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HISTORY OF ANCIENT GREECE |
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MYTHOLOGICAL GREECEILEGENDS RESPECTING THE GODS
THE mythical world of the Greeks opens with
the gods, anterior as well as superior to man: it gradually descends, first to
heroes, and next to the human race. Along with the gods are found various
monstrous natures, ultra-human and extra-human, who cannot with propriety be
called gods, but who partake with gods and men in the attributes of freewill,
conscious agency, and susceptibility of pleasure and pain,—such as the Harpies,
the Gorgons, the Graeae, the Sirens, Scylla
and Charybdis, Echidna, Sphinx, Chimaera, Chrysaor,
Pegasus, the Cyclopes, the Centaurs, etc. The first acts of what may be termed
the great mythical cycle describe the proceedings of these gigantic agents, the
crash and collision of certain terrific and overboiling forces,
which are ultimately reduced to obedience, or chained up, or extinguished,
under the more orderly government of Zeus, who supplants his less capable
predecessors, and acquires precedence and supremacy over gods and men—subject
however to certain social restraints from the chief gods and goddesses around
him, as well as to the custom of occasionally convoking and consulting the
divine agora.
I recount these events briefly, but
literally, treating them simply as myths springing from the same creative
imagination, addressing themselves to analogous tastes and feelings, and
depending upon the same authority, as the legends of Thebes and Troy. It is the
inspired voice of the Muse which reveals and authenticates both, and from which
Homer and Hesiod alike derive their knowledge—the one, of the heroic, the
other, of the divine, foretime. I maintain, moreover, fully, the character of
these great divine agents as Persons, which is the light in which they
presented themselves to the Homeric or Hesiodic audience. Uranos, Nyx, Hypnos and Oneiros (Heaven, Night, Sleep and Dream), are Persons,
just as much as Zeus and Apollo. To resolve them into mere allegories, is
unsafe and unprofitable: we then depart from the point of view of the original
hearers, without acquiring any consistent or philosophical point of view of our
own. For although some of the attributes and actions ascribed to these persons
are often explicable by allegory the whole series and system of them never are
so: the theorist who adopts this course of explanation finds that, after one or
two simple and obvious steps, the path is no longer open, and he is forced to
clear a way for himself by gratuitous refinements and conjectures. The
allegorical persons and attributes are always found mingled with other persons
and attributes not allegorical; but the two classes cannot be severed without
breaking up the whole march of the mythical events, nor can any explanation
which drives us to such a necessity he considered as admissible. To suppose
indeed that these legends could be all traced by means of allegory into a
coherent body of physical doctrine, would be inconsistent with all reasonable
presumptions respecting the age or society in which they arose. Where the
allegorical mark is clearly set upon any particular character, or attribute, or
event, to that extent we may recognize it; but we can rarely venture to divine
further, still less to alter the legends themselves on the faith of any such
surmises. The theogony of the Greeks contains
some cosmogonic ideas; but it cannot be considered
as a system of cosmogony, or translated into a string of elementary, planetary,
or physical changes.
ZEUS AND HERA
In the order of legendary chronology, Zeus
comes after Kronos and Uranos;
but in the order of Greek conception, Zeus is the prominent person, and Kronos and Uranos are inferior
and introductory precursors, set up in order to be overthrown and to serve as
mementos of the prowess of their conqueror. To Homer and Hesiod, as well as to
the Greeks universally, Zeus is the great and predominant god, “the father of
gods and men”, whose power none of the other gods can hope to resist, or even
deliberately think of questioning.
All the other gods have their specific
potency and peculiar sphere of action and duty, with which Zeus does not
usually interfere; but it is he who maintains the lineaments of a providential
superintendence, as well over the phenomena of Olympus as over those of earth.
Zeus and his brothers Poseidon and Hades have made a division of power: he has
reserved the ether and the atmosphere to himself —Poseidon has obtained the
sea— and Hades the underworld or infernal regions; while earth, and the events
which pass upon earth, are common to all of them, together with free access to
Olympus.
Zeus, then, with his brethren and colleagues,
constitute the present gods, whom Homer and Hesiod recognize as in full dignity
and efficiency. The inmates of this divine world are conceived upon the model,
but not upon the scale, of the human. They are actuated by the full play and
variety of those appetites, sympathies, passions and affections, which divide
the soul of man; invested with a far larger and indeterminate measure of power,
and an exemption as well from death as (with some rare exceptions) from
suffering and infirmity. The rich and diverse types thus conceived, full of
energetic movement and contrast, each in his own province, and soaring
confessedly above the limits of experience, were of all themes the most
suitable for adventure and narrative, and operated with irresistible force upon
the Greek fancy. All nature was then conceived as moving and working through a
number of personal agents, amongst whom the gods of Olympus were the most
conspicuous; the reverential belief in Zeus and Apollo being only one branch of
this omnipresent personifying faith. The attributes of all these agents had a
tendency to expand themselves into illustrative legends —especially those of
the gods, who were constantly invoked in the public worship. Out of this same
mental source sprang both the divine and heroic myths — the former being often
the more extravagant and abnormous in their
incidents, in proportion as the general type of the gods was more vast and
awful than that of the heroes.
As the gods have houses and wives like men,
so the present dynasty of gods must have a past to repose upon; and the curious
and imaginative Greek, whenever he does not find a recorded past ready to his
hand, is uneasy until he has created one. Thus the Hesiodic theogony explains, with a certain degree of system and
coherence, first the antecedent circumstances under which Zeus acquired the
divine empire, next the number of his colleagues and descendants.
First in order of time (we are told by
Hesiod) came Chaos; next Gaea, the broad, firm, and flat Earth, with deep and
dark Tartarus at her base. Eros (Love),
the subduer of gods as well as men, came
immediately afterwards.
From Chaos sprung Erebos and Nyx; from these latter Ether and Hemera.
Gaea also gave birth to Uranos, equal in breadth to
herself, in order to serve both as an overarching vault to her, and as a
residence for the immortal gods; she further produced the mountains,
habitations of the divine nymphs, and Pontus, the barren and billowy sea.
Then Gaea intermarried with Uranos, and from this union came a numerous offspring
—twelve Titans and Titanides, three Cyclopes,
and three Hekatoncheires or beings with a
hundred hands each. The Titans were Oceanus, Koeos, Krios, Hyperion, Iapetos, and Kronos: the Titanides, Theia, Rhea, Themis, Mnemosyne, Phoebe, and Tethys.
The Cyclopes were Brontes,Steropes, and Arges,—formidable persons, equally distinguished for
strength and for manual craft, so that they made the thunder which afterwards
formed the irresistible artillery of Zeus.
The Hekatoncheires were Kottos, Briareus, and Gyges, of prodigious bodily force.
URANOS AND KRONOS
Uranos contemplated this powerful brood with fear
and horror; as fast as any of them were born, he concealed them in cavities of
the earth, and would not permit them to come out. Gaea could find no room for
them, and groaned under the pressure: she produced iron, made a sickle, and
implored her sons to avenge both her and themselves against the oppressive
treatment of their father. But none of them, except Kronos,
had courage to undertake the deed: he, the youngest and the most daring, was
armed with the sickle and placed in suitable ambush by the contrivance of Gaea.
Presently night arrived, and Uranos descended to the
embraces of Gaea: Kronos then emerged from his
concealment, cut off the genitals of his father, and cast the bleeding member
behind him far away into the sea. Much of the blood was spilt upon the earth,
and Gaea in consequence gave birth to the irresistible Erinnys,
the vast and muscular Gigantes, and the Melian nymphs. Out of the genitals themselves, as they
swam and foamed upon the sea, emerged the goddess Aphrodite, deriving her name
from the foam out of which she had sprung. She first landed at Cythera, and
then went to Cyprus: the island felt her benign influence, and the green herb
started up under her soft and delicate tread. Eras immediately joined her, and
partook with her the function of suggesting and directing the amorous impulses
both of gods and men.
Uranos being thus dethroned and disabled, Kronos and the Titans acquired their liberty and became
predominant: the Cyclopes and the Hekatoncheires had
been cast by Uranos into Tartarus,
and were still allowed to remain there.
Each of the Titans had a numerous offspring: Oceanus, especially, marrying his sister Tethys, begat three thousand daughters, the Oceanic nymphs, and as many sons: the rivers and springs passed for his offspring. Hyperion and his sister Theia had for their children Helios, Selene, and Eos; Koeos with Phoebe begat Leto and Asteria ; the children of Krios were Astraeos, Pallas, and Perses , from Astraeos and Eos sprang the winds Zephyrus, Boreas, and Notus. Iapetos marrying the Oceanic nymph Clymene, counted as his progeny the celebrated Prometheus, Epimetheus, Menoetius, and Atlas. But the off spring of Kronos were the most powerful and transcendent of all. He married his sister Rhea, and had by her three daughters—Hestia, Demeter, and Here—and three sons, Hades, Poseidon, and Zeus, the latter at once the youngest and the greatest. But Kronos foreboded to himself destruction from one of his own children, and accordingly, as soon as any of them were born, he immediately swallowed them and retained them in his own belly. In this manner had the first five been treated, and Rhea was on the point of being delivered of Zeus. Grieved and indignant at the loss of her children, she applied for counsel to her father and mother, Uranos and Gaea, who aided her to conceal the birth of Zeus. They conveyed her by night to Lyktus in Crete, hid the new-born child in a woody cavern on Mount Ida, and gave to Kronos, in place of it, a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes, which he greedily swallowed, believing it to be his child. Thus was the safety of Zeus ensured. As he grew up his vast powers fully developed themselves: at the suggestion of Gaea, he induced Kronos by stratagem to vomit up, first the stone which had been given to him,—next, the five children whom he had previously devoured. Hestia, Demeter, Here, Poseidon and Hades, were thus allowed to grow up along with Zeus; and the stone to which the latter owed his preservation was placed near the temple of Delphi, where it ever afterwards stood, as a conspicuous and venerable memorial to the religious Greek. THE TITANS
We have not yet exhausted the catalogue of beings generated during this early period, anterior to the birth of Zeus. Nyx, alone and without any partner, gave birth to a numerous progeny: Thanatos, Hypnos and Oneiros; Momus and Oizys(Grief); Klotho, Lachesis and Atropos, the three Fates; the retributive and equalizing Nemesis;Apate and Philotes;(Deceit and amorous Propensity), Germ (Old Age) and Eris (Contention). From Eris proceeded an abundant offspring, all mischievous and maleficent: Ponos(Suffering), Lethe, Limos (Famine),Phonos and Macke (Slaughter and Battle),Dysnomia and Ate (Lawlessness and reckless Impulse), and Horkos, the ever-watchful sanctioner of oaths, as well as the inexorable punisher of voluntary perjury Gaea, too, intermarrying with Pontus, gave birth to Nereus, the just and righteous old man of the sea; to Thaumas,Phorkys and Keto. From Nereus and Doris, daughter of Oceanus, proceeded the fifty Nereids or Sea-nymphs. Thaumus also married Elektra daughter of Oceanus, and had by her Iris and the two Harpies, Allo and Okypete—winged and swift as the winds. From Phorkys and Keto sprung the Dragon of the Hesperides, and the monstrous Graeae and Gorgons: the blood of Medusa, one of the Gorgons, when killed by Perseus, produced Chrysaor and the horse Pegasus: Chrysaor and Kallirrhoe gave birth to Geryonas well as to Echidna—a creature half-nymph and hall-serpent, unlike both to gods and to men. Other monsters arose from the union of Echidna with Typhaon,—Orthros, the two-headed dog of Geryon; Cerberus, the dog of Hades, with fifty heads, and the Lernaean Hydra. From the latter proceeded the Chimaera, the Sphinx of Thebes, and the Nemean lion. A powerful and important progeny, also, was
that of Styx, daughter of Oceanus, by Pallas; she had Zelos and
Nike (Imperiousness and Victory), and Kratos and Bia (Strength and Force). The hearty and early
cooperation of Styx and her four sons with Zeus was one of the main causes
which enabled him to achieve his victory over the Titans.
Zeus had grown up not less distinguished for
mental capacity than for bodily force. He and his brothers now determined to
wrest the power from the hands of Kronos and the
Titans, and a long and desperate struggle commenced, in which all the gods and
all the goddesses took part. Zeus convoked them to Olympus, and promised to all
who would aid him against Kronos, that their
functions and privileges should remain undisturbed. The first who responded to
the call, came with her four sons, and embraced his cause, was Styx. Zeus took
them all four as his constant attendants, and conferred upon Styx the majestic
distinction of being the Horkos, or oath-sanctioner of the Gods— what Horkos was
to men, Styx was to the Gods.
Still further to strengthen himself, Zeus
released the other Uranids who had been
imprisoned in Tartarus by their father—the
Cyclopes and the Centimanes—and prevailed upon
them to take part with him against the Titans. The former supplied him with
thunder and lightning, and the latter brought into the fight their boundless
muscular strength. Ten full years did the combat continue; Zeus and the Kronids occupying Olympus, and the Titans being established
on the more southerly mountain-chain of Othrys.
All nature was convulsed, and the distant Oceanus, though he took no part in
the struggle, felt the boiling, the noise, and the shock, not less than Gaea
and Pontus. The thunder of Zeus, combined with the crags and mountains torn up
and burled by the Centimanes, at length
prevailed, and the Titans were defeated and thrown down into Tartarus. Iapetos, Kronos, and the remaining Titans (Oceanus excepted) were
imprisoned, perpetually and irrevocably, in that subterranean dungeon, a wall
of brass being built around them by Poseidon, and the three Centimanes being planted as guards. Of the two sons
of Iapetos, Menoetius was
made to share this prison, while Atlas was condemned to stand for ever at the
extreme west, and to bear upon his shoulders the solid vault of heaven.
Thus were the Titans subdued, and the Kronids with Zeus at their head placed in possession
of power. They were not, however, yet quite secure; for Gaea, intermarrying
with Tartarus, gave birth to a new and still
more formidable monster called Typhoeus, of such
tremendous properties and promise, that, had he been allowed to grow into full
development, nothing could have prevented him from vanquishing all rivals and
becoming supreme. But Zeus foresaw the danger, smote him at once with a thunderbolt
from Olympus, and burnt him up: he was cast along with the rest into Tartarus, and no further enemy remained to question the
sovereignty of the Kronids.
POSEIDON, HADES
With Zeus begins a new dynasty and a
different order of beings. Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades agree upon the
distribution before noticed, of functions and localities: Zeus retaining the
Ether and the atmosphere, together with the general presiding function;
Poseidon obtaining the sea, and administering subterranean forces generally;
and Hades ruling the underworld or region in which the half-animated shadows of
departed men reside.
It has been already stated, that in Zeus, his
brothers and his sisters, and his and their divine progeny, we find the present
Gods; that is, those, for the most part, whom the Homeric
and Hesiodic Greeks recognized and worshipped. The wives of Zeus were
numerous as well as his offspring. First be married Metis, the wisest and
most sagacious of the goddesses; but Gaea and Uranos forewarned him that if he permitted himself to have children by her, they would
be stronger than himself and dethrone him. Accordingly when Metis was on the
point of being delivered of Athena, he swallowed her up, and her wisdom and
sagacity thus became permanently identified with his own being. His head was
subsequently cut open, in order to make way for the exit and birth of the
goddess Athena. By Themis, Zeus begat the Horae,
by Eurynome, the three Charities or Graces; by
Mnemosyne, the Muses; by Leto (Latona), Apollo and Artemis; and by Demeter, Persephone.
Last of all he took for his wife Hera, who maintained permanently the dignity
of queen of the Gods; by her he had Hebe, Ares, and Eileithyia.
Hermes also was born to him by Maia, the daughter of Atlas: Hephaestus was born
to Hera, according to some accounts, by Zeus; according to others, by her own
unaided generative force. He was born lame, and Hera was ashamed of him: she
wished to secrete him away, but he made his escape into the sea, and found
shelter under the maternal care of the Nereids Thetis
and Eurynome. Our enumeration of the divine
race, under the presidency of Zeus, will thus give us:
1. The twelve great gods and goddesses
of Olympus— Zeus, Poseidon, Apollo, Ares, Hephaestus, Hermes, Hera, Athena,
Artemis, Aphrodite, Hestia, Demeter.
2. An indefinite number of other
deities, not included among the Olympic, seemingly because the number twelve
was complete without them, but some of them not inferior in power and dignity
to many of the twelve:— Hades, Helios, Hekate, Dionysos, Leto, Diane,
Persephone, Selene, Themis, Eos, Harmonia,
the Charities, the Muses, the Eilaithyia,
the Moerae, the Oceanids and
the Nereids, Proteus, Eidothea,
the Nymphs, Leukothea, Phorkys,
Eolus, Nemesis, etc.
3. Deities who perform special services
to the greater gods:— Iris, Hebe, the Horae,
etc.
4. Deities whose personality is more
faintly and unsteadily conceived:—Ate, the Litae,
Eris, Thanatos, Hypnos, Kratos, Bia, Ossa, etc. The same name is here employed sometimes to
designate the person, sometimes the attribute or event not personified—an
unconscious transition of ideas, which, when consciously performed, is called
Allegory.
5. Monsters, offspring of the Gods:—the
Harpies, the Gorgons, the Graeae, Pegasus, Chrysaor, Echidna, Chimaera, the Dragon of the
Hesperides, Cerberus, Orthros, Geryon, the Lernaean Hydra,
the Nemean lion, Scylla and Charybdis, the
Centaurs, the Sphinx, Xanthos and Balios the immortal horses, etc.
HESIODIC THEOGONY
From the gods we slide down insensibly, first
to heroes, and then to men; but before we proceed to this new mixture, it is
necessary to say a few words on the theogony generally. I have given it briefly as it stands in the Hesiodic Theogonia, because that poem — in spite of great
incoherence and confusion, arising seemingly from diversity of authorship as
well as diversity of age — presents an ancient and genuine attempt to cast the
divine foretime into a systematic sequence. Homer and Hesiod were the grand
authorities in the pagan world respecting theogony;
but in the Iliad and Odyssey nothing is found except passing allusions and
implications, and even in the Hymns (which were commonly believed in antiquity
to be the productions of the same author as the Iliad and the Odyssey) there
are only isolated, unconnected narratives. Accordingly men habitually took
their information respecting their theogonic antiquities
from the Hesiodic poem, where it was ready laid out before them; and
the legends consecrated in that work acquired both an extent of circulation and
a firm hold on the national faith, such as independent legends could seldom or
never rival. Moreover the scrupulous and skeptical Pagans, as well as the open
assailants of Paganism in later times, derived their subjects of attack from
the same source; so that it has been absolutely necessary to recount in their
naked simplicity the Hesiodic stories, in order to know what it was
that Plato deprecated and Xenophanes denounced. The strange proceedings
ascribed to Uranos, Kronos and Zeus, have been more frequently alluded to, in the way of ridicule or
condemnation, than any other portion of the mythical world.
But though the Hesiodic theogony passed as orthodox among the later Pagans, because it stood before them as the only system anciently set forth and easily accessible, it was evidently not the only system received at the date of the poem itself. Homer knows nothing of Uranos, in the sense of an arch-God anterior to Kronos. Uranos and Gaea, like Oceanus, Tethys and Nyx, are with him great and venerable Gods, but neither the one nor the other present the character of predecessors of Kronos and Zeus. The Cyclopes, whom Hesiod ranks as sons of Uranos and fabricators of thunder, are in Homer neither one nor the other; they are not noticed in the Iliad at all, and in the Odyssey they are gross gigantic shepherds and cannibals, having nothing in common with the Hesiodic Cyclops except the one round central eye. Of the
three Centimanes enumerated by
Hesiod, Briareus only is mentioned in
Homer, and to all appearance, not as the son of Uranos,
but as the son of Poseidon; not as aiding Zeus in his combat against the
Titans, but as rescuing him at a critical moment from a conspiracy formed
against him by Hera, Poseidon and Athena. Not only is the Hesiodic Uranos (with the Uranids)
omitted in Homer, but the relations between Zeus and Kronos are also presented in a very different light. No mention is made of Kronos swallowing his young children: on the contrary, Zeus
is the eldest of the three brothers instead of the youngest, and the children
of Kronos live with him and Rhea: there the stolen
intercourse between Zeus and Hera first takes place without the knowledge of
their parents. When Zeus puts Kronos down into Tartarus, Rhea consigns her daughter Hera to the care of
Oceanus: no notice do we find of any terrific battle with the Titans as
accompanying that event. Kronos, Iapetos, and the remaining Titans are down in Tartarus, in the lowest depths under the earth, far removed
from the genial rays of Helios; but they are still powerful and venerable, and
Hypnos makes Hera swear an oath in their name, as the most inviolable that he
can think of.
HOMERIC
THEOGONY
In Homer, then, we find nothing beyond the
simple fact that Zeus threw his father Kronos together with the remaining Titans into Tartarus;
an event to which he affords us a tolerable parallel in certain occurrences
even under the presidency of Zeus himself. For the other gods make more than
one rebellious attempt against Zeus, and are only put down, partly by his
unparalleled strength, partly by the presence of his ally the Centimane Briareus. Kronos, likeLaertes or Peleus,
has become old, and has been supplanted by a force vastly superior to his own.
The Homeric epic treats Zeus as present, and, like all the interesting heroic
characters, a father must be assigned to him: that father has once been the
chief of the Titans, but has been superseded and put down into Tartarus along with the latter, so soon as Zeus and
the superior breed of the Olympic gods acquired their full development.
That antithesis between Zeus and Kronos—between the Olympic gods and the Titans—which Homer
has thus briefly brought to view, Hesiod has amplified into a theogony, with many things new, and some things
contradictory to his predecessor; while Eumelus or Arktinus in the poem called Titanomachia (now
lost) also adopted it as their special subject). As Stasinus, Arktinus, Lesches, and
others, enlarged the Legend of Troy by composing poems relating to a supposed
time anterior to the commencement, or subsequent to the termination of the
Iliad,—as other poets recounted adventures of Odysseus subsequent to his
landing in Ithaca,—so Hesiod enlarged and systematized, at the same time that
he corrupted, the skeleton theogony which we find
briefly indicated in Homer. There is violence and rudeness in the Homeric gods,
but the great genius of Greek epic is no way accountable for the stories of Uranos and Kronos—the standing
reproach against Pagan legendary narrative.
How far these stories are the invention of
Hesiod himself is impossible to determine. They bring us down to a cast of
fancy more coarse and indelicate than the Homeric, and more nearly resembling
some of the Holy Chapters of the more recent mysteries, such (for example) as
the tale of Dionysos Zagreus.
There is evidence in the Theogony itself that the author was acquainted with
local legends current both at Crete and at Delphi; for he mentions both the
mountain-cave in Crete wherein the new-born Zeus was hidden, and the stone near
the Delphian temple—the identical stone which Kronos had swallowed—“placed by Zeus himself as a sign and
wonder to mortal men”. Both these two monuments, which the poet expressly
refers to, and had probably seen, imply a whole train of accessory and
explanatory local legends — current probably among the priests of Crete and
Delphi, between which places, in ancient times, there was an intimate religious
connection. And we may trace further in the poem, that which would
be the natural feeling of Cretan worshippers of Zeus, an effort to
make out that Zeus was justified in his aggression on Kronos,
by the conduct of Kronos himself both towards his
father and towards his children: the treatment of Kronos by Zeus appears in Hesiod as the retribution foretold and threatened by the
mutilated Uranos against the son who had outraged
him. In fact the relations of Uranos and Gaea are in
almost all their particulars a mere copy and duplication of those between Kronos and Rhea, differing only in the mode whereby the
final catastrophe is brought about. Now castration was a practice thoroughly
abhorrent both to the feelings and to the customs of Greece; but it was seen
with melancholy frequency in the domestic life as well as in the religious
worship of Phrygia and other parts of Asia, and it even became the special
qualification of a priest of the Great Mother Cybele, as well as of the
Ephesian Artemis. The employment of the sickle ascribed to Kronos seems to be the product of an imagination familiar
with the Asiatic worship and legends, which were connected with and partially
resembled the Cretan. And this deduction becomes the more probable when we
connect it with the first genesis of iron, which Hesiod mentions to have been
produced for the express purpose of fabricating the fatal sickle; for
metallurgy finds a place in the early legends both of the Trojan and of the
Cretan Ida, and the three Idaean Dactyls,
the legendary inventors of it, are assigned sometimes to one and sometimes to
the other.
As Hesiod had extended the Homeric series of
gods by prefixing the dynasty of Uranos to that of Kronos, so the Orphic theogony lengthened it still further. First came Chronos,
or Time, as a person, after him Ether and Chaos, out of whom Chronos produced the vast mundane egg. Hence emerged
in process of time the first-born god Phone’s, or Metis, or Herikapaeos, a person of double sex, who first generated
the Cosmos, or mundane system, and who carried within him the seed of the gods.
He gave birth to Nyx, by whom he begat Uranos and Gaea; as well as to Helios and Selene.
From Uranos and
Gaea sprang the three Moerae, or Fates, the
three Centimanes and the three Cyclopes:
these latter were cast by Uranos into Tartarus, under the foreboding that they would rob him of
his dominion. In revenge for this maltreatment of her sons, Gaea produced of
herself the fourteen Titans, seven male and seven female: the former were Kaeos, Krios, Phorkys, Kronos, Oceanus,
Hyperion and Iapetos; the latter were Themis,
Tethys, Mnemosyne, Thera, Dione, Phoebe and Rhea. They received the name of Titans
because they avenged upon Uranos the expulsion of
their elder brothers. Six of the Titans, headed by Kronos the most powerful of them all, conspiring against Uranos,
castrated and dethroned him: Oceanus alone stood aloof and took no part in the
aggression. Kronos assumed the government and fixed
his seat on Olympos; while Oceanus remained
apart, master of his own divine stream. The reign of Kronos was a period of tranquility and happiness, as well as of extraordinary
longevity and vigor.
ORPHIC THEOGONY
Kronos and Rhea gave birth to Zeus and his brothers
and sisters. The concealment and escape of the infant Zeus, and the swallowing
of the stone by Kronos, are given in the Orphic
Theogony substantially in the same manner as by Hesiod, only in a style less
simple and more mystified. Zeus is concealed in the cave of Nyx, the seat of Phanes himself,
along with Ride and Adrasteia, who nurse and
preserve him, while the armed dance and sonorous instruments of the Kuretes prevent his infant cries from reaching the
ears of Kronos. When grown up, he lays a snare for
his father, intoxicates him with honey, and having surprised him in the depth
of sleep, enchains and castrates him. Thus exalted to the supreme mastery, he
swallowed and absorbed into himself Metis, or Phanes,
with all the preexisting elements of things, and then generated all things anew
out of his own being and conformably to his own divine ideas. So scanty are the
remains of this system, that we find it difficult to trace individually the
gods and goddesses sprung from Zeus beyond Apollo, Dionysos,
and Persephone,—the latter being confounded with Artemis and Hekate.
But there is one new personage, begotten by
Zeus, who stands preeminently marked in the Orphic Theogony, and whose
adventures constitute one of its peculiar features. Zagreus,
“the horned child”, is the son of Zeus by his own daughter Persephone: he is
the favorite of his father, a child of magnificent promise, and predestined, if
he grow up, to succeed to supreme dominion as well as to the handling of the
thunderbolt. He is seated, whilst an infant, on the throne beside Zeus, guarded
by Apollo and the Kuretes. But the jealous Hera
intercepts his career and incites the Titans against him, who, having first
smeared their faces with plaster, approach him on the throne, tempt his
childish fancy with playthings, and kill him with a sword while he is
contemplating his face in a mirror. They then cut up his body and boil it in a
caldron, leaving only the heart, which is picked up by Athena and carried to
Zeus, who in his wrath strikes down the Titans with thunder into Tartarus; whilst Apollo is directed to collect the remains
of Zagreus and bury them at the foot of
Mount Parnassus. The heart is given to Semele,
and Zagreus is born again from her under
the form of Dionysos.
Such is the tissue of violent fancies
comprehended under the title of the Orphic Theogony, and read as such, it
appears, by Plato, Isocrates and Aristotle. It will be seen that it is based
upon the Hesiodic Theogony, but according to the general expansive
tendency of Greek legend, much new matter is added: Zeus has in Homer one
predecessor, in Hesiod two, and in Orpheus four.
The Hesiodic Theogony, though later
in date than the Iliad and Odyssey, was coeval with the earliest period of what
may be called Greek history, and certainly of an age earlier than 700 BC. It
appears to have been widely circulated in Greece, and being at once ancient and
short, the general public consulted it as their principal source of information
respecting divine antiquity. The Orphic Theogony belongs to a later date, and
contains the Hesiodic ideas and persons, enlarged and mystically
disguised: its vein of invention was less popular, adapted more to the
contemplation of a sect specially prepared than to the taste of a casual
audience, and it appears accordingly to have obtained currency chiefly among
purely speculative men. Among the majority of these latter, however,
it acquired greater veneration, and above all was supposed to be of greater
antiquity, than the Hesiodic. The belief in its superior antiquity
(disallowed by Herodotus, and seemingly also by Aristotle, as well as the
respect for its contents, increased during the Alexandrine Age and through the
declining centuries of Paganism, reaching its maximum among the New-Platonists
of the third and fourth century after Christ: both the Christian assailants, as
well as the defenders, of paganism, treated it as the most ancient and
venerable summary of the Grecian faith. Orpheus is celebrated by Pindar as
the harper and companion of the Argonautic maritime
heroes: Orpheus and Musaeus, as well as Painphos and
Olen, the great supposed authors of theogonic,
mystical, oracular, and prophetic verses and hymns, were generally considered
by literary Greeks as older than either Hesiod or Homer: and such was also the
common opinion of modern scholars until a period comparatively recent. It has
now been shown, on sufficient ground, that the compositions which passed under
these names emanate for the most part from poets of the Alexandrine Age, and
subsequent to the Christian Era; and that even the earliest among them, which
served as the stock on which the later additions were engrafted, belong to a
period far more recent than Hesiod; probably to the century preceding Onomakritus (BC 610-510). It seems, however, certain,
that both Orpheus and Musaeus were names of established reputation at
the time when Onomakritus flourished; and
it is distinctly stated by Pausanias that the latter was himself the author of
the most remarkable and characteristic myth of the Orphic Theogony —the discerption of Zagreus by
the Titans, and his resurrection as Dionysos.
FOREIGN RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE
The names of Orpheus
and Musaeus (as well as that of Pythagoras, looking at one side of
his character) represent facts of importance in the history of the Greek mind —
the gradual influx of Thracian, Phrygian, and Egyptian, religious ceremonies
and feelings, and the increasing diffusion of special mysteries schemes for
religious purification, and orgies (I venture to anglicize the Greek word, which contains in its original meaning no implication of the
ideas of excess to which it was afterwards diverted) in honor of some
particular god—distinct both from the public solemnities and from the gentile solemnities
of primitive Greece,—celebrated apart from the citizens generally, and
approachable only through a certain course of preparation and initiation—sometimes
even forbidden to be talked of in the presence of the uninitiated, under the
severest threats of divine judgment. Occasionally such voluntary combinations
assumed the form of permanent brotherhoods, bound together by periodical
solemnities as well as by vows of an ascetic character: thus the Orphic life
(as it was called) or regulation of the Orphic brotherhood, among other
injunctions partly arbitrary and partly abstinent, forbade animal food
universally, and on certain occasions, the use of woolen clothing. The great
religious and political fraternity of the Pythagoreans, which acted so
powerfully on the condition of the Italian cities, was one of the many
manifestations of this general tendency, which stands in striking contrast with
the simple, open-hearted, and demonstrative worship of the Homeric Greeks.
Festivals at seed-time and harvest—at the
vintage and at the opening of the new wine—were doubtless coeval with the
earliest habits of the Greeks; the latter being a period of unusual joviality.
Yet in the Homeric poems, Dionysos and
Demeter, the patrons of the vineyard and the cornfield, are seldom mentioned,
and decidedly occupy little place in the imagination of the poet as compared
with the other gods: nor are they of any conspicuous importance even in
the Hesiodic Theogony. But during the interval between Hesiod
and Onomakritus, the revolution in the religious
mind of Greece was such as to place both these deities in the front rank.
According to the Orphic doctrine, Zagreus, son
of Persephone, is destined to be the successor of Zeus, and although the
violence of the Titans intercepts this lot, yet even when he rises again from
his discerption under the name of Dionysus,
he is the colleague and coequal of his divine father.
This remarkable change, occurring as it did
during the sixth and a part of the seventh century before the Christian Era,
may be traced to the influence of communication with Egypt (which only became
fully open to the Greeks about BC 660), as well as with Thrace, Phrygia, and
Lydia. From hence new religious ideas and feelings were introduced, which
chiefly attached themselves to the characters of Dionysius and Demeter. The
Greeks identified these two deities with the great Egyptian Osiris and Isis, so
that what was borrowed from the Egyptian worship of the two latter naturally
fell to their equivalents in the Grecian system. Moreover the worship of
Dionysus (under what name cannot be certainly made out) was indigenous in
Thrace, as that of the Great Mother was in Phrygia, and in Lydia —
together with those violent ecstasies and manifestations of temporary frenzy,
and that clashing of noisy instruments, which we find afterwards characterizing
it in Greece. The great masters of the pipe — as well as the dithyramb,
and indeed the whole musical system appropriated to the worship of Dionysus,
which contrasted so pointedly with the quiet solemnity of the Paean addressed
to Apollo were all originally Phrygian.
POST-HOMERIC CHANGES IN RELIGION
From all these various countries, novelties, unknown to the Homeric men, found their way into the Greek worship: and there is one amongst them which deserves to be specially noticed, because it marks the generation of the new class of ideas in their theology. Homer mentions many persons guilty of private or involuntary homicide, and compelled either to go into exile or to make pecuniary satisfaction; but he never once describes any of them to have either received or required purification for the crime. Now in the time subsequent to Homer, purification for homicide comes to be considered as indispensable: the guilty person is regarded as unfit for the society of man or the worship of the gods until he has received it, and special ceremonies are prescribed whereby it is to be administered. Herodotus tells us that the
ceremony of purification was the same among the Lydians and
among the Greeks: we know that it formed no part of the early religion of the
latter, and we may perhaps reasonably suspect that they borrowed it from the
former. The oldest instance known to us of expiation for homicide was contained
in the epic poem of the Milesian Arktinus,
wherein Achilles is purified by Odysseus for the murder of Thersites:
several others occurred in the later or Hesiodic epic
— Heracles, Peleus, Bellerophon, Alkmeon, Amphiktyim, Poemander, Triopas,— from whence they probably passed through the hands of the logographers to
Apollodorus, Diodorus, and others. The purification
of the murderer was originally operated, not by the hands of any priest or
specially sanctified man, but by those of a chief or king, who goes through the
appropriate ceremonies in the manner recounted by Herodotus in his pathetic
narrative respecting Croesus and Adrastus.
The idea of a special taint of crime, and of
the necessity as well as the sufficiency of prescribed religious ceremonies as
a means of removing it, appears thus to have got footing in Greek practice
subsequent to the time of Homer. The peculiar rites or orgies, composed or put
together by Onomakritus, Methapus, and other men of more than the ordinary piety,
were founded upon a similar mode of thinking, and adapted to the same mental
exigencies. They were voluntary religious manifestations, superinduced upon the old public sacrifices of the
king or chiefs on behalf of the whole society, and of the father on his own
family hearth — they marked out the details of divine service proper to appease
or gratify the god to whom they were addressed, and to procure for the
believers who went through them his blessings and protection here or hereafter
— the exact performance of the divine service in all its specialty was held
necessary, and thus the priests or Hierophants, who alone were familiar with
the ritual, acquired a commanding position. Generally speaking, these peculiar
orgies obtained their admission and their influence at periods of distress,
disease, public calamity and danger, or religious terror and despondency, which
appear to have been but too frequent in their occurrence.
The minds of men were prone to the belief
that what they were suffering arose from the displeasure of some of the gods,
and as they found that the ordinary sacrifices and worship were insufficient
for their protection, so they grasped at new suggestions proposed to them with
the view of regaining the divine favor. Such suggestions were more usually
copied, either in whole or in part, from the religious rites of some foreign
locality, or from some other portion of the Hellenic world; and in this manner
many new sects or voluntary religious fraternities, promising to relieve the
troubled conscience and to reconcile the sick or suffering with the offended
gods, acquired permanent establishment as well as considerable influence. They
were generally under the superintendence of hereditary families of priests, who
imparted the rites of confirmation and purification to communicants generally;
no one who went through the prescribed ceremonies being excluded. In many
cases, such ceremonies fell into the hands of jugglers, who volunteered their
services to wealthy men, and degraded their profession as well by obtrusive
venality as by extravagant promises: sometimes the price was lowered to bring
them within reach of the poor and even of slaves. But the wide diffusion, and
the number of voluntary communicants of these solemnities, proves how much they
fell in with the feeling of the time and how much respect they enjoyed—a
respect, which the more conspicuous establishments, such as Eleusis and
Samothrace, maintained for several centuries. And the visit of the Cretan Epimenides to Athens—in the time of Solon, and at a
season of the most serious disquietude and dread of having offended the
gods—illustrates the tranquillizing effect of new orgies and rites of
absolution, when enjoined by a man standing high in the favor of the gods and
reputed to be the son of a nymph. The supposed Erythraean Sibyl,
and the earliest collection of Sibylline prophecies, afterwards so much
multiplied and interpolated, and referred (according to Greek custom) to an age
even earlier than Homer, appear to belong to a date not long posterior to Epimenides. Other oracular verses, such as those of Bakis, were treasured up in Athens and other cities: the
sixth century before the Christian Era was fertile in these kinds of religious
manifestations.
Amongst the special rites and
orgies of the character just described, those which enjoyed the greatest
Pan-Hellenic reputation were attached to the Idaean Zeus
in Crete, to Demeter at Eleusis, to the Kabeiri in
Samothrace, and to Dionysus at Delphi and Thebes. That they were all to a great
degree analogous, is shown by the way in which they unconsciously run together
and become confused in the minds of various authors: the ancient inquirers
themselves were unable to distinguish one from the other, and we must be
content to submit to the like ignorance. Bet we see enough to satisfy us of the
general fact, that during the century and a half which elapsed between the
opening of Egypt to the Greeks and the commencement of their struggle with the
Persian kings, the old religion was largely adulterated by importations from
Egypt, Asia Minor and Thrace. The rites grew to be more furious and ecstatic,
exhibiting the utmost excitement, bodily as well as mental: the legends became
at once more coarse, more tragical, and less
pathetic. The manifestations of this frenzy were strongest among the women,
whose religious susceptibilities were often found extremely unmanageable, and
who had everywhere congregative occasional ceremonies of their awn, part from
the men — indeed, in the ease of the colonists, especially of the Asiatic
colonists, the women had been originally women of the country, and as such
retained to a great degree their non-Hellenic manners and feelings. The god
Dionysus, whom the legends described as clothed in feminine attire, and leading
a troop of frenzied women, inspired a temporary ecstasy, and those who resisted
the inspiration, being supposed to disobey his will, were punished either by
particular judgments or by mental terrors; while those who gave full loose to
the feeling, is the appropriate season and with the received solemnities,
satisfied his exigencies, and believed themselves to have procured immunity
from such disquietudes for the future. Crowds of women, clothed with fawn-skins
and bearing the sanctified thyrsus, flocked to the solitudes of Parnassus, or Kithaeron, or Taygetus,
during the consecrated triennial period, passed the night there with torches,
and abandoned themselves to demonstrations of frantic excitement, with dancing
and clamorous invocation of the god: they were said to tear animals limb from
limb, to devour the raw flesh, and to cut themselves without feeling the wound.
The men yielded to a similar impulse by noisy revels in the streets, sounding
the cymbals and tambourine, and carrying the image of the god in procession. It
deserves to be remarked, that the Athenian women never practiced these
periodical mountain excursions, so common among the rest of the Greeks: they
had their feminine solemnities of the Thesmophoria,
mournful in their character and accompanied with fasting, and their separate
congregations at the temples of Aphrodite, but without any extreme or unseemly
demonstrations. The state festival of the Dyonysia,
in the city of Athens, was celebrated with dramatic entertainments, and the
once rich harvest of Athenian tragedy and comedy was thrown up under its
auspices. The ceremonies of the Kuretes in
Crete, originally armed dances in honor of the Idaean Zeus,
seem also to have borrowed from Asia so much of fury, of self-infliction, and
of mysticism, that they became at last inextricably confounded with the
Phrygian Korybantes or worshippers of the
Great Mother; though it appears that Greek reserve always stopped short of the
irreparable self-mutilation of Atys.
The influence of the Thracian religion upon
that of the Greeks cannot be traced in detail, but the ceremonies contained in
it were of a violent and fierce character, like the Phrygian, and acted upon
Hellas in the same general direction as the latter. And the like may be said of
the Egyptian religion, which was in this case the more operative, inasmuch as
all the intellectual Greeks were naturally attracted to go and visit the wonders
on the banks of the Nile; the powerful effect produced upon them is attested by
many evidences, but especially by the interesting narrative of Herodotus. Now
the Egyptian ceremonies were at once more licentious, and more profuse in the
outpouring both of joy and sorrow, than the Greek: but a still greater
difference sprang from the extraordinary power, separate mode of life, minute
observances, and elaborate organization of the priesthood. The ceremonies of
Egypt were multitudinous, but the legends concerning them were framed by the
priests, and as a general rule, seemingly, known to the priests alone: at least
they were not intended to be publicly talked of, even by pious men. They were
“holy stories”, which it was sacrilege publicly to mention, and which from this
very prohibition only took firmer hold of the minds of the Greek visitors who
heard them. And thus the element of secrecy and mystic silence — foreign to
Homer, and only faintly glanced at in Hesiod — if it was not originally derived
from Egypt, at least received from thence its greatest stimulus and diffusion.
The character of the legends themselves was naturally affected by this change
from publicity to secrecy: the secrets when revealed would be such as to
justify by their own tenor the interdict on public divulgation: instead of
being adapted, like the Homeric myth, to the universal sympathies and hearty
interest of a crowd of hearers, they would derive their impressiveness from
the tragical, mournful, extravagant, or
terror-striking character of the incidents. Such a tendency, which appears
explicable and probable even on general grounds, was in this particular case
rendered still more certain by the coarse taste of the Egyptian priests. That
any recondite doctrine, religious or philosophical, was attached to the
mysteries or contained in the holy stories, has never been shown, and is to the
last degree improbable though the affirmative has been asserted by many learned
men.
THE WORSHIP OF DIONYSUS
Herodotus seems to have believed that the
worship and ceremonies of Dionysus generally were derived by the Greeks from
Egypt, brought over by Cadmus and taught by him to Melampus: and
the latter appears in the Hesiodic Catalogue as having cured the
daughters of Proteus of the mental distemper with which they had been smitten
by Dionysus for rejecting his ritual. He cured them by introducing the Bacchic dance and fanatical excitement: this mythical
incident is the most ancient mention of the Dionysiac solemnities
presented in the same character as they bear in Euripides. It is the general
tendency of Herodotus to apply the theory of derivation from Egypt far too
extensively to Greek institutions: the orgies of Dionysus were not
originally borrowed from thence, though they may have been much modified by
connection with Egypt as well as with Asia. The remarkable myth composed by Onomakritus respecting the dismemberment of Zagreus was founded upon an Egyptian tale very similar
respecting the body of Osiris, who was supposed to be identical with Dionysus:
nor was it unsuitable to the reckless fury of the Bacchanals during their state
of temporary excitement, which found a still more awful expression in the myth
of Pentheus — torn in pieces by his own
mother Agave at the head of her companions in the ceremony, as an intruder upon
the feminine rites as well as a scoffer at the god. A passage in the Iliad (the
authenticity of which has been contested, but even as an interpolation it must
be old) also recounts how Lycurgus was struck blind by Zeus for having chased
away with a whip “the nurses of the mad Dionysos” and
frightened the god himself into the sea to take refuge in the arms of Thetis:
and the fact, that Dionysus is so frequently represented in his myths as
encountering opposition and punishing the refractory, seems to indicate that
his worship under its ecstatic form was a late phenomenon and introduced not
without difficulty. The mythical Thracian Orpheus was attached as Eponymous to
a new sect, who seem to have celebrated the ceremonies of Dionysus with
peculiar care, minuteness and fervor, besides observing various rules in
respect to food and clothing. it was the opinion of Herodotus, that these
rules, as well as the Pythagorean, were borrowed from Egypt. But whether this
be the fact or not, the Orphic brotherhood is itself both an evidence, and a
cause, of the increased importance of the worship of Dionysus, which indeed is
attested by the great dramatic poets of Athens.
The Homeric Hymns present to us, however, the
religious ideas and legends of the Greeks at an earlier period, when the
enthusiastic and mystic tendencies had not yet acquired their full development.
Though not referable to the same age or to the same author as either the Iliad
or the Odyssey, they do to a certain extent continue the same stream of
feeling, and the same mythical tone and coloring, as these poems—manifesting
but little evidence of Egyptian, Asiatic, or Thracian adulterations. The
difference is striking between the god Dionysus as he appears in the Homeric
hymn and in the Bacchae of
Euripides. The hymnographer describes him as
standing on the sea-shore, in the guise of a beautiful and richly-clothed
youth, when Tyrrhenian pirates suddenly approach: they seize and bind him and
drag him on board their vessel. But the bonds which they employ burst
spontaneously, and leave the god free. The steersman, perceiving this with
affright, points out to his companions that they have unwittingly laid hands on
a god—perhaps Zeus himself; or Apollo, or Poseidon. He conjures them to desist,
and to replace Dionysus respectfully on the shore, lest in his wrath he should
visit the ship with wind and hurricane: but the crew deride his scruples, and
Dionysus is carried prisoner out to sea with the ship under full sail.
Miraculous circumstances soon attest both his presence and his power.
Sweet-scented wine is seen to flow spontaneously about the ship, the sail and
mast appear adorned with vine and ivy-leaves, and the oar-peas with garlands,
The terrified crew now too late entreat the helmsman to steer his course for
the shore, and crowd round him for protection on the poop. But their
destruction is at hand: Dionysus assumes the form of a lion — a bear is seen
standing near him—this bear rushes with a loud roar upon the captain, while the
crew leap overboard in their agony of fright, and are changed into dolphins.
Then remains none but the discreet and pious steersman, to whom Dionysus
addresses words of affectionate encouragement, revealing his name, parentage
and dignity.
This hymn, perhaps produced at the Naxian festival of Dionysus, and earlier than the time
when the dithyrambic chorus became the established mode of singing the praise
and glory of that god, is conceived in a spirit totally different from that of
the Bacchic Telattae,
or special rites which the Bacchae of Euripides so abundantly extol,—rites
introduced from Asia by Dionysus himself at the head of a thiasus or troop of enthusiastic women,—inflaming
with temporary frenzy the minds of the women of Thebes, — not communicable
except to those who approach as pious communicants, —and followed by the most tragical results to all those who fight against the
god. The Bacchic Teletae,
and the Bacchic feminine frenzy, were
importations from abroad, as Euripides represents them, engrafted upon the
joviality of the primitive Greek Dionysia; they
were borrowed, in all probability, from more than one source and introduced
through more than one channel, the Orphic life or brotherhood being one of the
varieties. Strabo ascribes to this latter a Thracian original, considering
Orpheus, Musaeus, and Eumolpus as
having been all Thracians. It is curious to observe how, in the Bacchae of
Euripides, the two distinct and even conflicting ideas of Dionysus come
alternately forward; sometimes the old Greek idea of the jolly and exhilarating
god of wine—but more frequently the recent and imported idea of the terrific
and irresistible god who unseats the reason, and whose power can only be
appeased by a willing, though temporary obedience. In the fanatical impulse
which inspired the votaries of the Asiatic Rhea or Cybele, or of the
Thracian Kotys, there was nothing of spontaneous
joy; it was a sacred madness, during which the soul appeared to be surrendered
to a stimulus from without, and accompanied by preternatural strength and
temporary sense of power, — altogether distinct from the unrestrained hilarity
of the original Dionysia, as we see them in the
rural Attica, or in the gay city of Tarentum. There was indeed a side on which
the two bore some analogy, inasmuch as, according to the religious point of
view of the Greeks, even the spontaneous joy of the vintage feast was conferred
by the favor and enlivened by the companionship of Dionysus. It was upon this
analogy that the framers of the Bacchic orgies
proceeded but they did not the less disfigure the genuine character of the old
Greek Dionysia.
Dionysus is in the conception of Pindar
the Paredros or companion in worship of
Demeter: the worship and religious estimate of the latter has by that time
undergone as great a change as that of the former, if we take our comparison
with the brief description of Homer and Hesiod: she has acquired much of the
awful and soul-disturbing attributes of the Phrygian Cybele. In Homer, Demeter
is the goddess of the corn-field, who becomes attached to the mortal
man Jason; an unhappy passion, since Zeus, jealous of the connection
between goddesses and men, puts him to death. In
the Hesiodic Theogony, Demeter is the mother of Persephone by Zeus,
who permits Hades to carry off the latter as his wife: moreover Demeter has,
besides, by Jason a son called Pintos, born in Crete. Even from Homer
to Hesiod, the legend of Demeter, has been expanded and her dignity exalted;
according to the usual tendency of Greek legend, the expansion goes on still
further. Through Jason, Demeter becomes connected with the mysteries of
Samothrace; through Persephone, with those of Eleusis. The former connection it
is difficult to follow out in detail, but the latter is explained and traced to
its origin in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter.
Though we find different statements
respecting the date as well as the origin of the Eleusinian mysteries, yet the
popular belief of the Athenians, and the story which found favor at Eleusis,
ascribed them to the presence and dictation of the goddess Demeter herself;
just as the Bacchic rites are, according to
the Bacchae of Euripides, first
communicated and enforced on the Greeks by the personal visit of Dionysus to
Thebes, the metropolis of the Bacchic ceremonies.
In the Eleusinian legend, preserved by the author of the Homeric Hymn, she
comes voluntarily and identifies herself with Eleusis; her past abode in Crete
being briefly indicated. Her visit to Eleusis is connected with the deep sorrow
caused by the loss of her daughter Persephone, who had been seized by Hades,
while gathering flowers in a meadow along with the Oceanic Nymphs, and carried
off to become his wife in the underworld. In vain did the reluctant Persephone
shriek and invoke the aid of her father Zeus: he had consented to give her to
Hades, and her cries were heard only by Hekate and
Helios. Demeter was inconsolable at the disappearance of her daughter, but knew
not where to look for her: she wandered for nine days and nights with torches
in search of the lost maiden without success. At length Helios, the “spy of
gods and men”, revealed to her, in reply to her urgent prayer, the rape of
Persephone, and the permission given to Hades by Zeus. Demeter was smitten with
anger and despair: she renounced Zeus and the society of Olympus, abstained
from nectar and ambrosia, and wandered on earth in grief and fasting until her
form could no longer be known. In this condition she came to Eleusis, then
governed by the prince Keleos. Sitting down by a
well at the wayside in the guise of an old woman, she was found by the
daughters of Keleos, who came hither with their
pails of brass for water. In reply to their questions, she told them that she
had been brought by pirates from Crete to Thorikos,
and had made her escape; she then solicited from them succor and employment as
a servant or as a nurse. The damsels prevailed upon their mother Metaneira, to receive her, and to entrust her with the
nursing of the young Demophoon, their late–born
brother, the only son of Keleos. Demeter was
received into the house of Metaneira, her
dignified form still borne down by grief: she sat long silent and could not be
induced either to smile or to taste food, until the maid-servant Iambe, by jests and playfulness, succeeded in amusing and
rendering her cheerful. She would not taste wine, but requested a peculiar
mixture of barley-meal with water and the herb mint.
The child Demophoon,
nursed by Demeter, throve and grew up like a god, to the delight and
astonishment of his parents: she gave him no food, but anointed him daily with
ambrosia, and plunged him at night in the fire like a torch, where he
remained unburnt. She would have rendered him
immortal, had she not been prevented by the indiscreet curiosity and alarm
of Metaneira, who secretly looked in at night,
and shrieked with horror at the sight of her child in the fire. The indignant
goddess, setting the infant on the ground, now revealed her true character
to Metaneira: her wan and aged look disappeared,
and she stood in the genuine majesty of her divine shape, diffusing a
dazzling brightness which illuminated the whole house. “Foolish mother” she
said, “thy want of faith has robbed thy son of immortal life. I am the
exalted Demeter, the charm and comfort both of gods and men: I was preparing for
thy son exemption from death and old age; now it cannot be but he must taste of
both. Yet shall he be ever honored, since he has sat upon my knee and slept in
my arms. Let the people of Eleusis erect for me a temple and altar on yonder
hill above the fountain; I will myself prescribe to them the orgies which they
must religiously perform in order to propitiate my favor”.
The terrified Metaneira was
incapable even of lifting up her child from the ground; her daughters entered
at her cries, and began to embrace and tend their infant brother, but be
sorrowed and could not be pacified for the loss of his divine nurse. All night
they strove to appease the goddess.
Strictly executing the injunctions of
Demeter, Keleos convoked the people of
Eleusis and erected the temple on the spot which she had pointed out. It was
speedily completed, and Demeter took up her abode in it,—apart from the
remaining gods, still pining with grief for the loss of her daughter, and
withholding her beneficent aid from mortals. And thus she remained a whole
year,— a desperate and terrible year: in vain did the oxen draw the plough, and
in vain was the barley-seed cast into the furrow, Demeter suffered it not to
emerge from the earth. The human race would have been starved, and the gods would
have been deprived of their honors and sacrifice, had not Zeus found means to
conciliate her. But this was a hard task; for Demeter resisted the entreaties
of Iris and of all the other goddesses and gods whom Zeus successively sent to
her. She would be satisfied with nothing less than the recovery of her
daughter. At length Zeus sent Hermes to Hades, to bring Persephone away:
Persephone joyfully obeyed, but Hades prevailed upon her before she departed to
swallow a grain of pomegranate, which rendered it impossible for her to remain
the whole year away from him.
With transport did Demeter receive back her
lost daughter, and the faithful Hekate sympathized
in the delight felt by both at the reunion. It was now an easier undertaking to
reconcile her with the gods. Her mother Rhea, sent down expressly by Zeus,
descended from Olympus on the fertile Rharan plain,
then smitten with barrenness like the rest of the earth: she succeeded in
appeasing the indignation of Demeter, who consented again to put forth her relieving
hand. The buried seed came up in abundance, and the earth was covered with
fruit and flowers. She would have wished to retain Persephone constantly with
her, but this was impossible; and she was obliged to consent that her daughter
should go down for one-third of each year to the house of Hades, departing from
her every spring at the time when the seed is sown. She then revisited Olympus,
again to dwell with the gods; but before her departure, she communicated to the
daughters of Keleos, and to Keleos himself; together with Triptolemus, Diokles and Eumolpus,
the divine service and the solemnities which she required to be observed in her
honor. And thus began the venerable mysteries of Eleusis, at her special
command: the lesser mysteries, celebrated in February, in honor of Persephone;
the greater, in August, to the honor of Demeter herself. Both are jointly
patronesses of the holy city and temple.
Such is a brief sketch of the temple legend
of Eleusis, set forth at length in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter. It is
interesting not less as a picture of the Mater Dolorosa (in the mouth of en
Athenian, Demeter and Persephone were always the Mother and Daughter, by
excellence), first an agonized sufferer, and then finally glorified,—the weal
and woe of man being dependent upon her kindly feeling,—than as an illustration
of the nature and of Greek legend generally. Though we now read this Hymn as
pleasing poetry, to the Eleusinians, for whom it
was composed, it was genuine and sacred history. They believed in the visit of
Demeter to Eleusis, and in the mysteries as a revelation from her, as
implicitly as they believed in her existence and power as a goddess. The
Eleusinian psalmist shares this belief in common with his countrymen, and
embodies it in a continuous narrative, in which the great goddesses of the
place, as well as the great heroic families, figure in inseparable
conjunction Keleos is the son of the
Eponymous hero Eleusis, and his daughters, with the old epic simplicity, carry
their basins to the well for water. Eumolpus, Triptolemus, Diokles, heroic
ancestors of the privileged families who continued throughout the historical
times of Athens to fulfill their special hereditary functions in the Eleusinian
solemnities, are among the immediate recipients of inspiration from the
goddess; but chiefly does she favor Metaneira and
her infant son Demophoon, for the latter of whom
her greatest boon is destined, and intercepted only by the weak faith of the
mother. Moreover, every incident in the Hymn has a local coloring and a special
reference. The well, overshadowed by an olive-tree near which Demeter had
rested, the stream Kallichorus and the
temple-hill, were familiar and interesting places in the eyes of every
Eleusinian; the peculiar posset prepared from barley-meal with mint was
always tasted by the Mysts (or
communicants) after a prescribed fast, as an article in the ceremony, —while it
was also the custom, at a particular spot in the processional march, to permit
the free interchange of personal jokes and taunts upon individuals for the
general amusement. And these two customs are connected in the Hymn with the
incidents. that Demeter herself had chosen the posset as the first
interruption of her long and melancholy fast, and that her sorrowful thoughts
had been partially diverted by the coarse playfulness of the servant-maid Iambe. In the enlarged representation of the Eleusinian
ceremonies, which became established after the incorporation of Eleusis with
Athens, the part of Iambe herself was
enacted by a woman, or man in woman’s attire, of suitable wit and imagination,
who was posted on the bridge over the Kephissos,
and addressed to the passers-by in the procession, especially the great men of
Athens, saucy jeers, probably not less piercing than those of Aristophane’s on the stage. The torch-bearing Hekate received a portion of the worship in the
nocturnal ceremonies of the Eleusinia: this too
is traced, in the Hymn, to her kind and affectionate sympathy with the great
goddesses.
Though all these incidents were sincerely
believed by the Eleusinians as a true
history of the past, and as having been the real initiatory cause of their own
solemnities, it is not the less certain that they are simply myths or legends,
and not to be treated as history, either actual or exaggerated. They do not
take their start from realities of the past, but from realities of the present,
combined with retrospective feeling and fancy, which fills up the blank of the
aforetime in a manner at once plausible and impressive. What proportion of fact
there may be in the legend, or whether there be any at all, it is impossible to
ascertain and useless to inquire; for the story did not acquire belief from its
approximation to real fact, but from its perfect harmony with Eleusinian faith
and feeling, and from the absence of any standard of historical credibility.
The little town of Eleusis derived all its importance from the solemnity of
the Demetria, and the Hymn which we have been
considering (probably at least as old as 600 BC) represents the town as it
stood before its absorption into the larger unity of Athens, which seems to
have produced an alteration of its legends and an increase of dignity in its
great festival. In the faith of an Eleusinian, the religious as well as the
patriotic antiquities of his native town were connected with this capital
solemnity. The divine legend of the sufferings of Demeter and her visit to
Eleusis was to him that which the heroic legend of Adrastus and the Siege of Thebes was to a Sikyenian, or
that of Erechtheus and Athene to an Athenian grouping
together in the same scene and story the goddess and the heroic fathers of the
town. If our information were fuller, we should probably find abundance of
other legends respecting the Demetria: the Gephyrai of Athens, to whom belonged the
celebrated Harmodios and Aristogeiton, and who possessed special Orgies of Demeter
the Sorrowful, to which no man foreign to their Gens was ever admitted, would
doubtless have told stories not only different but contradictory; and even in
other Eleusinian myths we discover Eumolpus as
king of Eleusis, son of Poseidon, and a Thracian, completely different from the
character which he bears in the Hymn before us. Neither discrepancies nor want
of evidence, in reference to alleged antiquities, shocked the faith of a
non-historical public. What they wanted was a picture of the past, impressive
to their feelings and plausible to their imagination; and it is important to
the reader to remember, while he reads either the divine legends which we are
now illustrating or the heroic legends to which we shall soon approach, that he
is dealing with a past which never was present—a region essentially mythical,
neither approachable by the critic nor mensurable by
the chronologer.
The tale respecting the visit of Demeter,
which was told by the ancient Gens, called the Phytalids,
in reference to another temple of Demeter between Athens and Eleusis, and also
by the Megarians in reference to a Demetrion near their city, acquired under the auspices
of Athens still further extension. The goddess was reported to have first
communicated to Triptolemus at Eleusis the
art of sowing corn, which by his intervention was disseminated all over the
earth. And thus the Athenians took credit to themselves for having been the
medium of communication from the gods to man of all the inestimable blessings
of agriculture, which they affirmed to have been first exhibited on the fertile
Marian plain near Eleusis. Such pretensions are not to be found in the old
Homeric hymn. The festival of the Thesmophoria,
celebrated in honor of Demeter Thesmophoros at
Athens, was altogether different from the Eleusinia,
in this material respect, as well as others, that all males were excluded, and
women only were allowed to partake in it: the surname Thesmophorus gave
occasion to new legends in which the goddess was glorified as the first
authoress of laws and legal sanctions to mankind. This festival, for women
apart and alone, was also celebrated at Paros, at Ephesus, and in many other
parts of Greece.
Altogether, Demeter and Dionysus, as the
Grecian counterparts of the Egyptian Isis and Osiris, seem to have been the
great recipients of the new sacred rites borrowed from Egypt, before the
worship of Isis in her own name was introduced into Greece: their solemnities
became more frequently recluse and mysterious than those of the other deities.
The importance of Demeter to the collective nationality of Greece may be
gathered from the fact that her temple was erected at Thermopylae, the spot
where the Amphiktyonic assemblies were held,
close by the temple of the Eponymous hero Amphiktylin himself,
and under the surname of the Amphiktyonic Demeter.
We now pass to another and not less important
celestial personage—Apollo.
HOMERIC HYMN TO APOLLO
The legends of Delos and Delphi, embodied in
the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, indicate, if not a greater dignity, at least a more
widely diffused worship of that god than even of Demeter. The Hymn is, in point
of fact, an aggregate of two separate compositions, one emanating from an Ionic
bard at Delos, the other from Delphi. The first details the birth, the second
the mature divine efficiency, of Apollo; but both alike present the unaffected
charm as well as the characteristic peculiarities of Greek mythical narrative.
The hymnographer sings, and his hearers accept
in perfect good faith, a history of the past; but it is a past, imagined partly
as an introductory explanation to the present, partly as a means of glorifying
the god. The island of Delos was the accredited birth-place of Apollo, and is
also the place in which he chiefly delights, where the great and brilliant
Ionic festival is periodically convened in his honor. Yet it is a rock narrow,
barren, and uninviting: how came so glorious a privilege to be awarded to it?
This the poet takes upon himself to explain. Leto,
pregnant with Apollo, and persecuted by the jealous Hera, could find no spot
wherein to give birth to her offspring. In vain did she address herself to
numerous places in Greece, the Asiatic coast and the intermediate islands; all
were terrified at the wrath of Hera, and refused to harbor her. As a last
resort, she approached the rejected and repulsive island of Delos, and promised
that, if shelter were granted to her in her forlorn condition, the island
should become the chosen resort of Apollo as well as the site of his temple
with its rich accompanying solemnities. Delos joyfully consented, but not
without many apprehensions that the potent Apollo would despise her
unworthiness, and not without exacting a formal oath from Leto,—who was then admitted to the desired protection, and
duly accomplished her long and painful labor. Though Diane,
Rhea, Themis and Amphitrite came to soothe and succor her, yet Hera
kept away the goddess presiding over childbirth, Eileithyia,
and thus cruelly prolonged her pangs. At length Eileithyia came,
and Apollo was born. Hardly had Apollo tasted, from the hands of Themis,
the immortal food, nectar and ambrosia, when he burst at once his infant bands,
and displayed himself in full divine form and strength, claiming his
characteristic attributes of the bow and the harp, and his privileged function
of announcing beforehand to mankind the designs of Zeus. The promise made
by Leto to Delos was faithfully performed:
amidst the numberless other temples and groves which men provided for him, he
ever preferred that island as his permanent residence, and there the Ionians
with their wives and children, and all their “bravery”, congregated
periodically from their different cities to glorify him. Dance and song and
athletic contests adorned the solemnity, and the countless ships, wealth, and
grace of the multitudinous Ionians had the air of an assembly of gods.
The Delian maidens, servants of Apollo,
sang hymns to the glory of the god, as well as of Artemis and Leto, intermingled with adventures of foregone men and
women, to the delight of the listening crowd. The blind itinerant bard of Chios
(composer of this the Homeric hymn, and confounded in antiquity with the author
of the Iliad) had found honor and acceptance at this festival, and commends
himself, in a touching farewell strain, to the remembrance and sympathy of
the Delian maidens.
But Delos was not an oracular spot: Apollo
did not manifest himself there as revealer of the futurities of Zeus. A place
must be found where this beneficent function, without which mankind would
perish under the innumerable doubts and perplexities of life, may be exercised
and rendered available. Apollo himself descends from Olympus to make choice of
a suitable site: the hymnographer knows a
thousand other adventures of the god which he might sing, but he prefers this
memorable incident, the charter and patent of consecration for the Delphian temple. Many different places did Apollo
inspect; he surveyed the country of the Magnetes and
the Perrhaebians, came to Iolkos, and passed over from thence to Euboea and the plain
of Lelanton. But even this fertile spot did not
please him: he crossed the Euripus to Boeotia, passed by Teumessus and Mykalessus,
and the then inaccessible and unoccupied forest on which the city of Thebes
afterwards stood. He next proceeded to Onchestos,
but the grove of Poseidon was already established there; next across the Kephissus to Okalea, Haliartus, and the agreeable plain and much-frequented
fountain of Delphusa, or Tilphusa. Pleased with the place, Apollo prepared to
establish his oracle there, but Tilphusa was
proud of the beauty of her own site, and did not choose that her glory should
be eclipsed by that of the god. She alarmed him with the apprehension that the
chariots which contended in her plain, and the horses and mules which watered
at her fountain would disturb the solemnity of his oracle; and she thus induced
him to proceed onward to the southern side of Parnassus, overhanging the harbor
of Krissa. Here he established his oracle, in
the mountainous site not frequented by chariots and horses, and near to a
fountain, which however was guarded by a vast and terrific serpent, once the
nurse of the monster Typhaon. This serpent
Apollo slew with an arrow, and suffered its body to rot in the sun: hence the
name of the place, Pythe, and the surname of
the Pythian Apollo. The plan of his temple
being marked out, it was built by Trophonios and Agamedes, aided by a crowd of forward auxiliaries from the
neighborhood. He now discovered with indignation, however, that Tilphusa had cheated him, and went back with swift
step to resent it. “Thou shalt not thus”, he said, “succeed in thy
fraud and retain thy beautiful water; the glory of the place shall be mine, and
not thine alone”. Thus saying, he tumbled
down a crag upon the fountain, and obstructed her limped current: establishing
an altar for himself in a grove hard by near another spring, where men still
worship him as Apollo Tilphusios, because of his
severe vengeance upon the once beautiful Tilphusa.
Apollo next stood in need of chosen ministers
to take care of his temple and sacrifice, and to pronounce his responses
at Pytho. Descrying a ship, “containing many and
good men”, bound on traffic from the Minoian Knossos in
Crete, to Pylus in Peloponnesus, he
resolved to make use of the ship and her crew for his purpose. Assuming the
shape of a vast dolphin, he splashed about and shook the vessel so as to strike
the mariners with terror, while he sent a strong wind, which impelled her along
the coast of Peloponnesus into the Corinthian Gulf, and finally to the harbor
of Krissa, where she ran aground. The affrighted
crew did not dare to disembark: but Apollo was seen standing on the shore in the
guise of a vigorous youth, and inquired who they were, and what was their
business. The leader of the Cretans recounted in reply their miraculous and
compulsory voyage, when Apollo revealed himself as the author and contriver of
it, announcing to them the honorable function and the dignified post to which
he destined them. They followed him by his orders to the rocky Pytho on Parnassus, singing the solemn Io-Paian such as it is sung in Crete, while the god
himself marched at their head, with his fine form and lofty step, playing on
the harp. He showed them the temple and site of the oracle, and directed them
to worship him as Apollo Delphinios, because
they bad first seen him in the shape of a dolphin. “But how”, they inquired,
“are we to live in a spot where there is neither corn, nor vine, nor
pasturage?”. “Ye silly mortals”, answered the god, “who look only for toil and
privation, know that an easier lot is yours. Ye shall live by the cattle whom
crowds of pious visitors will bring to the temple: ye shall need only the knife
to be constantly ready for sacrifice. Your duty will be to guard my temple, and
to officiate as ministers at my feasts: but if ye be guilty of wrong or
insolence, either by word or deed, ye shall become the slaves of other men, and
shall remain so forever. Take heed of the word and the warning”.
Such are the legends of Delos and Delphi,
according to the Homeric Hymn to Apollo. The specific functions of the god, and
the chief localities of his worship, together, with the surnames attached to
them, are thus historically explained, being connected with his past acts and
adventures. Though these are to us only interesting poetry, yet to those who
heard them sung they possessed all the requisites of history, and were fully
believed as such, not because they were partially founded in reality, but
because they ran in complete harmony with the feelings; and, so long as that
condition was fulfilled, it was not the fashion of the time to canvass truth or
falsehood. The narrative is purely personal, without any discernible symbolized
doctrine or allegory, to serve as a supposed ulterior purpose: the particular
deeds ascribed to Apollo grow out of the general preconceptions as to his
attributes, combined with the present realities of his worship. It is neither
history nor allegory, but simple myth or legend.
WORSHIP OF APOLLO
The worship of Apollo is among the most
ancient, capital, and strongly marked facts of the Greek world, and widely
diffused over every branch of the race. It is older than the Iliad or Odyssey,
in the latter of which both Pytho and Delos
are noted, though Delos is not named in the former. But the ancient Apollo is
different in more respects than one from the Apollo of later times. He is in an
especial manner the god of the Trojans, unfriendly to the Greeks, and
especially to Achilles; he has, moreover, only two primary attributes, his bow
and his prophetic powers, without any distinct connection either with the harp,
or with medicine, or with the sun, all which in later times he came to
comprehend. He is not only, as Apollo Karneius, the
chief god of the Doric race, but also (under the surname of Patrous) the great protecting divinity of the gentile tie
among the Ionians: he is moreover the guide and stimulus to Greek colonization,
scarcely any colony being ever sent out without encouragement and direction
from the oracle at Delphi: Apollo Archegetes is
one of his great surnames. His temple lends sanctity to the meetings of the Amphiktyonic assembly, and he is always in filial subordination
and harmony with his father Zeus: Delphi and Olympia are never found in
conflict. In the Iliad, the warm and earnest patrons of the Greeks are Hera,
Athena, and Poseidon: here too Zeus and Apollo are seen in harmony, for Zeus is
decidedly well-inclined to the Trojans, and reluctantly sacrifices them to the
importunity of the two great goddesses. The worship of the Sminthian Apollo, in various parts of
the Troad and the neighboring territory, dates before the earliest
periods of colonization: hence the zealous patronage of Troy ascribed to him in
the Iliad. Altogether, however, the distribution and partialities of the gods
in that poem are different from what they become in later times,—a difference
which our means of information do not enable us satisfactorily to explain.
Besides the Delphian temple, Apollo had
numerous temples throughout Greece, and oracles at Abae in Phocis,
on the Mount Ptoon, and at Tegyra in Boeotia, where he was said to have been
born, at Branchidae near Miletus, at Klarus in Asia Minor, and at Patara in Lycia.
He was not the only oracular god: Zeus at Dodona and at Olympia gave responses
also: the gods or heroes Trophonius, Amphiaraus, Amphilochus, Mopsus, etc., each at his own sanctuary and in his own
prescribed manner, rendered the same service.
The two legends of Delphi and Delos, above
noticed, form of course a very insignificant fraction of the narratives which
once existed respecting the great and venerated Apollo. They serve only as
specimens, and as very early specimens, to illustrate what these divine myths
were, and what was the turn of Greek faith and imagination. The constantly
recurring festivals of the gods caused an incessant demand for new myths
respecting them, or at least for varieties and reproductions of the old myths.
Even during the third century of the Christian era, in the time of the rhetor Menander, when the old forms of Paganism were
waning and when the stock of myths in existence was extremely abundant, we see
this demand in great force; but it was incomparably more operative in those
earlier times when the creative vein of the Grecian mind yet retained its
pristine and unfaded richness. Each god had
many different surnames, temples, groves, and solemnities; with each of which
was connected more or less of mythical narrative, originally hatched in the
prolific and spontaneous fancy of a believing neighborhood, to be afterwards
expanded, adorned and diffused by the song of the poet. The earliest subject of
competition at the great Pythian festival was the
singing of a hymn in honor of Apollo: other agones were
subsequently added, but the ode or hymn constituted the fundamental attribute
of the solemnity: the Pythia at Sicyon and
elsewhere were probably framed on a similar footing. So too at the ancient and
celebrated Charitesia, or festival of the Charites, at Orchomenos, the
rivalry of the poets in their various modes of composition both began and
continued as the predominant feature; and the inestimable treasures yet
remaining to us of Attic tragedy and comedy, are gleanings from the once
numerous dramas exhibited at the solemnity of the Dionysia.
The Ephesians gave considerable rewards for the best hymns in honor of Artemis,
to be sung at her temple. And the early lyric poets of Greece, though their
works have not descended to us, devoted their genius largely to similar
productions, as may be seen by the titles and fragments yet remaining.
Both the Christian and the Mahomedan religions have begun during the historical
age, have been propagated from one common centre, and
have been erected upon the ruins of a different preexisting faith. With none of
these particulars did Greek Paganism correspond. It took rise in an age of
imagination and feeling simply, without the restraints, as well as without the
aid, of writing or records, of history or philosophy: it was, as a general
rule, the spontaneous product of many separate tribes and localities, imitation
and propagation operating as subordinate causes; it was moreover a primordial
faith, as far as our means of information enable us to discover. These
considerations explain to us two facts in the history of the early Pagan mind:
first, the divine myths, the matter of their religion, constituted also the
matter of their earliest history; next, these myths harmonized with each other
only in their general types, but differed incurably in respect of particular
incidents. The poet who sung a new adventure of Apollo, the trace of which he
might have heard in some remote locality, would take care that it should be agreeable
to the general conceptions which his hearers entertained respecting the god. He
would not ascribe the amorous influences to Athena, nor armed interference and
the aegis to Aphrodite; but, provided he maintained this general keeping, he
might indulge his fancy without restraint in the particular events of the
story. The feelings and faith of his hearers went along with him, and there
were no critical scruples to hold them back: to scrutinize the alleged
proceedings of the gods was repulsive, and to disbelieve them impious. And thus
these divine myths, though they had their root simply in religious feelings,
and though they presented great discrepancies of fact, served nevertheless as
primitive matter of history to an early Greek: they were the only narratives,
at once publicly accredited and interesting, which he possessed. To them were
aggregated the heroic myths (to which we shall proceed presently),—indeed the
two are inseparably blended, gods, heroes and men almost always appearing in
the same picture,—analogous both in their structure and their genesis, and
differing chiefly in the circumstance that they sprang from the type of a hero
instead of from that of a god.
APHRODITE AND ATHENS
We are not to be astonished if we find
Aphrodite, in the Iliad, born from Zeus and Dione,
—and in the Theogony of Hesiod, generated from the foam on the sea after the
mutilation of Uranos; nor if in the Odyssey she
appears as the wife of Hephaestus, while in the Theogony the latter is married
to Aglaia, and Aphrodite is described as mother
of three children by Ares. The Homeric hymn to Aphrodite details the legend of
Aphrodite and Anchises, which is presupposed in the Iliad as the parentage
of Aeneas: but the author of the hymn, probably sung at one of the festivals of
Aphrodite in Cyprus, represents the goddess as ashamed of her passion for a
mortal, and as enjoining Anchises under severe menaces not to reveal
who the mother of Aeneas was; while in the Iliad she has no scruple in publicly
owning him, and he passes everywhere as her acknowledged son Aphrodite is
described in the hymn as herself cold and unimpressible,
but ever active and irresistible in inspiring amorous feelings to gods, to men,
and to animals. Three goddesses are recorded as memorable exceptions to her
universal empire,—Athena, Artemis, and Hestia or Vesta.
Aphrodite was one of the most important of all the goddesses in the mythical
world; for the number of interesting, pathetic and tragical adventures
deducible from misplaced or unhappy passion was of course very great; and in
most of these cases the intervention of Aphrodite was usually prefixed, with
some legend to explain why she manifested herself. Her range of action grows
wider in the later epic and lyric and tragic poets than in Homer.
Athena, the man-goddess, born from the head
of Zeus, without a mother and without feminine sympathies, is the antithesis
partly of Aphrodite, partly of the effeminate or womanized god Dionysus—the
latter is an importation from Asia, but Athena is a Greek conception—the type
of composed, majestic and unrelenting force. It appears however as if this
goddess had been conceived in a different manner in different parts of Greece.
For we find ascribed to her, in some of the legends, attributes of industry and
home-keeping; she is represented as the companion of Hephaestus, patronizing
handicraft, and expert at the loom and the spindle: the Athenian potters
worshipped her along with Prometheus. Such traits of character do not square
with the formidable aegis and the massive and crushing spear which Homer and
most of the myths assign to her. There probably were at first at least two
different types of Athena, and their coalescence has partially obliterated the
less marked of the two. Athena is the constant and watchful protectress of
Heracles: she is also locally identified with the soil and people of Athens,
even in the Iliad: Erechtheus, the Athenian, is born of the earth, but Athena
brings him up, nourishes him, and lodges him in her own temple, where the
Athenians annually worship him with sacrifice and solemnities. It was
altogether impossible to make Erechtheus son of Athena,—the type of
the goddess forbade it; but the Athenian myth-creators, though they found this
barrier impassable, strove to approach to it as near as they could, and the
description which they give of the birth of Erichthonios,
at once un-Homeric and unseemly, presents something like the phantom of
maternity.
ARTEMIS AND POSEIDON
The huntress Artemis, in Arcadia and in
Greece proper generally, exhibits a well-defined type with which the legends
respecting her are tolerably consistent. But the Ephesian as well as
the Tauric Artemis partakes more of the
Asiatic character, and has borrowed the attributes of the Lydian Great Mother
as well as of an indigenous Tauric Virgin:
this Ephesian Artemis passed to the colonies of Phocaea and Miletus.
The Homeric Artemis shares with her brother Apollo in the dexterous use of the
far-striking bow, and sudden death is described by the poet as inflicted by her
gentle arrow. The jealousy of the gods at the withholding of honors and
sacrifices, or at the presumption of mortals in contending with them,—a point
of character so frequently recurring in the types of the Grecian
gods,—manifests itself in the legends of Artemis: the memorable Calydonian boar is sent by her as a visitation
upon Eneus, because he bad omitted to sacrifice
to her, while he did honor to other gods. The Arcadian heroine Atalanta is however a reproduction of Artemis, with
little or no difference, and the goddess is sometimes confounded even with her
attendant Nymphs.
The mighty Poseidon, the earth-shaker and the
ruler of the sea, is second only to Zeus in power, but has no share in those
imperial and superintending capacities which the Father of gods and men
exhibits. He numbers a numerous heroic progeny, usually men of great corporeal
strength, and many of them belonging to the Aeolic race: the
great Neleid family of Pylus trace their origin up to him; and he is also the father
of Polyphemus the Cyclops, whose well-earned suffering be cruelly
revenges upon Odysseus. The island of Kalaureia is
his Delos, and there was held in it an old local Amphiktyony,
for the purpose of rendering to him joint honor and sacrifice: the isthmus of
Corinth, Helike in Achaia, and Onchestos in Boeocia,
are also residences which he much affects, and where he is solemnly worshipped.
But the abode which he originally and specially selected for himself was the
Acropolis of Athens, where by a blow of his trident he produced a well of water
in the rock: Athena came afterwards and claimed the spot for herself, planting
in token of possession the olive-tree which stood in the sacred grove of Pandrosos: and the decision either of the
autochthonous Cecrops, or of Erechtheus,
awarded to her the preference, much to the displeasure of Poseidon. Either on
this account, or on account of the death of his son Eumolpus,
slain in assisting the Eleusinians against Erechtheus,
the Attic myths ascribed to Poseidon great enmity against the Erechtheid family, which he is asserted to have ultimately
overthrown: Theseus, whose glorious reign and deeds succeeded to that family,
is said to have been really his son. In several other places,—in Aegina, Argos
and Naxos,—Poseidon had disputed the privileges of patron-god with Zeus, Hera
and Dionysus: he was worsted in all, but bore his defeat patiently.
Poseidon endured a long slavery, in common
with Apollo, gods as they were, under Laomedon, king of Troy, at the
command and condemnation of Zeus: the two gods rebuilt the walls of the city,
which had been destroyed by Heracles. When their time was expired, the
insolent Laomedon withheld from them the stipulated reward, and even
accompanied its refusal with appalling threats; and the subsequent animosity of
the god against Troy was greatly determined by the sentiment of this injustice.
Such periods of servitude, inflicted upon individual gods, are among the most
remarkable of all the incidents in the divine legends. We find Apollo on
another occasion condemned to serve Admetus,
king of Pherae, as a punishment for having killed the Cyclops, and Heracles
also is sold as a slave to Omphale. Even the
fierce Ares, overpowered and imprisoned for a long time by the two Aloids, is ultimately liberated only by extraneous aid. Such
narratives attest the discursive range of Greek fancy in reference to the gods,
as well as the perfect commingling of things and persons, divine and human, in
their conceptions of the past. The god who serves is for the time degraded: but
the supreme god who commands the servitude is in the like proportion exalted,
whilst the idea of some sort of order and government among these superhuman
beings was never lost sight of. Nevertheless the myths respecting the servitude
of the gods became obnoxious afterwards, along with many others, to severe
criticism on the part of philosophers.
HERA, HEPHESTUS AND HERMES
The proud, jealous, and bitter Hera,—the
goddess of the once-wealthy Mycenae, the fax et focus of the Trojan war, and
the ever-present protectress of Jason in
the Argonautic expedition— occupies an
indispensable station in the mythical world. As the daughter of Kronos and wife of Zeus, she fills a throne from whence he
cannot dislodge her, and which gives her a right perpetually to grumble and to
thwart him. Her unmeasured jealousy of the female favorites of Zeus, and her
antipathy against his sons, especially against Heracles, has been the
suggesting cause of innumerable myths: the general type of her character stands
here clearly marked, as furnishing both stimulus and guide to
the mythopoeic fancy. The “Sacred Wedding”, or marriage of Zeus and
Hera, was familiar to epithalamic poets long
before it became a theme for the spiritualizing ingenuity of critics.
Hephaestus is the son of Hera without a father,
and stands to her in the same relation as Athena to Zeus: her pride and want of
sympathy are manifested by her casting him out at once in consequence of his
deformity. He is the god of fire, and especially of fire in its practical
applications to handicraft, and is indispensable as the right-hand and
instrument of the gods. His skill and his deformity appear alternately as the
source HERMES of mythical stories: wherever exquisite and effective
fabrication is intended to be designated, Hephaestus is announced as the maker,
although in this function the type of his character is reproduced in Daedalos. In the Attic legends he appears intimately united
both with Prometheus and with Athena, in conjunction with whom he was
worshipped at Kolonus near Athens. Lemnos was the favorite residence of Hephaestus; and
if we possessed more knowledge of this island and its town Hephaestias, we should doubtless find abundant legends
detailing his adventures and interventions.
The chaste, still, and home-keeping Hestia,
goddess of the family hearth, is far less fruitful in mythical narratives, it
spite of her very superior dignity, than the knavish, smooth-torqued, keen, and
acquisitive Hermes. His function of messenger of the gods brings him
perpetually on the stage, and affords ample scope for portraying the features
of his character. The Homeric hymn to Hermes describes the scene and
circumstances of his birth, and the almost instantaneous manifestation, even in
infancy, of his peculiar attributes; it explains the friendly footing on which
he stood with Apollo,—the interchange of gifts and functions between them,—and
lastly, the inviolate security of all the wealth and offerings in the Delphian temple, exposed as they were to thieves
without any visible protection. Such was the innate cleverness and talent of
Hermes, that on the day he was born he invented the lyre, stringing the seven
chords on the shell of a tortoise: and he also stole the cattle of Apollo in
Pieria, dragging them backwards to his cave in Arcadia, so that their track
could not be detected. To the remonstrances of
his mother Maia, who points out to him the danger of offending Apollo, Hermes
replies, that he aspires to rival the dignity and functions of Apollo among the
immortals, and that if his father Zeus refuses to grant them to him, he will
employ his powers of thieving in breaking open the sanctuary at Delphi, and in
carrying away the gold and the vestments, the precious tripods and vessels.
Presently Apollo discovers the loss of his cattle, and after some trouble finds
his way to the Kyllenian cavern, where he
sees Hermes asleep in his cradle. The child denies the theft with effrontery,
and even treats the surmise as a ridiculous impossibility: he persists in such
denial even before Zeus, who however detects him at once, and compels him to
reveal the place where the cattle are concealed. But the lyre was as yet
unknown to Apollo, who has heard nothing except the voice of the Muses and the
sound of the pipe. So powerfully is lie fascinated by hearing the tones of the
lyre from Hermes, and so eager to become possessed of it, that he is willing at
once to pardon the past theft, and even to conciliate besides the friendship of
Hermes. Accordingly a bargain is struck between the two gods and sanctioned by
Zeus. Hermes surrenders to Apollo the lyre, inventing for his own use
the syrinx or panspipe, and receiving
from Apollo in exchange the golden rod of wealth, with empire over flocks and
herds as well as over horses and oxen and the wild animals of the woods. He
presses to obtain the gift of prophecy, but Apollo is under a special vow not
to impart that privilege to any god whatever: he instructs Hermes however how
to draw information, to a certain extent, from the Moerae or
Fates themselves; and assigns to him, over and above, the function of messenger
of the gods to Hades.
Although Apollo has acquired the lyre, the
particular object of his wishes, he is still under apprehension that Hermes
will steal it away from him again, together with his bow, and he exacts a
formal oath by Styx as security. Hermes promises solemnly that he will steal
none of the acquisitions, nor ever invade the sanctuary of Apollo; while the
latter on his part pledges himself to recognize Hermes as his chosen friend and
companion, amongst all the other sons of Zeus, human or divine.
So came to pass, under the sanction of Zeus,
the marked favor shown by Apollo to Hermes. But Hermes (concludes the hymnographer, with frankness unusual in speaking of a god
“does very little good: he avails himself of the darkness of night to cheat
without measure the tribes of mortal men”.
Here the general types of Hermes and Apollo,
coupled with the present fact that no thief ever approached the rich and
seemingly accessible treasures of Delphi, engender a string of expository
incidents cast into a quasi-historical form and detailing how it happened that
Hermes had bound himself by especial convention to respect the Delphian temple. The types of Apollo seem to have been
different in different times and parts of Greece: in some places he was
worshipped as Apollo Nomios, or the patron of
pasture and cattle; and this attribute, which elsewhere passed over to his
son Aristaeus, is by our hymnographer voluntarily surrendered to Hermes, combined
with the golden rod of fruitfulness. On the other hand, the lyre did not
originally belong to the Far-striking King, nor is he at all an inventor: the
hymn explains both its first invention and how it came into his possession. And
the value of the incidents is thus partly expository, partly illustrative, as
expanding in detail the general preconceived character of the Kyllenian god.
ZEUS AND HIS ATRIBUTES
To Zeus more amours are ascribed than to any of the other gods,—probably because the Grecian kings and chieftains were especially anxious to trace their lineage to the highest and most glorious of all—each of these amours having its representative progeny on earth. Such subjects were among the most promising and agreeable for the interest of mythical narrative, and Zeus as a lover thus became the father of a great many legends, branching out into innumerable interferences, for which his sons, all of them distinguished individuals, and many of them persecuted by Hera, furnished the occasion. But besides this, the commanding functions of the
supreme god, judicial and administrative, extending both over gods and men, was
a potent stimulus to the mythopoeic activity. Zeus has to watch over
his own dignity—the first of all considerations with a god: moreover as Horkios, Xenios, Ktesios, Meilichios, (a
small proportion of his thousand surnames,) he guaranteed oaths and punished
perjurers, he enforced the observance of hospitality, he guarded the family
hoard and the crop realized for the year, and he granted expiation to the
repentant criminal. All these different functions created a demand for myths,
as the means of translating a dim, but serious, presentiment into distinct
form, both self-explaining and communicable to others. In enforcing the
sanctity of the oath or of the tie of hospitality, the most powerful of all
arguments would be a collection of legends respecting the judgments of
Zeus Horkios or Xenios;
the more impressive and terrific such legends were, the greater would be their
interest, and the less would any one dare to disbelieve them. They constituted
the natural outpourings of a strong and common sentiment, probably without any
deliberate ethical intention: the preconceptions of the divine agency, expanded
into legend, form a product analogous to the idea of the divine features and
symmetry embodied in the bronze or the marble statue.
But it was not alone the general type and
attributes of the gods which contributed to put in action themythopoeic propensities.
The rites and solemnities forming the worship of each god, as well as the
details of his temple and its locality, were a fertile source of myths,
respecting his exploits and sufferings, which to the people who heard them
served the purpose of past history. The exegetes, or local guide and
interpreter, belonging to each temple, preserved and recounted to curious
strangers these traditional narratives, which lent a certain dignity even to
the minutiae of divine service. Out of a stock of materials thus ample, the
poets extracted individual collections, such as the “Causes” of Kallimachus, now lost, and such as the Fasti of Ovid are for the Roman religious antiquities.
It was the practice to offer to the gods in
sacrifice the bones of the victim only, enclosed in fat: how did this practice
arise?
The author of the Hesiodic Theogony
has a story which explains it: Prometheus tricked Zeus into an imprudent
choice, at the period when the gods and mortal men first came to an arrangement
about privileges and duties. Prometheus, the tutelary representative of man,
divided a large steer into two portions: on the one side he placed the flesh
and guts, folded up in the momentum and covered over with the skin:
on the other, he put the bones enveloped in fat. He then invited Zeus to
determine which of the two portions the gods would prefer to receive from
mankind. Zeus “with both hands” decided for and took the white fat, but was
highly incensed on finding that he had got nothing at the bottom except the
bones. Nevertheless the choice of the gods was now irrevocably made: they were
not entitled to any portion of the sacrificed animal beyond the bones and the
white fat; and the standing practice is thus plausibly explained. I select this
as one amongst a thousand instances to illustrate the genesis of legend out of
religious practices. In the belief of the people, the event narrated in the
legend was the real producing cause of the practice: but when we come to apply
a sound criticism, we are compelled to treat the event as existing only in its
narrative legend, and the legend itself as having been, in the greater number
of cases, engendered by the practice,—thus reversing the supposed order of
production.
In dealing with Greek myths generally, it is
convenient to distribute them into such as belong to the Gods and such at
belong to the Heroes, according as the one or the other arc the prominent
personages. The former class manifests, more palpably than the latter, their
real origin, as growing out of the faith and the feelings, without any
necessary basis, either of matter of fact or allegory: moreover, they elucidate
more directly the religion of the Greeks, so important an item in their
character as a people. But in point of fact, most of the myths present to us
Gods, Heroes and Men, in juxtaposition one with the other and the richness of Grecian
mythical literature arises from the infinite diversity of combinations thus
opened out; first by the three class-types, God, Hero, and Man; next by the
strict keeping with which each separate class and character is handled. We
shall now follow downward the stream of mythical time, wich begins with the
Gods, to the Heroic legends, or those which principally concern the Heroes and
Heroines; for the latter were to the full as important in legend as the former.
IIHEROES AND MEN
THE Hesiodic theogony gives no account of
anything like a creation of man, nor does it seem that such an idea was much
entertained in the legendary vein of Grecian imagination; which commonly
carried back the present men by successive generations to some primitive
ancestor, himself sprung from the soil, or from a neighboring river, or
mountain, or from a god, a nymph, &c. But the poet of the Hesiodic “Works
and Days” has given us a narrative conceived in a very different spirit
respecting the origin of the human race, more in harmony with the sober and
melancholy ethical tone which reigns through that poem.
First (he tells us) the Olympic gods made the golden
race,—good, perfect, and happy men, who lived from the spontaneous abundance of
the earth, in ease and tranquility, like the gods themselves: they suffered
neither disease nor old-age, and their death was like a gentle sleep. After
death they became, by the award of Zeus, guardian terrestrial demons, who watch
unseen over the proceedings of mankind—with the regal privilege of dispensing
to them wealth, and taking account of good and bad deeds.
Next, the gods made the silver race,—unlike and
greatly inferior, both in mind and body, to the golden. The men of this race
were reckless and mischievous towards each other, and disdainful to the
immortal gods, to whom they refused to offer either worship or sacrifice. Zeus
in his wrath buried them in the earth; but there they still enjoy a secondary
honor, as the Blest of the underworld.
Thirdly, Zeus made the brazen race, quite different
from the silver. They were made of hard ash-wood, pugnacious and terrible: they
were of immense strength and adamantine soul, neither raising nor touching
bread. Their arms, their houses, and their implements were all of brass: there
was then no iron. This race, eternally fighting, perished by each other's
hands, died out, and descended without name or privilege to Hades.
Next, Zeus made a fourth race, far juster and better than the last preceding. These were
the Heroes or demigods, who fought at the sieges of Troy and Thebes. But this
splendid stock also became extinct: some perished in war, others were removed
by Zeus to a happier state in the islands of the Blest. There they dwell in
peace and comfort, under the government of Kronos, reaping thrice in the
year the spontaneous produce of the earth.
The fifth race, which succeeds to the Heroes, is of
iron: it is the race to which the poet himself belongs, and bitterly does he
regret it. He finds his contemporaries mischievous, dishonest, unjust,
ungrateful, given to perjury, careless both of the ties of consanguinity and of
the behests of the gods: Nemesis and Edo’s (Ethical Self-reproach) have left
earth and gone back to Olympus. How keenly does he wish that his lot had been
cast either earlier or later! This iron race is doomed to continual guilt,
care, and suffering, with a small infusion of good; but the time will come when
Zeus will put an end to it. The poet does not venture to predict what sort of
race will succeed.
Such is the aeries of distinct races of men, which
Hesiod, or the author of the “Works and Days”, enumerates as having existed
down to his own time. I give it as it stands, without placing much confidence
in the various explanations which critics have offered. It stands out in more
than one respect from the general tone and sentiment of Grecian legend:
moreover, the sequence of races is neither natural nor homogeneous,—the heroic
race not having any metallic denomination, and not occupying any legitimate
place in immediate succession to the brazen. Nor is the conception of the
daemons in harmony either with Homer or with the Hesiodic theogony. In
Homer, there is scarcely any distinction between gods and daemons: farther, the
gods are stated to go about and visit the cities of men in various disguises
for the purpose of inspecting good and evil proceedings. But in the poem now
before us, the distinction between gods and demons is generic. The latter are
invisible tenants of earth, remnants of the once happy golden race whom the
Olympic gods first made: the remnants of the second or silver race are not
daemons, nor are they tenants of earth, but they still enjoy an honorable
posthumous existence as the Blest of the underworld. Nevertheless the Hesiodic
daemons are in no way authors or abettors of evil: on the contrary, they form
the unseen police of the gods, for the purpose of repressing wicked behavior in
the world.
We may trace, I think, in this quintuple succession of
earthly races, set forth by the author of the “Works and Days”, the confluence
of two veins of sentiment, not consistent one with the other, yet both
co-existing in the author’s mind. The drift of his poem is thoroughly didactic
and ethical. Though deeply penetrated with the injustice and suffering which
darken the face of human life, he nevertheless strives to maintain both in
himself and in others, a conviction that on the whole the just and laborious
man will come off well, and he enforces in considerable detail the lessons of
practical prudence and virtue. This ethical sentiment, which dictates his
appreciation of the present, also guides his imagination as to the past. It is
pleasing to him to bridge over the chasm between the gods and degenerate man,
by the supposition of previous races,—the first altogether pure, the second
worse than the first, and the third still worse than the second; and to show
further how the first race passed by gentle death-sleep into glorious
immortality; how the second race was sufficiently wicked to drive Zeus to bury
them in the underworld, yet still leaving them a certain measure of honor;
while the third was so desperately violent as to perish by its own animosities,
without either name or honor of any kind. The conception of the golden race
passing after death into good guardian daemons, which some supposed to have
been derived from a comparison with oriental angels, presents itself to the
poet partly as approximating this race to the gods, partly as a means of
constituting a triple gradation of post-obituary existence, proportioned to the
character of each race whilst alive. The denominations of gold and silver,
given to the two first races, justify themselves, like those given by Simonides
of Amorgos and by Phokylides to
the different characters of women, derived from the dog, the bee, the mare, the
ass, and other animals; and the epithet of brazen is specially explained by
reference to the material which the pugnacious third race so plentifully
employed for their arms and other implements.
So far we trace intelligibly enough the moralizing
vein: we find the revolutions of the past so arranged as to serve partly as an
ethical lesson, partly as a suitable preface to the present. But fourth in the
list comes “the divine race of Heroes” and here a new vein of thought is opened
by the poet. The symmetry of his ethical past is broken up, in order to make
way for these cherished beings of the national faith. For though the author of
the “Works and Days” was himself of a didactic cast of thought, like Phokylides, or Solon, or Theognis,
yet he had present to his feelings, in common with his countrymen, the picture
of Grecian foretime, as it was set forth in the current myths, and still more
in Homer and those other epical productions which were then the only existing
literature and history. It was impossible for him to exclude, from his sketch
of the past, either the great persons or the glorious exploits which these
poems ennobled; and even if he himself could have consented to such an
exclusion, the sketch would have become repulsive to his bearers. But the
chiefs who figured before Thebes and Troy could not be well identified either
with the golden, the silver, or the brazen race: moreover, it was essential
that they should be placed in immediate contiguity with the present race,
because their descendants, real or supposed, were the most prominent and
conspicuous of existing men. Hence the poet is obliged to assign to them the
fourth place in the series, and to interrupt the descending ethical movement in
order to interpolate them between the brazen and the iron race, with neither of
which they present any analogy. The iron race, to which the poet himself
unhappily belongs, is the legitimate successor, not of the heroic, but of the
brazen. Instead of the fierce and self-annihilating pugnacity which
characterizes the latter, the iron race manifests an aggregate of smaller and
meaner vices and mischiefs, It will not perish by suicidal extinction—but it is
growing worse and worse, and is gradually losing its vigor, so that Zeus will
not vouchsafe to preserve much longer such a race upon the earth.
The Works and Days,
earliest didactic poem.
I conceive that the series of races imagined by the
poet of the “Works and Days” is the product of two distinct and incongruous
veins of imagination,—the didactic or ethical blending with the primitive
mythical or epical. His poem is remarkable as the most ancient didactic
production of the Greeks, and as one of the first symptoms of a new tone of
sentiment finding its way into their literature, never afterwards to become
extinct. The tendency of the “Works and Days” is antiheroic: far from seeking
to inspire admiration for adventurous enterprise, the author inculcates the
strictest justice, the most unremitting labor and frugality, and a sober, not
to say anxious, estimate of all the minute specialties of the future. Prudence
and probity are his means,—practical comfort and happiness his end. But he
deeply feels, and keenly exposes, the manifold wickedness and shortcomings of
his contemporaries, in reference to this capital standard. He turns with
displeasure from the present men, not because they are too feeble to hurl
either the spear of Achilles or some vast boundary-stone, but because they are
rapacious, knavish, and unprincipled.
The daemons first introduced into the religious
atmosphere of the Grecian world by the author of the “Works and Days”—as
generically different from the gods, but essentially good, and forming the
intermediate agents and police between gods and men,—are deserving of
attention. They are the seed of a doctrine which afterwards underwent many
changes, and became of great importance, first as one of the constituent
elements of pagan faith, then as one of the helps to its subversion. It will be
recollected that the buried remnants of the half-wicked silver race, though
they are not recognized as demons, are still considered as having a substantive
existence, a name, and dignity, in the underworld.
The step was easy, to treat them as demons also, but
as demons of a defective and malignant character: this step was made by
Empedocles and Xenocrates, and to a certain extent countenanced by Plato. There
came thus to be admitted among the pagan philosophizers daemons both good and
bad, in every degree: and these daemons were found available as a means of
explaining many phenomena for which it was not convenient to admit the agency
of the gods. They served to relieve the gods from the odium of physical and
moral evils, as well as from the necessity of constantly meddling in small
affairs. The objectionable ceremonies of the pagan religion were defended upon
the ground that in no other way could the exigencies of such malignant beings
be appeased. The demons were most frequently noticed as causes of evil, and
thus the name came insensibly to convey with it a bad sense,—the idea of an
evil being as contrasted with the goodness of a god. So it was found by the
Christian writers when they commenced their controversy with paganism. One
branch of their argument led them to identify the pagan gods with demons in the
evil sense, and the insensible change in the received meaning of the word lent
them a specious assistance.
For they could easily show, that not only in Homer,
but in the general language of early pagans, all the gods generally were spoken
of as demons—and therefore, verbally speaking, Clemens and Tatian seemed
to affirm nothing more against Zeus or Apollo than was involved in the language
of paganism itself. Yet the audience of Homer or Sophocles would have
strenuously repudiated the proposition, if it had been put to them in the sense
which the word demon bore in the ago and among the circle of these Christian writers.
In the imagination of the author of the “Works and
Days”, the demons occupy an important place, and are regarded as being of
serious practical efficiency. When he is remonstrating with the rulers around
him upon their gross injustice and corruption, he reminds them of the vast
number of these immortal servants of Zeus who are perpetually on guard amidst
mankind, and through whom the visitations of the gods will descend even upon
the most potent evil-doers. His supposition that the demons were not gods, but
departed men of the golden race, allowed him to multiply their number
indefinitely, without too much cheapening the divine dignity.
As this poet, enslaved by the current legends, has
introduced the heroic race into a series to which they do not legitimately
belong—so he has under the same influence inserted in another part of his poem
the myth of Pandora and Prometheus, as a means of explaining the primary
diffusion, and actual abundance, of evil among mankind. Yet this myth can in no
way consist, with his quintuple scale of distinct races, and is in fact a
totally distinct theory to explain the same problem,—the transition of mankind
from a supposed state of antecedent happiness to one of present toil and
suffering. Such an inconsistency is not a sufficient reason for questioning the
genuineness of either passage; for the two stories, though one contradicts the
other, both harmonies with that central purpose which governs the author’s
mind,—a querulous and didactic appreciation of the present. That such was his
purpose appears not only from the whole tenor of his poem, but also from the
remarkable fact that his own personality, his own adventures and kindred, and
his own sufferings figure in it conspicuously. And this introduction of
self-imparts to it a peculiar interest. The father of Hesiod came over from the
Eolic Kyme, with the view of bettering his
condition, and settled at Askra in Boeotia,
at the foot of Mount Helicon. After his death his two sons divided the family
inheritance: but Hesiod bitterly complains that his brother Perses cheated and went to law with him, and obtained
through corrupt judges an unjust decision. He farther reproaches his brother
with a preference for the suits and unprofitable bustle of the agora, at a time
when he ought to be laboring for his subsistence in the field. Askra indeed was a miserable place, repulsive both in
summer and winter. Hesiod had never crossed the sea, except once from Aulis to
Euboea, whither he went to attend the funeral-games of Amphidamas, the chief
of Chalcis: he sung a hymn, and gained as prize a tripod, which he consecrated
to the muses in Helicon.
Probable age of the poem. These particulars, scanty as they are, possess a peculiar value, as the earliest authentic memorandum respecting the doing or suffering of any actual Greek person. There is no external testimony at all worthy of trust respecting the age of the “Works and Days” Herodotus treats Hesiod and Homer as belonging to the same age, four hundred years before his own time; and there are other statements besides, some placing Hesiod at an earlier date than Homer, some at a later. Looking at the internal evidences, we may observe that the pervading sentiment, tone, and purpose of the poem is widely different from that of the Iliad and Odyssey, and analogous to what we read respecting the compositions of Archilochus and the Amorgian Simonides. The author of the “Works and Days” is indeed a preacher and not a satirist: but with this distinction, we find in him the same predominance of the present and the positive, the same disposition to turn the muse into an exponent of his own personal wrongs, the same employment of Aesopic fable by way of illustration, and the same unfavorable estimate of the female sex, all of which may be traced in the two poets above-mentioned, placing both of them in contrast with the Homeric epic. Such an internal analogy, in the absence of good testimony, is the best guide which we can follow in determining the date of the “Works and Days”, which we should accordingly place shortly after the year 700 BC. The style of the poem might indeed afford a proof that the ancient and uniform hexameter, though well adapted to continuous legendary narrative or to solemn hymns, was somewhat monotonous when called upon either to serve a polemical purpose or to impress a striking moral lesson. When poets, then the only existing composers, first began to apply their thoughts to the cut and thrust of actual life, aggressive or didactic, the verse would be seen to require a new, livelier, and smarter metre; and out of this want grew the elegiac and the iambic verse, both seemingly contemporaneous, and both intended to supplant the primitive hexameter for the short effusions then coming into vogue.
III
LEGEND OF THE IAPETIDS
THE
sons of the Titan god Iapetus, as described in the Hesiodic theogony,
are Atlas, Mencetius, Prometheus, and
Epimetheus. Of these, Atlas alone is mentioned by Homer in the Odyssey, and
even he not as the son of Iapetus: the latter himself is named in the
Iliad as existing in Tartarus along with Kronos. The Homeric
Atlas “knows the depths of the whole sea, and keeps by himself those tall
pillars which hold the heaven apart from the earth”.
As the
Homeric theogony generally appears much expanded in Hesiod, so also
does the family of Iapetus, with their varied adventures. Atlas is here
described, not as the keeper of the intermediate pillars between heaven and
earth, but as himself condemned by Zeus to support the heaven on his head and
hands; while the fierce Menoetius is pushed down to Erebus as a
punishment for his ungovernable insolence. But the remaining two brothers,
Prometheus and Epimetheus, are among the most interesting creations of Grecian
legend, and distinguished in more than one respect from all the remainder.
First,
the main battle between Zeus and the Titan gods is a contest of force purely
and simply—mountains are hurled and thunder is launched, and the victory
remains to the strongest. But the competition between Zeus and Prometheus is
one of craft and stratagem: the victor does indeed remain to the former, but
the honors of the fight belong to the latter. Secondly, Prometheus and
Epimetheus (the fore-thinker and the after-thinker) are characters stamped at
the same mint, and by the same effort, the express contrast and antithesis of
each other. Thirdly, mankind are here expressly brought forward, not indeed as
active partners in the struggle, but as the grand and capital subjects
interested,—as gainers or sufferers by the result. Prometheus appears in the
exalted character of champion of the human race, even against the formidable superiority
of Zeus.
In the
primitive or Hesiodic legend, Prometheus is not the creator or molder of man;
it is only the later additions which invest him with this character. The race
are supposed as existing, and Prometheus, a member of the dispossessed body of
Titan gods, comes forward as their representative and defender. The
advantageous bargain which he made with Zeus on their behalf, in respect to the
partition of the sacrificial animals, has been recounted in a preceding
chapter. Zeus felt that he had been outwitted, and was exceeding wroth. In his
displeasure he withheld from mankind the inestimable comfort of fire, so that
the race would have perished, had not Prometheus stolen fire, in defiance of
the Supreme Ruler, and brought it to men in the hollow stem of the plant called
giant-fennel.
Zeus
was now doubly indignant, and determined to play off a still more ruinous
stratagem. Hephaestus, by his direction, molded the form of a beautiful virgin;
Athene dressed her, Aphrodite and the Charites bestowed upon her both
ornament and fascination, while Hermes infused into her the mind of a dog, a
deceitful spirit, and treacherous words. The messengers of the gods conducted
this “fascinating mischief” to mankind, at a time when Prometheus was not
present. Now Epimetheus had received from his brother peremptory injunctions
not to accept from the hands of Zeus any present whatever; but the beauty of
Pandora (so the newly-formed female was called) was not to be resisted. She was
received and admitted among men, and from that moment their comfort and tranquility
was exchanged for suffering of every kind. The evils to which mankind are
liable had been before enclosed in a cask in their own keeping; Pandora in her
malice removed the lid of the cask, and out flew these thousand evils and
calamities, to exercise for ever their
destroying force. Hope alone remained imprisoned, and therefore without
efficacy, as before—the inviolable lid being replaced before she could escape.
Before this incident (says the legend) men had lived without disease or
suffering; but now both earth and sea are full of mischiefs. Maladies of every
description stalk abroad by day as well as by night, without any hope fox man
of relief to come.
The
Theogony gives the legend here recounted, with some variations—leaving out the
part of Epimetheus altogether, as well as the cask of evils. Pandora is the
ruin of man, simply as the mother and representative of the female sex. And the
variations are thus useful, as they enable us to distinguish the essential from
the accessory circumstances of the story.
“Thus
(says the poet, at the conclusion of his narrative) it is not possible to
escape from the purposes of Zeus”. His myth, connecting the calamitous
condition of man with the malevolence of the supreme god, shows, first, by what
cause such an unfriendly feeling was raised; next, by what instrumentality its
deadly results were brought about. The human race are not indeed the creation,
but the protected flock of Prometheus, one of the elder or dispossessed Titan
gods. When Zeus acquires supremacy, mankind along with the rest become subject
to him, and are to make the best bargain they can, respecting worship and
service to be yielded. By the stratagem of their advocate Prometheus, Zeus is
cheated into such a partition of the victims as is eminently unprofitable to
him; whereby his wrath is so provoked, that he tries to subtract from man the
use of feeling of fire. Here, however, his scheme is frustrated by the theft of
Prometheus: but his second attempt is more successful, and he in his turn
cheats the unthinking Epimetheus into the acceptance of a present (in spite of
the peremptory interdict of Prometheus) by which the whole of man’s happiness
is wrecked. This legend grows out of two feelings; partly as to the relations
of the gods with man, partly as to the relation of the female sex with the
male. The present gods are unkind towards man, but the old gods, with whom
man's lot was originally cast, were much kinder—and the ablest among them
stands forward as the indefatigable protector of the race. Nevertheless, the
mere excess of his craft proves the ultimate ruin of the cause which he
espouses. He cheats Zeus out of a fair share of the sacrificial victim, so as
both to provoke and justify a retaliation which he cannot be always at hand to
ward off; the retaliation is, in his absence, consummated by a snare laid for
Epimetheus and voluntarily accepted. And thus, though Hesiod ascribes the
calamitous condition of man to the malevolence of Zeus, his piety suggests two
exculpatory pleas for the latter; mankind have been the first to defraud Zeus
of his legitimate share of the sacrifice—and they have moreover been consenting
parties to their own ruin. Such are the feelings, as to the relation between
the gods and man, which have been one of the generating elements of this
legend. The other element, a conviction of the vast mischief arising to man
from women, whom yet they cannot dispense with, is frequently and strongly set
forth in several of the Greek poets—by Simonides of Amorgos and Phokylidis, not less than by Euripides.
Punishment
of Prometheus
But the
miseries arising from woman, however great they might be, did not reach
Prometheus himself. For him, the rash champion who had ventured “to compete in
sagacity” with Zeus, a different punishment was in store. Bound by heavy chains
to a pillar, he remained fast imprisoned for several generations: every day did
an eagle prey upon his liver, and every night did the liver grow afresh for the
next day’s suffering. At length Zeus, eager to enhance the glory of his favorite
son, Heracles, permitted the latter to kill the eagle and rescue the captive.
Such is
the Promethean myth as it stands in the Hesiodic poems; its earliest form, as
far as we can trace. Upon it was founded the sublime tragedy of Aeschylus, “The
Enchained Prometheus”, together with at least one more tragedy, now lost, by
the same author. Aeschylus has made several important alterations; describing
the human race, not as having once enjoyed and subsequently lost a state of
tranquility and enjoyment, but as originally feeble and wretched. He suppresses
both the first trick played off by Prometheus upon Zeus respecting the
partition of the victim—and the final formation and sending of Pandora—which
are the two most marked portions of the Hesiodic story; while on the other hand
he brings out prominently and enlarges upon the theft of fire, which in Hesiod
is but slightly touched. If he has thus relinquished the antique simplicity of
the story, he has rendered more than ample compensation by imparting to it a grandeur
of ideal, a large reach of thought combined with appeals to our earnest and
admiring sympathy, and a pregnancy of suggestion in regard to the relations
between the gods and man, which soar far above the Hesiodic level, and which
render his tragedy the most impressive, though not the most artistically
composed, of all Grecian dramatic productions. Prometheus there appears not
only as the heroic champion and sufferer in the cause and for the protection of
the human race, but also as the gifted teacher of all the arts, helps, and
ornaments of life, amongst which fire is only one: all this against the will
and in defiance of the purpose of Zeus, who, on acquiring his empire, wished to
destroy the human race and to beget some new breed. Moreover, new relations
between Prometheus and Zeus are superadded by Aeschylus. At the commencement of
the struggle between Zeus and the Titan gods, Prometheus had vainly attempted
to prevail upon the latter to conduct it with prudence; but when he found that
they obstinately declined all wise counsel, and that their ruin was inevitable,
he abandoned their cause and joined Zeus. To him and to his advice Zeus owed
the victory; yet the monstrous ingratitude and tyranny of the latter is now
manifested by nailing him to a rock, for no other crime than because he
frustrated the purpose of extinguishing the human race, and furnished to them
the means of living with tolerable comfort. The new ruler Zeus, insolent with
his victory over the old gods, tramples down all right, and sets at naught
sympathy and obligation, as well towards gods as towards man. Yet the prophetic
Prometheus, in the midst of intense suffering, is consoled by the foreknowledge
that the time will come when Zeus must again send for him, release him, and
invoke his aid, as the sole means of averting from himself dangers otherwise
insurmountable. The security and means of continuance for mankind have now been
placed beyond the reach of Zeus—whom Prometheus proudly defies, glorying in his
generous and successful championship, despite the terrible price which he is
doomed to pay for it.
As
the Aeschylean Prometheus, though retaining the old lineaments, has
acquired a new coloring, soul, and character, so he has also become identified
with a special locality. In Hesiod there is no indication of the place in which
he is imprisoned; but Aeschylus places it in Scythia, and the general belief of
the Greeks supposed it to be on Mount Caucasus. So long and so firmly did this
belief continue, that the Roman general Pompey, when in command of an army in
Colchis, made with his companion, the literary Greek Theophanes, a special
march to view the spot in Caucasus where Prometheus had been transfixed.
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