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READING HALLTHE DOORS OF WISDOM |
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GEORGE GROTE'S HISTORY OF GREECELEGENDARY GREECECHAPTER XVI.
GREEK MYTHS, AS UNDERSTOOD, FELT AND INTERPRETED BY
THE GREEKS THEMSELVES
THE preceding sections have been intended to exhibit a
sketch of that narrative matter, so abundant, so characteristic and so
interesting, out of which early Grecian history and chronology have been
extracted. Raised originally by hands unseen and from data unassignable, it
existed first in the shape of floating talk among the people, from whence a
large portion of it passed into the song of the poets, who multiplied,
transformed and adorned it in a thousand various ways.
These myths or current stories, the spontaneous and
earliest growth of the Grecian mind, constituted at the same time the entire
intellectual stock of the age to which they belonged. They are the common root
of all those different ramifications into which the mental activity of the Greeks
subsequently diverged; containing, as it were, the preface and germ of the
positive history and philosophy, the dogmatic theology and the professed
romance, which we shall hereafter trace each in its separate development. They
furnished aliment to the curiosity, and solution to the vague doubts and
aspirations of the age; they explained the origin of those customs and standing
peculiarities with which men were familiar; they impressed moral lessons,
awakened patriotic sympathies, and exhibited in detail the shadowy, but anxious
presentiments of the vulgar as to the agency of the gods : moreover they
satisfied that craving for adventure and appetite for the marvelous, which has
in modern times become the province of fiction proper.
It is difficult, we may say impossible, for a man of
mature age to carry back his mind to his conceptions such as they stood when he
was a child, growing naturally out of his imagination and feelings, working
upon a scanty stock of materials, and borrowing from authorities whom he
blindly followed but imperfectly apprehended. A similar difficulty occurs when
we attempt to place ourselves in the historical and quasi-philosophical point
of view which the ancient myths present to us. We can follow perfectly the
imagination and feeling which dictated these tales, and we can admire and
sympathize with them as animated, sublime, and affecting poetry; but we are too
much accustomed to matter of fact and philosophy of a positive kind, to be able
to conceive a time when these beautiful fancies were construed literally and
accepted as serious reality.
Nevertheless it is obvious that Grecian myths cannot
be either understood or appreciated except with reference to the system of
conceptions and belief of the ages in which they arose. We must suppose a
public not reading and writing, but seeing, hearing and telling — destitute of
all records, and careless as well as ignorant of positive history with its
indispensable tests, yet at the same time curious and full of eagerness for new
or impressive incidents — strangers even to the rudiments of positive
philosophy and to the idea of invariable sequences of nature either in the
physical or moral world, yet requiring some connecting theory to interpret and
regularize the phenomena before them. Such a theory was supplied by the
spontaneous inspirations of an early fancy, which supposed the habitual agency
of beings intelligent and voluntary like themselves, but superior in extent of
power, and different in peculiarity of attributes. In the geographical ideas of
the Homeric period, the earth was flat and round, with the deep and gentle
ocean-stream flowing around and returning into itself: chronology, or means of
measuring past time, there existed none; but both unobserved regions might be
described, the forgotten past unfolded, and the unknown future
predicted—through particular men specially inspired by the gods, or endowed by
them with that peculiar vision which detected and interpreted passing signs and
omens.
If even the rudiments of scientific geography and
physics, now so universally diffused and so invaluable as a security against
error and delusion, were wanting in this early stage of society, their place
was abundantly supplied by vivacity of imagination and by personifying
sympathy. The unbounded tendency of the Homeric Greeks to multiply fictitious
persons, and to construe the phenomena which interested them into
manifestations of design, is above all things here to be noticed, because the
form of personal narrative, universal in their myths, is one of its many
manifestations. Their polytheism (comprising some elements of an original
fetichism, in which particular objects had themselves been supposed to be
endued with life, volition, and design) recognized agencies of unseen beings
identified and confounded with the different localities and departments of the
physical world. Of such beings there were numerous varieties, and many
gradations both in power and attributes; there were differences of age, sex and
local residence, relations both conjugal and filial between them, and
tendencies sympathetic as well as repugnant. The gods formed a sort of
political community of their own, which had its hierarchy, its distribution of
ranks and duties, its contentions for power and occasional revolutions, its
public meetings in the agora of Olympus, and its multitudinous banquets or
festivals. The great Olympic gods were in fact only the most exalted amongst an
aggregate of quasi-human or ultra-human personages, —daemons, heroes, nymphs,
eponymous (or name-giving) genii, identified with each river, mountain, cape,
town, village, or known circumscription of territory,—besides horses, bulls,
and dogs, of immortal breed and peculiar attributes, and monsters of strange
lineaments and combinations, “Gorgons and Harpies and Chimeras dire”. As there
were in every gens or family special gentile deities and foregone ancestors who
watched over its members, forming in each the characteristic symbol and
recognized guarantee of their union, so there seem to have been in each guild
or trade peculiar beings whose vocation it was to cooperate or to impede in
various stages of the business.
We read in the Iliad that Asteropaeus was grandson of the beautiful river Axius, and Achilles, after having slain
him, admits the dignity of this parentage, but boasts that his own descent from
Zeus was much greater, since even the great river Achelous and Oceanus himself
is inferior to Zeus. Skamander fights with Achilles,
calling his brother Simois to his aid. Tyro, the daughter of Salmoneus, falls in love with Enipeus, the most beautiful
of rivers. Achelous appears as a suitor of Deianira.
There cannot be a better illustration of this feeling
than what is told of the New Zealanders at the present time. The chief Heu-Hen
appeals to his ancestor, the great mountain Tonga Riro:
“I am the Heu-Heu, and rule over you all, just as my ancestor Tonga Riro, the mountain of snow, stands above all this land”.
Heu-Heu refused permission to anyone to ascend the mountain, on the ground that
it was his tipuna or ancestor: "he constantly
identified himself with the mountain and called it his sacred ancestor".
The mountains in New Zealand are accounted by the natives masculine and
feminine: Tonga Riro, and Taranaki, two male
mountains, quarreled about the affections of a small volcanic female mountain
in the neighborhood.
The religious imagination of the Hindoos also (as described by Colonel Sleeman in his excellent work, Rambles and
Recollections of an Indian Official), affords a remarkable parallel to that of
the early Greeks. Colonel Sleeman says, "Any Englishman can easily
conceive a poet in his highest calenture of the brain, addressing the Ocean as
a steed that knows his rider, and patting the crested billow as his flowing
mane. But he must come to India to understand how every individual of a whole
community of many millions can address a fine river as a living being—a
sovereign princess who hears and understands all they say, and exercises a kind
of local superintendence over their affairs, without a single temple in which
her image is worshipped, or a single priest to profit by the delusion. As in
the case of the Ganges, it is the river itself to whom they address themselves,
and not to any deity residing in it, or presiding over it—the stream itself is
the deity which fills their imaginations, and receives their homage. Compare
also the remarks in the same work on the sanctity of Mother Nerbudda;
also of the holy personality of the earth. "The land is considered as the
MOTHER of the prince or chief who holds it, the great parent from whom he
derives all that maintains him, his family, and his establishments. If
well-treated, she yields this in abundance to her son; but if he presumes to
look upon her with the eye of desire, she ceases to be fruitful ; or the Deity
sends down hail or blight to destroy all that she yields. The measuring the
surface of the fields, and the frequently inspecting the crops by the chief
himself or his immediate agents, were considered by the people in this light—
either it should not be done at all, or the duty should be delegated to
inferior agents, whose close inspection of the great parent could not be so
displeasing to the Deity".
GEA, URANOS, HELIOS, ETC.
The extensive and multiform personifications, here
faintly sketched, pervaded in every direction the mental system of the Greeks,
and were identified intimately both with their conception and with their
description of phenomena, present as well as past. That which to us is
interesting as the mere creation of an exuberant fancy, was to the Greek
genuine and venerated reality. Both the earth and the solid heaven (Gea and Uranos) were both conceived and spoken of by him as endowed
with appetite, feeling, sex, and most of the various attributes of humanity.
Instead of a sun such as we now see, subject to astronomical laws, and forming
the center of a system the changes of which we can ascertain and foreknow, he
saw the great god Helios, mounting his chariot in the morning in the east,
reaching at midday the height of the solid heaven, and arriving in the evening
at the western horizon, with horses fatigued and desirous of repose.
Helios, having favorite spots wherein his beautiful
cattle grazed, took pleasure in contemplating them during the course of his
journey, and was sorely displeased if any man slew or injured them: he had
moreover sons and daughters on earth, and as his all-seeing eye penetrated
everywhere, he was sometimes in a situation to reveal secrets even to the gods
themselves—while on other occasions he was constrained to turn aside in order
to avoid contemplating scenes of abomination. To us these now appear puerile,
though pleasing fancies, but to an Homeric Greek they seemed perfectly natural
and plausible. In his view, the description of the sun, as given in a modern
astronomical treatise, would have appeared not merely absurd, but repulsive and
impious. Even in later times, when the positive spirit of inquiry had made
considerable progress, Anaxagoras and other astronomers incurred the charge of
blasphemy for dispersonifying and trying to assign
invariable laws to the solar phenomena. Personifying fiction was in this way
blended by the Homeric Greeks with their conception of the physical phenomena
before them, not simply in the way of poetical ornament, but as a genuine
portion of their everyday belief.
It was in this early state of the Grecian mind,
stimulating so forcibly the imagination and the feelings, and acting through
them upon the belief, that the great body of the myths grew up and obtained
circulation. They were, from first to last, personal narratives and adventures;
and the persons who predominated as subjects of them were the gods, the heroes,
the nymphs, etc., whose names were known and reverenced, and in whom everyone
felt interested. To every god and every hero it was consistent with Grecian
ideas to ascribe great diversity of human motive and attribute : each indeed
has his own peculiar type of character, more or less strictly defined; but in
all there was a wide foundation for animated narrative and for romantic
incident. The gods and heroes of the land and the tribe belonged, in the
conception of a Greek, alike to the present and to the past : he worshipped in
their groves and at their festivals; he invoked their protection, and believed in
their superintending guardianship, even in his own day : but their more
special, intimate, and sympathizing agency was cast back into the unrecorded
past. To give suitable utterance to this general sentiment, to furnish body and
movement and detail to these divine and heroic pre-existences, which were
conceived only in shadowy outline, to lighten up the dreams of what the past
must have been, in the minds of those who knew not what it really had been —
such was the spontaneous aim and inspiration of productive genius in the
community, and such were the purposes which the Grecian myths preeminently
accomplished.
GOD AND MEN IN COMMUNION.
The love of antiquities, which Tacitus notices as so
prevalent among the Greeks of his day, was one of the earliest, the most
durable, and the most widely diffused of the national propensities. But the
antiquities of every state were divine and heroic, reproducing the lineaments,
but disregarding the measure and limits, of ordinary humanity. The gods formed
the starting-point, beyond which no man thought of looking, though some gods
were more ancient than others : their progeny, the heroes, many of them sprung
from human mothers, constitute an intermediate link between god and man. The
ancient epic usually recognizes the presence of a multitude of nameless men,
but they are introduced chiefly for the purpose of filling the scene, and of
executing the orders, celebrating the valor, and bringing out the personality,
of a few divine or heroic characters. It was the glory of bards and
storytellers to be able to satisfy those religious and patriotic
predispositions of the public, which caused the primary demand for their tales,
and which were of a nature eminently inviting and expansive. For Grecian
religion was many-sided and many colored; it comprised a great multiplicity of
persons, together with much diversity in the types of character; it divinized
every vein and attribute of humanity, the lofty as well as the mean—the tender
as well as the warlike—the self-devoting and adventurous as well as the
laughter-loving and sensual. We shall hereafter reach a time when philosophers
protested against such identification of the gods with the more vulgar
appetites and enjoyments, believing that nothing except the spiritual
attributes of man could properly be transferred to superhuman beings, and
drawing their predicates respecting the gods exclusively from what was awful,
majestic and terror-striking in human affairs. Such restrictions on the
religious fancy were continually on the increase, and the mystic and didactic
stamp which marked the last century of paganism in the days of Julian and
Libanius, contrasts forcibly with the concrete and vivacious forms, full of
vigorous impulse and alive to all the capricious gusts of the human temperament,
which people the Homeric Olympus. At present, however, we have only to consider
the early, or Homeric and Hesiodic paganism, and its operation in the genesis
of the mythical narratives. We cannot doubt that it supplied the most powerful
stimulus, and the only one which the times admitted, to the creative faculty of
the people; as well from the sociability, the gradations, and the mutual action
and reaction of its gods and heroes, as from the amplitude, the variety, and
the purely human cast, of its fundamental types.
STIMULUS TO MYTHOPOEIC FACULTY.
Though we may thus explain the mythopoeic fertility of
the Greeks, I am far from pretending that we can render any sufficient account
of the supreme beauty of their chief epic and artistical productions. There is
something in the first-rate productions of individual genius which lies beyond
the compass of philosophical theory : the special breath of the Muse (to speak
the language of ancient Greece) must be present in order to give them being.
Even among her votaries, many are called, but few are chosen; and the
peculiarities of those few remain as yet her own secret.
We shall not however forget that Grecian language was
also an indispensable requisite to the growth and beauty of Grecian myths — its
richness, its flexibility and capacity of new combinations, its vocalic
abundance and metrical pronunciation: and many even among its proper names, by
their analogy to words really significant, gave direct occasion to explanatory
or illustrative stories. Etymological myths are found in sensible proportion
among the whole number.
To understand properly then the Grecian myths, we must
try to identify ourselves with the state of mind of the original mythopoeic
age; a process not very easy, since it requires us to adopt a string of
poetical fancies not simply as realities, but as the governing realities of the
mental system; yet a process which would only reproduce something analogous to
our own childhood. The age was one destitute both of recorded history and of
positive science, but full of imagination and sentiment and religious
impressibility; from these sources sprung that multitude of supposed persons
around whom all combinations of sensible phenomena were grouped, and towards
whom curiosity, sympathies, and reverence were earnestly directed. The
adventures of such persons were the only aliment suited at once both to the
appetites and to the comprehension of an early Greek; and the myths which
detailed them, while powerfully interesting his emotions, furnished to him at
the same time a quasi-history and quasi-philosophy: they filled up the vacuum
of the unrecorded past, and explained many of the puzzling incognita of the
present. Nor need we wonder that the same plausibility which captivated his
imagination and his feelings was sufficient to engender spontaneous belief; or
rather, that no question as to truth or falsehood of the narrative suggested
itself to his mind. His faith is ready, literal and uninquiring, apart from all
thought of discriminating fact from fiction, or of detecting hidden and
symbolized meaning; it is enough that what he hears be intrinsically plausible
and seductive, and that there be no special cause to provoke doubt. And if
indeed there were, the poet overrules such doubts by the holy and
all-sufficient authority of the Muse, whose omniscience is the warrant for his
recital, as her inspiration is the cause of his success.
The state of mind, and the relation of speaker to
hearers, thus depicted, stand clearly marked in the terms and tenor of the
ancient epic, if we only put a plain meaning upon what we read. The poet—like
the prophet, whom he so much resembles—sings under heavenly guidance, inspired
by the goddess to whom he has prayed for her assisting impulse : she puts the
word into his mouth and the incidents into his mind : he is a privileged man,
chosen as her organ and speaking from her revelations. As the Muse grants the
gift of song to whom she will, so she sometimes in her anger snatches it away,
and the most consummate human genius is then left silent and helpless. It is
true that these expressions, of the Muse inspiring and the poet singing a tale
of past times, have passed from the ancient epic to compositions produced under
very different circumstances, and have now degenerated into unmeaning forms of
speech; but they gained currency originally in their genuine and literal
acceptation. If poets had from the beginning written or recited, the predicate
of singing would never have been ascribed to them; nor would it have ever
become customary to employ the name of the Muse as a die to be stamped on
licensed fiction, unless the practice had begun when her agency was invoked and
hailed in perfect good faith. Belief, the fruit of deliberate inquiry and a
rational scrutiny of evidence, is in such an age unknown : the simple faith of
the time slides in unconsciously, when the imagination and feeling are exalted;
and inspired authority is at once understood, easily admitted, and implicitly
confided in.
ORIGIN OF THE WORD “MYTH”
The word myth (fabula, story), in its original
meaning, signified simply a statement or current narrative, without any
connotative implication either of truth or falsehood. Subsequently the meaning
of the word (in Latin and English as well as in Greek) changed, and came to
carry with it the idea of an old personal narrative, always uncertified,
sometimes untrue or avowedly fictitious. And this change was the result of a
silent alteration in the mental state of the society, — of a transition on the
part of the superior minds (and more or less on the part of all) to a stricter
and more elevated canon of credibility, in consequence of familiarity with
recorded history, and its essential tests, affirmative as well as negative.
Among the original hearers of the myths, all such tests were unknown; they had
not yet learned the lesson of critical disbelief; the myth passed unquestioned
from the mere fact of its currency, and from its harmony with existing
sentiments and preconceptions. The very circumstances which contributed to rob
it of literal belief in after-time, strengthened its hold upon the mind of the
Homeric man. He looked for wonders and unusual combinations in the past; he
expected to hear of gods, heroes and men, moving and operating together upon
earth; he pictured to himself the foretime as a theatre in which the gods
interfered directly, obviously and frequently, for the protection of their
favorites and the punishment of their foes. The rational conception, then only
dawning in his mind, of a systematic course of nature was absorbed by this
fervent and lively faith. And if he could have been supplied with as perfect
and philosophical a history of his own real past time, as we are now enabled to
furnish with regard to the last century of England or France, faithfully
recording all the successive events, and accounting for them by known positive
laws, but introducing no special interventions of Zeus and Apollo — such a
history would have appeared to him not merely unholy and unimpressive, but
destitute of all plausibility or title to credence. It would have provoked in
him the same feeling of incredulous aversion as a description of the sun (to
repeat the previous illustration) in a modern book on scientific astronomy.
To us these myths are interesting fictions; to the
Homeric and Hesiodic audience they were rerum divinarum et humanarum scientia, an
aggregate of religious, physical and historical revelations, rendered more
captivating, but not less true and real, by the bright coloring and fantastic
shapes in which they were presented. Throughout the whole of "myth-bearing
Hellas" they formed the staple of the uninstructed Greek mind, upon which
history and philosophy were by so slow degrees superinduced; and they continued
to be the aliment of ordinary thought and conversation, even after history and
philosophy had partially supplanted the mythical faith among the leading men,
and disturbed it more or less in the ideas of all. The men, the women, and the
children of the remote domes and villages of Greece, to whom Thucydides,
Hippocrates, Aristotle, or Hipparchus were unknown, still continued to dwell
upon the local fables which formed their religious and patriotic antiquity. And
Pausanias, even in his time, heard everywhere divine or heroic legends yet
alive, precisely of the type of the old epic; he found the conceptions of
religious and mythical faith, coexistent with those of positive science, and
contending against them at more or less of odds, according to the temper of the
individual. Now it is the remarkable characteristic of the Homeric age, that no
such coexistence or contention had yet begun. The religious and mythical point
of view covers, for the most part, all the phenomena of nature; while the
conception of invariable sequence exists only in the background, itself
personified under the name of the Moerae, or Fates,
and produced generally as an exception to the omnipotence of Zeus for all
ordinary purposes. Voluntary agents, visible and invisible, impel and govern
everything. Moreover this point of view is universal throughout the community,
adopted with equal fervor, and carried out with equal consistency, by the
loftiest minds and by the lowest. The great man of that day is he who,
penetrated like others with the general faith, and never once imagining any
other system of nature than the agency of these voluntary Beings, can clothe
them in suitable circumstances and details, and exhibit in living body and
action those types which his hearers dimly prefigure. Such men were the authors
of the Iliad and the Odyssey; embodying in themselves the whole measure of
intellectual excellence which their age was capable of feeling: to us, the
first of poets —but to their own public, religious teachers, historians, and
philosophers besides—inasmuch as all that then represented history and
philosophy was derived from those epical effusions and from others homogeneous
with them. Herodotus recognizes Homer and Hesiod as the main authors of Grecian
belief respecting the names and generations, the attributes and agency, the
forms and the worship of the gods.
History, philosophy, etc., properly so called and
conforming to our ideas (of which the subsequent Greeks were the first
creators, never belonged to more than a comparatively small number of thinking
men, though their influence indirectly affected more or less the whole national
mind. But when positive science and criticism, and the idea of an invariable
sequence of events, came to supplant in the more vigorous intellects the old
mythical creed of omnipresent personification, an inevitable scission was
produced between the instructed few and the remaining community. The opposition
between the scientific and the religious point of view was not slow in
manifesting itself: in general language, indeed, both might seem to stand
together, but in every particular case the admission of one involved the
rejection of the other. According to the theory which then became predominant,
the course of nature was held to move invariably on, by powers and attributes
of its own, unless the gods chose to interfere and reverse it; but they had the
power of interfering as often and to as great an extent as they thought fit.
Here the question was at once opened, respecting a great variety of particular
phenomena, whether they were to be regarded as natural or miraculous. No
constant or discernible test could be suggested to discriminate the two : every
man was called upon to settle the doubt for himself, and each settled it
according to the extent of his knowledge, the force of his logic, the state of
his health, his hopes, his fears, and many other considerations affecting his
separate conclusion. In a question thus perpetually arising, and full of
practical consequences, instructed minds, like Pericles, Thucydides, and
Euripides, tended more and more to the scientific point of view, in cases where
the general public were constantly gravitating towards the religious.
The age immediately prior to this unsettled condition
of thought is the really mythopoeic age; in which the creative faculties of the
society know no other employment, and the mass of the society no other mental
demand. The perfect expression of such a period, in its full peculiarity and
grandeur, is to be found in the Iliad and Odyssey, — poems of which we cannot
determine the exact date, but which seem both to have existed prior to the
first Olympiad, 776 BC, our earliest trustworthy mark of Grecian time. For some
time after that event, the mythopoeic tendencies continued in vigor (Arktinus, Lesches, Eumelus, and
seemingly most of the Hesiodic poems, fall within or shortly after the first
century of recorded Olympiads); but from and after this first century, we may
trace the operation of causes which gradually enfeebled and narrowed them,
altering the point of view from which the myths were looked at. What these
causes were, it will be necessary briefly to intimate.
EXPANSION OF GREEK INTELLECT
The foremost and most general of all is, the expansive
force of Grecian intellect itself, — a quality in which this remarkable people
stand distinguished from all their neighbors and contemporaries. Most, if not
all nations have had myths, but no nation except the Greeks have imparted to
them immortal charm and universal interest; and the same mental capacities,
which raised the great men of the poetic age to this exalted level, also pushed
forward their successors to outgrow the early faith in which the myths had been
generated and accredited.
One great mark, as well as means, of such intellectual
expansion, was the habit of attending to, recording, and combining, positive
and present facts, both domestic and foreign. In the genuine Grecian epic, the
theme was an unknown and aoristic past; but even as early as the Works and Days
of Hesiod, the present begins to figure: the man who tills the earth appears in
his own solitary nakedness, apart from gods and heroes—bound indeed by serious
obligations to the gods, but contending against many difficulties which are not
to be removed by simple reliance on their help. The poet denounces his age in
the strongest terms as miserable, degraded and profligate, and looks back with
reverential envy to the extinct heroic races who fought at Troy and Thebes. Yet
bad as the present time is, the Muse condescends to look at it along with him,
and to prescribe rules for human life—with the assurance that if a man be
industrious, frugal, provident, just and friendly in his dealings, the gods
will recompense him with affluence and security. Nor does the Muse disdain,
while holding out such promise, to cast herself into the most homely details of
present existence and to give advice thoroughly practical and calculating. Men
whose minds were full of the heroes of Homer, called Hesiod in contempt the
poet of the Helots; and the contrast between the two is certainly a remarkable
proof of the tendency of Greek poetry towards the present and the positive.
Other manifestations of the same tendency become
visible in the age of Archilochus (680-660 BC). In an age when metrical
composition and the living voice are the only means whereby the productive
minds of a community make themselves felt, the invention of a new metre, new forms of song and recitation, at diversified
accompaniments, constitute an epoch. The iambic, elegiac, choric, and lyric
poetry, from Archilochus downwards, all indicate purposes in the poet, and
impressibilities of the hearers, very different from those of the ancient epic.
In all of them the personal feeling of the poet and the specialties of present
time and place, are brought prominently forward, while in the Homeric hexameter
the poet is a mere nameless organ of the historical Muse—the hearers are
content to learn, believe, and feel, the incidents of a foregone world, and the
tale is hardly less suitable to one time and place than to another. The iambic metre (we are told) was first suggested to Archilochus by
the bitterness of his own private antipathies; and the mortal wounds inflicted
by his lampoons, upon the individuals against whom they were directed, still
remain attested, though the verses themselves have perished. It was the metre (according to the well-known judgment of Aristotle)
most nearly approaching to common speech, and well suited both to the coarse
vein of sentiment, and to the smart and emphatic diction of its inventor.
Simonides of Amorgus, the younger contemporary of
Archilochus, employed the same metre, with less
bitterness, but with an anti-heroic tendency not less decided. His remaining
fragments present a mixture of teaching and sarcasm, having a distinct bearing
upon actual life, and carrying out the spirit which partially appears in the
Hesiodic Works and Days. Of Alkaeus and Sappho, though unfortunately we are
compelled to speak of them upon hearsay only, we know enough to satisfy us that
their own personal sentiments and sufferings, their relations private or public
with the contemporary world, constituted the soul of those short effusions
which gave them so much celebrity : and in the few remains of the elegiac poets
preserved to us —Kallinus, Mimnermus, Tyrtaeus — the
impulse of some present motive or circumstance is no less conspicuous. The same
may also be said of Solon, Theognis and Phokylides, who preach, encourage, censure, or complain,
but do not recount—and in whom a profound ethical sensibility, unknown to the
Homeric poems, manifests itself: the form of poetry (to use the words of Solon
himself) is made the substitute for the public speaking of the agora.
Doubtless all these poets made abundant use of the
ancient myths, but it was by turning them to present account, in the way of
illustration, or flattery, or contrast,—a tendency which we may usually detect
even in the compositions of Pindar, in spite of the lofty and heroic strain
which they breathe throughout. That narrative or legendary poetry still
continued to be composed during the seventh and sixth centuries before the
Christian era is not to be questioned; but it exhibited the old epical
character without the old epical genius; both the inspiration of the composer
and the sympathies of the audience had become more deeply enlisted in the world
before them, and disposed to fasten on incidents of their own actual
experience. From Solon and Theognis we pass to the
abandonment of all metrical restrictions and to the introduction of prose
writing,—a fact, the importance of which it is needless to dwell upon—, marking
as well the increased familiarity with written records, as the commencement of
a separate branch of literature for the intellect, apart from the imagination
and emotions wherein the old legends had their exclusive root.
COMMENCEMENT OF PHYSICAL SCIENCE.
Egypt was first unreservedly opened to the Greeks
during the reign of Psammetichus, about BC 660;
gradually it became much frequented by them for military or commercial
purposes, or for simple curiosity, and enlarged the range of their thoughts and
observations, while it also imparted to them that vein of mysticism, which
overgrew the primitive simplicity of the Homeric religion, and of which I have
spoken in a former chapter. They found in it a long-established civilization,
colossal wonders of architecture, and a certain knowledge of astronomy and
geometry, elementary indeed, but in advance of their own. Moreover it was a
portion of their present world, and it contributed to form in them an interest
for noting and describing the actual realities before them. A sensible progress
is made in the Greek mind during the two centuries from 700 to 500 BC, in the
record and arrangement of historical facts: an historical sense arises in the
superior intellects, and some idea of evidence as a discriminating test between
fact and fiction. And this progressive tendency was further stimulated by
increased communication and by more settled and peaceful social relations
between the various members of the Hellenic world, to which may be added
material improvements, purchased at the expense of a period of turbulence and
revolution, in the internal administration of each separate state. The Olympic,
Pythian, Nemean, and Isthmian games became frequented by visitors from the most
distant parts of Greece : the great periodical festival in the island of Delos
brought together the citizens of every Ionic community, with their waves and
children, and an ample display of wealth and ornaments.
Numerous and flourishing colonies were founded in
Sicily, the south of Italy, the coasts of Epirus and of the Euxine Sea : the
Phocaeans explored the whole of the Adriatic, established Massilia, and
penetrated even as far as the south of Iberia, with which they carried on a
lucrative commerce. The geographical ideas of the Greeks were thus both
expanded and rectified : the first preparation of a map, by Anaximander the
disciple of Thales, is an epoch in the history of science. We may note the
ridicule bestowed by Herodotus both upon the supposed people called Hyperboreans
and upon the idea of a circumfluous ocean-stream, as demonstrating the progress
of the age in this department of inquiry. And even earlier than Herodotus,
Xanthus had noticed the occurrence of fossil marine productions in the interior
of Asia Minor, which led him to reflections on the changes of the earth's
surface with respect to land and water.
If then we look down the three centuries and a half
which elapsed between the commencement of the Olympic era and the age of
Herodotus and Thucydides, we shall discern a striking advance in the Greeks, —
ethical, social and intellectual. Positive history and chronology has not only
been created, but in the case of Thucydides, the qualities necessary to the
historiographer, in their application to recent events, have been developed
with a degree of perfection never since surpassed. Men’s minds have assumed a
gentler as well as a juster cast; and acts come to be
criticized with reference to their bearing on the internal happiness of a
well-regulated community, as well as upon the standing harmony of fraternal
states. While Thucydides treats the habitual and licensed piracy, so coolly
alluded to in the Homeric poems, as an obsolete enormity, many of the acts
described in the old heroic and Theogonic legends were
found not less repugnant to this improved tone of feeling. The battles of the
gods with the Giants and Titans, — the castration of Uranus by his son Cronus,—
the cruelty, deceit and licentiousness, often supposed both in the gods and
heroes, provoked strong disapprobation. And the language of the philosopher
Xenophanes, who composed both elegiac and iambic poems for the express purpose
of denouncing such tales, is as vehement and unsparing as that of the Christian
writers, who, eight centuries afterwards, attacked the whole scheme of
paganism.
Nor was it alone as an ethical and social critic that
Xenophanes stood distinguished. He was one of a great and eminent triad —
Thales and Pythagoras being the others — who, in the sixth century before the
Christian era, first opened up those veins of speculative philosophy which
occupied afterwards so large a portion of Grecian intellectual energy. Of the
material differences between the three I do not here speak; I regard them only
in reference to the Homeric and Hesiodic philosophy which preceded them, and
from which all three deviated .by a step, perhaps the most remarkable in all
the history of philosophy. In the scheme of ideas common to Homer and to the
Hesiodic Theogony (as has been already stated), we find nature distributed into
a variety of personal agencies, administered according to the free-will of
different Beings more or less analogous to man—each of these Beings having his
own character, attributes and powers, his own sources of pain and pleasure, and
his own especial sympathies or antipathies with human individuals; each being
determined to act or forbear, to grant favor or inflict injury in his own
department of phenomena, according as men, or perhaps other Beings analogous to
himself; might conciliate or offend him. The Gods, properly so called, (those
who bore a proper name and received some public or family worship,) were the
most commanding and capital members amidst this vast network of agents visible
and invisible, spread over the universe. The whole vie of nature was purely
religious and subjective, the spontaneous suggestion of the early mind. It
proceeded from the instinctive tendencies of the feelings and imagination to
transport, to the world without, the familiar type of free-will and conscious
personal action : above all, it took deep hold of the emotions, from the widely
extended sympathy which it so perpetually called forth between man and nature.
The first attempt to disenthrall the philosophic
intellect from this all-personifying religious faith, and to constitute a
method of interpreting nature distinct from the spontaneous inspirations of
untaught minds, is to be found in Thales, Xenophanes and Pythagoras, in the
sixth century before the Christian era. It is in them that we first find the
idea of Person tacitly set aside or limited, and an impersonal Nature conceived
as the object of study. The divine husband and wife, Oceanus and Tethys,
parents of many gods and of the Oceanic nymphs, together with the avenging
goddess Styx, are translated into the material substance water, or, as we ought
rather to say, the Fluid : and Thales set himself to prove that water was the
primitive element, out of which all the different natural substances had been
formed. He, as well as Xenophanes and Pythagoras, started the problem of
physical philosophy, with its objective character and invariable laws, to be
discoverable by a proper and methodical application of the human intellect. The
Greek word Physic, denoting nature, and its derivatives physics and physiology,
unknown in that large sense to Homer or Hesiod, as well as the word Cosmos, to
denote the mundane system, first appears with these philosophers. The elemental
analysis of Thales — the one unchangeable cosmic substance, varying only in
appearance, but not in reality, as suggested by Xenophanes,—and the geometrical
and arithmetical combinations of Pythagoras, — all these were different ways of
approaching the explanation of physical phenomena, and each gave rise to a
distinct school or succession of philosophers. But they all agreed in departing
from the primitive method, and in recognizing determinate properties,
invariable sequences, and objective truth, in nature — either independent of
willing or designing agents, or serving to these latter at once as an
indispensable subject-matter and as a limiting condition. Xenophanes disclaimed
openly all knowledge respecting the gods, and pronounced that no man could have
any means of ascertaining when he was right and when he was wrong, in
affirmations respecting them : while Pythagoras represents in part the
scientific tendencies of his age, in part also the spirit of mysticism and of
special fraternities for religious and ascetic observance, which became
diffused throughout Greece in the sixth century before the Christian era. This
was another point which placed him in antipathy with the simple, unconscious
and demonstrative faith of the old poets, as well as with the current legends.
If these distinguished men, when they ceased to follow
the primitive instinct of tracing the phenomena of nature to personal and
designing agents, passed over, not at once to induction and observation, but to
a misemployment of abstract words, substituting metaphysical eidola in the
place of polytheism, and to an exaggerated application of certain narrow
physical theories— we must remember that nothing else could be expected from
the scanty stock of facts then accessible, and that the most profound study of
the human mind points out such transition as an inevitable law of intellectual
progress. At present, we have to compare them only with that state of the Greek
minds which they partially superseded, and with which they were in decided
opposition. The rudiments of physical science were conceived and developed
among superior men; but the religious feeling of the mass was averse to them;
and the aversion, though gradually mitigated, never wholly died away. Some of
the philosophers were not backward in charging others with irreligion, while
the multitude seems to have felt the same sentiment more or less towards all—or
towards that postulate of constant sequences, with determinate conditions of
occurrence, which scientific study implies, and which they could not reconcile
with their belief in the agency of the gods, to whom they were constantly
praying for special succor and blessings.
SOCRATES. HIPPOCRATES. ANAXAGORAS.
The discrepancy between the scientific and the
religious point of view was dealt with differently by different philosophers.
Thus Socrates openly admitted it, and assigned to each a distinct and
independent province. He distributed phenomena into two classes : one, wherein
the connection of antecedent and consequent was invariable and ascertainable by
human study, and therefore future results accessible to a well-instructed
foresight; the other, and those, too, the most comprehensive and important,
which the gods had reserved for themselves and their own unconditional agency,
wherein there was no invariable or ascertainable sequence, and where the result
could only be foreknown by some omen, prophecy, or other special inspired
communication from themselves. Each of these classes was essentially distinct,
and required to be looked at and dealt with in a manner radically incompatible
with the other. Socrates held it wrong to apply the scientific interpretation
to the latter, or the theological interpretation to the former. Physics and
astronomy, in his opinion, belonged to the divine class of phenomena, in which
human research was insane, fruitless, and impious.
On the other hand, Hippocrates, the contemporary of
Socrates, denied the discrepancy, and merged into one those two classes of
phenomena, the divine and the scientifically determinable,—which the latter had
put asunder. Hippocrates treated all phenomena as at once both divine and
scientifically determinable. In discussing certain peculiar bodily disorders
found among the Scythians, he observes, “The Scythians themselves ascribe the
cause of this to God, and reverence and bow down to such sufferers, each man
fearing that he may suffer the like; and I myself think too that these
affections, as well as all others, are divine : no one among them is either
more divine or more human than another, but all are on the same footing, and
all divine; nevertheless each of them has its own physical conditions, and not
one occurs without such physical conditions”.
A third distinguished philosopher of the same day,
Anaxagoras, allegorizing Zeus and the other personal gods, proclaimed the
doctrine of one common pervading Mind, as having first established order and
system in the mundane aggregate, which had once been in a state of chaos—and as
still manifesting its uninterrupted agency for wise and good purposes. This
general doctrine obtained much admiration from Plato and Aristotle; but they at
the same time remarked with surprise, that Anaxagoras never made any use at all
of his own general doctrine for the explanation of the phenomena of
nature,—that he looked for nothing but physical causes and connecting laws,—so
that in fact the spirit of his particular researches was not materially
different from those of Democritus or Leucippus, whatever might be the
difference in their general theories. His investigations in meteorology and
astronomy, treating the heavenly bodies as subjects for calculation, have been
already noticed as offensive, not only to the general public of Greece, but
even to Socrates himself among them : he was tried at Athens, and seems to have
escaped condemnation only by voluntary exile.
The three eminent men just named, all essentially
different from each other, may be taken as illustrations of the philosophical
mind of Greece during the last half of the fifth century BC. Scientific
pursuits had acquired a powerful hold, and adjusted themselves in various ways
with the prevalent religious feelings of the age. Both Hippocrates and
Anaxagoras modified their ideas of the divine agency so as to suit their thirst
for scientific research. According to the former, the gods were the really
efficient agents in the production of all phenomena,—the mean and indifferent
not less than the terrific or tutelary. Being thus alike connected with all
phenomena, they were specially associated with none—and the proper task of the
inquirer was, to find out those rules and conditions by which (he assumed)
their agency was always determined, and according to which it might be
foretold. And this led naturally to the proceeding which Plato and Aristotle
remark in Anaxagoras,—that the all-governing and Infinite Mind, having been announced
in sublime language at the beginning of his treatise, was afterward left out of
sight, and never applied to the explanation of particular phenomena, being as
much consistent with one modification of nature as with another.
Now such a view of the divine agency could never be
reconciled with the religious feelings of the ordinary Grecian believer, even
as they stood in the time of Anaxagoras; still less could it have been
reconciled with those of the Homeric man, more than three centuries earlier. By
him Zeus and Athene were conceived as definite Persons, objects of special
reverence, hopes, and fears, and animated with peculiar feelings, sometimes of
favor, sometimes of wrath, towards himself or his family or country. They were
propitiated by his prayers, and prevailed upon to lend him succor in danger—but
offended and disposed to bring evil upon him if he omitted to render thanks or
sacrifice. This sense of individual communion with, and dependence upon them
was the essence of his faith; and with that faith, the all-pervading Mind
proclaimed by Anaxagoras—which had no more concern with one man or one
phenomenon than with another,—could never be brought into harmony. Nor could
the believer, while ho prayed with sincerity for special blessings or protection
from the gods, acquiesce in the doctrine of Hippocrates, that their agency was
governed by constant laws and physical conditions.
That radical discord between the mental impulses of
science and religion, which manifests itself so decisively during the most
cultivated ages of Greece, and which harassed more or less so many of the
philosophers, produced its most afflicting result in the condemnation of
Socrates by the Athenians. According to the remarkable passage recently cited
from Xenophon, it will appear that Socrates agreed with his countrymen in
denouncing physical speculations as impious,—that he recognized the religious
process of discovery as a peculiar branch, coordinate with the scientific,—and
that he laid down a theory, of which the basis was, the confessed divergence of
these two processes from the beginning—thereby seemingly satisfying the
exigencies of religious hopes and fears on the one hand, and those of reason,
in her ardor for ascertaining the invariable laws of phenomena, on the other.
We may remark that the theory of this religious and extra-scientific process of
discovery was at that time sufficiently complete; for Socrates could point out,
that those anomalous phenomena which the gods had reserved for themselves, and
into which science was forbidden to pry, were yet accessible to the seekings of the pious man, through oracles, omens, and
other exceptional means of communication which divine benevolence vouchsafed to
keep open. Considering thus to how great an extent Socrates was identified in
feeling with the religious public of Athens, and considering moreover that his
performance of open religious duties was assiduous—we might wonder, as Xenophon
does wonder, how it could have happened that the Athenian dikasts mistook him at the end of his life for an irreligious man. But we see, by the
defense which Xenophon as well as Plato gives for him, that the Athenian public
really considered him, in spite of his own disclaimer, as homogeneous with
Anaxagoras and the other physical inquirers, because he had applied similar
scientific reasonings to moral and social phenomena. They looked upon him with
the same displeasure as he himself felt towards the physical philosophers, and
we cannot but admit that in this respect they were more unfortunately
consistent than he was. It is true that the mode of defense adopted by Socrates
contributed much to the verdict found against him, and that he was further
weighed down by private offence given to powerful individuals and professions;
but all these separate antipathies found their best account in swelling the cry
against him as an over-curious skeptic, and an impious innovator.
Now the scission thus produced between the superior
minds and the multitude, in consequence of the development of science and the
scientific point of view, is a fact of great moment in the history of Greek
progress, and forms an important contrast between the age of Homer and Hesiod
and that of Thucydides; though in point of fact even the multitude, during this
later age, were partially modified by those very scientific views which they
regarded with disfavor. And we must keep in view the primitive religious faith,
once universal and unobstructed, but subsequently disturbed by the intrusions
of science; we must follow the great change, as well in respect to enlarged
intelligence as to refinement of social and ethical feeling, among the Greeks,
from the Hesiodic times downward, in order to render some account of the
altered manner in which the ancient myths came to be dealt with. The myth, the
spontaneous growth of a creative and personifying interpretation of nature, had
struck root in Grecian associations at a time when the national faith required
no support from what we call evidence. They were now submitted, not simply to a
feeling, imagining, and believing public, but also to special classes of
instructed men, —philosophers, historians, ethical teachers, and to a public
partially modified by their ideas as well as improved by a wider practical
experience. They were not intended for such an audience; they had ceased to be
in complete harmony even with the lower strata of intellect and sentiment,—much
more so with the higher. But they were the cherished inheritance of a past
time; they were interwoven in a thousand ways with the religious faith, the
patriotic respect, and the national worship, of every Grecian community; the
general type of the myth was the ancient, familiar, and universal form of
Grecian thought, which even the most cultivated men bad imbibed in their
childhood from the poets and by which they were to a certain degree
unconsciously enslaved. Taken as a whole the myths and acquired prescriptive
and ineffaceable possession : to attack, call in question, or repudiate them,
was a task painful even to undertake, and far beyond the power of any one to
accomplish.
For these reasons the anti-mythic vein of criticism
was of no effect as a destroying force, but nevertheless its dissolving
decomposing and transforming influence was very considerable. To accommodate
the ancient myths to an improved tone of sentiment and a newly created canon of
credibility, was a function which even the wisest Greeks did not disdain, and
which occupied no small proportion of the whole intellectual activity of the
nation.
The myths were looked at from a point of view
completely foreign to the reverential curiosity and literal imaginative faith
of the Homeric man; they were broken up and recast in order to force them into
new molds such as their authors had never conceived. We may distinguish four
distinct classes of minds, in the literary age now under examination, as having
taken them in hand — the poets, the logographers, the philosophers, and the
historians.
POETS AND LOGOGRAPHERS
With the poets and logographers, the mythical persons
are real predecessors, and the mythical world an antecedent fact; but it is
divine and heroic reality, not human; the present is only half-brother of the
past (to borrow an illustration from Pindar in his allusion to gods and men),
remotely and generically, but not closely and specifically, analogous to it. As
a general habit, the old feelings and the old unconscious faith, apart from all
proof or evidence, still remain in their minds; but recent feelings have grown
up which compel them to omit, to alter, sometimes even to reject and condemn,
particular narratives.
Pindar repudiates some stories and transforms others,
because they are inconsistent with his conceptions of the gods. Thus he
formally protests against the tale that Pelops had been killed and served up at
table by his father, for the immortal gods to eat; he shrinks from the idea of
imputing to them so horrid an appetite; he pronounces the tale to have been
originally fabricated by a slanderous neighbor. Nor can he bring himself to
recount the quarrels between different gods. The amours of Zeus and Apollo are
no way displeasing to him; but he occasionally suppresses some of the simple
details of the old myth, as deficient in dignity : thus, according to the
Hesiodic narrative, Apollo was informed by a raven of the infidelity of the
nymph Koronis : but the mention of the raven did not appear to Pindar
consistent with the majesty of the god, and he therefore wraps up the mode of
detection in vague and mysterious language. He feels considerable repugnance to
the character of Odysseus, and intimates more than once that Homer has unduly
exalted him, by force of poetical artifice. With the character of the Eakid Ajax, on the other hand, he has the deepest sympathy,
as well as with his untimely and inglorious death, occasioned by the undeserved
preference of a less worthy rival. He appeals for his authority usually to the
Muse, but sometimes to “ancient sayings of men”, accompanied with a general
allusion to story-tellers and bards,—admitting, however, that these stories
present great discrepancy, and sometimes that they are false. Yet the marvelous
and the supernatural afford no ground whatever for rejecting a story. Pindar
makes an express declaration to this effect in reference to the romantic
adventures of Perseus and the Gorgon's head. He treats even those mythical
characters, which conflict the most palpably with positive experience, as
connected by a real genealogical thread with the world before him. Not merely
the heroes of Troy and Thebes, and the demigod seamen of Jason and the ship
Argo, but also the Centaur Cheiron, the hundred-headed Typhos, the giant Alkyoneus, Antaeus, Bellorophon and Pegasus, the Chimaera, the Amazons and the Hyperboreans—all appear painted
on the same canvas, and touched with the same colors, as the men of the recent
and recorded past, Phalaris and Croesus; only they are thrown back to a greater
distance in the perspective. The heroic ancestors of those great Eginetan, Thessalian, Theban, Argeian, etc. families, whose
present members the poet celebrates for their agonistic victories, sympathize
with the exploits and second the efforts of their descendants : the inestimable
value of a privileged breed and of the stamp of nature is powerfully contrasted
with the impotence of unassisted teaching and practice. The power and skill of
the Argeian Theaeus and his relatives as wrestlers,
are ascribed partly to the fact that their ancestors Pamphaes in aforetime had hospitably entertained the Tyndarids Castor and Pollux.
Perhaps however the strongest proof of the sincerity of Pindar's mythical faith
is afforded when he notices a guilty incident with shame and repugnance, but
with an unwilling confession of its truth, as in the case of the fratricide
committed on Phokus by his brothers Peleus and
Telamon.
TRAGIC POETS: AESCHYLUS AND SOPHOCLES
Aeschylus and Sophocles exhibit the same spontaneous
and uninquiring faith as Pindar in the legendary antiquities of Greece, taken
as a whole; but they allow themselves greater license as to the details. It was
indispensable to the success of their compositions that they should recast and
group anew the legendary events, preserving the names and general understood
relation of those characters whom they introduced. The demand for novelty of
combination increased with the multiplication of tragic spectacles at Athens :
moreover the feelings of the Athenians, ethical as well as political, had
become too critical to tolerate the literal reproduction of many among the
ancient stories.
Both of them exalted rather than lowered the dignity
of the mythical world, as something divine and heroic rather than human. The
Prometheus of Aeschylus is a far more exalted conception than his keen-witted
namesake in Hesiod, and the more homely details of the ancient Thebais and Edipodia were in like
manner modified by Sophocles. The religious agencies of the old epic are
constantly kept prominent, and the paternal curse, —the wrath of deceased
persons against those from whom they have sustained wrong,—the judgments of the
Erinnys against guilty or foredoomed persons, sometimes inflicted directly,
sometimes brought about through dementation of the
sufferer himself (like the Homeric Atê),—are frequent
in their tragedies.
Aeschylus in two of his remaining pieces brings
forward the gods as the chief personages, and far from sharing the objection of
Pindar to dwell upon dissensions of the gods, he introduces Prometheus and Zeus
in the one, Apollo and the Eumenides in the other, in marked opposition. The
dialogue, first superinduced by him upon the primitive Chorus, gradually became
the most important portion of the drama, and is more elaborated in Sophocles
than in Aeschylus. Even in Sophocles, however, it still generally retains its
ideal majesty as contrasted with the rhetorical and forensic tone which
afterwards crept in; it grows out of the piece, and addresses itself to the
emotions more than to the reason of the audience. Nevertheless, the effect of
Athenian political discussion and democratic feeling is visible in both these
dramatists. The idea of rights and legitimate privileges as opposed to usurping
force, is applied by Aeschylus even to the society of the gods : the Eumenides
accuse Apollo of having, with the insolence of youthful ambition, "ridden
down" their old prerogatives — while the Titan Prometheus, the champion of
suffering humanity against the unfriendly dispositions of Zeus, ventures to depict
the latter as a recent usurper reigning only by his superior strength, exalted
by one successful revolution, and destined at some future time to be overthrown
by another,—a fate which cannot be averted except through warnings
communicable only by Prometheus himself.
It is commonly understood that Aeschylus disapproved
of the march of democracy at Athens during his later years, and that the
Eumenides is intended as an indirect manifestation in favor of the senate of Areiopagus. Without inquiring at present whether such a
special purpose can be distinctly made out, we may plainly see that the poet
introduces, into the relations of the gods with each other, a feeling of
political justice, arising out of the times in which he lived and the debates
of which he was a witness. But though Aeschylus incurred reproaches of impiety
from Plato, and seemingly also from the Athenian public, for particular
speeches and incidents in his tragedies, and though he does not adhere to the
received vein of religious tradition with the same strictness as Sophocles —
yet the ascendency and interference of the gods is never out of sight, and the
solemnity with which they are represented, set off by a bold, figurative, and
elliptical style of expression (often but imperfectly intelligible to modern
readers), reaches its maximum in his tragedies. As he throws round the gods a
kind of airy grandeur, so neither do his men or heroes appear like tenants of
the common earth : the mythical world from which he borrows his characters is
peopled only with the immediate seed of the gods, in close contact with Zeus,
in whom the divine blood has not yet had time to degenerate en his individuals are taken, not from the iron race whom Hesiod acknowledges with
shame as his contemporaries, but from the extinct heroic race which had fought
at Troy and Thebes. It is to them that his conceptions aspire, and he is even
chargeable with frequent straining, beyond the limits of poetical taste, to
realize his picture. If he does not consistently succeed in it, the reason is
because consistency in such a matter is unattainable, since, after all, the
analogies of common humanity, the only materials which the most creative
imagination has to work upon, obtrude themselves involuntarily, and the
lineaments of the man are thus seen even under a dress which promises
superhuman proportions.
Sophocles, the most illustrious ornament of Grecian
tragedy, dwells upon the same heroic characters, and maintains their grandeur,
on the whole, with little abatement, combining with it a far better dramatic
structure, and a wider appeal to human sympathies. Even in Sophocles, however,
we find indications that an altered ethical feeling and a more predominant
sense of artistic perfection are allowed to modify the harsher religious
agencies of the old epic; occasional misplaced effusions of rhetoric, as well
as of didactic prolixity, may also be detected. It is Aeschylus, not Sophocles,
who forms the marked antithesis to Euripides; it is Aeschylus, not Sophocles,
to whom Aristophanes awards the prize of tragedy, as the poet who assigns most
perfectly to the heroes of the past those weighty words, imposing equipments, simplicity of great deeds with little talk, and
masculine energy superior to the corruptions of Aphrodite, which beseem the
comrades of Agamemnon and Adrastus.
EURIPIDES
How deeply this feeling, of the heroic character of
the mythical world, possessed the Athenian mind, may be judged by the bitter
criticisms made on Euripides, whose compositions were pervaded, partly by ideas
of physical philosophy learnt under Anaxagoras, partly by the altered tone of
education and the wide diffusion of practical eloquence, forensic as well as
political, at Athens. While Aristophanes assails Euripides as the
representative of this "young Athens", with the utmost keenness of
sarcasm, — other critics also concur in designating him as having vulgarized
the mythical heroes, and transformed them into mere characters of common life,
—loquacious, subtle, and savoring of the market-place. In some of his plays,
skeptical expressions and sentiments were introduced, derived from his
philosophical studies, sometimes confounding two or three distinct gods into
one, sometimes translating the personal Zeus into a substantial Ether with
determinate attributes. He put into the mouths of some of his unprincipled
dramatic characters, apologetic speeches which were denounced as ostentatious
sophistry, and as setting out a triumphant case for the criminal. His thoughts,
his words, and the rhythm of his choric songs, were all accused of being
deficient in dignity and elevation. The mean attire and miserable attitude in
which he exhibited Aeneas, Telephus, Thyestes, Ino, and other heroic
characters, were unmercifully derided, though it seems that their position and
circumstances had always been painfully melancholy; but the effeminate pathos
which Euripides brought so nakedly into the foreground, was accounted unworthy
of the majesty of a legendary hero. And he incurred still greater obloquy on
another point, on which he is allowed even by his enemies to have only
reproduced in substance the preexisting tales, —the illicit and fatal passion
depicted in several of his female characters, such as Phaedra and Sthenoboea. His opponents admitted that these stories were
true, but contended that they ought to be kept back and not produced upon the
stage,—a proof both of the continued mythical faith and of the more sensitive
ethical criticism of his age. The marriage of the six daughters to the six sons
of Eolus is of Homeric origin, and stands now, though briefly stated, in the
Odyssey : but the incestuous passion of Macareus and Canace, embodied by
Euripides in the lost tragedy called Eolus, drew upon him severe censure.
Moreover, he often disconnected the horrors of the old legends with those
religious agencies by which they had been originally forced on, prefacing them
by motives of a more refined character, which carried no sense of awful
compulsion : thus the considerations by which the Euripidean Alkmaeon was reduced to the necessity of killing his
mother appeared to Aristotle ridiculous. After the time of this great poet, his
successors seem to have followed him in breathing into their characters the
spirit of common life, but the names and plot were still borrowed from the
stricken mythical families of Tantalus, Cadmus, etc.: and the heroic exaltation
of all the individual personages introduced, as contrasted with the purely
human character of the Chorus, is still numbered by Aristotle among the
essential points of the theory of tragedy.
OPINION OF PLATO
4. The time however came, when this plausibility
ceased to be complete. The Grecian mind made an important advance, socially,
ethically, and intellectually. Philosophy and history were constituted, prose
writing and chronological records became familiar; a canon of belief more or
less critical came to be tacitly recognized. Moreover, superior men profited
more largely by the stimulus, and contracted habits of judging different from
the vulgar : the god Elenchus (to use a personification of Menander) the giver
and prover of truth, descended into their minds. Into the new intellectual
medium, thus altered in its elements, and no longer uniform in its quality, the
myths descended by inheritance; but they were found, to a certain extent, out
of harmony even with the feelings of the people, and altogether dissonant with
those of instructed men. But the most superior Greek was still a Greek, and
cherished the common reverential sentiment towards the foretime of his country.
Though he could neither believe nor respect the myths as they stood, he was
under an imperious mental necessity to transform them into a state worthy of
his belief and respect. Whilst the literal myth still continued to float among
the poets and the people, critical men interpreted, altered, decomposed, and
added, until they found something which satisfied their minds as a supposed
real basis. They manufactured some dogmas of supposed original philosophy, and
a long series of fancied history and chronology, retaining the mythical names
and generations even when they were obliged to discard or recast the mythical
events. The interpreted myth was thus promoted into a reality, while the
literal myth was degraded into a fiction.
CHAPTER XVII.PRE-GRECIAN MYTHICAL VEIN COMPARED WITH THAT OF MODERN
EUROPE.
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