remarkable Homeric formulæ, which are used with such extraordinary
grandeur of effect in the later books of the Odyssey; returning upon
the ear like the solemn tolling of a funeral bell.
But the sentiments which the passage contains are in themselves most
remarkable, and perhaps only find a parallel in the awful language
of Holy Writ; ‘and the Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart, that he should
not let the people go[222].’ They describe at once the doctrine of
Providence, and the essential laws of human nature, in their loftiest
and severest form. They show us the hardening power of a long continued
course of offences against the moral law, which at length converts the
most unbounded license into the most absolute slavery, under the iron
yoke of habitual depravity; and they likewise exhibit the figure of
Deity superintending this terrible, but natural as well as judicial
retribution, which is the ultimate and effective sanction of the whole
moral code, alike in the earlier and in the later stages of the Divine
dispensations. Besides all this, the passage exhibits to us pain
administered to the just man, in order to prove his resolution, and
steel him, that he may be the fitting minister of divine vengeance.
Nor does this process of probation cease here: for the conflict with
the Suitors is a prolonged one; and it is prolonged, because Minerva
was still making trial of the constancy of Ulysses and his son[223], as
of metal in the fire.
[222] Exod. x. 20.
[223] Od. xxii. 236.
It is hard to find even approximations to such a picture in the later
heathen literature, particularly after Æschylus: and in Homer no
function of this kind is ever attributed to an ordinary deity; nor even
to Jupiter, whose place in the government of mankind, if estimated
morally, is lower than that of Minerva. I shall have occasion shortly
to glance further at this subject.
The higher powers attaching to the character of the great Deliverer
of man, besides being more or less obscured in each case, are by the
disintegration, with which we may now have become familiar, divided
between Apollo and Minerva; so that while in some, and indeed in most,
points of view, it is a common character which distinguishes and severs
them from the deities of mere invention, in others we must combine the
gifts of one with those of the other, in order to get at the entire
outline of the ancient tradition.
Thus we have seen, that Minerva exercises higher functions in
Providential government, and in the administration of the general
laws of our nature, than are wielded even by the Homeric Jupiter.
We have also partially considered why it is, that she thus attains
a superiority which, undoubtedly, no pristine tradition could while
unaltered accord to her. At present I proceed to observe, that we may
find a counterpart to this paramount prerogative of Minerva in the gift
of fore and after knowledge, possessed most peculiarly and largely by
Apollo.
Calchas, Seer of the Greek army, knew what was, what had been, and what
was to be, by the gift which Phœbus Apollo had conferred on him[224].
It is the business of this order, who are ministers of Apollo, to
interpret all signs and presages to men in virtue of the prerogative
of that deity. In the Fifteenth Book, indeed, Apollo inquires of
Hector the cause of his evil plight: but he has not yet put off his
_incognito_, as we see from the reply of Hector;
[224] Il. i. 69-72.
τίς δὲ σύ ἐσσι, φέριστε θεῶν[225];
[225] Il. xv. 247.
And, while Jupiter has the single and remote oak of Dodona for the
delivery of oracles to men, Apollo has already his Pythian temple in
the very heart of Greece, and hard by the great highway across the
Corinthian gulf, and has likewise a shrine at Delos for that purpose;
for we must presume that, when Ulysses[226] stopped to visit Delos on
his way home, it was in order to obtain information as to his fate.
Thus Apollo appears to stand first of the gods in regard to knowledge
of events, as Minerva does with respect to the ordinary government
of mankind. Nor does Homer scruple to call this favourite divinity
the first of the gods; an expression, however, which he employs with
latitude, and which must not be too rigidly construed[227]:
[226] Od. vi. 163.
[227] Il. xix. 413.
θεῶν ὤριστος, ὃν ἠΰκομος τέκε Λητώ.
I have already observed that the abstract words θεὸς and θεοὶ, which
are generally used by Homer to convey the idea of Providence, are when
so used commonly referable in the main to Jupiter, so far as we can
connect them at all with any of the Olympian personages. Sometimes,
however, they are determined by the sense of the passage to signify
Minerva or Apollo; but I think they never, when they relate to
Providential action, mean any other divinity.
It is by no means from any merely national, or even personal
predilection, but it is mainly from the lofty standing ground of a
Providence, that Minerva follows Ulysses: it is in the same general
character that Apollo is made a party in the final crisis of the
Odyssey through the introduction of his festival, and of the Bow.
In the Olympian assemblage, it is Minerva who really represents the
element of mind and its inborn supremacy over all other forces. She
proceeds upon principles, when Juno acts upon partial attachments; and
her superiority is so great, as to be wholly inexplicable under the
hypothesis which would represent the characters and attributes of all
alike as the mere products of invention.
~_Intimacy of Minerva’s personal relations._~
The offices of both these deities, but especially of Minerva, in
relation to the guidance of human conduct, are much higher than those
of any other deity in their kind. Not only do they both act in the
largest and most free manner on the human mind by inward influence,
but, if there is any trace in the Homeric system of what may be called
spiritual religion, of the tender and intimate relations which have
from the first subsisted between the children of faith and their Father
in Heaven, it is in Minerva that we must seek for it. It is indeed but
a faint resemblance that we shall find; the very application of the
word may be disputable. Yet it is something, which appears to show that
it was at any rate not of heathen origin: that it is a flower, sickly,
because transplanted from a better to a less kindly soil; a shadow,
or a wreck of something greater and better, and not a scheme built up
from beneath. The mode in which Minerva cares for Ulysses deserves at
least thus much of honour. It is a contact so close and intimate, a
care so sleepless and so tender, embracing alike the course of events
without, and the state of mind within; so affectionate in relation to
the person, yet so entirely without the least partiality or caprice; so
personal, yet so far from what Holy Scripture calls, with the highest
perfection of phrase, respect of persons; so deeply founded on general
laws of truth and justice, even if some deviations can be detected,
by a jealous eye, in the choice of subsidiary means; that, as it is
without any thing like a parallel in the ruder and meaner relations
of men with the deities of invention, so it makes its own audible and
legitimate claim to a higher origin. The principle at least of inward
and sustained intercourse between the Deity and the soul of man is
perceptibly represented to us by the literature of Greece in a case
like this, and, with the very partial and qualified exception of the
δαίμων of Socrates, in such a case only.
Minerva, again, can affect the mind with a friendly bewilderment;
as when she paralyses for a moment the understanding of the nurse
Euryclea, that she may not give an answer, which would be inconvenient,
to the question of Penelope[228]. To her Ulysses looks for the right
rearing of his son: and she assures him he need have no anxiety[229].
Even as respects the human person, no powers so large are any where
ascribed by Homer to any other deity as those which she exercises,
especially in the transformation and re-transformation of Ulysses.
[228] Od. xviii. 479.
[229] Od. xiii. 359.
~_Form of their relation to their attributes._~
3. Another very remarkable distinction, or rather cluster of
distinctions, attaching to these deities, relates to the manner in
which they bear their attributes. Speaking generally, the deities of
pure invention are the mere impersonations of a passion, or of an
elemental or bodily power, or of a mental gift. They are, in the order
of ideas, posterior and ministerial to their own attributes: the mere
vehicles for carrying them into movement and action, so that in truth
the persons are the embellishments and the attributes of qualities,
and not the qualities attributes of persons. To state it at the very
highest, the inventive divinity is the steward of his own gifts.
Now the traditive god is their proprietor and master. In the case of
the two great traditive deities, Apollo and Minerva, the relation
between function and person exactly reverses that which has been
described. Here the attribute is something attached to, something in
the possession and under the command of, the person; as much so, as
the unerring bow of Apollo, or the invincible spear of Minerva. It is
not Apollo, but it is the bow of Apollo, which stands in the relation
to his office as minister of death, that Vulcan himself bears to the
element of fire and to the metallic art, or Mars to the passions and
the strong hand of war. If we except the single case of the choice
garment of Juno[230], Minerva neither spins nor hammers. Mars always
appears fighting, but Apollo does not always appear prophesying or
playing the lyre, a function which he seems to perform only in the
company of the gods.
[230] Il. xiv. 178.
The difference is strongly marked in Homer, by the fact that the
invented divinities of the second order are identified in common
language with their offices. Ares is a synonym for a spear: fire
is φλὸξ Ἡφαίστοιο, or even simply Ἥφαιστος[231]: the name Ἠέλιος is
absolutely identified with a great natural object: corn is Δημήτερος
ἀκτή. But no analogous phrase is applicable to Apollo or to Minerva in
Homer. As, with the lapse of time, the will and fancy of man did its
work more fully upon the idea of deity, the names of other divinities
fell within the circle; and the remembrance of tradition having become
fainter and fainter, in the time of Horace the word Minerva could be
used for wit (Hor. Sat. II. ii. 3);
[231] Il. ii. 426.
Rusticus, abnormis sapiens, crassâque Minervâ.
But, as is often the case, in this change, external as it is, and
apparently slight, we have an outward sign of the profound alterative
process, which in Homer’s time had largely begun, and which continued
until the incrustation and absorption of religious truth became entire.
~_Their capacity to attract new ones._~
4. In conformity with the last-named indication is another, which I
have next to notice. The traditive god is capable of receiving new
functions; apparently because he is not the servant of the old ones:
but the deity who is a mere personal expression for a certain idea,
can, as a general rule, have no duty or prerogative beyond its bounds,
more than can a counter beyond the thing which it has been chosen to
signify. Hence Vulcan, Venus, Mars, Ceres, Bacchus, even Mercury,
the god of gain, continue, after as well as in Homer, to be devoted
to and identified with their several functions. Only in the case of
Mercury, as traffic involves motion from place to place, and the
acts of both honest and dishonest persuasion, he is in Homer, and he
afterwards continues to be more generally, a messenger and conductor,
a negotiator and a rhetorician, as well as a thief. But even Juno,
elevated as she is in station, yet, having been called into Olympus as
a vehicle for conveying the idea of maternity, continues to be charged
with that office, and is not specifically invested with any other.
Such attributions as are implied in the Venus Victrix, or other like
dedications, are indeed at variance with these propositions; but they
belong to a later and greatly altered state of the old mythology, when
it had reached to an immeasurable distance from its source, and had
lost the traces even of its own early features. But in the cases of
Apollo and Minerva, we perceive that the traditive deity was not thus
‘cabined, cribbed, confined.’
We find the Apollo of Homer the deity of the following particular
functions:
1. The lyre and poetry, Il. i. 603.
2. Divination, Il. i. 72.
3. Healing, Il. xvi. 517.
4. The bow, Il. i. 49. ii. 827.
5. Death, either gentle and painless, or not referable to any known
cause, such as ordinary disease or wounds.
Besides all this, he may be called, with Pallas, the god of Help in
general; and, even within the range of single attributes, he shews an
immense diversity. He was the god at once of the severe and simple
music of the Dorians[232], and of the rabid ecstasy of the Pythoness.
[232] Müller’s Dorians, II. viii. 12.
It is hardly possible that he could have begun his career in the Greek
mythology with such an assemblage of functions, not only not united
by any obvious tie, but some of them in apparent contradiction with
one another. Probably the constitutive ideas of the tradition he
represented were fitted out by a gradual process with this outward
apparatus of prerogatives; each of which, when taken singly, was in
harmony with them. Nor was the operation completed even in the time of
Homer, as we see from the curious case of the Sun.
We may, I apprehend, view that case in either of two aspects. We
may consider what was historically the progress of the traditions
concerning the Sun from their source to their maturity, when they were
incorporated into the comprehensive deity of Apollo: or we may examine
the moral affinities, which determined the direction and conclusion of
their career.
Historically, I presume that the Homeric tradition of the Sun
represents a separate and recent importation from a foreign country,
which had not as yet been fitted into a place of its own in the Greek
mythology. It therefore wanders as it were unappropriated, and hangs in
temporary suspense.
The Apollo had already undergone a formative process, and the ornaments
of fancy had been embroidered upon the tissue of an ancient tradition.
After Homer’s time, the function of animating and governing the Sun was
added to the multifarious offices of that deity. As respects himself,
this is a proof that his receptiveness was not yet exhausted; that he
was independent and disengaged. As respects the Ἠέλιος, this result
shows that there was some sympathy or moral gravitation, which led to
the absorption of this Homeric divinity in Apollo.
The oscillating condition of that conception in the Homeric poems, and
the indeterminate state of its affinities, will be considered in the
next Section.
~_Wide range of their functions._~
In Homer the deities of invention are, without an exception, limited
either to a single function (and this in the great majority of cases),
or to functions which are connected, as in the case of Mercury,
with one common and central idea, itself such as may belong to a
mythological formation. But there is no such idea on which, as on a
string, we can possibly hang all the various attributes of Homer’s
Apollo: and the case becomes stronger when we find that it is this very
god, already (if he be mythological only) quite overstocked, who shows
a yet further capacity to absorb into his own person new powers of
divinity, which in Homer’s time as yet stood apart from him.
As respects mere multiplicity and diversity of function, the case of
Minerva is somewhat less marked than that of Apollo: for it may be
practicable to associate together all her offices as they are described
in Homer, around one grand combination of Power with Wisdom, as their
central point. But even then, when we consider that she supremely
administers political society, personal conduct, war, and skilled
industry, in fact that the whole intelligence of the world, individual
and collective, appears to be under her paramount guidance, besides all
the power she exercises over inanimate and animate nature, and even in
the innermost sphere of personal action, we perceive that, apart from
the elevation and glory of her position, the range of her gifts goes
to an extent which, simply as such, could never have been assigned by
mere human invention to any deity but the supreme one. The idea of
the goddess of Wisdom, conceived as largely as it must be in order to
cover all Minerva’s Homeric attributes, leaves no room for the other
conceptions necessary to fit out a mythology.
For what a range do these attributes include!
Minerva is in heaven armed with such power that to none of the gods,
except Jove only, and to him scarcely, does she succumb. She is supreme
in war, supreme in policy, supreme in art; supreme in prudence and
the practical business of life; supreme in manual skill; supreme in
or over all contests of force: while at the same time the lower and
executory parts of each of these functions, where she drops them, are
taken up, as we have seen, by deities far inferior to her, though still
of the first or Olympian order. Even physical strength, if combined
with skill, is under her supreme management: for it is through her aid
that Tydeus wins in the games at Thebes[233], as well as Mecisteus on
another occasion, and that Nestor conquers Ereuthalion[234].
[233] Il. iv. 327. xxiii. 678.
[234] Il. vii. 154.
When Jupiter admonishes Venus to abandon attempts at war, he adds[235],
[235] Il. v. 430. Compare xvii. 398. xiii. 127. Od. xiv. 216.
ταῦτα δ’ Ἄρηϊ θοῷ καὶ Ἀθήνῃ πάντα μελήσει.
There can be no doubt which of these two war-divinities was superior
and which subordinate; the exploit of Diomed alone would avail to
settle the question: but more direct evidence is to be found in the
singular passage which describes Minerva as invested with the charge
of chastising Mars, and in the mode after which, in the Fifteenth and
Twenty-first Books, she herself recognises and fulfils the obligation
of her office. (Il. v. 766. xv. 123-42).
Again, her name is connected with that of Vulcan as to his own
special and sole art of working in metals. Twice in the Odyssey the
silversmith is introduced in a simile, and he is called a man educated
by these two[236];
[236] Od. vi. 233. xxiii. 159.
ἴδρις, ὃν Ἥφαιστος δέδαεν καὶ Παλλὰς Ἀθήνη
τέχνην παντοίην.
Only in the arts of tissue and embroidery she seems to have no
coadjutor. This probably is on account of their purely feminine
character. But generally all the principles and foundations of art are
hers. Thus she even teaches mensuration to the carpenter[237]:
[237] Il. xv. 412.
ὅς ῥά τε πάσης
εὖ εἰδῇ σοφίης, ὑποθημοσύνῃσιν Ἀθήνης.
As some of her distinctive epithets, like ἐρυσίπτολις, φθισίμβροτος
refer especially to war, so she has others which look either mainly
or exclusively to the supreme care of political order. Such are
ἀλαλκομένηις, λαόσσοος, and ἀγελείη (collector or leader of a people).
It is the executory duty that is intrusted to Themis. She is the
messenger, who summons the deities, and she both collects and dissolves
human assemblies[238]: thus discharging a subordinate function, where
Pallas is the presiding goddess. It is probably for this reason that,
notwithstanding the strong political spirit of Homer, we find Themis
act so secondary a part in Olympus.
[238] Od. ii. 69.
~_The central Wisdom of Minerva._~
Thus Wisdom is the centre, and every thing that flows forth from it is
hers, whether in peace or war.
Over and above all these offices, which seem to have a connection with
her ordinary attributes, she appears to share in the most recondite and
peculiar functions of other deities. She enters into Apollo’s knowledge
of the future; for in the Ithacan cave she foretells to Ulysses all
that he has yet to suffer. Her power even descends, as we have seen,
into the nether world. It seems as if this power in the Shades were
the portion falling to her out of the supremacy over death, assigned
by tradition to the Messiah. And she has also, if not the jurisdiction
over death lodged peculiarly in her hands, a faculty yet more wonderful
ascribed to her, that of staying its approach; for Euryclea bids
Penelope in her distress pray to Minerva, who can deliver Telemachus
from death; that is, can raise him up again:
ἡ γάρ κέν μιν ἔπειτα καὶ ἐκ θανάτοιο σαώσαι[239].
[239] Od. iv. 750-3.
In truth it seems to be the distinctive character of Minerva in the
Homeric theo-mythology, that though she is not the sole deity, yet
the very flower of the whole office and work of deity is every where
reserved for her: and though she is not directly invested with the
external form and body of every gift, yet she has the heart, essence
and virtue of them all; insomuch that, practically, no limit can be
placed upon her powers and functions. The whole conception is therefore
fundamentally at variance with the measured and finite organization of
an invented system of religion, and by its own incongruities with that
system it proves itself to be an exotic element.
By another path, we arrive at the very same conclusion for Apollo. He
too has much of that inwardness and universality of function, which
belongs to Minerva, as well as a diversity of offices peculiarly his
own. But the argument here admits of being presented in a different
form. All his peculiar gifts in Homer are referable to one of three
characters, those of Prophet, Deliverer, and Avenger, or Judge. In the
first, gifted with all knowledge, he is also the God of Song, which was
its vehicle. In the second, he is the hearer of prayer, the healer of
wounds, the champion of Heaven itself against rebellion. In the third,
he punishes the guilty, and especially administers the one grand penal
law of death. All this he does as the organ of one, with whom in will
he is perfectly united. The tangled thread runs out without knot or
break, when we unravel it by primitive Messianic tradition; because it
was fundamental in that tradition, that the person who was the subject
of it, should exhibit this many sided union of character and function.
But could Deliverance and Destruction, there combined, any where else
have been read otherwise than as contradictory to one another, and
incapable of being united in the same being?
~_The conflicting Characters of Apollo._~