HISTORY OF GREECE.
I. Legendary Greece.
II. Grecian History to the Reign of
Peisistratus at Athens.
BY
GEORGE GROTE, Esq.
VOL. I.
REPRINTED FROM THE SECOND LONDON EDITION
NEW YORK:
HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS,
329 AND 331 PEARL STREET.
1880.
PART I.—LEGENDARY GREECE
Ἀνδρῶν ἡρώων θεῖον γένος, οἳ καλέονται
Ἡμίθεοι προτἐρῃ γενέῃ.—Hesiod
PART II.—HISTORICAL GREECE.
... Πόλιες μερόπων ἀνθρώπων.—Homer
PREFACE.
The first idea of this History was conceived many years ago, at a time when ancient Hellas was known to the English public chiefly through the pages of Mitford; and my purpose in writing it was to rectify the erroneous statements as to matter of fact which that History contained, as well as to present the general phenomena of the Grecian world under what I thought a juster and more comprehensive point of view. My leisure, however, was not at that time equal to the execution of any large literary undertaking; nor is it until within the last three or four years that I have been able to devote to the work that continuous and exclusive labor, without which, though much may be done to illustrate detached points, no entire or complicated subject can ever be set forth in a manner worthy to meet the public eye.
Meanwhile the state of the English literary world, in reference to ancient Hellas, has been materially changed in more ways than one. If my early friend Dr. Thirlwall’s History of Greece had appeared a few years sooner, I should probably never have conceived the design of the present work at all; I should certainly not have been prompted to the task by any deficiencies, such as those which I felt and regretted in Mitford. The comparison of the two authors affords, indeed, a striking proof of the progress of sound and enlarged views respecting the ancient world during the present generation. Having studied of course the same evidences as Dr. Thirwall, I am better enabled than others to bear testimony to the learning, the sagacity, and the candor which pervade his excellent work: and it is the more incumbent on me to give expression to this sentiment, since the particular points on which I shall have occasion to advert to it will, unavoidably, be points of dissent oftener than of coincidence.
The liberal spirit of criticism, in which Dr. Thirwall stands so much distinguished from Mitford, is his own: there are other features of superiority which belong to him conjointly with his age. For during the generation since Mitford’s work, philological studies have been prosecuted in Germany with remarkable success: the stock of facts and documents, comparatively scanty, handed down from the ancient world, has been combined and illustrated in a thousand different ways: and if our witnesses cannot be multiplied, we at least have numerous interpreters to catch, repeat, amplify, and explain their broken and half-inaudible depositions. Some of the best writers in this department—Boeckh, Niebuhr, O. Müller—have been translated into our language; so that the English public has been enabled to form some idea of the new lights thrown upon many subjects of antiquity by the inestimable aid of German erudition. The poets, historians, orators, and philosophers of Greece, have thus been all rendered both more intelligible and more instructive than they were to a student in the last century; and the general picture of the Grecian world may now be conceived with a degree of fidelity, which, considering our imperfect materials, it is curious to contemplate.
It is that general picture which an historian of Greece is required first to embody in his own mind, and next to lay out before his readers;—a picture not merely such as to delight the imagination by brilliancy of coloring and depth of sentiment, but also suggestive and improving to the reason. Not omitting the points of resemblance as well as of contrast with the better-known forms of modern society, he will especially study to exhibit the spontaneous movement of Grecian intellect, sometimes aided but never borrowed from without, and lighting up a small portion of a world otherwise clouded and stationary. He will develop the action of that social system, which, while insuring to the mass of freemen a degree of protection elsewhere unknown, acted as a stimulus to the creative impulses of genius, and left the superior minds sufficiently unshackled to soar above religious and political routine, to overshoot their own age, and to become the teachers of posterity.
To set forth the history of a people by whom the first spark was set to the dormant intellectual capacities of our nature,—Hellenic phenomena, as illustrative of the Hellenic mind and character,—is the task which I propose to myself in the present work; not without a painful consciousness how much the deed falls short of the will, and a yet more painful conviction, that full success is rendered impossible by an obstacle which no human ability can now remedy,—the insufficiency of original evidence. For, in spite of the valuable expositions of so many able commentators, our stock of information respecting the ancient world still remains lamentably inadequate to the demands of an enlightened curiosity. We possess only what has drifted ashore from the wreck of a stranded vessel; and though this includes some of the most precious articles amongst its once abundant cargo, yet if any man will cast his eyes over the citations in Diogenes Laërtius, Athenæus, or Plutarch, or the list of names in Vossius de Historicis Græcis, he will see with grief and surprise how much larger is the proportion which, through the enslavement of the Greeks themselves, the decline of the Roman Empire, the change of religion, and the irruption of barbarian conquerors, has been irrecoverably submerged. We are thus reduced to judge of he whole Hellenic world, eminently multiform as it was, from a few compositions; excellent, indeed, in themselves, but bearing too exclusively the stamp of Athens. Of Thucydides and Aristotle, indeed, both as inquirers into matter of fact, and as free from narrow local feeling, it is impossible to speak too highly; but, unfortunately, that work of the latter which would have given us the most copious information regarding Grecian political life—his collection and comparison of one hundred and fifty distinct town constitutions—has not been preserved: and the brevity of Thucydides often gives us but a single word where a sentence would not have been too much, and sentences which we should be glad to see expanded into paragraphs.
Such insufficiency of original and trustworthy materials, as compared with those resources which are thought hardly sufficient for the historian of any modern kingdom, is neither to be concealed nor extenuated, however much we may lament it. I advert to the point here on more grounds than one. For it not only limits the amount of information which an historian of Greece can give to his readers,—compelling him to leave much of his picture an absolute blank,—but it also greatly spoils the execution of the remainder. The question of credibility is perpetually obtruding itself, and requiring a decision, which, whether favorable or unfavorable, always introduces more or less of controversy; and gives to those outlines, which the interest of the picture requires to be straight and vigorous, a faint and faltering character. Expressions of qualified and hesitating affirmation are repeated until the reader is sickened; while the writer himself, to whom this restraint is more painful still, is frequently tempted to break loose from the unseen spell by which a conscientious criticism binds him down,—to screw up the possible and probable into certainty, to suppress counterbalancing considerations, and to substitute a pleasing romance in place of half-known and perplexing realities. Desiring, in the present work, to set forth all which can be ascertained, together with such conjectures and inferences as can be reasonably deduced from it, but nothing more,—I notice, at the outset, that faulty state of the original evidence which renders discussions of credibility, and hesitation in the language of the judge, unavoidable. Such discussions, though the reader may be assured that they will become less frequent as we advance into times better known, are tiresome enough, even with the comparatively late period which I adopt as the historical beginning; much more intolerable would they have proved, had I thought it my duty to start from the primitive terminus of Deukaliôn or Inachus, or from the unburied Pelasgi and Leleges, and to subject the heroic ages to a similar scrutiny. I really know nothing so disheartening or unrequited as the elaborate balancing of what is called evidence,—the comparison of infinitesimal probabilities and conjectures all uncertified,—in regard to these shadowy times and persons.
The law respecting sufficiency of evidence ought to be the same for ancient times as for modern; and the reader will find in this History an application, to the former, of criteria analogous to those which have been long recognized in the latter. Approaching, though with a certain measure of indulgence, to this standard, I begin the real history of Greece with the first recorded Olympiad, or 776 B. C. To such as are accustomed to the habits once universal, and still not uncommon, in investigating the ancient world, I may appear to be striking off one thousand years from the scroll of history; but to those whose canon of evidence is derived from Mr. Hallam, M. Sismondi, or any other eminent historian of modern events, I am well assured that I shall appear lax and credulous rather than exigent or sceptical. For the truth is, that historical records, properly so called, do not begin until long after this date: nor will any man, who candidly considers the extreme paucity of attested facts for two centuries after 776 B. C., be astonished to learn that the state of Greece in 900, 1000, 1100, 1200, 1300, 1400 B. C., etc.,—or any earlier century which it may please chronologists to include in their computed genealogies,—cannot be described to him upon anything like decent evidence. I shall hope, when I come to the lives of Socrates and Plato, to illustrate one of the most valuable of their principles,—that conscious and confessed ignorance is a better state of mind, than the fancy, without the reality, of knowledge. Meanwhile, I begin by making that confession, in reference to the real world of Greece anterior to the Olympiads; meaning the disclaimer to apply to anything like a general history,—not to exclude rigorously every individual event.
The times which I thus set apart from the region of history are discernible only through a different atmosphere,—that of epic poetry and legend. To confound together these disparate matters is, in my judgment, essentially unphilosophical. I describe the earlier times by themselves, as conceived by the faith and feeling of the first Greeks, and known only through their legends,—without presuming to measure how much or how little of historical matter these legends may contain. If the reader blame me for not assisting him to determine this,—if he ask me why I do not undraw the curtain and disclose the picture,—I reply in the words of the painter Zeuxis, when the same question was addressed to him on exhibiting his master-piece of imitative art: “The curtain is the picture.” What we now read as poetry and legend was once accredited history, and the only genuine history which the first Greeks could conceive or relish of their past time: the curtain conceals nothing behind, and cannot, by any ingenuity, be withdrawn. I undertake only to show it as it stands,—not to efface, still less to repaint it.
Three-fourths of the two volumes now presented to the public are destined to elucidate this age of historical faith, as distinguished from the later age of historical reason: to exhibit its basis in the human mind,—an omnipresent religious and personal interpretation of nature; to illustrate it by comparison with the like mental habit in early modern Europe; to show its immense abundance and variety of narrative matter, with little care for consistency between one story and another; lastly, to set forth the causes which overgrew and partially supplanted the old epical sentiment, and introduced, in the room of literal faith, a variety of compromises and interpretations.
The legendary age of the Greeks receives its principal charm and dignity from the Homeric poems: to these, therefore, and to the other poems included in the ancient epic, an entire chapter is devoted, the length of which must be justified by the names of the Iliad and Odyssey. I have thought it my duty to take some notice of the Wolfian controversy as it now stands in Germany, and have even hazarded some speculations respecting the structure of the Iliad. The society and manners of the heroic age, considered as known in a general way from Homer’s descriptions and allusions, are also described and criticized.
I next pass to the historical age, beginning at 776 B. C.; prefixing some remarks upon the geographical features of Greece. I try to make out, amidst obscure and scanty indications, what the state of Greece was at this period; and I indulge some cautious conjectures, founded upon the earliest verifiable facts, respecting the steps immediately antecedent by which that condition was brought about. In the present volumes, I have only been able to include the history of Sparta and the Peloponnesian Dorians, down to the age of Peisistratus and Crœsus. I had hoped to have comprised in them the entire history of Greece down to this last-mentioned period, but I find the space insufficient.
The history of Greece falls most naturally into six compartments, of which the first may be looked at as a period of preparation for the five following, which exhaust the free life of collective Hellas.
I. Period from 776 B. C. to 560 B. C., the accession of Peisistratus at Athens and of Crœsus in Lydia.
II. From the accession of Peisistratus and Crœsus to the repulse of Xerxes from Greece.
III. From the repulse of Xerxes to the close of the Peloponnesian war and overthrow of Athens.
IV. From the close of the Peloponnesian war to the battle of Leuktra.
V. From the battle of Leuktra to that of Chæroneia.
VI. From the battle of Chæroneia to the end of the generation of Alexander.
The five periods, from Peisistratus down to the death of Alexander and of his generation, present the acts of an historical drama capable of being recounted in perspicuous succession, and connected by a sensible thread of unity. I shall interweave in their proper places the important but outlying adventures of the Sicilian and Italian Greeks,—introducing such occasional notices of Grecian political constitutions, philosophy, poetry, and oratory, as are requisite to exhibit the many-sided activity of this people during their short but brilliant career.
After the generation of Alexander, the political action of Greece becomes cramped and degraded,—no longer interesting to the reader, or operative on the destinies of the future world. We may, indeed, name one or two incidents, especially the revolutions of Agis and Kleomenês at Sparta, which are both instructive and affecting; but as a whole, the period, between 300 B. C. and the absorption of Greece by the Romans, is of no interest in itself, and is only so far of value as it helps us to understand the preceding centuries. The dignity and value of the Greeks from that time forward belong to them only as individual philosophers, preceptors, astronomers, and mathematicians, literary men and critics, medical practitioners, etc. In all these respective capacities, especially in the great schools of philosophical speculation they still constitute the light of the Roman world; though, as communities, they have lost their own orbit, and have become satellites of more powerful neighbors.
I propose to bring down the history of the Grecian communities to the year 300 B. C., or the close of the generation which takes its name from Alexander the Great, and I hope to accomplish this in eight volumes altogether. For the next two or three volumes I have already large preparations made, and I shall publish my third (perhaps my fourth) in the course of the ensuing winter.
There are great disadvantages in the publication of one portion of a history apart from the remainder; for neither the earlier nor the later phenomena can be fully comprehended without the light which each mutually casts upon the other. But the practice has become habitual, and is indeed more than justified by the well-known inadmissibility of “long hopes” into the short span of human life. Yet I cannot but fear that my first two volumes will suffer in the estimation of many readers by coming out alone,—and that men who value the Greeks for their philosophy, their politics, and their oratory, may treat the early legends as not worth attention. And it must be confessed that the sentimental attributes of the Greek mind—its religious and poetical vein—here appear in disproportionate relief, as compared with its more vigorous and masculine capacities,—with those powers of acting, organizing, judging, and speculating, which will be revealed in the forthcoming volumes. I venture, however, to forewarn the reader, that there will occur numerous circumstances in the after political life of the Greeks, which he will not comprehend unless he be initiated into the course of their legendary associations. He will not understand the frantic terror of the Athenian public during the Peloponnesian war, on the occasion of the mutilation of the statues called Hermæ, unless he enters into the way in which they connected their stability and security with the domiciliation of the gods in the soil: nor will he adequately appreciate the habit of the Spartan king on military expeditions,—when he offered his daily public sacrifices on behalf of his army and his country,—“always to perform this morning service immediately before sunrise, in order that he might be beforehand in obtaining the favor of the gods,”[1] if he be not familiar with the Homeric conception of Zeus going to rest at night and awaking to rise at early dawn from the side of the “white-armed Hêrê.” The occasion will, indeed, often occur for remarking how these legends illustrate and vivify the political phenomena of the succeeding times, and I have only now to urge the necessity of considering them as the beginning of a series,—not as an entire work.
London, March 5, 1846.
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION OF
VOLUMES I. AND II.
In preparing a Second Edition of the first two volumes of my History, I have profited by the remarks and corrections of various critics, contained in Reviews, both English and foreign. I have suppressed, or rectified, some positions which had been pointed out as erroneous, or as advanced upon inadequate evidence. I have strengthened my argument in some cases where it appeared to have been imperfectly understood,—adding some new notes, partly for the purpose of enlarged illustration, partly to defend certain opinions which had been called in question. The greater number of these alterations have been made in Chapters XVI. and XXI. of Part I., and in Chapter VI. of Part II.
I trust that these three Chapters, more full of speculation, and therefore more open to criticism than any of the others, will thus appear in a more complete and satisfactory form. But I must at the same time add that they remain for the most part unchanged in substance, and that I have seen no sufficient reason to modify my main conclusions even respecting the structure of the Iliad, controverted though they have been by some of my most esteemed critics.
In regard to the character and peculiarity of Grecian legend, as broadly distinguished throughout these volumes from Grecian history, I desire to notice two valuable publications with which I have only become acquainted since the date of my first edition. One of these is, A Short Essay on Primæval History, by John Kenrick, M. A. (London, 1846, published just at the same time as these volumes,) which illustrates with much acute reflection the general features of legend, not only in Greece but throughout the ancient world,—see especially pages 65, 84, 92, et seq. The other work is, Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official, by Colonel Sleeman,—first made known to me through an excellent notice of my History in the Edinburgh Review for October 1846. The description given by Colonel Sleeman, of the state of mind now actually prevalent among the native population of Hindostan, presents a vivid comparison, helping the modern reader to understand and appreciate the legendary era of Greece. I have embodied in the notes of this Second Edition two or three passages from Colonel Sleeman’s instructive work: but the whole of it richly deserves perusal.
Having now finished six volumes of this History, without attaining a lower point than the peace of Nikias, in the tenth year of the Peloponnesian war,—I find myself compelled to retract the expectation held out in the preface to my First Edition, that the entire work might be completed in eight volumes. Experience proves to me how impossible it is to measure beforehand the space which historical subjects will require. All I can now promise is, that the remainder of the work shall be executed with as much regard to brevity as is consistent with the paramount duty of rendering it fit for public acceptance.
London, April 3, 1849.
NAMES OF GODS, GODDESSES, AND HEROES.
Following the example of Dr. Thirlwall and other excellent scholars, I call the Greek deities by their real Greek names, and not by the Latin equivalents used among the Romans. For the assistance of those readers to whom the Greek names may be less familiar, I here annex a table of the one and the other.
| Greek. | Latin. | |
| Zeus, | Jupiter. | |
| Poseidôn, | Neptune. | |
| Arês, | Mars. | |
| Dionysus, | Bacchus. | |
| Hermês, | Mercury. | |
| Hêlios, | Sol. | |
| Hêphæstus, | Vulcan. | |
| Hadês, | Pluto. | |
| Hêrê, | Juno. | |
| Athênê, | Minerva. | |
| Artemis, | Diana. | |
| Aphroditê, | Venus. | |
| Eôs, | Aurora. | |
| Hestia, | Vesta. | |
| Lêtô, | Latona. | |
| Dêmêtêr, | Ceres. | |
| Hêraklês, | Hercules. | |
| Asklêpius, | Æsculapius. |
A few words are here necessary respecting the orthography of Greek names adopted in the above table and generally throughout this history. I have approximated as nearly as I dared to the Greek letters in preference to the Latin; and on this point I venture upon an innovation which I should have little doubt of vindicating before the reason of any candid English student. For the ordinary practice of substituting, in a Greek name, the English C in place of the Greek K, is, indeed, so obviously incorrect, that it admits of no rational justification. Our own K, precisely and in every point, coincides with the Greek K: we have thus the means of reproducing the Greek name to the eye as well as to the ear, yet we gratuitously take the wrong letter in preference to the right. And the precedent of the Latins is here against us rather than in our favor, for their C really coincided in sound with the Greek K, whereas our C entirely departs from it, and becomes an S, before e, i, æ, œ, and y. Though our C has so far deviated in sound from the Latin C, yet there is some warrant for our continuing to use it in writing Latin names,—because we thus reproduce the name to the eye, though not to the ear. But this is not the case when we employ our C to designate the Greek K, for we depart here not less from the visible than from the audible original; while we mar the unrivalled euphony of the Greek language by that multiplied sibilation which constitutes the least inviting feature in our own. Among German philologists, the K is now universally employed in writing Greek names, and I have adopted it pretty largely in this work, making exception for such names as the English reader has been so accustomed to hear with the C, that they may be considered as being almost Anglicised. I have, farther, marked the long e and the long o (η, ω,) by a circumflex (Hêrê) when they occur in the last syllable or in the penultimate of a name.
CONTENTS
VOL. I.
PART I.
LEGENDARY GREECE.
CHAPTER I.
LEGENDS RESPECTING THE GODS.
Opening of the mythical world. — How the mythes are to be told. — Allegory rarely admissible. — Zeus — foremost in Grecian conception. — The gods — how conceived: human type enlarged. — Past history of the gods fitted on to present conceptions. — Chaos. — Gæa and Uranos. — Uranos disabled. — Kronos and the Titans. — Kronos overreached. — Birth and safety of Zeus and his brethren. — Other deities. — Ambitious schemes of Zeus. — Victory of Zeus and his brethren over Kronos and the Titans. — Typhôeus. — Dynasty of Zeus. — His offspring. — General distribution of the divine race. — Hesiodic theogony — its authority. — Points of difference between Homer and Hesiod. — Homeric Zeus. — Amplified theogony of Zens. — Hesiodic mythes traceable to Krête and Delphi. — Orphic theogony. — Zeus and Phanês. — Zagreus. — Comparison of Hesiod and Orpheus. — Influence of foreign religions upon Greece — Especially in regard to the worship of Dêmêtêr and Dionysos. — Purification for homicide unknown to Homer. — New and peculiar religious rites. — Circulated by voluntary teachers and promising special blessings. — Epimenidês, Sibylla, Bakis. — Principal mysteries of Greece. — Ecstatic rites introduced from Asia 700-500 B. C. — Connected with the worship of Dionysos. — Thracian and Egyptian influence upon Greece. — Encouragement to mystic legends. — Melampus the earliest name as teacher of the Dionysiac rites. — Orphic sect, a variety of the Dionysiac mystics. — Contrast of the mysteries with the Homeric Hymns. — Hymn to Dionysos. — Alteration of the primitive Grecian idea of Dionysos. — Asiatic frenzy grafted on the joviality of the Grecian Dionysia. — Eleusinian mysteries. — Homeric Hymn to Dêmêtêr. — Temple of Eleusis, built by order of Dêmêtêr for her residence. — Dêmêtêr prescribes the mystic ritual of Eleusis. — Homeric Hymn a sacred Eleusinian record, explanatory of the details of divine service. — Importance of the mysteries to the town of Eleusis. — Strong hold of the legend upon Eleusinian feelings. — Different legends respecting Dêmêtêr elsewhere. — Expansion of the legends. — Hellenic importance of Dêmêtêr. — Legends of Apollo. — Delian Apollo. — Pythian Apollo. — Foundation legends of the Delphian oracle. — They served the purpose of historical explanation. — Extended worship of Apollo. — Multifarious local legends respecting Apollo. — Festivals and Agônes. — State of mind and circumstances out of which Grecian mythes arose. — Discrepancies in the legends little noticed. — Aphroditê. — Athênê. — Artemis. — Poseidôn. — Stories of temporary servitude imposed on gods. — Hêrê. — Hêphæstos. — Hestia. — Hermês. — Hermês inventor of the lyre. — Bargain between Hermês and Apollo. — Expository value of the Hymn. — Zeus. — Mythes arising out of the religious ceremonies. — Small part of the animal sacrificed. — Promêtheus had outwitted Zeus. — Gods, heroes, and men, appear together in the mythes.
pages [1-64]
CHAPTER II.
LEGENDS RELATING TO HEROES AND MEN.
Races of men as they appear in the Hesiodic “Works and Days.” — The Golden. — The Silver. — The Brazen. — The Heroic. — The Iron. — Different both from the Theogony and from Homer. — Explanation of this difference. — Ethical vein of sentiment. — Intersected by the mythical. — The “Works and Days,” earliest didactic poem. — First Introduction of dæmons. — Changes in the idea of dæmons. — Employed in attacks on the pagan faith. — Functions of the Hesiodic dæmons. — Personal feeling which pervades the “Works and Days.” — Probable age of the poem.
CHAPTER III.
LEGEND OF THE IAPETIDS.
Iapetids in Hesiod. — Promêtheus and Epimêtheus. — Counter-manœuvring of Promêtheus and Zeus. — Pandôra. — Pandôra in the Theogony. — General feeling of the poet. — Man wretched, but Zeus not to blame. — Mischiefs arising from women. — Punishment of Promêtheus. — The Promêtheus of Æschylus. — Locality in which Promêtheus was confined.
CHAPTER IV.
HEROIC LEGENDS. — GENEALOGY OF ARGUS.
Structure and purposes of Grecian genealogies. — To connect the Grecian community with their common god. — Lower members of the genealogy historical — higher members non-historical. — The non-historical portion equally believed, and most valued by the Greeks. — Number of such genealogies — pervading every fraction of Greeks. — Argeian genealogy. — Inachus. — Phorôneus. — Argos Panoptês. — Iô. — Romance of Iô historicized by Persians and Phœnicians. — Legendary abductions of heroines adapted to the feelings prevalent during the Persian war. — Danaos and the Danaïdes. — Acrisios and Prœtos. — The Prœtides cured of frenzy by Melampus. — Acrisios, Danaê, and Zeus. — Perseus and the Gorgons. — Foundation of Mycênæ — commencement of Perseid dynasty. — Amphitryôn, Alkmênê, Sthenelos. — Zeus and Alkmênê. — Birth of Hêraklês. — Homeric legend of his birth: its expository value. — The Hêrakleids expelled. — Their recovery of Peloponnêsus and establishment in Argos, Sparta, and Messênia.
CHAPTER V.
DEUKALION, HELLEN, AND SONS OF HELLEN.
Deukaliôn, son of Promêtheus. — Phthiôtis: his permanent seat. — General deluge. — Salvation of Deukaliôn and Pyrrha. — Belief in this deluge throughout Greece. — Hellên and Amphiktyôn. — Sons of Hellên: Dôrus, Xuthus, Æolus. — Amphiktyonic assembly. — Common solemnities and games. — Division of Hellas: Æolians, Dôrians, Iônians. — Large extent of Dôris implied in this genealogy. — This form of the legend harmonizes with the great establishments of the historical Dôrians. — Achæus — purpose which his name serves in the legend. — Genealogical diversities.
CHAPTER VI.
THE ÆOLIDS, OR SONS AND DAUGHTERS OF ÆOLUS.
Legends of Greece, originally isolated, afterwards thrown into series. — Æolus. — His seven sons and five daughters. — 1. First Æolid line — Salmôneus, Tyrô. — Pelias and Nêleus. — Pêrô, Bias, and Melampus. — Periklymenos. — Nestor and his exploits. — Nêleids down to Kodrus. — Second Æolid line — Krêtheus. — Admêtus and Alcêstis. — Pêleus and the wife of Acastus. — Pelias and Jasôn. — Jasôn and Mêdea. — Mêdea at Corinth. — Third Æolid line — Sisyphus. — Corinthian genealogy of Eumêlus. — Coalescence of different legends about Mêdea and Sisyphus. — Bellerophôn. — Fourth Æolid line — Athamas. — Phryxus and Hellê. — Inô and Palæmôn — Isthmian games. — Local root of the legend of Athamas. — Traces of ancient human sacrifices. — Athamas in the district near Orchomenos. — Eteoklês — festival of the Charitêsia. — Foundation and greatness of Orchomenos. — Overthrow by Hêraklês and the Thebans. — Trophônius and Agamêdês. — Ascalaphos and Ialmenos. — Discrepancies in the Orchomenian genealogy. — Probable inferences as to the ante-historical Orchomenos. — Its early wealth and industry. — Emissaries of the lake Kôpaïs. — Old Amphiktyony at Kalauria. — Orchomenos and Thebês. — Alcyonê and Kêyx. — Canacê. — The Alôids. — Calycê. — Elis and Ætôlia. — Eleian genealogy. — Augeas. — The Molionid brothers. — Variations in the Eleian genealogy. — Ætôlian genealogy. — Œneus, Meleager, Tydeus. — Legend of Meleager in Homer. — How altered by the poets after Homer. — Althæa and the burning brand. — Grand Kalydônian boar-hunt. — Atalanta. — Relics of the boar long preserved at Tegea. — Atalanta vanquished in the race by stratagem. — Deianeira. — Death of Hêraklês. — Tydeus. — Old age of Œneus. — Discrepant genealogies.
CHAPTER VII.
THE PELOPIDS.
Misfortunes and celebrity of the Pelopids. — Pelops — eponym of Peloponnêsus. — Deduction of the sceptre of Pelops. — Kingly attributes of the family. — Homeric Pelops. — Lydia, Pisa, etc., post-Homeric additions. — Tantalus. — Niobê. — Pelops and Œnomaus, king of Pisa. — Chariot victory of Pelops — his principality at Pisa. — Atreus, Thyestês, Chrysippus. — Family horrors among the Pelopids. — Agamemnôn and Menelaus. — Orestês. — The goddess Hêrê and Mykênæ. — Legendary importance of Mykênæ. — Its decline coincident with the rise of Argos and Sparta. — Agamemnôn and Orestês transferred to Sparta.
CHAPTER VIII.
LACONIAN AND MESSENIAN GENEALOGIES.
Lelex — autochthonous in Lacônia. — Tyndareus and Lêda. — Offspring of Lêda. — 1. Castôr, Timandra, Klytæmnêstra, 2. Pollux, Helen. — Castôr and Pollux. — Legend of the Attic Dekeleia. — Idas and Lynkeus. — Great functions and power of the Dioskuri. — Messênian genealogy. — Periêrês — Idas and Marpêssa.
CHAPTER IX.
ARCADIAN GENEALOGY.
Pelasgus. — Lykaôn and his fifty sons. — Legend of Lykaôn — ferocity punished by the gods. — Deep religious faith of Pausanias. — His view of past and present world. — Kallistô and Arkas. — Azan, Apheidas, Elatus. — Aleus, Augê, Telephus. — Ancæus. — Echemus. — Echemus kills Hyllus. — Hêrakleids repelled from Peloponnêsus. — Korônis and Asklêpius. — Extended worship of Asklêpius — numerous legends. — Machaôn and Podaleirius. — Numerous Asklêpiads, or descendants from Asklêpius. — Temples of Asklêpius — sick persons healed there.
CHAPTER X
ÆAKUS AND HIS DESCENDANTS. — ÆGINA, SALAMIS, AND PHTHIA.
Æakus — son of Zeus and Ægina. — Offspring of Æakus — Pêleus, Telamôn, Phôkus. — Prayers of Æakus — procure relief for Greece — Phôkus killed by Pêleus and Telamôn. — Telamôn, banished, goes to Salamis. — Pêleus — goes to Phthia — his marriage with Thetis. — Neoptolemus. — Ajax, his son Philæus the eponymous hero of a dême in Attica. — Teukrus banished, settles in Cyprus. — Diffusion of the Æakid genealogy.
CHAPTER XI.
ATTIC LEGENDS AND GENEALOGIES.
Erechtheus — autochthonous. — Attic legends — originally from different roots — each dême had its own. — Little noticed by the old epic poets. — Kekrops. — Kranaus — Pandiôn. — Daughters of Pandiôn — Proknê, Philomêla. — Legend of Têreus. — Daughters of Erechtheus — Prokris. — Kreüsa. — Oreithyia, the wife of Boreas. — Prayers of the Athenians to Boreas — his gracious help in their danger. — Erechtheus and Eumolpus. — Voluntary self-sacrifice of the three daughters of Erechtheus. — Kreüsa and Iôn. — Sons of Pandiôn — Ægeus, etc. — Thêseus. — His legendary character refined. — Plutarch — his way of handling the matter of legend. — Legend of the Amazons. — Its antiquity and prevalence. — Glorious achievements of the Amazons. — Their ubiquity. — Universally received as a portion of the Greek past. — Amazons produced as present by the historians of Alexander. — Conflict of faith and reason in the historical critics.
CHAPTER XII.
KRETAN LEGENDS. — MINOS AND HIS FAMILY.
Minôs and Rhadamanthus, sons of Zeus. — Europê. — Pasiphaê and the Minôtaur. — Scylla and Nisus. — Death of Androgeos, and anger of Minôs against Athens. — Athenian victims for the Minôtaur. — Self-devotion of Thêseus — he kills the Minôtaur. — Athenian commemorative ceremonies. — Family of Minôs. — Minôs and Dædalus — flight of the latter to Sicily. — Minôs goes to retake him, but is killed. — Semi-Krêtan settlements elsewhere — connected with this voyage of Minôs. — Sufferings of the Krêtans afterwards from the wrath of Minôs. — Portrait of Minôs — how varied. — Affinity between Krête and Asia Minor.
CHAPTER XIII.
ARGONAUTIC EXPEDITION.
Ship Argô in the Odyssey. — In Hesiod and Eumêlus. — Jasôn and his heroic companions. — Lêmnos. — Adventures at Kyzikus, in Bithynia, etc. — Hêraklês and Hylas. — Phineus. — Dangers of the Symplêgades. — Arrival at Kolchis. — Conditions imposed by Æêtês as the price of the golden fleece. — Perfidy of Æêtês — flight of the Argonauts and Mêdea with the fleece. — Pursuit of Æêtês — the Argonauts saved by Mêdea. — Return of the Argonauts — circuitous and perilous. — Numerous and wide-spread monuments referring to the voyage. — Argonautic legend generally. — Fabulous geography — gradually modified as real geographical knowledge increased. — Transposition of epical localities. — How and when the Argonautic voyage became attached to Kolchis. — Æêtês and Circê. — Return of the Argonauts — different versions. — Continued faith in the voyage — basis of truth determined by Strabo.
CHAPTER XIV.
LEGENDS OF THEBES.
Abundant legends of Thêbes. — Amphiôn and Zethus, Homeric founders of Kadmus and Bœôtus — both distinct legends. — Thêbes. — How Thêbes was founded by Kadmus. — Five primitive families at Thêbes called Sparti. — The four daughters of Kadmus: 1. Inô; 2. Semelê; 3. Autonoê and her son Actæôn; 4. Agavê and her son Pentheus. — He resists the god Dionysus — his miserable end. — Labdakus, Antiopê, Amphiôn, and Zêthus. — Laius — Œdipus — Legendary celebrity of Œdipus and his family. — The Sphinx. — Eteoklês and Polynikês. — Old epic poems on the sieges of Thêbes.
SIEGES OF THEBES.
Curse pronounced by the devoted Oedipus upon his sons. — Novelties introduced by Sophoklês. — Death of Oedipus — quarrel of Eteoklês and Polynikês for the sceptre. — Polynikês retires to Argos — aid given to him by Adrastus. — Amphiaräus and Eriphylê. — Seven chiefs of the army against Thêbes. — Defeat of the Thêbans in the field — heroic devotion of Menœkus. — Single combat of Eteoklês and Polynikês, in which both perish. — Repulse and destruction of the Argeian chiefs — all except Adrastus — Amphiaräus is swallowed up in the earth. — Kreôn, king of Thêbes, forbids the burial of Polynikês and the other fallen Argeian chiefs. — Devotion and death of Antigonê. — The Athenians interfere to procure the interment of the fallen chiefs. — Second siege of Thêbes by Adrastus with the Epigoni, or sons of those slain in the first. — Victory of the Epigoni — capture of Thêbes. — Worship of Adrastus at Sikyôn — how abrogated by Kleisthenês. — Alkmæôn — his matricide and punishment. — Fatal necklace of Eriphylê.
CHAPTER XV.
LEGEND OF TROY.
Great extent and variety of the tale of Troy. — Dardanus, son of Zeus. — Ilus, founder of Ilium. — Walls of Ilium built by Poseidôn. — Capture of Ilium by Hêraklês. — Priam and his offspring. — Paris — his judgment on the three goddesses. — Carries off Helen from Sparta. — Expedition of the Greeks to recover her. — Heroes from all parts of Greece combined under Agamemnôn. — Achilles and Odysseus. — The Grecian host mistakes Teuthrania for Troy — Telephus. — Detention of the Greeks at Aulis — Agamemnon and Iphigeneia. — First success of the Greeks on landing near Troy. — Brisêis awarded to Achilles. — Palamêdês — his genius, and treacherous death. — Epic chronology — historicized. — Period of the Homeric Iliad. — Hectôr killed by Achilles. — New allies of Troy — Penthesileia. — Memnôn — killed by Achilles. — Death of Achilles. — Funeral games celebrated in honor of him. — Quarrel about his panoply. — Odysseus prevails and Ajax kills himself. — Philoktêtês and Neoptolemus. — Capture of the Palladium. — The wooden horse. — Destruction of Troy. — Distribution of the captives among the victors. — Helen restored to Menelaus — lives in dignity at Sparta — passes to a happy immortality. — Blindness and cure of the poet Stesichorus — alteration of the legend about Helen. — Egyptian tale about Helen — tendency to historicize. — Return of the Greeks from Troy. — Their sufferings — anger of the gods. — Wanderings of the heroes in all directions. — Memorials of them throughout the Grecian world. — Odysseus — his final adventures and death. — Æneas and his descendants. — Different stories about Æneas. — Æneadæ at Skêpsis. — Ubiquity of Æneas. — Antenôr. — Tale of Troy — its magnitude and discrepancies. — Trojan war — essentially legendary — its importance as an item in Grecian national faith. — Basis of history for it — possible, and nothing more. — Historicizing innovations — Dio Chrysostom. — Historical Ilium. — Generally received and visited as the town of Priam. — Respect shown to it by Alexander. — Successors of Alexander — foundation of Alexandreia Trôas. — The Romans — treat Ilium with marked respect. — Mythical legitimacy of Ilium — first called in question by Dêmêtrius of Skêpsis and Hestiæa. — Supposed Old Ilium, or real Troy, distinguished from New Ilium. — Strabo alone believes in Old Ilium as the real Troy — other authors continue in the old faith — the moderns follow Strabo. — The mythical faith not shaken by topographical impossibilities. — Historical Trôas and the Teukrians. — Æolic Greeks in the Trôad — the whole territory gradually Æolized. — Old date, and long prevalence of the worship of Apollo Sminthius. — Asiatic customs and religion — blended with Hellenic. — Sibylline prophecies. — Settlements from Milêtus, Mitylênê, and Athens.
CHAPTER XVI.
GRECIAN MYTHES, AS UNDERSTOOD, FELT, AND INTERPRETED BY THE GREEKS THEMSELVES.
The mythes formed the entire mental stock of the early Greeks. — State of mind out of which they arose. — Tendency to universal personification. — Absence of positive knowledge — supplied by personifying faith. — Multitude and variety of quasi-human personages. — What we read as poetical fancies, were to the Greeks serious realities. — The gods and heroes — their chief agency cast back into the past, and embodied in the mythes. — Marked and manifold types of the Homeric gods. — Stimulus which they afforded to the mythopœic faculty. — Easy faith in popular and plausible stories. — Poets — receive their matter from the divine inspiration of the Muse. — Meaning of the word mythe — original — altered. — Matter of actual history — uninteresting to early Greeks. — Mythical faith and religious point of view — paramount in the Homeric age. — Gradual development of the scientific point of view — its opposition to the religious. — Mythopœic age — anterior to this dissent. — Expansive force of Grecian intellect. — Transition towards positive and present fact. — The poet becomes the organ of present time instead of past. — Iambic, elegiac, and lyric poets. — Influence of the opening of Egypt to Grecian commerce, B. C. 660. — Progress — historical, geographical, social — from that period to B. C. 500. — Altered standard of judgment, ethical and intellectual. — Commencement of physical science — Thalês, Xenophanês, Pythagoras. — Impersonal nature conceived as an object of study. — Opposition between scientific method and the religious feeling of the multitude. — How dealt with by different philosophers. — Socratês. — Hippocratês. — Anaxagoras. — Contrasted with Grecian religious belief. — Treatment of Socratês by the Athenians. — Scission between the superior men and the multitude — important in reference to the mythes. — The mythes accommodated to a new tone of feeling and judgment. — The poets and logographers. — Pindar. — Tragic poets. — Æschylus and Sophoklês. — Tendencies of Æschylus in regard to the old legends. — He maintains undiminished the grandeur of the mythical world. — Euripidês — accused of vulgarizing the mythical heroes, and of introducing exaggerated pathos, refinement, and rhetoric. — The logographers — Pherekydês, etc. — Hekatæus — the mythes rationalized. — The historians — Herodotus. — Earnest piety of Herodotus — his mystic reserve. — His views of the mythical world. — His deference for Egypt and Egyptian statements. — His general faith in the mythical heroes and eponyms — yet combined with scepticism as to matters of fact — His remarks upon the miraculous foundation of the oracle at Dôdôna. — His remarks upon Melampus and his prophetic powers. — His remarks upon the Thessalian legend of Tempê. — Allegorical interpretation of the mythes — more and more esteemed and applied. — Divine legends allegorized. — Heroic legends historicized. — Limits to this interpreting process. — Distinction between gods and dæmons — altered and widened by Empedoclês. — Admission of dæmons as partially evil beings — effect of such admission. — Semi-historical interpretation — utmost which it can accomplish. — Some positive certificate indispensable as a constituent of historical proof — mere popular faith insufficient. — Mistake of ascribing to an unrecording age the historical sense of modern times. — Matter of tradition uncertified from the beginning. — Fictitious matter of tradition does not imply fraud or imposture. — Plausible fiction often generated and accredited by the mere force of strong and common sentiment, even in times of instruction. — Allegorical theory of the mythes — traced by some up to an ancient priestly caste. — Real import of the mythes supposed to be preserved in the religious mysteries. — Supposed ancient meaning is really a modern interpretation. — Triple theology of the pagan world. Treatment and use of the mythes according to Plato. — His views as to the necessity and use of fiction. — He deals with the mythes as expressions of feeling and imagination — sustained by religious faith, and not by any positive basis. — Grecian antiquity essentially a religious conception. — Application of chronological calculation divests it of this character. — Mythical genealogies all of one class, and all on a level in respect to evidence. — Grecian and Egyptian genealogies. — Value of each is purely subjective, having especial reference to the faith of the people. — Gods and men undistinguishable in Grecian antiquity. — General recapitulation. — General public of Greece — familiar with their local mythes, careless of recent history. — Religious festivals — their commemorative influence. — Variety and universality of mythical relics. — The mythes in their bearing on Grecian art. — Tendency of works of art to intensify the mythical faith.
CHAPTER XVII.
THE GRECIAN MYTHICAL VEIN COMPARED WITH THAT OF MODERN EUROPE.
Μῦθος — Sage — an universal manifestation of the human mind. — Analogy of the Germans and Celts with the Greeks. — Differences between them. — Grecian poetry matchless. — Grecian progress self-operated. — German progress brought about by violent influences from without. — Operation of the Roman civilization and of Christianity upon the primitive German mythes. — Alteration in the mythical genealogies — Odin and the other gods degraded into men. — Grecian Paganism — what would have been the case, if it had been supplanted by Christianity in 500 B. C. — Saxo Grammaticus and Snorro Sturleson contrasted with Pherekydês and Hellanikus. — Mythopœic tendencies in modern Europe still subsisting, but forced into a new channel: 1. Saintly ideal; 2. Chivalrous ideal. — Legends of the Saints — their analogy with the Homeric theology. — Chivalrous ideal — Romances of Charlemagne and Arthur. — Accepted as realities of the fore-time. — Teutonic and Scandinavian epic — its analogy with the Grecian. — Heroic character and self-expanding subject common to both. — Points of distinction between the two — epic of the Middle Ages neither stood so completely alone, nor was so closely interwoven with religion, as the Grecian. — History of England — how conceived down to the seventeenth century — began with Brute the Trojan. — Earnest and tenacious faith manifested in the defence of this early history. — Judgment of Milton. — Standard of historical evidence — raised in regard to England — not raised in regard to Greece. — Milton’s way of dealing with the British fabulous history objectionable. — Two ways open of dealing with the Grecian mythes: 1, to omit them; or, 2, to recount them as mythes. — Reasons for preferring the latter. — Triple partition of past time by Varro.
HISTORY OF GREECE.
PART I.
LEGENDARY GREECE.
CHAPTER I.
LEGENDS RESPECTING THE GODS.
The mythical world of the Greeks opens with the gods, anterior as well as superior to man: it gradually descends, first to heroes, and next to the human race. Along with the gods are found various monstrous natures, ultra-human and extra-human, who cannot with propriety be called gods, but who partake with gods and men in the attributes of free-will, conscious agency, and susceptibility of pleasure and pain,—such as the Harpies, the Gorgons, the Grææ, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, Echidna, Sphinx, Chimæra, Chrysaor, Pegasus, the Cyclôpes, the Centaurs, etc. The first acts of what may be termed the great mythical cycle describe the proceedings of these gigantic agents—the crash and collision of certain terrific and overboiling forces, which are ultimately reduced to obedience, or chained up, or extinguished, under the more orderly government of Zeus, who supplants his less capable predecessors, and acquires precedence and supremacy over gods and men—subject, however to certain social restraints from the chief gods and goddesses around him, as well as to the custom of occasionally convoking and consulting the divine agora.
I recount these events briefly, but literally, treating them simply as mythes springing from the same creative imagination, addressing themselves to analogous tastes and feelings, and depending upon the same authority, as the legends of Thebes and Troy. It is the inspired voice of the Muse which reveals and authenticates both, and from which Homer and Hesiod alike derive their knowledge—the one, of the heroic, the other, of the divine, foretime. I maintain, moreover, fully, the character of these great divine agents as Persons, which is the light in which they presented themselves to the Homeric or Hesiodic audience. Uranos, Nyx, Hypnos and Oneiros (Heaven, Night, Sleep and Dream), are Persons, just as much as Zeus and Apollo. To resolve them into mere allegories, is unsafe and unprofitable: we then depart from the point of view of the original hearers, without acquiring any consistent or philosophical point of view of our own.[2] For although some of the attributes and actions ascribed to these persons are often explicable by allegory the whole series and system of them never are so: the theorist who adopts this course of explanation finds that, after one or two simple and obvious steps, the path is no longer open, and he is forced to clear a way for himself by gratuitous refinements and conjectures. The allegorical persons and attributes are always found mingled with other persons and attributes not allegorical; but the two classes cannot be severed without breaking up the whole march of the mythical events, nor can any explanation which drives us to such a necessity be considered as admissible. To suppose indeed that these legends could be all traced by means of allegory into a coherent body of physical doctrine, would be inconsistent with all reasonable presumptions respecting the age or society in which they arose. Where the allegorical mark is clearly set upon any particular character, or attribute, or event, to that extent we may recognize it; but we can rarely venture to divine further, still less to alter the legends themselves on the faith of any such surmises. The theogony of the Greeks contains some cosmogonic ideas; but it cannot be considered as a system of cosmogony, or translated into a string of elementary, planetary, or physical changes.
In the order of legendary chronology, Zeus comes after Kronos and Uranos; but in the order of Grecian conception, Zeus is the prominent person, and Kronos and Uranos are inferior and introductory precursors, set up in order to be overthrown and to serve as mementos of the prowess of their conqueror. To Homer and Hesiod, as well as to the Greeks universally, Zeus is the great and predominant god, “the father of gods and men,” whose power none of the other gods can hope to resist, or even deliberately think of questioning. All the other gods have their specific potency and peculiar sphere of action and duty, with which Zeus does not usually interfere; but it is he who maintains the lineaments of a providential superintendence, as well over the phænomena of Olympus as over those of earth. Zeus and his brothers Poseidôn and Hadês have made a division of power: he has reserved the æther and the atmosphere to himself—Poseidôn has obtained the sea—and Hadês the under-world or infernal regions; while earth, and the events which pass upon earth, are common to all of them, together with free access to Olympus.[3]
Zeus, then, with his brethren and colleagues, constitute the present gods, whom Homer and Hesiod recognize as in full dignity and efficiency. The inmates of this divine world are conceived upon the model, but not upon the scale, of the human. They are actuated by the full play and variety of those appetites, sympathies, passions and affections, which divide the soul of man; invested with a far larger and indeterminate measure of power, and an exemption as well from death as (with some rare exceptions) from suffering and infirmity. The rich and diverse types thus conceived, full of energetic movement and contrast, each in his own province, and soaring confessedly above the limits of experience, were of all themes the most suitable for adventure and narrative, and operated with irresistible force upon the Grecian fancy. All nature was then conceived as moving and working through a number of personal agents, amongst whom the gods of Olympus were the most conspicuous; the reverential belief in Zeus and Apollo being only one branch of this omnipresent personifying faith. The attributes of all these agents had a tendency to expand themselves into illustrative legends—especially those of the gods, who were constantly invoked in the public worship. Out of this same mental source sprang both the divine and heroic mythes—the former being often the more extravagant and abnormous in their incidents, in proportion as the general type of the gods was more vast and awful than that of the heroes.
As the gods have houses and wives like men, so the present dynasty of gods must have a past to repose upon;[4] and the curious and imaginative Greek, whenever he does not find a recorded past ready to his hand, is uneasy until he has created one. Thus the Hesiodic theogony explains, with a certain degree of system and coherence, first the antecedent circumstances under which Zeus acquired the divine empire, next the number of his colleagues and descendants.
First in order of time (we are told by Hesiod) came Chaos; next Gæa, the broad, firm, and flat Earth, with deep and dark Tartarus at her base. Erôs (Love), the subduer of gods as well as men, came immediately afterwards.[5]
From Chaos sprung Erebos and Nyx; from these latter Æthêr and Hêmera. Gæa also gave birth to Uranos, equal in breadth to herself, in order to serve both as an overarching vault to her, and as a residence for the immortal gods; she further produced the mountains, habitations of the divine nymphs, and Pontus, the barren and billowy sea.
Then Gæa intermarried with Uranos, and from this union came a numerous offspring—twelve Titans and Titanides, three Cyclôpes, and three Hekatoncheires or beings with a hundred hands each. The Titans were Oceanus, Kœos, Krios, Hyperiôn, Iapetos, and Kronos: the Titanides, Theia, Rhea, Themis, Mnêmosynê, Phœbê, and Têthys. The Cyclôpes were Brontês, Steropês, and Argês,—formidable persons, equally distinguished for strength and for manual craft, so that they made the thunder which afterwards formed the irresistible artillery of Zeus.[6] The Hekatoncheires were Kottos, Briareus, and Gygês, of prodigious bodily force.
Uranos contemplated this powerful brood with fear and horror; as fast as any of them were born, he concealed them in cavities of the earth, and would not permit them to come out. Gæa could find no room for them, and groaned under the pressure: she produced iron, made a sickle, and implored her sons to avenge both her and themselves against the oppressive treatment of their father. But none of them, except Kronos, had courage to undertake the deed: he, the youngest and the most daring, was armed with the sickle and placed in suitable ambush by the contrivance of Gæa. Presently night arrived, and Uranos descended to the embraces of Gæa: Kronos then emerged from his concealment, cut off the genitals of his father, and cast the bleeding member behind him far away into the sea.[7] Much of the blood was spilt upon the earth, and Gæa in consequence gave birth to the irresistible Erinnys, the vast and muscular Gigantes, and the Melian nymphs. Out of the genitals themselves, as they swam and foamed upon the sea, emerged the goddess Aphroditê, deriving her name from the foam out of which she had sprung. She first landed at Kythêra, and then went to Cyprus: the island felt her benign influence, and the green herb started up under her soft and delicate tread. Erôs immediately joined her, and partook with her the function of suggesting and directing the amorous impulses both of gods and men.[8]
Uranos being thus dethroned and disabled, Kronos and the Titans acquired their liberty and became predominant: the Cyclôpes and the Hekatoncheires had been cast by Uranos into Tartarus, and were still allowed to remain there.
Each of the Titans had a numerous offspring: Oceanus, especially, marrying his sister Têthys, begat three thousand daughters, the Oceanic nymphs, and as many sons: the rivers and springs passed for his offspring. Hyperiôn and his sister Theia had for their children Hêlios, Selênê, and Eôs; Kœos with Phœbê begat Lêtô and Asteria; the children of Krios were Astræos, Pallas, and Persês,—from Astræos and Eôs sprang the winds Zephyrus, Boreas, and Notus. Iapetos, marrying the Oceanic nymph Clymenê, counted as his progeny the celebrated Promêtheus, Epimêtheus, Menœtius, and Atlas. But the offspring of Kronos were the most powerful and transcendent of all. He married his sister Rhea, and had by her three daughters—Hestia, Dêmêtêr, and Hêrê—and three sons, Hadês, Poseidôn, and Zeus, the latter at once the youngest and the greatest.
But Kronos foreboded to himself destruction from one of his own children, and accordingly, as soon as any of them were born, he immediately swallowed them and retained them in his own belly. In this manner had the first five been treated, and Rhea was on the point of being delivered of Zeus. Grieved and indignant at the loss of her children, she applied for counsel to her father and mother, Uranos and Gæa, who aided her to conceal the birth of Zeus. They conveyed her by night to Lyktus in Crête, hid the new-born child in a woody cavern on Mount Ida, and gave to Kronos, in place of it, a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes, which he greedily swallowed, believing it to be his child. Thus was the safety of Zeus ensured.[9] As he grew up his vast powers fully developed themselves: at the suggestion of Gæa, he induced Kronos by stratagem to vomit up, first the stone which had been given to him,—next, the five children whom he had previously devoured. Hestia, Dêmêtêr, Hêrê, Poseidôn and Hadês, were thus allowed to grow up along with Zeus; and the stone to which the latter owed his preservation was placed near the temple of Delphi, where it ever afterwards stood, as a conspicuous and venerable memorial to the religious Greek.[10]
We have not yet exhausted the catalogue of beings generated during this early period, anterior to the birth of Zeus. Nyx, alone and without any partner, gave birth to a numerous progeny: Thanatos, Hypnos and Oneiros; Mômus and Oïzys (Grief); Klôthô, Lachesis and Atropos, the three Fates; the retributive and equalizing Nemesis; Apatê and Philotês (Deceit and amorous Propensity), Gêras (Old Age) and Eris (Contention). From Eris proceeded an abundant offspring, all mischievous and maleficent: Ponos (Suffering), Lêthê, Limos (Famine), Phonos and Machê (Slaughter and Battle), Dysnomia and Atê (Lawlessness and reckless Impulse), and Horkos, the ever watchful sanctioner of oaths, as well as the inexorable punisher of voluntary perjury.[11]
Gæa, too, intermarrying with Pontus, gave birth to Nereus, the just and righteous old man of the sea; to Thaumas, Phorkys and Kêtô. From Nereus, and Doris daughter of Oceanus, proceeded the fifty Nereids or Sea-nymphs. Thaumus also married Elektra daughter of Oceanus, and had by her Iris and the two Harpies, Allô and Okypetê,—winged and swift as the winds. From Phorkys and Kêtô sprung the Dragon of the Hesperides, and the monstrous Grææ and Gorgons: the blood of Medusa, one of the Gorgons, when killed by Perseus, produced Chrysaor and the horse Pegasus: Chrysaor and Kallirrhoê gave birth to Geryôn as well as to Echidna,—a creature half-nymph and half-serpent, unlike both to gods and to men. Other monsters arose from the union of Echidna with Typhaôn,—Orthros, the two-headed dog of Geryôn; Cerberus, the dog of Hadês, with fifty heads, and the Lernæan Hydra. From the latter proceeded the Chimæra, the Sphinx of Thêbes, and the Nemean lion.[12]
A powerful and important progeny, also, was that of Styx, daughter of Oceanus, by Pallas; she had Zêlos and Nikê (Imperiousness and Victory), and Kratos and Bia (Strength and Force). The hearty and early coöperation of Styx and her four sons with Zeus was one of the main causes which enabled him to achieve his victory over the Titans.
Zeus had grown up not less distinguished for mental capacity than for bodily force. He and his brothers now determined to wrest the power from the hands of Kronos and the Titans, and a long and desperate struggle commenced, in which all the gods and all the goddesses took part. Zeus convoked them to Olympus, and promised to all who would aid him against Kronos, that their functions and privileges should remain undisturbed. The first who responded to the call, came with her four sons, and embraced his cause, was Styx. Zeus took them all four as his constant attendants, and conferred upon Styx the majestic distinction of being the Horkos, or oath-sanctioner of the Gods,—what Horkos was to men, Styx was to the Gods.[13]
Still further to strengthen himself, Zeus released the other Uranids who had been imprisoned in Tartarus by their father,—the Cyclôpes and the Centimanes,—and prevailed upon them to take part with him against the Titans. The former supplied him with thunder and lightning, and the latter brought into the fight their boundless muscular strength.[14] Ten full years did the combat continue; Zeus and the Kronids occupying Olympus, and the Titans being established on the more southerly mountain-chain of Othrys. All nature was convulsed, and the distant Oceanus, though he took no part in the struggle, felt the boiling, the noise, and the shock, not less than Gæa and Pontus. The thunder of Zeus, combined with the crags and mountains torn up and hurled by the Centimanes, at length prevailed, and the Titans were defeated and thrust down into Tartarus. Iapetos, Kronos, and the remaining Titans (Oceanus excepted) were imprisoned, perpetually and irrevocably, in that subterranean dungeon, a wall of brass being built around them by Poseidôn, and the three Centimanes being planted as guards. Of the two sons of Iapetos, Menœtius was made to share this prison, while Atlas was condemned to stand for ever at the extreme west, and to bear upon his shoulders the solid vault of heaven.[15]
Thus were the Titans subdued, and the Kronids with Zeus at their head placed in possession of power. They were not, however, yet quite secure; for Gæa, intermarrying with Tartarus, gave birth to a new and still more formidable monster called Typhôeus, of such tremendous properties and promise, that, had he been allowed to grow into full development, nothing could have prevented him from vanquishing all rivals and becoming supreme. But Zeus foresaw the danger, smote him at once with a thunderbolt from Olympus, and burnt him up: he was cast along with the rest into Tartarus, and no further enemy remained to question the sovereignty of the Kronids.[16]
With Zeus begins a new dynasty and a different order of beings. Zeus, Poseidôn, and Hadês agree upon the distribution before noticed, of functions and localities: Zeus retaining the Æthêr and the atmosphere, together with the general presiding function; Poseidôn obtaining the sea, and administering subterranean forces generally; and Hadês ruling the under-world or region in which the half-animated shadows of departed men reside.
It has been already stated, that in Zeus, his brothers and his sisters, and his and their divine progeny, we find the present Gods; that is, those, for the most part, whom the Homeric and Hesiodic Greeks recognized and worshipped. The wives of Zeus were numerous as well as his offspring. First he married Mêtis, the wisest and most sagacious of the goddesses; but Gæa and Uranos forewarned him that if he permitted himself to have children by her, they would be stronger than himself and dethrone him. Accordingly when Mêtis was on the point of being delivered of Athênê, he swallowed her up, and her wisdom and sagacity thus became permanently identified with his own being.[17] His head was subsequently cut open, in order to make way for the exit and birth of the goddess Athênê.[18] By Themis, Zeus begat the Hôræ, by Eurynomê, the three Charities or Graces; by Mnêmosynê, the Muses; by Lêtô (Latona), Apollo and Artemis; and by Dêmêtêr, Persephonê. Last of all he took for his wife Hêrê, who maintained permanently the dignity of queen of the Gods; by her he had Hêbê, Arês, and Eileithyia. Hermês also was born to him by Maia, the daughter of Atlas: Hêphæstos was born to Hêrê, according to some accounts, by Zeus; according to others, by her own unaided generative force.[19] He was born lame, and Hêrê was ashamed of him: she wished to secrete him away, but he made his escape into the sea, and found shelter under the maternal care of the Nereids Thetis and Eurynome.[20] Our enumeration of the divine race, under the presidency of Zeus, will thus give us,[21]—
1. The twelve great gods and goddesses of Olympus,—Zeus, Poseidôn, Apollo, Arês, Hêphæstos, Hermês, Hêrê, Athênê, Artemis, Aphroditê, Hestia, Dêmêtêr.
2. An indefinite number of other deities, not included among the Olympic, seemingly because the number twelve was complete without them, but some of them not inferior in power and dignity to many of the twelve:—Hadês, Hêlios, Hekatê, Dionysos, Lêtô, Diônê, Persephonê, Selênê, Themis, Eôs, Harmonia, the Charities, the Muses, the Eileithyiæ, the Mœræ, the Oceanids and the Nereids, Proteus, Eidothea, the Nymphs, Leukothea, Phorkys, Æolus, Nemesis, etc.
3. Deities who perform special services to the greater gods:—Iris, Hêbê, the Horæ, etc.
4. Deities whose personality is more faintly and unsteadily conceived:—Atê, the Litæ, Eris, Thanatos, Hypnos, Kratos, Bia, Ossa, etc.[22] The same name is here employed sometimes to designate the person, sometimes the attribute or event not personified,—an unconscious transition of ideas, which, when consciously performed, is called Allegory.
5. Monsters, offspring of the Gods:—the Harpies, the Gorgons, the Grææ, Pegasus, Chrysaor, Echidna, Chimæra, the Dragon of the Hesperides, Cerberus, Orthros, Geryôn, the Lernæan Hydra, the Nemean lion, Scylla and Charybdis, the Centaurs, the Sphinx, Xanthos and Balios the immortal horses, etc.
From the gods we slide down insensibly, first to heroes, and then to men; but before we proceed to this new mixture, it is necessary to say a few words on the theogony generally. I have given it briefly as it stands in the Hesiodic Theogonia, because that poem—in spite of great incoherence and confusion, arising seemingly from diversity of authorship as well as diversity of age—presents an ancient and genuine attempt to cast the divine foretime into a systematic sequence. Homer and Hesiod were the grand authorities in the pagan world respecting theogony; but in the Iliad and Odyssey nothing is found except passing allusions and implications, and even in the Hymns (which were commonly believed in antiquity to be the productions of the same author as the Iliad and the Odyssey) there are only isolated, unconnected narratives. Accordingly men habitually took their information respecting their theogonic antiquities from the Hesiodic poem, where it was ready laid out before them; and the legends consecrated in that work acquired both an extent of circulation and a firm hold on the national faith, such as independent legends could seldom or never rival. Moreover the scrupulous and sceptical Pagans, as well as the open assailants of Paganism in later times, derived their subjects of attack from the same source; so that it has been absolutely necessary to recount in their naked simplicity the Hesiodic stories, in order to know what it was that Plato deprecated and Xenophanês denounced. The strange proceedings ascribed to Uranos, Kronos and Zeus, have been more frequently alluded to, in the way of ridicule or condemnation, than any other portion of the mythical world.
But though the Hesiodic theogony passed as orthodox among the later Pagans,[23] because it stood before them as the only system anciently set forth and easily accessible, it was evidently not the only system received at the date of the poem itself. Homer knows nothing of Uranos, in the sense of an arch-God anterior to Kronos. Uranos and Gæa, like Oceanus, Têthys and Nyx, are with him great and venerable Gods, but neither the one nor the other present the character of predecessors of Kronos and Zeus.[24] The Cyclôpes, whom Hesiod ranks as sons of Uranos and fabricators of thunder, are in Homer neither one nor the other; they are not noticed in the Iliad at all, and in the Odyssey they are gross gigantic shepherds and cannibals, having nothing in common with the Hesiodic Cyclops except the one round central eye.[25] Of the three Centimanes enumerated by Hesiod, Briareus only is mentioned in Homer, and to all appearance, not as the son of Uranos, but as the son of Poseidôn; not as aiding Zeus in his combat against the Titans, but as rescuing him at a critical moment from a conspiracy formed against him by Hêrê, Poseidôn and Athênê.[26] Not only is the Hesiodic Uranos (with the Uranids) omitted in Homer, but the relations between Zeus and Kronos are also presented in a very different light. No mention is made of Kronos swallowing his young children: on the contrary, Zeus is the eldest of the three brothers instead of the youngest, and the children of Kronos live with him and Rhea: there the stolen intercourse between Zeus and Hêrê first takes place without the knowledge of their parents.[27] When Zeus puts Kronos down into Tartarus, Rhea consigns her daughter Hêrê to the care of Oceanus: no notice do we find of any terrific battle with the Titans as accompanying that event. Kronos, Iapetos, and the remaining Titans are down in Tartarus, in the lowest depths under the earth, far removed from the genial rays of Hêlios; but they are still powerful and venerable, and Hypnos makes Hêrê swear an oath in their name, as the most inviolable that he can think of.[28]
In Homer, then, we find nothing beyond the simple fact that Zeus thrust his father Kronos together with the remaining Titans into Tartarus; an event to which he affords us a tolerable parallel in certain occurrences even under the presidency of Zeus himself. For the other gods make more than one rebellious attempt against Zeus, and are only put down, partly by his unparalleled strength, partly by the presence of his ally the Centimane Briareus. Kronos, like Laërtes or Pêleus, has become old, and has been supplanted by a force vastly superior to his own. The Homeric epic treats Zeus as present, and, like all the interesting heroic characters, a father must be assigned to him: that father has once been the chief of the Titans, but has been superseded and put down into Tartarus along with the latter, so soon as Zeus and the superior breed of the Olympic gods acquired their full development.
That antithesis between Zeus and Kronos—between the Olympic gods and the Titans—which Homer has thus briefly brought to view, Hesiod has amplified into a theogony, with many things new, and some things contradictory to his predecessor; while Eumêlus or Arktinus in the poem called Titanomachia (now lost) also adopted it as their special subject.[29] As Stasinus, Arktinus, Leschês, and others, enlarged the Legend of Troy by composing poems relating to a supposed time anterior to the commencement, or subsequent to the termination of the Iliad,—as other poets recounted adventures of Odysseus subsequent to his landing in Ithaka,—so Hesiod enlarged and systematized, at the same time that he corrupted, the skeleton theogony which we find briefly indicated in Homer. There is violence and rudeness in the Homeric gods, but the great genius of Grecian epic is no way accountable for the stories of Uranos and Kronos,—the standing reproach against Pagan legendary narrative.
How far these stories are the invention of Hesiod himself is impossible to determine.[30] They bring us down to a cast of fancy more coarse and indelicate than the Homeric, and more nearly resembling some of the Holy Chapters (ἱεροὶ λόγοι) of the more recent mysteries, such (for example) as the tale of Dionysos Zagreus. There is evidence in the Theogony itself that the author was acquainted with local legends current both at Krête and at Delphi; for he mentions both the mountain-cave in Krête wherein the new-born Zeus was hidden, and the stone near the Delphian temple—the identical stone which Kronos had swallowed—“placed by Zeus himself as a sign and wonder to mortal men.” Both these two monuments, which the poet expressly refers to, and had probably seen, imply a whole train of accessory and explanatory local legends—current probably among the priests of Krête and Delphi, between which places, in ancient times, there was an intimate religious connection. And we may trace further in the poem,—that which would be the natural feeling of Krêtan worshippers of Zeus,—an effort to make out that Zeus was justified in his aggression on Kronos, by the conduct of Kronos himself both towards his father and towards his children: the treatment of Kronos by Zeus appears in Hesiod as the retribution foretold and threatened by the mutilated Uranos against the son who had outraged him. In fact the relations of Uranos and Gæa are in almost all their particulars a mere copy and duplication of those between Kronos and Rhea, differing only in the mode whereby the final catastrophe is brought about. Now castration was a practice thoroughly abhorrent both to the feelings and to the customs of Greece;[31] but it was seen with melancholy frequency in the domestic life as well as in the religious worship of Phrygia and other parts of Asia, and it even became the special qualification of a priest of the Great Mother Cybelê,[32] as well as of the Ephesian Artemis. The employment of the sickle ascribed to Kronos seems to be the product of an imagination familiar with the Asiatic worship and legends, which were connected with and partially resembled the Krêtan.[33] And this deduction becomes the more probable when we connect it with the first genesis of iron, which Hesiod mentions to have been produced for the express purpose of fabricating the fatal sickle; for metallurgy finds a place in the early legends both of the Trojan and of the Krêtan Ida, and the three Idæan Dactyls, the legendary inventors of it, are assigned sometimes to one and sometimes to the other.[34]
As Hesiod had extended the Homeric series of gods by prefixing the dynasty of Uranos to that of Kronos, so the Orphic theogony lengthened it still further.[35] First came Chronos, or Time, as a person, after him Æthêr and Chaos, out of whom Chronos produced the vast mundane egg. Hence emerged in process of time the first-born god Phanês, or Mêtis, or Hêrikapæos, a person of double sex, who first generated the Kosmos, or mundane system, and who carried within him the seed of the gods. He gave birth to Nyx, by whom he begat Uranos and Gæa; as well as to Hêlios and Selêne.[36]
From Uranos and Gæa sprang the three Mœræ, or Fates, the three Centimanes and the three Cyclôpes: these latter were cast by Uranos into Tartarus, under the foreboding that they would rob him of his dominion. In revenge for this maltreatment of her sons, Gæa produced of herself the fourteen Titans, seven male and seven female: the former were Kœos, Krios, Phorkys, Kronos, Oceanus, Hyperiôn and Iapetos; the latter were Themis, Têthys, Mnêmosynê, Theia, Diônê, Phœbê and Rhea.[37] They received the name of Titans because they avenged upon Uranos the expulsion of their elder brothers. Six of the Titans, headed by Kronos the most powerful of them all, conspiring against Uranos, castrated and dethroned him: Oceanus alone stood aloof and took no part in the aggression. Kronos assumed the government and fixed his seat on Olympos; while Oceanus remained apart, master of his own divine stream.[38] The reign of Kronos was a period of tranquillity and happiness, as well as of extraordinary longevity and vigor.
Kronos and Rhea gave birth to Zeus and his brothers and sisters. The concealment and escape of the infant Zeus, and the swallowing of the stone by Kronos, are given in the Orphic Theogony substantially in the same manner as by Hesiod, only in a style less simple and more mysticized. Zeus is concealed in the cave of Nyx, the seat of Phanês himself, along with Eidê and Adrasteia, who nurse and preserve him, while the armed dance and sonorous instruments of the Kurêtes prevent his infant cries from reaching the ears of Kronos. When grown up, he lays a snare for his father, intoxicates him with honey, and having surprised him in the depth of sleep, enchains and castrates him.[39] Thus exalted to the supreme mastery, he swallowed and absorbed into himself Mêtis, or Phanês, with all the preëxisting elements of things, and then generated all things anew out of his own being and conformably to his own divine ideas.[40] So scanty are the remains of this system, that we find it difficult to trace individually the gods and goddesses sprung from Zeus beyond Apollo, Dionysos, and Persephonê,—the latter being confounded with Artemis and Hekatê.
But there is one new personage, begotten by Zeus, who stands preëminently marked in the Orphic Theogony, and whose adventures constitute one of its peculiar features. Zagreus, “the horned child,” is the son of Zeus by his own daughter Persephonê: he is the favorite of his father, a child of magnificent promise, and predestined, if he grow up, to succeed to supreme dominion as well as to the handling of the thunderbolt. He is seated, whilst an infant, on the throne beside Zeus, guarded by Apollo and the Kurêtes. But the jealous Hêrê intercepts his career and incites the Titans against him, who, having first smeared their faces with plaster, approach him on the throne, tempt his childish fancy with playthings, and kill him with a sword while he is contemplating his face in a mirror. They then cut up his body and boil it in a caldron, leaving only the heart, which is picked up by Athênê and carried to Zeus, who in his wrath strikes down the Titans with thunder into Tartarus; whilst Apollo is directed to collect the remains of Zagreus and bury them at the foot of Mount Parnassus. The heart is given to Semelê, and Zagreus is born again from her under the form of Dionysos.[41]
Such is the tissue of violent fancies comprehended under the title of the Orphic Theogony, and read as such, it appears, by Plato, Isokratês and Aristotle. It will be seen that it is based upon the Hesiodic Theogony, but according to the general expansive tendency of Grecian legend, much new matter is added: Zeus has in Homer one predecessor, in Hesiod two, and in Orpheus four.
The Hesiodic Theogony, though later in date than the Iliad and Odyssey, was coeval with the earliest period of what may be called Grecian history, and certainly of an age earlier than 700 B. C. It appears to have been widely circulated in Greece, and being at once ancient and short, the general public consulted it as their principal source of information respecting divine antiquity. The Orphic Theogony belongs to a later date, and contains the Hesiodic ideas and persons, enlarged and mystically disguised: its vein of invention was less popular, adapted more to the contemplation of a sect specially prepared than to the taste of a casual audience, and it appears accordingly to have obtained currency chiefly among purely speculative men.[42] Among the majority of these latter, however, it acquired greater veneration, and above all was supposed to be of greater antiquity, than the Hesiodic. The belief in its superior antiquity (disallowed by Herodotus, and seemingly also by Aristotle[43]), as well as the respect for its contents, increased during the Alexandrine age and through the declining centuries of Paganism, reaching its maximum among the New-Platonists of the third and fourth century after Christ: both the Christian assailants, as well as the defenders, of paganism, treated it as the most ancient and venerable summary of the Grecian faith. Orpheus is celebrated by Pindar as the harper and companion of the Argonautic maritime heroes: Orpheus and Musæus, as well as Pamphôs and Olên, the great supposed authors of theogonic, mystical, oracular, and prophetic verses and hymns, were generally considered by literary Greeks as older than either Hesiod or Homer:[44] and such was also the common opinion of modern scholars until a period comparatively recent. It has now been shown, on sufficient ground, that the compositions which passed under these names emanate for the most part from poets of the Alexandrine age, and subsequent to the Christian æra; and that even the earliest among them, which served as the stock on which the later additions were engrafted, belong to a period far more recent than Hesiod; probably to the century preceding Onomakritus (B. C. 610-510). It seems, however, certain, that both Orpheus and Musæus were names of established reputation at the time when Onomakritus flourished; and it is distinctly stated by Pausanias that the latter was himself the author of the most remarkable and characteristic mythe of the Orphic Theogony—the discerption of Zagreus by the Titans, and his resurrection as Dionysos.[45]
The names of Orpheus and Musæus (as well as that of Pythagoras,[46] looking at one side of his character) represent facts of importance in the history of the Grecian mind—the gradual influx of Thracian, Phrygian, and Egyptian, religious ceremonies and feelings, and the increasing diffusion of special mysteries,[47] schemes for religious purification, and orgies (I venture to anglicize the Greek word, which contains in its original meaning no implication of the ideas of excess to which it was afterwards diverted) in honor of some particular god—distinct both from the public solemnities and from the gentile solemnities of primitive Greece,—celebrated apart from the citizens generally, and approachable only through a certain course of preparation and initiation—sometimes even forbidden to be talked of in the presence of the uninitiated, under the severest threats of divine judgment. Occasionally such voluntary combinations assumed the form of permanent brotherhoods, bound together by periodical solemnities as well as by vows of an ascetic character: thus the Orphic life (as it was called) or regulation of the Orphic brotherhood, among other injunctions partly arbitrary and partly abstinent, forbade animal food universally, and on certain occasions, the use of woollen clothing.[48] The great religious and political fraternity of the Pythagoreans, which acted so powerfully on the condition of the Italian cities, was one of the many manifestations of this general tendency, which stands in striking contrast with the simple, open-hearted, and demonstrative worship of the Homeric Greeks.
Festivals at seed-time and harvest—at the vintage and at the opening of the new wine—were doubtless coeval with the earliest habits of the Greeks; the latter being a period of unusual joviality. Yet in the Homeric poems, Dionysos and Dêmêtêr, the patrons of the vineyard and the cornfield, are seldom mentioned, and decidedly occupy little place in the imagination of the poet as compared with the other gods: nor are they of any conspicuous importance even in the Hesiodic Theogony. But during the interval between Hesiod and Onomakritus, the revolution in the religious mind of Greece was such as to place both these deities in the front rank. According to the Orphic doctrine, Zagreus, son of Persephonê, is destined to be the successor of Zeus, and although the violence of the Titans intercepts this lot, yet even when he rises again from his discerption under the name of Dionysos, he is the colleague and coëqual of his divine father.
This remarkable change, occurring as it did during the sixth and a part of the seventh century before the Christian æra, may be traced to the influence of communication with Egypt (which only became fully open to the Greeks about B. C. 660), as well as with Thrace, Phrygia, and Lydia. From hence new religious ideas and feelings were introduced, which chiefly attached themselves to the characters of Dionysos and Dêmêtêr. The Greeks identified these two deities with the great Egyptian Osiris and Isis, so that what was borrowed from the Egyptian worship of the two latter naturally fell to their equivalents in the Grecian system.[49] Moreover the worship of Dionysos (under what name cannot be certainly made out) was indigenous in Thrace,[50] as that of the Great Mother was in Phyrgia, and in Lydia—together with those violent ecstasies and manifestations of temporary frenzy, and that clashing of noisy instruments, which we find afterwards characterizing it in Greece. The great masters of the pipe—as well as the dythyramb,[51] and indeed the whole musical system appropriated to the worship of Dionysos, which contrasted so pointedly with the quiet solemnity of the Pæan addressed to Apollo—were all originally Phrygian.
From all these various countries, novelties, unknown to the Homeric men, found their way into the Grecian worship: and there is one amongst them which deserves to be specially noticed, because it marks the generation of the new class of ideas in their theology. Homer mentions many persons guilty of private or involuntary homicide, and compelled either to go into exile or to make pecuniary satisfaction; but he never once describes any of them to have either received or required purification for the crime.[52] Now in the time subsequent to Homer, purification for homicide comes to be considered as indispensable: the guilty person is regarded as unfit for the society of man or the worship of the gods until he has received it, and special ceremonies are prescribed whereby it is to be administered. Herodotus tells us that the ceremony of purification was the same among the Lydians and among the Greeks:[53] we know that it formed no part of the early religion of the latter, and we may perhaps reasonably suspect that they borrowed it from the former. The oldest instance known to us of expiation for homicide was contained in the epic poem of the Milesian Arktinus,[54] wherein Achillês is purified by Odysseus for the murder of Thersitês: several others occurred in the later or Hesiodic epic—Hêraklês, Pêleus, Bellerophôn, Alkmæôn, Amphiktyôn, Pœmander, Triopas,—from whence they probably passed through the hands of the logographers to Apollodôrus, Diodôrus, and others.[55] The purification of the murderer was originally operated, not by the hands of any priest or specially sanctified man, but by those of a chief or king, who goes through the appropriate ceremonies in the manner recounted by Herodotus in his pathetic narrative respecting Crœsus and Adrastus.
The idea of a special taint of crime, and of the necessity as well as the sufficiency of prescribed religious ceremonies as a means of removing it, appears thus to have got footing in Grecian practice subsequent to the time of Homer. The peculiar rites or orgies, composed or put together by Onomakritus, Methapus,[56] and other men of more than the ordinary piety, were founded upon a similar mode of thinking, and adapted to the same mental exigencies. They were voluntary religious manifestations, superinduced upon the old public sacrifices of the king or chiefs on behalf of the whole society, and of the father on his own family hearth—they marked out the details of divine service proper to appease or gratify the god to whom they were addressed, and to procure for the believers who went through them his blessings and protection here or hereafter—the exact performance of the divine service in all its specialty was held necessary, and thus the priests or Hierophants, who alone were familiar with the ritual, acquired a commanding position.[57] Generally speaking, these peculiar orgies obtained their admission and their influence at periods of distress, disease, public calamity and danger, or religious terror and despondency, which appear to have been but too frequent in their occurrence.
The minds of men were prone to the belief that what they were suffering arose from the displeasure of some of the gods, and as they found that the ordinary sacrifices and worship were insufficient for their protection, so they grasped at new suggestions proposed to them with the view of regaining the divine favor.[58] Such suggestions were more usually copied, either in whole or in part, from the religious rites of some foreign locality, or from some other portion of the Hellenic world; and in this manner many new sects or voluntary religious fraternities, promising to relieve the troubled conscience and to reconcile the sick or suffering with the offended gods, acquired permanent establishment as well as considerable influence. They were generally under the superintendence of hereditary families of priests, who imparted the rites of confirmation and purification to communicants generally; no one who went through the prescribed ceremonies being excluded. In many cases, such ceremonies fell into the hands of jugglers, who volunteered their services to wealthy men, and degraded their profession as well by obtrusive venality as by extravagant promises:[59] sometimes the price was lowered to bring them within reach of the poor and even of slaves. But the wide diffusion, and the number of voluntary communicants of these solemnities, proves how much they fell in with the feeling of the time and how much respect they enjoyed—a respect, which the more conspicuous establishments, such as Eleusis and Samothrace, maintained for several centuries. And the visit of the Kretan Epimenidês to Athens—in the time of Solôn, and at a season of the most serious disquietude and dread of having offended the gods—illustrates the tranquillizing effect of new orgies[60] and rites of absolution, when enjoined by a man standing high in the favor of the gods and reputed to be the son of a nymph. The supposed Erythræan Sibyl, and the earliest collection of Sibylline prophecies,[61] afterwards so much multiplied and interpolated, and referred (according to Grecian custom) to an age even earlier than Homer, appear to belong to a date not long posterior to Epimenidês. Other oracular verses, such as those of Bakis, were treasured up in Athens and other cities: the sixth century before the Christian æra was fertile in these kinds of religious manifestations.
Amongst the special rites and orgies of the character just described, those which enjoyed the greatest Pan-Hellenic reputation were attached to the Idæan Zeus in Krête, to Dêmêtêr at Eleusis, to the Kabeiri in Samothrace, and to Dionysos at Delphi and Thebes.[62] That they were all to a great degree analogous, is shown by the way in which they unconsciously run together and become confused in the minds of various authors: the ancient inquirers themselves were unable to distinguish one from the other, and we must be content to submit to the like ignorance. But we see enough to satisfy us of the general fact, that during the century and a half which elapsed between the opening of Egypt to the Greeks and the commencement of their struggle with the Persian kings, the old religion was largely adulterated by importations from Egypt, Asia Minor,[63] and Thrace. The rites grew to be more furious and ecstatic, exhibiting the utmost excitement, bodily as well as mental: the legends became at once more coarse, more tragical, and less pathetic. The manifestations of this frenzy were strongest among the women, whose religious susceptibilities were often found extremely unmanageable,[64] and who had everywhere congregative occasional ceremonies of their own, apart from the men—indeed, in the case of the colonists, especially of the Asiatic colonists, the women had been originally women of the country, and as such retained to a great degree their non-Hellenic manners and feelings.[65] The god Dionysos,[66] whom the legends described as clothed in feminine attire, and leading a troop of frenzied women, inspired a temporary ecstasy, and those who resisted the inspiration, being supposed to disobey his will, were punished either by particular judgments or by mental terrors; while those who gave full loose to the feeling, in the appropriate season and with the received solemnities, satisfied his exigencies, and believed themselves to have procured immunity from such disquietudes for the future.[67] Crowds of women, clothed with fawn-skins and bearing the sanctified thyrsus, flocked to the solitudes of Parnassus, or Kithærôn, or Taygetus, during the consecrated triennial period, passed the night there with torches, and abandoned themselves to demonstrations of frantic excitement, with dancing and clamorous invocation of the god: they were said to tear animals limb from limb, to devour the raw flesh, and to cut themselves without feeling the wound.[68] The men yielded to a similar impulse by noisy revels in the streets, sounding the cymbals and tambourine, and carrying the image of the god in procession.[69] It deserves to be remarked, that the Athenian women never practised these periodical mountain excursions, so common among the rest of the Greeks: they had their feminine solemnities of the Thesmophoria,[70] mournful in their character and accompanied with fasting, and their separate congregations at the temples of Aphroditê, but without any extreme or unseemly demonstrations. The state festival of the Dionysia, in the city of Athens, was celebrated with dramatic entertainments, and the once rich harvest of Athenian tragedy and comedy was thrown up under its auspices. The ceremonies of the Kurêtes in Krête, originally armed dances in honor of the Idæan Zeus, seem also to have borrowed from Asia so much of fury, of self-infliction, and of mysticism, that they became at last inextricably confounded with the Phrygian Korybantes or worshippers of the Great Mother; though it appears that Grecian reserve always stopped short of the irreparable self-mutilation of Atys.
The influence of the Thracian religion upon that of the Greeks cannot be traced in detail, but the ceremonies contained in it were of a violent and fierce character, like the Phrygian, and acted upon Hellas in the same general direction as the latter. And the like may be said of the Egyptian religion, which was in this case the more operative, inasmuch as all the intellectual Greeks were naturally attracted to go and visit the wonders on the banks of the Nile; the powerful effect produced upon them is attested by many evidences, but especially by the interesting narrative of Herodotus. Now the Egyptian ceremonies were at once more licentious, and more profuse in the outpouring both of joy and sorrow, than the Greek;[71] but a still greater difference sprang from the extraordinary power, separate mode of life, minute observances, and elaborate organization, of the priesthood. The ceremonies of Egypt were multitudinous, but the legends concerning them were framed by the priests, and as a general rule, seemingly, known to the priests alone: at least they were not intended to be publicly talked of, even by pious men. They were “holy stories,” which it was sacrilege publicly to mention, and which from this very prohibition only took firmer hold of the minds of the Greek visitors who heard them. And thus the element of secrecy and mystic silence—foreign to Homer, and only faintly glanced at in Hesiod—if it was not originally derived from Egypt, at least received from thence its greatest stimulus and diffusion. The character of the legends themselves was naturally affected by this change from publicity to secrecy: the secrets when revealed would be such as to justify by their own tenor the interdict on public divulgation: instead of being adapted, like the Homeric mythe, to the universal sympathies and hearty interest of a crowd of hearers, they would derive their impressiveness from the tragical, mournful, extravagant, or terror-striking character of the incidents.[72] Such a tendency, which appears explicable and probable even on general grounds, was in this particular case rendered still more certain by the coarse taste of the Egyptian priests. That any recondite doctrine, religious or philosophical, was attached to the mysteries or contained in the holy stories, has never been shown, and is to the last degree improbable though the affirmative has been asserted by many learned men.
Herodotus seems to have believed that the worship and ceremonies of Dionysos generally were derived by the Greeks from Egypt, brought over by Kadmus and taught by him to Melampus: and the latter appears in the Hesiodic Catalogue as having cured the daughters of Prœtus of the mental distemper with which they had been smitten by Dionysos for rejecting his ritual. He cured them by introducing the Bacchic dance and fanatical excitement: this mythical incident is the most ancient mention of the Dionysiac solemnities presented in the same character as they bear in Euripidês. It is the general tendency of Herodotus to apply the theory of derivation from Egypt far too extensively to Grecian institutions: the orgies of Dionysos were not originally borrowed from thence, though they may have been much modified by connection with Egypt as well as with Asia. The remarkable mythe composed by Onomakritus respecting the dismemberment of Zagreus was founded upon an Egyptian tale very similar respecting the body of Osiris, who was supposed to be identical with Dionysos:[73] nor was it unsuitable to the reckless fury of the Bacchanals during their state of temporary excitement, which found a still more awful expression in the mythe of Pentheus,—torn in pieces by his own mother Agavê at the head of her companions in the ceremony, as an intruder upon the feminine rites as well as a scoffer at the god.[74] A passage in the Iliad (the authenticity of which has been contested, but even as an interpolation it must be old)[75] also recounts how Lykurgus was struck blind by Zeus for having chased away with a whip “the nurses of the mad Dionysos,” and frightened the god himself into the sea to take refuge in the arms of Thetis: and the fact, that Dionysos is so frequently represented in his mythes as encountering opposition and punishing the refractory, seems to indicate that his worship under its ecstatic form was a late phænomenon and introduced not without difficulty. The mythical Thracian Orpheus was attached as Eponymos to a new sect, who seem to have celebrated the ceremonies of Dionysos with peculiar care, minuteness and fervor, besides observing various rules in respect to food and clothing. It was the opinion of Herodotus, that these rules, as well as the Pythagorean, were borrowed from Egypt. But whether this be the fact or not, the Orphic brotherhood is itself both an evidence, and a cause, of the increased importance of the worship of Dionysos, which indeed is attested by the great dramatic poets of Athens.
The Homeric Hymns present to us, however, the religious ideas and legends of the Greeks at an earlier period, when the enthusiastic and mystic tendencies had not yet acquired their full development. Though not referable to the same age or to the same author as either the Iliad or the Odyssey, they do to a certain extent continue the same stream of feeling, and the same mythical tone and coloring, as these poems—manifesting but little evidence of Egyptian, Asiatic, or Thracian adulterations. The difference is striking between the god Dionysos as he appears in the Homeric hymn and in the Bacchæ of Euripidês. The hymnographer describes him as standing on the sea-shore, in the guise of a beautiful and richly-clothed youth, when Tyrrhenian pirates suddenly approach: they seize and bind him and drag him on board their vessel. But the bonds which they employ burst spontaneously, and leave the god free. The steersman, perceiving this with affright, points out to his companions that they have unwittingly laid hands on a god,—perhaps Zeus himself, or Apollo, or Poseidôn. He conjures them to desist, and to replace Dionysos respectfully on the shore, lest in his wrath he should visit the ship with wind and hurricane: but the crew deride his scruples, and Dionysos is carried prisoner out to sea with the ship under full sail. Miraculous circumstances soon attest both his presence and his power. Sweet-scented wine is seen to flow spontaneously about the ship, the sail and mast appear adorned with vine and ivy-leaves, and the oar-pegs with garlands. The terrified crew now too late entreat the helmsman to steer his course for the shore, and crowd round him for protection on the poop. But their destruction is at hand: Dionysos assumes the form of a lion—a bear is seen standing near him—this bear rushes with a loud roar upon the captain, while the crew leap overboard in their agony of fright, and are changed into dolphins. There remains none but the discreet and pious steersman, to whom Dionysos addresses words of affectionate encouragement, revealing his name, parentage and dignity.[76]
This hymn, perhaps produced at the Naxian festival of Dionysos, and earlier than the time when the dithyrambic chorus became the established mode of singing the praise and glory of that god, is conceived in a spirit totally different from that of the Bacchic Telatæ, or special rites which the Bacchæ of Euripidês so abundantly extol,—rites introduced from Asia by Dionysos himself at the head of a thiasus or troop of enthusiastic women,—inflaming with temporary frenzy the minds of the women of Thebes,—not communicable except to those who approach as pious communicants,—and followed by the most tragical results to all those who fight against the god.[77] The Bacchic Teletæ, and the Bacchic feminine frenzy, were importations from abroad, as Euripidês represents them, engrafted upon the joviality of the primitive Greek Dionysia; they were borrowed, in all probability, from more than one source and introduced through more than one channel, the Orphic life or brotherhood being one of the varieties. Strabo ascribes to this latter a Thracian original, considering Orpheus, Musæus, and Eumolpus as having been all Thracians.[78] It is curious to observe how, in the Bacchæ of Euripidês, the two distinct and even conflicting ideas of Dionysos come alternately forward; sometimes the old Grecian idea of the jolly and exhilarating god of wine—but more frequently the recent and imported idea of the terrific and irresistible god who unseats the reason, and whose œstrus can only be appeased by a willing, though temporary obedience. In the fanatical impulse which inspired the votaries of the Asiatic Rhea or Cybelê, or of the Thracian Kotys, there was nothing of spontaneous joy; it was a sacred madness, during which the soul appeared to be surrendered to a stimulus from without, and accompanied by preternatural strength and temporary sense of power,[79]—altogether distinct from the unrestrained hilarity of the original Dionysia, as we see them in the rural demes of Attica, or in the gay city of Tarentum. There was indeed a side on which the two bore some analogy, inasmuch as, according to the religious point of view of the Greeks, even the spontaneous joy of the vintage feast was conferred by the favor and enlivened by the companionship of Dionysos. It was upon this analogy that the framers of the Bacchic orgies proceeded but they did not the less disfigure the genuine character of the old Grecian Dionysia.
Dionysos is in the conception of Pindar the Paredros or companion in worship of Dêmêtêr:[80] the worship and religious estimate of the latter has by that time undergone as great a change as that of the former, if we take our comparison with the brief description of Homer and Hesiod: she has acquired[81] much of the awful and soul-disturbing attributes of the Phrygian Cybelê. In Homer, Dêmêtêr is the goddess of the corn-field, who becomes attached to the mortal man Jasiôn; an unhappy passion, since Zeus, jealous of the connection between goddesses and men, puts him to death. In the Hesiodic Theogony, Dêmêtêr is the mother of Persephonê by Zeus, who permits Hadês to carry off the latter as his wife: moreover Dêmêtêr has, besides, by Jasiôn a son called Plutos, born in Krête. Even from Homer to Hesiod, the legend of Dêmêtêr, has been expanded and her dignity exalted; according to the usual tendency of Greek legend, the expansion goes on still further. Through Jasiôn, Dêmêtêr becomes connected with the mysteries of Samothrace; through Persephonê, with those of Eleusis. The former connection it is difficult to follow out in detail, but the latter is explained and traced to its origin in the Homeric Hymn to Dêmêtêr.
Though we find different statements respecting the date as well as the origin of the Eleusinian mysteries, yet the popular belief of the Athenians, and the story which found favor at Eleusis, ascribed them to the presence and dictation of the goddess Dêmêtêr herself; just as the Bacchic rites are, according to the Bacchæ of Euripidês, first communicated and enforced on the Greeks by the personal visit of Dionysos to Thêbes, the metropolis of the Bacchic ceremonies.[82] In the Eleusinian legend, preserved by the author of the Homeric Hymn, she comes voluntarily and identifies herself with Eleusis; her past abode in Krête being briefly indicated.[83] Her visit to Eleusis is connected with the deep sorrow caused by the loss of her daughter Persephonê, who had been seized by Hadês, while gathering flowers in a meadow along with the Oceanic Nymphs, and carried off to become his wife in the under-world. In vain did the reluctant Persephonê shriek and invoke the aid of her father Zeus: he had consented to give her to Hadês, and her cries were heard only by Hekatê and Hêlios. Dêmêtêr was inconsolable at the disappearance of her daughter, but knew not where to look for her: she wandered for nine days and nights with torches in search of the lost maiden without success. At length Hêlios, the “spy of gods and men,” revealed to her, in reply to her urgent prayer, the rape of Persephonê, and the permission given to Hadês by Zeus. Dêmêtêr was smitten with anger and despair: she renounced Zeus and the society of Olympus, abstained from nectar and ambrosia, and wandered on earth in grief and fasting until her form could no longer be known. In this condition she came to Eleusis, then governed by the prince Keleos. Sitting down by a well at the wayside in the guise of an old woman, she was found by the daughters of Keleos, who came hither with their pails of brass for water. In reply to their questions, she told them that she had been brought by pirates from Krête to Thorikos, and had made her escape; she then solicited from them succor and employment as a servant or as a nurse. The damsels prevailed upon their mother Metaneira to receive her, and to entrust her with the nursing of the young Dêmophoôn, their late-born brother, the only son of Keleos. Dêmêtêr was received into the house of Metaneira, her dignified form still borne down by grief: she sat long silent and could not be induced either to smile or to taste food, until the maid-servant Iambê, by jests and playfulness, succeeded in amusing and rendering her cheerful. She would not taste wine, but requested a peculiar mixture of barley-meal with water and the herb mint.[84]
The child Dêmophoôn, nursed by Dêmêtêr, throve and grew up like a god, to the delight and astonishment of his parents: she gave him no food, but anointed him daily with ambrosia, and plunged him at night in the fire like a torch, where he remained unburnt. She would have rendered him immortal, had she not been prevented by the indiscreet curiosity and alarm of Metaneira, who secretly looked in at night, and shrieked with horror at the sight of her child in the fire.[85] The indignant goddess, setting the infant on the ground, now revealed her true character to Metaneira: her wan and aged look disappeared, and she stood confest in the genuine majesty of her divine shape, diffusing a dazzling brightness which illuminated the whole house. “Foolish mother,” she said, “thy want of faith has robbed thy son of immortal life. I am the exalted Dêmêtêr, the charm and comfort both of gods and men: I was preparing for thy son exemption from death and old age; now it cannot be but he must taste of both. Yet shall he be ever honored, since he has sat upon my knee and slept in my arms. Let the people of Eleusis erect for me a temple and altar on yonder hill above the fountain; I will myself prescribe to them the orgies which they must religiously perform in order to propitiate my favor.”[86]
The terrified Metaneira was incapable even of lifting up her child from the ground; her daughters entered at her cries, and began to embrace and tend their infant brother, but he sorrowed and could not be pacified for the loss of his divine nurse. All night they strove to appease the goddess.[87]
Strictly executing the injunctions of Dêmêtêr, Keleos convoked the people of Eleusis and erected the temple on the spot which she had pointed out. It was speedily completed, and Dêmêtêr took up her abode in it,—apart from the remaining gods, still pining with grief for the loss of her daughter, and withholding her beneficent aid from mortals. And thus she remained a whole year,—a desperate and terrible year:[88] in vain did the oxen draw the plough, and in vain was the barley-seed cast into the furrow,—Dêmêtêr suffered it not to emerge from the earth. The human race would have been starved, and the gods would have been deprived of their honors and sacrifice, had not Zeus found means to conciliate her. But this was a hard task; for Dêmêtêr resisted the entreaties of Iris and of all the other goddesses and gods whom Zeus successively sent to her. She would be satisfied with nothing less than the recovery of her daughter. At length Zeus sent Hermês to Hadês, to bring Persephonê away: Persephonê joyfully obeyed, but Hadês prevailed upon her before she departed to swallow a grain of pomegranate, which rendered it impossible for her to remain the whole year away from him.[89]
With transport did Dêmêtêr receive back her lost daughter, and the faithful Hekatê sympathized in the delight felt by both at the reunion.[90] It was now an easier undertaking to reconcile her with the gods. Her mother Rhea, sent down expressly by Zeus, descended from Olympus on the fertile Rharan plain, then smitten with barrenness like the rest of the earth: she succeeded in appeasing the indignation of Dêmêtêr, who consented again to put forth her relieving hand. The buried seed came up in abundance, and the earth was covered with fruit and flowers. She would have wished to retain Persephonê constantly with her, but this was impossible; and she was obliged to consent that her daughter should go down for one-third of each year to the house of Hadês, departing from her every spring at the time when the seed is sown. She then revisited Olympus, again to dwell with the gods; but before her departure, she communicated to the daughters of Keleos, and to Keleos himself, together with Triptolemus, Dioklês and Eumolpus, the divine service and the solemnities which she required to be observed in her honor.[91] And thus began the venerable mysteries of Eleusis, at her special command: the lesser mysteries, celebrated in February, in honor of Persephonê; the greater, in August, to the honor of Dêmêtêr herself. Both are jointly patronesses of the holy city and temple.
Such is a brief sketch of the temple legend of Eleusis, set forth at length in the Homeric Hymn to Dêmêtêr. It is interesting not less as a picture of the Mater Dolorosa (in the mouth of an Athenian, Dêmêtêr and Persephonê were always the Mother and Daughter, by excellence), first an agonized sufferer, and then finally glorified,—the weal and woe of man being dependent upon her kindly feeling,—than as an illustration of the nature and growth of Grecian legend generally. Though we now read this Hymn as pleasing poetry, to the Eleusinians, for whom it was composed, it was genuine and sacred history. They believed in the visit of Dêmêtêr to Eleusis, and in the mysteries as a revelation from her, as implicitly as they believed in her existence and power as a goddess. The Eleusinian psalmist shares this belief in common with his countrymen, and embodies it in a continuous narrative, in which the great goddesses of the place, as well as the great heroic families, figure in inseparable conjunction. Keleos is the son of the Eponymous hero Eleusis, and his daughters, with the old epic simplicity, carry their basins to the well for water. Eumolpus, Triptolemus, Dioklês, heroic ancestors of the privileged families who continued throughout the historical times of Athens to fulfil their special hereditary functions in the Eleusinian solemnities, are among the immediate recipients of inspiration from the goddess; but chiefly does she favor Metaneira and her infant son Dêmophoôn, for the latter of whom her greatest boon is destined, and intercepted only by the weak faith of the mother. Moreover, every incident in the Hymn has a local coloring and a special reference. The well, overshadowed by an olive-tree near which Dêmêtêr had rested, the stream Kallichorus and the temple-hill, were familiar and interesting places in the eyes of every Eleusinian; the peculiar posset prepared from barley-meal with mint was always tasted by the Mysts (or communicants) after a prescribed fast, as an article in the ceremony,—while it was also the custom, at a particular spot in the processional march, to permit the free interchange of personal jokes and taunts upon individuals for the general amusement. And these two customs are connected in the Hymn with the incidents, that Dêmêtêr herself had chosen the posset as the first interruption of her long and melancholy fast, and that her sorrowful thoughts had been partially diverted by the coarse playfulness of the servant-maid Iambê. In the enlarged representation of the Eleusinian ceremonies, which became established after the incorporation of Eleusis with Athens, the part of Iambê herself was enacted by a woman, or man in woman’s attire, of suitable wit and imagination, who was posted on the bridge over the Kephissos, and addressed to the passers-by in the procession,[92] especially the great men of Athens, saucy jeers, probably not less piercing than those of Aristophanês on the stage. The torch-bearing Hekatê received a portion of the worship in the nocturnal ceremonies of the Eleusinia: this too is traced, in the Hymn, to her kind and affectionate sympathy with the great goddesses.
Though all these incidents were sincerely believed by the Eleusinians as a true history of the past, and as having been the real initiatory cause of their own solemnities, it is not the less certain that they are simply mythes or legends, and not to be treated as history, either actual or exaggerated. They do not take their start from realities of the past, but from realities of the present, combined with retrospective feeling and fancy, which fills up the blank of the aforetime in a manner at once plausible and impressive. What proportion of fact there may be in the legend, or whether there be any at all, it is impossible to ascertain and useless to inquire; for the story did not acquire belief from its approximation to real fact, but from its perfect harmony with Eleusinian faith and feeling, and from the absence of any standard of historical credibility. The little town of Eleusis derived all its importance from the solemnity of the Dêmêtria, and the Hymn which we have been considering (probably at least as old as 600 B. C.) represents the town as it stood before its absorption into the larger unity of Athens, which seems to have produced an alteration of its legends and an increase of dignity in its great festival. In the faith of an Eleusinian, the religious as well as the patriotic antiquities of his native town were connected with this capital solemnity. The divine legend of the sufferings of Dêmêtêr and her visit to Eleusis was to him that which the heroic legend of Adrastus and the Siege of Thêbes was to a Sikyonian, or that of Erechtheus and Athênê to an Athenian grouping together in the same scene and story the goddess and the heroic fathers of the town. If our information were fuller, we should probably find abundance of other legends respecting the Dêmêtria: the Gephyræi of Athens, to whom belonged the celebrated Harmodios and Aristogeitôn, and who possessed special Orgies of Dêmêtêr the Sorrowful, to which no man foreign to their Gens was ever admitted,[93] would doubtless have told stories not only different but contradictory; and even in other Eleusinian mythes we discover Eumolpus as king of Eleusis, son of Poseidôn, and a Thracian, completely different from the character which he bears in the Hymn before us.[94] Neither discrepancies nor want of evidence, in reference to alleged antiquities, shocked the faith of a non-historical public. What they wanted was a picture of the past, impressive to their feelings and plausible to their imagination; and it is important to the reader to remember, while he reads either the divine legends which we are now illustrating or the heroic legends to which we shall soon approach, that he is dealing with a past which never was present,—a region essentially mythical, neither approachable by the critic nor mensurable by the chronologer.
The tale respecting the visit of Dêmêtêr, which was told by the ancient Gens, called the Phytalids,[95] in reference to another temple of Dêmêtêr between Athens and Eleusis, and also by the Megarians in reference to a Dêmêtrion near their city, acquired under the auspices of Athens still further extension. The goddess was reported to have first communicated to Triptolemus at Eleusis the art of sowing corn, which by his intervention was disseminated all over the earth. And thus the Athenians took credit to themselves for having been the medium of communication from the gods to man of all the inestimable blessings of agriculture, which they affirmed to have been first exhibited on the fertile Rharian plain near Eleusis. Such pretensions are not to be found in the old Homeric hymn. The festival of the Thesmophoria, celebrated in honor of Dêmêtêr Thesmophoros at Athens, was altogether different from the Eleusinia, in this material respect, as well as others, that all males were excluded, and women only were allowed to partake in it: the surname Thesmophoros gave occasion to new legends in which the goddess was glorified as the first authoress of laws and legal sanctions to mankind.[96] This festival, for women apart and alone, was also celebrated at Paros, at Ephesus, and in many other parts of Greece.[97]
Altogether, Dêmêtêr and Dionysos, as the Grecian counterparts of the Egyptian Isis and Osiris, seem to have been the great recipients of the new sacred rites borrowed from Egypt, before the worship of Isis in her own name was introduced into Greece: their solemnities became more frequently recluse and mysterious than those of the other deities. The importance of Dêmêtêr to the collective nationality of Greece may be gathered from the fact that her temple was erected at Thermopylæ, the spot where the Amphiktyonic assemblies were held, close by the temple of the Eponymous hero Amphiktyôn himself, and under the surname of the Amphiktyonic Dêmêtêr.[98]
We now pass to another and not less important celestial personage—Apollo.
The legends of Dêlos and Delphi, embodied in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, indicate, if not a greater dignity, at least a more widely diffused worship of that god than even of Dêmêtêr. The Hymn is, in point of fact, an aggregate of two separate compositions, one emanating from an Ionic bard at Dêlos, the other from Delphi. The first details the birth, the second the mature divine efficiency, of Apollo; but both alike present the unaffected charm as well as the characteristic peculiarities of Grecian mythical narrative. The hymnographer sings, and his hearers accept in perfect good faith, a history of the past; but it is a past, imagined partly as an introductory explanation to the present, partly as a means of glorifying the god. The island of Dêlos was the accredited birth-place of Apollo, and is also the place in which he chiefly delights, where the great and brilliant Ionic festival is periodically convened in his honor. Yet it is a rock narrow, barren, and uninviting: how came so glorious a privilege to be awarded to it? This the poet takes upon himself to explain. Lêtô, pregnant with Apollo, and persecuted by the jealous Hêrê, could find no spot wherein to give birth to her offspring. In vain did she address herself to numerous places in Greece, the Asiatic coast and the intermediate islands; all were terrified at the wrath of Hêrê, and refused to harbor her. As a last resort, she approached the rejected and repulsive island of Dêlos, and promised that, if shelter were granted to her in her forlorn condition, the island should become the chosen resort of Apollo as well as the site of his temple with its rich accompanying solemnities.[99] Dêlos joyfully consented, but not without many apprehensions that the potent Apollo would despise her unworthiness, and not without exacting a formal oath from Lêtô,—who was then admitted to the desired protection, and duly accomplished her long and painful labor. Though Diônê, Rhea, Themis and Amphitritê came to soothe and succor her, yet Hêrê kept away the goddess presiding over childbirth, Eileithyia, and thus cruelly prolonged her pangs. At length Eileithyia came, and Apollo was born. Hardly had Apollo tasted, from the hands of Themis, the immortal food, nectar and ambrosia, when he burst at once his infant bands, and displayed himself in full divine form and strength, claiming his characteristic attributes of the bow and the harp, and his privileged function of announcing beforehand to mankind the designs of Zeus. The promise made by Lêtô to Dêlos was faithfully performed: amidst the numberless other temples and groves which men provided for him, he ever preferred that island as his permanent residence, and there the Ionians with their wives and children, and all their “bravery,” congregated periodically from their different cities to glorify him. Dance and song and athletic contests adorned the solemnity, and the countless ships, wealth, and grace of the multitudinous Ionians had the air of an assembly of gods. The Delian maidens, servants of Apollo, sang hymns to the glory of the god, as well as of Artemis and Lêtô, intermingled with adventures of foregone men and women, to the delight of the listening crowd. The blind itinerant bard of Chios (composer of this the Homeric hymn, and confounded in antiquity with the author of the Iliad) had found honor and acceptance at this festival, and commends himself, in a touching farewell strain, to the remembrance and sympathy of the Delian maidens.[100]
But Dêlos was not an oracular spot: Apollo did not manifest himself there as revealer of the futurities of Zeus. A place must be found where this beneficent function, without which mankind would perish under the innumerable doubts and perplexities of life, may be exercised and rendered available. Apollo himself descends from Olympus to make choice of a suitable site: the hymnographer knows a thousand other adventures of the god which he might sing, but he prefers this memorable incident, the charter and patent of consecration for the Delphian temple. Many different places did Apollo inspect; he surveyed the country of the Magnêtes and the Perrhæbians, came to Iôlkos, and passed over from thence to Eubœa and the plain of Lelanton. But even this fertile spot did not please him: he crossed the Euripus to Bœotia, passed by Teumêssus and Mykalêssus, and the then inaccessible and unoccupied forest on which the city of Thêbes afterwards stood. He next proceeded to Onchêstos, but the grove of Poseidôn was already established there; next across the Kêphissus to Okalea, Haliartus, and the agreeable plain and much-frequented fountain of Delphusa, or Tilphusa. Pleased with the place, Apollo prepared to establish his oracle there, but Tilphusa was proud of the beauty of her own site, and did not choose that her glory should be eclipsed by that of the god.[101] She alarmed him with the apprehension that the chariots which contended in her plain, and the horses and mules which watered at her fountain would disturb the solemnity of his oracle; and she thus induced him to proceed onward to the southern side of Parnassus, overhanging the harbor of Krissa. Here he established his oracle, in the mountainous site not frequented by chariots and horses, and near to a fountain, which however was guarded by a vast and terrific serpent, once the nurse of the monster Typhaôn. This serpent Apollo slew with an arrow, and suffered its body to rot in the sun: hence the name of the place, Pythô,[102] and the surname of the Pythian Apollo. The plan of his temple being marked out, it was built by Trophônios and Agamêdês, aided by a crowd of forward auxiliaries from the neighborhood. He now discovered with indignation, however, that Tilphusa had cheated him, and went back with swift step to resent it. “Thou shalt not thus,” he said, “succeed in thy fraud and retain thy beautiful water; the glory of the place shall be mine, and not thine alone.” Thus saying, he tumbled down a crag upon the fountain, and obstructed her limpid current: establishing an altar for himself in a grove hard by near another spring, where men still worship him as Apollo Tilphusios, because of his severe vengeance upon the once beautiful Tilphusa.[103]
Apollo next stood in need of chosen ministers to take care of his temple and sacrifice, and to pronounce his responses at Pythô. Descrying a ship, “containing many and good men,” bound on traffic from the Minoian Knossus in Krête, to Pylus in Peloponnêsus, he resolved to make use of the ship and her crew for his purpose. Assuming the shape of a vast dolphin, he splashed about and shook the vessel so as to strike the mariners with terror, while he sent a strong wind, which impelled her along the coast of Peloponnêsus into the Corinthian Gulf, and finally to the harbor of Krissa, where she ran aground. The affrighted crew did not dare to disembark: but Apollo was seen standing on the shore in the guise of a vigorous youth, and inquired who they were, and what was their business. The leader of the Krêtans recounted in reply their miraculous and compulsory voyage, when Apollo revealed himself as the author and contriver of it, announcing to them the honorable function and the dignified post to which he destined them.[104] They followed him by his orders to the rocky Pythô on Parnassus, singing the solemn Io-Paian such as it is sung in Krête, while the god himself marched at their head, with his fine form and lofty step, playing on the harp. He showed them the temple and site of the oracle, and directed them to worship him as Apollo Delphinios, because they had first seen him in the shape of a dolphin. “But how,” they inquired, “are we to live in a spot where there is neither corn, nor vine, nor pasturage?” “Ye silly mortals,” answered the god, “who look only for toil and privation, know that an easier lot is yours. Ye shall live by the cattle whom crowds of pious visitors will bring to the temple: ye shall need only the knife to be constantly ready for sacrifice.[105] Your duty will be to guard my temple, and to officiate as ministers at my feasts: but if ye be guilty of wrong or insolence, either by word or deed, ye shall become the slaves of other men, and shall remain so forever. Take heed of the word and the warning.”
Such are the legends of Dêlos and Delphi, according to the Homeric Hymn to Apollo. The specific functions of the god, and the chief localities of his worship, together with the surnames attached to them, are thus historically explained, being connected with his past acts and adventures. Though these are to us only interesting poetry, yet to those who heard them sung they possessed all the requisites of history, and were fully believed as such, not because they were partially founded in reality, but because they ran in complete harmony with the feelings; and, so long as that condition was fulfilled, it was not the fashion of the time to canvass truth or falsehood. The narrative is purely personal, without any discernible symbolized doctrine or allegory, to serve as a supposed ulterior purpose: the particular deeds ascribed to Apollo grow out of the general preconceptions as to his attributes, combined with the present realities of his worship. It is neither history nor allegory, but simple mythe or legend.
The worship of Apollo is among the most ancient, capital, and strongly marked facts of the Grecian world, and widely diffused over every branch of the race. It is older than the Iliad or Odyssey, in the latter of which both Pythô and Dêlos are noted, though Dêlos is not named in the former. But the ancient Apollo is different in more respects than one from the Apollo of later times. He is in an especial manner the god of the Trojans, unfriendly to the Greeks, and especially to Achilles; he has, moreover, only two primary attributes, his bow and his prophetic powers, without any distinct connection either with the harp, or with medicine, or with the sun, all which in later times he came to comprehend. He is not only, as Apollo Karneius, the chief god of the Doric race, but also (under the surname of Patrôus) the great protecting divinity of the gentile tie among the Ionians:[106] he is moreover the guide and stimulus to Grecian colonization, scarcely any colony being ever sent out without encouragement and direction from the oracle at Delphi: Apollo Archêgetês is one of his great surnames.[107] His temple lends sanctity to the meetings of the Amphiktyonic assembly, and he is always in filial subordination and harmony with his father Zeus: Delphi and Olympia are never found in conflict. In the Iliad, the warm and earnest patrons of the Greeks are Hêrê, Athênê, and Poseidôn: here too Zeus and Apollo are seen in harmony, for Zeus is decidedly well-inclined to the Trojans, and reluctantly sacrifices them to the importunity of the two great goddesses.[108] The worship of the Sminthian Apollo, in various parts of the Troad and the neighboring territory, dates before the earliest periods of Æolic colonization:[109] hence the zealous patronage of Troy ascribed to him in the Iliad. Altogether, however, the distribution and partialities of the gods in that poem are different from what they become in later times,—a difference which our means of information do not enable us satisfactorily to explain. Besides the Delphian temple, Apollo had numerous temples throughout Greece, and oracles at Abæ in Phôkis, on the Mount Ptôon, and at Tegyra in Bœotia, where he was said to have been born,[110] at Branchidæ near Milêtus, at Klarus in Asia Minor, and at Patara in Lykia. He was not the only oracular god: Zeus at Dodona and at Olympia gave responses also: the gods or heroes Trophônius, Amphiaraus, Amphilochus, Mopsus, etc., each at his own sanctuary and in his own prescribed manner, rendered the same service.
The two legends of Delphi and Dêlos, above noticed, form of course a very insignificant fraction of the narratives which once existed respecting the great and venerated Apollo. They serve only as specimens, and as very early specimens,[111] to illustrate what these divine mythes were, and what was the turn of Grecian faith and imagination. The constantly recurring festivals of the gods caused an incessant demand for new mythes respecting them, or at least for varieties and reproductions of the old mythes. Even during the third century of the Christian æra, in the time of the rhêtôr Menander, when the old forms of Paganism were waning and when the stock of mythes in existence was extremely abundant, we see this demand in great force; but it was incomparably more operative in those earlier times when the creative vein of the Grecian mind yet retained its pristine and unfaded richness. Each god had many different surnames, temples, groves, and solemnities; with each of which was connected more or less of mythical narrative, originally hatched in the prolific and spontaneous fancy of a believing neighborhood, to be afterwards expanded, adorned and diffused by the song of the poet. The earliest subject of competition[112] at the great Pythian festival was the singing of a hymn in honor of Apollo: other agones were subsequently added, but the ode or hymn constituted the fundamental attribute of the solemnity: the Pythia at Sikyôn and elsewhere were probably framed on a similar footing. So too at the ancient and celebrated Charitêsia, or festival of the Charites, at Orchomenos, the rivalry of the poets in their various modes of composition both began and continued as the predominant feature:[113] and the inestimable treasures yet remaining to us of Attic tragedy and comedy, are gleanings from the once numerous dramas exhibited at the solemnity of the Dionysia. The Ephesians gave considerable rewards for the best hymns in honor of Artemis, to be sung at her temple.[114] And the early lyric poets of Greece, though their works have not descended to us, devoted their genius largely to similar productions, as may be seen by the titles and fragments yet remaining.
Both the Christian and the Mahomedan religions have begun during the historical age, have been propagated from one common centre, and have been erected upon the ruins of a different pre-existing faith. With none of these particulars did Grecian Paganism correspond. It took rise in an age of imagination and feeling simply, without the restraints, as well as without the aid, of writing or records, of history or philosophy: it was, as a general rule, the spontaneous product of many separate tribes and localities, imitation and propagation operating as subordinate causes; it was moreover a primordial faith, as far as our means of information enable us to discover. These considerations explain to us two facts in the history of the early Pagan mind: first, the divine mythes, the matter of their religion, constituted also the matter of their earliest history; next, these mythes harmonized with each other only in their general types, but differed incurably in respect of particular incidents. The poet who sung a new adventure of Apollo, the trace of which he might have heard in some remote locality, would take care that it should be agreeable to the general conceptions which his hearers entertained respecting the god. He would not ascribe the cestus or amorous influences to Athênê, nor armed interference and the ægis to Aphroditê; but, provided he maintained this general keeping, he might indulge his fancy without restraint in the particular events of the story.[115] The feelings and faith of his hearers went along with him, and there were no critical scruples to hold them back: to scrutinize the alleged proceedings of the gods was repulsive, and to disbelieve them impious. And thus these divine mythes, though they had their root simply in religious feelings, and though they presented great discrepancies of fact, served nevertheless as primitive matter of history to an early Greek: they were the only narratives, at once publicly accredited and interesting, which he possessed. To them were aggregated the heroic mythes (to which we shall proceed presently),—indeed the two are inseparably blended, gods, heroes and men almost always appearing in the same picture,—analogous both in their structure and their genesis, and differing chiefly in the circumstance that they sprang from the type of a hero instead of from that of a god.
We are not to be astonished if we find Aphroditê, in the Iliad, born from Zeus and Dionê,—and in the Theogony of Hesiod, generated from the foam on the sea after the mutilation of Uranos; nor if in the Odyssey she appears as the wife of Hêphæstos, while in the Theogony the latter is married to Aglaia, and Aphroditê is described as mother of three children by Arês.[116] The Homeric hymn to Aphroditê details the legend of Aphroditê and Anchisês, which is presupposed in the Iliad as the parentage of Æneas: but the author of the hymn, probably sung at one of the festivals of Aphroditê in Cyprus, represents the goddess as ashamed of her passion for a mortal, and as enjoining Anchisês under severe menaces not to reveal who the mother of Æneas was;[117] while in the Iliad she has no scruple in publicly owning him, and he passes everywhere as her acknowledged son. Aphroditê is described in the hymn as herself cold and unimpressible, but ever active and irresistible in inspiring amorous feelings to gods, to men, and to animals. Three goddesses are recorded as memorable exceptions to her universal empire,—Athênê, Artemis, and Hestia or Vesta. Aphroditê was one of the most important of all the goddesses in the mythical world; for the number of interesting, pathetic and tragical adventures deducible from misplaced or unhappy passion was of course very great; and in most of these cases the intervention of Aphroditê was usually prefixed, with some legend to explain why she manifested herself. Her range of action grows wider in the later epic and lyric and tragic poets than in Homer.[118]
Athênê, the man-goddess,[119] born from the head of Zeus, without a mother and without feminine sympathies, is the antithesis partly of Aphroditê, partly of the effeminate or womanized god Dionysos—the latter is an importation from Asia, but Athênê is a Greek conception—the type of composed, majestic and unrelenting force. It appears however as if this goddess had been conceived in a different manner in different parts of Greece. For we find ascribed to her, in some of the legends, attributes of industry and home-keeping; she is represented as the companion of Hêphæstos, patronizing handicraft, and expert at the loom and the spindle: the Athenian potters worshipped her along with Promêtheus. Such traits of character do not square with the formidable ægis and the massive and crushing spear which Homer and most of the mythes assign to her. There probably were at first at least two different types of Athênê, and their coalescence has partially obliterated the less marked of the two.[120] Athênê is the constant and watchful protectress of Hêraklês: she is also locally identified with the soil and people of Athens, even in the Iliad: Erechtheus, the Athenian, is born of the earth, but Athênê brings him up, nourishes him, and lodges him in her own temple, where the Athenians annually worship him with sacrifice and solemnities.[121] It was altogether impossible to make Erechtheus son of Athênê,—the type of the goddess forbade it; but the Athenian mythe-creators, though they found this barrier impassable, strove to approach to it as near as they could, and the description which they give of the birth of Erichthonios, at once un-Homeric and unseemly, presents something like the phantom of maternity.[122]
The huntress Artemis, in Arcadia and in Greece proper generally, exhibits a well-defined type with which the legends respecting her are tolerably consistent. But the Ephesian as well as the Tauric Artemis partakes more of the Asiatic character, and has borrowed the attributes of the Lydian Great Mother as well as of an indigenous Tauric Virgin:[123] this Ephesian Artemis passed to the colonies of Phokæa and Milêtus.[124] The Homeric Artemis shares with her brother Apollo in the dexterous use of the far-striking bow, and sudden death is described by the poet as inflicted by her gentle arrow. The jealousy of the gods at the withholding of honors and sacrifices, or at the presumption of mortals in contending with them,—a point of character so frequently recurring in the types of the Grecian gods,—manifests itself in the legends of Artemis: the memorable Kalydônian boar is sent by her as a visitation upon Œneus, because he had omitted to sacrifice to her, while he did honor to other gods.[125] The Arcadian heroine Atalanta is however a reproduction of Artemis, with little or no difference, and the goddess is sometimes confounded even with her attendant nymphs.
The mighty Poseidôn, the earth-shaker and the ruler of the sea, is second only to Zeus in power, but has no share in those imperial and superintending capacities which the Father of gods and men exhibits. He numbers a numerous heroic progeny, usually men of great corporeal strength, and many of them belonging to the Æolic race: the great Neleid family of Pylus trace their origin up to him; and he is also the father of Polyphêmus the Cyclôps, whose well-earned suffering he cruelly revenges upon Odysseus. The island of Kalaureia is his Dêlos,[126] and there was held in it an old local Amphiktyony, for the purpose of rendering to him joint honor and sacrifice: the isthmus of Corinth, Helikê in Achaia, and Onchêstos in Bœotia, are also residences which he much affects, and where he is solemnly worshipped. But the abode which he originally and specially selected for himself was the Acropolis of Athens, where by a blow of his trident he produced a well of water in the rock: Athênê came afterwards and claimed the spot for herself, planting in token of possession the olive-tree which stood in the sacred grove of Pandrosos: and the decision either of the autochthonous Cecrops, or of Erechtheus, awarded to her the preference, much to the displeasure of Poseidôn. Either on this account, or on account of the death of his son Eumolpus, slain in assisting the Eleusinians against Erechtheus, the Attic mythes ascribed to Poseidôn great enmity against the Erechtheid family, which he is asserted to have ultimately overthrown: Theseus, whose glorious reign and deeds succeeded to that family, is said to have been really his son.[127] In several other places,—in Ægina, Argos and Naxos,—Poseidôn had disputed the privileges of patron-god with Zeus, Hêrê and Dionysos: he was worsted in all, but bore his defeat patiently.[128] Poseidôn endured a long slavery, in common with Apollo, gods as they were,[129] under Laomedôn, king of Troy, at the command and condemnation of Zeus: the two gods rebuilt the walls of the city, which had been destroyed by Hêraklês. When their time was expired, the insolent Laomedôn withheld from them the stipulated reward, and even accompanied its refusal with appalling threats; and the subsequent animosity of the god against Troy was greatly determined by the sentiment of this injustice.[130] Such periods of servitude, inflicted upon individual gods, are among the most remarkable of all the incidents in the divine legends. We find Apollo on another occasion condemned to serve Admêtus, king of Pheræ, as a punishment for having killed the Cyclôpes, and Hêraklês also is sold as a slave to Omphalê. Even the fierce Arês, overpowered and imprisoned for a long time by the two Alôids,[131] is ultimately liberated only by extraneous aid. Such narratives attest the discursive range of Grecian fancy in reference to the gods, as well as the perfect commingling of things and persons, divine and human, in their conceptions of the past. The god who serves is for the time degraded: but the supreme god who commands the servitude is in the like proportion exalted, whilst the idea of some sort of order and government among these superhuman beings was never lost sight of. Nevertheless the mythes respecting the servitude of the gods became obnoxious afterwards, along with many others, to severe criticism on the part of philosophers.
The proud, jealous, and bitter Hêrê,—the goddess of the once-wealthy Mykênæ, the fax et focus of the Trojan war, and the ever-present protectress of Jasôn in the Argonautic expedition,[132]—occupies an indispensable station in the mythical world. As the daughter of Kronos and wife of Zeus, she fills a throne from whence he cannot dislodge her, and which gives her a right perpetually to grumble and to thwart him.[133] Her unmeasured jealousy of the female favorites of Zeus, and her antipathy against his sons, especially against Hêraklês, has been the suggesting cause of innumerable mythes: the general type of her character stands here clearly marked, as furnishing both stimulus and guide to the mythopœic fancy. The “Sacred Wedding,” or marriage of Zeus and Hêrê, was familiar to epithalamic poets long before it became a theme for the spiritualizing ingenuity of critics.
Hêphæstos is the son of Hêrê without a father, and stands to her in the same relation as Athênê to Zeus: her pride and want of sympathy are manifested by her casting him out at once in consequence of his deformity.[134] He is the god of fire, and especially of fire in its practical applications to handicraft, and is indispensable as the right-hand and instrument of the gods. His skill and his deformity appear alternately as the source of mythical stories: wherever exquisite and effective fabrication is intended to be designated, Hêphæstos is announced as the maker, although in this function the type of his character is reproduced in Dædalos. In the Attic legends he appears intimately united both with Promêtheus and with Athênê, in conjunction with whom he was worshipped at Kolônus near Athens. Lemnos was the favorite residence of Hêphæstos; and if we possessed more knowledge of this island and its town Hêphæstias, we should doubtless find abundant legends detailing his adventures and interventions.
The chaste, still, and home-keeping Hestia, goddess of the family hearth, is far less fruitful in mythical narratives, in spite of her very superior dignity, than the knavish, smooth-tongued, keen, and acquisitive Hermês. His function of messenger of the gods brings him perpetually on the stage, and affords ample scope for portraying the features of his character. The Homeric hymn to Hermês describes the scene and circumstances of his birth, and the almost instantaneous manifestation, even in infancy, of his peculiar attributes; it explains the friendly footing on which he stood with Apollo,—the interchange of gifts and functions between them,—and lastly, the inviolate security of all the wealth and offerings in the Delphian temple, exposed as they were to thieves without any visible protection. Such was the innate cleverness and talent of Hermês, that on the day he was born he invented the lyre, stringing the seven chords on the shell of a tortoise:[135] and he also stole the cattle of Apollo in Pieria, dragging them backwards to his cave in Arcadia, so that their track could not be detected. To the remonstrances of his mother Maia, who points out to him the danger of offending Apollo, Hermês replies, that he aspires to rival the dignity and functions of Apollo among the immortals, and that if his father Zeus refuses to grant them to him, he will employ his powers of thieving in breaking open the sanctuary at Delphi, and in carrying away the gold and the vestments, the precious tripods and vessels.[136] Presently Apollo discovers the loss of his cattle, and after some trouble finds his way to the Kyllênian cavern, where he sees Hermês asleep in his cradle. The child denies the theft with effrontery, and even treats the surmise as a ridiculous impossibility: he persists in such denial even before Zeus, who however detects him at once, and compels him to reveal the place where the cattle are concealed. But the lyre was as yet unknown to Apollo, who has heard nothing except the voice of the Muses and the sound of the pipe. So powerfully is he fascinated by hearing the tones of the lyre from Hermês, and so eager to become possessed of it, that he is willing at once to pardon the past theft, and even to conciliate besides the friendship of Hermês.[137] Accordingly a bargain is struck between the two gods and sanctioned by Zeus. Hermês surrenders to Apollo the lyre, inventing for his own use the syrinx or panspipe, and receiving from Apollo in exchange the golden rod of wealth, with empire over flocks and herds as well as over horses and oxen and the wild animals of the woods. He presses to obtain the gift of prophecy, but Apollo is under a special vow not to impart that privilege to any god whatever: he instructs Hermês however how to draw information, to a certain extent, from the Mœræ or Fates themselves; and assigns to him, over and above, the function of messenger of the gods to Hadês.
Although Apollo has acquired the lyre, the particular object of his wishes, he is still under apprehension that Hermês will steal it away from him again, together with his bow, and he exacts a formal oath by Styx as security. Hermês promises solemnly that he will steal none of the acquisitions, nor ever invade the sanctuary of Apollo; while the latter on his part pledges himself to recognize Hermês as his chosen friend and companion, amongst all the other sons of Zeus, human or divine.[138]
So came to pass, under the sanction of Zeus, the marked favor shown by Apollo to Hermês. But Hermês (concludes the hymnographer, with frankness unusual in speaking of a god) “does very little good: he avails himself of the darkness of night to cheat without measure the tribes of mortal men.”[139]
Here the general types of Hermês and Apollo, coupled with the present fact that no thief ever approached the rich and seemingly accessible treasures of Delphi, engender a string of expository incidents cast into a quasi-historical form and detailing how it happened that Hermês had bound himself by especial convention to respect the Delphian temple. The types of Apollo seem to have been different in different times and parts of Greece: in some places he was worshipped as Apollo Nomios,[140] or the patron of pasture and cattle; and this attribute, which elsewhere passed over to his son Aristæus, is by our hymnographer voluntarily surrendered to Hermês, combined with the golden rod of fruitfulness. On the other hand, the lyre did not originally belong to the Far-striking King, nor is he at all an inventor: the hymn explains both its first invention and how it came into his possession. And the value of the incidents is thus partly expository, partly illustrative, as expanding in detail the general preconceived character of the Kyllênian god.
To Zeus more amours are ascribed than to any of the other gods,—probably because the Grecian kings and chieftains were especially anxious to trace their lineage to the highest and most glorious of all,—each of these amours having its representative progeny on earth.[141] Such subjects were among the most promising and agreeable for the interest of mythical narrative, and Zeus as a lover thus became the father of a great many legends, branching out into innumerable interferences, for which his sons, all of them distinguished individuals, and many of them persecuted by Hêrê, furnished the occasion. But besides this, the commanding functions of the supreme god, judicial and administrative, extending both over gods and men, was a potent stimulus to the mythopœic activity. Zeus has to watch over his own dignity,—the first of all considerations with a god: moreover as Horkios, Xenios, Ktêsios, Meilichios, (a small proportion of his thousand surnames,) he guaranteed oaths and punished perjurers, he enforced the observance of hospitality, he guarded the family hoard and the crop realized for the year, and he granted expiation to the repentant criminal.[142] All these different functions created a demand for mythes, as the means of translating a dim, but serious, presentiment into distinct form, both self-explaining and communicable to others. In enforcing the sanctity of the oath or of the tie of hospitality, the most powerful of all arguments would be a collection of legends respecting the judgments of Zeus Horkios or Xenios; the more impressive and terrific such legends were, the greater would be their interest, and the less would any one dare to disbelieve them. They constituted the natural outpourings of a strong and common sentiment, probably without any deliberate ethical intention: the preconceptions of the divine agency, expanded into legend, form a product analogous to the idea of the divine features and symmetry embodied in the bronze or the marble statue.
But it was not alone the general type and attributes of the gods which contributed to put in action the mythopœic propensities. The rites and solemnities forming the worship of each god, as well as the details of his temple and its locality, were a fertile source of mythes, respecting his exploits and sufferings, which to the people who heard them served the purpose of past history. The exegetes, or local guide and interpreter, belonging to each temple, preserved and recounted to curious strangers these traditional narratives, which lent a certain dignity even to the minutiæ of divine service. Out of a stock of materials thus ample, the poets extracted individual collections, such as the “Causes” (Αἴτια) of Kallimachus, now lost, and such as the Fasti of Ovid are for the Roman religious antiquities.[143]
It was the practice to offer to the gods in sacrifice the bones of the victim only, inclosed in fat: how did this practice arise? The author of the Hesiodic Theogony has a story which explains it: Promêtheus tricked Zeus into an imprudent choice, at the period when the gods and mortal men first came to an arrangement about privileges and duties (in Mekônê). Promêtheus, the tutelary representative of man, divided a large steer into two portions: on the one side he placed the flesh and guts, folded up in the omentum and covered over with the skin: on the other, he put the bones enveloped in fat. He then invited Zeus to determine which of the two portions the gods would prefer to receive from mankind. Zeus “with both hands” decided for and took the white fat, but was highly incensed on finding that he had got nothing at the bottom except the bones.[144] Nevertheless the choice of the gods was now irrevocably made: they were not entitled to any portion of the sacrificed animal beyond the bones and the white fat; and the standing practice is thus plausibly explained.[145] I select this as one amongst a thousand instances to illustrate the genesis of legend out of religious practices. In the belief of the people, the event narrated in the legend was the real producing cause of the practice: but when we come to apply a sound criticism, we are compelled to treat the event as existing only in its narrative legend, and the legend itself as having been, in the greater number of cases, engendered by the practice,—thus reversing the supposed order of production.
In dealing with Grecian mythes generally, it is convenient to distribute them into such as belong to the Gods and such as belong to the Heroes, according as the one or the other are the prominent personages. The former class manifests, more palpably than the latter, their real origin, as growing out of the faith and the feelings, without any necessary basis, either of matter of fact or allegory: moreover, they elucidate more directly the religion of the Greeks, so important an item in their character as a people. But in point of fact, most of the mythes present to us Gods, Heroes and Men, in juxtaposition one with the other and the richness of Grecian mythical literature arises from the infinite diversity of combinations thus opened out; first by the three class-types, God, Hero, and Man; next by the strict keeping with which each separate class and character is handled. We shall now follow downward the stream of mythical time, which begins with the Gods, to the Heroic legends, or those which principally concern the Heroes and Heroines; for the latter were to the full as important in legend as the former.
CHAPTER II.
LEGENDS RELATING TO HEROES AND MEN.
The Hesiodic theogony gives no account of anything like a creation of man, nor does it seem that such an idea was much entertained in the legendary vein of Grecian imagination; which commonly carried back the present men by successive generations to some primitive ancestor, himself sprung from the soil, or from a neighboring river or mountain, or from a god, a nymph, etc. But the poet of the Hesiodic “Works and Days” has given us a narrative conceived in a very different spirit respecting the origin of the human race, more in harmony with the sober and melancholy ethical tone which reigns through that poem.[146]
First (he tells us) the Olympic gods made the golden race,—good, perfect, and happy men, who lived from the spontaneous abundance of the earth, in ease and tranquillity like the gods themselves: they suffered neither disease nor old age, and their death was like a gentle sleep. After death they became, by the award of Zeus, guardian terrestrial dæmons, who watch unseen over the proceedings of mankind—with the regal privilege of dispensing to them wealth, and taking account of good and bad deeds.[147]
Next, the gods made the silver race,—unlike and greatly inferior, both in mind and body, to the golden. The men of this race were reckless and mischievous towards each other, and disdainful of the immortal gods, to whom they refused to offer either worship or sacrifice. Zeus in his wrath buried them in the earth: but there they still enjoy a secondary honor, as the Blest of the under-world.[148]
Thirdly, Zeus made the brazen race, quite different from the silver. They were made of hard ash-wood, pugnacious and terrible; they were of immense strength and adamantine soul, nor did they raise or touch bread. Their arms, their houses, and their implements were all of brass: there was then no iron. This race, eternally fighting, perished by each other’s hands, died out, and descended without name or privilege to Hadês.[149]
Next, Zeus made a fourth race, far juster and better than the last preceding. These were the Heroes or demigods, who fought at the sieges of Troy and Thêbes. But this splendid stock also became extinct: some perished in war, others were removed by Zeus to a happier state in the islands of the Blest. There they dwell in peace and comfort, under the government of Kronos, reaping thrice in the year the spontaneous produce of the earth.[150]
The fifth race, which succeeds to the Heroes, is of iron: it is the race to which the poet himself belongs, and bitterly does he regret it. He finds his contemporaries mischievous, dishonest, unjust, ungrateful, given to perjury, careless both of the ties of consanguinity and of the behests of the gods: Nemesis and Ædôs (Ethical Self-reproach) have left earth and gone back to Olympus. How keenly does he wish that his lot had been cast either earlier or later![151] This iron race is doomed to continual guilt, care, and suffering, with a small infusion of good; but the time will come when Zeus will put an end to it. The poet does not venture to predict what sort of race will succeed.
Such is the series of distinct races of men, which Hesiod, or the author of the “Works and Days,” enumerates as having existed down to his own time. I give it as it stands, without placing much confidence in the various explanations which critics have offered. It stands out in more than one respect from the general tone and sentiment of Grecian legend: moreover the sequence of races is neither natural nor homogeneous,—the heroic race not having any metallic denomination, and not occupying any legitimate place in immediate succession to the brazen. Nor is the conception of the dæmons in harmony either with Homer or with the Hesiodic theogony. In Homer, there is scarcely any distinction between gods and dæmons, while the gods are stated to go about and visit the cities of men in various disguises for the purpose of inspecting good and evil proceedings.[152] But in the poem now before us, the distinction between gods and dæmons is generic. The latter are invisible tenants of earth, remnants of the once happy golden race whom the Olympic gods first made: the remnants of the second or silver race are not dæmons, nor are they tenants of earth, but they still enjoy an honorable posthumous existence as the Blest of the under-world. Nevertheless the Hesiodic dæmons are in no way authors or abettors of evil: on the contrary, they form the unseen police of the gods, for the purpose of repressing wicked behavior in the world.
We may trace, I think, in this quintuple succession of earthly races, set forth by the author of the “Works and Days,” the confluence of two veins of sentiment, not consistent one with the other, yet both coëxisting in the author’s mind. The drift of his poem is thoroughly didactic and ethical: though deeply penetrated with the injustice and suffering which darken the face of human life, he nevertheless strives to maintain, both in himself and in others, a conviction that on the whole the just and laborious man will come off well,[153] and he enforces in considerable detail the lessons of practical prudence and virtue. This ethical sentiment, which dictates his appreciation of the present, also guides his imagination as to the past. It is pleasing to him to bridge over the chasm between the gods and degenerate man, by the supposition of previous races,—the first altogether pure, the second worse than the first, and the third still worse than the second; and to show further how the first race passed by gentle death-sleep into glorious immortality; how the second race was sufficiently wicked to drive Zeus to bury them in the under-world, yet still leaving them a certain measure of honor; while the third was so desperately violent as to perish by its own animosities, without either name or honor of any kind. The conception of the golden race passing after death into good guardian dæmons, which some suppose to have been derived from a comparison with oriental angels, presents itself to the poet partly as approximating this race to the gods, partly as a means of constituting a triple gradation of post-obituary existence, proportioned to the character of each race whilst alive. The denominations of gold and silver, given to the first two races, justify themselves, like those given by Simonidês of Amorgos and by Phokylidês to the different characters of women, derived from the dog, the bee, the mare, the ass, and other animals; and the epithet of brazen is specially explained by reference to the material which the pugnacious third race so plentifully employed for their arms and other implements.
So far we trace intelligibly enough the moralizing vein: we find the revolutions of the past so arranged as to serve partly as an ethical lesson, partly as a suitable preface to the present.[154] But fourth in the list comes “the divine race of Heroes:” and here a new vein of thought is opened by the poet. The symmetry of his ethical past is broken up, in order to make way for these cherished beings of the national faith. For though the author of the “Works and Days” was himself of a didactic cast of thought, like Phokylidês, or Solôn, or Theognis, yet he had present to his feelings, in common with his countrymen, the picture of Grecian foretime, as it was set forth in the current mythes, and still more in Homer and those other epical productions which were then the only existing literature and history. It was impossible for him to exclude, from his sketch of the past, either the great persons or the glorious exploits which these poems ennobled; and even if he himself could have consented to such an exclusion, the sketch would have become repulsive to his hearers. But the chiefs who figured before Thêbes and Troy could not be well identified either with the golden, the silver, or the brazen race: moreover it was essential that they should be placed in immediate contiguity with the present race, because their descendants, real or supposed, were the most prominent and conspicuous of existing men. Hence the poet is obliged to assign to them the fourth place in the series, and to interrupt the descending ethical movement in order to interpolate them between the brazen and the iron race, with neither of which they present any analogy. The iron race, to which the poet himself unhappily belongs, is the legitimate successor, not of the heroic, but of the brazen. Instead of the fierce and self-annihilating pugnacity which characterizes the latter, the iron race manifests an aggregate of smaller and meaner vices and mischiefs. It will not perish by suicidal extinction—but it is growing worse and worse, and is gradually losing its vigor, so that Zeus will not vouchsafe to preserve much longer such a race upon the earth.
We thus see that the series of races imagined by the poet of the “Works and Days” is the product of two distinct and incongruous veins of imagination,—the didactic or ethical blending with the primitive mythical or epical. His poem is remarkable as the most ancient didactic production of the Greeks, and as one of the first symptoms of a new tone of sentiment finding its way into their literature, never afterwards to become extinct. The tendency of the “Works and Days” is anti-heroic: far from seeking to inspire admiration for adventurous enterprise, the author inculcates the strictest justice, the most unremitting labor and frugality, and a sober, not to say anxious, estimate of all the minute specialties of the future. Prudence and probity are his means,—practical comfort and happiness his end. But he deeply feels, and keenly exposes, the manifold wickedness and short-comings of his contemporaries, in reference to this capital standard. He turns with displeasure from the present men, not because they are too feeble to hurl either the spear of Achilles or some vast boundary-stone, but because they are rapacious, knavish, and unprincipled.
The dæmons first introduced into the religious atmosphere of the Grecian world by the author of the “Works and Days,” as generically different from the gods, but as essentially good, and as forming the intermediate agents and police between gods and men,—are deserving of attention as the seed of a doctrine which afterwards underwent many changes, and became of great importance, first as one of the constituent elements of pagan faith, then as one of the helps to its subversion. It will be recollected that the buried remnants of the half-wicked silver race, though they are not recognized as dæmons, are still considered as having a substantive existence, a name, and dignity, in the under-world. The step was easy, to treat them as dæmons also, but as dæmons of a defective and malignant character: this step was made by Empedoclês and Xenocratês, and to a certain extent countenanced by Plato.[155] There came thus to be admitted among the pagan philosophers dæmons both good and bad, in every degree: and these dæmons were found available as a means of explaining many phænomena for which it was not convenient to admit the agency of the gods. They served to relieve the gods from the odium of physical and moral evils, as well as from the necessity of constantly meddling in small affairs; and the objectionable ceremonies of the pagan world were defended upon the ground that in no other way could the exigencies of such malignant beings be appeased. They were most frequently noticed as causes of evil, and thus the name (dæmon) came insensibly to convey with it a bad sense,—the idea of an evil being as contrasted with the goodness of a god. So it was found by the Christian writers when they commenced their controversy with paganism. One branch of their argument led them to identify the pagan gods with dæmons in the evil sense, and the insensible change in the received meaning of the word lent them a specious assistance. For they could easily show that not only in Homer, but in the general language of early pagans, all the gods generally were spoken of as dæmons—and therefore, verbally speaking, Clemens and Tatian seemed to affirm nothing more against Zeus or Apollo than was employed in the language of paganism itself. Yet the audience of Homer or Sophoklês would have strenuously repudiated the proposition, if it had been put to them in the sense which the word dæmon bore in the age and among the circle of these Christian writers.
In the imagination of the author of the “Works and Days,” the dæmons occupy an important place, and are regarded as being of serious practical efficiency. When he is remonstrating with the rulers around him upon their gross injustice and corruption, he reminds them of the vast number of these immortal servants of Zeus who are perpetually on guard amidst mankind, and through whom the visitations of the gods will descend even upon the most potent evil doers.[156] His supposition that the dæmons were not gods, but departed men of the golden race, allowed him to multiply their number indefinitely, without too much cheapening the divine dignity.
As this poet has been so much enslaved by the current legends as to introduce the Heroic race into a series to which it does not legitimately belong, so he has under the same influence inserted in another part of his poem the mythe of Pandora and Promêtheus,[157] as a means of explaining the primary diffusion, and actual abundance, of evil among mankind. Yet this mythe can in no way consist with his quintuple scale of distinct races, and is in fact a totally distinct theory to explain the same problem,—the transition of mankind from a supposed state of antecedent happiness to one of present toil and suffering. Such an inconsistency is not a sufficient reason for questioning the genuineness of either passage; for the two stories, though one contradicts the other, both harmonize with that central purpose which governs the author’s mind,—a querulous and didactic appreciation of the present. That such was his purpose appears not only from the whole tenor of his poem, but also from the remarkable fact that his own personality, his own adventures and kindred, and his own sufferings, figure in it conspicuously. And this introduction of self imparts to it a peculiar interest. The father of Hesiod came over from the Æolic Kymê, with the view of bettering his condition, and settled at Askra in Bœotia, at the foot of Mount Helicon. After his death his two sons divided the family inheritance: but Hesiod bitterly complains that his brother Persês cheated and went to law with him, and obtained through corrupt judges an unjust decision. He farther reproaches his brother with a preference for the suits and unprofitable bustle of the agora, at a time when he ought to be laboring for his subsistence in the field. Askra indeed was a miserable place, repulsive both in summer and winter. Hesiod had never crossed the sea, except once from Aulis to Eubœa, whither he went to attend the funeral games of Amphidamas, the chief of Chalkis: he sung a hymn, and gained as prize a tripod, which he consecrated to the muses in Helicon.[158]
These particulars, scanty as they are, possess a peculiar value, as the earliest authentic memorandum respecting the doing or suffering of any actual Greek person. There is no external testimony at all worthy of trust respecting the age of the “Works and Days:” Herodotus treats Hesiod and Homer as belonging to the same age, four hundred years before his own time; and there are other statements besides, some placing Hesiod at an earlier date than Homer, some at a later. Looking at the internal evidences, we may observe that the pervading sentiment, tone and purpose of the poem is widely different from that of the Iliad and Odyssey, and analogous to what we read respecting the compositions of Archilochus and the Amorgian Simonidês. The author of the “Works and Days” is indeed a preacher and not a satirist: but with this distinction, we find in him the same predominance of the present and the positive, the same disposition to turn the muse into an exponent of his own personal wrongs, the same employment of Æsopic fable by way of illustration, and the same unfavorable estimate of the female sex,[159] all of which may be traced in the two poets above mentioned, placing both of them in contrast with the Homeric epic. Such an internal analogy, in the absence of good testimony, is the best guide which we can follow in determining the date of the “Works and Days,” which we should accordingly place shortly after the year 700 B. C. The style of the poem might indeed afford a proof that the ancient and uniform hexameter, though well adapted to continuous legendary narrative or to solemn hymns, was somewhat monotonous when called upon either to serve a polemical purpose or to impress a striking moral lesson. When poets, then the only existing composers, first began to apply their thoughts to the cut and thrust of actual life, aggressive or didactic, the verse would be seen to require a new, livelier and smarter metre; and out of this want grew the elegiac and the iambic verse, both seemingly contemporaneous, and both intended to supplant the primitive hexameter for the short effusions then coming into vogue.
CHAPTER III.
LEGEND OF THE IAPETIDS.
The sons of the Titan god Iapetus, as described in the Hesiodic theogony, are Atlas, Menœtius, Promêtheus and Epimêtheus.[160] Of these, Atlas alone is mentioned by Homer in the Odyssey, and even he not as the son of Iapetus: the latter himself is named in the Iliad as existing in Tartarus along with Kronos. The Homeric Atlas “knows the depths of the whole sea, and keeps by himself those tall pillars which hold the heaven apart from the earth.”[161]
As the Homeric theogony generally appears much expanded in Hesiod, so also does the family of Iapetus, with their varied adventures. Atlas is here described, not as the keeper of the intermediate pillars between heaven and earth, but as himself condemned by Zeus to support the heaven on his head and hands;[162] while the fierce Menœtius is thrust down to Erebus as a punishment for his ungovernable insolence. But the remaining two brothers, Promêtheus and Epimêtheus, are among the most interesting creations of Grecian legend, and distinguished in more than one respect from all the remainder.
First, the main battle between Zeus and the Titan gods is a contest of force purely and simply—mountains are hurled and thunder is launched, and the victory remains to the strongest. But the competition between Zeus and Promêtheus is one of craft and stratagem: the victory does indeed remain to the former, but the honors of the fight belong to the latter. Secondly, Promêtheus and Epimêtheus (the fore-thinker and the after-thinker[163]) are characters stamped at the same mint and by the same effort, the express contrast and antithesis of each other. Thirdly, mankind are here expressly brought forward, not indeed as active partners in the struggle, but as the grand and capital subjects interested,—as gainers or sufferers by the result. Promêtheus appears in the exalted character of champion of the human race, even against the formidable superiority of Zeus.
In the primitive or Hesiodic legend, Promêtheus is not the creator or moulder of man; it is only the later additions which invest him with this character.[164] The race are supposed as existing, and Promêtheus, a member of the dispossessed body of Titan gods, comes forward as their representative and defender. The advantageous bargain which he made with Zeus on their behalf, in respect to the partition of the sacrificial animals, has been recounted in the preceding chapter. Zeus felt that he had been outwitted, and was exceeding wroth. In his displeasure he withheld from mankind the inestimable comfort of fire, so that the race would have perished, had not Promêtheus stolen fire, in defiance of the command of the Supreme Ruler, and brought it to men in the hollow of a ferule.[165]
Zeus was now doubly indignant, and determined to play off a still more ruinous stratagem. Hêphæstos, by his direction, moulded the form of a beautiful virgin; Athênê dressed her, Aphroditê and the Charities bestowed upon her both ornament and fascination, while Hermês infused into her the mind of a dog, a deceitful spirit, and treacherous words.[166] The messenger of the gods conducted this “fascinating mischief” to mankind, at a time when Promêtheus was not present. Now Epimêtheus had received from his brother peremptory injunctions not to accept from the hands of Zeus any present whatever; but the beauty of Pandôra (so the newly-formed female was called) was not to be resisted. She was received and admitted among men, and from that moment their comfort and tranquillity was exchanged for suffering of every kind.[167] The evils to which mankind are liable had been before enclosed in a cask in their own keeping: Pandôra in her malice removed the lid of the cask, and out flew these thousand evils and calamities, to exercise forever their destroying force. Hope alone remained imprisoned, and therefore without efficacy, as before—the inviolable lid being replaced before she could escape. Before this incident (says the legend) men had lived without disease or suffering; but now both earth and sea are full of mischiefs, while maladies of every description stalk abroad by day as well as by night,[168] without any hope for man of relief to come.
The Theogony gives the legend here recounted, with some variations—leaving out the part of Epimêtheus altogether, as well as the cask of evils. Pandôra is the ruin of man, simply as the mother and representative of the female sex.[169] And the variations are thus useful, as they enable us to distinguish the essential from the accessory circumstances of the story.
“Thus (says the poet, at the conclusion of his narrative) it is not possible to escape from the purposes of Zeus.”[170] His mythe, connecting the calamitous condition of man with the malevolence of the supreme god, shows, first, by what cause such an unfriendly feeling was raised; next, by what instrumentality its deadly results were brought about. The human race are not indeed the creation, but the protected flock of Promêtheus, one of the elder or dispossessed Titan gods: when Zeus acquires supremacy, mankind along with the rest become subject to him, and are to make the best bargain they can respecting worship and service to be yielded. By the stratagem of their advocate Promêtheus, Zeus is cheated into such a partition of the victims as is eminently unprofitable to him; whereby his wrath is so provoked, that he tries to subtract from man the use of fire. Here however his scheme is frustrated by the theft of Promêtheus: but his second attempt is more successful, and he in his turn cheats the unthinking Epimêtheus into the acceptance of a present (in spite of the peremptory interdict of Promêtheus) by which the whole of man’s happiness is wrecked. This legend grows out of two feelings; partly as to the relations of the gods with man, partly as to the relation of the female sex with the male. The present gods are unkind towards man, but the old gods, with whom man’s lot was originally cast, were much kinder—and the ablest among them stands forward as the indefatigable protector of the race. Nevertheless, the mere excess of his craft proves the ultimate ruin of the cause which he espouses. He cheats Zeus out of a fair share of the sacrificial victim, so as both to provoke and justify a retaliation which he cannot be always at hand to ward off: the retaliation is, in his absence, consummated by a snare laid for Epimêtheus and voluntarily accepted. And thus, though Hesiod ascribes the calamitous condition of man to the malevolence of Zeus, his piety suggests two exculpatory pleas for the latter: mankind have been the first to defraud Zeus of his legitimate share of the sacrifice—and they have moreover been consenting parties to their own ruin. Such are the feelings, as to the relation between the gods and man, which have been one of the generating elements of this legend. The other element, a conviction of the vast mischief arising to man from women, whom yet they cannot dispense with, is frequently and strongly set forth in several of the Greek poets—by Simonidês of Amorgos and Phokylidês, not less than by the notorious misogynist Euripidês.
But the miseries arising from woman, however great they might be, did not reach Promêtheus himself. For him, the rash champion who had ventured “to compete in sagacity”[171] with Zeus, a different punishment was in store. Bound by heavy chains to a pillar, he remained fast imprisoned for several generations: every day did an eagle prey upon his liver, and every night did the liver grow afresh for the next day’s suffering. At length Zeus, eager to enhance the glory of his favorite son Hêraclês, permitted the latter to kill the eagle and rescue the captive.[172]
Such is the Promêthean mythe as it stands in the Hesiodic poems; its earliest form, as far as we can trace. Upon it was founded the sublime tragedy of Æschylus, “The Enchained Promêtheus,” together with at least one more tragedy, now lost, by the same author.[173] Æschylus has made several important alterations; describing the human race, not as having once enjoyed and subsequently lost a state of tranquillity and enjoyment, but as originally feeble and wretched. He suppresses both the first trick played off by Promêtheus upon Zeus respecting the partition of the victim—and the final formation and sending of Pandôra—which are the two most marked portions of the Hesiodic story; while on the other hand he brings out prominently and enlarges upon the theft of fire,[174] which in Hesiod is but slightly touched. If he has thus relinquished the antique simplicity of the story, he has rendered more than ample compensation by imparting to it a grandeur of idéal, a large reach of thought combined with appeals to our earnest and admiring sympathy, and a pregnancy of suggestion in regard to the relations between the gods and man, which soar far above the Hesiodic level—and which render his tragedy the most impressive, though not the most artistically composed, of all Grecian dramatic productions. Promêtheus there appears not only as the heroic champion and sufferer in the cause and for the protection of the human race, but also as the gifted teacher of all the arts, helps, and ornaments of life, amongst which fire is only one:[175] all this against the will and in defiance of the purpose of Zeus, who, on acquiring his empire, wished to destroy the human race and to beget some new breed.[176] Moreover, new relations between Promêtheus and Zeus are superadded by Æschylus. At the commencement of the struggle between Zeus and the Titan gods, Promêtheus had vainly attempted to prevail upon the latter to conduct it with prudence; but when he found that they obstinately declined all wise counsel, and that their ruin was inevitable, he abandoned their cause and joined Zeus. To him and to his advice Zeus owed the victory: yet the monstrous ingratitude and tyranny of the latter is now manifested by nailing him to a rock, for no other crime than because he frustrated the purpose of extinguishing the human race, and furnished to them the means of living with tolerable comfort.[177] The new ruler Zeus, insolent with his victory over the old gods, tramples down all right, and sets at naught sympathy and obligation, as well towards gods as towards man. Yet the prophetic Promêtheus, in the midst of intense suffering, is consoled by the foreknowledge that the time will come when Zeus must again send for him, release him, and invoke his aid, as the sole means of averting from himself dangers otherwise insurmountable. The security and means of continuance for mankind have now been placed beyond the reach of Zeus—whom Promêtheus proudly defies, glorying in his generous and successful championship,[178] despite the terrible price which he is doomed to pay for it.
As the Æschylean Promêtheus, though retaining the old lineaments, has acquired a new coloring, soul and character, so he has also become identified with a special locality. In Hesiod, there is no indication of the place in which he is imprisoned; but Æschylus places it in Scythia,[179] and the general belief of the Greeks supposed it to be on Mount Caucasus. So long and so firmly did this belief continue, that the Roman general Pompey, when in command of an army in Kolchis, made with his companion, the literary Greek Theophanês, a special march to view the spot in Caucasus where Promêtheus had been transfixed.[180]
CHAPTER IV.
HEROIC LEGENDS.—GENEALOGY OF ARGOS.
Having briefly enumerated the gods of Greece, with their chief attributes as described in legend, we come to those genealogies which connected them with historical men.
In the retrospective faith of a Greek, the ideas of worship and ancestry coalesced. Every association of men, large or small, in whom there existed a feeling of present union, traced back that union to some common initial progenitor; that progenitor being either the common god whom they worshipped, or some semi-divine person closely allied to him. What the feelings of the community require is, a continuous pedigree to connect them with this respected source of existence, beyond which they do not think of looking back. A series of names, placed in filiation or fraternity, together with a certain number of family or personal adventures ascribed to some of the individuals among them, constitute the ante-historical past through which the Greek looks back to his gods. The names of this genealogy are, to a great degree, gentile or local names familiar to the people,—rivers, mountains, springs, lakes, villages, demes, etc.,—embodied as persons, and introduced as acting or suffering. They are moreover called kings or chiefs, but the existence of a body of subjects surrounding them is tacitly implied rather than distinctly set forth; for their own personal exploits or family proceedings constitute for the most part the whole matter of narrative. And thus the genealogy was made to satisfy at once the appetite of the Greeks for romantic adventure, and their demand for an unbroken line of filiation between themselves and the gods. The eponymous personage, from whom the community derive their name, is sometimes the begotten son of the local god, sometimes an indigenous man sprung from the earth, which is indeed itself divinized.
It will be seen from the mere description of these genealogies that they included elements human and historical, as well as elements divine and extra-historical. And if we could determine the time at which any genealogy was first framed, we should be able to assure ourselves that the men then represented as present, together with their fathers and grandfathers, were real persons of flesh and blood. But this is a point which can seldom be ascertained; moreover, even if it could be ascertained, we must at once set it aside, if we wish to look at the genealogy in the point of view of the Greeks. For to them, not only all the members were alike real, but the gods and heroes at the commencement were in a certain sense the most real; at least, they were the most esteemed and indispensable of all. The value of the genealogy consisted, not in its length, but in its continuity; not (according to the feeling of modern aristocracy) in the power of setting out a prolonged series of human fathers and grandfathers, but in the sense of ancestral union with the primitive god. And the length of the series is traceable rather to humility, inasmuch as the same person who was gratified with the belief that he was descended from a god in the fifteenth generation, would have accounted it criminal insolence to affirm that a god was his father or grandfather. In presenting to the reader those genealogies which constitute the supposed primitive history of Hellas, I make no pretence to distinguish names real and historical from fictitious creations; partly because I have no evidence upon which to draw the line, and partly because by attempting it I should altogether depart from the genuine Grecian point of view.
Nor is it possible to do more than exhibit a certain selection of such as were most current and interesting; for the total number of them which found place in Grecian faith exceeds computation. As a general rule, every deme, every gens, every aggregate of men accustomed to combined action, religious or political, had its own. The small and unimportant demes into which Attica was divided had each its ancestral god and heroes, just as much as the great Athens herself. Even among the villages of Phokis, which Pausanias will hardly permit himself to call towns, deductions of legendary antiquity were not wanting. And it is important to bear in mind, when we are reading the legendary genealogies of Argos, or Sparta, or Thêbes, that these are merely samples amidst an extensive class, all perfectly analogous, and all exhibiting the religious and patriotic retrospect of some fraction of the Hellenic world. They are no more matter of historical tradition than any of the thousand other legendary genealogies which men delighted to recall to memory at the periodical festivals of their gens, their deme, or their village.
With these few prefatory remarks, I proceed to notice the most conspicuous of the Grecian heroic pedigrees, and first, that of Argos.
The earliest name in Argeian antiquity is that of Inachus, the son of Oceanus and Têthys, who gave his name to the river flowing under the walls of the town. According to the chronological computations of those who regarded the mythical genealogies as substantive history, and who allotted a given number of years to each generation, the reign of Inachus was placed 1986 B. C., or about 1100 years prior to the commencement of the recorded Olympiads.[181]
The sons of Inachus were Phorôneus and Ægialeus; both of whom however were sometimes represented as autochthonous men, the one in the territory of Argos, the other in that of Sikyôn. Ægialeus gave his name to the north-western region of the Peloponnêsus, on the southern coast of the Corinthian Gulf.[182] The name of Phorôneus was of great celebrity in the Argeian mythical genealogies, and furnished both the title and the subject of the ancient poem called Phorônis, in which he is styled “the father of mortal men.”[183] He is said to have imparted to mankind, who had before him lived altogether isolated, the first notion and habits of social existence, and even the first knowledge of fire: his dominion extended over the whole Peloponnêsus. His tomb at Argos, and seemingly also the place called the Phorônic city, in which he formed the first settlement of mankind, were still shown in the days of Pausanias.[184] The offspring of Phorôneus, by the nymph Teledikê, were Apis and Niobê. Apis, a harsh ruler, was put to death by Thelxiôn and Telchin, having given to Peloponnêsus the name of Apia:[185] he was succeeded by Argos, the son of his sister Niobê by the god Zeus. From this sovereign Peloponnêsus was denominated Argos. By his wife Evadnê, daughter of Strymôn,[186] he had four sons, Ekbasus, Peiras, Epidaurus, and Kriasus. Ekbasus was succeeded by his son Agênôr, and he again by his son Argos Panoptês,—a very powerful prince who is said to have had eyes distributed over all his body, and to have liberated Peloponnêsus from several monsters and wild animals which infested it:[187] Akusilaus and Æschylus make this Argos an earth-born person, while Pherekydês reports him as son of Arestôr. Iasus was the son of Argos Panoptês by Ismênê, daughter of Asôpus. According to the authors whom Apollodôrus and Pausanias prefer, the celebrated Iô was his daughter: but the Hesiodic epic (as well as Akusilaus) represented her as daughter of Peiras, while Æschylus and Kastor the chronologist affirmed the primitive king Inachus to have been her father.[188] A favorite theme, as well for the ancient genealogical poets as for the Attic tragedians, were the adventures of Iô, of whom, while priestess of Hêrê, at the ancient and renowned Hêræon between Mykênæ and Argos, Zeus became amorous. When Hêrê discovered the intrigue and taxed him with it, he denied the charge, and metamorphosed Iô into a white cow. Hêrê, requiring that the cow should be surrendered to her, placed her under the keeping of Argos Panoptês; but this guardian was slain by Hermês, at the command of Zeus: and Hêrê then drove the cow Iô away from her native land by means of the incessant stinging of a gad-fly, which compelled her to wander without repose or sustenance over an immeasurable extent of foreign regions. The wandering Iô gave her name to the Ionian Gulf, traversed Epirus and Illyria, passed the chain of Mount Hæmus and the lofty summits of Caucasus, and swam across the Thracian or Cimmerian Bosporus (which also from her derived its appellation) into Asia. She then went through Scythia, Cimmeria, and many Asiatic regions, until she arrived in Egypt, where Zeus at length bestowed upon her rest, restored her to her original form, and enabled her to give birth to his black son Epaphos.[189]
Such is a general sketch of the adventures which the ancient poets, epic, lyric, and tragic, and the logographers after them, connect with the name of the Argeian Iô,—one of the numerous tales which the fancy of the Greeks deduced from the amorous dispositions of Zeus and the jealousy of Hêrê. That the scene should be laid in the Argeian territory appears natural, when we recollect that both Argos and Mykênæ were under the special guardianship of Hêrê, and that the Hêræon between the two was one of the oldest and most celebrated temples in which she was worshipped. It is useful to compare this amusing fiction with the representation reported to us by Herodotus, and derived by him as well from Phœnician as from Persian antiquarians, of the circumstances which occasioned the transit of Iô from Argos to Egypt,—an event recognized by all of them as historical matter of fact. According to the Persians, a Phœnician vessel had arrived at the port near Argos, freighted with goods intended for sale to the inhabitants of the country. After the vessel had remained a few days, and disposed of most of her cargo, several Argeian women, and among them Iô the king’s daughter, coming on board to purchase, were seized and carried off by the crew, who sold Iô in Egypt.[190] The Phœnician antiquarians, however, while they admitted the circumstance that Iô had left her own country in one of their vessels, gave a different color to the whole by affirming that she emigrated voluntarily, having been engaged in an amour with the captain of the vessel, and fearing that her parents might come to the knowledge of her pregnancy. Both Persians and Phœnicians described the abduction of Iô as the first of a series of similar acts between Greeks and Asiatics, committed each in revenge for the preceding. First came the rape of Eurôpê from Phœnicia by Grecian adventurers,—perhaps, as Herodotus supposed, by Krêtans: next, the abduction of Mêdeia from Kolchis by Jasôn, which occasioned the retaliatory act of Paris, when he stole away Helena from Menelaos. Up to this point the seizures of women by Greeks from Asiatics, and by Asiatics from Greeks, had been equivalents both in number and in wrong. But the Greeks now thought fit to equip a vast conjoint expedition to recover Helen, in the course of which they took and sacked Troy. The invasions of Greece by Darius and Xerxes were intended, according to the Persian antiquarians, as a long-delayed retribution for the injury inflicted on the Asiatics by Agamemnôn and his followers.[191]
The account thus given of the adventures of Iô, when contrasted with the genuine legend, is interesting, as it tends to illustrate the phænomenon which early Grecian history is constantly presenting to us,—the way in which the epical furniture of an unknown past is recast and newly colored so as to meet those changes which take place in the retrospective feelings of the present. The religious and poetical character of the old legend disappears: nothing remains except the names of persons and places, and the voyage from Argos to Egypt: we have in exchange a sober, quasi-historical narrative, the value of which consists in its bearing on the grand contemporary conflicts between Persia and Greece, which filled the imagination of Herodotus and his readers.
To proceed with the genealogy of the kings of Argos, Iasus was succeeded by Krotôpus, son of his brother Agênôr; Krotôpus by Sthenelas, and he again by Gelanôr.[192] In the reign of the latter, Danaos came with his fifty daughters from Egypt to Argos; and here we find another of those romantic adventures which so agreeably decorate the barrenness of the mythical genealogies. Danaos and Ægyptos were two brothers descending from Epaphos, son of Iô: Ægyptos had fifty sons, who were eager to marry the fifty daughters of Danaos, in spite of the strongest repugnance of the latter. To escape such a necessity, Danaos placed his fifty daughters on board of a penteconter (or vessel with fifty oars) and sought refuge at Argos; touching in his voyage at the island of Rhodes, where he erected a statue of Athênê at Lindos, which was long exhibited as a memorial of his passage. Ægyptos and his sons followed them to Argos and still pressed their suit, to which Danaos found himself compelled to assent; but on the wedding night he furnished each of his daughters with a dagger, and enjoined them to murder their husbands during the hour of sleep. His orders were obeyed by all, with the single exception of Hypermnêstra, who preserved her husband Lynkeus, incurring displeasure and punishment from her father. He afterwards, however, pardoned her; and when, by the voluntary abdication of Gelanôr, he became king of Argos, Lynkeus was recognized as his son-in-law and ultimately succeeded him. The remaining daughters, having been purified by Athênê and Hermês, were given in marriage to the victors in a gymnic contest publicly proclaimed. From Danaos was derived the name of Danai, applied to the inhabitants of the Argeian territory,[193] and to the Homeric Greeks generally.
From the legend of the Danaïdes we pass to two barren names of kings, Lynkeus and his son Abas. The two sons of Abas were Akrisios and Prœtos, who, after much dissension, divided between them the Argeian territory; Akrisios ruling at Argos, and Prœtos at Tiryns. The families of both formed the theme of romantic stories. To pass over for the present the legend of Bellerophôn, and the unrequited passion which the wife of Prœtos conceived for him, we are told that the daughters of Prœtos, beautiful, and solicited in marriage by suitors from all Greece, were smitten with leprosy and driven mad, wandering in unseemly guise throughout Peloponnêsus. The visitation had overtaken them, according to Hesiod, because they refused to take part in the Bacchic rites; according to Pherekydês and the Argeian Akusilaus,[194] because they had treated scornfully the wooden statue and simple equipments of Hêrê: the religious character of the old legend here displays itself in a remarkable manner. Unable to cure his daughters, Prœtos invoked the aid of the renowned Pylian prophet and leech, Melampus son of Amythaôn, who undertook to remove the malady on condition of being rewarded with the third part of the kingdom. Prœtos indignantly refused these conditions: but the state of his daughters becoming aggravated and intolerable, he was compelled again to apply to Melampus; who, on the second request, raised his demands still higher, and required another third of the kingdom for his brother Bias. These terms being acceded to, he performed his part of the covenant. He appeased the wrath of Hêrê by prayer and sacrifice; or, according to another account, he approached the deranged women at the head of a troop of young men, with shouting and ecstatic dance,—the ceremonies appropriate to the Bacchic worship of Dionysos,—and in this manner effected their cure. Melampus, a name celebrated in many different Grecian mythes, is the legendary founder and progenitor of a great and long-continued family of prophets. He and his brother Bias became kings of separate portions of the Argeian territory: he is recognized as ruler there even in the Odyssey, and the prophet Theoklymenos, his grandson, is protected and carried to Ithaca by Telemachus.[195] Herodotus also alludes to the cure of the women, and to the double kingdom of Melampus and Bias in the Argeian land: he recognizes Melampus as the first person who introduced to the knowledge of the Greeks the name and worship of Dionysos, with its appropriate sacrifices and phallic processions. Here again he historicizes various features of the old legend in a manner not unworthy of notice.[196]
But Danaê, the daughter of Akrisios, with her son Perseus acquired still greater celebrity than her cousins the Prœtides. An oracle had apprized Akrisios that his daughter would give birth to a son by whose hand he would himself be slain. To guard against this danger, he imprisoned Danaê in a chamber of brass under ground. But the god Zeus had become amorous of her, and found means to descend through the roof in the form of a shower of gold: the consequence of his visits was the birth of Perseus. When Akrisios discovered that his daughter had given existence to a son, he enclosed both the mother and the child in a coffer, which he cast into the sea.[197] The coffer was carried to the isle of Seriphos, where Diktys, brother of the king Polydektês, fished it up, and rescued both Danaê and Perseus. The exploits of Perseus, when he grew up, against the three Phorkides or daughters of Phorkys, and the three Gorgons, are among the most marvellous and imaginative in all Grecian legend: they bear a stamp almost Oriental. I shall not here repeat the details of those unparalleled hazards which the special favor of Athênê enabled him to overcome, and which ended in his bringing back from Libya the terrific head of the Gorgon Medusa, endued with the property of turning every one who looked upon it into stone. In his return, he rescued Andromeda, daughter of Kêpheus, who had been exposed to be devoured by a sea-monster, and brought her back as his wife. Akrisios trembled to see him after this victorious expedition, and retired into Thessaly to avoid him; but Perseus followed him thither, and having succeeded in calming his apprehensions, became competitor in a gymnic contest where his grandfather was among the spectators. By an incautious swing of his quoit, he unintentionally struck Akrisios, and caused his death: the predictions of the oracle were thus at last fulfilled. Stung with remorse at the catastrophe, and unwilling to return to Argos, which had been the principality of Akrisios, Perseus made an exchange with Megapenthês, son of Prœtos king of Tiryns. Megapenthês became king of Argos, and Perseus of Tiryns: moreover, the latter founded, within ten miles of Argos, the far-famed city of Mykênæ. The massive walls of this city, like those of Tiryns, of which remains are yet to be seen, were built for him by the Lykian Cyclôpes.[198]
We here reach the commencement of the Perseid dynasty of Mykênæ. It should be noticed, however, that there were among the ancient legends contradictory accounts of the foundation of this city. Both the Odyssey and the Great Eoiai enumerated, among the heroines, Mykênê, the Eponyma of the city; the former poem classifying her with Tyrô and Alkmênê, the latter describing her as the daughter of Inachus and wife of Arestôr. And Akusilaus mentioned an Eponymus Mykêneus, the son of Spartôn and grandson of Phorôneus.[199]
The prophetic family of Melampus maintained itself in one of the three parts of the divided Argeian kingdom for five generations, down to Amphiaraos and his sons Alkmæôn and Amphilochos. The dynasty of his brother Bias, and that of Megapenthês, son of Prœtos, continued each for four generations: a list of barren names fills up the interval.[200] The Perseids of Mykênæ boasted a descent long and glorious, heroic as well as historical, continuing down to the last sovereigns of Sparta.[201] The issue of Perseus was numerous: his son Alkæos was father of Amphitryôn; another of his sons, Elektryôn, was father of Alkmênê;[202] a third, Sthenelos, father of Eurystheus.
After the death of Perseus, Alkæos and Amphitryôn dwelt at Tiryns. The latter became engaged in a quarrel with Elektryôn respecting cattle, and in a fit of passion killed him:[203] moreover the piratical Taphians from the west coast of Akarnania invaded the country, and slew the sons of Elektryôn, so that Alkmênê alone was left of that family. She was engaged to wed Amphitryôn; but she bound him by oath not to consummate the marriage until he had avenged upon the Têleboæ the death of her brothers. Amphitryôn, compelled to flee the country as the murderer of his uncle, took refuge in Thêbes, whither Alkmênê accompanied him: Sthenelos was left in possession of Tiryns. The Kadmeians of Thêbes, together with the Locrians and Phocians, supplied Amphitryôn with troops, which he conducted against the Têleboæ and the Taphians:[204] yet he could not have subdued them without the aid of Komæthô, daughter of the Taphian king Pterelaus, who conceived a passion for him, and cut off from her father’s head the golden lock to which Poseidôn had attached the gift of immortality.[205] Having conquered and expelled his enemies, Amphitryôn returned to Thêbes, impatient to consummate his marriage: but Zeus on the wedding-night assumed his form and visited Alkmênê before him: he had determined to produce from her a son superior to all his prior offspring,—“a specimen of invincible force both to gods and men.”[206] At the proper time, Alkmênê was delivered of twin sons: Hêraklês the offspring of Zeus,—the inferior and unhonored Iphiklês, offspring of Amphitryôn.[207]
When Alkmênê was on the point of being delivered at Thêbes, Zeus publicly boasted among the assembled gods, at the instigation of the mischief-making Atê, that there was on that day about to be born on earth, from his breed, a son who should rule over all his neighbors. Hêrê treated this as an empty boast, calling upon him to bind himself by an irremissible oath that the prediction should be realized. Zeus incautiously pledged his solemn word; upon which Hêrê darted swiftly down from Olympus to the Achaic Argos, where the wife of Sthenelos (son of Perseus, and therefore grandson of Zeus) was already seven months gone with child. By the aid of the Eileithyiæ, the special goddesses of parturition, she caused Eurystheus, the son of Sthenelos, to be born before his time on that very day, while she retarded the delivery of Alkmênê. Then returning to Olympus, she announced the fact to Zeus: “The good man Eurystheus, son of the Perseid Sthenelos, is this day born of thy loins: the sceptre of the Argeians worthily belongs to him.” Zeus was thunderstruck at the consummation which he had improvidently bound himself to accomplish. He seized Atê his evil counsellor by the hair, and hurled her forever away from Olympus: but he had no power to avert the ascendency of Eurystheus and the servitude of Hêraklês. “Many a pang did he suffer, when he saw his favorite son going through his degrading toil in the tasks imposed upon him by Eurystheus.”[208]
The legend, of unquestionable antiquity, here transcribed from the Iliad, is one of the most pregnant and characteristic in the Grecian mythology. It explains, according to the religious ideas familiar to the old epic poets, both the distinguishing attributes and the endless toil and endurances of Hêraklês,—the most renowned and most ubiquitous of all the semi-divine personages worshipped by the Hellênes,—a being of irresistible force, and especially beloved by Zeus, yet condemned constantly to labor for others and to obey the commands of a worthless and cowardly persecutor. His recompense is reserved to the close of his career, when his afflicting trials are brought to a close: he is then admitted to the godhead and receives in marriage Hêbê.[209] The twelve labors, as they are called, too notorious to be here detailed, form a very small fraction of the exploits of this mighty being, which filled the Hêrakleian epics of the ancient poets. He is found not only in most parts of Hellas, but throughout all the other regions then known to the Greeks, from Gadês to the river Thermôdôn in the Euxine and to Scythia, overcoming all difficulties and vanquishing all opponents. Distinguished families are everywhere to be traced who bear his patronymic, and glory in the belief that they are his descendants. Among Achæans, Kadmeians, and Dôrians, Hêraklês is venerated: the latter especially treat him as their principal hero,—the Patron Hero-God of the race: the Hêrakleids form among all Dôrians a privileged gens, in which at Sparta the special lineage of the two kings was included.
His character lends itself to mythes countless in number as well as disparate in their character. The irresistible force remains constant, but it is sometimes applied with reckless violence against friends as well as enemies, sometimes devoted to the relief of the oppressed. The comic writers often brought him out as a coarse and stupid glutton, while the Athênian philosopher Prodikos, without at all distorting the type, extracted from it the simple, impressive, and imperishable apologue still known as the Choice of Hercules.
After the death and apotheosis of Hêraklês, his son Hyllos and his other children were expelled and persecuted by Eurystheus: the fear of his vengeance deterred both the Trachinian king Kêyx and the Thêbans from harboring them, and the Athênians alone were generous enough to brave the risk of offering them shelter. Eurystheus invaded Attica, but perished in the attempt by the hand of Hyllos, or by that of Iolaos, the old companion and nephew of Hêraklês.[210] The chivalrous courage which the Athênians had on this occasion displayed in behalf of oppressed innocence, was a favorite theme for subsequent eulogy by Attic poets and orators.
All the sons of Eurystheus lost their lives in the battle along with him, so that the Perseid family was now represented only by the Hêrakleids, who collected an army and endeavored to recover the possessions from which they had been expelled. The united forces of Iônians, Achæans, and Arcadians, then inhabiting Peloponnêsus, met the invaders at the isthmus, when Hyllos, the eldest of the sons of Hêraklês, proposed that the contest should be determined by a single combat between himself and any champion of the opposing army. It was agreed, that if Hyllos were victorious, the Hêrakleids should be restored to their possessions—if he were vanquished, that they should forego all claim for the space of a hundred years, or fifty years, or three generations,—for in the specification of the time, accounts differ. Echemos, the hero of Tegea in Arcadia, accepted the challenge, and Hyllos was slain in the encounter; in consequence of which the Hêrakleids retired, and resided along with the Dôrians under the protection of Ægimios, son of Dôrus.[211] As soon as the stipulated period of truce had expired, they renewed their attempt upon Peloponnêsus conjointly with the Dôrians, and with complete success: the great Dôrian establishments of Argos, Sparta, and Messênia were the result. The details of this victorious invasion will be hereafter recounted.
Sikyôn, Phlios, Epidauros, and Trœzen[212] all boasted of respected eponyms and a genealogy of dignified length, not exempt from the usual discrepancies—but all just as much entitled to a place on the tablet of history as the more renowned Æolids or Hêrakleids. I omit them here because I wish to impress upon the reader’s mind the salient features and character of the legendary world,—not to load his memory with a full list of legendary names.
CHAPTER V.
DEUKALION, HELLEN, AND SONS OF HELLEN.
In the Hesiodic Theogony, as well as in the “Works and Days,” the legend of Promêtheus and Epimêtheus presents an import religious, ethical, and social, and in this sense it is carried forward by Æschylus; but to neither of the characters is any genealogical function assigned. The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women brought both of them into the stream of Grecian legendary lineage, representing Deukaliôn as the son of Promêtheus and Pandôra, and seemingly his wife Pyrrha as daughter of Epimêtheus.[213]
Deukaliôn is important in Grecian mythical narrative under two points of view. First, he is the person specially saved at the time of the general deluge: next, he is the father of Hellên, the great eponym of the Hellenic race; at least this was the more current story, though there were other statements which made Hellên the son of Zeus.
The name of Deukaliôn is originally connected with the Lokrian towns of Kynos and Opus, and with the race of the Leleges, but he appears finally as settled in Thessaly, and ruling in the portion of that country called Phthiôtis.[214] According to what seems to have been the old legendary account, it is the deluge which transferred him from the one to the other; but according to another statement, framed in more historicizing times, he conducted a body of Kurêtes and Leleges into Thessaly, and expelled the prior Pelasgian occupants.[215]
The enormous iniquity with which earth was contaminated—as Apollodôrus says, by the then existing brazen race, or as others say, by the fifty monstrous sons of Lykaôn—provoked Zeus to send a general deluge.[216] An unremitting and terrible rain laid the whole of Greece under water, except the highest mountain-tops, whereon a few stragglers found refuge. Deukaliôn was saved in a chest or ark, which he had been forewarned by his father Promêtheus to construct. After floating for nine days on the water, he at length landed on the summit of Mount Parnassus. Zeus having sent Hermês to him, promising to grant whatever he asked, he prayed that men and companions might be sent to him in his solitude: accordingly Zeus directed both him and Pyrrha to cast stones over their heads: those cast by Pyrrha became women, those by Deukaliôn men. And thus the “stony race of men” (if we may be allowed to translate an etymology which the Greek language presents exactly, and which has not been disdained by Hesiod, by Pindar, by Epicharmus, and by Virgil) came to tenant the soil of Greece.[217] Deukaliôn on landing from the ark sacrificed a grateful offering to Zeus Phyxios, or the God of escape; he also erected altars in Thessaly to the twelve great gods of Olympus.[218]
The reality of this deluge was firmly believed throughout the historical ages of Greece: the chronologers, reckoning up by genealogies, assigned the exact date of it, and placed it at the same time as the conflagration of the world by the rashness of Phaëtôn, during the reign of Krotôpas king of Argus, the seventh from Inachus.[219] The meteorological work of Aristotle admits and reasons upon this deluge as an unquestionable fact, though he alters the locality by placing it west of Mount Pindus, near Dôdôna and the river Achelôus.[220] He at the same time treats it as a physical phenomenon, the result of periodical cycles in the atmosphere, thus departing from the religious character of the old legend, which described it as a judgment inflicted by Zeus upon a wicked race. Statements founded upon this event were in circulation throughout Greece even to a very late date. The Megarians affirmed that Megaros, their hero, son of Zeus by a local nymph, had found safety from the waters on the lofty summit of their mountain Geraneia, which had not been completely submerged. And in the magnificent temple of the Olympian Zeus at Athens, a cavity in the earth was shown, through which it was affirmed that the waters of the deluge had retired. Even in the time of Pausanias, the priests poured into this cavity holy offerings of meal and honey.[221] In this, as in other parts of Greece, the idea of the Deukalionian deluge was blended with the religious impressions of the people and commemorated by their sacred ceremonies.
The offspring of Deukaliôn and Pyrrha were two sons, Hellên and Amphiktyôn, and a daughter, Prôtogeneia, whose son by Zeus was Aëthlius: it was however maintained by many, that Hellên was the son of Zeus and not of Deukaliôn. Hellên had by a nymph three sons, Dôrus, Xuthus, and Æolus. He gave to those who had been before called Greeks,[222] the name of Hellênes, and partitioned his territory among his three children. Æolus reigned in Thessaly; Xuthus received Peloponnêsus, and had by Creüsa as his sons, Achæus and Iôn; while Dôrus occupied the country lying opposite to the Peloponnêsus, on the northern side of the Corinthian Gulf. These three gave to the inhabitants of their respective countries the names of Æolians, Achæans and Iônians, and Dôrians.[223]
Such is the genealogy as we find it in Apollodôrus. In so far as the names and filiation are concerned, many points in it are given differently, or implicitly contradicted, by Euripidês and other writers. Though as literal and personal history it deserves no notice, its import is both intelligible and comprehensive. It expounds and symbolizes the first fraternal aggregation of Hellênic men, together with their territorial distribution and the institutions which they collectively venerated.
There were two great holding-points in common for every section of Greeks. One was the Amphiktyonic assembly, which met half-yearly, alternately at Delphi and at Thermopylæ; originally and chiefly for common religious purposes, but indirectly and occasionally embracing political and social objects along with them. The other was, the public festivals or games, of which the Olympic came first in importance; next, the Pythian, Nemean and Isthmian,—institutions which combined religious solemnities with recreative effusion and hearty sympathies, in a manner so imposing and so unparalleled. Amphiktyôn represents the first of these institutions, and Aëthlius the second. As the Amphiktyonic assembly was always especially connected with Thermopylæ and Thessaly, Amphiktyôn is made the son of the Thessalian Deukaliôn; but as the Olympic festival was nowise locally connected with Deukaliôn, Aëthlius is represented as having Zeus for his father, and as touching Deukaliôn only through the maternal line. It will be seen presently, that the only matter predicted respecting Aëthlius is, that he settled in the territory of Elis, and begat Endymiôn: this brings him into local contact with the Olympic games, and his function is then ended.
Having thus got Hellas as an aggregate with its main cementing forces, we march on to its subdivision into parts, through Æolus, Dôrus and Xuthus, the three sons of Hellen;[224] a distribution which is far from being exhaustive: nevertheless, the genealogists whom Apollodôrus follows recognize no more than three sons.
The genealogy is essentially post-Homeric; for Homer knows Hellas and the Hellênes only in connection with a portion of Achaia Phthiôtis. But as it is recognized in the Hesiodic Catalogue[225]—composed probably within the first century after the commencement of recorded Olympiads, or before 676 B. C.—the peculiarities of it, dating from so early a period, deserve much attention. We may remark, first, that it seems to exhibit to us Dôrus and Æolus as the only pure and genuine offspring of Hellên. For their brother Xuthus is not enrolled as an eponymus; he neither founds nor names any people; it is only his sons Achæus and Iôn, after his blood has been mingled with that of the Erechtheid Kreüsa, who become eponyms and founders, each of his own separate people. Next, as to the territorial distribution, Xuthus receives Peloponnêsus from his father, and unites himself with Attica (which the author of this genealogy seems to have conceived as originally unconnected with Hellên) by his marriage with the daughter of the indigenous hero, Erechtheus. The issue of this marriage, Achæus and Iôn, present to us the population of Peloponnêsus and Attica conjointly as related among themselves by the tie of brotherhood, but as one degree more distant both from Dôrians and Æolians. Æolus reigns over the regions about Thessaly, and called the people in those parts Æolians; while Dôrus occupies “the country over against Peloponnêsus on the opposite side of the Corinthian Gulf,” and calls the inhabitants after himself, Dôrians.[226] It is at once evident that this designation is in no way applicable to the confined district between Parnassus and Œta, which alone is known by the name of Dôris, and its inhabitants by that of Dôrians, in the historical ages. In the view of the author of this genealogy, the Dôrians are the original occupants of the large range of territory north of the Corinthian Gulf, comprising Ætôlia, Phôkis, and the territory of the Ozolian Lokrians. And this farther harmonizes with the other legend noticed by Apollodôrus, when he states that Ætolus, son of Endymiôn, having been forced to expatriate from Peloponnêsus, crossed into the Kurêtid territory,[227] and was there hospitably received by Dôrus, Laodokus and Polypœtês, sons of Apollo and Phthia. He slew his hosts, acquired the territory, and gave to it the name of Ætôlia: his son Pleurôn married Xanthippê, daughter of Dôrus; while his other son, Kalydôn, marries Æolia, daughter of Amythaôn. Here again we have the name of Dôrus, or the Dôrians, connected with the tract subsequently termed Ætôlia. That Dôrus should in one place be called the son of Apollo and Phthia, and in another place the son of Hellên by a nymph, will surprise no one accustomed to the fluctuating personal nomenclature of these old legends: moreover the name of Phthia is easy to reconcile with that of Hellên, as both are identified with the same portion of Thessaly, even from the days of the Iliad.
This story, that the Dôrians were at one time the occupants, or the chief occupants, of the range of territory between the river Achelôus and the northern shore of the Corinthian Gulf, is at least more suitable to the facts attested by historical evidence than the legends given in Herodotus, who represents the Dôrians as originally in the Phthiôtid; then as passing under Dôrus, the son of Hellên, into the Histiæôtid, under the mountains of Ossa and Olympus; next, as driven by the Kadmeians into the regions of Pindus; from thence passing into the Dryopid territory, on Mount Œta; lastly, from thence into Peloponnêsus.[228] The received story was, that the great Dôrian establishments in Peloponnêsus were formed by invasion from the north, and that the invaders crossed the gulf from Naupaktus,—a statement which, however disputable with respect to Argos, seems highly probable in regard both to Sparta and Messênia. That the name of Dôrians comprehended far more than the inhabitants of the insignificant tetrapolis of Dôris Proper, must be assumed, if we believe that they conquered Sparta and Messênia: both the magnitude of the conquest itself, and the passage of a large portion of them from Naupaktus, harmonize with the legend as given by Apollodôrus, in which the Dôrians are represented as the principal inhabitants of the northern shore of the gulf. The statements which we find in Herodotus, respecting the early migrations of the Dôrians, have been considered as possessing greater historical value than those of the fabulist Apollodôrus. But both are equally matter of legend, while the brief indications of the latter seem to be most in harmony with the facts which we afterwards find attested by history.
It has already been mentioned that the genealogy which makes Æolus, Xuthus and Dôrus sons of Hellên, is as old as the Hesiodic Catalogue; probably also that which makes Hellên son of Deukaliôn. Aëthlius also is an Hesiodic personage: whether Amphiktyôn be so or not, we have no proof.[229] They could not have been introduced into the legendary genealogy until after the Olympic games and the Amphiktyonic council had acquired an established ascendancy and universal reverence throughout Greece.
Respecting Dôrus the son of Hellên, we find neither legends nor legendary genealogy; respecting Xuthus, very little beyond the tale of Kreüsa and Iôn, which has its place more naturally among the Attic fables. Achæus however, who is here represented as the son of Xuthus, appears in other stories with very different parentage and accompaniments. According to the statement which we find in Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Achæus, Phthius and Pelasgus are sons of Poseidôn and Larissa. They migrate from Peloponnêsus into Thessaly, and distribute the Thessalian territory between them, giving their names to its principal divisions: their descendants in the sixth generation were driven out of that country by the invasion of Deukaliôn at the head of the Kurêtes and the Leleges.[230] This was the story of those who wanted to provide an eponymus for the Achæans in the southern districts of Thessaly: Pausanias accomplishes the same object by different means, representing Achæus, the son of Xuthus as having gone back to Thessaly and occupied the portion of it to which his father was entitled. Then, by way of explaining how it was that there were Achæans at Sparta and at Argos, he tells us that Archander and Architelês, the sons of Archæus, came back from Thessaly to Peloponnêsus, and married two daughters of Danaus: they acquired great influence at Argos and Sparta, and gave to the people the name of Achæans after their father Achæus.[231]
Euripidês also deviates very materially from the Hesiodic genealogy in respect to these eponymous persons. In the drama called Iôn, he describes Iôn as son of Kreüsa by Apollo, but adopted by Xuthus: according to him, the real sons of Xuthus and Kreüsa are Dôrus and Achæus,[232]—eponyms of the Dôrians and Achæans in the interior of Peloponnêsus. And it is a still more capital point of difference, that he omits Hellên altogether—making Xuthus an Achæan by race, the son of Æolus, who is the son of Zeus.[233] This is the more remarkable, as in the fragments of two other dramas of Euripidês, the Melanippê and the Æolus, we find Hellên mentioned both as father of Æolus and son of Zeus.[234] To the general public even of the most instructed city of Greece, fluctuations and discrepancies in these mythical genealogies seem to have been neither surprising nor offensive.
CHAPTER VI.
THE ÆOLIDS, OR SONS AND DAUGHTERS OF ÆOLUS.
If two of the sons of Hellên, Dôrus and Xuthus, present to us families comparatively unnoticed in mythical narrative, the third son, Æolus, richly makes up for the deficiency. From him we pass to his seven sons and five daughters, amidst a great abundance of heroic and poetical incident.
In dealing however with these extensive mythical families, it is necessary to observe, that the legendary world of Greece, in the manner in which it is presented to us, appears invested with a degree of symmetry and coherence which did not originally belong to it. For the old ballads and stories which were sung or recounted at the multiplied festivals of Greece, each on its own special theme, have been lost: the religious narratives, which the Exegêtês of every temple had present to his memory, explanatory of the peculiar religious ceremonies and local customs in his own town or Dême, have passed away: all these primitive elements, originally distinct and unconnected, are removed out of our sight, and we possess only an aggregate result, formed by many confluent streams of fable, and connected together by the agency of subsequent poets and logographers. Even the earliest agents in this work of connecting and systematizing—the Hesiodic poets—have been hardly at all preserved. Our information respecting Grecian mythology is derived chiefly from the prose logographers who followed them, and in whose works, since a continuous narrative was above all things essential to them, the fabulous personages are woven into still more comprehensive pedigrees, and the original isolation of the legends still better disguised. Hekatæus, Pherekydês, Hellanikus, and Akusilaus lived at a time when the idea of Hellas as one great whole, composed of fraternal sections, was deeply rooted in the mind of every Greek; and when the fancy of one or a few great families, branching out widely from one common stem, was more popular and acceptable than that of a distinct indigenous origin in each of the separate districts. These logographers, indeed, have themselves been lost; but Apollodôrus and the various scholiasts, our great immediate sources of information respecting Grecian mythology, chiefly borrowed from them: so that the legendary world of Greece is in fact known to us through them, combined with the dramatic and Alexandrine poets, their Latin imitators, and the still later class of scholiasts—except indeed such occasional glimpses as we obtain from the Iliad and the Odyssey, and the remaining Hesiodic fragments, which exhibit but too frequently a hopeless diversity when confronted with the narratives of the logographers.
Though Æolus (as has been already stated) is himself called the son of Hellên along with Dôrus and Xuthus, yet the legends concerning the Æolids, far from being dependent upon this genealogy, are not all even coherent with it: moreover the name of Æolus in the legend is older than that of Hellên, inasmuch as it occurs both in the Iliad and Odyssey.[235] Odysseus sees in the under-world the beautiful Tyrô, daughter of Salmôneus, and wife of Krêtheus, son of Æolus.
Æolus is represented as having reigned in Thessaly: his seven sons were Krêtheus, Sisyphus, Athamas, Salmôneus, Deiôn, Magnês and Periêrês: his five daughters, Canacê, Alcyonê, Peisidikê, Calycê and Perimêdê. The fables of this race seem to be distinguished by a constant introduction of the god Poseidôn, as well as by an unusual prevalence of haughty and presumptuous attributes among the Æolid heroes, leading them to affront the gods by pretences of equality, and sometimes even by defiance. The worship of Poseidôn must probably have been diffused and preëminent among a people with whom these legends originated.