[Picture: Decorative chapter header]
You remember the Titans who rebelled against Jupiter. There was one who
was noble, and wise, and kind, who did not rebel, and kept his brother
from doing so. His name was Prometheus, which means Forethought; his
brother's was Epimetheus, or Afterthought; their father was Iapetus.
When all the other Titans had been buried under the rocks, Jupiter bade
Prometheus mould men out of the mud, and call on the winds of heaven to
breathe life into them. Then Prometheus loved the beings he had made,
and taught them to build houses, and tame the animals, and row and sail
on the sea, and study the stars. But Zeus was afraid they would be too
mighty, and would not give them fire. Then Prometheus climbed the skies,
and brought fire down for them in a hollow reed.
[Picture: Mount Parnassus]
The gods were jealous, and thought it time to stop this. So Jupiter bade
Vulcan mould a woman out of clay, and Pallas to adorn her with all charms
and gifts, so that she was called Pandora, or All Gifts; and they gave
her a casket, into which they had put all pains, and griefs, and woes,
and ills, and nothing good in it but hope; and they sent her down to
visit the two Titan brothers. Prometheus knew that Jupiter hated them,
and he had warned Epimetheus not to take any gift that came from Olympus;
but he was gone from home when Pandora came; and when Epimetheus saw how
lovely she was, and heard her sweet voice, he was won over to trust her,
and to open the box. Then out flew all the evils and miseries that were
stored in it, and began to torment poor mankind with war, and sickness,
and thirst, and hunger, and nothing good was left but hope at the bottom
of the box. And by-and-by there came spirits, called Prayers, but they
were lame, coming after evil, because people are so apt not to begin to
pray till harm has befallen them.
[Picture: Pandora] The gods undertook also to accept sacrifices, claiming
a share in whatever animal man slew. Prometheus guarded his people here
by putting the flesh of a bullock on one side, and the bones and inward
parts covered with the fat on the other, and bidding Jupiter choose which
should be his. The fat looked as if the heap it covered were the best,
and Jupiter chose that, and was forced to abide by his choice; so that,
whenever a beast was killed for food, the bones and fat were burnt on the
altar, and man had the flesh. All this made Jupiter so angry, that, as
Prometheus was immortal and could not be killed, he chained the great,
good Titan to a rock on Mount Caucasus, and sent an eagle continually to
rend his side and tear out his liver as fast as it grew again; but
Prometheus, in all his agony, kept hope, for he knew that deliverance
would come to him; and, in the meantime, he was still the comforter and
counsellor of all who found their way to him.
Men grew very wicked, owing to the evils in Pandora's box, and Jupiter
resolved to drown them all with a flood; but Prometheus, knowing it
beforehand, told his mortal son Deucalion to build a ship and store it
with all sorts of food. In it Deucalion and his wife Pyrrha floated
about for nine days till all men had been drowned, and as the waters went
down the ship rested on Mount Parnassus, and Deucalion and Pyrrha came
out and offered sacrifices to Jupiter. He was appeased, and sent Mercury
down to ask what he should grant them. Their prayer was that the earth
might be filled again with people, upon which the god bade them walk up
the hill and throw behind them the bones of their grandmother. Now Earth
was said to be the mother of the Titans, so the bones of their
grandmother were the rocks, so as they went they picked up stones and
threw them over their shoulders. All those that Deucalion threw rose up
as men, and all those that Pyrrha threw became women, and thus the earth
was alive again with human beings. No one can fail to see what far older
histories must have been brought in the minds of the Greeks, and have
been altered into these tales, which have much beauty in themselves. The
story of the flood seems to have been mixed up with some small later
inundation which only affected Greece.
The proper old name of Greece was Hellas, and the people whom we call
Greeks called themselves Hellenes. {29} Learned men know that they, like
all the people of Europe, and also the Persians and Hindoos, sprang from
one great family of the sons of Japhet, called Arians. A tribe called
Pelasgi came first, and lived in Asia Minor, Greece, and Italy; and after
them came the Hellenes, who were much quicker and cleverer than the
Pelasgi, and became their masters in most of Greece. So that the people
we call Greeks were a mixture of the two, and they were divided into
three lesser tribes--the AEolians, Dorians, and Ionians.
[Picture: The World according to the Greeks]
Now, having told you that bit of truth, I will go back to what the Greeks
thought. They said that Deucalion had a son whose name was Hellen, and
that he again had three sons, called AEolus, Dorus, and Xuthus. AEolus
was the father of the AEolian Greeks, and some in after times thought
that he was the same with the god called AEolus, who was thought to live
in the Lipari Islands; and these keep guard over the spirits of the
winds--Boreas, the rough, lively north wind; Auster, the rainy south
wind; Eurus, the bitter east; and Zephyr, the gentle west. He kept them
in a cave, and let one out according to the way the wind was wanted to
blow, or if there was to be a storm he sent out two at once to struggle,
and fight, and roar together, and lash up Neptune's world, the sea. The
AEolians did chiefly live in the islands and at Corinth. One of the sons
of AEolus turned out very badly, and cheated Jupiter. His name was
Sisyphus, and he was punished in Tartarus--Pluto's world below--by having
always to roll a stone up a mountain so steep that it was sure to come
down upon him again.
Dorus was, of course, the father of the Dorians; and Xuthus had a son,
called Ion, who was the father of the Ionians. But, besides all these,
there was a story of two brothers, named AEgyptus and Danaus, one of whom
settled in Egypt, and the other in Argos. One had fifty sons and the
other fifty daughters, and AEgyptus decreed that they should all marry;
but Danaus and his daughters hated their cousins, and the father gave
each bride a dagger, with which she stabbed her bridegroom. Only one had
pity, and though the other forty-nine were not punished here, yet, when
they died and went to Tartarus, they did not escape, but were obliged to
be for ever trying to carry water in bottomless vessels. The people of
Argos called themselves Danai, and no doubt some of them came from Egypt.
One more story, and a very strange one, tells of the peopling of Greece.
A fair lady, named Europa, was playing in the meadows on the Phoenician
coast, when a great white bull came to her, let his horns be wreathed
with flowers, lay down, and invited her to mount his back; but no sooner
had she done so, than he rose and trotted down with her to the sea, and
swam with her out of sight. He took her, in fact, to the island of
Crete, where her son Minos was so good and just a king, that, when he
died, Pluto appointed him and two others to be judges of the spirits of
the dead. Europe was called after Europa, as the loss of her led
settlers there from Asia. Europa's family grieved for her, and her
father, mother, and brother went everywhere in search of her. Cadmus was
the name of her brother, and he and his mother went far and wide, till
the mother died, and Cadmus went to Delphi--the place thought to be the
centre of the earth--where Apollo had slain the serpent Python, and where
he had a temple and cavern in which every question could be answered.
Such places of divination were called oracles, and Cadmus was here told
to cease from seeking his sister, and to follow a cow till she fell down
with fatigue, and to build a city on that spot. The poor cow went till
she came into Boeotia, and there fell. Cadmus meant to offer her up, and
went to fetch water from a fountain near, but as he stooped a fierce
dragon rushed on him. He had a hard fight to kill it, but Pallas shone
out in her beauty on him, and bade him sow its teeth in the ground. He
did so, and they sprung up as warriors, who at once began to fight, and
killed one another, all but five, who made friends, and helped Cadmus to
build the famous city called Thebes. It is strange, after so wild a
story as this, to be told that Cadmus first taught writing in Greece, and
brought the alphabet of sixteen letters. The Greek alphabet was really
learnt from the Phoenicians, and most likely the whole is a curious story
of some settlement of that eastern people in Greece. Most likely they
brought in the worship of the wine-god, Bacchus (Dionysos), for he was
called Cadmus's grandson. An orphan at first, he was brought up by the
nymphs and Mercury, and then became a great conqueror, going to India,
and Egypt, and everywhere, carrying the vine and teaching the use of
wine. He was attended by an old fat man, named Silenus, and by
creatures, called Fauns and Satyrs, like men with goats' ears and legs;
his crown was of ivy, and his chariot was drawn by leopards, and he was
at last raised to Olympus. His feasts were called orgies; he-goats were
sacrificed at them, and songs were sung, after which there was much
drinking, and people danced holding sticks wreathed with vine and ivy
leaves. The women who danced were called Bacchanals. The better sort of
Greeks at first would not adopt these shameful rites. There were horrid
stories of women who refused them going mad and leaping into the sea, and
the Bacchanals used to fall upon and destroy all who resisted them.
[Picture: Man in chariot]