The Historians' History of the World 04

Like all institutions, this worship and the whole system of the cult of Apollo was not established without fierce struggles; and it incorporated into itself, and thus rendered innocuous, many things which it was unable to cast forth. This was true more particularly of ecstasy. There had been a time when the nation was thrilled by a mighty religious movement having its source in the Phrygio-Thracian religions; the great god Dionysus came, he who walks the earth demanding faith and followers, who possesses men with his spirit and enables a man to experience what he himself experienced, and is ever experiencing afresh—divine madness, death and resurrection. The movement naturally laid hold upon the Greeks of the East also, but it did not take souls captive there; the Homeric Greeks have no appreciation of mysticism. Here, on the contrary, within the religion that was gradually being Homerised, a counter-current set in, capable, indeed, of becoming a sub-current, but only if its course were directed into the bed of the official religion, and if Apollo effected a compromise with Dionysus. In narrower circles, outside the state religion, this doctrine and practice based upon the ecstasy, the redemption of man, have always held their own; the old religion of Demeter passed through similar crises, and the incorporation into the state cult of secret rites such as were practised at Eleusis, did not suffice to stifle the longing for an individual religion. But for the time the Apolline system is triumphant.

Doric architecture is now added to the solemn rendering of Doric music. The temple, the house of the image of the god, made, not for congregational worship, but for solemn procession or devout meditation, is the consummate expression of this piety. That the gods should take the form of men is an outcome of the Homeric temper; but Zeus as a naked man hurling lightning, Apollo as a naked youth, the calm, majestic matrons and maidens—these are the Doric ideal of divinity. In addition to these we get the statues of men, the male image (ἀνδριάς) and the virginal image (κόρη). The inspiration of these arts certainly came from the East, but what interests and delights us in archaic sculpture and in those very examples which seem to us typical, as so genuinely Greek, is the Doric element; it reveals itself to us not only in the Æginetæ and the statues of nude youths who are just as much gods as men, but also in the Idolino and the Delphic charioteer, the Hestia Giustiniani and the female prize-runner, in the works of Polyclitus and again in those of Myron; for Athens long shares in this culture, the chief prophet of which at the twelfth hour was the Theban Pindar, with his gift for showing us both its splendour and its remoteness from modern sentiment. To this day Homer and the Athenians produce a vivid impression on every unsophisticated mind; Pindar requires arduous historical study, like Virgil, Dante, and Calderon.