question which arises out of the faint notices of Δημήτηρ in Homer.
We ought, perhaps, to consider her as the Pelasgian, and Juno as
the Hellenic, reproduction of those eastern traditions, which gave
mythological impersonation to the female principle. They naturally
centred upon the Earth as the recipient of productive influences, and
as the great nurse and feeder of man, the τραφερὴ, the πολύφορβος,
the πουλυβότειρα, the ζείδωρος. The Pelasgic Demeter may be a very
fair and close copy, in all probability, from these traditions as
they existed in Egypt. But when the same materials were presented to
the Hellenic mind, they could not satisfy its active and idealizing
fancy. For the Hellene, man was greater than nature: so that the
great office of Jupiter as king of air was subordinated to his yet
more august function as the supreme superintendent and controller of
human affairs. As the political idea thus predominated in the chief of
the Hellenic Immortals, it was requisite that a similar predominance
of the intellectual and organizing element should be obtained in
his divine Mate. Traditions, however, that had their root in earth,
were of necessity wholly intractable for such a purpose, although
the lighter and more spirit-like fabric of air was less unsuited to
it. Earth was heavy, inactive; and was the prime representative of
matter as opposed to mind. Hence the personality of the tradition was
severed by the Greeks from its material groundwork; and Earth, the
Nature-power, remained beneath, while the figure of Juno, relieved
from this incumbrance, and invested with majestic and vigorous
attributes, soared aloft and took the place of eldest sister and first
wife of Jupiter. Hence doubtless it is that the Γαῖα of Homer is so
inanimate and weakling: because she was but the exhausted residue of
a tradition, from which the higher life had escaped. But the Ἥρη and
the Γαῖα, according to this hypothesis, made up between them a full
representation of the traditions from the East, relating to the chief
female form of deity. This being so, no legitimate place was left in
the mythology of Homer for Ceres; as she had nothing to represent but
the same tradition in a form far less adapted to the Hellenic mind, a
form indeed which it had probably repudiated. Hence while the Olympian
system was young, and Juno not wholly severed from her Oriental origin,
the Γῆ μήτηρ could not but remain a mere outlier. But as the poetry of
the system was developed, and its philosophy submerged and forgotten,
this difficulty diminished, and the later mythology found an ample
space for Ceres as a great elemental power.
I may, then, observe, in conclusion, that the whole of this hypothesis
is eminently agreeable to the Homeric representation of Ceres in
its four main branches, (1) as Pelasgian, (2) as subject to lustful
passion, (3) as a secondary wife of Jupiter, and (4) as immediately
associated with productive Earth.
_Persephone._
~_The Persephone of Homer._~
Although the Persephone of Homer is rarely brought before us, and
our information respecting her is therefore slight, there seems to
be sufficient ground for asserting that she is not the mere female
reflection of Hades or Aidoneus.
It is only for those deities from whom other deities are drawn by
descent, that we find in Homer a regular conjugal connection provided.
Thus Neptune, as we have seen, cannot be said to have a wife in Homer.
Amphitrite appears in the poems with a faint and indeed altogether
doubtful personality, though she afterwards grew into his spouse.
Now Neptune was a deity much more in view than Aides: and it is not
likely that we should have found Persephone more fully developed than
Amphitrite, had she not represented some older and more independent
tradition.
Again, in cases where the female deity is the mere reflection of
the male, we do not find her invested with a share in his dominion,
although, as in the case of Juno, she may occasionally and
derivatively exercise some of the prerogatives, which in him have a
higher and more unquestionable activity. Thus Tartarus is the region
of Κρόνος, not of Ῥέα; air is the realm of Jupiter, not of Jupiter and
Juno. But Persephone appears by the side of Hades as a substantive
person; she is invoked with him by Althea to slay Meleager, in the
Legend of the Ninth Iliad[405]: and the region in which she dwells is
not less hers than his[406],
[405] Il. ix. 569.
[406] Od. x. 491.
εἰς Ἀΐδαο δόμους καὶ ἐπαινῆς Περσεφονείης.
Indeed her personality is the better developed of the two: for
no personal act is ascribed in the poems to Aides, except the
indeterminate one of trembling, at the battle of the gods, lest the
crust of earth should be broken through: and the name given him in the
Iliad of Ζεὺς καταχθόνιος, subterranean Jupiter, may possibly suggest
that he was sometimes viewed as hardly more than a form or function of
the highest god: whereas, in the under-world of the Eleventh Odyssey,
all the active functions of sovereignty are placed in her hands. It
is she who gathers the women-shades for Ulysses: and it is she who
disperses them when they have been passed in review. It is by her that
Ulysses apprehends the head of Gorgo may be sent forth to drive him
off, should he linger too long; it is by her that he apprehends he may
have been deluded with an εἴδωλον or shade, instead of a substance;
most of all, it is she who endows Tiresias, alone among the dead, with
the character of the Seer[407]. In fine, the whole of the active duties
of the nether kingdom appear to be in her hands.
[407] Od. xi. 226, 385, 639, 213, and x. 494.
That she was generally worshipped by the Hellenic tribes we must infer
from the cases mentioned in the Ninth Iliad, the one in Ætolia, the
other farther North[408]; as well as from her office in regard to the
thoroughly national region of the Shades.
[408] Il. x. 457, 569.
~_Her marked and substantive character._~
She has her own strongly marked set of epithets. Of these, one is ἁγνὴ,
the severely pure; for with Homer ἁγνὸς is exclusively applicable to
divine womanhood, and is given only to Diana and Persephone: then she
is ἀγαυὴ, the dread: and lastly, she is ἐπαινὴ, an epithet appropriated
to her exclusively, which appears to be Homer’s favourite method for
sharply marking out individuality of character. Buttmann has also well
observed, that she has this epithet only when mentioned along with
Hades, that is, when shown very strictly in her official character; and
that ἀγαυὴ is used when she appears alone. Upon this he observes; ‘this
way of joining the name of Proserpine with that of Pluto was an old
epic formula, handed down even to Homer and our oldest Greek poets from
still earlier times, and which they used unchanged[409].’ He would read
ἐπ’ αἰνὴ, instead of ἐπαινὴ, but this neither affects the sense (awful,
terrible) nor the force of the exclusive appropriation.
[409] Buttmann’s Lexil. p. 62. _in voc._ αἶνος.
There is another sign confirmatory of the belief that the origin of
this mythical person must be sought, not in the necessity of finding a
queen for Aidoneus, but in an anterior and distinct tradition. Namely,
this; that, though she is a daughter of Jupiter[410], she is not
provided with a mother. Thus she seems as if she were older than the
Olympian œconomy. Venus, Mars, Vulcan, Mercury, are all equipped with a
full parentage. The later tradition, which made Persephone the daughter
of Ceres, has no other support from Homer than this, that we are left
to suppose that Ceres had some offspring by Jupiter, while none is
named[411].
[410] Od. xi. 217.
[411] Il. xiv. 326.
The chain of presumptions appears to me to become complete, when we
take into view two other pieces of evidence supplied by the poems.
In the far East[412], beyond the couch of the morning Sun, some
distance up the stream of the great river Ocean, but to the south of
the point where it is entered, and at a spot where the shore narrows
very much--immediately, in short, before the point of descent--are the
groves of Persephone. According to the general rules of interpretation
applicable to Homer, this appears to convey to us that the seat of her
worship was in the far Southern East, and that her office, as there
understood, was that of the goddess or queen of Death. And if she is
indeed the reflection, in the mirror of the lower world, of any other
known deity, then, both from this great office, and from the peculiar
epithet ἁγνὴ, it is most likely to be of Diana, with whom, in the later
mythology, she was identified; and, again, through Diana, of Apollo,
from whom the light of Diana herself was derived. Or, in other words,
she may be for the lower world that reflection of Apollo, which the
Homeric Diana was for this earth: and it is worth observation, that the
gift of second sight, which she allows to Tiresias, and which therefore
is at her disposal beneath ground[413], is the peculiar and exclusive
property of Apollo.
[412] Od. x. 506 _seqq._ xi. 1 _seqq._ xii. _1 seqq._
[413] Od. x. 492-5.
Let us now lastly consider, what light the etymology of her remarkable
name may afford us. Its meaning appears to be, either destruction by
slaughter; from two roots, one that represented in ἔπερσα, from the
verb πέρθω, and the other φόνη; or else, that of the destruction or
slaughter of Persians. In the former view, the evidence leaves us
where we were, or brings us a point nearer to Diana, whose function
was not that of all death whatever, but of such death as might be
called slaughter, because not due to disease, but brought about at the
moment by a sudden process, though often the mildest of all ways of
dying[414]. But the other etymology may be worth some further attention.
[414] Od. xv. 409.
~_Her connection with the East_.~
Besides that cluster of traditions, relating to remote places, which
the Greeks derived from the Phœnician navigators, and which cannot but
have included some eastward wanderings in the Black Sea, as well as
westward experience in the Mediterranean, they must in all likelihood
have had oriental traditions properly their own, brought by their
Hellic forefathers with them from their cradle. We have already seen
that that cradle was probably Persia; and we have found traces of the
connection in the name of the great pre-Achæan hero, Perseus, and in
the continuing use of that name in the high Achæan family of Nestor,
as well as at much later historic dates. Another link, connecting the
Homeric traditions with this name, and both with the East, is found in
the name of Perse, who was the mother of Circe, an Eastern goddess; and
who was the daughter of Ocean, and the wife of the Sun[415].
[415] Od. x. 135-9.
We must take these circumstances into view along with the force of
the name Persephone, and with the evidence we have already had of the
antiquity of the traditions relating to her. To this we have to add
the absence of any Homeric evidence connecting her with any other
local source. There is no sign of any institution, that belonged to
her worship, except in those groves planted in the far East; and no
sign of any other particular locality marked as her peculiar abode,
which we have found to be a mark of such invented deities generally as
had a well developed personality. There is no note of her whatever in
Troas; and nothing to connect her with Egypt, or with the Pelasgians in
any quarter. It is not likely that she came in with the Phœnicians, as
she would then have had signs of a recent origin, and would not have
attained to so august and mysterious a position as she actually holds.
The two distinct notices of her worship are both in the Homeric Hellas;
not in Southern Greece, nor in the islands.
It seems, therefore, on every ground reasonable to suppose, that the
tradition of Proserpine was an original Hellic tradition brought into
the country from the East, probably by the Hellic tribes, and from
among their Persian forefathers; and that the name of the deity, as we
find it in Homer, affords a new indication of the extraction of the
race.
Accordingly, the unusually substantive aspect of her position in
the nether world, which makes her relation to Aidoneus so different
from that of the other mythological wives, or feminines, to their
respective husbands, is such, that it seems most reasonable, instead of
deriving her from him, as Juno was derived from Jupiter, or Tethys from
Ocean, to consider them as representing the union of two independent
impersonations, associated together primarily by their common subject
matter. For there does not seem to be any thing improbable in the
hypothesis, that Persephone may, in the belief of some country and age,
have served alone for the ruler of the region of the dead. Just as so
many subordinate ministers of Doom, the Fates, the Erinues, and the
Harpies, assumed the female form in the process of impersonation, so
it may have been with their sovereign. And if we are to look farther
for the metaphysical groundwork of such a tradition, we may perhaps
find it as follows. There is a relation of analogy between each
function and its converse: and as in the pure mythology, all that gave
life was feminine, so conversely, all that represented the destroying
agency might assume a similar form.
~_Her relation to Olympus_.~
In her case, as in that of one or two others, it is difficult to
discover whether Homer meant a particular deity to be included, or not,
among the Olympian gods of the ordinary or smaller assembly. There is
no indication in the poems, which directly connects Persephone with
Olympus; and that celestial palace may seem to belong to the government
of the living world, and to be almost incapable of relations with that
of the departed. Nor is she connected specially with the Olympian
system, like Aidoneus, by the position which birth confers. The ἄλσος,
and the worship paid her there, can hardly belong to the departed
spirits on their way to their abode, and more probably indicate an
ancient tradition deriving her worship from the far East. On the other
hand, her dignity and majesty in the poems are unquestionable, and
indeed superior to those of any Olympian deity, after some five or six.
I do not find materials for a confident judgment on the Homeric view
of her place in his theo-mythology, with reference to this particular
point of connection with Olympus.
Founding conjecture upon the facts before us, I venture, however, on
a further extension of these hypotheses with respect to Persephone.
We perceive in Persephone and Diana that kind of likeness which may
be due to their common origin; if, as we suppose, both were images of
Apollo. But it is not likely that two such images should have been
formed by the same race for itself. Can we then, probably refer Diana
and Persephone to different sources ethnically?
It is plain that Diana was worshipped in Troy and Greece. Persephone,
so far as we know, in Greece only. This would agree with the
supposition that Diana was originally Pelasgian, Persephone only Hellic.
Again, Diana was an earthly, Persephone a subterraneous reflection of
Apollo. Now the Hellic tribes were lively believers in a future state:
as we see from the communion of Achilles with the soul of Patroclus,
and from many places in the Odyssey. But we have nowhere in Homer the
slightest allusion among the Trojans to the belief in a future state,
beyond the mere formula of entering the region of Aïdes. Neither the
succinct account of the funeral rites of Hector, nor any one of the
three addresses over his remains, contain the slightest allusion to his
separate existence as a spirit. There is, indeed, mention of wine used
to extinguish the flame of the funeral pile, but none of invocation
along with it, as there is in the case of Patroclus[416]. And as we
have no less than an hundred lines spoken over or otherwise bestowed
upon the dead Hector, the omission is singular. It becomes still more
significant, when we recollect that the Greeks, and their goddess
Juno, invoke the deities of the under-world, and the powers connected
with a future state, in their solemn oaths and imprecations[417]; but
when Hector swears to Dolon, (our only example of a Trojan oath,) he
adjures Jupiter alone[418]. Now it may be that the religion of Troy
did not include so distinct a reference to a future state, as that of
Greece, and that the Trojans knew nothing of Persephone, or of any
deity holding her place. This hypothesis would at once accord with
the features of the Homeric portrait, and with the striking absence
among the Trojans of all pointed reference to a future life, or to
the disembodied spirit. Nor need we consider it to be at all shaken
by slight and formal allusions, or by the words in which Homer on his
own part dismisses to Hades the spirit of the slain Hector[419]. The
hypothesis which the circumstances appear to suggest is, not that
the Trojans disbelieved a future existence, but that they neither
felt keenly respecting it, nor gave a mythological development to the
doctrine.
[416] Il. xxiii. 218-21.
[417] Il. iii. 278. ix. 454. 569. xiv. 271-4. xv. 36-40. xix. 258-60.
[418] Il. x. 329.
[419] Il. xvi. 856, 7, and xxii. 362, 3.
_Mars._
~_The Mars of Homer._~
Even in Homer, Mars is externally the most imposing figure among the
masculine deities of pure invention. The greatest of war-bards could
not but find him a fine subject for poetical amplification. But in the
Roman period he had far outgrown the limits of his Homeric position.
With the lapse of time, the forces and passions, which gave to this
impersonation its hold upon human nature, were sure to prevail in a
considerable degree over the finer elements from which Apollo was
moulded. It requires an effort of mind to liberate ourselves from the
associations of the later mythology, and contract our vision for the
purpose of estimating the Mars of Homer as he really is.
Notwithstanding his stature, beauty, hand and voice, which constitute,
taken together, a proud appearance, it seems as if Mars had stood lower
in the mind of Homer than any Olympian deity who takes part in the
Trojan war, except Venus only.
The Odyssey never once brings Mars before us, even by way of allusion,
except in the licentious lay of Demodocus; and the spirit of that
lay certainly seems to aim at making him ridiculous, especially in
the manner of his release and withdrawal. In the Iliad his part is,
of course, more considerable; but on no occasion whatever does Homer
apparently seek to set him off, or give him a commanding attitude in
comparison with other deities.
We have nowhere any account of any act of reverence or worship done to
him, either in or out of Greece. For instance, he is never, even in the
contingencies of war, the object of prayer. He never shows command over
the powers of nature, or the mind of man; which he nowhere attempts
to influence by suggestion. It is said, indeed, that he entered into
Hector, as that warrior was putting on the armour of Achilles;
δῦ δέ μιν Ἄρης
δεινὸς Ἐνυάλιος[420].
[420] Il. xvii. 210.
But no words could more conclusively fix his place in the Homeric
system as the mere impersonation of a Passion. For with Homer no
greater deity, indeed, no other of the Olympian gods, is ever said to
enter into the mind of a mortal man. In the Fifth Book he stirs up
the warlike passion of Menelaus; having, like Venus, a limited hold
upon a particular propensity. His climax of honour in this department
is his giving θάρσος to the Pseudo-Ulysses; but this he does only in
conjunction with Minerva[421].
[421] Od. xiv. 216.
~_His limited worship and attributes._~
His possession of the attributes of deity appears to have been most
limited. The use of the word Ἄρης not only for the passion of war, but
even for its weapons, shows us that the impersonation was in this case
as yet very partially disengaged from the metaphysical ideas, or the
material objects, in which it took its rise.
His function as god of war was confined to the merely material side
of war, and had nothing to do with that aspect, in which war enlists
and exhausts all the higher faculties of the human mind; so much so,
indeed, that to be a great general is almost necessary in order to
enter the first rank of greatness at all. Even of war in the lower
sense he had not, as a god, exclusive possession, but he administered
his office in partnership with a superior, Minerva. Besides being every
thing else that she was, she presided, along with him, over war. On
the shield of Achilles, he and Minerva lead the opposing hosts[422].
Over the body of Patroclus the struggle was one of which, says the
Poet, neither Mars nor Minerva could think lightly[423]. Achilles, when
pursuing the Trojans, calls for assistance; for, says he, neither Mars
nor Minerva could undertake to dispose of such a multitude[424]. Mars
and Minerva, says Jupiter, will take charge of the concerns of war[425].
[422] Il. xviii. 516.
[423] xvii. 398.
[424] xx. 359.
[425] Il. v. 430.
But that in this partnership he was an inferior, and not an equal, is
clear from the manner in which he is habitually handled by Minerva.
She wounds him through the spear of Diomed, when, unless saved by
flight, he himself apprehends he might have perished[426]. In the
Theomachy, she twice over strikes him powerless to the ground. In the
Olympian meeting of the Fifteenth Book, when his intended visit to
the battlefield menaces the gods with trouble from the displeasure of
Jupiter, Minerva strips his armour off his back, scolds him sharply,
and replaces him in his seat[427]. And she is pointed out by Jupiter
as the person, whose habitual duty it was to keep him in order by the
severest means[428];
[426] Il. v. 885-7.
[427] Il. xv. 110-42.
[428] Il. v. 766.
ἥ ἑ μάλιστ’ εἴωθε κακῇς ὀδύνῃσι πελάζειν.
In the Fifth Iliad, he stirs up the Trojans, and envelopes the fight
in darkness: but here he is acting under ἐφετμαὶ, or injunctions from
Apollo[429], who thus appears, like Minerva, in the light of a superior
to him, even in his own department.
[429] Il. v. 508.
We learn, again, that he was overcome and imprisoned by the youths Otus
and Ephialtes, whom Apollo subdued: he was in bondage for thirteen
months, and would have perished, had not Mercury released him[430].
[430] Il. v. 385.
He is able to assume the human figure, and, as we have seen, to bring
darkness over contending hosts: but, when in Olympus, he remains
ignorant[431] of the death of his son Ascalaphus, until he receives
the information from Juno; as it was only from his Nymphs that the
Sun learned the slaughter of his oxen. Nay, Minerva even puts on
a particular helmet, in order that it may secure her from being
recognised by Mars when within his view[432].
[431] Il. xiii. 521. xv. 110 _et seqq._
[432] Il. v. 845.
Mars in the Olympian court bears some resemblance to Ajax among the
Grecian heroes. But the intellectual element, which appears to be
simply blunt in Ajax, in Mars seems to be wholly wanting: so that he
represents an animal principle in its crudest form: and is not so much
an Ajax, as a Caliban.
We are not told that he is greedy of sacrifices, for no _cultus_ is
assigned to him: but he is represented as greedy of blood, and as
capable of being satiated with it[433].
[433] Il. v. 289.
Except with Venus for his mere person, he has no favour with any other
Olympian deities[434]. Juno describes him as lawless and as a fool: and
Jupiter tells him that, were he the son of any other deity but himself,
he would long ago have been ejected from his place in heaven[435].
[434] Od. viii. 310.
[435] v. 831, 97.
On one occasion, his name is associated with those of Agamemnon
and Neptune: but the due relation between them is still preserved.
Agamemnon is compared with Jupiter as to his face and head; with
Neptune as to his chest; and with Mars as to his waist. The eyes of
Hector on the field of battle were like the Gorgon, and like Mars[436].
[436] Il. ii. 478, and viii. 349.
From the repeated allusions to contingencies in which he would have
perished, there seems to be something more or less equivocal even about
his title to immortality. If more, he is also much less, than man. He
is perhaps the least human of the Olympian family; and is a compound
between deity and brute.
The exhibitions of Mars, as wounded by Diomed for the Iliad, and in
the lay of Demodocus for the Odyssey, seem to imply that this deity
could not, in the time of Homer, have become an object of general or
established religious worship in Greece.
~_Mars as yet scarcely Greek._~
He is a local deity, and his abode is in Thrace. From thence he issues
forth with his mythical son Terror to make war upon the Ephyri: a
race whose name has a strong Greek savour, and whose hostile relation
to Mars thus exhibited, tends, with other evidence, to place him in
the category of foreign deities, not yet naturalized in the country,
though made available by Homer for his Olympian Court. After the
detection in the palace of Vulcan, it is to Thrace that he again
repairs.
We are not to consider this paramount Thracian relation as absolutely
separating him from Greece: Thracians, like Pelasgi, had links with
both parties in the war, though the stronger ones are apparently those
which connect them with Troy.
He has among the deities the nickname of ἀλλοπρόσαλλος, or turncoat,
because of his vacillation between the two parties. This singular
epithet, applied to the Thracian god, conveys the idea that Homer,
knowing of the sympathies of the name with both sides, was puzzled as
to placing him decisively on either. Now the Thracians of Homer were
ἀκρόκομοι[437], while the Achæans were καρηκομόωντες. And it is worth
notice that the Germans of Tacitus, among whom we find marked signs of
resemblance to the Hellenic tribes, wore in general flowing hair, but
the Suevi, one particular tribe of them, on the contrary, gathered it
into a knot[438].
[437] Il. iv. 533.
[438] Tac. Germ. c. 38. Il. xx. 413.
Mars, however, incurs the particular wrath of Juno by abandoning the
party of the Greeks, and siding with the Trojans. But in the Fifteenth
Book, where Juno acquaints him of the death of his son, who had fought
in the Greek ranks, she evidently does it in the expectation that grief
and resentment will once more make him a foe to the Trojans. And her
calculation is well founded: for he is setting out with that intention,
when Minerva follows, and roughly brings him back.