AT an early period in their intellectual development the Greeks reached
that critical point in the history of every civilised nation, when
speculative invades the domain of revealed truth, when the spiritual
ideas of the people can no longer be satisfied by the lower, material
conceptions of their inspired writers, and when men find it impossible to
pour the new wine of free thought into the old bottles of a narrow and a
trammelling creed.
From their Aryan ancestors they had received the fatal legacy of a
mythology stained with immoral and monstrous stories which strove to hide
the rational order of nature in a chaos of miracles, and to mar by
imputed wickedness the perfection of God’s nature—a very shirt of Nessos
in which the Heracles of rationalism barely escaped annihilation. Now
while undoubtedly the speculations of Thales, and the alluring analogies
of law and order afforded by physical science, were most important forces
in encouraging the rise of the spirit of scepticism, yet it was on its
ethical side that the Greek mythology was chiefly open to attack.
It is difficult to shake the popular belief in miracles, but no man will
admit sin and immorality as attributes of the Ideal he worships; so the
first symptoms of a new order of thought are shown in the passionate
outcries of Xenophanes and Heraclitos against the evil things said by
Homer of the sons of God; and in the story told of Pythagoras, how that
he saw tortured in Hell the ‘two founders of Greek theology,’ we can
recognise the rise of the Aufklärung as clearly as we see the Reformation
foreshadowed in the _Inferno_ of Dante.
Any honest belief, then, in the plain truth of these stories soon
succumbed before the destructive effects of the _a priori_ ethical
criticism of this school; but the orthodox party, as is its custom, found
immediately a convenient shelter under the ægis of the doctrine of
metaphors and concealed meanings.
To this allegorical school the tale of the fight around the walls of Troy
was a mystery, behind which, as behind a veil, were hidden certain moral
and physical truths. The contest between Athena and Ares was that
eternal contest between rational thought and the brute force of
ignorance; the arrows which rattled in the quiver of the ‘Far Darter’
were no longer the instruments of vengeance shot from the golden bow of
the child of God, but the common rays of the sun, which was itself
nothing but a mere inert mass of burning metal.
Modern investigation, with the ruthlessness of Philistine analysis, has
ultimately brought Helen of Troy down to a symbol of the dawn. There
were Philistines among the Greeks also who saw in the _ἄναξ ἀδρῶν_ a mere
metaphor for atmospheric power.
Now while this tendency to look for metaphors and hidden meanings must be
ranked as one of the germs of historical criticism, yet it was
essentially unscientific. Its inherent weakness is clearly pointed out
by Plato, who showed that while this theory will no doubt explain many of
the current legends, yet, if it is to be appealed to at all, it must be
as a universal principle; a position he is by no means prepared to admit.
Like many other great principles it suffered from its disciples, and
furnished its own refutation when the web of Penelope was analysed into a
metaphor of the rules of formal logic, the warp representing the
premises, and the woof the conclusion.
Rejecting, then, the allegorical interpretation of the sacred writings as
an essentially dangerous method, proving either too much or too little,
Plato himself returns to the earlier mode of attack, and re-writes
history with a didactic purpose, laying down certain ethical canons of
historical criticism. God is good; God is just; God is true; God is
without the common passions of men. These are the tests to which we are
to bring the stories of the Greek religion.
‘God predestines no men to ruin, nor sends destruction on innocent
cities; He never walks the earth in strange disguise, nor has to mourn
for the death of any well-beloved son. Away with the tears for Sarpedon,
the lying dream sent to Agamemnon, and the story of the broken covenant!’
(Plato, _Republic_, Book ii. 380; iii. 388, 391.)
Similar ethical canons are applied to the accounts of the heroes of the
days of old, and by the same _a priori_ principles Achilles is rescued
from the charges of avarice and insolence in a passage which may be
recited as the earliest instance of that ‘whitewashing of great men,’ as
it has been called, which is so popular in our own day, when Catiline and
Clodius are represented as honest and far-seeing politicians, when _eine
edle und gute Natur_ is claimed for Tiberius, and Nero is rescued from
his heritage of infamy as an accomplished _dilettante_ whose moral
aberrations are more than excused by his exquisite artistic sense and
charming tenor voice.
But besides the allegorising principle of interpretation, and the ethical
reconstruction of history, there was a third theory, which may be called
the semi-historical, and which goes by the name of Euhemeros, though he
was by no means the first to propound it.
Appealing to a fictitious monument which he declared that he had
discovered in the island of Panchaia, and which purported to be a column
erected by Zeus, and detailing the incidents of his reign on earth, this
shallow thinker attempted to show that the gods and heroes of ancient
Greece were ‘mere ordinary mortals, whose achievements had been a good
deal exaggerated and misrepresented,’ and that the proper canon of
historical criticism as regards the treatment of myths was to rationalise
the incredible, and to present the plausible residuum as actual truth.
To him and his school, the centaurs, for instance, those mythical sons of
the storm, strange links between the lives of men and animals, were
merely some youths from the village of Nephele in Thessaly, distinguished
for their sporting tastes; the ‘living harvest of panoplied knights,’
which sprang so mystically from the dragon’s teeth, a body of mercenary
troops supported by the profits on a successful speculation in ivory; and
Actæon, an ordinary master of hounds, who, living before the days of
subscription, was eaten out of house and home by the expenses of his
kennel.
Now, that under the glamour of myth and legend some substratum of
historical fact may lie, is a proposition rendered extremely probable by
the modern investigations into the workings of the mythopœic spirit in
post-Christian times. Charlemagne and Roland, St. Francis and William
Tell, are none the less real personages because their histories are
filled with much that is fictitious and incredible, but in all cases what
is essentially necessary is some external corroboration, such as is
afforded by the mention of Roland and Roncesvalles in the chronicles of
England, or (in the sphere of Greek legend) by the excavations of
Hissarlik. But to rob a mythical narrative of its kernel of supernatural
elements, and to present the dry husk thus obtained as historical fact,
is, as has been well said, to mistake entirely the true method of
investigation and to identify plausibility with truth.
And as regards the critical point urged by Palaiphatos, Strabo, and
Polybius, that pure invention on Homer’s part is inconceivable, we may
without scruple allow it, for myths, like constitutions, grow gradually,
and are not formed in a day. But between a poet’s deliberate creation
and historical accuracy there is a wide field of the mythopœic faculty.
This Euhemeristic theory was welcomed as an essentially philosophical and
critical method by the unscientific Romans, to whom it was introduced by
the poet Ennius, that pioneer of cosmopolitan Hellenicism, and it
continued to characterise the tone of ancient thought on the question of
the treatment of mythology till the rise of Christianity, when it was
turned by such writers as Augustine and Minucius Felix into a formidable
weapon of attack on Paganism. It was then abandoned by all those who
still bent the knee to Athena or to Zeus, and a general return, aided by
the philosophic mystics of Alexandria, to the allegorising principle of
interpretation took place, as the only means of saving the deities of
Olympus from the Titan assaults of the new Galilean God. In what vain
defence, the statue of Mary set in the heart of the Pantheon can best
tell us.
Religions, however, may be absorbed, but they never are disproved, and
the stories of the Greek mythology, spiritualised by the purifying
influence of Christianity, reappear in many of the southern parts of
Europe in our own day. The old fable that the Greek gods took service
with the new religion under assumed names has more truth in it than the
many care to discover.
Having now traced the progress of historical criticism in the special
treatment of myth and legend, I shall proceed to investigate the form in
which the same spirit manifested itself as regards what one may term
secular history and secular historians. The field traversed will be
found to be in some respects the same, but the mental attitude, the
spirit, the motive of investigation are all changed.
There were heroes before the son of Atreus and historians before
Herodotus, yet the latter is rightly hailed as the father of history, for
in him we discover not merely the empirical connection of cause and
effect, but that constant reference to Laws, which is the characteristic
of the historian proper.
For all history must be essentially universal; not in the sense of
comprising all the synchronous events of the past time, but through the
universality of the principles employed. And the great conceptions which
unify the work of Herodotus are such as even modern thought has not yet
rejected. The immediate government of the world by God, the nemesis and
punishment which sin and pride invariably bring with them, the revealing
of God’s purpose to His people by signs and omens, by miracles and by
prophecy; these are to Herodotus the laws which govern the phenomena of
history. He is essentially the type of supernatural historian; his eyes
are ever strained to discern the Spirit of God moving over the face of
the waters of life; he is more concerned with final than with efficient
causes.
Yet we can discern in him the rise of that _historic sense_ which is the
rational antecedent of the science of historical criticism, the _φυσικὸν
κριτήριον_, to use the words of a Greek writer, as opposed to that which
comes either _τέχνη_ or _διδαχῇ_.
He has passed through the valley of faith and has caught a glimpse of the
sunlit heights of Reason; but like all those who, while accepting the
supernatural, yet attempt to apply the canons of rationalism, he is
essentially inconsistent. For the better apprehension of the character
of this historic sense in Herodotus it will be necessary to examine at
some length the various forms of criticism in which it manifests itself.
Such fabulous stories as that of the Phoenix, of the goat-footed men, of
the headless beings with eyes in their breasts, of the men who slept six
months in the year (_τοῦτο οὐκ ἐνδέχομαι ηὴν ἀρχήν_), of the wer-wolf of
the Neuri, and the like, are entirely rejected by him as being opposed to
the ordinary experience of life, and to those natural laws whose
universal influence the early Greek physical philosophers had already
made known to the world of thought. Other legends, such as the suckling
of Cyrus by a bitch, or the feather-rain of northern Europe, are
rationalised and explained into a woman’s name and a fall of snow. The
supernatural origin of the Scythian nation, from the union of Hercules
and the monstrous Echidna, is set aside by him for the more probable
account that they were a nomad tribe driven by the Massagetæ from Asia;
and he appeals to the local names of their country as proof of the fact
that the Kimmerians were the original possessors.
But in the case of Herodotus it will be more instructive to pass on from
points like these to those questions of general probability, the true
apprehension of which depends rather on a certain quality of mind than on
any possibility of formulated rules, questions which form no unimportant
part of scientific history; for it must be remembered always that the
canons of historical criticism are essentially different from those of
judicial evidence, for they cannot, like the latter, be made plain to
every ordinary mind, but appeal to a certain historical faculty founded
on the experience of life. Besides, the rules for the reception of
evidence in courts of law are purely stationary, while the science of
historical probability is essentially progressive, and changes with the
advancing spirit of each age.
Now, of all the speculative canons of historical criticism, none is more
important than that which rests on psychological probability.
Arguing from his knowledge of human nature, Herodotus rejects the
presence of Helen within the walls of Troy. Had she been there, he says,
Priam and his kinsmen would never have been so mad (_φρενοβλαβεῖς_) as
not to give her up, when they and their children and their city were in
such peril (ii. 118); and as regards the authority of Homer, some
incidental passages in his poem show that he knew of Helen’s sojourn in
Egypt during the siege, but selected the other story as being a more
suitable motive for an epic. Similarly he does not believe that the
Alcmæonidæ family, a family who had always been the haters of tyranny
(_μισοτύραννοι_), and to whom, even more than to Harmodios and
Aristogeiton, Athens owed its liberty, would ever have been so
treacherous as to hold up a shield after the battle of Marathon as a
signal for the Persian host to fall on the city. A shield, he
acknowledges, was held up, but it could not possibly have been done by
such friends of liberty as the house of Alcmæon; nor will he believe that
a great king like Rhampsinitus would have sent his daughter _κατίσαι ἐπ’
οἰκήματος_.
Elsewhere he argues from more general considerations of probability; a
Greek courtesan like Rhodopis would hardly have been rich enough to build
a pyramid, and, besides, on chronological grounds the story is impossible
(ii. 134).
In another passage (ii. 63), after giving an account of the forcible
entry of the priests of Ares into the chapel of the god’s mother, which
seems to have been a sort of religious faction fight where sticks were
freely used (_μάχη ξύλοισι καρτερή_), ‘I feel sure,’ he says, ‘that many
of them died from getting their heads broken, notwithstanding the
assertions of the Egyptian priests to the contrary.’ There is also
something charmingly naïve in the account he gives of the celebrated
Greek swimmer who dived a distance of eighty stadia to give his
countrymen warning of the Persian advance. ‘If, however,’ he says, ‘I
may offer an opinion on the subject, I would say that he came in a boat.’
There is, of course, something a little trivial in some of the instances
I have quoted; but in a writer like Herodotus, who stands on the
borderland between faith and rationalism, one likes to note even the most
minute instances of the rise of the critical and sceptical spirit of
inquiry.
How really strange, at base, it was with him may, I think, be shown by a
reference to those passages where he applies rationalistic tests to
matters connected with religion. He nowhere, indeed, grapples with the
moral and scientific difficulties of the Greek Bible; and where he
rejects as incredible the marvellous achievements of Hercules in Egypt,
he does so on the express grounds that he had not yet been received among
the gods, and so was still subject to the ordinary conditions of mortal
life (_ἔτι ἄνθρωπον ἐόντα_).
Even within these limits, however, his religious conscience seems to have
been troubled at such daring rationalism, and the passage (ii. 45)
concludes with a pious hope that God will pardon him for having gone so
far, the great rationalistic passage being, of course, that in which he
rejects the mythical account of the foundation of Dodona. ‘How can a
dove speak with a human voice?’ he asks, and rationalises the bird into a
foreign princess.
Similarly he seems more inclined to believe that the great storm at the
beginning of the Persian War ceased from ordinary atmospheric causes, and
not in consequence of the incantations of the _Magians_. He calls
Melampos, whom the majority of the Greeks looked on as an inspired
prophet, ‘a clever man who had acquired for himself the art of prophecy’;
and as regards the miracle told of the Æginetan statues of the primeval
deities of Damia and Auxesia, that they fell on their knees when the
sacrilegious Athenians strove to carry them off, ‘any one may believe
it,’ he says, ‘who likes, but as for myself, I place no credence in the
tale.’
So much then for the rationalistic spirit of historical criticism, as far
as it appears explicitly in the works of this great and philosophic
writer; but for an adequate appreciation of his position we must also
note how conscious he was of the value of documentary evidence, of the
use of inscriptions, of the importance of the poets as throwing light on
manners and customs as well as on historical incidents. No writer of any
age has more vividly recognised the fact that history is a matter of
evidence, and that it is as necessary for the historian to state his
authority as it is to produce one’s witnesses in a court of law.
While, however, we can discern in Herodotus the rise of an historic
sense, we must not blind ourselves to the large amount of instances where
he receives supernatural influences as part of the ordinary forces of
life. Compared to Thucydides, who succeeded him in the development of
history, he appears almost like a mediæval writer matched with a modern
rationalist. For, contemporary though they were, between these two
authors there is an infinite chasm of thought.
The essential difference of their methods may be best illustrated from
those passages where they treat of the same subject. The execution of
the Spartan heralds, Nicolaos and Aneristos, during the Peloponnesian War
is regarded by Herodotus as one of the most supernatural instances of the
workings of nemesis and the wrath of an outraged hero; while the
lengthened siege and ultimate fall of Troy was brought about by the
avenging hand of God desiring to manifest unto men the mighty penalties
which always follow upon mighty sins. But Thucydides either sees not, or
desires not to see, in either of these events the finger of Providence,
or the punishment of wicked doers. The death of the heralds is merely an
Athenian retaliation for similar outrages committed by the opposite side;
the long agony of the ten years’ siege is due merely to the want of a
good commissariat in the Greek army; while the fall of the city is the
result of a united military attack consequent on a good supply of
provisions.
Now, it is to be observed that in this latter passage, as well as
elsewhere, Thucydides is in no sense of the word a sceptic as regards his
attitude towards the truth of these ancient legends.
Agamemnon and Atreus, Theseus and Eurystheus, even Minos, about whom
Herodotus has some doubts, are to him as real personages as Alcibiades or
Gylippus. The points in his historical criticism of the past are, first,
his rejection of all extra-natural interference, and, secondly, the
attributing to these ancient heroes the motives and modes of thought of
his own day. The present was to him the key to the explanation of the
past, as it was to the prediction of the future.
Now, as regards his attitude towards the supernatural he is at one with
modern science. We too know that, just as the primeval coal-beds reveal
to us the traces of rain-drops and other atmospheric phenomena similar to
those of our own day, so, in estimating the history of the past, the
introduction of no force must be allowed whose workings we cannot observe
among the phenomena around us. To lay down canons of ultra-historical
credibility for the explanation of events which happen to have preceded
us by a few thousand years, is as thoroughly unscientific as it is to
intermingle preternatural in geological theories.
Whatever the canons of art may be, no difficulty in history is so great
as to warrant the introduction of a spirit of spirit _θεὸς ἀπὸ μηχανῆς_,
in the sense of a violation of the laws of nature.
Upon the other point, however, Thucydides falls into an anachronism. To
refuse to allow the workings of chivalrous and self-denying motives among
the knights of the Trojan crusade, because he saw none in the
faction-loving Athenian of his own day, is to show an entire ignorance of
the various characteristics of human nature developing under different
circumstances, and to deny to a primitive chieftain like Agamemnon that
authority founded on opinion, to which we give the name of divine right,
is to fall into an historical error quite as gross as attributing to
Atreus the courting of the populace (_τεθεραπευκότα τὸν δῆμον_) with a
view to the Mycenean throne.
The general method of historical criticism pursued by Thucydides having
been thus indicated, it remains to proceed more into detail as regards
those particular points where he claims for himself a more rational
method of estimating evidence than either the public or his predecessors
possessed.
‘So little pains,’ he remarks, ‘do the vulgar take in the investigation
of truth, satisfied with their preconceived opinions,’ that the majority
of the Greeks believe in a Pitanate cohort of the Spartan army and in a
double vote being the prerogative of the Spartan kings, neither of which
opinions has any foundation in fact. But the chief point on which he
lays stress as evincing the ‘uncritical way with which men receive
legends, even the legends of their own country,’ is the entire
baselessness of the common Athenian tradition in which Harmodios and
Aristogeiton were represented as the patriotic liberators of Athens from
the Peisistratid tyranny. So far, he points out, from the love of
freedom being their motive, both of them were influenced by merely
personal considerations, Aristogeiton being jealous of Hipparchos’
attention to Harmodios, then a beautiful boy in the flower of Greek
loveliness, while the latter’s indignation was aroused by an insult
offered to his sister by the prince.
Their motives, then, were personal revenge, while the result of their
conspiracy served only to rivet more tightly the chains of servitude
which bound Athens to the Peisistratid house, for Hipparchos, whom they
killed, was only the tyrant’s younger brother, and not the tyrant
himself.
To prove his theory that Hippias was the elder, he appeals to the
evidence afforded by a public inscription in which his name occurs
immediately after that of his father, a point which he thinks shows that
he was the eldest, and so the heir. This view he further corroborates by
another inscription, on the altar of Apollo, which mentions the children
of Hippias and not those of his brothers; ‘for it was natural for the
eldest to be married first’; and besides this, on the score of general
probability he points out that, had Hippias been the younger, he would
not have so easily obtained the tyranny on the death of Hipparchos.
Now, what is important in Thucydides, as evinced in the treatment of
legend generally, is not the results he arrived at, but the method by
which he works. The first great rationalistic historian, he may be said
to have paved the way for all those who followed after him, though it
must always be remembered that, while the total absence in his pages of
all the mystical paraphernalia of the supernatural theory of life is an
advance in the progress of rationalism, and an era in scientific history,
whose importance could never be over-estimated, yet we find along with it
a total absence of any mention of those various social and economical
forces which form such important factors in the evolution of the world,
and to which Herodotus rightly gave great prominence in his immortal
work. The history of Thucydides is essentially one-sided and incomplete.
The intricate details of sieges and battles, subjects with which the
historian proper has really nothing to do except so far as they may throw
light on the spirit of the age, we would readily exchange for some notice
of the condition of private society in Athens, or the influence and
position of women.
There is an advance in the method of historical criticism; there is an
advance in the conception and motive of history itself; for in Thucydides
we may discern that natural reaction against the intrusion of didactic
and theological considerations into the sphere of the pure intellect, the
spirit of which may be found in the Euripidean treatment of tragedy and
the later schools of art, as well as in the Platonic conception of
science.
History, no doubt, has splendid lessons for our instruction, just as all
good art comes to us as the herald of the noblest truth. But, to set
before either the painter or the historian the inculcation of moral
lessons as an aim to be consciously pursued, is to miss entirely the true
motive and characteristic both of art and history, which is in the one
case the creation of beauty, in the other the discovery of the laws of
the evolution of progress: _Il ne faut demander de l’Art que l’Art_, _du
passé que le passé_.
Herodotus wrote to illustrate the wonderful ways of Providence and the
nemesis that falls on sin, and his work is a good example of the truth
that nothing can dispense with criticism so much as a moral aim.
Thucydides has no creed to preach, no doctrine to prove. He analyses the
results which follow inevitably from certain antecedents, in order that
on a recurrence of the same crisis men may know how to act.
His object was to discover the laws of the past so as to serve as a light
to illumine the future. We must not confuse the recognition of the
utility of history with any ideas of a didactic aim. Two points more in
Thucydides remain for our consideration: his treatment of the rise of
Greek civilisation, and of the primitive condition of Hellas, as well as
the question how far can he be said really to have recognised the
existence of laws regulating the complex phenomena of life.