Priest

Ancient Greece.

Homer speaks of special priests who pre side over ritual acts in the temples to which they are attached; but his kings also do sacrifice on behalf of their people. The king, in fact, both in Greece and in Rome, was the acting head of the state religion, and when the regal power came to an end his sacred functions were not transferred to the ordinary priests, but either they were distributed among high officers of state, as ar chons and prytanes, or the title of "king" was still preserved as that of a religious functionary, as in the case of the rex sacrorum at Rome and the archon basileus at Athens. In the domestic circle the union of priesthood and natural headship was never disturbed ; the Roman paterfamilias sacrificed for the whole family. On the other hand, genres and phratriae, which had no natural head, had special priests chosen from their members; for every circle of ancient society, from the family up to the state, was a religious as well as a civil unity, and had its own gods and sacred rites. We cannot speak of priestly power and hardly even of a distinct priestly class.

In Greece the priest, so far as he is an independent functionary and not one of the magistrates, is simply the elected or hereditary minister of a temple charged with "those things which are or dained to be done towards the gods" (see Aristotle, Pol. vi. 8), and remunerated from the revenues of the temple, or by the gifts of worshippers and sacrificial dues. The position was often lucrative and always honourable, and the priests were under the special protection of the gods they served. But their purely ritual functions gave them no means of establishing a considerable in fluence on the minds of men, and the technical knowledge which they possessed as to the way in which the gods could be acceptably approached was neither so intricate nor so mysterious as to give the class a special importance. There was, indeed, one sacred function of great importance in the ancient world in which the Greek priests had a share. As man approached the gods in sacri fice and prayers, so too the gods declared themselves to men by divers signs and tokens, which it was possible to read by the art of Divination (q.v.). In many nations divination and priest hood have always gone hand in hand ; at Rome, for example, the augurs and the XV. viri sacrorum, who interpreted the Sibylline books, were priestly colleges. In Greece, on the other hand, div ination was not generally a priestly function, but it did belong to the priests of the Oracles. (See ORACLE.) The great oracles, however, were of Panhellenic celebrity and did not serve each a particular state, and so in this direction also the risk of an independent priestly power within the state was avoided.

In Rome, again, where the functions of the priesthood were po litically much more weighty, where the technicalities of religion were more complicated, where priests interpreted the will of the gods, and where the pontiffs had a most important jurisdiction in sacred things, the state was much too strong to suffer these powers to escape from its own immediate control : the old mon archy of the king in sacred things descended to the inheritors of his temporal power ; the highest civil and religious functions met in the same persons (cf. Cic. De dom. i. i) ; and every priest was subject to the state exactly as the magistrates were, referring all weighty matters to state decision and then executing what the one supreme power decreed. And it is instructive to observe that when the plebeians extorted their full share of political power they also demanded and obtained admission to every priestly col lege of political importance, to those, namely, of the pontiffs, the augurs, and the XV. viri sacrorum. The Romans, it need hardly be said, had no hereditary priests.

Aryan Religions.

In historical times the priesthood in India is rigidly confined to members of the Brahman caste. But at an earlier date the warrior caste of ten became priests. The power of the priesthood began with the delegation by the king of his sacrificial duties to an appointed official. This power grew with the growing importance of the sacrifice and the complication of its ceremonial. In the post-Vedic period "right" or "wrong" simply meant the exact performance or the neglect, whether intentional or unintentional—of all the details of a prescribed ritual, the centre of which was the sacrifice. At this period the priestly caste gained its unbounded power over the minds of men. For further de tails as to the development of the priestly caste and wisdom in India the reader must refer to BRAHMANISM.

Among the Zoroastrian Iranians, as among the Indian Aryans, the aid of a priest to recite the sacrificial liturgy was necessary at every offering (Herod. i. 132), and the Iranian priests (athra vans, later Magi) claimed, like the Brahmans, to be the highest order of society; but they did not acquire the powers of the Indian priesthood; in particular, the priesthood, as it was not based on family tradition, did not form a strict hereditary caste. Nevertheless, it formed a compact hierarchy not inferior in influence to the clergy of the Christian middle ages, had great power in the state, and were often irksome even to the great king. But the monarchs had one strong hold on the clergy by retaining the patronage of great ecclesiastical places.