myth, relics of the first stage of the development of the story, so
also many of its incidents are probably suggested by the
circumstances and details of the Eleusinian ritual. There were
religious usages before there were distinct religious conceptions,
and these antecedent religious usages shape and determine, at many
points, the ultimate religious conception, as the details of the myth
interpret or explain the religious custom. The hymn relates the
legend of certain holy places, to which various impressive religious
rites had attached themselves--the holy well, the old fountain, the
stone of sorrow, which it was the office of the "interpreter" of the
holy places to show to the people. The sacred way which led from
Athens to Eleusis was rich in such memorials. The nine days of the
wanderings of Demeter in the Homeric hymn are the nine days of the
duration of the greater or autumnal mysteries; the jesting of the old
woman Iambe, who endeavours to make Demeter smile, are the customary
mockeries with which the worshippers, as they rested on the bridge,
on the seventh day of the feast, assailed those who passed by. The
torches in the hands of Demeter are borrowed from the same source;
and the shadow in which she is [121] constantly represented, and
which is the peculiar sign of her grief, is partly ritual, and a
relic of the caves of the old Chthonian worship, partly poetical--
expressive, half of the dark earth to which she escapes from Olympus,
half of her mourning. She appears consistently, in the hymn, as a
teacher of rites, transforming daily life, and the processes of life,
into a religious solemnity. With no misgiving as to the proprieties
of a mere narration, the hymn-writer mingles these symbolical
imitations with the outlines of the original story; and, in his
Demeter, the dramatic person of the mysteries mixes itself with the
primitive mythical figure. And the worshipper, far from being
offended by these interpolations, may have found a special
impressiveness in them, as they linked continuously its inner sense
with the outward imagery of the ritual.
And, as Demeter and her story embodied themselves gradually in the
Greek imagination, so these mysteries in which her worship found its
chief expression, grew up little by little, growing always in close
connexion with the modifications of the story, sometimes prompting
them, at other times suggested by them. That they had a single
special author is improbable, and a mere invention of the Greeks,
ignorant of their real history and the general analogy of such
matters. Here again, as in the story itself, the idea of
development, of degrees, of a slow [122] and natural growth, impeded
here, diverted there, is the illuminating thought which earlier
critics lacked. "No tongue may speak of them," says the Homeric
hymn; and the secret has certainly been kept. The antiquarian,
dealing, letter by letter, with what is recorded of them, has left
few certain data for the reflexion of the modern student of the Greek
religion; and of this, its central solemnity, only a fragmentary
picture can be made. It is probable that these mysteries developed
the symbolical significance of the story of the descent into Hades,
the coming of Demeter to Eleusis, the invention of Persephone. They
may or may not have been the vehicle of a secret doctrine, but were
certainly an artistic spectacle, giving, like the mysteries of the
middle age, a dramatic representation of the sacred story,--perhaps a
detailed performance, perhaps only such a conventional
representation, as was afforded for instance by the medieval
ceremonies of Palm Sunday; the whole, probably, centering in an image
of Demeter--the work of Praxiteles or his school, in ivory and gold.
There is no reason to suppose any specific difference between the
observances of the Eleusinian festival and the accustomed usages of
the Greek religion; nocturns, libations, quaint purifications,
processions--are common incidents of all Greek worship; in all
religious ceremonies there is an element of dramatic symbolism; and
what we really do see, through those scattered notices, [123] are
things which have their parallels in a later age, the whole being not
altogether unlike a modern pilgrimage. The exposition of the sacred
places--the threshing-floor of Triptolemus, the rocky seat on which
Demeter had rested in her sorrow, the well of Callichorus--is not so
strange, as it would seem, had it no modern illustration. The
libations, at once a watering of the vines and a drink-offering to
the dead--still needing men's services, waiting for purification
perhaps, or thirsting, like Dante's Adam of Brescia, in their close
homes--must, to almost all minds, have had a certain natural
impressiveness; and a parallel has sometimes been drawn between this
festival and All Souls' Day.
And who, everywhere, has not felt the mystical influence of that
prolonged silence, the mystic silence, from which the very word
"mystery" has its origin? Something also there undoubtedly was,
which coarser minds might misunderstand. On one day, the initiated
went in procession to the sea-coast, where they underwent a
purification by bathing in the sea. On the fifth night there was the
torchlight procession; and, by a touch of real life in him, we gather
from the first page of Plato's Republic that such processions were
popular spectacles, having a social interest, so that people made
much of attending them. There was the procession of the sacred
basket filled with poppy-seeds and pomegranates. There was the day
of rest, after [124] the stress and excitement of the "great night."
On the sixth day, the image of Iacchus, son of Demeter, crowned with
myrtle and having a torch in its hand, was carried in procession,
through thousands of spectators, along the sacred way, amid joyous
shouts and songs. We have seen such processions; we understand how
many different senses, and how lightly, various spectators may put on
them; how little definite meaning they may have even for those who
officiate in them. Here, at least, there was the image itself, in
that age, with its close connexion between religion and art,
presumably fair. Susceptibility to the impressions of religious
ceremonial must always have varied with the peculiarities of
individual temperament, as it varies in our own day; and Eleusis,
with its incense and sweet singing, may have been as little
interesting to the outward senses of some worshippers there, as the
stately and affecting ceremonies of the medieval church to many of
its own members. In a simpler yet profounder sense than has
sometimes been supposed, these things were really addressed to the
initiated only.*
We have to travel a long way from the Homeric hymn to the hymn of
Callimachus, who writes in the end of Greek literature, in the third
century before Christ, in celebration of the procession of the sacred
basket of Demeter, not [125] at the Attic, but at the Alexandrian
Eleusinia. He developes, in something of the prosaic spirit of a
medieval writer of "mysteries," one of the burlesque incidents of the
story, the insatiable hunger which seized on Erysichthon because he
cut down a grove sacred to the goddess. Yet he finds his
opportunities for skilful touches of poetry;--"As the four white
horses draw her sacred basket," he says, "so will the great goddess
bring us a white spring, a white summer." He describes the grove
itself, with its hedge of trees, so thick that an arrow could hardly
pass through, its pines and fruit-trees and tall poplars within, and
the water, like pale gold, running from the conduits. It is one of
those famous poplars that receives the first stroke; it sounds
heavily to its companion trees, and Demeter perceives that her sacred
grove is suffering. Then comes one of those transformations which
Plato will not allow. Vainly anxious to save the lad from his ruin,
she appears in the form of a priestess, but with the long hood of the
goddess, and the poppy in her hand; and there is something of a real
shudder, some still surviving sense of a haunting presence in the
groves, in the verses which describe her sudden revelation, when the
workmen flee away, leaving their axes in the cleft trees.
Of the same age as the hymn of Callimachus, but with very different
qualities, is the idyll of Theocritus on the Shepherds' Journey.
Although it is possible to define an epoch in mythological [126]
development in which literary and artificial influences began to
remodel the primitive, popular legend, yet still, among children, and
unchanging childlike people, we may suppose that that primitive stage
always survived, and the old, instinctive influences were still at
work. As the subject of popular religious celebrations also, the
myth was still the property of the people, and surrendered to its
capricious action. The shepherds in Theocritus, on their way to
celebrate one of the more homely feasts of Demeter, about the time of
harvest, are examples of these childlike people; the age of the poets
has long since come, but they are of the older and simpler order,
lingering on in the midst of a more self-conscious world. In an
idyll, itself full of the delightful gifts of Demeter, Theocritus
sets them before us; through the blazing summer day's journey, the
smiling image of the goddess is always before them; and now they have
reached the end of their journey:--
"So I, and Eucritus, and the fair Amyntichus, turned aside into the
house of Phrasidamus, and lay down with delight in beds of sweet
tamarisk and fresh cuttings from the vines, strewn on the ground.
Many poplars and elm-trees were waving over our heads, and not far
off the running of the sacred water from the cave of the nymphs
warbled to us; in the shimmering branches the sun-burnt grasshoppers
were busy with their talk, and from afar the little owl cried softly,
out of [127] the tangled thorns of the blackberry; the larks were
singing and the hedge-birds, and the turtle-dove moaned; the bees
flew round and round the fountains, murmuring softly; the scent of
late summer and of the fall of the year was everywhere; the pears
fell from the trees at our feet, and apples in number rolled down at
our sides, and the young plum-trees were bent to the earth with the
weight of their fruit. The wax, four years old, was loosed from the
heads of the wine-jars. O! nymphs of Castalia, who dwell on the
steeps of Parnassus, tell me, I pray you, was it a draught like this
that the aged Chiron placed before Hercules, in the stony cave of
Pholus? Was it nectar like this that made the mighty shepherd on
Anapus' shore, Polyphemus, who flung the rocks upon Ulysses' ships,
dance among his sheepfolds?--A cup like this ye poured out now upon
the altar of Demeter, who presides over the threshing-floor. May it
be mine, once more, to dig my big winnowing-fan through her heaps of
corn; and may I see her smile upon me, holding poppies and handfuls
of corn in her two hands!"
Some of the modifications of the story of Demeter, as we find it in
later poetry, have been supposed to be due, not to the genuine action
of the Greek mind, but to the influence of that so-called Orphic
literature, which, in the generation succeeding Hesiod, brought, from
Thessaly and Phrygia, a tide of mystical ideas into the Greek [128]
religion, sometimes, doubtless, confusing the clearness and
naturalness of its original outlines, but also sometimes imparting to
them a new and peculiar grace. Under the influence of this Orphic
poetry, Demeter was blended, or identified, with Rhea Cybele, the
mother of the gods, the wilder earth-goddess of Phrygia; and the
romantic figure of Dionysus Zagreus, Dionysus the Hunter, that most
interesting, though somewhat melancholy variation on the better known
Dionysus, was brought, as son or brother of Persephone, into her
circle, the mystical vine, who, as Persephone descends and ascends
from the earth, is rent to pieces by the Titans every year and
remains long in Hades, but every spring-time comes out of it again,
renewing his youth. This identification of Demeter with Rhea Cybele
is the motive which has inspired a beautiful chorus in the Helena--
the new Helena--of Euripides, that great lover of all subtle
refinements and modernisms, who, in this play, has worked on a
strange version of the older story, which relates that Helen had
never really gone to Troy at all, but sent her soul only there, apart
from her sweet body, which abode all that time in Egypt, at the court
of King Proteus, where she is found at last by her husband Menelaus,
so that the Trojan war was about a phantom, after all. The chorus
has even less than usual to do with the action of the play, being
linked to it only by a sort of parallel, which may be understood,
[129] between Menelaus seeking Helen, and Demeter seeking Persephone.
Euripides, then, takes the matter of the Homeric hymn into the region
of a higher and swifter poetry, and connects it with the more
stimulating imagery of the Idaean mother. The Orphic mysticism or
enthusiasm has been admitted into the story, which is now full of
excitement, the motion of rivers, the sounds of the Bacchic cymbals
heard over the mountains, as Demeter wanders among the woody valleys
seeking her lost daughter, all directly expressed in the vivid Greek
words. Demeter is no longer the subdued goddess of the quietly-
ordered fields, but the mother of the gods, who has her abode in the
heights of Mount Ida, who presides over the dews and waters of the
white springs, whose flocks feed, not on grain, but on the curling
tendrils of the vine, both of which she withholds in her anger, and
whose chariot is drawn by wild beasts, fruit and emblem of the earth
in its fiery strength. Not Hecate, but Pallas and Artemis, in full
armour, swift-footed, vindicators of chastity, accompany her in her
search for Persephone, who is already expressly, korê arrêtos+--"the
maiden whom none may name." When she rests from her long wanderings,
it is into the stony thickets of Mount Ida, deep with snow, that she
throws herself, in her profound grief. When Zeus desires to end her
pain, the Muses and the "solemn" Graces are sent to dance and sing
before her. It is then [130] that Cypris, the goddess of beauty, and
the original cause, therefore, of her distress, takes into her hands
the brazen tambourines of the Dionysiac worship with their Chthonian
or deep-noted sound; and it is she, not the old Iambe, who with this
wild music, heard thus for the first time, makes Demeter smile at
last. "Great," so the chorus ends with a picture, "great is the
power of the stoles of spotted fawn-skins, and the green leaves of
ivy twisted about the sacred wands, and the wheeling motion of the
tambourine whirled round in the air, and the long hair floating
unbound in honour of Bromius, and the nocturns of the goddess, when
the moon looks full upon them."
The poem of Claudian on the Rape of Proserpine, the longest extant
work connected with the story of Demeter, yet itself unfinished,
closes the world of classical poetry. Writing in the fourth century
of the Christian era, Claudian has his subject before him in the
whole extent of its various development, and also profits by those
many pictorial representations of it, which, from the famous picture
of Polygnotus downwards, delighted the ancient world. His poem,
then, besides having an intrinsic charm, is valuable for some
reflexion in it of those lost works, being itself pre-eminently a
work in colour, and excelling in a kind of painting in words, which
brings its subject very pleasantly almost to the eye of the reader.
The mind of this late votary [131] of the old gods, in a world
rapidly changing, is crowded with all the beautiful forms generated
by mythology, and now about to be forgotten. In this after-glow of
Latin literature, lighted up long after their fortune had set, and
just before their long night began, they pass before us, in his
verses, with the utmost clearness, like the figures in an actual
procession. The nursing of the infant Sun and Moon by Tethys;
Proserpine and her companions gathering flowers at early dawn, when
the violets are drinking in the dew, still lying white upon the
grass; the image of Pallas winding the peaceful blossoms about the
steel crest of her helmet; the realm of Proserpine, softened somewhat
by her coming, and filled with a quiet joy; the matrons of Elysium
crowding to her marriage toilet, with the bridal veil of yellow in
their hands; the Manes, crowned with ghostly flowers yet warmed a
little, at the marriage feast; the ominous dreams of the mother; the
desolation of the home, like an empty bird's-nest or an empty fold,
when she returns and finds Proserpine gone, and the spider at work
over her unfinished embroidery; the strangely-figured raiment, the
flowers in the grass, which were once blooming youths, having both
their natural colour and the colour of their poetry in them, and the
clear little fountain there, which was once the maiden Cyane;--all
this is shown in a series of descriptions, like the designs in some
unwinding tapestry, like Proserpine's own [132] embroidery, the
description of which is the most brilliant of these pictures, and, in
its quaint confusion of the images of philosophy with those of
mythology, anticipates something of the fancy of the Italian
Renaissance.
"Proserpina, filling the house soothingly with her low song, was
working a gift against the return of her mother, with labour all to
be in vain. In it, she marked out with her needle the houses of the
gods and the series of the elements, showing by what law, nature, the
parent of all, settled the strife of ancient times, and the seeds of
things disparted into their places; the lighter elements are borne
aloft, the heavier fall to the centre; the air grows bright with
heat, a blazing light whirls round the firmament; the sea flows; the
earth hangs suspended in its place. And there were divers colours in
it; she illuminated the stars with gold, infused a purple shade into
the water, and heightened the shore with gems of flowers; and, under
her skilful hand, the threads, with their inwrought lustre, swell up,
in momentary counterfeit of the waves; you might think that the sea-
wind flapped against the rocks, and that a hollow murmur came
creeping over the thirsty sands. She puts in the five zones, marking
with a red ground the midmost zone, possessed by burning heat; its
outline was parched and stiff; the threads seemed thirsty with the
constant sunshine; on either side lay the two zones proper for human
life, [133] where a gentle temperance reigns; and at the extremes she
drew the twin zones of numbing cold, making her work dun and sad with
the hues of perpetual frost. She paints in, too, the sacred places of
Dis, her father's brother, and the Manes, so fatal to her; and an
omen of her doom was not wanting; for, as she worked, as if with
foreknowledge of the future, her face became wet with a sudden burst
of tears. And now, in the utmost border of the tissue, she had begun
to wind in the wavy line of the river Oceanus, with its glassy
shallows; but the door sounds on its hinges, and she perceives the
goddesses coming; the unfinished work drops from her hands, and a
ruddy blush lights up in her clear and snow-white face."
I have reserved to the last what is perhaps the daintiest treatment
of this subject in classical literature, the account of it which Ovid
gives in the Fasti--a kind of Roman Calendar--for the seventh of
April, the day of the games of Ceres. He tells over again the old
story, with much of which, he says, the reader will be already
familiar; but he has something also of his own to add to it, which
the reader will hear for the first time; and, like one of those old
painters who, in depicting a scene of Christian history, drew from
their own fancy or experience its special setting and accessories, he
translates the story into something very different from the Homeric
hymn. The writer of the Homeric [134] hymn had made Celeus a king,
and represented the scene at Eleusis in a fair palace, like the
Venetian painters who depict the persons of the Holy Family with
royal ornaments. Ovid, on the other hand, is more like certain
painters of the early Florentine school, who represent the holy
persons amid the more touching circumstances of humble life; and the
special something of his own which he adds, is a pathos caught from
homely things, not without a delightful, just perceptible, shade of
humour even, so rare in such work. All the mysticism has
disappeared; but, instead, we trace something of that "worship of
sorrow," which has been sometimes supposed to have had no place in
classical religious sentiment. In Ovid's well-finished elegiacs,
Persephone's flower-gathering, the Anthology, reaches its utmost
delicacy; but I give the following episode for the sake of its
pathetic expression.
"After many wanderings Ceres was come to Attica. There, in the
utmost dejection, for the first time, she sat down to rest on a bare
stone, which the people of Attica still call the stone of sorrow.
For many days she remained there motionless, under the open sky,
heedless of the rain and of the frosty moonlight. Places have their
fortunes; and what is now the illustrious town of Eleusis was then
the field of an old man named Celeus. He was carrying home a load of
acorns, and wild berries shaken down from the [135] brambles, and dry
wood for burning on the hearth; his little daughter was leading two
goats home from the hills; and at home there was a little boy lying
sick in his cradle. 'Mother,' said the little girl--and the goddess
was moved at the name of mother--'what do you, all alone, in this
solitary place?' The old man stopped too, in spite of his heavy
burden, and bade her take shelter in his cottage, though it was but a
little one. But at first she refused to come; she looked like an
old woman, and an old woman's coif confined her hair; and as the man
still urged her, she said to him, 'Heaven bless you; and may children
always be yours! My daughter has been stolen from me. Alas! how
much happier is your lot than mine'; and, though weeping is
impossible for the gods, as she spoke, a bright drop, like a tear,
fell into her bosom. Soft-hearted, the little girl and the old man
weep together. And after that the good man said, 'Arise! despise not
the shelter of my little home; so may the daughter whom you seek be
restored to you.' 'Lead me,' answered the goddess; 'you have found
out the secret of moving me;' and she arose from the stone, and
followed the old man; and as they went he told her of the sick child
at home--how he is restless with pain, and cannot sleep. And she,
before entering the little cottage, gathered from the untended earth
the soothing and sleep-giving poppy; and as she gathered it, it is
said that she [136] forgot her vow, and tasted of the seeds, and
broke her long fast, unaware. As she came through the door, she saw
the house full of trouble, for now there was no more hope of life for
the sick boy. She saluted the mother, whose name was Metaneira, and
humbly kissed the lips of the child, with her own lips; then the
paleness left its face, and suddenly the parents see the strength
returning to its body; so great is the force that comes from the
divine mouth. And the whole family was full of joy--the mother and
the father and the little girl; they were the whole household.*
Three profound ethical conceptions, three impressive sacred figures,
have now defined themselves for the Greek imagination, condensed from
all the traditions which have now been traced, from the hymns of the
poets, from the instinctive and unformulated mysticism of primitive
minds. Demeter is become the divine sorrowing mother. Kore, the
goddess of summer, is become Persephone, the goddess of death, still
associated with the forms and odours of flowers and fruit, yet as one
risen from the dead also, presenting one side of her ambiguous nature
to men's gloomier fancies. Thirdly, there is the image of Demeter
enthroned, chastened by sorrow, and somewhat advanced in age,
blessing the earth, in her joy at the return of Kore. The myth has
[137] now entered on the third phase of its life, in which it becomes
the property of those more elevated spirits, who, in the decline of
the Greek religion, pick and choose and modify, with perfect freedom
of mind, whatever in it may seem adapted to minister to their
culture. In this way, the myths of the Greek religion become parts
of an ideal, visible embodiments of the susceptibilities and
intuitions of the nobler kind of souls; and it is to this latest
phase of mythological development that the highest Greek sculpture
allies itself. Its function is to give visible aesthetic expression
to the constituent parts of that ideal. As poetry dealt chiefly with
the incidents of the story, so it is with the personages of the
story--with Demeter and Kore themselves--that sculpture has to do.