Grecian antiquity cannot be at all understood except in connection

with Grecian religion. It begins with gods and it ends with historical

men, the former being recognized not simply as gods, but as primitive

ancestors, and connected with the latter by a long mythical genealogy,

partly heroic and partly human. Now the whole value of such genealogies

arises from their being taken entire; the god or hero at the top is

in point of fact the most important member of the whole;[996] for

the length and continuity of the series arises from anxiety on the

part of historical men to join themselves by a thread of descent

with the being whom they worshipped in their gentile sacrifices.

Without the ancestorial god, the whole pedigree would have become not

only acephalous, but worthless and uninteresting. The pride of the

Herakleids, Asklêpiads, Æakids, Nêleids, Dædalids, etc. was attached

to the primitive eponymous hero and to the god from whom they sprung,

not to the line of names, generally long and barren, through which the

divine or heroic dignity gradually dwindled down into common manhood.

Indeed, the length of the genealogy (as I have before remarked) was an

evidence of the humility of the historical man, which led him to place

himself at a respectful distance from the gods or heroes; for Hekatæus

of Milêtus, who ranked himself as the fifteenth descendant of a god,

might perhaps have accounted it an overweening impiety in any living

man to claim a god for his immediate father.

[996] For a description of similar tendencies in the Asiatic

religions, see Mövers, Die Phönizier, ch. v. p. 153 (Bonn, 1841):

he points out the same phænomena as in the Greek,—coalescence

between the ideas of ancestry and worship,—confusion between

gods and men in the past,—increasing tendency to Euêmerize (pp.

156-157).

The whole chronology of Greece, anterior to 776 B. C., consists of

calculations founded upon these mythical genealogies, especially upon

that of the Spartan kings and their descent from Hêraklês,—thirty

years being commonly taken as the equivalent of a generation, or

about three generations to a century. This process of computation

was altogether illusory, as applying historical and chronological

conditions to a case on which they had no bearing. Though the domain

of history was seemingly enlarged, the religious element was tacitly

set aside: when the heroes and gods were chronologized, they became

insensibly approximated to the limits of humanity, and the process

indirectly gave encouragement to the theory of Euêmerus. Personages

originally legendary and poetical were erected into definite landmarks

for measuring the duration of the foretime, thus gaining in respect to

historical distinctness, but not without loss on the score of religious

association. Both Euêmerus and the subsequent Christian writers, who

denied the original and inherent divinity of the pagan gods, had a

great advantage in carrying their chronological researches strictly and

consistently upwards—for all chronology fails as soon as we suppose a

race superior to common humanity.

Moreover, it is to be remarked that the pedigree of the Spartan kings,

which Apollodôrus and Eratosthenês selected as the basis of their

estimate of time, is nowise superior in credibility and trustworthiness

to the thousand other gentile and family pedigrees with which Greece

abounded; it is rather indeed to be numbered among the most incredible

of all, seeing that Hêraklês as a progenitor is placed at the head of

perhaps more pedigrees than any other Grecian god or hero.[997] The

descent of the Spartan king Leonidas from Hêraklês rests upon no better

evidence than that of Aristotle or Hippocratês from Asklêpius,[998]—of

Evagoras or Thucydidês from Æakus,—of Socratês from Dædalus,—of the

Spartan heraldic family from Talthybius,—of the prophetic Iamid family

in Elis from Iamus,—of the root-gatherers in Pêlion from Cheirôn,—and

of Hekatæus and his gens from some god in the sixteenth ascending

line of the series. There is little exaggeration in saying, indeed,

that no permanent combination of men in Greece, religious, social, or

professional, was without a similar pedigree; all arising out of the

same exigences of the feelings and imagination, to personify as well

as to sanctify the bond of union among the members. Every one of these

_gentes_ began with a religious and ended with an historical person.

At some point or other in the upward series, entities of history were

exchanged for entities of religion; but where that point is to be

found we are unable to say, nor had the wisest of the ancient Greeks

any means of determining. Thus much, however, we know, that the series

taken as a whole, though dear and precious to the believing Greek,

possesses no value as chronological evidence to the historian.

[997] According to that which Aristotle seems to recognize

(Histor. Animal. vii. 6), Hêraklês was father of seventy-two

sons, but of only one daughter—he was essentially ἀῤῥενόγονος,

illustrating one of the physical peculiarities noticed by

Aristotle. Euripidês, however, mentions daughters of Hêraklês in

the plural number (Euripid. Herakleid. 45).

[998] Hippocratês was twentieth in descent from Hêraklês,

and nineteenth from Asklêpius (Vita Hippocr. by Soranus, ap.

Westermann, Scriptor. Biographic. viii. 1); about Aristotle,

see Diogen. Laërt. v. 1. Xenophôn, the physician of the emperor

Claudius, was also an Asklêpiad (Tacit. Ann. xii. 61).

In Rhodes, the neighboring island to Kôs, was the gens Ἁλιάδαι,

or sons of Hêlios, specially distinguished from the Ἁλιασταὶ of

mere associated worshippers of Hêlios, τὸ κοινὸν τῶν Ἁλιαδῶν καὶ

τῶν Ἁλιαστῶν (see the Inscription in Boeckh’s Collection, No.

2525, with Boeckh’s comment).

When Hekatæus visited Thêbes in Egypt, he mentioned to the Egyptian

priests, doubtless with a feeling of satisfaction and pride, the

imposing pedigree of the gens to which he belonged,—with fifteen

ancestors in ascending line, and a god as the initial progenitor. But

he found himself immeasurably overdone by the priests “who genealogized

against him.”[999] They showed to him three hundred and forty-one

wooden colossal statues, representing the succession of chief priests

in the temple in uninterrupted series from father to son, through a

space of 11,300 years. Prior to the commencement of this long period

(they said), the gods dwelling along with men, had exercised sway in

Egypt; but they repudiated altogether the idea of men begotten by gods

or of heroes.[1000]

[999] Herodot. ii. 144. Ἑκαταίῳ δὲ γενεηλογήσαντι ἑωϋτὸν,

καὶ ἀναδήσαντι ἐς ἑκκαιδέκατον θεὸν, ἀντεγενεηλόγησαν ἐπὶ τῇ

ἀριθμήσει, οὐ δεκόμενοι παρ᾽ αὐτοῦ, ἀπὸ θεοῦ γένεσθαι ἄνθρωπον·

ἀντεγενεηλόγησαν δὲ ὧδε, etc.

[1000] Herod. ii. 143-145. Καὶ ταῦτα Αἰγύπτιοι ἀτρεκέως φασὶν

ἐπίστασθαι, αἰεί τε λογιζόμενοι καὶ αἰεὶ ἀπογραφόμενοι τὰ ἔτεα.

But these counter-genealogies, are, in respect to trustworthiness and

evidence, on the same footing. Each represents partly the religious

faith, partly the retrospective imagination, of the persons from whom

it emanated; in each, the lower members of the series (to what extent

we cannot tell) are real, the upper members fabulous; but in each also

the series derived all its interest and all its imposing effect from

being conceived unbroken and entire. Herodotus is much perplexed by the

capital discrepancy between the Grecian and Egyptian chronologies, and

vainly employs his ingenuity in reconciling them. There is no standard

of objective evidence by which either the one or the other of them can

be tried: each has its own subjective value, in conjunction with the

faith and feelings of Egyptians and Greeks, and each presupposes in the

believer certain mental prepossessions which are not to be found beyond

its own local limits. Nor is the greater or less extent of duration at

all important, when we once pass the limits of evidence and verifiable

reality. One century of recorded time, adequately studded with

authentic and orderly events, presents a greater mass and a greater

difficulty of transition to the imagination than a hundred centuries of

barren genealogy. Herodotus, in discussing the age of Homer and Hesiod,

treats an anterior point of 400 years as if it were only yesterday;

the reign of Henry VI. is separated from us by an equal interval, and

the reader will not require to be reminded how long that interval now

appears.

The mythical age was peopled with a mingled aggregate of gods, heroes,

and men, so confounded together that it was often impossible to

distinguish to which class any individual name belonged. In regard

to the Thracian god Zalmoxis, the Hellespontic Greeks interpreted

his character and attributes according to the scheme of Euêmerism.

They affirmed that he had been a man, the slave of the philosopher

Pythagoras at Samos, and that he had by abilities and artifice

established a religious ascendency over the minds of the Thracians,

and obtained from them divine honors. Herodotus cannot bring himself

to believe this story, but he frankly avows his inability to determine

whether Zalmoxis was a god or a man,[1001] nor can he extricate

himself from a similar embarrassment in respect to Dionysus and Pan.

Amidst the confusion of the Homeric fight, the goddess Athênê confers

upon Diomêdês the miraculous favor of dispelling the mist from his

eyes, so as to enable him to discriminate gods from men; and nothing

less than a similar miracle could enable a critical reader of the

mythical narratives to draw an ascertained boundary-line between

the two.[1002] But the original hearers of the mythes felt neither

surprise nor displeasure from this confusion of the divine with the

human individual. They looked at the past with a film of faith over

their eyes—neither knowing the value, nor desiring the attainment, of

an unclouded vision. The intimate companionship, and the occasional

mistake of identity between gods and men, were in full harmony with

their reverential retrospect. And we, accordingly, see the poet Ovid

in his Fasti, when he undertakes the task of unfolding the legendary

antiquities of early Rome, re-acquiring, by the inspiration of Juno,

the power of seeing gods and men in immediate vicinity and conjunct

action, such as it existed before the development of the critical and

historical sense.[1003]

[1001] Herod. iv. 94-96. After having related the Euemeristic

version given by the Hellespontic Greeks, he concludes with his

characteristic frankness and simplicity—Ἐγὼ δὲ, περὶ μὲν τούτου

καὶ τοῦ καταγαίου οἰκήματος, οὔτε ἀπιστέω, οὔτε ὦν πιστεύω τι

λίην, δοκέω δὲ πολλοῖσι ἔτεσι πρότερον τὸν Ζάλμοξιν τοῦτον

γενέσθαι Πυθαγόρεω. Εἴτε δὲ ἐγένετό τις Ζάλμοξις ἄνθρωπος, εἴτ᾽

ἐστὶ δαίμων τις Γέτησι οὗτος ἐπιχώριος, χαιρέτω. So Plutarch

(Numa c. 19) will not undertake to determine whether Janus was a

god or a king εἴτε δαίμων, εἴτε βασιλεὺς γενόμενος, etc.

Herakleitus the philosopher said that men were θεοὶ θνητοὶ, and

the gods were ἄνθρωποι ἀθάνατοι (Lucian, Vitar. Auctio. c. 13.

vol. i. p. 303, Tauch.: compare the same author, Dialog. Mortuor.

iii. vol. i. p. 182, ed. Tauchn).

[1002] Iliad, v. 127:—

Ἀχλὺν δ᾽ αὖ τοι ἀπ᾽ ὀφθαλμῶν ἕλον, ἣ πρὶν ἐπῆεν,

Ὄφρ᾽ εὖ γιγνώσκῃς ἠμὲν θεὸν, ἠδὲ καὶ ἄνδρα.

Of this undistinguishable confusion between gods and men,

striking illustrations are to be found both in the third book of

Cicero de Naturâ Deorum (16-21), and in the long disquisition of

Strabo (x. pp. 467-474) respecting the Kabeiri, the Korybantes,

the Dactyls of Ida; the more so, as he cites the statements of

Pherekydês, Akusilaus, Dêmêtrius of Skêpsis, and others. Under

the Roman empire, the lands in Greece belonging to the immortal

gods were exempted from tribute. The Roman tax-collectors

refused to recognize as immortal gods any persons who had once

been men; but this rule could not be clearly applied (Cicero,

Nat. Deor. iii. 20). See the remarks of Pausanias (ii. 26, 7)

about Asklêpius: Galen, too, is doubtful about Asklêpius and

Dionysus—Ἀσκληπιός γέ τοι καὶ Διόνυσος, εἶτ᾽ ἄνθρωποι πρότερον

ἤστην, εἴτε καὶ ἀρχῆθεν θεοί (Galen in Protreptic. 9. tom. i. p.

22, ed. Kühn). Xenophôn (De Venat. c. i.) considers Cheirôn as

the brother of Zeus.

The ridicule of Lucian (Deorum Concilium, t. iii. p 527-538,

Hems.) brings out still more forcibly the confusion here

indicated.

[1003] Ovid, Fasti, vi. 6-20:—

“Fas mihi præcipue vultus vidisse Deorum,

Vel quia sum vates, vel quia sacra cano ...

... Ecce Deas vidi....

Horrueram, tacitoque animum pallore fatebar:

Cum Dea, quos fecit, sustulit ipsa metus.

Namque ait—O vates, Romani conditor anni,

Ause per exiguos magna referre modos;

Jus tibi fecisti numen cœleste videndi,

Cum placuit numeris condere festa tuis.”

To resume, in brief, what has been laid down in this and the preceding

chapters respecting the Grecian mythes:—

1. They are a special product of the imagination and feelings,

radically distinct both from history and philosophy: they cannot be

broken down and decomposed into the one, nor allegorized into the

other. There are indeed some particular and even assignable mythes,

which raise intrinsic presumption of an allegorizing tendency; and

there are doubtless some others, though not specially assignable, which

contain portions of matter of fact, or names of real persons, embodied

in them. But such matter of fact cannot be verified by any intrinsic

mark, nor we are entitled to presume its existence in any given case

unless some collateral evidence can be produced.

2. We are not warranted in applying to the mythical world the rules

either of historical credibility or chronological sequence. Its

personages are gods, heroes, and men, in constant juxtaposition and

reciprocal sympathy; men, too, of whom we know a large proportion to

be fictitious, and of whom we can never ascertain how many may have

been real. No series of such personages can serve as materials for

chronological calculation.

3. The mythes were originally produced in an age which had no records,

no philosophy, no criticism, no canon of belief, and scarcely any

tincture either of astronomy or geography—but which, on the other hand,

was full of religious faith, distinguished for quick and susceptible

imagination, seeing personal agents where we look only for objects and

connecting laws;—an age, moreover, eager for new narrative, accepting

with the unconscious impressibility of children (the question of truth

or falsehood being never formally raised) all which ran in harmony

with its pre-existing feelings, and penetrable by inspired prophets

and poets in the same proportion that it was indifferent to positive

evidence. To such hearers did the primitive poet or story-teller

address himself: it was the glory of his productive genius to provide

suitable narrative expression for the faith and emotions which he

shared in common with them, and the rich stock of Grecian mythes

attests how admirably he performed his task. As the gods and the heroes

formed the conspicuous object of national reverence, so the mythes were

partly divine, partly heroic, partly both in one.[1004] The adventures

of Achilles, Helen, and Diomêdês, of Œdipus and Adrastus, of Meleager

and Athæa, of Jasôn and the Argô, were recounted by the same tongues,

and accepted with the same unsuspecting confidence, as those of Apollo

and Artemis, of Arês and Aphroditê, of Poseidôn and Hêraklês.

[1004] The fourth Eclogue of Virgil, under the form of a

prophecy, gives a faithful picture of the heroic and divine past,

to which the legends of Troy and the Argonauts belonged:—

“Ille Deûm vitam accipiet, Divisque videbit

Permixtos heroas,” etc.

“Alter erit tum Tiphys et altera quæ vehat Argo

Delectos heroas: erunt etiam altera bella,

Atque iterum ad Trojam magnus mittetur Achilles.”

4. The time however came, when this plausibility ceased to be complete.

The Grecian mind made an important advance, socially, ethically, and

intellectually. Philosophy and history were constituted, prose writing

and chronological records became familiar; a canon of belief more

or less critical came to be tacitly recognized. Moreover, superior

men profited more largely by the stimulus, and contracted habits of

judging different from the vulgar: the god Elenchus[1005] (to use a

personification of Menander) the giver and prover of truth, descended

into their minds. Into the new intellectual medium, thus altered in its

elements, and no longer uniform in its quality, the mythes descended by

inheritance; but they were found, to a certain extent, out of harmony

even with the feelings of the people, and altogether dissonant with

those of instructed men. But the most superior Greek was still a Greek,

and cherished the common reverential sentiment towards the foretime of

his country. Though he could neither believe nor respect the mythes as

they stood, he was under an imperious mental necessity to transform

them into a state worthy of his belief and respect. Whilst the literal

mythe still continued to float among the poets and the people, critical

men interpreted, altered, decomposed, and added, until they found

something which satisfied their minds as a supposed real basis. They

manufactured some dogmas of supposed original philosophy, and a long

series of fancied history and chronology, retaining the mythical names

and generations even when they were obliged to discard or recast

the mythical events. The interpreted mythe was thus promoted into a

reality, while the literal mythe was degraded into a fiction.[1006]

[1005] Lucian, Pseudol. c. 4. Παρακλητέος ἡμῖν τῶν Μενάνδρου

προλόγων εἷς, ὁ Ἔλεγχος, φίλος ἀληθείᾳ καὶ παῤῥησίᾳ θεὸς, οὐχ

ὁ ἀσημότατος τῶν ἐπὶ τὴν σκήνην ἀναβαινόντων. (See Meineke ad

Menandr. p. 284.)

[1006] The following passage from Dr. Ferguson’s Essay on Civil

Society (part ii. sect. i. p. 126) bears well on the subject

before us:—

“If conjectures and opinions formed at a distance have not a

sufficient authority in the history of mankind, the domestic

antiquities of every nation must for this very reason be received

with caution. They are, for the most part, the mere conjectures

or the fictions of subsequent ages; and even where at first they

contained some resemblance of truth, they still vary with the

imagination of those by whom they were transmitted, and in every

generation receive a different form. They are made to bear the

stamp of the times through which they have passed in the form of

tradition, not of the ages to which their pretended descriptions

relate.... When traditionary fables are rehearsed by the vulgar,

they bear the marks of a national character, and though mixed

with absurdities, often raise the imagination and move the heart:

when made the materials of poetry, and adorned by the skill and

the eloquence of an ardent and superior mind, they instruct the

understanding as well as engage the passions. It is only in the

management of mere antiquaries, or stript of the ornaments which

the laws of history forbid them to wear, that _they become unfit

even to amuse the fancy or to serve any purpose whatever_.

“It were absurd to quote the fable of the Iliad or the Odyssey,

the legend of Hercules, Theseus, and Œdipus, as authorities

in matters of fact relating to the history of mankind; but

they may, with great justice, be cited to ascertain what were

the conceptions and sentiments of the age in which they were

composed, or to characterize the genius of that people with whose

imaginations they were blended, and by whom they were fondly

rehearsed and admired. In this manner, fiction may be admitted

to vouch for the genius of nations, while history has nothing to

offer worthy of credit.”

To the same purpose, M. Paulin Paris (in his Lettre à M. H. de

Monmerqué, prefixed to the Roman de Berte aux Grans Piés, Paris,

1836), respecting the “romans” of the Middle Ages: “Pour bien

connaître l’histoire du moyen âge, non pas celle des faits, mais

celle des mœurs qui rendent les faits vraisemblables, il faut

l’avoir étudiée dans les romans, et voilà pourquoi l’Histoire de

France n’est pas encore faite.” (p. xxi.)

The habit of distinguishing the interpreted from the literal mythe

has passed from the literary men of antiquity to those of the modern

world, who have for the most part construed the divine mythes as

allegorized philosophy, and the heroic mythes as exaggerated, adorned,

and over-colored history. The early ages of Greece have thus been

peopled with quasi-historical persons and quasi-historical events,

all extracted from the mythes after making certain allowances for

poetical ornament. But we must not treat this extracted product as

if it were the original substance; we cannot properly understand it

except by viewing it in connection with the literal mythes out of

which it was obtained, in their primitive age and appropriate medium,

before the superior minds had yet outgrown the common faith in an

all-personified Nature, and learned to restrict the divine free-agency

by the supposition of invariable physical laws. It is in this point

of view that the mythes are important for any one who would correctly

appreciate the general tone of Grecian thought and feeling; for they

were the universal mental stock of the Hellenic world—common to men and

women, rich and poor, instructed and ignorant; they were in every one’s

memory and in every one’s mouth,[1007] while science and history were

confined to comparatively few. We know from Thucydidês how erroneously

and carelessly the Athenian public of his day retained the history

of Peisistratus, only one century past;[1008] but the adventures of

the gods and heroes, the numberless explanatory legends attached to

visible objects and periodical ceremonies, were the theme of general

talk, and any man unacquainted with them would have found himself

partially excluded from the sympathy of his neighbors. The theatrical

representations, exhibited to the entire city population, and listened

to with enthusiastic interest, both presupposed and perpetuated

acquaintance with the great lines of heroic fable: indeed, in later

times even the pantomimic dancers embraced in their representations

the whole field of mythical incident, and their immense success proves

at once how popular and how well known such subjects were. The names

and attributes of the heroes were incessantly alluded to in the way

of illustration, to point out a consoling, admonitory, or repressive

moral: the simple mention of any of them sufficed to call up in every

one’s mind the principal events of his life, and the poet or rhapsode

could thus calculate on touching chords not less familiar than

susceptible.[1009]

[1007] A curious evidence of the undiminished popularity of

the Grecian mythes to the exclusion even of recent history, is

preserved by Vopiscus at the beginning of his Life of Aurelian.

The præfect of the city of Rome, Junius Tiberianus, took Vopiscus

into his carriage on the festival-day of the Hilaria; he was

connected by the ties of relationship with Aurelian, who had

died about a generation before—and as the carriage passed by the

splendid Temple of the Sun, which Aurelian had consecrated, he

asked Vopiscus, what author had written the life of that emperor?

To which Vopiscus replied, that he had read some Greek works

which touched upon Aurelian, but nothing in Latin. Whereat the

venerable præfect was profoundly grieved: “Dolorem gemitûs sui

vir sanctus per hæc verba profudit: Ergo _Thersitem, Sinonem,

cæteraque illa prodigia vetustatis, et nos bene scimus, et

posteri frequentabunt_: divum Aurelianum, clarissimum principem,

severissimum Imperatorem, per quem totus Romano nomini orbis est

restitutus, posteri nescient? Deus avertat hanc amentiam! Et

tamen, si bene memini, ephemeridas illius viri scriptas habemus,”

etc. (Historiæ August. Scriptt. p. 209, ed. Salmas.)

This impressive remonstrance produced the Life of Aurelian by

Vopiscus. The materials seem to have been ample and authentic; it

is to be regretted that they did not fall into the hands of an

author qualified to turn them to better account.

[1008] Thucyd. vi. 56.

[1009] Pausan. i. 3, 3. Λέγεται μὲν δὴ καὶ ἄλλα οὐκ ἀληθῆ παρὰ

τοῖς πολλοῖς, οἷα ἱστορίας ἀνηκόοις οὖσι, καὶ ὅποσα ἤκουον εὐθὺς

ἐκ παιδῶν ἔν τε χόροις καὶ τραγῳδίαις πιστὰ ἡγουμένοις, etc.

The treatise of Lucian, De Saltatione, is a curious proof how

much these mythes were in every one’s memory, and how large the

range of knowledge of them was which a good dancer possessed (see

particularly c. 76-79. t. ii. p. 308-310, Hemst).

Antiphanês ap. Athenæ. vi. p. 223:—

Μακάριόν ἐστιν ἡ τραγῳδία

ποίημα κατὰ πάντ᾽, εἴ γε πρῶτον οἱ λόγοι

ὑπὸ τῶν θεατῶν εἰσιν ἐγνωρίσμενοι

πρὶν καί τιν᾽ εἰπεῖν· ὡς ὑπομνῆσαι μόνον

δεῖ τὸν ποιητήν. Οἰδίπουν γὰρ ἂν γε φῶ,

τὰ δ᾽ ἄλλα πάντ᾽ ἴσασιν· ὁ πατὴρ Λάϊος,

μήτηρ Ἰοκάστη, θυγατέρες, παῖδες τίνες·

τί πείσεθ᾽ οὗτος, τί πεποίηκεν. Ἂν πάλιν

εἴπῃ τις Ἀλκμαίωνα, καὶ τὰ παιδία

πάντ᾽ εὐθὺς εἴρηχ᾽, ὅτι μανεὶς ἀπέκτονε

τὴν μήτερ᾽· ἀγανακτῶν δ᾽ Ἄδραστος εὐθέως

ἥξει, πάλιν δ᾽ ἄπεισιν, etc.

The first pages of the eleventh Oration of Dio Chrysostom contain

some striking passages both as to the universal acquaintance

with the mythes, and as to their extreme popularity (Or. xi. p.

307-312, Reisk). See also the commencement of Heraklidês, De

Allegoriâ Homericâ (ap. Scriptt. Myth. ed. Gale, p. 408), about

the familiarity with Homer.

The Lydê of the poet Antimachus was composed for his own

consolation under sorrow, by enumerating the ἡρωϊκὰς συμφοράς

(Plutarch, Consolat. ad Apollôn. c. 9. p. 106: compare Æschines

cont. Ktesiph. c. 48): a sepulchral inscription in Thêra, on the

untimely death of Admêtus, a youth of the heroic gens Ægidae,

makes a touching allusion to his ancestors Pêleus and Pherês

(Boeckh, C. I. t. ii. p. 1087).

A curious passage of Aristotle is preserved by Dêmêtrius

Phalereus (Περὶ Ἑρμηνείας, c. 144),—Ὅσῳ γὰρ αὐτίτης καὶ

μονώτης εἰμὶ, φιλομυθότερος γέγονα (compare the passage in the

Nikomachean Ethics, i. 9, μονώτης καὶ ἄτεκνος). Stahr refers this

to a letter of Aristotle written in his old age, the mythes being

the consolation of his solitude (Aristotelia, i. p. 201).

For the employment of the mythical names and incidents as

topics of pleasing and familiar comparison, see Menander, Περὶ

Ἐπιδεικτῖκ. § iv. capp. 9 and 11, ap. Walz. Coll. Rhett. t. ix.

pp. 283-294. The degree in which they passed into the ordinary

songs of women is illustrated by a touching epigram contained

among the Chian Inscriptions published in Boeckh’s Collection

(No. 2236):—

Βιττὼ καὶ Φαινὶς, φίλη ἡμέρη (?), αἱ συνέριθοι,

Αἱ πενιχραὶ, γραῖαι, τῆδ᾽ ἐκλίθημεν ὁμοῦ.

Ἀμφότεραι Κώαι, πρῶται γένος—ὦ γλυκὺς ὄρθρος,

Πρὸς λύχνον ᾧ μύθους ᾔδομεν ἡμιθέων.

These two poor women were not afraid to boast of their family

descent. They probably belonged to some noble gens which traced

its origin to a god or a hero. About the songs of women, see also

Agathias, i. 7. p. 29, ed. Bonn.

In the family of the wealthy Athenian Dêmocratês was a legend,

that his primitive ancestor (son of Zeus by the daughter of

the Archêgetês of the dême Aixôneis, to which he belonged) had

received Hêraklês at his table: this legend was so rife that the

old women sung it,—ἅπερ αἱ γραῖαι ᾄδουσι (Plato, Lysis, p. 205).

Compare also a legend of the dême Ἀναγυροῦς, mentioned in Suidas

_ad voc._

“Who is this virgin?” asks Orestês from Pyladês in the Iphigeneia

in Tauris of Euripidês (662), respecting his sister Iphigeneia,

whom he does not know as priestess of Artemis in a foreign land:—

Τίς ἐστιν ἡ νεᾶνις; ὡς ~Ἑλληνικῶς~

Ἀνήρεθ᾽ ἡμᾶς τούς τ᾽ ἐν Ἰλίῳ πόνους

Νόστον τ᾽ Ἀχαιῶν τόν τ᾽ ἐν οἰωνοῖς σοφὸν

Κάλχαντ᾽, Ἀχιλλέως τ᾽ οὔνομ᾽, etc.

... ἐστὶν ἡ ξένη γένος

Ἐκεῖθεν. Ἀργεία τις, etc.

A similar effect was produced by the multiplied religious festivals

and processions, as well as by the oracles and prophecies which

circulated in every city. The annual departure of the Theôric ship

from Athens to the sacred island of Dêlos, kept alive, in the minds

of Athenians generally, the legend of Thêseus and his adventurous

enterprise in Krete;[1010] and in like manner most of the other

public rites and ceremonies were of a commemorative character,

deduced from some mythical person or incident familiarly known to

natives, and forming to strangers a portion of the curiosities of

the place.[1011] During the period of Grecian subjection under the

Romans, these curiosities, together with their works of art and

their legends, were especially clung to as a set-off against present

degradation. The Thêban citizen who found himself restrained from the

liberty enjoyed by all other Greeks, of consulting Amphiaräus as a

prophet, though the sanctuary and chapel of the hero stood in his own

city—could not be satisfied without a knowledge of the story which

explained the origin of such prohibition,[1012] and which conducted

him back to the originally hostile relations between Amphiaräus and

Thêbes. Nor can we suppose among the citizens of Sikyôn anything less

than a perfect and reverential conception of the legend of Thêbes,

when we read the account given by Herodotus of the conduct of the

despot Kleisthenês in regard to Adrastus and Melanippus.[1013] The

Trœzenian youths and maidens,[1014] who universally, when on the eve

of marriage, consecrated an offering of their hair at the Herôon of

Hippolytus, maintained a lively recollection of the legend of that

unhappy recusant whom Aphroditê had so cruelly punished. Abundant

relics preserved in many Grecian cities and temples, served both as

mementos and attestations of other legendary events; and the tombs

of the heroes counted among the most powerful stimulants of mythical

reminiscence. The sceptre of Pelops and Agamemnôn, still preserved in

the days of Pausanias at Chæroneia in Bœôtia, was the work of the god

Hêphæstos. While many other alleged productions of the same divine hand

were preserved in different cities of Greece, this is the only one

which Pausanias himself believed to be genuine: it had been carried

by Elektra, daughter of Agamemnôn to Phôkis, and received divine

honors from the citizens of Chæroneia.[1015] The spears of Mêrionês

and Odysseus were treasured up at Engyium in Sicily, that of Achilles

at Phasêlis; the sword of Memnôn adorned the temple of Asklêpius at

Nicomêdia; and Pausanias, with unsuspecting confidence, adduces the two

latter as proofs that the arms of the heroes were made of brass.[1016]

The hide of the Kalydônian boar was guarded and shown by the Tegeates

as a precious possession; the shield of Euphorbus was in like manner

suspended in the temple of Branchidæ near Milêtus, as well as in the

temple of Hêrê in Argos. Visible relics of Epeius and Philoktêtês

were not wanting, while Strabo raises his voice with indignation

against the numerous Palladia which were shown in different cities,

each pretending to be the genuine image from Troy.[1017] It would be

impossible to specify the number of chapels, sanctuaries, solemnities,

foundations of one sort or another, said to have been first commenced

by heroic or mythical personages,—by Hêraklês, Jasôn, Mêdea, Alkmæôn,

Diomêdês, Odysseus, Danaus, and his daughters,[1018] etc. Perhaps in

some of these cases particular critics might raise objections, but the

great bulk of the people entertained a firm and undoubted belief in the

current legend.

[1010] Plato, Phædo, c. 2.

[1011] The Philopseudes of Lucian (t. iii. p. 31, Hemst. cap.

2, 3, 4) shows not only the pride which the general public of

Athens and Thêbes took in their old mythes (Triptolemus, Boreas,

and Oreithyia, the Sparti, etc.), but the way in which they

treated every man who called the stories in question as a fool

or as an atheist. He remarks, that if the guides who showed the

antiquities had been restrained to tell nothing but what was

true, they would have died of hunger; for the visiting strangers

would not care to hear plain truth, even if they could have got

it for nothing (μηδὲ ἀμισθὶ τῶν ξένων ἀληθὲς ἀκούειν ἐθελησάντων).

[1012] Herodot. viii. 134.

[1013] Herodot. v. 67.

[1014] Euripid. Hippolyt. 1424; Pausan. ii. 32, 1; Lucian, De Deâ

Syriâ, c. 60. vol. iv. p. 287, Tauch.

It is curious to see in the account of Pausanias how all the

petty peculiarities of the objects around became connected with

explanatory details growing out of this affecting legend. Compare

Pausan. i. 22, 2.

[1015] Pausan. ix. 40, 6.

[1016] Plutarch, Marcell. c. 20; Pausan. iii. 3, 6.

[1017] Pausan. viii. 46, 1; Diogen. Laër. viii. 5; Strabo, vi. p.

263; Appian, Bell. Mithridat. c. 77; Æschyl. Eumen. 380.

Wachsmuth has collected the numerous citations out of Pausanias

on this subject (Hellenische Alterthumskunde, part ii. sect. 115.

p. 111).

[1018] Herodot. ii. 182; Plutarch, Pyrrh. c. 32; Schol. Apoll.

Rhod iv. 1217; Diodôr. iv. 56.

If we analyze the intellectual acquisitions of a common Grecian

townsman, from the rude communities of Arcadia or Phôkis even up to the

enlightened Athens, we shall find that, over and above the rules of

art or capacities requisite for his daily wants, it consisted chiefly

of the various mythes connected with his gens, his city, his religious

festivals, and the mysteries in which he might have chosen to initiate

himself, as well as with the works of art and the more striking

natural objects which he might see around him,—the whole set off and

decorated by some knowledge of the epic and dramatic poets. Such was

the intellectual and imaginative reach of an ordinary Greek, considered

apart from the instructed few: it was an aggregate of religion, of

social and patriotic retrospect, and of romantic fancy, blended into

one indivisible faith. And thus the subjective value of the mythes,

looking at them purely as elements of Grecian thought and feeling, will

appear indisputably great, however little there may be of objective

reality, either historical or philosophical, discoverable under them.

Nor must we omit the incalculable importance of the mythes as

stimulants to the imagination of the Grecian artist in sculpture, in

painting, in carving, and in architecture. From the divine and heroic

legends and personages were borrowed those paintings, statues, and

reliefs, which rendered the temples, porticos, and public buildings,

at Athens and elsewhere, objects of surpassing admiration; and such

visible reproduction contributed again to fix the types of the gods and

heroes familiarly and indelibly on the public mind.[1019] The figures

delineated on cups and vases, as well as on the walls of private

houses, were chiefly drawn from the same source—the mythes being the

great storehouse of artistic scenes and composition.

[1019] Ἡμιθέων ἀρεταῖς, the subjects of the works of Polygnotus

at Athens (Melanthius ap. Plutarch. Cimôn. c. 4): compare

Theocrit. xv. 138.

To enlarge on the characteristic excellence of Grecian art would here

be out of place: I regard it only in so far as, having originally drawn

its materials from the mythes, it reacted upon the mythical faith and

imagination—the reaction imparting strength to the former as well

as distinctness to the latter. To one who saw constantly before him

representations of the battles of the Centaurs or the Amazons,[1020]

of the exploits performed by Perseus and Bellerophôn, of the incidents

composing the Trojan war or the Kalydônian boar-hunt—the process of

belief, even in the more fantastic of these conceptions, became easy

in proportion as the conception was familiarized. And if any person

had been slow to believe in the efficacy of the prayers of Æakus,

whereby that devout hero once obtained special relief from Zeus, at a

moment when Greece was perishing with long-continued sterility, his

doubts would probably vanish when, on visiting the Æakeion at Ægina,

there were exhibited to him the statues of the very envoys who had

come on the behalf of the distressed Greeks to solicit that Æakus

would pray for them.[1021] A Grecian temple[1022] was not simply a

place of worship, but the actual dwelling-place of a god, who was

believed to be introduced by the solemn dedicatory ceremony, and whom

the imagination of the people identified in the most intimate manner

with his statue. The presence or removal of the statue was conceived

as identical with that of the being represented,—and while the statue

was solemnly washed, dressed, and tended with all the respectful

solicitude which would have been bestowed upon a real person,[1023]

miraculous tales were often rife respecting the manifestation of real

internal feeling in the wood and the marble. At perilous or critical

moments, the statue was affirmed to have sweated, to have wept, to have

closed its eyes, or brandished the spear in its hands, in token of

sympathy or indignation.[1024] Such legends, springing up usually in

times of suffering and danger, and finding few men bold enough openly

to contradict them, ran in complete harmony with the general mythical

faith, and tended to strengthen it in all its various ramifications.

The renewed activity of the god or hero both brought to mind and

accredited the preëxisting mythes connected with his name. When Boreas,

during the invasion of Greece by Xerxês, and in compliance with the

fervent prayers of the Athenians, had sent forth a providential storm,

to the irreparable damage of the Persian armada,[1025] the sceptical

minority (alluded to by Plato), who doubted the mythe of Boreas and

Oreithyia, and his close connection thus acquired with Erechtheus,

and the Erechtheids generally, must for the time have been reduced to

absolute silence.

[1020] The Centauromachia and the Amazonomachia are constantly

associated together in the ancient Grecian reliefs (see

the Expedition Scientifique de Morée, t. ii. p. 16, in the

explanation of the temple of Apollo Epikureius at Phigaleia).

[1021] Pausan. ii. 29, 6.

[1022] Ernst Curtius, Die Akropolis von Athen, Berlin, 1844, p.

18. Arnobius adv. Gentes, vi. p. 203, ed. Elmenhorst.

[1023] See the case of the Æginêtans lending the Æakids for a

time to the Thebans (Herodot. v. 80), who soon, however, returned

them: likewise sending the Æakids to the battle of Salamis (viii.

64-80). The Spartans, when they decreed that only one of their

two kings should be out on military service, decreed at the same

time that only one of the Tyndarids should go out with them

(v. 75): they once lent the Tyndarids as aids to the envoys of

Epizephyrian Locri, who prepared for them a couch on board their

ship (Diodôr. Excerpt. xvi. p. 15, Dindorf). The Thebans grant

their hero Melanippus to Kleisthenês of Sikyôn (v. 68). What was

sent, must probably have been a consecrated copy of the genuine

statue.

Respecting the solemnities practised towards the statues, see

Plutarch, Alkibiad. 34; Kallimach. Hymn. ad Lavacr. Palladis,

init. with the note of Spanheim; K. O. Müller, Archæologie der

Kunst, § 69; compare Plutarch, Quæstion. Romaic. § 61. p. 279;

and Tacit. Mor. Germ. c. 40; Diodôr. xvii. 49.

The manner in which the real presence of a hero was identified

with his statue (τὸν δίκαιον δεῖ θεὸν οἴκοι μένειν σώζοντα

ροὺς ἱδρυμένους.—Menander, Fragm. Ἡνίοχος, p. 71, Meineke),

consecrated ground, and oracle, is nowhere more powerfully

attested than in the Heroïca of Philostratus (capp. 2-20.

pp. 674-692; also De Vit Apollôn. Tyan. iv. 11), respecting

Prôtesilaus at Elæus, Ajax at the Aianteium, and Hectôr at

Ilium: Prôtesilaus appeared exactly in the equipment of his

statue,—χλαμύδα ἐνῆπται, ξένε, τὸν Θετταλικὸν τρόπον, ὥσπερ καὶ

τὸ ἄγαλμα τοῦτο (p. 674). The presence and sympathy of the hero

Lykus is essential to the satisfaction of the Athenian dikasts

(Aristophan. Vesp. 389-820): the fragment of Lucilius, quoted by

Lactantius, De Falsâ Religione (i. 22), is curious.—Τοῖς ἥρωσι

τοῖς κατὰ τὴν πόλιν καὶ τὴν χώραν ~ἱδρυμένοις~ (Lycurgus cont.

Leocrat. c. 1).

[1024] Plutarch, Timoleon, c. 12; Strabo, vi. p. 264.

Theophrastus treats the perspiration as a natural phænomenon in

the statues made of cedar-wood (Histor. Plant. v. 10). Plutarch

discusses the credibility of this sort of miracles in his Life of

Coriolanus, c. 37-38.

[1025] Herodot. vii. 189. Compare the gratitude of the

Megalopolitans to Boreas for having preserved them from the

attack of the Lacedæmonian king Agis (Pausan. viii. 27, 4.—viii.

36, 4). When the Ten Thousand Greeks were on their retreat

through the cold mountains of Armenia, Boreas blew in their

faces, “parching and freezing intolerably.” One of the prophets

recommended that a sacrifice should be offered to him, which was

done, “and the painful effect of the wind appeared to every one

forthwith to cease in a marked manner;” (καὶ πᾶσι δὴ περιφανῶς

ἔδοξε λῆξαι τὸ χαλεπὸν τοῦ πνεύματος.—Xenoph. Anab. iv. 5, 3.)

CHAPTER XVII.

THE GRECIAN MYTHICAL VEIN COMPARED WITH THAT OF MODERN EUROPE.

I have already remarked that the existence of that popular narrative

talk, which the Germans express by the significant word _Sage_

or _Volks-Sage_, in a greater or less degree of perfection or

development, is a phænomenon common to almost all stages of society

and to almost all quarters of the globe. It is the natural effusion

of the unlettered, imaginative, and believing man, and its maximum

of influence belongs to an early state of the human mind; for the

multiplication of recorded facts, the diffusion of positive science,

and the formation of a critical standard of belief, tend to discredit

its dignity and to repress its easy and abundant flow. It supplies to

the poet both materials to recombine and adorn, and a basis as well

as a stimulus for further inventions of his own; and this at a time

when the poet is religious teacher, historian, and philosopher, all in

one,—not, as he becomes at a more advanced period, the mere purveyor of

avowed, though interesting, fiction.

Such popular stories, and such historical songs (meaning by historical,

simply that which is accepted as history) are found in most quarters

of the globe, and especially among the Teutonic and Celtic populations

of early Europe. The old Gothic songs were cast into a continuous

history by the historian Ablavius;[1026] and the poems of the Germans

respecting Tuisto the earth-born god, his son Mannus, and his

descendants the eponyms of the various German tribes,[1027] as they

are briefly described by Tacitus, remind us of Hesiod, or Eumêlus, or

the Homeric Hymns. Jacob Grimm, in his learned and valuable Deutsche

Mythologie, has exhibited copious evidence of the great fundamental

analogy, along with many special differences, between the German,

Scandinavian, and Grecian mythical world; and the Dissertation of

Mr. Price (prefixed to his edition of Warton’s History of English

Poetry) sustains and illustrates Grimm’s view. The same personifying

imagination—the same ever-present conception of the will, sympathies,

and antipathies of the gods as the producing causes of phænomena,

and as distinguished from a course of nature with its invariable

sequence—the same relations between gods, heroes, and men, with the

like difficulty of discriminating the one from the other in many

individual names—a similar wholesale transfer of human attributes to

the gods, with the absence of human limits and liabilities—a like

belief in Nymphs, Giants, and other beings, neither gods nor men—the

same coalescence of the religious with the patriotic feeling and

faith—these are positive features common to the early Greeks with

the early Germans: and the negative conditions of the two are not

less analogous—the absence of prose writing, positive records, and

scientific culture. The preliminary basis and encouragements for the

mythopœic faculty were thus extremely similar.

[1026] Jornandes, De Reb. Geticis, capp. 4-6.

[1027] Tacit. Mor. German. c. 2. “Celebrant carminibus antiquis,

quod unum apud eos memoriæ et annalium genus est, Tuistonem Deum

terrâ editum, et filium Mannum, originem gentis conditoresque.

Quidam licentiâ vetustatis, plures Deo ortos, pluresque gentis

appellationes, Marsos, Gambrivios, Suevos, Vandaliosque

affirmant: eaque vera et antiqua nomina.”

But though the prolific forces were the same in kind, the results were

very different in degree, and the developing circumstances were more

different still.

First, the abundance, the beauty, and the long continuance of early

Grecian poetry, in the purely poetical age, is a phænomenon which has

no parallel elsewhere.

Secondly, the transition of the Greek mind from its poetical to its

comparatively positive state was self-operated, accomplished by its

own inherent and expansive force—aided indeed, but by no means either

impressed or provoked, from without. From the poetry of Homer, to

the history of Thucydidês and the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle,

was a prodigious step, but it was the native growth of the Hellenic

youth into an Hellenic man; and what is of still greater moment, it

was brought about without breaking the thread either of religious

or patriotic tradition—without any coercive innovation or violent

change in the mental feelings. The legendary world, though the ethical

judgments and rational criticisms of superior men had outgrown

it, still retained its hold upon their feelings as an object of

affectionate and reverential retrospect.

Far different from this was the development of the early Germans. We

know little about their early poetry, but we shall run no risk of

error in affirming that they had nothing to compare with either Iliad

or Odyssey. Whether, if left to themselves, they would have possessed

sufficient progressive power to make a step similar to that of the

Greeks, is a question which we cannot answer. Their condition, mental

as well as political, was violently changed by a foreign action from

without. The influence of the Roman empire introduced artificially

among them new institutions, new opinions, habits, and luxuries, and,

above all, a new religion; the Romanized Germans becoming themselves

successively the instruments of this revolution with regard to such of

their brethren as still remained heathen. It was a revolution often

brought about by penal and coercive means: the old gods Thor and Woden

were formally deposed and renounced, their images were crumbled into

dust, and the sacred oaks of worship and prophecy hewn down. But even

where conversion was the fruit of preaching and persuasion, it did not

the less break up all the associations of a German with respect to

that mythical world which he called his past, and of which the ancient

gods constituted both the charm and the sanctity: he had now only the

alternative of treating them either as men or as dæmons.[1028] That

mixed religious and patriotic retrospect, formed by the coalescence

of piety with ancestral feeling, which constituted the appropriate

sentiment both of Greeks and of Germans towards their unrecorded

antiquity, was among the latter banished by Christianity: and while

the root of the old mythes was thus cankered, the commemorative

ceremonies and customs with which they were connected, either lost

their consecrated character or disappeared altogether. Moreover, new

influences of great importance were at the same time brought to bear.

The Latin language, together with some tinge of Latin literature—the

habit of writing and of recording present events—the idea of a

systematic law and pacific adjudication of disputes,—all these formed

a part of the general working of Roman civilization, even after the

decline of the Roman empire, upon the Teutonic and Celtic tribes. A

class of specially-educated men was formed, upon a Latin basis and upon

Christian principles, consisting too almost entirely of priests, who

were opposed, as well by motives of rivalry as by religious feeling,

to the ancient bards and storytellers of the community: the “lettered

men”[1029] were constituted apart from “the men of story,” and Latin

literature contributed along with religion to sink the mythes of

untaught heathenism. Charlemagne, indeed, at the same time that he

employed aggressive and violent proceedings to introduce Christianity

among the Saxons, also took special care to commit to writing and

preserve the old heathen songs. But there can be little doubt that

this step was the suggestion of a large and enlightened understanding

peculiar to himself. The disposition general among lettered Christians

of that age is more accurately represented by his son Louis le

Debonnaire, who, having learned these songs as a boy, came to abhor

them when he arrived at mature years, and could never be induced either

to repeat or tolerate them.[1030]

[1028] On the hostile influence exercised by the change of

religion on the old Scandinavian poetry, see an interesting

article of Jacob Grimm in the Göttingen Gelehrte Anzeigen, Feb.

1830, pp. 268-273; a review of Olaf Tryggvson’s Saga. The article

_Helden_, in his Deutsche Mythologie, is also full of instruction

on the same subject: see also the Einleitung to the book, p. 11,

2nd edition.

A similar observation has been made with respect to the old

mythes of the pagan Russians by Eichhoff: “L’établissement du

Christianisme, ce gage du bonheur des nations, fut vivement

apprécié par les Russes, qui dans leur juste reconnaissance, le

personnifièrent dans un héros. Vladimir le Grand, ami des arts,

protecteur de la religion qu’il protégea, et dont les fruits

firent oublier les fautes, devint l’Arthus et le Charlemagne de

la Russie, et ses hauts faits furent un mythe national qui domina

tous ceux du paganisme. Autour de lui se groupèrent ces guerriers

aux formes athlétiques, au cœur généreux, dont la poésie aime à

entourer le berceau mystérieux des peuples: et les exploits du

vaillant Dobrinia, de Rogdai, d’Ilia, de Curilo, animèrent les

ballades nationales, et vivent encore dans de naïfs récits.”

(Eichhoff, Histoire de la Langue et Littérature des Slaves,

Paris, 1839, part iii. ch. 2. p. 190.)

[1029] This distinction is curiously brought to view by Saxo

Grammaticus, where he says of an Englishman named Lucas, that

he was “literis quidem tenuiter instructus, sed historiarum

scientiâ apprime eruditus” (p. 330, apud Dahlmann’s Historische

Forschungen, vol. i. p. 176).

[1030] “Barbara et antiquissima carmina (says Eginhart, in

his Life of Charlemagne), quibus veterum regum actus et bella

canebantur, conscripsit.”

Theganus says of Louis le Debonnaire, “Poetica carmina gentilia,

quæ in juventute didicerat, respuit, nec legere, nec audire, nec

docere, voluit.” (De Gestis Ludovici Imperatoris ap. Pithœum, p.

304, c. xix.)

According to the old heathen faith, the pedigree of the Saxon, Anglian,

Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish kings,—probably also those of the German

and Scandinavian kings generally,—was traced to Odin, or to some of

his immediate companions or heroic sons.[1031] I have already observed

that the value of these genealogies consisted not so much in their

length, as in the reverence attached to the name serving as primitive

source. After the worship attached to Odin had been extinguished, the

genealogical line was lengthened up to Japhet or Noah,—and Odin, no

longer accounted worthy to stand at the top, was degraded into one of

the simple human members of it.[1032] And we find this alteration of

the original mythical genealogies to have taken place even among the

Scandinavians, although the introduction of Christianity was in those

parts both longer deferred, so as to leave time for a more ample

development of the heathen poetical vein—and seems to have created a

less decided feeling of antipathy (especially in Iceland) towards the

extinct faith.[1033] The poems and tales composing the Edda, though

first committed to writing after the period of Christianity, do not

present the ancient gods in a point of view intentionally odious or

degrading.

[1031] See Grimm’s Deutsche Mythologie, art. _Helden_, p. 356,

2nd edit. Hengist and Horsa were fourth in descent from Odin

(Venerable Bede, Hist. i. 15). Thiodolff, the Scald of Harold

Haarfager king of Norway, traced the pedigree of his sovereign

through thirty generations to Yngarfrey, the son of Niord,

companion of Odin at Upsal; the kings of Upsal were called

Ynglinger, and the song of Thiodolff, Ynglingatal (Dahlmann,

Histor. Forschung. i. p. 379). Eyvind, another Scald, a century

afterwards, deduced the pedigree of Jarl Hacon from Saming,

son of Yngwifrey (p. 381). Are Frode, the Icelandic historian,

carried up his own genealogy through thirty-six generations to

Yngwe; a genealogy which Torfæus accepts as trustworthy, opposing

it to the line of kings given by Saxo Grammaticus (p. 352).

Torfæus makes Harold Haarfager a descendant from Odin through

twenty-seven generations; Alfred of England through twenty-three

generations; Offa of Mercia through fifteen (p. 362). See also

the translation by Lange of P. A. Müller’s Saga Bibliothek,

Introd. p. xxviii. and the genealogical tables prefixed to Snorro

Sturleson’s Edda.

Mr. Sharon Turner conceives the human existence of Odin to

be distinctly proved, seemingly upon the same evidence as

Euêmerus believed in the human existence of Zeus (History of the

Anglo-Saxons, Appendix to b. ii. ch. 3. p. 219, 5th edit.).

[1032] Dahlmann, Histor. Forschung. t. i. p. 220. There is

a valuable article on this subject in the Zeitschrift für

Geschichts Wissenschaft (Berlin, vol. i. pp. 237-282) by Stuhr,

“Über einige Hauptfragen des Nordischen Alterthums,” wherein

the writer illustrates both the strong motive and the effective

tendency, on the part of the Christian clergy who had to deal

with these newly-converted Teutonic pagans, to Euêmerize the old

gods, and to represent a genealogy, which they were unable to

efface from men’s minds, as if it consisted only of mere men.

Mr. John Kemble (Über die Stammtafel der Westsachsen, ap. Stuhr,

p. 254) remarks, that “nobilitas,” among that people, consisted

in descent from Odin and the other gods.

Colonel Sleeman also deals in the same manner with the religious

legends of the Hindoos,—so natural is the proceeding of Euêmerus,

towards any religion in which a critic does not believe:—

“They (the Hindoos) of course think that the incarnation of

their three great divinities were beings infinitely superior to

prophets, being in all their attributes and prerogatives equal

to the divinities themselves. _But we are disposed to think that

these incarnations were nothing more than great men whom their

flatterers and poets have exalted into gods,—this was the way

in which men made their gods in ancient Greece and Egypt._—All

that the poets have sung of the actions of these men is now

received as revelation from heaven: though nothing can be more

monstrous than the actions ascribed to the best incarnation,

Krishna, of the best of the gods, Vishnoo.” (Sleeman, Rambles and

Recollections of an Indian Official, vol. i. ch. viii. 61.)

[1033] See P. E. Müller, Über den Ursprung und Verfall der

Isländischen Historiographie, p. 63.

In the Leitfaden zur Nordischen Alterthumskunde, pp. 4-5

(Copenhagen, 1837), is an instructive summary of the different

schemes of interpretation applied to the northern mythes: 1, the

historical; 2, the geographical; 3, the astronomical; 4, the

physical; 5, the allegorical.

The transposition above alluded to, of the genealogical root from Odin

to Noah, is the more worthy of notice, as it illustrates the genuine

character of these genealogies, and shows that they sprung, not from

any erroneous historical data, but from the turn of the religious

feeling; also that their true value is derived from their being taken

entire, as connecting the existing race of men with a divine original.

If we could imagine that Grecian paganism had been superseded by

Christianity in the year 500 B. C., the great and venerated gentile

genealogies of Greece would have undergone the like modification; the

Herakleids, Pelopids, Æakids, Asklêpiads, etc., would have been merged

in some larger aggregate branching out from the archæology of the Old

Testament. The old heroic legends connected with these ancestral names

would either have been forgotten, or so transformed as to suit the new

vein of thought; for the altered worship, ceremonies, and customs would

have been altogether at variance with them, and the mythical feeling

would have ceased to dwell upon those to whom prayers were no longer

offered. If the oak of Dôdôna had been cut down, or the Theôric ship

had ceased to be sent from Athens to Dêlos, the mythes of Theseus and

of the two black doves would have lost their pertinence, and died away.

As it was, the change from Homer to Thucydidês and Aristotle took place

internally, gradually, and imperceptibly. Philosophy and history were

superinduced in the minds of the superior few, but the feelings of

the general public continued unshaken—the sacred objects remained the

same both to the eye and to the heart—and the worship of the ancient

gods was even adorned by new architects and sculptors who greatly

strengthened its imposing effect.

While then in Greece the mythopœic stream continued in the same course,

only with abated current and influence, in modern Europe its ancient

bed was blocked up, and it was turned into new and divided channels.

The old religion—though as an ascendent faith, unanimously and publicly

manifested, it became extinct—still continued in detached scraps and

fragments, and under various alterations of name and form. The heathen

gods and goddesses, deprived as they were of divinity, did not pass

out of the recollection and fears of their former worshippers, but

were sometimes represented (on principles like those of Euêmerus) as

having been eminent and glorious men—sometimes degraded into dæmons,

magicians, elfs, fairies, and other supernatural agents, of an inferior

grade and generally mischievous cast. Christian writers, such as Saxo

Grammaticus and Snorro Sturleson, committed to writing the ancient oral

songs of the Scandinavian Scalds, and digested the events contained

in them into continuous narrative—performing in this respect a task

similar to that of the Grecian logographers Pherekydês and Hellanikus,

in reference to Hesiod and the Cyclic poets. But while Pherekydês and

Hellanikus compiled under the influence of feelings substantially

the same as those of the poets on whom they bestowed their care,

the Christian logographers felt it their duty to point out the Odin

and Thor of the old Scalds as evil dæmons, or cunning enchanters,

who had fascinated the minds of men into a false belief in their

divinity.[1034] In some cases, the heathen recitals and ideas were

modified so as to suit Christian feeling. But when preserved without

such a change, they exhibited themselves palpably, and were designated

by their compilers, as at variance with the religious belief of the

people, and as associated either with imposture or with evil spirits.

[1034] “Interea tamen homines Christiani in numina non credant

ethnica, nec aliter fidem narrationibus hisce adstruere vel

adhibere debent, quam in libri hujus proœmio monitum est de

causis et occasionibus cur et quomodo genus humanum a verâ fide

aberraverit.” (Extract from the Prose Edda, p. 75, in the Lexicon

Mythologicum ad calcem Eddæ Sæmund. vol. iii. p. 357, Copenhag.

edit.)

A similar warning is to be found in another passage cited by

P. E. Müller, Über den Ursprung und Verfall der Isländischen

Historiographie, p. 138, Copenhagen, 1813; compare the Prologue

to the Prose Edda, p. 6, and Mallet, Introduction à l’Histoire de

Dannemarc, ch. vii. pp. 114-132.

Saxo Grammaticus represents Odin sometimes as a magician,

sometimes as an evil dæmon, sometimes as a high priest or pontiff

of heathenism, who imposed so powerfully upon the people around

him as to receive divine honors. Thor also is treated as having

been an evil dæmon. (See Lexicon Mythologic. ut supra, pp. 567,

915.)

Respecting the function of Snorro as logographer, see Præfat.

ad Eddam, ut supra, p. xi. He is much more faithful, and less

unfriendly to the old religion, than the other logographers

of the ancient Scandinavian Sagas. (Leitfaden der Nordischen

Alterthümer, p. 14, by the Antiquarian Society of Copenhagen,

1837.)

By a singular transformation, dependent upon the same tone

of mind, the authors of the French Chansons de Geste, in the

twelfth century, turned Apollo into an evil dæmon, patron of the

Mussulmans (see the Roman of Garin le Loherain, par M. Paulin

Paris, 1833, p. 31): “Car mieux vaut Dieux que ne fait Apollis.”

M. Paris observes, “Cet ancien Dieu des beaux arts est l’un des

démons le plus souvent désignés dans nos poëmes, comme patron des

Musulmans.”

The prophet Mahomet, too, anathematized the old Persian epic

anterior to his religion. “C’est à l’occasion de Naser Ibn

al-Hareth, qui avait apporté de Perse l’Histoire de Rustem et

d’Isfendiar, et la faisait réciter par des chanteuses dans

les assemblées des Koreischites, que Mahomet prononça le vers

suivant (of the Koran): Il y a des hommes qui achètent des contes

frivoles, pour détourner par-là les hommes de la voie de Dieu,

d’une manière insensée, et pour la livrer à la risée: mais leur

punition les couvrira de honte.” (Mohl, Préface au Livre des Rois

de Ferdousi, p. xiii.)

A new vein of sentiment had arisen in Europe, unsuitable indeed to

the old mythes, yet leaving still in force the demand for mythical

narrative generally. And this demand was satisfied, speaking generally,

by two classes of narratives,—the legends of the Catholic Saints and

the Romances of Chivalry, corresponding to two types of character, both

perfectly accommodated to the feelings of the time,—the saintly ideal

and the chivalrous ideal.

Both these two classes of narrative correspond, in character as well

as in general purpose, to the Grecian mythes—being stories accepted

as realities, from their full conformity with the predispositions and

deep-seated faith of an uncritical audience, and prepared beforehand by

their authors, not with any reference to the conditions of historical

proof, but for the purpose of calling forth sympathy, emotion, or

reverence. The type of the saintly character belongs to Christianity,

being the history of Jesus Christ as described in the gospels, and

that of the prophets in the Old Testament; whilst the lives of holy

men, who acquired a religious reputation from the fourth to the

fourteenth century of the Christian æra, were invested with attributes,

and illustrated with ample details, tending to assimilate them to

this revered model. The numerous miracles, the cure of diseases, the

expulsion of dæmons, the temptations and sufferings, the teachings

and commands, with which the biography of Catholic saints abounds,

grew chiefly out of this pious feeling, common to the writer and

to his readers. Many of the other incidents, recounted in the same

performances, take their rise from misinterpreted allegories, from

ceremonies and customs of which it was pleasing to find a consecrated

origin, or from the disposition to convert the etymology of a name

into matter of history: many have also been suggested by local

peculiarities, and by the desire of stimulating or justifying the

devotional emotions of pilgrims who visited some consecrated chapel or

image. The dove was connected, in the faith of the age, with the Holy

Ghost, the serpent with Satan; lions, wolves, stags, unicorns, etc.

were the subjects of other emblematic associations; and such modes of

belief found expression for themselves in many narratives which brought

the saints into conflict or conjoint action with these various animals.

Legends of this kind, so indefinitely multiplied and so preëminently

popular and affecting, in the Middle Ages, are not exaggerations of

particular matters of fact, but emanations in detail of some current

faith or feeling, which they served to satisfy, and by which they were

in turn amply sustained and accredited.[1035]

[1035] The legends of the Saints have been touched upon by M.

Guizot (Cours d’Histoire Moderne, leçon xvii.) and by M. Ampère

(Histoire Littéraire de la France, t. ii. cap. 14, 15, 16); but

a far more copious and elaborate account of them, coupled with

much just criticism, is to be found in the valuable Essai sur les

Légendes Pieuses du Moyen Age, par L. F. Alfred Maury, Paris,

1843.

M. Guizot scarcely adverts at all to the more or less of

matter of fact contained in these biographies: he regards them

altogether as they grew out of and answered to the predominant

emotions and mental exigences of the age: “Au milieu d’un déluge

de fables absurdes, la morale éclate avec un grand empire” (p.

159, ed. 1829). “Les légendes ont été pour les Chrétiens de ce

temps (qu’on me permette cette comparaison purement littéraire)

ce que sont pour les Orientaux ces longs récits, ces histoires

si brillantes et si variées, dont les Mille et une Nuits nous

donnent un échantillon. C’était là que l’imagination populaire

errait librement dans un monde inconnu, merveilleux, plein de

mouvement et de poésie” (p. 175, _ibid._).

M. Guizot takes his comparison with the tales of the Arabian

Nights, as heard by an Oriental with uninquiring and unsuspicious

credence. Viewed with reference to an instructed European, who

reads these narratives as pleasing but recognized fiction, the

comparison would not be just; for no one in that age dreamed of

questioning the truth of the biographies. All the remarks of M.

Guizot assume this implicit faith in them as literal histories:

perhaps, in estimating the feelings to which they owed their

extraordinary popularity, he allows too little predominance to

the religious feeling, and too much influence to other mental

exigences which then went along with it; more especially as he

remarks, in the preceding lecture (p. 116), “Le caractère général

de l’époque est la concentration du développement intellectuel

dans la sphère religieuse.”

How this absorbing religious sentiment operated in generating

and accrediting new matter of narrative, is shown with great

fulness of detail in the work of M. Maury: “Tous les écrits

du moyen âge nous apportent la preuve de cette préoccupation

exclusive des esprits vers l’Histoire Sainte et les prodiges qui

avaient signalé l’avènement du Christianisme. Tous nous montrent

la pensée de Dieu et du Ciel, dominant les moindres œuvres de

cette époque de naïve et de crédule simplicité. D’ailleurs,

n’était-ce pas le moine, le clerc, qui constituaient alors les

seuls écrivains? Qu’y a-t-il d’étonnant que le sujet habituel de

leurs méditations, de leurs études, se reflétât sans cesse dans

leurs ouvrages? Partout reparaissait à l’imagination Jésus et ses

Saints: cette image, l’esprit l’accueillait avec soumission et

obéissance: il n’osait pas encore envisager ces célestes pensées

avec l’œil de la critique, armé de défiance et de doute; au

contraire, l’intelligence les acceptait toutes indistinctement

et s’en nourrissait avec avidité. Ainsi s’accréditaient tous

les jours de nouvelles fables. _Une foi vive veut sans cesse de

nouveaux faits qu’elle puisse croire_, comme la charité veut de

nouveaux bienfaits pour s’exercer” (p. 43). The remarks on the

History of St. Christopher, whose personality was allegorized by

Luther and Melancthon, are curious (p. 57).

Every reader of Pausanias will recognize the great general analogy

between the stories recounted to him at the temples which he visited,

and these legends of the Middle Ages. Though the type of character

which the latter illustrate is indeed materially different, yet the

source as well as the circulation, the generating as well as the

sustaining forces, were in both cases the same. Such legends were

the natural growth of a religious faith, earnest, unexamining, and

interwoven with the feelings at a time when the reason does not need

to be cheated. The lives of the Saints bring us even back to the

simple and ever-operative theology of the Homeric age; so constantly

is the hand of God exhibited even in the minutest details, for the

succor of a favored individual,—so completely is the scientific

point of view, respecting the phænomena of nature, absorbed into the

religious.[1036] During the intellectual vigor of Greece and Rome,

a sense of the invariable course of nature and of the scientific

explanation of phænomena had been created among the superior minds, and

through them indirectly among the remaining community; thus limiting

to a certain extent the ground open to be occupied by a religious

legend. With the decline of the pagan literature and philosophy, before

the sixth century of the Christian æra, this scientific conception

gradually passed out of sight, and left the mind free to a religious

interpretation of nature not less simple and _naïf_ than that which

had prevailed under the Homeric paganism.[1037] The great religious

movement of the Reformation, and the gradual formation, of critical

and philosophical habits in the modern mind, have caused these legends

of the Saints,—once the charm and cherished creed of a numerous

public,[1038] to pass altogether out of credit, without even being

regarded, among Protestants at least, as worthy of a formal scrutiny

into the evidence,—a proof of the transitory value of public belief,

however sincere and fervent, as a certificate of historical truth, if

it be blended with religious predispositions.

[1036] “Dans les prodiges que l’on admettait avoir dû

nécessairement s’opérer au tombeau du saint nouvellement

canonisé, l’expression, ‘Cæci visum, claudi gressum, muti

loquelam, surdi auditum, paralytici debitum membrorum officium,

recuperabant,’ était devenue plûtot une formule d’usage que la

rélation littérale du fait.” (Maury, Essai sur les Légendes

Pieuses du Moyen Age, p. 5.)

To the same purpose M. Ampère, ch. 14. p. 361: “Il y a un certain

nombre de faits que l’agiographie reproduit constamment, quelque

soit son héros: ordinairement ce personnage a eu dans sa jeunesse

une vision qui lui a révélé son avenir: ou bien, une prophétie

lui a annoncé ce qu’il serait un jour. Plus tard, il opère un

certain nombre de miracles, toujours les mêmes; il exorcise des

possédés, ressuscite des morts, il est averti de sa fin par un

songe. Puis sur son tombeau s’accomplissent d’autres merveilles

à-peu-près semblables.”

[1037] A few words from M. Ampère to illustrate this: “C’est

donc au sixième siècle que la légende se constitue: c’est alors

qu’elle prend complètement le caractère naïf qui lui appartient:

qu’elle est elle-même, qu’elle se sépare de toute influence

étrangère. En même temps, l’ignorance devient de plus en plus

grossière, et par suite la crédulité s’accroit: les calamités du

temps sont plus lourdes, et l’on a un plus grand besoin de remède

et de consolation.... Les récits miraculeux se substituent aux

argumens de la théologie. Les miracles sont devenus la meilleure

démonstration du Christianisme: c’est la seule que puissent

comprendre les esprits grossiers des barbares” (c. 15. p. 373).

Again, c. 17. p. 401: “Un des caractères de la légende est de

mêler constamment le puéril au grand: il faut l’avouer, elle

défigure parfois un peu ces hommes d’une trempe si forte, en

mettant sur leur compte des anecdotes dont le caractère n’est pas

toujours sérieux; elle en a usé ainsi pour St. Columban, dont

nous verrons tout à l’heure le rôle vis-à-vis de Brunehaut et des

chefs Mérovingiens. La légende auroit pu se dispenser de nous

apprendre, comment un jour, il se fit rapporter par un corbeau

les gants qu’il avait perdus: comment, un autre jour, il empêcha

la bière de couler d’un tonneau percé, et diverses merveilles,

certainement indignes de sa mémoire.”

The miracle by which St. Columban employed the raven to fetch

back his lost gloves, is exactly in the character of the Homeric

and Hesiodic age: the earnest faith, as well as the reverential

sympathy, between the Homeric man and Zeus or Athênê, is

indicated by the invocation of their aid for his own sufferings

of detail, and in his own need and danger. The criticism of

M. Ampère, on the other hand, is analogous to that of the

later pagans, after the conception of a course of nature had

become established in men’s minds, so far as that exceptional

interference by the gods was understood to be, comparatively

speaking, rare, and only supposable upon what were called great

emergences.

In the old Hesiodic legend (see above, ch. ix. p. 245), Apollo

is apprized by a raven of the infidelity of the nymph Korônis

to him—τῷ μὲν ἄρ᾽ ἄγγελος ἦλθε κόραξ, etc. (the raven appears

elsewhere as companion of Apollo, Plutarch, de Isid. et Os.

p. 379, Herod. iv. 5.) Pindar, in his version of the legend,

eliminated the raven, without specifying _how_ Apollo got his

knowledge of the circumstance. The Scholiasts praise Pindar much

for having rejected the puerile version of the story—ἐπαινεῖ

τὸν Πίνδαρον ὁ Ἀρτέμων ὅτι παρακρουσάμενος τὴν περὶ τὸν κόρακα

ἱστορἱαν, αὐτὸν δι᾽ ἑαυτοῦ ἐγνωκέναι φησὶ τὸν Ἀπόλλω ... χαίρειν

οὖν ἐάσας τῷ τοιούτῳ μύθῳ ~τέλεως ὄντι ληρώδει~, etc.—compare

also the criticisms of the Schol. ad Soph. Œdip. Kol. 1378, on

the old epic Thebaïs; and the remarks of Arrian (Exp. Al. iii. 4)

on the divine interference by which Alexander and his army were

enabled to find their way across the sand of the desert to the

temple of Ammon.

In the eyes of M. Ampère, the recital of the biographer of

St. Columban appears puerile (οὔπω ἴδον ὧδε θεοὺς ἀνάφανδρα

φιλεῦντας, Odyss. iii. 221); in the eyes of that biographer,

the criticism of M. Ampère would have appeared impious. When

it is once conceded that phænomena are distributable under two

denominations, the natural and the miraculous, it must be left to

the feelings of each individual to determine what is and what is

not, a suitable occasion for a miracle. Diodôrus and Pausanias

differed in opinion (as stated in a previous chapter) about the

death of Actæôn by his own hounds,—the former maintaining that

the case was one fit for the special intervention of the goddess

Artemis; the latter, that it was not so. The question is one

determinable only by the religious feelings and conscience of the

two dissentients: no common standard of judgment can be imposed

upon them; for no reasonings derived from science or philosophy

are available, inasmuch as in this case the very point in dispute

is, whether the scientific point of view be admissible. Those

who are disposed to adopt the supernatural belief, will find

in every case the language open to them wherewith Dionysius of

Halicarnassus (in recounting a miracle wrought by Vesta, in

the early times of Roman history, for the purpose of rescuing

an unjustly accused virgin) reproves the sceptics of his time:

“It is well worth while (he observes) to recount the special

manifestation (ἐπιφάνειαν) which the goddess showed to these

unjustly accused virgins. For these circumstances, extraordinary

as they are, have been held worthy of belief by the Romans, and

historians have talked much about them. Those persons, indeed,

who adopt the atheistical schemes of philosophy (if, indeed, we

must call them _philosophy_), pulling in pieces as they do _all_

the special manifestations (ἁπάσας διασύροντες τὰς ἐπιφανείας

τῶν θεῶν) of the gods which have taken place among Greeks or

barbarians, will of course turn _these_ stories also into

ridicule, ascribing them to the vain talk of men, as if none of

the gods cared at all for mankind. But those who, having pushed

their researches farther, believe the gods not to be indifferent

to human affairs, but favorable to good men and hostile to

bad—will not treat _these_ special manifestations as _more_

incredible than others.” (Dionys. Halic. ii. 68-69.) Plutarch,

after noticing the great number of miraculous statements in

circulation, expresses his anxiety to draw a line between the

true and the false, but cannot find where: “excess, both of

credulity and of incredulity (he tells us) in such matters is

dangerous; caution, and nothing too much, is the best course.”

(Camillus, c. 6.) Polybius is for granting permission to

historians to recount a sufficient number of miracles to keep up

a feeling of piety in the multitude, but not more: to measure

out the proper quantity (he observes) is difficult, but not

impossible (δυσπαράγραφός ἐστι ἡ ποσότης, οὐ μὴν ἀπαράγραφός γε,

xvi. 12).

[1038] The great Bollandist collection of the Lives of the

Saints, intended to comprise the whole year, did not extend

beyond the nine months from January to October, which occupy

fifty-three large volumes. The month of April fills three of

those volumes, and exhibits the lives of 1472 saints. Had the

collection run over the entire year, the total number of such

biographies could hardly have been less than 25,000, and might

have been even greater (see Guizot, Cours d’Histoire Moderne,

leçon xvii. p. 157).

The same mythopœic vein, and the same susceptibility and facility of

belief, which had created both supply and demand for the legends of the

Saints, also provided the abundant stock of romantic narrative poetry,

in amplification and illustration of the chivalrous ideal. What the

legends of Troy, of Thêbes, of the Kalydônian boar, of Œdipus, Thêseus,

etc. were to an early Greek, the tales of Arthur, of Charlemagne,

of the Niebelungen, were to an Englishman, or Frenchman, or German,

of the twelfth or thirteenth century. They were neither recognized

fiction nor authenticated history: they were history, as it is felt and

welcomed by minds unaccustomed to investigate evidence, and unconscious

of the necessity of doing so. That the Chronicle of Turpin, a mere

compilation of poetical legends respecting Charlemagne, was accepted

as genuine history, and even pronounced to be such by papal authority,

is well known; and the authors of the Romances announce themselves,

not less than those of the old Grecian epic, as being about to recount

real matter of fact.[1039] It is certain that Charlemagne is a great

historical name, and it is possible, though not certain, that the

name of Arthur may be historical also. But the Charlemagne of history,

and the Charlemagne of romance, have little except the name in common

nor could we ever determine, except by independent evidence (which in

this case we happen to possess), whether Charlemagne was a real or a

fictitious person.[1040] That illustrious name, as well as the more

problematical Arthur, is taken up by the romancers, not with a view to

celebrate realities previously verified, but for the purpose of setting

forth or amplifying an ideal of their own, in such manner as both to

rouse the feelings and captivate the faith of their hearers.

[1039] See Warton’s History of English Poetry, vol. i. dissert.

i. p. xvii. Again, in sect. iii. p. 140: “Vincent de Beauvais,

who lived under Louis IX. of France (about 1260), and who, on

account of his extraordinary erudition, was appointed preceptor

to that king’s sons, very gravely classes Archbishop Turpin’s

Charlemagne among the real histories, and places it on a level

with Suetonius and Cæsar. He was himself an historian, and has

left a large history of the world, fraught with a variety of

reading, and of high repute in the Middle Ages; but edifying and

entertaining as this work might have been to his contemporaries,

at present it serves only to record their prejudices and to

characterize their credulity.” About the full belief in Arthur

and the Tales of the Round Table during the fourteenth century,

and about the strange historical mistakes of the poet Gower in

the fifteenth, see the same work, sect. 7. vol. ii. p. 33; sect.

19. vol. ii. p. 239.

“L’auteur de la Chronique de Turpin (says M. Sismondi,

Littérature du Midi, vol. i. ch. 7. p. 289) n’avait point

l’intention de briller aux yeux du public par une invention

heureuse, ni d’amuser les oisifs par des contes merveilleux

qu’ils reconnoitroient pour tels: il présentait aux Français

tous ces faits étranges comme de l’histoire, et la lecture des

légendes fabuleuses avait accoutumé à croire à de plus grandes

merveilles encore; aussi plusieurs de ces fables furent-elles

reproduites dans la Chronique de St. Denis.”

Again, _ib._ p. 290: “Souvent les anciens romanciers, lorsqu’ils

entreprennent un récit de la cour de Charlemagne, prennent un ton

plus élevé: ce ne sont point des fables qu’ils vont conter, c’est

de l’histoire nationale,—c’est la gloire de leurs ancêtres qu’ils

veulent célébrer, et ils ont droit alors à demander qu’on les

écoute avec respect.”

The Chronicle of Turpin was inserted, even so late as the year

1566, in the collection printed by Scardius at Frankfort of

early German historians (Ginguené, Histoire Littéraire d’Italie,

vol. iv. part ii. ch. 3. p. 157).

To the same point—that these romances were listened to as real

stories—see Sir Walter Scott’s Preface to Sir Tristram, p. lxvii.

The authors of the Legends of the Saints are not less explicit in

their assertions that everything which they recount is true and

well-attested (Ampère, c. 14. p. 358).

[1040] The series of articles by M. Fauriel, published in the

Revue des Deux Mondes, vol. xiii. are full of instruction

respecting the origin, tenor, and influence of the Romances of

Chivalry. Though the name of Charlemagne appears, the romancers

are really unable to distinguish him from Charles Martel or

from Charles the Bald (pp. 537-539). They ascribe to him an

expedition to the Holy Land, in which he conquered Jerusalem from

the Saracens, obtained possession of the relics of the passion

of Christ, the crown of thorns, etc. These precious relics he

carried to Rome, from whence they were taken to Spain by a

Saracen emir, named Balan, at the head of an army. The expedition

of Charlemagne against the Saracens in Spain was undertaken for

the purpose of recovering the relics: “Ces divers romans peuvent

être regardés comme la suite, comme le développement, de la

fiction de la conquête de Jérusalem par Charlemagne.”

Respecting the Romance of Rinaldo of Montauban (describing the

struggles of a feudal lord against the emperor) M. Fauriel

observes, “Il n’y a, je crois, aucun fondement historique: c’est

selon toute apparence, la pure expression poétique du fait

général,” etc. (p. 542.)

To inquire which of the personages of the Carlovingian epic were real

and which were fictitious,—to examine whether the expedition ascribed

to Charlemagne against Jerusalem had ever taken place or not,—to

separate truth from exaggeration in the exploits of the Knights of the

Round Table,—these were problems which an audience of that day had

neither disposition to undertake nor means to resolve. They accepted

the narrative as they heard it, without suspicion or reserve; the

incidents related, as well as the connecting links between them, were

in full harmony with their feelings, and gratifying as well to their

sympathies as to their curiosity: nor was anything farther wanting to

induce them to believe it, though the historical basis might be ever so

slight or even non-existent.[1041]

[1041] Among the “formules consacrées” (observes M. Fauriel)

of the romancers of the Carlovingian epic, are asseverations

of their own veracity, and of the accuracy of what they are

about to relate—specification of witnesses whom they have

consulted—appeals to pretended chronicles: “Que ces citations,

ces indications, soient parfois sérieuses et sincères, cela peut

être; mais c’est une exception et une exception rare. De telles

allégations de la part des romanciers, sont en général un pur et

simple mensonge, mais non toutefois un mensonge gratuit. C’est

un mensonge qui a sa raison et sa convenance: il tient au désir

et au besoin de satisfaire une opinion accoutumée à supposer

et à chercher du vrai dans les fictions du genre de celles où

l’on allègue ces prétendues autorités. La manière dont les

auteurs de ces fictions les qualifient souvent eux-mêmes, est

une conséquence naturelle de leur prétention d’y avoir suivi des

documens vénérables. Ils les qualifient de chansons de _vieille

histoire_, de _haute histoire_, de _bonne geste_, de _grande

baronnie_: et ce n’est pas pour se vanter qu’ils parlent ainsi:

la vanité d’auteur n’est rien chez eux, en comparaison du besoin

qu’ils ont d’être crus, de passer pour de simples traducteurs,

de simples répétiteurs de légendes ou d’histoire consacrée. Ces

protestations de véracité, qui, plus ou moins expresses, sont de

rigueur dans les romans Carlovingiens, y sont aussi fréquemment

accompagnées de protestations accessoires contre les romanciers,

qui, ayant déjà traité un sujet donné, sont accusés d’y avoir

faussé la vérité.” (Fauriel, Orig. de l’Epopée Chevaleresque, in

the Revue des Deux Mondes, vol. xiii. p. 554.)

About the Cycle of the Round Table, see the same series of

articles (Rev. D. M. t. xiv. pp. 170-184). The Chevaliers of the

Saint Graal were a sort of _idéal_ of the Knights Templars: “Une

race de princes héroïques, originaires de l’Asie, fut prédestinée

par le ciel même à la garde du Saint Graal. Perille fut le

premier de cette race, qui s’étant converti au Christianisme,

passa en Europe sous l’Empereur Vespasien,” etc.; then follows

a string of fabulous incidents: the epical agency is similar to

that of Homer—Διὸς δ᾽ ἐτελείετο βουλή.

M. Paulin Paris, in his Prefaces to the Romans des Douze Pairs

de France, has controverted many of the positions of M. Fauriel,

and with success, so far as regards the Provençal origin of

the Chansons de Geste, asserted by the latter. In regard to

the Romances of the Round Table, he agrees substantially with

M. Fauriel; but he tries to assign a greater historical value

to the poems of the Carlovingian epic,—very unsuccessfully, in

my opinion. But his own analysis of the old poem of Garin de

Loherain bears out the very opinion which he is confuting: “Nous

sommes au règne de Charles Martel, et nous reconnaissons sous

d’autres noms les détails exacts de la fameuse défaite d’Attila

dans les champs Catalauniques. Saint Loup et Saint Nicaise,

glorieux prélats du quatrième siècle, reviennent figurer autour

du père de Pépin le Bref: enfin pour compléter la confusion,

Charles Martel meurt sur le champ de bataille, à la place du roi

des Visigoths, Theodoric.... _Toutes les parties de la narration

sont vraies_: seulement _toutes s’y trouvent déplacées_. En

général, les peuples n’entendent rien à la chronologie: les

evènemens restent: les individus, les lieux et les époques, ne

laissent aucune trace: c’est pour ainsi dire, une décoration

scénique que l’on applique indifféremment à des récits souvent

contraires.” (Preface to the Roman de Garin le Loherain, pp.

xvi.-xx.: Paris, 1833.) Compare also his Lettre à M. Monmerqué,

prefixed to the Roman de Berthe aux Grans Piés, Paris, 1836.

To say that _all_ the parts of the narrative are true, is

contrary to M. Paris’s own showing: _some_ parts may be true,

separately taken, but these fragments of truth are melted down

with a large mass of fiction, and cannot be discriminated unless

we possess some independent test. The poet who picks out one

incident from the fourth century, another from the fifth, and

a few more from the eighth, and then blends them all into a

continuous tale along with many additions of his own, shows that

he takes the items of fact because they suit the purposes of his

narrative, not because they happen to be attested by historical

evidence. His hearers are not critical: they desire to have their

imaginations and feelings affected, and they are content to

accept without question whatever accomplishes this end.

The romances of chivalry represented, to those who heard them, real

deeds of the foretime—“glories of the foregone men,” to use the

Hesiodic expression[1042]—at the same time that they embodied and

filled up the details of an heroic ideal, such as that age could

conceive and admire—a fervent piety, combined with strength, bravery,

and the love of adventurous aggression, directed sometimes against

infidels, sometimes against enchanters or monsters, sometimes in

defence of the fair sex. Such characteristics wore naturally popular,

in a century of feudal struggles and universal insecurity, when the

grand subjects of common respect and interest were the Church and

the Crusades, and when the latter especially were embraced with an

enthusiasm truly astonishing.

[1042] Hesiod, Theogon. 100—κλέα προτέρων ἀνθρώπων. Puttenham

talks of the remnant of bards existing in his time (1589): “Blind

Harpers, or such like Taverne Minstrels, whose matters are for

the most part _stories of old time_, as the Tale of Sir Topaze,

the Reportes of Bevis of Southampton, Adam Bell, Clymme of the

Clough, and such other old Romances or _Historical Rhymes_.”

(Arte of English Poesie, book ii. cap. 9.)

The long German poem of the Niebelungen Lied, as well as the Volsunga

Saga and a portion of the songs of the Edda, relate to a common

fund of mythical, superhuman personages, and of fabulous adventure,

identified with the earliest antiquity of the Teutonic and Scandinavian

race, and representing their primitive sentiment towards ancestors

of divine origin. Sigurd, Brynhilde, Gudrun, and Atle, are mythical

characters celebrated as well by the Scandinavian Scalds as by the

German epic poets, but with many varieties and separate additions to

distinguish the one from the other. The German epic, later and more

elaborated, includes various persons not known to the songs in the

Edda, in particular the prominent name of Dieterich of Bern—presenting,

moreover, the principal characters and circumstances as Christian,

while in the Edda there is no trace of anything but heathenism. There

is, indeed, in this the old and heathen version, a remarkable analogy

with many points of Grecian mythical narrative. As in the case of the

short life of Achilles, and of the miserable Labdakids of Thêbes—so

in the family of the Volsungs, though sprung from and protected by

the gods—a curse of destiny hangs upon them and brings on their ruin,

in spite of preëminent personal qualities.[1043] The more thoroughly

this old Teutonic story has been traced and compared, in its various

transformations and accompaniments, the less can any well-established

connection be made out for it with authentic historical names or

events. We must acquiesce in its personages as distinct in original

conception from common humanity, and as belonging to the subjective

mythical world of the race by whom they were sung.

[1043] Respecting the Volsunga Saga and the Niebelungen Lied,

the work of Lange—Untersuchungen über die Geschichte und das

Verhältniss der Nordischen und Deutschen Heldensage—is a valuable

translation from the Danish Saga-Bibliothek of P. E. Müller.

P. E. Müller maintains, indeed, the historical basis of the tales

respecting the Volsungs (see pp. 102-107)—upon arguments very

unsatisfactory; though the genuine Scandinavian origin of the

tale is perfectly made out. The chapter added by Lange himself,

at the close (see p. 432, etc.), contains juster views as to the

character of the primitive mythology, though he too advances

some positions respecting a something “reinsymbolisches” in the

background, which I find it difficult to follow (see p. 477,

etc.).—There are very ancient epical ballads still sung by the

people in the Faro Islands, many of them relating to Sigurd and

his adventures (p. 412).

Jacob Grimm, in his Deutsche Mythologie, maintains the purely

mythical character, as opposed to the historical, of Siegfried

and Dieterich (Art. _Helden_, pp. 344-346).

So, too, in the great Persian epic of Ferdousi, the principal

characters are religious and mythical. M. Mohl observes,—“Les

caractères des personnages principaux de l’ancienne histoire de

Perse se retrouvent dans le livre des Rois (de Ferdousi) tels

que les indiquent les parties des livres de Zoroaster que nous

possédons encore. Kaioumors, Djemschid, Feridoun, Gushtasp,

Isfendiar, etc. jouent dans le poème épique le même rôle que dans

les Livres sacrés: à cela près, que dans les derniers ils nous

apparaissent à travers une atmosphere mythologique qui grandit

tous leurs traits: mais cette difference est précisément celle

qu’on devait s’attendre à trouver entre la tradition religieuse

et la tradition épique.” (Mohl, Livre des Rois par Ferdousi,

Preface, p. 1.)

The Persian historians subsequent to Ferdousi have all taken

his poem as the basis of their histories, and have even copied

him faithfully and literally (Mohl, p. 53). Many of his heroes

became the subjects of long epical biographies, written and

recited without any art or grace, often by writers whose names

are unknown (_ib._ pp. 54-70). Mr. Morier tells us that “the

Shah Nameh is still believed by the present Persians to contain

their ancient history” (Adventures of Hadgi Baba, c. 32). As

the Christian romancers transformed Apollo into the patron of

Mussulmans, so Ferdousi makes Alexander the Great a Christian:

“La critique historique (observes M. Mohl) était du temps de

Ferdousi chose presqu’inconnue.” (_ib._ p. xlviii.) About the

absence not only of all historiography, but also of all idea of

it, or taste for it among the early Indians, Persians, Arabians,

etc., see the learned book of Nork, _Die Götter Syriens_,

Preface, p. viii. _seqq._ (Stuttgart, 1842.)

Such were the compositions which not only interested the emotions,

but also satisfied the undistinguishing historical curiosity, of the

ordinary public in the middle ages. The exploits of many of these

romantic heroes resemble in several points those of the Grecian: the

adventures of Perseus, Achilles, Odysseus, Atalanta, Bellerophôn,

Jasôn, and the Trojan war, or Argonautic expedition generally, would

have fitted in perfectly to the Carlovingian or other epics of the

period.[1044] That of the middle ages, like the Grecian, was eminently

expansive in its nature: new stories were successively attached to the

names and companions of Charlemagne and Arthur, just as the legend

of Troy was enlarged by Arktinus, Leschês, and Stesichorus,—that of

Thêbes, by fresh miseries entailed on the fated head of Œdipus,—and

that of the Kalydônian boar, by the addition of Atalanta. Altogether,

the state of mind of the hearers seems in both cases to have been much

the same,—eager for emotion and sympathy, and receiving any narrative

attuned to their feelings, not merely with hearty welcome, but also

with unsuspecting belief.

[1044] Several of the heroes of the ancient world were indeed

themselves popular subjects with the romancers of the middle

ages, Thêseus, Jasôn, etc.; Alexander the Great, more so than any

of them.

Dr. Warton observes, respecting the Argonautic expedition,

“Few stories of antiquity have more the cast of one of the old

romances than this of Jasôn. An expedition of a new kind is

made into a strange and distant country, attended with infinite

dangers and difficulties. The king’s daughter of the new country

is an enchantress; she falls in love with the young prince, who

is the chief adventurer. The prize which he seeks is guarded by

brazen-footed bulls, who breathe fire, and by a hideous dragon,

who never sleeps. The princess lends him the assistance of her

charms and incantations to conquer these obstacles; she gives him

possession of the prize, leaves her father’s court, and follows

him into his native country.” (Warton, Observations on Spenser,

vol. i. p. 178.)

To the same purpose M. Ginguené: “Le premier modèle des Fées

n’est-il pas dans Circé, dans Calypso, dans Médée? Celui des

géans, dans Polyphème, dans Cacus, et dans les géans, ou les

Titans, cette race ennemie de Jupiter? Les serpens et les

dragons des romans ne sont-ils pas des successeurs du dragon

des Hesperides et de celui de la Toison d’or? Les Magiciens! la

Thessalie en étoit pleine. Les armes enchantées impénétrables!

elles sont de la même trempe, et l’on peut les croire forgées

au même fourneau que celles d’Achille et d’Enée.” (Ginguené,

Histoire Littéraire d’Italie, vol. iv. part ii. ch. 3, p. 151.)

Nevertheless, there were distinctions deserving of notice, which render

the foregoing proposition more absolutely exact with regard to Greece

than with regard to the middle ages. The tales of the epic, and the

mythes in their most popular and extended signification, were the only

intellectual nourishment with which the Grecian public was supplied,

until the sixth century before the Christian æra: there was no prose

writing, no history, no philosophy. But such was not exactly the

case at the time when the epic of the middle ages appeared. At that

time, a portion of society possessed the Latin language, the habit of

writing, and some tinge both of history and philosophy: there were a

series of chronicles, scanty, indeed, and imperfect, but referring

to contemporary events and preventing the real history of the past

from passing into oblivion: there were even individual scholars, in

the twelfth century, whose acquaintance with Latin literature was

sufficiently considerable to enlarge their minds and to improve their

judgments. Moreover, the epic of the middle ages, though deeply imbued

with religious ideas, was not directly amalgamated with the religion

of the people, and did not always find favor with the clergy; while

the heroes of the Grecian epic were not only linked in a thousand ways

with existing worship, practices, and sacred localities, but Homer and

Hesiod pass with Herodotus for the constructors of Grecian theology. We

thus see that the ancient epic was both exempt from certain distracting

influences by which that of the middle ages was surrounded, and more

closely identified with the veins of thought and feeling prevalent in

the Grecian public. Yet these counteracting influences did not prevent

Pope Calixtus II. from declaring the Chronicle of Turpin to be a

genuine history.

If we take the history of our own country as it was conceived and

written from the twelfth to the seventeenth century by Hardyng,

Fabyan, Grafton, Hollinshed, and others, we shall find that it was

supposed to begin with Brute the Trojan, and was carried down from

thence, for many ages and through a long succession of kings, to the

times of Julius Cæsar. A similar belief of descent from Troy, arising

seemingly from a reverential imitation of the Romans and of their

Trojan origin, was cherished in the fancy of other European nations.

With regard to the English, the chief circulator of it was Geoffrey

of Monmouth, and it passed with little resistance or dispute into

the national faith—the kings from Brute downward being enrolled in

regular chronological series with their respective dates annexed. In

a dispute which took place during the reign of Edward I. (A. D. 1301)

between England and Scotland, the descent of the kings of England

from Brute the Trojan was solemnly embodied in a document put forth

to sustain the rights of the crown of England, as an argument bearing

on the case then in discussion: and it passed without attack from the

opposing party,[1045]—an incident which reminds us of the appeal

made by Æschinês, in the contention between the Athenians and Philip

of Macedôn, respecting Amphipolis, to the primitive dotal rights of

Akamas son of Thêseus—and also of the defence urged by the Athenians

to sustain their conquest of Sigeium, against the reclamations of the

Mitylenæans, therein the former alleged that they had as much right

to the place as any of the other Greeks who had formed part of the

victorious armament of Agamemnôn.[1046]

[1045] See Warton’s History of English Poetry, sect. iii. p. 131,

note. “No man before the sixteenth century presumed to doubt

that the Francs derived their origin from Francus son of Hector;

that the Spaniards were descended from Japhet, the Britons from

Brutus, and the Scotch from Fergus.” (_Ibid._ p. 140.)

According to the Prologue of the prose Edda, Odin was the

supreme king of Troy in Asia, “in eâ terrâ quam nos Turciam

appellamus.... Hinc omnes Borealis plagæ magnates vel primores

genealogias suas referunt, atque principes illius urbis inter

numina locant: sed in primis ipsum Priamum pro Odeno ponunt,”

etc. They also identified _Tros_ with _Thor_. (See Lexicon

Mythologicum ad calcem Eddæ Sæmund, p. 552. vol. iii.)

[1046] See above, ch. xv. p. 458; also Æschinês, De Falsâ

Legatione, c. 14, Herodot. v. 94. The Herakleids pretended a

right to the territory in Sicily near Mount Eryx, in consequence

of the victory gained by their progenitor Hêraklês over Eryx, the

eponymous hero of the place. (Herodot. v. 43.)

The tenacity with which this early series of British kings was

defended, is no less remarkable than the facility with which it was

admitted. The chroniclers at the beginning of the seventeenth century

warmly protested against the intrusive scepticism which would cashier

so many venerable sovereigns and efface so many noble deeds. They

appealed to the patriotic feelings of their hearers, represented the

enormity of thus setting up a presumptuous criticism against the belief

of ages, and insisted on the danger of the precedent as regarded

history generally.[1047] How this controversy stood, at the time and

in the view of the illustrious author of Paradise Lost, I shall give

in his own words, as they appear in the second page of his History of

England. After having briefly touched upon the stories of Samothes son

of Japhet, Albion son of Neptune, etc., he proceeds:—

[1047] The remarks in Speed’s Chronicle (book v. c. 3. sect.

11-12), and the preface to Howes’s Continuation of Stow’s

Chronicle, published in 1631, are curious as illustrating this

earnest feeling. The Chancellor Fortescue, in impressing upon

his royal pupil, the son of Henry VI., the limited character of

English monarchy, deduces it from Brute the Trojan: “Concerning

the different powers which kings claim over their subjects, I am

firmly of opinion that it arises solely from the different nature

of their original institution. So the kingdom of England had its

original from Brute and the Trojans, who attended him from Italy

and Greece, and became a mixed kind of government, compounded of

the regal and the political.” (Hallam, Hist. Mid. Ages, ch. viii.

P. 3, page 230.)

“But now of Brutus and his line, with the whole progeny of kings to the

entrance of Julius Cæsar, we cannot so easily be discharged: descents

of ancestry long continued, laws and exploits not plainly seeming to

be borrowed or devised, which on the common belief have wrought no

small impression: _defended by many, denied utterly by few_. For what

though Brutus and the whole Trojan pretence were yielded up, seeing

they, who first devised to bring us some noble ancestor, were content

at first with Brutus the Consul, till better invention, though not

willing to forego the name, taught them to remove it higher into a more

fabulous age, and by the same remove lighting on the Trojan tales, in

affectation to make the Briton of one original with the Roman, pitched

there: _Yet those old and inborn kings, never any to have been real

persons, or done in their lives at least some part of what so long hath

been remembered, cannot be thought without too strict incredulity._

For these, and those causes above mentioned, that which hath received

approbation from so many, I have chosen not to omit. Certain or

uncertain, be that upon the credit of those whom I must follow: _so far

as keeps aloof from impossible or absurd_, attested by ancient writers

from books more ancient, I refuse not, as the due and proper subject of

story.”[1048]

[1048] “Antiquitas enim recepit fabulas fictas etiam nonnunquam

incondite: hæc ætas autem jam exculta, præsertim eludens omne

quod fieri non potest, respuit,” etc. (Cicero, De Republicâ, ii.

10, p. 147, ed. Maii.)

Yet in spite of the general belief of so many centuries—in spite of

the concurrent persuasion of historians and poets—in spite of the

declaration of Milton, extorted from his feelings rather than from his

reason, that this long line of quasi-historical kings and exploits

could not be _all_ unworthy of belief—in spite of so large a body of

authority and precedent, the historians of the nineteenth century begin

the history of England with Julius Cæsar. They do not attempt either to

settle the date of king Bladud’s accession, or to determine what may

be the basis of truth in the affecting narrative of Lear.[1049] The

standard of historical credibility, especially with regard to modern

events, has indeed been greatly and sensibly raised within the last

hundred years.

[1049] Dr. Zachary Grey has the following observations in his

Notes on Shakspeare (London, 1754, vol. i. p. 112). In commenting

on the passage in King Lear, _Nero is an angler in the lake of

darkness_, he says, “This is one of Shakspeare’s most remarkable

_anachronisms_. King Lear succeeded his father Bladud anno mundi

3105; and Nero, anno mundi 4017, was sixteen years old, when he

married Octavia, Cæsar’s daughter. See Funcii Chronologia, p. 94.”

Such a supposed chronological discrepancy would hardly be pointed

out in any commentary now written.

The introduction prefixed by Mr. Giles, to his recent translation

of Geoffrey of Monmouth (1842), gives a just view both of the

use which our old poets made of his tales, and of the general

credence so long and so unsuspectingly accorded to them. The

list of old British kings given by Mr. Giles also deserves

attention, as a parallel to the Grecian genealogies anterior to

the Olympiads.

But in regard to ancient Grecian history, the rules of evidence still

continue relaxed. The dictum of Milton, regarding the ante-Cæsarian

history of England, still represents pretty exactly the feeling now

prevalent respecting the mythical history of Greece: “Yet those old

and inborn kings (Agamemnôn, Achilles, Odysseus, Jasôn, Adrastus,

Amphiaräus, Meleager, etc.), never any to have been real persons,

or done in their lives at least some part of what so long hath been

remembered, cannot be thought without too strict incredulity.” Amidst

much fiction (we are still told), there must be some truth: but how is

such truth to be singled out? Milton does not even attempt to make the

severance: he contents himself with “keeping aloof from the impossible

and the absurd,” and ends in a narrative which has indeed the merit

of being sober-colored, but which he never for a moment thinks of

recommending to his readers as true. So in regard to the legends of

Greece,—Troy, Thêbes, the Argonauts, the Boar of Kalydôn, Hêraklês,

Thêseus, Œdipus,—the conviction still holds in men’s minds, that there

must be something true at the bottom; and many readers of this work may

be displeased, I fear, not to see conjured up before them the Eidôlon

of an authentic history, even though the vital spark of evidence be

altogether wanting.[1050]

[1050] The following passage, from the Preface of Mr. Price

to Warton’s History of English Poetry, is alike just and

forcibly characterized; the whole Preface is, indeed, full of

philosophical reflection on popular fables generally. Mr. Price

observes (p. 79):—

“The great evil with which this long-contested question appears

to be threatened at the present day, is an extreme equally

dangerous with the incredulity of Mr. Ritson,—a disposition to

receive as authentic history, under a slightly fabulous coloring,

every incident recorded in the British Chronicle. An allegorical

interpretation is now inflicted upon all the marvellous

circumstances; a forced construction imposed upon the less

glaring deviations from probability; and the usual subterfuge

of baffled research,—erroneous readings and etymological

sophistry,—is made to reduce every stubborn and intractable text

to something like the consistency required. It might have been

expected that the notorious failures of Dionysius and Plutarch,

in Roman history, would have prevented the repetition of an

error, which neither learning nor ingenuity can render palatable;

and that the havoc and deadly ruin effected by these ancient

writers (in other respects so valuable) in one of the most

beautiful and interesting monuments of traditional story, would

have acted as sufficient corrective on all future aspirants.

The favorers of this system might at least have been instructed

by the philosophic example of Livy,—if it be lawful to ascribe

to philosophy a line of conduct which perhaps was prompted by

a powerful sense of poetic beauty,—that traditional record can

only gain in the hands of the future historian by one attractive

aid,—the grandeur and lofty graces of that incomparable style in

which the first decade is written; and that the best duty towards

antiquity, and the most agreeable one towards posterity, is to

transmit the narrative received as an unsophisticated tradition,

in all the plenitude of its marvels and the awful dignity of its

supernatural agency. For, however largely we may concede that

real events have supplied the substance of any traditive story,

yet the amount of absolute facts, and the manner of those facts,

the period of their occurrence, the names of the agents, and the

locality given to the scene, are all combined upon principles so

wholly beyond our knowledge, that it becomes impossible to fix

with certainty upon any single point better authenticated than

its fellow. Probability in such decisions will often prove the

most fallacious guide we can follow; for, independently of the

acknowledged historical axiom, that ‘le vrai n’est pas toujours

le vraisemblable,’ innumerable instances might be adduced, where

tradition has had recourse to this very probability to confer

a plausible sanction upon her most fictitious and romantic

incidents. It will be a much more useful labor, wherever it can

be effected, to trace the progress of this traditional story in

the country where it has become located, by a reference to those

natural or artificial monuments which are the unvarying sources

of fictitious events; and, by a strict comparison of its details

with the analogous memorials of other nations, to separate

those elements which are obviously of a native growth, from the

occurrences bearing the impress of a foreign origin. _We shall

gain little, perhaps, by such a course for the history of human

events_; but it will be an important accession to our stock of

knowledge on the _history of the human mind_. It will infallibly

display, as in the analysis of every similar record, the

operations of that refining principle which is ever obliterating

the monotonous deeds of violence that fill the chronicle of a

nation’s early career, and exhibit the brightest attribute in

the catalogue of man’s intellectual endowments,—a glowing and

vigorous imagination,—bestowing upon all the impulses of the

mind a splendor and virtuous dignity, which, however fallacious

historically considered, are never without a powerfully redeeming

good, the ethical tendency of all their lessons.”

I presume to think that our great poet has proceeded upon mistaken

views with respect to the old British fables, not less in that which

he leaves out than in that which he retains. To omit the miraculous and

the fantastic, (it is that which he really means by “the impossible

and the absurd,”) is to suck the lifeblood out of these once popular

narratives,—to divest them at once both of their genuine distinguishing

mark, and the charm by which they acted on the feelings of believers.

Still less ought we to consent to break up and disenchant in a similar

manner the mythes of ancient Greece,—partly because they possess the

mythical beauties and characteristics in far higher perfection, partly

because they sank deeper into the mind of a Greek, and pervaded both

the public and private sentiment of the country to a much greater

degree than the British fables in England.

Two courses, and two only, are open; either to pass over the mythes

altogether, which is the way in which modern historians treat the

old British fables, or else to give an account of them as mythes;

to recognize and respect their specific nature, and to abstain from

confounding them with ordinary and certifiable history. There are good

reasons for pursuing this second method in reference to the Grecian

mythes; and when so considered, they constitute an important chapter

in the history of the Grecian mind, and indeed in that of the human

race generally. The historical faith of the Greeks, as well as that

of other people, in reference to early and unrecorded times, is as

much subjective and peculiar to themselves as their religious faith:

among the Greeks, especially, the two are confounded with an intimacy

which nothing less than great violence can disjoin. Gods, heroes, and

men—religion and patriotism—matters divine, heroic, and human—were

all woven together by the Greeks into one indivisible web, in which

the threads of truth and reality, whatever they might originally have

been, were neither intended to be, nor were actually, distinguishable.

Composed of such materials, and animated by the electric spark of

genius, the mythical antiquities of Greece formed a whole at once

trustworthy and captivating to the faith and feelings of the people;

but neither trustworthy nor captivating, when we sever it from these

subjective conditions, and expose its naked elements to the scrutiny

of an objective criticism. Moreover, the separate portions of Grecian

mythical foretime ought to be considered with reference to that

aggregate of which they form a part: to detach the divine from the

heroic legends, or some one of the heroic legends from the remainder,

as if there were an essential and generic difference between them, is

to present the whole under an erroneous point of view. The mythes of

Troy and Thêbes are no more to be handled objectively, with a view to

detect an historical base, than those of Zeus in Krête, of Apollo and

Artemis in Dêlos, of Hermês, or of Promêtheus. To single out the Siege

of Troy from the other mythes, as if it were entitled to preëminence

as an ascertained historical and chronological event, is a proceeding

which destroys the true character and coherence of the mythical world:

we only transfer the story (as has been remarked in the preceding

chapter) from a class with which it is connected by every tie both of

common origin and fraternal affinity, to another with which it has

no relationship, except such as violent and gratuitous criticism may

enforce.

By drawing this marked distinction between the mythical and the

historical world,—between matter appropriate only for subjective

history, and matter in which objective evidence is attainable,—we

shall only carry out to its proper length the just and well-known

position long ago laid down by Varro. That learned man recognized three

distinguishable periods in the time preceding his own age: “First, the

time from the beginning of mankind down to the first deluge; a time

wholly unknown. Secondly, the period from the first deluge down to the

first Olympiad, which is called _the mythical period_, because many

fabulous things are recounted in it. Thirdly, the time from the first

Olympiad down to ourselves, which is called _the historical period_,

because the things done in it are comprised in true histories.”[1051]

[1051] Varro ap. Censorin. de Die Natali; Varronis Fragm. p. 219,

ed. Scaliger, 1623. “Varro tria discrimina temporum esse tradit.

Primum ab hominum principio usque ad cataclysmum priorem, quod

propter ignorantiam vocatur ἄδηλον. Secundum, a cataclysmo priore

ad Olympiadem primam, quod quia in eo multa fabulosa referuntur,

_Mythicon_ nominatur. Tertium a primâ Olympiade ad nos; quod

dicitur _Historicon_, quia res in eo gestæ veris historiis

continentur.”

To the same purpose Africanus, ap. Eusebium, Præp. Ev. xx.

p. 487: Μέχρι μὲν Ὀλυμπιάδων, οὐδὲν ἀκριβὲς ἱστόρηται τοῖς

Ἕλλησι, πάντων συγκεχυμένων, καὶ κατὰ μηδὲν αὐτοῖς τῶν πρὸ τοῦ

συμφωνούντων, etc.

Taking the commencement of true or objective history at the point

indicated by Varro, I still consider the mythical and historical

periods to be separated by a wider gap than he would have admitted. To

select any one year as an absolute point of commencement, is of course

not to be understood literally: but in point of fact, this is of very

little importance in reference to the present question, seeing that the

great mythical events—the sieges of Thêbes and Troy, the Argonautic

expedition, the Kalydônian boar-hunt, the Return of the Hêrakleids,

etc.—are all placed long anterior to the first Olympiad, by those who

have applied chronological boundaries to the mythical narratives. The

period immediately preceding the first Olympiad is one exceedingly

barren of events; the received chronology recognizes four hundred

years, and Herodotus admitted five hundred years, from that date back

to the Trojan war.