Rohde's Psyche: The Cult of Souls

, Apollo received a Dionysiac
element into his own religion. Henceforward, he, the cold,

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aloof, sober deity of former times, can be addressed by titles
that imply Bacchic excitement and self-abandonment. He is
now the “ enthusiastic ”, the Bacchic god : Aeschylus strikingly
calls him “ ivy-crowned Apollo, the Bacchic-frenzied prophet ”.
It is now Apollo, who more than any other god, calls
forth in men’s souls the madness that makes them clairvoyant
and enables them to know hidden things. At not a
few places there are founded oracular sites at which priests
or priestesses in frenzied ecstasy utter what Apollo puts into
their mouths. But the Pythian oracle remained the pattern
of them all. There, prophecy was uttered by the Pythia,
the youthful priestess who sat upon the tripod over the earth-
chasm and was inspired by the intoxicating vapour that arose
from it, until she was filled with the god, and with his spirit.
The god, so ran the belief, entered into the earthly body; or
else the soul of the priestess, “ released ” from her body,
received the heavenly revelation with spiritual sense. What
she then “ with frenzied mouth ” proclaimed, that the god
spoke out of her ; when she said “ I Apollo was speaking
of himself and of what concerned him.” It is the god who
lives, thinks, and speaks in her so long as the madness lasts.

§4

A profound and compelling tendency of the human mind
must have been the source of the great religious movement
that could succeed in establishing, with the ecstatic prophecy of
the Delphic priestess, a seed of mysticism in the very heart
of Greek religion. The introduction of ekstasis into the
ordered stability of the Delphic mode of religion was only a
symptom of that religious movement and not its cause.
But now, confirmed hy the god himself, and by the experience
which the mantic practice seemed to make so evident, the
new belief, so long familiar to Dionysiac religion and worship,
must have at last invaded the older and original type of Greek
religion, and taken hold of it in spite of that religion’s natural
antipathy to anything of the kind. And this belief was that
a highly exalt state of feeling could raise man above the
normal level of his limited, everyday consciousness, and
could elevate him to heights of vision and knowledge
unlimited ; that, further, to the human soul it was not denied,
in very truth and not in vain fancy, to live for a moment
the life of divinity. This belief is the fountain-head of all
mysticism, and tradition still records a few traces of the way
in which it grew and spread at that time.

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It is true that the formal and official worship of the gods in
Greece (where their cults were not obviously affected by foreign
influence) remained as fast-bound as ever within the confines
of order and lucidity. We hear very little of the entrance of
ecstatic exaltation into the constitution of the older cults.
The irresistible religious impulse to such things found an
outlet through other channels. Men and women began to
appear who on their own initiative began to act as intermediaries
between the gods and the needs of individual men.
They were natures, we must suppose, of unusual susceptibility
to “ enthusiastic ” exaltation ; having a strange capacity for
projecting themselves into the infinite. Nothing in the
organization of Greek religion prevented such men and
women, if they could not obtain authority from any religious
community of the state itself, from acquiring a real influence
in religious matters simply from their own experience of
divine favour, their own inward communion with divine
powers.

In the darkness and ferment of this period of growth, from
the eighth to the sixth centuries, we can vaguely discern many
such shadowy figures ; they look uncommonly like those
strange products of the earliest infancy of Christianity when
prophets, asectics, and exorcists wandered from land to land,
called to their work by nothing but the immediate grace of
god (span class=”greek”>χάρισμα), and not attached to any permanent religious
community. It is true that what we hear of Sibyls and
Bakides–men and women who wandered from land to land
prophesying the future, independently of and uncommissioned
by any particular oracular institute–is mostly legend ; but
these are the sort of legends that preserve real historical
tradition condensed into single types and pictures. The
nomenclature itself tells us much ; Sibyls and Bakides are not
individual names, but titles belonging to various types of
ecstatic prophet, and we are entitled to suppose that the
types so named once existed. The appearance in many places
of Greek Asia Minor and the old mainland of Greece of such
divinely inspired prophets is among the distinguishing marks
of a clearly defined period in Greek history ; the age of
promise that came immediately before the philosophic period
of Greece. The later age, entirely given up as it was to the
pursuit of philosophic enlightenment, made so little claim to
the inheritance in their own time of the divine favour that
had once enabled the Sibyls and Bakides to see their visions
and utter their wisdom, that there actually began to appear
in large numbers prophets at second-hand, who were satisfied

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with preserving the traditional wisdom of the inspired
prophets of the past, and with the judicious interpretation
of their treasures. The age of enthusiastic prophets was
evidently a thing of the past. The very literature of Sibylline
and Bakid oracles, which began to appear just at that time
and showed itself capable of an almost indefinite extension,
was itself largely responsible for the veil of myth and legend
which completely enveloped the original bearers of the
prophetic title. Earlier and earlier became the historic
events of the past which they had foretold ; further and
further into the mythical past, before the time of the events
prophesied, receded the imaginary period of the great prophets.
In spite of which the scientific chronologists of antiquity,
who were far from being imposed upon by the delusive anticipations
of prophetic poems, found reason for fixing the date
of particular Sibyls–which means for our purpose the whole
prophetic age of Greece–in the fully historical period of the
eighth and seventh centuries.

We may recognize, in what we hear of these prophets, the
shadowy representatives of a once real and living past ; they
are reminiscences of a striking and therefore never quite
forgotten phase of Greek religious life. The Bakids and Sibyls
were independent agents–though not entirely without connexion
with the regular worship of the gods, they were
not attached to any particular temple–who wandered from
land to land according to the needs of those who sought their
counsel. In this respect, at least, they resembled the Homeric
amen-interpreters, and continued their work ; but they
differed from them profoundly in the mode of their prophesying.
They were “ seized by the god ” and in ecstatic
clairvoyance saw and proclaimed unseen things. It was
no academic skill that they possessed, enabling them to
interpret the meaning of signs and omens that anyone could
see–they saw what was visible only to God and to the
soul of man filled with God. In hoarse tones and wild words
the Sibyl gave utterance to what the divine impelling power
within her and not her own arbitrary fancy suggested ;
possessed by the god, she spoke in a divine distraction. An
echo of such daimonic session, and of the horrible reality
and terror that it had for the possessed, can still be heard in
the cries and convulsions which Aeschylus in the Agamemnon
gives to his Kassandra–a true picture of the primitive
Sibyl, and a type that the poets of that prophetic
generation had reflected backwards into the earlier past of
legend.

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§5

The activity of the seer was not confined to foreseeing and
foretelling the future. We hear of a “ Bakis ” who “ purified ”
and delivered the women of Sparta from an attack of
madness that had spread like an epidemic among them.
The prophetic age of Greece must have seen the origin of what
later became part of the regular duties of the “ seer ” ; the
cure of diseases, especially those of the mind ; the averting
of evil of every kind by various strange means, and particularly
the supply of help and counsel by “ purifications ” of a
religious nature. The gift or art of prophecy, the purification
of “ the unclean ”, the healing of disease, all seem to be
derived from one source. Nor can we be long in doubt as to
what the single source of this threefold capacity must have
been. The world of invisible spirits surrounding man, which
ordinary folk know only by its effects, is familiar and accessible
to the ecstatic prophet. the Mantis, the spirit-seer. As exorcist
he undertakes to heal disease ; the Kathartic process is
also essentially and originally an exorcism of the baleful
influences of the spirit-world.

The wide popularity and elaboration given to the notion–
hardly hinted at as yet in Homer–of the universally
present menace of “ pollution ” which is only to be averted
or got rid of by means of a religious process of purification–
this is one of the chief distinguishing features of the over-
anxious piety that marked the post-Homeric age when men
could no longer be content with the means of salvation
handed down to them by their fathers. If we confined our
attention to the fact that now we find purification required
for such actions as murder and the spilling of blood which
seem to imply at moral stain to the doer of’ them, we might be
tempted to see in the development of Kathartic practices a
fresh step in the history of Greek ethics, and to suppose
that the new practices arose out of a refinement and deepening
of the “ conscience ” which now desired to be free from the
taint of “ sin ” by the help of religion. But such an interpretation
of Katharsis (favourite as it is) is disposed of by a consideration
of the real essence and meaning of the thing. In
later times the methods of Katharsis were nearly always in
competition and conflict (rarely in friendly alliance) with “ conscience ”,
with the independently developed ethical thought
that based itself upon the unchanging requirements of a moral
law transcending all personal will and feeling, and even the
will of daimonic powers. In its origin and essence Katharsis

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had nothing whatever to do with morality or with what we
should call the voice of conscience, On the contrary, it
usurped the place which in a more advanced and morally
developed people would have belonged to a true morality
based on an inner feeling for what is right. Nor did it fail
to hinder the free and unfettered development of such a
morality. Kathartic practices required and implied no feeling
of offence, of personal guilt, of personal responsibility. All
that we know of these practices serves to bring this out and
set the matter in a clearer light.

Ceremonies of “ purification ” accompany every step of
a man’s life from the cradle to the grave. The woman with
child is “ unclean ” and so is anyone who touches her ; the
new-born child is unclean ; marriage is fenced about with
a series of purificatory rites ; the dead, and everything that
approaches them, are unclean. Now, in these instances of
the common and almost daily occurrence of purification
ceremonies, there can be no moral stain involved that requires
to be washed off, not even a symbolical one. Equally little
can there be any when ritual purifications are employed
after a bad dream, the occurrence of a prodigy, recovery
from illness, or when a person has touched an offering made to
deities of the lower world or the graves of the dead ; or when
it is found necessary to purify house and hearth, and even
fire and water for sacred or profane purposes. The purification
of those who have shed blood stands on exactly the same
footing. It was necessary even for those who had killed a
man with just cause, or had committed homicide unknowingly
or unwillingly; the moral aspect of such cases, the guilt
or innocence of the doer is ignored or unperceived. Even in
the case of premeditated murder, the remorse of the criminal
or his “ will to amend ” is quite superfluous to the efficacy
of purification.

It could not be otherwise. The “ stain ” which is wiped
out by these mysterious and religious means is not within
the heart of man. It clings to a man as something hostile,
and from without, and that can he spread from him to others
like an infectious disease. Hence, the purification is effected
by religious processes directed to the external removal of the
evil thing ; it may be washed off (as by water from a running
:spring or from the sea), it may be violently effaced and obliterated
(as by fire or even smoke alone), it may be absorbed (by
wool, fleece of animals, eggs), etc.

It must be something hostile and dangerous to men that is
thus removed ; since this something can only he attacked by

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religious means, it must belong to the daimonic world to
which alone Religion and its means of salvation have reference.
There exists a population of spirits whose neighbourhood or
contact with men renders then “ unclean ”, for it gives them
over to the power of the unholy. Anyone who touches their
places of abode, or the offerings made to them, falls under
their spell ; they may send him sickness, insanity, evils of
every kind. The priest with his purifications is an “ exorcist ”
who sets free those who have fallen victims to the surrounding
powers of darkness. He certainly fulfils this function when
he dispenses diseases. i.e. the spirits who send the diseases,
by his ministrations ; when he employs in his purificatory
ritual hymns and incantatory formulæ which regularly imply
an invisibly listening being to whom they are addressed ;
when he uses the clang of bronze instruments whose well-
known property it is to drive away ghosts. Where human
blood has been shed and requires “ purification ” the Kathartic
priest accomplishes this “ by driving out murder with
murder ” i.e. he lets the blood of a sacrificed animal fall
over the hands of the polluted person. Here, the purification
is plainly in the nature of a substitution-sacrifice (the animal
being offered instead of the murderer). In this way the
anger of the dead is washed-away–for this anger is itself the
pollution that is to be removed. The famous scapegoats
were nothing but sacrifices offered to appease the anger of the
Unseen, and thereby release a whole city from “ pollution ”.
At the Thargelia or on extraordinary occasions of need in
Ionic cities, and even in Athens, unfortunate men were in
ancient times slain or stoned to death or burnt “ for the
purification of the city ” Even the materials of purification
that in private life served to free the individual and his
house from the claims of invisible powers, were thought of as
offerings to these powers ; this is proved clearly enough by the
custom of removing such materials, when they had served
their purpose as “ purifications ”, to the cross-roads, and of
making them over to the unearthly spirits who have their
being there. The materials of purification so treated are in
fact identical with offerings to the dead or even with “ Hekate’s
banquets ” In this case we can see most clearly what the
forces are which Kathartic processes essentially aim at
averting. In them no attempt was made to satisfy a heartfelt
consciousness of sin or a moral sense that has become delicate ;
they were much rather the result of a superstitious fear of
uncanny forces surrounding men and stretching out after
them with a thousand threatening hands in the darkness.

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It was the monstrous phantasies of their own imagination
that made men call upon the priests of purification and
expiation for much-needed aid and protection.

§6

It is simply the invasion of human life by the sinister
creatures of the daimonic world that the clairvoyant mantis
is supposed to avert with his “ purifications ”. Among
these sinister influences Hekate and her crew are particularly
noticeable. This is without doubt an ancient product of
religious phantasy–though it is not mentioned by Homer
–which did not till a late period emerge from the obscurity
of local observance and obtain general popularity ; even then
it only here and there ceased to be a private and domestic
cult and reached the dignity of public city-worship. The
cult of Hekate fled the light of day, as did the wild farrago of
weird and sinister phantoms that surrounded her. She is
cthonic, a goddess of the lower world, where she is at home ;
but, more easily than other lower-world creatures, she finds
her way to the living world of men. Wherever a soul is
entering into partnership with a body–at birth or in child
bed-she is at hand ; where a soul is separating from a
body, in burials of the dead, she is there. Amidst the dwelling-
places of the departed, the monuments of the dead and
the gloomy ritual of their worship, she is in her element.
She is the queen of the souls who are still fast bound to the
upper world. It shows her deep-seated connexion with
the primeval worship of’ the dead at the household hearth,
when we hear of Hekate as dwelling “ in the depth of the
hearth ”, and being honoured together with the underworld
Hermes, her masculine counterpart, among the domestic gods
who “ were left to us by our forefathers ”.

This domestic cult may be a legacy from times when in
familiar intercourse with the lower world men did not yet
fear “ pollution ” therefrom. To later ages Hekate was
the principal source and originator of all that was ghostly
and uncanny. Men came upon her suddenly and to their
hurt by night, or in the dreamy solitudes of midday’s blinding
heat ; they see her in monstrous shapes that, like the figures
in a dream, are continually changing. The names of many
female deities of the underworld of whom the common
people had much to say–Gorgyra (Gorgo), Mormo. Lamia,
Gello or Empousa, the ghost of midday–denote in reality
so many different personifications and variations of Hekate.

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She appeared most frequently by night, under the half-light
of the moon, at the cross-roads. She is not alone but is
accompanied by her “ crew ”, the hand-maidens who follow
in her train. These are the souls of those who have not had
their share of burial and the holy rites that accompany it ;
who have been violently done to death, or who have died
“ before their time ”. Such souls find no rest after death ;
they travel on the wind now, in the company of Hekate and
her daimonic pack of hounds. It is not without reason that
we are reminded of the legends of “ wild hunters ” and the
“ furious host ”, so familiar in modern times in many countries.
Similar beliefs produced similar results in each case ; perhaps
there is even some historical connexion between them,
These night-wandering spirits and souls of the dead bring
pollution and disaster upon all who meet them or fall into
their hands ; they send evil dreams, nightmares, nocturnal
apparitions, madness and epilepsy. It is for them, the
unquiet souls of the dead and Hekate their queen, that men
set out the “ banquets of Hekate ” at the cross-roads.
To them men consign with averted facts the remains of the
purificatory sacrifices that they may not come too close
to human dwelling places. Puppies, too, were sacrificed to
Hekate for “ purifications ”, i.e. “ apotropaic ” sacrifices.

Gruesome inventions of all kinds were easily attached to
this province of supernaturalism ; it is one of the sources
which, with help from other Greek conceptions and many
foreign creations of fancy, let loose a stream of anxious
and gloomy surreptitiousness that spread through the whole
of later antiquity and even reached through the Middle Ages
to our own day.

Protection and riddance from such things were sought at
the hands of seers and “ Kathartic priests ” who, in addition
to ceremonies of purification and exorcism had other ways of
giving help–prescriptions and recipes of many strange sorts
which were originally clear and natural enough to the fantastic
logic of superstition and were still credited and handed down
as magic and inexplicable formula after their real meaning
had been entirely forgotten. Others, again, were driven by a
fearful curiosity to attempt to bring the world of surrounding
spirits–of whose doings such strange stories were told in
legend–even closer to themselves. By magic arts and
incantations, they compelled the wandering ghosts and even
Hekate herself to appear before them : the magic power
forces them to do the will of the spirit-raiser or to harm his
enemies. It was these creatures of the spirit-world that

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magicians and exorcists claimed to banish or compel. Popular
belief was on their side in this, but it is hardly possible that
they never resorted to deceit and imposture in making good
their claims.

§7

The mantic and Kathartic practices, together with what
arose out of them, are known to us almost exclusively as they
were in the time of their decay. Even in the brief sketch
just attempted of this notable by-way of Greek religion,
many details have had to be taken from the accounts left
to us by later ages that had quite outgrown the whole idea
of mantic and Kathartic procedure. Compared on the one
hand with science, seriously engaged in studying the real and
inward sources of being and becoming throughout the world.
together with the limitations of man’s estate, and on the
other hand with the practical and cautious medical study
of the physical conditions of human life in health and sickness,
the mantic and Kathartic practices and all the myriad
superstitious arising from them seemed like a legacy from a
forgotten and discredited past. But such things persisted
in many circles of old-fashioned and primitive-minded people,
though by the emancipated and cultured they~were despised
as the silly and dangerous quackery of mendicant priests and
wizards.

But this product of the religious instinct cannot always
have appeared in such a light ; it certainly was not so regarded
when it first came into prominence. A movement that was
zealously taken up by the Delphic oracle, which influenced
many Greek states in the organization of their religious
cults, must have had a period when its right to exist was
incontestable. It must have answered to the needs of a time
when the dawning sense of the profound unity and inter-connexion
of all being and becoming in the world still contented
itself with a religious explanation of what seemed mysterious,
and when a few chosen natures were seriously credited with
the power to communicate with the all-embracing spirit-world.
Every age has its own ideal of Wisdom ; and there
came a time when the ideal of the Wise Man, who by his own
innate powers has achieved a commanding spiritual position
and insight, became embodied in the persons of certain great
men who seemed to fulfil the highest conceptions of wisdom
and power that were attributed to the ecstatic seer and priest
of purification. The half-mythical stories in which later
ages preserved the memory of the times lying just before the

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age of the philosophic exploration of nature tell us of certain
great masters of a mysterious and occult Wisdom. It is true
that they are credited with powers over nature of a magical
kind rather than with a purely intellectual insight into the
laws of nature; but even in the scanty accounts of them
which have come down to us there are clear indications that
their work already included the tirst attempts at a mode of
study based on theory. We cannot call them philosophers–
not even the forerunners of Greek philosophy. More often
their point of view was one which the real philosophic impulse
towards self-determination and the freedom of the soul
consciously and decisively rejected, and continued to reject,
though not indeed without occasional wavering and back-
sliding. These men must be counted among the magicians
and exorcists who so often appear in the earliest dawn of the
spiritual history of civilized nations, and, as primitive and
marvellous types of the spirit of inquiry, precede the philosophers.
They all belong to the class of ecstatic seers and
Kathartic priests.

Legend related how, out of the country of the Hyperboreans.
that distant Wonderland where Apollo hid himself in winter.
there came to Greece one Abaris, sent by the god himself. He
was a saint and needed no earthly food. Carrying in his hand
the golden arrow, the proof of his Apolline origin and mission,
he passed through many lands dispelling sickness and pestilence
by sacrifices of a magic kind, giving warning of earthquakes
and other disasters. Even in later times prophecies
and “ purifications ”, going under his name, were still to be
read. –This man, and also another like him, called Aristeas,
were already mentioned by Pindar. Aristeas, a man
of high rank in his native city of Prokonnesos, had the magic
gift of prolonged ekstasis. When his soul left his body behind,
being seized by Phoibos, it (as his second self made visible)
was seen in distant places. As Apollo’s attendant he also
appeared together with the god in Metapontum. A bronze
statue in the market-place of that city remained to testify
to his presence there, and to the astonishment awakened
by his inspired utterances. But among all these examples
of the type, Hermotimos of Klazomenai is the most striking.
His soul could desert his body “ for many years ”, and on its
return from its ecstatic voyages, brought with it much mantic
lore and knowledge of the future. At last, enemies set fire
to the tenantless body of Hermotimos when his soul was
away. and the latter returned no more.

The greatest master of all these magically gifted men was,

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according to tradition, Epimenides. His home was in Crete.
an ancient centre of Kathartic wisdom, where Epimenides
was instructed in this lore as an adherent of the cult of
the underworld Zeus. Through a mist of legend and fable
we hear of his prolonged stay in the mysterious cave of Zeus
on Mt. Ida, his intercourse with the spirits of the darkness,
his severe fasting, the long ecstasy of his soul, and his
final return from solitude to the light of day, much experienced
and far-travelled in “ enthusiastic wisdom ”. Next he
journeyed through many lands bringing his health-giving
arts with him, prophesying the future as an ecstatic seer,
interpreting the hidden meaning of past occurrences, and as
Kathartic priest expelling the daimonic evils that arose from
specially foul misdeeds of the past. The Kathartic activity of
Epimenides in Delos and other Greek cities was famous.
It was in particular never forgotten how in Athens at the end
of the seventh century he brought to a satisfactory close the
expiation of the godless murder of the followers of Kylon.
With potent ceremonies of which his wisdom alone knew the
secret, with sacrifice of animals and men, he appeased the
anger of the offended spirits of the depth who in their rage
were “ polluting ” and harming the city…

It was not without reason that later tradition, undeterred
by questions of chronological possibility, brought all the names
just mentioned into connexion with Pythagoras or his adherents,
and was even accustomed to refer to Pherekydes of
Syros, the latest of the band, as the teacher of Pythagoras.
The practice, if not the philosophy, of the Pythagorean sect
grew up among the ideas and what may be called the teaching
of these men. and belongs to the epoch which honoured them as
Wise Men. We still possess a few scraps of evidence to show
that the conceptions guiding their life and work tended to
reach some sort of unification in the minds of these visionaries
who were yet something more than the mere practicians of a
magical species of religion. We cannot, indeed, tell how far
the fanciful pictures of the origin of the world of men which
Epimenides and Pherekydes drew were connected with
the business and professional activity of these men ; but
when it is related of Hermotimos that he, like his countryman
Anaxagoras, attempted a distinction between pure “ mind ”
and matter, we can see very clearly how this theory might
arise out of his special “ experiences ”. The ecstasies of the
soul of which Hermotimos himself and this whole generation
had such ample experience seemed to point to the separability
of the soul from the body–and, indeed, to the superiority of

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the sou1’s essence in its separate state over that of the body–
as to a fact of the most firmly established authenticity. In
contrast with the soul the body could hardly help appearing
as an encumbrance, an obstacle to be got rid of. The conception
of an ever-threatening pollution and “ uncleanness ”
which was nourished by the teaching and activities of those
innumerable purification-priests of whom Epimenides is
known to us as the supreme master, had gradually so penetrated
the whole of the official religion itself with purification-
ceremonies that it might very well have seemed as though.
in the midst of this renovation and development of a type of’
religious thought that had been more than half forgotten in
the Homeric period, Greek religion was fast approaching
the condition of Brahmanism or Zoroastrianism and becoming
essentially a religion of purification. Those who had become
familiar with the contrast between body and soul, especially
if they lived in the atmosphere of Kathartic ideas and their
practical exercise, were almost bound to proceed to the idea
that even the “soul ” required to be purified from the polluting
embarrassment of the body. That such ideas were almost a
commonplace is shown by many stories and turns of
phrase which represent the destruction of the body by fire
as a “ purification ” of the man himself. Wherever these
ideas–the precise opposite and contrary of the Homeric
conception of the relation between body and soul-image–
had penetrated more deeply they must have led to the idea
that even in the lifetime of the body the purification of
the soul should be prepared by the denial and inhibition of
the body and its impulses. The first step was thus taken
towards a purely negative system of morality, not attempting
the inner reformation of the will, but aiming simply at averting
from the soul of man a polluting evil threatening it from without
–in fact to a morality of religious asceticism such as later
became such an important and decisive spiritual movement in
Greece. In spite of all the inadequacy of our information about
these Wise Men of the early pre-philosophic period, we can still
dimly make out the fact that their natural bent lay in this
ascetic direction (the abstention from food practised by Abaris
and Epimenides are distinct cases of it). How far exactly,
they went in this direction is indeed more than we can say.

Thus, the ascetic ideal was not absent even from Greece. It
remained, however–in spite of the influence it had in some
quarters–always a foreign thing in Greece, having its obscure
home among sects of spiritualistic enthusiasts, and regarded
in contrast with the normal and ruling view of life as a paradox,

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almost a heresy. The official religion itself is not entirely
without the seeds of an ascetic system of morality but the
ascetic ideal, fully developed and distinguished from the
simple and normal religious attitude, was in Greece
found only among minorities who cut themselves off in closed
and exclusive conventicles of a theological or philosophical
temper. The “ Wise Men ”, as idealized in the legends of
Albaris, Epimenides, etc., were as individuals not far removed
from the ideal of asceticism. Nor was it long before the
attempt was made to use these ideals as the basis on which
to found a society.

Notes:

The formatting of quote marks and spacing remains the same as the original. The copious footnotes supplied by Rohde have been omitted. If one wants to read the full copy along with the footnotes, the following options are available:

The contents were scanned using OCR software and the results are about 98% accurate, but there are some problems such as periods supposed to be a comma or quote marks not appearing in the right place or mixed with inch marks. If you find such an error, please contact me and forward the error so it can be corrected.

For more information:

• For a printed version click here.

• For an online digital version (payment required) click here.

• Or you can go to your local university library, or use inter-library loan through a public library.