Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 1.djvu/117

 96 Primitive Greece : Mycenian Art. they had an outlet on the sea. Here they had received the first impulses to action from the most advanced groups of the Hellenic race, with which they were brought in contact. In their seats on the western slopes of Olympus and Ossa were laid the foundations of the peculiar social customs and political order by which the Dorians ever stood out from among their brethren ; here at any rate they first began to practise the worship of Apollo. This form of worship, whose influence was pre- eminently beneficial to mankind, was embraced with much fervour, and carried everywhere with them ; they became its apostles, and diffused it among other tribes to such an extent as to have been credited, not without much show of probability, with having been the inventors of this civilizing religion. Doreus, said one of the genealogical tables in which the Greeks easily put all they knew, or thought they knew, of their origin, — Doreus is the son of Apollo ; in which proposition, but in an inverted sense, modern science agrees. Apollo, writes Ottfried Miiller, is the son of Doreus.^ The religious conceptions of which the Hellenic gods are the embodiment, carry us back to so remote a period as to make it impossible to affirm aught in regard to the original home of those divine types that did not emanate from Semitic sources ; nevertheless, when we cast about for the central point whence the worship of Apollo spread over continental Hellas, we naturally turn towards Northern Thessaly. The vale of Tempe was held as the actual cradle of this form of religion ; every ninth year, a sacred procession travelled thither to gather a branch of laurel, which was carried with great pomp and deposited in his shrine at Delphi. The "sacred way" led through Thessaly, and its traditional stations help us to follow the gradual advance of the Apolline worship to the very gates of Delphi, where an altar already existed, raised to him by Cretan emigrants.^ Here, where the two currents meet, one from the south, the other from the north, the god fixed his favourite abode, and through his oracle began to exercise an all-efficacious and powerful influence on the minds of the Greeks. 1 OiTFRiED MuLLER, Dit DoHer, 2 O'JTFRiED MuLLER has coUectcd all the texts bearing upon the worship of Apollo Tempeitas, as an inscription designates him ; as also upon the sacred way running from Tempe to Delphi {Die Doner), With regard to Cretan influences, read the Homeric hymn to Pythian Apollo.