Studies of the Greek Poets (Vol 1 of 2)
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Title: Studies of the Greek Poets (Vol 1 of 2)
Author: John Addington Symonds
Release date: October 20, 2014 [eBook #47157]
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Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STUDIES OF THE GREEK POETS (VOL 1 OF 2) ***
STUDIES
OF
THE GREEK POETS
BY
JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS
AUTHOR OF "SKETCHES AND STUDIES IN SOUTHERN EUROPE" ETC.
_Im Ganzen, Guten, Schönen_
_Resolut zu leben_
IN TWO VOLUMES
VOL. I.
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS
FRANKLIN SQUARE
1880
TO
HENRY GRAHAM DAKYNS
~I Dedicate these Volumes~
IN MEMORY OF COMMON INTERESTS, JOINT STUDIES, AND
SIXTEEN YEARS OF FRIENDSHIP
PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION.
The studies of Greek Poets, now reprinted, appeared in England in two
series, published at an interval of three or four years. In preparing
this edition, I have rearranged the chapters of both series in their
proper order, and have made certain additions, with the view of
rendering the book more complete as a survey of Greek Poetry. Thus I
have inserted several new translations in the chapters on the Lyric
Poets and the Anthology. The criticism of Euripides has been enlarged,
and the concluding chapter has been, in a great measure, rewritten.
Each chapter has undergone such revision and alteration in minor
details as might remove unnecessary repetitions and bring the whole
series of essays into harmony. At the same time I have judged it
inexpedient to introduce radical changes into a book which professes
to be the reprint of volumes already known to the English public. For
this reason the chapters which deal with the Greek Tragedians have been
left substantially in their original form, and bear upon their face the
record of their composition as almost independent essays.
CONTENTS OF VOL. I.
CHAPTER I.
_THE PERIODS OF GREEK LITERATURE._
Language and Mythology.--The Five Chief Periods of
Greek Literature. The First Period: Homer--Religion and
State of the Homeric Age--Achilles and Ulysses.--Second
Period: Transition--Breaking-up of the Homeric
Monarchies--Colonization--the Nomothetæ--Ionians
and Dorians--Development of Elegiac, Iambic, Lyric
Poetry--Beginning of Philosophy.--Third Period: Athenian
Supremacy--Philosophy at Athens--the Fine Arts--the
Drama--History--Sparta and Athens--Pericles and
Anaxagoras.--Fourth Period: Hegemony of Sparta--Enslavement of
Hellas--Demosthenes--Alexander and Achilles--Aristotle--the
Hellenization of the East--Menander--the Orators.--Fifth
Period: Decline and Decay--Greek Influence upon the
World--Alexandria--the Sciences--Theocritus--the University of
Athens--Sophistic Literature--Byzantium--Hellas and Christendom
Page 13
CHAPTER II.
_MYTHOLOGY._
The Notion of a Systematic Pantheon.--Homer and
Hesiod.--Mythology before Homer.--Supposed Conditions of the
Mythopoeic Age.--Vico.--The Childhood of the World.--Goethe's
Boyhood.--Mythology is a Body of Rudimentary Thought,
Penetrated with the Spirit of the Nation.--Different
Views of the Greek Myths.--Grote.--Relics of a Primitive
Revelation.--The Symbolic Hypothesis.--Rationalism and
Euhemerus.--Fetichism.--Poetic Theory.--The Linguistic
Theory.--Comparative Philology.--Solar Theory.--The
Myth of Herakles: its Solar Interpretation--its Ethical
Significance.--Summary of the Points Suggested with
Regard to Mythology.--Mediæval Myths.--The Action of
the Greek Intelligence upon Mythology: in Art--in
Philosophy.--Persistence of the National Polytheism.--Homer
Allegorized at Alexandria.--Triumph of Christianity.--The Greek
Pantheon in the Middle Ages.--Greek Mythology Recovers Poetic
and Artistic Value in the Renaissance Page 51
CHAPTER III.
_ACHILLES._
Unity of _Iliad_.--Character of Achilles.--Structure of
the whole Poem.--Comparison with other Epics.--Energy
Dividing into Anger and Love.--Personality of
Achilles.--The Quarrel with Agamemnon.--Pallas Athene.--The
Embassy.--Achilles' Foreknowledge of his Death.--The Message
of Antilochus.--Interview with Thetis.--The Shouting
in the Trench.--The Speech of Xanthus.--The Pæan over
Hector's Corpse.--The Ghost of Patroclus.--The Funeral
Obsequies of Patroclus.--Achilles and Priam.--Achilles in
Hades.--Achilles Considered as a Greek Ideal.--Friendship
among the Greeks.--Heroism and Knighthood: Ancient and Modern
Chivalry.--The _Myrmidones_ of Æschylus.--Achilles and
Hector.--Alexander the Great.--The Dæmonic Nature of Achilles
Page 91
CHAPTER IV.
_THE WOMEN OF HOMER._
Helen of Troy--Her Eternal Youth--Variety of Legends
connected with her.--Stesichorus.--Helen in the
_Iliad_.--Helen in the _Odyssey_.--The Treatment of Helen
by Æschylus.--Euripidean Handling of her Romance.--Helen
in Greek Art.--Quintus Smyrnæus.--Apollonius of Tyana and
the Ghost of Achilles.--Helen in the Faust Legend.--Marlowe
and Goethe.--Penelope--Her Home-love.--Calypso and
the Isle Ogygia.--Circe.--The Homeric and the Modern
Circe.--Nausicaa--Her Perfect Girlishness.--Briseis and
Andromache.--The Sense of Proportion and of Relative Distance
in Homer's Pictures.--Andromache and Astyanax.--The Cult of
Heroes and Heroines in Greece.--Artistic Presentation of
Homeric Persons.--Philostratus Page 124
CHAPTER V.
_HESIOD._
The Difference between the Homeric and the Hesiodic
Spirit.--The Personality of Hesiod more Distinct than that of
Homer.--What we Know about his Life.--Perses.--The Hesiodic
Rhapsodes.--_Theogony_ and _Works and Days_.--Didactic
Poetry.--The Story of Prometheus.--Greek and Hebrew Myths
of the Fall.--The Allegorical Element in the Promethean
Legend.--The Titans.--The Canto of the Four Ages.--Hesiodic
Ethics.--The Golden Age.--Flaxman's Illustrations.--Justice
and Virtue.--Labor.--Bourgeois Tone of Hesiod.--Marriage and
Women.--The Gnomic Importance of Hesiod for the Early Greeks
Page 161
CHAPTER VI.
_PARMENIDES._
Greek Philosophical Poetry.--The Emergence of
Philosophy from Mythology.--The Ionian Sages.--The
Pythagoreans.--Anaxagoras.--Democritus.--The
Eleatics.--Heraclitus.--Xenophanes of Colophon.--His
Critique of the Myths.--Assertion of Monotheism.--Fragments
of his Poem on Nature.--Parmenides of Elea.--His Political
Importance.--Parmenides in the Dialogues of Plato.--His
Metaphysic of Being.--His Natural Philosophy.--The Logic
Deduced from him by Zeno and Melissus.--Translation of
the Fragments of his Poem.--The Dualism of Truth and
Opinion.--Impossibility of Obtaining Absolute Knowledge Page 185
CHAPTER VII.
_EMPEDOCLES._
The Grandeur of his Fame.--His Versatility of Genius.--His
Mysticism.--His Supposed Miracles.--Legends about his
Death.--His Political Action.--His Poems.--Estimation in which
the Ancients held them.--Their Prophetic Fervor.--Belief in
Metempsychosis.--Purifying Rites.--Contempt for the Knowledge
of the Senses.--Physical Theories.--The Poem on Nature.--The
Four Elements.--The Sphærus.--Love and Discord.--The
Eclecticism of Empedocles Page 207
CHAPTER VIII.
_THE GNOMIC POETS._
Definition of the Term Gnomic.--The Elegiac Metre.--The
Age of the Despots in Greece.--Three Periods in
Elegiac Poetry: the Martial, the Erotic, the
Gnomic.--Callinus.--Tyrtæus.--Mimnermus.--His Epicurean
Philosophy of Life.--Solon.--The Salaminian Verses.--Doctrine
of Hereditary Guilt.--Greek Melancholy.--Phocylides.--His
Bourgeois Intellect.--Xenophanes.--Theognis.--The Politics
of Megara.--Cyrnus.--Precepts upon Education and Conduct in
Public and Private Life.--The Biography of Theognis.--Dorian
Clubs.--Lamentations over the Decay of Youth and Beauty Page 236
CHAPTER IX.
_THE SATIRISTS._
Invention of the Iambic Metre.--Archilochus.--His Parentage
and Life.--His Fame among the Ancients.--Ancient and Modern
Modes of Judging Artists.--The Originality of Archilochus as a
Poet.--Simonides of Amorgos.--His Satire on Women.--The Ionian
Contempt for Women.--Hipponax.--Limping Iambics.--Differences
between the Satire of the Greeks and Romans Page 274
CHAPTER X.
_THE LYRIC POETS._
The Æsthetic Instinct of the Greeks in their
Choice of Metres.--Different Species of
Lyrical Poetry.--The Fragments in Bergk's
Collection.--Proemia.--Prosodia.--Parthenia.--Pæan.--Hyporchem.--
Dithyramb.--Phallic Hymn.--Epinikia.--Threnoi.--Scolia.--Æolian
and Dorian Lyrists.--The Flourishing Period of
Lesbos.--Sappho.--Alcæus.--Anacreon.--Nationality
of the Dorian Lyrists.--Spartan
Education.--Alcman.--Arion.--Stesichorus.--Ibycus.--Simonides.--Greek
Troubadours.--Style of Simonides.--Pindar.--Later Literary Odes
Page 287
CHAPTER XI.
_PINDAR._
His Life.--Legends connected with him.--The Qualities of
his Poetry.--The Olympic Games.--Pindar's Professional
Character.--His Morality.--His Religious Belief.--Doctrine of a
Future State.--Rewards and Punishments.--The Structure of his
Odes.--The Proemia to his Odes.--His Difficulty and Tumidity of
Style Page 340
CHAPTER XII.
_ÆSCHYLUS._
Life of Æschylus.--Nature of his Inspiration.--The
Theory of Art in the _Ion_ of Plato.--Æschylus and
Sophocles.--What Æschylus accomplished for the Attic
Drama.--His Demiurgic Genius.--Colossal Scale of his
Work.--Marlowe.--Oriental Imagery.--Absence of Love
as a Motive in his Plays.--The Organic Vitality of
his Art.--Opening Scenes.--Messenger.--Chorus.--His
Theology.--Destiny in Æschylus.--The Domestic Curse.--His
Character-drawing.--Clytemnestra.--Difficulty of Dealing
with the _Prometheus_.--What was his Fault?--How was
Zeus justified?--Shelley's Opinion.--The Last Trilogy of
_Prometheus_.--Middle Plays in Trilogies.--Attempt to
Reconstruct a _Prometheis_.--The Part of Herakles.--Obscurity
of the Promethean Legend.--The Free Handling of Myths
Permitted to the Dramatist.--The _Oresteia_.--Its
Subject.--The Structure of the Three Plays.--The
_Agamemnon_.---Its Imagery.--Cassandra.--The Cry of the
King.--The Chorus.--Iphigeneia at the Altar.--Menelaus
abandoned by Helen.--The Dead Soldiers on the Plains of
Troy.--The _Persæ_.--The Crime of Xerxes.--Irony of the
Situation.--Description of the Battle of Salamis.--The Style of
Æschylus.--His Religious Feeling 372
CHAPTER XIII.
_SOPHOCLES._
The Personal Beauty of Sophocles: his Life; Stories about
him.--Athens in the Age of Pericles.--Antique Criticism
on his Style: its Perfect Harmony.--Aristotle's Respect
for Sophocles.--Character in Greek Tragedy.--Sophocles
and Æschylus.--The Religious Feeling of Sophocles.--His
Ethics.--Exquisite Proportion observed in his Treatment
of the _Dramatis Personæ_.--Power of Using Motives.--The
_Philoctetes_.--Comparison of the _Choëphoroe_ and the
_Electra_.--Climax of the _Oedipus Coloneüs_.--How Sophocles
led onward to Euripides.--The _Trachiniæ_.--Goethe's
Remarks on the _Antigone_.--The Tale of Thebes.--_Oedipus
Tyrannus_, _Oedipus Coloneüs_, and _Antigone_ do not make up
a Trilogy.--Story of Laius.--The Philosophy of Fate contained
in it.--The Oracle.--Analysis of _Oedipus Tyrannus_.--Masterly
Treatment of the Character of Oedipus.--Change of
Situation in the _Coloneüs_.--Emergence of Antigone into
Prominence.--Analysis of the Antigone.--The Character of
Antigone: its Beauty.--Contrast afforded by Ismene and by
Creon.--Fault in the Climax of the _Antigone_.--The Final
Solution of the Laian Curse.--Antigone is not Subject to
Nemesis Page 436
THE GREEK POETS
CHAPTER I.
_THE PERIODS OF GREEK LITERATURE._
Language and Mythology.--The Five Chief Periods of Greek
Literature. The First Period: Homer--Religion and State
of the Homeric Age--Achilles and Ulysses.--Second
Period: Transition--Breaking-up of the Homeric
Monarchies--Colonization--the Nomothetæ--Ionians
and Dorians--Development of Elegiac, Iambic, Lyric
Poetry--Beginning of Philosophy.--Third Period:
Athenian Supremacy--Philosophy at Athens--the Fine
Arts--the Drama--History--Sparta and Athens--Pericles
and Anaxagoras.--Fourth Period: Hegemony of
Sparta--Enslavement of Hellas--Demosthenes--Alexander
and Achilles--Aristotle--the Hellenization of the
East--Menander--the Orators.--Fifth Period: Decline and
Decay--Greek Influence upon the World--Alexandria--the
Sciences--Theocritus--the University of Athens--Sophistic
Literature--Byzantium--Hellas and Christendom.
The most fascinating problems of history are veiled as closely from
our curiosity as the statue of Egyptian Isis. Nothing is known for
certain about the emergence from primitive barbarism of the great
races, or about the determination of national characteristics.
Analogies may be adduced from the material world; but the mysteries
of organized vitality remain impenetrable. What made the Jew a Jew,
the Greek a Greek, is as unexplained as what daily causes the germs of
an oak and of an ash to produce different trees. All we know is that
in the vague and infinitely distant past races were nourished into
form and individuality by the varied operation of those unreckoned
sympathies which attach man to nature, his primitive mother. But the
laws of that rudimentary growth are still unknown; "the abysmal deeps
of personality" in nations as in men remain unsounded: we cannot even
experimentalize upon the process of ethnical development.
Those mighty works of art which we call languages, in the construction
of which whole peoples unconsciously co-operated, the forms of which
were determined not by individual genius, but by the instincts of
successive generations, acting to one end, inherent in the nature of
the race--those poems of pure thought and fancy, cadenced not in words,
but in living imagery, fountain-heads of inspiration, mirrors of the
mind of nascent nations, which we call Mythologies--these surely are
more marvellous in their infantine spontaneity than any more mature
production of the races which evolved them. Yet we are utterly ignorant
of their embryology: the true science of Origins is as yet scarcely in
its cradle.
Experimental philologers may analyze what remains of early languages,
may trace their connections and their points of divergence, may
classify and group them. But the nature of the organs of humanity
which secreted them is unknown, the problem of their vital structure
is insoluble. Antiquarian theorists may persuade us that myths are
decayed, disintegrated, dilapidated phrases, the meaning of which had
been lost to the first mythopoeists. But they cannot tell us how these
splendid flowers, springing upon the rich soil of rotting language,
expressed in form and color to the mental eye the thoughts and
aspirations of whole races, and presented a measure of the faculties to
be developed during long ages of expanding civilization. If the boy is
father of the man, myths are the parents of philosophies, religions,
polities.
To those unknown artists of the prehistoric age, to the
language-builders and myth-makers, architects of cathedrals not raised
with hands, but with the spirit of man, for humanity to dwell therein,
poets of the characters of nations, sculptors of the substance of the
very soul, melodists who improvised the themes upon which subsequent
centuries have written variations, we ought to erect our noblest
statues and our grandest temples. The work of these first artificers
is more astonishing in its unconsciousness, more effective in its
spontaneity, than are the deliberate and calculated arts of sculptor,
painter, poet, philosopher, and lawgiver of the historic periods.
Some such reflections as these are the natural prelude to the study of
a literature like that of the Greeks. Language and mythology form the
vestibules and outer courts to Homer, Pheidias, Lycurgus.
It is common to divide the history of Greek literature into three chief
periods: the first embracing the early growth of poetry and prose
before the age in which Athens became supreme in Hellas--that is,
anterior to about 480 B.C.; the second coinciding with the brilliant
maturity of Greek genius during the supremacy of Athens--that is,
from the termination of the Persian war to the age of Alexander; the
third extending over the decline and fall of the Greek spirit after
Alexander's death--that is, from B.C. 323, and onwards, to the final
extinction of Hellenic civilization. There is much to be said in favor
of this division. Indeed, Greek history falls naturally into these
three sections. But a greater degree of accuracy may be attained by
breaking up the first and last of these divisions, so as to make five
periods instead of three. After having indicated these five periods in
outline, we will return to the separate consideration of them in detail
and in connection with the current of Greek history.
The first may be termed the Heroic, or Prehistoric, or Legendary
period. It ends with the first Olympiad, B.C. 776, and its chief
monuments are the epics of Homer and Hesiod. The second is a period
of transition from the heroic or epical to that of artistic maturity
in all the branches of literature. In this stage history, properly
so called, begins. The Greeks try their strength in several branches
of composition. Lyrical, satirical, moral, and philosophical poetry
supplant the epic. Prose is cultivated. The first foundations of the
drama are laid. The earliest attempts at science emerge from the
criticism of old mythologies. The whole mind of the race is in a
ferment, and, for the moment, effort and endeavor are more apparent
than mastery and achievement. This period extends from B.C. 776
to B.C. 477, the date of the Athenian league. The third period is
that of the Athenian supremacy. Whatever is great in Hellas is now
concentrated upon Athens. Athens, after her brilliant activity during
the Persian war, wins the confidence and assumes the leadership of
Greece. Athens is the richest, grandest, most liberal, most cultivated,
most enlightened state of Hellas. To Athens flock all the poets and
historians and philosophers. The drama attains maturity in her theatre.
Philosophy takes its true direction from Anaxagoras and Socrates.
The ideal of history is realized by Thucydides. Oratory flourishes
under the great statesmen and the demagogues of the republic. During
the brief but splendid ascendency of Athens, all the masterpieces
of Greek literature are simultaneously produced with marvellous
rapidity. Fixing 413 B.C. as the date of the commencement of Athenian
decline, our fourth period, which terminates in B.C. 323 with the
death of Alexander, is again one of transition. The second period was
transitional from adolescence to maturity. The fourth is transitional
from maturity to old age. The creative genius of the Greeks is now
less active. We have, indeed, the great names of Plato, Aristotle, and
Demosthenes to give splendor to this stage of national existence;
but the sceptre has passed away from the Greek nation proper. Their
protagonist, Athens, is in slavery. The civilization which they
had slowly matured, and which at Athens had been reflected in the
masterpieces of art and literature, is now spread abroad and scattered
over the earth. Asia and Egypt are Hellenized. The Greek spirit is
less productive than it has been; but it is not less vigorous. It
still asserts itself as the greatest in the world; but it does so
relying more upon its past acquirements than on any seeds of power that
remain to be developed in the future. The fifth period, the longest
of all, is one of decline and decay. It extends from B.C. 323 to the
final extinction of classical civilization. Two chief centres occupy
our attention--Athens, where the traditions of art and philosophy
yet linger, where the Stoics and Epicureans and the sages of the New
Academy still educate the world and prepare a _nidus_ for the ethics
of Christianity; and Alexandria, where physical science is cultivated
under the Ptolemies, where mystical theology flourishes in the schools
of the Neoplatonists, where libraries are formed and the labor of
literary criticism is conducted on a gigantic scale, but where nothing
new is produced except the single, most beautiful flower of idyllic
poetry and some few epigrams. In this fifth period, Rome and Byzantium,
where the Greek spirit, still vital, overlives its natural decay upon a
foreign soil, close the scene.
In these five periods--periods of superb adolescence, early manhood,
magnificent maturity, robust old age, and senility--we can trace the
genius of the Greeks putting forth its vigor in successive works of
art and literature, concentrating its energy at first upon its own
self-culture, then extending its influence in every direction, and
controlling the education of humanity, finally contenting itself
with pondering and poring on its past, with mystical metaphysics and
pedantic criticism. Yet even in its extreme decadence the Hellenic
spirit is still potent. It still assimilates, transmutes, and
alchemizes what it works upon. Coming into contact with the new and
mightier genius of Christianity, it forces even that first-born of
the Deity to take form from itself. One dying effort of the Greek
intellect, if we may so speak, is to formulate the dogma of the
Trinity and to impress the doctrine of the Logos upon the author of
the Gospel of St. John. The analogy between the history of a race so
undisturbed in its development as the Greek, and the life of a man,
is not altogether fanciful. A man like Goethe, beautiful in soul and
body, exceedingly strong and swift and active and inquisitive in all
the movements of his spirit, first lives the life of the senses and of
physical enjoyment. His soul, "immersed in rich foreshadowings of the
world," has scarcely begun to think consciously in the first period.
But he feels the glory of existence, the strivings of inexhaustible
energy, the desire of infinite expansion. The second period is one
of _Sturm und Drang_. New things are learned: much of the beautiful
physical activity is sacrificed; he discovers that life involves care
and responsibility as well as pleasure; he concentrates his mental
faculty on hard and baffling study, in which at first he halts and
falters. Then he goes forth to the world and wins great fame, and
does the deeds and thinks the thoughts by which he shall be known to
all posterity. His physical and mental faculties are now in perfect
harmony; together they offer him the noblest and most enduring
pleasures. But after a while his productiveness begins to dwindle.
He has put forth his force, has fully expressed himself, has matured
his principles, has formed his theory of the world. Our fourth period
corresponds to the early old age of such a man's life. He now applies
his principles, propagates his philosophy, subordinates his fancy,
produces less, enjoys with more sobriety and less exhilaration, bears
burdens, suffers disappointments, yet still, as Solon says, "learns
always as he grows in years." Then comes the fifth stage. He who was
so vigorous and splendid now has but little joy in physical life; his
brain is dry and withering; he dwells on his old thoughts, and has no
faculty for generating new ones; yet his soul contains deep mines of
wisdom; he gives counsel and frames laws for younger generations. And
so he gradually sinks into the grave. His acts remain: his life is
written.
The great name of Homer covers the whole of the first period of Greek
literature.[1] It is from the Homeric poems alone that we can form
a picture to our imagination of the state of society in prehistoric
Hellas. The picture which they present is so lively in its details,
and so consistent in all its parts, that we have no reason to suspect
that it was drawn from fancy. Its ideal, as distinguished from merely
realistic, character is obvious. The poet professes to sing to us of
heroes who were of the seed of gods, whose strength exceeded tenfold
the strength of actual men, and who filled the world with valiant
deeds surpassing all that their posterity achieved. Yet, in spite of
this, the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ may be taken as faithful mirrors
of a certain phase of Greek society, just as the _Niebelungen Lied_,
the romances of Charlemagne, and the tales of the Round Table reflect
three stages in the history of feudalism. We find that in this
earliest period of Greek history the nation was governed by monarchs
each of whom claimed descent from a god. Thus the kings exercised
their power over the people by divine right; but at the same time a
necessary condition of their maintaining this supremacy was that they
should be superior in riches, lands, personal bravery, and wisdom.
Their subjects obeyed them, not merely because they were #Diogeneis#,
or because they were fathers of the people, but also, and chiefly,
because they were the ablest men, the men fitted by nature to rule,
the men who could be depended upon in an emergency. The king had
just so much personal authority as he had ability to acquire or to
assert. As soon as this ability failed, the sceptre departed from
him. Thus Laertes overlives his royalty; and the suitors of Penelope,
fancying that Ulysses is dead, take no heed of Telemachus, who ought
to rule in his stead, because Telemachus is a mere lad; but as soon
as the hero returns, and proves his might by stringing the bow, the
suitors are slain like sheep. Again, Achilles, while acknowledging
the sway of Agamemnon, quarrels with him openly, proving his equality
and right to such independence as he can assert for himself. The bond
between the king in the heroic age and his chieftains was founded on
the personal superiority of the suzerain, and upon the necessity felt
for the predominance of one individual in warfare and council. The
chiefs were grouped around the monarch like the twelve peers round
Charlemagne, or like the barons whose turbulence Shakespeare has
described in _Richard II._ The relation of the Homeric sovereign to his
princes was, in fact, a feudal one. Olympus repeats the same form of
government. There Zeus is monarch simply because he wields the thunder.
When Herè wishes to rebel, Hephæstus advises her to submit, because
Zeus can root up the world, or hurl them all from the crystal parapet
of heaven. Such, then, is the society of kings and princes in Homer.
They stand forth in brilliant relief against the background, gray and
misty, of the common people. The masses of the nation, like the chorus
in tragedy, kneel passive, deedless, appealing to Heaven, trembling at
the strokes of fate, watching with anxiety the action of the heroes.
Meanwhile the heroes enact their drama for themselves. They assume
responsibility. They do and suffer as their passions sway them. Of
these the greatest, the most truly typical, is Achilles. In Achilles,
Homer summed up and fixed forever the ideal of the Greek character. He
presented an imperishable picture of their national youthfulness, and
of their ardent genius, to the Greeks. The "beautiful human heroism"
of Achilles, his strong personality, his fierce passions controlled
and tempered by divine wisdom, his intense friendship and love that
passed the love of women, above all, the splendor of his youthful life
in death made perfect, hovered like a dream above the imagination of
the Greeks, and insensibly determined their subsequent development. At
a later age, this ideal was destined to be realized in Alexander. The
reality fell below the ideal: for _rien n'est si beau que la fable, si
triste que la vérité_. But the life of Alexander is the most convincing
proof of the importance of Achilles in the history of the Greek race.
If Achilles be the type of the Hellenic genius--radiant, adolescent,
passionate--as it still dazzles us in its artistic beauty and
unrivalled physical energy, Ulysses is no less a true portrait of the
Greek as known to us in history--stern in action, ruthless in his
hatred, pitiless in his hostility, subtle, vengeful, cunning; yet at
the same time the most adventurous of men, the most persuasive in
eloquence, the wisest in counsel, the bravest and coolest in danger.
The _Græculus esuriens_ of Juvenal may be said to be the caricature in
real life of the idealized Ulysses. And what remains to the present
day of the Hellenic genius in the so-called _Greek nation_ descends
from Ulysses rather than Achilles. If the Homeric Achilles has the
superiority of sculpturesque and dramatic splendor, the Homeric Ulysses
excels him on the ground of permanence of type.
Homer, then, was the poet of the heroic age, the poet of Achilles and
Ulysses. Of Homer we know nothing, we have heard too much. Need we ask
ourselves again the question whether he existed, or whether he sprang
into the full possession of consummate art without a predecessor? That
he had no predecessors, no scattered poems and ballads to build upon,
no well-digested body of myths to synthesize, is an absurd hypothesis
which the whole history of literature refutes. That, on the other hand,
there never was a Homer--that is to say, that some diaskeuast, acting
under the orders of Pisistratus, gave its immortal outline to the
colossus of the _Iliad_, and wove the magic web of the _Odyssey_--but
that no supreme and conscious artist working towards a well-planned
conclusion conceived and shaped these epics to the form they bear,
appears to the spirit of sound criticism equally untenable. The very
statement of this alternative involves a contradiction in terms; for
such a diaskeuast must himself have been a supreme and conscious
artist. Some Homer did exist. Some great single poet intervened between
the lost chaos of legendary material and the cosmos of artistic beauty
which we now possess. His work may have been tampered with in a
thousand ways, and religiously but inadequately restored. Of his age
and date and country we may know nothing. But this we do _know_, that
the fire of moulding, fusing, and controlling genius in some one brain
has made the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ what they are.[2]
The epic poet merges his personality in his poems, the words of which
he ascribes to the inspiration of the muse. The individual is nowhere,
is forgotten in the subject and suppressed, while the luminous forms of
gods and heroes move serenely across the stage, summoned and marshalled
by the maidens of Helicon. In no other period of Greek literature shall
we find the same unconsciousness of self, the same immersion in the
work of art. In this respect the poetry of the heroic age answers to
the condition of prehistoric Hellas, where as yet the elements of the
Greek race remain still implicit in the general mass and undeveloped.
We hear in Homer of no abrupt division between Dorians and Ionians.
Athens and Sparta have not grown up into prominence as the two
leaders of the nation. Argos is the centre of power; but Phthiotis,
the cradle of the Hellenes, is the home of Achilles. Ulysses is an
islander. In the same way in Homer the art of the Greeks is still a
mere potentiality. The artistic sentiment, indeed, exists in exquisite
perfection; but it is germinal, not organized and expanded as it will
be. We hear of embroidery for royal garments, of goldsmith's work for
shields and breastplates, of stained ivory trappings for chariots
and horses. But even here the poet's imagination had probably outrun
the fact. What he saw with his fancy, could the heroic artisans have
fashioned with their tools? Is not the shield of Achilles, like Dante's
pavement of the purgatorial staircase, a forecast of the future?
Architecture and sculpture, at any rate, can scarcely be said to exist.
Ulysses builds his own house. The statues of the gods are fetiches.
But, meanwhile, the foundation of the highest Greek art is being laid
in the cultivation of the human body. The sentiment of beauty shows
itself in dances and games, in the races of naked runners, in rhythmic
processions, and the celebration of religious rites. This was the
proper preparation for the after-growth of sculpture. The whole race
lived out its sculpture and its painting, rehearsed, as it were, the
great works of Pheidias and Polygnotus in physical exercise before it
learned to express itself in marble or in color. The public games,
which were instituted in this first period, further contributed to the
cultivation of the sense of beauty which was inherent in the Greeks.
The second period is one of transition--in politics, in literature, in
the fine arts. Everywhere the old landmarks are being broken up, and
the new ones are not yet fixed. The heroic monarchies yield first of
all to oligarchies, and then to tyrannies; the tyrannies in their turn
give place to democracies, or to constitutional aristocracies. Argos,
the centre of heroic Hellas, is the first to change. Between 770 and
730 B.C. Pheidon usurps the sovereign power, and dies, leaving no
dynasty behind him.[3] Between 650 and 500 we find despots springing
up in all the chief Greek cities. At Corinth the oligarchical family
of the Bacchiadæ are superseded by the tyrants Cypselus and Periander.
At Megara the despot Theagenes is deposed and exiled. At Sicyon the
Orthagoridæ terminate in the despot Cleisthenes, whose reign is marked
by an attempt to supersede the ancient Doric order of government by
caste. At Mitylene, Pittacus becomes a constitutional autocrat, or
dictator, for the public safety. At Samos, Polycrates holds a post of
almost Oriental despotism. At Athens we find the great family of the
Pisistratidæ, who supersede the dynastic tyranny in commission of the
house of Codrus. What is the meaning of these changes? How does the
despot differ from the heroic monarch, who held, as we have seen, his
power by divine right, but who also had to depend for his ascendency on
personal prowess? Gradually the old respect for the seed of Zeus died
out. Either the royal families abused their power or became extinct,
or, as in the case of Athens and Sparta, retained hereditary privileges
under limitations. During this decay of the Zeus-born dynasties the
cities of Greece were a prey to the quarrels of great families; and
it often happened that one of these obtained supreme power--in which
case a monarchy, based not on divine right, but on force and fear, was
founded; or else a few of the chief houses combined against the State
to establish an oligarchy. The oligarchies, owing their authority to
no true, legal, or religious fount of honor, were essentially selfish,
and were exposed to the encroachments of the more able among their
own families. The cleverest man in an oligarchy tended to draw the
power into his own hands; but in this he generally succeeded by first
flattering and then intimidating the people. Thus in one way or another
the old type of dynastic government was superseded by despotisms, more
or less arbitrary, tending to the tyranny of single individuals, or
to the coalition of noble houses, and bringing with them the vices of
greed, craft, and servile cruelty. The political ferment caused a vast
political excitement. Party strove against party; and when one set
gained the upper hand, the other had to fly. The cities of Hellas were
filled with exiles. Diplomacy and criticism occupied the minds of men.
Personal cleverness became the one essential point in politics. But
two permanent advantages were secured by this anarchy to the Greeks.
The one was a strong sense of the equality of citizens; the other, a
desire for established law, as opposed to the caprice of individuals
and to the clash of factions in the State. This, then, is the first
point which marks the transitional period. The old monarchies break up,
and give place to oligarchies first, and then to despotism. The tyrants
maintain themselves by violence and by flattering the mob. At last they
fall, or are displaced, and then the states agree to maintain their
freedom by the means of constitutions and fixed laws. The despots are
schoolmasters, who bring the people to _Nomos_ as their lord.
Three other general features distinguish this period of transition.
The first is colonization. In the political disturbances which attend
the struggle for power, hundreds of citizens were forced to change
their residence. So we find the mother cities sending settlers to
Italy, to Sicily, to Africa, to the Gulf of Lyons, to Thrace, and to
the islands. In these colonies the real life and vigor of Hellas show
themselves at this stage more than in the mother states. It is in
Sicily, on the coast of Magna Græcia, on the seaboard of Asia Minor,
in the islands of the Ægean, that the first poets and philosophers and
historians of Greece appear. Sparta and Athens, destined to become
the protagonists of the real drama of Hellas, are meanwhile silent and
apparently inert. Secondly, this is the age of the Nomothetæ. Thebes
receives a constitution from the Corinthian lovers and law-givers
Philolaus and Diocles. Lycurgus and Solon form the states of Sparta
and Athens. It is not a little wonderful to think of these three great
cities, successively the leaders of historic Hellas, submitting to the
intellect each of its own lawgiver, taking shape beneath his hands,
cheerfully accepting and diligently executing his directions. Lastly,
it is in this period that the two chief races of the Greeks--the
Ionians and the Dorians--emerge into distinctness. Not only are Athens
and Sparta fashioned to the form which they will afterwards maintain;
but also in the colonies two distinct streams of thought and feeling
begin to flow onward side by side, and to absorb, each into its own
current, those minor rivulets which it could best appropriate.
What happens to literature in this period of metamorphosis, expansion,
and anarchy? We have seen that Homer covers the whole of the first
period of literature; and in the Homeric poems we saw that the
interests of the present were subordinated to a splendid picture of the
ideal past, that the poet was merged in his work, that the individual
joys and sorrows of the artist remained unspoken, and that his words
were referred immediately to the Muse. All this is now to be altered.
But meanwhile, between the first and second period, a link is made by
Hesiod. In his _Works and Days_ he still preserves the traditions of
the epic. But we no longer listen to the deeds of gods and heroes; and
though the Muse is invoked, the poet appears before us as a living,
sentient, suffering man. We descend to earth. We are instructed in
the toils and duties of the beings who have to act and endure upon
the prosaic stage of the world, as it exists in the common light of
the present time. Even in Hesiod there has therefore been a change.
Homer strung his lyre in the halls of princes who loved to dwell on the
great deeds of their god-descended ancestors. Hesiod utters a weaker
and more subdued note to the tillers of the ground and the watchers of
the seasons. In Homer we see the radiant heroes expiring with a smile
upon their lips as on the Æginetan pediment. In Hesiod we hear the low,
sad outcry of humanity. The inner life, the daily loss and profit, the
duties and the cares of men are his concern. Homer, too, was never
analytical. He described the world without raising a single moral or
psychological question. Hesiod poses the eternal problems: What is
the origin and destiny of mankind? Why should we toil painfully upon
the upward path of virtue? How came the gods to be our tyrants? What
is justice? How did evil and pain and disease begin? After Hesiod the
epical impulse ceases. Poets, indeed, go on writing narrative poems
in hexameters. But the cycle, so called by the Alexandrian critics,
produced about this time, had not innate life enough to survive the
wear and tear of centuries. We have lost the whole series, except in
the tragedies which were composed from their materials. Literature had
passed beyond the stage of the heroic epic. The national ear demanded
other and more varied forms of verse than the hexameter. Among the
Ionians of Asia Minor was developed the pathetic melody of the elegiac
metre, which first apparently was used to express the emotions of love
and sorrow, and afterwards came to be the vehicle of moral sentiment
and all strong feeling. Callinus and Tyrtæus adapted the elegy to
songs of battle. Solon consigned his wisdom to its couplets, and used
it as a trumpet for awakening the zeal of Athens against her tyrants.
Mimnermus confined the metre to its more plaintive melodies, and made
it the mouthpiece of lamentations over the fleeting beauty of youth and
the evils of old age. In Theognis the elegy takes wider scope. He uses
it alike for satire and invective, for precept, for autobiographic
grumblings, for political discourses, and for philosophical
apophthegms. Side by side with the elegy arose the various forms of
lyric poetry. The names of Alcæus and Sappho, of Alcman, Anacreon,
Simonides, Bacchylides, Stesichorus, Arion, instantly suggest
themselves. But it must be borne in mind that lyric poetry in Greece at
a very early period broke up into two distinct species. The one kind
gave expression to strong personal emotion, and became a safety-valve
for perilous passions; the other was choric and complex in its form;
designed for public festivals and solemn ceremonials, it consisted
chiefly of odes sung in the honor of gods and great men. To the former,
or personal species, belong the lyrics of the Ionian and Æolian
families; to the latter, or more public species, belong the so-called
Dorian odes. Besides the elegy and all the forms of lyric stanza, the
iambic, if not invented in this period, was now adapted of set purpose
to personal satire.[4] Archilochus is said to have preferred this
metre, as being the closest in its form to common speech, and therefore
suited to his unideal practical invective. From the lyric dithyrambs of
Arion, sung at festivals of Dionysus, and from the iambic satires of
Archilochus, recited at the feasts of Demeter,[5] was to be developed
the metrical structure of the drama in the third period. As yet, it
is only among the Dorians of Sicily and of Megara that we hear of any
mimetic shows, and these of the simplest description.
In this period the first start in the direction of philosophy was made.
The morality which had been implicit in Homer, and had received a
partial development in Hesiod, was condensed in proverbial couplets
by Solon, Theognis, Phocylides, and Simonides. These couplets formed
the starting-points for discussion. Many of Plato's dialogues turn on
sayings of Theognis and Simonides. Many of the sublimer flights of
meditation in Sophocles are expansions of early gnomes. Even the ethics
of Aristotle are indebted to their wisdom. The ferment of thought
produced by the political struggles of this age tended to sharpen
the intellect and to turn reflection inward. Hence we find that the
men who rose to greatest eminence in state-craft as tyrants or as
law-givers are also to be reckoned among the primitive philosophers of
Greece. The aphorisms of the Seven Sages, two of whom were Nomothetæ,
and several of whom were despots, contain the kernel of much that
is peculiar in Greek thought. It is enough to mention these: #mêden
agan; metron ariston; gnôthi seauton; kairon gnôthi; anankêi d' oude
theoi machontai#--which are the germs of subsequent systems of ethics,
metaphysics, and theories of art.[6] Solon, as a patriot, a modeller of
the Athenian constitution, an elegiac poet, one of the Seven Sages, and
the representative of Greece at the court of Croesus, may be chosen as
the one most eminent man in a period when literature and thought and
politics were, to a remarkable extent, combined in single individuals.
Meanwhile philosophy began to flourish in more definite shape among
the colonists of Asia Minor, Italy, and Sicily. The criticism of
the Theogony of Hesiod led the Ionian thinkers--Thales, Anaximenes,
Anaximander, Heraclitus--to evolve separate answers to the question
of the origin of the universe. The problem of the physical #archê#,
or starting-point, of the world occupied their attention. Some more
scientific theory of existence than mythology afforded was imperatively
demanded. The same spirit of criticism, the same demand for accuracy,
gave birth to history. The Theogony of Hesiod and the Homeric version
of the Trojan war, together with the genealogies of the heroes, were
reduced to simple statements of fact, stripped of their artistic
trappings, and rationalized after a rude and simple fashion by the
annalists of Asia Minor. This zeal for greater rigor of thought was
instrumental in developing a new vehicle of language. The time had come
at length for separation from poetry, for the creation of a prose style
which should correspond in accuracy to the logical necessity of exact
thinking. Prose accordingly was elaborated with infinite difficulty
by these first speculators from the elements of common speech. It was
a great epoch in the history of European culture when men ceased to
produce their thoughts in the fixed cadences of verse, and consigned
them to the more elastic periods of prose. Heraclitus of Ephesus was
the first who achieved a notable success in this new and difficult art.
He for his pains received the title of #ho skoteinos#, the obscure--so
strange and novel did the language of science seem to minds accustomed
hitherto to nothing but metre. Yet even after his date philosophy
of the deepest species was still conveyed in verse. The Eleatic
metaphysicians Xenophanes and Parmenides--Xenophanes, who dared to
criticise the anthropomorphism of the Greek Pantheon, and Parmenides,
who gave utterance to the word of Greek ontology, #to on#, or being,
which may be significantly contrasted with the Hebrew I am--wrote
long poems in which they invoked the Muse, and dragged the hexameter
along the pathway of their argument upon the entities, like a pompous
sacrificial vestment. Empedocles of Agrigentum, to whom we owe the
rough-and-ready theory of the four elements, cadenced his great work on
Nature in the same sonorous verse, and interspersed his speculations on
the cycles of the universe with passages of brilliant eloquence.
Thus the second period is marked alike by changes in politics and
society, and by a revolution in the spirit of literature. The old
Homeric monarchies are broken up. Oligarchies and tyrannies take their
place. To the anarchy and unrest of transition succeeds the demand for
constitutional order. The colonies are founded, and contain the very
pith of Hellas at this epoch: of all the great names we have mentioned,
only Solon and Theognis belong to Central Greece. The Homeric epos has
become obsolete. In its stead we have the greatest possible variety
of literary forms. The elegiac poetry of morality and war and love;
the lyrical poetry of personal feeling and of public ceremonial; the
philosophical poetry of metaphysics and mysticism; the iambic, with its
satire; prose, in its adaptation to new science and a more accurate
historical investigation--are all built up upon the ruins of the epic.
What is most prominent in the spirit of this second period is the
emergence of private interests and individual activities. No dreams of
a golden past now occupy the minds of men. No gods or heroes fill the
canvas of the poet. Man, his daily life, his most crying necessities,
his deepest problems, his loves and sorrows, his friendships, his
social relations, his civic duties--these are the theme of poetry. Now
for the first time in Europe a man tells his own hopes and fears, and
expects the world to listen. Sappho simply sings her love; Archilochus,
his hatred; Theognis, his wrongs; Mimnermus, his _ennui_; Alcæus, his
misfortunes; Anacreon, his pleasure of the hour; and their songs find
an echo in all hearts. The individual and the present have triumphed
over the ideal and the past. Finally, it should be added that the
chief contributions to the culture of the fine arts in this period are
architecture, which is carried to perfection; music, which receives
elaborate form in the lyric of the Dorian order; and sculpture, which
appears as yet but rudimentary upon the pediments of the temples of
Ægina and Selinus.
Our third period embraces the supremacy of Athens from the end of the
Persian to the end of the Peloponnesian war. It was the struggle with
Xerxes which developed all the latent energies of the Greeks, which
intensified their national existence, and which secured for Athens, as
the central power on which the scattered forces of the race converged,
the intellectual dictatorship of Hellas. No contest equals for interest
and for importance this contest of the Greeks with the Persians. It was
a struggle of spiritual energy against brute force, of liberty against
oppression, of intellectual freedom against superstitious ignorance,
of civilization against barbarism. The whole fate of humanity hung
trembling in the scales at Marathon, at Salamis, at Platæa. On the one
side were ranged the hordes of Asia--tribe after tribe, legion upon
legion, myriad by myriad--under their generals and princes. On the
other side stood forth a band of athletes, of Greek citizens, each one
himself a prince and general. The countless masses of the herd-like
Persian host were opposed to a handful of resolute men in whom the
force of the spirit of the world was concentrated. The triumph of the
Greeks was the triumph of the spirit, of the intellect of man, of
light-dispersing darkness, of energy repelling a dead weight of matter.
Other nations have shown a temper as heroic as the Greeks. The Dutch,
for instance, in their resistance against Philip, or the Swiss in their
antagonism to Burgundy and Austria. But in no other single instance has
heroism been exerted on so large a scale, in such a fateful contest
for the benefit of mankind at large. Had the Dutch, for example, been
quelled by Spain, or the Swiss been crushed by the House of Hapsburg,
the world could have survived the loss of these athletic nations.
There were other mighty peoples who held the torch of liberty and of
the spirit, and who were ready to carry it onward in the race. But if
Persia had overwhelmed the Greeks upon the plains of Marathon or in the
straits of Salamis, that torch of spiritual liberty would have been
extinguished. There was no runner in the race to catch it up from the
dying hands of Hellas, and to bear it forward for the future age. No;
this contest of the Greeks with Persia was the one supreme battle of
history; and to the triumph of the Greeks we owe whatever is most great
and glorious in the subsequent achievements of the human race.
Athens rose to her full height in this duel. She bore the brunt of
Marathon alone. Her generals decided the sea-fight of Salamis. For
the Spartans it remained to defeat Mardonius at Platæa. Consequently
the olive-wreath of this more than Olympian victory crowned Athens.
Athens was recognized as Saviour and Queen of Hellas. And Athens, who
had fought the battle of the spirit--by spirit we mean the greatness
of the soul, liberty, intelligence, civilization, culture--everything
which raises men above brutes and slaves, and makes them free beneath
the arch of heaven--Athens, who had fought and won this battle of the
spirit, became immediately the recognized impersonation of the spirit
itself. Whatever was superb in human nature found its natural home and
sphere in Athens. We hear no more of the colonies. All great works of
art and literature now are produced in Athens. It is to Athens that
the sages come to teach and to be taught. Anaxagoras, Socrates, Plato,
the three masters of philosophy in this third period, are Athenians.
It is, however, noticeable and significant that Anaxagoras, who forms
a link between the philosophy of the second and third period, is a
native of Clazomenæ, though the thirty years of his active life are
spent at Athens. These thinkers introduce into speculation a new
element. Instead of inquiries into the factors of the physical world
or of ontological theorizing, they approach all problems which involve
the activities of the human soul--the presence in the universe of a
controlling spirit. Anaxagoras issues the famous apophthegm: #nous
pantôn kratei#, "intelligence disposes all things in the world."
Socrates founds his ethical investigation upon the Delphian precept:
#gnôthi seauton#; or, "the proper study of mankind is man." Plato,
who belongs chronologically to the fourth period, but who may here
be mentioned in connection with the great men of the third, as
synthesizing all the previous speculations of the Greeks, ascends to
the conception of an ideal existence which unites truth, beauty, and
goodness in one scheme of universal order.
At the same time Greek art rises to its height of full maturity.
Ictinus designs the Parthenon, and Mnesicles the Propylæa; Pheidias
completes the development of sculpture in his statue of Athene, his
pediment and friezes of the Parthenon, his chryselephantine image of
Zeus at Olympia, his marble Nemesis upon the plain of Marathon. These
were the ultimate, consummate achievements of the sculptor's skill; the
absolute standards of what the statuary in Greece could do. Nothing
remained to be added. Subsequent progression--for a progression there
was in the work of Praxiteles--was a deflection from the pure and
perfect type.
Poetry, in the same way, receives incomparable treatment at the hands
of the great dramatists. As the epic of Homer contained implicitly
all forms of poetry, so did the Athenian drama consciously unite them
in one supreme work of art. The energies aroused by the Persian war
had made action and the delineation of action of prime importance to
the Greeks. We no longer find the poets giving expression to merely
personal feeling, or uttering wise saws and moral precepts, as in the
second period. Human emotion is indeed their theme; but it is the
phases of passion in living, acting, and conflicting personalities
which the drama undertakes to depict. Ethical philosophy is more than
ever substantive in verse; but its lessons are set forth by example
and not by precept--they animate the conduct of whole trilogies. The
awakened activity of Hellas at this period produced the first great
drama of Europe, as the Reformation in England produced the second. The
Greek drama being essentially religious, the tragedians ascended to
mythology for their materials. Homer is dismembered, and his episodes
or allusions, together with the substance of the Cyclic poems, supply
the dramatist with plots. But notice the difference between Homer and
Æschylus, the epic and the drama. In the latter we find no merely
external delineation of mythical history. The legends are used as
outlines to be filled in with living and eternally important details.
The heroes are not interesting merely as heroes, but as the types and
patterns of human nature; as representatives on a gigantic scale of
that humanity which is common to all men in all ages, and as subject
to the destinies which control all human affairs. Mythology has
thus become the text-book of life, interpreted by the philosophical
consciousness. With the names of Æschylus, Sophocles, Euripides,
must be coupled that of Aristophanes. His comedy is a peculiarly
Athenian product--the strongest mixture of paradox and irony and broad
buffoonery and splendid poetry, designed to serve a serious aim, the
world has ever seen. Here the many-sided, flashing genius of the Ionian
race appears in all its subtlety, variety, suppleness, and strength.
The free spirit of Athens runs riot and proclaims its liberty by
license in the prodigious saturnalia of the wit of Aristophanes.
It remains to be added that to this period belong the histories of
Herodotus, the Halicarnassean by birth, who went to Thurii as colonist
from Athens, and of Thucydides, the Athenian general; the lyrics
of Pindar the Theban, who was made the public guest of Athens; the
eloquence of Pericles, and the wit of Aspasia. This brief enumeration
suffices to show that in the third period of Greek literature was
contained whatever is most splendid in the achievements of the genius
of the Greeks, and that all these triumphs converged and were centred
upon Athens.
The public events of this period are summed up in the struggle for
supremacy between Athens and Sparta. The race which had shown itself
capable of united action against the common foe now develops within
itself two antagonistic and mutually exclusive principles. The age
of the despots is past. The flowering-time of the colonies is over.
The stone of Tantalus in Persia has been removed from Hellas. But it
remains for Sparta and Athens to fight out the duel of Dorian against
Ionian prejudices, of oligarchy against democracy. Both states have
received their definite stamp, or permanent #êthos#--Sparta from
semi-mythical Lycurgus; Athens from Solon, Cleisthenes, and Pericles.
Their war is the warfare of the powers of the sea with the powers
of the land, of Conservatives with Liberals, of the rigid principle
of established order with the expansive spirit of intellectual
and artistic freedom. What is called the Peloponnesian war--that
internecine struggle of the Greeks--is the historical outcome of
this deep-seated antagonism. And the greatest historical narrative
in the world--that of Thucydides--is its record. To dwell upon the
events of this war would be superfluous. Athens uniformly exhibits
herself as a dazzling, brilliant, impatient power, led astray by the
desire of novelty, and the intoxicating sense of force in freedom.
Sparta proceeds slowly, coldly, cautiously; secures her steps; acts
on the defensive; spends no strength in vain; is timid, tentative,
and economical of energy; but at the decisive moment she steps in
and crushes her antagonist. Deluded by the wandering fire of the
inspiration of Alcibiades, the Athenians venture to abandon the
policy of Pericles and to contemplate the conquest of Syracuse. A
dream of gigantic empire, in harmony with their expansive spirit, but
inconsistent with the very conditions of vitality in a Greek state,
floated before their imaginations. In attempting to execute it, they
overreached themselves and fell a prey to Sparta. With the fall of
Athens faded the real beauty and grandeur of Greece. Athens had
incarnated that ideal of loveliness and sublimity. During her days of
prosperity she had expressed it in superb works of art and literature,
and in the splendid life of a free people governed solely by their own
intelligence. Sparta was strong to destroy this life, to extinguish
this light of culture. But to do more she had no strength. Stiffened
in her narrow rules of discipline, she was utterly unable to sustain
the spiritual vitality of Hellas, or to carry its still vigorous energy
into new spheres. It remained for aliens to accomplish this.
Just before passing to the fourth period of comparative decline, we
may halt a moment to contemplate the man who represents this age of
full maturity. Pericles, called half in derision by the comic poets
the Zeus of Athens, called afterwards, with reverence, by Plutarch,
the Olympian--Pericles expresses in himself the spirit of this age.
He is the typical Athenian who governed Athens during the years in
which Athens governed Greece, who formed the taste of the Athenians
at the time when they were educating the world by the production
of immortal works of beauty. We have seen that the conquest of the
Persians was the triumph of the spirit, and that after the conquest
the spirit of humanity found itself for the first time absolutely and
consciously free in Athens. This spirit was, so to speak, incarnated in
Pericles. The Greek genius was made flesh in him, and dwelt at Athens.
In obedience to its dictates, he extended the political liberties
of the Athenians to the utmost, while he controlled those liberties
with the laws of his own reason. In obedience to the same spirit, he
expended the treasures of the Ionian League upon the public works
which formed the subsequent glory of Hellas, and made her august even
in humiliation. "That," says Plutarch, "which now is Greece's only
evidence that the power she boasts of and her ancient wealth are no
romance or idle story was his construction of the public and sacred
buildings." It was, again, by the same inspiration that Pericles
divined the true ideal of the Athenian commonwealth. In the Funeral
Oration he says: "We love the beautiful, but without ostentation or
extravagance; we philosophize without being seduced into effeminacy;
we are bold and daring, but this energy in action does not prevent us
from giving to ourselves a strict account of what we undertake. Among
other nations, on the contrary, martial courage has its foundation in
deficiency of culture. We know best how to distinguish between the
agreeable and the irksome; notwithstanding which we do not shrink
from perils." In this panegyric of the national character, Pericles
has rightly expressed the real spirit of Athens as distinguished from
Sparta. The courage and activity of the Athenians were the result of
open-eyed wisdom, and not of mere gymnastic training. Athens knew that
the arts of life and the pleasures of the intellect were superior to
merely physical exercises, to drill, and to discipline.
While fixing our thoughts upon Pericles as the exponent of the
mature spirit of free Hellas, we owe some attention to his master,
the great Anaxagoras, who first made reason play the chief part in
the scheme of the universe. Of the relations of Anaxagoras to his
pupil Pericles, this is what Plutarch tells us: "He that saw most
of Pericles, and furnished him most especially with a weight and
grandeur of sense superior to all arts of popularity, and in general
gave him his elevation and sublimity of purpose and of character, was
Anaxagoras of Clazomenæ, whom the men of those times called by the
name of Nous--that is, mind or intelligence; whether in admiration
of the great and extraordinary gift he displayed for the science of
nature, or because he was the first of the philosophers who did not
refer the first ordering of the world to fortune or chance, nor to
necessity or compulsion, but to a pure, unadulterated intelligence,
which in all other existing mixed and compound things acts as a
principle of discrimination, and of combination of like with like."
Thus we may say, without mysticism, that at the very moment in history
when the intelligence of mankind attained to freedom, there arose
a philosopher in Anaxagoras to proclaim the freedom and absolute
supremacy of intelligence in the universe; and a ruler in Pericles to
carry into action the laws of that intelligence, and to govern the most
uncontrollably free of nations by reason. When Pericles died, Athens
lost her Zeus, her head, her real king. She was left a prey to parties,
to demagogues, to the cold encroaching policy of Sparta. But Pericles
had lived long enough to secure the immortality of what was greatest in
his city--to make of Athens in her beauty "a joy forever."
"If the army of Nicias had not been defeated under the walls of
Syracuse; if the Athenians had, acquiring Sicily, held the balance
between Rome and Carthage, sent garrisons to the Greek colonies in
the south of Italy, Rome might have been all that its intellectual
condition entitled it to be, a tributary, not the conqueror, of Greece;
the Macedonian power would never have attained to the dictatorship of
the civilized states of the world." Such is the exclamation of Shelley
over the fall of Athens. But, according to the Greek proverb, to
desire impossibilities--in the past as in the present--is a sickness
of the soul. No Greek state could have maintained its #êthos# while it
ruled a foreign empire; nor is the right to govern measured by merely
intellectual capacity. The work of Greece was essentially spiritual
and not political. The chief sign of weakness which meets us in the
fourth period is in the region of politics. After the humiliation of
Athens, Sparta assumed the leadership of Greece. But she shamefully
misused her power by betraying the Greek cities of Asia to the
Persians, while her generals and harmosts made use of their authority
for the indulgence of their private vices. Nothing in the previous
training of the Spartan race fitted them for the control of nations
with whose more liberal institutions and refined manners they could
not sympathize. Their tyranny proved insupportable, and was at last
reduced to the dust by the Thebans under Pelopidas and Epaminondas.
But Thebes had neither the wealth nor the vigor to administer the
government of Hellas. Therefore the Greek states fell into a chaos
of discord, without leadership, without a generous spirit of mutual
confidence and aid; while at the same time the power of the Macedonian
kingdom was rapidly increasing under the control of Philip. An occasion
offered itself to Philip for interfering in the Greek affairs. From
that moment forward forever the cities of Greece became the fiefs of
foreign despots. The occasion in question was a great one. The Phocians
had plundered the Delphian temple, and none of the Greeks were strong
enough to punish them. The act of the Phocians was parricidal in its
sacrilege, suicidal in short-sightedness. Defiling the altar of the
ancestral god, on whose oracles the states had hitherto depended for
counsel, and destroying, with the sanctity of Delphi, the sacred symbol
of Greek national existence, they abandoned themselves to desecration
and dishonor. With as little impunity could a king of Judah have robbed
the temple and invaded the holiest of holies. But neither Spartans nor
Athenians nor yet Thebans arose to avenge the affront offered to their
common nationality. The whole of Greece proper lay paralyzed, and the
foreigner stepped in--Philip, whom in their pride they had hitherto
called the Barbarian. He took up the cause of Phoebus and punished
the children of the Delphian god for their impiety. It was clearly
proved to the states of Hellas that their independence was at an end.
They submitted. Greece became the passive spectator of the deeds of
Macedonia. Hellas, who had been the hero, was now the chorus. It was
Alexander of Macedon who played the part of Achilles in her future
drama.
One man vindicated the spirit of Greek freedom against this despotism.
The genius of Athens, militant once more, but destined not to triumph,
incarnates itself in Demosthenes. By dint of eloquence and weight of
character he strives to stem the tide of dissolution. But it is in
vain. His orations remain as the monuments of a valiant but ineffectual
resistance. The old intelligence of Athens shines, nay, fulminates, in
these tremendous periods; but it is no longer intelligence combined
with power. The sceptre of empire has passed from the hands of the
Athenians.
Still, though the states of Greece are humiliated, though we hear no
more of Ionians and Dorians, but only of Macedonians, yet the real
force of the Greek race is by no means exhausted in this fourth period.
On the contrary, their practical work in the world is just beginning.
Under the guidance of Alexander, the Greek spirit conquers and attempts
to civilize the East. The parallel between Alexander and Achilles,
as before hinted, is more than accidental. Trained in the study of
Homer as we are in the study of the Bible, he compared his destinies
with those of the great hero, and formed himself upon the type of
Pelides. At Troy he pays peculiar reverence to the tomb of Patroclus.
He celebrates Hephæstion's death with Homeric games and pyres up-piled
to heaven. He carries Homer with him on war-marches, and consults the
_Iliad_ on occasions of doubt. Alexander's purpose was to fight out
to the end the fight begun by Achilles between West and East, and
to avenge Greece for the injuries of Asia. But it was not a merely
military conquest which he executed. Battles were the means to higher
ends. Alexander sought to subject the world to the Greek spirit, to
stamp the customs, the thoughts, the language, and the culture of the
Greeks upon surrounding nations. Poets and philosophers accompanied
his armies. In the deserts of Bactria and Syria and Libya he founded
Greek cities. During the few years of his short life he not only swept
those continents, but he effaced the past and inaugurated a new state
of things throughout them; so that, in subsequent years, when the
Romans, themselves refined by contact with the Greeks, advanced to
take possession of those territories, they found their work half done.
The alchemizing touch of the Greek genius had transformed languages,
cities, constitutions, customs, nay, religions also, to its own
likeness. This fourth period, a period of transition from maturity to
decay, is the period of Alexander. In it the Greek spirit, which had
been gathering strength through so many generations, poured itself
abroad over the world. What it lost in intensity and splendor, it
gained in extension. It was impossible, even for Greeks, while thus
impressing their civilization on the whole earth, to go on increasing
in the beauty of their life and art at home.
Some of the greatest names in art, philosophy, and literature
still belong to this fourth period. The chief of all is Aristotle,
_il maestro di color che sanno_, the absorber of all previous and
contemporary knowledge into one coherent system, the legislator for
the human intellect through eighteen centuries after his death. It is
worth observing that Aristotle, unlike Socrates and Plato, is not a
citizen of Athens, but of the small Thracian town Stageira. Thus, at
the moment when philosophy lost its essentially Hellenic character and
became cosmopolitan in Aristotle, the mantle devolved upon an alien.
Again Aristotle was the tutor of Alexander. The two greatest men of
the fourth period are thus brought into the closest relations. In pure
literature the most eminent productions of this period are the orations
of Æschines, Demosthenes, Isocrates, and the comedies of Menander. It
is not a little significant that we should have retained no authentic
fragment of the speeches of Pericles--except in so far as we may trust
Thucydides--while the studied rhetoric of these politically far less
important orators should have been so copiously preserved. The reign of
mere talk was imminent. Oratory was coming to be studied as an art,
and practised, not as a potent instrument in politics, but as an end in
itself. Men were beginning to think more of how they spoke than of what
they might achieve by speaking. Besides, the whole Athenian nation,
as dikasts and as ecclesiasts, were interested in rhetoric. The first
masters of eloquence considered as a fine art were therefore idolized.
Demosthenes, Æschines, Isocrates, combined the fire of vehement
partisans and impassioned politicians with the consummate skill of
professional speech-makers. After their days rhetoric in Greece became
a matter of frigid display--an #agônisma es to parachrêma#. In the
comedies of Menander, as far as we may judge of them from fragments
and critiques, and from their Latin copies, a very noticeable change
in the spirit of literature is apparent. The so-called New Comedy, of
which he was the representative, is the product of a meditative and
inactive age. The great concerns of the world, and of human life seen
in its profoundest depth, which formed the staple of Aristophanes, have
been abandoned. We are brought close to domesticities: the events of
common life occupy the stage of Menander. The audience of Aristophanes
listened with avidity to comedies of which politics upon the grandest
scale were the substance. Menander invited his Athenians to the
intrigues of young men, slaves, and hetairai, at warfare with niggardly
parents. Athens has ceased to be an empress. She has become a garrulous
housewife. She contents herself with studious analysis and refined
amusements--still splendid with intelligence and dignified with wisdom,
but not weighty with the consciousness of power, nor throbbing with the
pulses of superabundant youthfulness and vigor.
In the fine arts this fourth period was still inventive. Under
Alexander painting, which had received its Hellenic character from
Polygnotus and Zeuxis, continued to flourish with Apelles. Indeed, it
may be fairly said that while art in the heroic period was confined
to the perfecting of the human body, in the second period it produced
architecture, in the third sculpture, and in the fourth painting--this
being apparently the natural order of progression in the evolution
of the fine arts. Lysippus, meanwhile, worthily represents the craft
of the statuary in Alexander's age; while the coins and gems of this
time show that the glyptic and numismatic arts were at their zenith
of technical perfection. Of Greek music, in the absence of all sure
information, it is difficult to speak. Yet it is probable that the age
of Alexander witnessed a new and more complex development of orchestral
music. We hear of vast symphonies performed at the Macedonian court.
Nor is this inconsistent with what we know about the history of art;
for music attains independence, ceases to be the handmaid of poetry or
dancing, only in an age of intellectual reflectiveness. When nations
have expressed themselves in the more obvious and external arts, they
seek through harmonies and melodies to give form to their emotions.
The fifth, last, and longest period is one of decline and decay. But
these words must be used with qualification when we speak of a people
like the Greeks. What is meant is, that the Greeks never recovered
their national vigor or produced men so great as those whom we have
hitherto been mentioning. The Macedonian empire prepared the way for
the Roman: Hellenic civilization put on the garb of servitude to Rome
and to Christianity. Henceforth we must not look to Greece proper for
the more eminent achievements of the still surviving spirit of the
Greeks. Greek culture in its decadence has become the heritage of
the whole world. Syrians, Egyptians, Phrygians, Romans, carry on the
tradition inherited from Athens. Hellas is less a nation now than an
intellectual commonwealth, a society of culture holding various races
in communion. The spiritual republic established thus by the Greek
genius prepares the way for Christian brotherhood: the liberty of the
children of the Muses leads onward to the freedom of the sons of God.
In this period, the chief centres are first Alexandria and Athens, then
Rome and Byzantium. The real successors of Alexander were his generals.
But the only dynasty founded by them which rises into eminence by its
protection of the arts and literature was the Ptolemaic. At Alexandria,
under the Ptolemies, libraries were formed and sciences were studied.
Euclid the geometer, Aratus the astronomer, Ptolemy the cosmographer,
add lustre to the golden age of Alexandrian culture. Callimachus
at the same time leads a tribe of learned poets and erudite men of
letters. Dramas meant to be read, like Lycophron's _Cassandra_; epics
composed in the study, like the _Argonautica_ of Apollonius Rhodius,
form the diversion of the educated world. Meanwhile the whole genus of
parasitic _littérateurs_ begin to flourish: grammarians, who settle
and elucidate texts with infinite labor and some skill; sophists
and rhetoricians, whose purpose in life it is to adorn imaginary
subjects and to defend problematical theses with conceits of the
fancy and ingenious subtleties of reasoning. A young man writing to
his mistress, a dinner-seeker who has failed to get an invitation,
Themistocles at the Persian court, celebrated statues, philosophical
puzzles--everything that can be wordily elaborated is grist for their
mill. The art of writing without having anything particular to say,
the sister art of quarrying the thoughts of other people and setting
them in elaborate prolixities of style, are brought to perfection. At
the same time, side by side with these literary moths and woodlice,
are the more industrious ants--the collectors of anecdotes, compilers
of biographies, recorders of quotations, composers of all sorts of
commonplace books, students of the paste-brush and scissors sort, to
whom we owe much for the preservation of scraps of otherwise lost
treasures. Into such mechanical and frigid channels has the life
of literature passed. Literature is no longer an integral part of
the national existence, but a form of polite amusement. The genius
of Hellas has nothing better to do than to potter about like a
_dilettante_ among her treasures.
The only true poets of this period are the Sicilian idyllists. Over
the waning day of Greek poetry Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus cast the
sunset hues of their excessive beauty. Genuine and exquisite is their
inspiration; pure, sincere, and true is their execution. Yet we agree
with Shelley, who compares their perfume to "the odor of the tuberose,
which overcomes and sickens the spirit with excess of sweetness." In
the same way the erotic epigrammatists, though many of them genuine
poets, especially the exquisite Meleager of Gadara, in the very
perfection of their peculiar quality of genius offer an unmistakable
sign of decay. It is the fashion among a certain class of modern
critics to extol the art of decadence, to praise the hectic hues of
consumption, and even the dull livors of corruption, above the roses
and the lilies of health. Let them peruse the epigrams of Meleager and
of Straton. Of beauty in decay sufficient splendors may be found there.
While Alexandria was thus carrying the poetic tradition of Hellas to
its extremity in the idyl and the epigram--carving cherrystones after
the sculptor's mallet had been laid aside--and was continuing the
criticism which had been set on foot by Aristotle, Athens persisted in
her function of educating Europe. She remained a sort of university, in
which the doctrines of Plato and Aristotle were adequately developed,
though not in the most comprehensive spirit, by a crowd of peripatetic
and academic sages, and where the founders of the Epicurean and Stoic
schools gave a new direction to thought. It was during the first vigor
of the Epicurean and Stoic teaching that the spirit of Hellas came
into contact with the spirit of Rome. Hence Lucretius, Cicero, the
satirists--whatever, in fact, Rome may boast of philosophy, retains the
tincture of the ethics of her schoolmasters. Rome, as Virgil proudly
said, was called to govern--not to write poems or carve statues, but
to quell the proud and spare the abject. Still she caught, to some
extent, the æsthetic manners of her captive. Consequently, long after
the complete political ascendency of Rome was an established fact,
and geographical Greece had become an insignificant province, the
Hellenic spirit led the world. And some of its latest products are
still dazzling in beauty, marvellous in ingenuity, Titanic in force. A
few names selected from the list of Græco-Roman authors will be more
impressive than much description. Plutarch of Chæronea, in the first
century, the author of the great biographies; Lucian, the Syrian, in
the second century, the master of irony and graceful dialogue and
delicate description; Epictetus, the Phrygian slave, in the second
century, who taught the latest form of Stoicism to the Romans, and
had for his successor Marcus Aurelius; Philostratus of Lemnos, the
rhetorician and author of the life of Apollonius; Plotinus, Porphyrius,
and Proclus, the revivers of Platonic philosophy under a new form
of mysticism at Alexandria during the third and fourth centuries;
Longinus, the critic, who adorned Palmyra in the third century;[7]
Heliodorus of Emesa, Achilles Tatius, Longus, Musæus, the erotic
novelists and poets of the fourth and fifth centuries--these, not to
mention the Christian fathers, are a few of the great men whom Greece
produced in this last period. But now notice how miscellaneous in
nationality and in pursuit they are. One only is a Greek of the old
stock--Plutarch, the Boeotian. One is a slave from Phrygia. Another is
a Roman emperor.
A fourth is a native of the desert city of Tadmor. Two are Syrians.
One is a Greek of the Ægean. Another is an Egyptian. From this we may
see how the genius of the Greeks had been spread abroad to embrace all
lands. No fact better illustrates the complete leavening of the world
by their spirit.
But considering that this fifth period may be said to cover six
centuries, from the death of Alexander to about 300 after Christ--for
why should we continue our computation into the dreary regions of
Byzantine dulness?--it must be confessed that it is sterile in
productiveness and inferior in the quality of its crop to any of the
previous periods. Subtle and beautiful is the genius of Hellas still,
because it _is_ Greek; strong and stern it is in part, because it has
been grafted on the Roman character; its fascinations and compulsions
are powerful enough to bend the metaphysics of the Christian faith.
Yet, after all, it is but a shadow of its own self.
After the end of the fourth century the iconoclastic zeal and piety
of the Christians put an end practically to Greek art and literature.
Christianity was at that time the superior force in the world; and
though Clement of Alexandria contended for an amicable treaty of peace
between Greek culture and the new creed, though the two Gregories and
Basil were, to use the words of Gibbon, "distinguished above all their
contemporaries by the rare union of profane eloquence and orthodox
piety," though the bishops of the Church were selected from the ranks
of scholars trained by Libanius and other Greek sophists, yet the
spirit of Christianity proved fatal to the spirit of Greek art. Early
in the fifth century the Christian rabble at Alexandria, under the
inspiration of their ferocious despot Cyril, tore in pieces Hypatia,
the last incarnation of the dying beauty of the Greeks. She had turned
her eye backward to Homer and to Plato, dreaming that haply even yet
the gods of Hellas might assert their power and resume the government
of the world, and that the wisdom of Athens might supplant the folly
of Jerusalem. But it was a vain and idle dream. The genius of Greece
was effete. Christianity was pregnant with the mediæval and the modern
world. In violence and bloodshed the Gospel triumphed. This rending
in pieces of the past, this breaking-down of temples and withering
of illusions, was no doubt necessary. New wine cannot be poured into
old bottles. No cycle succeeds another cycle in human affairs without
convulsions and revolutions that rouse the passions of humanity. It is
thus that
God fulfils himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.
Yet even in this last dire struggle of the spirit of pagan art with the
spirit of Christian faith, when beauty had become an abomination in the
eyes of the Holiest, on the ruins, as it were, of the desecrated fanes
of Hellas, weeds lovely in their rankness flourished. While Cyril's
mobs were dismembering Hypatia, the erotic novelists went on writing
about Daphnis, and Musæus sang the lamentable death of Leander. Nonnus
was perfecting a new and more polished form of the hexameter. These
were the last notes of Greek poetry. In these faint and too melodious
strains the Muse took final farewell of her beloved Hellas. And when,
after the lapse of a thousand years, the world awoke upon the ruins of
the past, these were among the first melodies which caught its ear.
One of the three first Greek books issued from the Aldine press about
the year 1493, and called by Aldus the "precursors," was the poem of
Hero and Leander. It was reprinted at Paris in 1507 by De Gourmont,
at Alcala in Spain in 1514, and at Cologne in 1517 by Hirschhorn. Our
Marlowe in the sixteenth century translated Musæus. The French Amyot
translated Longus, and bequeathed to his nation a voluminous literature
of pastorals founded upon the tale of Chloe. Tasso and Guarini, in
Italy, caught the same strain; so that the accents of the modern
Renaissance were an echo of the last utterances of dying Greece. The
golden age of pastoral innocence, the _bell' età dell' oro_, of which
the Alexandrians had been dreaming in the midst of their effete and
decaying civilization, fascinated the imagination of our immediate
ancestors, when, three centuries ago, they found the sun of art and
beauty shining in the heavens, new worlds to conquer, and indefinite
expansions of the spirit to be realized.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] My special debt to Hegel's _Philosophy of History_ in this
paragraph ought to be acknowledged.
[2] I do not mean by this that _one_ poet must have composed both
epics, but that each bears upon it the mark of unity in conception and
execution. Whether the same poet produced both is a different question,
and I am inclined to accept the _Odyssey_ as a later work.
[3] The date of Pheidon is in truth unfixed. According to recent
calculations, he may have celebrated the 28th and not the 8th Olympiad.
The involved alteration in his date would bring him into closer
connection with the other despots.
[4] The _Margites Eiresione_, attributed by the Greeks to Homer,
contain possibly the earliest fragments of iambic verses.
[5] Satire, it is well known, was permitted at some of the festivals of
Demeter; and the legend of the maid Iambé, who alone could draw a smile
from Demeter, after she had lost Persephone, seems to symbolize the
connection of iambic recitations with the cultus of this goddess.
[6] Nothing overmuch; measure is best; know thyself; know the right
moment; against necessity not even gods fight.
[7] Recent criticism renders the age and country of the critic Longinus
doubtful.
CHAPTER II.
_MYTHOLOGY._
The Notion of a Systematic Pantheon.--Homer and
Hesiod.--Mythology before Homer.--Supposed Conditions
of the Mythopoeic Age.--Vico.--The Childhood
of the World.--Goethe's Boyhood.--Mythology is
a Body of Rudimentary Thought, Penetrated with
the Spirit of the Nation.--Different Views of
the Greek Myths.--Grote.--Relics of a Primitive
Revelation.--The Symbolic Hypothesis.--Rationalism and
Euhemerus.--Fetichism.--Poetic Theory.--The Linguistic
Theory.--Comparative Philology.--Solar Theory.--The
Myth of Herakles: its Solar Interpretation--its Ethical
Significance.--Summary of the Points Suggested with
Regard to Mythology.--Mediæval Myths.--The Action of
the Greek Intelligence upon Mythology: in Art--in
Philosophy.--Persistence of the National Polytheism.--Homer
Allegorized at Alexandria.--Triumph of Christianity.--The
Greek Pantheon in the Middle Ages.--Greek Mythology
Recovers Poetic and Artistic Value in the Renaissance.
It has been remarked with justice that, when we use the word mythology,
we are too apt to think of a Pantheon, of a well-defined hierarchy of
gods and demigods and heroes, all fabulous indeed, but all arranged
in one coherent system. This conception of Greek mythology arises
partly from the fact that we learn to know it in dictionaries, compiled
from the works of authors who lived long after the age in which myths
were produced, and partly from the fact that the conditions under
which myth-making was a possibility are so far removed from us as to
be almost unintelligible. Yet there is some truth in what, upon the
whole, is an erroneous view. Although the Greek myths, in their origin,
were not a well-digested system, still they formed a complete body
of national thought, on which the intelligence of the Greek race, in
its art and its religion, was continually working, until it took the
final form in which we have it in our dictionaries. What remained in
the Pantheon of Apollodorus and Hyginus, remained there by no freak of
accident. What was omitted by Homer and by Hesiod was omitted by no
operation of blind chance. The spirit of the Greeks was concerned in
the purification and the preservation of their myths, and the unity of
that spirit constitutes the unity of their mythology.
Two great poets gave to Greek mythology the form which it maintained in
the historic period. Herodotus says that "Homer and Hesiod named the
gods, and settled their genealogies for the Hellenes." What this means
is, that at a certain prehistoric epoch, the epoch of epic poetry,
mythology had passed from the primitive and fluid state, and had
become the subject-matter of the arts. Between the mythopoeic liberty
of creation and the collections of the grammarians was interposed the
poetry, the sculpture, and the religious ritual of the historic Greeks.
What we have to deal with at the present moment is, not mythology as
it appears in art, but the genesis of the myths conceived as a body of
Greek thought and fancy in their infantine or rudimentary stages.
What was mythology before Homer? How did it come into existence? How
were the Greeks brought to believe that there was a supreme father of
gods and men called Zeus, a wise patroness of arts and sciences called
Pallas, a pure and glorious and far-darting deity called Phoebus? There
is no one who does not acknowledge something sublime and beautiful
in this part of the Greek mythology. Even those who do not care to
comprehend the growth of these conceptions admit that the genius of the
race shone with splendor peculiar to itself in their creation.
To this question must be counterpoised another. What are we to think
about the many repulsive, grotesque, and hideous elements of Greek
mythology--the incest and adultery of Zeus, the cannibalism of Kronos,
the profligacy of Aphrodite, the cruelty of Phoebus? When thought
began to be conscious of itself in Greece these abominations moved the
anger of the philosophers. Xenophanes, Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Pindar,
and Plato, in succession, recognized that the mythical fables were
incompatible with the notion of deity, and rejected them forthwith.
Modern students have been so disgusted by the same indecencies that
some of them have abandoned Greek mythology as hopeless, while others
have taken refuge in the extraordinary paradox that myths are a disease
of language. These methods of dealing with the problem are alike
unphilosophical. It is impossible for the historian to reject what
formed the groundwork of religious and artistic thought in Greece. It
is childish to represent the human mind as a sort of bound Mazeppa,
stretched helpless on the wild horse, Language, which carries it away
into the wilderness.
In order to understand the two questions which have been propounded,
we must make a demand upon our imagination, and endeavor to return,
in thought at least, to the conditions of a people in the mythopoeic
age--the age, that is to say, in which not only were myths naturally
made, but all the thinking of a nation took the form of myths. We must
go back to a time when there were no written records, when there were
no systems of thought, when language had not been subjected to analysis
of any kind, when abstract notions were unknown, when science had
not begun to exist, when history was impossible, and when the whole
world was a land of miracles. There was no check then laid upon fancy,
because nothing as yet was conceived as thought, but everything existed
as sensation. In this infancy the nation told itself stories, and
believed in them. The same faculties of the mind which afterwards gave
birth to poetry and theology, philosophy and state-craft, science and
history, were now so ill-defined and merely germinal that they produced
but fables. Yet these faculties were vigorous and vivid. The fables
they produced were infinite in number and variety, beautiful, and so
pregnant with thought under the guise of fancy that long centuries
scarcely sufficed for disengaging all that they contained. In dealing
with Greek mythology it must be remembered that the nation with whose
mythopoeic imagination we are concerned was the Greek nation.[8] It had
already in itself all Hellas, as the seed enfolds the plant.
A famous passage in Vico's work _Della Metafisica Poetica_ may here
be paraphrased, in order to make the conditions under which we must
imagine myths to have arisen more intelligible:[9] "Poetry, which was
the first form of wisdom, began with a system of thought, not reasoned
or abstract, as ours is now, but felt and imagined, as was natural in
the case of those primitive human beings who had developed no reasoning
faculties, but were all made up of senses in the highest physical
perfection, and of the most vigorous imaginations. In their total
ignorance of causes they wondered at everything; and their poetry was
all divine, because they ascribed to gods the objects of their wonder,
and thought that beings like themselves, but greater, could alone
have caused them. Thus they were like children whom we notice taking
into their hands inanimate things, and playing and talking with them
as though they were living persons. When thunder terrified them, they
attributed their own nature to the phenomenon; and being apt to express
their most violent passions by howls and roarings, they conceived
heaven as a vast body, which gave notice of its anger by lightnings
and thunderings. The whole of nature, in like manner, they imagined to
be a vast animated body, capable of feeling and passion." Vico then
proceeds to point out how difficult it is for us, who, through long
centuries, have removed ourselves as far as possible from the life of
the instincts, senses, and imagination, whose language has become full
of abstract terms, whose conception of the universe has been formed
by science, whose thought is critical and reflective, and who have
been educated in a rational theology, to comprehend the attitude of
primitive humanity in its personifying stage of thought.
In this childhood of the world, when the Greek myths came into
existence, the sun was called a shepherd, and the clouds were his
sheep; or an archer, and the sunbeams were his arrows. It was easier
then to think of the sea as a husky-voiced and turbulent old man, whose
true form none might clearly know, because he changed so often and was
so secret in his ways, who shook the earth in his anger, and had the
white-maned billows of the deep for horses, than to form a theory of
the tides. The spring of the year became a beautiful youth, beloved
by the whole earth, or beloved, like Hyacinthus, by the sun, or,
like Adonis, by the queen of beauty, over whom the fate of death was
suspended, and for whose loss annual mourning was made. Such tales the
Greeks told themselves in their youth; and it would be wrong to suppose
that deliberate fiction played any part in their creation. To conceive
of the world thus was natural to the whole race; and the tales that
sprang up formed the substance of their intellectual activity. Here,
then, if anywhere, we watch the process of a people in its entirety
contributing to form a body of imaginative thought, projecting itself
in a common and unconscious work of art. Nor will it avail to demur
that behind the Greeks there stretched a dim and distant past, that
many of their myths had already taken shape, to some extent, before the
separation of the Aryan families. That is now an ascertained fact, the
bearings of which will have to be discussed farther on in this chapter.
For the moment it is enough to reply that not the similarities, but the
differences, brought to light by the study of comparative mythology are
important for the historian of each several race. The raw material of
silk may interest the merchant or the man of science; the artist cares
for the manufactured fabric, with its curious patterns and refulgent
hues.
In order further to illustrate the conditions of the mythopoeic age, a
passage from the _Dichtung und Wahrheit_ of Goethe might be quoted. If
it is not a mere fancy to suppose that the individual lives, to some
extent at least, in his own self the life of humanity, and therefore
to conclude that the childhood of the world can be mirrored in the
childhood of a man, a poet like Goethe is precisely fitted, by the
record of his own boyhood, to throw light upon the early operations of
the human mind. For, in one sense of the term, the mythopoeic faculty
never dies with poets. In their own persons they prolong the youth and
adolescence of the race, retaining the faculty, now lost to nearly
all, of looking on the universe as living. Goethe, then, relates that
when he was at school at Frankfort, he used to invent stories about
himself and the places he frequented, half consciously, and half by
a spontaneous working of his fancy. These stories he told to his
school-fellows so vividly that they accepted them as fact. "It greatly
rejoiced them," he says, "to know that such wonderful things could
befall one of their own playmates; nor was it any harm that they did
not understand how I could find time and space for such adventures, as
they must have been pretty well aware of all my comings and goings, and
how I was occupied the whole day." He goes on to recount one of these
marvellous narratives. The scene of it was laid in Frankfort, in a
street familiar to his school-fellows. Down this street, which had a
long blank wall surmounted by trees, he supposed himself to have been
walking one day, and to have found a door in the wall, not noticed by
him on any previous occasion. His curiosity being aroused, he knocked
at the door, and, after some delay, was admitted. Inside he found
a garden full of wonders--fountains and fair nymphs, exotic shrubs
and quaint old men, magicians, knights, sylphs, and all the proper
furniture of a romance. Goethe's comrades, the first time that they
heard him describe this enchanted pleasure-ground in glowing terms,
already more than half believed in its existence; "and," says the poet,
"each of them visited alone the place, without confiding it to me or
to the others, and discovered the nut-trees," but none found the door.
Still, they did not disbelieve what Goethe told them, but preferred
to imagine that the magic door had once, at least, been seen by him,
and opened for him only, though it remained invisible and closed
for them. And herein they were literally right, for Goethe trod an
enchanted ground of poetry which few can hope to win. The story proved
so fascinating that he had to tell it over and over again, always
repeating the same order of events, until, he says, "by the uniformity
of the narrative I converted the fable into truth in the minds of my
hearers."
This, then, may be used as an illustration of the mythopoeic faculty.
All that was needed for the growth of myths was creative mind on the
one side and receptive and believing mind on the other. It did not,
probably, require a Goethe to make a myth, though we may still believe
that the greatest and best myths owed their form to the intervention
at some period of unknown and unacknowledged Goethes. When the logical
faculty was in abeyance, when the critical faculty had not been
aroused, when sympathy was quick, language fertile, fancy exuberant,
and belief sincere, there was nothing to check mythopoetry. The
nation had to make the step from boyhood to adolescence before the
impulse ceased. Nor was there any education from without in a fixed
body of systematized knowledge to coerce its freedom. Forming the
first activity of the intellect, it held in solution, as it were, the
rudiments of religion and morality, of psychological reflection, of
politics, geography, and history. Had there been any one to ask the
myth-maker: Who told you this strange tale? what is your authority
for imposing it upon us? he would have answered: The goddess told me,
the divine daughter of memory, as I walked alone. And this he would
sincerely and conscientiously have believed; and those who heard him
would have given credence to his words; and thus his intuitions became
their intuitions. Creative faculty and credence, insight and sympathy,
two forms of the same as yet scarcely divided operation of the mind,
gave permanence to myths. What the fathers received they transmitted
to their sons. Successive generations dealt freely with them, moulding
and remodelling, within the limits set upon the genius of the race.
Hundreds may have been produced simultaneously, and among them must
have raged a fierce struggle for existence, so that multitudes perished
or were hopelessly defaced, just as in the animal and vegetable
kingdoms whole species disappear or survive only in fragments and
fossils.
It cannot be too often repeated that the power which presided over the
transmission of the myths was the spirit of the people. An inherent
selective instinct in the nation determined which of them should
ultimately survive; and thus a body of legend, truly national, was
formed, in which the nation saw itself reflected. When, therefore, we
say that Greek mythology is Hellenic and original, we are admitting
this unconscious, silent, steady, irresistible faculty of the mind to
fashion gods in its own image, to come to a knowledge of itself in its
divinities, to create a glorified likeness of all that it admires in
its own nature, to deify its truest and its best, and to invest its
thought in an imperishable form of art. Nor will it here again avail to
demur that Zeus was originally the open sky, Pallas the dawn, Phoebus
and Artemis the sun and moon. The student of the Greeks accepts this
information placidly and gratefully from the philologer; but he passes
immediately beyond it. For him Zeus, Pallas, Phoebus, Artemis are no
longer the sky and dawn, the sun and moon. Whatever their origin may
have been, the very mythopoeic process placed them in quite a different
and more important relation to Greek thought when it handed them over
to Hesiod and Homer, to Pindar and Æschylus, to Pheidias and Polygnotus.
To discuss the bearings of the linguistic and solar theories of
mythology may be reserved for another part of this essay. It is
enough, at this point, to bear in mind that there was nothing in
the consciousness of the prehistoric Greeks which did not take the
form of myth. Consequently their mythology, instead of being a
compact system of polytheism, is really a whole mass of thought,
belonging to a particular period of human history, when it was
impossible to think except by pictures, or to record impressions of
the world except in stories. That all these tales are religious or
semi-religious--concerned, that is to say, with deities--must be
explained by the tendency of mankind at an early period of culture to
conceive the powers of nature as persons, and to dignify them with
superhuman attributes. To the apprehension of infantine humanity
everything is a god. Viewed even as a Pantheon, reduced to rule and
order by subsequent reflection, Greek mythology is, therefore, a
mass of the most heterogeneous materials. Side by side with some of
the sublimest and most beautiful conceptions which the mind has ever
produced, we find in it much that is absurd and trivial and revolting.
Different ages and conditions of thought have left their products
embedded in its strange conglomerate. While it contains fragments of
fossilized stories, the meaning of which has either been misunderstood
or can only be explained by reference to barbaric customs, it also
contains, emergent from the rest and towering above the rubbish, the
serene forms of the Olympians. Those furnish the vital and important
elements of Greek mythology. To perfect them was the work of poets and
sculptors in the brief, bright blooming time of Hellas. Yet, when we
pay these deities homage in the temple of the human spirit, let us not
forget that they first received form in the mythopoeic age--the age of
"the disease of language," as Max Müller whimsically states it.
In order to comprehend a problem so complex as that which is offered
by mythology, we must not be satisfied with approaching it from one
point of view, but must sift opinion, submit our theory to the crucible
in more than one experiment, and, after all our labor, be content
to find that much remains still unexplained. Therefore, it will not
do to accept without further inquiry the general description of the
mythopoeic faculty which has just been advanced. After examining the
various methods which may be adopted for dealing with the myths, and
welcoming the light which can be thrown upon the subject from different
quarters, it will, perhaps, be possible to return to the original
position with a fuller understanding of the problem. If nothing else
be gained by this process, it is, at least, useful to be reminded that
intricate historical questions cannot be settled by one answer alone;
that a variety of agencies must be admitted; and that the domination of
a favorite hypothesis is prejudicial to the end which serious inquiry
has in view.
Regarding the Greek myths in their totality as a thickly tufted
jungle of inexplicable stories, and presupposing the activity of the
mythopoeic faculty to be a play of irrational fancy, it is possible
for the political historian to state them as he finds them, and then
to pass on and to disregard them. This is, practically speaking,
what Grote has done, though the luminous and exhaustive treatment of
mythology in his sixteenth chapter proves his complete mastery of
the subject from the philosophic point of view. Solely occupied with
history, and especially interested in political history, when he has
once recognized "the uselessness of digging for a supposed basis of
truth" in legends which relate to "a past which was never present," he
is justified in leaving them alone. The strong political bias which
concentrates attention upon the development of constitutions and the
history of states, while it throws the æsthetic activity of the race
into the background, sufficiently accounts for this negative relation
to the myths. Its value for our purpose consists in the recognition
that mythology must not be confounded with history.
Another method of dealing with mythology requires a passing notice,
and a brief dismissal. It has not unfrequently been suggested at
uncritical periods of culture, and by uncritical minds in our own
age, that the Greek myths are the degradation of primitive truth
revealed to mankind by God. As they are Christians who advance this
view, the essential dogmas of Christianity are sought for in the Greek
Pantheon. The three persons of the Trinity, the personality of the
devil, the Divine Redeemer, and so forth, are read into the sagas of
Kronos and Prometheus and Phoebus. To bring arguments against a theory
so visionary, and so devoid of real historical imagination, would
be superfluous. Otherwise, it might be questioned how a primitive
revelation, after undergoing such complete disintegration and
debasement, blossomed forth again into the æsthetical beauty which no
one can deny to be the special property of the Greek race. According
to the terms of the hypothesis, a primal truth was first degraded, so
as to lose its spiritual character; and then, from this corruption of
decay, arose a polytheism eminently artistic, which produced works of
beauty in their kind unsurpassable, but in their essence diverse from
the starting-point of revelation. Moreover, the very dogmas which these
visionaries detect in Greek mythology had an historical development
posterior to the formation of the Greek Olympus. It was, for instance,
the Greek genius in its old age which gave the substantiality of
thought to the doctrine of the Trinity. The only good to be got from
the consideration of this vain method is the conviction that a problem
like that of Greek mythology must be studied in itself and for itself.
Whatever its antecedents may have been, its outgrowth in poetry,
philosophy, and sculpture--in other words, its realized or permanent
manifestation--is not Christian, and has nothing but general human
elements in common with Christianity.
A third hypothesis for the explanation of Greek myths, which used
to find much favor with the learned, may be stated thus. Myths were
originally invented by priests and sages, in order to convey to
the popular mind weighty truths and doctrines which could not be
communicated in abstract terms to weak intelligences. Thus, each myth
was a dark speech uttered in parables. The first fatal objection to
this theory is that it does not fulfil its own conditions. To extract a
body of doctrine from the vast majority of the myths is not possible.
Moreover, it is an inversion of the natural order to assume that
priests and sages in a very early age of culture should have been
able to arrive at profound truth, and clever enough to clothe it in
parable, and yet that, as the nation grew in mental power, the truths
should have been forgotten, and the symbols which expressed them have
been taken as truth in and for itself. Without, however, entering
into a discussion of this hypothesis in detail, it is enough to point
out that it implies the same incapacity for realizing the early
conditions of society which is involved in Locke's and Adam Smith's
theory of the Origin of Language. It presupposes fully developed
intelligence, whereas we are concerned precisely with the first and
germinal commencement of intelligence. At the same time there is a
certain foundation for the symbolic theory. Just in the same way as all
language is unconsciously metaphorical, so all myths are parabolical,
inasmuch as they involve the operation of thought seeking to express
itself externally. The mistake lies in maintaining that the parabolic
form was deliberately used in the prehistoric period. Its deliberate
employment must rather be confined to the age of self-conscious
thinking. Thus the myths by which Plato illustrated his philosophy,
the Empedoclean parable of Love and Hate, the Choice of Herakles
invented by the sophist Prodicus, are purposely symbolical. It is also
worth noticing that, among genuine myths, those which seem to justify
this hypothesis are of comparatively late origin, or are immediately
concerned with psychological questions--such, for example, as the myths
of Cupid and Psyche and of Pandora and Epimetheus.
A fourth way of dealing with mythology is to rationalize it, by
assuming that all the marvellous stories told about the gods and heroes
had historical foundation in the past. Myths, according to this method,
become the reminiscences of actual facts, the biographies of persons,
which in course of time have lost their positive truth. In order to
recover and reconstitute that truth, it is necessary to reduce them to
prose. Thus Hecatæus, who was one of the earliest among the Greeks to
attempt this interpretation, declared that Geryon was a king of Epirus,
and that Cerberus was a serpent haunting the caverns of Cape Tænarus.
Herodotus, in like manner, explained the sacred black dove of Dodona
by saying that she was a woman, who came from Egyptian Thebes, and
introduced a peculiar cult of Zeus into Hellas. After the same fashion,
Python, slain by Phoebus, was supposed to have been a troublesome
freebooter. Æolus was changed into a weatherwise seaman, the Centaurs
into horsemen, Atlas into an astronomer, Herakles into a strong-limbed
knight-errant. It was when the old feeling for the myths had died
out among the learned, when physical hypotheses were adopted for the
explanation of the heavens and the earth instead of the religious
belief in nature-deities, and when prose had usurped on poetry, that
this theory was worked into a system. Euhemerus, the contemporary of
the Macedonian Cassander, wrote a kind of novel in which he made out
that all the gods and heroes had once been men. Ennius translated
this work into Latin, and the rationalizing method was called
Euhemerism. The hold which it has retained upon the minds of succeeding
ages is sufficient to show that it readily approves itself to the
understanding. It seems to make everything quite smooth and easy. When,
for instance, we read the revolting legend of Pasiphaë we like to fancy
that after all she only fell in love with a captain called Taurus, and
that Dædalus was an artful go-between. Unfortunately, however, there is
no guide more delusive than Euhemerism. It destroys the true value of
mythology, considered as the expression of primitive thought and fancy,
reducing it to a mere decayed and weed-grown ruin of prosaic fact.
Plato was right when he refused to rationalize the myths, and when,
by his own use of myths, he showed their proper nature as the vehicle
for thoughts as yet incapable of more exact expression. At the same
time it would be unphilosophical to deny that real persons and actual
events have supplied in some cases the subject-matter of mythology. The
wanderings of Odysseus, the Trojan War, the voyage of the Argonauts,
the kingdom of Minos, the achievements of Herakles, have, all of them,
the appearance of dimly preserved or poetized history. Yet to seek to
reconstruct history from them, "to dig for a supposed basis of truth"
in them, is idle. The real thing to bear in mind is that great men and
stirring events must have been remembered even in the mythopoeic age,
and that to eliminate them from the national consciousness would have
been impossible. A nucleus of fact may, therefore, have formed the
basis of certain myths, just as a wire immersed in a solution of salts
will cause the fluid to condense in crystals round it. But, as in the
case just used by way of illustration, we do not see the wire, but the
crystals, after the process has been finished, so in mythology it is
not the fact but the fancy which attracts our attention and calls for
our consideration. This illustration might be extended so as to apply
to any substratum, linguistic, solar, symbolical, or other, that may
be supposed to underlie the fancy-fabric of mythology. The truth to be
looked for in myths is psychological, not historical, æsthetic rather
than positive.
In order to make the relation of actuality to imagination in the
mythopoeic process still more intelligible, another illustration can
be drawn from nature. Pearls are said to be the result of a secretion
effused from the pearl-oyster round a piece of grit or thorn inserted
between its flesh and the shell in which it lives. To the production of
the pearl this extraneous object and the irritation which it causes are
both necessary; yet the pearl is something in itself quite independent
of the stimulating substance. Just so the myth, which corresponds to
the pearl, is a secretion of the national imagination which has been
roused into activity by something accidental and exterior.
It is possible to take a fifth line and to refer mythology to
fetichism. Strictly speaking, fetichism can never explain the problem
of the mythopoeic faculty, except in so far as we may assume it to have
formed a necessary stage of human development anterior to polytheism.
Greek mythology, together with Greek nature-worship, would, according
to this fifth method of interpretation, have to be regarded as a
refinement on the savage dread of fetiches. Beginning with a servile
prostration before the powers of nature, this attitude of simple awe
would have been gradually elevated to the height which it attained in
Homer and Hesiod. In the progressive amelioration of the race myths
would thus have occupied a middle place between the fetich and the free
divinities of art. Putting aside all the difficulties which involve the
question whether fetichism is rightly regarded as the first attitude
of man towards nature, it is clear that the fetichistic hypothesis
cannot cover the whole field of our inquiry. What it does do is to
offer an explanation of the origin of nature-worship, and to account
for the fact that external objects are regarded as living, sentient
beings in the myths. Long before the philosophers of Ionia conjectured
that the stars are fiery vapors, people fancied they were gods. It
has been well observed that the Greeks never speak of a god _of the_
sun, or a goddess _of the_ moon. They worshipped the sun as a god in
Helios, the moon as a goddess in Selene. This direct reference of the
mind to natural things as objects of adoration may, possibly, be a
purified form of fetichism. But, taken by itself alone, fetichism is
not adequate to account for the many-sided, many-featured product of
the mythical imagination, which continued active long after the age
of savagery. Nor, indeed, have the historians, who attribute great
importance to this stage of religious feeling, claimed for it so much.
According to yet a sixth view the myths are to be considered as
nothing more or less than poems. This theory is not, at first sight,
very different from that which is involved in the first account given
of the mythopoeic faculty. It is clear that the stories of Galatea,
of Pan and Pitys, of Hesperus and Hymenæus, and, in a deeper sense,
perhaps, of Prometheus and Pandora, are pure poems. That is to say, the
power which produced them was analogous to the power which we observe
in poetic creation at the present day, and which has continued the
mythopoeic age into the nineteenth century. Yet we should lose a great
deal in exactitude and fulness of conception if we identified mythology
with poetry. Poetry is conscious of its aim; it demands a fixed form;
it knows itself to be an art, and, as an art, to be different from
religion and distinguished from history. Now, mythology in its origin
was antecedent to all such distinctions, and to all the conscious
adaptations of means to ends. Behind the oldest poetry which we possess
there looms a background of mythology, substantially existing, already
expressed in language, nebulous, potential, containing in itself the
germs of all the several productions of the human intellect. The
whole intellect is there in embryo; and behind mythology nothing is
discoverable but thought and language in the same sphere. Therefore we
lose rather than gain by a too strict adherence to what may be termed
the poetical hypothesis, although the analogy of poetry, and of poetry
alone, places us at the right point of view for comprehending the
exercise of the myth-making faculty.
Before completing the circle of inquiry by a return with fuller
knowledge to the point from which we started, it is necessary to
discuss a seventh way of dealing with the problem, which professes to
be alone the truly scientific method. It may be called the linguistic
theory, since it rests upon analysis of language, and maintains that
mythology is not so much an independent product of the human mind,
expressed in words, as a morbid phase of language, considered as
a thing apart. Max Müller, who has given currency to this view in
England, states expressly that "Mythology, which was the bane of the
ancient world, is in truth a disease of language. A myth means a word,
but a word which, from being a name or an attribute, has been allowed
to assume a more substantial existence;" and again, under mythology "I
include every case in which language assumes an independent power and
reacts on the mind, instead of being, as it was intended to be, the
mere realization and outward embodiment of the mind." The first thing
which strikes a student accustomed to regard mythology as a necessary
and important phase in the evolution of thought, when he reads these
definitions, is the assumption that #mythos# is synonymous with what
we mean by word, instead of including the wider content of a story
told in words. He is thus led to suspect a theory which contrives to
make the problem of mythology pass for a branch of philology. Nor
can he comprehend in what sense mythology may be called "a disease
of language" rather than a disease of the mind which uses language.
Does Max Müller mean that language suffered, or that the thinking
subject suffered through the action of the bane? He probably means the
former; but, if so, language must be supposed to live a life apart from
thought, triumphing over the freedom of the human mind, and imposing
its figments on the intellect. Such a belief might seem due partly to
a too exclusive study of language in itself, in the course of which
the philologer comes to regard it as disconnected from thought, and
partly to the neglect of the fact that it is the same human subject
which produces language and myths, that language and thought in their
origin are inseparable, but that when language has once been started,
it has to serve the various purposes of thought, and lend itself to
myth and poem, philosophical analysis and religious dogma. Another
point to criticise is the inevitable corollary that the soul of a great
nation, like the Greeks, for instance, in the course of its advance to
the maturity of art and freedom, passes through a period of derangement
and disease, by which its civilization is vitiated, its vitality
poisoned at the root, and all its subsequent achievements tainted;
and that this spiritual phthisis can be traced to a sickly state of
language at a very remote historical period when as yet the nation was
scarcely constituted. Seriously to entertain this view is tantamount
to maintaining that corruption and disease may be the direct efficient
causes of the highest art on which humanity can pride itself, since it
is indubitable that the poems of Homer and the sculptures of Pheidias
are the direct outgrowth of that "bane of the ancient world" which,
to quote another pithy saying of Max Müller, converted _nomina_ into
_numina_. It is hardly necessary to point out the curious want of faith
in the Welt-Geist (or God) which this implies; the unimaginative habit
of mind we should encourage if we failed to discern the excellence
of a civilization that owed its specific character to mythology;
the unphilosophical conclusions to which we might be brought if we
denied that the intelligence is free while following the fixed laws
of its evolution, and that the essential feature in this evolution
is the advance from rudimentary to more developed thought. Language,
however potent in reaction upon thought, is after all the vehicle
and instrument of thought, and not its master. This leads to yet a
further criticism: granting that language was "intended to be the mere
realization and outward embodiment of the mind"--though this is a wide
begging of the most difficult of all questions--it does not follow
that in mythology language is not pursuing its appointed function. If
the mythological phase of thought is less apparent among the Semitic
than among the Aryan nations, are we to say that this is so because
the Semitic languages escaped the whooping-cough of mythology, or not
far rather because the mind of the Aryan races had a greater aptitude
for mythology, a greater aptitude for art? In the fifth place, the
definition of mythology is too wide for the special purpose of the
problem. Bacon long ago pointed out that one of the chief sources of
error arises from our tendency to mistake words for realities. This
imperfect adjustment of language to the purposes of thought is not
peculiar to the mythopoeic age. When we use such phrases as "vital
force," we are designating the results of observation and experience
by a word which ought not to be regarded as more than a sign. Yet,
because "vital force" has sometimes been recognized as something
positive and substantially existent, we cannot on that account call
it a myth without impoverishing the resources of language, and making
one word do the work of two. The truth, therefore, is, that in the
mythopoeic as in every other age, words have done violence to thought;
nor need it be contested that the _idola fori_ were more potent in the
infancy than in the maturity of intelligence. While concerned with
this branch of our critique, it is curious to observe the satisfaction
with which the advocates of the linguistic theory use it as the means
of rehabilitating the moral character of the ancient Greeks, by trying
to make out that the tales of Oedipus, Pelops, and Kronos owe their
repulsive elements to verbal mistakes. To the student it is undoubtedly
a relief to fancy that the incest of Jocasta was originally no more
than a figurative way of speaking about the alternations of day and
night. He derives, indeed, the same sort of contentment by this
method as the rationalist who explains the legend of Pasiphaë upon
Euhemeristic principles. Yet it is surely a poor way of whitewashing
the imagination of the ancients to have recourse to a theory which
sees in myths nothing better than a mange or distemper breaking out
in language, and tormenting the human mind for a season. Nor can the
theory be stretched so far as to exonerate the nation from its share of
interest in these stories. The people who made the supposed linguistic
mistakes delighted in the grotesque and fantastic legends which were
produced. Even if words deluded them, their wills were free and their
brains at work while under the pernicious influence. The real way of
exculpating the conscience of the Greeks, indicated both by philosophy
and common-sense, is to point out that in the age of reflection
the tragic poets moralized these very myths, and made them the
subject-matter of the gravest art, while the sages instituted a polemic
against the confusion of fabulous mythology with the pure notion of
Godhead obtained by reflection.
The theory of development which seems to underlie the linguistic
doctrine is, that thought in its earliest stage is positive and clear
and adequate. The first savage who thinks sees the sun, for example,
and calls it the sun; but in talking about the sun he begins to use
figurative language, and so converts his simple propositions into
myths. At this point, argues the philologer, he goes wrong and becomes
the victim of delusions. The fallacy in this view appears to lie in
attributing to the simple and sensuous apprehension of the savage the
same sort of simplicity as that which we have gained by a process of
abstraction, and consequently inferring that the importation of fancy
into the thinking process implies a species of degeneracy. The truth
seems rather to be quite the contrary. If we grant, for the sake of
argument, that the first thoughts are in a certain sense simple, they
have nothing in common with the generalizations of the understanding.
Except in relation to immediate perceptions, their generality is empty
until it has been filled up with the varied matter of the senses and
the imagination. Mythology and poetry are, therefore, an advance upon
the primitive prose of simple apprehension. What was a mere round
ball becomes a dædal world; and it is not till the full cycle of the
myth-creating fancy has been exhausted that the understanding can
return upon a higher level by abstraction to intellectual simplicity.
The same is true about theology. The first dim sense of the divine in
nature as a unity may possibly have been prior to the many deities
of polytheism; men may have looked upon the open sky and called
that god. Yet it was not a retrogression, but an advance from that
first perception to the mythological fulness and variety which gave
concreteness to the notion of the deity. In this way the whole content
of human nature--feeling, sense, activity, and so forth--was imported
into the original and hollow notion; or, to state the process with
greater accuracy, the germ of thought, by unfolding its potentiality,
showed that what had seemed a barren unit was a complicated organism
with a multiplicity of parts. It remained for a further stage of
thought, by reflection and abstraction, to return at a higher level to
the conception of intellectual unity. What we have to guard against is
the temptation to attribute our own abstractedness, the definiteness of
positivism, the purity of monotheism, to the first stage of thought.
Ours is the triumph of the understanding in its vigor over bewildering
fulness; theirs was the poverty and nakedness of a first awakening
of intelligence. The same critique might be applied to the theory
that language starts with universals. Here, again, all turns upon the
question, What sort of universals? Unless we are cautious, we run the
risk of ending in a view almost identical with the theory of primitive
revelation, by following which to its conclusions we are forced to
regard the history of the human race, not as a process of development,
but as a series of disastrous errors and of gradual decline.
What remains the solid outcome of the linguistic theory is that in the
mythopoeic age, when there was no criticism and no reflection possible,
the _idola fori_ were far more powerful than now, and consequently many
legends were invented to account for words of which the true meaning
had been forgotten. Accordingly philology is one of the keys by which
the door of mythology may be unlocked. At the same time, considering
the complex relations of thought to language, especially in their
commencement, it is wrong to concentrate attention upon language.
In like manner, it will be admitted that the genders of the nouns
contributed their quota to the personification of female and male
deities; but it would be wrong to argue that the _numina_ were divided
into male and female because the _nomina_ were so distinguished. In
order to appreciate the personifying instinct, we must go back in
imagination to a point beyond the divergence of thought and language;
and we shall find that if priority can be assigned to either, it will
be to thought, as that by which alone the human subject can be said to
be. Language has sex because sex is a property of the talking being.
The deities are male and female, not because their names have genders,
but because the thinking being, for whom sex is all-important, thinks
its own conditions into the world outside it.
The linguistic theory for the interpretation of mythology is based
upon comparative philology, which has proved beyond all contest that
the Aryan races had not only their grammar, but a certain number of
their myths in common before the separation of the Hindoo, Hellenic,
and Teutonic stocks. The Vedic literature exhibits the mythological
material in rudiment, and its style approximates to that of poetry.
Hence it has been assumed that the disease of language was less
virulent in the oldest Aryan writings than it afterwards became in
Hesiod and Homer--the _nomina_ had not as yet been so utterly deformed
and corrupted into _numina_. The inefficiency of arguments like this
is that they have no value except in relation to a previously adopted
view. To the opponent of the linguistic as the only scientific method
for the explanation of myths, it is left to answer: What you regard
as corruption of language I regard as development of thought. What
interests me in Greek mythology is precisely this: that the Aryan poems
have passed into complicated stories illustrative of pure Hellenic
modes of thought and feeling, which in their turn will give occasion
for epics, dramas, statues, and philosophies. In the same way, the
amount of similarity which comparative mythology has demonstrated in
the myths of all the members of the Aryan family is, from the Greek
historian's point of view, far less important than their differences.
The similarity belongs to the stock as it existed in prehistoric
times. The differences mark the external conditions and internal
qualities of the nations as they played their part in the world's
history. The "disease of language" which severally afflicted the
Hindoos, the Persians, the Greeks, and the Scandinavians, turns out
to be a faithful mirror of their concrete life. Any one, by way of
illustration, can work out the problem of national psychology offered
by the nature-worship of the sun in Ormuzd, in Phoebus, and in Balder.
The pale and beautiful Balder, who must perish, and whose death
involves the world in wailing; the radiant and conquering Phoebus,
the healing deity, the purifier, the voice of prophecy and poetry and
music; Ormuzd, the antagonist of darkness and of evil, the object of
desire and adoration to the virtuous and pure--these sun-gods answer
to the races, as their geographical conditions and their spirit made
them. Nor is this all. The mythology of each nation has a physiognomy
and character of its own--that of the Greeks being clearness and
articulation in opposition to the formlessness and misty vagueness of
the Hindoos. To mistake a Greek tale of deity or hero for a Hindoo tale
of deity or hero is impossible. While the student of prehistorical
antiquities will, therefore, direct attention to the likeness revealed
by comparative mythology, the historian of nations will rather be
attracted by those differences which express themselves in mature art,
literature, and religion.[10]
One of the most salient points of similarity between the several
families of Aryan myths concerns those which are called solar legends.
In all of these we read of children fated to slay their fathers, of
strong giants condemned to obey the rule of feeble princes, of heroic
young men forced to quit their first love for another woman. The
heroes of these stories are marked out in their cradle by miraculous
signs and wonders, or are suckled by wild beasts in the absence of
their parents; in their youth they slay serpents sent to destroy
them; in their manhood they shine forth as conquerors. Their death
is not unfrequently caused by slight and unforeseen, though fated,
occurrences--by a weapon that strikes the only vulnerable part of their
body, in the case of Achilles and Siegfried; by a twig of mistletoe,
in the case of Balder; by a thorn, in the case of Isfendiyar; by an
envenomed mantle, in the case of Herakles. One great mythus fascinated
the imagination of Norsemen and Hindoos, Greek and Persian, German
and Roman; interwove itself with their history; gave a form to their
poetry; and assumed a prominent place in their religion. So far, it
may be said that comparative philology has established something
solid, which is at the same time of vast importance for the student of
prehistorical antiquity. It is also not improbable that these legends
referred originally to the vicissitudes of the sun in his yearly and
daily journeys through the heavens. Thus much may be conceded to the
solar theorists, remembering always that this primitive astronomical
significance, if it existed, was forgotten by the races for whom the
myths became the material of poetry and religion. But, unfortunately,
the discovery has been strained beyond its proper limits by students
who combine a solar theory with the linguistic in their interpretation
of mythology. In their hands all the myths are made to refer to the sun
and the moon, to dawn and evening. "The difficulty," says Max Müller,
"which I myself have most keenly felt is the monotonous character
of the dawn and sun legends. Is everything the dawn? is everything
the sun? This question I had asked myself many times before it was
addressed me by others." How consistently Professor Max Müller found
himself obliged to answer this question in the affirmative is known
to every student of his works, not to mention those of Mr. Cox. The
hand-books of mythology which are now in vogue in England expound
this solar theory so persistently that it is probable a race is
growing up who fancy that the early Greeks talked with most "damnable
iteration" of nothing but the weather, and that their conversation on
that fruitful topic fell sick of some disease, breeding the tales of
Thebes and Achilles and Pelops's line, as a child breeds measles. It is
therefore necessary to subject it to criticism.
The first point for notice is that mythology lends itself almost as
well to meteorological as to solar theories. Kuhn and Schwartz, as
Professor Müller himself informs us, arrived at the conclusion that
"originally the sun was conceived implicitly as a mere accident in the
heavenly scenery." Instead, therefore, of finding the sun and the dawn
in all the myths, they are always stumbling upon clouds and winds and
thunder. This differing of the doctors is, after all, no great matter.
Yet it warns us to be careful in adopting so exclusively, as is the
present fashion, either the solar or the meteorological hypothesis.
A second consideration which inclines to caution is the facility
of adapting the solar theory to every story, whether fabulous or
historical. In this sense the famous tract which proved that Napoleon
the Great only existed in the mythical imagination may be taken as a
_reductio ad absurdum_ of the method. A third ground for suspension of
judgment lies in the very elaborate manipulation which the etymologies
of such words as Eros, Erinnys, and the Charites have undergone before
they yielded up their solar content. But the multiplication of general
objections is not to the present purpose. It is enough to bear in
mind that, however important the sun was to the ancient Aryans, he
could not have been everything: he was, after all, but one among many
objects of interest; and what requires to be still more remembered, is
that the Greeks themselves in dealing with the tales of Achilles, or
of Kephalos and Prokris, did not know that they were handling solar
stories. It is, therefore, misleading to base hand-books which serve
as introductions to Greek literature and art upon speculation about
the solar groundwork of the myths. In the works of Homer and Hesiod,
of Æschylus and Sophocles, the myths were animated with spiritual,
intellectual, and moral life. To draw the lessons from them which those
poets drew, to demonstrate the grandeur of the imagination which could
deal with those primeval tragic tales, should be the object of the
educator; not to fill his pages with extremely doubtful matter about
sun and dawn _ad infinitum_. The true relation of the solar theory
to a Greek myth may be illustrated by the tale of Herakles, whom the
Greeks themselves may perhaps have recognized as a solar deity, since
Herodotus identified him with a Phoenician god.[11] We are therefore
justified in dealing with this hero as a personification of the sun.
Herakles is the child of Zeus. He strangles in his cradle the serpents
of the night. He loves Iole, or the violet-colored clouds of dawn. He
performs twelve labors, corresponding to the twelve months of the solar
year. He dies of a poisoned robe amid flames that may be taken for the
blood-red sunset clouds. The maiden Iole, now evening and not morning,
visits him again in death; and he ascends from his funeral pyre of
empurpled mountain peaks to heaven. Let all this be granted. So far
the solar theory carries us. But is this all? In other words, is this,
which the current hand-books tell us about Herakles, the pith of the
matter as it appeared to the Greeks? When we turn to the _Philosophy of
History_ of Hegel, who worked by another than the solar method, and was
more anxious to discover thoughts than etymologies, we read: "Hercules
is among the Hellenes that spiritual humanity which, by native energy,
attains Olympus through the twelve far-famed labors; but the foreign
idea that lies at the basis is the sun completing its revolution
through the twelve signs of the Zodiac." Here we touch the truth. The
solar foundation of the mythus is wholly valueless and unimportant--in
other words, is alien to its essence, when compared with the moral
import it acquired among the Greeks. It is the conception of life-long
service to duty, of strength combined with patience, of glory followed
at the cost of ease, of godhead achieved by manhood through arduous
endeavor--it is this that is really vital in the myth of Herakles. By
right of this the legend entered the sphere of religion and of art. In
this spirit the sophist enlarged upon it, when he told how Herakles in
his youth chose virtue with toil rather than pleasure, incorporating
thus the high morality of Hesiod with the mythical element. If myths
like these are in any sense diseased words about the sun, we must go
further and call them immortalized words, words that have attained
eternal significance by dying of the disease that afflicted them. The
same remarks apply to all the solar and lunar stories--to Achilles,
Endymion, Kephalos, and all the rest. As solar myths these tales had
died to the Greeks. As poems, highly capable of artistic treatment, in
sculpture, or in verse, pregnant with humanity, fit to form the subject
of dramatic presentation or ethical debate, they retained incalculable
value. The soul of the nation was in them. And that is their value for
us.
To deny the important part which the sun, like the earth or the sea,
played in early mythology would be absurd. To dispute the illumination
which comparative philology has thrown not only upon the problem of
the myths, but also upon the early unity of races until recently
divided in our thought, would be still more ridiculous. The point at
issue is simply this, that in Greek mythology there is far more than
linguistic and solar theories can explain, and that _more_ is precisely
the Greek genius. The philologer from his point of view is justified
in directing attention to the verbal husk of myths; but the student of
art and literature must keep steadily in view the kernel of thought and
feeling which the myths contain. It is only by so doing that the poetry
and art which sprang from them can be intelligently studied. Thus the
modern text-books of mythology are misleading, in so far as they draw
the learner's mind away from subjects of historical importance to bare
archæology.
As the result of analysis, the following propositions may be advanced.
In the earliest ages the races to whom we owe languages and literature
and art possessed a faculty which may be called the mythopoeic, now
almost wholly extinct, or rather superseded by the exercise of other
faculties which it contained in embryo. The operation of this faculty
was analogous to that of the poetic; that is to say, it was guided
by the imagination more than by the dry light of the understanding,
and its creative energy varied in proportion to the imaginative vigor
of the race which exercised it. The distinction here introduced is
all-important; for only thus can we explain the very different nature
of the Greek and Roman religions. The tendency to personification which
distinguishes mythology was due to the instinct of uncivilized humanity
to impute to external objects a consciousness similar to that by which
men are governed--in other words, to regard them as living agents with
wills and passions like our own. If fetichism be the rudimentary phase
of this instinct, polytheism indicates an advance by which the mind
has passed from the mere recognition of spiritual power in nature to
the investment of that power with personal and corporeal qualities.
But just as the imagination varies in degree and force in different
races, so will this power of carrying the personifying instinct onward
into art be found to vary. The Romans stopped short at allegories;
in other words, they did not carry their personification beyond the
first stage. The Greeks created divine personalities. Many myths
contain moral and philosophical ideas conveyed in parables, and some
of them have indubitable reference to real events and persons. But in
no case of a primitive and genuine mythus are we to expect deliberate
fiction or conscious symbolism, or, again, to seek for a discoverable
substratum of solid fact. Entering the sphere of mythology, facts
become etherealized into fancies, the actual value of which lies in the
expression of the national mind, so that mythical and spiritual are in
this respect synonymous. To use a metaphor, a myth is a Brocken-spectre
of the thought which produced it, and owes the features by which we
can distinguish it to the specific character of the people among
whom it sprang into existence. The analysis of language shows that
the whole Aryan family held a great number of their myths in common,
that many legends are stories told to account for words and phrases
which had lost their original significance, and that in these stories
the alternations of night and day and the procession of the seasons
played a very important part. Philology can, however, furnish no more
than the prolegomena to mythology. After hearing its report, the
student of Greek art and literature must take the Greek myths at a
Greek valuation--must consider what they were for the Athenians, for
example, and not what they had once been. Finally, it may be remembered
that to hope for a complete elucidation of a problem so far removed
from observation and experiment would be vain. The conditions of the
mythopoeic age cannot be reconstituted; and were they to reappear
through the destruction of civilizations, the reflective understanding
would not be present to examine and record them.
The difficulty which besets the problem of mythology, owing to the
remote antiquity of the myth-making age, is to some extent removed
by observing the operation of the mythopoeic faculty in the historic
period. Given social circumstances similar, if even only in a limited
degree, to those of the prehistoric age; given a defect of the critical
and reflective faculty, an absence of fixed records, and a susceptible
condition of the popular imagination, myths have always sprung up.
While it is not, therefore, possible to find exact analogies to the
conditions under which the Greek mythology originated, something may be
gained by directing attention to mediæval romance. The legends which
in Italy converted Virgil into a magician, the epic cycles of Charles
the Great and Arthur, the Lives of the Saints, the fable of Tannhäuser
and the Venusberg, the Spanish tale of Don Juan, and the German tale
of Faust are essentially mythical. What is instructive about mediæval
romance for the student of mythology in general is that here the
mythopoeic imagination has been either dealing with dim recollections
of past history, or else has been constructing for itself a story to
express a doctrine. After excluding the hypothesis of conscious working
to a prefixed end, we, therefore, find in these legends an illustration
of the sense in which the symbolical and rationalistic theories can
be said to be justified. In the case of Virgil, the poetry of Rome's
greatest singer never ceased to be studied during the darkest years
of the dark ages, and his name was familiar even to people who could
not read his verse. He was known to have been a pagan, and at the same
time possessed with what then seemed like superhuman knowledge. It
followed that he must have been a wizard, and have gained his power
and wisdom by compelling fiends. Having formed this notion of Virgil,
the popular fancy ascribed to him all the vast works of architecture
and engineering which remained at Rome and Naples, inventing the most
curious stories to explain why he had made them. When we turn to the
Carlovingian cycle, we discover that the great name of the Frankish
emperor, the memory of his wars, and the fame of his generals have
survived and been connected with the crusading enthusiasm which
pervaded Europe at a later period. Border-warfare between France and
Spain plays a prominent part in this epic, and gradually the figure
of Roland usurps upon the more historically important personages. To
"dig for a supposed basis of truth" in the Carlovingian cycle would
be vain; yet the view is forced upon us that without some historical
basis the cycle would not have sprung into existence, or have formed
a framework for the thought and feeling of one period of the Middle
Ages. The achievements of Arthur must be regarded as still more wholly
mythological. The more we inquire into his personality, the less we
find of real historical subsistence. A Celtic hero, how created it
is impossible to say, becomes the central figure of the most refined
romance which occupied the attention of German, French, and British
poets in the Middle Ages. Round the fictitious incidents of his
biography gathers all that chivalry, with its high sense of humanity
and its profound religious mysticism, conceived of purest and most
noble; while, at the same time, certain dark and disagreeable details,
especially the incestuous union from which Mordred sprang, remind
us of the savage and unmoralized origin of the fable. We therefore
find in the Arthurian cycle something very much analogous to the
Tale of Troy. The dim memory of a national struggle, an astronomical
myth, perchance, and many incidents of merely local interest have
been blended together and filled with the very spirit of the ages
and the races that delighted in the story as a story. This spiritual
content gives its value to the epic. Mediæval hagiography furnishes
abundant examples of the way in which facts transform themselves into
fables and mythological material is moulded into shape around some
well-remembered name, the religious consciousness externalizing itself
in acts which it attributes to its heroes. When we read the _Fioretti
di San Francesco_, we are well aware that the saint lived--his life is
one of the chief realities of the thirteenth century; but we perceive
that the signs and wonders wrought by him proceed from the imagination
of disciples ascribing to St. Francis what belongs partly to the
ideal of his own character and partly to that of monastic sanctity
in general. In the fable of Tannhäuser we meet with another kind of
reminiscence. There is less of fact and more of pure invention. The
pagan past, existent as a sort of dæmonic survival, is localized at
Hörsel. The interest, however, consists here wholly in the parabolic
meaning--whether Tannhäuser ever existed does not signify. His legend
is a poem of the Christian knight ensnared by sin, aroused to a sense
of guilt, condemned by the supreme tribunal of the Church, and pardoned
by the grace of God. In like manner, the lust for knowledge, for power,
and for pleasure, withheld by God and nature, finds expression in the
Faust legend; while inordinate carnal appetite is treated tragically
in _Don Juan_. These three legends deserve to be called myths rather
than poems in the stricter sense of the word, because they appear at
many points and cannot be traced up to three definite artistic sources,
while it is clear from their wide acceptance that they embodied
thoughts which were held to be of great importance. In them, therefore,
we find illustrated the theory which explains mythology by the
analogy of poetry. That the mediæval myths which have been mentioned
never attained the importance of Greek mythology is immediately
accounted for by the fact that they sprang up, as it were, under the
shadow of philosophy, religion, and history. They belonged to the
popular consciousness; and this popular consciousness had no need or
opportunity of converting its creatures into a body of beliefs, because
both science and orthodoxy existed. In the historic period mythology
must always occupy this subordinate position; and, perhaps, this fact
might be reflected back as a further argument, if such were needed,
against the theories that the Greek myths, while leading onward to the
Greek Pantheon and Greek art, originated as an undergrowth beneath the
decaying fabric of revealed truth or firmly apprehended philosophical
ideas. At all events, both the positive and negative circumstances
which we observe in them confirm the general view of mythology that has
been advanced.
The Homeric and Hesiodic poems were interposed between the reflective
consciousness of the Greeks in the historic age and the mass of myths
already existent in Hellas at the time of their composition, and thus
mythology passed into the more advanced stage of art. It did not,
however, cease on that account to retain some portion of its original
plasticity and fluidity. It is clear from Pindar and the fragments of
the minor lyric poets, from the works of the dramatists, from Plato,
and from other sources, that what Herodotus reports about Homer and
Hesiod having fixed the genealogies of the gods cannot be taken too
literally. Non-Homeric and non-Hesiodic versions of the same tales
were current in various parts of Greece. The same deities in different
places received different attributes and different forms of worship;
and the same legends were localized in widely separated spots. Each
division of the Hellenic family selected its own patron deities,
expressing in their cult and ritual the specific characteristics which
distinguished Dorian, Æolian, and Ionian Hellas. At the same time
certain headquarters of worship, like the shrine of Delphi and the
temple of Olympian Zeus, were strictly Panhellenic. In this way it is
clear that while Greek mythology acquired the consistence of a natural
religion, it retained its free poetic character in a great measure.
The nation never regarded their myths as a body of fixed dogma, to
alter which was impious. Great liberty, consequently, was secured for
artists; and it may be said with truth that the Greeks arrived through
sculpture at a consciousness of their gods. A new statue was, in a
certain sense, a new deity, although the whole aim of the sculptor
must, undoubtedly, have been to render visible the thoughts contained
in myths and purified by poetry, and so to pass onward step-wise to a
fuller and fuller realization of the spiritual type. It is this unity,
combined with difference, that makes the study of Greek sculpture
fascinating in itself, and fruitful for the understanding of the Greek
religion.
It lies beyond the scope of this chapter to consider how the Greek
intelligence was first employed upon the articulation of its mythology,
and next upon its criticism. The tradition of a Titanomachy, or contest
between nature-powers and deities of reason, marks the first step in
the former process. The cosmogonical forces personified in the Titans
gave place to the presiding deities of political life and organized
society, in whom the human reason recognized itself as superior to
mere nature. Olympus was reserved for gods of intellectual order, and
thus the Greeks worshipped what was best and noblest in themselves. At
the same time the cosmogonical divinities were not excluded from the
Greek Pantheon, and so there grew up a kind of hierarchy of greater
and lesser deities. Oceanus, Poseidon, Proteus, the Tritons and the
Nereids, Amphitrite and Thetis, for example, are all powers of the
sea. They are the sea conceived under different aspects, its divine
personality being multitudinously divided and delicately characterized
in each case to accord with the changes in the element. The same kind
of articulation is observable in the worship of deities under several
attributes. Aphrodite Ourania and Aphrodite Pandemos are one as well
as two. Eros and Himeros and Pothos are not so much three separate
loves, as love regarded from three different points of view. Here
the hierarchy is psychological, and represents an advance made in
reflection upon moral qualities; whereas in the former case it was
based on the observation of external nature. To this inquiry, again,
belongs the question of imported myths and foreign cults. The worship
of Corinthian Aphrodite, for example, was originally Asiatic. Yet,
on entering Greek thought, Mylitta ceased to be Oriental and assumed
Hellenic form and character. Sensuality was recognized as pertaining
to the goddess whose domain included love and beauty and the natural
desires.
More than the vaguest outlines of such subjects of interest cannot
be indicated here. It is enough to have pointed out that as Greek
mythology was eminently imaginative, fertile in fancy and prolific in
dramatic incident, so it found its full development in poetry and art.
Only through art can it be rightly comprehended; and the religion for
which it supplied the groundwork was itself a kind of art. It is just
this artistic quality which distinguished the Greeks from the Romans.
As Mommsen well observes, "there was no formation of legend in the
strict sense in Italy." The Italian gods were in their origin more
matter-of-fact than Greek gods. They contained from the first a prosaic
element which they never threw aside; nor did they give occasion to the
growth of fable with its varied fabric of human action and passion.
Thus the legal and political genius of the Latin race worshipped its
own qualities in these allegorical beings.
The process hitherto described has been the passage of mythology
into religion and the expression of religion by art. When the Greek
intelligence became reflective in the first dawn of philosophy, it
recognized that the notion of divinity, #to theion#, was independent
and in some sense separable from the persons of the Pantheon in
whom it inhered. This recognition led to a criticism of the myths
by the standard of ideal godhead. Just as the Olympic deities, as
representative of pure intellect or spirit, had superseded the bare
nature-forces, so now the philosophers sought to distil a refined
conception of God from the myths in general. Their polemic was directed
against Homer, in whom, like Herodotus, they recognized the founder
of the current mythological theology. Both Pythagoras and Heraclitus
are reported to have said that Homer ought to be publicly thrust from
the assembly and scourged. Xenophanes plainly asserted that the Greek
anthropomorphism was no better than a worship of humanity with all its
vices, illustrating his critique by adding that just in the same way
might lions adore lions and horses horses. His own conception of the
deity was monotheistic, to this extent, at least, that he abstracted
from the universe a notion of divine power and wisdom, and ascribed to
it the only reality. Plato, in the _Republic_, unified these points of
view, severely criticising Homer for the immorality of his fictions,
and attributing to his own demiurgic deity those qualities of goodness,
truth, and beauty which are the highest ideals of the human spirit.
In connection with this polemic against poetical theology, we have to
notice the attempts of physical philosophers to explain the universe
by natural causes, and the great saying of Anaxagoras that reason
rules the world. Thus the speculative understanding, following various
lines of thought and adopting diverse theories, tended to react upon
mythology and to corrode the ancient fabric of Greek polytheism. In
the course of this disintegrating process a new and higher religion
was developed, which Plato expressed by saying that we ought "to
become like God, as far as this is possible; and to become like him
is to become holy and just and wise." At the same time those who felt
the force of the critique, but could not place themselves at the new
scientific point of view, remained sceptical; and against this kind of
scepticism, which implied personal lawlessness, Aristophanes directed
his satire. Whatever may have been the attitude of philosophers in
their schools, mythology meanwhile retained its hold upon the popular
mind. It was bound up with the political traditions, the gentile
customs, the ritual, and the arts of the whole race. To displace it by
a reasoned system of theology, enforced by nothing stronger than the
theories of the sages, was impossible. The extent to which philosophy
permanently affected the creed of thinking and religious men in Greece
by substituting theism for the fabulous theology of the poets has been
well expressed in Plutarch's _Life of Pericles_. "So dispassionate a
temper," he observes, "a life so pure and unblemished in authority,
might well be called Olympian, in accordance with our conceptions of
the divine beings to whom, as the natural authors of all good and of
nothing evil, we ascribe the rule and government of the world--not as
the poets represent, who, while confounding us with their ignorant
fancies, are themselves confuted by their own poems and fictions, and
call the place, indeed, where they say the gods make their abode, 'a
secure and quiet seat, untroubled with winds or clouds,' and 'equally
through all time illumined with a soft serenity and a pure light,'
as though such were a home most agreeable for a blessed and immortal
nature; and yet, in the meanwhile, affirm that the gods themselves
are full of trouble and enmity and anger, and other passions which no
way become or belong to even men that have any understanding." It is
clear that when the religious consciousness had reached this point of
purified clairvoyance the race was ready for a more spiritual theology,
which philosophers like Marcus Aurelius found in natural religion,
while the common folk accepted Christianity.
After flowing side by side for many centuries, the currents of
mythological belief and of philosophical speculation reunited at
Alexandria, where a final attempt was made to animate the Homeric
Pantheon with the spirit of metaphysical mysticism. Homer became a
priest as well as poet, and the _Iliad_ was made to furnish allegories
for an age grown old in intellectual subtlety. This was the last
period of mythology. While Hypatia was lecturing on Homer, the
Christians were converting the world. To keep the gods of Greece alive
was no longer possible. Regarded from the beginning as persons with a
body corresponding to their spiritual substance, they had in them the
certainty of dissolution. Though removed ideally beyond the sphere of
human chance and change, they remained men and women with passions like
our own. Pure spirit had not been realized in them; and blind fate had
from the first been held to be supreme above them. Unlike the incarnate
God of Christianity, they had not passed forth from the spiritual world
to abide here for a season and return to it again. Therefore they
perished. During the domination of mediæval Christianity the utmost
they could do was to haunt the memory like wraiths and phantoms, to
linger in neglected and unholy places like malignant powers of evil.
But when the force of ascetic Christianity declined, and the spirit
of humane culture re-awoke in Europe, these old gods reasserted their
ascendency--no longer as divinities indeed, but as poems forming an
essential element of the imagination. The painters and sculptors of
Italy gave once more in breathing marble and fair color form to those
immortal thoughts. The poets sang the old songs of Hellas in new
language to new measures. Even the Churchmen invoked God from Roman
pulpits as _Summus Jupiter_, and dignified Madonna with the attributes
of Artemis and Pallas.
Such is the marvellous vitality of this mythology. Such is its
indissoluble connection with the art and culture which sprang from it,
of which it was the first essential phase, and to which we owe so much.
Long after it has died as religion, it lives on as poetry, retaining
its original quality, though the theology contained in it has been
forever superseded or absorbed into more spiritual creeds.
NOTE.--I wish to qualify what I have said upon pp. 67-80
by stating that my critique of the linguistic and solar
theories is not, as I hope, directed in any impertinent spirit
against the illustrious teacher to whom, in common with most
Englishmen, I owe nearly all my knowledge of comparative
mythology, but rather against notions which have gained
currency through a too exclusive attention to the origin of
Greek mythology. I want to remind students of Greek literature
that, after all they may have learned from Sanscrit, they are
still upon the threshold of mythology as it was determined by
the genius of the Greek race. There is a danger of diverting
the mind from questions of thoughts to questions of words, and
leading people to fancy that etymological solutions are final.
FOOTNOTES:
[8] For this reason the analogy of existing barbarous races will not
help us much, inasmuch as they are not Greeks nor destined to be
Greeks. This consideration ought to weigh with those who, struck by
the depth and beauty of some Greek myths, theorize a corruption of
primitive revelation or pure theology to explain them. They ought to
remember that they are dealing with the myths of Greeks--our masters in
philosophy and poetry and art.
[9] The original is quoted in the Notes to Grote, vol. i. p. 474.
[10] The dissimilarity between Greek and Roman religion has often been
observed, and will be touched upon below. Supposing it to be proved
that the Romans can produce one relic of an Aryan myth in Romulus,
we find that their most native deities--Saturnus, Ops, Bellona,
Janus, Terminus, Concordia, Fides, Bonus Eventus, and so forth--are
abstractions which have nothing in common with Greek or other Aryan
legends. They are the characteristic product of the Roman mind, and
indicate its habit of thought. In like manner it is only by a crasis
amounting to confusion that Mercurius can be identified with Hermes, or
Hercules with Herakles.
[11] ii. 44.
CHAPTER III.
_ACHILLES._
Unity of _Iliad_.--Character of Achilles.--Structure of the
whole Poem.--Comparison with other Epics.--Energy Dividing
into Anger and Love.--Personality of Achilles.--The Quarrel
with Agamemnon.--Pallas Athene.--The Embassy.--Achilles'
Foreknowledge of his Death.--The Message of
Antilochus.--Interview with Thetis.--The Shouting in
the Trench.--The Speech of Xanthus.--The Pæan over
Hector's Corpse.--The Ghost of Patroclus.---The Funeral
Obsequies of Patroclus.--Achilles and Priam.--Achilles in
Hades.--Achilles Considered as a Greek Ideal.--Friendship
among the Greeks.--Heroism and Knighthood: Ancient and
Modern Chivalry.--The _Myrmidones_ of Æschylus.--Achilles
and Hector.--Alexander the Great.--The Dæmonic Nature of
Achilles.
It is the sign of a return to healthy criticism that scholars are
beginning to acknowledge that the _Iliad_ may be one poem--that is
to say, no mere patchwork of ballads and minor epics put together by
some diaskeuast in the age of Pisistratus, but the work of a single
poet, who surveyed his creation as an artist, and was satisfied with
its unity. We are not bound to pronounce an opinion as to whether
this poet was named Homer, whether Homer ever existed, and, if so,
at what period of the world's history he lived. We are not bound to
put forward a complete view concerning the college of Homeridæ, from
which the poet must have arisen, if he did not found it. Nor, again,
need we deny that the _Iliad_ itself presents unmistakable signs of
having been constructed in a great measure out of material already
existing in songs and romances dear to the Greek nation in their youth,
and familiar to the poet. The æsthetic critic finds no difficulty
in conceding, nay, is eager to claim, a long genealogy through
antecedent, now forgotten, poems for the _Iliad_. But about this, of
one thing, at any rate, he will be sure, after due experience of the
tests applied by Wolf and his followers, that a great artist gave
its present form to the _Iliad_, that he chose from the whole Trojan
tale a central subject for development, and that all the episodes and
collateral matter with which he enriched his epic were arranged by him
with a view to the effect that he had calculated.
What, then, was this central subject, which gives the unity of a true
work of art to the _Iliad_? We answer, the person and the character
of Achilles. It is not fanciful to say, with the old grammarians of
Alexandria, that the first line of the poem sets forth the whole of its
action--
Sing, goddess, the wrath of Achilles, son of Peleus.
The wrath of Achilles, and the consequences of that wrath in the misery
of the Greeks, left alone to fight without their fated hero; the death
of Patroclus, caused by his sullen anger; the energy of Achilles,
reawakened by his remorse for his friend's death; and the consequent
slaughter of Hector, form the whole of the simple structure of the
_Iliad_. This seems clear enough when we analyze the conduct of the
poem.
The first book describes the quarrel of Achilles with Agamemnon and
his secession from the war. The next seven books and a half, from the
second to the middle of the ninth, are occupied with the fortunes
of the Greeks and Trojans in the field, the exploits of Diomede and
Ajax, and Hector's attack upon the camp. In the middle of the ninth
book Achilles reappears upon the scene. Agamemnon sends Ulysses and
Phoenix to entreat him to relax his wrath and save the Greeks; but the
hero remains obdurate. He has resolved that his countrymen shall pay
the uttermost penalty for the offense of their king. The poet having
foredetermined that Achilles shall only consent to fight in order to
revenge Patroclus, is obliged to show the inefficacy of the strongest
motives from without; and this he has effected by the episode of the
embassy. The tenth book relates the night attack upon the camp of the
Trojan allies and the theft of the horses of Rhesus. The next five
books contain a further account of the warfare carried on among the
ships between the Achaians and their foes. It is in the course of these
events that Patroclus comes into prominence. We find him attending on
the wounded Eurypylus and warning Achilles of the imminent peril of the
fleet. At last, in the sixteenth book, when Hector has carried fire
to the ship of Protesilaus, Achilles commands Patroclus to assume the
armor of Peleus and lead his Myrmidons to war. The same book describes
the repulse of Hector and the death of Patroclus, while the seventeenth
is taken up with the fight for the body of Achilles' friend. But from
the eighteenth onward the true hero assumes his rank as protagonist,
making us feel that what has gone before has only been a preface to his
action. His seclusion from the war has not only enabled the poet to
vary the interest by displaying other characters, but has also proved
the final intervention of Achilles to be absolutely necessary for the
success of the Greek army. All the threads of interest are gathered
together and converge on him. Whatever we have learned concerning the
situation of the war, the characters of the chiefs, and the jealousies
of the gods, now serves to dignify his single person and to augment
the terror he inspires. With his mere shout he dislodges the Trojans
from the camp. The divine arms of Hephæstus are fashioned for him, and
forth he goes to drive the foe like mice before him. Then he contends
with Simoeis and Scamander, the river-gods. Lastly, he slays Hector.
What follows in the twenty-third and twenty-fourth books seems to be
intended as a repose from the vehement action and high-wrought passion
of the preceding five. Patroclus is buried, and his funeral games are
celebrated. Then, at the very end, Achilles appears before us in the
interview with Priam, no longer as a petulant spoiled child or fiery
barbarian chief, but as a hero, capable of sacrificing his still fierce
passion for revenge to the nobler emotion of reverence for the age and
sorrow of the sonless king.
The centralization of interest in the character of Achilles constitutes
the grandeur of the _Iliad_. It is also by this that the _Iliad_ is
distinguished from all the narrative epics of the world. In the case
of all the rest there is one main event, one deed which has to be
accomplished, one series of actions with a definite beginning and
ending. In none else are the passions of the hero made the main points
of the movement. This may be observed at once by comparing the _Iliad_
with the chief epical poems of European literature. To begin with the
_Odyssey_. The restoration, after many wanderings, of Odysseus to his
wife and kingdom forms the subject of this romance. When that has been
accomplished, the _Odyssey_ is completed. In the same way the subject
of the _Æneid_ is the foundation of the Trojan kingdom in Italy. Æneas
is conducted from Troy to Carthage, from Carthage to Latium. He flies
from Dido, because fate has decreed that his empire should not take
root in Africa. He conquers Turnus because it is destined that he, and
not the Latin prince, should be the ancestor of Roman kings. As soon as
Turnus has been killed and Lavinia has been wedded to Æneas, the action
of the poem is accomplished and the _Æneid_ is completed. When we pass
to modern epics, the first that meets us is the _Niebelungen Lied_.
Here the action turns upon the murder of Sigfrit by Hagen, and the
vengeance of his bride, Chriemhilt. As soon as Chriemhilt has assembled
her husband's murderers in the halls of King Etzel, and there has
compassed their destruction, the subject is complete, the _Niebelungen_
is at an end. The British epic of the Round Table, if we may regard
Sir Thomas Mallory's _Mort d'Arthur_ as a poem, centres in the life and
predestined death of King Arthur. Upon the fate of Arthur hangs the
whole complex series of events which compose the romance. His death
is its natural climax, for with him expires the Round Table he had
framed to keep the pagans in awe. After that event nothing remains for
the epic poet to relate. Next in date and importance is the _Orlando
Furioso_ of Ariosto. The action of this poem is bound up with the
destinies of Ruggiero and Bradamante. Their separations and wanderings
supply the main fabric of the plot. When these are finally ended, and
their marriage has been consummated, nothing remains to be related. The
theme of the _Gerusalemme Liberata_, again, is the conquest of the Holy
City from the Saracens. When this has been described, there is nothing
left for Tasso to tell. The _Paradise Lost_, in spite of its more
stationary character, does not differ from this type. It sets forth
the single event of the fall. After Adam and Eve have disobeyed the
commands of their Maker and have been expelled from Eden, the subject
is exhausted, the epic is at an end.
Thus each of these great epic poems has one principal event, on which
the whole action hinges and which leaves nothing more to be narrated.
But with the _Iliad_ it is different. At the end of the _Iliad_ we
leave Achilles with his fate still unaccomplished, the Trojan war still
undecided. The _Iliad_ has no one great external event or series of
events to narrate. It is an episode in the war of Troy, a chapter in
the life of Peleus's son. But it does set forth, with the vivid and
absorbing interest that attaches to true æsthetic unity, the character
of its hero, selecting for that purpose the group of incidents which
best display it.
The _Iliad_, therefore, has for its whole subject the passion of
Achilles--that ardent energy or #MÊNIS# of the hero, which displayed
itself first as anger against Agamemnon, and afterwards as love for
the lost Patroclus. The truth of this was perceived by one of the
greatest poets and profoundest critics of the modern world, Dante. When
Dante, in the _Inferno_, wished to describe Achilles, he wrote, with
characteristic brevity:
Achille,
Che per amore al fine combatteo.
Achilles,
Who at the last was brought to fight by love.
In this pregnant sentence Dante sounded the whole depth of the
_Iliad_. The wrath of Achilles against Agamemnon, which prevented him
at first from fighting; the love of Achilles, passing the love of
women, for Patroclus, which induced him to forego his anger and to
fight at last--these are the two poles on which the _Iliad_ turns.
Two passions--heroic anger and measureless love--in the breast of the
chief actor, are the motive forces of the poem. It is this simplicity
in the structure of the _Iliad_ which constitutes its nobleness.
There is no double plot, no attempt to keep our interest alive by
misunderstandings, or treacheries, or thwartings of the hero in his
aims. These subtleties and resources of art the poet, whom we will call
Homer, for the sake of brevity, discards. He trusts to the magnitude
of his chief actor, to the sublime central figure of Achilles, for the
whole effect of his epic. It is hardly necessary to insist upon the
highly tragic value of this subject. The destinies of two great nations
hang trembling in the balance. Kings on the earth below, gods in the
heavens above, are moved to turn this way or that the scale of war.
Meanwhile the whole must wait upon the passions of one man. Nowhere
else, in any work of art, has the relation of a single heroic character
to the history of the world been set forth with more of tragic pomp
and splendid incident. Across the scene on which gods and men are
contending in fierce rivalry moves the lustrous figure of Achilles,
ever potent, ever young, but with the ash-white aureole of coming death
around his forehead. He too is in the clutch of destiny. As the price
of his decisive action, he must lay his life down and retire with
sorrow to the shades. It is thus that in the very dawn of civilization
the Greek poet divined the pathos and expounded the philosophy of human
life, showing how the fate of nations may depend upon the passions of
a man, who in his turn is but the creature of a day, a ripple on the
stream of time. Nothing need be said by the æsthetic critic about the
solar theory, which pretends to explain the tale of Troy. The mythus of
Achilles may possibly in very distant ages have expressed some simple
astronomical idea. But for a man to think of this with the actual
_Iliad_ before his eyes would be about as bad as botanizing on his
mother's grave. Homer was not thinking of the sun when he composed the
_Iliad_. He wove, as in a web, all elements of tragic pity and fear,
pathos and passion, and fateful energy which constitute the dramas of
nations and of men.
In the two passions, anger and love, which form the prominent features
of the character of Achilles, there is nothing small or mean. Anger
has scarcely less right than ambition to be styled the last infirmity
of noble minds. And love, when it gives the motive force to great
action, is sublime. The love of Achilles had no softness or effeminacy.
The wrath of Achilles never degenerated into savagery. Both of these
passions, instead of weakening the hero, add force to his activity.
Homer has traced the outlines of the portrait of Achilles so largely
that criticism can scarcely avoid dwarfing them. In looking closely
at the picture, there is a danger lest, while we examine the parts,
we should fail to seize the greatness of the whole. It is better to
bring together in rapid succession those passages of the _Iliad_ which
display the character of Achilles under the double aspect of anger and
love. The first scene (i. 148-246) shows us Agamemnon surrounded by
the captains of the Greek host, holding the same position among them
as Charlemagne among his peers, or King John among the English barons.
They recognize his heaven-descended right of monarchy; but their
allegiance holds by a slight thread. They are not afraid of bearding
him, browbeating him with threats, and roundly accusing him of his
faults. This turbulent feudal society has been admirably sketched by
Marlowe in _Edward II._, and by Shakespeare in _Richard II._ And it
must be remembered that between Agamemnon and the Hellenic #basileis#
there was not even so much as a feudal bond of fealty. Calchas has just
told Agamemnon that, in order to avert the plague, Chryseis must be
restored to her father. The king has answered that if he is forced to
relinquish her, the Greeks must indemnify him richly. Then the anger of
Achilles boils over:
"Ah, clothed upon with impudence and greedy-souled! How,
thinkest thou, can man of the Achaians with glad heart follow
at thy word to take the field or fight the foe? Not for the
quarrel of the warlike Trojans did I come unto these shores,
for they had wronged me not. They never drove my cattle nor
my steeds, nor ever, in rich, populous Phthia, did they waste
the corn; since far between us lie both shadowy mountains and
a sounding sea: but following thee, thou shameless king, we
came to gladden thee, for Menelaus and for thee, thou hound, to
win you fame from Troy. Of this thou reckest not and hast no
care. Yea, and behold thou threatenest even from me to wrest
my guerdon with thy hands, for which I sorely strove, and
which the sons of the Achaians gave to me. Never, in sooth,
do I take equally with thee, when Achaians sack a well-walled
Trojan town. My hands do all the work of furious war; but when
division comes, thy guerdon is far greater, and I go back with
small but well-loved treasure to the ships, tired out with
fighting. Now, lo! I am again for Phthia; for better far, I
ween, it is homeward to sail with beaked ships: nor do I think
that if I stay unhonored wilt thou get much wealth and gain.
"Him, then, in answer, Agamemnon, king of men, bespake:
"Away! fly, if thy soul is set on flying. I beg thee not to
stay for me. With me are many who will honor me, and most of
all, the Counsellor Zeus. Most hateful to me of the Zeus-born
kings art thou. Forever dost thou love strife, warfare,
wrangling. If very stout of limb thou art, that did God give
thee. Go home, then, with thy ships and friends. Go, rule the
Myrmidones. I care not for thee, nor regard thy wrath, but
this will I threaten--since Phoebus robs me of Chryseis, her
with my ship and with my followers will I send; but I will
take fair-cheeked Briseis, thy own prize, and fetch her from
thy tent, that thou mayest know how far thy better I am, and
that others too may dread to call themselves my equal, and to
paragon themselves with me.
"So spake he. And Peleides was filled with grief; and his heart
within his shaggy bosom was cut in twain with thought, whether
to draw his sharp sword from his thigh, and, breaking through
the heroes, kill the king, or to stay his anger and refrain his
soul. While thus he raged within his heart and mind, and from
its scabbard was in act to draw the mighty sword, came Athene
from heaven; for Here, white-armed goddess, sent her forth,
loving both heroes in her soul, and caring for them. She stood
behind, and took Peleides by the yellow hair, seen by him only,
but of the rest none saw her. Achilles marvelled, and turned
back; and suddenly he knew Pallas Athene, and awful seemed her
eyes to him; and, speaking winged words, he thus addressed her:
"Why, daughter of ægis-bearing Zeus, art thou come hither? Say,
is it to behold the violence of Agamemnon, Atreus's son? But I
will tell to thee, what verily I think shall be accomplished,
that by his own pride he soon shall slay his soul.
"Him then the gray-eyed goddess Athene bespake:
"I came to stay thy might, if thou wilt hear me, from heaven;
for Here, white-armed goddess, sent me forth, loving you both
alike, and caring for you. But come, give up strife, nor draw
thy sword! But, lo, I bid thee taunt him with sharp words,
as verily shall be. For this I say to thee, and it shall
be accomplished: the time shall come when thou shalt have
thrice-fold as many splendid gifts because of his violence.
Only restrain thyself; obey me.
"To her, in turn, spake swift-footed Achilles:
"Needs must I, goddess, keep thy word and hers, though sorely
grieved in soul; for thus is it best. He who obeys the gods,
him have they listened to in time of need.
"He spake, and on the silver handle pressed a heavy hand, and
back into the scabbard thrust the mighty sword, nor swerved
from Athene's counsel. But she back to Olympus fared, to the
house of ægis-bearing Zeus unto the other gods.
"Then Peleides again with bitter words bespake Atrides, and not
yet awhile surceased from wrath:
"Wine-weighted, with a dog's eyes and a heart of deer! Never
hadst thou spirit to harness thee for the battle with the folk,
nor yet to join the ambush with the best of the Achaians.
_This_ to thee seems certain death. Far better is it, verily,
throughout the broad camp of Achaians to filch gifts when a
man stands up to speak against thee--thou folk-consuming king,
that swayest men of nought. Lo, of a sooth, Atrides, now for
the last time wilt thou have dealt knavishly. But I declare
unto thee, and will swear thereon a mighty oath; yea, by this
sceptre, which shall never put forth leaf nor twig since that
day that it left the stock upon the mountains, nor again shall
bud or bloom, for of its leafage and its bark the iron stripped
it bare; and sons of the Achaians hold it in their palms for
judgment, they who guard the laws by ordinance of Zeus; and
this shall be to thee a mighty oath. Verily, and of a truth,
the day shall be when sore desire for Achilles shall come upon
Achaians one and all. Then shalt thou, though grieved in soul,
have no power to help, while in multitudes they fall and die at
Hector's murderous hands; but thou shalt tear thy heart within
thy breast for rage, seeing thou honoredst not the best of the
Achaians aught.
"So spake Peleides; and on the earth cast down the sceptre
studded with nails of gold; and he sat down upon his seat."
What is chiefly noticeable in this passage is the grand scale upon
which the anger of Achilles is displayed. He is not content with
taunting Agamemnon, but he includes all the princes in his scorn--
#dêmoboros basileus, epei outidanoisin anasseis.#
We may also notice the interference of Athene. The Athene of the
_Iliad_ is a different goddess from the Athene of the Parthenon.
In strength she is more than a match for Ares. Her cunning she
subordinates to great and masculine ends, not to the arts of beauty
or to study. She is the saint of the valiant and wary soldier. While
checking Achilles, she does not advise him to avoid strife in any
meek and gentle spirit. She simply reminds him that if he gets to
blows with Agamemnon, he will put himself in the wrong; whereas, by
contenting himself with sharp words and with secession from the war,
he will reduce the haughty king to sue him with gifts and submission.
Athene in this place acts like all the other deities in Homer when they
come into direct contact with the heroes. She is exterior to Achilles,
and at the same time a part of his soul. She is the expression of both
thought and passion deeply seated in his nature, the force of his
own character developed by circumstance, the god within his breast
externalized and rendered visible to him alone. What Athene is to the
son of Peleus, Até is to Agamemnon.
The next passage in which Achilles appears in the forefront of the
scene is in the ninth book (307-429). Worn out with the losses of the
war, Agamemnon has at last humbled his pride, and sent the wisest of
the chiefs, silver-tongued Odysseus, and Phoenix, the old guardian
of the son of Peleus, to beg Achilles to receive back Briseis and to
take great gifts if only he will relax his wrath. But Achilles remains
inflexible. In order to maintain the firmness of his character, to
justify the righteousness of his indignation, Homer cannot suffer him
to abandon his resentment at the first entreaty. Some more potent
influence must break his resolution than the mere offer to restore
Briseis. Homer has the death of Patroclus in the background. He means
to show the iron heart of Peleides at last softened by his sorrow and
his love. Therefore, for the time, he must protract the situation in
which Achilles is still haughty, still implacable towards his repentant
injurer. In this interview with the ambassadors we have to observe how
confident Achilles abides in the justice of his cause and in his own
prowess. It is he with his valiant bands who has sacked the Trojan
cities; it is he who kept Hector from the ships; and now in his absence
the Achaians have had to build a wall in self-defence. And for whom has
he done this? For the sons of Atreus and for Helen. And what has he
received as guerdon? Nothing but dishonor. These arguments might seem
to savor too much of egotism and want of feeling for the dangers of the
host. But at the end come those great lines upon the vanity of gifts
and possessions in comparison with life, and upon the doom which hangs
above the hero:
"You may make oxen and sheep your prey; you may gather together
tripods and the tawny mane of horses; but none can make the
soul of man return by theft or craft when once it has escaped.
As for me," he resumes, "my goddess mother, silver-footed
Thetis, warns me that fate lays two paths to bear me deathward.
If I abide and fight before the walls of Troy, my return to
Hellas is undone, but fame imperishable remains for me. If I
return to my dear country then my good glory dies, but long
life awaits me, nor will the term of death be hastened."
This foreknowledge of Achilles that he has to choose between a long,
inglorious life and a swift-coming but splendid death illuminates his
ultimate action with a fateful radiance. In the passage before us it
lends dignity to his obstinate and obdurate endurance. He says: I am
sick at heart for the insults thrust on me. I am wounded in my pride.
Toiling for others, I get no reward. And behold, if I begin to act
again, swift death is before me. Shall I, to please Agamemnon, hasten
on my own end?
When the moment arrives for Achilles to be aroused from inactivity by
his own noblest passion, then, and not till then, does he fling aside
the thought of death, and trample on a long reposeful life. He is
conscious that his glory can only be achieved by the sacrifice of ease
and happiness and life itself; but he holds honor dearer than these
good things. Yet, at the same time, he is not eager to throw away his
life for a worthless object, or to buy mere fame by an untimely end. It
requires another motive--the strong pressure of sorrow and remorse--to
quicken his resolution; but when once quickened, nothing can retard
it. Achilles at this point might be compared to a mass of ice and snow
hanging at the jagged edge of a glacier, suspended on a mountain brow.
We have seen such avalanches brooding upon Monte Rosa, or the Jungfrau,
beaten by storms, loosened, perchance, by summer sun, but motionless.
In a moment a lightning-flash strikes the mass, and it roars crumbling
to the deep.
This lightning-flash in the case of Achilles was the death of Patroclus
(xviii. 15). Patroclus has gone forth to aid the Achaians and has
fallen beneath Hector's sword. Antilochus, sent to bear the news to
Achilles, finds him standing before the ships, already anxious about
the long delay of his comrade. Antilochus does not break the news
gently. His tears betray the import of his message, and he begins:
"Woe is me, son of brave Peleus! Verily thou shalt hear right
sorrowful tidings--Patroclus lies slain; round his corpse they
are fighting; stripped it lies, but plumèd Hector hath his
armor.
"So he spake. But a black cloud of woe covered the hero. With
both hands he took the dust of ashes and flung them down upon
his head, and disfigured his fair face, and on his fragrant
tunic lay the black cinders. But he, huge in his hugeness,
stretched upon the dust lay, and with his hands he tore and
ravaged his hair."
Thus Achilles receives the first shock of grief. When his mother rises
from the sea to comfort him, he refuses consolation, and cries:
"My mother, the Olympian hath done all these things; but of
what pleasure is this to me, now that my dear friend is dead,
Patroclus, whom above all my comrades I honored, even as
myself? Him have I slain!"
This is the pith and marrow of his anguish. I slew Patroclus: it was
I who sent him forth to fight. "Now," he resumes a few lines lower
down--"now my soul bids me no longer live or be with men, save only I
strike Hector first and slay him with my spear, and make him pay the
fine of Patroclus."
Thetis reminds him that if he slay Hector, his own life will be short.
This only serves to turn his anguish into desperate resolve:
"Straight let me die, seeing I might not come to the aid of my
comrade when he was dying. Far from his fatherland he perished.
He looked for me that I should have been his helper. But now,
since never to my home shall I return, nor was I a light in
trouble to Patroclus, nor to my other comrades who are slain
by hundreds by the godlike Hector--while I here sit beside
the ships, a useless load upon the earth--I who am such as
there is none else like me among brazen-coated Achaians in the
war--others may be better perchance in council--now let strife
perish from among gods and men, with anger which stirs up the
prudent even to fury."
Thus he foregoes his wrath, and flings resentment from him like a
mantle. Then he rises ready for the fight. "If death come, let death
be welcome. Death came to Herakles. In his due time he comes to me.
Meanwhile I thirst to make Dardan ladies widows in the land."
When he next appears, his very form and outward semblance are
transfigured. He stands alone and unarmed in the trench. A fire
surrounds his head and flames upon his curls. His voice thrills the
armies like the blare of a victorious trumpet. This is how Homer has
described him shouting in the trench (xviii. 203):
"But Achilles, dear to Zeus, arose, and around his mighty
shoulders Athene cast her tasselled ægis; and about his head
the queenly goddess set a crown of golden mist, and from it she
made blaze a dazzling flame. As when smoke rises to the clear
sky from a town, afar from an island which foemen beleaguer,
who all day long contend in grisly war, issuing from their own
town; but at sundown beacons blaze in rows, and on high the
glare goes up, and soars for neighboring men to see, if haply
warders-off of woe may come to them with ships--so from the
head of Achilles the flame went up to heaven. He stood at the
trench, away from the wall, nor joined the Achaians; for he
honored his mother's wise command. There he stood and shouted;
and beside him Pallas Athene cried; but among the Trojans
he raised infinite tumult. As when a mighty voice, when the
trumpet shrills for the murderous foemen that surround a town,
so was the mighty voice of the son of Æacus. They then, when
they heard the brazen cry of Æacides, in the breasts of all of
them the heart was troubled; but the fair-maned horses turned
the cars backward; for in their heart they knew the sorrows
that were to be. And the charioteers were stricken when they
saw the tireless flame terrible above the head of big-hearted
Peleus's son blazing. The gray-eyed goddess Athene kindled it.
Thrice above the trench shouted the godlike Achilles in his
might; thrice were the Trojans and their noble allies troubled."
From this moment the action of the _Iliad_ advances rapidly. Achilles
takes his proper place, and occupies the whole stage. The body of
Patroclus is brought home to him; he mourns over it, and promises to
bury it when he shall have slain Hector, and slaughtered twelve sons of
the Trojans on the pyre. Then he reconciles himself with Agamemnon, and
formally renounces anger. Lastly, when he has put on the divine armor
made for him by Hephæstus, he ascends his car, and hastens into the
fight. But again at this point, when Achilles is at the very pitch and
summit of his glory, the voice of fate is heard. It is with the promise
of the tomb that he enters the battle. Turn to book xix. 399. Achilles
has just mounted his chariot:
"Fiercely did he cheer the horses of his sire. Xanthus and
Balius, far-famed children of Podargé, take other heed, I
warn ye, how to save your master, and to bring him to the
Danaan host, returning of war satisfied; nor leave him, like
Patroclus, dead there on the field.
"To him, then, from beneath the yoke spake the fleet-footed
horse Xanthus, and straightway drooped his head; and all his
mane, escaping from the collar by the yoke, fell earthward.
Goddess Here, of the white arms, gave him speech:
"Verily shall we save thee yet this time, fierce Achilles; but
close at hand is thy doomsday. Nor of this are we the cause,
but great God in heaven and resistless fate. For neither was
it by our sloth or sluggishness that Trojans stripped the
arms from Patroclus his shoulders; but of gods the best, whom
fair-haired Leto bare, slew him among the foremost, and gave to
Hector glory of the deed. We, though we should run apace with
Zephyr's breath, the fleetest, as 'tis said, yet for thee it is
decreed to perish by the might of God and man.
"When he had thus spoken the Erinnyes stayed his voice; and,
high in wrath, fleet-foot Achilles answered him:
"Xanthus! why prophesy my death? Thou hast no call. Right well
know I, too, that it is my fate to perish here, far from dear
sire and mother; yet for all this will I not surcease before I
satiate the Trojans with war.
"He spoke, and vanward held his steeds with mighty yell."
This dialogue between Achilles and Xanthus i
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