to the history of the gods before the dynasty of Zeus, and to the conflicts by which his empire was established, that Hesiod devotes himself, and, farther back, to the earliest divine generations and the origin of the gods. The theogony here becomes cosmogony, and presents the oldest extant Greek speculations on the beginning of things, speculations not only closely akin to the Orphic cosmogonies but anticipating the problems of the Ionian natural philosophy.

First Chaos (the yawning void) came into being; next the broad-bosomed Earth, the firm foundation of all things, and murky Tartarus (the cavernous interior of the earth); then Love. From Chaos sprung Erebos and Night; from Night were born Aither (the circumambient light) and Day. Earth produced the starry Heaven, which covers it completely, the mountains, haunts of the nymphs, and the barren sea. Thus far the cosmogony. With the marriage of Heaven and Earth (Ouranos and Gē) the theogony begins. From this union spring the Titans, the youngest and greatest of whom was Kronos, father of the Cyclopes and the hundred-armed monsters whom Ouranos imprisons in the deep recesses of Earth to her great discomfort. At her instance, Kronos emasculates his father; from the blood that drips upon the earth spring later the Erinyes and the giants, from the froth of the abscinded member cast into the sea, the "foam-born" goddess, Aphrodite. Then follow the offspring of the Titans, a motley brood. Of Kronos and Rhea are born Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades, Poseidon, and, last of all, Zeus. Fearing that his children may deal with him as unfilially as he had dealt by his father, Kronos devours his progeny, new born; from this fate Zeus is saved by the ruse of Rhea, who substitutes for the infant a stone wrapped in swaddlingclothes; the young god is brought up in concealment in Crete. When he is grown, the struggle for the empire of the world begins. Zeus is aided by his brothers, whom Kronos has been constrained to disgorge, and by the Cyclopes and the Hekatoncheires, whom Zeus has released from their prisonhouse within the earth. The Titans are vanquished, and

An imprisoned in Hades under guard of the hundred-armed monsters. Zeus is acknowledged by the gods as sovereign.

The Hesiodic Theogony is an attempt to reduce to order a body of traditional material of diverse origin. Allusions in the epics show that much of this material was in circulation long before Hesiod's time, and in other things he seems to have followed the authority of Homer. There are traces also of different myths of the origin of the world of perhaps equal antiquity, in one of which the cosmic egg figured as it does in India and in Egypt.

Hesiod's story of the birth of Zeus is derived from Cretan myths: his mother Rhea is the Cretan goddess; the cave where she brought into the world her greatest son was shown on Mount Dicte, or, if you preferred, on Mount Ida; the Kouretes, whose clanging arms drowned his cries, were Cretan sword-dancers-in short, the infancy of Zeus belonged to

Crete.

To scholars whose notions of early Greek religion were drawn solely from the epic, the savage features of the Cretan myths seemed singularly un-Greek, and they easily convinced themselves that the Kronos who devoured his own offspring was a Phoenician god and that the non-Hellenic element in Cretan religion was of Semitic origin. According to Philo of Byblos, the sacrifice of children, which was so striking a characteristic of the Phoenician religion, was inaugurated by a god whom he calls Kronos, who sacrificed his only son. There is, however, no real parallel between the two myths: one is a cultus myth, giving divine precedent and authority for a peculiar type of human sacrifice, the other is an example of a common folk-lore motive, the putting out of the way of an infant which is destined, if it grows up, to supplant the ruler (commonly a kinsman). To connect these myths is a very naïve procedure even for comparative mythology. It is unnecessary to dwell on this, however, for in the light of our present knowledge of Cretan civilisation the theory of early Phoenician influence must be abandoned altogether.

The scene of the Titanomachy is Thessaly; the Titans descend to the encounter from Mount Othrys, the gods from Mount Olympus. The war between the gods of the present order and the monstrous powers who ruled the world before them was clearly, in its original conception, a cosmic conflict, though in the Hesiodic version Kronos and Iapetos, the protagonists of the Titans, are completely anthropomorphic deities. A Babylonian poem has for its principal subject a like conflict between Bel, as the champion of the gods, and the dragon Tiamat with her allies, the monstrous brood of chaos. The motives of the two myths are obviously the same, and many scholars are inclined to assume, more or less confidently, that the Greek myth is an echo of the Babylonian.

In the Works, Hesiod paints a sombre picture of the degeneracy of his times. Age by age, from the beginning, the world has grown worse. On the golden age, with which human history began, followed one of silver, and on that the age of bronze; the present is the iron age, and the decadence is still in progress. The heroic age represented in the epic stands in this series between bronze and iron, that is, immediately preceding the author's own day. The present is an evil day: judges take bribes and pervert justice; those who have the might scoff at the protests of their victims as the hawk in the fable does at the cries of the nightingale. The shadows of the actual are deepened by contrast with the picture of the ideal city wherein dwelleth righteousness.

That man has so hard a lot on earth, Hesiod ascribes to the anger of Zeus for the theft of fire by Prometheus. For this fault the gods contrived the maiden Pandora, with her fatal charm and her fatal guile, and sent her to Prometheus's slow-witted brother, Epimetheus, who took her in; whereupon, with feminine curiosity, she lifted the lid off the jar in which all evils were confined and let them loose beyond reclaim.

1 See above, pp. 209 ff.

CHAPTER XVIII

THE GREEKS

FROM THE AGE OF COLONISATION TO THE PELOPONNE

SIAN WAR

The Age of Expansion-Effect of New Conditions on ReligionDemeter-Dionysos-Savage Features of Myth and Cult-The Hope of Immortality-Orphic Mysteries-Cosmogony and Theogony-The Other Life-The Eleusinian Mysteries-Salvation— Other Mysteries and Salvationist Sects-The Ionian PhilosophyAttacks on the Popular Religion-Parmenides, Empedocles, Anaxagoras-Democritus-The Sophists-Agnosticism-Theories of the Origin of Religion-Influence of the Sophists-Effect of the Persian Wars-Greek Worship-Holy Places-Priesthoods-Sacrifices-Expiations-Festivals-Oracles

IN Hesiod, as has already been remarked, a very different spirit breathes from that which inspired the epic poets. This difference is in part personal: the sturdy Boeotian farmer was a man of another race and temperament from the bards who sang at the courts of Ionian princes; his surroundings and interests were remote from theirs. But besides the individuality of the poet we hear in him the first voice of a new time. In the eighth century began a period of commercial expansion and colonisation, in which the Ionian cities of Asia Minor, particularly Miletus, took the lead, closely followed by those of Euboea and the Isthmus. All around the eastern end of the Mediterranean, from Propontis and the Black Sea to the Cyrenaica, and westward to Sicily and southern Italy, new Greek settlements were planted and old ones acquired new importance. The maritime cities, with their extensive commerce, outgrew the inland towns; the demand for export stimulated domestic industries and led to produc

tion on a commercial scale. The opening of Egypt under Psammetichos, and the rise of a new Lydian dynasty which in the end brought most of Asia Minor this side the Halys under its sway, made new fields for enterprise and adventure; Greek mercenaries and traders penetrated far into these countries. Though the colonies were planted by particular cities, and reproduced the social and political organisation of the old home as they established the worship of the ancestral gods, they drew to themselves immigrants from many places, and, in the presence of races of alien speech and custom, the settlers felt themselves members of one Hellenic people. Commerce had to be protected against pirates, colonies against the aggression of neighbours; thus navies were created, and a new era of Greek politics began.

The effects of these conditions were manifold and farreaching not only abroad but at home. The landed aristocracy lost its political and social pre-eminence; rich merchants and manufacturers soon thought themselves quite as good as the old nobility with their long pedigrees and their unproductive acres. Household industries were displaced by manufacture; industrial slavery became profitable, and foreign slaves were in demand. The condition of the free peasant was harder with the decline of agriculture, and the country people thronged into the cities in the hope of bettering their fortunes. The freer life of the colonies reacted on the old country. The old social order, in which every man's place and status were fixed, broke down under all these changes; and as in the modern age of colonisation and emigration, individualism was the signature of the time in every sphere of life.

This spirit finds expression in a new form of poetry. The stately hexameter measures of Homer and Hesiod give place to elegiacs and the mordant or familiar iambic; the objective recital of what was done and said in the far-away past of the heroic age, to the subjectivity of the lyric poet, the thought and feeling of the individual and the hour, or to moral reflections and exhortations addressed to his contemporaries. The institutions which had sufficed for a simpler time were