The worship of Aphrodite was perhaps as widely diffused around the Mediterranean lands as that of any other Hellenic divinity. We find it in North Greece, and in especial honour at Thebes; in the country of Attica, in the city, and the coast; in Megara, Corinth, and the Corinthian colonies; in Sicyon, Hermione, Epidauros, and Argos; in Laconia there was a special and important form of the worship; there are comparatively slight traces of it in Arcadia, but abundant testimony of its prevalence in Elis and on the coast of Achaea. The most famous centres of the cult were the Greek islands, Cyprus, Cythera, and Crete. It spread with Greek colonization over the shores of the Black Sea, to Phanagoria for example; and it was one of the chief public worships in most of the Greek cities of the coast of Asia Minor, notably at Cnidos; while from the Troad issued the worship of Aphrodite, that was associated with the name of her favourite hero Aeneas, and was borne to the mainland of Greece, to Sicily, and Italy. Finally we have proofs of the worship of the goddess at Naucratis and Saguntum.

But in spite of its wide prevalence in the Hellenic world, there is no valid evidence that the cult of Aphrodite belonged to the aboriginal religion of the Hellenic nation.

As we can trace very primitive elements in the worship of Artemis, so in her earliest monuments we find the very ancient type of the religious emblem, the rude stock or the shaped stone without any human semblance. The Artemis of Icaria was represented by a piece of unhewn wood according to Arnobius, and Pausanias describes the emblem of the Artemis Patroa of Sicyon as a pillar of stone. A cone-shaped stone, decorated below with metal bands and surmounted with a human head, was the form under which she was worshipped in her temple at Perge, which is represented with the idol inside on coins of the city, and we see an Artemis-idol of similar shape on a Neapolitan vase. The temple-statue of the Ephesian goddess of many breasts also preserves in the treatment of the lower limbs much of the aniconic form; and it is not unlikely that the statue of Artemis Μονογισήνη, which the legend ascribed to Daedalus, was of the same type, showing the transition from the pillar to the human likeness. It is an interesting fact that the most primitive representation of the human form which has come down to us from the beginnings of Greek sculpture, and which illustrates that transition, is an image of Artemis found in Delos, and now in Athens, and dedicated according to the inscription by Nicandra of Naxos ‘to the far-darting one, the lover of the bow’ (Pl. XXVIII).

It is generally believed that the worship of Zeus was primeval among the Hellenes, their ancestors bringing it from a common Aryan centre, and that in the popular religion no organized system of divinities existed prior to the Olympian. Stated thus, this belief is reasonable, and yet we must take notice of cults that were perhaps pre-Hellenic, or at least belonged to an earlier period than the developed ‘ Olympian ’ religion and survived long in certain localities by the side of this. We have to account for the prevalent legends concerning Cronos with his Titan dynasty and the Titanomachia which overthrew them. The question of origins must here be glanced at, for on the answers will depend whether we shall consider Cronos as a real personage in tradition and worship. Welcker, who maintains that Zeus is the starting-point of Greek religion, explains away Cronos very ingeniously: he arose from a misunderstanding of an epithet of Zeus—Kρoνίδης or Kρoνίων: this meant originally the Son of Time, a figurative way of naming the ‘ Eternal ’ or ‘ the Ancient of Days.’ At a pre-Homeric period this was misinterpreted and understood as a son of Cronos, a mere nominis umbra. This theory, though accepted by some later writers, was born of false philology, a misleading theological bias, and an ignorance of what is really primitive in ancient religion.

The history of Greek religion, so much neglected in our country, is often mistaken for a discussion concerning its origins. The main scope of the present work is not the question of origin, but a survey of the most important texts and monuments that express the actual religious conceptions of the various Greek communities at different historical epochs. Such a study evidently concerns the student of the literature no less than the student of the archaeology of Greece, although the subject has been hitherto approached rather from the archaeological side. The question of origins may be put aside, although it may be true that one does not fully and perfectly know the present character of a fact unless one also knows the embryology of it. Yet this dictum expresses more the ideal of knowledge than a practical method of working. In dealing with so complicated a phenomenon as the religion of a people, it is surely advisable to consider separately and first the actual facts, the actual beliefs in the age of which we have history, rather than the prehistoric germ from which they arose. Again, this is the only aspect of the problem that directly concerns the student of the Greek world pure and simple, for the other line of inquiry, touching the birth of the nation's religion, can never be followed out within the limits of that nation's literature and monuments.

We cannot quote from the period before Pheidias any great monument that presented the inner character of the goddess by means of spiritual expression in the face or whole form. It would be tempting to take as a masterpiece of the religious sculpture of this period the Sosandra of Calamis, the greatest master before Pheidias in this field of work, and to call it Aphrodite. But reasons have been adduced against this interpretation. A beautiful bronze, of the pre- Pheidian style, has been recently acquired by M. Caraponos and published in the Bulletin de Correspondance Hellénique under the name of Aphrodite. A female figure of tall slim maidenly form stands holding a dove in her left hand and in her right hand some object that has disappeared but was probably a flower; the face is very earnest, and free from all sentiment, so far as one can judge from the photograph. The nobility and purity of the work, its naive unconscious grace, would give it an important place and an original value among Aphrodite-monuments, if the name were sure. A religious dedication of some kind it is undoubtedly, and the drapery with the folds of the chiton ποδήρης and its arrangement of the upper mantle strikingly recalls the Vesta Giustiniani; the symbols also are appropriate to Aphrodite. But no certain representation of this period shows us an Aphrodite of these virginal forms, these half-developed features, and this girlish simplicity in the arrangement of the hair.

The female divinities of the Greek religion have so much of common character as to suggest the belief that they are all different forms under different names of the same divine personage. Such a theory can only be criticized a posteriori, after a minute examination of the various cults and the various ideas attaching to those cults. And it is at any rate convenient to study side by side such cognate forms as Artemis, Hekate, Demeter, Persephone, and Aphrodite. Of these the most prominent among the scattered tribes and communities of the Greek world was Artemis. Perhaps no other figure in the Greek Pantheon is so difficult to understand and explain, not because the conceptions that grew up in her worship are mystic and profound, but because they are, or at first sight appear, confusing and contradictory.

Most of her cult is genuinely Hellenic, although in some places we can discover Oriental influences and ideas. We can trace it back to a prehistoric period, and it is found in all the chief places of prehistoric Greek settlement; in Thessaly, Euboea, Boeotia, Phocis, Locris, Aetolia, Sicyon, Achaea, Elis, Argolis, and, in its most primitive form, in Attica Laconia and Arcadia. Partly from its wide prevalence, and partly from certain most primitive features that it possessed, we must hold that this cult was either an aboriginal heritage of the Greek nation, or that it was borrowed by all the tribes at some very remote time, and as no trace or remembrance of its foreign origin has been preserved in the earliest traditions that were rife in the chief centres of the worship, the latter supposition appears idle and gratuitous.

The evidence of the monuments as to the character and significance of Hekate is almost as full as that of the literature. But it is only in the later period that they come to express her manifold and mystic nature. Before the fifth century there is little doubt that she was usually represented as of single form like any other divinity, and it was thus that the Boeotian poet imagined her, as nothing in his verses contains any allusion to a triple-formed goddess. The earliest known monument is a small terracotta found in Athens, with a dedication to Hekate (Pl. XXXVIII. a), in writing of the style of the sixth century. The goddess is seated on a throne with a chaplet bound round her head; she is altogether without attributes and character, and the only value of this work, which is evidently of quite a general type and gets a special reference and name merely from the inscription, is that it proves the single shape to be her earlier form, and her recognition at Athens to be earlier than the Persian invasion.

With this single exception, the black-figured and earlier red-figured vases are the only monuments that show us the figure of Hekate in the archaic and transitional periods; and on these, as well as on the vases of the later time, her form is single, and her usual attribute is the double torch.

It is important for the history of Greek cult to consider the question when the object first became iconic, or when the process of art had advanced so far as to make idolatry possible. The wooden ∈ἰκών is at least as early as Homer's period; and while a certain artistic record begins from the latter half of the seventh century, the works of Daedalus belong to the prehistoric age, and may roughly be assigned to the ninth century. But according to tradition, the wooden idols attributed to Daedalus were not the most primitive in form. We may go then still further back for the beginnings of iconism in Greek worship.

The uncouth human-shaped idols found on the ruins of Troy and Mycenae give us no clue for the present question, since we do not know their date even approximately, and we do not know whether in the remotest degree they were Greek in origin; the most developed is almost certainly Babylonian. The iconic impulse probably came from the East, for from the tenth century onwards the fame of the carved idols of Egypt and Assyria must have been spreading through the Greek world; the impulse may have come thence, but not the prevalent form, as I have elsewhere tried to show, though certain special types can be traced to an Oriental model.

It has been shown that in the cult of Aphrodite, Greek religion was mainly conservative of Oriental ideas; the ritual, the attributes, and most of the characteristics of the goddess are derived from the East.

On the other hand, the comparison of the monuments of the two nations proves, perhaps more than any other archaeological study, the freedom and the originality of the Hellene. ‘La déesse de la fécondité sera devenue pour les contemporains de Scopas et de Praxitele la déesse de la beauté.’ It was the signal achievement of Greek art to have replaced the Oriental type, of which the forms were often gross and at best had little more than a merely hieratic meaning, with a type that became of significance for religion through its depth of spiritual expression, and of the highest importance for the history of art through its embodiment of the perfected forms of corporeal beauty.

The debt of Greece in this worship to the art of the East, was only superficial; yet the monuments of the Oriental cult are of very great importance in their bearing on the religious question discussed in the preceding chapter; for they strengthen the conclusion derived from other evidence that Aphrodite was of Semitic birth.

The Homeric poems, as has been said, present us with a group of divinities not at all regarded as personifications of the various forces and spheres of nature, but as real personages humanly conceived with distinct form and independent action. We have no clear trace in the literature legend and cults of Greece of that earlier stage which is often supposed to precede polytheism in the cycle of religious development, a stage of polydaemonism when the objects of worship are vague companies of ‘ numina ’ nameless and formless. There is no evidence of this, as regards Greek religion, in the statement of Herodotus that the Pelasgians attached no names to their divinities, for Herodotus is in the first place defending an unscientific thesis that most of the Greek divinities derived their names from Egypt, and may be only referring to the primitive custom of avoiding the name of the divinity in ritual. Nor are Hesiod's lines, that speak of the thirty thousand daemones of Zeus, the ‘ watchers of mortal men,’ any proof that Greek religion had passed through that earlier stage; for Hesiod is often perfectly free in the creation of such unseen moral agencies, or if there is some popular belief underlying this conception, it is that which was attached to hero-worship; but however old this may be it cannot be proved to be prior in the history of Greek religion to the higher cult.