as to the person of Dionysus, the main figure of the piece; he is in
part Dionysus, indeed; but in part, only his messenger, or minister
preparing his way; a certain harshness of effect in the actual
appearance of a god upon the stage being in this way relieved, or
made easy, as by a gradual revelation in two steps. To Pentheus, in
his invincible ignorance, his essence remains to the last unrevealed,
and even the women of the chorus seem to understand in him, so far,
only the forerunner of their real leader. As he goes away bound,
therefore, they too, threatened also in their turn with slavery,
invoke his greater original to appear and deliver them. In pathetic
cries they reproach Thebes for rejecting them--ti m' anainei, ti me
pheugeis;+ yet they foretell his future greatness; a new Orpheus, he
will more than renew that old miraculous reign over animals and
plants. Their song is full of suggestions of wood and river. It is
as if, for a moment, Dionysus became the suffering vine again; and
the rustle of the leaves and water come through their words to
refresh it. The [70] fountain of Dirce still haunted by the virgins
of Thebes, where the infant god was cooled and washed from the flecks
of his fiery birth, becomes typical of the coolness of all springs,
and is made, by a really poetic licence, the daughter of the distant
Achelous--the earliest born, the father in myth, of all Greek rivers.
A giddy sonorous scene of portents and surprises follows--a distant,
exaggerated, dramatic reflex of that old thundering tumult of the
festival in the vineyard--in which Dionysus reappears, miraculously
set free from his bonds. First, in answer to the deep-toned
invocation of the chorus, a great voice is heard from within,
proclaiming him to be the son of Semele and Zeus. Then, amid the
short, broken, rapturous cries of the women of the chorus,
proclaiming him master, the noise of an earthquake passes slowly; the
pillars of the palace are seen waving to and fro; while the strange,
memorial fire from the tomb of Semele blazes up and envelopes the
whole building. The terrified women fling themselves on the ground;
and then, at last, as the place is shaken open, Dionysus is seen
stepping out from among the tottering masses of the mimic palace,
bidding them arise and fear not. But just here comes a long pause in
the action of the play, in which we must listen to a messenger newly
arrived from the glens, to tell us what he has seen there, among the
Maenads. The singular, somewhat sinister beauty of this speech, and
a [71] similar one subsequent--a fair description of morning on the
mountain-tops, with the Bacchic women sleeping, which turns suddenly
to a hard, coarse picture of animals cruelly rent--is one of the
special curiosities which distinguish this play; and, as it is wholly
narrative, I shall give it in English prose, abbreviating, here and
there, some details which seem to have but a metrical value:--
"I was driving my herd of cattle to the summit of the scaur to feed,
what time the sun sent forth his earliest beams to warm the earth.
And lo! three companies of women, and at the head of one of them
Autonoe, thy mother Agave at the head of the second, and Ino at the
head of the third. And they all slept, with limbs relaxed, leaned
against the low boughs of the pines, or with head thrown heedlessly
among the oak-leaves strewn upon the ground--all in the sleep of
temperance, not, as thou saidst, pursuing Cypris through the
solitudes of the forest, drunken with wine, amid the low rustling of
the lotus-pipe.
"And thy mother, when she heard the lowing of the kine, stood up in
the midst of them, and cried to them to shake off sleep. And they,
casting slumber from their eyes, started upright, a marvel of beauty
and order, young and old and maidens yet unmarried. And first, they
let fall their hair upon their shoulders; and those [72] whose
cinctures were unbound re-composed the spotted fawn-skins, knotting
them about with snakes, which rose and licked them on the chin.
Some, lately mothers, who with breasts still swelling had left their
babes behind, nursed in their arms antelopes, or wild whelps of
wolves, and yielded them their milk to drink; and upon their heads
they placed crowns of ivy or of oak, or of flowering convolvulus.
Then one, taking a thyrsus-wand, struck with it upon a rock, and
thereupon leapt out a fine rain of water; another let down a reed
upon the earth, and a fount of wine was sent forth there; and those
whose thirst was for a white stream, skimming the surface with their
finger-tips, gathered from it abundance of milk; and from the ivy of
the mystic wands streams of honey distilled. Verily! hadst thou seen
these things, thou wouldst have worshipped whom now thou revilest.
"And we shepherds and herdsmen came together to question with each
other over this matter--what strange and terrible things they do.
And a certain wayfarer from the city, subtle in speech, spake to us--
'O! dwellers upon these solemn ledges of the hills, will ye that we
hunt down, and take, amid her revelries, Agave, the mother of
Pentheus, according to the king's pleasure?' And he seemed to us to
speak wisely; and we lay in wait among the bushes; and they, at the
time appointed, began moving their wands for the Bacchic dance, [73]
calling with one voice upon Bromius!--Iacchus!--the son of Zeus! and
the whole mountain was moved with ecstasy together, and the wild
creatures; nothing but was moved in their running. And it chanced
that Agave, in her leaping, lighted near me, and I sprang from my
hiding-place, willing to lay hold on her; and she groaned out, 'O!
dogs of hunting, these fellows are upon our traces; but follow me!
follow! with the mystic wands for weapons in your hands.' And we, by
flight, hardly escaped tearing to pieces at their hands, who
thereupon advanced with knifeless fingers upon the young of the kine,
as they nipped the green; and then hadst thou seen one holding a
bleating calf in her hands, with udder distent, straining it asunder;
others tore the heifers to shreds amongst them; tossed up and down
the morsels lay in sight--flank or hoof--or hung from the fir-trees,
dropping churned blood. The fierce, horned bulls stumbled forward,
their breasts upon the ground, dragged on by myriad hands of young
women, and in a moment the inner parts were rent to morsels. So,
like a flock of birds aloft in flight, they retreat upon the level
lands outstretched below, which by the waters of Asopus put forth the
fair-flowering crop of Theban people--Hysiae and Erythrae--below the
precipice of Cithaeron."--
A grotesque scene follows, in which the [74] humour we noted, on
seeing those two old men diffidently set forth in chaplet and fawn-
skin, deepens into a profound tragic irony. Pentheus is determined
to go out in arms against the Bacchanals and put them to death, when
a sudden desire seizes him to witness them in their encampment upon
the mountains. Dionysus, whom he still supposes to be but a prophet
or messenger of the god, engages to conduct him thither; and, for
greater security among the dangerous women, proposes that he shall
disguise himself in female attire. As Pentheus goes within for that
purpose, he lingers for a moment behind him, and in prophetic speech
declares the approaching end;--the victim has fallen into the net;
and he goes in to assist at the toilet, to array him in the ornaments
which he will carry to Hades, destroyed by his own mother's hands.
It is characteristic of Euripides--part of his fine tact and
subtlety--to relieve and justify what seems tedious, or constrained,
or merely terrible and grotesque, by a suddenly suggested trait of
homely pathos, or a glimpse of natural beauty, or a morsel of form or
colour seemingly taken directly from picture or sculpture. So here,
in this fantastic scene our thoughts are changed in a moment by
the singing of the chorus, and divert for a while to the dark-haired
tresses of the wood; the breath of the river-side is upon us; beside
it, a fawn escaped from the hunter's net is flying swiftly in [75]
its joy; like it, the Maenad rushes along; and we see the little head
thrown back upon the neck, in deep aspiration, to drink in the dew.
Meantime, Pentheus has assumed his disguise, and comes forth tricked
up with false hair and the dress of a Bacchanal; but still with some
misgivings at the thought of going thus attired through the streets
of Thebes, and with many laughable readjustments of the unwonted
articles of clothing. And with the woman's dress, his madness is
closing faster round him; just before, in the palace, terrified at
the noise of the earthquake, he had drawn sword upon a mere fantastic
appearance, and pierced only the empty air. Now he begins to see the
sun double, and Thebes with all its towers repeated, while his
conductor seems to him transformed into a wild beast; and now and
then, we come upon some touches of a curious psychology, so that we
might almost seem to be reading a modern poet. As if Euripides had
been aware of a not unknown symptom of incipient madness (it is said)
in which the patient, losing the sense of resistance, while lifting
small objects imagines himself to be raising enormous weights,
Pentheus, as he lifts the thyrsus, fancies he could lift Cithaeron
with all the Bacchanals upon it. At all this the laughter of course
will pass round the theatre; while those who really pierce into the
purpose of the poet, shudder, as they see the victim thus grotesquely
clad going to his doom, [76] already foreseen in the ominous chant of
the chorus--and as it were his grave-clothes, in the dress which
makes him ridiculous.
Presently a messenger arrives to announce that Pentheus is dead, and
then another curious narrative sets forth the manner of his death.
Full of wild, coarse, revolting details, of course not without
pathetic touches, and with the loveliness of the serving Maenads, and
of their mountain solitudes--their trees and water--never quite
forgotten, it describes how, venturing as a spy too near the sacred
circle, Pentheus was fallen upon, like a wild beast, by the mystic
huntresses and torn to pieces, his mother being the first to begin
"the sacred rites of slaughter."
And at last Agave herself comes upon the stage, holding aloft the
head of her son, fixed upon the sharp end of the thyrsus, calling
upon the women of the chorus to welcome the revel of the Evian god;
who, accordingly, admit her into the company, professing themselves
her fellow-revellers, the Bacchanals being thus absorbed into the
chorus for the rest of the play. For, indeed, all through it, the
true, though partly suppressed relation of the chorus to the
Bacchanals is this, that the women of the chorus, staid and temperate
for the moment, following Dionysus in his alternations, are but the
paler sisters of his more wild and gloomy votaries--the true
followers of the mystical Dionysus--the real chorus of Zagreus; the
idea that their [77] violent proceedings are the result of madness
only, sent on them as a punishment for their original rejection of
the god, being, as I said, when seen from the deeper motives of the
myth, only a "sophism" of Euripides--a piece of rationalism of which
he avails himself for the purpose of softening down the tradition of
which he has undertaken to be the poet. Agave comes on the stage,
then, blood-stained, exulting in her "victory of tears," still quite
visibly mad indeed, and with the outward signs of madness, and as her
mind wanders, musing still on the fancy that the dead head in her
hands is that of a lion she has slain among the mountains--a young
lion, she avers, as she notices the down on the young man's chin, and
his abundant hair--a fancy in which the chorus humour her, willing to
deal gently with the poor distraught creature. Supported by them,
she rejoices "exceedingly, exceedingly," declaring herself
"fortunate" in such goodly spoil; priding herself that the victim has
been slain, not with iron weapons, but with her own white fingers,
she summons all Thebes to come and behold. She calls for her aged
father to draw near and see; and for Pentheus himself, at last, that
he may mount and rivet her trophy, appropriately decorative there,
between the triglyphs of the cornice below the roof, visible to all.
And now, from this point onwards, Dionysus himself becomes more and
more clearly discernible [78] as the hunter, a wily hunter, and man
the prey he hunts for; "Our king is a hunter," cry the chorus, as
they unite in Agave's triumph and give their sanction to her deed.
And as the Bacchanals supplement the chorus, and must be added to it
to make the conception of it complete; so in the conception of
Dionysus also a certain transference, or substitution, must be made--
much of the horror and sorrow of Agave, of Pentheus, of the whole
tragic situation, must be transferred to him, if we wish to realise
in the older, profounder, and more complete sense of his nature, that
mystical being of Greek tradition to whom all these experiences--his
madness, the chase, his imprisonment and death, his peace again--
really belong; and to discern which, through Euripides' peculiar
treatment of his subject, is part of the curious interest of this
play.
Through the sophism of Euripides! For that, again, is the really
descriptive word, with which Euripides, a lover of sophisms, as
Aristophanes knows, himself supplies us. Well;--this softened
version of the Bacchic madness is a sophism of Euripides; and
Dionysus Omophagus--the eater of raw flesh, must be added to the
golden image of Dionysus Meilichius--the honey-sweet, if the old
tradition in its completeness is to be, in spite of that sophism, our
closing impression; if we are to catch, in its fulness, that deep
undercurrent of horror which runs below, all through [79] this masque
of spring, and realise the spectacle of that wild chase, in which
Dionysus is ultimately both the hunter and the spoil.
But meantime another person appears on the stage; Cadmus enters,
followed by attendants bearing on a bier the torn limbs of Pentheus,
which lying wildly scattered through the tangled wood, have been with
difficulty collected and now decently put together and covered over.
In the little that still remains before the end of the play, destiny
now hurrying things rapidly forward, and strong emotions, hopes and
forebodings being now closely packed, Euripides has before him an
artistic problem of enormous difficulty. Perhaps this very haste and
close-packing of the matter, which keeps the mind from dwelling
overmuch on detail, relieves its real extravagance, and those who
read it carefully will think that the pathos of Euripides has been
equal to the occasion. In a few profoundly designed touches he
depicts the perplexity of Cadmus, in whose house a god had become an
inmate, only to destroy it--the regret of the old man for the one
male child to whom that house had looked up as the pillar whereby
aged people might feel secure; the piteous craziness of Agave; the
unconscious irony with which she caresses the florid, youthful head
of her son; the delicate breaking of the thing to her reviving
intelligence, as Cadmus, though he can but wish that she might live
on for ever in her visionary enjoyment, [80] prepares the way, by
playing on that other horrible legend of the Theban house, the
tearing of Actaeon to death--he too destroyed by a god. He gives us
the sense of Agave's gradual return to reason through many glimmering
doubts, till she wakes up at last to find the real face turned up
towards the mother and murderess; the quite naturally spontaneous
sorrow of the mother, ending with her confession, down to her last
sigh, and the final breaking up of the house of Cadmus; with a result
so genuine, heartfelt, and dignified withal in its expression of a
strange ineffable woe, that a fragment of it, the lamentation of
Agave over her son, in which the long-pent agony at last finds vent,
were, it is supposed, adopted into his paler work by an early
Christian poet, and have figured since, as touches of real fire, in
the Christus Patiens of Gregory Nazianzen.
NOTES
64. +Transliteration: autika ga pasa choreusei. E-text editor's
translation: "Straightway all the earth shall dance." Euripides,
Bacchae 114. Euripidis Fabulae, ed. Gilbert Murray, vol. 3.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913.
66. +Transliteration: poi dei choreuein; poi kathistanai poda; kai
krata seisai polion. Translation: "Where must I dance? Where must
I stand and shake my white locks?" Euripides, Bacchae 184-85.
Euripidis Fabulae, ed. Gilbert Murray, vol. 3. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1913.
69. +Transliteration: ti m' anainei, ti me pheugeis. Translation:
"Why do you reject me, why do you run from me?" Bacchae 519. Euripidis
Fabulae, ed. Gilbert Murray, vol. 3. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913.
THE MYTH OF DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE: I
[81] No chapter in the history of human imagination is more curious
than the myth of Demeter, and Kore or Persephone. Alien in some
respects from the genuine traditions of Greek mythology, a relic of
the earlier inhabitants of Greece, and having but a subordinate place
in the religion of Homer, it yet asserted its interest, little by
little, and took a complex hold on the minds of the Greeks, becoming
finally the central and most popular subject of their national
worship. Following its changes, we come across various phases of
Greek culture, which are not without their likenesses in the modern
mind. We trace it in the dim first period of instinctive popular
conception; we see it connecting itself with many impressive elements
of art, and poetry, and religious custom, with the picturesque
superstitions of the many, and with the finer intuitions of the few;
and besides this, it is in itself full of [82] interest and
suggestion, to all for whom the ideas of the Greek religion have any
real meaning in the modern world. And the fortune of the myth has
not deserted it in later times. In the year 1780, the long-lost text
of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter was discovered among the manuscripts
of the imperial library at Moscow; and, in our own generation, the
tact of an eminent student of Greek art, Sir Charles Newton, has
restored to the world the buried treasures of the little temple and
precinct of Demeter, at Cnidus, which have many claims to rank in the
central order of Greek sculpture. The present essay is an attempt to
select and weave together, for those who are now approaching the
deeper study of Greek thought, whatever details in the development of
this myth, arranged with a view rather to a total impression than to
the debate of particular points, may seem likely to increase their
stock of poetical impressions, and to add to this some criticisms on
the expression which it has left of itself in extant art and poetry.
The central expression, then, of the story of Demeter and Persephone
is the Homeric hymn, to which Grote has assigned a date at least as
early as six hundred years before Christ. The one survivor of a whole
family of hymns on this subject, it was written, perhaps, for one of
those contests which took place on the seventh day of the Eleusinian
festival, and in which a bunch of [83] ears of corn was the prize;
perhaps, for actual use in the mysteries themselves, by the
Hierophantes, or Interpreter, who showed to the worshippers at
Eleusis those sacred places to which the poem contains so many
references. About the composition itself there are many difficult
questions, with various surmises as to why it has remained only in
this unique manuscript of the end of the fourteenth century.
Portions of the text are missing, and there are probably some
additions by later hands; yet most scholars have admitted that it
possesses some of the true characteristics of the Homeric style, some
genuine echoes of the age immediately succeeding that which produced
the Iliad and the Odyssey. Listen now to a somewhat abbreviated
version of it.
"I begin the song of Demeter"--says the prize-poet, or the
Interpreter, the Sacristan of the holy places--"the song of Demeter
and her daughter Persephone, whom Aidoneus carried away by the
consent of Zeus, as she played, apart from her mother, with the deep-
bosomed daughters of the Ocean, gathering flowers in a meadow of soft
grass--roses and the crocus and fair violets and flags, and
hyacinths, and, above all, the strange flower of the narcissus, which
the Earth, favouring the desire of Aidoneus, brought forth for the
first time, to snare the footsteps of the flower-like girl. A
hundred [84] heads of blossom grew up from the roots of it, and the
sky and the earth and the salt wave of the sea were glad at the scent
thereof. She stretched forth her hands to take the flower; thereupon
the earth opened, and the king of the great nation of the dead sprang
out with his immortal horses. He seized the unwilling girl, and bore
her away weeping, on his golden chariot. She uttered a shrill cry,
calling upon her father Zeus; but neither man nor god heard her
voice, nor even the nymphs of the meadow where she played; except
Hecate only, the daughter of Persaeus, sitting, as ever, in her cave,
half veiled with a shining veil, thinking delicate thoughts; she, and
the Sun also, heard her.
"So long as she could still see the earth, and the sky, and the sea
with the great waves moving, and the beams of the sun, and still
thought to see again her mother, and the race of the ever-living
gods, so long hope soothed her, in the midst of her grief. The peaks
of the hills and the depths of the sea echoed her cry. And the
mother heard it. A sharp pain seized her at the heart; she plucked
the veil from her hair, and cast down the blue hood from her
shoulders, and fled forth like a bird, seeking Persephone over dry
land and sea. But neither man nor god would tell her the truth; nor
did any bird come to her as a sure messenger.
"Nine days she wandered up and down upon the earth, having blazing
torches in her hands; [85] and, in her great sorrow, she refused to
taste of ambrosia, or of the cup of the sweet nectar, nor washed her
face. But when the tenth morning came, Hecate met her, having a
light in her hands. But Hecate had heard the voice only, and had
seen no one, and could not tell Demeter who had borne the girl away.
And Demeter said not a word, but fled away swiftly with her, having
the blazing torches in her hands, till they came to the Sun, the
watchman both of gods and men; and the goddess questioned him, and
the Sun told her the whole story.
"Then a more terrible grief took possession of Demeter, and, in her
anger against Zeus, she forsook the assembly of the gods and abode
among men, for a long time veiling her beauty under a worn
countenance, so that none who looked upon her knew her, until she
came to the house of Celeus, who was then king of Eleusis. In her
sorrow, she sat down at the wayside by the virgin's well, where the
people of Eleusis come to draw water, under the shadow of an olive-
tree. She seemed as an aged woman whose time of child-bearing is
gone by, and from whom the gifts of Aphrodite have been withdrawn,
like one of the hired servants, who nurse the children or keep house,
in kings' palaces. And the daughters of Celeus, four of them, like
goddesses, possessing the flower of their youth, Callidice,
Cleisidice, Demo, and Callithoe the eldest of them, coming to draw
water that they [86] might bear it in their brazen pitchers to their
father's house, saw Demeter and knew her not. The gods are hard for
men to recognise.
"They asked her kindly what she did there, alone; and Demeter
answered, dissemblingly, that she was escaped from certain pirates,
who had carried her from her home and meant to sell her as a slave.
Then they prayed her to abide there while they returned to the
palace, to ask their mother's permission to bring her home.
"Demeter bowed her head in assent; and they, having filled their
shining vessels with water, bore them away, rejoicing in their
beauty. They came quickly to their father's house, and told their
mother what they had seen and heard. Their mother bade them return,
and hire the woman for a great price; and they, like the hinds or
young heifers leaping in the fields in spring, fulfilled with the
pasture, holding up the folds of their raiment, sped along the hollow
road-way, their hair, in colour like the crocus, floating about their
shoulders as they went. They found the glorious goddess still
sitting by the wayside, unmoved. Then they led her to their father's
house; and she, veiled from head to foot, in her deep grief, followed
them on the way, and her blue robe gathered itself as she walked, in
many folds about her feet. They came to the house, and passed
through the sunny porch, where their mother, Metaneira, was [87]
sitting against one of the pillars of the roof, having a young child
in her bosom. They ran up to her; but Demeter crossed the threshold,
and, as she passed through, her head rose and touched the roof, and
her presence filled the doorway with a divine brightness.