DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.1021#0366
RELIGION 313
rifice a coal-black sheep." With the Ionian race, to whom
more immediately we owe the Homeric poems in their final
form, this Chthonic faith died out at an early day; it be-
longed to a race that buried its dead and could hardly
persist with the practice of cremation. As a consequence,
ancestor-worship in the court would give way to the wor-
ship of Zeus Herkeios. But in post-Homeric
times there crops out again in new vigor that historical
sense of the power of the dead which had cer-
tainly never been quite lost in the consciousness of the
people j and this belief lived on in full force even through
the very ages of Hellenic bloom. In the earliest known
Athenian code, Draco enjoined the common worship of the
gods and ancestral heroes according to the usage of the
fathers, thus obviously reaffirming under legal sanctions
an immemorial practice which the Attic graveyards of the
geometrical period" now abundantly attest.1 Athenian
family law is built upon it: in historical Attica, as in Vedic
India, " to be a man's heir, and to oifer the dead man's
meal to him are convertible expressions." The family
lawyer Isaeus attests its operation on every page of his
speeches; and so when the poets invoke its sanctions they
are not dealing with a worn-out and forgotten belief. The
people who thronged the Athenian theatre had invented
adoption solely " that they might not leave their houses
desolate, but have some' one to offer sacrifices to them and
perform for them all the hallowed rites."2 They must
have been quite prepared, then, to see Orestes and Electra
approach as suppliants their father's tomb and hear them
vow him the customary sacrifices as they invoke his aid in
their mission of vengeance and whet his rage by recalling
the deep damnation of his taking off.?
1 See RohdVs Psyche, p. 137 ; Ath. Mitth., I c.
2 Isaeus, vii. 30. % s Aeschylus, Choephoroi, 479 ff.
rifice a coal-black sheep." With the Ionian race, to whom
more immediately we owe the Homeric poems in their final
form, this Chthonic faith died out at an early day; it be-
longed to a race that buried its dead and could hardly
persist with the practice of cremation. As a consequence,
ancestor-worship in the court would give way to the wor-
ship of Zeus Herkeios. But in post-Homeric
times there crops out again in new vigor that historical
sense of the power of the dead which had cer-
tainly never been quite lost in the consciousness of the
people j and this belief lived on in full force even through
the very ages of Hellenic bloom. In the earliest known
Athenian code, Draco enjoined the common worship of the
gods and ancestral heroes according to the usage of the
fathers, thus obviously reaffirming under legal sanctions
an immemorial practice which the Attic graveyards of the
geometrical period" now abundantly attest.1 Athenian
family law is built upon it: in historical Attica, as in Vedic
India, " to be a man's heir, and to oifer the dead man's
meal to him are convertible expressions." The family
lawyer Isaeus attests its operation on every page of his
speeches; and so when the poets invoke its sanctions they
are not dealing with a worn-out and forgotten belief. The
people who thronged the Athenian theatre had invented
adoption solely " that they might not leave their houses
desolate, but have some' one to offer sacrifices to them and
perform for them all the hallowed rites."2 They must
have been quite prepared, then, to see Orestes and Electra
approach as suppliants their father's tomb and hear them
vow him the customary sacrifices as they invoke his aid in
their mission of vengeance and whet his rage by recalling
the deep damnation of his taking off.?
1 See RohdVs Psyche, p. 137 ; Ath. Mitth., I c.
2 Isaeus, vii. 30. % s Aeschylus, Choephoroi, 479 ff.