philosophy of life, it was necessary that that philosophy should be
shown to be consonant with current beliefs, by being formulated, so to
speak, in terms of the current standards; and when, soon afterwards, the
conception of education, in the sense in which the term has ever since
been understood, arose, it was inevitable that the ancient poets should
be the basis of that education. Literature consisted, in effect, of the
ancient poets. Literary education necessarily meant the understanding of
them. “I consider,” says Protagoras, in the Platonic dialogue which bears
his name,[66] “that the chief part of a man’s education is to be skilled
in epic poetry; and this means that he should be able to understand what
the poets have said, and whether they have said it rightly or not, and
to know how to draw distinctions, and to give an answer when a question
is put to him.” The educators recognized in Homer one of themselves: he,
too, was a “sophist,” and had aimed at educating men.[67] Homer was the
common text-book of the grammar-schools as long as Greek continued to
be taught, far on into imperial times. The study of him branched out in
more than one direction. It was the beginning of that study of literature
for its own sake which still holds its ground. It was continued until
far on in the Christian era, partly by the schools of textual critics,
and partly by the successors of the first sophists, who sharpened their
wits by disputations as to Homer’s meaning, posing difficulties and
solving them: of these disputations some relics survive in the _Scholia_,
especially such as are based upon the _Questions_ of Porphyry.[68]
But in the first conception, literary and moral education had been
inseparable. It was impossible to regard Homer simply as literature.
Literary education was not an end in itself, but a means. The end was
moral training. It was imagined that virtue, no less than literature,
could be taught, and Homer was the basis of the one kind of education
no less than of the other. Nor was it difficult for him to become so.
For though the thoughts of men had changed, and the new education was
bringing in new conceptions of morals, Homer was a force which could
easily be turned in new directions. All imaginative literature is plastic
when it is used to enforce a moral; and the sophists could easily preach
sermons of their own upon Homeric texts. There was no fixed traditional
interpretation; and they were but following a current fashion in drawing
their own meanings from him. He thus became a support, and not a rival.
The _Hippias Minor_ of Plato furnishes as pertinent instances as could be
mentioned of this educational use of Homer.
The method lasted as long as Greek literature. It is found in full
operation in the first centuries of our era. It was explicitly
recognized, and most of the prominent writers of the time supply
instances of its application. “In the childhood of the world,” says
Strabo,[69] “men, like children, had to be taught by tales;” and Homer
told tales with a moral purpose. “It has been contended,” he says
again,[70] “that poetry was meant only to please:” on the contrary, the
ancients looked upon poetry as a form of philosophy, introducing us early
to the facts of life, and teaching us in a pleasant way the characters
and feelings and actions of men. It was from Homer that moralists drew
their ideals: it was his verses that were quoted, like verses of the
Bible with us, to enforce moral truths. There is in Dio Chrysostom[71] a
charming “imaginary conversation” between Philip and Alexander. “How is
it,” said the father, “that Homer is the only poet you care for: there
are others who ought not to be neglected?” “Because,” said the son, “it
is not every kind of poetry, just as it is not every kind of dress, that
is fitting for a king; and the poetry of Homer is the only poetry that I
see to be truly noble and splendid and regal, and fit for one who will
some day rule over men.” And Dio himself reads into Homer many a moral
meaning. When, for example,[72] the poet speaks of the son of Kronos
having given the staff and rights of a chief that he might take counsel
for the people, he meant to imply that not all kings, but only those who
have a special gift of God, had that staff and those rights, and that
they had them, moreover, not for their own gratification, but for the
general good; he meant, in fact, that no bad man can be a true master
either of himself or of others—no, not if all the Greeks and all the
barbarians join in calling him king.
It was not only the developing forms of ethics that were thus made to
find a support in Homer, but all the varying theories of physics and
metaphysics, one by one. The Heracliteans held, for example, that when
Homer spoke of
“Ocean, the birth of gods, and Tethys their mother,”
he meant to say that all things are the offspring of flow and
movement.[73] The Platonists held that when Zeus reminded Hera of the
time when he had hung her trembling by a golden chain in the vast concave
of heaven, it was God speaking to matter which he had taken and bound by
the chains of laws.[74] The Stoics read into the poets so much Stoicism,
that Cicero says, in good-humoured banter, that you would think the old
poets, who had really no suspicion of such things, to have been Stoical
philosophers.[75] Sometimes Homer was treated as a kind of encyclopædia.
Xenophon, in his _Banquet_,[76] makes one of the speakers, who could
repeat Homer by heart, say that “the wisest of mankind had written about
almost all human things;” and there is a treatise by an unknown author of
imperial times which endeavours to show in detail that he contains the
beginning of every one of the later sciences, historical, philosophical,
and political.[77] When he calls men deep-voiced and women high-voiced,
he shows his knowledge of the distinctions of music. When he gives to
each character its appropriate style of speech, he shows his knowledge
of rhetoric. He is the father of political science, in having given
examples of each of the three forms of government—monarchy, aristocracy,
democracy. He is the father of military science, in the information which
he gives about tactics and siege-works. He knew and taught astronomy and
medicine, gymnastics and surgery; “nor would a man be wrong if he were to
say that he was a teacher of painting also.”
This indifference to the actual meaning of a writer, and the habit
of reading him by the light of the reader’s own fancies, have a
certain analogy in our own day in the feeling with which we sometimes
regard other works of art. We stand before some great masterpiece of
painting—the St. Cecilia or the Sistine Madonna—and are, as it were,
carried off our feet by the wonder of it. We must be cold critics if
we simply ask ourselves what Raffaelle meant by it. We interpret it
by our own emotions. The picture speaks to us with a personal and
individual voice. It links itself with a thousand memories of the past
and a thousand dreams of the future. It translates us into another
world—the world of a lost and impossible love, the dreamland of achieved
aspirations, the tender and half-tearful heaven of forgiven sins: we
are ready to believe, if only for a moment, that Raffaelle meant by it
all that it means to us; and for what he did actually mean, we have but
little care.
* * * * *
But these tendencies to draw a moral from all that Homer wrote, and to
read philosophy into it, though common and permanent, were not universal.
There was an instinct in the Greek mind, as there is in modern times,
which rebelled against them. There were literalists who insisted that
the words should be taken as they stood, and that some of the words as
they stood were clearly immoral.[78] There were, on the other hand,
apologists who said sometimes that Homer reflected faithfully the
chequered lights and shadows of human life, and sometimes that the
existence of immorality in Homer must clearly be allowed, but that if
a balance were struck between the good and the evil, the good would
be found largely to predominate.[79] There were other apologists who
made a distinction between the divine and the human elements: the poets
sometimes spoke, it was said, on their own account: some of their poetry
was inspired, and some was not: the Muses sometimes left them: “and they
may very properly be forgiven if, being men, they made mistakes when the
divinity which spoke through their mouths had gone away from them.”[80]
But all these apologies were insufficient. The chasm between the older
religion which was embodied in the poets, and the new ideas which were
marching in steady progress away from the Homeric world, was widening
day by day. A reconciliation had to be found which had deeper roots. It
was found in a process of interpretation whose strength must be measured
by its permanence. The process was based upon a natural tendency. The
unseen working of the will which lies behind all voluntary actions, and
the unseen working of thought which by an instinctive process causes some
of those actions to be symbolical, led men in comparatively early times
to find a meaning beneath the surface of a record or representation of
actions. A narrative of actions, no less than the actions themselves,
might be symbolical. It might contain a hidden meaning. Men who retained
their reverence for Homer, or who at least were not prepared to break
with the current belief in him, began to search for such meanings.
They were assisted in doing so by the concomitant development of the
“mysteries.” The mysteries were representations of passages in the
history of the gods which, whatever their origin, had become symbolical.
It is possible that no words of explanation were spoken in them; but they
were, notwithstanding, habituating the Greek mind both to symbolical
expression in general, and to the finding of physical or religious
or moral truths in the representation of fantastic or even immoral
actions.[81]
It is uncertain when this method of interpretation began to be applied
to ancient literature. It was part of the general intellectual movement
of the fifth century B.C. It is found in one of its forms in Hecatæus,
who explained the story of Cerberus by the existence of a poisonous snake
in a cavern on the headland of Tænaron.[82] It was elaborated by the
sophists. It was deprecated by Plato. “If I disbelieved it,” he makes
Socrates say,[83] in reference to the story of Boreas and Oreithyia, “as
the philosophers do, I should not be unreasonable: then I might say,
talking like a philosopher, that Oreithyia was a girl who was caught by
a strong wind and carried off while playing on the cliffs yonder; ...
but it would take a long and laborious and not very happy lifetime to
deal with all such questions: and for my own part I cannot investigate
them until, as the Delphian precept bids me, I first Know myself.” Nor
will he admit allegorical interpretation as a sufficient vindication of
Homer:[84] “The chaining of Hera, and the flinging forth of Hephæstus
by his father, and all the fightings of gods which Homer has described,
we shall not admit into our state, whether with allegories or without
them.” But the direct line of historical tradition of the method seems
to begin with Anaxagoras and his school.[85] In Anaxagoras himself the
allegory was probably ethical: he found in Homer a symbolical account of
the movements of mental powers and moral virtues: Zeus was mind, Athené
was art. But the method which, though it is found in germ among earlier
or contemporary writers, seems to have been first formulated by his
disciple Metrodorus, was not ethical but physical.[86] By a remarkable
anticipation of a modern science, possibly by a survival of memories of
an earlier religion, the Homeric stories were treated as a symbolical
representation of physical phenomena. The gods were the powers of nature:
their gatherings, their movements, their loves, and their battles, were
the play and interaction and apparent strife of natural forces. The
method had for many centuries an enormous hold upon the Greek mind; it
lay beneath the whole theology of the Stoical schools; it was largely
current among the scholars and critics of the early empire.[87]
Its most detailed exposition is contained in two writers, of both of whom
so little is personally known that there is a division of opinion whether
the name of the one was Heraclitus or Heraclides,[88] and of the other
Cornutus or Phornutus;[89] but both were Stoics, both are most probably
assigned to the early part of the first century of our era, and in both
of them the physical is blended with an ethical interpretation.
1. Heraclitus begins by the definite avowal of his apologetic purpose.
His work is a vindication of Homer from the charge of impiety. “He would
unquestionably be impious if he were not allegorical;”[90] but as it is,
“there is no stain of unholy fables in his words: they are pure and free
from impiety.”[91] Apollo is the sun; the “far-darter” is the sun sending
forth his rays: when it is said that Apollo slew men with his arrows,
it is meant that there was a pestilence in the heat of summer-time.[92]
Athené is thought: when it is said that Athené came to Telemachus, it
is meant only that the young man then first began to reflect upon the
waste and profligacy of the suitors: a thought, shaped like a wise old
man, came, as it were, and sat by his side.[93] The story of Proteus
and Eidothea is an allegory of the original formless matter taking many
shapes:[94] the story of Ares and Aphrodite and Hephæstus is a picture of
iron subdued by fire, and restored to its original hardness by Poseidon,
that is by water.[95]
2. Cornutus writes in vindication not so much of the piety of the
ancients as of their knowledge: they knew as much as men of later times,
but they expressed it at greater length and by means of symbols. He rests
his interpretation of those symbols to a large extent upon etymology.
The science of religion was to him, as it has been to some persons in
modern days, an extension of the science of philology. The following
are examples: Hermes (from ἐρεῖν, “to speak”) is the power of speech
which the gods sent from heaven as their peculiar and distinguishing
gift to men. He is called the “conductor,” because speech conducts one
man’s thought into his neighbour’s soul. He is the “bright-shiner,”
because speech makes dark things clear. His winged feet are the symbols
of “winged words.” He is the “leader of souls,” because words soothe
the soul to rest; and the “awakener from sleep,” because words rouse
men to action. The serpents twined round his staff are a symbol of the
savage natures that are calmed by words, and their discords gathered into
harmony.[96] The story of Prometheus (“forethought”), who made a man from
clay, is an allegory of the providence and forethought of the universe:
he is said to have stolen fire, because it was the forethought of men
found out its use: he is said to have stolen it from heaven, because
it came down in a lightning-flash: and his being chained to a rock is
a picture of the quick inventiveness of human thought chained to the
painful necessities of physical life, its liver gnawed at unceasingly by
petty cares.[97]
Two other examples of the method may be given from later writers, to show
the variety of its application.
The one is from Sallust, a writer of the fourth century of our era. He
thus explains the story of the judgment of Paris. The banquet of the gods
is a picture of the vast supra-mundane Powers, who are always in each
other’s society. The apple is the world, which is thrown from the banquet
by Discord, because the world itself is the play of opposing forces; and
different qualities are given to the world by different Powers, each
trying to win the world for itself; and Paris is the soul in its sensuous
life, which sees not the other Powers in the world, but only Beauty, and
says that the world is the property of Love.[98]
The other is from a writer of a late but uncertain age. He deals only
with the Odyssey. Its hero is the picture of a man who is tossed upon
the sea of life, drifted this way and that by adverse winds of fortune
and of passion: the companions who were lost among the Lotophagi are
pictures of men who are caught by the baits of pleasure and do not return
to reason as their guide: the Sirens are the pleasures that tempt and
allure all men who pass over the sea of life, and against which the only
counter-charm is to fill one’s senses and powers of mind full of divine
words and actions, as Odysseus filled his ears with wax, that, no part of
them being left empty, pleasure may knock at their doors in vain.[99]
The method survived as a literary habit long after its original purpose
failed. The mythology which it had been designed to vindicate passed from
the sphere of religion into that of literature; but in so passing, it
took with it the method to which it had given rise. The habit of trying
to find an _arrière pensée_ beneath a man’s actual words had become so
inveterate, that all great writers without distinction were treated as
writers of riddles. The literary class insisted that their functions were
needed as interpreters, and that a plain man could not know what a great
writer meant. “The use of symbolical speech,” said Didymus, the great
grammarian of the Augustan age, “is characteristic of the wise man, and
the explanation of its meaning.”[100] Even Thucydides is said by his
biographer to have purposely made his style obscure that he might not be
accessible except to the truly wise.[101] It tended to become a fixed
idea in the minds of many men that religious truth especially must be
wrapped up in symbol, and that symbol must contain religious truth. The
idea has so far descended to the present day, that there are, even now,
persons who think that a truth which is obscurely stated is more worthy
of respect, and more likely to be divine, than a truth which “he that
runs may read.”
* * * * *
The same kind of difficulty which had been felt on a large scale in the
Greek world in regard to Homer, was felt in no less a degree by those
Jews who had become students of Greek philosophy in regard to their
own sacred books. The Pentateuch, in a higher sense than Homer, was
regarded as having been written under the inspiration of God. It, no
less than Homer, was so inwrought into the minds of men that it could
not be set aside. It, no less than Homer, contained some things which,
at least on the surface, seemed inconsistent with morality. To it, no
less than to Homer, was applicable the theory that the words were the
veils of a hidden meaning. The application fulfilled a double purpose: it
enabled educated Jews, on the one hand, to reconcile their own adoption
of Greek philosophy with their continued adhesion to their ancestral
religion, and, on the other hand, to show to the educated Greeks with
whom they associated, and whom they frequently tried to convert, that
their literature was neither barbarous, nor unmeaning, nor immoral. It
may be conjectured that, just as in Greece proper the adoption of the
allegorical method had been helped by the existence of the mysteries, so
in Egypt it was helped by the large use in earlier times of hieroglyphic
writing, the monuments of which were all around them, though the writing
itself had ceased.[102]
The earliest Jewish writer of this school of whom any remains have come
down to us, is reputed to be Aristobulus (about B.C. 170-150).[103] In
an exposition of the Pentateuch which he is said to have addressed
to Ptolemy Philometor, he boldly claimed that, so far from the Mosaic
writings being outside the sphere of philosophy, the Greek philosophers
had taken their philosophy from them. “Moses,” he said, “using the
figures of visible things, tells us the arrangements of nature and the
constitutions of important matters.” The anthropomorphisms of the Old
Testament were explained on this principle. The “hand” of God, for
example, meant His power, His “feet,” the stability of the world.
But by far the most considerable monument of this mode of interpretation
consists of the works of Philo. They are based throughout on the
supposition of a hidden meaning. But they carry us into a new world. The
hidden meaning is not physical, but metaphysical and spiritual. The seen
is the veil of the unseen, a robe thrown over it which marks its contour,
“and half conceals and half reveals the form within.”
It would be easy to interest you, perhaps even to amuse you, by quoting
some of the strange meanings which Philo gives to the narratives of
familiar incidents. But I deprecate the injustice which has sometimes
been done to him by taking such meanings apart from the historical
circumstances out of which allegorical interpretation grew, and
the purpose which it was designed to serve. I will give only one
passage, which I have chosen because it shows as well as any other the
contemporary existence of both the methods of interpretation of which
I have spoken—that of finding a moral in every narrative, and that of
interpreting the narrative symbolically: the former of these Philo calls
the literal, the latter the deeper meaning. The text is Gen. xxviii. 11,
“He took the stones of that place and put them beneath his head;” the
commentary is:[104]
“The words are wonderful, not only because of their allegorical
and physical meaning, but also because of their literal
teaching of trouble and endurance. The writer does not think
that a student of virtue should have a delicate and luxurious
life, imitating those who are called fortunate, but who are in
reality full of misfortunes, eager anxieties and rivalries,
whose whole life the Divine Lawgiver describes as a sleep
and a dream. These are men who, after spending their days in
doing injuries to others, return to their homes and upset
them—I mean, not the houses they live in, but the body which
is the home of the soul—by immoderate eating and drinking,
and at night lie down in soft and costly beds. Such men are
not the disciples of the sacred word. Its disciples are real
men, lovers of temperance and sobriety and modesty, who make
self-restraint and contentment and endurance the corner-stones,
as it were, of their lives: who rise superior to money and
pleasure and fame: who are ready, for the sake of acquiring
virtue, to endure hunger and thirst, heat and cold: whose
costly couch is a soft turf, whose bedding is grass and leaves,
whose pillow is a heap of stones or a hillock rising a little
above the ground. Of such men, Jacob is an example: he put a
stone for his pillow: a little while afterwards (v. 20), we
find him asking only for nature’s wealth of food and raiment:
he is the archetype of a soul that disciplines itself, one who
is at war with every kind of effeminacy.
“But the passage has a further meaning, which is conveyed in
symbol. You must know that the divine place and the holy
ground is full of incorporeal Intelligences, who are immortal
souls. It is one of these that Jacob takes and puts close
to his mind, which is, as it were, the head of the combined
person, body and soul. He does so under the pretext of going to
sleep, but in reality to find repose in the Intelligence which
he has chosen, and to place all the burden of his life upon it.”
In all this, Philo was following not a Hebrew but a Greek method.
He expressly speaks of it as the method of the Greek mysteries. He
addresses his hearers by the name which was given to those who were being
initiated. He bids them be purified before they listen. And in this way
it was possible for him to be a Greek philosopher without ceasing to be a
Jew.
* * * * *