lies concealed within the grapes all through the bright season denoted by Semelé, and perhaps the thunder and lightning which accompany the first immature birth of the infant wine-god may denote the aërial phænomena of that time of the year; for in the South of Europe the spring and the autumn are the seasons in which they most prevail: or possibly they indicate the joyous, riotous hilarity of the vintage. From the grapes the wine comes forth in an imperfect immature condition, and to attain its proper state of perfection it must undergo a further period of concealment in amphora, etc.; receptacles of a widely different nature from the soft tender grapes in which it had taken its origin. This fact then may have been given a mythic form by the fiction of the immature deity being sewed up in the thigh of Zeus, his sire, a fiction which may have derived its origin from an apparent derivation of his name.

CHAPTER XV.

FOREIGN DEITIES:-KYBELE, KOTYTTO AND BENDIS, ARTEMIS OF EPHESOS, ISIS.

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OUR object in introducing the present chapter is to give a slight view of the manner in which the intercourse with Asia and Egypt, which had such an injurious effect on the religion of Greece, commenced. We know not how we can better open the subject, than by quoting the following just and philosophic observations of a writer1 for whom we entertain the highest respect and esteem :After that most happy age, whose image we behold expressed in the poems of Homer, had passed away, a great change took place in civil affairs, but a still greater in religions, in pursuits, and inclinations; and the whole of Greece was so much altered, that if any one passes from the perusal of Homer to that of those writers who lived in the time of the Persian war, he will feel as if removed to another region, and seem hardly to recognise those old Achæans, who happy with the present, careless of the future, prompt to act, mindless of what they had done, were aloof from all the causes of anxiety and superstition. But when, as reason gradually ripened, the Greeks began to examine the involved conceptions of the mind, and to know themselves, there succeeded that more mature and solicitous age, at which when men arrive they feel more strongly and acutely the incentives of pleasure

1 Lobeck, Aglaophamus, 312 seq.

and of virtue, fluctuating alternately, with great commotion of mind, and often with extreme ennui, between what they condemn and what they desire. Hence that anxiety about hidden matter, and those presages of the future, and the various superstitions which consciousness of guilt and despair of salvation are wont to produce. The entrance and traces of this new age of Greece we are prevented from clearly discerning by the obscurity of those times, which, being illumed by hardly any literary monuments, may be said to resemble a region covered with dark clouds, through which the tops of the towers and castles elevate themselves, while the ground and foundation lie concealed. But that there was a great agitation of the human mind, and some new efforts, is proved by the perfection of lyric poetry, which commenced a little after the time of Hésiod, and by the origin of philosophy and the advance of the elegant arts. We presently see magnificent temples raised to the gods and heroes, solemn games instituted throughout the towns, the number and the insignia of the priests, especially when the regal power had been abolished, increased. But that at the same time the mystic ceremonies, whose first traces appear in the Hésiodic and Kyklic poems, were diffused far and wide, and occupied the whole of life with new superstitions, is manifest from the number of jugglers who then roved through Greece, expiating by certain secret rites not only blood and manslaughter, but also prodigies, sacrileges, and whatever piacular offences either individuals or states had committed."

Having enumerated the principal of these men, such as Abaris, Aristeas, Onomakritos of Lokris, and Epimenidés, our author thus proceeds:

"Meantime Egypt, the parent of superstition and sacerdotal falsehood, was laid open; and who that reflects on the long and frequent intercourse of the two nations, and the vaniloquence of the one and the credulity of the other,' will hesitate to concede that the contagion had secretly insinuated itself into Greece before the time of Pythagoras ? But it is not without reason believed, that during the same period the mystic poems of Musæos, Eumolpos, Orpheus, and that which was called the Minyas, were made public; in all of which were scattered new fables about the lower-world, and hopes of a more happy life and E'lysian abodes promised to those who received the sacred decrees of the gods, and equal punishments threatened to the despisers of them. What! is not the religion of the subterrane deities sanctioned by those Athenian laws, which direct that those who have committed manslaughter

1 Comp. Paus. ix. 36, 5. Ukert, I. i. 51, note.

should be brought before the King of the Sacred Affairs, and being absolved by the judgment should be solemnly purified,—of which laws Drakón is said to have been the author? This religion was also confirmed by Solón; who, in cases of manslaughter, directed to swear by three deities, Hikesios, Katharsios, and Exakesterios. Nor were the psychomanty and evocations of the dead, which we read of in the stories of Archilochos, Periander, and Pausanias, built on any other foundation: and these were posterior to Homer; for if his contemporaries had known anything of that art, he needed not to have sent Odysseus to the netherworld. After a little interval succeeded Pythagoras, the author of a portentous wisdom, and that twilight-season in which poets began to philosophise and philosophers to poetise.

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In these four centuries, therefore, which elapsed between Homer and the Persian wars, the greatest change was made in all matters pertaining to the worship of the gods. They contain the origin and growth of solemn lustrations, mysteries, bieratic medicine, and fanatic poetry: in these too the most ancient poems of Bakis, Pamphós, Olén, and the Sibyls, appear to have been patched up, and all the avenues of pious frauds to have been thrown open. Whence the conclusion is easy, that the web of the Orphic fable, which is all composed of the same kind of threads with those, was not woven by Pro-selénian philosophers, but was commenced perhaps a century or two after Homer, and completed a little before the time of Onomakritos."

It is needless to remind our readers, that we have no account on which we can place reliance of any intercourse between the Greeks and foreign nations previous to the Trojan war, save the commercial one with the Phoenician merchants who visited their harbours. The revolution named the Return of the Hérakleids, which is said to have occurred somewhat less than a century after that event, caused portions of the Achæan race to abandon their country and seek new settlements. They are supposed to have turned their eyes to the former realms of the Trojan monarchs, whose power had been broken; and the first colonies were planted by the Eolians along the coast, from the island of Kyzikos in the Propontis to the mouth of the Hermos. The Iónians and the Dórians afterwards came and settled to the south of that river; and thus the coast of Asia was occupied to a considerable extent by the Grecian colonies.

We cannot trace in Homer any difference beween the religion of the Achæans and that of the Asiatics. In the case of the

Comp. Müller, Proleg. 387.

Trojans, who are regarded (and we think justly) as a portion of the Pelasgic race, this need not surprise us; but the poet is equally silent with respect to anything of the kind between them and the Phrygians, whose religion we know to have been different.1 It does not however seem to have been the practice of the Aœdi to attend to distinctions of this kind; for Odysseus, we may observe, in all his wanderings never found any want of an interpreter, as good Greek was spoken wherever he came, and he everywhere met with Grecian manners and customs. The silence therefore of the poet throws no impediment in the way of our assuming that, when the Grecian colonies settled on the Hellespont, they found there a religion very different from their own; the one being calm and cheerful, the other wild and orgiastic. This religion was that of

Κυβέλη. Κυβήβη. (Rhea. Ops.)

Kybelé, also called the Great Mother, was regarded by the Phrygians and Lydians2 as the goddess of nature or of the earth. Her temples stood on the summits of hills; such as that of Dindymos in the isle of Kyzikos, of Berekynthos, Sipylos, Kybelos; from which last she is said to have derived her name, though the reverse is more likely to be the truth. At Pessínus was preserved the aërolite which was held to be her heaven-sent image.

The following pragmatised account of Kybelé is given by Diodóros.

Kybelé was daughter to king Mæón and his queen Dindymé. She was exposed by her father on Mount Kybelos, where she was suckled by panthers and lionesses, and was afterwards reared by shepherdesses, who named her Kybelé. When she grew up she displayed great skill in the healing art, and cured all the diseases of the children and cattle. They thence called her the MountainMother. While dwelling in the woods she formed a strict friendship with Marsyas, and had a love-affair with a youth named Attis. She was afterwards acknowledged by her parents; but her father, on discovering her intimacy with Attis, seized that unhappy youth and put him to death. Grief deprived Kybelé of her reason: with dishevelled locks she roamed, to the sound of the drums and pipes which she had invented, over various regions of the earth, even as far as the country of the Hyperboreans, teaching mankind agriculture: her companion was still the faithful Marsyas. Meantime a dreadful famine ravaged Phrygia: the oracle, on being consulted, directed that the body of Attis should be buried, and 2 Hérod. v. 102.

1 See Müller, Dor. i. 10.

3 See our note on Ovid's Fasti, iv. 276.

divine honours be paid to Kybelé. A stately temple was accordingly erected to her at Pessínus by king Midas.1

It is apparent from this account that Kybelé, Marsyas, and Attis were all ancient Phrygian deities. Marsyas,, as we have seen, was a river-god; and Attis, whose name occurs frequently in the dynasties of the Lydian kings (who according to the usual practice were named after their god), was probably, like Adónis, a personification of the Sun, of whose union with Earth we have apparently another instance in Amphíón and Niobé. The Lydian legend of the birth of Attis is curious and significant.2

Like Asiatic worship in general, that of Kybelé was enthusiastic. Her priests, named Galli and Korybantes, ran about with dreadful cries and howlings, beating on timbrels, clashing cymbals, sounding pipes, and cutting their flesh with knives. The boxtree and the cypress were considered sacred to her; as from the former she made the pipes, and Attis was said to have been changed into the latter.

We find from Pindar and the dramatists that the worship and the mysteries of the Great mother were common in Greece, particularly at Athens, in their time.

The worship of Kybelé was introduced into Rome A.U.c. 547, when a solemn embassy was sent to Attalus king of Pergamos, to request the image at Pessínus which had fallen from heaven. The monarch readily yielded compliance, and the goddess was conveyed to Rome; where a stately temple was built to receive her, and a solemn festival named the Megalesia was celebrated every year in her honour. As the Greeks had confounded her with Rhea, so the Latins made her one with their Ops, the goddess of the earth.

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In works of art Kybelé exhibits the matronly air and composed dignity which distinguish Héra and Démétér. Sometimes she is veiled, and seated on a throne with lions at her side; at other times riding in a chariot drawn by lions. Her head is always crowned with towers. She frequently beats on a drum, and bears a sceptre in her hand.

1 Diodór. iii. 58, 59. He probably took his account of Kybelé from Dionýsios of Samos, not from Xanthos the Lydian, as Creuzer (Symb. ii. 46) supposes: see Lobeck, 640, note. 2 Paus. vii. 17, 10.

Lauer observes that there is always something gloomy and stern in those religions of which Earth is the chief object. This however is only very partially true of the Grecian worship of Démétér, and does not at all apply to the religion of ancient Italy.

Pind. Pyth. iii. 78 (137) cum Schol. Eur. Hip. 144. Bac. 78, Fr. Crétens. 5 Liv. xxix. 14. Ov. Fast. iv. 179 seq. with our notes.

6 Lucret. ii. 598 seq. Verg. En. iii. 111; vi. 785; x. 252. Ov. ut supra Id. Trist. ii. 24. Tibull. i. 4 68.