Project Gutenberg's Five Stages of Greek Religion, by Gilbert Murray

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Title: Five Stages of Greek Religion

Author: Gilbert Murray

Release Date: October 14, 2009 [EBook #30250]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FIVE STAGES OF GREEK RELIGION ***

Produced by David Garcia, David Newman, Juliet Sutherland,
Lisa Reigel, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
at http://www.pgdp.net

Transcriber's Notes: Words in Greek in the original have been
transliterated and placed between +plus signs+. Words in Hebrew in the
original have been transliterated and placed between #pound signs#.
Words surrounded by _underscores_ are in italics in the original.
Characters superscripted in the original are enclosed in {braces}.
Ellipses match the original. A row of asterisks represents a thought
break.

There are diacritical accents in the original. In this text, [=a]
represents the letter "a" with a macron.

Variations in spelling and hyphenation have been left as in the
original. Some typographical and punctuation errors have been corrected.
A complete list follows the text.

FIVE STAGES OF
GREEK RELIGION

BY
GILBERT MURRAY

Boston
THE BEACON PRESS

PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION

Anyone who has been in Greece at Easter time, especially among the more
remote peasants, must have been struck by the emotion of suspense and
excitement with which they wait for the announcement "_Christos
aneste_," "Christ is risen!" and the response "_Alethos aneste_," "He
has really risen!" I have referred elsewhere to Mr. Lawson's old peasant
woman, who explained her anxiety: "If Christ does not rise tomorrow we
shall have no harvest this year" (_Modern Greek Folklore_, p. 573). We
are evidently in the presence of an emotion and a fear which, beneath
its Christian colouring and, so to speak, transfiguration, is in its
essence, like most of man's deepest emotions, a relic from a very remote
pre-Christian past. Every spri