There is no divinity whose presence is more familiar among the various monuments of Greek art than Dionysos. It is especially the works of the fifth century and the later period that testify how inwardly the imagination of the world of Hellenic paganism was possessed with the Bacchic myth, cult, and enthusiasm. But though the art-record abundantly illustrates the complex conception of his nature, the monuments are mainly mythologic rather than sacral, and comparatively few reproduce for us the actual scenes of ritual or the types of temple worship.

His character as a tree-god, which, we have seen reason to believe, belonged to his aboriginal nature, can be illustrated by an interesting art-form that, though iconic, bears still some reminiscence of the aniconic fashion. We have literary record of sufficient authority, a verse of an oracle and a fragment from the Antiope of Euripides, both quoted by Clemens, to prove that his earliest agalma at Thebes was a mere fetish, an upright pillar; and simple villagers, even in the latest period, still attracted his beneficent power to the orchard by the consecration of a rude tree-stump: even Dionysos-Kadmos was represented by Thebes as a column of wood, supposed to have fallen from heaven, which later piety decorated with bronze, but never changed into human semblance.

The previous sketch has not clearly revealed any salient difference between Dionysos and the other high divinities of Hellas. It is rather through the minute study of the ritual that the distinctive and characteristic features of this religion emerge, and these are of equal interest for the students of primitive as of advanced religious ideas. The more striking phenomena of the aboriginal religion are found to have been the wild and ecstatic enthusiasm that it inspired, the self-abandonment and communion with the deity achieved through orgiastic rites and a savage sacramental act, and the prominence of women in the ritual, which in accordance with a certain psychic law made a special appeal to their temperament. It becomes then our first task to consider how far these features are reflected, clearly or dimly, in the cult-practices of the civilized Greek states; and, as the record is defective and confused, we must supplement it by every kind of indirect evidence within our reach.

That the mortal might be temporarily charged with the personality or spirit of the divinity, at exceptional times and through exceptional means, is an idea that may be traced here and there in the older Greek religion.

The personality of Ares is of less value for the social and religious history of Greece than that of any of the divinities hitherto considered. It is probable indeed that he received worship or at least recognition from most of the states, but no part of the higher civilization was connected with his legend and cult. And it is only a few records concerning these that arouse interest, an interest that is mainly anthropological or ethnographic. Two leading questions arise in this study. Was Ares a genuine Hellenic divinity? And was he in origin as well as in the later stages of his career a war-god and nothing more? It is easier to deal with the evidence for the latter problem first.

The earliest epic poetry of Greece, both the Homeric and Hesiodic, present him solely as the war-god, and convey no hint of a wider function or a more complex character. The short ‘Homeric’ Hymn, in which he is invoked as a great cosmic and planetary power of righteousness and a spiritual prayer is proffered to him for moral strength and peace, stands alone in Greek literature, and has been regarded as an Orphic figment. And Greek ritual, where it is expressive of divine character at all, agrees nowhere with this, but rather with the most narrow conception of him, which only broadens slightly in the later literature and on the most natural lines.

This divinity, although probably recognized by every Greek community, plays only a subordinate role in Greek life in comparison with the higher divinities of the state, nor does his cult appear to have taken deep root anywhere except in Arcadia and, as numismatic evidence leads us to suspect, at Ainos in Thrace and Eresos in Lesbos. His figure is not prominent among the coin-types of Greece, save in the last-mentioned city, nor his name among the genealogies of clans or communities; only Arcadia claimed him as divine ancestor. Yet some of the details of his worship are of interest for the comparative study of religion and for the history of certain social usages.

In the Homeric and much of classical literature the god appears to us as a Hellene of the Hellenes, the embodiment of the leading characteristics of the race; yet we have reason to suspect that he may have been a surviving figure of a pre-Hellenic religion. The question could only be settled if we could interpret the name ʿρμῆς, which appears under the form ῝Ερμελος in Boeotia and ʿΕρμὠν in Laconia and Arcadia; but none of the etymological theories that have been put forward can be regarded as satisfactory; for though the name has the air of being Hellenic, we do not know to what stratum of language it belongs.

With the publication of this volume the self-imposed task that has occupied my intervals of leisure throughout twenty years is at last completed. But the fulfilment of the promise of the title is incomplete; for it has happened, according to the anticipation expressed in the preface to my third volume, that no room could be found for a full account of hero-worship and the cults of the dead and of the various ideas thereto attaching. I hope to be able subsequently to publish in a different setting the various materials I have gathered under this head and the conclusions that I have drawn from them. Apart from this omission, a work of the present compass, carried on through so long a period of one's life, is scarcely likely in its final form to satisfy either the writer or his readers. I may hope, however, to have shown myself amenable to the influence of all criticism that was meant to be helpful, and of the newer theories that in recent years have presented the problems of ancient religion in a new light. Though it has absorbed more time than I had supposed it would demand, I rejoice to have chosen and pursued this theme, for I at least, if no one else, have derived from it both mental profit and pleasure.

The study of the Dionysiac cult is one of the most attractive in the whole investigation into the religion of Hellas. For though its influence on the progress of the national culture was masterful at one point only, namely, in the evolution of the drama, yet the problems that it presents to the student of Mediterranean religion, history, and anthropology, are of primary importance. Many of them are very perplexing; and the adequate discussion of Dionysiac ritual demands a wide comparison with the phenomena of primitive and advanced religions. It is in the organization of this cult that the early Hellenic character displays itself in the clearest light; and here, if anywhere, in the Greek peoples' worship, we may find traces of that fervour and self-abandonment which in our religious vocabulary is called faith.

The first inevitable question is in regard to the original home of the cult. Was Dionysos by earliest ancestry a genuinely Hellenic divinity? The same question arises, as we have seen, concerning other personages of the Pantheon; but Dionysos stands on a different footing from any of them. The Homeric poems reveal only a glimmer of his personality and cult; he plays no ancestral part in the early genealogies, and certain communities preserved a tradition of his late arrival and the opposition that his rites provoked.

The classical literature and art of Greece appear to claim for this god a place in the pantheon of the leading divinities; and yet the meagreness of the cult-records, unless they are accidentally defective and strangely misleading, establishes the conclusion that he played but a small part in the social and political life, and counted but little for the higher religious consciousness of the race. His figure is more transparent than that of any other male Olympian; and the study of his cult is comparatively easy, and most of the problems that present themselves concern comparative philology, mythology, ethnology, rather than religion. He is one of the very few Hellenic gods whose elemental origin is obvious and never disguised, for he belongs unmistakeably to the fire; and the preanthropomorphic perception of fire as a divine thing seems to survive in various popular or poetic expressions which use the name of the god as a synonym for it. We are familiar with the Homeric phrase describing the cooking of meat, ‘they held it over Hephaistos’; and the prophet in Sophocles’ Antigone says of the offerings that refused to catch fire on the altar, ‘from the sacrifice Hephaistos did not gleam,’ and again the fire with which the enemy threatened the walls of Thebes is called in the same play ‘the Hephaistos of the pine-torch.’

Among the minor cults of Hellas that of Hestia specially arrests our attention for the light that it throws on a certain primitive phase of religious thought as well as on a special chapter in the history of primitive culture. Being the least anthropomorphic of Hellenic divinities, she appears to be the product of that period of animistic belief that may everywhere have preceded a more precise anthropomorphism. At least, although Homer is silent about her, we can scarcely doubt her great antiquity. It has long been recognized that we must be cautious in the deductions we draw from Homer's silence. He may have known of her cult, and have found her figure inappropriate to the purposes of a divine drama. He uses the term ἱσΤίη indeed merely as a common noun, designating the ‘hearth’ or the ‘fire of the hearth’ but the word has at times a certain sacred association and value for him; for he regards the hearth as the natural place for the suppliant and as a thing that might serve as the pledge of an oath.

But the first literary record of the personal goddess is found in the Theogony of Hesiod, who speaks of her as the eldest daughter of Rhea and Kronos, and sister of Demeter. He does not, however, describe her nature or functions, and the first witnesses to these are certain passages in the Homeric Hymns.

The leading personal deities of the public worships of Greece have been the main subject of this treatise hitherto. But the picture of the state-polytheism would be incomplete without a careful study of the minor cults, of which the material documents are collected at the end of this volume, but which can only be considered now in regard to their general and essential features.

The high gods are, as we have seen, mainly anthropomorphic and ethical personalities more or less detached from nature. Yet pure nature-worship and nature-magic were practised widely no doubt by the prehistoric Greek communities, and never wholly abandoned in the historic period. The rite, that Pausanias described as maintained in his own day by Methana near Troizen, of carrying round the vineyards the dismembered limbs of a cock to preserve the vines when the baneful wind blew that they called Lips, may be preanimistic magic, directed to no personal god. The processes whereby the ‘magi’ of Kleonai endeavoured to avert storms of hail and snow, according to the statement of Clemens, combined magic with elemental worship: ‘they endeavour to avert the threat of (the sky's) anger by incantations and sacrifices; and if they are in want of a sacrificial victim, they draw blood from their own fingers.’ This blood-letting must have had the piacular purpose of soothing the wrath of the elements, and this is religion.

When the fetish-types of the iconic and semi-iconic period of religious art were being abandoned, and the anthropomorphic form was beginning to emerge clearly, the archaic artist was accustomed to present Dionysos as a grave and bearded god, amply draped, usually erect and tranquil or in quiet movement–except in the rare representations of his battle with the giants–and only distinguished from the other high divinities by thyrsos, ivy-crown, cup, or vine-spray, or often by a freer treatment of the hair. But here and there the consciousness that in character, form, and action; he was different from the others, appears to glimmer through the stiff conventions of the early art of design and modelling. The sculptor of the chest of Kypselos distinguished the deity of nature by his picturesque environment, the divine giver of the wine-feast by his recumbent posture, and remembered that he haunted the wilds and the cool solitude of the cavern rather than the cities of men. The engraver of that very early coin of unknown provenance, mentioned above, seems to have had in mind–as few probably of his contemporaries had–the semi-barbaric character of the god derived from a barbaric origin, and therefore ventured to give him a coarse and almost brutal type of features [Coin P1. 20].