CHAPTER VIII
RELIGION AND EDUCATION IN HELLAS
The greater part of the religious instruction in Hellas was given outside the schools, in the home and in public life. The child learnt the current ritual observances proper to each particular deity or occasion by participating in them himself. His religious devotion was practised and stimulated by the festivals and sacred songs and dances which made up so large a part of Hellenic life. In a religion like the Hellenic, which was so largely a matter of forms and ceremonies, there was little dogma to be learnt by children; no catechism, no sectarian teaching was necessary. Such dogma as there was consisted in the myths which were current about the various deities and heroes; and of these myths there were so many varieties that heterodoxy about them became almost impossible.
Such as it was, this dogma, consisting of manifold and often contradictory myths, was enshrined in the poetry of the race, so that most of the poems became sacred books, regarded by the orthodox as inspired. This sacred literature, as we have seen, was the chief object of study in the primary schools at Athens, where it was read, written, and learnt by heart. At Sparta almost the whole of literary and intellectual education consisted of sacred songs in honour of gods and heroes. The myths were the very essence of primary education in Hellas.
In order to understand the attitude of the educational theorists towards these myths which run through most of the Hellenic poetry, it is necessary to realise the extraordinary authority which was given to the poets, and especially to Homer and Hesiod. Every word of them was regarded as inspired and strictly true: their authority was indisputable. At the beginning of the sixth century an interpolated line in the Iliad was made the main support of the Athenian claim to the Island of Salamis. Gelon, the tyrant of Syracuse, according to the current legend, was refused the command of the Hellenic forces against Persia because, as the Spartan envoy put it, Agamemnon would groan if he heard of such a thing, and because Homer had said that an Athenian was the best man at drawing up and marshalling a host, for which cause the Athenians now claimed the command.[655] That such arguments could be employed shows in what veneration Homer was held. He was considered to be especially inspired.[656] His admirers asserted that he had educated Hellas, and that his works provided fit instruction for the whole conduct of life.[657] More specifically, it was said that “The divine Homer won his glory and renown from this, that he taught good things, drill, valour and the arming of troops.”[658] He was misquoted to support peculiar views, as in Plato.[659] People had their favourite texts: Sokrates’ was “In due proportion to thy means pay honour to the gods.” It was a not unheard-of accomplishment to know the whole Iliad and Odyssey by heart. Moral lessons were drawn from them. Thus the story of Kirké was a warning against self-indulgence. Kirké made the companions of Odusseus swine through their over-indulgence in the pleasures of the table; Odusseus himself, by Hermes’ advice and his own self-restraint in such matters, escaped this fate.[660]
In time, however, the higher morality of the leading Hellenic thinkers revolted against the low morality, to say nothing more, of much of the mythology embodied in the poets. Xenophanes began the attack. “Homer and Hesiod,” he cries, “ascribed to the gods all that is considered disgraceful among men.” Herakleitos declared that Homer deserved a thrashing. Even the pious Pindar tried to alter some of the myths to suit his own morality, and Aeschylus fights hard for an underlying monotheism. In the next generation the storm broke: awakening intelligence, fostered by the Sophists and the philosophers, shrank away from the horrors of the Theogony. Tragedy, by bringing mythology before the eyes, had made its impossibility more apparent. The researches of the earlier historians in comparative mythology had undermined the bases of belief. Herodotos had found that a god named Herakles had been recognised in Egypt 17,000 years before his time; consequently the Hellenic Herakles, only six centuries before the historian’s age, must be only a man of the same name.[661] Rationalism began to master the mythology: Thucydides tried to apply scientific methods to the Trojan War, making, for example, its duration due to the difficulty of obtaining supplies for so large a force. The rationalism of Euripides is well known. Metrodoros, a pupil of Anaxagoras, made the gods natural forces and varieties of matter—a device already employed by Empedokles for poetical convenience. In this way Sokrates rationalises the Boreas-myth in the Phaidros,[662] where Plato states that the wise disbelieve such tales; but Sokrates was too busy studying his own personality to raise all these numerous questions, so he accepts the customary belief. The defenders of Homer, led by Metrodoros and Stesimbrotos,[663] tried to allegorise him, declaring that the worst myths had a moral meaning in the background. The allegories were often ludicrous: Plato rejects them wholly for educational purposes, as children always take the literal interpretation.
But public opinion was still fiercely attached to the old deities, as the incident of the Hermai and the condemnation of Anaxagoras, Protagoras, and Sokrates showed. The deities could not be sacrificed: consequently it was the myths that had to go. The myths said that Zeus dethroned his own father and committed adultery: if the myth is true, since Zeus is Supreme God, these crimes are justifiable.[664] Therefore the myth must be untrue. Homer and Hesiod lied: their works are mainly a blasphemous fiction.[665] Isokrates[666] sums up this new attitude. “The poets,” he declares, “blasphemously represented the sons of the Immortals as having done and suffered worse deeds than the most impious of men: they spoke such things about the gods as no one would venture to allege of his worst enemy; not only do they make them steal, commit adultery, and fall into slavery to mortals, but even represent them as eating their children, mutilating their fathers, and binding their mothers in chains.… For this the poets did not go unpunished, but some of them were wanderers and begged their bread, some became blind, another was an exile all his life long, and Orpheus, who devoted himself especially to such stories, was torn in pieces.”[667]
The greatest objection to these immoral legends was that they were taught in the nursery and the elementary school, at the most impressionable age.[668] Hence Plato wishes to lay down strict canons for the myths, legends, and fables which are to be taught to children. “For the beginning of everything is half the battle, especially in the case of what is young and tender. Young children are like soft wax, ready to take a clear and deep impression of any seal which is laid upon them. Hence the immense importance of the earliest stages of education, the myths and stories taught in the nursery and at school.… The compositions of Homer and Hesiod are fiction, and unlovely fiction at that; even if true, they had better not be told to the young and undiscerning.… The myths must be improving on the surface, not by allegory.”[669]
Plato is not prepared to rewrite the Hellenic Bible: he will only draw up the canons which the poets must follow. It is to be noticed that these canons are peculiar, and would exclude not merely most of Homer and Hesiod, but a large part of the Old and some of the New Testament. The first canon is that God, being good, cannot be the cause or originator of any harm or evil to mankind; for these things some other cause must be discovered. The greater part of the human lot is evil: so God is not the cause of the majority of human events.
This excludes Homer’s lines:
Two butts of human fortunes by the gates of Heaven stood,
One full of all things evil, and one of all things good.
To whom God gives a mixture, his life is weal and woe,
But to whom He gives of the evil alone, he lives as a beggar below.
And
Zeus is the world’s housekeeper, who serves out weal and woe.
And Aeschylus’
God plants the seed of sin among mankind,
Whene’er He wills to bring a race to naught.
If God is represented as the cause of misfortunes, the poet must say that the misfortunes were good for the sufferers, making them better and happier.[670]
The second canon is that God is not a wizard, appearing now in one form, now in another. Why should He change? External forces are not likely to change Him: He would not change Himself, since it would necessarily be a transition to the less good and less beautiful, since He is perfect. So the lines—
Disguised as human strangers, in many a changing guise,
Gods roam about the cities, to spy iniquities,
and the tales of Proteus and other metamorphoses, are false. Consequently mothers should not tell their children that a god may always be present in disguise, for it is a lie and is also likely to make the children cowardly. Lying is only useful in dealing with enemies, for managing lunatics, and for making a satisfactory explanation where certainty is impossible. God has no such reason for lying or deception.
The character of the Deity having been thus purged of mythological accretions, Plato passes on to the treatment of the future state. This must not be described as in any way terrible, or the children will learn to prefer dishonourable life to honourable death. So reject—
O better be a poor man’s serf, and share his scanty bread,
Than be the crownèd king of all the nations of the dead.
And
From him his soul bewailing her hapless fortunes fled,
Her youth and beauty leaving, to the kingdoms of the dead!
All such passages must be expurgated from school editions; nor is it right to admit the fearful scenery of Hell, the rivers of Hate (Styx) and Wailing (Kokutos), ghosts, banshees, and other terrible words, for fear of making the children nervous.
Then comes the discussion of the ideal man, in which Achilles falls from the pedestal which he had previously occupied as the ideal of Hellenic manhood. Great men must not indulge in immoderate lamentations for their dead friends. The lament of Achilles for Patroklos and of Priam for Hektor, when he rolled in the dust and the dungheap, must be rejected. “For if the young should take such stories seriously and not laugh them to scorn as contemptibly improbable, they would be most unlikely to consider such lamentations degrading, or to check themselves when they felt any impulse to act in such a way, but, without shame or restraint, they would whine out many dirges over tiny misfortunes.”[671]
Nor must the heroes be made too fond of laughing. For immoderate laughter leads by reaction to immoderate grief. So reject—
Then rose among the blessed gods a laugh unquenchable.
The myths must instil self-control, obedience to rulers and elders and to the better instincts. This leads Plato to expurgate—
Thou drunkard, shameless as a dog, and fearful as a deer:
but commend—
Good father, sit in silence, and hearken to what I say.
Then Homer teaches gluttony, by making Odusseus, the wisest of men, say—
Best thing in life I count it, a heavy-laden board,
While in the goblets ceaselessly the good strong wine is poured.
Still worse are the tales of the lusts of Zeus or of Ares and Aphrodite, and of the covetousness of the gods.
Gifts win the heart of gods: gifts win the heart of kings.
Nor must the heroes be allowed to blaspheme. “My respect for Homer makes me shrink from saying it, but it is impious to state or to believe that Achilles was ready to fight against the river, a god, or that he dragged Hektor’s body round Patroklos’ tomb or slaughtered captives upon it, or that he gave to the dead Patroklos the hair which he had dedicated to the river god Spercheios.”[672] Nor must poets say that wicked men are enviable, if they are not found out, or that justice does good to others but is a loss to oneself. On the contrary, they must invent myths to establish the opposite, whether it be true or not, because it is profitable.
Plato cares very little for literal truth in mythology; he is only desirous that the fiction should be improving and in accordance with sound ethics. It is impossible to know the truth, he thinks, about things primeval and the gods, so it is necessary to invent stories as near the truth as possible and such that they will be improving. The majority of men, as Isokrates also noticed, prefer myths to anything else; for their intelligence can only grasp ethical and metaphysical truths when they are embodied in stories and parables and fables.[673] These fictions, however, are like powerful drugs: their concoction must only be entrusted to competent hands, or the result will be deadly. The rulers of the State, the philosophers, must construct the national mythology, not unskilled and irresponsible persons like poets.[674] Plato himself gives a good many instances of such profitable myths; he enshrines in them, as in a popular form, many of his deepest beliefs, his psychology,[675] his views of the immortality of the soul,[676] his political theory that all men are not equal.[677] In his opinion mythology was the proper food for the unenlightened many who were incapable of philosophic certainty; the philosopher, by the light of his exact knowledge of ethics and metaphysics, was to concoct this food.
In pursuance of this theory an ideal character, in history or fiction, was required to personify and make real to the multitude the disembodied ideals of Ethics.[678] Achilles had been tumbled from his pedestal by philosophy. Who was to replace him? Plato tries to put an idealised Sokrates in this position, but he could not square the historical personality with the ideal man postulated in the Republic. Xenophon, also thinking that a pattern man is “an excellent invention for the study of morality,” proposes Agesilaos.[679] Prodikos tried to make Herakles the model of the young. Aristotle formulated the μεγαλόψυχος, but never personified him. Stoicism sought for its Wise Man or Perfect Saint, but never found him; Epicureanism was satisfied with its founder. But the search for the personification of the ethical ideal becomes the central feature of Hellenic philosophy and religion from the time of Plato onwards.
[655] Herod. vii. 159-161.
[656] Plato, Ion, 24 C.
[657] Rep. 606 E. So in Isokrates, To Nikokles, 530 B.
[658] Aristoph. Frogs, 1034-1036.
[659] Plato, Rep. 391 B.
[660] Sokrates in Xenophon, Mem. i. 3, 7. The moralisation is quite un-Homeric.
[661] Herod, ii. 43-46. This tendency culminated in Euhemeros, at the end of the fourth century, who claimed to have found inscriptions in Crete giving the careers of mortal kings named Ouranos, Kronos, and Zeus. He argued that the gods were distinguished men, deified by admiring posterity. His theory passed to Rome in Ennius’ translation and supported the imperial cult.
[662] Plato, Phaedr. 229 C.
[663] Plato, Ion, 530. Cp. Xen. Banquet, iii. 6, where Anaximandros is mentioned.
[664] Cp. Aristoph. Clouds, 905, 1080, representing “Sophist” arguments.
[665] Plato, Rep. 377 D.
[666] Isok. Bous. 228 D.
[667] Cp. the statement of Herodotos (ii. 53) that Homer and Hesiod created the details of Hellenic mythology, even the names and functions of the deities.
[668] Plato, Rep. 377 B.
[669] Ibid. 378.
[670] Plato, Rep. 380.
[671] Plato, Rep. 388 D.
[672] Ibid. 391 B. Plato maligns Achilles. He only promised the hair to Spercheios on condition that he returned home alive, which he knew he would not do if he slew Hektor.
[673] Compare Tennyson, In Memoriam, xxxvi.:
For Wisdom dealt with mortal powers,
Where truth in closest words shall fail,
When truth embodied in a tale
Shall enter in at lowly doors.
[674] Plato, Rep. 389 C.
[675] In the Phaidros.
[676] In the Republic, and elsewhere.
[677] Rep. 414-417, etc. For the use which Plato made of myths as popular expositions of his views, cp. Laws, 663, 664, 713, 714, 716.
[678] Isokrates recognised this too, Antid. 105 C.
[679] Xen. Ag. x. 2.