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.

Adrasteia, understood in the later period as the goddess of inevitable fate, came to be a sort of twin-sister of Nemesis, and so was occasionally connected with Artemis.

At Andros and Cos there was a joint worship of Adrasteia and Nemesis, and we find the two connected by Antimachus, the learned epic poet of the latter part of the fifth century, quoted by Strabo; in the drama of the fifth century, in the younger Attic comedy, in passages of the Anthology and of Lucian, the functions of the one goddess cannot easily be distinguished from those of the other; and in the later literature the identity is completely established. We need not look further than this for an explanation of the statement in Harpocration that Demetrius of Scepsis identified Adrasteia with Artemis, and for the presence of the statue of the former in the temple of Artemis Leto and Apollo at Cirrha, the divinities who brought down the due ‘nemesis’ on the Cirrhaeans.

But the origin of ʾΑδράστεια, which can be clearly traced, is independent of Nemesis. There is no doubt that it was a cult-name and probably a local title of Cybele detached at an early period. It was near Priapus, Cyzicus, and in the Troad, localities where Cybele was especially worshipped, that the cult of Adrasteia was established; in a fragment of the Phoronis she is scarcely distinguished from Cybele, being described as the mountain-goddess whose attendants were the Idaean Dactyli.

A great obscurity hangs about the name, the origin, and the character of this goddess. The name at least seems to be Greek, and to be an epithet that may signify the ‘far-off one’ or the ‘far-darting one,’ if we consider it as a shortened form of ἑκατηβόλος; but no explanation that has been offered is very certain or significant.

As to her origin, she is usually accepted as a Hellenic divinity, and the question has scarcely been discussed by modern writers. If this view is correct, she was one whose worship must have been obscured in the earliest period among the leading Greek tribes, and have revived later. For there is no mention of her in the Iliad and Odyssey, nor in any fragment of the ‘Homeric’ epic; although, had the epic poets of the eighth or seventh century known of her as she was known to the later Greek, she would probably have been noticed in such a passage, for instance, as Odysseus' descent to Hades. Again, neither early nor late did any real mythology grow up about her: we find nothing but a few stories of little value or credit, invented sometimes to explain some of her obscure titles, such as ῞Αγγελος; and only once does she play some part in a dramatic myth, namely, in the Giganto machy as described by Apollodorus, as the legends of the later period bring all the deities into the action and Hekate is named among them, though she is not found in the early accounts of the battle.

The figure of Eileithyia, whose worship was ancient and widely prevalent, illustrates the strong tendency in the Greek polytheism towards the multiplicity of personages; for while Hera and Artemis were pre-eminently goddesses of childbirth, the goddess Eileithyia was developed to take special charge of this department, and to play a direct physical part in assisting the processes of birth. She was developed in all probability out of Hera herself, and is identified most frequently with her, though sometimes also with Artemis. The name—whatever its exact original sense may have been—has an adjectival form, and was primarily, we may believe, an epithet of Hera, and then detached from her and treated as the name of a separate divinity. We hear of the worship of Hera Eileithyia in Attica, and there is some reason for believing that it existed in Argos also; a passage in Hesychius seems to explain Εἰλείθυια as the Argive Hera, and Suidas mentions a strange statue of Hera at Argos which represented her with a pair of shears in her hand, an emblem which can scarcely belong to her as an agricultural goddess, and which can only be interpreted as alluding to the cutting of the umbilical cord.

It is true also that the assimilation of the goddess of birth to Artemis seems to have been no less frequent.

The idea of the righteous control of human life, which did not conspicuously appear in the cults that have just been examined, essentially belonged to the worship of Nemesis. This figure lost much of its personal force in proportion as it developed in moral significance. In the beginning the name denoted more than a mere moral abstraction; for there is reason to suppose that both Nemesis and Upis were connected titles or surnames of Artemis or Artemis Aphrodite. In regard to the latter, of which the Doric form is Ὦπις, the Ionic Οὖπις, there is no doubt; its usual explicit reference is to Artemis, who was worshipped by this title in Lacedaemon and probably Troezen. We have, indeed, only the testimony of late and learned writers such as Callimachus and the lexicographers; but this was drawn either from earlier literature or from knowledge of actual legend and cult. And we have indirect evidence that is even more trustworthy: we hear in Athenaeus of the οὔπιγγοι, the sacred formulae or hymns by which Artemis was addressed at Troezen, the name implying the invocation and the worship of Artemis Upis; and mention has already been made of the Delian maiden Upis who with Arge first brought the Hyperborean offerings to the island, and arrived there in company with the divinities themselves, as Herodotus emphatically says.