The hero by FitzRoy Richard Somerset Raglan

Author:FitzRoy Richard Somerset Raglan [Somerset Raglan, FitzRoy Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Referencia, Ciencias sociales
Publisher: ePubLibre
Published: 1936-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter XV

MYTH AND RITUAL: THE TALE OF TROY

The scientific, as contrasted with the literary, study of the Homeric poems has hardly yet begun, and cannot take us far until a sufficient number of students has realized that the poems have no historical foundation, but that as documents illustrating the development of religious ideas and beliefs they are of the highest importance. It is impossible for one who, like myself, is neither a Greek nor a German scholar (for there is much untranslated matter on this subject in German) to do more than try to point out the direction that in my belief these studies will take.

We must first try to form a picture of Greece as it really was about 700 B.C. It was in some respects analogous to England in A.D. 600; that is to say, it was occupied by tribes of barbarians who had blotted out an ancient civilization and were themselves beginning to be civilized through alien influence. Of the Greeks, as of the Saxons, we know nothing from historical, and little from archaeological, sources of the origin and history of these tribes, but of the Greeks we know much less than we do of the Saxons, for the period of darkness is much longer, and we have nothing to correspond with the late classical literature. There is this other difference: that whereas the Saxons never progressed very far along the path of civilization, a very small proportion of the Greeks rapidly reached a pitch of intellectual eminence which has rarely been rivalled. That this progress was extremely rapid, and that it was based upon alien elements, are shown not merely by the known facts of contemporary and earlier Asiatic culture, but by the manners and customs of the generality of Greeks, which up to the end of the classical period were still almost incredibly barbarous.

About 700 B.C., then, when we first begin to know something of the Greeks, we find a small educated class making, under the most favourable social and political conditions, the most phenomenal progress from a foundation of thought and knowledge which was entirely non-Greek, and a vast majority of illiterates, who knew nothing, and could know nothing, of their past history, but who were largely absorbed in their religion. This religion, though one in origin, and generally similar in ritual, had retained or acquired varying features in the more or less isolated cities, islands, and rural valleys; it consisted in the sacrificial worship of “heroes” at local shrines, combined with group meetings at highly sacred sites for the periodical performance of more important or more generalized rites. There were in historical times a number of these group meetings, at Delphi, at Olympia, at Delos, at Dodona, at Mycale, and elsewhere, the rites at which, especially the games and contests, suggest developments or survivals from a different state of society, a state in which the kingship played a highly important part. The type of kingship suggested by these rites, and by the survivals

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