Herodotos the Historian (Routledge Revivals) by K. H. Waters

Author:K. H. Waters [Waters, K. H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317756101
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2014-04-08T00:00:00+00:00

8

RELIGIOUS AND MORAL ATTITUDES

The religious ambience of Greece in Herodotos’ formative years was one of rather superstitious belief in divine influence in, or control of, human affairs. At the most unsophisticated level, it had hardly advanced from that of the Homeric poems where direct intervention of deities both on a community scale (for example the epidemic visited by Apollo on the Greek forces) and in the individual case (a spear-cast turned aside to protect a favourite — or indeed a relative!) was the controlling influence upon single events. History as a whole, however, appeared rather to be determined by a very vaguely defined force, Fate or Necessity, against which even Zeus, Father of gods and men, on one occasion declared his impotence. (Compare the reply of the Pythia to Kroisos, 1.91 which has close epic parallels.) As we have seen in another context, the Homeric poems, the basis of primary education, continued to affect or even to shape the intellectual attitudes of fifth-century Greeks.

Religious observance formed an important, if not the major component of community life; every state festival was held in honour of one or more deities; the great athletic and literary/musical contests were staged at religious festivals, and every city had its own divine patron and protector. Art, especially in the form of architecture and sculpture, was particularly dedicated to religious purposes.

The majority of Herodotos’ contemporaries, as the majority in many other societies both ancient and modern, were unthinking acceptors of the traditional religion, and duly observed its forms. Religion in ancient Greece did not demand either conformity with a given set of beliefs, or a particular strict code of ethics. The ‘recorded’, that is to say, legendary, behaviour of the gods themselves — vain and jealous females, arrogant and bullying males — resembled that of spoilt children rather than that of ideal humans. The Greeks had indeed made gods in their own image, as Xenophanes had ironically pointed out before Herodotos was born — but his message went largely unheeded. Social conventions owed little to religious teaching; for instance Zeus, not alone amongst deities, cohabited with his own sister, an example considered undesirable by the Greeks (until they came into contact with certain Oriental cultures). Nor were the deities monogamous in ‘practice’, while in Greece it was not generally considered advisable to ape the sexual feats of Zeus or Herakles — even were it humanly possible!

This intellectual climate had not remained entirely unchallenged, apart from Xenophanes’ destructive criticism as noticed in Chapter 2. Not only had a nobler concept of divinity developed among thinking persons who were still believers, on the other hand the whole fabric of belief came under fire from agnostics and atheists.1 These no doubt received no less than their fair share of publicity, though of course among the younger generation of the Pelopon-nesian War period — about which we have some information from the contemporary but very different works of Thukydides and Aristophanes — it was fairly fashionable to pour contempt on traditional tenets in all fields.

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