The myths, but not religion! The criticism certainly of Plato and
probably of Euripides was prompted by the desire not to discredit
altogether the belief in the gods, but to bring it into harmony with the
requirements of a more fully developed consciousness. The philosopher
and the poet came not to destroy, but to fulfil; not to annihilate but
to transform the popular theology. Such an intention, strange as it may
appear to us with our rigid creeds, we shall see to be natural enough to
the Greek mind, when we remember that the material of their religion was
not a set of propositions, but a more or less indeterminate body of
traditions capable of being presented in the most various forms as the
genius and taste of individual poets might direct. And we find, in fact,
that the most religious poets of Greece, those even who were most
innocent of any intention to innovate on popular beliefs, did
nevertheless unconsciously tend to transform, in accordance with their
own conceptions, the whole structure of the Homeric theology. Taking
over the legends of gods and heroes, as narrated in poetry and
tradition, the earlier tragedians, Aeschylus and Sophocles, as they
shaped and reshaped their material for the stage, were evolving for
themselves, not in opposition to but as it were on the top of the
polytheistic view, the idea of a single supreme and righteous God. The
Zeus of Homer, whose superiority, as we saw, was based on physical
force, grows, under the hands of Aeschylus, into something akin to the
Jewish Jehovah. The inner experience of the poet drives him inevitably
to this transformation. Born into the great age of Greece, coming to
maturity at the crisis of her fate, he had witnessed with his own eyes,
and assisted with his own hands the defeat of the Persian host at
Marathon. The event struck home to him like a judgment from heaven. The
Nemesis that attends upon human pride, the vengeance that follows crime,
henceforth were the thoughts that haunted and possessed his brain; and
under their influence he evolved for himself out of the popular idea of
Zeus the conception of a God of justice who marks and avenges crime.
Read for example the following passage from the "Agamemnon" and contrast
it with the lines of Homer quoted on page 42. Nothing could illustrate
more strikingly the transformation that could be effected, under the
conditions of the Greek religion, in the whole conception of the divine
power by one whose conscious intention, nevertheless, was not to
innovate but to conserve.
"Zeus the high God! Whate'er be dim in doubt,
This can our thought track out--
The blow that fells the sinner is of God,
And as he wills, the rod
Of vengeance smiteth sore. One said of old
'The Gods list not to hold
A reckoning with him whose feet oppress
The grace of holiness'--
An impious word! for whensoe'er the sire
Breathed forth rebellious fire--
What time his household overflows the measure
Of bliss and health and treasure--
His children's children read the reckoning plain,
At last, in tears and pain.
* * * * *
Who spurns the shrine of Right, nor wealth nor power
Shall be to him a tower,
To guard him from the gulf: there lies his lot,
Where all things are forgot.
Lust drives him on--lust, desperate and wild
Fate's sin-contriving child--
And cure is none; beyond concealment clear
Kindles sin's baleful glare.
As an ill coin beneath the wearing touch
Betrays by stain and smutch
Its metal false--such is the sinful wight.
Before, on pinions light,
Fair pleasure flits, and lures him childlike on,
While home and kin make moan
Beneath the grinding burden of his crime;
Till, in the end of time,
Cast down of heaven, he pours forth fruitless prayer
To powers that will not hear."
[Footnote: Aesch. Agamem. 367.--Translated by E. D. A.
Morshead ("The House of Atreus").]
And Sophocles follows in the same path. For him too Zeus is no longer
the god of physical strength; he is the creator and sustainer of the
moral law--of "those laws of range sublime, called into life throughout
the high clear heaven, whose father is Olympus alone; their parent was
no race of mortal men, no, nor shall oblivion ever lay them to sleep; a
mighty god is in them, and he grows not old." [Footnote: Soph. O.T.
865.--Translated by Dr. Jebb.] Such words imply a complete
transformation of the Homeric conception of Divinity; a transformation
made indeed in the interests of religion, but involving nevertheless,
and contrary, no doubt, to the intention of its authors, a complete
subversion of the popular creed. Once grant the idea of God as an
eternal and moral Power and the whole fabric of polytheism falls away.
The religion of the Greeks, as interpreted by their best minds,
annihilates itself. Zeus indeed is saved, but only at the cost of all
Olympus.