Five Stages of Greek Religion Part 10

'Throughout the whole world, at every place and hour, by every voice Fortune alone is invoked and her name spoken: she is the one defendant, the one culprit, the one thought in men's minds, the one object of praise, the one cause. She is worshipped with insults, counted as fickle and often as blind, wandering, inconsistent, elusive, changeful, and friend of the unworthy. . . . We are so much at the mercy of chance that Chance is our G.o.d.'

The word used is first _Fortuna_ and then _Sors_. This shows how little real difference there is between the two apparently contradictory conceptions.--'Chance would have it so.' 'It was fated to be.' The sting of both phrases--their pleasant bitterness when played with, their quality of poison when believed--lies in their denial of the value of human endeavour.

Yet on the whole, as one might expect, the believers in Destiny are a more respectable congregation than the worshippers of Chance. It requires a certain amount of thoughtfulness to rise to the conception that nothing really happens without a cause. It is the beginning, perhaps, of science. Ionic philosophers of the fifth century had laid stress on the ?????? f?s???,[134:1] what we should call the Chain of causes in Nature. After the rise of Stoicism Fate becomes something less physical, more related to conscious purpose. It is not _Ananke_ but _Heimarmene_. Heimarmene, in the striking simile of Zeno,[134:2] is like a fine thread running through the whole of existence--the world, we must remember, was to the Stoics a live thing--like that invisible thread of life which, in heredity, pa.s.ses on from generation to generation of living species and keeps the type alive; it runs causing, causing for ever, both the infinitesimal and the infinite. It is the ????? t??

??s??,[135:1] the ???? ????, the Reason of the World or the mind of Zeus, rather difficult to distinguish from the p.r.o.noia or Providence which is the work of G.o.d and indeed the very essence of G.o.d. Thus it is not really an external and alien force. For the human soul itself is a fragment or effluence of the divine, and this Law of G.o.d is also the law of man's own Phusis. As long as you act in accordance with your true self you are complying with that divine ??a???? or ??????a, whose service is perfect freedom. Only when you are false to your own nature and become a rebel against the kingdom of G.o.d which is within you, are you dragged perforce behind the chariot-wheels. The doctrine is implied in Cleanthes' celebrated Hymn to Destiny and is explained clearly by Plotinus.[135:2]

That is a n.o.ble conception. But the vulgar of course can turn Kismet into a stupid idol, as easily as they can Fortune. And Epicurus may have had some excuse for exclaiming that he would sooner be a slave to the old G.o.ds of the vulgar, than to the Destiny of the philosophers.[135:3]

So much for the result in superst.i.tious minds of the denial, or rather the removal, of the Olympian G.o.ds. It landed men in the worship of Fortune or of Fate.

Next, let us consider what happened when, instead of merely rejecting the G.o.ds _en ma.s.se_, people tried carefully to collect what remained of religion after the Olympian system fell.

Aristotle himself gives us a fairly clear answer. He held that the origins of man's idea (?????a) of the Divine were twofold,[136:1] the phenomena of the sky and the phenomena of the human soul. It is very much what Kant found two thousand years later. The spectacle of the vast and ordered movements of the heavenly bodies are compared by him in a famous fragment with the marching forth of Homer's armies before Troy.

Behind such various order and strength there must surely be a conscious mind capable

??s?sa? ?????? te ?a? ????a? ?sp?d??ta?,

To order steeds of war and mailed men.

It is only a step from this to regarding the sun, moon, and stars as themselves divine, and it is a step which both Plato and Aristotle, following Pythagoras and followed by the Stoics, take with confidence.

Chrysippus gives practically the same list of G.o.ds: 'the Sun, Moon, and Stars; and Law: and men who have become G.o.ds.'[136:2] Both the wandering stars and the fixed stars are 'animate beings, divine and eternal', self-acting subordinate G.o.ds. As to the divinity of the soul or the mind of man, the earlier generations are shy about it. But in the later Stoics it is itself a portion of the divine life. It shows this ordinarily by its power of reason, and more conspicuously by becoming ???e??, or 'filled with G.o.d', in its exalted moments of prevision, ecstasy, and prophetic dreams. If reason itself is divine, there is something else in the soul which is even higher than reason or at least more surprisingly divine.

Let us follow the history of both these remaining subst.i.tutes for the Olympian G.o.ds.

First for the Heavenly bodies. If they are to be made divine, we can hardly stop there. The Earth is also a divine being. Old tradition has always said so, and Plato has repeated it. And if Earth is divine, so surely are the other elements, the _Stoicheia_, Water, Air, and above all, Fire. For the G.o.ds themselves are said by Plato to be made of fire, and the Stars visibly are so. Though perhaps the heavenly Fire is really not our Fire at all, but a p?pt?? s?a, a 'Fifth Body', seeing that it seems not to burn nor the Stars to be consumed.

This is persuasive enough and philosophic; but whither has it led us?

Back to the Olympians, or rather behind the Olympians; as St. Paul puts it (Gal. iv. 9), to 'the beggarly elements'. The old Kore, or Earth Maiden and Mother, seems to have held her own unshaken by the changes of time all over the Aegean area. She is there in prehistoric Crete with her two lions; with the same lions orientalized in Olympia and Ephesus; in Sparta with her great marsh birds; in Boeotia with her horse. She runs riot in a number of the Gnostic systems both pre-Christian and post-Christian. She forms a divine triad with the Father and the Son: that is ancient and natural. But she also becomes the Divine Wisdom, Sophia, the Divine Truth, Aletheia, the Holy Breath or Spirit, the Pneuma. Since the word for 'spirit' is neuter in Greek and masculine in Latin, this last is rather a surprise. It is explained when we remember that in Hebrew the word for Spirit, 'Ruah', is mostly feminine. In the meantime let us notice one curious development in the life of this G.o.ddess. In the old religion of Greece and Western Asia, she begins as a Maiden, then in fullness of time becomes a mother. There is evidence also for a third stage, the widowhood of withering autumn.[138:1] To the cla.s.sical Greek this motherhood was quite as it should be, a due fulfilment of normal functions. But to the Gnostic and his kind it connoted a 'fall', a pa.s.sage from the glory of Virginity to a state of Sin.[138:2] The Kore becomes a fallen Virgin, sometimes a temptress or even a female devil; sometimes she has to be saved by her Son the Redeemer.[138:3] As far as I have observed, she loses most of her earthly agricultural quality, though as Selene or even Helen she keeps up her affinity with the Moon.

Almost all the writers of the h.e.l.lenistic Age agree in regarding the Sun, Moon, and Stars as G.o.ds. The rationalists Hecataeus and Euhemerus, before going on to their deified men, always start with the heavenly bodies. When Plutarch explains in his beautiful and kindly way that all religions are really attempts towards the same goal, he clinches his argument by observing that we all see the same Sun and Moon though we call them by different names in all languages.[139:1] But the belief does not seem to have had much religious intensity in it, until it was reinforced by two alien influences.

First, we have the ancient worship of the Sun, implicit, if not explicit, in a great part of the oldest Greek rituals, and then idealized by Plato in the _Republic_, where the Sun is the author of all light and life in the material world, as the Idea of Good is in the ideal world. This worship came gradually into contact with the traditional and definite Sun-worship of Persia. The final combination took place curiously late. It was the Roman conquests of Cilicia, Cappadocia, Commagene, and Armenia that gave the decisive moment.[139:2]

To men who had wearied of the myths of the poets, who could draw no more inspiration from their Apollo and Hyperion, but still had the habits and the craving left by their old G.o.ds, a fresh breath of reality came with the entrance of ????? ?????t?? ????a?, 'Mithras, the Unconquered Sun'.

But long before the triumph of Mithraism as the military religion of the Roman frontier, Greek literature is permeated with a kind of intense language about the Sun, which seems derived from Plato.[139:3] In later times, in the fourth century A. D. for instance, it has absorbed some more full-blooded and less critical element as well.

Secondly, all the seven planets. These had a curious history. The planets were of course divine and living bodies, so much Plato gave us.

Then come arguments and questions scattered through the Stoic and eclectic literature. Is it the planet itself that is divine, or is the planet under the guidance of a divine spirit? The latter seems to win the day. Anthropomorphism has stolen back upon us: we can use the old language and speak simply of the planet Mercury as ???? ?st??. It is the star of Hermes, and Hermes is the spirit who guides it.[140:1] Even Plato in his old age had much to say about the souls of the seven planets. Further, each planet has its sphere. The Earth is in the centre, then comes the sphere of the Moon, then that of the Sun, and so on through a range of seven spheres. If all things are full of G.o.ds, as the wise ancients have said, what about those parts of the sphere in which the shining planet for the moment is not? Are they without G.o.d?

Obviously not. The whole sphere is filled with innumerable spirits everywhere. It is all Hermes, all Aphrodite. (We are more familiar with the Latin names, Mercury and Venus.) But one part only is visible. The voice of one school, as usual, is raised in opposition. One veteran had seen clearly from the beginning whither all this sort of thing was sure to lead. 'Epicurus approves none of these things.'[140:2] It was no good his having destroyed the old traditional superst.i.tion, if people by deifying the stars were to fill the sky with seven times seven as many objects of worship as had been there before. He allows no _Schwarmerei_ about the stars. They are _not_ divine animate beings, or guided by G.o.ds. Why cannot the astrologers leave G.o.d in peace? When their orbits are irregular it is _not_ because they are looking for food. They are just conglomerations of ordinary atoms of air or fire--it does not matter which. They are not even very large--only about as large as they look, or perhaps smaller, since most fires tend to look bigger at a distance. They are not at all certainly everlasting. It is quite likely that the sun comes to an end every day, and a new one rises in the morning. All kinds of explanations are possible, and none certain.

????? ? ???? ?p?st?. In any case, as you value your life and your reason, do not begin making myths about them!

On other lines came what might have been the effective protest of real Science, when Aristarchus of Samos (250 B. C.) argued that the earth was not really the centre of the universe, but revolved round the Sun. But his hypothesis did not account for the phenomena as completely as the current theory with its 'Epicycles'; his fellow astronomers were against him; Cleanthes the Stoic denounced him for 'disturbing the Hearth of the Universe', and his heresy made little headway.[141:1]

The planets in their seven spheres surrounding the earth continued to be objects of adoration. They had their special G.o.ds or guiding spirits a.s.signed them. Their ordered movements through s.p.a.ce, it was held, produce a vast and eternal harmony. It is beautiful beyond all earthly music, this Music of the Spheres, beyond all human dreams of what music might be. The only pity is that--except for a few individuals in trances--n.o.body has ever heard it. Circ.u.mstances seem always to be unfavourable. It may be that we are too far off, though, considering the vastness of the orchestra, this seems improbable. More likely we are merely deaf to it because it never stops and we have been in the middle of it since we first drew breath.[142:1]

The planets also become Elements in the Kosmos, _Stoicheia_. It is significant that in h.e.l.lenistic theology the word Stoicheion, Element, gets to mean a Daemon--as Megathos, Greatness, means an Angel.[142:2]

But behold a mystery! The word _Stoicheia_, 'elementa', had long been used for the Greek A B C, and in particular for the seven vowels a e ? ?

? ? ?. That is no chance, no mere coincidence. The vowels are the mystic signs of the Planets; they have control over the planets. Hence strange prayers and magic formulae innumerable.

Even the way of reckoning time changed under the influence of the Planets. Instead of the old division of the month into three periods of nine days, we find gradually establishing itself the week of seven days with each day named after its planet, Sun, Moon, Ares, Hermes, Zeus, Aphrodite, Kronos. The history of the Planet week is given by Dio Ca.s.sius, x.x.xvii. 18, in his account of the Jewish campaign of Pompeius.

But it was not the Jewish week. The Jews scorned such idolatrous and polytheistic proceedings. It was the old week of Babylon, the original home of astronomy and planet-worship.[143:1]

For here again a great foreign religion came like water in the desert to minds reluctantly and superficially enlightened, but secretly longing for the old terrors and raptures from which they had been set free. Even in the old days Aeschylus had called the planets 'bright potentates, shining in the fire of heaven', and Euripides had spoken of the 'shaft hurled from a star'.[143:2] But we are told that the first teaching of astrology in h.e.l.lenic lands was in the time of Alexander, when Berossos the Chaldaean set up a school in Cos and, according to Seneca, _Belum interpretatus est_. This must mean that he translated into Greek the '_Eye of Bel_', a treatise in seventy tablets found in the library of a.s.sur-bani-pal (686-626 B. C.) but composed for Sargon I in the third millennium B. C. Even the philosopher Theophrastus is reported by Proclus[143:3] as saying that 'the most extraordinary thing of his age was the lore of the Chaldaeans, who foretold not only events of public interest but even the lives and deaths of individuals'. One wonders slightly whether Theophrastus spoke with as much implicit faith as Proclus suggests. But the chief account is given by Diodorus, ii. 30 (perhaps from Hecataeus).

'Other nations despise the philosophy of Greece. It is so recent and so constantly changing. They have traditions which come from vast antiquity and never change. Notably the Chaldaeans have collected observations of the Stars through long ages, and teach how every event in the heavens has its meaning, as part of the eternal scheme of divine forethought.

Especially the seven Wanderers, or Planets, are called by them Hermeneis, Interpreters: and among them the Interpreter in chief is Saturn. Their work is to interpret beforehand t?? t??

?e?? ?????a?, the thought that is in the mind of the G.o.ds. By their risings and settings, and by the colours they a.s.sume, the Chaldaeans predict great winds and storms and waves of excessive heat, comets, and earthquakes, and in general all changes fraught with weal or woe not only to nations and regions of the world, but to kings and to ordinary men and women. Beneath the Seven are thirty G.o.ds of Counsel, half below and half above the Earth; every ten days a Messenger or Angel star pa.s.ses from above below and another from below above. Above these G.o.ds are twelve Masters, who are the twelve signs of the Zodiac; and the planets pa.s.s through all the Houses of these twelve in turn. The Chaldaeans have made prophecies for various kings, such as Alexander who conquered Darius, and Antigonus and Seleucus Nikator, and have always been right. And private persons who have consulted them consider their wisdom as marvellous and above human power.'

Astrology fell upon the h.e.l.lenistic mind as a new disease falls upon some remote island people. The tomb of Ozymandias, as described by Diodorus (i. 49, 5), was covered with astrological symbols, and that of Antiochus I, which has been discovered in Commagene, is of the same character. It was natural for monarchs to believe that the stars watched over them. But every one was ready to receive the germ. The Epicureans, of course, held out, and so did Panaetius, the coolest head among the Stoics. But the Stoics as a whole gave way. They formed with good reason the leading school of philosophy, and it would have been a service to mankind if they had resisted. But they were already committed to a belief in the deity of the stars and to the doctrine of Heimarmene, or Destiny. They believed in the pervading p.r.o.noia,[145:1] or Forethought, of the divine mind, and in the S?p??e?a t?? ????--the Sympathy of all Creation,[145:2] whereby whatever happens to any one part, however remote or insignificant, affects all the rest. It seemed only a natural and beautiful ill.u.s.tration of this Sympathy that the movements of the Stars should be bound up with the sufferings of man. They also appealed to the general belief in prophecy and divination.[145:3] If a prophet can foretell that such and such an event will happen, then it is obviously fated to happen. Foreknowledge implies Predestination. This belief in prophecy was, in reality, a sort of appeal to fact and to common sense. People could produce then, as they can now, a large number of striking cases of second sight, presentiment, clairvoyance, actual prophecy and the like;[145:4] and it was more difficult then to test them.

The argument involved Stoicism with some questionable allies.

Epicureans and sceptics of the Academy might well mock at the sight of a great man like Chrysippus or Posidonius resting an important part of his religion on the undetected frauds of a shady Levantine 'medium'. Still the Stoics could not but welcome the arrival of a system of prophecy and predestination which, however the incredulous might rail at it, possessed at least great antiquity and great stores of learning, which was respectable, recondite, and in a way sublime.

In all the religious systems of later antiquity, if I mistake not, the Seven Planets play some lordly or terrifying part. The great Mithras Liturgy, unearthed by Dieterich from a magical papyrus in Paris,[146:1]

repeatedly confronts the worshipper with the seven vowels as names of 'the Seven Deathless Kosmokratores', or Lords of the Universe, and seems, under their influence, to go off into its 'Seven Maidens with heads of serpents, in white raiment', and its divers other Sevens. The various Hermetic and Mithraic communities, the Naa.s.senes described by Hippolytus,[146:2] and other Gnostic bodies, authors like Macrobius and even Cicero in his _Somnium Scipionis_, are full of the influence of the seven planets and of the longing to escape beyond them. For by some simple psychological law the stars which have inexorably p.r.o.nounced our fate, and decreed, or at least registered the decree, that in spite of all striving we must needs tread their prescribed path; still more perhaps, the Stars who know in the midst of our laughter how that laughter will end, become inevitably powers of evil rather than good, beings malignant as well as pitiless, making life a vain thing. And Saturn, the chief of them, becomes the most malignant. To some of the Gnostics he becomes Jaldabaoth, the Lion-headed G.o.d, the evil Jehovah.[147:1] The religion of later antiquity is overpoweringly absorbed in plans of escape from the prison of the seven planets.

In author after author, in one community after another, the subject recurs. And on the whole there is the same answer. Here on the earth we are the sport of Fate; nay, on the earth itself we are worse off still.

We are beneath the Moon, and beneath the Moon there is not only Fate but something more unworthy and equally malignant, Chance--to say nothing of damp and the ills of earth and bad daemons. Above the Moon there is no chance, only Necessity: there is the will of the other six Kosmokratores, Rulers of the Universe. But above them all there is an Eighth region--they call it simply the Ogdoas--the home of the ultimate G.o.d,[147:2] whatever He is named, whose being was before the Kosmos. In this Sphere is true Being and Freedom. And more than freedom, there is the ultimate Union with G.o.d. For that spark of divine life which is man's soul is not merely, as some have said, an ?p?????a t?? ?st???, an effluence of the stars: it comes direct from the first and ultimate G.o.d, the Alpha and Omega, who is beyond the Planets. Though the Kosmokratores cast us to and fro like their slaves or dead chattels, in soul at least we are of equal birth with them. The Mithraic votary, when their wrathful and tremendous faces break in upon his vision, answers them unterrified: ??? e?? s?p?a??? ??? ?st??, 'I am your fellow wanderer, your fellow Star.' The Orphic carried to the grave on his golden scroll the same boast: first, 'I am the child of Earth and of the starry Heaven'; then later, 'I too am become G.o.d'.[148:1] The Gnostic writings consist largely of charms to be uttered by the Soul to each of the Planets in turn, as it pursues its perilous path past all of them to its ultimate home.

That journey awaits us after death; but in the meantime? In the meantime there are initiations, sacraments, mystic ways of communion with G.o.d. To see G.o.d face to face is, to the ordinary unprepared man, sheer death.

But to see Him after due purification, to be led to Him along the true Way by an initiating Priest, is the ultimate blessing of human life. It is to die and be born again. There were regular official initiations. We have one in the Mithras-Liturgy, more than one in the Corpus Hermetic.u.m.

Apuleius[148:2] tells us at some length, though in guarded language, how he was initiated to Isis and became 'her image'. After much fasting, clad in holy garments and led by the High Priest, he crossed the threshold of Death and pa.s.sed through all the Elements. The Sun shone upon him at midnight, and he saw the G.o.ds of Heaven and of Hades. In the morning he was clad in the Robe of Heaven, set up on a pedestal in front of the G.o.ddess and worshipped by the congregation as a G.o.d. He had been made one with Osiris or Horus or whatever name it pleased that Sun-G.o.d to be called. Apuleius does not reveal it.

There were also, of course, the irregular personal initiations and visions of G.o.d vouchsafed to persons of special prophetic powers. St.

Paul, we may remember, knew personally a man who had actually been s.n.a.t.c.hed up into the Third Heaven, and another who was similarly rapt into Paradise, where he heard unspeakable words;[149:1] whether in the body or not, the apostle leaves undecided. He himself on the road to Damascus had seen the Christ in glory, not after the flesh. The philosopher Plotinus, so his disciple tells us, was united with G.o.d in trance four times in five years.[149:2]

We seem to have travelled far from the simplicity of early Greek religion. Yet, apart always from Plotinus, who is singularly aloof, most of the movement has been a reaction under Oriental and barbarous influences towards the most primitive pre-h.e.l.lenic cults. The union of man with G.o.d came regularly through _Ekstasis_--the soul must get clear of its body--and _Enthousiasmos_--the G.o.d must enter and dwell inside the worshipper. But the means to this union, while sometimes allegorized and spiritualized to the last degree, are sometimes of the most primitive sort. The vagaries of religious emotion are apt to reach very low as well as very high in the scale of human nature. Certainly the primitive Thracian savages, who drank themselves mad with the hot blood of their G.o.d-beast, would have been quite at home in some of these rituals, though in others they would have been put off with some subst.i.tute for the actual blood. The primitive priestesses who waited in a bridal chamber for the Divine Bridegroom, even the Cretan Kouretes with their Zeus Koures[150:1] and those strange hierophants of the 'Men's House' whose initiations are written on the rocks of Thera, would have found rites very like their own reblossoming on earth after the fall of h.e.l.lenism. 'Prepare thyself as a bride to receive her bridegroom,' says Markos the Gnostic,[150:2] 'that thou mayst be what I am and I what thou art.' 'I in thee, and thou in me!' is the ecstatic cry of one of the Hermes liturgies. Before that the prayer has been 'Enter into me as a babe into the womb of a woman'.[150:3]

In almost all the liturgies that I have read need is felt for a mediator between the seeker after G.o.d and his goal. Mithras himself saw a Mesites, a Mediator, between Ormuzd and Ahriman, but the ordinary mediator is more like an interpreter or an adept with inner knowledge which he reveals to the outsider. The circ.u.mstances out of which these systems grew have left their mark on the new G.o.ds themselves. As usual, the social structure of the worshippers is reflected in their objects of worship. When the Chaldaeans came to Cos, when the Thracians in the Piraeus set up their national worship of Bendis, when the Egyptians in the same port founded their society for the Egyptian ritual of Isis, when the Jews at a.s.suan in the fifth century B. C. established their own temple, in each case there would come proselytes to whom the truth must be explained and interpreted, sometimes perhaps softened. And in each case there is behind the particular priest or initiator there present some greater authority in the land he comes from. Behind any explanation that can be made in the Piraeus, there is a deeper and higher explanation known only to the great master in Jerusalem, in Egypt, in Babylon, or perhaps in some unexplored and ever-receding region of the east. This series of revelations, one behind the other, is a characteristic of all these mixed Graeco-Oriental religions.

Most of the Hermetic treatises are put in the form of initiations or lessons revealed by a 'father' to a 'son', by Ptah to Hermes, by Hermes to Thoth or Asclepios, and by one of them to us. It was an ancient formula, a natural vehicle for traditional wisdom in Egypt, where the young priest became regularly the 'son' of the old priest. It is a form that we find in Greece itself as early as Euripides, whose Melanippe says of her cosmological doctrines,

'It is not my word but my Mother's word'.[152:1]

It was doubtless the language of the old Medicine-Man to his disciple.

In one fine liturgy Thoth wrestles with Hermes in agony of spirit, till Hermes is forced to reveal to him the path to union with G.o.d which he himself has trodden before. At the end of the Mithras liturgy the devotee who has pa.s.sed through the mystic ordeals and seen his G.o.d face to face, is told: 'After this you can show the way to others.'

But this leads us to the second great division of our subject. We turn from the phenomena of the sky to those of the soul.

If what I have written elsewhere is right, one of the greatest works of the h.e.l.lenic spirit, and especially of fifth-century Athens, was to insist on what seems to us such a commonplace truism, the difference between Man and G.o.d. Sophrosyne in religion was the message of the cla.s.sical age. But the ages before and after had no belief in such a lesson. The old Medicine-Man was perhaps himself the first _Theos_. At any rate the primeval kings and queens were treated as divine.[152:2]

Just for a few great generations, it would seem, humanity rose to a sufficient height of self-criticism and self-restraint to reject these dreams of self-abas.e.m.e.nt or megalomania. But the effort was too great for the average world; and in a later age nearly all the kings and rulers--all people in fact who can command an adequate number of flatterers--become divine beings again. Let us consider how it came about.

First there was the explicit recognition by the soberest philosophers of the divine element in man's soul.[153:1] Aristotle himself built an altar to Plato. He did nothing superst.i.tious; he did not call Plato a G.o.d, but we can see from his beautiful elegy to Eudemus, that he naturally and easily used language of worship which would seem a little strange to us. It is the same emotion--a n.o.ble and just emotion on the whole--which led the philosophic schools to treat their founders as 'heroes', and which has peopled most of Europe and Asia with the memories and the worship of saints. But we should remember that only a rare mind will make its divine man of such material as Plato. The common way to dazzle men's eyes is a more brutal and obvious one.

To people who were at all accustomed to the conception of a G.o.d-Man it was difficult not to feel that the conception was realized in Alexander.

His tremendous power, his brilliant personality, his achievements beggaring the fables of the poets, put people in the right mind for worship. Then came the fact that the kings whom he conquered were, as a matter of fact, mostly regarded by their subjects as divine beings.[154:1] It was easy, it was almost inevitable, for those who worshipped the 'G.o.d'[154:2] Darius to feel that it was no man but a greater G.o.d who had overthrown Darius. The incense which had been burned before those conquered G.o.ds was naturally offered to their conqueror. He did not refuse it. It was not good policy to do so, and self-depreciation is not apt to be one of the weaknesses of the born ruler.[154:3] But besides all this, if you are to judge a G.o.d by his fruits, what G.o.d could produce better credentials? Men had often seen Zeus defied with impunity; they had seen faithful servants of Apollo come to bad ends. But those who defied Alexander, however great they might be, always rued their defiance, and those who were faithful to him always received their reward. With his successors the worship became more official. Seleucus, Ptolemaeus, Antigonus, Demetrius, all in different degrees and different styles are deified by the acclamations of adoring subjects. Ptolemy Philadelphus seems to have been the first to claim definite divine honours during his own life. On the death of his wife in 271 he proclaimed her deity and his own as well in the worship of the Theoi Adelphoi, the 'G.o.ds Brethren'. Of course there was flattery in all this, ordinary self-interested lying flattery, and its inevitable accompaniment, megalomania. Any reading of the personal history of the Ptolemies, the Seleucidae or the Caesars shows it. But that is not the whole explanation.

One of the characteristics of the period of the Diadochi is the acc.u.mulation of capital and military force in the hands of individuals.