The Cults of the Greek States

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1907 edition. Excerpt: ...of public as well as private import, was certainly in vogue during the Homeric period. In the Odyssey it is naively suggested that the suitors should be guided by the Aids OimoTts, which in that context mean the utterances of Dodonaean Zeus, as touching the question whether they should slay Telemachos; and though a political consultation of the Delphic shrine is only once mentioned by Homer, and that in a comparatively late passage, yet its wealth which had become proverbial in his time must be supposed to have arisen from the services it rendered to the Homeric or pre-Homeric communities110. Now the habitual consultation of an oracle by the state puts a very powerful weapon into the hands of the priesthood: and it is found that in primitive societies the priest by a dangerous use of divination can defy the king and can sometimes hold 16. 403-405; cf. 14. 326. the individual's life at his mercy. Perhaps in prehistoric Greece the germs of a conflict between church and state may have existed in the occasional variance between an oracular priesthood and the royalty; there seems, for instance, an ominous hint of this in the question put by Nestor to Telemachos--' Art thou dispossessed of thy own free will or do the people hate thee in the town, in obedience to the voice of God?b' for the 9eov d/xtpri certainly alludes to an oracle, which might command or tempt the people to fall away from their allegiance. According to an anecdote in Plutarch, the Ainianes, when they lived in the Cyrrhaean plain, were ordered by an oracle, probably the Delphic, to stone their king, apparently as a piacular offering in time of drought T. But we might regard a case of this kind, not so much as a sacerdotal persecution of a dynasty, but as a time-honoured ritual of...