(2) Worship in Time of Need. Nowhere is the objective character of Greek religion more apparent than in its attitude toward sin. The normal worship that has just been considered has been called mechanical because it proceeds on the supposition that, if man offers food and other ob jects to the gods. then the gods will grant him prosperity ; it may more truly be called social, in that theoretically man honors the gods as he would honor a human ruler, and regards divine blessings and the divine rule as Ile would re gard the rule of a righteous king. If, however, the student uses the word social, he should not forget that the social relations between man and the gods in Greece must be conceived as far broader and far more intimate than those between man and any human king.
In such a religion it is impossible that the sense of sin should occupy a fundamental place. It was not indeed difficult or unusual for men to.in cur the dipleasure of the gods. But what im pressed the Greek was the judicial side of the matter, the fact that disaster followed wrong doing as its penalty. No stress was laid on re pentance; the Greek gods found no satisfaction in extreme self-humiliation; the wrong was con ceived as in the outward act, not so much in the disposition from which the act sprang, so that the only remedy lay in the practice of certain out ward rites by which at length divine favor might be regained.
The origin and motives of wrong-doing were carefully analyzed in Greek poetry. It was the presumption of Agamemnon that incurred the wrath of Artemis, his ambition which led him to appease her wrath by the sacrifice of his daugh ter that he might lead the expedition against Troy. The ambition and lust of Aigisthos led him to marry Agamemnon's wife and to slay the king on his return. Pride, becoming presumption, brought severe penalty on such heroes of Greek legend as Marsyas and Niobe. The two great moral thoughts of Greek tragedy are: that sin breeds sin as its penalty and that laws some times conflict so that the observance of higher law makes one subject to the penalty of another law, as in the stories of Orestes and Antigone.
Thus the supplicant did not pray for forgive ness of inward guilt, but sought immunity from the penalty of sin in the same spirit that he asked the divine help in evils which he had done noth ing to bring on himself. Of the rites by which individuals sought to soothe the anger of the gods and escape disaster we know but little. When in peril at sea or in battle, men sought protect ing favor by vows of sacrifices to be paid if they survived. Before a journey they sacrificed to Hermes, the traveler's god, and to their own family gods, to prevent disaster. In sickness they vowed sacrifices to some patron deity or hero, or had sacrifices performed in their behalf to some god of healing, such as Paian or Asklepios.
Sophocles gives us a picture of the rites by which a city sought relief from the plague. An embassy is sent' to Delphi to learn what should be done, and meantime processions kindle sacrifices on all the altars of the city. In time of extreme need even human sacrifices were practiced, though rarely, in the hope that the anger of the gods might be satisfied by one victim instead of many. It was the regular practice to offer sacrifices be fore battle and before an expedition set out from home, and the will of the god was ascertained from the appearance of the victim. The victims for sacrifice in titne of calamity or of peril were not always domestic animals, as in the case of ordinary sacrifices, but dogs, asses, wild animals, and birds were also occasionally offered. Nor was the ritual of sacrifice the same; for appar ently libations were omitted, the animal was slain in a slightly different manner, and its body was completely burned. At such times men could not seek communion with the gods, but by peculiar sacrifices sought to avert their wrath.
These sacrifices were offered not' only to the great gods that ordinarily protected a city, but particularly to the special gods of each locality— the gods closely connected with the soil, and the so-called heroes. -The gods of the soil were wor shiped mainly by the peasantry, and often repre sented an older type of deity than the Olympian gods of the ruling classes. To the peculiar rites of such worship men turned in time of need, when the customary forms did not seem effica cious. The hero may be defined as a god wor shiped only in a limited locality, and with no place among the Olympian gods of mythology. Often they, too, were old gods whose worship con tinued only in one place, so that they were re duced to the rank of local spirits. The myths about some of these gods were taken up in the Greek epic, where the term hero (hen5s) had something of its English meaning; the general use of the term, however, in literature as well as in religion, had to do simply with local divinities. The worship of heroes filled a large place in prac tical religion. Not that cities celebrated great feasts in their honor, though such was sometimes the case, but for a smaller group of worshipers the hero was more of a real divinity than were the gods thetnselves. Calamity was attributed to the anger of some hero who had been neglected; and on the other hand, special blessings were expected from their favor. Like the saints of Europe, they stood much nearer the worshiper than the great state gods; they sympathized bet ter with his needs, and so he paid them a truer worship.