ciated by Octavian : " Eome must not enlarge the borders of her empii-e/' Accordingly, the greater number of his successors Hmited themselves to the maintenance of the existing state of things, and the conduct of merely defensive wars ; and even went so far, either of their own free will or by compulsion, as to re- nounce conquests already made. The Koman empire did not rest upon the strength, and dis- tinctive national qualities, of a great people, but still, as at the outset, on the inhabitants of a single city, which ever and con- sistently claimed not only to form the seat of empire, but also to remain in entire and exclusive possession of the whole power of the state. Weary, however, of the long civil wars, of proscrip- tions and endless bloodshed, Rome still longed for security of property and of enjoyment, and was only able to realise it under the sway of a single chief. That one man was Octavian, who, after overcoming his last enemy and rival, Antony, seized the helm with a strong and temperate hand ; and retaining, for the most part, the old established republican forms and names, quietly guided the state into a new channel, and erected his throne upon republican principles. Where the principate combined in itself, and for life, all the executive powers, the republic meanwhile could be but a phan- tom form, gradually dwindling off to the vanishing-point. As chief of a standing army of nearly three hundred and forty thou- sand men, for the support of his wars and his administration ; as president of a senate without a will in opposition to his, and that had been degraded to a mere assessorial and functional authority; as censor, perpetual tribune, and head of the state rehgion; protected by a body-guard devoted to him, whose prefect, as early as under Tiberius, became the second person in the realm, — the monarch was now possessed of an unlimited power : and the successor of Augustus had it already in his hands to destroy or to exalt whatever still remained of republican form, without danger to himself. People in Rome were kept in good humour by largesses of money and corn, by public spectacles in theatre and arena, by fights of gladiators and wild-beasts. Amongst all ranks a dispo- sition was evinced to manifest sheer cowardice and slavish self- ishness towards the man in authority ; and thus the principate ROME. developed with astonishing rapidity into a fearful despotism^ which, fostered and egged on by women, freedmen, flatterers, spies, and informers, was soon to present its horrified eye-wit- nesses with the spectacle of such a series of abominations as wantonness, thirst of blood, and scorn of humanity, could inspire into tyrants, released from all restraint and shame. The city of Rome, enriched and splendidly ornamented, as it had been in the last times of the republic, by rifled treasures of conquered lands, assumed an entirely new aspect under Augus- tus. The splendour of the Campus Martius, adorned by him with public buildings, far surpassed even the beauty of the old city of the Seven Hills ; and with justice might that monarch pride himself on having found a city of brick, and left one of marble in its stead. ^ With each year, as it came, the city on the Tiber now developed more and more into a rendezvous for all the nations of the globe. Slaves, dragged together from every land, penetrated with their foreign manners into the interiors of families, and, with their strange views, into the spirit and modes of thought of the rising generation. Rome was also inundated with independent aliens. From three quarters of the world they pressed to the world's city, either to lead there a life of greater enjoyment and pleasure, or simply to procure a livelihood — perhaps to return again, with what they had there earned, to hearth and home. Greek and Syrian, inhabitants of Asia Minor and Egypt, sat themselves down in Rome as literati and philoso- phers, as ministers of luxmy, debauchery, and impurity, or as priests of strange rites and propagators of superstition. Rome had become a Greek city in language and manners, and " the Syrian waters of the Orontes streamed into the Tiber," — so the poet afterwards complained in his picture of the manners of his day -.2 while, in a centiiry and a half from Augustus, Athenseus could say, whole nations of the East had settled themselves in Rome.^ Thus Rome, since Augustus, maintained a population ap- proaching, or perhaps equal to, that of the London of the pre- sent day, of a million and a half, possibly two millions. Nearly the half of these, however, were slaves ; and of the free- men, by far the larger proportion were externs, who had been presented with the freedom of the state, or were freedmen and ' Sueton. Aug. xxviii. - Juvenal, iii. 60 sqq. ^ Deipnosoph. i. 30. STATE OF THE -WORLD. their descendants. Side by side with the enormous opnlence of a small number of families, such poverty prevailed that Augus- tus, in his time, had been obliged to provide upwards of two hundred thousand of the inhabitants with money, corn, and bread. In spite of the care this monarch took to preserve the old pure citizen blood, the genuine Eoman families, already sore diminished by civil wars and proscriptions, kept continually dying out. To this issue a radical evil of the day specially con- tributed, namely, a wide-spreading disinclination to the state of marriage, which had come to be felt an onerous restraint. In vain did Augustus endeavour, by the laws Papia and Julia-Pop- psea, to check this prevailing state - sickness of celibacy amongst the well-to-do and richer classes. Even in wedlock childlessness became more and more frequent; and thus, by virtue of the second of these two enactments, the having three children brought with it important privileges. Eome, therefore, inevitably became the city in which all the vices of different zones, aU the defects and excrescences of hu- man society, were gathered together and blended — the city in which a homeless population, roaming about in idleness, beggarly and yet habituated to all the requirements of luxury, were main- tained out of the public revenues ; and this was the plebs, form- ing the greater proportion of the free community, i In the dependent countries too, while the imperial authority lasted, no right public spirit, no patriotic sentiment of a common bond of union could be awakened. The Gaul and the Syrian, the Egyptian and the Spaniard, were far too great strangers one to the other, and remained so ; and yet the administration of the provinces was, on the whole, substantially better than it had been in the latter days of the republic. In those times, a Volesus Messala could, as proconsul of Asia, execute three thou- sand men in one day, and exclaim, in a rapture of self-admira- tion, as he passed through where the dead bodies lay, "What king had dared to do this deed ?"^ Provinces were then looked upon, and given up to plunder, as mere gold-mines for Rome, as means of enrichment for the oft-changed proconsul thence despatched, as well as for every Roman who chose to betake himself thither in character of factor and farmer of the public 1 Seneca, Consol. ad Helvid. vi. ; Tacit. Annal. xiv. 20. ' Seneca de Ira, ii. 5. THE PROVINCES : GKBECE. / revenues; but under Augustus, and after him, a more secure and more tolerable state of things arose. The governors of provinces were subjected to a stricter surveillance, had fixed salaries, and dared not arbitrarily increase the imposts on their subjects. Their superintendence of municipal administration was kindly towards the people. The distinction between the sovereign Roman commonalty and the dependent provincial dis- appeared, and the Roman tribunals of justice in aU countries were superior to the earlier ones at home. Under Roman domination, there was an end of the perpetual family feuds and domestic factions which, in former times, had lacerated many countries. The tyranny of the Csesars, whose memory is stig- matised in history, pressed heavily on the Roman aristocracy — not at all, or at least far more lightly, on the provinces. The connection of the different portions of the vast empire with one another, and with the centre of power, was now estab- lished on a magnificent footing. The means and ways of commu- nication were multiplied ; a network of excellently constructed mihtary roads and highways gradually spread over the whole empire, and the government postal service, already set on foot by the first Csesar, was extended to all the provinces. The result of the change to the monarchical system was, therefore, decidedly beneficial to far the greater portion of sub- jects, whether races or individuals, united together under the Roman sceptre. Many countries — Gaul, for instance, Spain, Africa, even Egypt and Syria — attained to a greater security of property and rights, took part in the community of intellectual life and intercourse, which resulted from the connection of the three quarters of the world lying round the Mediterranean sea, and contrasted advantageously their present flourishing condition with their earlier one, before their incorporation into the Roman empire. In the central countries of the empire, however, and of the old world generally, there already might be discovered symp- toms of a suspicious depopulation and desolation, sure forerun- ners of the breaking to pieces of the then system. By this time the history of the old Hellenes was played out to the end, like a great passion-stirring drama, that at the close is only pitiful. The Macedonian, and after them the Roman, wars had fiUed that fair land with ruins. Old cities of renown had disappeared, 8 STATE OF THE WORLD. or were only partially inhabited, or, like Thebes and Megalopolis, had sunk into villages. Many islands, once well inhabited, were now solitary rocks. The races of Mta, were almost annihilated. Acarnania and ^tolia were converted into wastes ; the cities of Thessaly decayed, and the land impoverished. The neighbouring Epirus could not recover itself from the shock it had received through Paulus JEmilius j its cities were demoUshed ; only a small remnant of its former population dwelt in thinly-scattered villages. Of the twelve cities of Achaia, five were destroyed or deserted; Arcadia and Messenia hardly boasted an inhabitant. In Laconia, once rich in cities, one hardly counted now thirty vUlages. Later on, Plutarch thought the whole of Greece might, with an effort, perhaps bring into the field three thousand hop- htes. Athens, it is true, looked stiLl a beautiful city ; but the old families were exterminated there, the last blow they received being in the blood shed by Sylla. A gathering of foreign settlers now filled the city.^ The Roman colonies, Patrse, Corinth, and Nicopolis, on the promontory of Actium, were meant as raUying- points for Roman authority, as well as for the revivification of the desolated country. Corinth, favoured by its position between two seas, soon became again a flourishing commercial city, and, with its prosperity, came hand in hand the old luxury. But on the whole, the pressure of fiscal authority, which was a continual burden on Greece during the time of the Csesars, proved a con- stant counter-agent to national prosperity, and checked the re- turning tide of population. Hellas remained a thinly-inhabited land, exhibiting more graves than living men, more ruins than cities, and the Hellenes were a people sapped at the very heart's core. The immunity from taxes, granted by Nero to the Greeks, was again withdrawn under Vespasian ; but the existence of free cities with municipal privileges, local courts of justice, and pro- vincial councils, the enduring validity of many Greek laws and regulations, and, besides, the official character, which the Greek tongue remained in possession of, — all this afforded the descend- ants of the old Hellenes, who had undergone the admixture of foreign blood, the appearance and consolation of national indepen- dence. They saw the Amphictyons still assemble, the Areopagus stiU judging in Athens, in accordance with the old custom, and ' Tao. Anna], ii. 55. ITALY. 9 deputies from tte Achsean^ Phocian, and Boeotian leagues meeting for deliberation on affairs. Addicted as they were to tlie cultus of the past, despisers of every thing that was foreign, and admirers of their own productions only^ what wonder that they should be even yet disposed to keep up the old presumptuous division of mankind into Greeks and barbarians ? True it is notwithstand- ing, that each swarm of Hellenes, whom the lust of gain drove Eomewards, was mostly received there with cold neglect, and as hungry adventurers was classed together with the new arrivals from Egypt and the various countries of Asia, who spoke the Greek tongue.^ On the score of prosperity and population, Italy herself had come off worst from the pressure, the clogging and destructive influence of Eome. Already, before the beginning of the civU wars, whole races in Middle and South Italy had been rooted out. In the ten years from 90 till 80 B.C., the Peninsula suffered a new and almost iucalculable loss of her best population. The Italian war against Rome swept away more than three hundred thou- sand young men.2 Little was left of the Samnite and Etrurian people. The Sabine, Etruscan, and Venetian tongues had dis- appeared, or were on the point of becoming extinct. The ab- original peasantry of Italy was, as it were, exterminated, and villanously replaced by slaves, who cultivated the broad demesnes (latifundia) of their masters. Most ruinous was the operation of the military colonies, started by Octavian, chiefly as settlements for his thirty-four legions, and accompanied as it was with the expulsion of the quondam occupants of the soU. It was cast in his teeth that he had given up nearly the whole of Italy as a prize to his veterans.^ The mass of these military settlers had neither inclination nor capacity for a regular, well-ordered family life, and died speedily out.* They could not compensate for those sixty-three cities, which, from the dictatorship of Caesar to the first year of Augustus, had lost their population ; or, robbed of their territorial possessions, had fallen into an inevitable decay. Besides, in one year, Augustus had sent one hundred and twenty thousand colonists from Italy into the provinces,^ and at the same time, there was a perpetual, half-spontaneous, half-compulsory 1 Juvenal. Sat. iii. 76. = Veil. Pat. ii. 15. 3 Appian. Bell. Civ. v. 12 sqq. p. 728, Schweig. ; Suet. Aug. xiii. ^ Tacit. Ann. xiv. 37. * Monum. Aucyran. 10 STATE OF THE WOULD. immigration of people, either into Rome, or the last-embodied portion of the empire : into Rome, to procure a livelihood for themselves at the expense of the state, as partakers in the dis- tribution of the corn largess ; into the provinces, to lay hands on a lucrative office, or to find an opening into one of the numerous Roman trading companies. Italian merchants were settled in all cities, from Arabia, on the one hand, to the Marcomanni and Cherusci,! on the other. In the gradual and ever-increasing exhaustion of Italy lay the chief cause of the subsequent decay of the whole empire. Nevertheless, Northern Italy was favourably distinguished from Middle and South. There Padua, Verona, Ravenna, Milan, Aquileia, were or became all of them flourishing cities, as seats of Roman colonists. On the other hand, the old splendour of Magna Grsecia had vanished j^ only Rhegium, Brundusium, Be- neventum, and Tarentum, now shrunk into the half of its former circuit, still preserved a kind of life. " If any one wants to see wastes," says Seneca,^ " let him go into Lucania and Bruttium." Meanwhile, Campania, and particularly the Bay of Naples, that earthly paradise, whose beauty even the rich Romans knew how to appreciate, remained in full bloom. Here was Naples, with her manners, art, and science, all Greek, a favourite retreat of well-educated Romans ; here Baise displayed her charming villas; and here too Puteoli formed an emporium for Alexandrian and Spanish merchandise. In the three-ton gued Sicily, with its old Sicilian, or Celtic, country population, its Grecian cities and Roman colonists, the Greek character and civilisation still preponderated.^ Still the cities of this fairest and most fertile island of the Mediterra- nean could never recover themselves again. On the whole of the line of coast looking towards Africa, the cities, as far as Agrigentum, had already gone to ruin in the Carthaginian wars.5 In the interior, slave wars and the freebooting habits of the pastoral people had wrought grievous desolation. Hi- mera, Selinus, and Gela, Naxos too, with Eubcea and CaUipolis on the east coast, had all disappeared ; Enna was well nigh de- 1 Dio Cass. Ixxi. 1187; Tacit. Ann. ii. 6a. 2 Cic. de Amic. iv. ' De Tranq. Animi, ii. ■• " Siouli trilingues." Apul. Metam. xi. p. 259, ed. Elmenh, « Strabo, vi. p. 372 (pp. 392, 393, Oxf.). SARDINIA AND CORSICA — ASIA MINOR. 11 serted ; Tauromenium, hardly dealt with by Octavian, had fallen into decay. Syracuse had her prosperity interrupted by the con- quest of Marcellus^ and it was in vain that Augustus tried to revive it by a colony. The prospect was fairer with Catana, Pan- ormus, Segesta, and Lilybseum ; on the whole, through the quiet and order established under the CsesarSj the island attained again to considerable prosperity, as the granary of Rome and Italy. The islands of Sardinia and Corsica, united into one pro- vince, contained a very mixed population. There Tyrrhenian lolai, and immigrant Corsi and Belari (refugees), formed the basis of a population reputed as slothful and evil-disposed ; and to these are to be added Phenician and Carthaginian colonists besides. The land was considered unhealthy, and on that account was selected as a place of banishment for condemned criminals ; yet, on the score of its fertility, it was the second corn-granary for Rome, after Sicily. The poptdation of rocky and thinly-in- habited Corsica was composed of a medley of Tyrrhenian, Ligu- rian, and Roman colonists. In Strabo's time, the Corsicans appear still as rude barbarians, entirely devoted to the breed- ing of cattle. Notwithstanding, one might have counted not less than thirty-three towns in the island under the Roman sovereignty. In the peninsula of Asia Minor, the river Halys served to divide the languages and the countries. The nations living to the west of it, Lydians, Carians, Mysians, and Bithynians, be- longed in general to the common stock of Thracians in Europe. With them the Greek language was the prevalent one; the old native dialect in parts, as, for instance, among the Lydians, having been lost without leaving a trace behind.' Eastward of the Halys lived the people of Syro-Arabic descent, Cappado- cians, Cilicians, Pamphylians, and Solymi, i.e. the old inhabit- ants of Lycia and Pisidia, although the Lycians had received so strong an admixtm-e of Greek blood, that they passed for a Greek people. The northern portion of Asia Minor, extending to the Black Sea, formed the countries of Bithynia, Paphlagonia, and Pontus. Bithynia, also in earlier times denominated Asiatic Thrace, one of the most fertUe of countries, was inhabited by some tribes » Strabo, pp. 565-631 (pp. 817-905, Orf.). 12 STATE OF THE WOKLD. of Thracians who had immigrated thither, and by the remnant of an earlier Mysian population. Its capital, Nicomedia, now grown to a great size, had become one of the finest and largest cities of the old world. Cius, Chalcedon, Nicsea, and Heraclea, mostly with Hellenic colonists, diffused their Greek civilisation through the country. The Paphlagonians were an entirely different people in lan- guage and customs from their Thracian neighbours on the west, and their Celtic to the south. They came of Syrian stock, and were reputed particularly superstitious, even amongst the heathens. The interior of their rough mountainous district was poor in towns, and but little known : only Gangra, situated near the borders of Galatia, which in Strabo's time was but a small town, became considerable at a later period, and the capital of the province. There were Hellenic settlers, however, on the sea coast ; and Sinope, a Milesian colony, early became a rich and important seat of commerce, and was still a large and beautiful city. Extending along the shores of the Black Sea, to the north- east lay Pontus, inhabited by many small heterogeneous tribes, with Greek commercial cities on its coast ; and since the death of King Polemo the Second, under Nero, a tributary province of Rome. On the east, it reached as far as Colchis and Greater Armenia. A variety of tongues, it appears, were spoken in the interior. Cities here were only of importance and famous in regard of their religious woi'ship ; Comana, for instance, Pon- tica, and Cabira; Neo-Cassarea, afterwards the large and beau- tiful capital of the disti-ict, had begun to flourish from the year sixty-four. To the south of Galatia and Pontus was Cappadocia, consti- tuting, with lesser Armenia, one of the largest provinces of the Roman empire. It comprised nearly a third of the whole pen- insula. The land was, for the most part, rough and unfruitful : its inhabitants were of Syrian origin, and styled white Syrians by the Persians, to distinguish them from the darker- coloured inhabitants of Syria. Cities were here first founded under the Romans, chiefly through the establishment of Roman colonies, in lieu of the fortresses and open towns that had hitherto existed. It was thus that the capital Ctesarea gradually rose, besides Tyana and Comana. Lesser Armenia and Melitene, first formed ASIA AKTERIOE. 13 under Tiberius into a Roman province, after being made a pre- sent of by Caligula to tbe Tbracian Cotys, and by Nero to the Jewisb king Aristobulus, were not reunited again to the Eoman empire till Trajan's time. Asia Anterior remained one of the brightest jewels in the Ro- man territorial crown, being blest above other lands with natural beauty, inexhaustible resources, and abundance of population, and was, moreover, the great industrial workshop of the empire. Here, in the countries of Mysia, Lydia, and Caria, which, to- gether with a part of Phrygia, formed the Roman province of Asia, five hundred cities arose,^ all richly endowed with works of art, public buildings and monuments of various kinds. Later on, there were reckoned to be at least one thousand cities, if the smaller towns were thrown into the computation.^ Here the Greek mind and Greek customs lorded it, and made head against all foreign elements : here, surrounded by all that commerce, art, and the most refined luxury, could procure, man lived an easy voluptuous life, and the Romans had no need of their legions for the maintenance of their authority. The cities prided themselves on their privilege of coining, for the Romans had granted them extensive municipal immunities : as, for instance, Smyrna, that fairest city of Asia, and one of the most beautiful of all antiquity, often afterwards desolated as she was by earthquakes and enemies' hands, and as often rising again out of her ruins under favour of her excellent harbour. Ephesus ranked as " the first and largest metropolis of Asia" — so she is distinguished in inscriptions. Phny esteemed her an eye of Asia;^ and her pride was her Temple of Artemis, the largest and most magnificent building of the Greek world. Introduced by cities such as Sardes, Thyatira, Tralles, and Magnesia, Hellenism had so thoroughly penetrated even into the heart of Lydia, that in Strabo's time the Lydian dialect had al- ready disappeared. In Mysia was Cyzicus, one of the most flour- ishing of seaside cities, and in favour with Romans of distinction as a place of resort. It had once been the intention of Csesar to exalt the aspiring Alexandria-Troas to the dignity of metropolis of the whole empire. Pergamum had lost indeed its famous ^ Philostr. Tit. Sophist, p. 56 ; 21, Kayser. ; Joseph. Bell. Jud. ii. 16. ' Stat. Silv. ii. 2, 57. ' " Altermn lumen Asiee." Plin. H. N. v. 2D, 31. 14 STATE OF THE WORLD. library, but still exhibited in so higb a degree the character of a capital, which the kings of the Pergamean dynasty had imparted to it, that Pliny styles it by far the most renowned city of Asia.i Alabanda, the zealous partisan of Rome, with its dancing and singing women, ranked foremost amongst Caria^s cities, claiming the honour of having been the first to erect a temple to the god- dess Iloma.2 Halicarnassus had not yet been able to recover completely from her demolition by Alexander, yet she congratu- lated herself on the privilege, so scarce and valuable amongst Asiatic cities, of being secure from earthquakes, by reason of her rocky foundation. The existing ruins of Cnidus bear witness to the magnificence and extent of that city. Lycia, whose inhabitants in their peaceful lives displayed cus- toms partly Cretan, and partly Carian, possessed twenty-three towns, which contrived to preserve their confederation even in Roman times ; though the most considerable of them, Patara and Telmessus, were akeady far gone in decay : and Xanthus, the Lycian capital, could never lift its head again after its des- truction by Brutus. Side and Aspendus, cities of Pamphylia, a small seaboard lying to the east of Lycia, were inhabited by the descendants of Greek colonists. In the centre of Asia Minor, hemmed round completely by mountains, lay the fertile Phrygia, with its large cities, subse- quently of importance in Christian history, Apamsea, Colosse, Laodicea, and Hierapolis, and with a population that for the last six hundred years had been accustomed to foreign masters, Ly- dian, Persian, Grseco-Macedonian, and now, since the death of Attains III., king of Pergamus, to Roman ; yet it still pre- served the consciousness of having formed a mighty kingdom at an earlier period, and of having been the oldest of people, and the first land that reappeared out of the waters of the Deluge, as domestic traditions testified. Through the intellectual supremacy of the Greeks, by whom the entire land was encircled, and who soon had settled them- selves in its very heart, the Phrygian race was already so com- pletely overborne, that Phrygia seemed to be quite Greek, and the Phrygian tongue was only spoken in the country, and by slaves in the cities. The people, which had drawn down to its present settlements from the highlands of Armenia, to whose 1 PUn. H. N. V. 30, 33. 2 t^c. Arm. iv, 60. GALATIA ASIA MINOR, SOUTH. 15 family races it was closely allied in old times, had formed the most considerable part of the population of Asia Minor, and had sent important oflFshoots into Thrace, Macedonia, and lUyria; but, since Persian times, had fallen into general disrepute as intractable, cowardly, and effeminate. Of its cities, Synnada, still inconsiderable in Strabo's time, raised itself at a later period to be the capital of the whole of Phrygia Salutaris ; Ce- Isenae had dechned from its former greatness into the condition of a market-town, a consequence of the proximity of the newly- founded Apamsea. Meanwhile this Apamsea Cibotus had by commerce risen to be the most important city in Phrygia; Colosse, on the other hand, remained still but a small town. The wealthy Laodicea, on the river Lycus, utterly destroyed by an earthquake under Tiberius, was able to rebuild herself from her own resources. The rich mountain land of Galatia, a Roman province since the death of its last prince, was inhabited by three Celtic tribes, the Trocmi, Tectosages, and Tolistoboii, who, in the year 278 B.C., having migrated from their seats between the Danube and the Alps, were for long the bravest people of Asia Minor, and remained still in possession of their Gallic tongue and Gallic cus- toms. > Amongst its cities, Pessinus was now on the wane ; whilst Ancyra, the middle point of the great highway from Byzantium into Syria, and the emporium of oriental caravan traffic, was now flourishing as capital of the province. The mountaineers in the south-east parts of Asia Minor, — Pisidians, Isaurians, and Cilicians, all of kindred descent, and long devoted to piracy and the slave-trade, — were never completely subjugated to the Roman power. Not one Roman settlement or colony was to be found in the interior of Pisidia and Isauria. It was only by a chain of fortresses that the adjacent country could be secured a^inst the predatory incursions of these tribes, who were inaccessible when they withdrew into their mountain fortresses. In spite of these fortresses, the Isaurians, who, since the third century had formed themselves into one people with the inhabitants of Cilicia Trachea, had been the terror of all their neighbours. On the level land (pedias) along the sea-coast lay a group of flourishing cities, with Greek language and civilisa- tion; amongst them, the ancient Tarsus, metropolis of Cilicia, • Strabo, p. 5fi6 (820, Oxf.). 16 STATE OF THE WORLD. and in earlier times the seat of one of the kings dependent on the Persian monarchy. Its schools gave it importance in the history of the world; and even in Cilicia Trachea, which was first united under Vespasian, in the year 7-4, with the Roman province of Cilicia, lay Seleucia Trachea, a free city, which had become in consequence so large and beautiful, 1;hat Ammian,i jjj the fourth century, gave it the title of " Mother of Cities." The islands of the ^Egean and eastern Mediterranean maybe reckoned as some of the most valuable constituents of the vast empire. The rich Cyprus, vying even with Egypt in fertility and variety of produce, and, in olden times, divided into nine petty sovereignties, had a mixed population once preeminently Phenician, which, however, could not maintain their individuality when they came in contact vrith the intellectual superiority of their Hellenic neighbours, who had early settled as colonists in the island. In particular Citium, Salamis, and Amathus, cities of Phenician foundation, had already become thoroughly grecised. The primitive city, old Paphos, was known throughout the world for its cultus of Venus Aphrodite ; and new Paphos, at only three hours' distance, was a harbour-city, adorned with beautiful temples. It required no army to keep Crete in check, with its medley population, partly Greek and partly Asiatic ; a Eoman colony at Gnossus was all that was necessary ; and hence the island was a province of the senate. One could still distinguish here the Greek from the earlier Asiatic settler. However, the evil repu- tation which the Cretans had, throughout antiquity, for lying, greediness, debauchery, and impurity, attached alike to the whole population without distinction of Greek and barbarian. The inhabitants of Rhodes, a lovely island lying off the Carian coast, were held in far better estimation. They were a mixture of Carians, Phenicians, Cretans, and Dorian Greeks, and the in- tellectual superiors of them all. True, the growth of this indus- trious and clever little people had been crushed in the civil wars ensuing after Csesar's death, and the barbarous treatment it met with from Cassius ; yet still a stirring life, devoted to scientific and artistical pursuits, survived here, particularly in the capital of the same name : thus there was a Rhodian eloquence, and a Rhodian school of art, formed by Chares of Lindus. Of three ' Ammian. xiv, 2. ISLANDS — LESBOS, ETC. — EGYPT. 17 islands on the coast of Asia, all richly endowed with the gifts of nature, Leshos, Chios, and Samos, the last, with its capital city of the same name, one of the most beautiful of past ages, dwin- dled away more and more into insignificance under Roman dominion. The Chians, once the wealthiest of the Greeks,^ were stiU proverbial for their life of enjoyment and voluptuousness ; while the soft immoral Lesbos still lived upon the reputation of having given being to a long train of Grecian scholars, artists, and poets. The most productive of the Roman provinces in proportion to its size was Egypt, the valley on the north-east of Africa, which, compressed between mountain-chain and sand-desert, is inundated year by year by the Nile from its seven outlets on the Medi- terranean as far up as to the cataracts of Syene. The extraor- dinary fertility of this valley, the lie of the country, which enables the master of it to use it as a stronghold equally against Africa and Arabia, and the extreme importance of Alexandria as an emporium for the world's commerce, made the possession of Egypt of the last consequence to Rome ; and the country which, under the thoughtless and good-for-nothing administration of the last Lagidse, had retrograded in most points, under the statesmanlike dispositions of Augustus, and the indulgent, and at the same time safe, line of policy pursued by his successors, had risen again to greater prosperity than ever; so that the population reached the number of seven million eight hundred thousand.^ This population consisted of old Egyptians (Copts), Greeks, and Jews. The attempts of the Lagidse to hellenise Egypt, and to blend Greek and Egyptian to the uttermost, were not without their effect, as already the prevalence of Greek names testified, though without doubt the Egyptians foi'med the great bulk of the population ; and thus Philo could describe the population of the land as presenting only a simple contrast of Jew and Egyp- tian.3 This people, the oldest of the ci'sdlised nations in the empire, during six centuries of its subjugation to the yoke of a stranger, the Persian and the Greek, had suffered the loss of almost all its old institutions. Its caste system had been broken up; its religion it still preserved, and to this it held fast with tenacious obstinacy : as the Romans carefully refrained from in- 1 Thucyd. viii. 45. 2 Joseph. Bell. Jud. ii. 16, p. 4. (7,050,000?). ^luMacc. V. 23, 28(p. 071B). C 18 STATE OF THE WORLD. terference upon that head, thereby showing themselves wiser than the Persians, Egypt, in consequence, became one of the safest and most peaceable provinces of the empire. The people had always gone greater lengths than others in the exaltation and worship of sovereign authority : in the most ancient times it had deitied its native, rulers ; then the Lagidse ; and so it was an easy matter to submit to the Roman emperors as new divini- ties. Within ten years after the death of Cleopatra, Augustus figured in hieroglyphic inscriptions on the temple of Isis at Phyle as " Son of the Sun, and King of Upper and Lower Egypt."' On the whole, the people had withstood Greek influences more than other nations of the East ; yet of all the more considerable nations of antiquity, the Egyptian was the one which was held in the greatest contempt, partly because of their worship of ani- mals, despicable even in heathen eyes, as well as of the whole system of their wild and extravagant cultus ; partly because of the deceitfal, fawning, and uuwarlike character they had assumed under a despotism of two thousand years' duration. Still, in the storms which bru'st upon the Egyptians,^ firmness under suffer- ing, and an energy of will, were displayed, which might have been elicited in the service of a good cause, and have been en- nobled thereby. Hardly dependent on the land, a republic in itself, enthroned on the narrow slip of soil between the Mediterranean Sea and the Lake Mareotis, sat Alexandria, the queen of cities and centre of the world's commerce ; with a harbour in which more ships rode at anchor than in any other of the world; with temples and palaces that covered a fourth part of the area of the city; and with a population of eight hundred thousand souls. Alex- andria was, like Rome, a congregating place for all nations. Here one saw, all the year round, men of every complexion, from the most distant zones ; not only Greeks, Italians, Syrians, Arabians, Libyans, Cilicians, and Ethiopians, but Bactrians, Scy- thians, Persians, and Indians as well^ And so here a pecuhar character had developed itself among the people, quite distinct from that of the rest of their fellow-countrymen. The Alexan- drians were very hard workers ; it struck the emperor Hadrian 1 Sbarpe, Hist, of Egypt (3a edit. Lond. 1852), ii. 85. 2 Amm. Marcell. xxii. 16, 23. s Dio Chrysost. ad Alexand. p. 252 (vol. i. p. 072. Eeiske). EGYPT — SYEIA. 19 he saw no idlers there ; at the same time they were frivolous, pleasure-seekers, noisy, and easily worked themselves up to tumult and bloodshed on very trifling provocation. Memphis, with a mised population resembling the Alexan- drian, and the earliest capital of the country after the downfall of Thebes, was still a large city, only yielding the precedence to Alexandria in its thronged streets, its temples, and its palaces. It maintained itself as the chief seat of heathen cultus in its palmy state tiU the fourth century. Thebes, however, or the " great Diospolis," the oldest city of the whole world in Egyp- tian estimation, and Abydos as well, were already sunk into the condition of villages. HeUopolis, the old holy city, with its far- famed Temple of the Sun, was almost deserted ; and Ptolemais, in Upper Egypt, had raised itself in consequence from a mere encampment for Greek soldiery to be the most considerable city of the country, — a city nearly as large as Memphis, entirely built by Greeks, and living under Greek laws. It was only because they had so many monuments come down to them from former times that Egyptian cities of the in- terior had an importance for a wider circle ; but in Syria it was otherwise, where flourishing city-like communities, with inde- pendent constitutions and ruling families, had already made head under Persian domination. These again, under the Seleucidse, receiving an access of strength by the admixtion of the Grseco- Macedonian element into their blood, and by the foundation of many new cities, became the centre and bulwark of Hellenism, in opposition to the Syrian country population. So that the native tongue partially disappeared before the tide of Greek lan- guage and customs flowing upwards from the flat country, or was considered as the dialect of an uncivilised people, alongside of the Greek. The Syrian people, by being split up into many races at enmity amongst themselves, and having no established nationality, no unity of customs, kept together by the bond of re- ligion, to oppose to the intrusive stranger, appropriated the new and the foreign^ far more readily, and underwent the process of hellenisation in a far higher degree, than the Egyptians did. Thus the Romans obtained, according as it devolved to them, after the lingering dissolution of the kingdom of the Seleucidse, the whole country in its continuity from CiUcia, between the ' Polyb. xxii. 20. (?) 20 STATE OF THE WORLD. Mediterranean and the Euphrates, as far as the Arabian desert and the extreme borders of Egypt ; a rich and fertile inheritance, and in speech and civilisation preeminently Greek. For Syria was at that time far better cultivated and more productive than now, and had to the east flourishing cities, that have long since disappeared in the sand of the Syrian desert, even out beyond Palmyra. The people, as well as the Assyrians, Mesopotamians, white Syrians, and Cappadocians, all belonged to the Aramaic family. They were industrious, and possessed naturally intel- lectual powers, but were morally sunk through a servile dispo- sition, the refinements of luxury, and pernicious religious influ- ences. They had acquired a bad name among other nations for avarice and rapacity, and these drove the Syrian trafficker out into all lands, and taught him, with all his eft'eminacy, to de- spise danger.! In Upper Syria, close upon the commencement of the Libanus range, lay the first seaport of Syria, Laodicea (also Hierapolis), which owed its size and importance to the worship of the goddess Atargatis. Then Apamaea and Emesa, on the Orontes ; and on the same, Antioch, the creation of Seleucus and capital of Syria, with which at one time no other city but Rome and Seleucia on the Tigris could compare in size and beauty, though Alexandria was its superior in monumental magnificence. This rich, volup- tuous city had its arch-enemy under ground ; ten times in seven centuries was it visited with earthquakes, more than once almost completely destroyed. In Julian's time, Libanius asserted that it was the fourth city that now stood on the ruins of An- tioch, three having been already destroyed. The Antiochenes, however, united Greek civilisation with Syrian petulance, showed themselves thoughtless, turbulent, and overbearing; and whilst one Csesar conceived they were good for nothing but elegant and witty banter, another asserted that there were more comedians than citizens in Antioch.^ In Lower or Coele-Syria shone the primeval Damascus, a city in existence in Abraham^s time. Slighted by Syrian sovereigns as an insecure possession, it re- covered itself under the Roman power, as well as Heliopolis (Baalbec), on Libanus, where Antoninus Pius afterwards erected 1 The passages on this pomt are collected by Savarou in the notes to Sidon. ApoUin. p. 01. 2 Herodian. ii. 10 ; Juhan. Misopogon, p. 314, Spanh. PHENICIA — PALESTINE. 21 the temple of Jupiter, one of the most renowned structures of the old world. Phenicia, a narrow tract of land, lying hardly 140 miles along the coast, belonged now to the province of Syria. Like the rest of the Syrians, the Phenicians too had been grecised under the sway of the Seleucidse. Their national history had long since come to a close. After being dependent in turns on the Assy- rians, Chaldeans, Persians, Macedonians, and the Egyptian Pto- lemies, and now finally on the K-omans, they had preserved but little of their individuality. Their language had died out in the mother country about the middle of the second century after Christ, whilst it was still in use in the African colonies in the sixtli century.i The Phenicians themselves, however, still main- tained their ancient reputation, as the most active commercial people in the world, and as being greatly distinguished in archi- tecture and the plastic arts. Sidon, the old mother city, and Tyre, the island one, were still, and had been long, busy cities of commerce ; and Bery tus, after its destruction by Tryphon, the Syrian dynast, and restoration under Augustus, had been raised to the rank of a Roman military colony, and became at a later period the seat of a flourishing university. The low country to the south on the sea-coast, before Pales- tine, and formerly so styled par excellence, had been occupied in old times by a tribe of Philistines, who had migrated thither from Egypt. This people was ivithout a nationahty of its own ; it had been ground down by troubles in the constant wars be- tween its powerful neighbours, Egypt and Asiatic conquerors, and again under the blows inflicted upon it by its hereditary enemy, the Jews. Its cities were ruined; Gaza, in particular, reduced to a state of thorough desolation by the Jewish prince Alexander Jannfeus, in the year 96 b.c, and Ascalon by Judas Maccabseus. The country population existed now only under the general name of Idumseans. The Romans, however, Pompey, and after him Gabinius, founded new cities herej a new Gaza and a new Ascalon arose, then Anthedon and Raphia, with mixed inhabitants and Greek civilisation. Between Phenicia, Arabia Petrsea, and the vast Syro-Arabic desert, extending from the Nile to the Euphrates, lay Palestine, ' Hamaker, Miscell. Phcenic. p. 114. 22 STATE OF THE WOKLD. or Judfea, a country in Roman occupation since the year 63 B.C. When they first penetrated into it under Pompey, after the con- quest of Syria, the Romans found it in the possession of a people ■who had assumed the name of Jews from the time that a small portion of the nation returned from the Babylonian and Assyrian captivities. These Jews, under valiant captains and princes of the priestly race of the Maccabees, particularly under Hyrcanus the First, who died in the year 106 b.c, again developed them- selves into a powerful and flourishing kingdom. But the de- scendants of the same family brought themselves down again by internal discord. The Romans disposed of the country at plea- sure : Pompey annexed the northern part of it to Syria ; Caesar appointed an Idumaean, Antipater, procurator of the whole of Judsea, in reward for services rendered. It is true, the last Mac- cabee, Antigonus, made use of the momentary authority of the Parthians in Syria to have himself set up as ruler in Jerusalem. This was but a brief interlude. The Romans, at the instance of Antony and Octavian, declared Antigonus an enemy of the Ro- man people, and Antipater's son, Herod, king of Judsea, in the year 39 b.c. From that date, this stranger, the son of an Idu- maean and of an Arabian woman, lorded it with an iron hand for thirty-seven years over a people who, above all others, held a foreign master in abhorrence. Flatterer and slave of the Ro- mans, he had the cunning to win over to his ends Cassius, An- tony, and Augustus in turns. By favour of the last named, he ascended higher and higher. Under his protection he was en- abled to defy with impunity the hatred and disgust of the Jews, elicited by his introducing and adopting Roman customs, by tyrannical extortion, and lavishly wasting the sums he extorted upon strangers, and by executions en masse. After his death, his kingdom was divided amongst his posterity, till, under the Emperor Claudius, his grandson, Herod Agrippa, became again sovereign of all Palestine, though but for a short time ; for, on his dying suddenly, in the year 44 a.d., the whole country be- came a Roman province administered by procurators. Under the Roman dominion, the country on this side the Jordan was formed into three grand divisions — Galilee, Judaea, and Samuria. The rich and fertile Galilee, its northern division, where, according to Josephus, two hundred and four cities and towns were to be met with, the smallest of which counted fifteen SAMAEIA — JUD^A. 23 thousand inhabitants/ had a warlike and intrepid population composed of Israelites mixed with Phenicians and Syrians. Ti- berias ranked as the foremost of its cities, though only just built by Herod Antipas, who gave it its name in honour of Tiberius Csesar, and raised it to the dignity of capital of Lower Galilee. This prince besides converted Sephoris, under the name of Dio- CsesarBea, into a strong fortress, and made it the capital of all Galilee ; and it also became at the same time the seat of one of the five great Jewish Sanhedrim. Samaria, the smallest of the three divisions, lay to the south of Galilee, and on the north-east of Judsea. It was a beautiful, mountainous, and yet fertile little territory, in excellent culti- vation, whose inhabitants — a mixed people, half Israelite, half heathen — were ecclesiastically cut off from the Jews, and by them hated as an apostate and alien race. The whole history of the people attached to its two cities, Neapolis and Samaria. The first of these was the old Sichem, destroyed in the Jewish wars ; it was situated between Mounts Ebal and Gerizim, at the foot of the latter. Samaria, which had risen again from its ruins after being demolished by Hyrcanas, was enlarged by Herod, to whom Augustus gave it, and adorned with magnificent buildings, among which a temple of Augustus was conspicuous, and called Sebaste, in honour of the same Caesar. It had a considerable population, composed of natives and Roman veterans. Just as fertile and thickly-populated as Samaria was Judsea, bounded to the east by the Jordan and the Dead Sea; to the south by deserts. It was inhabited by Jews and Jewish pro- selytes, that is, circumcised Idumseans, and Jews who spoke Greek. Near to the northern border, by the sea, lay Cse- sarsea, before called Strato^s Tower [Turris Stratonis) , and only inhabited by Greeks and Syrians, untU enlarged by Herod, and adorned with a beautiful temple of Augustus, when it re- ceived Jewish settlers in addition. Previously the seat of the governor, it became the capital after the destruction of Jeru- salem. The old Canaanitish city Jericho was now also dwelt in by many Arabs and Egyptians. Nearly in the centre of the country lay the often- conquered and often-plundered Jerusalem, with its population of one hundred and fifty thousand. The city was built on three, or, more strictly speaking, four hills. On ' Bell. Jud. iii. 3, 3. 24 STATE OF THE WOELD. Sion was the upper town^ with the city of David aad the finest buildings. The hill Acra formed the lower town. On Moria stood the Temple, the wonder of the land. It was built through- out of the purest white marble, which appeared to the traveller at a distance like a mountain of snow. Adjoining it was the citadel of Antonia, now a Roman fortress-prison, dominating the temple and whole city. On a hill to the north, which Herod Agrippa first threw into the city, the overflowing population built itself the new town Bezetha. A more complete contrast can hardly be conceived than that presented by Roman North Africa under the Csesars, and in its later occupation by Mahometan masters. With a quick growth, New Carthage advanced into the importance and magnitude of a city of the first class. Their ruins still bear testimony to the beauty and size of other cities, such as Utica, Hippo, Tagaste, Cirta, and Lambesa. The five hundred episcopal sees, counted in West Africa in the fourth century, are a speaking evidence of the flourishing condition of a well-peopled country : in its towns, as far as Mauritania, the Latin tongue was the prevalent one ; whilst in the country the Punic tongue maintained itself long amongst the descendants of Phenician colonists. To the west of Egypt, Marmarica belonged to Roman juris- diction, a sandy, waterless, and unfruitful land, far, however, from being such a complete desert then as now. The inhabitants lived in nomad fashion, without any towns of importance. Next came the Pentapolis, from which, in like manner, every living thing has now vrithdrawn. It had a population partly Greek, partly Jewish, a fertile and well -cultivated soil, and already formed a Roman province with Crete. On the coast was Ptole- mais, a magnificent city ; in the interior, Cyrene, from its happy situation as a place of commerce, art, and science, had become the largest and most beautiful city of North Africa after Carthage. The Romans, as heirs of the Carthaginians, whom they had annihilated, ^nd of the kingdom of Numidia, possessed the whole of North Africa, from the Pentapolis to the Western Ocean. Proconsular Africa, separated as a province from Numidia sinc% the year 39 B.C., had its centre at New Carthage. The site of old Carthage was, in fact, under an interdict and accursed, and had been turned into pasture-land. Hard by, however, the citizen colony of three thousand families, sent out by Augustus, sprang AFRICA — SPAIN. 25 up with such rapidity-j as, by Tiberius's timej to have become the first city of Africa, and one which soon contended with Alexandria for the position of the second in the empire. ^ To the east, in the Syrtes, lay Leptis, a Sidonian colony, and a commercial city with a large population down to the fourth century. Utica, renowned for the death- scene of Cato, was only surpassed by Carthage in size. In the interior, and built on a steep rock, was Cirta, peopled by Greeks since King Micipsa^s time, and now that it had received a Roman colony, the largest and richest city of Numidia. It was also under Claudius that the western part of North Africa, or Mauritania, — the Fez and Morocco of the present day, including a part of Algeria, — was first incorporated with the Ro- man Empire, and divided into two extensive pro^^nces. Accord- ant testimonies of antiquity paint in very unfavourable colours the character of the two cognate races, the Numidian and the Moorish; they are described as crafty, deceitful, and treach- erous, as easily excited to sudden and violent action, and yet as daring despisers of danger and death. They contributed to the weakening of the empire by a long succession of insurrections, sometimes serious, sometimes not, but always put down with difiBculty. In the country to the south there was another lan- guage spoken, the Libyan, beside the Punic, which for some time still maintained itself amongst them. The cities in which, as a consequence of colonisation, the Roman language and cus- toms prevailed, were, particularly in Numidia, seats of scientific culture; Sicca, Cirta, Caesaraea, Madaura, Tagaste, Tubursica, were distinguished in this respect ; and the Africo-Roman lite- rature displayed a peculiar, fiery, and yet often turgid eloquence, which took pleasure in out-of-the-way and far-fetched ex- pressions. After a struggle that lasted some two centuries, Spain was conquered through the overpowering tactics and policy of the Romans. Singly and successively the nations of the Peninsula were mastered; the last of them, the Cantabrians, were first sub- dued in the year 19 b.c. Prom the bMnding efiected in Mid- Spain of the Iberian aborigines with the Celts who had come in as conquerors, sprang the Celtiberians, amongst whom, however, the Iberian, and not the Gallic, character prevailed. The five ' Herodian, vii. G, 2 (Irmisch). 26 STATE OF THE WORLD. powerful races of Cantabrians, Asturians^ Vascons, Gallsecians, and Lusitanians^ in the north and west, were unmixed Celts. The leading people in the south of Spain were the Iberian Tur- detani on the Bcetis, the cleverest and most cultivated of all the Iberian tribes, possessing, in fact, a literature of their own, his- torical books, popular lays, and ancient ordinances thrown into a metrical form. Yet even they, in Strabo's time, were almost thoroughly romanised, and had widened the breach with their antecedents by going so far as to unlearn their mother tongue. The artful and inconstant Lusitanians, up to the coming of the Romans, had left their excellent soil uncultivated, in order to pursue the constant inroads and endless feuds of their several races. The Celtiberians in south-western Aragon, the most war- like people of Spain, had accustomed themselves, since the fall of Sertorius, to Roman language and manners. On one side, pride, craft, and reserve ; on the other, great temperance, physical en- durance, and firmness in bearing pain, struck the Greeks and Romans as salient points in the Iberian, character. i Augustus divided the Peninsula into three great provinces ; Tarraconensis in the north, Bcetica in the south-east, and Lusi- tania in the south-west. Spain obtained, what it had hitherto wanted, unity of administration and a large number of cities; and these, adorned with noble buildings and monuments, even in their ruins awoke a high conception of their former flourishing state and the inexhaustible resources of the country. The Roman- Spanish aqueducts, as still preserved at Segovia, the examples of the same at Merida, Toledo, and Tarragona; the enormous theatres, as that at Saguntum; the circus and warm-baths; the bridges, for instance that wondrous one at Alcantara ; the trium- phal arches, and excellent military roads which penetrated Spain in many directions, — all showed how much combined energy and skill had been imparted by the contact of the Italians with the Iberian population, whose dwellings not so long ago consisted of huts of straw or of trodden earth.^ The five-and-twenty Roman colonies took the first rank amongst the cities. These, peopled either by Roman citizens or legionary soldiers, became so many centres and schools for the acquisition and extension of Roman customs and language. 1 Strabo, iii. p. 105 ; Justin, xliv. 2 ; Valer. Max. iii. 3. - Plin. H. N. XXXV. 48 ; Vitruv. de Architec. ii. 1. THE PENINSULA — GATJl. 27 Thus originated the city Leon (Legio), as being the settlement of the seventh legion. Thus too Emerita Augusta (Merida), for it was here Augustus placed the Emeriti, or soldiers of the fifth and tenth legions who had completed their time of service; and also Pax Julia (Beja) and C^sar- Augusta (Saragossa). By the year 171 B.C. there were in Carteja four thousand soldiers settled, whose mothers were all Spanish women. Forty-nine municipal towns [mmiicipia] had not, it is true, all the rights of colonies, but still that of independence. Next came the cities under the Latin law, whose inhabitants, by hold- ing oflSces, could acquire the rights of Roman citizenship ; six so- called free or independent cities ; some few confederated towns with similar privileges ; and lastly those which payed tribute, on whom the heavy burden of taxes principally pressed. These dis- tinctions came to be effaced in time. Already Vespasian gave the Latin law to the Spanish cities, which had not yet received it ; and Caracalla, by his general extension of the rights of citi- zenship, put the finishing stroke upon all inequality. In Eome, Spain, on the score of the richness of her mines and the unsurpassed fertility of her land, was regarded and treated as an inexhaustible storehouse. She was obliged to send the twentieth part of her corn-harvest thither. Indeed, the wealth of the Peninsula was proverbial. A single city like Cadiz counted four hundred equites, each of whom had necessarily a fortune of at least four hundred thousand sestertia. In litera- ture, a reg-ular school, the Spanish-Roman, was formed, and sus- tained by poets like Lucan and Martial, philosophers like Seneca, and by Floras, Mela, and Columella ; and this school, with its characteristics of sententious emphasis and rhetorical antithesis, exercised a very considerable influence on literature and taste in Rome. Beyond the Pyrenees, and bounded by them and the Alps, the Atlantic, and Mediterranean Sea, and the Rhine, lay Gaul, the head-quarters of the Celtic race, which Caesar, by the sacrifice of about a million of lives, had completely subjected to the Ro- man arms. The Celtic race, once the most powerful and widest spread in the West, was divided into two great branches, that of the Gauls, and that of the Cymri. The Galli, or Gauls, already in early times spread widely over Gaul, Britain, and a part of Italy, penetrated deep into the Pyrenean peninsula, and, being 28 STATE OF THE WOKLD. there partially mixed with Iberians, had, in the seventh century before Christ, lost nearly the half of Gaul before the advancing pressure Qf the Cymri in that direction from Germany. Later on, at the beginning of the fourth century, the Belgians, a branch of the Cymri settled in Germany, had forced their way into the north of Gaul, between the Rhine, the Meuse, and the Seine. Thus, at the time of the Roman conquest of Gaul, its population consisted of Aquitanians, between the Garonne and the Pyrenees, who were quite distinct from the Gauls and Belgians in race, language, bodily form, and countenance, bearing a greater resem- blance to the Iberians ; of the original Gallians or Gauls, who, forming the larger proportion of the population, occupied the country from the Garonne to the Seine and Marne, and between the Atlantic and the Vosges ; and also of the Belgians in the north. To these must be added the Ligurians, who, probably of Iberian descent, dwelt on the coast of the Mediterranean, in the country between the eastern Pyrenees and the Alps. That the conquest of Gaul was the work of a few years, while the subjugation of Spain cost two hundred years of per- severing effort, may partly be attributed to the surpassing genius of Csesar ; partly, and in still greater degree, to the character of the G auls, who were ripe for the loss of their independence and for the yoke of a foreign power. A general breaking up into parties, and a spirit of faction that penetrated into the very heart of families, was the first thing that came under the obser- vation of the Romans in Gaul. A number of petty tribes stood side by side, the less under the protection of the greater ; many were united together by voluntary associations; all were wavering and shifting, and the several confederations were almost always taking up arms one against the other. Whilst in the country the system of clanship, the peculiarity of Celtic nations, was ever working more towards division than consolidation, a demo- cratic movement was developing in the towns, which was utterly opposed to danism and the authority of the nobles. Monarchy was so hated in Gaul, that death or banishment threatened those who aspired to it. The priest-class, too, of the Druids was far short of being a political centre : it was no longer hereditary, but supplied by election, and does not appear to have been in a situation to counteract effectually the political disunion of the nation, or the civil wars breaking out year by year. Thus GAUL. 29 througli their discord, the Gauls went on to ruin; throughout the whole of the war against Csesar, it was only in the last year that unity and combined operation manifested itself among the most important Gallic factions ; but then it was too late. The character of the Gauls always excited the astonishment of the persevering, earnest, disciplined Roman; on the one hand, judicious, apt, and docile, easily enticed to study and to intellectual activity, sociable, cheerful, and inquisitive to an ex- cess ; on the other, exhibiting themselves thoughtless, fickle, and fond of innovation, irritable, easily roused to fury and violence, insolent and elated at once in good fortune, but cast down in bad. They were accustomed, we are told, to break their promises with a smile on their lips. A strange medley of bar- barism and civilisation showed itself in them. Even in Strabo's time, as much as fifty years after their conquest, the greater part of them slept on the bare ground ; although, according to Caesar's observation, they did not live so simply and poorly as the Germans. The women, who in earlier times occupied a more dignified position, and one more on a level with the men, were- at that time sunk- deep below them. The husband had the right of life and death over wife and children ; and as even the boys were not allowed to associate with their elders, it was impossible to conceive the idea of real domestic life amongst them ; thus they fell the more readily into the vice of drunken- ness. The custom of hanging the skulls of slain enemies to the necks of their horses or up in their houses, and of using them as drinking-eups at banquets, disappeared only under E-oman rule. Their towns were but large open villages, without exten- sive buildings or any artificial defence. For civil uses, they employed Greek writing ; but no literature, properly speaking, appears to have existed among them, although a regular system of doctrines was to be met with amongst the Druids, which, however, was only propagated by word of mouth. Through their incorporation into the Roman empire, an extraordinary change took place in the aspect of things amongst the Gauls in a comparatively short time; and yet, of all the nations subjugated by Rome, the Gatds evinced by far the greatest inclination to cut themselves loose again, and esta- blish themselves afresh as an independent state. Attempts of the kind were frequently made up to Vespasian's time; then 30 STATE OF THE WORLD. a period of repose came ; but even in the third century, in the time of the emperor Gallienus, they again had a Csesar of their own. Meantime, notwithstanding the desire of independence, the process of romanising went steadily onward amongst them. After the pattern of Roman colonisation in the south, the Gaul- ish villages and market-towns were transformed into well-built cities ; and Josephus, in his time, speaks of the flourishing state of Gaul, with its three hundred and five peoples, and twelve hundred cities and towns.^ Italian merchants, money-changers, and farmers of the revenue, had settled extensively in the coun- try, spreading far and wide the Roman language and municipal institutions. Cicero, in his time, said that not a silver coin was in circulation in Narbonensis that had not passed through a Romanes hand. It is true that they were hated, and that tumults frequently arose out of their assassination, as at Genabum (Orleans) .2 Still their influence was abiding, and the Celtic tongue disappeared more and more. Caesar had already begun to adopt distinguished Gauls out of Narbonensis into the senate. Claudius established the rule, that Gauls, even of the other three provinces, should be qjiosen into it ; others were led through the extension of the rights of citizenship, or of the equestrian dignity, or through military service in the legions, to the adoption of Roman customs and ideas, danism went out before the all-levelling machinery of Roman state-policy and jurisprudence. The Csesars were eager to crush the mighty influence of the Druids. Roman schools of rhetoric, grammar, medicine, and philosophy, besides the cities of Narbonensis, had also Autun, Lyons, and Bordeaux to boast of. Hand in hand with civilisation, efl'eminacy stole over the Gauls, which even the Belgians, the strongest and bravest pai't of the population, could not j-esist. Tacitus points to the Gauls as rich and unwarlike, and as having lost their high courage with their independence.^ Under Augustus, Agrippa divided the whole of Gaul into four provinces. Narbonensis, which, as being an old Roman possession before Csesar's time, was till then designated " the Province," comprised the present Languedoc, Provence, and Dauphine. Here the great and beautiful Roman colony Narbo ' Bell. Jud. ii. 16. 2 Cajs. B. G. vii. 3. " Ann. xi. 1&; Germ. 28; Agrio. xi. GAXJL. 31 was capital. Arles^ on the Rhone, still in possession of the greatest remains of Roman magnificence and architecture of all the French cities, was built by the veterans of the sixth legion. To the size and beauty of the city Nemausus (Nismes), its an- tiquities, rivalling in magnificence even those of Aries, bear ample testimony. The old Greek city Massilia (Marseilles), founded by the Pho- cffians, so long flourishing, strong, and powerful by sea and land, so long the trusty helpmate and ally of Rome, was at last dis- armed by Csesar. Though afterwards reduced to a Roman pro- vincial city, it was always of such importance as the seat of Greek civilisation for the Gauls as well as the Italians, that the noblest Romans resorted thither rather than to Athens for the purpose of pursuing their courses of philosophical studies.' With reason, people admired in the Massilians the indestruc- tible, unvarying elasticity of the Greek spirit, which here, so far from Hellas and quite encircled by barbarians,'^ still kept such firm hold on Grecian manners and ideas. Tacitus him- self praises the excellent combination of Greek elegance with provincial reserve, as peculiarly favourable to the studies of young men. Vienne, the capital of the settlers in the modern Dauphine and Savoy, was a Roman colony, with a population of AUobroges, converted from a warlike into an agricultural one, and was the rival of its neighbour Lugdunum (Lyons), the bitterest enmity existing between the two. Gallia Lugdunensis, the largest of the four provinces, em- braced all the country between the Cevennes and the Loire, and between the Rhone, the Saone, and Seine. The capital, Lug- dunum (Lyons), on the confluence of the Rhone and SS,one (Arar), a Roman colony, made so rapid an advance, that, after resisting for a few decennia, it soon became the most populous city thereabouts next to Narbo, and the head-quarters of indus- trial activity, where, besides Gauls and Romans, considerable numbers of Greeks and North Africans were employed in a va- riety of crafts and manufactures. As birthplace of two Csesars, Claudius and Caracalla, it had privileges showered upon it, par- ticularly by the first named. Though annihilated in one night, in Nero's days, by a conflagration, it speedily arose to new pro- sperity ; and more than one Caesar chose it for a place of pro- ' Strabo, p. 181 (248, Oxf.). ^ Cic. pro Flacco, 20. 32 STATE OF THE WORLD. longed sojourn. The most important town of the J^ldui, who had become effeminate by Ctesar's time, and were the first to give in to the Romans, was Augustodunum (Autun), a much- frequented place of study at a later period. Lutetia, the capital of the Parisii, on an island of the Seine, did not for some time show any promise of her future greatness and importance in the world^s history, wherein no mention is made of her in the four centuries from Caesar to Julian. The province of Aquitania, little known to the Romans in earlier times, was left by Csesar, en passant, to be conquered by his legate Crassus, as it were unworthy of himself. In fact, the division of the Aquitani into more than a score of small tribes did not allow any resistance in earnest to be thought of. A revolt under Augustus ended speedily in a renewed subjugation. The Aquitani, after being romanised, were famous for their elegant scientific education ;i still no cities of importance could be raised amongst them, on account of their internal divisions. The most important was Burdigala (Bordeaux), the capital of a single Celtic tribe, the Bituriges, in old Aquitania, right in the heart of small Iberian tribes. It was in high repute as a place of commerce, and afterwards also as a principal seat of scientific studies. The maintenance of order in the province Belgica, and its defence, was a far harder task for Rome. This province included not only the territory of the Belgse in particular, but in general the whole country between the Northern Ocean on the west, the Rhine on the north and east, the Seine, Rhone, and Saone to the south. In the present Hainault, Namur, and part of Luxembourg, were settled the remains of a once powerful and very valiant people, the jSTervii, who, however, had been mostly destroyed by Ceesar, and who possessed no large towns. East- ward from them, in woods and marshes, not far from the mouth of the Rhine, dwelt the Menapii ; and to the north, as far as the shore of the ocean, the Batavi, principally on the island formed by the estuaries of the Rhine and Mosa (Mouse) . These, ori- ginally a German people, in alliance with the Romans, and as such incorporated in the empire and considered a part of Gallia- Belgica, afterwards excited the terrible insurrection under Clau- dius Civilis, to their own destruction. To the south of the Nervii, and separated from them by the forest of Ardennes, and between 1 Auson de Clar. Urb. xiv. 1-3 ; Sulp. Sev. dial. i. 20. GERMANY — BEITAIN. 33 the Remi and the Rhine, lay the Treviri, according to Mela, the most distinguished of the Belgian tribes, and only allies of the Romans. They and the Nervii, according to the observation of Tacitus, were anxious to pass for Germans,^ whilst Ceesar takes them to be Gauls; it is certain they lived in perpetual quarrels with the Germans. Their capital, Treves, on the Mo- selle, was, as a Roman colony, styled Augusta-Trevirorum, and became gradually, by commerce, by possessing schools for edu- cation, and as a residence of the later Roman emperors, one of the most flourishing and important cities of Gaul. The countries on the west bank of the Rhine, inhabited for the most part by German tribes, had been divided by the Ro- mans since the time of Tiberius into first and second, or upper and lower, Germany. In Upper Germany, between the Vosges and the Rhine, three German tribes, the Vangiones, Tribocci, and Nemetes, were settled about Strasburg, Worms, and Speyer, who, before Caesar's time, had immigrated hither, dispossessing the Celtic tribes. Their cities, which did not grow into con- sideration till later times, were Argentoratum (Strasburg), Bor- betomagus (Worms), Noviomagus, afterwards Speyer, and Mo- guntia (Mentz). Lower Germany extended from the country of the Vangiones, or the neighbourhood of the Rhine, down- wards to the Scheldt, as far as the Belgian Nervii, yet so that the Treviri and Nervii were apportioned to the province Belgica. Here dwelt the Ubii, transplanted in the year 37 b.c. by Agrippa to the left bank of the Rhine, which they held from Bingen as low down as Gelduba (Gelb). From their capital, Cologne, they had taken the name of Agrippinenses ; for Claudius, at the desire of his consort Agrippina, who was born there, sent a Roman colony to it, and since then it has been called Colonia Agrippina. Their next neighbours were the Tongri, with their chief town Tongres. These PUny reckons as a non- German race. The great island of the west, hardly known to the ancients, not even considered part of Europe, and only visited by a few adventurous mariners, came first, through Caesar, within the grasp of the Roman spirit of conquest ; but it was not till the year 43 that Claudius undertook the subjugation of Britain in earnest. It was advancing slowly, when a great rising took ' Germ, xxviii. 34 STATE OP THE WORLD. place, in the year 61, which led to the destruction of the Eoman colonies of Camulodunum, Verulamium, and Londinium, and to the slaughter of 70,000 Roman inhabitants. Notwithstand- ing this, the military superiority of the Romans was again tri- umphant, and Agricola completed the conquest of Britain as far as into the south of Scotland. Though Strabo expresses himself disparagingly of the value and fertility of the island, at a later period it was looked on as one of the most highly -favoured pro- vinces of the empire.i The inhabitants were Celts, partly Galli, partly Cymri. The Belgse on the sea-coast, the Atrebates on the Thames, the Cenomani on the Stour, the Parisii on the Humber, were all connected by descent with the tribes of the same name on the mainland of Gaul, and pointed to an early emigration from the north of Gaul. The Druid worship they shared in common was also a still closer bond of unity between Britain and Gaul ; and the design of the Romans, to attack and give the deathblow to Druidism in its last stronghold and cita- del, Britain, appears to have entered largely into the enterprise under Claudius. In spite of the perfection to which the Druid system had arrived amongst them, the Britons were very low in the scale of civilisation at the time of the Roman conquest. Their towns were nothing but woods, surrounded by a mound of earth and a ditch. They tattooed themselves, and wore the skins of wild-beasts; and had also, if Csesar be not deceived in this respect, a community of wives amongst relations ;2 and in the interior they lived on flesh and milk, without tilling the ground. In rudeness and barbarity, but also in frankness and fair deahng, they surpassed the Gauls,^ with whom, as with descendants of the same stock, they had most points of character in common. So soon, however, as the Roman autho- rity was securely established amongst them, the British Celts, like their neighbours of Gaul, took kindly to the Roman customs and language. It was specially the wise policy and mild ad- ministration of Agricola which achieved this ; and, according to the expression of his son-in-law, brought it to pass, that "what in their ignorance they termed civilisation, was in reality one of 1 Strabo, ii. p. 116 (154, Oxf.) ; Eumen. Paneg. Const, xi. 2 B. G. Y. 1-1 ; Herodian, iii. U ; Dio Cass. Ixxvi. 12. 3 Diod. V. 21 ; Dio Cass. Ixii. 7 ; Tacit. Agr. xi. EHjETIA NOEICUM. 35 the conditions of their servitude."' At the same time, the sepa- ration of the unsubdued North-Britain, with its tribes of Cale- donians and Picts, also of Celtic race, from the romanised Bri- tons of the south, was assured for many centuries in advance. Under the Roman domination, too, twenty-eight cities gradually rose in the island; of these, two were municipia, Eboracum (York), the basis of operations for all the Roman expeditions against the northern tribes, and frequently the residence of Ro- man emperors, with Verulam and nine colonies. London, already in existence as a place of commerce before the Roman invasion, and well-nigh destroyed in the insurrection under Boadicea, re- covered itself, and was again, in the time of Antoninus Pius, a city of importance. In the present Germany, Augustus, through his stepsons Drusus and Tiberius, had added to the empire the whole of the Alpine chain as far as the Danube, under the names of the provinces of Rhsetia, Noricum, and Pannonia. The Romans did not consider these countries parts of Germany proper; before their conquest they were included in Illyria. Rhsetia in its more limited sense comprised the Grisons, Tyrol, and a part of Lom- bardy. Previously in the occupation^ it is said, of a Tuscan race, since the Romans knew it, it had been inhabited by tribes of Celtic descent. Vindelicia was regarded as a part of Rhsetia from the end of the first century : afterwards, as a province by itself, and called Rhsetia Secunda, it embraced portions of Switzer- land, Baden, Wirtemburg, and Bavaria: its Celtic inhabitants were in part removed by the triumphant Romans to other locali- ties. None of its cities, Tridentum, Campodunum, Brigantium, Augusta, or Reginum, appear to have been of importance ; the population of the country was, on the contrary, decreasing. Yet Tacitus mentions Augusta (Augsburg) as an extremely fine colony of the Rhsetian province. ' The province of Noricum comprised the present iipper and lower Austria between the Inn, the Danube, and forest of Vienna, the greater part of Styria and Carinthia, and the territory of Saltzburg, and was inhabited by a people then still Celtic, the Taurisci. The town of Lauriacum, on the Danube, afterwards of so much political and ecclesiastical importance, probably arose under the emperor Marcus Aurelius. The old capital of the ' Tac. Agr. xxi. 36 STATE OF THE WORLD. country, and centre of the Norican gold and iron trade, was No- reia, in Styria. The country could not attain to any degree of prosperity, inasmuch as it was hardly any thing but a battle-field, over which the devastations of the Germans, and the equally ferocious reprisals of the Roman legions, alternated with but little interruption. The fair and fertile land between the Inn and the forest of Vienna was called at that time " the waste of the Boii," because that Celtic tribe was either annihilated on the spot, or thence expelled by the Getse. Further to the east lav Pannonia, on the south of the Dan- ube, including the eastern parts of Austria, Styria, Carinthia, and Carniola, the whole of Hungary between the Danube and the Save, and a part of Croatia and Bosnia. Those enormous plains, extending between the Danube and the Alps, the western por- tions of which formed the upper Paunonian, and the eastern the lower Pannonian pro-sinces, were inhabited by a numerous and warlike tribe of lUyrian descent, a rude and wild people with whom some few small Celtic tribes were intermixed. These Pan- nonians, the Eomans, under the order of Tiberius, were obliged to reduce afresh. The struggle was a bloody one, and lasted for many years. To the old Pannonian towns of Nauportus, Siscia, and Sirmium, new ones were now added by the Romans : the originally Celtic town, Vindobona, afterwards converted into a Roman municipium, served as a military arsenal, and continued for long a flourishing city ; Sabaria, the old Boian town (now Stein am Anger) ; Petovio (Pettau in Styria) on the Drave ; and Segesta, or Siscia (Sissock), in the time of Augustus the most important city in all Pannonia, but depressed afterwards when Sirmium, the old town of the Celtic Taiuisci on the left bank of the Drave arose, which, from being the chief depot of all military stores in the expeditions against the Dacians and other Danubian tribes, became the real capital of Pannonia. To the east of the Adriatic sea, over the modern Dalmatia, Bosnia, a part of Croatia and Albania, extended the Roman lUyria, with a people which, according to the testimony of the ancients, was originally connected by descent with the Thracians, but had developed itself independently of them. They also, particularly the tribes of the lapydes, had a portion of Celtic blood. There were no towns of note here. The Greek Illyria, afterwards new Epirus, comprehending the larger part of the present Albania, MACEDONIA — THEACE . 37 was in a state of sad desolation in consequence of the wars of earlier times ; it was only on the coast that cities flourished — Dyracchium, a great place of commerce^ for instance, and Apol- lonia, much frequented as a place of scientific study by Romans of distinction. Macedonia, the country whose people and king, three hundred years before, laid the foundation of that great empire of the world, the precursor of the Eoman, had been now for a hun- dred and fifty years incorporated in this last. Enfeebled by the magnitude of its conquests and the long-continued emigrations which resulted from them, Macedonia, under Alexander's suc- cessors, had succumbed in the struggle against the northern barbarians, and in useless efforts to compel the Greeks to unite with it. A single battle in the time of Perseus put the whole country into the hands of the Romans ; and they, finding it too small and unimportant to make a province of by itself, united it to Illyria and Thessaly, while the strip of coast lying to the east from the Nestus was attached to Thrace. Thus Macedonia reached, in the days of the Caesars, from the Adriatic to the iEgean. The still warlike population of Macedonia proper had supplied Brutus, in the war against the Triumvirs, with two legions. Enclosed within the four walls of its mountain-chain, this Mace- donia was the fortress from which the Romans kept watch and ward over the restless predatory tribes of the valley of the Danube. On its north and north-western mountain quarters, the original Illyrian race, only half subjugated by the Romans, and long a source of dread to them, preserved their non- Grecian customs and language : the flat country was, and continued to be, Greek. Thessalonica, still in its youth, now began, as capital of one of the four districts of Macedon, to rise into greater importance, and became one of the largest commercial cities of the old world. The Athenian colony Amphipolis, Philippi, made a Roman one by Augustus, and Pella, the old residence of the kings of Ma- cedon and birthplace of Alexander, but soon after shrunk into the dimensions of a village, were the capitals of the three other districts. To the east of Macedonia lay Thrace, a name of much more limited signification now than when in use amongst the Greeks, and signifying only the south-eastern part of old Thrace, south of the Hsemus (Balkan). Though generally mountainous, it had 38 STATE OF THE WOELD. an extensive plain lying between Hsemus and Rhodope. The Thracians had immigrated, in pre-historic times, into the coun- try, divided into a number of single clans, each with a chief of its own. They belonged, with the Getas, or Dacians, and the Bi- thynians in Asia Minor, to one great family, whose customs bear a strong resemblance to those of the Germans and Celts. The marked disinclination they displayed in old times to the cul- tivation of the soil, and other peaceful occupations, had already yielded, before the period of Roman domination, to an agrarian and industrial activity : but a predilection for war and robbery, contempt of death, and drunkenness, were attributed to them at a later age. As both Celtic and Scythian tribes dwelt amongst them, and numerous Greek colonies had founded flourishing cities on the coast, it may be supposed the population of the country was considerably mixed. The kings of the Odrysse, the most powerful of the Thracian tribes, were already vassals of Rome, imtil the murder of King Rheemetalces induced the embodiment of the Odryso-Thracian kingdom into the Roman empire under the emperor Claudius, though it was not till Vespasian that the country was formally organised as a province. Cities, it appears, there were none as yet in the interior. The Romans had beaten the Bessi, the central people of Thrace, but only after sanguinary engagements. As, in Strabo's time, they were leading a wretched existence in hovels, and were styled robbers even by robbers,^ it is quite possible this state of things might have followed only in consequence of their wars with the Romans and financial burdens laid upon them. On the coast of the Propontis lay the old Samian colony Perinthus, which, un- der the later denomination of Heraclea, became the capital of the province ; while, in a most happy situation on the Golden Horn between the Propontis and the Bosphorus, arose Byzantium, as if predestined to be one of the world's capitals. Megarian sett- lers first founded it, Milesian followed. The Romans had al- lowed it its own laws and its considerable territory on the coast of Pontus, and made it one of their strongest cities. Between the Hsemus and the Danube to the north of Thrace, and containing the modern Servia and Bulgaria, lay the province of Moesia, inhabited by many tribes related to the Thracian stock. It had but little place in the history of the Roman wars, except 1 Strabo.p. 318 (401, Oxf.). DACIA — THE GET-ffi IMPEKIAL POLICY. 39 as a battle-ground; and even its cities, as Singidunum (Belgrade) and Dorostorum, had only a certain importance as head-quarters for the legions. And now of those great Thracian families, once so famous and powerful, and so widely spread over the Thraco- lUyrian peninsula and Asia Minor, all that survives is a few in- considerable remnants of Albanians and Arnauts in Epirus and Macedonia. The Dacians also and Getae belonged to the great Thracian family, and in reality formed but one people under different names. Their country, divided from Moesia by the Danube, in- cluded Hungary to the east of the Theiss, Transylvania, the Buko-\vina, Moldavia to the west of the Pruth, and Wallachia, and in the time of Augustus formed a powerful Geto-Thracian monarchy under its sovereign Byrebistus. This fortunate par- venu by the aid of a stranger, a juggler idolised by the Getse, had not only subjected and united the whole population, but had also collected together a standing army of two hundred thousand warriors, before which the whole vaUey of the Danube, from the Pontus to Noricum, prostrated itself in submission. ^ The pre- sent Bessarabia and South Moldavia vrere at that time a wilder- ness, and called "■ the waste of the Getse.-"^ The Celtic tribe of the Boii on the upper Danube, in modern Austria, had, since the year 48 B.C., yielded to the ascendency of the Dacians. However, this great Dacian monarchy fell to pieces on the mur- der of Byrebistus ; and when, later on, the Dacian king Dece- balus fell beneath the victorious arms of Trajan, Dacia was con- verted into a Roman province, and remained so till about the time of Aurelian (a.d. 275). The policy of the Roman Csesars, to break dovra nationali- ties, at least to pare them away in all points of essential distinc- tion, was accompanied with almost complete success. In east as well as west, the old hereditary national spirit, that kept them together, had disappeared. Putting aside the Germans, who, in their leading races, were not exposed to the Roman systematic processes of assimilation and denationalising, one discovers but two people who withstood these influences, the Jew and, partially, the Egyptian. Prom the Adriatic Sea to the Ocean, aU was ready to become Roman in speech and cus- 1 Strabo, vii. p. 304 (438, Oxf.) ; xvi. p. 702 (1084, Oxf.). 2 Ibid. pp. 294, 305 (438, 440, Oxf.). 40 STATE OF THE WOELD. toms. In the east, however^ from the Euphrates as far as to the Adriatic, there was a continued prevalence and extension of Greek usage and the Hellenic tongue : like a mighty stream, pene- trating every where, Hellenism had overflowed all here. Even in remote Bactria, to the very bank of the Indus, Greek was understood; Greek civilisation and writing maintained their ground into the first century after Christ. Parthian kings had the dramas of Euripides played in their presence : Greek rheto- ric and philosophy, the Hellenic passion for public speaking, discussions, and lectures, spread far in Asiatic cities. In the whole circuit of the empire the Greek language was, and con- tinued, the chosen medium for oral and written intercourse amongst the educated; so that, even in Homan- Africa, Appuleius expounded philosophy in Greek. Acquaintance with Latin, on the other hand, was the less common amongst the Greeks and hellenised orientals, as they all cherished the idea, which Strabo^ among others expresses, that Roman literature was too unindependent, and that the study of it was but to little purpose, inasmuch as it had borrowed its largest aud best part from Greek sources. Hence it has been observed, that from Dionysius to Libanius not a single Greek critic even names Horace or Virgil. Moreover, the notion, that all who had not hellenised them- selves in language and manners, and therefore the Romans too, were stiU at bottom but barbarians, had gained ground every where in common with Hellenism, although it was not expressed to their masters in their presence. On the other hand, the Romans, up to Hadrian's time, were not wanting in endeavours to oblige the eastern nations of the Greek tongue to the reception of the Latin. Governors and magistrates issued their orders, and gave their decisions, only in the oflBcial language. They compelled their subjects to hold intercourse with them through interpreters.2 It was but seldom Roman statesmen condescended to have recourse to Greek in the transaction of business. In the government departments, as well as in the courts of judicature and in the army, Latin prevailed. The emperor Claudius actually deprived a Lycian deputy of high rank of his rights of Roman citizenship on the plea that his ignorance of Latin was disgraceful.^ By these means their suc- 1 Geogr. iii. p. 166 (227, 8, Oxf.). 2 Valer. Max. ii. 2, 2. 3 Suet. Claud, xvi. INFLUENCE OF HOME. 41 cess was such, that Plutarch^ could assert in general terms, "Almost all mankind speak Latin;" and Pliny could panegyrise his own tongue in high-flown words of praise, as combining in unity the discordant tongues of so many people, and that with this medium of oral communication mankind were being gra- dually humanised. Meanwhile the old dialects of the country maintained their ground in many lands in the lower strata of society. As late as a.d. 230, a decree of the emperor Alexander takes for granted that the Celtic and Punic were still spoken and written in Gaul and Africa respectively.^ Care, however, was taken that every intellectual acquisition of the different na- tions should be turned to common account through the medium of one or other of the two prevalent languages. The great emporium for all, the centre, which exercised so powerful an attraction over the educated, the ambitious, the pleasure-seeker, and the greedy of gain of all nations, was, and continued to be, Rome. To her all other cities necessarily looked. Rome was now the epitome of the whole world. Rome in Strabo's time swarmed with scholars from Tarsus and Alex- andria. The voice and standard of the Roman public reacted on taste, and gave the intellectual direction in Greece and Asia. The fortunate provincials who were permitted to stay there sent their literary notices of newly-issued writings, and reports of speeches and witty sayings of famous persons, to their native homes ; papers, acta, edited at the imperial court, kept the re- motest provinces informed of the daily life and events in Rome, and even of remarkable trials, speeches, and literary news.^ Rome did not govern in the heart of her empu-e with the resources and in the guise of a military or bureaucratic despot- ism, which is aU-controUing, and with a jealous, all-observant eye encroaches upon every department of life. Her moderate army was stationed, for the most part, on the frontiers, in quarters of its owm, for protection against external enemies. In the whole of inner Gaul, for instance, there were but 1200 men in garrison ; Asia Minor was without a standing force ; in most of the cities there were generally no troops. With just pride contemporaries speak of the Roman peace, and praise " its ' Qusest. Plat. p. 1010 ; x. 198, Beisie ; Pliu. H. N. iii. 6. " Dig. Leg. sxxii. tit. i. 11. 2 Seneca, Consol. ad Helv, vi. ; Dionys. Halic. de Oratt. ant. iii. 20. 42 STATE OF THE WOKLD. majesty," as Pliny does. They considered their government as the guardian of the world's repose,— a repose which guaranteed the intercourse of all parts of the empire with one another and with Rome, which was facilitated by excellent military roads j but which was fearfully interrupted by sanguinary struggles for the empire, after Nero and Commodus. The helm of govern- ment was, on the whole, guided by a strong and steady hand, the pressure of which was but little felt, because there was but little of administrative interference. The idea of watching jea- lously over subjects was far from the minds of those in power, and the contrary principle of leaving cities and corporations to look after their own interests was ordinarily pui-sued. II. THE NATIONS AND COUNTRIES OUTSIDE OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE. Beyond the boundaries of the Roman empire lay " another world," Armenia, the kingdom of Parthia, India, China, Arabia, ^Ethiopia, and the Teutonic north, — powers, two of which, the Arabs and Germans, held in their own hands the destinies of east and west, though without their being conscious of it. Greater Armenia was a country richly blessed by nature, in extent equivalent to about the half of Germany. It is a well- watered mountain-land between the Black and Caspian Seas, having the races of the Caucasus on the north, and Mesopotamia and Assyria on the south. Situated at that time between two great empires, the Roman and the Parthian, dependence on one of which seemed inevitable, while policy required the mainten- ance of a good understanding with the other, its people were nevertheless enabled to preserve their freedom in the interior, and an unmixed purity of blood, in spite of occasional immigra- tions. At the same time, it continued to be, even in the follow- ing centuries, the arena on which the great powers of east and west fought for the possession of Western Asia and the prey which falls to the conqueror. The ancients had no certain know- ledge concerning the descent of the Armenians. The statement of Herodotus, that they descended from the Phrygians, must probably be reversed ; and Strabo's fancy of deriving them from COLCHIS— IBERIA. 43 the Thessalians appears to originate only in the perception of certain accidental external similarities. They held themselves to be a primitive people, descended from Haig, one of the Ja- phetidffi. Their language is akin to the Indo-Germanic family. Their dispersion into many countries, and the spirit of trading thereby awakened, were consequences only of their being con- quered at a later period. Armenia became a Roman province under Trajan only transiently. Artaxata, the beautiful and for- tified residence of Armenian kings on the Araxes, was burnt by Corbulo in Nero's time. King Tiridates was allowed to rebuild it, under the title of Neronias. LucuUus had already attempted to ruin Tigranocerta, the artificial half-finished creation of Ti- granes, by sending home the colonists there collected, and by demolishing it : yet it reappears again, on the pages of Tacitus,^ in Nero's time as a strong city. Otherwise Armenia was a strik- ingly poor country for cities, in proportion to its size. The ancients had, on the whole, a very deficient acquaintance with the mountain races dwelling in Caucasia, between the Black Sea and the Caspian. The nature of the country, as well as of its people, was incompatible with a complete conquest and a Roman organisation. The people of Colchis, in whom, from many striking resemblances, Herodotus believed he discerned an Egyptian origin, dwelt in the modern Russian provinces of Gu- riel, Imeretia, and Mingrelia, but were broken up into a mul- titude of separate tribes, speaking such a variety of tongues, that the Romans, at the Colchian sea-port of Dioscurias, otherwise Sebastopolis, were forced to transact business by means of a hundred and thirty interpreters.^ After the conquest of Mith- ridates, they had given the country to Polemo ; later it was con- sidered as Roman property, particularly after Trajan had built fortresses on the coast : still their power there was limited to the exaction of tribute from a few petty princes. Iberia, the Georgia of the present day, the fertile mountain- girt plain of the Caucasian isthmus, with an agricultural and peaceful population, living after Armenian and Median fashion, first fell into Roman hands after Trajan. A poor Scythian tribe inhabited Albania, which borders on Iberia on the east, and comprises the modern Schirwan and the southern part of Da- ghestan. This people, out of indolence, pursued agriculture only ' Annal. xv. 4. ^ pij^. jj. N. vi. 10, U (vi. 5, ed. Franzius). 44 STATE or THE WORLD. in its rudest form, and, notwithstanding the twenty-six dialects spoken amongst them, according to Strabo, were united together under one supreme chief. The Parthian kingdom had risen from inconsiderable begin- nings with the dynasty of the Arsacidte or Ashcanians, in the year 350 b.c. At the head of a northern wandering horde, and claiming to be of the line of the old Persian kings, Arsaces had made his appearance in Parthia, and profited there by the inte- rior dismemberment and growing weakness of the Syrian king- dom of the SeleucidEe, to lay the foundations of an independent power. By the year 189 b.c. the authority of the Seleucidse over the Zend races had come to a close. Media and Persia formed again their own national kingdoms. The hitherto insig- nificant kingdom of the Arsacidse raised itself, from the date 174 B.C., under Arsaces to a considerable size. The kings of the Persians, Modes, and Elymseans, were tributaries; and already, in 145 B.C., the satrapies of Mesopotamia and Babylon had fallen to the Parthians. In the year 130 b.c their domination over the whole of Western Asia was established. About the be- ginning of the Christian era, the Median kingdom was destroyed by them ; at a somewhat later period the Persian royal dynasty followed. The wars between them and the Romans, which had been conducted with but little advantage for either side, yet not without permanent enfeeblement of the Roman empire, and still more of the Parthian, turned upon the possession of Armenia and the country between the Tigris and Euphrates. In the ia- terior of the kingdom, growing contests for the succession, and revolts of satraps, had occurred already, and showed critical symptoms of decay. The countries of Mesopotamia, Babylonia, and Assyria, that gi-eat district of Western Asia which, bounded on the north by Armenia, on the east by Media and Susiana, on the west by Syria and the Arabian Desert, extends downwards as far as the Persian Gulf, and forms the river-land of the Eu- phrates and Tigris, — had hitherto constantly shared the same fortunes. First dependencies of the Assyrian, then of the Per- sian empire, next, after the conquest of Alexander, incorporated for the most part into the kingdom of the Seleucidfe, they were now partly under Roman, partly under Parthian dominion, and formed the vast battle-field and prize for Roman and Parthian ASSYRIA — MESOPOTAMIA. 45 combatants. Yet even at that time AdiabcBe, the plain of the Tigris, and the chief province of Assyria, made a separate king- dom, dependent on the Parthians; and its princes, Monobazus and Izates, with their mother Helena, adopted the Jewish reli- gion in the time of Claudius.^ The old Assyrian capital, Ninive on the Tigris, the volup- tuous, thoughtless city, which, according to the Hebrew prophet, said in her heart, " I, and no other beside me,'''' had now been in ruins for 600 years. Xenophon found them uninhabited in his expedition through Asia. It must have been later that a new city, Ninus, was built in the neighbourhood by the princes of Adiabene under the Parthian sway; for Tacitus and Ptolemy^ make mention of it. Assyria appears, however, to have been in a state of extreme depopulation in our Lord's days : Xenophon, in his, found the earlier cities, as those of Mespila and Larissa, abeady ruined and desolate ; and no new ones of any importance are mentioned. Mesopotamia, lying on this side the Tigris, was better sup- plied with cities. The Chaboras divided it into the western principality of Osroene, which the chief of an Arab nomad horde had laid the foundations of, about the year 146 B.C., in the time of the decay of the Seleucidaj; and into the eastern one of Myg- donia, styled Anthemusia, the land of flowers, on account of Its fertility. The Grseco-Syrian capital of Osroene, Edessa, situated exactly on the frontier line of the Roman and Parthian empires, was now the seat of its king Abgarus. It was afterwards de- stroyed by Trajan's army, but revived and flourished again. Not far from it lay the ancient town Charrse, in a later day colonised by the Macedonians, the Haran of Abraham, where the flower of the Roman army was cut ofl^ under Crassus. From that "heathen city," Hellenopolis, as the Syrian Christians subse- quently named it, idol-worship must have spread itself the whole world over, according to their legends.^ Nisibis, or at first Antiochia, the former residence of Armenian sovereigns in Mygdonia, where, according to Plutarch's statement,* genuine descendants of the Spartans still dwelt, was conquered by ' Joseph. Ant. .Txid. xx. 2-4. ' Tacit. Ann. xii. 13 ; Ptolem. Yi. tab. 1. 3 Assemani Bibl. Orient, i. 51, 201; ii. lO'?, 2(10. * De Sera Num. Yind. xxi. 46 STATE OF THE WOELD. LucuUus in spite of the fame of its invincibility. It fell after- wards into Parthian hands, from whom Trajan again tore it. Thenceforward, down to Jovian, it continued to be the outwork of the Eoman empire, on which all the attempts of Parthian and Persian were wrecked. Babylonia, the southern continuation of Mesopotamia from the point where the Euphrates and Tigris approximate down to the Persian Gulf, the Senaar of the Old Testament, and now a satrapy of the Parthian kingdom, was, on account of its excellent soU, thickly peopled in high antiquity. It was then protected by artificial canalisation against annual inundations, which now make the country a vast surface of water for almost six months of the year, and after subsiding leave behind an incrustation of salt that is destructive of vegetation. Even now the numerous bar- rows of ruins there visible, and the names of many cities that have disappeared, bear witness to the once-flourishing condition of a land that has been brought to desolation through the slug- gishness of its last inhabitants and the misrule of its masters. The ancients distinguish the Semitic race of Chaldees, who occupied the south-western part of the country on the Euphrates, from the members of the priest-caste in Babylonia, commonly called Chaldees, who, in pre-historic times, are said to have come as colonists from Egypt, and now, divided into several schools, with a variety of systems, pursued the study of astronomy.^ The oldest of the world-cities and glory of the whole earth, the proud beauty of the Chaldees, "the hammer of the uni- verse,"^ Babylon on the Euphrates, already saw the Divine doom, announced long beforehand, in course of fulfilment. Pre- viously broken down by her destruction under Darius, she re- ceived her deathblow from the foundation of new capitals in her vicinity, first Seleucia, and then Ctesiphon. Add to that the two emigrations, in the time of the emperor Claudius, of Jews,^ who were even then still numerous there. Thus, according to Strabo's account,* the city was then for the first time in ruins. The emperor Severus found it completely depopulated ; and, as Pausanias tells us, there was nothing but walls to be seen.* The four capitals, Seleucia, Ctesiphon, El Madain, and Kufa, which ' Strabo, xvi. 739 (1050, Oxf.) ; Diodor. i. 28, ii. 29-3]. - Jerem. 1. 23, li. ii ; Esaias xiii. 19. ^ Joseph. Ant. Jud. xviii. 9, 8. ■• xvi. p. 738 (1010, Oxf.). » Dio Cass. Ixxv. 9 ; Pausan. viii. 33. BELETTCIA — AKABIA. 47 rose there successively, were all built for the most part out of her ruins. And soon the sentence which the prophets had pro- claimed was fulfilled to the letter,— that Babel should be a heap of stones, and a den of serpents, and that even the Arabs should no more build huts there.' On the other hand, Seleucia on the Tigris, with her 600,000 inhabitants, was then standing in her full bloom. She was the creation of the first Seleucus, a sovereign generally successful in the foundations of his cities. She was peopled by the removal of a large proportion of the inhabitants of Babylon, and the at- traction of niimbers of Greeks. Kivalling Alexandria as an em- porium for Asiatic commerce, she formed a free state, respected and spared by the Parthians, with a Greek constitution; and soon after her foundation became the centre and rallying-point for the history of Western Asia. The remnants of the earlier Greek settlements on the Euphrates and Tigris had also congre- gated here. Three, or in reality four, nationalities, the Baby- lonians and Syrians, — Josephus designates both by the latter title, — Greeks and Macedonians, and lastly, Jews, who generally swarmed in Mesopotamia and Babylonia, formed a community often embroiled in quarrels one with another. For instance, in the year 50 e.g., the united Greeks and Syrians determined on a frightful massacre of the detested Jews, of whom about 50,000 lost their lives.^ Seleucia had a dangerous rival in her neigh- bour Ctesiphon, lying over against her on the east bank of the Tigris ; a large town by Strabo's time, it had served as a winter residence for the Parthian kings, and a place of encampment for their troops; after which it grew rapidly great. There is evi- dence of the size which it reached, in the fact that, on the con- quest of the city by the emperor Severus, and after a terrific massacre, still 100,000 of the survivors were made prisoners. The inhabitants of Inner Arabia, intrenched behind the im- penetrable bulwarks which nature had drawn round their set- tlements, had remained hitherto without the pale of history. Persians, Macedonians, and Romans had in turn recoiled from before their girdle of desert. The attempt of ^lius Gallus, under Augustus, to penetrate into the country had utterly failed, and was never afterwards renewed. The country, out of which ' Jerem. li. 37 ; Esaias xiii. 19 sqq., xiv. 4, 12. ' Joseph., Ant. Jud. xviii. 9, 9. 48 STATE OF THE WORLD. Trajan formed a province of Arabia, with Bostra for its capital, did not properly belong to Arabia. Whilst commercial inter- course with the inhabitants of the coast had created an influx of strange customs or rites amongst them, the national character of the Semitic Arab preserved itself in the peninsula all the purer. It was for later centuries to show the astonished world what energy and indomitable spirit dwelt in the sons of Joktan and Ismael under the influences of a new religion. Meanwhile the Eomans of the east learnt by experience that diamond only can cut diamond, Arab only can subdue Arab. To the south of Egypt, amongst the Ethiopians, or negro people of the east of Africa, a primitive, priestly, and commercial state had arisen in Meroe, the large peninsula surrounded by the sources of the Nile, whose rule extended over the whole of North Ethiopia, the modern Nubia. Their capital of the same name lay in the neighbourhood of Schendy, where to the pre- sent day the most splendid ruins of temples, sepulchral monu- ments, and pyramids are visible. Here, at an early period, a higher civilisation had developed itself than was to be found amongst the rest of the Ethiopians ; so much so, that, according to Pliny, 4000 artificers were to be found in Meroe.^ However, from 284 to 246 b.c. King Ergamenes, who was acquainted with Greek civilisation, put an end to the hierarchy there by means of a massacre of the priests, and converted the govern- ment of the country into an unlimited monarchy. ^ The king- dom of Meroe seems soon after to have fallen into decay. In the time of Christ, and immediately afterwards, two kingdoms appear there, the northern, or Nubian, having Napata for its capital. Here female sovereignty was in vogue, and the queen always took the name of Candace.^ Napata was the southern- most point to which the Romans penetrated, when Petronius, their prefect in Egypt, conquered the city, in the year 24 b.c. To the south-east of Meroe, in what is now Abyssinia, perhaps about the same period, the great Auxumitic kingdom, first men- tioned by Ptolemy and Arrian, grew up, and extended its sway right across to Arabia, over the country of the Homeritse and Sabseans. The Greek language and civilisation had made its 1 Hist. Nat. vi. 29, 33 (^^. 35, ed. Franzius). 2 Diodor. vol. i. jjp. 1 7H, 3. 3 Strabo, p. 820 (J 161, Oxf.) ; Acts viii. 27. INDIA. 49 way even here through the medium of the seaport Adule^ a foun- dation of runaway Egyptian slaves not known to Strabo, and also through the brisk trade for which the beautiful capital Axume served as a centre. From a.d. 76 to 99 there was a so- vereign here named Zoskales, who was distinguished as a Greek scholar. 1 The southernmost country of Asia, that between the moun- tains of Himalaya, the Indus, and the Ocean, from Cashmeer to Cape Comorin, from the embouchure of the Indus to the moun- tains lying to the east of the Barhampooter, now divided into two parts by the Vindya mountains forming Hindoostan on the north, and the Deccan on the south, was but little known to the ancients before Alexander's time, although they already enter- tained the idea that it was one of the most important and re- markable countries of the world. It was first thrown open by the victorious expedition of the Macedonians, and then the first attempt was made to render India dependent on the western world. The early rise and fall of the great Asiatic monarchies, which reached betimes to the western bank of the Indus, seem not to have affected India in fact. Alexander advanced only to the Hyphasis in the Punjaub, and therefore never reached the Indians proper. Somewhat later, the Greek Megasthenes, in his character of ambassador from Seleucus Nicator to the Indian king Sandracottus, spent many years at his court at Palibothra; and from his report, which corresponds in almost all particulars with original Indian documents, the later accounts are princi- pally derived. There was then in existence there the great king- dom of Magadha, called by the Greeks the kingdom of the Pra- sians, which reached from the Indus in the west to the bay of Bengal and the mouths of the Ganges to the east, and whose capital, Palibothra, now Patna, where the Son flows into the Ganges below Benares, built in the shape of a regular paralle- logram, with sixty-four gates, extended two German miles in length ; and is a place of fame in the old Indian epic poetry. The sovereign Sandracottus, the Indian Tschandragupta, 312- 288 B.C., made an alliance with Seleucus about the year 302, and by conquest raised his kingdom to the acme of greatness and power. And yet the smaller dynasties in the Deccan con- tinued to subsist. This great kingdom came to an end about 1 Peripl. Mar. Erythr. ap. Hudson, Geogr. Min. i. 3. E 50 STATE OF THE WORLD. the year 173 B.C., on the fall of the Maurja dynasty, which ruled 137 years from Tschandragupta. In Bactria, the modern Balk, the Greek Diodotus, withdraw- ing himself from his allegiance to Syria, about the year 350 b.c, founded a Bactrian kingdom, which, under its Greek sovereigns, soon extended itself as far as to India. From there Demetrius especially, and after him Menandrus, in the course of their con- quests, about the middle of the second century, pushed their con- quests further into India than Alexander and the other Greeks. The kingdom of the last-named monarch appears to have extended south as far as Barygaza, now Baroatsch, and east almost to the Ganges. However, no long time afterwards, the Bactro-Grecian dynasty fell, partly beneath the superiority of the Parthian, partly from the invasion of Scythian (Tartar) nomad hordes, advancing into the country from the north: and from the year 126 b.c there grew up the vast Indo- Scythian empire of the Sacse, comprising Bactria, Caboohstan, the countries on the Indus, the Punjaub, and a large portion of the present Rajpootana. This kingdom was destroyed in the year 56 b.c. by Bikramaditya, "the mortal foe of the Sacas j" at least, it was broken up into the Punjaub and the countries lying east of it. This monarch, who seems to have again enlarged the Indian empire to the west as far as the Indus, appears quite in a light of mythical brilliancy, fabulously exaggerated by Indian tradition. The time of his sovereignty, identical with that of the birth of Christ, is said to have been the real date of Indian science and art in its meridian splendour. Rather later, about the year 60 a.d., when the Periplus of the Red Sea was written, a Partho-Indian empire existed that ex- tended at least to Jellalabad, and had nearly the whole extent of the Indo-Scythia of Ptolemy. Shortly before the birth of Christ, an empire founded by the Hue-tchi, one of the nomad tribes that came from Inner Asia, seems to have taken its place; but as concerns its duration and circuit all is enveloped in mys- tery. Even the notices furnished by Pliny, and resting, as it appears, on accurate information, throw no light on the exist- ence and character of a great Indian empire. On the other hand, Ptolemy, about the year 140 a.d., was acquainted with a kingdopi of Caspirseans, the ruling people of Cashmeer, which extended as far as the Ganges on the east, and very likely had expanded itself east as well as south at the expense of the then PEOPLE OF INDIA — CASTES. 51 considerably -limited Indo- Scythian kingdom. To the south of the Ganges, Ptolemy enumerates a series of nations and kings, none of whom seem to have possessed an ascendency, and may rather be considered as having been all independent. The people of India were connected with the Indo-Germanic race, and in particular with the great Arian family. They were, therefore, near of kin to the Persian Zends in language and pedi- gree. In pre-historic times they had drawn from the north-west, the Iranian highlands, to the western and southern slopes of the Hindoo Koosch and the Himalayas, whence they spread gene- rally over the whole peninsula. The whole population of black race were partly dispersed amongst the mountains, and partly- thrust down to the lowest grade of servitude, as a despised class, whose very touch was contamination. Even Ctesias had already learnt to distinguish between the white and black Hindoos ; and remains of such dark and swarthy people have kept their ground on the Indus, in the Himalaya, and the Ganges country. To the Arian, or Sanscrit, people, belonged the ruling religion, the powers of government, and the whole civilisation and intellectual direction of India. The most distinctive feature in Hindoo society, the division into castes, is described by the Greeks' in a way which agrees in the more important points with native authorities. By no other people of antiquity was this organisation, which also ex- isted in Egypt, so logically carried out, so consistently, or so strictly. The first order was composed of the sages ; for the Brahmins appeared to the Greeks as philosophers rather than primarily as priests. They were the soul of the body politic, holy and inviolate, the teachers and spiritual guardians of the people, the depositaries of all science, judges and expounders of the laws, soothsayers, physicians, councillors of kings, pro- tectors of religion, and superintendents of sacrifice. One part of them went about teaching ; another, living in the forests, took upon themselves the severest and most violent ascetic practices. Megasthenes was acquainted, in his time, with the religious divisions of the Hindoos. He tells us the sages were divided into two sects ; the Brahmins, and Sramins, or tamers of the senses, a name given to the Biksoos, Buddhist ascetics living ' etrabo, pp. 703-15 (1001, Oxf.) ; Diodor. ii. 40 ; Arrian. Ind. 11, 12; Porphyr. de Abstiu. iv. 17, 18. 52 STATE OF THE WORLD. on alms. These last Clement of Alexandria^ designates ex- pressly as Buddhists. The Brahmins, however, have always had the great proportion of people in India on their side, even at the time when powerful sovereigns threw all their influence mto the scale of Buddhism; and the long struggle at last terminated in the entire expulsion of Buddhism and its followers from the peninsula. The Greek accounts have increased the true number of In- dian castes from four to seven, in this way: they reckon as separate orders what are only subdivisions of the Brahmin and Kshatryas castes. So with the civil functionaries, from whom the kings chose the supreme council, the judges and the commanders in war, and the class of police-inspectors, who appear to have formed a large body of secret. police, exercising a universal vigilance, and reporting to the sovereign or the magis- trates.^ The caste of the Kshatryas, whom Megasthenes calls the warriors, and with some exaggeration accuses of leading a reckless, jovial, and insubordinate life, was very numerous, par- ticularly in Southern India, but held in less veneration than the Brahmins. The king belonged to their caste. They, as well as the Brahmins, were allowed to pursue other occupa- tions in order to gain a livelihood. The third caste, that of the Vaisjas, was composed of merchants, farmers, and craftsmen. The Sudras reckoned as the fourth, and were descendants of the vanquished aborigines, who are devoted to servitude, and for whom a blind subjection to their masters' wiU is a religious duty. If the Sudra be not a slave born, then he must serve a Brahmin, or if need be, even a Kshatrya or a Vaisja. The Greeks observed the dense population of India with astonishment. In their eyes, the good qualities of the nation appeared to be the prominent ones. They praise them for love of truth; and remark, that robbery was extremely rare amongst them, and that their kings spent nearly the whole day in the administration of justice. In the kingdom of Magadha, under the first successors of Tschandragupta, not only was the country flourishing, but gradually violence, theft, and robbery became un- known. The simplicity and temperance of the Indian in eating and drinking struck the followers of Alexander particularly. Suicide was the more frequent amongst them, as they esteemed 1 p. 350, Potter. = Strabo, pp. 707 sqq. (1005, Oxf.). BKAHMINISM — BUDDHISM. 53 death but a birth to a real life^' and perpetrated the destruction of their own existence lilce a religious ceremony. Amongst the Catheeans in the north-west of India^ and some other tribes also, a custom prevailed that obliged the widow to burn herself along with her husband's corpse, if she would not be looked upon as dishonoured. 2 Of the hundred and eighteen Indian nations whom Megas- thenes enumerated, there were some free races without kings. The settlements of such were chiefly to be found to the east of the Irawaddy, as far as Vipasa. Many lived, too, without Brah- mins, and without the exclusive system of castes. On these the Brahmin Indians, even at this day, look down, as " excom- municate" and " recreant," with aversion and contempt.^ Brah- min views and Brahmin law, meanwhile, continued to make their way further and further into India, and lorded it more and more over the whole social and intellectual life of the people. Flexible and yielding in its system of teaching, yielding to the polytheistic inclination of the people, and to the service of new gods whom this incHnation produced, Brahminism clung with greater tenacity to the caste-system, and to the ritual and cere- monial part of religion, which continued to grow more and more artificial and intricate. Just, however, as Brahminism attained its fall proportions in India, there arose a powerful opponent to it out of its own bosom. Buddhism upreared itself, four or five centuries before Christ ; and taking its stand upon the same speculative founda- tion as Brahminism, nevertheless developed a completely op- posite system. Whilst Brahminism, as compared with its ever- lastingly-reposing and only-existing God, considered the actual world only as a thing encumbered with finiteness and nega- tion, and that, too, but a huge delusion and a fleeting dream ; the doctrine of Buddha, on the other hand, denied the divine primal being (Brahma) as the cause of the universe (whose course, moving in circle through countless evolutions of worlds, had had no beginning), and represented the subduing of all human misery as the end to be obtained through the greatest possible annihilation of the world and self. For pain and existence, in Buddhist teaching, are inseparable; and as passion only ' Strabo, p. 715 (1011, Oxf.). ' Arrian. Ind. 10, 2. 3 Lassen. Ind. Alterth. i. 821-823. 54 STATE or THE WOKLD. leads to continued propagation^ or renewal of being, so the sup- pression of passion is the way to escape from the renovation of existence, and therewith from pain. Its morale of quietism, and of compassionate sympathy with man and beast, its break- ing through the restraints of caste-ordinances, while each one of any caste might be received in the class or order of poor Biksoos, renouncers of marriage and family, all won for it the hearts of many amongst the people ; and as the system started at first without any cultus, or particular theology, but at the same time seemed to leave scope for the popular divinities and their worship, and for a spirit-world; and as it did not, above all, set up to pass for a new religion in opposition to Brah- minism, but rather as a mere new philosophical school, like the Greek, and, in such character, only announced a peculiar kind of speculation of its own, with a corresponding moral and ascetic teaching, — it was by these means enabled to extend itself at first with so little resistance. Buddhism made great progress under the Indo-Scythians, and, in the great kingdom of Magadha, the emperor Asoka, Tschandragupta's grandson, formally em- braced it, and laboured with such zeal for its extension, and with such striking success, that all the Buddhist traditions are full of his name. An edict he left behind him, hewn in stone, of the date 336 b.c, mentions an agreement, by force of which two kings of the west, Ptolemy (Euergetes), and his son Magas in Egypt, allowed Buddhist missionaries admission into their terri- tories.' Afterwards, however, it came to a struggle for life and death between Brahminism and Buddhism, which lasted cen- turies in India, and resulted in the complete victory of the former, and with the entire expidsion of Buddhism from the land of its birth. Grecian influence, the vehicle of which, in the first instance, was the long-protracted sway of Grecian sovereigns in the north- western parts of India, and later the decided and regular com- mercial intercourse kept up vrith the eastern countries of the Roman empire, and Alexandria in particular, was considerable in India, but only not upon religion or the institutions of poli- tical and social life. On the other hand, Indian architecture, and still more astronomy, the scientific form of which proceeded entirely from translations of Greek works, pointed the more de- ' Ritter, Asia, ii. 1130 ; Benfey, Eucyol. of Halle, ii. §§ 17, 71. CHINA. 55 cidedly to Hellenic inspiration. The performance of Greek plays at the court of the Grecian sovereigns appears to have had some share even in the development of the Indian drama. The island of Taprohane, or Ceylon^ from the ignorance of antiquity about its extent, passed for a new world, and one in a high state of cultivation ; so much so, that Pliny speaks of 500 cities as to be found there. The Indo-Brahmin civihsation had already, in the last century before Christ, sunk here under the victorious onslaught of Buddhism. The islands of the Indian archipelago, Java, Borneo, Celebes, and Sumatra, were hardly known to the ancients by name, and they had but a misty idea of them. They were peopled and cultivated by Hindoo races, after the primitive black population had been overpowered. Of the Indo-Chinese peninsula to the east, inhabited by tribes of Mongol descent, only a very scanty and obscure notice had penetrated into the west. Up to Alexander's time, people still thought that the world came to an end just behind the Ganges. Later information came from Greek voyagers, that there was a country rich in gold and silver beyond. They gave it the name of Chryse and Argyre, but had no notion whether it was island or continent. Phny and Mela mention the legend of one having a soil of gold, and the other of silver. Ptolemy was the first to import authentic information, and to give the names of one or two cities. That gigantic empire of the east, even then the oldest, and, after the Roman, the most populous also, isolated by nature from the west (for on this side it is quite surrounded by lofty mountains covered with snow and glaciers), was only known to the Greeks and Romans under the names of Serica and Sinse. Yet the authentic history of China reaches back to the ninth, and even to the eleventh, century before Christ ; and there flour- ished here a primitive civilisation that far surpassed the Euro- pean in antiquity. In a hundred families, all of one relationship, the original stock of the Chinese, the oldest branch of the great parent fa- mily of nations, spread through the back of Asia. After they had descended from the bleak highland in the north-west, and established themselves first iii the present Schen-si, they partly assimilated to themselves, and partly extirpated and chased away, the wild barbarian inhabitants met with on the spot, remains of 56 STATE OF THE WORLT). whom are the Miao in the mountains. The barbarians of South China were first subdued about the middle of the third centmy B.C. In its essential features, the whole system of the Chmese kingdom was complete as many as eleven centuries before the same era. According to its conception, it was predestined and entitled to the worship of the world. Every thing under heaven belonged to it ; no distinction was made between China and the orbis terrarinn. As, however, China, considering itself far supe- rior in cultivation and wisdom, looked contemptuously down upon all other nations ; and as the character of the Chinese was never warlike, — they professed that the outcast beasts of barba- rians were not worth a conquest, which could only be effected by bloodshed. The ideas upon which the social and political life of the Chinese was originally founded were persevered in with un- exampled tenacity in spite of internal catastrophes and change of dynasties. Every development and advance, did it but present the appearance of variation, was repelled or suppressed. All foreign influence was wrecked on the unbending system of no progress ; and foreign conquerors themselves soon fell into the Chinese customs and laws, and became assimilated. In this way China, in her self-dependence, in her downright exclusiveness, a world to herself, rather went alongside of the history of the human race than interfered in any active and decisive way in it. But once, in the year 94 a.d., Pan-tschao, the Chinese com- mander, penetrated as far as the Caspian Sea, in a war against the Turkish tribes. The princes of the house of Tsin, about the third century B.C., had crushed the power of the subordinate sovereigns; and dispossessing the dynasty of Tscheu, invested themselves with the imperial dignity. The strongest and most violent monarch of this new dynasty, Schi-hoang-ti (246-209 b.c), the builder of the great wall, under whom the half of the present area of China was brought into one, undertook not only to reform the whole of the political structure of the empire from its foundation, and to erect in its stead an unlimited uniform monarchy, adminis- tered by removable fimctionaries, but also determined to sweep away the spiritual influence that was an obstacle in his path. This was the doctrine and sect of Confucius. The ethics of this great national teacher, so implicitly reverenced in China, who had chosen the old imperial system for the basis of his doc- CHINESE EMPEROR. 57 trinesj were of a political nature, and a kind of art of go- vernment received like a religion. His niimerons scholars, the lettered, were zealous encomiasts of the old state of things, and bitter opponents of the new imperial measures. Then the mon- arch commanded, under pain of death, all the literary memorials of antiquity, and particularly the Schu-king of Confucius, to be committed to the flames, and had 460 of the lettered buried alive. After his death, however, the whole house of Tsin was extirpated. A man of mean extraction became the founder of a new dynasty, the Han dynasty (206 b.o. to 263 a.d.) ; and the Confucian doctrine raised itself again to a preeminence which was thenceforward undisputed. Its founder had not re- formed, but only confirmed the old religion of the empire and state. In this religion, the spirit of heaven, with that of the earth, and that of the human race, composed a divine trinity ; but the elements, and the stars, mountains, seas, rivers, and winds, were also conjointly honoured. In general, the Schin, the indwelling spirit in the being of nature, served as the object of worship. 1 It was a religion without priests, without temples, and without festivals. The emperor alone was priest, and offered sacrifice to the celestial spirit; and what chiefly remained as essential was a worship of the dead, through which ancestors, and especially those of the emperors and Confucius, were honoured as divine guardian spirits. Now that the emperor was the only priest, he also was in possession of aU the authority that follows from religion, with- out its being tempered or limited by the power of church or priesthood. Thus he was, in fact, as very " son of heaven," surrounded with divine honours, and the homage paid him partook of the character of religious adoration. Besides, in a country where the respect and obedience of the child to the parent is a traditional doctrine and the first of all virtues, in fact the beginning of all moral relations, he became the common father of the whole people, the gerent of the highest fatherly patriarchal authority, under which, as all ought to be equal in unconditional submission, like children of one family, no political organisation, no nobility or hereditary rank, can find place. That authority of the men of letters and the officials, by which the imperial omnipotence was not really limited and 1 Grosier, Descript. de la Cliine, iv. 368. 58 STATE OF THE WOULD. curbed, but only conducted in a regulated course, and attached to the formalities of an intricate etiquette, only reached its accomplishment much later, about the seventh century before Christ, after long struggles and vicissitudes. In consequence of the meagre character of the rehgion of the empire, which afforded no food either to the imagination or the intellectual faculties of men, and left the heart empty and dis- satisfied, the rulers were unable, with all their exclusiveness, to prevent the influx of foreign teaching from abroad. Not only did the Tao school, a gloomy and enervate form of Brahminism, find its way at an early period from India into China, but the doctrines of Fo, or Buddha, also penetrated thither, thirty-three years after the beginning of Christianity, and soon became com- pletely domesticated, in spite of the resistance offered by the disciples of Confucius to the new rehgion, which they stigma- tised as a pernicious superstition. In the year 57 b.c, the Dairi, or sovereign of Japan, of his own accord sent an embassy to offer homage and presents to the Chinese emperors. The constant intercourse then begun between the two kingdoms was followed by Chinese settlements there, and along with them, by the introduction of Chinese civilisation and regulations into barbarian Japan. In the centre of Europe, between the Rhine, from the Lake of Constance to its mouth, and the Daimbe, from its source to where it receives the waters of the Theiss; northwards up as far as the coasts of the North and Baltic seas, from the mouth of the Rhine to that of the Dwina ; in the east to the Vistula, and thence southwards into the vast plain country as far as the Black and Caspian seas, — the German people, as they were called, had their settlements. They were a motley reunion of races and people, resembling one another in bodily frame, character, language, and customs, and yet not united by any external bond. And thus they could only be called one people in so far as they had all the consciousness of a com- mon nationality, and presented the impression of the same to the view of a stranger, in spite of all their divisions, and the bloody wars they had carried on amongst one another. Ger- many extended further to the north then than now, for Jutland had a German population ; but it was more confined on the west and south, for the whole left bank of the Rhine belonged to THE GERMANS. 59 Gaul, notwithstanding its inhabitants were partially German, while the country between the Danube and the Alps had a Celtic population, and formed Roman provinces. But in the east, from the Vistula as far as the Black and Caspian seas, German races were settled amongst Finnish, Tartar, and Slave tribes, and in part mixed with them. The land, covered with vast forests and marshes, and with a climate more raw still than now, was considered inhospitable and gloomy by the Romans ; and being still destitute of cities, only here and there open villages, like towns, were to be seen, and a number of isolated farms. It was a long time before the Romans learned to distin- guish the German people from the Celtic, whom they even afterwards appeared to them strongly to resemble. Strabo him- self thought^ that the Germans, besides resembling the Celts in mind, customs, and modes of life, surpassed them in ferocity, size, and yellow-hairedness. Tacitus held the name of German! to be the appellation of a single tribe (afterwards called the Tungri) extended to all the German tribes in general. Attempts have also been made to explain it from the Celtic, the Persian, and from the Latin signification, as " brothers," i. e. to the Gauls. The Germans themselves appear not to have used it originally, but to have adopted it from the Romans or the Gauls. Following old native traditions, the Germans were divided into three great races — the Ingsevones, Istsevones, and Hermi- nones — who derive themselves from the three so-named sons of Mannus, a common ancestor of divine descent. At the time, however, that the Romans and Germans became acquainted, these three great divisions of the nation displayed a host of separate tribes and small district-communities. Each one of these went his own way, without troubling himself about his neighbour, until a number of them banded together in a con- federation on behalf of a joint enterprise or warlike defence, or by subjection^ beneath a stronger power. At the head of such a confederacy, or war-repubhc, a race that had become powerful took its position; and this bestowed its name on the vanquished tribes, or any that joined of their own accord, until it again, after the dissolution of the confederacy, or other loss of ' vii. 290 (418, Oxf.) ; iv. 195, 190 (273, Oxf.). 60 STATE OP THE WORLD. its power, was swallowed up in the name of another tribe that had waxed into importance meanwhile. It was thus that the confederacies of the Suevi, Marcomanni, and Alemanni, on the Upper Rhine, and those of Sygambri, Cherusci, and Franks, on the Lower, became successively prominent. The Suevi were settled in the modern Moravia and Bohemia, Franconia and Thuringia, Lower Saxony and Brandenburg, and the greater part of Poland. The central people were the Sem- nones, between the Elbe and the Oder, on the Elster and Spree. To them belonged the Longobardi on the Lower Elbe, south of Hamburg towards Salzwedel. To the north of them again were the Angli; then the Chatti in Hesse; the Hermunduri from the valley of the Werra, as far as the Elbe to the east, and the Sudeti in the north ; the Marcomanni, who made themselves mas- ters of Bohemia, just after the subjugation or expulsion of the Celtic Boii; and the Quadi, who about the same time had settled in the present Moravia and the north-western part of Hungary. Just at the beginning of the Christian era, the Marcoman prince Maroboduus, who had received a Roman education, made the attempt to form these people into one great Suevic kingdom. This kingdom, or confederation, whose centre was the recently- conquered Bohemia, and the town Marobudum, adjoining the present Budweis, appears to have reached from the Middle Dan- ube to the Lower Elbe, and eastward as far as the Visttda; and the Romans understood the danger which threatened them from that quarter. Contemporary with this, another confederation took its rise in north-western Germany, directly pointed against the Roman domination, the centre of which was composed of the Cherusci on the Weser, under their duke Herminius. There took part in it the Bructeri, who were established between the Rhine and Weser, as far as the sea ; the once very powerful Sygambri be- tween the Sieg and the Lippe; the Marsi in the environs of Munster and Hamm, and other tribes. At their hands Varus and his three legions met with total destruction in the Saltus Tentoburgensis, 9 a.d. ; and with it the fruits of a twenty years' struggle were utterly lost to the Romans, who were obliged to evacuate entirely the German soil beyond the Rhine. However, the two great confederacies, and their leaders Arminius and Ma- roboduus, soon after fell out and joined battle. The latter, ba- THE GERMANS. 61 nished and proscribed by his own people, fled into the Roman territory. Not long after, Arminius himself was murdered by people of his own tribe, the two confederacies fell to pieces, and the Romans succeeded in keeping the German tribes on the Lower Rhine in dependence, though the emperor Claudius with- drew all the Roman troops from free Germany. As the Germans of the races in alliance with Rome were glad to enter into its military service, and were enrolled by the Ro- mans in their legions without hesitation, on the strength of their physical and moral qualifications, it soon fell out, in the struggle between Otho and ViteUius, that the imperial throne seemed, for the moment at least, at the disposal of the victorious German legions in full march towards Rome. In the beginning of the second century a.d., too, the keen eye of a Roman discovered in this people the germ of a new life that only required develop- ment, the elements of another state of things in the world. The wish he uttered that the variance and discord which belonged to this nation might never cease amongst them, inasmuch as their union would threaten the existence of the whole Roman empire,^ shows what a conception he had formed of the energy latent in the heart of the German race. At their first appearance in history, the Germans show as a half nomadic race in transition from an unsettled life to one of fixed settlement. They were easily inclined, and soon ready, to leave their homes, particularly in a southern direction, to win themselves there a milder climate and more genial soil; not from a restless disposition and the mere pleasure of moving, but with a real desire to reach again a fixed domicile. True, they had, in the time of Tacitus,^ houses securely built, and agricul- ture ; and they were distinguished thereby from the Sarmatian tribes, who only lived on horseback and in wagons. Still, they cherished a dislike for walled towns; their houses, in truth, were only huts built of wood. Individuals amongst them were not allowed to erect more commodious dwellings, in order to guard against effeminacy,^ and to leave no impediment in the way of migration. Their great distinction was the sacredness of marriage, and the consequent consideration and respect for women. "The Germans are almost the only barbarians who content themselves ' Tacit Germ, xxxiii. - Ibid. xlvi. ^ Cffs. B. G. vi. 23. 63 STATE OF THE WORLD. witli one wife;" in many tribes the widows even could not marry again.i Continency among young men and late wedlock were in high repute ; unnatural lust was punished with death. With a corporate division into priests, nobles, free, freedmen, and slaves, they only allowed the possessors of landed property a vote in the municipal councils. Their district princes were elective. The priests were extremely powerful and influential; their power even over life and death was greater than that of their princes. Drunkenness and rude brawling in that state, and rage for play, to the degree of staking their freedom, were the most prominent vices of the Germans. Beyond the German settlements in a north-east direction, in the Russia of the present day, and the north-eastern part of Gallicia, and those parts of Prussia and Poland which lie to the east of the Vistula, and to the south again, as far down as to the Mseotis and Tanais (Don), stretched the lands which the ancients now called Sarmatia. Where at an earlier period the Scythians are spoken of, the name of Sarmatians was now in vogue, though for a long time both denominations were fluc- tuating, and used as synonymous. The real Sarmatians came from Medo-Persia, and were allied to the Parthians. Their chief seat was in the steppes beyond the Don, between the Mseotis, the Caucasus, and the Caspian Sea. The smaller tribes of the Roxolani, Jazyges, Alani, and Jaxamatse belonged to them. Gradually pressed forward from their settlements between the Don and Dnieper as far as the Dneister and Danube, the Sar- matee just now began to disturb the Roman territory by constant inroads. About the year 50 b.c. they had burst into Hungary between the Theiss and Danube. A victory of Asinius Gallus over them in the year 15 b.c. is mentioned. They were wild, untamed nomads, living on their horses and in wagons, so war- like that even their wives fought alongside of them; but they were better qualified for predatory irruptions than regular war- fare.^ Their descendants are living to this day in the Caucasus, as Alani. The Slave tribes, under the names of Wends and Serbs, set- tled in the countries between the Baltic and Black seas, the Carpathians, the Don, and Upper Volga. Though in part dis- 1 Tao. Germ, xviii. 19. 2 Ibid. xlvi. ; Mela, iii. 4 ; Amra. Maroell. xvii. 12, 23. THE SLAVE TRIBES. 63 possessed, and in part subjugated^ by the Sarmatians, they were also in a degree independent of their neighbours who surrounded them ; no one then thought of them as destined to play a great part in the world^s history at a later day. The Greeks and Ro- mans knew nothing of them. PUny is the first to mention the Wends behind the Carpathians. Next Tacitus, who is not clear on the question of their nationality, whether it was Sarmatian or German; and thought he must acknowledge them as Ger- mans for no other reason than that, unlike the Sarmatians, they buUt houses, bore shields, and were distinguished for their swift- ness of foot. They were not remarkable for a warlike disposi- tion, it appears, and were more attached to the peaceful occupa- tions of agriculture and a domestic life. The Finns were already at that time driven into the extreme north of Europe, on the Gulf of Finland and the Upper Volga. Lastly, the Lithuanian race, in all probability an offshoot from the Slavic iu pre-historic times, through admixture with strange tribes, early fell under the dominion of the German people. It was already settled, though small and weak, at the beginning of the Christian era, in the countries of which its successors, the Prussians, Lithuanians, Courlanders, and Letts, were afterwards masters. BOOK II. I. THE GEEEK EELIUION. 1. The Beginnings of Greek Polttheish. The deification of nature and her powers^ or of particular sen- sible objects, lay at the root of all the heathen religions as they existed from old time amongst the nations now united under the Eoman empire. The elements, the sun, the heavens, the stars, single natural objects and physical phenomena, — it was the deifying and worshiping of these that led to the rise and development of polytheism. When once a dark cloud stole over man's original consciousness of the Divinity, and, in conse- quence of his own guilt, an estrangement of the creature from the one living God took place, man, as under the overpowering sway of sense and sensual lust, proportionally weakened there- fore in his moral freedom, was unable any longer to conceive of the Divinity as a pure, spiritual, supernatural, and infinite being, distinct from the world, and exalted above it. And then it followed inevitably that, with his intellectual horizon bounded and confined within the limits of nature, he should seek to satisfy the inborn necessity of an acknowledgment and reverence of the Divinity by the deification of material nature ; for, even in its obscuration, the idea of the Deity, no longer recognised indeed, but still felt and perceived, continued powerful; and, in conjunc- tion with it, the truth struck home, that the Divinity manifested itself in nature as ever present and in operation. And now nature unfolded herself to man's sense as a boundless demesne, wherein was confined an unfathomable plenitude of powers, in- 66 EELIGIONS. commensurable and incalculable, and of energies not to be overcome. Every where, even where men, past their first im- pressions of sense, had already penetrated deeper into their inner life, she encountered them as an inscrutable mystery. At the same time, however, a sympathy for naturalism, easily elevated into a passion, developed itself among them, — a feeling in com- mon with it and after it, — which led again to a sacrifice of them- selves, all the more readily made, to natural powers and natural impulses. And thus man, deeper and deeper in the spells of his enchantress, and drawn downwards by their weight, had his moral consciousness overcast in proportion, and gave the fuller rein to impulses which were merely physical. Necessarily the heathen deification of nature could become nothing but an inexhaustible variety of divinities and worships; for according to the geographical division of zones and countries, and to the difierence of the impressions which the phenomena and powers of nature produced on races more or less susceptible and excitable; and also according as the imagination of man, selecting out of the kingdom of nature that which most strongly impressed it, fashioned it into a concrete divinity, — necessarily, as time ran on, in the natural process of the impulse of creating: divinities, the divine assumed in their minds thousands of fanciful and fortuitous images and forms. In general, all the gods must inevitably have been beings subject to the conditions of time and space, and, for the most part, to the powers of nature. Then, following the character and degree of civilisation of the different people, these gods of nature were formed on a sliding scale from simple potentiality, regarded as a bare development of physical agency, to individual personality ; or they were contemplated as real, self-conscious, and complete personalities. In the latter case they were also, in the conception of their worshipers, par- tially subject to the conditions of humanity, and shared in the inclinations, passions, and interests of men, from whom they were only distinct in degree. This pagan deification of the powers of nature led first to the worship of the elements. One divinity of the ether, or vault of heaven, or, supposing the ether and stars together to constitute a whole, one divinity of the heavens, stood in contrast with one of the earth. Fire, as the warming and nourishing power of nature, or as the consuming and destroying one also, was early ASTEOLATRY — GEOLATRT. 67 worshiped as a separate divinity. By the same process, another element of moisture and water was separated off from that of the earth, and thus a fourth elemental god came to be added. In the East, where the stars shine brightly in an ever-cloud- less sky, and men more readily receive the influences of these heavenly bodies, astrolatry, or the worship of the stars that illu- mine the earth, developed itself. Above all, it was the sun, the great quickener of nature, adored as the centre and lordly power of the visible universe, as the common source of light and life, by which men felt themselves irresistibly attracted. For their high, ever-increasing susceptibility of natural impressions, and of the properties of the universe, led men to give themselves up with longing and passion to the sidereal powers, and they felt them- selves governed by them as if by magic. The cultus they ren- dered them, the direction of all their intellectual powers towards them, the sympathy with their phases, their setting, disappear- ances and re- appearances, the every- where prevalent notion in all antiquity that the heavenly bodies were not dead masses of fire or earth, but living animated beings, — all this involved them more and more in a service of complete idolatry and worship. Religion became astrolatry. But where the influences of the heavens and heavenly bodies were less sensible, where man was surrounded by luxuriant vegetation and the magnificence of a richly furnished soil, at- tracted by the life of terrestrial nature, he addressed himself to it with all his senses and inclinations ; and here geolatry took its rise. The earth, with her teeming lap, like a nursing mother, comprehending in herself a manifold variety of beneficent influ- ences, but also gathering every living thing again to her bosom, came to be worshiped as the great divinity ; and from the deifi- cation of particular powers of the earthly and natural, a coherent polytheism was formed. The observation of the fact that in nature every where two energies or substantial agents, one an active and generative, the other a feminine passive or susceptible one, combine, and that heaven and earth, sun and moon, day and night, cooperate to the production of being, — the observation of this led to the distinction of male and female divinities. At first the divinity had been conceived as a being uniting the nature of both sexes. Now the female being was severed from the male divinity, and subordinated to it. The goddess of earth, impreg- 68 RELIGIONS. nated in holy espousals by the heaven-god, brings forth her fruits. Even the streams, on which the fertility of the soil and the provision of men who live beside them depends, now became personal divinities. The Greek religion was the result of the peculiar develop- ment and history of the Grecian people. Sprung from or grown out of the mixture of races markedly distinct, and situated on the limits of east and west, this people partook chiefly indeed of the western character, but by its colonies, by frequent immigrations fluctuating hither and thither between Asia Anterior and Hellas, and by active intercourse, received Asiatic habits into its popular life, Asiatic and Egyptian religious ideas and services into its intellectual consciousness. Leleges and Carians, Thracians and Pelasgi, appear in pre- Hellenic times as the representatives of the particular ingredients from the blending and consolidation of which the religious system of the Greeks was formed. The Leleges were an extremely ancient people, dwelling on the Asiatic coasts, as well as the Grseco-European, whose descent was unknown to the ancients ; they spread over almost the whole of central Greece and the islands of the Archipelago. Along with them appear the Carians, a seafaring folk akin to the Lydians and Mysians, who settled in the Cyclades and on the seaboard of the Greek continent (Attica and Megara). Later on, both races blended with the Hellenes. The Thracians had the largest share in the early religious cultivation of Greece, and in the beginnings of its civilisation. This was a people, origin- ally related to the Phrygian stock, that dwelt not only in Ma- cedonia and a part of Thessaly, but also in Phocis and Boeotia, extending even as far as to Attica, whilst many other less civilised tribes of this great people stretched far into the mountainous, north. Religious poetry and music, the worship of the Muses, the rites and mysteries of Demeter, and, according to the tes- timony of Herodotus, the gods Hermes, Ares, Dionysos, and Artemis, also originated amongst them. The indefinite title of Pelasgi too, like that of Frank and Saxon, comprehends a number of tribes of the original Greek stock, who, previous to the rise of the Hellenes in the Peloponnesus, had spread into Attica, Bceotia, Epirus, Thesprotia, and a portion of Thessaly. Their chief seats were Arcadia, Argolis, and Perrhsebia. According to Herodotus, the Pelasgi, who already possessed PELASGI — SYSTEM OF DEITIES. 69 the oracle of Dodona, the central point of their cultus, wor- shiped nameless divinities, supposed ghostlike powers of the universe, from whom all the ordering of the world proceeded, which without doubt they distinguished by particular words, as earth, heaven, sun, &c., but which did not pass with them as having human form with an individual distinct personality. Thus they had no names of their own specially appropriated to them, which would have conveyed the impression of anthropomorphic personality. This is the reason neither image of God in human shape, nor temple, is found amongst them, and why, till the latest times, the Pelasgic Arcadians and Boeotians held several gods to be Autochthones, — born and brought up in the land. Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Hermes, and Athene were, they say, born in Arcadia. There Pan was indebted to Sinoe, Zeus to the nymphs of Lycseum, for his rearing and nourishment. In like manner the Boeotians asserted that Hermes came into existence amongst them, that the events of the story of Cronos and Rhea happened in their country, and that there also Athene was educated.^ In this there is a consciousness betrayed that these gods and their worship were not imported from without, and that they were the ancient product of the race, first, as formless powers of nature, and then treated as humanised individuals and persons. The rude idols which in later times received divine honours are memorials of this oldest Pelasgic worship. Hera was worshiped in Samos and Thespise under the form of a plank j Athene of Lindus as a smooth, unwrought beam ; the Pallas of Attica as a rough stake, and the Icarian Artemis as a log; Zeus Meilichios, at Sicyon, had a pyramidal form j Zeus Casius was a rock ; Apollo Aguieus had the shape of an isosceles triangle ; the idols of the Charites of Orchomenos were rough stones that had fallen from heaven ; and Hermes exhibited himself as a phallus. Herodotus proceeds to inform us, the Pelasgi first learned the names " and attributes of the gods from foreigners, particularly from the Egyptians" (we may add the Phenicians and other Asiatics), and theuj under the authority of the oracle at Dodona, adopted them as their own, and so handed them down to the Hellenes ; and one can easily believe that intercourise with strangers, who had made greater advances in the attribution of forms to their gods, and in personification of nature, should have resulted in maturing > Pausan. viil 8. 2, 36. 2, 16, 26. i ; ix. 25. 1. 70 RELIGIONS. analogous ideas of tteir own gods among the Pelasgi, and the formation of their nomenclature. In the early pre-historic period there were, as it appears, two principal deities,— a god of the heavens, and a god of the earth, the one male, the other female,— to the worship of whom the Pelasgi were specially devoted. The Pelasgic Zeus, not only the son of Cronos and grandson of Uranos, but the primitive god who had always been there, according to the invocation in use at Do- dona,! to whom the summits of the mountains were generally consecrated, and to whom worship on heights and mountains was most grateful, was a god of the atmosphere, with the symbols of lightning, and the oak, who sent the quickening and fructifying rain. In his sanctuary at Dodona he manifested himself in the branches of the oak sacred to him, by the rustling of the wind in the top of the tree, which the priests, the Tomuri (afterwards called SeUi), had to interpret on Mount Lycseus, the highest peak of Arcadia. Lycaon, the son of Pelasgus, the most ancient king of the land, had erected an altar to Zeus, with two pillars bearing eagles, which was consecrated by the sacrifice of a child. On this altar, even up to the times of Pausanias, sacrifice was ofiered in mysterious fashion, that is, with mystical rites that brought up awakening recollections of the old human sacrifice.^ At Argos there long stood a three-eyed Zeus, — a carved image, having the third eye in the forehead, and symbolising the pre- Hellenic combination in one god^ of the three kingdoms of the universe, afterwards divided among three. The worship of a superior and primal female deity was of like antiquity with that of the male : Gaia appears also in the later theogonies as mother of all living, and her hereditary Pelasgic worship was maintained in Athens, Sparta, Patrae, Olympia, and Delphi. She was one of the nameless and imageless Pelasgian divinities, perhaps the oldest, as, in fact, both in iEschylus and Sophocles, Zeus himself is styled her son.* In PhUus she was designated the great goddess. At Delphi and Olympia she had her earth-oracle. In Gaion, near iEgae, her priestess was forced to drink bull's blood for her probation. At Dodona she was called Dione, and it was only in later times she was regarded as the consort of Zeus. This goddess of nature, or earth, was con- ' Pausan. x. 12, 5. ^ ibid. viii. 38, 7. ' Ibid. ii. 24 4 * ^soh. Suppl. 901 J Soph. Phil. 392. PRE-HELLENIC GODS. 71 ceived to be and reverenced as the mighty mother^ who had borne the gods themselves and all creatures in her womb— given them birth, the female factor of natural life. She was connected with Zeus, sometimes as wife, sometimes as mother; and earth, air, and moon, all three female powers, conceiving and bringing forth, as contrasted with the male and generative heaven, ether, and sun, were here blended into the one idea of a common motherly and primal divinity. It was this same mother of the gods who appeared as Rhea in the Cretan traditions, as the Cybele of Asia Anterior in the square stone at Pessinus, as the old moon-and-earth god- dess Hera of the Pelasgi in Arcadia and Argos, and at Samos, where, originally a shapeless mass of wood, she was afterwards transformed into a human shape ; lastly, she is the oriental god- dess of nature. Aphrodite Urania, who was represented in the gardens at Athens on the old square Pelasgic figure of Hermes. The male principle of generation, which, under the form of a phallus, serpent, or ram, accompanied the mother of the gods, was after a time dispossessed by Zeus, or developed itself as the nameless Pelasgic demon from the phallus, the symbol of nature^s procreating power, into the regular personal form of Hermes, the god of fructification and natural increase. The old figures of this god were rude masses of stone, or what were called Hermae, that is, pillars having a bearded head and a phallus. Of such'Ep/Maiai,, or Hermae-heaps and square forms of Hermes, the Pelasgian Arcadia was fullest of all countries. In Cyllene, the harbour town of Elis, however, this god was still honoured under the form of a simple phallus.^ Of the same high antiquity, or nearly, was the worship of the sun, or Helios, in whom, as in Gaia, we still recognise in later times one of the nameless divinities of the Pelasgi ; for even up to the time of Pausanias we find him in many places, and particularly where the Pelasgian systerh of gods and rites was preserved in its purity, worshiped as the sun simply, and not, as happened elsewhere, confounded with Apollo, or ab- sorbed in his worship and titles. In Elis he was placed next Selene, and had an image of marble with a head encircled by rays. He had also statues in his honour near ThalamaB in Messenia, and at Megalopolis, in the temple of Aphrodite ; while elsewhere, as at Corinth ia the Acropolis there, at Argos I Pausan. vi. 21, 5 ; -riii. 31, i; iii. 26, 1 j ii. 18, 3. 72 EELIGIONS. in Mantinea, and Troezen, lie had only altars, as the god originv ally without an image, whose ever-visible manifestation of him- self required representing by symbol or figure less than the great elemental divinities. In the course of a still more remote development, separate powers and phenomena of nature assumed the form of divinities to the minds of Greeks of the pre-Hellenic period ; and these, probably at a much later day, were attributed, in the theogony, to the first pair of gods. There is evidence of a very ancient deity of fire, with a service corresponding, in Hestia, whom Hesiod, following the Cretan legend, makes out to be the oldest and ever-virgin child of Cronos and Rhea. As having the care of the hearth and altar fires, she became the protectress of the hearth and of the domestic life connected with it. To her honour, a fixe that was never extinguished burnt on many a municipal hearth in the Greek cities. Long represented only by the hearth- stone and its flames, she did not pass readily into a concrete personality, had no mythical history attached to her, and representations of her appear to have been found only at Athens and Tenedos, we may add also, Naucratis in Egypt; and so but a few temples were erected to her, and hardly any particular festivals were solemnised in her honour, though she was the first to be invoked in the sacrifices, and the first sacri- fice was offered to her.^ Then followed the worship of the netherworld, or the powers under the earth. Domesticated in Greece from the remotest antiquity, it is principally found in neighhourhoods which are considered to have been the special settlements of pre-Hellenic races. Hades, the god of the world below, was not then what he became much later, dispenser of blessings on the corn and on the field; he was not called Pluto, a name which originated with the tragic poets; but he was the dread Aidoneus, the king of the realm of shadows, the dark, inexorable, mighty lord, whom as yet no effigy portrayed. His worship appears to have died out in various places where it existed in earlier times ; so that it might be asserted that this god was only honoured in Pylos and EHs.^ The goddess paired off with him was not Core {Koprj), the lovely " daughter'-' of Demeter, the goddess of agri- 1 Find. Nem. xi. 1 sqq. ; Horn. Hym. 29 ; Pausan. i. 18, 3, ii. 35, 2, ™i. 9, 2. ' Eustath. 744, 5. CABIRI. 73 culture, but Persephone, according to the original signification of her name, the murderess, the fearful death-goddess, the destroyer of all living, also styled by Homer "the Dread." Demeter, too, was worshiped in Arcadia, in a cavern at Phi- galeia, as a gloomy, hostile goddess, in black raiment and with serpent- hair; and at Thelpusa as Demeter Erinnys. Later on, again, her cultus as a lower-world goddess, it appears, was hellenised in Pelasgic neighbourhoods through the influence of the Eleusinian mysteries, and Demeter metamorphosed into a philanthropic goddess ; while Persephone, from a deity originally motherless, or, if we follow the other tradition, a daughter of Styx,i became the Core, or daughter of Demeter, and so, the child of a heavenly mother, and even a goddess sprung of the bright upper firmament, or heaven; and hence the numerous sanctuaries erected to the Eleusinian Demeter in Arcadia.^ Further, to the pre-Hellenic times belongs the worship of the Cabiri, i. e. great and mighty gods, the supreme powers of nature, who also were certainly adored at first without specific names. This worship was probably of Phenician origin, introduced into Thebes by the Phenician family of the Cadmeans, and established in the island of Samothracia by Tyrrhenian Pelasgi, who had mixed with the Cadmeans. Axieros, the mother -goddess, the creatrix, who occupied the first place in that island, was after- wards, in Greek fashion, identified with Demeter, Rhea, or Cy- bele. The pair of nether-world divinities connected with her, and called Axiokersos and Axiokersa, according to the inter- pretation of Mnaseas,^ were nothing else but Hades and Perse- phone, or Dionysos and Core. Other accounts add a fourth deity to these, Hermes Cadmilus, who, as the family god of the Tyrrhenian Pelasgi, was first thrown in with the original triad, probably in consequence of a settlement of this people in Samo- thrace; Varro, however, thinks only as an attendant on the greater divinities.* On the other hand, in the volcanic island Lemnos, and in conformity with the fire-worship there, the Cabiric union consisted of the pair of deities Hephsestos and Cabiro, and their three sons, who, as offshoots of the fire-god, became the guardian divinities of the blacksmith's craft.^ > ApoUod. i. 31. ' Pausan. viii. 14, 8 ; xxv. 2 ; xxix. 4 ; sxix. 31, &a. ' Schol. Paris. ApoU. Biod. i. 917. * Ling. Lat. -vii. 88, ed. Spengel. « Strabo, p. 472 (689, Oxf.). 74 RELIGIONS. 2. The Hellenic Gods, Demons, and Heeoes. In consequence of the great tide of movement and the immi- grations proceeding from the north during a space of six cen- turies, one of which, that of the Doric and ^tolian races in 1104 B.C., was very fertile in results, and by reason also of the progress made in the establishment of colonial cities since the be- ginning of the eleventh century b.c, the whole status of posses- sion amongst the Hellenic races was unsettled, the old population was almost entirely removed or expelled from its earlier settle- ments, and a new order of things was constituted. The Pelasgi succumbed, and, except in Arcadia, could only maintain their ground in a few places, where they fused with their conquerors, the new adventurers. The rough warlike races of the north had the upper hand. In the numerous emigrations of particular frag- ments of Hellenic tribes, distant settlements were formed in the islands of the Mediterranean, on the coasts of Asia and Africa, and in Italy and Gaul. The Hellenic tongue, civilisation, and worship were now extended to a circle embracing the countries round the Black and Mediterranean seas. From these migrations, blendings of races, and political inno- vations, the Hellenic religion sprang up, and remained unchanged in essentials until its decay. As families grew into tribes, and peoples, and civil communities, the religious rites, at first con- fined to families, were also extended to public rites common to entire polities and races. The newly-settled races brought along with them their own gods and ritual ; others they found already on the spot, which, whilst at times they treated with neglect or set aside, they more frequently appropriated. To these are to be added forms of worship introduced from foreign countries by a particular house or lineage. The religious rites in the colonies were fashioned after those of the mother-country, but did not disdain the reception into the system of such as were met with already in possession of their new territory. In general, these divinities and their several rites agreed very well together ; as, in fact, none had any such exclusive character or distinctly-marked features as utterly to reject all accommodation, or insertion into a strange circle. One god sat down by another in an easy un- constrained manner, or rather, from this juxtaposition they first HOMEK AND HESIOD THEOLOGUES. 75 derived reciprocally a more precise form or more limited and clearly-defined character. It often happened, too, that the same idea of a diviaity was honoured under different titles, when a new deity, that had originated elsewhere, was joined on to an old domesticated one of a like signification in principle, in which case Greek imagination and inventive powers were equal to the providing of each with his distinct characteristics and sphere of operation. Thus the Greeks entered on the historical period with an esta- blished religious system, or train of gods, in the composition of which all the more important races of Greece, or such as had once settled therein, had borne a part, and to which each had contri- buted its quota : the Pelasgi ; the old race of the Minyse ; the Pierian and Boeotian Thracians, who had bards of fame even be- fore Homer's time ; the Leleges and Carians ; the Dardanians and Teucrians, the former in Arcadia, the latter in Attica ; then the Tyrrhenian Pelasgi, from the northern islands of the J3gean, in Attica and Argos; the Phenician Cadmeans, and as well the people of Boeotian Arne, who conquered or expelled them ; and, finally, the Achaeans, lonians, and Dorians. Greek worship, mixed with Assyrian, Phenician, and Phrygian gods, partly of Hellenic complexion, prevailed in all the islands of the jEgean and Ionian seas ; on the coasts of Asia Minor, Macedonia, and Thrace ; in Lower Italy and Sicily ; in Crete, Cyprus, and Cyrene. In the judgment of Herodotus it was Homer and Hesiod who settled their theogony for the Greeks, that is, in fact, composed the common Hellenic religion. Certain it is that these epic poets and their predecessors did extract a unity of the divine republic out of the various traditions of races and local superstitions. From the general diffusion of their works, particularly of the Homeric poems, which were publicly recited to assemblies of people by wandering minstrels in aU parts of Greece, and from their thus fixing themselves in the memory and spirit of the people, it came to pass that these definite divinities, and the features of their existence, and their worship, as apprehended and worked out in poetry, filled and got possession of the religious conscience of the Hellenes, and formed the nucleus and substance of a common religion. There was an end now of the old formless gods of nature; and the gods of the Homeric imagination, in human shape and with human feelings, succeeded. These beings, con- 76 RELIGIONS. ceived as idealised, unearthly, and immortal men, are, however, subject to nearly all the ordinary imperfections and passions of man, are bound by the law of space and the requirements of food and rest, and appear as hating and loving at will, often at variance with one another and kindling quarrels. They are divinities among whom the old physical ideas of marriage and generation, strife and union, were invested with a motley garb of adventures and imaginary circumstances of human passion, and who in earUer times, with their sons, their relations, and fa- vourites, were thrown into closest intercourse with men, engaged personally in their concerns, and followed, as it happened, the various impulses of love, or hatred, or contempt. As, however, Herodotus points to Hesiod also, next to Ho- mer, as joint founder with him of the Hellenic religious creed, and makes them both mythologues of the Greek gods, he also shows thereby the want of unity and harmony under which this condition of their system laboured, as being concocted out of multifarious elements, and as indebted to the worship in vogue amongst single races and colonies belonging to sundry nations. In comparing the system of Hesiod with the Homeric, we find a far larger enumeration in it of gods at variance, though genea- logically related together ; chiefly because these pedigrees, which before were fluctuating and variable, received from Hesiod an established dogmatic character, and hence his works have derived sufficient importance to admit of their being ranked next to Homer's as the sources and standard of the Hellenic religion. His cosmogony, running into theogony, is quite foreign to the direction and view taken in the Homeric poems. Hesiod informs us how out of chaos and the teeming earth the first severed energies of nature disengaged themselves, in a long succession of gigantic forms ; how the earth-creating powers, the Titans, children of Gaia and Uranos, were at the same time origina- tors of crime, hatred, and strife in the world ; how, in, fine, the new generation of gods gained the upper hand by overpower- ing the older one. Cronos mutilated Uranos, but was himself vanquished by his youngest son, Zeus, when the long struggle between the old and new gods commenced, and the Titans were thrust down into Tartarus along with Cronos. After Typhseus was also overcome, the six children of Cronos thenceforth reigned in quiet over the universe, apportioned amongst them ; and the THE OLYMPIC GODS — THE TITANS. 77 new gods, with whom Zeus as their progenitor had surrounded himself as safeguards of his power, completed the circle of Olympic divinities. * This Olympic confederacy consisted of a system of twelve gods, and being the only one in Greece to which the general title of Hellenic could apply, at least enjoyed a higher reputation than any other. According to the sagas, the worship of these twelve gods must have been established by Deucalion, or even by Hercules. In reality they were the divinities of various dis- tinct races, who, from political considerations chiefly, were com- prehended in an external unity through the number twelve ; and being supported by the credit of the Amphictyons, bore the same names in Athens as in Rome — Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Demeter, Apollo, Artemis, Hephsestos, Athene, Ares, Aphrodite, Hermes, and Hestia. Only isolated traces of the older gods of the Hesiodic theo- gony were discoverable in the religious life of the Greeks. A cultus of Uranos does not seem to have existed at all. A rude stone image of Eros, however, was honoured in Hesiod^s native place, and was held to be an old-world creator- god before the times of the Cronidse. The Titans, the old powers of nature, who had their cultus supplanted by that of the Cronidse, and were converted into potentates of the nether world, preserved their worship meanwhile in several instances. Thus in Titane, in the north of the Peloponnese, Titan and Helios were honoured; and Cronos, spite of his being compelled to lie in Tartarus under the guard of the Hecatoncheires, or hundred-handed giants, had a sanctuary in Athens, which he shared with Rhea. On the Cronian hill, near Olympia, sacrifice was offered to him; and he was also honoured at Greta and Lebadea."^ Indeed, he ap- pears already in Hesiod in the character of a ruler of the blest departed. Thus then Zeus became and continued to be the supreme god, the strongest and mightiest; and the monotheistic character which mingles with his other lineaments, as he is sketched in the Homeric theology, came out stronger in the later poets, and with more consciousness in some respects — so much so, that at times he appears the only god really deserving the name. In the partition of the universe, the heaven, or ether, fell to his lot ; 1 Pausun. i.,18, 7; vi. 20, 1 ; Dionys. Hal. i. 34. RELIGIONS. and he remained always what the old Dodonean and Arcadian Zeus was at first — ruler of the change of the atmosphere, the god of the lightning, thunder, and clouds, whose prerogative it was to refresh with rain, and grant the blessings of increase and abundant harvests. Besides, he was at the same time the per- sonal centre of the world's course ; on him all man's life and health depended, so far as his might was not limited by the decrees of destiny. And as he was the sovereign of the Olympic assemblage of gods, and the author of the present order of the world, his influence extended into the sphere of operations of other divinities, and functions were appropriated to him which appear to have been the exclusive right of others. As he was considered the physical progenitor of most of the kingly lines amongst the Greeks, it was fitting that kings, people, and cities should be under his guardianship. All human law was an ema- nation of Dike, Justice, enthroned at his side. He was the protector of the oath, avenger of perjury, and jealously guarded his own dignity. It was from him all that was good, as well as what was evil, flowed to man ; it was his power that made itself felt in all the circumstances and conditions of human life. From him especially riches were looked for. Above all, he was dis- tinguished as the benefactor of humanity, and the idea of a divine providence was preeminently attached to his name.^ In feasts and solemn rites he was at one time the ruler of the human race, at another, the god of nature and the atmosphere, to whom the Hellenes did homage. By the side of the elevated, and comparatively refined, poeti- cal conception of the father of gods and men, the mythical re- presentation now took its place in glaring contrast. According to this, the god, born in Crete, and saved by his mother from his child-devouring father, came into possession of the rulership of the world, not as an everlasting property, but had first to extort it by war and violence from a hostile dynasty. And then, after a voluntary renunciation of the fullness of power, by a division of it amongst his brethren, he is further obliged to subordinate his own will to the superior decrees of destiny, and, as he had begotten a succession of heroes in love-intrigues with countless daughters of men, he appears withal as frequently tormented by the quarrelsome jealousy of his consort. ' e. g. Pindar. Nem. 1155. HEKA WATER AND SEA GODS. 79 Hera, tlie old Pelasgian self-existent goddess of nature in the ante-mythical times, was coupled later on with Zeus, and, as his sister and consort, became the queen of the Olympic heaven. Her original, elemental character is discoverable also in the later conception and definition of her. Por instance, people either imagined the province of her dominion to be the lower region of air, in contradistinction to the upper ether, the peculiar province of Zeus, — for, as is self-evident, Hephsestos, the god of the fire of earth, was her son, and Iris, the goddess of the rain- bow, her attendant ; or else she was interpreted to be a goddess of earth embraced by Zeus, under the notion of him as the vault of heaven, and it was her " holy espousals" with the vivifying, generating god of heaven that were yearly solemnised.^ In her ethical aspect she was the protectress of women, and patroness of the marriage state. According to the expression of Aristo- phanes,^ she kept the keys of marriage ; and in Plato's Utopian republic it was to her the fine was paid by those who refused to marry.^ In the case of Hera there is a clear indication of the influence which the superiority of particular tribes exercised upon the features of religion in the reciprocal intercourse of the Greek people. In divers places Zeus was united in marriage with this or that goddess; Dione, Leto, Eurynome, and De- meter, were severally such consorts of the supreme god. All these, however, were sent to the rear in the fusion of the Greek tribes consequent on migratory expeditions, or their connection with Zeus was made a mere temporary one. That Hera, then, the old Pelasgian goddess, kept her rank as the only and permanent consort of Zeus, is owing, we believe, to the influence of the Achsean race ; for Homer styles the capitals of this race, Sparta, Argos, and Mycenae, her favourite cities, i. e. the chief seats of her worship,* and it was the Achsean people who honoured Zeus more than all the other Greek races. Water and sea deities were early worshiped, in vast num- bers, by the inhabitants of a country such as Greece, consisting in great measure of islands and peninsulas, every where in con- tact with the sea, and cut up into thousands of its creeks, and ' Plutarch, Fragm. p. 157; Aug. Civ. Dei, iv. 10. 2 Thesm. 985 (976, Dindorf.). ■' Plat. Leg. Eepub. -vi. p. 622 (ed. Bekker,vi. 17). ' Schomami, das Ideal der Hera, Greifsw. 1847, p. 21. 80 KELIGIONS. hsbjs, and arms. A cultus, however, existed nowhere of the father of all streams and springs, the Titanid Oceanos. Thetis, the sea- goddess, was only worshiped in three places, in Pharsa- lus, Sparta, and Messenia; with the exception of that in ^gae, no worship of the Tritons occurs. Nereus, the ruler of the deep sea waters, was only invoked at ^'Egse, and Gythium in the Pelo- ponnese. The generality of Greeks knew but little of the Bceo- tian sea-god Glaucus, and the chameleon Proteus. The Nereids, however, the daughters' of Nereus, as being the divine inhabitants of the deep, had altars and sanctuaries in sundry places. Leu- cothea, the sea- goddess of the Minyans, had divine homage paid to her at Corinth as mother of the sea-god Palaemon. Yet all these several worships and names were but fragments and re- mains of an older water-cultus, that had early fallen into neglect and been suppressed. On the other hand, the old worship of Poseidon kept its ground and spread. This god, of foreign and Asiatic original, appears to have owed his first introduction to Carian and Pheni- cian visitors of the coasts of Hellas. His worship in early times too, solemnised with a sacrifice of maidens, became odious in many places in Greece ; in other places the attempt to naturalise him was a failure, and in many instances he was obliged to yield precedence to the other Hellenic divinities, his disgrace, no doubt, arising from his barbarian origin.^ He was the god of all waters, sweet as well as salt ; but he was lord of the sea par excellence; his throne was in the deep, and at the same time he was the earth-quaker, or earth-securer. For as man con- ceived the earth to be born of the sea, all agitations of nature were considered to be dependent on the sea or connected with it, and so were referred to him. His worship was most fre- quently met with in the islands, on the coast, and in harbour- cities, and more extensively amongst the JSolians and lonians than Dorians and Achseans, though, according to the showing of Diodorus,2 he was honoured above all the gods in most of the cities of Peloponnesus, and many races too in Boeotia, and the Peloponnese also ascribed theii- origin to sons of Poseidon. The Nereid Amphitrite became the consort of Poseidon only after Homer's time. 1 Gerhard, iiber Ursprung, Wesen und Geltung dea Poseidon. Berl. Akad. Abhandlg. ] 851, pp. 172 sqq. 2 xv. 14. THE GKEEK GODS : PALLAS ATHENE. 81 In nearest relation to ZeuSj the heaven-godj was Pallas Atheue^ one of the oldest and most national of the Hellenic divinities. As a Pelasgian goddess of nature and the elements, with festal solemnities and local myths of physical signification, features and spheres of action were assigned to her hardly admitting of being reduced to any harmonious combination, and she united in herself all the attributes of a supreme female divinity. StiU, the prominent idea in her was, that, as child and image of Zeus, the daughter of the god of the ether, born without mother in the empyrean, she was the goddess of the heavenly or ethereal fire and its brightness. Yet she was also conceived to be, and honoured as, the mistress of the clouds and the winds. When the lonians appropriated her worship, she first became the stern virgin and warrior-goddess. In the myth of the Hesiodic theogony, where Zeus, having devoured his wife Metis (wisdom), who already bore Athene under her heart, then gave birth to the daughter from his head, we are presented for the first time with the intellectual and moral aspect of the goddess, as standing in the most intimate relation to her father. She was the being most richly endowed with wisdom by Zeus, and the conviction that this was her most striking characteristic impressed itself more and more on men's minds. Whatever in human life was dependent on understanding and judgment was now ascribed to her. As the much-honoured Athene Ergane, she was the pa- troness of works of hand and of the arts. Many cities were under her protection, as specially dedicated to her. Eloquence, also prudent counsel, and good laws, were attributed to her. What- ever blessings people asked for from her father, they also expected in general at her hands — victory in war, as well as all the bless- ings of peace. The idea of the goddess necessarily followed, and accommodated itself to every historical development through which Athens (the most famous and influential of the cities dedi- cated to her) passed. In the heyday of the Greek republics she was, of course, the goddess of freedom, and hated tyrants.^ As she grew more and more of an idealisation and abstraction, she was blended with Metis, and became man's thought, wisdom, and knowledge, hypostatised, and hence was called the Highest, sit- ting, according to Pindar,^ on the father's right hand, to deliver his judgments to the other gods. ' Aristoph. Thesm. 1154 (11-14, ed. Dindorf.). 2 Fragm. vol. iii. p. 119. G 82 RELIGIONS. The -worship of Apollo spread far over each branch of the Greek family of races. He has so many features in common with Athene, that in many respects one might call him an Athene of the male species. As she is in the closest union with her fathei-'s essence, and his best-beloved daughter, so is Apollo, in Homer, the favourite son of Zeus, who, ever obedient to the father, announces his decrees to men. Already in the pre-Hel- lenic times his worship was much in fashion. At Ambracia, and in other cities of the Pelasgian period, he was represented in a conical form, in the shape of a pillar, and generally in the most varied guise ; and his cultus was of the same kind. The principal localities for his worship were, Lycia, where he was the national god ; Crete, from the northern coasts of which it was conveyed to the Greek and Asiatic coasts and islands, with its expiatory rites and its oracles ; next, the island of Delos, peopled from Crete, as a centre of the lonico- Attic worship of Apollo ; and lastly, Del- phi, for the northern parts of Greece and the Dorians, who, even after their conquest of the Peloponnese, remained in the closest relations with the Delphico-Pythian Apollo and his oracle, by continually consulting it. Neither local traditions nor the forms of worship admitted of the personality of the god being regarded as the offspring of a single idea. Ingredients of an old worship of nature ran, in his case, into notions which savour of a later development of Hel- lenic life. In old traditions he appears as the god of death, who sends plague and destruction ; and he is therefore armed with bow and quiver. In the lonico-Asiatic cultus, he is god of the fruits of the field and their increase, as owing to the changes of the seasons. As Apollo Carneius in the Peloponnese, he was god of war and of shepherds at the same time; and in the Carneia, the festival of the Dorian race, the memorial of the wandering life of the early Dorians in camp and tent, was celebrated with warlike rites and symbols ; while in the Hyacinthia, first sorrow for the decay of nature, caused by the heat of the sun, and then joy, in the hope of her reanimation, were expressed. As Zeus was honoured as Apomuios, or the averter of flies, so Apollo too had his worship as Smintheus, or exterminator of field-mice, and again as Parnopius, or averter of locusts. As Thargelios, he was a maturer of field- produce ; as Delphinius, he ruled over the sea and the storm ; as Erythibius, he kept watch against THE GREEK GODS : APOLLO. 83 the destruction of com by fire. As is ordinary with the oldest divinities, his activity and might were displayed throughout the kingdom of nature. In many places he was invoked as Ace- sius, or preserver from sickness ; and his aid was invoked par- ticularly against epidemic pestilences, which he sent abroad by his arrows. Ever exulting himself in eternal youthfalness, he was also the protector and guardian of manly youth, and warlike courage was his gift. Plato has made a fourfold division of his ethical signification and action into music, prophecy, the healing art, and skill in archery.'^ God of prophetic, as of poetic, inspira- tion, he led the song and the dance. From him, the bright,^ shining, pure god, all that is morally impure and defiled must keep aloof. In lieu of the old vengeance of blood he introduced the expiation for murder. War conducted in an unrighteous and inhuman manner was an offence to him. He was generally the representative and expositor of the ideas of moral law to the Hellenes. All the distinctions they claimed to themselves, as well as whatever separated the Greek from the barbarian, was regarded as emanating from his essence and influence. But it was by his oracle at Delphi, of which all the Greeks were proud, that Apollo exerted so mighty an influence on the whole of Hellas, cooperating in every important event and every considerable institution that could be brought in any way within the range of religion. He it was to whom Lycurgus was necessarily indebted for the inspiration of his Spartan code ; all the ordinances pertaining to public worship must have been, as Plato says, derived from Delphic sources, and be treated as inspirations of Apollo.^ And, in truth, all existing religious arrangements had received Apollo's sanction, according to the belief of the Greeks ; he either ratified them through the Pythia, or confirmed them through the answer always given when the oracle was consulted, that it was the will of the gods they should be worshiped by each and every citizen according to the tradi- tion and institution of his own city.^ Even war and peace, the sending out of colonies, the political constitutions of single states, — every thing was placed under the prophetic guidance of Apollo. The question whether Apollo, the son of the god of heaven and of the night (Leto), was originally the god of light only, ' Cratyl. 405 a. " Legg. \i. p. 759 c. ' Xenoph. Memor. i. 3, Ij iv. 3, 16. 84 KELIGIONS. or at the same time the sun-god, is one of the most intricate in the department of Greek religious history; for in Homer, throughout, Helios is distinct from Apollo. Planet-worship generally was not a predominant feature in the Greek religion. Sun, moon, and stars were not principal objects of their rever- ence; at least they had ceased to be so in Hellenic times. Of the stars, Sirius alone appears to have been worshiped. Aris- teeus had recommended the islanders of Ceos to adore this star, to avert a danger that was threatening them from it.^ A cultus of the moon (Selene) is nowhere to be found in earlier times; Helios, however, had his paid him very early, though it was brought over from Asia into Greece. This worship existed every where by the side of Apollo's, and entirely distinct from his, as was most strikingly the case in Khodes, where, as the whole island was consecrated to the sun, his worship especially flourished; whilst in many spots of the same island Apollo was also honoured as averter of fire from the corn ; at Camirus, as god of the flocks and herds; and as the dart-casting plague- god, at Lindus, and elsewhere. So, too, Phidias coupled He- lios with Apollo on the pedestal of the Olympic Zeus. Plato assures us- the Greeks prayed daily to Helios, and not to Apollo. It was first through the interpretation of the physical philosophers that Apollo became the sun ; and this gloss made its way and spread far and wide, particularly through their pupil Euripides. "Rightly he names thee, Apollo (Destroyer), who knows the secret names of the demons," Phaethon's mother said to his father Helios, in the tragedy of Euripides. This, as has been justly observed, ^ is no allusion to the doctrine of the mysteries, but is borrowed from the theocrasy of philosophers. In Plutarch's time this identification of Helios with Apollo was so generally prevalent, that he could say, that the sun had thrown Apollo (his character and meaning) into oblivion amongst all men; though, for his own part, he would acknowledge the distinction between the two only as that between soul and body united together.* The union of the twin pair, Artemis and Apollo, harmonising in all relations as we find them in Homer and all the poets, was ' Diodor. i. p. 324 (lib. iv. 381, ed. Wesselingii) ; ApoU. Ehod. ii. 523. !> Legg. X. p. 665 (vol. viii. p. 469, fd. Bel;.). a Otfr. MuUersDorien.i. 290. < De Kyth. Orac. vii. 575; Eeisk. de Orac. def. vii. 706. THE GREEK GODS : ARTEMIS. 85 not originally admitted along with the first, worship of the two divinities; for the older local Apollo rites made no mention of Artemis; and vice versi, Artemis was honoured without Apollo in places where the worship preserved its antique character. The association of the two originated with Delos and Delphi. Ar- temis was an old Pelasgic goddess of nature, to whom neverthe- less attributes and functions so very different were assigned in the several places where she was honoured, that the attempt to reduce these functions and spheres of operation into a consis- tent theory can only be effected by means of an arbitrary and artificial construction in her case as well as Apollo's. The rites of Artemis Tauropolos, Brauronia, and the like, came from Thrace, where she was the supreme di^'inity of the land, and were at first celebrated with human sacrifices; as also that of Artemis Orthia at Sparta, where scourgings to blood were substituted for them.i The Artemis Eurynome, at Phigalia in Arcadia, represented as a fisherwoman, and shown only once a year, lying in golden chains, betrayed her Asiatic original. There, in Arcadia, the goddess possessed the largest number of sanctuaries ; where, generally, the old Pelasgic traditions were maintained undisturbed. The whole country, which traced its ancestral inhabitants from her, was in a measure consecrated to her. The great variety of surnames, taken from mountains and waters, by which Artemis was distinguished above all the other divinities, points to her as a power of nature. The mountain and the chase were her highest attributes. As Limnatis or Heleia, she was frequently connected with marshes; as Potamia and Alpheionia, with rivers also ; and as Acria and Coryphseaj, with the mountain-peaks. In her dealings with mankind she appears habitually as awful and severe. There is no other di- vinity to whom so many acts of revenge and bloodthirstiness were ascribed. Hence the sanguinary character of her earlier rites. Even sacrifices of children, afterwards replaced by scourg- ings, were offered to her ; while, in later times, a trait of cruelty unusual for Hellas was preserved in her worship at Patrse — a number of wild-beasts, great and small, were thrown alive into blazing piles in a circle round her altar. ^ The mere sight of her image, as the Greeks asserted, would fill every one with terror, ' Pausan. iii. IC, 7. 2 n,id. vii. 18, 7. 86 RELIGIONS. wither up the very trees in the neighbourhood, and destroy their fruits.i Pestilences were of her sending; the sudden death, particularly of women, was her work. Spite of her maiden na- ture, she was, on the contrary, esteemed the protectress of births, nui'se of women in labour, and guardian goddess of children. Thus she might be panegyrised, under many different titles, as kindly intentioned and placable ; and we find her here and there honoured as a succouring divinity in peace and war, and protec- tress of towns. She appeared first in JSschylus as goddess of the moon, probably through some Asiatic influence of a late date. At Ephesus the Artemis was a kind of pantheistic deity, with more of an Asiatic than Hellenic character. The attributes of nearly all female divinities were centred in her there. She was most analogous to Cybele, as physical mother and parent of all. She was the great goddess of Ephesus, the Protothronia,^ and her worship had a world-wide fame ; so that up to the time of Pausanias, there was hardly a city in Greece the people of which had not done homage to her as a puissant divinity. She was often invoked on special occasions, and had her worship too in private dwellings ; even the Persians spared her sanctuary in their great devastating wars of reprisal against the Ionic Greeks. Ionian states contributed in a body to the building of her temple, nay, rather the whole of Asia Anterior. Her image, shaped like a mummy, was of black wood ; the upper part of the body was ornamented with the breasts of animals, the lower with figures of them.3 Hermes, the old family god of the Tyrrhenian Pelasgi, and son of Zeus and the Atlantid Maia, had so much in common with Apollo, that he often seems to be a " double" of him, or a personification of the same religious idea. In the first instance he was originally personified and adored as the generative and fructifying power of nature, and represented as a Herma, or pil- lar of stone, with a head superadded and a phallus ; under which form the Athenians received him from the Pelasgi, and the other Greeks from the Athenians. In Cyllene he was even honoured only as a phallus.* The ordinary attributes of an old god of nature were actually assigned him : he was god of the heights; ' Plutarch, Orat. xxxii. 2 Pausan. ji.. 38. ' Pausan. a. 38, 3 ; Caffimach. Hymn. Dian. 237-250 ; Strabo, xiv. 789. ' Pausan. yi. 26. THE GREEK GODS : HERMES, HESTIA. 87 furthered the growth of the products of the earth ; gave increase to flocks and herds, as Nomios or Epimelios ; as Trophonios, he protected the fields, and even the springs were his gift. Then, as member of the Olympic court and anthropomorphic god, he represented practical activity and inventive dexterity in human affairs. He was the nuncio and agent of the other gods, the god of speech, commercial intercourse, and trade, patron of fraud and pequry, and professor of thievery. Autolycus in Homer, who increases his property by thieving and perjury, is considered a son and pupil of Hermes.' His worship was diligently observed as Hermes Dolios, the overreacher, in the vicinity of Pallene ; he had the reputation of being quick to hear the prayers ad- dressed to him f and the myths delight in descanting upon the adroit purloinings of the king of thieves.^ With all this, there was not in his character a bad and vengeful sifle, as in the other divinities ; no act of revenge is ever recorded of him. On the contrary, he was a benevolent deity, the friend of man, who, as Pompseus or Agetor, accompanied mortals on their journeys, and whose images were encountered almost every where at the doors of houses, at the entrances of gardens, and in the streets and squares. In general, he was a god of blessing, who paid a gracious attention to the wishes of mankind, whose souls, after death, he also conducted, as the kindly Hermes Psychopompos, down to the kingdom of Hades. Hestia was frequently associated with Hermes. Though of Pelasgic origin, she is not mentioned in Homer and Hesiod as a goddess, but first appears as such in the Homeric hymns and the lyric poets. She is called the eldest, and at the same time the youngest, daughter of Cronos and Ehea, and with her the circle of the twelve superior deities is complete. The timid reverence with which the ancients contemplated the mysterious substance and being of fire, had given birth to several deities ; so Hestia too, in the historical period, became a personification, not of that element in general, but only of the fire burning on altars and domestic hearths. Hence she was the natural guardian of the hearth ; and as every hearth was also a domestic altar, the sacri- fices or ofierings were also placed under her care. All sacrificers invoked her first, and, according to the expression of the Homeric hymn, she was partaker in the honours paid at every shrine. In ' Odyss. i. 395, 0eo! /ii«A.(x""i— Pavisan. x. 38, 4. ' Ibid. i. 40, 5. 122 KELIGIONS. made beings of creation, and again deities of marriage and birth.i In Corinth not only the Cyclops had a temple, but Bia and Ananke (Force and Necessity) had theirs, which, however, could not have been much frequented ; and in Messene there was a holy house dedicated to the Curetes, those ambiguous beings who, according to the best-informed, were ministering de- mons of the mother of the gods, but whom Hesiod had aheady styled deities.^ After Alexander's time, a new importation of foreign deities was added to the host of old domestic ones. Every little country town now had a temple of foreign gods. Thus, Pausanias saw a temple of Isis at Ceryneia in Achaia. Images of Serapis and of Isis stood in ^Egira, and the Syrian goddess had a temple which could not be entered without submitting to purifications first. Isis had as many as two temples in Corinth, the one dedi- cated to her as Pelagia, the other as ^Egyptia : the same was the case with Serapis. Temples were erected here even to the Ko- man Jupiter Capitolinus, and to Octavia, sister of Augustus.^ If we survey the Greek universe of gods as regards the duties and sphere of action attributed to them, it is clear that the crea- tive imagination of the Greeks, far surpassing the poverty of other nations in such matters, and the eastern in particular, had given birth to a grandly organised whole, in which each god had his vocation assigned to him ; each department of nature and of human life, each branch of human effort and operation, had a tutelary deity to preside over it. The weather, sunshine, and rain, were immediately subject to the disposition of Zeus ; De- meter provided for the fertility of the soil. Countless nymphs of field, and spring, and stream, showered their gifts. The grape and its juice were intrusted to Dionysos, and Poseidon was the sovereign of the sea. The flocks and herds had their protectors in Hermes and Pan. The goddess of fate specially ruled the destinies of men. Kings and authorities saw in Zeus their type and their guardian; Athene held her shield over cities. The public and domestic hearth were in the hands of Hestia. To marriage the favour and providence of Hera were assured. Le- gislation was confined to Demeter. Mothers commended them- ' Pausan. i. 40, 5 ; Lobeck, Aglaopham. 753, 55. - Pausan. iv. 31, C ; Hesiod, Fragm. 1. 32 (quoted by Strabo, i. 087, Oxf.). ^ Pausan. ii. 3, i. SPHERES or ACTION OF THE GODS. 123 selves to the keeping of Artemis or Ilithuia. Music, skill in archeryj and soothsaying, were Apollo's attributes ; the healing art was under the tutelage of himself and his son Asclepios. In war, Athene was invoked, and Mars controlled. The chase was placed under the inspection of Artemis. The operations of the smithy and all who wrought by fire found a patron in Hephsestos ; whilst Athene Ergane presided over the softer works, and He- cate guarded the highways. BOOK III. THE MYSTBEIES AND THE OEPHIC RELIGIOUS DOCTRINE. In the Greek world there were a variety of mysteries collateral to that public worship of the gods which was practised before the eyes of aU. Some of these were recognised by the state authorities, and were placed under the protection of the laws; others were but tolerated, or passed over without notice. Many of these institutions were only distinguishable from the ordinances of public cultus by the accidental form of mystery and conceal- ment. It might happen that a service, which at an earlier period had been public, fell into obscurity, as a consequence of the for- tunes of the race to whose care it was committed ; or in order to the better preservation of its exclusive character of limitation to one family, or, generally speaking, to a narrower circle. But there were mysteries too, and those just the most important, which formed a contrast to the Hellenic worship in its public and political aspect. This opposition is not, however, to be looked for in a secret theology or metaphysical doctrine, contravening the expositions of the public religion, and which was to be communicated under the seal of silence. People indeed have represented the case as if it were a matter of secret doctrine, hereditary in and propa- gated by particular families of priests and theologians, and which had to be resorted to as an explanatory commentary upon sym- bolical actions and exhibitions, — a kind of monotheistic teaching, by which the prevalent errors of the popular polytheism were to be corrected. That, however, is not to be thought of; the sacer- dotal families who were charged with the custody and representa- tion of the mysteries, as, for example, the Eumolpidse at Athens, were as little of teachers or preachers as the other ministers of 126 THE MYSTERIES. Hellenic worship ; and, besides, the propagation and tradition of mystical lore, destructive of the prevailing religious creed, was a thing which the Greek states (punishing as they did with death every attack on that belief) would never have tolerated for an instant, much less have taken under their special protec- tion. There was no exposition of doctrine in the mysteries, and no course of dogmatical instruction; the address was not made to the understanding, but to the sense, the imagination, and the divining instincts of the initiated. And if in this way he car- ried off any instruction, if he was enriched with a store of con- ceptions to which he had been hitherto a stranger, concerning divine things and his own destiny, as dependent on the divine will, assuredly what was so acquired was but indirect and sym- bolical, though just as certainly it had, in its degree, a very con- siderable effect, and left a deep impression behind. For the whole was a drama, the prelude to which consisted in purifications, sacrifices, and injunctions with regard to the behaviour to be observed. The adventures of certain deities, their sufferings and joys, their appearance on earth, and relations to mankind, their death, or descent to the nether world, their re- turn, or their rising again, — all these, as symbolising the life of nature, were represented in a connected series of theatrical scenes. These representations, tacked on to a nocturnal solemnity, bril- liantly got up, particularly at Athens, with all the resources of art and sensual beauty, and accompanied with dancing and song, were eminently calculated to take a powerful hold on the imagi- nation and the heart, and to excite in the spectators alternately conflicting sentiments of terror and calm, sorrow, and fear, and hope. They worked upon them, now by agitating, now by sooth- ing, and meanwhile had a strong bearing upon susceptibilities and capacities of individuals, according as their several dispositions inclined them more to reflection and observation, or to a resigned credulity. Hence all that was generally put forward in the mysteries might be reduced to " things exhibited, things done, and things spoken." The things exhibited, to wit, were certain objects, sym- bols, or relics, given out as being particularly sacred. The things done and represented by imitation were the acts and adven- tures of the gods, inclusive of sacrifices and purifications. The things spoken were partly the so-called " holy legends," in each COKTENTS OP THE MYSTEEIES. 127 of whicli a mythical event — something done or suffered by a deity — was conveyed by way of illustrating a symbol or a rite ; partly liturgical formulae, and short enigmatical exclamations, relating to the occurrences represented, in which, moreover, prayers, hymns, and songs must be included. The mysteries, then, were certainly based on a doctrine, or some doctrine or other was involved in them, and could be practically deduced from them, though of course in very different ways. Still this doctrine was not put forward as such ; it was partly hypothesis, and in part it lay veiled under the symbols exhibited in the histories of the gods represented, and in the formulae of the prayers; and it was left to each individual's own judgment and degree of enlightenment to interpret these things as he would. The mystagogues, that is, the Athenian citizens who were charged to help stranger Greeks as assistants and guides in the initiation, also gave them instructions how they were to act, or explanations of what had preceded; but wherever they went beyond their own private sources of knowledge, or actual fact and the symbolical veil, all was but presumption and attempt at private interpre- tation. . This is the only plausible way the testimony of the an- cients, and the vast variety of their opinions upon the dogmatical purport of the mysteries, admit of being reconciled. They say the initiated had nothing to learn, but only impressions to receive, and to place themselves in a certain disposition for which they were prepared.^ No convincing by principles found place in the mysteries. Nothing was imparted that might de- termine the intellect to a believing reception.^ People were to reflect thoughtfully, under the guidance of philosophical discern- ment, upon what was here done and spoken.^ Galen draws out the contrast between the perfect brightness imparted by nature to the discerning mind, and the obscureness of the instruction aimed at in the mysteries;* and it was already said in the Ho- meric hymn, " Man must neither pass by nor investigate these matters.''^ A trait of mysteriousness penetrates the whole of the Greek rehgious system. Every where occurred things which were to 1 Ai-istot. ap. Synes. Orat. p, 48, Petav. ^ Plutarch, de Def. Orao. vol. -vii. 664, ed. Reisk. » Ibid, de Iside, c. Ixviii. ' De Usu Partium, vii. 14; Opp, vii. ifiO. ' Hymn, in Demctr. ,. 481 (478, Wolf. Oxf.) 128 THE MYSTERIES. remain hidden^ with which only the priests, or a narrow circle, were acquainted ; thus there were secret names of deities, secret sacrifices, secret forms of invocation. The women had their hidden rites, which were neither to be seen or known of men. There were also " holy legends," which illustrated certain pecu- liarities of the deities, as exhibited, or of the cultus, and which people might sometimes learn of the priest, though they were ordinarily concealed ; for example, the meaning of the pomegra- nate, which the image of Hera at Mycense bore in its hand, or the imageless festival, with which the Phliasians feted Hera.i Such secret sagas mostly contained something local, and contra- dictory to the common mythological notion, or pointed to some obscene circumstance regarding the deity. There were temples which always remained closed, as that of Aphrodite Urania at TEgira,^ and groves which no foot dared approach.^ Again, there were many temples only accessible to priests, such as that of Apollo Carneios at Sicyon, and Artemis at Pellene j* others were not to be entered by women, as the sanctuary of Aphrodite Acrsea in Cyprus ;5 whereas the temple of Dionysos at Brysese in La- conia was closed to men, and only women could perform a secret sacrificial rite there, carefully guarded from the eyes of men.^ Temples of Demeter were mostly open to women only, and gene- rally men were forbidden to enter a Thesmophorion, or sanctuary consecrated to Demeter. 7 Many images of the gods, too, were kept out of sight, and only open to priests, or were exhibited but once in the year in a nocturnal procession, as the statues at Si- cyon.^ Sacrifices that were deemed of special power were fre- quently performed in profound stillness and concealment at night-time, or with closed doors. Such were the sacrifices offered to the Lycsean Zeus in Arcadia, and to Hera at Mycense. If a sacrifice of this kind was further combined with rites and symbolic actions peculiar to itself, then the whole, as of itself, assumed the form of the celebration of a mystery. The same is true of the plays and games celebrated at night in honour of a deity; and Plutarch, in fact, observes of games of the kind sacred to Meli- certa, they had more the character of a mystery- rite than of theatrical representation and public festal procession.^ ' Pausan. ii. 17. 4, l.-J. 3. 2 Ibid. vii. 26, 3. 3 iijid. ^iij. 31, 2, * Ibid. vii. 27. 1, viii. 30. 2. * Strabo, p. 682 (971, Oxf.). " Ibid. iii. 20, i. 7 Teles, ap. Stob. p. 232 (ii. 82, Gaisford). " Ibid. ii. 7, 6. 9 Plutarch, Thes. xxv. MYSTERY-GODS. 129 Let us then make a further distinction of things which the ancients did not always keep duly separate. There were secret rites, in which sacrifices principally had to be offered with peculiar observances, and images of deities kept under lock and key had to be disclosed and unveiled to a few, or to persons of one sex ; and there were mystery-institutions. The former particularly gave rise to the expectation of a powerful effect from them, which effect, as men fancied, the deity was not able to deprive them of. The latter, the mystery-institutes proper, were in part a service consecrated to certain deities, or consisted of a succes- sion of religious functions ; but at the same time must have dis- closed to those who were prepared for it a new aspect of the deity, of which they had hitherto been ignorant, and so have pro- duced a lasting religious impression on them. . This distinction is of particular importance in the question of the nature of the mystic rites {TeXeral) of Dionysos. It will be shown afterwards there were really secret rites of that god, but by no means in- dependent Dionysiac mysteries, absolutely speaking, in which a peculiar religious doctrine was mythically represented and con- veyed. Dionysos was only a mystery- god in connection with other deities and under a different designation. There was, in fact, a strong line of demarcation between the deities when viewed in relation to the mysteries. The gods of the popular belief are beings of poetic creation, entirely anthropomor- phic, and extracted from nature : part of them retire quite into obscurity in the mysteries, while the rest show themselves in the light and with the mythical adjuncts of the old nature-gods, Demeter, Core, and Dionysos, were mystery-deities proper, not indeed universally and according to their whole essence, but De- meter, Dionysos, and probably Hermes too, preeminently so in their relation to death and the lower world, a relation which ex- isted in the instances of Core and Hecate anyhow. Zeus was only a mystery-god in Crete, and nowhere else. Hera, Athene, Apollo, and Poseidon had no qualifications for that character, and, grant- ing the service of Hera at Argos was a secret one, with a legend which was kept secret, and that a secret solemnity was observed in honour of the Charites at Athens, — these were assuredly re- mains of an old pre-Hellenic cultus, thrust aside by the latter system, and therefore not dovetailing into it exactly,— a cultus 130 THE MYSTERIES. wherein the old signification of the goddesses had been obliterated from the mind of men in general. An examination of the views and expressions the Greeks and Romans have left behind them for our use^ respecting the mysteries, shows that, far from imparting a solid teaching, with precise formnlse, these institutes were much more calculated for leaving a wide field for conjecture and the play of the imaginative powers of the mystse ; some of whom, without drawing further dogmatic conclusionSj contented themselves with the immediate impressions of the histories of the gods represented, and with the hopes thrown out in them of a life of bliss after death ; while others always referred what they saw and heard to the standard of their preconceived notions, and were widely divided in their estimate of the lessons contained under the symbolical veil of the mysteries. If we distinguish the expressions and views of Greeks, Ro- mans, and Christians, concerning the substance, value, and ef- fects of the mysteries, there appears at first sight an irrecon- cilable contradiction, not only between the heathen and the Christian statements, but also between those of the heathen Greeks themselves. Yet many an apparent contradiction is solved, if only we discriminate duly between the mysteries themselves, namely, the Samothracian, and those private myste- ries which came from abroad, the Eleusinian and Orphic. The Eleusinian were thought most highly of in antiquity, and were sometimes represented as the real flower of the Hellenic religion, and as containing the best, purest, and noblest of what Greece had to ofier in a religious point of view. Besides, we must not overlook the fact, that the Eleusinian festivals and mysteries were an institute of the Athenian state, and that the orators on whom it devolved to panegyrise the Athenian republic and people, would naturally exalt this institution as one of the jewels of the Athenian diadem, and glorify it with the cream of their rhetoric; and that, in a word, the lustre which the intellectual supremacy of Athens, her rich literature and poetry, and her artistic perfection, shed over all that was there done and prac- tised, would also reflect upon the Eleusinian mysteries. Thus it is first of all the orator Isocrates who in his pane- gyric' praises the two blessings of Demeter, the fruits of the ' Isocr. iv. 29. VIEWS OF PHILOSOPHEES. 131 field and the initiation rites, and then enhances the operation of the latter in regard to the brighter hopes of life and its conclu- sion, which the initiated derived from them. This is the passage which Cicero had before his eyes when he counted the mysteries of Ceres as the most excellent product of Athens, inasmuch as mortal men were first raised thereby from a crude, peasant exist- ence to the dignity of real civilisation, and had not only learnt cheerfulness in life, but also a better hope in dying.i In a like sense spoke the poets, — the author of the Homeric hymns, Pindar, and Sophocles, that the destinies of the initiate in the lower world would be entirely distinct from those of the initi- ated ; only those who knew life's source and object were to be sharers in bliss there,^ whUst the rest were to be lost in mire and filth. In particular, the sweeping denunciation of Sophocles,^ the most religious of the Greek poets, seems to have made the very greatest impression : Plutarch asserts that he filled many myriads of souls with despondency by it ; surely he also impelled many, by a participation in the mysteries, to secure themselves that consolation for the other side of the grave.* Yet the comic poet Philetairos, and in Athens too, dared by parody to make a mock of the poet's glowing promises of bliss, and of the hierophant's as well : " Pretty is it to die to the music of the flute, for such only are allowed in Hades to indulge in love."-5 The first thing that presents itself, on the other hand, is the pregnant silence, or the significant disapprobation and con- tempt, of the philosophers. If the philosopher Prodicus, who lived at Athens in the time of Socrates, derived all mysteries, and even all worship of the gods, from agriculture merely,^ there undoubtedly lies beneath that view the denial, on his part, of all deeper import and value in the Eleusinia, as was very much the case also with the Romans, Varro and Cotta. If Socrates had spoken ever a word in recommendation of the Eleusinian mysteries, so highly esteemed in his parent state, as certainly would it have been preserved ; for nothing would have better established in the eyes of his fellow- citizens the ground- ' Cic. de Legg. ii. \i. 2. Find. Fragrn. 102 ; Poetffi Lyrici, ed. Bergk, p. 253 ; SophocL Fragm. ap. Plutarch de aud. Poet. ' Soph. Fragm. 719; Poet. Seen. Grsec. ed^ Dindorf. " De aud. Poet. 21. t. vi. 5C, Reisk. : of, Aristoph. Ban. 457. , ° Ap. Athen. p. 633 f. 6 Themist. Or. xxx. 349 A. 132 THE MYSTEEIES. lessness of the charge which led him to execution ; and it was entirely owing to the insulting mockery of the mysteries hy his pupil Alcibiades, that the suspicion of irreverence came to fall upon himself. People tried to explain his doubtless intentional silence upon the hypothesis of his not having been initiated; but this is only grounded on a misinterpretation of the expres- sion of Lucian.'^ Still more significant is the attitude Plato has maintained towards the mysteries, — Plato, to whom in his writings the occasion must so frequently have presented itself of mentioning generally the explanations there given, or the advantages pro- mised, and who besides expresses himself so decidedly upon the maintenance of the state religion in 'aU its aspects, and the reverence due to the priest -class. Notwithstanding, we find in his works not only no favourable expression any where regarding the Eleusinia, but positive blame. For if he reproves the confidence which people were wont to place in the power of the mysteries (reXeTat), " affirmed even by the greatest states," to expiate sins and injustices for this life and the other,^ and if he paints the ruinous consequences of this error in the destruction of all sense of righteousness, it is clear that his mind is primarily running upon Athens and its state -mys- teries, the Eleusinian ; Athens, moreover, was the only one of the more important Greek states that had a mystery- institute of the kind. The same disapprobation is clear as daylight from another passage of the same treatise, where Plato complains that scandalous stories of the gods were put before all "who sacrificed a swine;" in other words, all who were initiated in the Eleusinia.^ Only when he propounds his opinion of the migration of souls, does he appeal to the old dogmas of the priests;* but even there he is not alluding to the Eleusinia, in which this doctrine was not brought forward, but to the Orphico-Dionysiac mysteries, from which it had been already transferred into the writings of the poets. There are other ways still in which Plato's dislike to the mysteries peeps out; for example, where he is describing the migration of souls into new bodies, according to the degree of their education. Such of 1 Demonnx, xi. (v. 237, ed Bip.). ^ pjatode Eepub. ii, 8, p. T3. 3 Plat. Tifp. ii. 17, p. 95. ■' Meno, p. 8] ; Legg. 0pp. ix. pp. 870-872. VIEWS OF PHILOSOPHERS. 133, these as have been occupied in divination and the mysteries he fixes in the fifth class only.i Again, when ridiculing the mystery -poets, he exclaims, " What better recompense can they give to virtue than an eternity of intoxication!" Lastly, when, with a significant side-hit at the state-mysteries, he says that the most perfect of mysteries are those which the phi- losopher celebrates while he revels in the recollection of that which he has seen in a former existence with God.^ Of the later writers, the view which Plutarch in particular held of the mysteries ought to be of the greatest weight. His strong religious feeling, and his industry in sifting every department of the then religious system, do not admit of indifference towards these institutions being presumed in him. He too attaches to the mysteries the hope, or the certainty, of a life after death. He directed his own wife to the Dionysia for consolation when mourning over the death of her daughter : from them they knew that the soul still has life and feeling after death.^ He may have been there alluding to the Lernsean or Delphic mystic rite, or even to the petty mysteries in Agrae ; it is not probable he meant the private initiation of the Orphica. How little value he attached to the real Eleusinia is shown by his taking Ceres and Proserpine to be goddesses, the one of the earth, and the other of the moon, and putting an astronomical interpretation on their destiny and wanderings in accordance with it;* and further by his assertion that the mysteries were only a contrivance of the ancients to habituate people to silence in matters of civil Hfe through the reserve imposed in religious matters.'^ In fine, he declared the mysteries to contain the strongest proofs that the deities, whose adventures were there represented, were not gods proper, but ministering demons, or partly good and partly bad genii, whose only oflice it was to execute the behests of the gods j^ and his reference to the wanderings of Demeter and the obscene stories, shows it was reaUy the Eleusinia he had in view when so speaking. On the other hand, others whom Diodorus men- tions had either heard it reported from the mysteries, or inferred ' Phtedr. p. 2i8 D. 2 Ibid. p. 249 D. 3 Hut. Consol. ad Uxor., 0pp. mi. 411 (Eeisk, 611). " De Facie in orbe lima3, ix. 715 sqq. (544 ?). ■' De Lib. educ. -vi. 24. « De Orac. def. -rii. 642 (485 ?) ; de Isid. vii. 424 (330, 331?). 134 THE MYSTERIES. from them, that Demeter was nathing else but the "mother earth."! As the rhetorical phrases of Aristides, who composed under Hadrian a declamatory exercise on the burning of the Eleusinian temple, are evidently too superficial, and a mere echo of the words of Isocrates, we can only quote of the Greeks, Diodorus, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and particularly the stoic Arrian. The latter asserts the Eleusinian mysteries to be profitable if approached after previous purification by sacrifice and prayer, and with a sentiment of the ancient dignity of those ceremonies ; and therefore it may be conjectured that the ancients introduced them with the intention of bettering and perfecting life.^ Arrian knew nothing of doctrine being imparted in them. Whilst Plutarch, who held Euhemerism in abhorrence, had so low an opinion of the mysteries, it is striking, on the other hand, to find so favour- able a judgment passed upon these institutes by a man hke Diodorus, whose work is leavened throughout with Euhemerist views. He says of the Samothracian mysteries, " they are re- nowned because the gods appeared to the initiated, and assisted them in danger, and that men, by initiation, become more god- fearing and righteous, and thoroughly better than they were before."^ Another remarkable expression of Diodorus will find place further on. The judgment of a contemporary of his, the Jew Philo, is different : " It happens frequently that not a single honest man is initiated, but highwaymen, pirates, and swarms of impure women, if they only give the hierophants money."'' The decision of Dionysius is not less unfavourable to the mys- teries, for he considered it an important advantage the Romans had over the Greeks, that they had not introduced any such rites. In his eyes, the mere existence of these mysteries, with their fables of the gods, " in which there was mighty little good," was a downright evil.^ Among the Romans we find Varro, Cicero, the Ciceronian Cotta, and the Stoic Annseus Cornutus in Nero's time, the autho- rities whose judgments upon the Greek mysteries afford infor- mation. Varro, a spirit that strove earnestly to investigate the unknown, and to clear up the obscure, discovered nothing in the ' Diodor. iii. 62 (ii. 048, Bip.). ^ Epict. Dys. iii. 2, p. 440, Schweigh. 3 Diod. V. 49 (iii. 062, Bip.). * Philo de Sacrificant. p. 857 A. 5 Antiq. Eom. ii. 10 (i. 273, Eeisk.). VIEWS OF PHILOSOPHEBS. 135 Eleusinia but a mytho-allegorical representation of the sowing and cultivation of corn. There was much, he allowed, that was imparted in these mysteries, but all had relation to the discovery of agriculture.! Gotta, the Academician and pontiff, came to the same conclusion. If people, he thought, would restore their real signification to the acts and adventures of the gods, as narrated and exhibited in the Eleusinian and Samothracian mysteries, they would assuredly learn more of the nature of things than of that of the gods by the process.^ He too had derived from these mysteries the fixed impression that they really dealt with natural phenomena; and that the Cabiri, the Cerealic, and Chthonic deities were but powers of nature personified, — their histories and sorrows and joys, physical states allegorised. Cicero himself, according as he spoke of the mysteries in the character of orator or philosopher, either brought out what was more appropriate for rhetorical ornament, or what seemed to him the kernel and whole impression remaining after the husk of symbol and myth had been removed. If, on one side, he adopted the expressions of Isocrates, or, as in his orations against Verres, lauded the secret rite of the two goddesses, by whom the sources of life and nourishment were opened, and from whom issued the precedents of laws and customs, refinement and the humanities; on the other, he is equally committed, in one of his philosophical works, to the doctrine of Euhemerism as being the core and fundamental principle of the mysteries. It resulted, he thought, from the Greek traditions, that even they who passed for gods of the first rank reached heaven from us here below. " Inquire further," he goes on, " to whom belong the sepulchres people point to in Greece — (those of Zeus in Crete, Asclepios in Arcadia,^ and Dionysos at Delphi), — bethink yourself, as you are initiated, of what you have been taught in the mysteries ; then at last you will be capable of taking in the full extent of this view ;"■• the view, he means, that to the eye and comprehension of the intelligent, the whole staflfof gods was composed of nothing but men, whom the bUndness and gratitude of the lower earth had exalted into gods. The Stoic Cornutus holds with Cicero the orator : " the mys- teries were instituted to record the invention of agriculture, and ' Ap. Aug. Civ. D. vii. 20. 2 Cio. Nat. Deor. i. 42. 2 De Nat. Deor. iii. 31, 22. * Tusoui. i. 13. 136 THE MYSTERIES. the transition to a civilised state associated with it, and as an exhibition of joy for these benefits."' On the other hand, his countryman Apuleius, the learned Platonist, a great partisan of, and investigator into, the mysteries, and who had himself been initiated in them all, while travelling, carefully preserved every sacred token and talisman^ so received, and wrote his far-famed romance principally to recommend the mysteries. From them he had learnt that one goddess reigned supreme over all the deities, and as mistress of the kingdom of nature, who was queen alike of souls severed from the body, and Ceres and Proserpine withal, and who was worshiped by various na- tions, and in the mysteries, under many different titles, as Isis, Cybele, Hecate, Juno, Venus, and Diana. ^ The judgment of Christian apologists on the mysteries is decidedly unfavourable and conveyed in terms of bitter invective. It is obvious that nothing was exhibited or taught in these in- stitutions that had any affinity whatever to Christian doctrine, or that could be interpreted as favouring it, otherwise they would not have failed to avail themselves of it. Rather, they con- sidered the mysteries as mainstays of the prevailing paganism, and schools too of the most ruinous and degrading supersti- tion. It has bsen observed,* that not one of these apologists actually asserts that he had been initiated. Tatian, however, while mentioning his journeys through different countries, and the investigations he had pursued of the manifold forms of hea- then error, says once expressly that he had been admitted into the mysteries ; and it would have been singular if, in so doing, he had entirely passed over the Eleusinia, the most celebrated and esteemed of all ; for, when speaking of them, he asserts that the Athenians, who had converted the rape of Core and the sor- rows of Demeter for her daughter into a mystery, still continued to find people who allowed themselves to be deceived by them.* There was at Athens then a community of Christians, among whom must have been many of the initiated. From Athens ori- ginally came Clement's master, Athenagoras, to whom we are indebted for the most exact account of the mysteries. From thence the Christian apologists Quadratus and Aristides wrote. 1 Cornut. de Nat. Deor. u. xxviii. p. 109, Osami. 2 Apul. Apol. s. de Magia, 494, 0pp. ii. 517, Bosscha. 3 Apul. Metamorph. xi. 241, 0pp. i. 703. ■• LoLeck, Aglaopli. 197. * Tatian, Or. ad GraDC. i;. ix. 29, p. 40 (112, ed. Otto). JUDGMENTS OF CHKISTIAN APOLOGISTS. 137 No Christian author who was in earnest about it could have experienced any difficulty in informing himself in detail of the contents of the Eleusinia, either by the writings or the oral testimony of his fellows in faith. Above all, there were men amongst them who, only after sifting the pagan religion and philosophy for years without arriving at certainty or repose of soul, had entered into communion with the Church of Christ. These, in the course of their examination, had un- doubtedly tested that institute, which was usually esteemed the flower of the Hellenic religion. Gregory of Nazianzus lived at Athens a long time for the sake of study, in fact, at the very period when Julian, who was subsequently emperor, was on the most intimate footing with the hierophants, and he had probably had himself initiated. It would have been strange if, in a time of the intensest struggle between Christendom and heathendom, and active interchange of polemical writings, a young and ardent pursuer of knowledge like Gregory had never once taken the trouble to inquire of his Athenian co- religionists, who had embraced the faith only in their maturity, what it was that really took place in the Eleusinia. Now, as he mentions the scandalous things which the Demeter of the mysteries did and submitted to, and tlien adds, " I take shame to myself for drawing the mystery of darkness into the light ; Eleusis knows it, and the Epoptae,^ who conceal these things, which indeed deserve concealment;" surely the presumption is, he knew what he was saying. We learn from a heathen's own mouth, how often it happened that the purport of the Greek mysteries was exposed by the initiated who had become con- verts to Christianity in the very assemblies of the Christians. It was quite an ordinary thing, in the days of Libanius, for Christian bishops to allow women to come forward publicly in their congregations to disclose and deride the seci'ets of the demons, of Ino, of the youth (Zagreus), of the Cabiri, and of Demeter.2 Clement of Alexandria, who took so favourable a view of the Greek philosophy that, in spite of the then e-sadence of its hostile attitude towards Christianity, he declared it to be a gift of God to the Greeks, and an institute for their education, — this same ' Gregor. Naz. Or. ii-^iLix. p. 679 (ed. Paris, 779). " Liban. pro Aristoph., 0pp. i. 448, Eeisk, 188 THE MYSTERIES. Clement pronounced a sentence of tte severest condemnation on the mysteries, of whichj to all appearancCj lie had an accurate knowledge. These, as he represents them, had sown far and wide the seeds of wickedness and corruption in the life of man. They were institutes full of deceit and imposture, in which a mangled boy (Zagreus), a wailing woman (Demeter), and mem- bers which modesty refuses to name, were adored.' Tertul- lian, Arnobius, Eusebius, and Firmicus make precisely the same statement. Widely, then, as these judgments of Greek, Roman, and Christian diverge, their contradiction is but apparent. Put all the statements together, keeping in mind the while the point of view occupied by each witness, and then the admiration and disgust, the praise and the blame, excited by the mysteries, the silence of one party, and the effusion of the other, wiU be perfectly intelligible. ORPHEUS AND HIS FOLLOWERS. A Thkacian hero, whom the Greeks used to contemplate under the name of Orpheus, as the representative of the oldest religious poetry belonging to the mythical period, is also pointed out as the originator and first founder of mysteries in general, and of the mythic rite of Dionysos in particular. Precisely where the mystery-system developed in its greatest luxuriance — in Athens, for instance — he occupies the position of a founder. The poets and orators of that place are unanimous in asserting that it was he who taught " the holy rites," and who revealed " unspeak- able mysteries ;" and therefore it was fitting that the daughter of Demeter should honour those who were intimately bound to Orpheus.^ This idea was attached to his name in the rest of Greece as well, as is shown by the testimony of Ephorus,^ by the wooden image of the hero preserved in the temple of the Eleusinian Demeter on Taygetus, and the figure of Telete, or the mystery-rite personified, which was placed at the side of his statue on Helicon.* 1 Clem. Alex. Protrept. pp. 13, 14, Totter. ' Demosth. Aristog. p. 773 ; Aristoph. Kan. 1032 ; Eurip. Ehes. 043 ; Plat. Protag. 316 D. ^ Ap. Diodor. v. 64. ^ Pausan. ill. 20, 5. OEPHEUS AND THE DIONYSOS WORSHIP. 139 The key too to the mythical stories generally circulated in Greece about Orpheus, his descent into Hades, and his tragical death at the hands of the Maenads, is to be found in his relation to the mysteries and the Dionysiac worship. According to the old worn-out notions current in Homer, deceased people led a gloomy, sorrowful, shadow-life in Hades. The good and the bad, the pious and the wicked, there dwelt together confusedly, without memory, until they tasted blood. Only special enemies of the gods there endured punishment ; and sundry favourites and sons of the gods were vouchsafed a blissful immortality in Elysium, an island of the western ocean. ' The state of the nether world was represented quite in a different way in the mysteries. Hope, as well as fear, was there profoundly stirred ; and whence was this knowledge derived, so directly opposed to the high authority of Homer ? No demand could be made of right upon the faith of people, unless the founder had seen what was going on below with his own eyes, and had brought the account of it back on his return to the living. Thus originated the myth of the descent of Orpheus into the lower regions ; his desire to sep his wife, and the hope of bringing her back with him, was made to serve as the occasion. The legend of the death of Orpheus by the hands of the Mseuads involves the record of an historical event — the contest which arose from the antagonism of two opposite rites belonging to the same deity. The worship of the wine-god, originating in Asia, had reached Thrace through Phrygian tribes settled on either side of the sea ; for in the earliest times the Phrygians formed the main stock of the population of Thrace and Mace- donia. This worship was a rite of tumultuous revelry, which hurried its adherents into wild, unbridled licentiousness, and ebriety destructive to reason. The god himself, according to the myth, having been long in a state of frenzy, there was a propriety in his throwing his worshipers iuto the same state; and the fury, which was the necessary consequence of excessive indulgence in wine, when it passed into an abiding madness, was considered as a revenge inflicted by the god, especially in the case of women, on which sex this worship must have had a particularly pernicious influence ; and that they were distin- guished in their devotion to the rite is proved by the traditions 1 Odyss. si. 475, 480, 568 sqq., 601. 140 THE MYSTERIES. regarding the female companies of Dionysos, the Bacchants and Maenads. The daughters of Minyas^ of Prcetus and Eleutherus, LeucippCj and Antiope, all owed their madness to the god ; and men must often have been indignant at a rite which taught then- wives and daughters to assume habitual drunkenness to he a state acceptable to the god, and extravagant contortions of the body and shameless nudity as an inspiration from him. Hence such traditions as the one in Argos, wherein the sun-worship which had come from Asia and was embodied in the hero Per- seus, resisted to blood the intrusion of the worship of Dionysos; and the graves of the female Bacchants who were slain in the con- flict were still exhibited in the days of Pausanias.^ The Pentheus saga points to a similar resistance and as sanguinary a quarrel taking place in Bceotia on the introduction of the new cultus. If then Orpheus was put to death by the Thracian women in the service of Bacchus, Maenads or Bassaridse, according to the tradition, it is beyond question a matter of a struggle be- tween two forms of cultus ; the latter of the two, the Orphic and mystical, endeavouring to thrust aside or to tone down the earlier wild and dissolute female rite. Almost all the accounts assign as the cause of his death the institution, or introduction by him into Thrace, of the mysteries ; which means, it was the anger of the god Dionysos, who would not be robbed of the Maenad cultus, hitherto his own, that brought destruction upon him ; or that he had been celebrating the orgies of Dionysos in a building appointed for the purpose, in company with the Thra- cian men, whereupon the women excluded by him, possessing themselves of the men^s arms, which had been left at the en- trance-door, hacked him in pieces and threw his remains into the sea.^ There was then a mystical rite of Dionysos that was celebrated by the men, which was opposed to the unbridled riot and license of that of the women. The laceration of Orpheus appears to be a later mythical embellishment, reminding one of Pentheus, and charging the manner of the god's death on the priests. Another tradition^ makes him out to have been slain by Zeus, in displeasure for his having revealed holy things in the mysteries, which ought to have been kept secret.* 1 Pausan. ii. 20. 3, 22. 1. s Conon. xlv. 3 I'niisan. ix. 30, 3 ; Diog. Laert. proosm. v. ■■ Tbe. statement of John of Salisbury, evidently drawn from an old and ORPHEUS AND THE DIONYSOS WORSHIP. 141 The country of the Cicones has been assigned as the theatre of the operations of Orpheus in founding the mysteries, and also of his death. It is situated on the southern coast of Thrace, and its most important town was Maronea, which, later on, received colonists from Chios as its inhabitants.^ In order to gain a point for history to rest on, the Ciconian Orpheus was made in the sequel into two distinct personages ; one of whom, the eldest, was son of JEagros ; the other, the younger by about eleven genera- tions, was the founder of the mysteries.^ The mysteries in ex- istence amongst the Cicones, and therefore of course in Maronea, Diodorus ranks in the same category with the Samothracian and Eleusinian, but in such a way as to admit all to have resembled those solemnised in Crete, and to have borne a strong resemblance to one another in essentials.^ In reality a very old colony, start- ing from Crete, and candying with it the culture of the grape and the worship of Dionysos, sat itself down in Thrace, and in now apparently lost source (Polycrat. i. 6), that the mothers of the Ciconian husbands, abetted by their daughters-iu-law, murdered Orpheus because he had made the husbands eifeminate by his rites, means no more than that the milder Orphic worship of Dionysos had attempted to put down the earlier rough and wild worship of the Thracians. If Phanocles (ap. Stob. serm. Ixiv.) and Ovid (Met. i. 83) attribute the vengeance taken by the women of Thrace on Orpheus to the introduction of pffiderastia by him, this seems to me to confirm the Cretan origin of the Orphic mysteries ; for the love of boys was a crime very early naturalised, nay organised, so to say, in Crete, the introduction of which Aristotle (Pol. ii. 10) ascribes to Minos ; and the propagation of which in Hellas Timieus (ap, Athen. xiii. 79, p. 602) attributes to the Cretans generally. This immorality may have made its way there from Thrace, together with the Orphico-Dionysic ivorship. Because of the contradiction of Bode (Gesch. der Hellen. Dichtkunst, i, 110) and others, I must not leave unmentioned that they are quite the earlier authorities who fix the theatre of the operations or the death of Orpheus in the land of the Cicones, and therefore in the neighbourhood of Maronea. See Diodor. (v. 77), Aristot. (Epitaph. 46), the Orphean Argonautica (ver. 78), besides Eustath. ad Homer. 696, 847 ; Mela, ii. 2, 8 ; Solin. 10 ; Marcian. Capella, vi. p. 557. Strabo however (p. 330) makes Pimplea in Thessaly his dwelling-place; and a proverb in Pausanias locates his grave near the very early destroyed Libethra in Pieria, on Mount Olympus, and this has been often repeated. That an old and veiy renowned hero Uke Orpheus should have sagas about him in various spots of ancient Thrace is natural; but the establishment of the Orphic mysteries is, for Thrace, unmistakably bound up with the Ciconian land and people. ' Herodot. vii. 109 ; Hymn. 675. ' Eustath. ad lUad. 359, 15. ' Lobeck finds fault with Mm for this, as there were no more Cicones in existence in his tiine. Certainly the inhabitants of the country were no longer so called, yet it was quite natural that Diodorus should have used the name in order to direct attention to the antiquity of the mysteries there, they in fact having passed from the Cicones to the later inhabitants. 143 THE MYSTERIES. fact just at Maronea ; of wHcli place, and of the cultivation of the vine in the neighbourhood, Maron was reckoned the founder. Homer mentions him as a priest of Apollo, and as having excel- lent wine,' and the ancients represent him as a son of the Cretan Ariadne and of Dionysos, or of the Cretan CEaopion, the man of wine, or of the Cretan Evanthe, banished by Rhadamanthus, and therefore a descendant of ^nopion, as well as of Dionysos him- self; and he then symbolised in his own person the introduction of the culture of the grape, and the rite of Dionysos connected with it, from Crete into the country of the Cicones.^ ^Eschylus has given another turn to the death of Orpheus, — that Dionysos in his wrath sent the Bassaridse against the seer, and had him torn in pieces by them, because Orpheus had not worshiped him as the greatest of the gods, but Helios, whom he also denominates Apollo. ^ There is no contradiction here of the generally-received notion of Orpheus as a minister of Dionysos ; but a corroboration of the fact that the spread of a new mystical rite was connected with the name of Orpheus. As a conse- quence of the blending that had taken place in Crete of the Egyptian Osiris with the Thraco- Grecian wine-god, the Orphic Dionysos had certainly become a solar deity, and therefore He- lios, and so he was termed in the Orphic writings.* This notion is borne out by some few of the local rites, as also by the expres- sions of poets and philosophers. The Eleans honoured Dionysos, who was generally the god they treated with the highest rever- ence, as the sun j^ while at Rhodes, where in earlier times the worship of Helios and Apollo had been quite distinct, at a later period Apollo, Helios, and Dionysos, passed for one and the same deity.^ A poem bearing the name of Eumolpus, and there- 1 Odyss. ix. 197. 2 Schol. Apollon. iii. 997 ; Pausan. vii. i, 6 ; Diodor. v. 7 9, — where, instead of " Euambes," according to Wesseling's generally-received emendation, we must read "Evanthes." Diodorus (i. 18, 20), following one of the old Creto-Egyptiaii sagas, which ascribes the migrations of Dionysos to Osiris, converts Maron into an attendant of the latter, who leaves him behind in Thrace, as an experienced cultivator of the grape, to found Maronea, just as he set Triptolemus over Attica and its agriculture. There is nothing more expressed in this,, than that the Cretan worship of Dionysos, after being modified by the engrafting on it of cer- tain Egyptian features taken from Osiris, was imported into this part of Greece. '■> Eratosth. Catast. xxiv. 4 Vide the passages in Lobeck, Aglaoph. i. 400, 498. 5 Etymol. Magn. s. v. Aiina-os, ^ Dio Chrys. Or. xxxi. p. 365, Emper. ORPHIC EELATIONS OF DEITIES. 143 fore belonging to the mystery-set, styled him the " star-bright god, with ray-crowned face of fire."' The Apollo, however, who was either nearly akin to Dionysos, and thereby to Helios, or really identical with him, was not the ordinary Achaeo-Doric son of Leto, but the Cretan one, whose worship was transplanted from thence to the ancient Cretan colony of Crissa in Phocis, and afterwards to the neighbourhood of Delphi. Homer and Hesiod were not acquainted with him. This ApoUo was a son of Corybas, and, through this father of his, the son of Cybele and the Arcad-Samothracic-Cretan Jasion,^ in closest relations with the cultus of the Asiatic great-mother of the gods, as he himself again was converted into the father of the Corybantes (the Curetes of Crete), sometimes conceived to be demon-creatures, at other times only mortals and priests of Cybele. He was accordingly an original production in Crete of the cultus of Rhea, or Cybele, introduced thither from Phrygia. The Phrygian Attes-Sabazius was not radically distinct from him, and hence this particular Apollo was near of kin to the Dionysos of Crete, who, on his side, was formed by blending Osiris with the Phrygian Attes or Corybas. Both deities, by virtue of their descent and origin, had a solar character, which appears to have been originally quite as foreign to that of the Homeric and Achseo-Doric Apollo, on the one side, as to that of the Greek god of the grape, Dionysos, on the other. Both were coupled together as having relation to the sun, Apollo as being the sun above, or god of hght to the upper hemisphere, Dionysos the sun of the world below, or god of the lower hemisphere.^ One can see, then, how the Maron we have alluded to was at the same time a priest of this Apollo and of Dionysos, and how easy it was for both to be fused into one deity of the sun, Helios. Thus is cleared up the close connection between the worship Df Apollo and Dionysos at Delphi, which had received its ApoUo- TOrship from Crete. There the sepulchre of Dionysos was close to ;he tripod of the Pythian Apollo ; there the entire holy place was consecrated to the two deities, and sacrifice was oflPered to both. Every year the Thyades coming out of Attica, and uniting with he women of Delphi, solemnised the orgies of the two gods in ioncert on the top of Parnassus.* At Phlya in Attica also people = Diodor.i.n. =Il)id. V. 49. 3 Macrob. Sat. i. 18. 4 Paus. x. 4. 2, 32. 5. 144 THE MYSTERIES. worshiped an ApoUo, " the gift of Dionysos." Hence both gods interchanged their own peculiar attributes. The great resemblance between the Dionysic oracle of the Thracians and that of the Apollo of Delphi was striking even to Herodotus in his time. The Orpheus of ^Eschylus would thus be a stranger to the worship of the frantic wine-god Dionysos. He served instead Helios, whose cultus ia the mysteries that had originated in Crete was equivalent to that of Apollo and Dionysos together as solar deities ; the one as the higher star, or that of the day, the other the lower one of the night, or lower world ; and in fact Macrohius has expressly told us that the signification of the two was carefuUy observed in the mysteries. Hence, by degrees, the double and correlative idea, that Apollo was Helios, and that he was iden- tical with Dionysos, spread abroad from the mysteries. Thus Euripides had already given Apollo the name of Bacchus, and the theological Aristotle had explained Apollo and Dionysos to be one and the same deity. ' Orpheus therefore, or the school of priests which seems t^ be personified in his name, imported the new Dionysic cultus from Crete into Thrace. He had been, it is said, in Crete a dis- ciple of the Idsean Dactyli, who were either the body of priests consecrated to the service of the great mother of the gods, whose home was the Phrygian Ida, or else the portion of the old Cretan inhabitants who in their migration from Phrygia had brought that worship into the island ; for the name of Dactyli had a consi- derably extensive ramification.^ According to another account, Orpheus had been in Egypt also, and had provided himself with the religious knowledge that could be there acquired.^ What is matter of fact in this tradition is this, that the peculiar religious doctrine which the Orphic school of priests transplanted in the form of mystery from Crete into Thrace, and thence into Hellas, received a shape from the combination of the doctrine of the Egyptian Osiris with the Phrygian worship of the island. The cultus of the great nature- goddess, the Phrygian Cyhele, was not distinguishable in essentials from that of the Cretan Ehea; it spread over the whole of Asia Anterior, and was coupled with the worship of a male deity, who, under the names of Corybas, Attes, or Sabazius, appears as minister and favourite, or else as son of the goddess. "When inserted into Greek my- ' In Macrob. Sat. i. 18. " Eplior. ap. Diodor. v. 64. " Diodor. iv. 26. ORPHIC RELATIONS OF DEITIES. 145 thology, this god became identified with Zeus as son of Cronos sometimes ; at others, and most frequently, he was changed into Dionysos, or at least his son;' but originally he was the moun- tain god of the Phrygians, was honoured with special devotion in Thrace as the sun-god, and, as lord of natural moisture, was called Hyes. He was also the generative fruit-maturing power of na- ture, and as symbol of its annual decay, the self-enervating god, or the god driven to self-enervation by the great goddess of earth and nature. He too had orgies in his honoiir, which, being quite distinct from those of the Thraco-Grecian wine-god, had nothing to do with the Msenad rite. In Crete this god passed for a son of Zeus and Persephone, the Dionysos Zagreus. In essentials he did not differ from the Syrian and Cyprian Adonis, who was likewise vegetative nature personified, and at the same time the star to which all increase and growth is owing, namely, the sun. Now Adonis on one side was held by many to be identical with Dionysos, and this identity, according to Plutarch's observation,^ was confirmed by the cor- respondence in their religious rites ; on the other, so closely was he connected with the Egyptian Osiris, that he was even honoured under that title at Amathus in Cyprus with a cultus brought from Egypt ; that in Byblus, the head-quarters of Adonis-worship, people asserted that the sepulchre of Osiris had been rediscovered there, and that the Alexandrines, at a later period, taught a mystic union of the two deities, worshiping in consequence Adonis and Osiris together under one idol.' Now Attys, or Sabazius, in Asia Anterior, was by no means the god of wiue, just as little as Osiris was so in Egypt, where a god of the grape and of drunkenness was not known at all ; but in Crete these deities blended together with Dionysos, who thereby became quite a different being from the old Thracian god, and the god of the fields and flocks who was worshiped in Hellas, at the Ascolia and Anthesteria. The tradition that Diony- sos had gone in a state of madness to Rhea, or Cybele, in Asia Anterior, that she had purified and healed and initiated him in her orgies, is in this regard as significant as it is instructive. What happened to the rite was transferred to the god, as was often the case; and the fact, stripped of its mythic veil, amounts ' Orph. Hymn. 49 ; Hesyoh. s.v. Sabazios. '^ Sympos. VI. 5 (vol. viii. fi07, ed. Eeislte). ^ Suidas, 9.V. Heraiscus. 146 THE MYSTERIES. to this, — that the cultus of the Thraco-Boeotian wine-god had been metamorphosed in essentials by the Phrygian one of Cybele and of Attys ; for the orgies of the latter were, as has been observed, very different from the Baechic: violent, passionate excitement, and the giving way to physical emotions, powerfully inflamed and artificially increased, occurred here and there. But the violence against one's own person, usual in the Phry- gian cultus, mutilation and enervation of self, found no place in the old Bacchic orgies; women were the principal agents, who, as Maenads under the influence of wine, surrendered them- selves to the wildest debaucheries. Dionysos now became a son of Khea, in whose cultus "the Bacchus-cries blend with the swelling tones of Phrygian flutes," and he the while, " high above on Ida, with his mother (E-hea Cybele), rejoices in the fanfar of the trumpets. "^ So strong, however, is the resemblance that the Orphic Dionysos bears to the Egyptian Osiris, that he must be con- sidered as the fac-simile of the other. In his Egyptian signifi- cations, as the generative and fructifying principle of nature generally, Osiris was also sun-god, just like Adonis; in par- ticular as god of the departed, as ruler and judge of the realm of the dead, the sun of the lower world. He was treacherously murdered by his enemy and brother, the Typhon-Set, and his body hewn in pieces. His death and sufferings were solemnly represented in mystic show in Egypt, and, as it appears, all the mysteries celebrated at different places in the Nile-country were more or less indebted to him and his fate for their leading fea- tures.^ Osiris, again, was the bull Apis, into whose body his soul migrated, and so came to be honoured as the bidl, and to be re- presented Tvith a bull's head. Horus, in fine, was nothing but an Osiris made young again into a fighting but victorious champion. The Osiris tradition was of such antiquity there, and, as is proved from inscriptions, so widely spread,^ that an importation of it from Hellas is not to be thought of. On the contrary, the myth of the Orphic Dionysos, or Zagreus, must be held to be an Hellenic copy of the Egyptian. Nevertheless, in the case of Isis an importation of the kind did take place later on, and her Egyptian tradition was trimmed up with some few traits > Eurip. ap. Strabo. p. 470 (684-5, Oxf.). 2 Lepsiua iiber den Mgypt. Gotterkreis, in the Berlin Acad. Abhandlg. 1851, p. 102. s ii-ij. ORPHIC RELATIONS OF DEITIES. 147 borrowed from the Greek Demeter, in the time of Alexander. Hence, doubtless, it came to pass that features quite un-Egyp- tian, such as the invention of the cultivation of the grape, were imputed to Osiris himself in a later account.' Originally, therefore, Dionysos Zagreus belonged to the Cre- tan reUgious creed. Eui'ipides makes a choir of Cretan priests say they were devotees of the Idsean Zeus, and Zagreus of the night. An author of the fourth century has communicated the tradition of him found in the Euhemeristic dress of the older Cretan fabulists, from whom Diodorus^ had already extracted a very similar one. Dionysos is a son of the Cretan king Zeus, begotten in adultery. The father, when setting out on a journey, had intrusted his throne and sceptre to the youth. But Hera, his step-mother, enticed the child away with a mirror and play- things, till he was out of reach of the protection of the palace, whereupon her servants, the Titans, put him to death, hewed him in pieces, boiled his limbs, and consumed them. The heart alone was saved by his sister Athene, and restored to her father on his return, who killed the Titans, and enclosed the heart in a plaster image resembling the child. The Cretans since then celebrated the trieteric festivals, in which all that Zagreus had done and suffered was imitated ; a living bull was torn by the teeth, and the chest in which the sister hid the heart was carried about^ with orgiastic rites. Diodorus also informs us, that, according to the traditions of the Cretans, the divine child was born in their island ; and that Zeus had begotten him of his own daughter Persephone, whom he had overpowered under the form of a serpent.^ There, then, the fate of Osiris was that of Zagreus. What Typhon and his seventy-two conspirators perpetrate on the Egyptian, that the earth-born Titans execute on the other ; and as the Ethiopic queen is the instigatrix of the murder in the one case, so is Hera in the other. Both by their death become gods of the lower world, so that Hesychius explains the name Zagreus as simply identical with Dionysos Chthonios.' As the bull Apis was honoured as Osiris, who through that animal had received an abiding habitation among mortals, so among the ' In Porphyry de Abst. iv. 19 (p. 365, Elioer.). 2 i. 17-3n. " Firmio. Mat. de Error, prof. rel. c. yi. p. 08, OeMer. ■» Diodor. v. 75. = Lex. i, 1573, Albert. 148 THE MYSTERIES. Greeks Dionysos was frequently figured as a bull, or at least with a builds horns, directly addressed as the bull, and as such invoked.! Mnaseas explained Epaphos, the Greek expression for Apis, as a synonym of Dionysos, as well as of Osiris and Serapis ; ^ and if Diodorus asserts this Dionysos, the son of Zeus and Persephone, or Demeter, to be the same who first taught how to yoke the plough with oxen,^ this must be taken as an Euhemeristic interpretation of his being represented with bull's horns. With the like genuine Euhemerism, Diodorus only ad- mits Dionysos to have been deified on account of the greatness of that benefit to mankind. The mangled remains of the god were possibly deposited at Delphi, the close connection of which place with Crete has been already remarked upon. Philochorus, writing about the year 306 b.c, speaks of the sepulchre of Dio- nysos as to be found there in the temple of Apollo, under the tripod of that god : here the five Hosioi (hallowed ministers) offered him a secret sacrifice, and the Thyades "waked" the dead Dionysos Liknites, of whom the euphemistic expression " he sleeps" was used. This surname he took from the fan, which has the same meaning in his case as in that of Osiris, where Isis collected the scattered members of her husband in a fan.* In Crete itself, the mysteries relating to the fate of Zagreus were solemnised in Phrygian orgic fashion — a living bull was torn in pieces by the teeth. In the carrying about of the chest, and in the noisy wailing for the god's death, the partakers iu the orgies behaved like frantic people,^ as the Asiatics did in the Attis and Adonis solemnity. Attempts have been made to refer this legend of the laceration of Dionysos to a later date, principally because of the assertion of Pausanias, that the Orphic poet Onomacritus (about 520-485 B.C.) was the first to ascribe the origination of the suffering in- flicted on Zagreus to the Titans. But if Pausanias did not know any older poet who had named the Titans as the actors, surely this would only prove at the most, that this part of the tradition before Onomacritus had not yet made its way from the mysteries into public circulation and into poetry : the tradition itself is certainly much older ; and Terpander had already made mention of a Dionysos who was son of Zeus and Persephone." The tomb 1 Atlien. ii. 7, p. 476. 2 Fragra. Hist. Gr. ed. Didot, iii. 155, 87. ' Diod. iii. 61. •• Serv. ad Georg. i. 166. •'' Firmio. 1. c. p. 6P. " Hook's Kretn, iii. 184. ORPHIC MYSTEEY- SCHOOL. 149 at Delphi, and the general acceptance by the Greeks, and by Herodotus himself, of the fact of Dionysos being the Egyptian Osiris, go to corroborate the higher antiquity of the Zagreus fable j for the Grecian wine-god, it is clear, could not have been assumed to be identical with Osiris ; inasmuch as the Egyptians would have been just the last to think that it reflected much honour on their highest and best god to have attributed to him the invention of wiue, a beverage they esteemed evil and impure.' It was, then, the mystery-doctrLue of the dismemberment of Dionysos, and the correlative idea of him, as god of the under-world, which autho- rised this identification. Herodotus, who only lived some few decennia later than Onomacritus, says^ the Egyptians hold Dio- nysos with Demeter (he meant Isis) to be gods of the nether world. Had he not in that instance had the Zagreus-shape, which Dionysos assumes in the mysteries, in his eye, he would have more probably interpreted Osiris, who is ordinarily repre- sented with the ithyphallus amongst the Egyptians, to be the Greek Hermes. ^Eschylus too styles this under-world god Za- greus ;2 and an earlier writer than they or Onomacritus, Phere- cydes (about 544 b.c), must have been already acquainted with the myth; for his Ophioneus, the serpent-god, who was issue of the loves of Zeus and Chthonia (Persephone), and acted as leader in a battle of the gods, but was worsted,* is in every cir- cumstance a close approximation to the Zagreus born of Per- sephone from her intercourse with Zeus in form of a serpent. Lastly, it was also perfectly well known at Delphi that the Lik- nites, there buried and honoured, was no other than Osiris ; for Plutarch tells Clea, " she, as high -priestess of the Delphic Thyades, and as having been already initiated by her father and mother in the worship of Osiris (meaning that her father as Hosios, and her mother as Thyad, had been in the service of Dionysos Liknites), could not but have known this right well."^ The Cretans saw an evidence of the high antiquity of their mystery-rite in the fact, that whatever was observed and com- municated as secret worship in the mystery-discipline amongst the Cicones (or their successors) in Thrace, at Samothrace, and in the Eleusinia, the same was with them openly exhibited, and ' Jablonaky, Pantheon iEgypt. i. 130. " Herodot. ii. 12)). ^ Etymol. Gud. p. 227; Max. Tyr. x. i. * Max. Tyr. x. 4. * Pint, de Isid. xxxv. p. 59, Parthey. 150 THE MYSTERIES, every one was admitted thereto, without further condition.^ This public celebration of the mysteries consisted in the already- mentioned representation of the Zagreus myth ; and it will be shown at greater length below how far the same event entered into the secret rite at Samothrace and the Eleusinia at Athens. So, in the territory of the old Cicones at Maronea, there existed a mystery- institute akin to the Cretan, and, according to the legend, brought thither by Orpheus from Crete; not indeed men- tioned elsewhere, but the existence and transplantation of which receives a corroborative testimony from the legend in question, according to which the Dionysic cultus was brought, along with the use of the vine, from Crete to Maronea (or Ismaros). Accordingly the Greek mystery-system represents itself as an institute having its first rise in Crete, whence it was trans- ferred at the same time to Thrace and to HeUas (Delphi), and again extended its influence back upon the neighbouring islands, Lemnos and Samothrace^ as well as to Athens. This transplan- tation could not, of course, have been the work of one man, since nothing historically tenable can be asserted about the my- thical personaUty of Orpheus ; it was a priest-class, or a school of priests, the Orphic, which was the receptacle of the mystery- rite j and again, this institute was the stay and prop on which the Orphic succession proceeded, and the bond which embraced the individual members and kept them together. Herodotus understood the terms Orphici and Pythagorici as denominations of the same school or class. The latter, who, since the dispersion of their association in Magna Grsecia (about 500 B.C.), began to spread in Hellas, appropriated the Orphic or Bacchic traditions and religious views; and it appears that much that had hitherto been transmitted through the mysteries, and the circle of priests connected with them, now first, in the main from the time of jEschylus, passed into the literature of the land, and became the common property of the higher educated class. Assuredly the Pythagoreans were not the originators of the Orphi-Bacchic creed ■? this they found already in existence and possessed themselves of, being determined thereto princi- pally by the doctrine of immortality, so important to them, for ■ Diod. V. 77. 2 As Brandis (Gesoh. d. Grieoh. Philos. i. 55 sqq.) and lobeck (Aglaopli. i. paBsim) agree in thinking. OEPHIC RULE or LIFE. 151 which they required a religious warranty and foundatiouj which the popular and epic creeds did not supply, and which they only could find in the Orphi-Dionysic religion. For if even the elder Orphici had not already themselves received the doctrine of the migration of souls from Egypt, and embodied it in their traditions, still there was room left in them for that purpose, as this doctrine could easily have been included in the Zagreus- myth. The oldest Orphic priest of whom history makes mention was the Cretan Epimenides, the minister of atonement, who was called to Athens, about the year 612 B.C., to release state and people from the guilt of Cylon's bloodshed, and to free them from its consequence, the plague. His Orphic style of life, the knowledge of mysteries attributed to him, together with the testimony that he himself was a Cures, and had poetised the genesis of the Curetes and Corybantes, all contribute to prove that he came out of the Egypto-Phrygian and Cretan mystery- college already iu existence on his own island. His invitation points at the same time to the old intercourse between Attica with Crete, of which, in a religious potut of view, the mysteries practised in both places were doubtless the medium. Whether or not Pythagoras was himself initiated in the Orphic mysteries, at Libethra, by the priest Aglaophamus, must remain rmdecided, as the account is a very late one. The oldest Pythagorean known to have been of the Orphic school was Cercops. After him came Brontinus, and particularly the above-mentioned Ono- macritus^ who composed oracles at Athens for political purposes, and is said to have been a prolific parent of Orphic doctrinal poems and hymns. The " mysteries,"' containing the legend of Zagreus, and composed or collected and arranged by him, was the most famous poem of the kind. With the Orphic theology a rule of life, also called Orphic, was connected; and its precepts of prohibition and abstinence were also communicated in the mysteries. Hence the state- ment of Diogenes : " Pythagoras («. e. the Pythagorean college) has enjoined to avoid all those things which the priests are ac- customed to forbid in the functions of the mysteries in the temples." As such forbidden things, he enumerates specially the contact of corpses, and of women during their delivery, ^ Pausan. viii. 37, where the word used is 6pyta (Tr.). 152 THE MYSTERIES. whereby man would become polluted and impure; next, the use of flesh that has been gnawed by beasts, or that of dead ani- mals, certain fishes, eggs, and beans.i All these prohibitions in- volved a religious principle that was imparted in "' holy legends.'' When, further, it is there asserted that the doctrine, " People must honour the gods by purity," is Pythagorean, — such purity being something entirely external, to be effected by ablutions and aspersions, — this too was plainly a doctrine, not invented by Pythagoras, but borrowed from the mystery-institutes them- selves ; and the rule of life was the same which the choir of Cre- tan priests, initiated in the mysteries there, describes in Euripides : ■'I lead a purer life since I became initiate of Idsean Zeus and of the nightly Zagreus, since I consummated the repast of raw meat" (the tearing of the Dionysic bull, and the tasting of his flesh), "and bore the torches of Cybele, mother of mountains; since my induction as a priest of the Curetes, clothed in sheeny vestment, I flee the birth of mortal, and touch not the coffin, and renounce all tasting of that which has life."^ Not to kill living creatures, and to live only on non- animal food, was a precept founded on the doctrine of migration of souls ; and many of the Orphic body never took flesh-meat more after having tasted of the flesh of the bull of the mysteries. Hence the same tragic poet makes Theseus say scornfully to his son, who is re- presented as being of the Orphic persuasion, " Do thou, then, play the cheat with thy starving meal of lifeless food, and be the bacchant, with Orpheus for thy king."^ Lastly, to all appear- ance, the prohibition of woollen garments, or at least against entering a temple in a dress of the kind, or allowing oneself to be buried in woollen, considered by Herodotus to be Egyp- tian, and at the same time Orplii-Bacchic or Pythagorean, was introduced into Hellas from Egypt by way of Crete, with some other peculiarities of the Osiris worship. In the same way, the Pythagorean prohibition of beans was an Orphic one from Egypt (where the priests dared not even look at that veget- able, so impure was it held),* and was also inculcated in the ' Diog. Laert. viii. 33. ^ Ap. Porphjr. de Abst. iv. 10. p. 365, Ehoer. ^ Si' aiJ'lJxo" iSupas ^irois KOTr^Xeu', n. t. A. Eurip. Hippol. 952 (Oxf.) ; see Lidd. and Scott Lex. s. v. Koirr)A.eiiw ; or as in the German, " Sadden thy meal with lifeless food," (tc. " Herod, ii. 37. THE ZAGREUS MYTH. 153 mysteries. There was an Orphic verse to this eifect : " A man must shun the eating of a bean, as much as if it were his own father's head."' There is no evidence to the effect, that at any one time there existed a regularly -formed association of Orphici in Greece. Those who bore that title were priests or ministers of the secret worship celebrated in a number of places ; or they were follow- ers of the Pythagorean school, that class of the Pythagoreans which, in the flourishing times of the sect, turned its thoughts more especially towards religious matters, and was distinct from the other two classes of " politici" and " speculativi."^ The Zagreus myth, forming the pith and nucleus of the Orphic doctrine, has been already mentioned in its Cretan Eu- hemeristic dress ; but as it is of decided importance in the un- derstanding of the mysteries, it must be once again the subject of our consideration here. Dionysos Zagreus, the son of Zeus and Persephone, the darling child of the father, and loaded with distinctions by him, sat enthroned by his side, and already •hmied the lightning, while Apollo and the Curetes kept watch over him to shield him from Hera's malice. Nevertheless Hera succeeded in the destruction of the child by means of the Titans, whom she instigated to the deed. Creeping softly into the apartment, their dark faces whitened with clay, they lured the child with some gaudy playthings, and, falling upon him sud- denly, overpowered him. It was in vain he resisted, and tried to escape their murderous hands by metamorphosing himself in various ways. They tore him in pieces, boiled his members in a caldron, and devoured him. Thereupon Zeus swallowed the heart of his son, that had been saved by Athene, from which he conceived seed for the procreation of the second, or Theban, Dio- nysos. At the bidding of Zeus, Apollo collected all that remained of the body of Zagreus, and interred it ; but Rhea, or Demeter (who was his mother, according to another legend^), again united the remains, and imparted life to them, and thus, according to one of the myths, a rejuvenescent Dionysos then arose. Out of the ashes of the Titans, whom Zeus destroyed by lightning, men ' Heraolid. ap. Lydum de Mens. p. 76 j Clem. Alex. Strom, iii. 435. ^ According to tlie division into trefiaiTTtKoi, ttoKitmoI, and /ia97)fioTi/to(. Vita Pyt^g. ap. Photium Biblioth. 249, p. 438, ed. Bekker. ^TDiodor. iii. 63, 154 THE MYSTERIES. were formed, who from thence inherited the good and the bad, the Dionysic and Titanic nature.^ The Orphici, at least the later ones, interpret the mangling of the little god, and his previous metamorphoses into aU ele- ments, in a pantheistic sense. The deity, says Plutarch, is in truth immutable and everlasting by nature; but has complacency in its variations of itself, and becomes what man calls universe, by assuming different forms, conditions, and powers, and deve- loping variety. As, further, according to the Orphic myth, man was formed of the substance of Dionysos mixed with Ti- tanic matter, that would seem to explain the ethical dualism in man, and the admixture of good and bad in him ; man would then feel himself, as it were, related by blood to Dionysos; and the radical meaning and intention latent in the zealous cultus of this deity, which was principally pursued in this Orphic college, may have been that man thereby should foster and nourish the Dionysic divine germ preexisting in him; whilst, on the other side, according to Orphic tradition, the sufferings and misery of mortals were a consequence of their Titanic, or sin-laden ori- ginal ; and souls dwelt in bodies as in prisons or sepulchres,^ to purge away all the guilt of their earlier being ; for which reason no one ought arbitrarily to shorten the period of his earthly puri- fication from Titanic sin-stains by suicide— a doctrine extracted by Philolaus from " the old theologians and seers," by Plato and Jamblichus from the mysteries. Here, at once, questions arise which are to be immediately answered : What mysteries were these ? what was the nature of the Orphic secret rites as a permanent institute? how did the Orphic rites stand towards the mysteries which existed as state- institutions ? To answer these, a survey of the different forms of the Dionysic worship in Hellas wiU be first required. No god had such numerous festivals as Dionysos, and festi- vals of joy, for the most part, celebrated with extravagant plea- sure and jubilant revelry. The little, or country, Dionysia were solemnised with phallic songs, banquets, and dramatic entertain- ments, at the approach of the vintage. In winter, after they 1 Clem. Alex. Protrept. p. 11 ; Norm. Dionys. vi. See the passages collected by Lobeck, Aglaoph. 553-592, 2 Plat. Cratyl. p. 400; Phisclon, p. 02 B ; Philolaus, ap. Clem. Alex. Stroip, ii. 518; Eusitheus, ap. Athen. iv. p. 157; Jamblich. Protr. viii. p. 63, ed. 1598v* DIONTSIA. 155 were done with the wine-press, the Lensea were celebrated at Athens by tasting of the sweet must, with a great banquet and a festal procession, accompanied with banter and ridicule and thea- trical representations as well. It is not clear whether the Am- brosia,! the name of which festival seems to have reference to sweet must, was on the same day with the Lenaea or a different one. The Anthesteria, or Dionysic flower-feast, was held during three days in the early spring. It consisted of the feast-day of the opening of casks (Pithoigia), the drinkmg-feast (Choes), and the pot-feast (Chutroi). On the Choes, which was the holiest day, the wife of the archon of Athens, in company with fourteen priestesses, offered a secret sacrifice for the state, and then was symbohcally betrothed to the god. On the third day a sacrifice was ofiered in earthen vessels to the under-ground Hermes, and to the souls of those who perished in Deucalion's flood.^ All thronged to Athens at the end of March or beginning of April, to the solemnity of the great or urban Dionysia, which were kept in state, with shows and processions, choirs of youths, and con- tests of tragic and comic poets. In times of ancient simplicity the procession consisted of a pitcher of wine, a he- goat, a basket of dried figs, and the phallus. Latterly there was a great deal of splendour. Golden baskets were borne by beautiful maidens, the phalli by young men crowned with flowers ; these were followed by men in women's clothes, singing phallic songs, and behaving themselves like drunkards. Last came the men with wine-skins and huge drinking-vessels.^ In the other Greek countries and cities the Dionysia were in part simple wine-feasts of unlicensed excess, without any mys- tical rites, as at Hermione in Argolis, where they were celebrated by musical games, and contests of swimming and rowing ;* the feast Thuion in Elis, where sealed vessels used to be miraculously filled with wine ; and that at Pellene, where vessels (for mixing) were placed full of wine all about the city. The observance of the Dionysic festival Skieria, at Alea in Arcadia, was of more importance, where, according to an injunction of the Delphic oracle, women were scourged in the temple of the god, probably to inspire a terrifying remembrance of an earlier Msenad mad- 1 Schol. ad Hesiod. Op. et Dies, 5t)4. 2 Schol. Ailstoph. Aoham. 900, 1075. ^ Aristopli. Aoham. 242, and Schol. v. 260; ^lian. Ynr. H. vi. 1; Athen. 14, 10' p. 622. 1 Paua. ii. 35. 1. 156 THE MYSTERIES. ness ;i then at Orchomenos, where a nocturnal feast was kept hy women and priests, in which search was made for the god, who had disappeared, and to escape the Titans, or some such enemy of his worship as Lycurgus, had hidden with the Muses ; and the priest pursued a maiden selected for sacrifice.^ On the other hand, at Sicyon and Corinth corresponding feasts were solem- nised in honour of a double Dionysos of opposite attributes, the one as Bacchus, the other as Lysius, — the one the inspirer of Maenad violence, and the other of gentle calm. The numberless triennial festivals of Dionysos retained throughout the wild orgic character of the old Thracian Mienad rite. The women kept these by annual excursions to the moun- tains, where they then spent the nights by torch-light in the exciting dance, and a state always graduating, under the influ- ence of wine, to a higher pitch of licentiousness ; and this was the Theban practice on the adjoining mountain Cithseron, and of the Delphian and Attic women in common on Parnassus, though there in a more subdued form. The cultus of Dionysos Omestes at Chios and Tenedos was quite a deviation from the other Dionysic rites, for human sacri- fices were offered to him on these islands adjacent to the Asiatic coast.2 Here it was the Phenician Baal Moloch, bearing the name Dionysos ; and hence the Cretan Talos was also designated as his son, being himself of solar nature, and nearly connected with Mo- loch.* Itj after the victory of the Hellenes over the Persians, Themistocles had that remarkable sacrifice of Persian prisoners slain to honour Dionysos Omestes, a god not worshiped elsewhere in Greece hitherto, that must be considered as having happened entirely from his desire to do honour to the stranger god, who belonged to a country subject to the Persian sway, in the manner practised on the spot, and to make him propitious to the Greeks. Thus, then, we find no real Dionysic mysteries any where in Greece, if we mean by the term an institution such as the Eleu- sinian and Samothracian, where people had first to be instructed and initiated in order to be partakers afterwards in the religious arcana. In many instances the Dionysos rite was celebrated by 1 Paus. viii, 23, 1. ^ Plut. Quaast. Bom. xii. ; Qusest. Groec. xxsviii. 3 Porpli.vr. de Abstiii. ii. 55. ■* Scho). ApoUon. Arg. iii. 977, where " Tauropolos" is TaJos, according to the explanation of Osanp (Ehein. Mua. 1835, p. 2il sqq,). THE OBPHEOTBLESTS. 157 women only. Others, it is true, were observed with ceremonies considered secret, as the sacrifice by the Hosii at Delphi ; still, nowhere was there an institute simply based upon the Dionysic cultus on which the Orphici might have engrafted their ritual and dogmatic communications. Even the Bacchanalia, which made their appearance about the year 186 B.C. in Etruria, and afterwards at Eome, had no Orphic, and especially no doctrinal ingredients, but were of a merely ritual character. First esta- bhshed by a Greek priest in Etruria, they were like the trieterica in Greece, only intended for women at their commencement. It was a Campanian priestess at Rome who first introduced the ad- mission of men, and these nocturnal mixed assemblies thereupon became places of disgraceful debauchery, unnatural sensuality, and bloody crimes. After the times of the Peloponnesian war, notice of the Or- pheotelestai, or the initiated of Orpheus, occurs in Greece. They belonged to no established or exclusive company, but standing aloof professed the practice of the Orphi-Bacchic rites on their own account. Provided with Orphic books, and amongst them particularly the secret formulae written or collected by Onoma- critus, they went from town to town tendering their services for pay to rich and poor in matters of expiation and of healing. Their rites delivered from all penalty of crime, even that which was in- herited from ancestors, secured against dangers, and helped to the attainment of a blissful life, and high dignity in the world below. There was nothing arduous, no severe abstinences required ; on the contrary, it was the custom to accomplish these expiations and other rites amid amusements and festivities, dancing, and the mimicry of the drunkenness of the Sileni.^ Many of these jug- glers, — whose tricks, in spite of their being ridiculed in many ways in the theatre, were eagerly sought after, and paid for, even by those who laughed at them, — appear to have declared one single recourse to their rites as sufficient, whilst others recom- mended a frequent repetition of them, or urged it as absolutely necessary. Theophrastus^ describes his superstitious man as going every month with wife and children to the Orpheotelests to have the ceremonies done over them. Many, called Metra- gyrtse, made use of rites and ceremonies for the purpose borrowed from the Phrygian worship of the " great mother," and com- ' Plat. Eep. ii. 364 ; Legg. vii. 815 ; Phsedr. 244. 2 Churact. xyi. 158 THE MYSTERIES. bined them with the Dionysic. Besides other advantages, they used to promise the healing of extraordinary diseases, particularly the physical ones, which were considered the work of a god. Not unfrequently they were women who performed these rites ; and though the priestess Ninus was put to death at Athens on that account, yet we see the mother of the orator Jischines, Glaucothea, holding the same office as Telestria, or Tympanis- tria, and the son as the metragyrtes of the mother, reading the holy hooks in public, putting the nebris, or fawn's skin, on the initiated, dancing before them, giving them mixed wine to drink, and then, in remembrance of the Titans having smeared their faces with clay or chalk at the murder of Zagreus, bedaubing them with clay, and rubbing it off with bran,i ^hile he made them repeat the words after him, " I have escaped the evil, and have found the better lot." On the nocturnal rites there followed by day the procession through the streets of the worshipers of Dionysos, in which tricks were played with serpents, and the god was invoked under the titles of Hyes and Attes.^ Where, then, the Dionysic teletai, or orgies, are spoken of, it means either the already-mentioned secret rites, merely ritual, and often practised by women; or actual mysteries, which, however, never and nowhere existed alone, but were always connected with the secret worships dedicated to other deities, as was the case in the Lernsea and Eleusinia; or else people understood by them the private inventions of these Orpheotelests and metragyrtse, who practised their rites ac- cording to their own discretion, though perhaps at the same time according to a kind of tradition, and met with greater or less respect, according to their character and cleverness. Many of them invested themselves with the aureole of a spe- cial divine inspiration, while others gained their livelihood as common charlatans and adventurers. Many belonged to that class of despised Pythagorists, so called, whose dirt and beggarli- ness, taken together with the high pretensions they made to espe- cial honours and recompenses in the other world, exposed them to the ridicule of the later Greek comedy.^ Sometimes numbers united, in order to make their performances more solemn and imposing; then they presented all kinds of frightful images and ■ Harpocrat. p. Si. ' Demosth. pro Corona, p. 313. 3 Aristophoutis Pythngoristcs, ap. Meinelve Com. Gr. ii. 302. THE OEPHEOTELESTS. 159 ghastly apparitions before the eyes of those they initiated^ to tor- ture them with the apprehension of Hecate's anger and its terrible effects^ and so to induce them to accept the proffered means of protection and remedy more greedily.'^ It was to an Orpheotelest of this kind that Antisthenes answered^ when the other exalted the bliss of the initiated after death, " Why don't you die, then ?" Lastly, there were also free religious companies often pro- pagating themselves for a length of time, the members of which were called Thiasotse or Orgeones. These had for their object the special honour of a deity, generally a foreign one, or Dio- nysos. As the service of this god attached itself by preference to the " Thiasos and Comos," that is, to festal banquets, danc- ings, and uproarious music, this sort of brotherhood was as common as it was popular. Their drinking-bouts, enlivened with flute-music and song, — for which often the god only lent his name as a pretext, — then came, half in jest and half in ear- nest, to be treated as mysteries, with a certain solemnity and with a few ceremonies of admission.^ No farther trace of the Orphici as an organised religious body appears, at all events in the period after Plato's time ; and when more modern writers ^ speak of a reception into this order with a ceremony of crowning, and of pmification with stone-dust, accompanied with singing, this is but what individual women, such as Glaucothea, or itinerant Orpheotelests, did, without fur- ther intention of creating an association transferable to an order, which, in fact, did not exist. The Orphic doctrines and myths, however, in Athens itself, had been transferred partially into the public cultus. It is recorded that the Orphic theology and legends were represented at the Dionysia, in the month An- thesterion, with dances, and with the appearance in the thea- tre of hours, nymphs, and female bacchants.^ Still the sub- stance of the Orphic theology was, and continued to be, in the mysteries, and particularly the Eleusinia. The aflBnity between the Phrygian worship and the Dionysia helps to illustrate this aspect of the nature of the mysteries. Over the whole of Asia Anterior a religion was spread, the ' Hippolyt. adv. Hajr. p. 73 ; Dio Chrysost. Or. iv. p. 1C8, Eeisk, ; Celsus in Origen 0pp. i. 607. ' Max. Tyr. Diss. iii. 7, p. 25; Markland, 1740. ' Petersen, der gelieime Gottesd bei d. Griech. p. 25. > ' Philostr. Vit. Apoll. iv. 21. 160 THE MYSTERIES. prominent figures of which were a great nature-goddess and mother of all living; and a god attached to her as husband, favourite, or son, subject to suffering and death. Experience taught that pain and danger are allied with conception and birth throughout the whole of nature and in the life of man; that beings mutually destroy each other in order to prolong their own existence the one through the other ; that new life is ever springing out of death, and the plant drawing its nourish- ment from corruption, so that the strongest means of sup- port for vegetable life is to be found in the dissolution of ani- mal bodies. This all-absolute, inexorable law of death from life, and life from death, by working upon the imagination of races completely abandoned to natural life, and physically and spiritually under its yoke, had evoked this notion of the gods and the corresponding legends. Man felt himself implicated in a perpetual revolution of life and death ; to his eyes the universe was as temple and sepulchre, as altar and bier ; and so his god, pertaining as he did entirely to the sphere of nature, and limited thereto, must alternately live and die ; and if the best and most precious of living creatures were to be offered to him in sacrifice, he too must fall a sacrifice to the great ordinance of death. The favourite of the great Phrygian goddess Dindymene, or Cybele, was Attes, the son of the god Men, or perhaps Men himself, who in a fit of madness made himself a eunuch, and died of the act, or was put to death. Cybele wandered frantic, with grief for his loss about the country, seeking and calling her beloved one. A death-wake was appointed in his honour, to take place every year ; but according to the ordinary notion, having been recalled to life, he continued to be the constant companion of the goddess afterwards. As then, if we follow one of the many myths concerning him, the death of Attes was caused by a wild-boar, which Zeus sent, so the same fate befell his counterpart, the Syrian and Cyprian Adonis. This Adonis was the paramour of the Syrian Astarte, or Ascherah, or the Asiatic Aphrodite, a goddess of female nature, or nature regarded as conceiving and giving birth, and who bears the strongest resem- blance to the Cybele E-hea in her attributes and symbols.' The beautiful youth, represented as shepherd or hunter, was carried off by the goddess, who was deeply enamoured of him ; ' Lajard, Eeoherohes sur le Culte de Venus, p. 75. ATTES — ADONIS. 161 but he was soon torn from her by a sudden death. The loud waihng for his death, accompanied with signs of acutest grief and with the plunging of his image into the sea, together with the unbounded joy consequent upon his being found again, shaped itself into a wide-spread festival, solemnised throughout the whole of western Asia, as well as in the islands and in Greece, particu- larly Athens, and at an early period there. We readily recognise in the beautiful youth, warmly beloved by the nature-goddess and quickly torn from her by death, though again restored alive, the emblem of the alternation of death and life in nature. He was at once symbol of corn germinating in the earth, of fruits swelling to maturity, and of the decay of vegetation from the summer heats and autumnal rain. Now there is an address to Attes, in an old hymn : " If thou be the progeny of Cronos, or of Zeus, or of the mighty Khea, hail to thee, O Attes, whom Rhea calls with far-ringing cry. Thee the Assyrians style the thrice-beloved Adonis. In Egypt, Osiris is thy name, horn of the moon in heaven. The Hellenes style thee Ophias, they of Samothrace the divine Adam. Corybas is thy name amongst the Thracians of Hsemus. The Phrygians, last, call thee now jfappas, now the dead one, or the god; and, again, the unfruitful, or the goat-herd, or the young ear (of corn) mowed down, or the flute-player Agdistis, born of the fruit-laden almond-tree."' Therefore, Attes and Adonis, Osiris and Corybas, Zagreus and Agdistis, and Adam, or Esmun, are all in principle one and the same divine being ; these are the names which the suffering nature-god bore amongst Assyrians and Phrygians, Syrians and Phenicians, in Egypt and Samothrace, at Lemnos, and in the Greek mysteries. Ophias, i. e. the serpent-son, is no other than Dionysos Zagreus, the son of Zeus in form of serpent, a name probably revealed in the mysteries as a secret to be kept. The identity of Zagreus or the hunter as weU with Adonis the hunter, as with Attes, was so strong that even the latter name was explained by the ate, or guilt, of the ruthless deed done by the Titans on Dionysos;* the Phrygian Sabazios, who was also called Attes, the one of these two designations only forming a surname to the other, was represented with a bull's horns, like Dionysos; and, according to the account of Diodorus,^ it was the ' Hippolyt. adv. Hser. 118, 61. 2 Etymol. M. s. v. •'' Diod. iv. i. M 162 ' THE MYSTERIES. very Dionysos, the offspring of Zeus and Persephone, who was called Sabazios. Whether Zagreus, as child or boy, be torn to pieces, or Attes, Adonis, Corybas, Osiris, or Esmun, as young men, be enervated and murdered, still the leading idea, which forms the nucleus of the legend, is one and the same throughout: the one as well as the other was a god of life and death: Zagreus returns to life as Adonis does; and Plutarch in his time observes,' that Adonis was considered identical with Dionysos, — a conclu- sion abundantly corroborated by the conformity of the festivals and rites solemnised in honour of each. Just as in the Orphic teaching Dionysos Amphietes, entombed and sleeping at Del- phi, spends the period of his slumbers in the holy abode of Persephone,^ and is then awakened by the nymphs (the Thy- ades) , i. e. summoned up again from Hades, so Adonis, in pur- suance of the decree of Zeus, had to live one portion of the year with Persephone below, and the other in the upper world with Aphrodite.^ That Osiris is to be discovered again in Dionysos Zagreus, and through him in Adonis and Attes- Sabazios too, is proved by the mutilation of both, and their signification in the infernal world. Later on, Osiris and Adqpis were worshiped in one idol at Alexandria ;^ and, if we may believe an old account,' the Ado- nis honoured by the Cyprians was no other than the Egyptian god. As Adonis and Dionysos belonged to Persephone, so, on the shore of the Nile, it was said, Osiris, after he was torn from Isis by death, lay in the arms of the dark Nephthys, the consort of Typhon, the mistress of the lower world, Amenthe.® Corybas, who is compared, not only here, but also by Cle- mens,' with Attes and Dionysos, was the god whom the Thracians of Hsemus and the Phrygians also adored.^ In the Greek myth he is the son of Cybele, i. e. Demeter, and Jasion,^ or, accord- ing to another account, of Persephone, who bore him without a father, that is, his paternity was a secret, '" in the sameway as Zagreus is sometimes reckoned the son of Demeter, sometimes the child of her daughter. Julian calls him the great sun-god,'' 1 Plut. Sympos. iv. 5, 3. 2 Orph. Hymn. 53. 3 Hygin. Fab. 251 ; Orph. Hymn. 53. ■< Damasc. ap. Suid. s. v. Heraisous. = Steph. Byz. s. v. Amathus. « Plut. de Isid. xiv. p. 24, Partlius. ' Protrept. p. 16. ° Hippol. adv. Hut. 109. " Diod. V. 49. 1" Serv. ad ^n. iii. 111. " Julian. Or. v. p. 167, Spanh. VARIABLE EI.EMENT IN THE MYSTEEIES. 163 seated at his mother's side; while he is styled the great king in the Orphic theology/ who, being put to death and dismembered by his brothers, the other two Corybantes, had taken a serpent- form in conformity with Demeter's will. It is clear, then, that he is distinct from the other deities of the same species in name only, and in a few other circumstances of his myth ; he too, like Osiris, Attes, Zagreus, and Adonis, was the suffering god of nature, with the solar relation already explained, who must die, and who returns again to life. Finally, the Samothracian Adam also belonged to the same class of mystery-deities. This was the Phenician Esmun,^ wor- shiped at Berytus, one of the Cabiri, a beautiful youth roving as a hunter in the mountains, whom the Phenician mother of the gods, Astronoe,^ fell in love with. Pursued by her, he made a eunuch of himself; but the goddess restored him to life again.^ It is perfectly clear this Esmun is only the Phenician persona- tion of Attes, or the latter the Phrygian copy of the former. THE MYSTEEIES OF SAMOTHEACE, LEMNOS, THEBES, LEENA, THE ISTHMUS, iEGINA, AND PHLYA. Now that we have ascertained the principle common to all these Asiatic and Hellenic divinities, of a god of nature violently deprived of the power of generation, dying and resuscitated, we may Safely proceed to a nearer investigation of the essence of the Greek mysteries. Only here comes the objection, that the con- tents of these mysteries did not by any means remain the same at all times, but, on the contrary, many alterations and expansions crept in; so that neither these alterations themselves, nor the date of their introduction, can be historically authenticated. They originated, partly in the differences of natural character, which, by little and little, gained an influence over mystery- institutions such, e.g., as the Samothracian, partly too in the interest of the sacerdotal corporations intrusted with their man- agement. While, namely, the public religious system, with its ' Orph. Hymn. 38. ^ Adani=Esinim, according to the interchange of the consonants d and s, which also takes place in the equally Phenician Cadniilos=Casmilos. ' In Phenician, Astaroth Naamah, the graceful, or Nemanun, as in Plutarch de Iside, xiii. ; Movers Phbnizier, i. 036. ■• Damaso. Vit. Isid. 302. 164 THE MYSTEKIES. established and legally-sanctioned ceremonialj continued in secu- rity and peace from its close connection with the state, and tena- ciously resisted the attempts made by novelties, and the inter- mixture of many diiferent deities, to shake its stability; the mys- teries were always variable in their nature; their tendency relative to another life being, for the most part, foreign to that of the pubhc cultus, was an element impelling to new and more tranquiUising ideas, and to the investing of them with a mythical character. "Theocrasy," the overflowing of one deity into another, the gradual melting-down or reduction of the gods to a few beings, but those of extended importance, must needs have found accep- tation here ; and it was to the interest of the sacerdotal managers not to let sympathies and predilections of the kind flag, and to prevent the institute, by implicit adherence to old ordinances and rites (which would appear far too needy and empty to a new generation), wearing itself out and damaging its respectability; a matter far more urgent and imperative with a people like the Greeks, intellectually so variable as to be almost in perpetual agi- tation, than with their soberer oriental neighbours. For though the authority of the mysteries rested, in part, directly on their re- nown for high antiquity and faithful observance of primitive forms of cultus, established by the gods themselves or their favourites, yet this was certainly no obstacle in the way of blending new with old, and of making ancient forms the vehicle for ideas and inter- pretations belonging to a later intellectual development. The secrecy, moreover, was a direct protection, and the peculiar names of the deities, in use in the mysteries only, favoured a great latitude of interpretation. The mysteries of the island of Samothrace owed their wide- spread renown partly to their high antiquity, losing itself in the obscurity of mythic eld, partly to the credit they had acquired of afi'ording efficient aid in the dangers of life ; at least it was said that no one initiated there had ever sufiered shipwreck.^ The in- vestigation of their nature, however, and of the gods worshiped there, forms the mistiest portion of Greek religious history; an ob- scurity, the cause of which is to be found, in some degree, in the vague undeterminedness and ambiguity of the expressions in use, particularly the names Cabiri and Corybantes ; and, further, in the circumstance that the variety of rites, introduced by different ' Schol. Aristid. Panatli. p. 324. SAMOTHKACIAN MYSTERIES. 165 races into the island through immigration and the intermixture of population^ lay like strata one over the other, and ran into each other : on which account, too, great uncertainty and division of opinions prevailed even in antiquity upon the subject of the Samothracian deities ; and, in fact, people could not define with any thing like accuracy what the Cabiri really were.' This island had, in truth, been colonised in earliest times by Thracians, but had received a settlement of Pelasgi, on their ex- pulsion from the Peloponnese (Arcadia), and from Attica by the Dorians and lonians ; and thus the old nameless deities of the Pelasgi were still kept up here. Cadmeans of Phenician origin, in like manner, passed over hither from Bceotia ; and doubtless the influence of the Phenicians of the mother-country, frequent- ing all the islands about, extended to the Samothracian religi- ous worship too. Three periods, or constituents, of this worship are recognisable in the sagas. Jasion, whom Demeter cast her eyes upon at the marriage solemnities of his sister Harmonia with the Phenician Cadmus, and who then became Demeter's paramour or spouse in Crete, represents the Cretan element in the Samothracian mysteries. Diodorus says of him, " The ini- tiatory rites had already existed a long time on the island, when Jasion remodelled them according to instructions he received from Zeus, and was the first to initiate foreigners."- Then the same legend in Diodorus connects the Phenician influence with the name of Cadmus, who had visited the island and been ini- tiated there. The third and last, the Phrygian constituent, was indicated by the further mythical statement, that it was Cybele whose husband Jasion became, and that he had issue of her the Lemnian Cabirus Corybas. Varro concluded, from the initiatory rites of the place, that under the designation of " the great gods," that old Pelasgian duality, a god of the heavens, or father of the gods (Zeus), and a female goddess of the earth, or mother of the gods, was wor- shiped.s In the mysteries themselves the male god does not seem to have been further mixed up with them, except perhaps in so far as he was the father of Axiokersa. The mother of the gods, how- ever, belonged, as Demeter Axieros, to the real triad of gods in the mystery-worship of the place, consisting of Demeter, Core, and Dionysos, or a god Hades, an equivalent for the Chthonic ' Strab. Fiagm., Vat. Mail Coll. vii. 40. - Diod. V. 48. 3 Varro, I.ing. Lut. vi. 88, ed. Bip. 166 THE MYSTERIES. Dionysos. This much is undoubted/ on the joint testimony of Strabo and Mnaseas ; the gods whose initiation people received here, according to the account of the latter, were Axicros i. e. Demeter, Axiokersos i. e. Hades, and Axiokersa i. e. Persephone. The name Cabiri, likewise given to the gods of this mystery- worship, serves first of all but to testify to the fact of the high antiquity and non-Hellenic origin of the powers signified. Gods there were under this designation in all the countries lying round the eastern part of the Mediterranean, in Egypt, and Syria, as well as in Asia Minor and Hellas, and as far as Italy itself. The original Semitic name only means " the great," or " the mighty." There were powers of nature, which, like the Pelasgian, had originally no precise designation, in whose case, therefore, in later times (where each god had, or should have had, a more distinct individuality) it remained doubtful what particular deities were intended by them; so that the most various interpretations of them might be current. In most in- stances a group or family of gods, or demons, eight, generally three, in number, were understood to be meant by it ; at times, indeed, only the two first and eldest were indicated, and then others, who were annexed to the first, later on, and under favour of local relations, here and there. In Macedonia, at Thessalonica, for instance, only a single Cabir was the object of worship. Very little indeed is known of the Egyptian Cabiric worship. All that is known leads to the conclusion, that Phenicia, and Phry- gia in the old and wider sense, were the real domiciles of these deities, and that this cultus was conveyed from thence to the islands and into Greece. How strong a claim Phrygia had to be a seat of the Cabiri is shown by the names of the Cabiric mountaias, from which many of the ancients — for example, Athenicon and Demetrius of Scepsis^ — derive the names of the deities. A further proof is the new fragment of Nicolas of Damascus, which tells of two young Phrygians with holy things of the Cabiri, which they carried in a chest, coming to the rescue of the inhabitants of the Ionian town Assessus, when in sore distress, and procuring them a victory by bearing the relics before them ; whereupon the worship of these divinities, which had hitherto been unknown to the Greeks around, in spite of their Phrygian neighbourhood, was first introduced into lonia.^ The Cabiric (Penates) worship 1 Strabo, iv.p. 108 (277-8, Oxf.) ; Schol. Apoll. Rhod. i. !)17. 2 Hist, Gr. Frngm. ii, r,7, iv. 346. 3 Ibid. iii. 388. THE CABIRI. 167 must also have been carried into Italy from Phrygia.i Tj^g sons of Sadyk, or Baal, were, with their father, honoured as Cabiri at Berytus in Phenicia. Esmun was the eighth. The later Greeks assumed this Esmun to be identical with Asclepios, partly because he shared with him the signification of a god of heahng and the attribute of a serpent, partly because of his being a son of the Syrian sun-god, and so of Apollo, now cur- rent with the Greeks as Helios ; but Asclepios was the only one among the gods known as Apollo^ s son.^ The minister of the gods, Cadmilos, a name which Hermes bore here, as also in Boeotia and Etruria, where it was Camillus, was joined to the three already named, Demeter, Hades, and Core.^ Represented ithyphallically, he was, with his passion for the under-world goddess Persephone, himself an infernal god, Hermes Eriunios or Ghthonios. The signification of this Cad- milos is obscure, and so it gave occasion at first to an almost inextricable confusion in regard to the Samothracian Corybantes, or Curetes, who were also called Cabiri ; for, on the one hand, the two first designations were frequently used of one of the bodies of priests consecrated to Cybele, or Rhea ; and then again these Corybantes, Dioscuri, or Cabiri, were divine beings, Tra- bantes, or demons of the great goddess, or even her sons, and thus were of Phrygian origin, although they were also derived from Greta, being considered as identical with the Cretan Curetes ; whilst the Phenician Philo declares them to be Phenicians, sons or descendants of the god Sadyk (Baal, or Cronos), and the first inventors of navigation.* The Samothracian ones were invoked as spirits of the whirlwind and storm, particularly at sea. Their images, too, stood on a promontory near Brasiee. Pausanias was not aware^ whether these were Corybantes or Dioscuri ; they were, in fact, both like the Tritopatores worshiped at Athens, the three sons of Zeus and Persephone, two of whom were called Eubuleus and Dionysos (the poetical names of Amalkeides, Pro- tocles, and Protocreon, had also been invented for them), and they were Ukewise wind-spirits, or warders of the winds. People used to sacrifice to these Tritopatores at marriages, to obtain ' Dion. Hal. Ant. i. 68. ^ Compare the explanation a Plienician gives in Pausan. yii. 23, witli Maorob. ^^*- '• 20. 3 Etym. Gud. p. 290 ; Tzetz. ad Lycophr. 163, 219. * Fragm. Hist. Gr. iii. 569 ; Damascius also (Vit. Isid. 302) calls these sons of Sadyk, Cahiri or Dioscuri. 5 fans. iii. 24, i. 168 THE MYSTERIES. offspring, because, according to Orphic teaching, in the procrea- tion of the body, the soul was carried by the winds and intro- duced into it.i Cicero calls these powers the first Dioscuri ; evi- dently they were genuine Cabiri, and Dionysos, as one of them, had a different signification here from that which is otherwise attributed to him in the mysteries. Thus is explained the contradiction of two old testimonies brought forward by Strabo, and by him left unsolved. One of these witnesses, Stesimbrotus, probably starting with the notion that the term Cabiri, or "the great and mighty gods," was re- ferable to the triad Demeter, Hades, and Core, asserted that it was the Cabiri whom the Samothracian worship acknowledged, that these Cabiri were identical with the three Corybantes, and received their name from the Phrygian mountain Cabirus. De- metrius of Scepsis took a contrary view, while declaring there was no mystical teaching about the Cabiri in Samothrace, which means, those three designated by Mnaseas as Demeter, Core, and Hades, the deities assuming the leading place in the mystery- worship, were not the real Cabiri. The true Cabiri were, in fact, the three gods under a male aspect, who were honoured at Samothrace only as demonic beings, and attached to the suite of Cybele, or even considered as her sons, and as powers of the wind and storm, externally to the mystery- worship ; whereas those of Lemnos, where one of them was called Corybas, were the mystery-gods proper. Stesimbrotus seems to have gone upon the notion that the designation Cabiri, or " the great and mighty gods," was equivalent to the triad Demeter, Core, and Hades, and then to have discovered Dionysos in Hades, or the god explained as such, and grounded his assertion on that.'^ Since we know for a certainty that the Samothracian secret worship was dedicated not only to Rhea or Cybele, but also to Demeter and Core, it is clear that Rhea, Cybele, and Demeter, the nature-goddess of the Cretans, Phrygians, and Hellenes, were already blended there. The tragedians had appropriated this Demeter Rhea to themselves from the mysteries, as well as much besides f and hence Rhea was designated precisely as the goddess who bore Persephone to Zeus.* Who Hades was, ' Aristot. de Auim. i. 5 ; Stob. i. 59, 863 : cf. Lobecli, Aglaoph. 753. 2 Strabo, X. p. 472 (689, Oxf.). ' The passages in Zopgn, Bassi-rilie^i, i, 80. < Athenng. Leg. xx. JAMION, DAKDANOS, AND EETION. 169 we learn from the definite statement^ that "Adam" (Esmun) had played the same part in the Samothracian mysteries as elsewhere Adonis, Osirisj or Zagreus.^ If Aphrodite and Per- sephone divided between them the love of Adonis, the Esmun imported from Berytus stood in the same relation to the De- meter Cybele of the upper world and the Persephone of the under world. If Attes died in consequence of his self-inflicted mutilation, Esmun had the same fate. It is clear enough, then, how the Cretans could maintain that the Samothracian mysteries contained nothing else in substance but what was subject of public representation with them. They knew that their Zagreus was in essence identical as with Osiris, so with Esmun and Adonis or Attes ; and that here, as well as there, the mystery of a god dying and returning again to life was the basis. The three brothers commemorated in the Samothracian my- thology, the sons of Zeus, or Dioscuri, Jasion, Dardanos, and Eetion, who, according to one legend, were founders of the mys- teries on the island, or had spread them beyond it, were nothing but the three Cabiri, or (first) Corybantes. Jasion, the Cretan favourite of Demeter, here of Cybele, and therefore, like Attes in one of the Phrygian sagas, slain by the lightning of Jove, or murdered by his brother Dardanos according to the Lemno- Cabiric saga, appears to have been but a duplicate of Adam or Esmun. His name too is probably but a hellenised form of this Phenician one. If it be asserted^ that the mysteries revealed the father of the Corybantes, whom the mother of the gods had given birth to, and settled in Samothi-ace (i.e. a second Cory- bant family), surely that Jasion is intended whom Servius actu- ally names as their father.^* As Samothrace was a gathering place for sagas and rites, which came from the most different neighbourhoods, and here intersected and blended, and ranged by one another's side, it might weU happen that in the public worship names and relations should occur, which had a different purport in the mysteries, though the forms and their destinies were alike in essentials. Hermes Cadmilos had probably come thither from another ' Hippol. adv. Hier. pp. 108-118. The Gnostica there asseverate that Adam was revealed in the mysteries by name, and expressly {'SiappiiS-qv) to the initiated, as the first man, or the heavenly prototype of the human race. '" Diodor. iii. 55. ^ ;p,-|^ jjj^ -^-^-^ 170 THE MYSTERIES. cultiiSj not unlikely through the Attic Pelasgi, and had been ad- opted into the Samothracian mystery-rite. The Athenians sacri- ficed to him, to Hermes ChthonioS; and to Dionysos, as gods of the nether world, on one of the days of the mystic Anthesterian solemnity, whilst all the other temples were closed, and sacrifice was offered to no other god besides.' The position he occupied in the mysteries as ithyphalhc god was most likely intended to symbolise the idea that the generative, life-supplying instinct endures still, even in the realms of the dead, and that the germ of life, betraying itself in desire, is the medium and guarantee of the return of the departed into the upper sphere; and it appears that his place in Hades ought to be by the side of the enervated Adonis Attes Esmun (who was unable to respond to the love of the goddess), as the god with generative power and desire, but rejected by the goddess. The secret rite of the grotto of Zerinthos seems to have existed independently of the actual mysteries on the island of Samothrace. We merely know of it that it was celebrated in honour of Hecate, with orgiastic rites and sacrifices of dogs;^ probably it also resembled the iEginetan rite. But those mys- teries were the most renowned and infiuential the Greeks were acquainted with; though the ^ginetan, according to one ac- count, must have been stiU more indispensable, while the others, the Samothracian, were in particular esteem on the score of their high antiquity .^ The purple-coloured band which the ini- tiated received and wound round their bodies'* appears to have been considered as a talisman, protecting agaiast dangers, espe- cially on the sea. On the island of Lemnos, lying not far from Samothrace, and having an early Thracian and later Pelasgian population, the mystery- worship was partially different from that of its neigh- bour. The cultus of Hephsestos was the prevalent one at Lem- nos, from whence Athens had received the god. From him the god of fire, and a goddess of earth called Cabeiro (and Lemnos also), sprang the three Lemnian Cabeiri, who formed the sub- ' Didym. a.]). Schol. Aristoph. Acliarn. 1075. The two gods of the lower world to be conciliated, 6iol ^pioivioi, of whom Antoninus Liheralis speaks, were then prohahly Dionysos and Hermes. Comp. Steph. Thes. nov. Paris, s. v. 2 Schol. Aristoph. Pao. 377. = Schol. Aristid. iii. 330. •> Schol. Apollon. i. 017. LEMNIAN MYSTERIES. 171 ject of the mystery-rite. HephsestoSj therefore^ was here what Jasion was at Samothrace. Cybele Demeter was here called Cabeiro ; and as Jasion pointed to Crete, so also did Hephsestos, for the Cretans were acquainted with him as the son of their Talos,' i.e. of the Phenician Baal Moloch, naturalised in their island, like Esmun, a son of Sadyk, god of the sun. In Egypt too the Cabiri were sons of the god corresponding to Hephses- tos.^ One of these sons of Hephsestos, Corybas, was here the god who had to die, and that by the hands of his brothers, who dealt with him the same way that Typhon did with his brother Osiris, and the Titans with their blood-relation Zagreus. This Corybas, or Cyrbas, whom Diodorus makes a son of Cybele and Jasion, was therefore the form of Attes Zagreus as honoured by the Thracians ; and the Tyrrhenian Pelasgi had already received him on the island from the Thracian Sintii. He it is whom an Orphic hymn invokes as the mighty king of the earth, slain by his brothers, the Curetes of the night. He is " the beautiful Cabir of the mysterious orgies, begotten of Lemnos," of Pindar.* His death was exhibited in the mystery-rite, in which the holy saga told how that the head of the slain, wrapped in a purple veil and adorned with a chaplet, was borne on a brazen shield to the foot of Olympus and there interred; just as in the other legend the limbs of the lacerated Dionysos were interred by his brother Apollo on Parnassus or in Delphi. It is said the two brothers preserved the genitalia of the murdered Cabir in a 1 Pausan. viii. 53, 2. Talos, as Moloch, being also identical with Cronos, Hephasstos in like manner is called a son of Cronos in Joan. Lydus. 2 Photius (Lex. p. 103) calls the Lemnian Cabiri sons of Hepha=stos (for 'Ti,pa(,TTov must clearly bereadfor"H(/)aicrToi) or Titans, thelast denomination recall- ing the fact of their haying done to their brother what the Titans do to Zagreus in the Orphi-Cretan sagas. What is added (Sai^oyes iic aV»" SA rh r6\ij.r,i^a twv yvmiiiHv /isTevexSei'Tis) sounds hke a local ta-adition of another town, probably Thessalonica, where people claimed to be in possession of the veritable cultus of the Cabiri of Lemnian origin, whose emigration was attached to the well-known tradition of the murder of their husbands by the Lemnian women. Another tra- dition besides is to be found in Acusilaus (Fragm. Hist. Gr. i. 100, and in He- sychius and Steph. Byz. v. KaPupU), which intercalated here the ithyphaffic Hermes Cadmilos, as sou of Hephsestos, and father of the Cabiri. 3 Fragm. ap. Hippolyt. adv. Hajr. 97. According to another account, preserved in Servius, he was son of Persephone without (having) a father, i.e. by Zeus, whose paternity, and consequent identity mth Hephicstos, was probably a mys- tery secret of Lemnos. Precisely by this circumstance Corybas is fully identified with Dionysos Zagreus. 172 THE MYSTERIES. chest, and carried it, as witness and pledge of the unextinct power of life and generation, into Tuscany, to the Italic Tyrrheni, race- relations of the Tyrrhenian Pelasgi of Lemnos ; who therefore were in possession of the legends of the murdered god, and may have stood in the same relation to the Lemnian mystery-rite as the Delphian Hosii did to that of Crete. But Corybas was meta- morphosed into a serpent by Demeter, and continued to live on under that form ;^ a feature doubtless borrowed from the legend of the mysteries, which the Orphic hymns had preserved, only that Demeter here is probably a later denomination of Perse- phone or Hecate, arising from the theocrasy so much in favour in the mysteries, and the Brauronian Artemis, who is an equiva- lent for these goddesses. This Lemnian rite was called, by way of distinction, the mystery of the Corybantes ; whence this name was applied to the three brothers, as identical with " Cabiri," though but one of them, namely, the murdered one, was really Corybas. The two others were called Alcon and Eurymedon by a later poet, but who had borrowed largely from the mystery-sagas.^ The title Anakto-telestai, borne by the Lemnian mystery -priests, shows, moreover, that the three Cabiri were here too called Anakes, the rulers, and were akin to the Tritopatores, who were similarly designated at Athens. The Cabir, who was invoked at Thessalonica with bloody hands,^ was no other than Corybas. People, it seems, dipped their hands in the blood of the animal sacrificed, to represent the bloody deed of the two brothers. The mystery-rite at Thebes, dedicated to the Cabiric De- meter and her daughter Core,, in a temple only- approachable by the initiated, appears to have been very closely related to the Lemnian. The Athenian Metapus, who busied himself much about the orgies and made one or two changes in them, had introduced this rite into Thebes. The three Cabiric brethren, who were here honoured, were clearly identical with the Athe- nian Tritopatores, only they were set aside by the Eleusinian lacchos-worship supervening, and seem to have almost died out of the knowledge of the people. In Thebes, it was Demeter ' Orph. Hymn. flO. ' Nonn. Dionys. xxx. 45, 59. He calJs tliem Corybantes aud Cabiri, sons of Cabiro, and makes them brandish the thiasos-lilie torches of Hecate. ' Filmic. Mat. ii. p. 77, Oehler. THEBES — LEENA— THE ISTHMUS. 173 Tvlio handed over the mystical chest to ^Eteseos, a son of Pro- metheus, two mythic receivers of the holy relics, corresponding to the Attic names Celeus and Triptolemos. Pausanias durst not mention the contents of the chest, which must have been the genitalia of the murdered Cabir, nor the attendant cere- fa monies The mysteries solemnised at Lerna in Argolis, on the Sinus Alcyonius, traced their descent from Thrace, like other Orphica, or at least came thither by way of Thrace. A mythical son of Apollo, PhUammon of Thrace, was named as their founder; Dionysos, Demeter, and Core, were here too the deities of the initiated; and the whole seems to have had reference merely to the lower world, to the descent into and return from it. Dio- nysos had to descend iato Hades, and cross the lake to bring his mother Semele up. Here then, neither his birth of Zeus and Per- sephone, nor his dismemberment and death, were made promi- nent ; their place was supplied by the journey to Hades. As the Thyades awoke the sleeping Dionysos while he lingered near Per- sephone at Delphi, so the Argive women invoked him to come up from out the waters of the lake, whilst they threw into them a lamb for the watcher of the gates of Hades. The phallus, as symbol of vital power and pledge of his return from Hades, was set here upon the tombs ; and the Greeks of the place, later on, in keeping with their psederastic propensities, invented the im- pure adventures with Prosymnus, in order to explain the sym- bol of the phallus, and to make a divine model for their sin.^ Whilst there is hardly any further mention of the Lemnian mysteries in later times, the Lernsean were maintained quite to the close of the heathen system ; and Roman ladies of distinc- tion at the end of the fourth century after Christ still continued to have inscribed on their grave-stones that they had been con- secrated, not only in Eleusis, but Lerna also, to Liber, Ceres, and Core.^ The Corintho-Isthmian mysteries, dedicated to Melicertes, betray in name and story their foreign (Phenician) origin. Meli- certes, with the Grecian surname Palsemon (wrestler) , whose native place the Greek myth indicates by making him the grandson of ' Pansan. iv. 1, 5, ix. 25, 5. 2 Ibid. ii. 37, 5; Clem. Alex. Protrept..p. 29; Tzetzes ad Lycophr. 212. ■• OreUi, Inscr. 2361. 174 THE MYSTERIES. the Phenician Cadmos, through his mother Ino^ was the Phe- nician Melkarth, a solar representation of deity akin to Baal Molochj for a Moloch offering of children was sacrificed to him also at Tenedos;^ and at the same time he was like Esmun, a duplicate of Osiris Adonis. Again^ he was the god who died and who was bewailed in the Isthmia, and the death he met with in the waves of the sea.^ The solemnities too derived their name from the sorrow of the mother lamenting, like Isis, over her dead son; for as the image of Osiris was annually plunged into the sea, amid loud waUings, and as the head of Osiris Adonis floated to Byblos, so the corpse of Melicertes was borne on a dolphin to land at the isthmus. Sisyphus, the mythic founder of Ephyra (Corinth), or his son Glaucus,^ were assigned as authors of the Isthmian rite ; and as both were legendary representatives of the oldest Corinthian navigation and sove- reignty of the sea, there is a further evidence in that of the exotic origin of this worship. On the other hand, the Athenian tradition made out the Isthmia to have been exalted by the Attic hero Theseus, through the addition of athletic combats, into a common Hellenic festival of Poseidon,* when before they had only consisted of a nocturnal mystery-fete in honour of MeU- certes. Nevertheless Melicertes continued to be always the god of the mystery-fete, of which Plutarch observes, that it contained nothing of special attraction in comparison with the great one of the contested games. The god used to be hid in an adytum which existed there, with an underground entrance.^ He was represented asleep, as Dionysos Liknites at Delphi; and a black bull was sacrificed to him. Upon the sorrow and lamentation over him, a feast of joy at his resuscitation probably followed in the Isthmian rite. As the myth represents his father Athamas as tutor, or his mother Leucothea as nurse of the Dionysos child, whence, madness, persecution, and murder came upon the family, there are indications here of an old struggle between the Msenad rite of Dionysos, and the Phenician cultus of Melkarth, at bottom. Moreover, the Isthmian mysteries may have ap- proximated more closely in form to the Cretan; for it has been 1 Lycophr. 2J9-31, and Tzetzes upon the passage, i. 49i sqq. 2 Clem. Alex. Protrept. p. 10; Philostr. Heroic, xix. 14. " Clem. Alex. Strom, p. 145. . • Plut. Thes. 25. '^ Pausan. ii. 2, 1. jEgina. 175 mentioned as their peculiarity, that they were the most known, as well as the easiest of access.^ Like the generality of mysteries, the secret solemnity at iEgina must have had Orpheus for its founder, and Origen makes them of equal consideration with the Eleusinian.^ It was to female deities that a secret worship was annually dedicated here, accompanied with initiation.^ The leading goddess was Hecate,* who was here unmistakably in the place of Persephone, as god- dess of the lower world, and sovereign mistress of the realm of shadows, or was identical with her, as she too is styled daughter to Deo, of a powerful father.* Sophocles talks of the under- world goddess who conducts the dead in company with Hermes; he could only have meant Hecate by that description, and so this designation appears to be an echo from the mysteries, as so much else in the tragic poets. For Hecate was not only a goddess much worshiped at jEgina, but at Samothrace too, and probably also at Lemnos ; in Samothrace an orgic service was solemnised to her honour in the Zerinthian cave ; and she seems not to have been distinct there from Axiokersa, or from the goddess Mnaseas calls Core. People in danger, we are informed, used to invoke the aid of the Corybantes (Cabiri) and of Hecate, as the divinities of Samothrace.^ At ^Egina, where there is mention of two goddesses of initiation, Demeter, as mother of Hecate, was no doubt the other goddess. These mysteries of ^gina further establish the fact, that some features of the Greek mythology were first the product of the mystery- worship, and from them gradually made their way into the popular mind. The Greeks have not, like the Egyptians, a god of the first rank, invested with the dignity of judge of the dead ; but there are four heroes, who are all connected with the secret rites of their native places, to whom the Greek traditions have intrusted that office, Minos and Rhadamanthus, Triptolemus and Macns. Minos occurs most frequently as the real judge in Hades, a fact which involves a new proof of the great antiquity of the Cretan mysteries and of the Orphic influence, to which the spread of the Cretan mythology and cultus was owing ; the same > Schol. Axistid. iii. 329, Dindorf. 2 Pausan. ii. 30; Orig. adv. Cels. vi. 290; Lucian, Navig. 15. ^ Compare the above-quoted inscription in OreUius (2361), " Sacratae apud iEgynam Deabus." « Schol. Theocr. ii. 12. ^ Schol. ApoUon. Arg. iii. 468. " Schol. Aristoph. Pac. 277. 176 THE MYSTEKIES. source is indicated by his countryman Rhadamanthus being assigned to him as assessor in office. As to Macns, the circum- stance of his being connected with j3Egina as the hero of the country^ and therefore with the mysteries there, was decisive;^ while Triptolemus attained a like dignity through his relations with the Eleusinians. The mysteries solemnised at Phlya in Attica to the so-caUed "great" goddess must have been of the highest antiquity .^ The expression means the old earth-goddess and great mother, after- wards combined with Cybele and Rhea. Here there was a famous symbolical representation, in interpreting which Plutarch em- ployed himself in his lost work on Empedocles. Amongst other things there was a picture shown here of a hoary old man, winged and ithyphallic, pursuing a female with a dog's head, who was flying before him; this, then, was a Hermes Cadmilos and a Hecate Brimo, or Hecate Persephone, also represented, as is known, with a dog's head, whose mutual relation had the most intimate bearing on the Samothracian mystery. THE ELEUSINIAN MYSTERIES. As Athens far surpassed other Hellenic cities in intellectual matters, so too her mysteries, the Eleusinian, had the precedence of all institutions of the kind. They owed this, in part, to the fame of Athens, and in part to the artistic splendour and tasteful beauty of their scenic ornamentation, and in some degree also to the care the Athenians took in cherishing the belief that those who were initiated there acquired the securest guarantee of bliss in the other world. Since the union of Dionysos with the cereal divinities, Demeter and Core, formed the characteristic feature of the Eleusinia, we may be certain they were derived, as to one com- ponent at least, from Thrace. A Thracian colony under Eumolpus, himself genealogically related to Orpheus through Musaeus, whose ' Plato, I believe, is the only Greek who styles him 'judge of the dead,' aad in imrticular of Europeans, Gorg. p. 533. The Romans malte more frequent allu- sion to his office : Ovid. Met. xiii. 'i5 ; Horat. Od. ii. xiii. xxii. Plato, Apol. p. 4). Dip., is also acquainted with Triptolemus as judge of the dead. 2 Hippol. adv. Hser. p. 144. Here instead of Kfyo/i.fi'Ti inyaX-iiyopia, ra Trjs Xefofiirq^ fisydXris ipjia is to he read; and instead of the corrupt (pKoMs lov6pyia, p, 145, we must substitute ipXiaaiav opyla. ELEUSl^'IAN MYSTERIES. 177 son he was^ had established them, or at least expanded and per- fected them ; and the Lycomidse^ who in the time of Pausanias (about the year 130 a.d.) were in hereditary possession of the office of torch-bearing in the Bleusinia, then used Orphic hymns at the initiation. 1 In Athens itself, at least in the time of Aris- tophanes and Euripides, it was the prevailing idea that what was holiest in the mysteries originated with Orpheus ; and thus people were generally accustomed to distinguish as Orphic, or to derive from Orpheus, whatever in the secret cultus referred to the world below and to the existence after death. The Eleusinia as a whole formed a great solemnity, lasting at least ten days, when much passed in public before all eyes, the magnificence of which always drew to Athens a crowd of people, including many who had no desire to be initiated. Peast and mystery were treated as an institution of the state, and therefore were under the direction of the republic. The great council of five hundred was charged with the observance of ordinances, and, according to a law of Solon, met together every year just after the festival, to pass sentence upon any transgression of them that had occurred during the time. It was a series of manifold cus- toms, purifications, sacrifices, expiations, dramatic dances, choral song, and orgies, divided between Athens, Agree, and Eleusis, all of which were connected more or less closely with the real subject-matter of the mysteries, namely, the religious theatrical entertainment, representing the sorrows and deeds of the three deities. Much of this was done in the open air; and all could be spectators, as the ritual functions took place in the Thriasian plain, at springs, or on the sea-shore ; while the part kept secret was exhibited in the mystery-buildings at Eleusis, the Anactoron, or Telesterion, only accessible to the initiated. All this was under the management of four leitourgoi, be- longing to the two old sacerdotal families of the Eumolpidse and Ceruces, of the Hierophant, the Dadouchos (or torch-bearer), the Herald, and the Epibomius (or minister of the altar). The hiero- phant, assisted by a hierophantess, was no ordinary priest. It was his business, with the assistance of others, and some priest- esses, by a series of representations artfully arranged, which, by sudden surprises and well-calculated and striking contrasts, pro- duced powerful efiects of agitation and tension, to set before ' Pausan. i. 14. 2, ix. 27. 2. N 178 THE MYSTERIES. the eyes of the spectators the adventures of their deities, their wondrous might, the evident signs of favour they bestowed on the inhabitants of Eleusis and Athens, and the still greater vouchsafed to the initiated. It was also his ofiSce to exhibit the holy symbols and pictures, which were covered up, and only unveUed for a few moments. In common with the dadouchoi, whose chief function it was to bear the torches at the sacrifices, he pronounced aloud the directions and formulae, or holy say- ings ; he also intoned the hymns, and therefore it was specially required he should have a clear sonorous voice. ^ The invention of agriculture was probably introduced into the Eleusinia at a later period. The oldest record of this secret worship is the Homeric hymn to Demeter, the author of which lived not long after Hesiod, perhaps about the thirtieth Olym- piad, and seems to have belonged either to the Eleusinian priest- circle or to the initiated. In this there is no reference to agri- culture. Only the wanderings of the mother in quest of her daughter, the effects of her anger and sorrow in spreading ster- ility, and the reunion of the two goddesses, are described ; and particular prominence is also given to the mother having taught the heroes of Eleusis the sacrificial rite and the orgies. This, and not the invention of agriculture, is the great beneficial act of Demeter here panegyrised. It is the initiated, without any regard to agriculture, on whose houses wealth is showered by the goddess ; and all who neglect to honour Persephone with sacrifice and holy gifts are menaced with an eternity of misery. The intention is clearly shown in the hymn to represent the mys- teries of the cereal goddess as an offspring of the soil, not brought thither from -ndthout, but immediately granted by the goddess herself to the old country heroes of Eleusis. All is calculated for the glorification of Eleusis as the actual spot selected by the goddess, and consecrated by her own habitation there, for the lavishing of her favours and for her worship. The association of Eleusis with Athens, so important for the perfection of the mys- tery-solemnities, is not alluded to. External influence, Thracian and Samothracian, as well as Athenian, is thereby repudiated, or only indicated as of a later accession. There is no trace to be found of Dionysos or lacchos ; the design to make every thing that regarded this cultus seem a later and foreign addi- ' Philostr. Yit, Soph. ii. 20. ELEUSINIAN MYSTERIES. 179 tion is transparent. This was done in the interest of the old Eleusinian families in opposition to Athens, where people some- times indicated Orpheus, sometimes Eumolpus, who was from Thrace, or his sons Phorbas and Immaradus, as authors of the mysteries. A special legend is attached to Phorbas, wliich points to an early derivation of the Attic mysteries from Samothrace or Lemnos. He is confounded with Jasion, the mythical founder of Samothracian worship ; the story being, that, as favourite of Demeter, he was struck with lightning by Zeus, as were Jasion and Attes. On the other hand, the Demeter hymn would make Eumolpus appear a native of Eleusis, by inserting him between Celeus, Dio- des, and Triptolemus, and not even admitting him to take part in the orgies proper, or the mystery-rite of the goddess, but only in the direction of the public sacrifices and ceremonial. '^ On similar grounds of local interests, a later Orphic poem designates Eumol- pus, Eubuleus, and Triptolemus as the three "earth-born" sons of Dysaules and Baubo, to whom Demeter appeared j^ and Ister maintained it was not the Thracian Eumolpus known at Athens who was the originator of the mysteries, but another of the same name, a grandson of the aboriginal Eleusinian Triptole- mus.^ Even the Musaeus, who was substantially concerned in the Eleusinian cultus, according to one tradition, was a native of Eleusis, and a Thracian according to another. To favour the same interests, and the claims of the Eleusinian families, a convention, concluded after an old war between Athens and Eleusis, was invented, by which Eleusis was incorporated in the Athenian state ; but the priestly families there were to re- main in exclusive possession of the administration of the mys- teries and holy things. One sees, then, why there should be a sepulchre of Eumolpus in existence at Eleusis as well as at Athens ; and why, further, Ceryx, the ancestor of the family of Ceryces, should have had himself inserted in the sacerdotal family at Eleusis as claiming to be son of Eumolpus against the will of the family, which pretended to descend from Hermes and the Athenian Pandrosos.* Thus the two traditions were contradictory ; the one would represent the Eleusinia as a pure aboriginal local rite, that had ' See Voss on the Homerio Hymn, p. 139. 2 ciem. Alex. Protrept. p. 6. ' Fragm. Hist. Gr. i. Jan. -i Andron. iu the Fragm. Hist, ii. 853. 180 THE MYSTERIES. arisen on the identical spot, and owing institution immediately to the supreme goddess. The other would have the whole of the secret rite, including the three deities, to have been imported from Thrace, but less immediately than through the islands ad- jacent to the Thracian coast. Thus much, however, is certain, that the Eleusinia were an ancient cultus, dating beyond the time of the Ionian migration from Attica into Asia Minor; for in their migration the lonians transferred this already-existing worship to their new home ; so that the ancient and noble fami- lies of the CelidsR and Androclidae at Ephesus continued in posses- sion of it there, while tracing their descent from Athens. The silence of Homer proves nothing against this view. But whether Dionysos was so very early associated with the two goddesses in cultus, and when that association took place, on these points, his- torically speaking, there is nothing decisive to be advanced. Dionysos, or lacchos, is the most enigmatical personage in the Attic mysteries. The assertion that lacchos and Dionysos were identical, and that he was the resuscitated Zagreus, has been emphatically denied lately ;i but to accept this would make an understanding of the Eleusinian worship impossible; and the fact that lacchos is no other than the son of Zeus and Core, called back again to life, is so strongly supported from many quarters, that we may rely upon it with all security. Lucian says that the laceration of lacchos was represented by the orchestra f and we learn that Athens distinguished herself by the worship of a Dionysos, who was not the one ordinarily honoured by the Greeks formerly, but an older one, who was son of Zeus and Core, and that a hymn was sung to this Dionysos, the lacchos of the mysteries, or one of the same name as that god, and not the Theban god (the son of Semele).'^ Sophocles even allowed himself to call lacchos the bull-horned,'* not know- ing any difference between him and Zagreus, though it was not the resuscitated one, but only the child Zagreus before his death, who was represented with this emblem in the mysteries. This mystery-god lacchos was in himself and in his origin quite distinct from the Thracian wine-god, whom the Thebans had appropriated by inscribing him into the genealogies of their 1 e.g. by Fritzscho, de Carm. Aristoph. Myst., Eostook, 1841, pp. 20 sqq. 2 De Saltat. v. 147, Bipont. ' Arrian, Exped. Alex. ii. 16, 3. < Ap. Strabn. k. p. 408 (082, Oxf.'). ELEUSINIAN MYSTEEIES. 181 country sagas ; so distinct that Cicero^ unhesitatingly held him, the said lacchos, to be identical with the old Italian Liber, who, forming a group with Ceres and Libera, had, to his mind, nothing in common with the son of Semele. In the same sense, Strabo discriminated between the Theban Dionysos, and "the demon" the introducer of the Demeter mysteries, as being two separate beings, lacchos being regarded as choragos of the festal procession consecrated to the god, who had transplanted the mystery-solemnity from Athens to Eleusis. This distinction comes out clearest in Aristophanes,^ where the son of Semele plays a ridiculous part on the stage, the poet making him listen whilst the initiated sing hymns of praise to lacchos. That the relation of the mystic Dionysos to the Theban, or of the son of Persephone to the son of Semele in the Attic mystery-rite, remained long unexplained, and the contradiction imsolved, is evident from the numerous uncertain and hesitat- ing assertions of the ancients, who dared not assert that the two were one,^ or who explained them outright as two entirely dif- ferent beings. Later on, however, the Orphic version, invented for the purpose of reconciling the contradiction, prevailed ; Zeus had given Semele the heart of Zagreus to eat, or had himself swallowed it, so that the son of the daughter of Cadmus was begotten of the substance of the first Dionysos. lacchos was actually addressed as Semele^s son in the Lensea throughout.* With this was combined the farther doctrine, that men arose from the ashes of the Titans when sated with the flesh of Zagreus ; which makes the better intellectual part of man to be of Dio- nysic origin.^ A still later gloss, concerning which we can- not decide, whether it made its way into the Eleusinia, or re- mained external to them, is that produced in Nonnus ; according to which, the son of Semele, who sprung from the heart of the first Dionysos, or Zagreus, by a rape committed on the Titanid ' Cie. N. D. ii. 24. ^ &v {jxV(TT7]pL0iv) TTJs TeAcVr/s oh iiovov xop^^'^hs ccWh Kal e^apxos ^v d Aiovvaos, says the scholiast to Aristoph. Ean. 363, so explaining apxiyeTijs, the expression of Strabo, "who calls lacchos the " demon," or a divine being in general, as the Cabiri were termed SaiVoces vepl t^v 'Veav. Etym. Gud. p. 289. There is no call upon one, then, to understand from this passage of the geographer a, "mystery- genius" unknown to the whole of antiquity. ^ Compare the expressions of the schol. to Aristoph. Ean. 324. ' Schol. Arist. Ean. 480. = Dio Chrysost. Or. sxx. 650. 182 THE MYSTEKIES. Aura in Phrygia^ became father of the third Dionysos, the Eleu- sinian lacchos^ to whom the Athenians paid the same honour as they did to Zagreus and the grandson of Cadmos.i The Orphic hymn represents the Eleusinian lacchos as of both sexes f this corresponds with his Asiatic proto- and anti- types. The Phrygians called their Attes "the barren," and represented him as an eunuch. Agdistis, the flute-player, born of the almond-tree, was hermaphrodite, as the hymn in Hip- polytus styles him. The generative member was wanting both in Osiris and Corybas at Lemnos. Adonis was similarly figured after his recall to Ufe. By their death they had become gods of the lower world, and represented, it is true, the idea of life after death, or rather the resuscitability of hfe; but for this very reason they have not themselves the power of procreation, but as resusci- tated beings lead a sexless existence. Thus, lacchos was not con- sort of Persephone, or Demeter, nor identical with Pluto. The three male Chthonic deities seem to have been representations of three ideas; — the veritable death-power, in Pluto ; the generative power, remaining still in death, in the ithyphallic Hermes; the re-awakening to life, and the new life (without sex), in lacchos. If we now proceed to prove in its detail the course and con- tents of the Attic mystery-solemnity, we shall certainly meet with much that is obscure and doubtful, though the principal portions still admit of being verified. There were, properly speaking, three separate and yet intrinsically connected mystical dramas; each was distinct from the other in place, time, and subject, and all, in a wider signification, were called the Eleusinia; and with the preparations thereto, the sacrifices and processions ' formed the whole solemnity. They were called the Eleusinia, though the two last only took place at Eleusis, the first being conducted at Agree near Athens. In order to assist at all the three, two years at least were necessary. The opening of the function was made by the proclamation, that the impure, meaning such as, on account of some heavy 1 Nonn. Dionys. xxiv. 48, xlviii. 238 sqq. In this representation the expression of the scholiast to Aristicl. p. 213, is explained, that lacchos, " as some few said," was the son of Dionysos, %. e. of him of Thehes. '■' Orph. Hymn. 42. lacchos is here styled " Misos," as an hermaphrodite being. He indulges in impurity in the temple at Eleuhis, or in the mystical rite of Phrygia, with the Mother (Attes), or in Cyprus with Aphrodite (Adonis), or with his mother Isis in Egypt (Osiris). ELE0SINIAN MYSTERIES. 183 crime, murder for instance, had not yet made atonement, and all non- Hellenes besides, were excluded from the mysteries. The solemnity of the lesser mysteries of Agrse, which served at the same time as a purifying preparation for the larger, fell in the month Anthesterion (at the end of February and beginning of March) . They were called the mysteries of Persephone,^ and also of Dionysos.2 The birth of the latter, whom Zeus in the form of a serpent begot of his own daughter Persephone, appears to have been the first subject brought forward in this division of the secret rite. Tatian quotes, as evidence for the incest of father with daughter, "Eleusis and the holy serpent."^ This creature generally played a conspicuous part in all mysteries, and was here the symbol of Zeus, and of the union which gave birth to Zagreus. Next followed the orchestral representation of the murdering and dismemberment of the child- god by the Titans, and the revenge inflicted by Zeus on the perpetrators of the deed.'' The words of Clement seem to apply to this part of the mysteries : " The hierophant must extinguish the fire, and the dadouchos remove the torches, for the light unveils the out- rage done on their lacchos."^ We may assume with the greater certainty that the Creto-Orphic myth of Zagreus was really exhibited in the little mysteries, as his birth necessarily required its further complement of the tragical fate of the boy. The symbols enumerated by Clement as exhibited in this portion of the mysteries — the dice, ball, top, mirror, and apple — were to signify the toys with which the Titans had allured the child into their power. The third act of the lesser mysteries appears now to have ' Hippol. adv. Uki: p. 116 ; Schol. Aristoph. Plut. 846. ^ Steph. Byz. v. Agra : ri fxiKp^ fivffr'fjpLa — /J.lfi7if/.a rui/ irepl rhv Ai6vv(Toy, These are to crE/jii/a ttjs Kiipijs luiarlipia, to the celebration of which Demeter came with Demetrius to Athens, as is said in the ithyphallio song in Athenasus (vi. p. 253, ii. 47, Schw.). Nonnus, who was conversant with Dionysic matters ('xxvii. 305), says that Atliens, after the Bacchus of the Lena^a, would have the Phrygian rhythm entoned to the Dionysos of Eleusis, and he has followed the calendar exactly. The Lensea, the feast of Dionysos, iv Ai/j.vms, took place in Gamelion, and therefore in the previous month; then followed the little mysteries, which, according to this testimony, were also in honour of Dionysos. 3 Tatian. p. 38. Ottf. ■* Compare the passage cited ahove from Lucian ahout the laceration of lacchos, and the one just mentioned of Steph. Byzant. ^ Clem. Alex. Protrept. p. 6. 184 THE MYSTERIES. been the restoration to life^ by Demeter, of the murdered Za- greus, whose remains Apollo had buried. For DiodoruSj who states that the goddess put the lacerated members together, says the matter was so represented as well in the Orphic poems as in the ceremonies of the mysteries ; but that he was not allowed to reveal the details to the uninitiated. i But Demeter completed the restoration of lacchos to life, not merely by putting the limbs together, but also by giving her maternal breasts to the child, and by her divine milk pouring a new stream of life into him. On that point the passages in Suidas, Lucretius, and Arnobius leave no room for doubt. ^ Six months later, in the month Bo'edromion (the end of Sep- tember or beginning of October), the great mysteries, or those of Demeter, the actual Eleusinia in the more restricted sense, were solemnised. These were divided again into two rites for the mystse, separated by a considerable interval. According to one account, and a very much controverted one of Tertullian,' we must assume that the initiated who had already passed through the less, and the first division of the greater mysteries, were only admitted after five years to the last, or consummating, rite of Epopteia, or inspection. If such was the rule,* many excep- tions were made to it in favour of distinguished or powerful strangers. The agyrmos, or assemblage of the mystse on the first day, formed the introduction to the great mysteries. On the day following the proclamation was made, " To the sea, ye initiated," upon which people drew off for lustration to two salt- water lakes, dedicated to the two goddesses, and near the sea. After sacrificial rites of some length followed the joyful procession, which conducted lacchos fresh risen to a second life, along the holy road from Athens to Eleusis, a distance of four hours. This removed the scene of the solemnity to Eleusis from Athens. As they passed over the river on the way, fresh lustrations were 1 Diod. iii. 62. ^ ''laKxos is explained in Suidas, AiSyvaos M t^ naa-r^. The passage of Lu- cretius, iv. IICI, "At gemina et mammosa Ceres est ipsa et Inccho," implies that Demeter was represented with full breasts on account of lacchos (cf. Arnob. iii. 10, p. 133, Oehler) ; and lacchos himself is styled iiroK(iA.Tnos in the Orphic hymns, 53, 9, for the same reason. 3 Adv. Valent. 1. * One year only is assigned as the interval till the Epopteia. Schol. Arist Kan. 744. Compare Seneca, Qusest. Nat, vii. 31. ELEUSINIAN MYSTERIES. 185 made. Ou the bridge over the Cephisus^ the so-called gephyrism took place, i. e. extravagant pranks were played, and ridiculous abuse of one another was interchfinged. The mystery-action in Eleusis consisted of the adventures of Demeter and her daughter. lacchos, now grown into a strip- ling, had become the Paredros^ (assessor) and companion of the goddess to whom he was obliged for his new life, just as the resuscitated Attes, or Adonis, is conceived to be, or represented as, Paredros and favourite of Cybele, or Aphrodite. The rape of the young goddess was the first dramatic exhibition. Whilst she is gathering flowers in the meadows. Core is carried ofi'by Pluto, or Hades, suddenly appearing out of the earth, and is taken down into his realm. Probably this is the moment, mentioned by a late Christian author, at which the dark abyss, by which the descent into Hades is made, discloses itself to the terrified spec- tators, when the hierophant (as Pluto) is discovered alone in the gloom with the priestess (as Proserpine), and the whole assembly " patiently waited for their blessing from the acts of the pair in the artificial night." ^ After this, the wanderings of Demeter in search of her daughter, and the sorrow and lamentation of the despairing mother, were represented. In this the mystse took an active part in person, running about the whole vigil, waving torches upon the Thriasian plain on the shore of the Eleusinian bay as if in quest of Core.^ Demeter comes sorrowing to Eleusis, and reposes by a spring there (on which account the initiated were forbidden to sit by it), and is enlivened by the shameless action of Baubo and lacchos. That this was actually represented we have the asser- tion of Clemens, of whom there is every ground for believing that he was himself initiated ; and also that of a contemporary work, written, not for Christians, but for pagans, at a time when the danger which Christians incurred must have made them doubly circumspect as to what they said.* Not improbably this act of exposing female nakedness was an old and peculiar religious ceremony, which the Orphici first connected with the cheering ' So Pindar ah-eady stjles Dionysos, Isth. vii. 3. 2 Aster. Encom. in SS. Mart. ii. 193 ; Bib. Max. PP. (Despout.) v. 834. ' Lactant. Instit. i. 21-24; Stat. Silv. iv. 8, 50. ^ Clem. Alex. Protrept. p. 6. Fritzsche (de Carm. Aristoph. Myst. p. 31) has explained how Arnobius (v. 35), -vvho there copiea Clement, fell into his mistaliie regarding lacchos. 186 THE MYSTEEIES. up of the disconsolate goddess ; a custom which was also practised in Egypt by the women at the festival of Bubastis, the daughter of Isis, herself nearly allied to the Greek Demeter.i The rest of the circumstances, with the behaviour of lacchos, and the myth regarding them, were after-fabrications of a similar stamp to the filthy Lernaean saga about Prosymnus, invented for the inter- pretation of the phallus- symbol. The mystse also, who had hitherto been fasting for nine days, after the example of the god- dess, now also tasted as she did the mixed drink (Kv/cemv), by which they obtained at the same time the right of admission to the completing rites of initiation. But there was yet another and a similar act represented in the mysteries, and attached to the appearance of the goddess in Eleusis. For the Creto-Samothracian legend, that Demeter had abandoned herself to a passion for Jasion, and from him conceived Plato, had been domesticated at Eleusis in this way, that the old hero of the place, Celeus, into whose house the goddess was received, had been substituted for Jasion. In gratitude for information concerning her daughter's rape, she had surrendered herself to him (Celeus) with a repetition of the behaviour of Baubo. This too was described in Orphic verses;^ and one who must have learnt it from eye-witnesses assures us in two places in his vrritings that this very exhibition still took place at Eleusis in his time, about a.d. 381.^ The meeting of mother and daughter did not take place in the same way in the mysteries as in the Homeric hymn, where Persephone, released from her husband at the bidding of Zeus, ' Herodot. ii. 60. The Lycian women seem to have had the same custom, for Plutarch (de Mul. Vu't. vii. ix. Wyttenh.) tells of their having appeased the anger of Poseidon avaffupd/xevai tovs x''''""^'^'""'^! ^^'^ so saved their countiy from an inundation. ' Comp. the verse in Gregor. Naz. Or. iv. 0pp. Paris, 17V9, i. 141. Thus are explained the heneflts mentioned hy Isoorates (Paneg. 0, p. 59) as conferred by Demeter on their ancestors, and which could not he made known to any but the initiated. Isocrates expressly distinguishes these from the gift of corn. 3 Greg. Naz. Or. iii. 104 (141 n.), xxxix. 0^5 i.. Lobeck (Aglaoph. p. 824) has the two passages, but has omitted to quote iu the latter the words kk! ■womv T V ao'XI/""''"'''''' f""''''^?""'- The word must be Troiei, the orator breaking off his sentence with the remark that he was ashamed of giving a precise description of the nocturnal mystery. The passage in the Orphic hymn concerning the mother AntEea (Demeter) having given way to human passion, and given birth to Eu- bulos, probably has reference to her liaison with Celeus. ELEUSINIAJT MYSTERIES. 187 comes up into the upper world; whereas in the Eleusinia, De- meter descends, " accompanied by the holy youth," into Hades, where lacchos shows her " the sacred nuptial couch of the Chthonic Zeus." ^ This descent of Demeter is mentioned by Cle- mens, who observes, that in the representation of the disappear- ance of the two goddesses, swine were made to go down with them.^ Here is the ground on which Herodotus explained Isis (who in Egypt was queen of the nether world with Osiris) to be identical with Demeter ; and ^schylus too, following in the same track, made Artemis a daughter of Demeter, as she passed for the Egyptian Bubastis, the daughter of Isis. This going down of Demeter into Hades, and the reunion of mother and daughter connected with it, appear to have belonged to the third principal division of the Attic mysteries, or to the second Eleusinian drama of the Epopteia. Accordingly Hades and its inhabitants were the last, and without doubt the most brilliant, scenic representation offered the epoptse to crown the whole. Upon this especially, tasteful Athens seems to have lavished all the wealth of her theatrical and artistic resources, so that the impression left behind by it on the mind of the spec- tator was profound and ineffaceable. We shall have no difficulty now in understanding the description of Plutarch :^ " First, losings of the way and tedious rambling about, and anxious, objectless wanderings in the darkness ; then, before the close, all kinds of terrific things, horror and trembling, sweat and an- guish ; then a burst of wondrous light, pleasant spots and mea- dows, welcome us : we hear voices, see dances, and receive the solemn impress of holy words and appearances." Therefore Himerius speaks of the longing for the " Eleusinian fire," which had attracted the Scythian Anacharsis to the mysteries. The terrors of Tartarus having been first shown to the epoptse, en- hanced the effect of the immediately subsequent exhibition of the pleasures and enjoyments there destined for the friends of the goddesses, and for the initiated. ' Orph. Hymn. 41 (40), v. 0, where, however, the name AvaavXov is first in- serted by the new editor. The text of Gessner has Avcayvas {Avaiyvrj) iraXS ayvhii 65i)7?)T7)pa Aaxovcra. The hoy who serves as guide in the under world is plainly lacchos, and not a son of Dysaules, and is called a.yii6s because ignorant of the commerce of love. ^ Protrept. p. 11 (? Tr.). » De Anima, Fragm. vi. 2 (v. 725, Wyttenb.). 188 THE MYSTERIES. Two actions of the last division of the Attic mysteries^ or Epopteiai, are still preserved to us, the proper place of which in the whole function, however, is matter of uncertainty: the one is the exclamation of the Hierophant, " The sublime Brimo has brought Brimeus into the world;" in other words, "The strong one has given birth to the strong."' This is confirma- tory of a statement taken from an old source,^ that Brimo was a name of Persephone ; for it could only be the birth of Zagreus lacchos which was alluded to. We may suppose that only on the meeting of the son with the mother in Hades, this circum- stance, which had been already signified in the little mysteries, was again solemnly announced in the Epopteiai. The second action, derived from the same source, is this : an ear of corn, plucked in silence, was exhibited to the epoptse as the great object, wonderful and perfect, of mystical contemplation. This symbol, as the authority observes, was borrowed from the Phry- gian cultus. " The yellow-reaped ear :"^ it was thus the Phry- gians styled their Attes, as they also called him the " dead," or the " barren one ;" Adonis too bore the name of Abuba, the ear.* It was exhibited accordingly as the symbol of the god, prema- turely killed, but, like the ear enclosing the seed-corn, bearing within himself the germ of a second life, and doubtless, too, as the symbol of the immortality assured to the epoptse. The sacred objects played a great part in the Attic mysteries. These had reference to the three deities and their histories, and were shown about in the mystic chests and touched. Some were given to the mystse, either to consume at once — a kind of communion — ^or to keep as a memorial or amulet ; and this in reality was the definitive act of initiation. In the great mys- teries, there were several kinds of cakes, sweetmeats in many shapes, sesame, grains of salt, pomegranates, little wands, ivy, and poppy/ the latter probably in memorial of the cure wrought with it by Demeter on Triptolemus when sick; the pomegranates because Persephone was made over to the under world for having eaten them; ivy as the attribute of Dionysos; the grain of salt and the sweetmeats as tokens of the better kind of life and the milder nourishment introduced by Demeter. 1 Hippolyt. adv. Hter. 115. 2 Etymol. M. p. 213, 49. ' Xf^oephv ctAx^' a/irifleVTa, Hippolyt. p. 118. '' Hesyoh. 3. v. : comp. Jablonsky, Opiisc. iii. 108. * Clem. Alex. Protrep. p. 6. ELEUSINIAN MYSTERIES. 189 The formulse quoted by Clemens were to be pronounced by each of the mystee. They served it seems as shibboleths, by which the mystse were known as such and admitted to epopteia. They ran thus : " I have fasted; I have drunk the mixed drink (cuceon) ; I have taken it out of the chest, have spun, have placed it in the basket, and from the basket laid it in the chest."^ The gesture too of spinning wool appears to have been an imi- tation of what Demeter did in the time of her affliction,^ and at the same time to have been acknowledged as relating to the improvement of domestic life and work attached to the name of the goddess. The phallus too was exhibited in the Attic mysteries : Ter- tuUian says this distinctly ;3 and in corroboration of him Diodorus certifies us, that this symbol was not only honoured in the Dio- nysic feasts, but in all other mysteries.* Most likely it was the case that in the little mysteries the phallus was exhibited as the member of the mutilated Zagreus which had escaped the fury of the Titans (like that of Osiris, and of the Cabir murdered by the brothers), and was preserved in the mystic chest under a symboli- cal name. The great mass of the heathens were not in the habit at any time of taking ofience at this figure. Accustomed to the sight of the Hermse, and such-like things, from their youth up, the imagination of the Greeks ceased to be easUy excited by it. People only saw in it the symbol of nature's generative power ; and why should that appear to them offensive in the mysteries which they had before their eyes every day and every where ? The Eleusinian pageant became at last, at the close of the epoptic arcana, public again, and open to all, as it had begun. ' ipyaa-a/j.ej'os, for whicti Lobeck and all the moderns after him, 0. Miiller and PrtEller inclusive, would substitute iyyev(rdiievos : my belief is the word is an Sjral \iy6iiivov; it occurs in Polyb. vii. 13, 7, of blood. Would a word of such rare occurrence have been used in one of the ordinary formulse of the mysteries ? According to the account of Epiphanius (0pp. 1092), one of the holy symbols was epia, 4^eLpya