développée plus complètement qu’ailleurs, où ses produits ont
été plus soigneusement recueillis et mieux conservés: dans ce
pays, ils ont reçu un nom particulier, dont l’équivalent exact ne
se trouve pas hors des langues Germaniques: c’est le mot _Saga,
Sage, ce qu’on dit, ce qu’on raconte_,—la tradition orale. Si
l’on prend ce mot non dans une acception restreinte, mais dans
le sens général où le prenait Niebuhr quand il l’appliquoit, par
exemple, aux traditions populaires qui ont pu fournir à Tite Live
une portion de son histoire, la Saga doit être comptée parmi
les produits spontanés de l’imagination humaine. La Saga a son
existence propre comme la poësie, comme l’histoire, comme le
roman. Elle n’est pas la poësie, parcequ’elle n’est pas chantée,
mais parlée; elle n’est pas l’histoire, parcequ’elle est denuée
de critique; elle n’est pas le roman, parcequ’elle est sincère,
parcequ’elle a foi à ce qu’elle raconte. Elle n’invente pas, mais
répète: elle peut se tromper, mais elle ne ment jamais. Ce récit
souvent merveilleux, que personne ne fabrique sciemment, et que
tout le monde altère et falsifie sans le vouloir, qui se perpétue
à la manière des chants primitifs et populaires,—ce récit, quand
il se rapporte non à un héros, mais à un saint, s’appelle une
légende.”
[850] Herodot. ii. 53.
History, philosophy, etc., properly so called and conforming to our
ideas (of which the subsequent Greeks were the first creators), never
belonged to more than a comparatively small number of thinking men,
though their influence indirectly affected more or less the whole
national mind. But when positive science and criticism, and the idea of
an invariable sequence of events, came to supplant in the more vigorous
intellects the old mythical creed of omnipresent personification,
an inevitable scission was produced between the instructed few and
the remaining community. The opposition between the scientific and
the religious point of view was not slow in manifesting itself: in
general language, indeed, both might seem to stand together, but in
every particular case the admission of one involved the rejection of
the other. According to the theory which then became predominant,
the course of nature was held to move invariably on, by powers and
attributes of its own, unless the gods chose to interfere and reverse
it; but they had the power of interfering as often and to as great an
extent as they thought fit. Here the question was at once opened,
respecting a great variety of particular phænomena, whether they were
to be regarded as natural or miraculous. No constant or discernible
test could be suggested to discriminate the two: every man was called
upon to settle the doubt for himself, and each settled it according to
the extent of his knowledge, the force of his logic, the state of his
health, his hopes, his fears, and many other considerations affecting
his separate conclusion. In a question thus perpetually arising, and
full of practical consequences, instructed minds, like Periklês,
Thucydidês, and Euripidês, tended more and more to the scientific
point of view,[851] in cases where the general public were constantly
gravitating towards the religious.
[851] See Plutarch, Perikl. capp. 5, 32, 38; Cicero, De Republ.
i. 15-16, ed. Maii.
The phytologist Theophrastus, in his valuable collection of facts
respecting vegetable organization, is often under the necessity
of opposing his scientific interpretation of curious incidents in
the vegetable world to the religious interpretation of them which
he found current. Anomalous phænomena in the growth or decay of
trees were construed as signs from the gods, and submitted to a
prophet for explanation (see Histor. Plantar. ii. 3, iv. 16; v.
3).
We may remark, however, that the old faith had still a certain
hold over his mind. In commenting on the story of the willow-tree
at Philippi, and the venerable old plane-tree at Antandros
(more than sixty feet high, and requiring four men to grasp it
round in the girth), having been blown down by a high wind, and
afterwards spontaneously resuming their erect posture, he offers
some explanations how such a phænomenon might have happened, but
he admits, at the end, that there may be something extra-natural
in the case, Ἀλλὰ ταῦτα μὲν ἴσως ἔξω φυσικῆς αἰτίας ἔστιν, etc.
(De Caus. Plant. v. 4): see a similar miracle in reference to the
cedar-tree of Vespasian (Tacit. Hist. ii. 78).
Euripidês, in his lost tragedy called Μελανίππη Σοφὴ, placed in
the month of Melanippê a formal discussion and confutation of the
whole doctrine of τέρατα, or supernatural indications (Dionys.
Halicar. Ars Rhetoric. p. 300-356, Reisk). Compare the Fables of
Phædrus, iii. 3; Plutarch, Sept. Sap. Conviv. ch. 3. p. 149; and
the curious philosophical explanation by which the learned men of
Alexandria tranquillized the alarms of the vulgar, on occasion of
the serpent said to have been seen entwined round the head of the
crucified Kleomenês (Plutarch, Kleomen. c. 39).
It is one part of the duty of an able physician, according to
the Hippocratic treatise called Prognosticon (c. 1. t. ii. p.
112, ed. Littré), when he visits his patient, to examine whether
there is anything divine in the malady, ἅμα δὲ καὶ εἴ τι θεῖον
ἔνεστιν ἐν τῇσι νούσοισι: this, however, does not agree with the
memorable doctrine laid down in the treatise, De Aëre, Locis et
Aquis (c. 22. p. 78, ed. Littré), and cited hereafter, in this
chapter. Nor does Galen seem to have regarded it as harmonizing
with the general views of Hippocratês. In the excellent
Prolegomena of M. Littré to his edition of Hippocratês (t. i.
p. 76) will be found an inedited scholium, wherein the opinion
of Baccheius and other physicians is given, that the affections
of the plague were to be looked upon as divine, inasmuch as the
disease came from God; and also the opinion of Xenophôn, the
friend of Praxagoras, that the “genus of days of crisis” in fever
was divine; “For (said Xenophôn) just as the Dioskuri, being
gods, appear to the mariner in the storm and bring him salvation,
so also do the days of crisis, when they arrive, in fever.”
Galen, in commenting upon this doctrine of Xenophôn, says that
the author “has expressed his own individual feeling, but has
no way set forth the opinion of Hippocratês:” Ὁ δὲ τῶν κρισίμων
γένος ἡμερῶν εἰπὼν εἶναι θεῖον, ἑαυτοῦ τι πάθος ὡμολόγησεν· οὐ
μὴν Ἱπποκράτους γε τὴν γνώμην ἔδειξεν (Galen, Opp. t. v. p. 120,
ed. Basil).
The comparison of the Dioskuri appealed to by Xenophôn is a
precise reproduction of their function as described in the
Homeric Hymn (Hymn xxxiii. 10): his personification of the “days
of crisis” introduces the old religious agency to fill up a gap
in his medical science.
I annex an illustration from the Hindoo vein of thought:—“It is
a rule with the Hindoos to bury, and not to burn, the bodies of
those who die of the small pox: for (say they) the small pox is
not only caused by the goddess Davey, but is, in fact, _Davey
herself_; and to burn the body of a person affected with this
disease, is, in reality, neither more nor less than _to burn the
goddess_.” (Sleeman, Rambles and Recollections, etc., vol. i. ch.
xxv. p. 221.)
The age immediately prior to this unsettled condition of thought is
the really mythopœic age; in which the creative faculties of the
society know no other employment, and the mass of the society no
other mental demand. The perfect expression of such a period, in
its full peculiarity and grandeur, is to be found in the Iliad and
Odyssey,—poems of which we cannot determine the exact date, but which
seem both to have existed prior to the first Olympiad, 776 B. C., our
earliest trustworthy mark of Grecian time. For some time after that
event, the mythopœic tendencies continued in vigor (Arktinus, Leschês,
Eumêlus, and seemingly most of the Hesiodic poems, fall within or
shortly after the first century of recorded Olympiads); but from and
after this first century, we may trace the operation of causes which
gradually enfeebled and narrowed them, altering the point of view from
which the mythes were looked at. What these causes were, it will be
necessary briefly to intimate.
The foremost and most general of all is, the expansive force of Grecian
intellect itself,—a quality in which this remarkable people stand
distinguished from all their neighbors and contemporaries. Most, if
not all nations have had mythes, but no nation except the Greeks have
imparted to them immortal charm and universal interest; and the same
mental capacities, which raised the great men of the poetic age to this
exalted level, also pushed forward their successors to outgrow the
early faith in which the mythes had been generated and accredited.
One great mark, as well as means, of such intellectual expansion,
was the habit of attending to, recording, and combining, positive
and present facts, both domestic and foreign. In the genuine Grecian
epic, the theme was an unknown and aoristic past; but even as early
as the Works and Days of Hesiod, the present begins to figure: the
man who tills the earth appears in his own solitary nakedness, apart
from gods and heroes—bound indeed by serious obligations to the gods,
but contending against many difficulties which are not to be removed
by simple reliance on their help. The poet denounces his age in the
strongest terms as miserable, degraded and profligate, and looks back
with reverential envy to the extinct heroic races who fought at Troy
and Thêbes. Yet bad as the present time is, the Muse condescends to
look at it along with him, and to prescribe rules for human life—with
the assurance that if a man be industrious, frugal, provident, just
and friendly in his dealings, the gods will recompense him with
affluence and security. Nor does the Muse disdain, while holding out
such promise, to cast herself into the most homely details of present
existence and to give advice thoroughly practical and calculating. Men
whose minds were full of the heroes of Homer, called Hesiod in contempt
the poet of the Helots; and the contrast between the two is certainly
a remarkable proof of the tendency of Greek poetry towards the present
and the positive.
Other manifestations of the same tendency become visible in the age of
Archilochus (B. C. 680-660). In an age when metrical composition and
the living voice are the only means whereby the productive minds of a
community make themselves felt, the invention of a new metre, new forms
of song and recitation, or diversified accompaniments, constitute an
epoch. The iambic, elegiac, choric, and lyric poetry, from Archilochus
downwards, all indicate purposes in the poet, and impressibilities
of the hearers, very different from those of the ancient epic. In
all of them the personal feeling of the poet and the specialties of
present time and place, are brought prominently forward, while in the
Homeric hexameter the poet is a mere nameless organ of the historical
Muse—the hearers are content to learn, believe, and feel, the incidents
of a foregone world, and the tale is hardly less suitable to one
time and place than to another. The iambic metre (we are told) was
first suggested to Archilochus by the bitterness of his own private
antipathies; and the mortal wounds inflicted by his lampoons, upon the
individuals against whom they were directed, still remain attested,
though the verses themselves have perished. It was the metre (according
to the well-known judgment of Aristotle) most nearly approaching to
common speech, and well suited both to the coarse vein of sentiment,
and to the smart and emphatic diction of its inventor.[852] Simonidês
of Amorgus, the younger contemporary of Archilochus, employed the same
metre, with less bitterness, but with an anti-heroic tendency not
less decided. His remaining fragments present a mixture of teaching
and sarcasm, having a distinct bearing upon actual life,[853] and
carrying out the spirit which partially appears in the Hesiodic Works
and Days. Of Alkæus and Sapphô, though unfortunately we are compelled
to speak of them upon hearsay only, we know enough to satisfy us that
their own personal sentiments and sufferings, their relations private
or public with the contemporary world, constituted the soul of those
short effusions which gave them so much celebrity:[854] and in the
few remains of the elegiac poets preserved to us—Kallinus, Mimnermus,
Tyrtæus—the impulse of some present motive or circumstance is no
less conspicuous. The same may also be said of Solôn, Theognis and
Phokylidês, who preach, encourage, censure, or complain, but do not
recount—and in whom a profound ethical sensibility, unknown to the
Homeric poems, manifests itself: the form of poetry (to use the words
of Solôn himself) is made the substitute for the public speaking of the
agora.[855]
[852] Horat. de Art. Poet. 79:—
“Archilochum proprio rabies armavit Iambo,” etc.
Compare Epist. i. 19, 23, and Epod. vi. 12; Aristot. Rhetor. iii.
8, 7, and Poetic. c. 4—also Synesius de Somniis—ὥσπερ Ἀλκαῖος καὶ
Ἀρχίλοχος, οἳ δεδαπανήκασι τὴν εὐστομίαν εἰς τὸν οἰκεῖον βίον
ἑκάτερος (Alcæi Fragment. Halle, 1810, p. 205). Quintilian speaks
in striking language of the power of expression manifested by
Archilochus (x. 1, 60).
[853] Simonidês of Amorgus touches briefly, but in a tone of
contempt upon the Trojan war—~γυναικὸς οὕνεκ᾽~ ἀμφιδηριωμένους
(Simonid. Fragm. 8. p. 36. v. 118); he seems to think it absurd
that so destructive a struggle should have taken place “_pro unâ
mulierculâ_,” to use the phrase of Mr. Payne Knight.
[854] See Quintilian, x. 1, 63. Horat. Od. i. 32; ii. 13.
Aristot. Polit. iii. 10, 4. Dionys. Halic. observes (Vett.
Scriptt. Censur. v. p. 421) respecting Alkæus—πολλαχοῦ γοῦν τὸ
μέτρον εἴ τις περιέλοι, ῥητορικὴν ἂν εὕροι πολιτείαν; and Strabo
(xiii. p. 617), τὰ στασιωτικὰ καλούμενα τοῦ Ἀλκαίου ποιήματα.
There was a large dash of sarcasm and homely banter aimed at
neighbors and contemporaries in the poetry of Sapphô, apart from
her impassioned love-songs—ἄλλως σκώπτει τὸν ἄγροικον νύμφιον καὶ
τὸν θυρωρὸν τὸν ἐν τοῖς γάμοις, εὐτελέστατα καὶ ἐν πέζοις ὀνόμασι
μᾶλλον ἢ ἐν ποιητικοῖς. Ὥστε αὐτῆς μᾶλλόν ἐστι τὰ ποιήματα ταῦτα
διαλέγεσθαι ἢ ἄδειν· οὐδ᾽ ἂν ἅρμοσαι πρὸς τὸν χόρον ἢ πρὸς τὴν
λύραν, εἰ μή τις εἴη χόρος διαλεκτικός (Dêmêtr. Phaler, De
Interpret. c. 167).
Compare also Herodot. ii. 135, who mentions the satirical talent
of Sapphô, employed against her brother for an extravagance about
the courtezan Rhodôpis.
[855] Solôn, Fragm. iv. 1, ed. Schneidewin:—
Αὐτὸς κήρυξ ἦλθον ἀφ᾽ ἱμερτῆς Σαλαμῖνος
Κόσμον ἐπέων ᾠδὴν ἀντ᾽ ἀγορῆς θέμενος, etc.
See _Brandis_, Handbuch der Griechischen Philosophie, sect.
xxiv.-xxv. Plato states that Solôn, in his old age, engaged in
the composition of an epic poem, which he left unfinished, on the
subject of the supposed island of Atlantis and Attica (Plato,
Timæus, p. 21, and Kritias, p. 113). Plutarch, Solôn, c. 31.
Doubtless all these poets made abundant use of the ancient mythes, but
it was by turning them to present account, in the way of illustration,
or flattery, or contrast,—a tendency which we may usually detect even
in the compositions of Pindar, in spite of the lofty and heroic strain
which they breathe throughout. That narrative or legendary poetry still
continued to be composed during the seventh and sixth centuries before
the Christian æra is not to be questioned; but it exhibited the old
epical character without the old epical genius; both the inspiration
of the composer and the sympathies of the audience had become more
deeply enlisted in the world before them, and disposed to fasten on
incidents of their own actual experience. From Solôn and Theognis
we pass to the abandonment of all metrical restrictions and to the
introduction of prose writing,—a fact, the importance of which it is
needless to dwell upon,—marking as well the increased familiarity with
written records, as the commencement of a separate branch of literature
for the intellect, apart from the imagination and emotions wherein the
old legends had their exclusive root.
Egypt was first unreservedly opened to the Greeks during the reign of
Psammetichus, about B. C. 660; gradually it became much frequented by
them for military or commercial purposes, or for simple curiosity, and
enlarged the range of their thoughts and observations, while it also
imparted to them that vein of mysticism, which overgrew the primitive
simplicity of the Homeric religion, and of which I have spoken in a
former chapter. They found in it a long-established civilization,
colossal wonders of architecture, and a certain knowledge of astronomy
and geometry, elementary indeed, but in advance of their own. Moreover
it was a portion of their present world, and it contributed to form in
them an interest for noting and describing the actual realities before
them. A sensible progress is made in the Greek mind during the two
centuries from B. C. 700 to B. C. 500, in the record and arrangement
of historical facts: an _historical sense_ arises in the superior
intellects, and some idea of evidence as a discriminating test between
fact and fiction. And this progressive tendency was further stimulated
by increased communication and by more settled and peaceful social
relations between the various members of the Hellenic world, to which
may be added material improvements, purchased at the expense of a
period of turbulence and revolution, in the internal administration
of each separate state. The Olympic, Pythian, Nemean, and Isthmian
games became frequented by visitors from the most distant parts of
Greece: the great periodical festival in the island of Dêlos brought
together the citizens of every Ionic community, with their wives and
children, and an ample display of wealth and ornaments.[856] Numerous
and flourishing colonies were founded in Sicily, the south of Italy,
the coasts of Epirus and of the Euxine Sea: the Phokæans explored the
whole of the Adriatic, established Massalia, and penetrated even as
far as the south of Ibêria, with which they carried on a lucrative
commerce.[857] The geographical ideas of the Greeks were thus both
expanded and rectified: the first preparation of a map, by Anaximander
the disciple of Thalês, is an epoch in the history of science. We may
note the ridicule bestowed by Herodotus both upon the supposed people
called Hyperboreans and upon the idea of a circumfluous ocean-stream,
as demonstrating the progress of the age in this department of
inquiry.[858] And even earlier than Herodotus, Xanthus had noticed the
occurrence of fossil marine productions in the interior of Asia Minor,
which led him to reflections on the changes of the earth’s surface with
respect to land and water.[859]
[856] Homer, Hymn. ad Apollin. 155; Thucydid. iii. 104.
[857] Herodot. i. 163.
[858] Herodot. iv. 36. γελῶ δὲ ὁρέων Γῆς περιόδους γράψαντας
πολλοὺς ἤδη, καὶ οὐδένα νόον ἔχοντας ἐξηγησάμενον· οἳ Ὠκέανόν τε
ῥέοντα γράφουσι πέριξ τὴν γῆν, ἐοῦσαν κυκλοτερέα ὡς ἀπὸ τόρνου,
etc., a remark probably directed against Hekatæus.
Respecting the map of Anaximander, Strabo, i. p. 7; Diogen.
Laërt. ii. 1; Agathemer ap. Geograph. Minor. i. 1. πρῶτος
ἐτόλμησε τὴν οἰκουμένην ἐν πίνακι γράψαι.
Aristagoras of Milêtus, who visited Sparta to solicit aid for the
revolted Ionians against Darius, brought with him a brazen tablet
or map, by means of which he exhibited the relative position of
places in the Persian empire (Herodot. v. 49).
[859] Xanthus ap. Strabo. i. p. 50; xii. p. 579. Compare Creuzer,
Fragmenta Xanthi, p. 162.
If then we look down the three centuries and a half which elapsed
between the commencement of the Olympic æra and the age of
Herodotus and Thucydidês, we shall discern a striking advance in
the Greeks,—ethical, social and intellectual. Positive history and
chronology has not only been created, but in the case of Thucydidês,
the qualities necessary to the historiographer, in their application to
recent events, have been developed with a degree of perfection never
since surpassed. Men’s minds have assumed a gentler as well as a juster
cast; and acts come to be criticized with reference to their bearing
on the internal happiness of a well-regulated community, as well as
upon the standing harmony of fraternal states. While Thucydidês
treats the habitual and licensed piracy, so coolly alluded to in the
Homeric poems, as an obsolete enormity, many of the acts described in
the old heroic and Theogonic legends were found not less repugnant to
this improved tone of feeling. The battles of the gods with the Giants
and Titans,—the castration of Uranus by his son Kronus,—the cruelty,
deceit and licentiousness, often supposed both in the gods and heroes,
provoked strong disapprobation. And the language of the philosopher
Xenophanês, who composed both elegiac and iambic poems for the express
purpose of denouncing such tales, is as vehement and unsparing as that
of the Christian writers, who, eight centuries afterwards, attacked the
whole scheme of paganism.[860]
[860] Xenophan. ap. Sext. Empiric. adv. Mathemat. ix. 193. Fragm.
1. Poet. Græc. ed. Schneidewin. Diogen. Laërt. ix. 18.
Nor was it alone as an ethical and social critic that Xenophanês
stood distinguished. He was one of a great and eminent triad—Thalês
and Pythagoras being the others—who, in the sixth century before the
Christian æra, first opened up those veins of speculative philosophy
which occupied afterwards so large a portion of Grecian intellectual
energy. Of the material differences between the three I do not here
speak; I regard them only in reference to the Homeric and Hesiodic
philosophy which preceded them, and from which all three deviated by a
step, perhaps the most remarkable in all the history of philosophy. In
the scheme of ideas common to Homer and to the Hesiodic Theogony (as
has been already stated), we find nature distributed into a variety of
personal agencies, administered according to the free-will of different
Beings more or less analogous to man—each of these Beings having his
own character, attributes and powers, his own sources of pain and
pleasure, and his own especial sympathies or antipathies with human
individuals; each being determined to act or forbear, to grant favor
or inflict injury in his own department of phænomena, according as
men, or perhaps other Beings analogous to himself, might conciliate or
offend him. The Gods, properly so called, (those who bore a proper name
and received some public or family worship,) were the most commanding
and capital members amidst this vast network of agents visible and
invisible, spread over the universe.[861] The whole view of nature
was purely religious and subjective, the spontaneous suggestion of
the early mind. It proceeded from the instinctive tendencies of the
feelings and imagination to transport, to the world without, the
familiar type of free-will and conscious personal action: above all, it
took deep hold of the emotions, from the widely extended sympathy which
it so perpetually called forth between man and nature.[862]
[861] Hesiod, Opp. Di. 122; Homer, Hymn. ad Vener. 260.
[862] A defence of the primitive faith, on this ground, is found
in Plutarch, Quæstion. Sympos. vii. 4, 4, p. 703.
The first attempt to disenthral the philosophic intellect from this
all-personifying religious faith, and to constitute a method of
interpreting nature distinct from the spontaneous inspirations of
untaught minds, is to be found in Thalês, Xenophanês and Pythagoras, in
the sixth century before the Christian æra. It is in them that we first
find the idea of Person tacitly set aside or limited, and an impersonal
Nature conceived as the object of study. The divine husband and wife,
Oceanus and Têthys, parents of many gods and of the Oceanic nymphs,
together with the avenging goddess Styx, are translated into the
material substance _water_, or, as we ought rather to say, the Fluid:
and Thalês set himself to prove that water was the primitive element,
out of which all the different natural substances had been formed.[863]
He, as well as Xenophanês and Pythagoras, started the problem of
physical philosophy, with its objective character and invariable laws,
to be discoverable by a proper and methodical application of the human
intellect. The Greek word Φύσις, denoting _nature_, and its derivatives
_physics_ and _physiology_, unknown in that large sense to Homer or
Hesiod, as well as the word _Kosmos_, to denote the mundane system,
first appears with these philosophers.[864] The elemental analysis
of Thalês—the one unchangeable cosmic substance, varying only in
appearance, but not in reality, as suggested by Xenophanês,—and the
geometrical and arithmetical combinations of Pythagoras,—all these were
different ways of approaching the explanation of physical phænomena,
and each gave rise to a distinct school or succession of philosophers.
But they all agreed in departing from the primitive method, and in
recognizing determinate properties, invariable sequences, and objective
truth, in nature—either independent of willing or designing agents, or
serving to these latter at once as an indispensable subject-matter and
as a limiting condition. Xenophanês disclaimed openly all knowledge
respecting the gods, and pronounced that no man could have any means of
ascertaining when he was right and when he was wrong, in affirmations
respecting them:[865] while Pythagoras represents in part the
scientific tendencies of his age, in part also the spirit of mysticism
and of special fraternities for religious and ascetic observance, which
became diffused throughout Greece in the sixth century before the
Christian æra. This was another point which placed him in antipathy
with the simple, unconscious and demonstrative faith of the old poets,
as well as with the current legends.
[863] Aristotel. Metaphys. i. 3.
[864] Plutarch, Placit. Philos. ii. 1; also Stobæus, Eclog.
Physic. i. 22, where the difference between the Homeric
expressions and those of the subsequent philosophers is seen.
Damm, Lexic. Homeric. v. Φύσις; Alexander von Humboldt, _Kosmos_,
p. 76, the note 9 on page 62 of that admirable work.
The title of the treatises of the early philosophers (Melissus,
Dêmokritus, Parmenidês, Empedoclês, Alkmæôn, etc.) was frequently
Περὶ Φύσεως (Galen. Opp. tom. i. p. 56, ed. Basil).
[865] Xenophan. ap. Sext. Empiric. vii. 50; viii. 326.—
Καὶ τὸ μὲν οὖν σαφὲς οὔτις ἀνὴρ ἴδεν, οὔτε τίς ἐστιν
Εἰδὼς ἀμφὶ θεῶν τε καὶ ἅσσα λέγω περὶ πάντων·
Εἰ γὰρ καὶ τὰ μάλιστα τύχοι τετελεσμένον εἰπῶν,
Αὐτος ὅμως οὐκ οἶδε, δόκος δ᾽ ἐπὶ πᾶσι τέτυκται.
Compare Aristotel. De Xenophane, Zenone, et Georgiâ, capp. 1-2.
If these distinguished men, when they ceased to follow the primitive
instinct of tracing the phænomena of nature to personal and designing
agents, passed over, not at once to induction and observation, but to a
misemployment of abstract words, substituting metaphysical _eideôla_ in
the place of polytheism, and to an exaggerated application of certain
narrow physical theories—we must remember that nothing else could be
expected from the scanty stock of facts then accessible, and that the
most profound study of the human mind points out such transition as an
inevitable law of intellectual progress.[866] At present, we have to
compare them only with that state of the Greek mind[867] which they
partially superseded, and with which they were in decided opposition.
The rudiments of physical science were conceived and developed among
superior men; but the religious feeling of the mass was averse to them;
and the aversion, though gradually mitigated, never wholly died away.
Some of the philosophers were not backward in charging others with
irreligion, while the multitude seems to have felt the same sentiment
more or less towards all—or towards that postulate of constant
sequences, with determinate conditions of occurrence, which scientific
study implies, and which they could not reconcile with their belief
in the agency of the gods, to whom they were constantly praying for
special succor and blessings.
[866] See the treatise of M. Auguste Comte (_Cours de Philosophie
Positive_), and his doctrine of the three successive stages of
the human mind in reference to scientific study—the theological,
the metaphysical, and the positive;—a doctrine laid down
generally in his first lecture (vol. i. p. 4-12), and largely
applied and illustrated throughout his instructive work. It is
also re-stated and elucidated by Mr. John Stuart Mill, in his
System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive, vol. ii. p. 610.
[867] “Human wisdom (ἀνθρωπίνη σοφία), as contrasted with
the primitive theology (οἱ ἀρχαῖοι καὶ διατρίβοντες περὶ τὰς
θεολογίας),” to take the words of Aristotle (Meteorolog. ii. 1.
pp. 41-42, ed. Tauchnitz).
The discrepancy between the scientific and the religious point of
view was dealt with differently by different philosophers. Thus
Socratês openly admitted it, and assigned to each a distinct and
independent province. He distributed phænomena into two classes: one,
wherein the connection of antecedent and consequent was invariable
and ascertainable by human study, and therefore future results
accessible to a well-instructed foresight; the other, and those, too,
the most comprehensive and important, which the gods had reserved
for themselves and their own unconditional agency, wherein there was
no invariable or ascertainable sequence, and where the result could
only be foreknown by some omen, prophecy, or other special inspired
communication from themselves. Each of these classes was essentially
distinct, and required to be looked at and dealt with in a manner
radically incompatible with the other. Socratês held it wrong to
apply the scientific interpretation to the latter, or the theological
interpretation to the former. Physics and astronomy, in his opinion,
belonged to the divine class of phænomena, in which human research was
insane, fruitless, and impious.[868]
[868] Xenoph. Memor. i. 1, 6-9. Τὰ μὲν ἀναγκαῖα (Σωκράτης)
συνεβούλευε καὶ πράττειν, ὡς ἐνόμιζεν ἄριστ᾽ ἂν πραχθῆναι·
περὶ δὲ τῶν ἀδήλων ὅπως ἀποβήσοιτο, μαντευσομένους ἔπεμπεν, εἰ
ποιητέα. Καὶ τοὺς μέλλοντας οἴκους τε καὶ πόλεις καλῶς οἰκήσειν
μαντικῆς ἔφη προσδεῖσθαι· τεκτονικὸν μὲν γὰρ ἢ χαλκευτικὸν ἢ
γεωργικὸν ἢ ἀνθρώπων ἀρχικὸν, ἢ τῶν τοιούτων ἔργων ἐξεταστικὸν,
ἢ λογιστικὸν, ἢ οἰκονομικὸν, ἢ στρατηγικὸν γενέσθαι, πάντα τὰ
τοιαῦτα, μαθήματα καὶ ἀνθρώπου γνώμῃ αἱρετέα, ἐνόμιζεν εἶναι· τὰ
δὲ μέγιστα τῶν ἐν τούτοις ἔφη ~τοὺς θεοὺς ἑαυτοῖς καταλείπεσθαι~,
ὧν οὐδὲν δῆλον εἶναι τοῖς ἀνθρώποις.... Τοὺς δὲ μηδὲν τῶν
τοιούτων οἰομένους εἶναι δαιμόνιον, ἀλλὰ πάντα τῆς ἀνθρωπίνης
γνώμης, δαιμονᾷν ἔφη· δαιμονᾷν δὲ καὶ τοὺς μαντευομένους ἃ τοῖς
ἀνθρώποις ἔδωκαν οἱ θεοὶ μαθοῦσι διακρίνειν.... Ἔφη δὲ δεῖν, ἃ
μὲν μαθόντας ποιεῖν ἔδωκαν οἱ θεοὶ, μανθάνειν· ἃ δὲ μὴ δῆλα τοῖς
ἀνθρώποις ἔστι, πειρᾶσθαι διὰ μαντικῆς παρὰ τῶν θεῶν πυνθάνεσθαι·
τοὺς θεοὺς γὰρ, οἷς ἂν ὦσιν ἵλεῳ, σημαίνειν. Compare also
Memorab. iv. 7. 7; and Cyropæd. i. 6, 3, 23-46.
Physical and astronomical phænomena are classified by Socratês
among the divine class, interdicted to human study (Memor. i.
1,13): τὰ θεῖα or δαιμόνια as supposed to τἀνθρώπεια. Plato
(Phileb. c. 16; Legg. x. p. 886-889; xii. p. 967) held the sun
and stars to be gods, each animated with its special soul: he
allowed astronomical investigation to the extent necessary
for avoiding blasphemy respecting these beings—μέχρι τοῦ μὴ
βλασφημεῖν περὶ αὐτά (vii. 821).
On the other hand, Hippocratês, the contemporary of Socratês,
denied the discrepancy, and merged into one those two classes of
phænomena,—the divine and the scientifically determinable,—which the
latter had put asunder. Hippocratês treated all phænomena as at once
both divine and scientifically determinable. In discussing certain
peculiar bodily disorders found among the Scythians, he observes, “The
Scythians themselves ascribe the cause of this to God, and reverence
and bow down to such sufferers, each man fearing that he may suffer
the like; and I myself think too that these affections, as well as all
others, are divine: no one among them is either more divine or more
human than another, but all are on the same footing, and all divine;
nevertheless each of them has its own physical conditions, and not one
occurs without such physical conditions.”[869]
[869] Hippocratês, De Aëre, Locis et Aquis, c. 22 (p. 78, ed.
Littré, sect. 106 ed. Petersen): Ἔτι τε πρὸς τουτέοισι εὐνούχιαι
γίγνονται οἱ πλεῖστοι ἐν Σκύθῃσι, καὶ γυναικηΐα ἐργάζονται καὶ
ὡς αἱ γυναῖκες διαλέγονταί τε ὁμοίως· καλεῦνταί τε οἱ τοιοῦτοι
ἀνανδριεῖς. Οἱ μὲν οὖν ἐπιχώριοι τὴν αἰτίην προστιθέασι θεῷ καὶ
σέβονται τουτέους τοὺς ἀνθρώπους καὶ προσκυνέουσι, δεδοικότες
περὶ ἑωϋτέων ἕκαστοι. Ἐμοὶ δὲ καὶ αὐτέῳ δοκέει ταῦτα τὰ πάθεα
θεῖα εἶναι, καὶ τἄλλα πάντα, καὶ οὐδὲν ἕτερον ἑτέρου θειότερον
οὐδὲ ἀνθρωπινώτερον, ἀλλὰ πάντα θεῖα· ἕκαστον δὲ ἔχει φύσιν τῶν
τοιουτέων, καὶ οὐδὲν ἄνευ φύσιος γίγνεται. Καὶ τοῦτο τὸ πάθος, ὥς
μοι δοκέει γίγνεσθαι, φράσω, etc.
Again, sect. 112. Ἀλλὰ γὰρ, ὥσπερ καὶ πρότερον ἔλεξα, θεῖα μὲν
καὶ ταῦτά ἐστι ὁμοίως τοῖσι ἄλλοισι, γίγνεται δὲ κατὰ φύσιν
ἕκαστα.
Compare the remarkable treatise of Hippocratês, De Morbo Sacro,
capp. 1 and 18, vol. vi. p. 352-394, ed. Littré. See this opinion
of Hippocratês illustrated by the doctrines of some physical
philosophers stated in Aristotle, Physic. ii. 8. ὥσπερ ὕει ὁ
Ζεὺς, οὐχ ὅπως τὸν σῖτον αὐξήσῃ, ἀλλ᾽ ἐξ ἀνάγκης, etc. Some
valuable observations on the method of Hippocratês are also found
in Plato, Phædr. p. 270.
A third distinguished philosopher of the same day, Anaxagoras,
allegorizing Zeus and the other personal gods, proclaimed the doctrine
of one common pervading Mind, as having first established order and
system in the mundane aggregate, which had once been in a state of
chaos—and as still manifesting its uninterrupted agency for wise and
good purposes. This general doctrine obtained much admiration from
Plato and Aristotle; but they at the same time remarked with surprise,
that Anaxagoras never made any use at all of his own general doctrine
for the explanation of the phænomena of nature,—that he looked for
nothing but physical causes and connecting laws,[870]—so that in fact
the spirit of his particular researches was not materially different
from those of Demokritus or Leukippus, whatever might be the difference
in their general theories. His investigations in meteorology and
astronomy, treating the heavenly bodies as subjects for calculation,
have been already noticed as offensive, not only to the general public
of Greece, but even to Socratês himself among them: he was tried at
Athens, and seems to have escaped condemnation only by voluntary
exile.[871]
[870] See the graphic picture in Plato, Phædon. p. 97-98 (cap.
46-47): compare Plato, Legg. xii. p. 967; Aristotel. Metaphysic.
i. p. 13-14 (ed. Brandis); Plutarch, Defect. Oracul. p. 435.
Simplicius, Commentar. in Aristotel. Physic. p. 38. καὶ ὅπερ
δὲ ὁ ἐν Φαίδωνι Σωκράτης ἐγκαλεῖ τῷ Ἀναξαγόρᾳ, τὸ ἐν ταῖς τῶν
κατὰ μέρος αἰτιολογίαις μὴ τῷ νῷ κεχρῆσθαι, ἀλλὰ ταῖς ὑλικαῖς
ἀποδόσεσιν, οἰκεῖον ἦν τῇ φυσιολογίᾳ. Anaxagoras thought that the
superior intelligence of men, as compared with other animals,
arose from his possession of hands (Aristot. de Part. Animal. iv.
10. p. 687, ed. Bekk.).
[871] Xenophôn, Memorab. iv. 7. Socratês said, καὶ παραφρονῆσαι
τὸν ταῦτα μεριμνῶντα οὐδὲν ἧττον ἢ Ἀναξαγόρας παρεφρόνησεν, ὁ
μέγιστον φρονήσας ἐπὶ τῷ τὰς τῶν θεῶν μηχανὰς ἐξηγεῖσθαι, etc.
Compare Schaubach, Anaxagoræ Fragment. p. 50-141; Plutarch,
Nikias, 23, and Periklês, 6-32; Diogen. Laërt. ii. 10-14.
The Ionic philosophy, from which Anaxagoras receded more in
language than in spirit, seems to have been the least popular
of all the schools, though some of the commentators treat it as
conformable to vulgar opinion, because it confined itself for the
most part to phænomenal explanations, and did not recognize the
_noumena_ of Plato, or the τὸ ἓν νοητὸν of Parmenidês,—“qualis
fuit Ionicorum, quæ tum dominabatur, ratio, vulgari opinione
et communi sensu comprobata” (Karsten, Parmenidis Fragment,
De Parmenidis Philosophiâ, p. 154). This is a mistake: the
Ionic philosophers, who constantly searched for and insisted
upon physical laws, came more directly into conflict with the
sentiment of the multitude than the Eleatic school.
The larger atmospheric phænomena were connected in the most
intimate manner with Grecian religious feeling and uneasiness
(see Demokritus ap. Sect. Empiric. ix. sect. 19-24. p. 552-554,
Fabric.): the attempts of Anaxagoras and Demokritus to explain
them were more displeasing to the public than the Platonic
speculations (Demokritus ap. Aristot. Meteorol. ii. 7; Stobæus,
Eclog. Physic. p. 594: compare Mullach, Democriti Fragmenta, lib.
iv. p. 394).
The three eminent men just named, all essentially different from
each other, may be taken as illustrations of the philosophical mind
of Greece during the last half of the fifth century B. C. Scientific
pursuits had acquired a powerful hold, and adjusted themselves in
various ways with the prevalent religious feelings of the age. Both
Hippocratês and Anaxagoras modified their ideas of the divine agency
so as to suit their thirst for scientific research. According to the
former, the gods were the really efficient agents in the production
of all phænomena,—the mean and indifferent not less than the terrific
or tutelary. Being thus alike connected with all phænomena, they were
specially associated with none—and the proper task of the inquirer
was, to find out those rules and conditions by which (he assumed)
their agency was always determined, and according to which it might
be foretold. And this led naturally to the proceeding which Plato and
Aristotle remark in Anaxagoras,—that the all-governing and Infinite
Mind, having been announced in sublime language at the beginning of
his treatise, was afterward left out of sight, and never applied to
the explanation of particular phænomena, being as much consistent with
one modification of nature as with another. Now such a view of the
divine agency could never be reconciled with the religious feelings
of the ordinary Grecian believer, even as they stood in the time
of Anaxagoras; still less could it have been reconciled with those
of the Homeric man, more than three centuries earlier. By him Zeus
and Athênê were conceived as definite Persons, objects of special
reverence, hopes, and fears, and animated with peculiar feelings,
sometimes of favor, sometimes of wrath, towards himself or his family
or country. They were propitiated by his prayers, and prevailed upon
to lend him succor in danger—but offended and disposed to bring evil
upon him if he omitted to render thanks or sacrifice. This sense of
individual communion with, and dependence upon them was the essence of
his faith; and with that faith, the all-pervading Mind proclaimed by
Anaxagoras—which had no more concern with one man or one phænomenon
than with another,—could never be brought into harmony. Nor could the
believer, while he prayed with sincerity for special blessings or
protection from the gods, acquiesce in the doctrine of Hippocratês,
that their agency was governed by constant laws and physical conditions.
That radical discord between the mental impulses of science and
religion, which manifests itself so decisively during the most
cultivated ages of Greece, and which harassed more or less so many
of the philosophers, produced its most afflicting result in the
condemnation of Socratês by the Athenians. According to the remarkable
passage recently cited from Xenophôn, it will appear that Socratês
agreed with his countrymen in denouncing physical speculations as
impious,—that he recognized the religious process of discovery as a
peculiar branch, coördinate with the scientific,—and that he laid down
a theory, of which the basis was, the confessed divergence of these
two processes from the beginning—thereby seemingly satisfying the
exigencies of religious hopes and fears on the one hand, and those of
reason, in her ardor for ascertaining the invariable laws of phænomena,
on the other. We may remark that the theory of this religious and
extra-scientific process of discovery was at that time sufficiently
complete; for Socratês could point out, that those anomalous phænomena
which the gods had reserved for themselves, and into which science was
forbidden to pry, were yet accessible to the seekings of the pious man,
through oracles, omens, and other exceptional means of communication
which divine benevolence vouchsafed to keep open. Considering thus
to how great an extent Socratês was identified in feeling with
the religious public of Athens, and considering moreover that his
performance of open religious duties was assiduous—we might wonder, as
Xenophôn does wonder,[872] how it could have happened that the Athenian
dikasts mistook him at the end of his life for an irreligious man.
But we see, by the defence which Xenophôn as well as Plato gives for
him, that the Athenian public really considered him, in spite of his
own disclaimer, as homogeneous with Anaxagoras and the other physical
inquirers, because he had applied similar scientific reasonings
to moral and social phænomena. They looked upon him with the same
displeasure as he himself felt towards the physical philosophers, and
we cannot but admit that in this respect they were more unfortunately
consistent than he was. It is true that the mode of defence adopted
by Socratês contributed much to the verdict found against him, and
that he was further weighed down by private offence given to powerful
individuals and professions; but all these separate antipathies found
their best account in swelling the cry against him as an over-curious
sceptic, and an impious innovator.
[872] Xenophôn, Memorab. i. 1.
Now the scission thus produced between the superior minds and the
multitude, in consequence of the development of science and the
scientific point of view, is a fact of great moment in the history
of Greek progress, and forms an important contrast between the age
of Homer and Hesiod and that of Thucydidês; though in point of fact
even the multitude, during this later age, were partially modified by
those very scientific views which they regarded with disfavor. And
we must keep in view the primitive religious faith, once universal
and unobstructed, but subsequently disturbed by the intrusions of
science; we must follow the great change, as well in respect to
enlarged intelligence as to refinement of social and ethical feeling,
among the Greeks, from the Hesiodic times downward, in order to render
some account of the altered manner in which the ancient mythes came
to be dealt with. These mythes, the spontaneous growth of a creative
and personifying interpretation of nature, had struck root in Grecian
associations at a time when the national faith required no support
from what we call evidence. They were _now_ submitted, not simply to a
feeling, imagining, and believing public, but also to special classes
of instructed men,—philosophers, historians, ethical teachers, and
critics,—and to a public partially modified by their ideas[873] as well
as improved by a wider practical experience. They were not intended
for such an audience; they had ceased to be in complete harmony even
with the lower strata of intellect and sentiment,—much more so with
the higher. But they were the cherished inheritance of a past time;
they were interwoven in a thousand ways with the religious faith,
the patriotic retrospect, and the national worship, of every Grecian
community; the general type of the mythe was the ancient, familiar,
and universal form of Grecian thought, which even the most cultivated
men had imbibed in their childhood from the poets,[874] and by which
they were to a certain degree unconsciously enslaved. Taken as a whole
the mythes had acquired prescriptive and ineffaceable possession: to
attack, call in question, or repudiate them, was a task painful even to
undertake, and far beyond the power of any one to accomplish.
[873] It is curious to see that some of the most recondite
doctrines of the Pythagorean philosophy were actually brought
before the general Syracusan public in the comedies of
Epicharmus: “In comœdiis suis personas sæpe ita colloqui fecit,
ut sententias Pythagoricas et in universum sublimia vitæ præcepta
immisceret” (Grysar, De Doriensium Comœdiâ, p. 111, Col. 1828).
The fragments preserved in Diogen. Laërt. (iii. 9-17) present
both criticisms upon the Hesiodic doctrine of a primæval chaos,
and an exposition of the archetypal and immutable ideas (as
opposed to the fluctuating phænomena of sense) which Plato
afterwards adopted and systematized.
Epicharmus seems to have combined with this abstruse philosophy
a strong vein of comic shrewdness and some turn to scepticism
(Cicero, Epistol. ad Attic. i. 19): “ut crebro mihi vafer ille
Siculus Epicharmus insusurret cantilenam suam.” Clemens Alex.
Strom. v. p. 258. Νᾶφε καὶ μέμνασ᾽ ἀπιστεῖν· ἄρθρα ταῦτα τῶν
φρενῶν. Ζῶμεν ἀριθμῷ καὶ λογισμῷ· ταῦτα γὰρ σώζει βροτοὺς. Also
his contemptuous ridicule of the prophetesses of his time who
cheated foolish women out of their money, pretending to universal
knowledge, καὶ πάντα γιγνώσκοντι τῷ τηνᾶν λόγῳ (ap Polluc. ix.
81). See, about Epicharmus. O. Müller, Dorians, iv. 7, 4.
These dramas seem to have been exhibited at Syracuse between
480-460 B. C., anterior even to Chionidês and Magnês at Athens
(Aristot. Poet. c. 3): he says ~πολλῷ~ πρότερος, which can hardly
be literally exact. The critics of the Horatian age looked upon
Epicharmus as the prototype of Plautus (Hor. Epistol. ii. 1. 58).
[874] The third book of the republic of Plato is particularly
striking in reference to the use of the poets in education:
see also his treatise De Legg. vii. p. 810-811. Some teachers
made their pupils learn whole poets by heart (ὅλους ποιητὰς
ἐκμανθάνων), others preferred extracts and selections.
For these reasons the anti-mythic vein of criticism was of no effect
as a destroying force, but nevertheless its dissolving decomposing
and transforming influence was very considerable. To accommodate the
ancient mythes to an improved tone of sentiment and a newly created
canon of credibility, was a function which even the wisest Greeks
did not disdain, and which occupied no small proportion of the whole
intellectual activity of the nation.
The mythes were looked at from a point of view completely foreign to
the reverential curiosity and literal imaginative faith of the Homeric
man; they were broken up and recast in order to force them into new
moulds such as their authors had never conceived. We may distinguish
four distinct classes of minds, in the literary age now under
examination, as having taken them in hand—the poets, the logographers,
the philosophers, and the historians.
With the poets and logographers, the mythical persons are real
predecessors, and the mythical world an antecedent fact; but it is
divine and heroic reality, not human; the present is only half-brother
of the past (to borrow[875] an illustration from Pindar in his allusion
to gods and men), remotely and generically, but not closely and
specifically, analogous to it. As a general habit, the old feelings
and the old unconscious faith, apart from all proof or evidence,
still remain in their minds; but recent feelings have grown up which
compel them to omit, to alter, sometimes even to reject and condemn,
particular narratives.
[875] Pindar, Nem. vi. 1. Compare Simonidês, Fragm. 1 (Gaisford).
Pindar repudiates some stories and transforms others, because they
are inconsistent with his conceptions of the gods. Thus he formally
protests against the tale that Pelops had been killed and served up at
table by his father, for the immortal gods to eat; he shrinks from the
idea of imputing to them so horrid an appetite; he pronounces the tale
to have been originally fabricated by a slanderous neighbor. Nor can
he bring himself to recount the quarrels between different gods.[876]
The amours of Zeus and Apollo are no way displeasing to him; but he
occasionally suppresses some of the simple details of the old mythe,
as deficient in dignity: thus, according to the Hesiodic narrative,
Apollo was informed by a raven of the infidelity of the nymph Korônis:
but the mention of the raven did not appear to Pindar consistent
with the majesty of the god, and he therefore wraps up the mode of
detection in vague and mysterious language.[877] He feels considerable
repugnance to the character of Odysseus, and intimates more than once
that Homer has unduly exalted him, by force of poetical artifice.
With the character of the Æakid Ajax, on the other hand, he has the
deepest sympathy, as well as with his untimely and inglorious death,
occasioned by the undeserved preference of a less worthy rival.[878]
He appeals for his authority usually to the Muse, but sometimes to
“ancient sayings of men,” accompanied with a general allusion to
story-tellers and bards,—admitting, however, that these stories
present great discrepancy, and sometimes that they are false.[879]
Yet the marvellous and the supernatural afford no ground whatever for
rejecting a story: Pindar makes an express declaration to this effect
in reference to the romantic adventures of Perseus and the Gorgon’s
head.[880] He treats even those mythical characters, which conflict
the most palpably with positive experience, as connected by a real
genealogical thread with the world before him. Not merely the heroes
of Troy and Thêbes, and the demigod seamen of Jasôn and the ship Argô,
but also the Centaur Cheirôn, the hundred-headed Typhôs, the giant
Alkyoneus, Antæus, Bellerophôn and Pegasus, the Chimæra, the Amazons
and the Hyperboreans—all appear painted on the same canvas, and touched
with the same colors, as the men of the recent and recorded past,
Phalaris and Krœsus; only they are thrown back to a greater distance
in the perspective.[881] The heroic ancestors of those great Æginetan,
Thessalian, Thêban, Argeian, etc. families, whose present members the
poet celebrates for their agonistic victories, sympathize with the
exploits and second the efforts of their descendants: the inestimable
value of a privileged breed and of the stamp of nature is powerfully
contrasted with the impotence of unassisted teaching and practice.[882]
The power and skill of the Argeian Theæus and his relatives as
wrestlers, are ascribed partly to the fact that their ancestors
Pamphaês in aforetime had hospitably entertained the Tyndarids Kastôr
and Pollux.[883] Perhaps however the strongest proof of the sincerity
of Pindar’s mythical faith is afforded when he notices a guilty
incident with shame and repugnance, but with an unwilling confession of
its truth, as in the case of the fratricide committed on Phôkus by his
brothers Pêleus and Telamôn.[884]
[876] Pindar, Olymp. i. 30-55; ix. 32-45.
[877] Pyth. iii. 25. See the allusions to Semelê, Alkmêna, and
Danaê, Pyth. iii. 98; Nem. x. 10. Compare also _supra_, chap. ix.
p. 245.
[878] Pindar, Nem. vii. 20-30; viii. 23-31. Isthm. iii. 50-60.
It seems to be sympathy for Ajax, in odes addressed to noble
Æginetan victors, which induces him thus to depreciate Odysseus;
for he eulogizes Sisyphus, specially on account of his cunning
and resources (Olymp. xiii. 50) in the ode addressed to Xenophôn
the Corinthian.
[879] Olymp. i. 28; Nem. viii. 20; Pyth. i. 93; Olymp. vii. 55;
Nem. vi. 43. φάντι δ᾽ ἀνθρώπων παλαιαὶ ῥήσιες, etc.
[880] Pyth. x. 49. Compare Pyth. xii. 11-22.
[881] Pyth. i. 17; iii. 4-7; iv. 12; viii. 16. Nem. iv. 27-32;
v. 89. Isthm. v. 31; vi. 44-48. Olymp. iii. 17; viii. 63; xiii.
61-87.
[882] Nem. iii. 39; v. 40. συγγενὴς εὐδοξία—πότμος συγγενής; v.
8. Olymp. ix. 103. Pindar seems to introduce φύᾳ in cases where
Homer would have mentioned the divine assistance.
[883] Nem. x. 37-51. Compare the family legend of the Athenian
Dêmocrates, in Plato, Lysis, p. 295.
[884] Nem. v. 12-16.
Æschylus and Sophoklês exhibit the same spontaneous and uninquiring
faith as Pindar in the legendary antiquities of Greece, taken as a
whole; but they allow themselves greater license as to the details. It
was indispensable to the success of their compositions that they should
recast and group anew the legendary events, preserving the names and
general understood relation of those characters whom they introduced.
The demand for novelty of combination increased with the multiplication
of tragic spectacles at Athens: moreover the feelings of the Athenians,
ethical as well as political, had become too critical to tolerate the
literal reproduction of many among the ancient stories.
Both of them exalted rather than lowered the dignity of the mythical
world, as something divine and heroic rather than human. The
Promêtheus of Æschylus is a far more exalted conception than his
keen-witted namesake in Hesiod, and the more homely details of
the ancient Thêbaïs and Œdipodia were in like manner modified by
Sophoklês.[885] The religious agencies of the old epic are constantly
kept prominent, and the paternal curse,—the wrath of deceased persons
against those from whom they have sustained wrong,—the judgments of
the Erinnys against guilty or foredoomed persons, sometimes inflicted
directly, sometimes brought about through dementation of the sufferer
himself (like the Homeric Atê),—are frequent in their tragedies.[886]
[885] See above, chap. xiv. p. 368. on the Legend of the Siege of
Thêbes.
[886] The curse of Œdipus is the determining force in the
Sept. ad Thêb., Ἀρά τ᾽, Ἐριννὺς πατρὸς ἡ μεγασθενής (v. 70);
it reappears several times in the course of the drama, with
particular solemnity in the mouth of Eteoklês (695-709, 725, 785,
etc.); he yields to it as an irresistible force, as carrying the
family to ruin:—
Ἐπεὶ τὸ πρᾶγμα κάρτ᾽ ἐπισπέρχει θεὸς,
Ἴτω κατ᾽ οὖρον, κῦμα Κωκυτοῦ λαχὸν,
Φοίβῳ στυγηθὲν πᾶν τὸ Λαΐου γένος.
· · · · ·
Φίλου γὰρ ἐχθρά μοι πατρὸς τέλει᾽ ἄρα
Ξηροῖς ἀκλαύστοις ὄμμασιν προσιζάνει, etc.
So again at the opening of the Agamemnôn, the μνάμων μῆνις
τεκνόποινος (v. 155) and the sacrifice of Iphigeneia are dwelt
upon as leaving behind them an avenging doom upon Agamemnôn,
though he took precautions for gagging her mouth during the
sacrifice and thus preventing her from giving utterance to
imprecations—Φθόγγον ἀραῖον οἴκοις, Βίᾳ χαλινῶν τ᾽ ἀναύδῳ μένει
(κατασχεῖν), v. 346. The Erinnys awaits Agamemnôn even at the
moment of his victorious consummation at Troy (467; compare
762-990, 1336-1433): she is most to be dreaded after great
good fortune: she enforces the curse which ancestral crimes
have brought upon the house of Atreus—πρώταρχος ἄτη—παλαιαὶ
ἁμαρτίαι δόμων (1185-1197, Choëph. 692)—the curse imprecated by
the outraged Thyestês (1601). In the Choëphoræ, Apollo menaces
Orestês with the wrath of his deceased father, and all the
direful visitations of the Erinnyes, unless he undertakes to
revenge the murder (271-296). Αἶσα and Ἐριννὺς bring on blood
for blood (647). But the moment that Orestês, placed between
these conflicting obligations (925), has achieved it, he becomes
himself the victim of the Erinnyes, who drive him mad even at
the end of the Choëphoræ (ἕως δ᾽ ἔτ᾽ ἔμφρων εἰμὶ, 1026), and who
make their appearance bodily, and pursue him throughout the third
drama of this fearful trilogy. The Eidôlon of Klytæmnêstra impels
them to vengeance (Eumenid. 96) and even spurs them on when they
appear to relax. Apollo conveys Orestês to Athens, whither the
Erinnyes pursue him, and prosecute him before the judgment-seat
of the goddess Athênê, to whom they submit the award; Apollo
appearing as his defender. The debate between “the daughters of
Night” and the god, accusing and defending, is eminently curious
(576-730): the Erinnyes are deeply mortified at the humiliation
put upon them when Orestês is acquitted, but Athênê at length
reconciles them, and a covenant is made whereby they become
protectresses of Attica, accepting of a permanent abode and
solemn worship (1006): Orestês returns to Argos, and promises
that even in his tomb he will watch that none of his descendants
shall ever injure the land of Attica (770). The solemn trial and
acquittal of Orestês formed the consecrating legend of the Hill
and Judicature of Areiopagus.
This is the only complete trilogy of Æschylus which we possess,
and the avenging Erinnyes (416) are the movers throughout the
whole—unseen in the first two dramas, visible and appalling in
the third. And the appearance of Cassandra under the actual
prophetic fever in the first, contributes still farther to impart
to it a coloring different from common humanity.
The general view of the movement of the Oresteia given in Welcker
(Æschyl. Trilogie, p. 445) appears to me more conformable to
Hellenic ideas than that of Klausen (Theologumena Æschyli, pp.
157-169), whose valuable collection and comparison of passages
is too much affected, both here and elsewhere, by the desire to
bring the agencies of the Greek mythical world into harmony with
what a religious mind of the present day would approve. Moreover,
he sinks the personality of Athênê too much in the supreme
authority of Zeus (p. 158-168).
Æschylus in two of his remaining pieces brings forward the gods as
the chief personages, and far from sharing the objection of Pindar
to dwell upon dissensions of the gods, he introduces Promêtheus and
Zeus in the one, Apollo and the Eumenidês in the other, in marked
opposition. The dialogue, first superinduced by him upon the primitive
Chorus, gradually became the most important portion of the drama, and
is more elaborated in Sophoklês than in Æschylus. Even in Sophoklês,
however, it still generally retains its ideal majesty as contrasted
with the rhetorical and forensic tone which afterwards crept in; it
grows out of the piece, and addresses itself to the emotions more than
to the reason of the audience. Nevertheless, the effect of Athenian
political discussion and democratical feeling is visible in both these
dramatists. The idea of rights and legitimate privileges as opposed to
usurping force, is applied by Æschylus even to the society of the gods:
the Eumenidês accuse Apollo of having, with the insolence of youthful
ambition, “ridden down” their old prerogatives[887]—while the Titan
Promêtheus, the champion of suffering humanity against the unfriendly
dispositions of Zeus, ventures to depict the latter as a recent usurper
reigning only by his superior strength, exalted by one successful
revolution, and destined at some future time to be overthrown by
another,—a fate which cannot be averted except through warnings
communicable only by Promêtheus himself.[888]
[887] Eumenidês, 150.—
Ἰὼ παῖ Διὸς, ἐπίκλοπος πέλει,
Νέος δὲ γραίας δαίμονας καθιππάσω, etc.
The same metaphor again, v. 731. Æschylus seems to delight in
contrasting the young and the old gods: compare 70-162, 882.
The Erinnyes tell Apollo that he assumes functions which do not
belong to him, and will thus desecrate those which do belong to
him (715-754):—
Ἀλλ᾽ αἱματηρὰ πράγματ᾽, ~οὐ λαχὼν~, σέβεις,
Μαντεῖα δ᾽ οὐκ ἔθ᾽ ἁγνὰ μαντεύσει μένων.
The refusal of the king Pelasgos, in the Supplices, to undertake
what he feels to be the sacred duty of protecting the suppliant
Danaïdes, without first submitting the matter to his people
and obtaining their expressed consent, and the fear which he
expresses of their blame (κατ᾽ ἀρχὰς γὰρ φιλαίτιος λέως), are
more forcibly set forth than an old epic poet would probably have
thought necessary (see Supplices, 369, 397, 485, 519). The solemn
wish to exclude both anarchy and despotism from Athens bears
still more the mark of political feeling of the time—μήτ᾽ ἄναρχον
μήτε δεσποτουμένον (Eumenid. 527-696).
[888] Promêtheus, 35, 151, 170, 309, 524, 910, 940, 956.
It is commonly understood that Æschylus disapproved of the march of
democracy at Athens during his later years, and that the Eumenidês
is intended as an indirect manifestation in favor of the senate of
Areiopagus. Without inquiring at present whether such a special
purpose can be distinctly made out, we may plainly see that the poet
introduces, into the relations of the gods with each other, a feeling
of political justice, arising out of the times in which he lived and
the debates of which he was a witness. But though Æschylus incurred
reproaches of impiety from Plato, and seemingly also from the Athenian
public, for particular speeches and incidents in his tragedies,[889]
and though he does not adhere to the received vein of religious
tradition with the same strictness as Sophoklês—yet the ascendency
and interference of the gods is never out of sight, and the solemnity
with which they are represented, set off by a bold, figurative, and
elliptical style of expression (often but imperfectly intelligible to
modern readers), reaches its maximum in his tragedies. As he throws
round the gods a kind of airy grandeur, so neither do his men or
heroes appear like tenants of the common earth: the mythical world from
which he borrows his characters is peopled only with “the immediate
seed of the gods, in close contact with Zeus, in whom the divine blood
has not yet had time to degenerate:”[890] his individuals are taken,
not from the iron race whom Hesiod acknowledges with shame as his
contemporaries, but from the extinct heroic race which had fought at
Troy and Thêbes. It is to them that his conceptions aspire, and he is
even chargeable with frequent straining, beyond the limits of poetical
taste, to realize his picture. If he does not consistently succeed in
it, the reason is because consistency in such a matter is unattainable,
since, after all, the analogies of common humanity, the only materials
which the most creative imagination has to work upon, obtrude
themselves involuntarily, and the lineaments of the man are thus seen
even under a dress which promises superhuman proportions.
[889] Plato, Republ. ii. 381-383; compare Æschyl. Fragment. 159,
ed. Dindorf. He was charged also with having divulged in some of
his plays secret matters of the mysteries of Dêmêtêr, but is said
to have excused himself by alleging ignorance: he was not aware
that what he had said was comprised in the mysteries (Aristot.
Ethic. Nicom. iii. 2; Clemens Alex. Strom. ii. p. 387); the story
is different again in Ælian, V. H. v. 19.
How little can be made out distinctly respecting this last
accusation may be seen in Lobeck, Aglaopham. p. 81.
Cicero (Tusc. Dis. ii. 10) calls Æschylus “almost a Pythagorean:”
upon what the epithet is founded we do not know.
There is no evidence to prove to us that the Promêtheus Vinctus
was considered as impious by the public before whom it was
represented; but its obvious meaning has been so regarded by
modern critics, who resort to many different explanations of it,
in order to prove that when properly construed it is not impious.
But if we wish to ascertain what Æschylus really meant, we ought
not to consult the religious ideas of modern times; we have no
test except what we know of the poet’s own time and that which
had preceded him. The explanations given by the ablest critics
seem generally to exhibit a predetermination to bring out Zeus
as a just, wise, merciful, and all-powerful Being; and all, in
one way or another, distort the figures, alter the perspective,
and give far-fetched interpretations of the meaning, of this
striking drama, which conveys an impression directly contrary
(see Welcker, Trilogie, Æsch. p. 90-117, with the explanation
of Dissen there given; Klausen, Theologum. Æsch. p. 140-154;
Schömann, in his recent translation of the play, and the
criticism on that Translation in the Wiener Jahrbücher, vol. cix.
1845, p. 245, by F. Ritter). On the other hand, Schutz (Excurs.
ad Prom. Vinct. p. 149) thinks that Æschylus wished by means of
this drama to enforce upon his countrymen the hatred of a despot.
Though I do not agree in this interpretation, it appears to me
less wide of the truth than the forcible methods employed by
others to bring the poet into harmony with their own religious
ideas.
Without presuming to determine whether Æschylus proposed to
himself any special purpose, if we look at the Æschylean
Promêtheus in reference only to ancient ideas, it will be found
to borrow both its characters and all its main circumstances
from the legend in the Hesiodic Theogony. Zeus acquires his
supremacy only by overthrowing Kronos and the Titans; the Titan
god Promêtheus is the pronounced champion of helpless man, and
negotiates with Zeus on their behalf: Zeus wishes to withhold
from them the most essential blessings, which Promêtheus employs
deceit and theft to procure for them, and ultimately with
success; undergoing, however, severe punishment for so doing from
the superior force of Zeus. These are the main features of the
Æschylean Promêtheus, and they are all derived from the legend
as it stands in the Theogony. As for the human race, they are
depicted as abject and helpless in an extreme degree, in Æschylus
even more than in Hesiod: they appear as a race of aboriginal
savages, having the god Promêtheus for their protector.
Æschylus has worked up the old legend, homely and unimpressive as
we read it in Hesiod, into a sublime ideal. We are not to forget
that Promêtheus is not a man, but a god,—the equal of Zeus in
race, though his inferior in power, and belonging to a family of
gods who were once superior to Zeus: he has moreover deserted his
own kindred, and lent all his aid and superior sagacity to Zeus,
whereby chiefly the latter was able to acquire supremacy (this
_last_ circumstance is an addition by Æschylus himself to the
Hesiodic legend). In spite of such essential service, Zeus had
doomed him to cruel punishment, for no other reason than because
he conferred upon helpless man the prime means of continuance and
improvement, thus thwarting the intention of Zeus to extinguish
the race.
Now Zeus, though superior to all the other gods and exercising
general control, was never considered, either in Grecian legend
or in Grecian religious belief, to be superior in so immeasurable
a degree as to supersede all free action and sentiment on the
part of gods less powerful. There were many old legends of
dissension among the gods, and several of disobedience against
Zeus: when a poet chose to dramatize one of these, he might
so turn his composition as to sympathize either with Zeus or
with the inferior god, without in either case shocking the
general religious feeling of the country. And if there ever
was an instance in which preference of the inferior god would
be admissible, it is that of Promêtheus, whose proceedings are
such as to call forth the maximum of human sympathy,—superior
intelligence pitted against superior force, and resolutely
encountering foreknown suffering, for the sole purpose of
rendering inestimable and gratuitous service to mortals.
Of the Promêtheus Solutus, which formed a sequel to the
Promêtheus Vinctus (the entire trilogy is not certainly known),
the fragments preserved are very scanty, and the guesses of
critics as to its plot have little base to proceed upon. They
contend that, in one way or other, the apparent objections which
the Promêth. Vinctus presents against the justice of Zeus were
in the Promêth. Solutus removed. Hermann, in his _Dissertatio
de Æschyli Prometheo Soluto_ (Opuscula, vol. iv. p. 256), calls
this position in question: I transcribe from his Dissertation one
passage, because it contains an important remark in reference
to the manner in which the Greek poets handled their religious
legends: “while they recounted and believed many enormities
respecting individual gods, they always described the Godhead in
the abstract as holy and faultless.” ...
“Immo illud admirari oportet, quod quum de singulis Diis
indignissima quæque crederent, tamen ubi sine certo nomine Deum
dicebant, immunem ab omni vitio, summâque sanctitate præditum
intelligebant. Illam igitur Jovis sævitiam ut excusent defensores
Trilogiæ, et jure punitum volunt Prometheum—et in sequente fabulâ
reconciliato Jove, restitutam arbitrantur divinam justitiam. Quo
invento, vereor ne non optime dignitati consuluerint supremi
Deorum, quem decuerat potius non sævire omnino, quam placari eâ
lege, ut alius Promethei vice lueret.”
[890] Æschyl. Fragment. 146, Dindorf; ap. Plato. Repub. iii. p.
391; compare Strabo, xii. p. 580.—
... οἱ θεῶν ἀγχίσποροι
Οἱ Ζηνὸς ἐγγὺς, οἷς ἐν Ἰδαίῳ πάγῳ
Διὸς πατρῴου βωμός ἐστ᾽ ἐν αἰθέρι,
Κοὔπω σφιν ἐξίτηλον αἷμα δαιμόνων.
There is one real exception to this statement—the Persæ—which
is founded upon an event of recent occurrence; and one apparent
exception—the Promêtheus Vinctus. But in that drama no individual
mortal is made to appear; we can hardly consider Iô as an
ἐφήμερος (253).
Sophoklês, the most illustrious ornament of Grecian tragedy, dwells
upon the same heroic characters, and maintains their grandeur, on the
whole, with little abatement, combining with it a far better dramatic
structure, and a wider appeal to human sympathies. Even in Sophoklês,
however, we find indications that an altered ethical feeling and a
more predominant sense of artistic perfection are allowed to modify
the harsher religious agencies of the old epic; occasional misplaced
effusions[891] of rhetoric, as well as of didactic prolixity, may
also be detected. It is Æschylus, not Sophoklês, who forms the marked
antithesis to Euripidês; it is Æschylus, not Sophoklês, to whom
Aristophanês awards the prize of tragedy, as the poet who assigns most
perfectly to the heroes of the past those weighty words, imposing
equipments, simplicity of great deeds with little talk, and masculine
energy superior to the corruptions of Aphroditê, which beseem the
comrades of Agamemnôn and Adrastus.[892]
[891] For the characteristics of Æschylus see Aristophan. Ran.
755, _ad fin. passim_. The competition between Æschylus and
Euripidês turns upon γνῶμαι ἀγαθαὶ, 1497; the weight and majesty
of the words, 1362; πρῶτος τῶν Ἑλλήνων πυργώσας ῥήματα σεμνά,
1001, 921, 930 (“sublimis et gravis et grandiloquus sæpe usque ad
vitium,” Quintil. x. 1); the imposing appearance of his heroes,
such as Memnôn and Cycnus, 961; their reserve in speech, 908; his
dramas “full of Arês” and his lion-hearted chiefs, inspiring the
auditors with fearless spirit in defence of their country,—1014,
1019, 1040; his contempt of feminine tenderness, 1042.—
ÆSCH. Οὐδ᾽ οἶδ᾽ οὐδεὶς ἥντιν᾽ ἐρῶσαν πώποτ᾽ ἐποίησα γυναῖκα.
EURIP. Μὰ Δί᾽, οὐδὲ γὰρ ἦν τῆς Ἀφροδίτης οὐδέν σοι.
ÆSCH. μηδέ γ᾽ ἐπείη·
Ἀλλ᾽ ἐπὶ σοί τοι καὶ τοῖς σοῖσιν πολλὴ πολλοῦ ᾽πικάθοιτο.
To the same general purpose Nubes (1347-1356), composed so many
years earlier. The weight and majesty of the Æschylean heroes
(βάρος, τὸ μεγαλοπρεπὲς) is dwelt upon in the life of Æschylus,
and Sophoklês is said to have derided it—Ὥσπερ γὰρ ὁ Σοφοκλῆς
ἔλεγε, τὸν Αἰσχύλου διαπεπαιχὼς ~ὄγκον~, etc. (Plutarch, De
Profect. in Virt. Sent. c. 7), unless we are to understand this
as a mistake of Plutarch quoting Sophoklês instead of Euripidês,
as he speaks in the Frogs of Aristophanês, which is the opinion
both of Lessing in his Life of Sophoklês and of Welcker (Æschyl.
Trilogie, p. 525).
[892] See above, Chapters xiv. and xv.
Æschylus seems to have been a greater innovator as to the matter
of the mythes than either Sophoklês or Euripidês (Dionys. Halic.
Judic. de Vett. Script. p. 422, Reisk.). For the close adherence
of Sophoklês to the Homeric epic, see Athena, vii. p. 277;
Diogen. Laërt. iv. 20; Suidas, v. Πολέμων. Æschylus puts into
the mouth of the Eumenidês a serious argument derived from the
behavior of Zeus in chaining his father Kronos (Eumen. 640).
How deeply this feeling, of the heroic character of the mythical
world, possessed the Athenian mind, may be judged by the bitter
criticisms made on Euripidês, whose compositions were pervaded, partly
by ideas of physical philosophy learnt under Anaxagoras, partly by
the altered tone of education and the wide diffusion of practical
eloquence, forensic as well as political, at Athens.[893] While
Aristophanês assails Euripidês as the representative of this “young
Athens,” with the utmost keenness of sarcasm,—other critics also
concur in designating him as having vulgarized the mythical heroes,
and transformed them into mere characters of common life,—loquacious,
subtle, and savoring of the market-place.[894] In some of his plays,
sceptical expressions and sentiments were introduced, derived from his
philosophical studies, sometimes confounding two or three distinct gods
into one, sometimes translating the personal Zeus into a substantial
Æthêr with determinate attributes. He put into the mouths of some of
his unprincipled dramatic characters, apologetic speeches which were
denounced as ostentatious sophistry, and as setting out a triumphant
case for the criminal.[895] His thoughts, his words, and the rhythm
of his choric songs, were all accused of being deficient in dignity
and elevation. The mean attire and miserable attitude in which he
exhibited Œneus, Têlephus, Thyestês, Inô, and other heroic characters,
were unmercifully derided,[896] though it seems that their position and
circumstances had always been painfully melancholy; but the effeminate
pathos which Euripidês brought so nakedly into the foreground, was
accounted unworthy of the majesty of a legendary hero. And he incurred
still greater obloquy on another point, on which he is allowed even
by his enemies to have only reproduced in substance the preëxisting
tales,—the illicit and fatal passion depicted in several of his female
characters, such as Phædra and Sthenobœa. His opponents admitted that
these stories were true, but contended that they ought to be kept back
and not produced upon the stage,—a proof both of the continued mythical
faith and of the more sensitive ethical criticism of his age.[897] The
marriage of the six daughters to the six sons of Æolus is of Homeric
origin, and stands now, though briefly stated, in the Odyssey: but the
incestuous passion of Macareus and Canacê, embodied by Euripidês[898]
in the lost tragedy called _Æolus_, drew upon him severe censure.
Moreover, he often disconnected the horrors of the old legends with
those religious agencies by which they had been originally forced on,
prefacing them by motives of a more refined character, which carried
no sense of awful compulsion: thus the considerations by which the
Euripidean Alkmæôn was reduced to the necessity of killing his mother
appeared to Aristotle ridiculous.[899] After the time of this great
poet, his successors seem to have followed him in breathing into their
characters the spirit of common life, but the names and plot were still
borrowed from the stricken mythical families of Tantalus, Kadmus, etc.:
and the heroic exaltation of all the individual personages introduced,
as contrasted with the purely human character of the Chorus, is still
numbered by Aristotle among the essential points of the theory of
tragedy.[900]
[893] See Valckenaer, Diatribe in Euripid. Fragm. capp. 5 and 6.
The fourth and fifth lectures among the _Dramatische Vorlesungen_
of August Wilhelm Schlegel depict both justly and eloquently the
difference between Æschylus, Sophoklês and Euripidês, especially
on this point of the gradual sinking of the mythical colossus
into an ordinary man; about Euripidês especially in lecture 5,
vol. i. p. 206, ed. Heidelberg 1809.
[894] Aristot. Poetic. c. 46. Οἷον καὶ Σοφοκλῆς ἔφη, αὐτὸς μὲν
οἵους δεῖ ποιεῖν, Εὐριπίδης δὲ, οἷοί εἰσι.
The Ranæ and Acharneis of Aristophanês exhibit fully the
reproaches urged against Euripidês: the language put into
the mouth of Euripidês in the former play (vv. 935-977)
illustrates specially the point here laid down. Plutarch (De
Gloriâ Atheniens. c. 5) contrasts ἡ Εὐριπίδου σοφία καὶ ἡ
Σοφοκλεοῦς λογιότης. Sophoklês either adhered to the old mythes
or introduced alterations into them in a spirit comformable to
their original character, while Euripidês refined upon them. The
comment of Dêmêtrius Phalereus connects τὸ λόγιον expressly with
the maintenance of the dignity of the tales. Ἄρξομαι δὲ ἀπὸ τοῦ
μεγαλοπρεποῦς, ὅπερ νῦν ~λόγιον~ ὀνομάζουσιν (c. 38).
[895] Aristophan. Ran. 770, 887, 1066.
Euripidês says to Æschylus, in regard to the language employed by
both of them,—
Ἦν οὖν σὺ λέγῃς Λυκαβήττους
Καὶ Παρνάσσων ἡμῖν μεγέθη, τοῦτ᾽ ἐστὶ τὸ χρηστὰ διδάσκειν,
Ὃν χρὴ φράζειν ἀνθρωπείως;
Æschylus replies,—
Ἀλλ᾽, ὦ κακόδαιμον, ἀνάγκη
Μεγάλων γνωμῶν καὶ διανοιῶν ἴσα καὶ τὰ ῥήματα τίκτειν.
Κἄλλως εἰκὸς τοὺς ~ἡμιθέους~ τοῖς ῥήμασι μείζοσι χρῆσθαι·
Καὶ γὰρ τοῖς ἱματίοις ἡμῶν χρῶνται πολὺ σεμνοτέροισι.
Ἃ ᾽μοῦ χρηστῶς καταδείξαντος διελυμήνω συ.
EURIP. Τί δράσας;
ÆSCH. Πρῶτον μὲν τοὺς βασιλεύοντας ῥάκι᾽ ἀμπίσχων, ἵν᾽ ἐλεινοὶ
Τοῖς ἀνθρώποις φαίνοιντ᾽ εἶναι.
For the character of the language and measures of Euripidês,
as represented by Æschylus, see also v. 1297, and Pac. 527.
Philosophical discussion was introduced by Euripidês (Dionys.
Hal. Ars Rhetor. viii. 10-ix. 11) about the Melanippê, where
the doctrine of prodigies (τέρας) appears to have been argued.
Quintilian (x. 1) remarks that to young beginners in judicial
pleading, the study of Euripidês was much more specially
profitable than that of Sophoklês: compare Dio Chrysostom, Orat.
xviii. vol. i. p. 477, Reisk.
In Euripidês the heroes themselves sometimes delivered
moralizing discourses:—εἰσάγων τὸν Βελλεροφόντην γνωμολογοῦντα
(Welcker, Griechisch. Tragöd. Eurip. Stheneb. p. 782). Compare
the fragments of his Bellerophôn (15-25, Matthiæ), and of his
Chrysippus (7, _ib._). A striking story is found in Seneca,
Epistol. 115; and Plutarch, de Audiend. Poetis, c. 4. t. i. p.
70, Wytt.
[896] Aristophan. Ran. 840.—
ὦ στωμυλιοσυλλεκτάδη
Καὶ πτωχοποιὲ καὶ ῥακιοσυῤῥαπτάδη·
See also Aristophan. Acharn. 385-422. For an unfavorable
criticism upon such proceeding, see Aristot. Poet. 27.
[897] Aristophan. Ran. 1050.—
EURIP. Πότερον δ᾽ ~οὐκ ὄντα λόγον~ τοῦτον περὶ τῆς Φαίδρας ξυνέθηκα;
ÆSCH. Μὰ Δί᾽, ἀλλ᾽ ὄντ᾽· ἀλλ᾽ ἀποκρύπτειν χρὴ τὸ πονηρὸν τόν γε ποιητὴν,
Καὶ μὴ παράγειν μηδὲ διδάσκειν.
In the Hercules Furens, Euripidês puts in relief and even
exaggerates the worst elements of the ancient mythes: the
implacable hatred of Hêrê towards Hêraklês is pushed so far as to
deprive him of his reason (by sending down Iris and the unwilling
Λύσσα), and thus intentionally to drive him to slay his wife and
children with his own hands.
[898] Aristoph. Ran. 849, 1041, 1080; Thesmophor. 547; Nubes,
1354. Grauert, De Mediâ Græcorum Comœdiâ in Rheinisch. Museum,
2nd Jahrs. 1 Heft, p. 51. It suited the plan of the drama of
Æolus, as composed by Euripidês, to place in the mouth of
Macareus a formal recommendation of incestuous marriages:
probably this contributed much to offend the Athenian public. See
Dionys. Hal. Rhetor. ix. p. 355.
About the liberty of intermarriage among relatives, indicated in
Homer, parents and children being alone excepted, see Terpstra,
Antiquitas Homerica, cap. xiii. p. 104.
Ovid, whose poetical tendencies led him chiefly to copy
Euripidês, observes (Trist. ii. 1, 380)—
“Omne genus scripti gravitate Tragœdia vincit,
Hæc quoque materiam semper amoris habet.
Nam quid in Hippolyto nisi cæcæ flamma novercæ?
Nobilis est Canace fratris amore sui.”
This is the reverse of the truth in regard to Æschylus and
Sophoklês, and only very partially true in respect to Euripidês.
[899] Aristot. Ethic. Nicom. iii. 1, 8. καὶ γὰρ τὸν Εὐριπίδου
Ἀλκμαίωνα γελοῖα φαίνεται τὰ ἀναγκάσαντα μητροκτονῆσαι (In the
lost tragedy called Ἀλκμαίων ὁ διὰ Ψωφῖδος).
[900] Aristot. Poetic. 26-27. And in his Problemata also, in
giving the reason why the Hypo-Dorian and Hypo-Phrygian musical
modes were never assigned to the Chorus, he says—
Ταῦτα δὲ ἄμφω χόρῳ μὲν ἀναρμοστὰ, τοῖς δὲ ἀπὸ σκηνῆς οἰκειότερα.
Ἐκεῖνοι μὲν γὰρ ἡρώων μίμηται· οἱ δὲ ἡγεμόνες τῶν ἀρχαίων μόνοι
ἦσαν ἥρωες, οἱ δὲ λαοὶ ἄνθρωποι, ὧν ἐστὶν ὁ χόρος. Διὸ καὶ
ἁρμόζει αὐτῷ τὸ γοερὸν καὶ ἡσύχιον ἦθος καὶ μέλος· ἀνθρωπικὰ γάρ.
The tendency then of Athenian tragedy—powerfully manifested in
Æschylus, and never wholly lost—was to uphold an unquestioning faith
and a reverential estimate of the general mythical world and its
personages, but to treat the particular narratives rather as matter
for the emotions than as recitals of actual fact. The logographers
worked along with them to the first of these two ends, but not
to the second. Their grand object was, to cast the mythes into a
continuous readable series, and they were in consequence compelled to
make selection between inconsistent or contradictory narratives; to
reject some narratives as false, and to receive others as true. But
their preference was determined more by their sentiments as to what
was appropriate, than by any pretended historical test. Pherekydês,
Akusilaus and Hellanikus[901] did not seek to banish miraculous or
fantastic incidents from the mythical world; they regarded it as
peopled with loftier beings, and expected to find in it phænomena
not paralleled in their own degenerate days. They reproduced the
fables as they found them in the poets, rejecting little except the
discrepancies, and producing ultimately what they believed to be
not only a continuous but an exact and trustworthy history of the
past—wherein they carry indeed their precision to such a length, that
Hellanikus gives the year, and even the day of the capture of Troy.[902]
[901] See Müller, Prolegom. zu einer wissenschaftlichen
Mythologie, c. iii. p. 93.
[902] Hellanic. Fragment. 143, ed. Didot.
Hekatæus of Milêtus (500 B. C.), anterior to Pherekydês and Hellanikus,
is the earliest writer in whom we can detect any disposition to
disallow the prerogative and specialty of the mythes, and to soften
down their characteristic prodigies, some of which however still find
favor in his eyes, as in the case of the speaking ram who carried
Phryxus over the Hellespont. He pronounced the Grecian fables to be
“many and ridiculous;” whether from their discrepancies or from their
intrinsic improbabilities we do not know: and we owe to him the first
attempt to force them within the limits of historical credibility; as
where he transforms the three-headed Cerberus, the dog of Hadês, into
a serpent inhabiting a cavern on Cape Tænarus—and Geryôn of Erytheia
into a king of Epirus rich in herds of oxen.[903] Hekatæus traced the
genealogy of himself and the gens to which he belonged through a line
of fifteen progenitors up to an initial god,[904]—the clearest proof
both of his profound faith in the reality of the mythical world, and
of his religious attachment to it as the point of junction between the
human and the divine personality.
[903] Hekatæi Fragm. ed. Didot. 332, 346, 349; Schol. Apollôn.
Rhod. 1. 256; Athenæ. ii. p. 133; Skylax, c. 26.
Perhaps Hekatæus was induced to look for Erytheia in Epirus by
the brick-red color of the earth there in many places, noticed
by Pouqueville and other travellers (Voyage dans la Grèce,
vol. ii. 248: see Klausen, Æneas und die Penaten, vol. i. p.
222). Ἑκαταῖος ὁ Μιλήσιος—λόγον εὖρεν εἰκότα, Pausan. iii. 25,
4. He seems to have written expressly concerning the fabulous
Hyperboreans, and to have upheld the common faith against doubts
which had begun to rise in his time: the derisory notice of
Hyperboreans in Herodotus is probably directed against Hekatæus,
iv. 36; Schol. Apollôn. Rhod. ii. 675; Diodôr. ii. 47.
It is maintained by Mr. Clinton (Fast. Hell. ii. p. 480) and
others (see not. ad Fragment. Hecatæi, p. 30, ed. Didot), that
the work on the Hyperboreans was written by Hekatæus of Abdêra, a
literary Greek of the age of Ptolemy Philadelphus—not by Hekatæus
of Milêtus. I do not concur in this opinion. I think it much more
probable that the earlier Hekatæus was the author spoken of.
The distinguished position held by Hekatæus at Milêtus is marked
not only by the notice which Herodotus takes of his opinions on
public matters, but also by his negotiation with the Persian
satrap Artaphernes on behalf of his countrymen (Diodôr. Excerpt.
xlvii. p. 41, ed. Dindorf).
[904] Herodot. ii. 143.
We have next to consider the historians, especially Herodotus and
Thucydidês. Like Hekatæus, Thucydidês belonged to a gens which traced
its descent from Ajax, and through Ajax to Æakus and Zeus.[905]
Herodotus modestly implies that he himself had no such privilege to
boast of.[906] Their curiosity respecting the past had no other
materials to work upon except the mythes; but these they found already
cast by the logographers into a continuous series, and presented as an
aggregate of antecedent history, chronologically deduced from the times
of the gods. In common with the body of the Greeks, both Herodotus
and Thucydidês had imbibed that complete and unsuspecting belief in
the general reality of mythical antiquity, which was interwoven with
the religion and the patriotism, and all the public demonstrations of
the Hellenic world. To acquaint themselves with the genuine details
of this foretime, was an inquiry highly interesting to them: but the
increased positive tendencies of their age, as well as their own habits
of personal investigation, had created in them an _historical sense_
in regard to the past as well as to the present. Having acquired a
habit of appreciating the intrinsic tests of historical credibility
and probability, they found the particular narratives of the poets and
logographers, inadmissible as a whole even in the eyes of Hekatæus,
still more at variance with their stricter canons of criticism. And we
thus observe in them the constant struggle, as well as the resulting
compromise, between these two opposite tendencies; on one hand a firm
belief in the reality of the mythical world, on the other hand an
inability to accept the details which their only witnesses, the poets
and logographers, told them respecting it.
[905] Marcellin. Vit. Thucyd. init.
[906] Herodot. ii. 143.
Each of them however performed the process in his own way. Herodotus is
a man of deep and anxious religious feeling; he often recognizes the
special judgments of the gods as determining historical events: his
piety is also partly tinged with that mystical vein which the last two
centuries had gradually infused into the religion of the Greeks—for
he is apprehensive of giving offence to the gods by reciting publicly
what he has heard respecting them; he frequently stops short in his
narrative and intimates that there is a sacred legend, but that he will
not tell it: in other cases, where he feels compelled to speak out, he
entreats forgiveness for doing so from the gods and heroes. Sometimes
he will not even mention the name of a god, though he generally
thinks himself authorized to do so, the names being matter of public
notoriety.[907] Such pious reserve, which the open-hearted Herodotus
avowedly proclaims as chaining up his tongue, affords a striking
contrast with the plain-spoken and unsuspecting tone of the ancient
epic, as well as of the popular legends, wherein the gods and their
proceedings were the familiar and interesting subjects of common talk
as well as of common sympathy, without ceasing to inspire both fear and
reverence.
[907] Herodot. ii. 3, 51, 61, 65, 170. He alludes briefly (c.
51) to an ἱρὸς λόγος which was communicated in the Samothracian
mysteries, but he does not mention what it was: also about the
Thesmophoria, or τελετὴ of Dêmêtêr (c. 171).
Καὶ περὶ μὲν τούτων τοσαῦτα ἡμῖν εἰποῦσι, καὶ παρὰ τῶν θεῶν καὶ
ἡρώων εὐμένεια εἴη (c. 45).
Compare similar scruples on the part of Pausanias (viii. 25 and
37).
The passage of Herodotus (ii. 3) is equivocal, and has been
understood in more ways than one (see Lobeck, Aglaopham. p. 1287).
The aversion of Dionysius of Halikarnassus to reveal the divine
secrets is not less powerful (see A. R. i. 67, 68), and Pausanias
_passim_.
Herodotus expressly distinguishes, in the comparison of Polykratês with
Minôs, the human race to which the former belonged, from the divine or
heroic race which comprised the latter.[908] But he has a firm belief
in the authentic personality and parentage of all the names in the
mythes, divine, heroic and human, as well as in the trustworthiness of
their chronology computed by generations. He counts back 1600 years
from his own day to that of Semelê, mother of Dionysus; 900 years to
Hêraklês, and 800 years to Penelopê, the Trojan war being a little
earlier in date.[909] Indeed even the longest of these periods must
have seemed to him comparatively short, seeing that he apparently
accepts the prodigious series of years which the Egyptians professed to
draw from a recorded chronology—17,000 years from their god Hêraklês,
and 15,000 years from their god Osiris or Dionysus, down to their king
Amasis[910] (550 B. C.) So much was his imagination familiarized with
these long chronological computations barren of events, that he treats
Homer and Hesiod as “men of yesterday,” though separated from his own
age by an interval which he reckons as four hundred years.[911]
[908] Herod. iii. 122.
[909] Herod. ii. 145.
[910] Herodot. ii. 43-145. Καὶ ταῦτα Αἰγύπτιοι ἀτρεκέως φασὶ
ἐπίστασθαι, ἀεί τε λογιζόμενοι καὶ ἀεὶ ἀπογραφόμενοι τὰ ἔτεα.
[911] Herodot, ii. 53. μέχρι οὗ πρωήν τε καὶ χθὲς, ὡς εἰπεῖν
λόγῳ. Ἡσίοδον γὰρ καὶ Ὅμηρον ἡλικίην τετρακοσίοισι ἔτεσι δοκέω
μευ πρεσβυτέρους γενέσθαι, καὶ οὐ πλέοσι.
Herodotus had been profoundly impressed with what he saw and heard
in Egypt. The wonderful monuments, the evident antiquity, and the
peculiar civilization of that country, acquired such preponderance in
his mind over his own native legends, that he is disposed to trace
even the oldest religious names or institutions of Greece to Egyptian
or Phœnician original, setting aside in favor of this hypothesis the
Grecian legends of Dionysus and Pan.[912] The oldest Grecian mythical
genealogies are thus made ultimately to lose themselves in Egyptian
or Phœnician antiquity, and in the full extent of these genealogies
Herodotus firmly believes. It does not seem that any doubt had
ever crossed his mind as to the real personality of those who were
named or described in the popular mythes: all of them have once had
reality, either as men, as heroes, or as gods. The eponyms of cities,
dêmes and tribes, are all comprehended in this affirmative category;
the supposition of fictitious personages being apparently never
entertained. Deukaliôn, Hellên, Dôrus,[913]—Iôn, with his four sons,
the eponyms of the old Athenian tribes,[914]—the autochthonous Titakus
and Dekelus,[915]—Danaus, Lynkeus, Perseus, Amphitryôn, Alkmêna, and
Hêraklês,[916]—Talthybius, the heroic progenitor of the privileged
heraldic gens at Sparta,—the Tyndarids and Helena,[917]—Agamemnôn,
Menelaus, and Orestes,[918]—Nestôr and his son Peisistratus,—Asôpus,
Thêbê, and Ægina,—Inachus and Iô, Æêtês and Mêdea,[919]—Melanippus,
Adrastus, and Amphiaräus, as well as Jasôn and the Argô,[920]—all
these are occupants of the real past time, and predecessors of himself
and his contemporaries. In the veins of the Lacedæmonian kings flowed
the blood both of Kadmus and of Danaus, their splendid pedigree being
traceable to both of these great mythical names: Herodotus carries the
lineage up through Hêraklês first to Perseus and Danaê, then through
Danaê to Akrisios and the Egyptian Danaus; but he drops the paternal
lineage when he comes to Perseus (inasmuch as Perseus is the son of
Zeus by Danaê, without any reputed human father, such as Amphitryôn
was to Hêraklês), and then follow the higher members of the series
through Danaê alone.[921] He also pursues the same regal genealogy,
through the mother of Eurysthenês and Proclês, up to Polynikês, Œdipus,
Laius, Labdakus, Polydôrus and Kadmus; and he assigns various ancient
inscriptions which he saw in the temple of the Ismenian Apollo at
Thêbes, to the ages of Laius and Œdipus.[922] Moreover, the sieges of
Thêbes and Troy,—the Argonautic expedition,—the invasion of Attica by
the Amazons,—the protection of the Herakleids, and the defeat and death
of Eurystheus, by the Athenians,[923]—the death of Mêkisteus and Tydeus
before Thêbes by the hands of Melanippus, and the touching calamities
of Adrastus and Amphiaräus connected with the same enterprise,—the
sailing of Kastôr and Pollux in the Argô,[924]—the abductions of Iô,
Eurôpa, Mêdea and Helena,—the emigration of Kadmus in quest of Eurôpa,
and his coming to Bϙtia, as well as the attack of the Greeks upon Troy
to recover Helen,[925]—all these events seem to him portions of past
history, not less unquestionably certain, though more clouded over by
distance and misrepresentation, than the battles of Salamis and Mykalê.
[912] Herodot. ii. 146.
[913] Herod. i. 56.
[914] Herod. v. 66.
[915] Herod. ix. 73.
[916] Herod. ii, 43-44, 91-98, 171-182 (the Egyptians admitted
the truth of the Greek legend, that Perseus had come to Libya to
fetch the Gorgon’s head).
[917] Herod. ii. 113-120; iv. 145; vii. 134.
[918] Herod. i. 67-68; ii. 113. vii. 159.
[919] Herod. i. 1, 2, 4; v. 81, 65.
[920] Herod. i. 52; iv. 145; v. 67; vii. 193.
[921] Herod. vi. 52-53.
[922] Herod. iv. 147; v. 59-61.
[923] Herod. v. 61; ix. 27-28.
[924] Herod. i. 52; iv. 145; v. 67.
[925] Herod. i. 1-4; ii. 49, 113: iv. 147; v. 94.
But though Herodotus is thus easy of faith in regard both to the
persons and to the general facts of Grecian mythes, yet when he comes
to discuss particular facts taken separately, we find him applying
to them stricter tests of historical credibility, and often disposed
to reject as well the miraculous as the extravagant. Thus even with
respect to Hêraklês, he censures the levity of the Greeks in ascribing
to him absurd and incredible exploits; he tries their assertion by
the philosophical standard of nature, or of determinate powers and
conditions governing the course of events. “How is it consonant to
nature (he asks), that Hêraklês, being, as he was, according to the
statement of the Greeks, _a man_, should kill many thousand persons?
I pray that indulgence may be shown to me both by gods and heroes for
saying so much as this.” The religious feelings of Herodotus here
told him that he was trenching upon the utmost limits of admissible
scepticism.[926]
[926] Herod. ii. 45. Λέγουσι δὲ πολλὰ καὶ ἄλλα ἀνεπισκέπτως
οἱ Ἕλληνες· εὐήθης δὲ αὐτέων καὶ ὅδε ὁ μῦθός ἐστι, τὸν περὶ
τοῦ Ἡρακλέος λέγουσι.... Ἔτι δὲ ἕνα ἐόντα τὸν Ἡρακλέα, καὶ ἔτι
ἄνθρωπον ὡς δή φασι, ~κῶς φύσιν ἔχει~ πολλὰς μυριάδας φονεῦσαι;
Καὶ περὶ μὲν τούτων τοσαῦτα ἡμῖν εἰποῦσι, καὶ παρὰ τῶν θεῶν καὶ
παρὰ τῶν ἡρώων εὐμένεια εἴη.
We may also notice the manner in which the historian criticizes
the stratagem whereby Peisistratus established himself as despot
at Athens—by dressing up the stately Athenian woman Phyê in the
costume of the goddess Athênê, and passing off her injunctions
as the commands of the goddess; the Athenians accepted her with
unsuspecting faith, and received Peisistratus at her command.
Herodotus treats the whole affair as a piece of extravagant
silliness, πρᾶγμα εὐηθέστατον μακρῷ (i. 60).
Another striking instance of the disposition of Herodotus to
rationalize the miraculous narratives of the current mythes, is to be
found in his account of the oracle of Dôdôna and its alleged Egyptian
origin. Here, if in any case, a miracle was not only in full keeping,
but apparently indispensable to satisfy the exigences of the religious
sentiment; anything less than a miracle would have appeared tame and
unimpressive to the visitors of so revered a spot, much more to the
residents themselves. Accordingly, Herodotus heard, both from the three
priestesses and from the Dodonæans generally, that two black doves had
started at the same time from Thêbes in Egypt: one of them went to
Libya, where it directed the Libyans to establish the oracle of Zeus
Ammon; the other came to the grove of Dôdôna, and perched on one of the
venerable oaks, proclaiming with a human voice that an oracle of Zeus
must be founded on that very spot. The injunction of the speaking dove
was respectfully obeyed.[927]
[927] Herod. ii. 55. Δωδωναίων δὲ αἱ ἱρηΐαι ... ἔλεγον ταῦτα,
συνωμολόγεον δέ σφι καὶ οἱ ἄλλοι Δωδωναῖοι οἱ περὶ τὸ ἱρόν.
The miracle sometimes takes another form; the oak at Dôdôna was
itself once endued with speech (Dionys. Hal. Ars. Rhetoric. i. 6;
Strabo).
Such was the tale related and believed at Dôdôna. But Herodotus had
also heard, from the priests at Thêbes in Egypt, a different tale,
ascribing the origin of all the prophetic establishments, in Greece as
well as in Libya, to two sacerdotal women, who had been carried away
from Thêbes by some Phœnician merchants and sold, the one in Greece,
the other in Libya. The Theban priests boldly assured Herodotus that
much pains had been taken to discover what had become of these women so
exported, and that the fact of their having been taken to Greece and
Libya had been accordingly verified.[928]
[928] Herod. ii. 54.
The historian of Halicarnassus cannot for a moment think of admitting
the miracle which harmonized so well with the feelings of the
priestesses and the Dodonæans.[929] “How (he asks) could a dove
speak with human voice?” But the narrative of the priests at Thêbes,
though its prodigious improbability hardly requires to be stated, yet
involved no positive departure from the laws of nature and possibility,
and therefore Herodotus makes no difficulty in accepting it. The
curious circumstance is, that he turns the native Dodonæan legend
into a figurative representation, or rather a misrepresentation, of
the supposed true story told by the Theban priests. According to his
interpretation, the woman who came from Thêbes to Dôdôna was called
a dove, and affirmed to utter sounds like a bird, because she was
non-Hellenic and spoke a foreign tongue: when she learned to speak the
language of the country, it was then said that the dove spoke with a
human voice. And the dove was moreover called black, because of the
woman’s Egyptian color.
[929] Herod. ii. 57. Ἐπεὶ τέῳ ἂν τρόπῳ πελειάς γε ἀνθρωπηΐῃ φωνῇ
φθέγξαιτο;
According to one statement, the word Πελειὰς in the Thessalian
dialect meant both a dove and a prophetess (Scriptor. Rer.
Mythicarum, ed. Bode, i. 96). Had there been any truth in this,
Herodotus could hardly have failed to notice it, inasmuch as it
would exactly have helped him out of the difficulty which he felt.
That Herodotus should thus bluntly reject a miracle, recounted to him
by the prophetic women themselves as the prime circumstance in the
_origines_ of this holy place, is a proof of the hold which habits
of dealing with historical evidence had acquired over his mind; and
the awkwardness of his explanatory mediation between the dove and the
woman, marks not less his anxiety, while discarding the legend, to let
it softly down into a story quasi-historical and not intrinsically
incredible.
We may observe another example of the unconscious tendency of
Herodotus to eliminate from the mythes the idea of special aid from
the gods, in his remarks upon Melampus. He designates Melampus “as a
clever man, who had acquired for himself the art of prophecy;” and
had procured through Kadmus much information about the religious
rites and customs of Egypt, many of which he introduced into
Greece[930]—especially the name, the sacrifices, and the phallic
processions of Dionysus: he adds, “that Melampus himself did not
accurately comprehend or bring out the whole doctrine, but wise men
who came after him made the necessary additions.”[931] Though the
name of Melampus is here maintained, the character described[932] is
something in the vein of Pythagoras—totally different from the great
seer and leech of the old epic mythes—the founder of the gifted family
of the Amythaonids, and the grandfather of Amphiaräus.[933] But that
which is most of all at variance with the genuine legendary spirit, is
the opinion expressed by Herodotus (and delivered with some emphasis
as _his own_), that Melampus “was a clever man, who had acquired for
himself prophetic powers.” Such a supposition would have appeared
inadmissible to Homer or Hesiod, or indeed to Solôn, in the preceding
century, in whose view even inferior arts come from the gods, while
Zeus or Apollo bestows the power of prophesying.[934] The intimation
of such an opinion by Herodotus, himself a thoroughly pious man, marks
the sensibly diminished omnipresence of the gods, and the increasing
tendency to look for the explanation of phenomena among more visible
and determinate agencies.
[930] Herod. ii. 49. Ἐγὼ μὲν νύν φημι Μελάμποδα γενόμενον ἄνδρα
σοφὸν, μαντικήν τε ἑωυτῷ συστῆσαι, καὶ πυθόμενον ἀπ᾽ Αἰγύπτου,
ἄλλα τε πολλὰ ἐσηγήσασθαι Ἕλλησι, καὶ τὰ περὶ τὸν Διόνυσον, ὀλίγα
αὐτῶν παραλλάξαντα.
[931] Herod. ii. 49. Ἀτρεκέως μὲν οὐ πάντα συλλαβὼν τὸν λόγον
ἔφῃνε· (Melampus) ἀλλ᾽ οἱ ἐπιγενόμενοι τούτῳ ~σοφισταὶ~ μεζόνως
ἐξέφῃναν.
[932] Compare Herod. iv. 95; ii. 81. Ἑλλήνων οὐ τῷ ἀσθενεστάτῳ
~σοφιστῇ~ Πυθαγόρᾳ.
[933] Homer, Odyss. xi. 290; xv. 225. Apollodôr. i. 9, 11-12.
Hesiod, Eoiai, Fragm. 55, ed. Düntzer (p. 43)—
Ἀλκὴν μὲν γὰρ ἔδωκεν Ὀλύμπιος Αἰακίδησι,
~Νοῦν δ᾽ Ἀμυθαονίδαις~, πλοῦτον δ᾽ ἔπορ᾽ Ἀτρείδησι.
also Frag. 34 (p. 38), and Frag. 65 (p. 45); Schol. Apoll. Rhod.
i. 118.
Herodotus notices the celebrated mythical narrative of Melampus
healing the deranged Argive women (ix. 34); according to the
original legend, the daughters of Prœtus. In the Hesiodic Eoiai
(Fr. 16, Düntz.; Apollod. ii. 2) the distemper of the Prœtid
females was ascribed to their having repudiated the rites and
worship of Dionysus (Akusilaus, indeed, assigned a different
cause), which shows that the old fable recognized a connection
between Melampus and these rites.
[934] Homer, Iliad, i. 72-87; xv. 412. Odyss. xv. 245-252; iv.
233. Some times the gods inspired prophecy for the special
occasion, without conferring upon the party the permanent gift
and _status_ of a prophet (compare Odyss. i. 202; xvii. 383).
Solôn, Fragm. xi. 48-53, Schneidewin:—
Ἄλλον μάντιν ἔθηκεν ἄναξ ἑκάεργος Ἀπολλὼν,
Ἔγνω δ᾽ ἀνδρὶ κακὸν τηλόθεν ἐρχόμενον,
Ὧι συνομαρτήσωσι θεοὶ....
Herodotus himself reproduces the old belief in the special gift
of prophetic power by Zeus and Apollo, in the story of Euenius of
Apollônia (ix. 94).
See the fine ode of Pindar, describing the birth and inspiration
of Jamus, eponymous father of the great prophetic family in Elis
called the Jamids (Herodot. ix. 33), Pindar, Olymp. vi. 40-75.
About Teiresias, Sophoc. Œd. Tyr. 283-410. Neither Nestôr nor
Odysseus possesses the gift of prophecy.
We may make a similar remark on the dictum of the historian respecting
the narrow defile of Tempê, forming the embouchure of the Pêneus and
the efflux of all the waters from the Thessalian basin. The Thessalians
alleged that this whole basin of Thessaly had once been a lake,
but that Poseidôn had split the chain of mountains and opened the
efflux;[935] upon which primitive belief, thoroughly conformable to
the genius of Homer and Hesiod, Herodotus comments as follows: “The
Thessalian statement is reasonable. For whoever thinks that Poseidôn
shakes the earth, and that the rifts of an earthquake are the work of
that god, will, on seeing the defile in question, say that Poseidôn
has caused it. For the rift of the mountains is, as appeared to me
(when I saw it), the work of an earthquake.” Herodotus admits the
reference to Poseidôn, when pointed out to him, but it stands only in
the background: what is present to his mind is the phænomenon of the
earthquake, not as a special act, but as part of a system of habitual
operations.[936]
[935] More than one tale is found elsewhere, similar to this,
about the defile of Tempê:—
“A tradition exists that this part of the country was once a
lake, and that Solomon commanded two deeves, or genii, named
Ard and Beel, to turn off the water into the Caspian, which
they effected by cutting a passage through the mountains; and a
city, erected in the newly-formed plain, was named after them
Ard-u-beel.” (Sketches on the Shores of the Caspian, by W. R.
Holmes.)
Also about the plain of Santa Fe di Bogota, in South America,
that it was once under water, until Bochica cleft the mountains
and opened a channel of egress (Humboldt, Vues des Cordillères,
p. 87-88); and about the plateau of Kashmir (Humboldt, Asie
Centrale, vol. i. p. 102), drained in a like miraculous manner
by the saint Kâsyapa. The manner in which conjectures, derived
from local configuration or peculiarities, are often made to
assume the form of _traditions_, is well remarked by the same
illustrious traveller: “Ce qui se présente comme une tradition,
n’est souvent que le reflet de l’impression que laisse l’aspect
des lieux. Des bancs de coquilles à demi-fossiles, répandues
dans les isthmes ou sur des plateaux, font naître même chez les
hommes les moins avancés dans la culture intellectuelle, l’idée
de grandes inondations, d’anciennes communications entre des
bassins limitrophes. Des opinions, que l’on pourroit appeler
systématiques, se trouvent dans les forêts de l’Orénoque comme
dans les îles de la Mer du Sud. Dans l’une et dans l’autre de
ces contrées, elles ont pris la forme des traditions.” (A. von
Humboldt, Asie Centrale, vol. ii. p. 147.) Compare a similar
remark in the same work and volume, p. 286-294.
[936] Herodot. vii. 129. (Poseidôn was worshipped as Πετραῖος
in Thessaly, in commemoration of this geological interference:
Schol. Pindar. Pyth. iv. 245.) Τὸ δὲ παλαιὸν λέγεται, οὐκ ἐόντος
κω τοῦ αὐλῶνος καὶ διεκρόου τούτου, τοὺς ποτάμους τούτους ...
ῥέοντας ποιεῖν τὴν Θεσσαλίην πᾶσαν πέλαγος. Αὐτοὶ μέν νυν
Θέσσαλοι λέγουσι Ποσειδέωνα ποιῆσαι τὸν αὐλῶνα, δι᾽ οὗ ῥέει ὁ
Πηνειὸς, οἰκότα λέγοντες. Ὅστις γὰρ νομίζει Ποσειδέωνα τὴν γῆν
σείειν, καὶ τὰ διεστεῶτα ὑπὸ σεισμοῦ τοῦ θεοῦ τούτου ἔργα εἶναι,
καὶ ἂν ἐκεῖνο ἰδὼν φαίη Ποσειδέωνα ποιῆσαι. Ἐστὶ γὰρ σεισμοῦ
ἔργον, ὡς ἐμοὶ ἐφαίνετο εἶναι, ἡ διάστασις τῶν οὐρέων. In another
case (viii. 129), Herodotus believes that Poseidôn produced a
preternaturally high tide, in order to punish the Persians, who
had insulted his temple near Potidæa: here was a special motive
for the god to exert his power.
This remark of Herodotus illustrates the hostile ridicule cast
by Aristophanês (in the Nubes) upon Socratês, on the score of
alleged impiety, because he belonged to a school of philosophers
(though in point of fact he discountenanced that line of
study) who introduced physical laws and forces in place of the
personal agency of the gods. The old man Strepsiades inquires
from Socratês, _Who rains? Who thunders?_ To which Socratês
replies, “_Not Zeus_, but the Nephelæ, _i. e. the clouds_: you
never saw rain without clouds.” Strepsiades then proceeds to
inquire—“But who is it that compels the clouds to move onward?
is it not Zeus?” Socratês—“Not at all; it is æthereal rotation.”
Strepsiades—“Rotation? that had escaped me: Zeus then no longer
exists, and Rotation reigns in his place.”
STREPS. Ὁ δ᾽ ἀναγκάζων ἐστὶ τίς αὐτὰς (Νεφέλας), οὐχ ὁ Ζεὺς,
ὥστε φέρεσθαι;
SOCRAT. Ἥκιστ᾽, ἀλλ᾽ αἰθέριος δῖνος.
STREPS. Δῖνος; τουτί μ᾽ ἐλελήθει—
Ὁ Ζεὺς οὐκ ὢν, ἀλλ᾽ ἀντ᾽ αὐτοῦ Δῖνος νυνὶ βασιλεύων.
To the same effect v. 1454, Δῖνος βασιλεύει τὸν Δί᾽
ἐξεληλακώς—“Rotation has driven out Zeus, and reigns in his
place.”
If Aristophanês had had as strong a wish to turn the public
antipathies against Herodotus as against Socratês and Euripidês,
the explanation here given would have afforded him a plausible
show of truth for doing so; and it is highly probable that the
Thessalians would have been sufficiently displeased with the view
of Herodotus to sympathize in the poet’s attack upon him. The
point would have been made (waiving metrical considerations)—
~Σεισμὸς~ βασιλεύει, τὸν ~Ποσειδῶν᾽~ ἐξεληλακώς.
The comment of Herodotus upon the Thessalian view seems almost as
if it were intended to guard against this very inference.
Other accounts ascribed the cutting of the defile of Tempê to
Hêraklês (Diodôr. iv. 18).
Respecting the ancient Grecian faith, which recognized the
displeasure of Poseidôn as the cause of earthquakes, see Xenoph.
Hellen. iii. 3, 2; Thucydid. i. 127; Strabo, xii. p. 579; Diodôr.
xv. 48-49. It ceased to give universal satisfaction even so early
as the time of Thalês and Anaximenês (see Aristot. Meteorolog.
ii. 7-8; Plutarch, Placit. Philos. iii. 15; Seneca, Natural.
Quæst. vi. 6-23); and that philosopher, as well as Anaxagoras,
Democritus and others, suggested different physical explanations
of the fact. Notwithstanding a dissentient minority, however,
the old doctrine still continued to be generally received: and
Diodôrus, in describing the terrible earthquake in 373 B. C.,
by which Helikê and Bura were destroyed, while he notices those
philosophers (probably Kallisthenês, Senec. Nat. Quæst. vi. 23)
who substituted physical causes and laws in place of the divine
agency, rejects their views, and ranks himself with the religious
public, who traced this formidable phænomenon to the wrath of
Poseidôn (xv. 48-49).
The Romans recognized many different gods as producers of
earthquakes; an unfortunate creed, since it exposed them to the
danger of addressing their prayers to the wrong god: “Unde in
ritualibus et pontificiis observatur, obtemperantibus sacerdotiis
caute, ne alio Deo pro alio nominato, cum quis eorum terram
concutiat, piacula committantur.” (Ammian. Marcell. xvii. 7.)
Herodotus adopts the Egyptian version of the legend of Troy, founded on
that capital variation which seems to have originated with Stesichorus,
and according to which Helen never left Sparta at all—her _eidôlon_
had been taken to Troy in her place. Upon this basis a new story had
been framed, midway between Homer and Stesichorus, representing Paris
to have really carried off Helen from Sparta, but to have been driven
by storms to Egypt, where she remained during the whole siege of
Troy, having been detained by Prôteus, the king of the country, until
Menelaus came to reclaim her after his triumph. The Egyptian priests,
with their usual boldness of assertion, professed to have heard the
whole story from Menelaus himself—the Greeks had beseiged Troy, in
the full persuasion that Helen and the stolen treasures were within
the walls, nor would they ever believe the repeated denials of the
Trojans as to the fact of her presence. In intimating his preference
for the Egyptian narrative, Herodotus betrays at once his perfect and
unsuspecting confidence that he is dealing with genuine matter of
history, and his entire distrust of the epic poets, even including
Homer, upon whose authority that supposed history rested. His reason
for rejecting the Homeric version is that it teems with historical
improbabilities. If Helen had been really in Troy (he says), Priam and
the Trojans would never have been so insane as to retain her to their
own utter ruin: but it was the divine judgment which drove them into
the miserable alternative of neither being able to surrender Helen,
nor to satisfy the Greeks of the real fact that they had never had
possession of her—in order that mankind might plainly read, in the
utter destruction of Troy, the great punishments with which the gods
visit great misdeeds. Homer (Herodotus thinks) had heard this story,
but designedly departed from it, because it was not so suitable a
subject for epic poetry.[937]