CHAPTER I.

Produced by Tapio Riikonen and David Widger

ATHENS: ITS RISE AND FALL

by Edward Bulwer Lytton

DEDICATION.

TO HENRY FYNES CLINTON, ESQ., etc., etc. AUTHOR OF “THE FASTI

HELLENICI.”

My Dear Sir,

I am not more sensible of the distinction conferred upon me when you

allowed me to inscribe this history with your name, than pleased with

an occasion to express my gratitude for the assistance I have derived

throughout the progress of my labours from that memorable work, in

which you have upheld the celebrity of English learning, and afforded

so imperishable a contribution to our knowledge of the Ancient World.

To all who in history look for the true connexion between causes and

effects, chronology is not a dry and mechanical compilation of barren

dates, but the explanation of events and the philosophy of facts. And

the publication of the Fasti Hellenici has thrown upon those times, in

which an accurate chronological system can best repair what is

deficient, and best elucidate what is obscure in the scanty

authorities bequeathed to us, all the light of a profound and

disciplined intellect, applying the acutest comprehension to the

richest erudition, and arriving at its conclusions according to the

true spirit of inductive reasoning, which proportions the completeness

of the final discovery to the caution of the intermediate process. My

obligations to that learning and to those gifts which you have

exhibited to the world are shared by all who, in England or in Europe,

study the history or cultivate the literature of Greece. But, in the

patient kindness with which you have permitted me to consult you

during the tedious passage of these volumes through the press--in the

careful advice--in the generous encouragement--which have so often

smoothed the path and animated the progress--there are obligations

peculiar to myself; and in those obligations there is so much that

honours me, that, were I to enlarge upon them more, the world might

mistake an acknowledgment for a boast.

With the highest consideration and esteem,

Believe me, my dear sir,

Most sincerely and gratefully yours,

EDWARD LYTTON BULWER

London, March, 1837.

ADVERTISEMENT.

The work, a portion of which is now presented to the reader, has

occupied me many years--though often interrupted in its progress,

either by more active employment, or by literary undertakings of a

character more seductive. These volumes were not only written, but

actually in the hands of the publisher before the appearance, and

even, I believe, before the announcement of the first volume of Mr.

Thirlwall’s History of Greece, or I might have declined going over any

portion of the ground cultivated by that distinguished scholar [1].

As it is, however, the plan I have pursued differs materially from

that of Mr. Thirlwall, and I trust that the soil is sufficiently

fertile to yield a harvest to either labourer.

Since it is the letters, yet more than the arms or the institutions of

Athens, which have rendered her illustrious, it is my object to

combine an elaborate view of her literature with a complete and

impartial account of her political transactions. The two volumes now

published bring the reader, in the one branch of my subject, to the

supreme administration of Pericles; in the other, to a critical

analysis of the tragedies of Sophocles. Two additional volumes will,

I trust, be sufficient to accomplish my task, and close the records of

Athens at that period when, with the accession of Augustus, the annals

of the world are merged into the chronicle of the Roman empire. In

these latter volumes it is my intention to complete the history of the

Athenian drama--to include a survey of the Athenian philosophy--to

describe the manners, habits, and social life of the people, and to

conclude the whole with such a review of the facts and events narrated

as may constitute, perhaps, an unprejudiced and intelligible

explanation of the causes of the rise and fall of Athens.

As the history of the Greek republics has been too often corruptly

pressed into the service of heated political partisans, may I be

pardoned the precaution of observing that, whatever my own political

code, as applied to England, I have nowhere sought knowingly to

pervert the lessons of a past nor analogous time to fugitive interests

and party purposes. Whether led sometimes to censure, or more often

to vindicate the Athenian people, I am not conscious of any other

desire than that of strict, faithful, impartial justice. Restlessly

to seek among the ancient institutions for illustrations (rarely

apposite) of the modern, is, indeed, to desert the character of a

judge for that of an advocate, and to undertake the task of the

historian with the ambition of the pamphleteer. Though designing this

work not for colleges and cloisters, but for the general and

miscellaneous public, it is nevertheless impossible to pass over in

silence some matters which, if apparently trifling in themselves, have

acquired dignity, and even interest, from brilliant speculations or

celebrated disputes. In the history of Greece (and Athenian history

necessarily includes nearly all that is valuable in the annals of the

whole Hellenic race) the reader must submit to pass through much that

is minute, much that is wearisome, if he desire to arrive at last at

definite knowledge and comprehensive views. In order, however, to

interrupt as little as possible the recital of events, I have

endeavoured to confine to the earlier portion of the work such details

of an antiquarian or speculative nature as, while they may afford to

the general reader, not, indeed, a minute analysis, but perhaps a

sufficient notion of the scholastic inquiries which have engaged the

attention of some of the subtlest minds of Germany and England, may

also prepare him the better to comprehend the peculiar character and

circumstances of the people to whose history he is introduced: and it

may be well to warn the more impatient that it is not till the second

book (vol. i., p. 181) that disquisition is abandoned for narrative.

There yet remain various points on which special comment would be

incompatible with connected and popular history, but on which I

propose to enlarge in a series of supplementary notes, to be appended

to the concluding volume. These notes will also comprise criticisms

and specimens of Greek writers not so intimately connected with the

progress of Athenian literature as to demand lengthened and elaborate

notice in the body of the work. Thus, when it is completed, it is my

hope that this book will combine, with a full and complete history of

Athens, political and moral, a more ample and comprehensive view of

the treasures of the Greek literature than has yet been afforded to

the English public. I have ventured on these remarks because I thought

it due to the reader, no less than to myself, to explain the plan and

outline of a design at present only partially developed.

London, March, 1837.

CONTENTS.

BOOK I

CHAPTER

I Situation and Soil of Attica.--The Pelasgians its earliest

Inhabitants.--Their Race and Language akin to the Grecian.--

Their varying Civilization and Architectural Remains.--

Cecrops.--Were the earliest Civilizers of Greece foreigners

or Greeks?--The Foundation of Athens.--The Improvements

attributed to Cecrops.--The Religion of the Greeks cannot

be reduced to a simple System.--Its Influence upon their

Character and Morals, Arts and Poetry.--The Origin of

Slavery and Aristocracy.

II The unimportant consequences to be deduced from the admission

that Cecrops might be Egyptian.--Attic Kings before

Theseus.--The Hellenes.--Their Genealogy.--Ionians and

Achaeans Pelasgic.--Contrast between Dorians and Ionians.--

Amphictyonic League.

III The Heroic Age.--Theseus.--His legislative Influence upon

Athens.--Qualities of the Greek Heroes.--Effect of a

Traditional Age upon the Character of a People.

IV The Successors of Theseus.--The Fate of Codrus.--The

Emigration of Nileus.--The Archons.--Draco.

V A General Survey of Greece and the East previous to the

Time of Solon.--The Grecian Colonies.--The Isles.--Brief

account of the States on the Continent.--Elis and the

Olympic Games.

VI Return of the Heraclidae.--The Spartan Constitution and

Habits.--The first and second Messenian War.

VII Governments in Greece.

VIII Brief Survey of Arts, Letters, and Philosophy in Greece,

prior to the Legislation of Solon.

BOOK II

CHAPTER

I The Conspiracy of Cylon.--Loss of Salamis.--First Appearance

of Solon.--Success against the Megarians in the Struggle for

Salamis.--Cirrhaean War.--Epimenides.--Political State of

Athens.--Character of Solon.--His Legislation.--General View

of the Athenian Constitution.

II The Departure of Solon from Athens.--The Rise of Pisistratus.

--Return of Solon.--His Conduct and Death.--The Second and

Third Tyranny of Pisistratus.--Capture of Sigeum.--Colony

In the Chersonesus founded by the first Miltiades.--Death of

Pisistratus.

III The Administration of Hippias.--The Conspiracy of Harmodius

and Aristogiton.--The Death of Hipparchus.--Cruelties of

Hippias.--The young Miltiades sent to the Chersonesus.--The

Spartans Combine with the Alcmaeonidae against Hippias.--The

fall of the Tyranny.--The Innovations of Clisthenes.--His

Expulsion and Restoration.--Embassy to the Satrap of Sardis.

--Retrospective View of the Lydian, Medean, and Persian

Monarchies.--Result of the Athenian Embassy to Sardis.--

Conduct of Cleomenes.--Victory of the Athenians against the

Boeotians and Chalcidians.--Hippias arrives at Sparta.--The

Speech of Sosicles the Corinthian.--Hippias retires to

Sardis.

IV Histiaeus, Tyrant of Miletus, removed to Persia.--The

Government of that City deputed to Aristagoras, who invades

Naxos with the aid of the Persians.--Ill Success of that

Expedition.--Aristagoras resolves upon Revolting from the

Persians.--Repairs to Sparta and to Athens.--The Athenians

and Eretrians induced to assist the Ionians.--Burning of

Sardis.--The Ionian War.--The Fate of Aristagoras.--Naval

Battle of Lade.--Fall of Miletus.--Reduction of Ionia.--

Miltiades.--His Character.--Mardonius replaces Artaphernes

in the Lydian Satrapy.--Hostilities between Aegina and

Athens.--Conduct of Cleomenes.--Demaratus deposed.--Death

Of Cleomenes.--New Persian Expedition.

V The Persian Generals enter Europe.--Invasion of Naxos,

Carystus, Eretria.--The Athenians Demand the Aid of Sparta.

--The Result of their Mission and the Adventure of their

Messenger.--The Persians advance to Marathon.--The Plain

Described.--Division of Opinion in the Athenian Camp.--The

Advice of Miltiades prevails.--The Drear of Hippias.--The

Battle of Marathon.

BOOK III

CHAPTER

I The Character and Popularity of Miltiades.--Naval expedition.

--Siege of Paros.--Conduct of Miltiades.--He is Accused and

Sentenced.--His Death.

II The Athenian Tragedy.--Its Origin.--Thespis.--Phrynichus.--

Aeschylus.--Analysis of the Tragedies of Aeschylus.

III Aristides.--His Character and Position.--The Rise of

Themistocles.--Aristides is Ostracised.--The Ostracism

examined.--The Influence of Themistocles increases.--The

Silver--mines of Laurion.--Their Product applied by

Themistocles to the Increase of the Navy.--New Direction

given to the National Character.

IV The Preparations of Darius.--Revolt of Egypt.--Dispute for

The Succession to the Persian Throne.--Death of Darius.--

Brief Review of the leading Events and Characteristics of

his Reign.

V Xerxes conducts an Expedition into Egypt.--He finally resolves

on the Invasion of Greece.--Vast Preparations for the

Conquest of Europe.--Xerxes arrives at Sardis.--Despatches

Envoys to the Greek States, demanding Tribute.--The Bridge

of the Hellespont.--Review of the Persian Armament at

Abydos.--Xerxes encamps at Therme.

VI The Conduct of the Greeks.--The Oracle relating to Salamis.--

Art of Themistocles.--The Isthmian Congress.--Embassies to

Argos, Crete, Corcyra, and Syracuse.--Their ill Success.--

The Thessalians send Envoys to the Isthmus.--The Greeks

advance to Tempe, but retreat.--The Fleet despatched to

Artemisium, and the Pass of Thermopylae occupied.--Numbers

of the Grecian Fleet.--Battle of Thermopylae.

VII The Advice of Demaratus to Xerxes.--Themistocles.--Actions off

Artemisium.--The Greeks retreat.--The Persians invade

Delphi, and are repulsed with great Loss.--The Athenians,

unaided by their Allies, abandon Athens, and embark for

Salamis.--The irresolute and selfish Policy of the

Peloponnesians.--Dexterity and Firmness of Themistocles.--

Battle of Salamis.--Andros and Carystus besieged by the

Greeks.--Anecdotes of Themistocles.--Honours awarded to him

in Sparta.--Xerxes returns to Asia.--Olynthus and Potidaea

besieged by Artabazus.--The Athenians return Home.--The

Ostracism of Aristides is repealed.

VIII Embassy of Alexander of Macedon to Athens.--The Result of his

Proposals.--Athenians retreat to Salamis.--Mardonius

occupies Athens.--The Athenians send Envoys to Sparta.--

Pausanias succeeds Cleombrotus as Regent of Sparta.--Battle

of Plataea.--Thebes besieged by the Athenians.--Battle of

Mycale.--Siege of Sestos.--Conclusion of the Persian War.

BOOK IV

CHAPTER

I Remarks on the Effects of War.--State of Athens.--Interference

of Sparta with respect to the Fortifications of Athens.--

Dexterous Conduct of Themistocles.--The New Harbour of the

Piraeus.--Proposition of the Spartans in the Amphictyonic

Council defeated by Themistocles.--Allied Fleet at Cyprus

and Byzantium.--Pausanias.--Alteration in his Character.--

His ambitious Views and Treason.--The Revolt of the Ionians

from the Spartan Command.--Pausanias recalled.--Dorcis

replaces him.--The Athenians rise to the Head of the Ionian

League.--Delos made the Senate and Treasury of the Allies.--

Able and prudent Management of Aristides.--Cimon succeeds

To the Command of the Fleet.--Character of Cimon.--Eion

besieged.--Scyros colonized by Atticans.--Supposed Discovery

of the Bones of Theseus.--Declining Power of Themistocles.

--Democratic Change in the Constitution.--Themistocles

ostracised.--Death of Aristides.

II Popularity and Policy of Cimon.--Naxos revolts from the

Ionian League.--Is besieged by Cimon.--Conspiracy and

Fate of Pausanias.--Flight and Adventures of Themistocles.

--His Death.

III Reduction of Naxos.--Actions off Cyprus.--Manners of

Cimon.--Improvements in Athens.--Colony at the Nine Ways.

--Siege of Thasos.--Earthquake in Sparta.--Revolt of Helots,

Occupation of Ithome, and Third Messenian War.--Rise and

Character of Pericles.--Prosecution and Acquittal of Cimon.

--The Athenians assist the Spartans at Ithome.--Thasos

Surrenders.--Breach between the Athenians and Spartans.--

Constitutional Innovations at Athens.--Ostracism of Cimon.

IV War between Megara and Corinth.--Megara and Pegae garrisoned

by Athenians.--Review of Affairs at the Persian Court.--

Accession of Artaxerxes.--Revolt of Egypt under Inarus.--

Athenian Expedition to assist Inarus.--Aegina besieged.--The

Corinthians defeated.--Spartan Conspiracy with the Athenian

Oligarchy.--Battle of Tanagra.--Campaign and Successes of

Myronides.--Plot of the Oligarchy against the Republic.--

Recall of Cimon.--Long Walls completed.--Aegina reduced.--

Expedition under Tolmides.--Ithome surrenders.--The

Insurgents are settled at Naupactus.--Disastrous Termination

of the Egyptian Expedition.--The Athenians march into

Thessaly to restore Orestes the Tagus.--Campaign under

Pericles.--Truce of five Years with the Peloponnesians.--

Cimon sets sail for Cyprus.--Pretended Treaty of Peace with

Persia.--Death of Cimon.

V Change of Manners in Athens.--Begun under the Pisistratidae.--

Effects of the Persian War, and the intimate Connexion with

Ionia.--The Hetaerae.--The Political Eminence lately

acquired by Athens.--The Transfer of the Treasury from Delos

to Athens.--Latent Dangers and Evils.--First, the Artificial

Greatness of Athens not supported by Natural Strength.--

Secondly, her pernicious Reliance on Tribute.--Thirdly,

Deterioration of National Spirit commenced by Cimon in the

Use of Bribes and Public Tables.--Fourthly, Defects in

Popular Courts of Law.--Progress of General Education.--

History.--Its Ionian Origin.--Early Historians.--Acusilaus.

--Cadmus.--Eugeon.--Hellanicus.--Pherecides.--Xanthus.--View

of the Life and Writings of Herodotus.--Progress of

Philosophy since Thales.--Philosophers of the Ionian and

Eleatic Schools.--Pythagoras.--His Philosophical Tenets and

Political Influence.--Effect of these Philosophers on

Athens.--School of Political Philosophy continued in Athens

from the Time of Solon.--Anaxagoras.--Archelaus.--Philosophy

not a thing apart from the ordinary Life of the Athenians.

BOOK V

CHAPTER

I Thucydides chosen by the Aristocratic Party to oppose

Pericles.--His Policy.--Munificence of Pericles.--Sacred

War.--Battle of Coronea.--Revolt of Euboea and Megara--

Invasion and Retreat of the Peloponnesians.--Reduction of

Euboea.--Punishment of Histiaea.--A Thirty Years’ Truce

concluded with the Peloponnesians.--Ostracism of Thucydides.

II Causes of the Power of Pericles.--Judicial Courts of the

dependant Allies transferred to Athens.--Sketch of the

Athenian Revenues.--Public Buildings the Work of the People

rather than of Pericles.--Vices and Greatness of Athens had

the same Sources.--Principle of Payment characterizes the

Policy of the Period.--It is the Policy of Civilization.--

Colonization, Cleruchia.

III Revision of the Census.--Samian War.--Sketch of the Rise and

Progress of the Athenian Comedy to the Time of Aristophanes.

IV The Tragedies of Sophocles.

ATHENS: ITS RISE AND FALL

BOOK I.

CHAPTER I.

Situation and Soil of Attica.--The Pelasgians its earliest

Inhabitants.--Their Race and Language akin to the Grecian.--Their

varying Civilization and Architectural Remains.--Cecrops.--Were the

earliest Civilizers of Greece foreigners or Greeks?--The Foundation of

Athens.--The Improvements attributed to Cecrops.--The Religion of the

Greeks cannot be reduced to a simple System.--Its Influence upon their

Character and Morals, Arts and Poetry.--The Origin of Slavery and

Aristocracy.

I. To vindicate the memory of the Athenian people, without disguising

the errors of Athenian institutions;--and, in narrating alike the

triumphs and the reverses--the grandeur and the decay--of the most

eminent of ancient states, to record the causes of her imperishable

influence on mankind, not alone in political change or the fortunes of

fluctuating war, but in the arts, the letters, and the social habits,

which are equal elements in the history of a people;--this is the

object that I set before me;--not unreconciled to the toil of years,

if, serving to divest of some party errors, and to diffuse through a

wider circle such knowledge as is yet bequeathed to us of a time and

land, fertile in august examples and in solemn warnings--consecrated

by undying names and memorable deeds.

II. In that part of earth termed by the Greeks Hellas, and by the

Romans Graecia [2], a small tract of land known by the name of Attica,

extends into the Aegaean Sea--the southeast peninsula of Greece. In

its greatest length it is about sixty, in its greatest breadth about

twenty-four, geographical miles. In shape it is a rude triangle,--on

two sides flows the sea--on the third, the mountain range of Parnes

and Cithaeron divides the Attic from the Boeotian territory. It is

intersected by frequent but not lofty hills, and, compared with the

rest of Greece, its soil, though propitious to the growth of the

olive, is not fertile or abundant. In spite of painful and elaborate

culture, the traces of which are yet visible, it never produced a

sufficiency of corn to supply its population; and this, the

comparative sterility of the land, may be ranked among the causes

which conduced to the greatness of the people. The principal

mountains of Attica are, the Cape of Sunium, Hymettus, renowned for

its honey, and Pentelicus for its marble; the principal streams which

water the valleys are the capricious and uncertain rivulets of

Cephisus and Ilissus [3],--streams breaking into lesser brooks,

deliciously pure and clear. The air is serene--the climate healthful

--the seasons temperate. Along the hills yet breathe the wild thyme,

and the odorous plants which, everywhere prodigal in Greece, are more

especially fragrant in that lucid sky;--and still the atmosphere

colours with peculiar and various taints the marble of the existent

temples and the face of the mountain landscapes.

III. I reject at once all attempt to penetrate an unfathomable

obscurity for an idle object. I do not pause to inquire whether,

after the destruction of Babel, Javan was the first settler in Attica,

nor is it reserved for my labours to decide the solemn controversy

whether Ogyges was the contemporary of Jacob or of Moses. Neither

shall I suffer myself to be seduced into any lengthened consideration

of those disputes, so curious and so inconclusive, relative to the

origin of the Pelasgi (according to Herodotus the earliest inhabitants

of Attica), which have vainly agitated the learned. It may amuse the

antiquary to weigh gravely the several doubts as to the derivation of

their name from Pelasgus or from Peleg--to connect the scattered

fragments of tradition--and to interpret either into history or

mythology the language of fabulous genealogies. But our subtlest

hypotheses can erect only a fabric of doubt, which, while it is

tempting to assault, it is useless to defend. All that it seems to me

necessary to say of the Pelasgi is as follows:--They are the earliest

race which appear to have exercised a dominant power in Greece. Their

kings can be traced by tradition to a time long prior to the recorded

genealogy of any other tribe, and Inachus, the father of the Pelasgian

Phoroneus, is but another name for the remotest era to which Grecian

chronology can ascend [4]. Whether the Pelasgi were anciently a

foreign or a Grecian tribe, has been a subject of constant and

celebrated discussion. Herodotus, speaking of some settlements held

to be Pelaigic, and existing in his time, terms their language

“barbarous;” but Mueller, nor with argument insufficient, considers

that the expression of the historian would apply only to a peculiar

dialect; and the hypothesis is sustained by another passage in

Herodotus, in which he applies to certain Ionian dialects the same

term as that with which he stigmatizes the language of the Pelasgic

settlements. In corroboration of Mueller’s opinion we may also

observe, that the “barbarous-tongued” is an epithet applied by Homer

to the Carians, and is rightly construed by the ancient critics as

denoting a dialect mingled and unpolished, certainly not foreign. Nor

when the Agamemnon of Sophocles upbraids Teucer with “his barbarous

tongue,” [6] would any scholar suppose that Teucer is upbraided with

not speaking Greek; he is upbraided with speaking Greek inelegantly

and rudely. It is clear that they who continued with the least

adulteration a language in its earliest form, would seem to utter a

strange and unfamiliar jargon to ears accustomed to its more modern

construction. And, no doubt, could we meet with a tribe retaining the

English of the thirteenth century, the language of our ancestors would

be to most of us unintelligible, and seem to many of us foreign. But,

however the phrase of Herodotus be interpreted, it would still be

exceedingly doubtful whether the settlements he refers to were really

and originally Pelasgic, and still more doubtful whether, if Pelasgia

they had continued unalloyed and uncorrupted their ancestral language.

I do not, therefore, attach any importance to the expression of

Herodotus. I incline, on the contrary, to believe, with the more

eminent of English scholars, that the language of the Pelasgi

contained at least the elements of that which we acknowledge as the

Greek;--and from many arguments I select the following:

1st. Because, in the states which we know to have been peopled by the

Pelasgi (as Arcadia and Attica), and whence the population were not

expelled by new tribes, the language appears no less Greek than that

of those states from which the Pelasgi were the earliest driven. Had

they spoken a totally different tongue from later settlers, I conceive

that some unequivocal vestiges of the difference would have been

visible even to the historical times.

2dly. Because the Hellenes are described as few at first--their

progress is slow--they subdue, but they do not extirpate; in such

conquests--the conquests of the few settled among the many--the

language of the many continues to the last; that of the few would

influence, enrich, or corrupt, but never destroy it.

3dly. Because, whatever of the Grecian language pervades the Latin

[7], we can only ascribe to the Pelasgic colonizers of Italy. In

this, all ancient writers, Greek and Latin, are agreed. The few words

transmitted to us as Pelasgic betray the Grecian features, and the

Lamina Borgiana (now in the Borgian collection of Naples, and

discovered in 1783) has an inscription relative to the Siculi or

Sicani, a people expelled from their Italian settlements before any

received date of the Trojan war, of which the character is Pelasgic--

the language Greek.

IV. Of the moral state of the Pelasgi our accounts are imperfect and

contradictory. They were not a petty horde, but a vast race,

doubtless divided, like every migratory people, into numerous tribes,

differing in rank, in civilization [8], and in many peculiarities of

character. The Pelasgi in one country might appear as herdsmen or as

savages; in another, in the same age, they might appear collected into

cities and cultivating the arts. The history of the East informs us

with what astonishing rapidity a wandering tribe, once settled, grew

into fame and power; the camp of to-day--the city of to-morrow--and

the “dwellers in the wilderness setting up the towers and the palaces

thereof.” [9] Thus, while in Greece this mysterious people are often

represented as the aboriginal race, receiving from Phoenician and

Egyptian settlers the primitive blessings of social life, in Italy we

behold them the improvers in agriculture [10] and first teachers of

letters. [11]

Even so early as the traditional appearance of Cecrops among the

savages of Attica, the Pelasgians in Arcadia had probably advanced

from the pastoral to the civil life; and this, indeed, is the date

assigned by Pausanias to the foundation of that ancestral Lycosura, in

whose rude remains (by the living fountain and the waving oaks of the

modern Diaphorte) the antiquary yet traces the fortifications of “the

first city which the sun beheld.” [12] It is in their buildings that

the Pelasgi have left the most indisputable record of their name.

Their handwriting is yet upon their walls! A restless and various

people--overrunning the whole of Greece, found northward in Dacia,

Illyria, and the country of the Getae, colonizing the coasts of Ionia,

and long the master-race of the fairest lands of Italy,--they have

passed away amid the revolutions of the elder earth, their ancestry

and their descendants alike unknown;--yet not indeed the last, if my

conclusions are rightly drawn: if the primitive population of Greece--

themselves Greek--founding the language, and kindred with the blood,

of the later and more illustrious Hellenes--they still made the great

bulk of the people in the various states, and through their most

dazzling age: Enslaved in Laconia--but free in Athens--it was their

posterity that fought the Mede at Marathon and Plataea,--whom

Miltiades led,--for whom Solon legislated,--for whom Plato thought,--

whom Demosthenes harangued. Not less in Italy than in Greece the

parents of an imperishable tongue, and, in part, the progenitors of a

glorious race, we may still find the dim track of their existence

wherever the classic civilization flourished,--the classic genius

breathed. If in the Latin, if in the Grecian tongue, are yet the

indelible traces of the language of the Pelasgi, the literature of the

ancient, almost of the modern world, is their true descendant!

V. Despite a vague belief (referred to by Plato) of a remote and

perished era of civilization, the most popular tradition asserts the

Pelasgic inhabitants of Attica to have been sunk into the deepest

ignorance of the elements of social life, when, either from Sais, an

Egyptian city, as is commonly supposed, or from Sais a province in

Upper Egypt, an Egyptian characterized to posterity by the name of

Cecrops is said to have passed into Attica with a band of adventurous

emigrants.

The tradition of this Egyptian immigration into Attica was long

implicitly received. Recently the bold skepticism of German scholars

--always erudite--if sometimes rash--has sufficed to convince us of

the danger we incur in drawing historical conclusions from times to

which no historical researches can ascend. The proofs upon which rest

the reputed arrival of Egyptian colonizers, under Cecrops, in Attica,

have been shown to be slender--the authorities for the assertion to be

comparatively modern--the arguments against the probability of such an

immigration in such an age, to be at least plausible and important.

Not satisfied, however, with reducing to the uncertainty of conjecture

what incautiously had been acknowledged as fact, the assailants of the

Egyptian origin of Cecrops presume too much upon their victory, when

they demand us to accept as a counter fact, what can be, after all,

but a counter conjecture. To me, impartially weighing the arguments

and assertions on either side, the popular tradition of Cecrops and

his colony appears one that can neither be tacitly accepted as

history, nor contemptuously dismissed as invention. It would be,

however, a frivolous dispute, whether Cecrops were Egyptian or

Attican, since no erudition can ascertain that Cecrops ever existed,

were it not connected with a controversy of some philosophical

importance, viz., whether the early civilizers of Greece were

foreigners or Greeks, and whether the Egyptians more especially

assisted to instruct the ancestors of a race that have become the

teachers and models of the world, in the elements of religion, of

polity, and the arts.

Without entering into vain and futile reasonings, derived from the

scattered passages of some early writers, from the ambiguous silence

of others--and, above all, from the dreams of etymological analogy or

mythological fable, I believe the earliest civilizers of Greece to

have been foreign settlers; deducing my belief from the observations

of common sense rather than from obscure and unsatisfactory research.

I believe it,

First--Because, what is more probable than that at very early periods

the more advanced nations of the East obtained communication with the

Grecian continent and isles? What more probable than that the

maritime and roving Phoenicians entered the seas of Greece, and were

tempted by the plains, which promised abundance, and the mountains,

which afforded a fastness? Possessed of a superior civilization to

the hordes they found, they would meet rather with veneration than

resistance, and thus a settlement would be obtained by an

inconsiderable number, more in right of intelligence than of conquest.

But, though this may be conceded with respect to the Phoenicians, it

is asserted that the Egyptians at least were not a maritime or

colonizing people: and we are gravely assured, that in those distant

times no Egyptian vessel had entered the Grecian seas. But of the

remotest ages of Egyptian civilization we know but little. On their

earliest monuments (now their books!) we find depicted naval as well

as military battles, in which the vessels are evidently those employed

at sea. According to their own traditions, they colonized in a remote

age. They themselves laid claim to Danaus: and the mythus of the

expedition of Osiris is not improbably construed into a figurative

representation of the spread of Egyptian civilization by the means of

colonies. Besides, Egypt was subjected to more than one revolution,

by which a large portion of her population was expelled the land, and

scattered over the neighbouring regions [13]. And even granting that

Egyptians fitted out no maritime expedition--they could easily have

transplanted themselves in Phoenician vessels, or Grecian rafts--from

Asia into Greece. Nor can we forget that Egypt [14] for a time was

the habitation, and Thebes the dominion, of the Phoenicians, and that

hence, perhaps, the origin of the dispute whether certain of the first

foreign civilizers of Greece were Phoenicians or Egyptians: The

settlers might come from Egypt, and be by extraction Phoenicians: or

Egyptian emigrators might well have accompanied the Phoenician. [15]

2dly. By the evidence of all history, savage tribes appear to owe

their first enlightenment to foreigners: to be civilized, they conquer

or are conquered--visit or are visited. For a fact which contains so

striking a mystery, I do not attempt to account. I find in the

history of every other part of the world, that it is by the colonizer

or the conqueror that a tribe neither colonizing nor conquering is

redeemed from a savage state, and I do not reject so probable an

hypothesis for Greece.

3dly. I look to the various arguments of a local or special nature,

by which these general probabilities may be supported, and I find them

unusually strong: I cast my eyes on the map of Greece, and I see that

it is almost invariably on the eastern side that these eastern

colonies are said to have been founded: I turn to chronology, and I

find the revolutions in the East coincide in point of accredited date

with the traditional immigrations into Greece: I look to the history

of the Greeks, and I find the Greeks themselves (a people above all

others vain of aboriginal descent, and contemptuous of foreign races)

agreed in according a general belief to the accounts of their

obligations to foreign settlers; and therefore (without additional but

doubtful arguments from any imaginary traces of Eastern, Egyptian,

Phoenician rites and fables in the religion or the legends of Greece

in her remoter age) I see sufficient ground for inclining to the less

modern, but mere popular belief, which ascribes a foreign extraction

to the early civilizers of Greece: nor am I convinced by the

reasonings of those who exclude the Egyptians from the list of these

primitive benefactors.

It being conceded that no hypothesis is more probable than that the

earliest civilizers of Greece were foreign, and might be Egyptian, I

do not recognise sufficient authority for rejecting the Attic

traditions claiming Egyptian civilizers for the Attic soil, in

arguments, whether grounded upon the fact that such traditions,

unreferred to by the more ancient, were collected by the more modern,

of Grecian writers--or upon plausible surmises as to the habits of the

Egyptians in that early age. Whether Cecrops were the first--whether

he were even one--of these civilizers, is a dispute unworthy of

philosophical inquirers [16]. But as to the time of Cecrops are

referred, both by those who contend for his Egyptian, and those who

assert his Attic origin, certain advances from barbarism, and certain

innovations in custom, which would have been natural to a foreigner,

and almost miraculous in a native, I doubt whether it would not be our

wiser and more cautious policy to leave undisturbed a long accredited

conjecture, rather than to subscribe to arguments which, however

startling and ingenious, not only substitute no unanswerable

hypothesis, but conduce to no important result. [17]

VI. If Cecrops were really the leader of an Egyptian colony, it is

more than probable that he obtained the possession of Attica by other

means than those of force. To savage and barbarous tribes, the first

appearance of men, whose mechanical inventions, whose superior

knowledge of the arts of life--nay, whose exterior advantages of garb

and mien [18] indicate intellectual eminence, till then neither known

nor imagined, presents a something preternatural and divine. The

imagination of the wild inhabitants is seduced, their superstitions

aroused, and they yield to a teacher--not succumb to an invader. It

was probably thus, then, that Cecrops with his colonists would have

occupied the Attic plain--conciliated rather than subdued the

inhabitants, and united in himself the twofold authority exercised by

primeval chiefs--the dignity of the legislator, and the sanctity of

the priest. It is evident that none of the foreign settlers brought

with them a numerous band. The traditions speak of them with

gratitude as civilizers, not with hatred as conquerors. And they did

not leave any traces in the establishment of their language:--a proof

of the paucity of their numbers, and the gentle nature of their

influence--the Phoenician Cadmus, the Egyptian Cecrops, the Phrygian

Pelops, introduced no separate and alien tongue. Assisting to

civilize the Greeks, they then became Greeks; their posterity merged

and lost amid the native population.

VII. Perhaps, in all countries, the first step to social improvement

is in the institution of marriage, and the second is the formation of

cities. As Menes in Egypt, as Fohi in China, so Cecrops at Athens is

said first to have reduced into sacred limits the irregular

intercourse of the sexes [19], and reclaimed his barbarous subjects

from a wandering and unprovidential life, subsisting on the

spontaneous produce of no abundant soil. High above the plain, and

fronting the sea, which, about three miles distant on that side,

sweeps into a bay peculiarly adapted for the maritime enterprises of

an earlier age, we still behold a cragged and nearly perpendicular

rock. In length its superficies is about eight hundred, in breadth

about four hundred, feet [20]. Below, on either side, flow the

immortal streams of the Ilissus and Cephisus. From its summit you may

survey, here, the mountains of Hymettus, Pentelicus, and, far away,

“the silver-bearing Laurium;” below, the wide plain of Attica, broken

by rocky hills--there, the islands of Salamis and Aegina, with the

opposite shores of Argolis, rising above the waters of the Saronic

Bay. On this rock the supposed Egyptian is said to have built a

fortress, and founded a city [21]; the fortress was in later times

styled the Acropolis, and the place itself, when the buildings of

Athens spread far and wide beneath its base, was still designated

polis, or the CITY. By degrees we are told that he extended, from

this impregnable castle and its adjacent plain, the limit of his

realm, until it included the whole of Attica, and perhaps Boeotia

[22]. It is also related that he established eleven other towns or

hamlets, and divided his people into twelve tribes, to each of which

one of the towns was apportioned--a fortress against foreign invasion,

and a court of justice in civil disputes.

If we may trust to the glimmering light which, resting for a moment,

uncertain and confused, upon the reign of Cecrops, is swallowed up in

all the darkness of fable during those of his reputed successors,--it

is to this apocryphal personage that we must refer the elements both

of agriculture and law. He is said to have instructed the Athenians

to till the land, and to watch the produce of the seasons; to have

imported from Egypt the olive-tree, for which the Attic soil was

afterward so celebrated, and even to have navigated to Sicily and to

Africa for supplies of corn. That such advances from a primitive and

savage state were not made in a single generation, is sufficiently

clear. With more probability, Cecrops is reputed to have imposed upon

the ignorance of his subjects and the license of his followers the

curb of impartial law, and to have founded a tribunal of justice

(doubtless the sole one for all disputes), in which after times

imagined to trace the origin of the solemn Areopagus.

VIII. Passing from these doubtful speculations on the detailed

improvements effected by Cecrops in the social life of the Attic

people, I shall enter now into some examination of two subjects far

more important. The first is the religion of the Athenians in common

with the rest of Greece; and the second the origin of the institution

of slavery.

The origin of religion in all countries is an inquiry of the deepest

interest and of the vaguest result. For, the desire of the pious to

trace throughout all creeds the principles of the one they themselves

profess--the vanity of the learned to display a various and recondite

erudition--the passion of the ingenious to harmonize conflicting

traditions--and the ambition of every speculator to say something new

upon an ancient but inexhaustible subject, so far from enlightening,

only perplex our conjectures. Scarcely is the theory of to-day

established, than the theory of to-morrow is invented to oppose it.

With one the religion of the Greeks is but a type of the mysteries of

the Jews, the event of the deluge, and the preservation of the ark;

with another it is as entirely an incorporation of the metaphysical

solemnities of the Egyptian;--now it is the crafty device of priests,

now the wise invention of sages. It is not too much to say, that

after the profoundest labours and the most plausible conjectures of

modern times, we remain yet more uncertain and confused than we were

before. It is the dark boast of every pagan mythology, as one of the

eldest of the pagan deities, that “none among mortals hath lifted up

its veil!”

After, then, some brief and preliminary remarks, tending to such

hypotheses as appear to me most probable and simple, I shall hasten

from unprofitable researches into the Unknown, to useful deductions

from what is given to our survey--in a word, from the origin of the

Grecian religion to its influence and its effects; the first is the

province of the antiquary and the speculator; the last of the

historian and the practical philosopher.

IX. When Herodotus informs us that Egypt imparted to Greece the names

of almost all her deities, and that his researches convinced him that

they were of barbarous origin, he exempts from the list of the

Egyptian deities, Neptune, the Dioscuri, Juno, Vesta, Themis, the

Graces, and the Nereids [23]. From Africa, according to Herodotus,

came Neptune, from the Pelasgi the rest of the deities disclaimed by

Egypt. According to the same authority, the Pelasgi learned not their

deities, but the names of their deities (and those at a later period),

from the Egyptians [24]. But the Pelasgi were the first known

inhabitants of Greece--the first known inhabitants of Greece had

therefore their especial deities, before any communication with Egypt.

For the rest we must accept the account of the simple and credulous

Herodotus with considerable caution and reserve. Nothing is more

natural--perhaps more certain--than that every tribe [25], even of

utter savages, will invent some deities of their own; and as these

deities will as naturally be taken from external objects, common to

all mankind, such as the sun or the moon, the waters or the earth, and

honoured with attributes formed from passions and impressions no less

universal;--so the deities of every tribe will have something kindred

to each other, though the tribes themselves may never have come into

contact or communication.

The mythology of the early Greeks may perhaps be derived from the

following principal sources:--First, the worship of natural objects;--

and of divinities so formed, the most unequivocally national will

obviously be those most associated with their mode of life and the

influences of their climate. When the savage first intrusts the seed

to the bosom of the earth--when, through a strange and unaccountable

process, he beholds what he buried in one season spring forth the

harvest of the next--the EARTH itself, the mysterious garner, the

benign, but sometimes the capricious reproducer of the treasures

committed to its charge--becomes the object of the wonder, the hope,

and the fear, which are the natural origin of adoration and prayer.

Again, when he discovers the influence of the heaven upon the growth

of his labour--when, taught by experience, he acknowledges its power

to blast or to mellow--then, by the same process of ideas, the HEAVEN

also assumes the character of divinity, and becomes a new agent, whose

wrath is to be propitiated, whose favour is to be won. What common

sense thus suggests to us, our researches confirm, and we find

accordingly that the Earth and the Heaven are the earliest deities of

the agricultural Pelasgi. As the Nile to the fields of the Egyptian--

earth and heaven to the culture of the Greek. The effects of the SUN

upon human labour and human enjoyment are so sensible to the simplest

understanding, that we cannot wonder to find that glorious luminary

among the most popular deities of ancient nations. Why search through

the East to account for its worship in Greece? More easy to suppose

that the inhabitants of a land, whom the sun so especially favoured--

saw and blessed it, for it was good, than, amid innumerable

contradictions and extravagant assumptions, to decide upon that

remoter shore, whence was transplanted a deity, whose effects were so

benignant, whose worship was so natural, to the Greeks. And in the

more plain belief we are also borne out by the more sound inductions

of learning. For it is noticeable that neither the moon nor the

stars--favourite divinities with those who enjoyed the serene nights,

or inhabited the broad plains of the East--were (though probably

admitted among the Pelasgic deities) honoured with that intense and

reverent worship which attended them in Asia and in Egypt. To the

Pelasgi, not yet arrived at the intellectual stage of philosophical

contemplation, the most sensible objects of influence would be the

most earnestly adored. What the stars were to the East, their own

beautiful Aurora, awaking them to the delight of their genial and

temperate climate, was to the early Greeks.

Of deities, thus created from external objects, some will rise out (if

I may use the expression) of natural accident and local circumstance.

An earthquake will connect a deity with the earth--an inundation with

the river or the sea. The Grecian soil bears the marks of maritime

revolution; many of the tribes were settled along the coast, and

perhaps had already adventured their rafts upon the main. A deity of

the sea (without any necessary revelation from Africa) is, therefore,

among the earliest of the Grecian gods. The attributes of each deity

will be formed from the pursuits and occupations of the worshippers--

sanguinary with the warlike--gentle with the peaceful. The pastoral

Pelasgi of Arcadia honoured the pastoral Pan for ages before he was

received by their Pelasgic brotherhood of Attica. And the

agricultural Demeter or Ceres will be recognised among many tribes of

the agricultural Pelasgi, which no Egyptian is reputed, even by

tradition [26], to have visited.

The origin of prayer is in the sense of dependance, and in the

instinct of self-preservation or self-interest. The first objects of

prayer to the infant man will be those on which by his localities he

believes himself to be most dependant for whatever blessing his mode

of life inclines him the most to covet, or from which may come

whatever peril his instinct will teach him the most to deprecate and

fear. It is this obvious truth which destroys all the erudite systems

that would refer the different creeds of the heathen to some single

origin. Till the earth be the same in each region--till the same

circumstances surround every tribe--different impressions, in nations

yet unconverted and uncivilized, produce different deities. Nature

suggests a God, and man invests him with attributes. Nature and man,

the same as a whole, vary in details; the one does not everywhere

suggest the same notions--the other cannot everywhere imagine the same

attributes. As with other tribes, so with the Pelasgi or primitive

Greeks, their early gods were the creatures of their own early

impressions.

As one source of religion was in external objects, so another is to be

found in internal sensations and emotions. The passions are so

powerful in their effects upon individuals and nations, that we can be

little surprised to find those effects attributed to the instigation

and influence of a supernatural being. Love is individualized and

personified in nearly all mythologies; and LOVE therefore ranks among

the earliest of the Grecian gods. Fear or terror, whose influence is

often so strange, sudden, and unaccountable--seizing even the bravest

--spreading through numbers with all the speed of an electric sympathy

--and deciding in a moment the destiny of an army or the ruin of a

tribe--is another of those passions, easily supposed the afflatus of

some preternatural power, and easily, therefore, susceptible of

personification. And the pride of men, more especially if habitually

courageous and warlike, will gladly yield to the credulities which

shelter a degrading and unwonted infirmity beneath the agency of a

superior being. TERROR, therefore, received a shape and found an

altar probably as early at least as the heroic age. According to

Plutarch, Theseus sacrificed to Terror previous to his battle with the

Amazons;--an idle tale, it is true, but proving, perhaps, the

antiquity of a tradition. As society advanced from barbarism arose

more intellectual creations--as cities were built, and as in the

constant flux and reflux of martial tribes cities were overthrown, the

elements of the social state grew into personification, to which

influence was attributed and reverence paid. Thus were fixed into

divinity and shape, ORDER, PEACE, JUSTICE, and the stern and gloomy

ORCOS [27], witness of the oath, avenger of the perjury.

This, the second source of religion, though more subtle and refined in

its creations, had still its origin in the same human causes as the

first, viz., anticipation of good and apprehension of evil. Of

deities so created, many, however, were the inventions of poets--

(poetic metaphor is a fruitful mother of mythological fable)--many

also were the graceful refinements of a subsequent age. But some (and

nearly all those I have enumerated) may be traced to the earliest

period to which such researches can ascend. It is obvious that the

eldest would be connected with the passions--the more modern with the

intellect.

It seems to me apparent that almost simultaneously with deities of

these two classes would arise the greater and more influential class

of personal divinities which gradually expanded into the heroic

dynasty of Olympus. The associations which one tribe, or one

generation, united with the heaven, the earth, or the sun, another

might obviously connect, or confuse, with a spirit or genius

inhabiting or influencing the element or physical object which excited

their anxiety or awe: And, this creation effected--so what one tribe

or generation might ascribe to the single personification of a

passion, a faculty, or a moral and social principle, another would

just as naturally refer to a personal and more complex deity:--that

which in one instance would form the very nature of a superior being,

in the other would form only an attribute--swell the power and amplify

the character of a Jupiter, a Mars, a Venus, or a Pan. It is in the

nature of man, that personal divinities once created and adored,

should present more vivid and forcible images to his fancy than

abstract personifications of physical objects and moral impressions.

Thus, deities of this class would gradually rise into pre-eminence and

popularity above those more vague and incorporeal--and (though I guard

myself from absolutely solving in this manner the enigma of ancient

theogonies) the family of Jupiter could scarcely fail to possess

themselves of the shadowy thrones of the ancestral Earth and the

primeval Heaven.

A third source of the Grecian, as of all mythologies, was in the

worship of men who had actually existed, or been supposed to exist.

For in this respect errors might creep into the calendar of heroes, as

they did into the calendar of saints (the hero-worship of the

moderns), which has canonized many names to which it is impossible to

find the owners. This was probably the latest, but perhaps in

after-times the most influential and popular addition to the aboriginal

faith. The worship of dead men once established, it was natural to a

people so habituated to incorporate and familiarize religious

impressions--to imagine that even their primary gods, first formed

from natural impressions (and, still more, those deities they had

borrowed from stranger creeds)--should have walked the earth. And

thus among the multitude in the philosophical ages, even the loftiest

of the Olympian dwellers were vaguely supposed to have known

humanity;--their immortality but the apotheosis of the benefactor or

the hero.

X. The Pelasgi, then, had their native or aboriginal deities

(differing in number and in attributes with each different tribe), and

with them rests the foundation of the Greek mythology. They required

no Egyptian wisdom to lead them to believe in superior powers. Nature

was their primeval teacher. But as intercourse was opened with the

East from the opposite Asia--with the North from the neighbouring

Thrace, new deities were transplanted and old deities received

additional attributes and distinctions, according as the fancy of the

stranger found them assimilate to the divinities he had been

accustomed to adore. It seems to me, that in Saturn we may trace the

popular Phoenician deity--in the Thracian Mars, the fierce war-god of

the North. But we can scarcely be too cautious how far we allow

ourselves to be influenced by resemblance, however strong, between a

Grecian and an alien deity. Such a resemblance may not only be formed

by comparatively modern innovations, but may either be resolved to

that general likeness which one polytheism will ever bear towards

another, or arise from the adoption of new attributes and strange

traditions;--so that the deity itself may be homesprung and

indigenous, while bewildering the inquirer with considerable

similitude to other gods, from whose believers the native worship

merely received an epithet, a ceremony, a symbol, or a fable. And

this necessity of caution is peculiarly borne out by the

contradictions which each scholar enamoured of a system gives to the

labours of the speculator who preceded him. What one research would

discover to be Egyptian, another asserts to be Phoenician; a third

brings from the North; a fourth from the Hebrews; and a fifth, with

yet wilder imagination, from the far and then unpenetrated caves and

woods of India. Accept common sense as our guide, and the

contradictions are less irreconcilable--the mystery less obscure. In

a deity essentially Greek, a Phoenician colonist may discover

something familiar, and claim an ancestral god. He imparts to the

native deity some Phoenician features--an Egyptian or an Asiatic

succeeds him--discovers a similar likeness--introduces similar

innovations. The lively Greek receives--amalgamates--appropriates

all: but the aboriginal deity is not the less Greek. Each speculator

may be equally right in establishing a partial resemblance, precisely

because all speculators are wrong in asserting a perfect identity.

It follows as a corollary from the above reasonings, that the religion

of Greece was much less uniform than is popularly imagined; 1st,

because each separate state or canton had its own peculiar deity;

2dly, because, in the foreign communication of new gods, each stranger

would especially import the deity that at home he had more especially

adored. Hence to every state its tutelary god--the founder of its

greatness, the guardian of its renown. Even in the petty and limited

territory of Attica, each tribe, independent of the public worship,

had its peculiar deities, honoured by peculiar rites.

The deity said to be introduced by Cecrops is Neith, or more properly

Naith [28]--the goddess of Sais, in whom we are told to recognise the

Athene, or Minerva of the Greeks. I pass over as palpably absurd any

analogy of names by which the letters that compose the word Keith are

inverted to the word Athene. The identity of the two goddesses must

rest upon far stronger proof. But, in order to obtain this proof, we

must know with some precision the nature and attributes of the

divinity of Sais--a problem which no learning appears to me

satisfactorily to have solved. It would be a strong, and, I think, a

convincing argument, that Athene is of foreign origin, could we be

certain that her attributes, so eminently intellectual, so thoroughly

out of harmony with the barbarism of the early Greeks, were accorded

to her at the commencement of her worship. But the remotest traditions

(such as her contest with Neptune for the possession of the soil), if

we take the more simple interpretation, seem to prove her to have been

originally an agricultural deity, the creation of which would have

been natural enough to the agricultural Pelasgi;--while her supposed

invention of some of the simplest and most elementary arts are

sufficiently congenial to the notions of an unpolished and infant era

of society. Nor at a long subsequent period is there much resemblance

between the formal and elderly goddess of Daedalian sculpture and the

glorious and august Glaucopis of Homer--the maiden of celestial beauty

as of unrivalled wisdom. I grant that the variety of her attributes

renders it more than probable that Athene was greatly indebted,

perhaps to the “Divine Intelligence,” personified in the Egyptian

Naith--perhaps also, as Herodotus asserts, to the warlike deity of

Libya--nor less, it may be, to the Onca of the Phoenicians [29], from

whom in learning certain of the arts, the Greeks might simultaneously

learn the name and worship of the Phoenician deity, presiding over

such inventions. Still an aboriginal deity was probably the nucleus,

round which gradually gathered various and motley attributes. And

certain it is, that as soon as the whole creation rose into distinct

life, the stately and virgin goddess towers, aloof and alone, the most

national, the most majestic of the Grecian deities--rising above all

comparison with those who may have assisted to decorate and robe her,

embodying in a single form the very genius, multiform, yet individual

as it was, of the Grecian people--and becoming among all the deities

of the heathen heaven what the Athens she protected became upon the

earth.

XI. It may be said of the Greeks, that there never was a people who

so completely nationalized all that they borrowed from a foreign

source. And whatever, whether in a remoter or more recent age, it

might have appropriated from the creed of Isis and Osiris, one cause

alone would have sufficed to efface from the Grecian the peculiar

character of the Egyptian mythology.

The religion of Egypt, as a science, was symbolical--it denoted

elementary principles of philosophy; its gods were enigmas. It has

been asserted (on very insufficient data) that in the earliest ages of

the world, one god, of whom the sun was either the emblem or the

actual object of worship, was adored universally throughout the East,

and that polytheism was created by personifying the properties and

attributes of the single deity: “there being one God,” says Aristotle,

finely, “called by many names, from the various effects which his

various power produces.” [30] But I am far from believing that a

symbolical religion is ever the earliest author of polytheism; for a

symbolical religion belongs to a later period of civilization, when

some men are set apart in indolence to cultivate their imagination, in

order to beguile or to instruct the reason of the rest. Priests are

the first philosophers--a symbolical religion the first philosophy.

But faith precedes philosophy. I doubt not, therefore, that

polytheism existed in the East before that age when the priests of

Chaldea and of Egypt invested it with a sublimer character by

summoning to the aid of invention a wild and speculative wisdom--by

representing under corporeal tokens the revolutions of the earth, the

seasons, and the stars, and creating new (or more probably adapting

old and sensual) superstitions, as the grosser and more external types

of a philosophical creed [31]. But a symbolical worship--the creation

of a separate and established order of priests--never is, and never

can be, the religion professed, loved, and guarded by a people. The

multitude demand something positive and real for their belief--they

cannot worship a delusion--their reverence would be benumbed on the

instant if they could be made to comprehend that the god to whom they

sacrificed was no actual power able to effect evil and good, but the

type of a particular season of the year, or an unwholesome principle

in the air. Hence, in the Egyptian religion, there was one creed for

the vulgar and another for the priests. Again, to invent and to

perpetuate a symbolical religion (which is, in fact, an hereditary

school of metaphysics) requires men set apart for the purpose, whose

leisure tempts them to invention, whose interest prompts them to

imposture. A symbolical religion is a proof of a certain refinement

in civilization--the refinement of sages in the midst of a subservient

people; and it absorbs to itself those meditative and imaginative

minds which, did it not exist, would be devoted to philosophy. Now,

even allowing full belief to the legends which bring the Egyptian

colonists into Greece, it is probable that few among them were

acquainted with the secrets of the symbolical mythology they

introduced. Nor, if they were so, is it likely that they would have

communicated to a strange and a barbarous population the profound and

latent mysteries shrouded from the great majority of Egyptians

themselves. Thus, whatever the Egyptian colonizers might have

imported of a typical religion, the abstruser meaning would become,

either at once or gradually, lost. Nor can we--until the recent age

of sophists and refiners--clearly ascertain any period in which did

not exist the indelible distinction between the Grecian and Egyptian

mythology: viz.--that the first was actual, real, corporeal,

household; the second vague, shadowy, and symbolical. This might not

have been the case had there been established in the Grecian, as in

the Egyptian cities, distinct and separate colleges of priests, having

in their own hands the sole care of the religion, and forming a

privileged and exclusive body of the state. But among the Greeks (and

this should be constantly borne in mind) there never was, at any known

historical period, a distinct caste of priests [32]. We may perceive,

indeed, that the early colonizers commenced with approaches to that

principle, but it was not prosecuted farther. There were sacred

families in Athens from which certain priesthoods were to be filled--

but even these personages were not otherwise distinguished; they

performed all the usual offices of a citizen, and were not united

together by any exclusiveness of privilege or spirit of party. Among

the Egyptian adventurers there were probably none fitted by previous

education for the sacred office; and the chief who had obtained the

dominion might entertain no irresistible affection for a caste which

in his own land he had seen dictating to the monarch and interfering

with the government. [33]

Thus, among the early Greeks, we find the chiefs themselves were

contented to offer the sacrifice and utter the prayer; and though

there were indeed appointed and special priests, they held no

imperious or commanding authority. The Areopagus at Athens had the

care of religion, but the Areopagites were not priests. This absence

of a priestly caste had considerable effect upon the flexile and

familiar nature of the Grecian creed, because there were none

professionally interested in guarding the purity of the religion, in

preserving to what it had borrowed, symbolical allusions, and in

forbidding the admixture of new gods and heterogeneous creeds. The

more popular a religion, the more it seeks corporeal representations,

and avoids the dim and frigid shadows of a metaphysical belief. [34]

The romantic fables connected with the Grecian mythology were, some

home-sprung, some relating to native heroes, and incorporating native

legends, but they were also, in great measure, literal interpretations

of symbolical types and of metaphorical expressions, or erroneous

perversions of words in other tongues. The craving desire to account

for natural phenomena, common to mankind--the wish to appropriate to

native heroes the wild tales of mariners and strangers natural to a

vain and a curious people--the additions which every legend would

receive in its progress from tribe to tribe--and the constant

embellishments the most homely inventions would obtain from the

competition of rival poets, rapidly served to swell and enrich these

primary treasures of Grecian lore--to deduce a history from an

allegory--to establish a creed in a romance. Thus the early mythology

of Greece is to be properly considered in its simple and outward

interpretations. The Greeks, as yet in their social infancy, regarded

the legends of their faith as a child reads a fairy tale, credulous of

all that is supernatural in the agency--unconscious of all that may be

philosophical in the moral.

It is true, indeed, that dim associations of a religion, sabaean and

elementary, such as that of the Pelasgi (but not therefore foreign and

philosophical), with a religion physical and popular, are, here and

there, to be faintly traced among the eldest of the Grecian authors.

We may see that in Jupiter they represented the ether, and in Apollo,

and sometimes even in Hercules, the sun. But these authors, while,

perhaps unconsciously, they hinted at the symbolical, fixed, by the

vitality and nature of their descriptions, the actual images of the

gods and, reversing the order of things, Homer created Jupiter! [35]

But most of the subtle and typical interpretations of the Grecian

mythology known to us at present were derived from the philosophy of a

later age. The explanations of religious fables--such, for instance,

as the chaining of Saturn by Jupiter, and the rape of Proserpine by

Pluto, in which Saturn is made to signify the revolution of the

seasons, chained to the courses of the stars, to prevent too

immoderate a speed, and the rape of Proserpine is refined into an

allegory that denotes the seeds of corn that the sovereign principle

of the earth receives and sepulchres [36];--the moral or physical

explanation of legends like these was, I say, the work of the few,

reduced to system either from foreign communication or acute

invention. For a symbolical religion, created by the priests of one

age, is reinstated or remodelled after its corruption by the

philosophers of another.

XII. We may here pause a moment to inquire whence the Greeks derived

the most lovely and fascinating of their mythological creations--those

lesser and more terrestrial beings--the spirits of the mountain, the

waters, and the grove.

Throughout the East, from the remotest era, we find that mountains

were nature’s temples. The sanctity of high places is constantly

recorded in the scriptural writings. The Chaldaean, the Egyptian, and

the Persian, equally believed that on the summit of mountains they

approached themselves nearer to the oracles of heaven. But the

fountain, the cavern, and the grove, were no less holy than the

mountain-top in the eyes of the first religionists of the East.

Streams and fountains were dedicated to the Sun, and their exhalations

were supposed to inspire with prophecy, and to breathe of the god.

The gloom of caverns, naturally the brooding-place of awe, was deemed

a fitting scene for diviner revelations--it inspired unearthly

contemplation and mystic revery. Zoroaster is supposed by Porphyry

(well versed in all Pagan lore, though frequently misunderstanding its

proper character) to have first inculcated the worship of caverns

[37]; and there the early priests held a temple, and primeval

philosophy its retreat [38]. Groves, especially those in high places,

or in the neighbourhood of exhaling streams, were also appropriate to

worship, and conducive to the dreams of an excited and credulous

imagination; and Pekah, the son of Remaliah, burnt incense, not only

on the hills, but “under every green tree.” [39]

These places, then--the mountain, the forest, the stream, and the

cavern, were equally objects of sanctity and awe among the ancient

nations.

But we need not necessarily suppose that a superstition so universal

was borrowed, and not conceived, by the early Greeks. The same causes

which had made them worship the earth and the sea, extended their

faith to the rivers and the mountains, which in a spirit of natural

and simple poetry they called “the children” of those elementary

deities. The very soil of Greece, broken up and diversified by so

many inequalities, stamped with volcanic features, profuse in streams

and mephitic fountains, contributed to render the feeling of local

divinity prevalent and intense. Each petty canton had its own Nile,

whose influence upon fertility and culture was sufficient to become

worthy to propitiate, and therefore to personify. Had Greece been

united under one monarchy, and characterized by one common monotony of

soil, a single river, a single mountain, alone might have been deemed

divine. It was the number of its tribes--it was the variety of its

natural features, which produced the affluence and prodigality of its

mythological creations. Nor can we omit from the causes of the

teeming, vivid, and universal superstition of Greece, the accidents of

earthquake and inundation, to which the land appears early and often

to have been exposed. To the activity and caprice of nature--to the

frequent operation of causes, unrecognised, unforeseen, unguessed, the

Greeks owed much of their disposition to recur to mysterious and

superior agencies--and that wonderful poetry of faith which delighted

to associate the visible with the unseen. The peculiar character not

only of a people, but of its earlier poets--not only of its soil, but

of its air and heaven, colours the superstition it creates: and most

of the terrestrial demons which the gloomier North clothed with terror

and endowed with malice, took from the benignant genius and the

enchanting climes of Greece the gentlest offices and the fairest

forms;--yet even in Greece itself not universal in their character,

but rather the faithful reflections of the character of each class of

worshippers: thus the graces [40], whose “eyes” in the minstrelsey of

Hesiod “distilled care-beguiling love,” in Lacedaemon were the nymphs

of discipline and war!

In quitting this subject, be one remark permitted in digression: the

local causes which contributed to superstition might conduct in after

times to science. If the Nature that was so constantly in strange and

fitful action, drove the Greeks in their social infancy to seek agents

for the action and vents for their awe, so, as they advanced to

maturer intellect, it was in Nature herself that they sought the

causes of effects that appeared at first preternatural. And, in

either stage, their curiosity and interest aroused by the phenomena

around them--the credulous inventions of ignorance gave way to the

eager explanations of philosophy. Often, in the superstition of one

age, lies the germe that ripens into the inquiry of the next.

XIII. Pass we now to some examination of the general articles of

faith among the Greeks; their sacrifices and rites of worship.

In all the more celebrated nations of the ancient world, we find

established those twin elements of belief by which religion harmonizes

and directs the social relations of life, viz., a faith in a future

state, and in the providence of superior powers, who, surveying as

judges the affairs of earth, punish the wicked and reward the good

[41]. It has been plausibly conjectured that the fables of Elysium,

the slow Cocytus, and the gloomy Hades, were either invented or

allegorized from the names of Egyptian places. Diodorus assures us

that by the vast catacombs of Egypt, the dismal mansions of the dead--

were the temple and stream, both called Cocytus, the foul canal of

Acheron, and the Elysian plains [42]; and, according to the same

equivocal authority, the body of the dead was wafted across the

waters by a pilot, termed Charon in the Egyptian tongue. But,

previous to the embarcation, appointed judges on the margin of the

Acheron listened to whatever accusations were preferred by the living

against the deceased, and if convinced of his misdeeds, deprived him

of the rites of sepulture. Hence it was supposed that Orpheus

transplanted into Greece the fable of the infernal regions. But there

is good reason to look on this tale with distrust, and to believe that

the doctrine of a future state was known to the Greeks without any

tuition from Egypt;--while it is certain that the main moral of the

Egyptian ceremony, viz., the judgment of the dead, was not familiar to

the early doctrine of the Greeks. They did not believe that the good

were rewarded and the bad punished in that dreary future, which they

imbodied in their notions of the kingdom of the shades. [43]

XIV. Less in the Grecian deities than in the customs in their honour,

may we perceive certain traces of oriental superstition. We recognise

the usages of the elder creeds in the chosen sites of their temples--

the habitual ceremonies of their worship. It was to the east that the

supplicator turned his face, and he was sprinkled, as a necessary

purification, with the holy water often alluded to by sacred writers

as well as profane--a typical rite entailed from Paganism on the

greater proportion of existing Christendom. Nor was any oblation duly

prepared until it was mingled with salt--that homely and immemorial

offering, ordained not only by the priests of the heathen idols, but

also prescribed by Moses to the covenant of the Hebrew God. [44]

XV. We now come to those sacred festivals in celebration of religious

mysteries, which inspire modern times with so earnest an interest.

Perhaps no subject connected with the religion of the ancients has

been cultivated with more laborious erudition, attended with more

barren result. And with equal truth and wit, the acute and searching

Lobeck has compared the schools of Warburton and St. Croix to the

Sabines, who possessed the faculty of dreaming what they wished.

According to an ancient and still popular account, the dark enigmas of

Eleusis were borrowed from Egypt;--the drama of the Anaglyph [45].

But, in answer to this theory, we must observe, that even if really,

at their commencement, the strange and solemn rites which they are

asserted to have been--mystical ceremonies grow so naturally out of

the connexion between the awful and the unknown--were found so

generally among the savages of the ancient world--howsoever dispersed

--and still so frequently meet the traveller on shores to which it is

indeed a wild speculation to assert that the oriental wisdom ever

wandered, that it is more likely that they were the offspring of the

native ignorance [46], than the sublime importation of a symbolical

philosophy utterly ungenial to the tribes to which it was

communicated, and the times to which the institution is referred. And

though I would assign to the Eleusinian Mysteries a much earlier date

than Lobeck is inclined to affix [47], I search in vain for a more

probable supposition of the causes of their origin than that which he

suggests, and which I now place before the reader. We have seen that

each Grecian state had its peculiar and favourite deities, propitiated

by varying ceremonies. The early Greeks imagined that their gods

might be won from them by the more earnest prayers and the more

splendid offerings of their neighbours; the Homeric heroes found their

claim for divine protection on the number of the offerings they have

rendered to the deity they implore. And how far the jealous desire to

retain to themselves the favour of tutelary gods was entertained by

the Greeks, may be illustrated by the instances specially alluding to

the low and whispered voice in which prayers were addressed to the

superior powers, lest the enemy should hear the address, and vie with

interested emulation for the celestial favour. The Eleusinians, in

frequent hostilities with their neighbours, the Athenians, might very

reasonably therefore exclude the latter from the ceremonies instituted

in honour of their guardian divinities, Demeter and Persephone (i. e.,

Ceres and Proserpine). And we may here add, that secrecy once

established, the rites might at a very early period obtain, and

perhaps deserve, an enigmatic and mystic character. But when, after a

signal defeat of the Eleusinians, the two states were incorporated,

the union was confirmed by a joint participation in the ceremony [48]

to which a political cause would thus give a more formal and solemn

dignity. This account of the origin of the Eleusinian Mysteries is

not indeed capable of demonstration, but it seems to me at least the

most probable in itself, and the most conformable to the habits of the

Greeks, as to those of all early nations.

Certain it is that for a long time the celebration of the Eleusinian

ceremonies was confined to these two neighbouring states, until, as

various causes contributed to unite the whole of Greece in a common

religion and a common name, admission was granted all Greeks of all

ranks, male and female,--provided they had committed no inexpiable

offence, performed the previous ceremonies required, and were

introduced by an Athenian citizen.

With the growing flame and splendour of Athens, this institution rose

into celebrity and magnificence, until it appears to have become the

most impressive spectacle of the heathen world. It is evident that a

people so imitative would reject no innovations or additions that

could increase the interest or the solemnity of exhibition; and still

less such as might come (through whatsoever channel) from that antique

and imposing Egypt, which excited so much of their veneration and

wonder. Nor do I think it possible to account for the great

similarity attested by Herodotus and others, between the mysteries of

Isis and those of Ceres, as well as for the resemblance in less

celebrated ceremonies between the rites of Egypt and of Greece,

without granting at once, that mediately, or even immediately, the

superstitious of the former exercised great influence upon, and

imparted many features to, those of the latter. But the age in which

this religious communication principally commenced has been a matter

of graver dispute than the question merits. A few solitary and

scattered travellers and strangers may probably have given rise to it

at a very remote period; but, upon the whole, it appears to me that,

with certain modifications, we must agree with Lobeck, and the more

rational schools of inquiry, that it was principally in the interval

between the Homeric age and the Persian war that mysticism passed into

religion--that superstition assumed the attributes of a science--and

that lustrations, auguries, orgies, obtained method and system from

the exuberant genius of poetical fanaticism.

That in these august mysteries, doctrines contrary to the popular

religion were propounded, is a theory that has, I think, been

thoroughly overturned. The exhibition of ancient statues, relics, and

symbols, concealed from daily adoration (as in the Catholic festivals

of this day), probably, made a main duty of the Hierophant. But in a

ceremony in honour of Ceres, the blessings of agriculture, and its

connexion with civilization, were also very naturally dramatized. The

visit of the goddess to the Infernal Regions might form an imposing

part of the spectacle: spectral images--alternations of light and

darkness--all the apparitions and effects that are said to have

imparted so much awe to the mysteries, may well have harmonized with,

not contravened, the popular belief. And there is no reason to

suppose that the explanations given by the priests did more than

account for mythological stories, agreeably to the spirit and form of

the received mythology, or deduce moral maxims from the

representation, as hackneyed, as simple, and as ancient, as the

generality of moral aphorisms are. But, as the intellectual progress

of the audience advanced, philosophers, skeptical of the popular

religion, delighted to draw from such imposing representations a

thousand theories and morals utterly unknown to the vulgar; and the

fancies and refinements of later schoolmen have thus been mistaken for

the notions of an early age and a promiscuous multitude. The single

fact (so often insisted upon), that all Greeks were admissible, is

sufficient alone to prove that no secrets incompatible with the common

faith, or very important in themselves, could either have been

propounded by the priests or received by the audience. And it may be

further observed, in corroboration of so self-evident a truth, that it

was held an impiety to the popular faith to reject the initiation of

the mysteries--and that some of the very writers, most superstitious

with respect to the one, attach the most solemnity to the ceremonies

of the other.

XVI. Sanchoniathon wrote a work, now lost, on the worship of the

serpent. This most ancient superstition, found invariably in Egypt

and the East, is also to be traced through many of the legends and

many of the ceremonies of the Greeks. The serpent was a frequent

emblem of various gods--it was often kept about the temples--it was

introduced in the mysteries--it was everywhere considered sacred.

Singular enough, by the way, that while with us the symbol of the evil

spirit, the serpent was generally in the East considered a benefactor.

In India, the serpent with a thousand heads; in Egypt, the serpent

crowned with the lotos-leaf, is a benign and paternal deity. It was

not uncommon for fable to assert that the first civilizers of earth

were half man, half serpent. Thus was Fohi of China [49] represented,

and thus Cecrops of Athens.

XVII. But the most remarkable feature of the superstition of Greece

was her sacred oracles. And these again bring our inquiries back to

Egypt. Herodotus informs us that the oracle of Dodona was by far the

most ancient in Greece [50], and he then proceeds to inform us of its

origin, which he traces to Thebes in Egypt. But here we are beset by

contradictions: Herodotus, on the authority of the Egyptian priests,

ascribes the origin of the Dodona and Lybian oracles to two

priestesses of the Theban Jupiter--stolen by Phoenician pirates--one

of whom, sold into Greece, established at Dodona an oracle similar to

that which she had served at Thebes. But in previous passages

Herodotus informs us, 1st, that in Egypt, no priestesses served the

temples of any deity, male or female; and 2dly, that when the

Egyptians imparted to the Pelasgi the names of their divinities, the

Pelasgi consulted the oracle of Dodona on the propriety of adopting

them; so that that oracle existed before even the first and

fundamental revelations of Egyptian religion. It seems to me,

therefore, a supposition that demands less hardy assumption, and is

equally conformable with the universal superstitions of mankind (since

similar attempts at divination are to be found among so many nations

similarly barbarous) to believe that the oracle arose from the

impressions of the Pelasgi [51] and the natural phenomena of the spot;

though at a subsequent period the manner of the divination was very

probably imitated from that adopted by the Theban oracle. And in

examining the place it indeed seems as if Nature herself had been the

Egyptian priestess! Through a mighty grove of oaks there ran a

stream, whose waters supplied a fountain that might well appear, to

ignorant wonder, endowed with preternatural properties. At a certain

hour of noon it was dry, and at midnight full. Such springs have

usually been deemed oracular, not only in the East, but in almost

every section of the globe.

At first, by the murmuring of waters, and afterward by noises among

the trees, the sacred impostors interpreted the voice of the god. It

is an old truth, that mystery is always imposing and often convenient.

To plain questions were given dark answers, which might admit of

interpretation according to the event. The importance attached to the

oracle, the respect paid to the priest, and the presents heaped on the

altar, indicated to craft and ambition a profitable profession. And

that profession became doubly alluring to its members, because it

proffered to the priests an authority in serving the oracles which

they could not obtain in the general religion of the people. Oracles

increased then, at first slowly, and afterward rapidly, until they

grew so numerous that the single district of Boeotia contained no less

than twenty-five. The oracle of Dodona long, however, maintained its

pre-eminence over the rest, and was only at last eclipsed by that of

Delphi [52], where strong and intoxicating exhalations from a

neighbouring stream were supposed to confer prophetic phrensy.

Experience augmented the sagacity of the oracles, and the priests, no

doubt, intimately acquainted with all the affairs of the states

around, and viewing the living contests of action with the coolness of

spectators, were often enabled to give shrewd and sensible

admonitions,--so that the forethought of wisdom passed for the

prescience of divinity. Hence the greater part of their predictions

were eminently successful; and when the reverse occurred, the fault

was laid on the blind misconstruction of the human applicant. Thus no

great design was executed, no city founded, no colony planted, no war

undertaken, without the advice of an oracle. In the famine, the

pestilence, and the battle, the divine voice was the assuager of

terror and the inspirer of hope. All the instincts of our frailer

nature, ever yearning for some support that is not of the world, were

enlisted in behalf of a superstition which proffered solutions to

doubt, and remedies to distress.

Besides this general cause for the influence of oracles, there was

another cause calculated to give to the oracles of Greece a marked and

popular pre-eminence over those in Egypt. A country divided into

several small, free, and warlike states, would be more frequently in

want of the divine advice, than one united under a single monarchy, or

submitted to the rigid austerity of castes and priestcraft; and in

which the inhabitants felt for political affairs all the languid

indifference habitual to the subjects of a despotic government. Half

a century might pass in Egypt without any political event that would

send anxious thousands to the oracle; but in the wonderful ferment,

activity, and restlessness of the numerous Grecian towns, every month,

every week, there was some project or some feud for which the advice

of a divinity was desired. Hence it was chiefly to a political cause

that the immortal oracle of Delphi owed its pre-eminent importance.

The Dorian worshippers of Apollo (long attached to that oracle, then

comparatively obscure), passing from its neighbourhood and befriended

by its predictions, obtained the mastership of the Peloponnesus;--

their success was the triumph of the oracle. The Dorian Sparta (long

the most powerful of the Grecian states), inviolably faithful to the

Delphian god, upheld his authority, and spread the fame of his

decrees. But in the more polished and enlightened times, the

reputation of the oracle gradually decayed; it shone the brightest

before and during the Persian war;--the appropriate light of an age of

chivalry fading slowly as philosophy arose!

XVIII. But the practice of divination did not limit itself to these

more solemn sources--its enthusiasm was contagious--its assistance was

ever at hand [53]. Enthusiasm operated on the humblest individuals.

One person imagined himself possessed by a spirit actually passing

into his soul--another merely inspired by the divine breath--a third

was cast into supernatural ecstasies, in which he beheld the shadow of

events, or the visions of a god--a threefold species of divine

possession, which we may still find recognised by the fanatics of a

graver faith! Nor did this suffice: a world of omens surrounded every

man. There were not only signs and warnings in the winds, the

earthquake, the eclipse of the sun or moon, the meteor, or the

thunderbolt--but dreams also were reduced to a science [54]; the

entrails of victims were auguries of evil or of good; the flights of

birds, the motions of serpents, the clustering of bees, had their

mystic and boding interpretations. Even hasty words, an accident, a

fall on the earth, a sneeze (for which we still invoke the ancient

blessing), every singular or unwonted event, might become portentous,

and were often rendered lucky or unlucky according to the dexterity or

disposition of the person to whom they occurred.

And although in later times much of this more frivolous superstition

passed away--although Theophrastus speaks of such lesser omens with

the same witty disdain as that with which the Spectator ridicules our

fears at the upsetting of a salt-cellar, or the appearance of a

winding-sheet in a candle,--yet, in the more interesting period of

Greece, these popular credulities were not disdained by the nobler or

wiser few, and to the last they retained that influence upon the mass

which they lost with individuals. And it is only by constantly

remembering this universal atmosphere of religion, that we can imbue

ourselves with a correct understanding of the character of the Greeks

in their most Grecian age. Their faith was with them ever--in sorrow

or in joy--at the funeral or the feast--in their uprisings and their

downsittings--abroad and at home--at the hearth and in the

market-place--in the camp or at the altar. Morning and night all the

greater tribes of the elder world offered their supplications on high:

and Plato has touchingly insisted on this sacred uniformity of custom,

when he tells us that at the rising of the moon and at the dawning of

the sun, you may behold Greeks and barbarians--all the nations of the

earth--bowing in homage to the gods.

XIX. To sum up, the above remarks conduce to these principal

conclusions; First, that the Grecian mythology cannot be moulded into

any of the capricious and fantastic systems of erudite ingenuity: as a

whole, no mythology can be considered more strikingly original, not

only because its foundations appear indigenous, and based upon the

character and impressions of the people--not only because at no one

period, from the earliest even to the latest date, whatever occasional

resemblances may exist, can any identify be established between its

most popular and essential creations, and those of any other faith;

but because, even all that it borrowed it rapidly remodelled and

naturalized, growing yet more individual from its very complexity, yet

more original from the plagiarisms which it embraced; Secondly, that

it differed in many details in the different states, but under the

development of a general intercourse, assisted by a common language,

the plastic and tolerant genius of the people harmonized all discords

--until (catholic in its fundamental principles) her religion united

the whole of Greece in indissoluble bonds of faith and poetry--of

daily customs and venerable traditions; Thirdly, that the influence of

other creeds, though by no means unimportant in amplifying the

character, and adding to the list of the primitive deities, appears

far more evident in the ceremonies and usages than the personal

creations of the faith. We may be reasonably skeptical as to what

Herodotus heard of the origin of rites or gods from Egyptian priests;

but there is no reason to disbelieve the testimony of his experience,

when he asserts, that the forms and solemnities of one worship closely

resemble those of another; the imitation of a foreign ceremony is

perfectly compatible with the aboriginal invention of a national god.

For the rest, I think it might be (and by many scholars appears to me

to have been) abundantly shown, that the Phoenician influences upon

the early mythology of the Greeks were far greater than the Egyptian,

though by degrees, and long after the heroic age, the latter became

more eagerly adopted and more superficially apparent.

In quitting this part of our subject, let it be observed, as an

additional illustration of the remarkable nationality of the Grecian

mythology, that our best light to the manners of the Homeric men, is

in the study of the Homeric gods. In Homer we behold the mythology of

an era, for analogy to which we search in vain the records of the

East--that mythology is inseparably connected with the constitution of

limited monarchies,--with the manners of an heroic age:--the power of

the sovereign of the aristocracy of heaven is the power of a Grecian

king over a Grecian state:--the social life of the gods is the life

most coveted by the Grecian heroes;--the uncertain attributes of the

deities, rather physical or intellectual than moral--strength and

beauty, sagacity mixed with cunning--valour with ferocity--inclination

to war, yet faculties for the inventions of peace; such were the

attributes most honoured among men, in the progressive, but still

uncivilized age which makes the interval so pre-eminently Grecian--

between the mythical and historic times. Vain and impotent are all

attempts to identify that religion of Achaian warriors with the

religion of oriental priests. It was indeed symbolical--but of the

character of its believers; typical--but of the restless, yet

poetical, daring, yet graceful temperament, which afterward conducted

to great achievements and imperishable arts: the coming events of

glory cast their shadows before, in fable.

XX. There now opens to us a far more important inquiry than that into

the origin and form of the religion of the Greeks; namely, the

influences of that religion itself upon their character--their morals

--their social and intellectual tendencies.

The more we can approach the Deity to ourselves--the more we can

invest him with human attributes--the more we can connect him with the

affairs and sympathies of earth, the greater will be his influence

upon our conduct--the more fondly we shall contemplate his attributes,

the more timidly we shall shrink from his vigilance, the more

anxiously we shall strive for his approval. When Epicurus allowed the

gods to exist, but imagined them wholly indifferent to the concerns of

men, contemplating only their own happiness, and regardless alike of

our virtues or our crimes;--with that doctrine he robbed man of the

divinity, as effectually as if he had denied his existence. The fear

of the gods could not be before the eyes of votaries who believed that

the gods were utterly careless of their conduct; and not only the

awful control of religion was removed from their passions, but the

more beautiful part of its influence, resulting not from terror but

from hope, was equally blasted and destroyed: For if the fear of the

divine power serves to restrain the less noble natures, so, on the

other hand, with such as are more elevated and generous, there is no

pleasure like the belief that we are regarded with approbation and

love by a Being of ineffable majesty and goodness--who compassionates

our misfortunes--who rewards our struggles with ourselves. It is this

hope which gives us a pride in our own natures, and which not only

restrains us from vice, but inspires us with an emulation to arouse

within us all that is great and virtuous, in order the more to deserve

his love, and feel the image of divinity reflected upon the soul. It

is for this reason that we are not contented to leave the character of

a God uncertain and unguessed, shrouded in the darkness of his own

infinite power; we clothe him with the attributes of human excellence,

carried only to an extent beyond humanity; and cannot conceive a deity

not possessed of the qualities--such as justice, wisdom, and

benevolence--which are most venerated among mankind. But if we

believe that he has passed to earth--that he has borne our shape, that

he has known our sorrows--the connexion becomes yet more intimate and

close; we feel as if he could comprehend us better, and compassionate

more benignly our infirmities and our griefs. The Christ that has

walked the earth, and suffered on the cross, can be more readily

pictured to our imagination, and is more familiarly before us, than

the Dread Eternal One, who hath the heaven for his throne, and the

earth only for his footstool [55]. And it is this very humanness of

connexion, so to speak, between man and the Saviour, which gives to

the Christian religion, rightly embraced, its peculiar sentiment of

gentleness and of love.

But somewhat of this connexion, though in a more corrupt degree,

marked also the religion of the Greeks; they too believed (at least

the multitude) that most of the deities had appeared on earth, and

been the actual dispensers of the great benefits of social life.

Transferred to heaven, they could more readily understand that those

divinities regarded with interest the nations to which they had been

made visible, and exercised a permanent influence over the earth,

which had been for a while their home.

Retaining the faith that the deities had visited the world, the Greeks

did not however implicitly believe the fables which degraded them by

our weaknesses and vices. They had, as it were--and this seems not to

have been rightly understood by the moderns--two popular mythologies--

the first consecrated to poetry, and the second to actual life. If a

man were told to imitate the gods, it was by the virtues of justice,

temperance, and benevolence [56]; and had he obeyed the mandate by

emulating the intrigues of Jupiter, or the homicides of Mars, he would

have been told by the more enlightened that those stories were the

inventions of the poets; and by the more credulous that gods might be

emancipated from laws, but men were bound by them--“Superis sea jura”

[57]--their own laws to the gods! It is true, then, that those fables

were preserved--were held in popular respect, but the reverence they

excited among the Greeks was due to a poetry which flattered their

national pride and enchained their taste, and not to the serious

doctrines of their religion. Constantly bearing this distinction in

mind, we shall gain considerable insight, not only into their

religion, but into seeming contradictions in their literary history.

They allowed Aristophanes to picture Bacchus as a buffoon, and

Hercules as a glutton, in the same age in which they persecuted

Socrates for neglect of the sacred mysteries and contempt of the

national gods. To that part of their religion which belonged to the

poets they permitted the fullest license; but to the graver portion of

religion--to the existence of the gods--to a belief in their

collective excellence, and providence, and power--to the sanctity of

asylums--to the obligation of oaths--they showed the most jealous and

inviolable respect. The religion of the Greeks, then, was a great

support and sanction to their morals; it inculcated truth, mercy,

justice, the virtues most necessary to mankind, and stimulated to them

by the rigid and popular belief that excellence was approved and guilt

was condemned by the superior powers [58]. And in that beautiful

process by which the common sense of mankind rectifies the errors of

imagination--those fables which subsequent philosophers rightly deemed

dishonourable to the gods, and which the superficial survey of modern

historians has deemed necessarily prejudicial to morals--had no

unworthy effect upon the estimate taken by the Greeks whether of human

actions or of heavenly natures.

XXI. For a considerable period the Greeks did not carry the notion of

divine punishment beyond the grave, except in relation to those

audacious criminals who had blasphemed or denied the gods; it was by

punishments in this world that the guilty were afflicted. And this

doctrine, if less sublime than that of eternal condemnation, was, I

apprehend, on regarding the principles of human nature, equally

effective in restraining crime: for our human and short-sighted minds

are often affected by punishments, in proportion as they are human and

speedy. A penance in the future world is less fearful and distinct,

especially to the young and the passionate, than an unavoidable

retribution in this. Man, too fondly or too vainly, hopes, by

penitence at the close of life, to redeem the faults of the

commencement, and punishment deferred loses more than half its

terrors, and nearly all its certainty.

As long as the Greeks were left solely to their mythology, their views

of a future state were melancholy and confused. Death was an evil,

not a release. Even in their Elysium, their favourite heroes seem to

enjoy but a frigid and unenviable immortality. Yet this saddening

prospect of the grave rather served to exhilarate life, and stimulate

to glory:--“Make the most of existence,” say their early poets, “for

soon comes the dreary Hades!” And placed beneath a delightful

climate, and endowed with a vivacious and cheerful temperament, they

yielded readily to the precept. Their religion was eminently glad and

joyous; even the stern Spartans lost their austerity in their sacred

rites, simple and manly though they were--and the gayer Athenians

passed existence in an almost perpetual circle of festivals and

holydays.

This uncertainty of posthumous happiness contributed also to the

desire of earthly fame. For below at least, their heroes taught them,

immortality was not impossible. Bounded by impenetrable shadows to

this world, they coveted all that in this world was most to be desired

[59]. A short life is acceptable to Achilles, not if it lead to

Elysium, but if it be accompanied with glory. By degrees, however,

prospects of a future state, nobler and more august, were opened by

their philosophers to the hopes of the Greeks. Thales was asserted to

be the first Greek who maintained the immortality of the soul, and

that sublime doctrine was thus rather established by the philosopher

than the priest. [60]

XXII. Besides the direct tenets of religion, the mysteries of the

Greeks exercised an influence on their morals, which, though greatly

exaggerated by modern speculators, was, upon the whole, beneficial,

though not from the reasons that have been assigned. As they grew up

into their ripened and mature importance--their ceremonial, rather

than their doctrine, served to deepen and diffuse a reverence for

religious things. Whatever the licentiousness of other mysteries

(especially in Italy), the Eleusinian rites long retained their renown

for purity and decorum; they were jealously watched by the Athenian

magistracy, and one of the early Athenian laws enacted that the senate

should assemble the day after their celebration to inquire into any

abuse that might have sullied their sacred character. Nor is it,

perhaps, without justice in the later times, that Isocrates lauds

their effect on morality, and Cicero their influence on civilization

and the knowledge of social principles. The lustrations and

purifications, at whatever period their sanctity was generally

acknowledged, could scarcely fail of salutary effects. They were

supposed to absolve the culprit from former crimes, and restore him, a

new man, to the bosom of society. This principle is a great agent of

morality, and was felt as such in the earlier era of Christianity: no

corrupter is so deadly as despair; to reconcile a criminal with

self-esteem is to readmit him, as it were, to virtue.

Even the fundamental error of the religion in point of doctrine, viz.,

its polytheism, had one redeeming consequence in the toleration which

it served to maintain--the grave evils which spring up from the fierce

antagonism of religious opinions, were, save in a few solitary and

dubious instances, unknown to the Greeks. And this general

toleration, assisted yet more by the absence of a separate caste of

priests, tended to lead to philosophy through the open and

unchallenged portals of religion. Speculations on the gods connected

themselves with bold inquiries into nature. Thought let loose in the

wide space of creation--no obstacle to its wanderings--no monopoly of

its commerce--achieved, after many a wild and fruitless voyage,

discoveries unknown to the past--of imperishable importance to the

future. The intellectual adventurers of Greece planted the first flag

upon the shores of philosophy; for the competition of errors is

necessary to the elucidation of truths; and the imagination indicates

the soil which the reason is destined to culture and possess.

XXIII. While such was the influence of their religion on the morals

and the philosophy of the Greeks, what was its effect upon their

national genius?

We must again remember that the Greeks were the only nation among the

more intellectual of that day, who stripped their deities of

symbolical attributes, and did not aspire to invent for gods shapes

differing (save in loftier beauty) from the aspect and form of man.

And thus at once was opened to them the realm of sculpture. The

people of the East, sometimes indeed depicting their deities in human

forms, did not hesitate to change them into monsters, if the addition

of another leg or another arm, a dog’s head or a serpent’s tail, could

better express the emblem they represented. They perverted their

images into allegorical deformities; and receded from the beautiful in

proportion as they indulged their false conceptions of the sublime.

Besides, a painter or a sculptor must have a clear idea presented to

him, to be long cherished and often revolved, if we desire to call

forth all the inspiration of which his genius may be capable; but how

could the eastern artist form a clear idea of an image that should

represent the sun entering Aries, or the productive principle of

nature? Such creations could not fail of becoming stiff or

extravagant, deformed or grotesque. But to the Greek, a god was

something like the most majestic or the most beautiful of his own

species. He studied the human shape for his conceptions of the

divine. Intent upon the natural, he ascended to the ideal. [61]

If such the effect of the Grecian religion upon sculpture, similar and

equal its influence upon poetry. The earliest verses of the Greeks

appear to have been of a religious, though I see no sufficient reason

for asserting that they were therefore of a typical and mystic,

character. However that be, the narrative succeeding to the sacred

poetry materialized all it touched. The shadows of Olympus received

the breath of Homer, and the gods grew at once life-like and palpable

to men. The traditions which connected the deities with humanity--the

genius which divested them of allegory--gave at once to the epic and

the tragic poet the supernatural world. The inhabitants of heaven

itself became individualized--bore each a separate character--could be

rendered distinct, dramatic, as the creatures of daily life. Thus--an

advantage which no moderns ever have possessed--with all the ineffable

grandeur of deities was combined all the familiar interest of mortals;

and the poet, by preserving the characteristics allotted to each god,

might make us feel the associations and sympathies of earth, even when

he bore us aloft to the unknown Olympus, or plunged below amid the

shades of Orcus.

The numerous fables mixed with the Grecian creed, sufficiently

venerable, as we have seen, not to be disdained, but not so sacred as

to be forbidden, were another advantage to the poet. For the

traditions of a nation are its poetry! And if we moderns, in the

German forest, or the Scottish highlands, or the green English fields,

yet find inspiration in the notions of fiend, and sprite, and fairy,

not acknowledged by our religion, not appended as an apocryphal

adjunct to our belief, how much more were those fables adapted to

poetry, which borrowed not indeed an absolute faith, but a certain

shadow, a certain reverence and mystery, from religion! Hence we find

that the greatest works of imagination which the Greeks have left us,

whether of Homer, of Aeschylus, or of Sophocles, are deeply indebted

to their mythological legends. The Grecian poetry, like the Grecian

religion, was at once half human, half divine--majestic, vast, august

--household, homely, and familiar. If we might borrow an illustration

from the philosophy of Democritus, its earthlier dreams and

divinations were indeed the impressions of mighty and spectral images

inhabiting the air. [62]

XXIV. Of the religion of Greece, of its rites and ceremonies, and of

its influence upon the moral and intellectual faculties--this--

already, I fear, somewhat too prolixly told--is all that at present I

deem it necessary to say. [63]

We have now to consider the origin of slavery in Greece, an inquiry

almost equally important to our accurate knowledge of her polity and

manners.

XXV. Wherever we look--to whatsoever period of history--conquest, or

the settlement of more enlightened colonizers amid a barbarous tribe,

seems the origin of slavery--modified according to the spirit of the

times, the humanity of the victor, or the policy of the lawgiver. The

aboriginals of Greece were probably its earliest slaves [64],--yet the

aboriginals might be also its earliest lords. Suppose a certain tribe

to overrun a certain country--conquer and possess it: new settlers are

almost sure to be less numerous than the inhabitants they subdue; in

proportion as they are the less powerful in number are they likely to

be the more severe in authority: they will take away the arms of the

vanquished--suppress the right of meetings--make stern and terrible

examples against insurgents--and, in a word, quell by the moral

constraint of law those whom it would be difficult to control merely

by, physical force;--the rigidity of the law being in ratio to the

deficiency of the force. In times semi-civilized, and even

comparatively enlightened, conquerors have little respect for the

conquered--an immense and insurmountable distinction is at once made

between the natives and their lords. All ancient nations seem to have

considered that the right of conquest gave a right to the lands of the

conquered country. William dividing England among his Normans is but

an imitator of every successful invader of ancient times. The

new-comers having gained the land of a subdued people, that people, in

order to subsist, must become the serfs of the land [65]. The more

formidable warriors are mostly slain, or exiled, or conciliated by

some remains of authority and possessions; the multitude remain the

labourers of the soil, and slight alterations of law will

imperceptibly convert the labourer into the slave. The earliest

slaves appear chiefly to have been the agricultural population. If

the possession of the government were acquited by colonizers [66],--

not so much by the force of arms as by the influence of superior arts

--the colonizers would in some instances still establish servitude for

the multitude, though not under so harsh a name. The laws they would

frame for an uncultured and wretched population, would distinguish

between the colonizers and the aboriginals (excepting perhaps only the

native chiefs, accustomed arbitrarily to command, though not

systematically to enslave the rest). The laws for the aboriginal

population would still be an improvement on their previous savage and

irregulated state--and generations might pass before they would attain

a character of severity, or before they made the final and

ineffaceable distinction between the freeman and the slave. The

perturbed restlessness and constant migration of tribes in Greece,

recorded both by tradition and by history, would consequently tend at

a very remote period to the institution and diffusion of slavery and

the Pelasgi of one tribe would become the masters of the Pelasgi of

another. There is, therefore, no necessity to look out of Greece for

the establishment of servitude in that country by conquest and war.

But the peaceful colonization of foreign settlers would (as we have

seen) lead to it by slower and more gentle degrees. And the piracies

of the Phoenicians, which embraced the human species as an article of

their market, would be an example, more prevalent and constant than

their own, to the piracies of the early Greeks. The custom of

servitude, thus commenced, is soon fed by new sources. Prisoners of

war are enslaved, or, at the will of the victor, exchanged as an

article of commerce. Before the interchange of money, we have

numerous instances of the barter of prisoners for food and arms. And

as money became the medium of trade, so slaves became a regular

article of sale and purchase. Hence the origin of the slave-market.

Luxury increasing slaves were purchased not merely for the purposes of

labour, but of pleasure. The accomplished musician of the beautiful

virgin was an article of taste or a victim of passion. Thus, what it

was the tendency of barbarism to originate, it became the tendency of

civilization to increase.

Slavery, then, originated first in conquest and war, piracy, or

colonization: secondly, in purchase. There were two other and

subordinate sources of the institution--the first was crime, the

second poverty. If a free citizen committed a heinous offence, he

could be degraded into a slave--if he were unable to pay his debts,

the creditor could claim his person. Incarceration is merely a

remnant and substitute of servitude. The two latter sources failed as

nations became more free. But in Attica it was not till the time of

Solon, several centuries after the institution of slavery at Athens,

that the right of the creditor to the personal services of the debtor

was formally abolished.

A view of the moral effects of slavery--of the condition of the slaves

at Athens--of the advantages of the system and its evils--of the light

in which it was regarded by the ancients themselves, other and more

fitting opportunities will present to us.

XXVI. The introduction of an hereditary aristocracy into a particular

country, as yet uncivilized, is often simultaneous with that of

slavery. A tribe of warriors possess and subdue a territory;--they

share its soil with the chief in proportion to their connexion with

his person, or their military services and repute--each becomes the

lord of lands and slaves--each has privileges above the herd of the

conquered population. Suppose again, that the dominion is acquired by

colonizers rather than conquerors; the colonizers, superior in

civilization to the natives,--and regarded by the latter with

reverence and awe, would become at once a privileged and noble order.

Hence, from either source, an aristocracy permanent and hereditary

[67]. If founded on conquest, in proportion to the number of the

victors, is that aristocracy more or less oligarchical. The extreme

paucity of force with which the Dorians conquered their neighbours,

was one of the main causes why the governments they established were

rigidly oligarchical.

XXVII. Proceeding onward, we find that in this aristocracy, are

preserved the seeds of liberty and the germe of republicanism. These

conquerors, like our feudal barons, being sharers of the profit of the

conquest and the glory of the enterprise, by no means allow undivided

and absolute authority to their chiefs. Governed by separate laws--

distinguished by separate privileges from the subdued community, they

are proud of their own freedom, the more it is contrasted with the

servitude of the population: they preserve liberty for themselves--

they resist the undue assumptions of the king [68]--and keep alive

that spirit and knowledge of freedom which in after times (as their

numbers increase, and they become a people, distinct still from the

aboriginal natives, who continue slaves) are transfused from the

nobles to the multitude. In proportion as the new race are warlike

will their unconscious spirit be that of republicanism; the connexion

between martial and republican tendencies was especially recognised by

all ancient writers: and the warlike habits of the Hellenes were the

cradle of their political institutions. Thus, in conquest (or

sometimes in immigration) we may trace the origin of an aristocracy

[69], as of slavery, and thus, by a deeper inquiry, we may find also

that the slavery of a population and the freedom of a state have their

date, though dim and undeveloped, in the same epoch.

XXVIII. I have thought that the supposed Egyptian colonization of

Attica under Cecrops afforded the best occasion to treat of the above

matters, not so much in reference to Cecrops himself as to the

migration of Eastern and Egyptian adventurers. Of such migrations the

dates may be uncertain--of such adventurers the names may be unknown.

But it seems to me impossible to deny the fact of foreign settlements

in Greece, in her remoter and more barbarous era, though we may

dispute as to the precise amount of the influence they exercised, and

the exact nature of the rites and customs they established.

A belief in the early connexion between the Egyptians and Athenians,

encouraged by the artful vanity of the one, was welcomed by the lively

credulity of the other. Many ages after the reputed sway of the

mythical Cecrops, it was fondly imagined that traces of their origin

from the solemn Egypt [70] were yet visible among the graceful and

versatile people, whose character was as various, yet as

individualized, as their religion--who, viewed in whatsoever aspect of

their intellectual history, may appear constantly differing, yet

remain invariably Athenian. Whether clamouring in the Agora--whether

loitering in the Academe--whether sacrificing to Hercules in the

temple--whether laughing at Hercules on the stage--whether with

Miltiades arming against the Mede--whether with Demosthenes declaiming

against the Macedonian--still unmistakeable, unexampled, original, and

alone--in their strength or their weakness, their wisdom or their

foibles their turbulent action, their cultivated repose.