§ 3
But perhaps by the expression of such doubts we do less than justice to the influence which a Greek poet might exercise upon the minds and dispositions of his hearers. Greek popular opinion was very much inclined to place the poet on a pedestal to which his modern representative would hardly care to aspire, and to which at any rate he could never attain. The purely artistic value and importance of a poem did not seem to be impaired by the demand that it should at the same time instruct and edify. The poet was to be the teacher of his people in an age when, in the conditions of Greek life, the people had no other instructor. He was to be a teacher in the highest sense of all when, speaking in the language of the most exalted poetry, he dealt with the doubts and certainties of religion and the relationship between religion and morality. In these matters he could supplement out of the wealth of [420] his own far-reaching reflection what was lacking in the public morality of the time through the absence of an official, authoritative religious Book. By giving them intelligible and memorable expression, together with greater cohesion and unity, he could strengthen the foundations of the common stock of moral ideas that had been evolved in the course of social and city life. He might also expand and give greater depth to the ideas of popular morality, tempering them in the fire of his own more rigorous thought and interpreting and refining them from the heights of a more elevated understanding of the divine. What he thus gave back to the people stamped with the impress of his own very personal temperament and outlook, no longer remained the casual opinion of a single individual, but took root in suitably constituted minds and became for many a valued possession, an enduring addition to their consciousness.
It was not until the rise in later times of a fully developed philosophy extending its range of interpretation to the whole of life that poetry was deprived of its special office of instructress to the aspiring minds among the people.[63] Poetry had always been willing to exercise this function, but never so decidedly or with such fully conscious purpose as in the times of transition at the beginning of which Pindar lived—the transition from an unsophisticated faith in the traditional view of all things visible and invisible to a fresh stabilization of belief secured by, and resting upon, philosophic conviction. The need felt for the readjustment or verification of the ancestral or traditional forms of belief was vividly awakened, and it was still only poetry that could extend the light of its teaching to illuminate the minds of whole classes of the population. The influence of the poets must have increased in proportion as the numbers increased of those who were ready to receive the special bounty which they were able to offer. But if the influence wielded by Pindar, the Pan-Hellenic poet of the great Festivals, as the teacher of his people was, as we have seen, considerable, a very wide field indeed for the propagation of fruitful ideas lay open to the Attic tragedians in the huge concourse of the people which flocked together to hear their creations—a multitude which seemed all the greater for being confined within a narrower space. The poets themselves frequently allow it to be seen how seriously they regarded themselves as the teachers of their public, and the people admitted their claims. All men expected and demanded instruction from the word of the poet—the highest instruction from the highest poetry.[64] We shall not be much mistaken [421] if we believe that the opinions and reflections to which Aeschylus, Sophokles, and not least Euripides, gave utterance in their tragic drama did not remain the sole property of those in whose minds they had first arisen.