history, was the failure of the various independent city states to
coalesce into a single harmonious whole. But the tendency of religion
was to obviate this defect. We find, for example, that at one time or
another federations of states were formed to support in common the cult
of some god; and one cult in particular there was--that of the Delphian
Apollo--whose influence on political no less than on religious life was
felt as far as and even beyond the limits of the Greek race. No colony
could be founded, no war hazarded, no peace confirmed, without the
advice and approval of the god--whose cult was thus at once a religious
centre for the whole of Greece, and a forecast of a political unity that
should co-ordinate into a whole her chaos of conflicting states.

The religion of the Greeks being thus, as we have seen, the
presupposition and bond of their political life, we find its sanction
extended at every point to custom and law. The persons of heralds, for
example, were held to be under divine protection; treaties between
states and contracts between individuals were confirmed by oath; the
vengeance of the gods was invoked upon infringers of the law; national
assemblies and military expeditions were inaugurated by public prayers;
the whole of corporate life, in short, social and political, was so
embraced and bathed in an idealising element of ritual that the secular
and religious aspects of the state must have been as inseparable to a
Greek in idea as we know them to have been in constitution.


Section 5. Religious Festivals.

For it was in ritual and art, not in propositions, that the Greek
religion expressed itself; and in this respect it was closer to the
Roman Catholic than to the Protestant branch of the Christian faith. The