restored from a comparison of ancient myth and superstition with the
physical characters of the regions wherein these legends took their
rise, or where, at least, they assumed the forms in which they have
been transmitted to later ages. Others have survived in place-names
which, still in common use, connect our own generation with the days of
our ancestors.
In pursuing the investigation of this subject we soon perceive that the
supernatural interpretations, and the tendency to personification which
led to them, began eventually to be supplanted by natural explanations
founded on actual observation of the outer world, and that this change
of view, commencing first with the few observant men or philosophers,
made considerable way among even the ordinary populace, long before
the decay of the mythological systems or superstitions of which these
primeval supernatural interpretations formed a characteristic part.
The growth of the naturalistic spirit was exceedingly slow, and for
many centuries was coeval with the continued vigorous life of religious
beliefs which accounted for many natural events as evidence of the
operations of supernatural beings.
Those features of the outer world which most attract attention were
the first that appealed to the observing faculty of mankind. Among
them the elements of topography obviously hold a foremost place,
including, as they do, the most frequent and impressive manifestations
of those natural agencies whereby the surface of the land is constantly
modified. It was impossible that after men had begun to observe, and
to connect effects with causes, they should refrain from referring the
resultant changes of landscape to the working of the natural processes
that were seen or inferred to produce them. They were led to trace this
connection even while their religious belief or superstition remained
hardly impaired. The conclusions thus popularly reached were sometimes
far from correct, but inasmuch as they substituted natural for
supernatural causes, they undoubtedly marked a distinct forward step in
the intellectual development of man.
From that time onward the influence of scenery on the human imagination
took a different course. The gods were dethroned, and the invisible
spirits of nature no longer found worshippers; but it was impossible
that the natural features which had prompted the primeval beliefs
should cease to exercise a potent influence on the minds of men. This
influence has varied in degree and in character from generation to
generation, as we may see by comparing its place in the literature of
successive periods. Probably at no time has it been more potent than it
is at the present day.
To discuss fully this wide subject would demand far more space than
can be given to it here. I propose, therefore, to select two portions
of it only; one from the beginning and the other from the end of
its historical development. I shall try to show first, by reference
to primitive myth and legend what were the earliest and most obvious
effects of prominent elements of topography on the imagination, and
secondly, what these effects are or should be now in the midst of
modern science and universal education.
The mythology of Ancient Greece supplies many illustrations of the
way in which the physical aspects of the land have impressed their
character on the religious beliefs and superstitions of a people. The
surface of that country is almost everywhere rugged, rising into groups
of bare, rocky hills and into chains of lofty mountains which separate
and enclose isolated plains and valleys. The climate embraces all the
softness of the Mediterranean shores, together with the year-long snows
and frosts of Olympus on the one hand, and the almost sub-tropical
heat of the lowlands of Attica on the other. The clouds and rains of
the mountains have draped the slopes with umbrageous forests, and have
spread over the plains a fertile soil which has been cultivated since
before the dawn of history. Thus, while a luxuriant vegetation clothes
the lower grounds with beauty, bare crags and crests are never far
away. The soft and the harsh of nature, the soothing and the repulsive,
are placed side by side. The indolence begotten of a teeming soil and
sunny clime is quickened by proximity to the stern mountain-world--the
home of thunder-clouds, tempests, and earthquakes. In the childhood
of mankind, the physical features of such a country could not fail
to react powerfully upon the imagination of those who dwelt among
them, calling forth visions of grace and beauty, and at the same time
imparting to these visions a variety and vigour which would hardly
have been developed among the dwellers on monotonous plains. The
natural influence of scenery and climate like those of Greece upon
the imagination of a race endowed with a large share of the poetic
faculty has never been more forcibly or gracefully expressed than by
our own Wordsworth, in a well-known passage in the fourth book of his
_Excursion_.
With the source of the early Hellenic myths we are not so much
concerned in the present inquiry as with the form in which they have
reached us. Whether they arose in Greece, or, having been brought from
some other home, received their final shape there, is of less moment
than the actual guise in which we find them in the earliest Greek
literature. There cannot, I think, be any doubt that to the striking
topography of Thessaly they are largely indebted for the dress in which
they appear in the poems of Homer and Hesiod. We may recognise among
them some of the earliest recorded efforts of the human imagination to
interpret the aspects of nature, and these aspects were unmistakably
such as presented themselves in that particular portion of the ancient
world.
The wide Thessalian plain, the largest area of lowland in Greece, lies
upon Cretaceous and Tertiary rocks, which, in the lower parts of the
region, are overlain with a level tract of alluvial soil. Round this
plain stretches a girdle of lofty and imposing mountains, composed
chiefly of hard crystalline schists and limestones. On the north the
crags and snowy crests of Olympus rise high and bare above the dense
forests that clothe their slopes. To the eastward, above the narrow
chasm of Tempe, through which the drainage of the great inland basin
escapes to the sea, the grey peak of Ossa forms the northern end of a
long chain of heights which, farther south, mount into the ridge of
Pelion. Along the southern edge of the plain another vast mountain
barrier sweeps eastward from Mount Pindus through the lofty chain of
Othrys to the sea.
No other part of Greece presents such diversities of topography and
of climate as are to be found within the region thus encircled with
mountains. The peaceful beauty and spontaneous fertility of the
plain offer an impressive contrast to the barren ruggedness of the
surrounding heights. High above the gardens, meadows, and corn-fields,
sharply-cut walls and pinnacles of white limestone mount out of the
thick woodland into the clear upper air. Nor is evidence wanting of
those catastrophes which from time to time convulse a mountain region.
At the base of the bare cliffs and down the rocky declivities lie
huge blocks of stone that have been detached by the weather from the
precipices above. And, doubtless, from time immemorial the dwellers
on these slopes have been familiar with the crash and tumult of the
landslip, and with the havoc wrought by it on forest and field. Along
the mountain-ridges, too, clouds are ever gathering, and thunderstorms
are of continual recurrence. The lightnings of Olympus are visible from
Othrys, and to the inhabitants of the intervening plain the incessant
peals and reverberations from the northern and southern ranges might
well sound like shouts of mutual defiance from the two lines of lofty
rampart, as where, in a more northern clime
"Jura answers from her misty shroud
Back to the joyous Alps that call to her aloud."
If to these daily or frequently returning meteorological phenomena
we add the terrors of occasional earthquakes, such as affect most
mountainous countries and are known to have convulsed different parts
of Greece within historic times, we perceive how favourable the
conditions of environment must have been for exciting the imagination
of an impressionable people. Whether, therefore, the early Hellenic
myths arose in Hellas, or came from elsewhere, they could hardly fail
in the end to betray the influence of the surroundings amid which they
were handed down from generation to generation. The snowy summits of
Olympus, rising serenely above the shifting clouds into the calm,
clear, blue heaven, naturally came to be regarded as the fit abode of
the gods who ruled the world. The association of that mountain-top with
the dwelling-place of the immortals, first suggested to the imagination
of the early settlers in Thessaly, passed outwards to the utmost
bounds of the Hellenic world. Everywhere the word Olympus came to be
synonymous with heaven itself.
In the myth of the Gods and the Titans, as handed down in early
Greek poetry, the influence of Thessalian topography is abundantly
conspicuous. The two opposite mountain ranges of Olympus and
Othrys became the respective strongholds of the opposing hosts. The
convulsions of that ten years' struggle, whether suggested or not by
the broken features of the ground and the conflicts of the elements,
assuredly took their poetic colouring from them. The riven crags piled
in confusion one above another, the rock-strewn slopes, the trees
uprooted by landslips, the thunder-peals that resound from the misty
mountain-chains, seem still to tell of that primeval belief, wherein
the Titans were pictured as striving with frantic efforts to scale
the heights of Olympus by piling Ossa on Pelion, hurling huge rocks
and trees through the darkened air, and answering the thunderbolts of
Zeus with fierce peals from the clouds of their lofty citadel. In the
magnificent description of Hesiod, beneath all the supernatural turmoil
we catch, as it were, the tumult of a wild storm among the Thessalian
hills, with such added horrors as might be suggested to the imagination
of the poet from the recollection or tradition of former earthquake or
volcanic eruption.
Long after the time of the primitive mythology, the more striking
features of the land continued to appeal to the Hellenic imagination
and to perpetuate the prowess of gods and heroes, even down to
generations of men among whom belief in these legends was already
beginning to grow dim. The narrow gorge of Tempe may be cited in
illustration of this influence. Cleft between the precipices of Olympus
and Ossa, and serving as the only outlet for the drainage of the wide
Thessalian plain, this chasm must have arrested the attention of
the earliest settlers, and certainly continued for many centuries
to be one of the most noted valleys of the Old World. The contrast
between the vast level plain through which the River Peneius and its
tributaries wander, and the narrow gorge through which the accumulated
waters issue; the apparently insurmountable barrier interposed across
the course of the stream; the singular and unexpected ravine by which
the drainage is allowed to escape to the sea; the naked, fissured
walls of white limestone on either side of the narrow pass, even now
powerfully impress the observant traveller of to-day.
These striking features could not fail to appeal to the imagination
of the old Greek. From early times it was recognised that the plain
of Thessaly had once been covered with a sheet of water, of which the
remaining portions formed two considerable lakes. Had no passage been
opened for the outflow of the drainage across the barrier of mountains
the plain would have remained submerged. The cleaving of a chasm
whereby the pent-up waters were allowed to flow down to the sea, and
thus to lay bare so wide an area of rich land for human occupation,
was looked on as the work of some benevolent power, and naturally came
to be associated with the name of Poseidon, the God of the Sea.[8] In
later times, when the deeds of gods and heroes began to be confounded
with each other, the supernatural character of the Vale of Tempe was
still acknowledged; but the opening of the cleft was in course of time
transferred to Hercules, who, by cutting a hollow across the ridge,
allowed the stagnant waters of the interior to flow off into the sea.[9]
Prominent hills and crags in other parts of Greece gave rise to
legends, or became the localised scenes of myths which had floated down
from an older time, and sometimes perhaps from another birthplace. Thus
the hill Lycabettus, that stands so picturesquely on the north-east of
Athens, suggested to the lively fancy of the early Athenians a record
of the prowess of their patron-goddess. When Athene, so the legend
ran, was founding their state and wished to strengthen the city, she
went out to Pallene, a demos lying to the north-eastward, and procured
there a great hill which she meant to place as a bulwark in front of
the Acropolis, but on her way back, hearing from a crow of the birth
of Erichthonius, she dropped the hill, which has remained on the same
spot ever since. Legends of this kind, but varying in dress with local
topography and national temperament, may be found all over the world.
To the early Greeks the West was a region of marvels. It lay on the
outermost bounds of the known world, where the sun descended beneath
the earth and where Atlas supported the vault of Heaven. By degrees as
the spirit of colonisation drew men in that direction, the occidental
marvels of the first voyagers faded away before a more accurate
knowledge of the Mediterranean shores. But the legends to which they
had given rise remained in the popular mythology, and served as
subjects for chroniclers and poets.
Thus the two singular masses of rock in which, at Gibraltar and Ceuta,
the European and African continents respectively terminate, and which
form, on each side of an intervening strait, only some seventeen miles
wide, a kind of gateway for the vast Mediterranean basin, naturally
fixed the attention of the early navigators on those distant waters,
and filled a prominent place among the travellers' tales from the
remote West. They took their part in the myths, becoming the 'pillars
of Hercules,' that were erected by this legendary explorer and
knight-errant as an eternal record of his labours and of the ultimate
limit of his wanderings. The details of the story vary. By some
narrators the hero was represented as having narrowed and shallowed
the strait, and built his pillars on the two sides to keep the huge
monsters of the outer ocean from entering the Mediterranean sea. By
others he was believed to have actually excavated the strait itself,
and by thus separating Europe and Africa, previously joined together,
to have allowed the waters of the ocean and those of the inner sea to
mingle.[10]
In a mountainous country, where the streams, swollen by sudden or
heavy rains, sweep down much detritus into the valleys and plains, the
great changes of topography thereby produced impress the imagination
and dwell in the memory of the inhabitants. In Greece, the myths that
gathered round the Achelous--the largest and most famous river in the
country--probably arose, as Strabo showed, from the varying operations
of the stream itself. The stories of the river-god assuming the form
of a bull and of a serpent, his contests with Hercules, and the loss
of his horn, are obviously only personifications of a rapid stream,
rushing impetuously from its mountainous birthplace and winding in
twisted curves across the plain; now strewing the meadows with gravel,
now curbed by the laborious construction of embankments, and now
bursting forth again to resume its old wayward course.[11] The river
still retains the character which prompted its ancient legends. It is
now called the Aspropotamo or white river, from the abundance of white
silt suspended in its water and lying on its bed. While in winter, fed
by the rains and melting snows of distant Pindus, it often fills its
channel from bank to bank, it shrinks in summer into a number of lesser
streams, which wind about in a broad gravelly channel.
In the myths that grew round other rivers of ancient Greece, we may
recognise similar early attempts to account for striking features
of local typography. When, for instance, Hercules is fabled to have
barred back the river Cephissus and to have submerged and destroyed the
country about Orchomenos in Bœotia,[12] we may doubtless recognise the
traditional record of some prehistoric inundation, perhaps an abnormal
rise of the singularly variable Lake Copais, whereby a large tract
of land was flooded; possibly even an attempt to account for the lake
itself.
But there was one physical feature which, more than any other, must
have impressed the imagination of the dwellers by the Mediterranean
shores; and that was furnished by the volcanic phenomena so
characteristic of the great depression between Europe and Africa. Among
the islands of the Ægean sea, some were continually smoking; others
retained, in their cindery cones and ashy slopes, the memorials of
subterranean fires not long extinguished. From time to time actual
eruptions broke forth, with their accompaniments of convulsion and
terror. We know from geological evidence that one of the most violent
volcanic explosions which have affected the Mediterranean basin took
place where now is the island of Santorin, after the original site was
inhabited by a civilised people.[13] A conical volcanic mountain--an
eastern Vesuvius or Etna--stood on that site, but in some prehistoric
age it was blown into the air, as happened at Krakatoa in August, 1883,
only portions of the base of the cone being left to form the present
semi-circular ring of islands. Whether this stupendous catastrophe
occurred after the Hellenic race appeared in the Ægean area has not
been determined. But the tradition of it may have lingered in the
district, down to the time when, about two hundred years B.C., a new
volcano rose from the sea in the centre of this group of islands.
Another marked eruption occurred in the year 46 B.C. Even in our own
day, this ancient vent has shown renewed activity, fresh eruptions
have taken place from the middle of the engulphed crater, and another
central volcanic cone is gradually rising there.
The Greeks, thus accustomed to volcanic phenomena among their own
islands, were prepared to accept the stories, brought to them from the
remote West, of far more colossal volcanoes, and more gigantic and
continuous eruptions. Like the accounts of other physical phenomena
imported from that distant and half mythical region, the tales of
the volcanoes were no doubt at first more or less exaggerated. The
adventurous voyagers who, sailing as far as Sicily and the Æolian
Islands, saw the noble snow-capped cone of Etna, loftier than the
mountains of Hellas, yet emitting smoke by day and a glare of fire by
night; who watched Stromboli continually in eruption; who perchance
beheld the land convulsed with earthquakes, the air darkened with
volcanic dust, the sea covered with floating cinders, and who only
with much effort were able to steer their vessels into opener water,
would bear eastward with them such tales of horror as would not fail to
confirm and increase the popular belief in the national mythology, and
might even suggest new myths or new versions of those already current.
The greater size and vigour of the volcanoes would tend to create the
impression that other characteristics of the region were on a similarly
exaggerated scale. Sicily was accordingly believed in Homeric times to
be the home of a gigantic race of shepherds--the Cyclops.
It is obvious how the legend arose of the hundred-armed giant Typhœus
or Enceladus, who was fabled to lie buried beneath the region between
Etna and the Phlegræan Fields. The belching of the volcano suggested
to the popular imagination, which so loved to personify the powers of
nature, the gasping of an imprisoned monster. The tremors so constantly
affecting the islands were his quiverings as he lay on his uneasy,
burning bed, and the earthquakes that from time to time shook the
region marked how he tried now and again to shift his position there.
As intercourse with the West made the volcanic phenomena of that region
more familiar, the mythological interpretation underwent gradual
modification. On the one hand, it was observed that eruptions from
Etna, sometimes disastrous enough when they occurred, took place at
irregular and often widely separated intervals. On the other hand, it
was noticed that among the Æolian Islands, which lay to the north,
within sight of the Sicilian volcano, subterranean rumblings and
explosions were of daily occurrence. The Cyclops of older time, being
no longer extant above ground, came to be transferred in popular fancy
to the underground regions as associates of Hephaistos or Vulcan.
The incessant commotion below the surface suggested the idea of a
subterranean workshop, where these beings were employed in forging
the thunderbolts of Jove and in making arms and implements for other
gods and heroes. Accordingly the belief gradually spread over the
ancient world that the god of fire had his abode under Sicily and the
neighbouring islands.
Further, the abundant discharges of steam and vapours, both in the
quiescent and the active phases of volcanic eruptivity, suggested that
somehow they were due to wind imprisoned within the earth, and led to
the myth which represented the god of the winds as having his home in
the same subterranean caverns.
It has often occurred to me that one phenomenon, connecting the
meteorological conditions of the atmosphere with the volcanic activity
of the Æolian Islands, which must have early attracted attention,
would not improbably react on mythological beliefs in that part of
the Mediterranean basin. Though continually in a state of eruption,
Stromboli is said to be more especially active when atmospheric
pressure is low. Its clouds of steam and discharges of stones are most
marked before or during stormy weather, and are consequently more
conspicuous in winter and spring than in summer and autumn. Since the
days of Polybius and Strabo, the fishermen of the region have regarded
the cloud-cap of that volcanic cone as a trustworthy indication of the
kind of weather to be expected.
In Roman times, this increase of subterranean excitement in the
early part of the year appears to have received a supernatural
interpretation. It was looked on as evidence that at that season Vulcan
and his Cyclops were specially busy over their furnaces, forging
the thunderbolts that the Father of Gods and men was to use during
the ensuing summer. Thus Horace, when joyously enumerating to his
friend L. Sextius the signs that winter is giving way to spring--the
disappearance of ice and hoar-frost, the coming of the balmy west wind,
the release of the cattle from their stalls and of the farmer from his
fireside, the advent of the goddess of love, and the dances of the
nymphs and graces under the bright moon--adds that now is the time
'When fiery Vulcan lights anew
The Cyclops' glowing forge.'[14]