Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/25

 in an uproar, because a number of idols were decently mutilated. Religious fears cost her the loss of the proudest armament that ever sailed from her shores. A charge of irreligion was pretext enough for condemning to death her noblest philosopher. In everything, great and small, the pouring of libations at the feast, the taking of omens before battle, the consulting of the Delphic oracle upon the most important or most trivial of occasions, the same spirit is manifest. Religion used or abused, piety or superstition, was to the Greeks an abiding motive and influence in all the affairs of life.

It is chiefly of these definite doings and customs that literature tells us, just as art depicts the mise-en-scène of religion. Yet it would be inconceivable that a people who displayed so strong and so abundant a religious feeling in all the circumstances and tasks of life, should not have pondered over the essential underlying questions of all religion, the nature of the soul and the mystery of life and death. Literature tells us that to their poets and philosophers these problems did present themselves, and many were the solutions which different thinkers propounded: but of the general sense of the people in this respect, of the fundamental beliefs which guided their conduct towards gods and men in this life and prompted their care for the dead, literature furnishes no direct statement: its evidence is fragmentary, casual, sporadic. Everywhere it displays the externals, but it leaves the inner spirit veiled. Literature as well as art needs an interpreter.

It is precisely in this task of interpretation that the assistance offered by the folklore of Modern Greece should be sought. It should be remembered that there is still living a people who, as they have inherited the land and the language, may also have inherited the beliefs and customs, of those ancients whose mazes of religion are bewildering without a guide who knows them. Among that still living people it is possible not only to observe acts and usages, but to enquire also their significance: and though some customs will undoubtedly be found either to be mere survivals of which the meaning has long been forgotten, or even to have been subjected to new and false interpretations, yet others, still rooted in and nourished by an intelligent belief, may be vital documents of ancient Greek life and thought.