CHAPTER SEVEN
Prayers and Hymns
William D. Furley
Prayer and Hymn
When modern Western man seeks privileged information with a view to improving his
lot he turns to science, law, medicine, school; with pounding heart he hears the
doctor’s diagnosis, the lawyer’s advice, the scientist’s judgment, or the teacher’s
assessment and feels either fortified or mortified. Of course, people still pray
and sing hymns in Western ‘‘civilization,’’ too, but I wanted to indicate how all-
encompassing andimportantprayer and hymn-singing to the gods were for ancient
Greek man. For the professions in those days, whilst remarkably advanced and
inventive, had not achieved the ascendancy which they have nowadays over religion.
Ancient man quite simply still believed in invisible powers which held him in their
grip. Even the famous Sophists in fifth-century Athens, despite their best efforts to
undermine belief in the traditional Olympian deities, were hardly successful with the
majority of the population, as continued worship showed (Mikalson 1983). For the
intellectually enlightened, religious belief simply shifted from the ‘‘primitive’’ Olym-
pians to new-fangled deities such as Fate, Chance, Health, or the Platonic Forms. It is
not always appreciated that the famous ‘‘atheists’’ of antiquity were not labeled thus
for not believing inanygods, but for believing inother, unconventional gods. That is
the joke behind Aristophanes’ comic portrayal of Socrates, the greatest intellectual
skeptic of the time: it was not that he was godless, but rather that he worshiped mad
gods like clouds and atmospheric ‘‘swirl.’’
In view of this we should not envisage Greeks, even in the intellectual center of
Athens, as ever having stopped praying and singing hymns to the gods. They certainly
never stopped sacrificing or processing to temples, and prayers and hymns were an
integral part of sacrifice and processions. Another way of putting this is to say that,
since the vast majority of Greeks maintained an unbroken belief in supernatural
powers throughout antiquity, and since these powers were conceived almost without
exception in anthropomorphic (or better) shape, there was a never-ending desire and