Mosaics of Grecian History

by Marcius Willson; Robert Pierpont Wilson

I. GRECIAN MYTHOLOGY.

As the Greeks, in common with the Egyptians and other Eastern nations, placed the reign of the gods anterior to the race of mortals, Grecian mythology—which is a system of myths, or fabulous opinions and doctrines respecting the universe and the deities who were supposed to preside over it—forms the most natural and appropriate introduction to Grecian history.

Our principal knowledge of this system is derived from the works of Homer, He'si-od, and other ancient writers, who have gathered the floating legends of which it consists into tales and epic poems, many of them of great power and beauty. Some of these legends are exceedingly natural and pleasing, while others shock and disgust us by the gross impossibilities and hideous deformities which they reveal. Yet these legends are the spontaneous and the earliest growth of the Grecian mind, and were long accepted by the people as serious realities. They are, therefore, to be viewed as exponents of early Grecian philosophy,—of all that the early Greeks believed, and felt, and conjectured, respecting the universe and its government, and respecting the social relations, duties, and destiny of mankind,—and their influence upon national character was great. As a Scotch poet and scholar of our own day well remarks,

Old fables these, and fancies old!
But not with hasty pride
Let logic cold and reason bold
Cast these old dreams aside.
Dreams are not false in all their scope:
Oft from the sleepy lair
Start giant shapes of fear and hope
That, aptly read, declare
Our deepest nature. God in dreams
Hath spoken to the wise;
And in a people's mythic themes
A people's wisdom lies.
—J. STUART BLACKIE.

According to Grecian philosophy, first in the order of time came Cha'os, a heterogeneous mass, containing all the seeds of nature. This was formed by the hand of an unknown god, into "broad-breasted Earth" (the mother of the gods), who produced U'ranus, or Heaven. Then Earth married Uranus, or Heaven; and from this union came a numerous and powerful brood—the Ti'tans, and the Cyclo'pes, and the gods of the wintry season Kot'-tos, Bria're-us, and Gy'ges, who had each a hundred hands), supposed to be personifications of the hail, the rain, and the snow.

The Titans made war upon their father, Uranus, who was wounded by Chro'nos, or Saturn, the youngest and bravest of his sons. From the drops of blood which flowed from the wound and fell upon the earth sprung the Furies, the Giants, and the Me'lian nymphs; and from those which fell into the sea sprang Venus, the goddess of love and beauty. Uranus being dethroned, Saturn was permitted by his brethren to reign, on condition that he would destroy all his male children. But Rhe'a (his wife), unwilling to see her children perish, concealed from him the birth of Zeus' (or Jupiter), Pos-ei'don (or Neptune), and Pluto.

THE BATTLE OF THE GIANTS.

The Titans, informed that Saturn had saved his children, made war upon him and dethroned him; but he was soon restored by his son Jupiter. Yet Jupiter soon afterward conspired against his father, and after a long war with him and his giant progeny, that lasted full ten years, he drove Saturn from the kingdom, which he held against the repeated assaults of all the gods, who were finally destroyed or imprisoned by his overmastering power. This contest is termed "the Battle of the Giants," and is very celebrated in Grecian mythology. The description of it which HESIOD has given in his Theogony is considered "one of the most sublime passages in classical poetry, conceived with great boldness, and executed with a power and force which show a masterly though rugged genius. It will bear a favorable comparison with Milton's 'Battle of the Angels,' in Paradise Lost." We subjoin the following extracts from it:

The immeasurable sea tremendous dashed
With roaring, earth resounded, the broad heaven
Groaned, shattering; huge Olympus reeled throughout,
Down to its rooted base, beneath the rush
Of those immortals. The dark chasm of hell
Was shaken with the trembling, with the tramp
Of hollow footsteps and strong battle-strokes,
And measureless uproar of wild pursuit.
So they against each other through the air
Hurled intermixed their weapons, scattering groans
Where'er they fell.

The voice of armies rose
With rallying shout through the starred firmament,
And with a mighty war-cry both the hosts
Encountering closed. Nor longer then did Jove
Curb down his force, but sudden in his soul
There grew dilated strength, and it was filled
With his omnipotence; his whole of might
Broke from him, and the godhead rushed abroad.
The vaulted sky, the Mount Olympus, flashed
With his continual presence, for he passed
Incessant forth, and lightened where he trod.

Thrown from his nervous grasp the lightnings flew,
Reiterated swift; the whirling flash,
Cast sacred splendor, and the thunder-bolt
Fell. Then on every side the foodful earth
Roared in the burning flame, and far and near
The trackless depth of forests crashed with fire;
Yea, the broad earth burned red, the floods of Nile
Glowed, and the desert waters of the sea.

Round and round the Titans' earthy forms
Rolled the hot vapor, and on fiery surge
Streamed upward, swathing in one boundless blaze
The purer air of heaven. Keen rushed the light
In quivering splendor from the writhen flash;
Strong though they were, intolerable smote
Their orbs of sight, and with bedimming glare
Scorched up their blasted vision. Through the gulf
Of yawning chaos the supernal flame
Spread, mingling fire with darkness.

The whirlwinds were abroad, and hollow aroused
A shaking and a gathering dark of dust,
Crushing the thunders from the clouds of air,
Hot thunder-bolts and flames, the fiery darts
Of Jove; and in the midst of either host
They bore upon their blast the cry confused
Of battle, and the shouting. For the din
Tumultuous of that sight-appalling strife
Rose without bound. Stern strength of hardy proof
Wreaked there its deeds, till weary sank the war.
—Trans. by ELTON.

Thus Jupiter, or Jove, became the head of the universe; and to him is ascribed the creation of the subsequent gods, of man, and of all animal life, and the supreme control and government of all. His supremacy is beautifully sung in the following hymn by the Greek philosopher CLE-AN'THES, said to be the only one of his numerous writings that has been preserved. Like many others of the ancient hymns of adoration, it presents us with high spiritual conceptions of the unity and attributes of Deity; and had it been addressed to Jehovah it would have been deemed a grand tribute to his majesty and a noble specimen of deep devotional feeling.

Hymn to Jupiter.

Most glorious of th' immortal powers above—
O thou of many names—mysterious Jove!
For evermore almighty! Nature's source,
That govern'st all things in their ordered course,
All hail to thee! Since, innocent of blame,
E'en mortal creatures may address thy name—
For all that breathe and creep the lowly earth
Echo thy being with reflected birth—
Thee will I sing, thy strength for aye resound!
The universe that rolls this globe around
Moves wheresoe'er thy plastic influence guides,
And, ductile, owns the god whose arm presides.

The lightnings are thy ministers of ire,
The double-forked and ever-living fire;
In thy unconquerable hand they glow,
And at the flash all nature quakes below.
Thus, thunder-armed, thou dost creation draw
To one immense, inevitable law;
And with the various mass of breathing souls
Thy power is mingled and thy spirit rolls.
Dread genius of creation! all things bow
To thee! the universal monarch thou!
Nor aught is done without thy wise control
On earth, or sea, or round the ethereal pole,
Save when the wicked, in their frenzy blind,
Act o'er the follies of a senseless mind.

Thou curb'st th' excess; confusion to thy sight
Moves regular; th' unlovely scene is bright.
Thy hand, educing good from evil, brings
To one apt harmony the strife of things.
One ever-during law still binds the whole,
Though shunned, resisted, by the sinner's soul.
Wretches! while still they course the glittering prize,
The law of God eludes their ears and eyes.
Life then were virtue, did they this obey;
But wide from life's chief good they headlong stray.

Now glory's arduous toils the breast inflame;
Now avarice thirsts, insensible of shame;
Now sloth unnerves them in voluptuous ease,
And the sweet pleasures of the body please.
With eager haste they rush the gulf within,
And their whole souls are centred in their sin.
But oh, great Jove! by whom all good is given—
Dweller with lightnings and the clouds of heaven—
Save from their dreadful error lost mankind!
Father, disperse these shadows of the mind!
Give them thy pure and righteous law to know,
Wherewith thy justice governs all below.
Thus honored by the knowledge of thy way,
Shall men that honor to thyself repay,
And bid thy mighty works in praises ring,
As well befits a mortal's lips to sing;
More blest nor men nor heavenly powers can be
Than when their songs are of thy law and thee.
—Trans. by ELTON.

Jupiter is said to have divided the dominion of the universe between himself and his two brothers, Neptune and Pluto, taking heaven as his own portion, and having his throne and holding his court on Mount Olympus, in Thessaly, while he assigned the dominion of the sea to Neptune, and to Pluto the lower regions—the abodes of the dead. Jupiter had several wives, both goddesses and mortals; but last of all he married his sister Juno, who maintained permanently the dignity of queen of the gods. The offspring of Jupiter were numerous, comprising both celestial and terrestrial divinities. The most noted of the former were Mars, the god of war; Vulcan, the god of fire (the Olympian artist who forged the thunder-bolts of Jupiter and the arms of all the gods); and Apollo, the god of archery, prophecy, music, and medicine.

"Mine is the invention of the charming lyre;
Sweet notes, and heavenly numbers I inspire.
Med'cine is mine: what herbs and simples grow
In fields and forests, all their powers I know,
And am the great physician called below."
—Apollo to Daphne, in OVID'S Metam. PRYDEN'S Trans.

Then come Mercury, the winged messenger, interpreter and ambassador of the gods; Diana, queen of the woods and goddess of hunting, and hence the counterpart of her brother Apollo; and finally, Minerva, the goddess of wisdom and skill, who is said to have Sprung full-armed from the brain of Jupiter.

Besides these divinities there were many others—as Ceres, the goddess of grain and harvests; and Vesta, the goddess of home joys and comforts, who presided over the sanctity of the domestic hearth. There were also inferior gods and goddesses innumerable—such as deities of the woods and the mountains, the meadows and the rivers—some terrestrial, others celestial, according to the places over which they were supposed to preside, and rising in importance in proportion to the powers they manifested. Even the Muses, the Fates, and the Graces were numbered among Grecian deities.

But while, undoubtedly, the great mass of the Grecian people believed that their divinities were real persons, who presided over the affairs of men, their philosophers, while encouraging this belief as the best adapted to the understanding of the people, took quite a different view of them, and explained the mythological legends as allegorical representations of general physical and moral truths. Thus, while Jupiter, to the vulgar mind, was the god or the upper regions, "who dwelt on the Summits of the highest mountains, gathered the clouds about him, shook the air with his thunder, and wielded the lightning as the instrument of his wrath," yet in all this he was but the symbol of the ether or atmosphere which surrounds the earth; and hence, the numerous fables of this monarch of the gods may be considered merely as "allegories which typify the great generative power of the universe, displaying itself in a variety of ways, and under the greatest diversity of forms." So, also, Apollo was, in all likelihood, originally the sun-god of the Asiatic nations; displaying all the attributes of that luminary; and because fire is "the great agent in reducing and working the metals, Vulcan, the fire-god, naturally became an artist, and is represented as working with hammer and tongs at his anvil. Thus the Greeks, instead of worshipping Nature, worshipped the Powers of Nature, as personified in the almost infinite number of their deities.

The process by which the beings of Grecian mythology came into existence, among an ardent and superstitious people, is beautifully described by the poet WORDSWORTH as very naturally arising out of the

Teeming Fancies of the Greek Mind.

The lively Grecian, in a land of hills,
Rivers, and fertile plains, and sounding shores,
Under a copse of variegated sky,
Could find commodious place for every god.
In that fair clime the lonely herdsman, stretched
On the soft grass through half a summer's day,
With music lulled his indolent repose;
And in some fit of weariness, if he,
When his own breath was silent, chanced to hear
A distant strain, far sweeter than the sounds
Which his poor skill could make, his fancy fetch'd
Even from the blazing chariot of the sun
A beardless youth, who touched a golden lute,
And filled the illumined groves with ravishment.

The night hunter, lifting a bright eye
Up toward the crescent moon, with grateful heart
Called on the lovely wanderer who bestow'd
That timely light to share his joyous sport.
And hence a beaming goddess, with her nymphs,
Across the lawn, and through the darksome grove
(Not unaccompanied with tuneful notes,
By echo multiplied from rock or cave),
Swept in the storm of chase, as moon and stars
Glance rapidly along the clouded heaven
When winds are blowing strong. The traveller slacked
His thirst from rill or gushing fount, and thank'd
The Naiad. Sunbeams, upon distant hills
Gliding apace, with shadows in their train,
Might, with small help from fancy, be transformed
Into fleet Oreads sporting visibly.

The Zephyrs fanning, as they passed, their wings,
Lacked not for love fair objects, whom they wooed
With gentle whisper. Withered boughs grotesque,
Stripped of their leaves and twigs by hoary age,
From depth of shaggy covert peeping forth
In the low vale, or on steep mountain side—
And sometimes intermixed with stirring horns
Of the live deer, or goat's depending beard—
These were the lurking Satyrs, a wild brood
Of gamesome deities; or Pan himself,
The simple shepherd's awe-inspiring god.

Similar ideas are expressed in an article on the Nature of Early History, by a celebrated English scholar, [Footnote: Henry George Liddell, D. D., Dean of Christchurch College, Oxford.] who says: "The legends, or mythic fables, of the Greeks are chiefly connected with religious ideas, and may mostly be traced to that sort of awe or wonder with which simple and uneducated minds regard the changes and movements of the natural world. The direct and easy way in which the imagination of such persons accounts for marvelous phenomena, is to refer them to the operation of Persons. When the attention is excited by the regular movements of sun, and moon, and stars, by the alternations of day and night, by the recurrence of the seasons, by the rising and falling of the seas, by the ceaseless flow of rivers, by the gathering of clouds, the rolling of thunder, and the flashing of lightning, by the operations of life in the vegetable and animal worlds—in short, by any exhibition of an active and motive power—it is natural for uninstructed minds to consider such changes and movements as the work of divine Persons. In this manner the early Greek legends associate themselves with personifications of the powers of Nature. All attempts to account for the marvels which surround us are foregone; everything is referred to the immediate operation of a god. 'Cloud-compelling Zeus' is the author of the phenomenon of the air; 'Earth-shaking Pos-ei'don,' of all that happens in the water under the earth; Nymphs are attached to every spring or tree; De-me'ter, or Mother Earth, for six months rejoices in the presence of Proserpine, [Footnote: In some legends Proserpine is regarded as the daughter of Mother Earth, or Ceres, and a personification of the growing corn.] the green herb, her daughter, and for six months regrets her absence in dark abodes beneath the earth.

"This tendency to deify the powers of Nature is due partly to a clear atmosphere and sunny climate, which incline a people to live much in the open air in close communion with all that Nature offers to charm the senses and excite the imagination; partly to the character of the people, and partly to the poets who in early times wrought these legendary tales into works which are read with increased delight in ages when science and method have banished the simple faith which procured acceptance for these legends.

"Among the Greeks all these conditions were found existing. They lived, so to say, out-of-doors; their powers of observation were extremely quick, and their imagination singularly vivid; and their ancient poems are the most noble specimens of the old legendary tales that have been preserved in any country."

This tendency of the Grecian mind is also very happily set forth in the following lines by PROFESSOR BLACKIE:

The old Greek men, the old Greek men—
No blinking fools were they,
But with a free and broad-eyed ken
Looked forth on glorious day.
They looked on the sun in their cloudless sky,
And they saw that his light was fair;
And they said that the round, full-beaming eye
Of a blazing GOD was there!

They looked on the vast spread Earth, and saw
The various fashioned forms, with awe
Of green and creeping life,
And said, "In every moving form,
With buoyant breath and pulses warm,
In flowery crowns and veined leaves,
A GODDESS dwells, whose bosom heaves
With organizing strife."

They looked and saw the billowy sea,
With its boundless rush of water's free,
Belting the firm earth, far and wide,
With the flow of its deep, untainted tide;
And wondering viewed, in its clear blue flood,
A quick and scaly-glancing brood,
Sporting innumerous in the deep
With dart, and plunge, and airy leap;
And said, "Full sure a GOD doth reign
King of this watery, wide domain,
And rides in a car of cerulean hue
O'er bounding billows of green and blue;
And in one hand a three-pronged spear
He holds, the sceptre of his fear,
And with the other shakes the reins
Of his steeds, with foamy, flowing manes,
And coures o'er the brine;
And when he lifts his trident mace,
Broad Ocean crisps his darkling face,
And mutters wrath divine;
The big waves rush with hissing crest,
And beat the shore with ample breast,
And shake the toppling cliff:

A wrathful god has roused the wave—
Vain is all pilot's skill to save,
And lo! a deep, black-throated grave
Ingulfs the reeling skiff."
Anon the flood less fiercely flows,
The rifted cloud blue ether shows,
The windy buffets cease;
Poseidon chafes his heart no more,
His voice constrains the billows' roar,
And men may sail in peace.

[Footnote: Pos-ei'don, another name for Neptune, the sea-god.]

In the old oak a Dryad dwelt;
The fingers of a nymph were felt
In the fine-rippled flood;
At drowsy noon, when all was still,
Faunus lay sleeping on the hill,
And strange and bright-eyed gamesome creatures,
With hairy limbs and goat-like features,
Peered from the prickly wood.

[Footnote: The Sa'tyrs.]

Thus every power that zones the sphere
With forms of beauty and of fear,
In starry sky, on grassy ground,
And in the fishy brine profound,
Were, to the hoar Pelasgic men
That peopled erst each Grecian glen,
GODS—or the actions of a god:
Gods were in every sight and sound
And every spot was hallowed ground
Where these far-wandering patriarchs trod.

But all this fairy world has passed away, to live only as shadows in the realms of fancy and of song. SCHILLER gives expression to the poet's lament in the following lines:

Art thou, fair world, no more?
Return, thou virgin-bloom on Nature's face!
Ah, only on the minstrel's magic shore
Can we the footsteps of sweet Fable trace!
The meadows mourn for the old hallowing life;
Vainly we search the earth, of gods bereft;
Where once the warm and living shapes were rife
Shadows alone are left.

The Latin poet OV'ID, who lived at the time of the Christian era, has collected from the fictions of the early Greeks and Oriental nations, and woven into one continuous history, the pagan accounts of the Creation, embracing a description of the primeval world, and the early changes it underwent, followed by a history of the four eras or ages of primitive mankind, the deluge of Deuca'lion, and then onward down to the time of Augustus Cæsar. This great work of the pagan poet, called The Metamorphoses, is not only the most curious and valuable record extant of ancient mythology, but some have thought they discovered, in every story it contains, a moral allegory; while others have attempted to trace in it the whole history of the Old Testament, and types of the miracles and sufferings of our Savior. But, however little of truth there may be in the last of these suppositions, the beautiful and impressive account of the Creation given by this poet, of the Four Ages of man's history which followed, and of the Deluge, coincides in so many remarkable respects with the Bible narrative, and with geological and other records, that we give it here as a specimen of Grecian fable that contains some traces of true history. The translation is by Dryden:

Account of the Creation.

Before the seas, and this terrestrial ball,
And heaven's high canopy, that covers all,
One was the face of Nature—if a face—
Rather, a rude and indigested mass;
A lifeless lump, unfashioned and unframed,
Of jarring elements, and CHAOS named.

No sun was lighted up the world to view,
Nor moon did yet her blunted horns renew,
Nor yet was earth suspended in the sky,
Nor, poised, did on her own foundations lie,
Nor seas about the shores their arms had thrown;
But earth, and air, and water were in one.
Thus air was void of light, and earth unstable,
And water's dark abyss unnavigable.
No certain form on any was impressed;
All were confused, and each disturbed the rest.

Thus disembroiled they take their proper place;
The next of kin contiguously embrace,
And foes are sundered by a larger space.
The force of fire ascended first on high,
And took its dwelling in the vaulted sky;
Then air succeeds, in lightness next to fire,
Whose atoms from inactive earth retire;
Earth sinks beneath and draws a numerous throng
Of ponderous, thick, unwieldy seeds along.
About her coasts unruly waters roar,
And, rising on a ridge, insult the shore.
Thus when the god—whatever god was he—
Had formed the whole, and made the parts agree,
That no unequal portions might be found,
He moulded earth into a spacious round;
Then, with a breath, he gave the winds to blow,
And bade the congregated waters flow.
He adds the running springs and standing lakes,
And bounding banks for winding rivers makes.
Some parts in earth are swallowed up; the most,
In ample oceans disembogued, are lost.
He shades the woods, the valleys he restrains
With rocky mountains, and extends the plains.

Then, every void of nature to supply,
With forms of gods Jove fills the vacant sky;
New herds of beasts sends the plains to share;
New colonies of birds to people air;
And to their cozy beds the finny fish repair.
A creature of a more exalted kind
Was wanting yet, and then was Man designed;
Conscious of thought, of more capacious breast,
For empire formed and fit to rule the rest;
Whether with particles of heavenly fire
The God of nature did his soul inspire,
Or earth, but new divided from the sky,
And pliant, still retained the ethereal energy.
Thus while the mute creation downward bend
Their sight, and to their earthly mother tend,
Man looks aloft, and with erected eyes
Beholds his own hereditary skies.

FOUR AGES OF MAN.

The poet now describes the Ages, or various epochs in the civilization of the human race. The first is the Golden Age, a period of patriarchal simplicity, when Earth yielded her fruits spontaneously, and spring was eternal.

The GOLDEN AGE was first, when man, yet new,
No rule but uncorrupted reason knew,
And, with a native bent, did good pursue.
Unforced by punishment, unawed by fear.
His words were simple and his soul sincere;
Needless were written laws where none oppressed;
The law of man was written on his breast.
No suppliant crowds before the judge appeared,
No court erected yet, nor cause was heard,
But all was safe, for conscience was their guard.

No walls were yet, nor fence, nor moat, nor mound;
Nor drum was heard, nor trumpet's angry sound;
Nor swords were forged; but, void of care and crime,
The soft creation slept away their time.
The teeming earth, yet guiltless of the plough,
And unprovoked, did fruitful stores allow;
The flowers, unsown, in fields and meadows reigned,
And western winds immortal spring maintained.

The next; or the Silver Age, was marked by the change of seasons, and the division and cultivation of lands.

Succeeding times a SILVER AGE behold,
Excelling brass, but more excelled by gold.
Then summer, autumn, winter did appear,
And spring was but a season of the year;
The sun his annual course obliquely made,
Good days contracted, and enlarged the bad.
Then air with sultry heats began to glow,
The wings of wind were clogged with ice and snow;
And shivering mortals, into houses driven,
Sought shelter from the inclemency of heaven.
Those houses then were caves or homely sheds,
With twining osiers fenced, and moss their beds.
Then ploughs for seed the fruitful furrows broke,
And oxen labored first beneath the yoke.

Then followed the Brazen Age, which was an epoch of war and violence.

To this came next in course the BRAZEN AGE;
A warlike offspring, prompt to bloody rage,
Not impious yet.

According to He'siod, the next age is the Heroic, in which the world began to aspire toward better things; but OVID omits this altogether, and gives, as the fourth and last, the Iron Age, also called the Plutonian Age, full of all sorts of hardships and wickedness. His description of it is as follows:

Hard steel succeeded then,
And stubborn as the metal were the men.
Truth, Modesty, and Shame the world forsook;
Fraud, Avarice, and Force their places took.
Then sails were spread to every wind that blew;
Raw were the sailors, and the depths were new:
Trees rudely hollowed did the waves sustain,
Ere ships in triumph plough'd the watery plain.
Then landmarks limited to each his right;
For all before was common as the light.
Nor was the ground alone required to bear
Her annual income to the crooked share;
But greedy mortals, rummaging her store,
Digged from her entrails first the precious ore;
(Which next to hell the prudent gods had laid),
And that alluring ill to sight displayed:
Thus cursed steel, and more accursed gold,
Gave mischief birth, and made that mischief bold;
And double death did wretched man invade,
By steel assaulted, and by gold betrayed.
Now (brandished weapons glittering in their hands)
Mankind is broken loose from moral bands:
No rights of hospitality remain;
The guest by him who harbored him is slain;
The son-in-law pursues the father's life;
The wife her husband murders, he the wife;
The step-dame poison for the son prepares,
The son inquires into his father's years.
Faith flies, and Piety in exile mourns;
And Justice, here oppressed, to heaven returns.

The Scriptures assert that the wickedness of mankind was the cause of the Noachian flood, or deluge. So, also, we find that, in Grecian mythology, like causes led to the deluge of Deuca'lion. Therefore, before giving Ovid's account of this latter event, we give, from Hesiod, a curious account of

THE ORIGIN OF EVIL, AND ITS INTRODUCTION INTO THE WORLD.

It appears from the legend that, during a controversy between the gods and men, Pro-me'theus, [Footnote: In most Greek proper names ending in eus, the eus is pronounced in one syllable; as Or'pheus, pronounced Or'phuse.] who is said to have surpassed all his fellow-men in intellectual vigor and sagacity, stole fire from the skies, and, concealing it in a hollow staff, brought it to man. Jupiter, angry at the theft of that which had been reserved from mortals for wise purposes, resolved to punish Prometheus, and through him all mankind, to show that it was not given to man to elude the wisdom of the gods. He therefore caused Vulcan to form an image of air and water, to give it human voice and strength, and make it assume the form of a beautiful woman, like the immortal goddesses themselves. Minerva endowed this new creation with artistic skill, Venus gave her the witchery of beauty, Mercury inspired her with an artful disposition, and the Graces added all their charms. But we append the following extracts from the beautifully written account by Hesiod, beginning with the command which Jupiter gave to Vulcan, the fire-god:

Thus spoke the sire, whom heaven and earth obey,
And bade the fire-god mould his plastic clay;
In-breathe the human voice within her breast;
With firm-strung nerves th'elastic limbs invest;
Her aspect fair as goddesses above—
A virgin's likeness, with the brows of love.

He bade Minerva teach the skill that dyes
The wool with color's as the shuttle flies:
He called the magic of Love's charming queen
To breathe around a witchery of mien;
Then plant the rankling stings of keen desire
And cares that trick the limbs with pranked attire:
Bade Her'mes [Footnote: Mercury.] last impart the Craft refined
Of thievish manners, and a shameless mind.

He gives command—the inferior powers obey—
The crippled artist [Footnote: Vulcan.] moulds the tempered clay:
A maid's coy image rose at Jove's behest;
Minerva clasped the zone, diffused too vest;
Adored Persuasion and the Graces young
Her tapered limbs with golden jewels hung;
Round her smooth brow the beauteous-tressed Hours
A garland twined of Spring's purpureal flowers.

The whole attire Minerva's graceful art
Disposed, adjusted, formed to every part;
And last, the winged herald [Footnote: Mercury.] of the skies,
Slayers of Argus, gave the gift of lies—
Gave trickish manners, honeyed words instilled,
As he that rolls the deepening thunder willed:
Then by the feathered messenger of Heaven
The name PANDO'RA to the maid was given;
For all the gods conferred a gifted grace
To crown this mischief of the mortal race.

Thus furnished, Pandora was brought as a gift from Jupiter to the dwelling of Ep-i-me'theus, the brother of Prometheus; and the former, dazzled by her charms, received her in spite of the warnings of his sagacious brother, and made her his wife.

The sire commands the winged herald bear
The finished nymph, th' inextricable snare.
To Epimetheus was the present brought:
Prometheus' warning vanished from his thought—
That he disdain each offering of the skies,
And straight restore, lest ill to man arise.
But he received, and, conscious, knew too late
Th' insidious gift, and felt the curse of fate.

In the dwelling of Epimetheus stood a closed casket, which he had been forbidden to open; but Pandora, disregarding the injunction, raised the lid; when lo! to her consternation, all the evils hitherto unknown to mortals poured out, and spread themselves over the earth. In terror at the sight of these monsters, Pandora shut down the lid just in time to prevent the escape of Hope, which thus remained to man, his chief support and consolation amid the trials of his pilgrimage.

On earth, of yore, the sons of men abode
From evil free, and labor's galling load;
Free from diseases that; with racking rage,
Precipitate the pale decline of age.
Now swift the days of manhood haste away,
And misery's pressure turns the temples gray.
The Woman's hands an ample casket bear;
She lifts the lid—she scatters ill in air.

Hope sole remained within, nor took her flight—
Beneath the vessel's verge concealed from light;
Issued the rest, in quick dispersion buried,
And woes innumerous roamed the breathing world:
With ills the land is full, with ills the sea;
Diseases haunt our frail humanity;
Self-wandering through the noon, at night they glide
Voiceless—a voice the power all-wise denied:
Know, then, this awful truth: it is not given
To elude the wisdom of omniscient Heaven.
—Trans. by ELTON.

PROFESSOR BLACKIE has made this legend the subject of a pleasing poem, from which we take the following extracts, beginning with the acceptance by Epimetheus of the gift from Jupiter. The deluded mortal exclaims—

"Bless thee, bless thee, gentle Hermes!
Once I sinned, and strove
Vainly with my haughty brother
'Gainst Olympian Jove.
Now my doubts his love hath vanquished;
Evil knows not he,
Whose free-streaming grace prepared
Such gift of gods for me.
Henceforth I and fair Pandora,
Joined in holy love,
Only one in heaven will worship—
Cloud-compelling Jove."
Thus he; and from the god received
The glorious gift of Jove,
And with fond embracement clasped her,
Thrilled by potent love;
And in loving dalliance with her
Lived from day to day,
While her bounteous smiles diffusive
Scared pale care away.

By the mountain, by the river,
'Neath the shaggy pine,
By the cool and grassy fountain
Where clear waters shine,
He with her did lightly stray,
Or softly did recline,
Drinking sweet intoxication
From that form divine.

One day, when the moon had wheeled
Four honeyed weeks away,
From her chamber came Pandora
Decked with trappings gay,
And before fond Epimetheus
Fondly she did stand,
A box all bright with lucid opal
Holding in her hand.

"Dainty box!" cried Epimetheus.
"Dainty well may't be,"
Quoth Pandora—"curious Vulcan
Framed it cunningly;
Jove bestowed it in my dowry:
Like bright Phoebus' ray
It shines without; within, what wealth
I know not to this day."

It will be observed in what follows that the poet does not strictly adhere to the legend as given by Hesiod, in which it is stated that Pandora, probably under the influence of curiosity, herself raised the lid of the mysterious casket. The poet, instead, attributes the act to Epimetheus, and so relieves Pandora of the odium and the guilt.

"Let me see," quoth Epimetheus,
"What my touch can do!"
And swiftly to his finger's call
The box wide open flew.
O heaven! O hell! What Pandemonium
In the pouncet dwells!
How it quakes, and how it quivers;
How it seethes and swells!
Misty steams from it upwreathing,
Wave on wave is spread!
Like a charnel-vault, 'tis breathing
Vapors of the dead!
Fumes on fumes as from a throat
Of sooty Vulcan rise,
Clouds of red and blue and yellow
Blotting the fair skies!
And the air, with noisome stenches,
As from things that rot,
Chokes the breather—exhalation
From the infernal pot.
And amid the thick-curled vapors
Ghastly shapes I see
Of dire diseases, Epimetheus,
Launched on earth by thee.
A horrid crew! Some lean and dwindled,
Some with boils and blains
Blistered, some with tumors swollen,
And water in the veins;
Some with purple blotches bloated,
Some with humors flowing
Putrid, some with creeping tetter
Like a lichen growing
O'er the dry skin scaly-crusted;
Some with twisted spine
Dwarfing low with torture slow
The human form divine;
Limping some, some limbless lying;
Fever, with frantic air,
And pale consumption veiling death
With looks serenely fair.

All the troop of cureless evils,
Rushing reinless forth
From thy damned box, Pandora,
Seize the tainted earth!
And to lay the marshalled legions
Of our fiendish pains,
Hope alone, a sorry charmer,
In the box remains.
Epimetheus knew the dolors,
But he knew too late;
Jealous Jove himself, now vainly,
Would revoke the fate.
And he cursed the fair Pandora,
But he cursed in vain;
Still, to fools, the fleeting pleasure
Buys the lasting pain!

WHAT PROMETHEUS PERSONIFIED.

PROFESSOR BLACKIE says, regarding Prometheus, that the common conception of him is, that he was the representative of freedom in contest with despotism. He thinks, however, that Goethe is nearer the depth of the myth when, in his beautiful lyric, he represents Prometheus as the impersonation of that indefatigable endurance in man which conquers the earth by skilful labor, in opposition to and despite; those terrible influences of the wild, elemental forces of Nature which the Greeks supposed were concentrated in the person of Jove. Accordingly, PROFESSOR BLACKIE, in his Legend of Prometheus; represents him as proclaiming, in the following language, his empire on the earth, in opposition to the powers above:

"Jove rules above: Fate willed it so.
'Tis well; Prometheus rules below.
Their gusty games let wild winds play,
And clouds on clouds in thick array
Muster dark armies in the sky:
Be mine a harsher trade to ply—
This solid Earth, this rocky frame
To mould, to conquer, and to tame—
And to achieve the toilsome plan
My workman shall be MAN.

"The Earth is young. Even with these eyes
I saw the molten mountains rise
From out the seething deep, while Earth
Shook at the portent of their birth.
I saw from out the primal mud
The reptiles crawl, of dull, cold blood,
While winged lizards, with broad stare,
Peered through the raw and misty air.
Where then was Cretan Jove? Where then
This king of gods and men?

"When, naked from his mother Earth,
Weak and defenceless, man crept forth,
And on mis-tempered solitude
Of unploughed field and unclipped wood
Gazed rudely; when; with brutes, he fed
On acorns, and his stony bed
In dark, unwholesome caverns found,
No skill was then to tame the ground,
No help came then from him above—
This tyrannous, blustering Jove.

"The Earth is young. Her latest birth,
This weakling man, my craft shall girth
With cunning strength. Him I will take,
And in stern arts my scholar make.
This smoking reed, in which hold
The empyrean spark, shall mould
Rock and hard steel to use of man:
He shall be as a god to plan
And forge all things to his desire
By alchemy of fire.

"These jagged cliffs that flout the air,
Harsh granite rocks, so rudely bare,
Wise Vulcan's art and mine shall own
To piles of shapeliest beauty grown.
The steam that snorts vain strength away
Shall serve the workman's curious sway,
Like a wise child; as clouds that sail
White-winged before the summer gale,
The smoking chariot o'er the land
Shall roll at his command.

"'Blow, winds, and crack your checks!' my home
Stands firm beneath Jove's rattling dome,
This stable Earth. Here let me work!
The busy spirits that eager lurk
Within a thousand laboring breasts
Here let me rouse; and whoso rests
From labor, let him rest from life.
To 'live's to strive;' and in the strife
To move the rock and stir the clod
Man makes himself a god!"

THE PUNISHMENT OF PROMETHEUS.

Regarding the punishment of Prometheus for his daring act, the legend states that Jupiter bound him with chains to a rock or pillar, supposed to be in Scythia, and sent an eagle to prey without ceasing on his liver, which grew every night as much as it had lost during the day. After an interval of thirty thousand years Hercules, a hero of great strength and courage, slew the eagle and set the sufferer free. The Greek poet ÆS'CHYLUS, justly styled the father of Grecian tragedy, has made the punishment of Prometheus the basis of a drama, entitled Prometheus Bound, which many think is this poet's masterpiece, and of which it has been remarked:

"Nothing can be grander than the scenery in which the poet has made his hero suffer. He is chained to a desolate and stupendous rock at the extremity of earth's remotest wilds, frowning over old ocean. The daughters of O-ce'a-nus, who constitute the chorus of the tragedy, come to comfort and calm him; and even the aged Oceanus himself, and afterward Mercury, do all they can to persuade him to submit to his oppressor, Jupiter. But all to no purpose; he sternly and triumphantly refuses. Meanwhile, the tempest rages, the lightnings flash upon the rock, the sands are torn up by whirlwinds, the seas are dashed against the sky, and all the artillery of heaven is leveled against his bosom, while he proudly defies the vengeance of his tyrant, and sinks into the earth to the lower regions, calling on the Powers of Justice to avenge his wrongs."

In trying to persuade the defiant Prometheus to relent, Æschylus represents Mercury as thus addressing him:

"I have indeed, methinks, said much in vain,
For still thy heart, beneath my showers of prayers,
Lies dry and hard! nay, leaps like a young horse
Who bites against the new bit in his teeth,
And tugs and struggles against the new-tried rein,
Still fiercest in the weakest thing of all,
Which sophism is—for absolute will alone,
When left to its motions in perverted minds,
Is worse than null for strength! Behold and see,
Unless my words persuade thee, what a blast
And whirlwind of inevitable woe
Must sweep persuasion through thee! For at first
The Father will split up this jut of rock
With the great thunder and the bolted flame,
And hide thy body where the hinge of stone
Shall catch it like an arm! and when thou hast passed
A long black time within, thou shalt come out
To front the sun; and Zeus's winged hound,
The strong, carnivorous eagle, shall wheel down
To meet thee—self-called to a daily feast—
And set his fierce beak in thee, and tear off
The long rags of thy flesh, and batten deep
Upon thy dusky liver!

"Do not look
For any end, moreover, to this curse,
Or ere some god appear to bear thy pangs
On his own head vicarious, and descend
With unreluctant step the darks of hell,
And the deep glooms enringing Tartarus!
Then ponder this: the threat is not growth
Of vain invention—it is spoken and meant!
For Zeus's mouth is impotent to lie,
And doth complete the utterance in the act.
So, look to it, thou! take heed! and nevermore
Forget good counsel to indulge self-will!

To which Prometheus answers as follows:

"Unto me, the foreknower, this mandate of power,
He cries, to reveal it!
And scarce strange is my fate, if I suffer from hate
At the hour that I feel it!
Let the rocks of the lightning, all bristling and whitening,
Flash, coiling me round!
While the ether goes surging 'neath thunder and scourging
Of wild winds unbound!
Let the blast of the firmament whirl from its place
The earth rooted below—
And the brine of the ocean, in rapid emotion,
Be it driven in the face
Of the stars up in heaven, as they walk to and fro!
Let him hurl me anon into Tartarus—on—
To the blackest degree,
With necessity's vortices strangling me down!
But he cannot join death to a fate meant for me!"
—Trans. by ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING.

THE SUFFERINGS OF PROMETHEUS.

We close this subject with a brief extract from the Prometheus Bound of the English poet SHELLEY, in which the sufferings of the defiant captive are vividly portrayed:

"No change, no pause, no hope! yet I endure.
I ask the Earth, have not the mountains felt?
I ask yon Heaven, the all-beholding Sun,
Has it not seen? The Sea, in storm or calm,
Heaven's ever-changing shadow, spread below,
Have its deaf waves not heard my agony?
Ah me! alas, pain, pain ever, forever!

The crawling glaciers pierce me with the spears
Of their moon-freezing crystals; the bright chains
Eat with their burning gold into my bones.
Heaven's winged hound, polluting from thy lips
His beak in poison not his own, tears up
My heart; and shapeless sights come wandering by—
The ghastly people of the realm of dream
Mocking me; and the Earthquake fiends are charged
To wrench the rivets from my quivering wounds
When the rocks split and close again behind;
While from their loud abysses howling throng
The genii of the storm."

Returning now to the poet Ovid, we present the account which he gives of the Deluge, or the destruction of mankind by a flood, called by the Greeks,

THE DELUGE OF DEUCALION.

Deucalion is represented as the son of Prometheus, and is styled the father of the Greek nation of post-diluvian times. When Jupiter determined to destroy the human race on account of its impiety, it was his first design, OVID tells us, to accomplish it with fire. But his own safety demanded the employment of a less dangerous agency.

Already had Jove tossed the flaming brand,
And rolled the thunder in his spacious hand,
Preparing to discharge on seas and land;
But stopped, for fear, thus violently driven,
The sparks should catch his axle-tree of heaven—
Remembering, in the Fates, a time when fire
Should to the battlements of heaven aspire,
And all his blazing worlds above should burn,
And all the inferior globe to cinders turn.
His dire artillery thus dismissed, he bent
His thoughts to some securer punishment;
Concludes to pour a watery deluge down,
And what he durst not burn resolves to drown.

In all this myth, it will be seen, Jupiter may very properly be considered as a personification of the elemental strife that drowned a guilty world. Deucalion, warned, by his father, of the coming deluge, thereupon made himself an ark or skiff, and, putting provisions into it, entered it with his wife, Pyrrha. The whole earth is then overspread with the flood of waters, and all animal life perishes, except Deucalion and his wife.

The northern breath that freezes floods, Jove binds,
With all the race of cloud-dispelling winds:
The south he loosed, who night and horror brings,
And fogs are shaken from his flaggy wings.
From his divided beard two streams he pours;
His head and rheumy eyes distil in showers.
The skies, from pole to pole, with peals resound;
And showers enlarged come pouring on the ground.

Nor from his patrimonial heaven alone
Is Jove content to pour his vengeance down:
Aid from his brother of the seas he craves,
To help him with auxiliary waves.
The watery tyrant calls his brooks and floods,
Who roll from mossy caves, their moist abodes,
And with perpetual urns his palace fill;
To whom, in brief, he thus imparts his will:

"Small exhortation needs; your powers employ,
And this bad world (so Jove requires) destroy.
Let loose the reins to all your watery store;
Bear down the dams and open every door."

The floods, by nature enemies to land,
And proudly swelling with their new command,
Remove the living stones that stopped their way,
And, gushing from their source, augment the sea.
Then with his mace their monarch struck the ground:
With inward trembling Earth received the wound,
And rising stream a ready passage found.
The expanded waters gather on the plain,
They float the fields and overtop the grain;
Then, rushing onward, with a sweepy sway,
Bear flocks and folds and laboring hinds away.
Nor safe their dwellings were; for, sapped by floods,
Their houses fell upon their household gods.
The solid hills, too strongly built to fall,
High o'er their heads behold a watery wall.
Now seas and earth were in confusion lost—
A world of waters, and without a coast.

One climbs a cliff; one in his boat is borne,
And ploughs above where late he sowed his corn.
Others o'er chimney-tops and turrets row,
And drop their anchors on the meads below;
Or, downward driven, they bruise the tender vine,
Or, tossed aloft, are hurled against a pine.
And where of late the kids had cropped the grass,
The monsters of the deep now take their place.
Insulting Ner'e-ids on the cities ride,
And wondering dolphins o'er the palace glide.
On leaves and masts of mighty oaks they browse,
And their broad fins entangle in the boughs.

The frighted wolf now swims among the sheep,
The yellow lion wanders in the deep;
His rapid force no longer helps the boar,
The stag swims faster than he ran before.
The fowls, long beating on their wings in vain,
Despair of land, and drop into the main.
Now hills and vales no more distinction know,
And levelled nature lies oppressed below.
The most of mortals perished in the flood,
The small remainder dies for want of food.

Deucalion and Pyrrha were conveyed to the summit of Mount Parnassus, the highest mountain in Central Greece. According to Ovid, Deucalion now consulted the ancient oracle of Themis respecting the restoration of mankind, and received the following response: "Depart from the temple, veil your heads, loosen your girded vestments, and cast behind you the great bones of your parent." At length Deucalion discovered the meaning of the oracle—the bones being, by a very natural figure, the stones, or rocky heights, of the earth. The poet then gives the following account of the abatement of the waters, and of the appearance of the earth:

"When Jupiter, surveying earth from high,
Beheld it in a lake of water lie—
That, where so many millions lately lived,
But two, the best of either sex, survived—
He loosed the northern wind: fierce Boreas flies
To puff away the clouds and purge the skies:
Serenely, while he blows, the vapors driven
Discover heaven to earth and earth to heaven;
The billows fall while Neptune lays his mace
On the rough sea, and smooths its furrowed face.
Already Triton [Footnote: Son of Neptune.] at his call appears
Above the waves: a Tyrian robe he wears,
And in his hands a crooked trumpet bears.
The sovereign bids him peaceful sounds inspire,
And give the waves the signal to retire.
The waters, listening to the trumpet's roar,
Obey the summons, and forsake the shore.
A thin circumference of land appears,
And Earth, but not at once, her visage rears,
And peeps upon the seas from upper grounds:
The streams, but just contained within their bounds,
By slow degrees into their channels crawl,
And earth increases as the waters fall:
In longer time the tops of trees appear,
Which mud on their dishonored branches bear.
At length the world was all restored to view,
But desolate, and of a sickly hue:
Nature beheld herself, and stood aghast,
A dismal desert and a silent waste.

When the waters had abated Deucalion left the rocky heights behind him, in obedience to the direction of the oracle, and went to dwell in the plains below.

MORAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE GODS, AND OF THEIR RULE OVER MANKIND.

It is a prominent feature of the polytheistic system of the Greeks that the gods are represented as subject to all the passions and frailties of human nature. There were, indeed, among them personifications of good and of evil, as we see in A'te, the goddess of revenge or punishment, and in the Erin'nys (or Furies), who avenge violations of filial duty, punish perjury, and are the maintainers of order both in the moral and the natural world; yet while these moral ideas restrained and checked men, the gods seem to have been almost wholly free from such control. "The society of Olympus, therefore," says MAHAFFY, "is only an ideal Greek society in the lowest sense—the ideal of the school-boy who thinks all control irksome, and its absence the greatest good—the ideal of a voluptuous man, who has strong passions, and longs for the power to indulge them without unpleasant consequences. It appears, therefore, that the Homeric picture of Olympus is very valuable, as disclosing to us the poet's notion of a society freed from the restraints of religion; for the rhapsodists [Footnote: Rhapsodist, a term applied to the reciters of Greek verse.] were dealing a death-blow (perhaps unconsciously) to the received religious belief by these very pictures of sin and crime among the gods. Their idea is a sort of semi-monarchical aristocracy, where a number of persons have the power to help favorites, and thwart the general progress of affairs; where love of faction overpowers every other consideration, and justifies violence or deceit. [Footnote: "Social Life in Greece," by J. P. Mahaffy.]

MR. GLADSTONE has given us, in the following extract, his views of what he calls the "intense humanity" of the Olympian system, drawn from what its great expounder has set forth in the Iliad and the Odyssey. "That system," he says, "exhibits a kind of royal or palace life of man, but on the one hand more splendid and powerful, on the other more intense and free. It is a wonderful and a gorgeous creation. It is eminently in accordance with the signification of the English epithet—rather a favorite, apparently, with our old writers—the epithet jovial, which is derived from the Latin name of its head. It is a life of all the pleasures of mind and body, of banquet and of revel, of music and of song; a life in which solemn grandeur alternates with jest and gibe; a life of childish willfulness and of fretfulness, combined with serious, manly, and imperial cares; for the Olympus of Homer has at least this one recommendation to esteem—that it is not peopled with the merely lazy and selfish gods of Epicurus, but its inhabitants busily deliberate on the government of man, and in their debates the cause of justice wins.

"I do not now discuss the moral titles of the Olympian scheme; what I dwell upon is its intense humanity, alike in its greatness and its littleness, its glory and its shame. As the cares and joys of human life, so the structure of society below is reflected, by the wayward wit of man, on heaven above. Though the names and fundamental traditions of the several deities were wholly or in great part imported from abroad, their characters, relations, and attributes passed under a Hellenizing process, which gradually marked off for them special provinces and functions, according to laws which appear to have been mainly original and indigenous, and to have been taken by analogy from the division of labor in political society. The Olympian society has its complement of officers and servants, with their proper functions. He-phæs'tus (or Vulcan) moulds the twenty golden thrones which move automatically to form the circle of the council of the gods, and builds for each of his brother deities a separate palace in the deep-folded recesses of the mighty mountain. Music and song are supplied by Apollo and the Muses; Gan-y-me'de and He'be are the cup-bearers, Hermes and Iris are the messengers; but Themis, in whom is impersonated the idea of deliberation and of relative rights, is the summoner of the Great Assembly of the gods in the Twentieth Iliad, when the great issue of the Trojan war is to be determined." [Footnote: Address to the Edinburgh University, November 3, 1865.]

But, however prone the gods were to evil passions, and subject to human frailties, they were not believed to approve (in men) of the vices in which they themselves indulged, but were, on the contrary, supposed to punish violations of justice and humanity, and to reward the brave and virtuous. We learn that they were to be appeased by libations and sacrifice; and their aid, not only in great undertakings, but in the common affairs of life, was to be obtained by prayer and supplication. For instance, in the Ninth Book of HOMER'S Iliad the aged Phoe'nix—warrior and sage—in a beautiful allegory personifying "Offence" and "Prayers," represents the former as robust and fleet of limb, outstripping the latter, and hence roaming over the earth and doing immense injury to mankind; but the Prayers, following after, intercede with Jupiter, and, if we avail ourselves of them, repair the evil; but if we neglect them we are told that the vengeance of the wrong shall overtake us. Thus, Phoenix says of the gods,

"If a mortal man
Offend them by transgression of their laws,
Libation, incense, sacrifice, and prayer,
In meekness offered, turn their wrath away.
Prayers are Jove's daughters,
Which, though far distant, yet with constant pace
Follow Offence. Offence, robust of limb,
And treading firm the ground, outstrips them all,
And over all the earth before them runs,
Hurtful to man. They, following, heal the hurt.
Received respectfully when they approach,
They yield us aid and listen when we pray;
But if we slight, and with obdurate heart
Resist them, to Saturinian Jove they cry.
Against us, supplicating that Offence
May cleave to us for vengeance of the wrong."
—COWPER'S Trans.

In the Seventeenth Book, Men-e-la'us is represented going into battle, "supplicating, first, the sire of all"—that is, Jupiter, the king of the gods. In the Twenty-third Book, Antil'ochus attributes the ill-success of Eu-me'lus in the chariot-race to his neglect of prayer. He says,

"He should have offered prayer; then had be not
Arrived, as now, the hindmost of us all."

Numerous other instances might be given, from the works of the Grecian poets, of the supposed efficacy of prayer to the gods.

The views of the early Greeks respecting the dispensations of an overruling Providence, as shown in their belief in retributive justice, are especially prominent in some of the sublime choruses of the Greek tragedians, and in the Works and Days of Hesiod. For instance, Æschylus says,

The ruthless and oppressive power
May triumph for its little hour;
But soon, with all their vengeful train,
The sullen Furies rise,
Break his full force, and whirl him down
Thro' life's dark paths, unpitied and unknown.
—POTTER'S Trans.

The following extracts from Hesiod illustrate the certainty with which Justice was believed to overtake and punish those who pervert her ways, while the good are followed by blessings. They also show that the crimes of one are often "visited on all."

Earth's crooked judges—lo! the oath's dread god
Avenging runs, and tracks them where they trod.
Rough are the ways of Justice as the sea,
Dragged to and fro by men's corrupt decree;
Bribe-pampered men! whose hands, perverting, draw
The right aside, and warp the wrested law.

Though while Corruption on their sentence waits
They thrust pale Justice from their haughty gates,
Invisible their steps the Virgin treads,
And musters evil o'er their sinful heads.
She with the dark of air her form arrays,
And walks in awful grief the city ways:
Her wail is heard; her tear, upbraiding, falls
O'er their stained manners and devoted walls.

But they who never from the right have strayed—
Who as the citizen the stranger aid—
They and their cities flourish: genial peace
Dwells in their borders, and their youth increase;
Nor Jove, whose radiant eyes behold afar,
Hangs forth in heaven the signs of grievous war;
Nor scath, nor famine; on the righteous prey—
Peace crowns the night, and plenty cheers the day.
Rich are their mountain oaks: the topmost tree
The acorns fill, its trunk the hiving bee;
Their sheep with fleeces pant; their women's race
Reflect both parents in the infant face:
Still flourish they, nor tempt with ships the main;
The fruits of earth are poured from every plain.

But o'er the wicked race, to whom belong
The thought of evil and the deed of wrong,
Saturnian Jove, of wide-beholding eyes,
Bids the dark signs of retribution rise;
And oft the deeds of one destructive fall—
The crimes of one—are visited on all.
The god sends down his angry plagues from high—
Famine and pestilence—in heaps they die!
Again, in vengeance of his wrath, he falls
On their great hosts, and breaks their tottering walls;
Scatters their ships of war; and where the sea
Heaves high its mountain billows, there is he!

Ponder, O Judges! in your inmost thought
The retribution by his vengeance wrought.
Invisible, the gods are ever nigh,
Pass through the midst, and bend th' all-seeing eye.
The man who grinds the poor, who wrests the right,
Aweless of Heaven, stands naked to their sight:
For thrice ten thousand holy spirits rove
This breathing world, the delegates of Jove;
Guardians of man, their glance alike surveys
The upright judgments and the unrighteous ways.

A virgin pure is Justice, and her birth
August from him who rules the heavens and earth—
A creature glorious to the gods on high,
Whose mansion is yon everlasting sky.
Driven by despiteful wrong she takes her seat,
In lowly grief, at Jove's eternal feet.
There of the soul unjust her plaints ascend:
So rue the nations when their kings offend—
When, uttering wiles and brooding thoughts of ill,
They bend the laws, and wrest them to their will.
Oh! gorged with gold, ye kingly judges, hear!
Make straight your paths, your crooked judgments fear,
That the foul record may no more be seen—
Erased, forgot, as though it ne'er had been.
—Trans. by ELTON.

OATHS.

As in the beginning of the foregoing extract, so the poets frequently refer to the oaths that were taken by those who entered into important compacts, showing that then as now, and as in Old Testament times, some overruling deity was invoked to witness the agreement or promise, and punish its violation. Sometimes the person touched the altar of the god by whom he swore, or the blood that was shed in the ceremonial sacrifice, while some walked through the fire to sanctify their oaths. When Abraham swore unto the King of Sodom that he would not enrich himself with any of the king's goods, he lifted up his hand to heaven, pointing to the supposed residence of the Deity, as if calling on him to witness the oath. When he requires his servant to take an oath unto him he says, "Put, I pray thee, thy hand under my thigh: and I will make thee swear by the Lord, the God of heaven and earth;" and Jacob requires the same ceremony from Joseph when the latter promises to carry his father's bones up out of Egypt.

When the goddess Vesta swore an oath in the very presence of Jupiter, as represented in Homer's hymn, she touched his head, as the most fitting ceremonial.

Touching the head of Ægis-bearing Jove,
A mighty oath she swore, and hath fulfilled,
That she among the goddesses of heaven
Would still a virgin be.

We find a military oath described by Æschylus in the drama of The Seven Chiefs against Thebes:

O'er the hollow of a brazen shield
A bull they slew, and, touching with their hands
The sacrificial stream, they called aloud
On Mars, Eny'o, and blood-thirsty Fear,
And swore an oath or in the dust to lay
These walls, and give our people to the sword,
Or, perishing, to steep the land in blood!

That there was sometimes a fire ordeal to sanctify the oath, we learn from the Antig'o-ne of SOPHOCLES. The Messenger who brought tidings of the burial of Polyni'ces says,

"Ready were we to grasp the burning steel,
To pass through fire, and by the gods to swear
The deed was none of ours, nor aught we knew
Of living man by whom 'twas planned or done."

In the Twelfth Book of VIRGIL'S Æne'id, when King Turnus enters into a treaty with the Trojans, he touches the altars of his gods and the flames, as part of the ceremony:

"I touch the sacred altars, touch the flames,
And all these powers attest, and all their names,
Whatever chance befall on either side,
No term of time this union shall divide;
No force nor fortune shall my vows unbind,
To shake the steadfast tenor of my mind."

The ancient poets and orators denounce perjury in the strongest terms, and speak of the offence as one of a most odious character.

THE FUTURE STATE.

The future state in which the Greeks believed was to some extent one of rewards and punishments. The souls of most of the dead, however, were supposed to descend to the realms of Ha'des, where they remained, joyless phantoms, the mere shadows of their former selves, destitute of mental vigor, and, like the spectres of the North American Indians, pursuing, with dreamlike vacancy, the empty images of their past occupations and enjoyments. So cheerless is the twilight of the nether world that the ghost of Achilles informs Ulysses that it would rather live the meanest hireling on earth than be doomed to continue in the shades below, even though as sovereign ruler there. Thus Achilles asks him—

"How hast thou dared descend into the gloom
Of Hades, where the shadows of the dead,
Forms without intellect, alone reside?"

And when Ulysses tries to console him by reminding him that he was even there supreme over all his fellow-shades, he receives this reply:

"Renowned Ulysses! think not death a theme
Of consolation: I would rather live
The servile hind for hire, and eat the bread
Of some man scantily himself sustained,
Than sovereign empire hold o'er all the shades."
—Odyssey, by COWPER, B. XI.

But even in Hades a distinction is made between the good and the bad, for there Ulysses finds Mi'nos, the early law-giver of Crete, advanced to the position of judge over the assembled shades— absolving the just, and condemning the guilty.

High on a throne, tremendous to behold,
Stern Minos waves a mace of burnished gold;
Around, ten thousand thousand spectres stand,
Through the wide dome of Dis, a trembling band;
Whilst, as they plead, the fatal lots he rolls,
Absolves the just, and dooms the guilty souls.
—Odyssey, by POPE, B. XI.

The kinds of punishment inflicted here are, as might be expected, wholly earthly in their nature, and may be regarded rather as the reflection of human passions than as moral retributions by the gods. Thus, Tan'talus, placed up to his chin in water, which ever flowed away from his lips, was tormented with unquenchable thirst, while the fruits hanging around him constantly eluded his grasp. The story of Tantalus is well told by PROFESSOR BLACKIE, as follows:

Tantalus.

O Tantalus! thou wert a man
More blest than all since earth began
Its weary round to travel;
But, placed in Paradise, like Eve,
Thine own damnation thou didst weave,
Without help from the devil.
Alas! I fear thy tale to tell;
Thou'rt in the deepest pool of hell,
And shalt be there forever.
For why? When thou on lofty seat
Didst sit, and eat immortal meat
With Jove, the bounteous Giver,
The gods before thee loosed their tongue,
And many a mirthful ballad sung,
And all their secrets open flung
Into thy mortal ear.

The poet then goes on to describe the gossip, and pleasures, and jealousies, and scandals of Olympus which Tantalus heard and witnessed, and then proceeds as follows:

But witless he such grace to prize;
And, with licentious babble,
He blazed the secrets of the skies
Through all the human rabble,
And fed the greed of tattlers vain
With high celestial scandal,
And lent to every eager brain
And wanton tongue a handle
Against the gods. For which great sin,
By righteous Jove's command,
In hell's black pool up to the chin
The thirsty king doth stand:
With-parched throat he longs to drink,
But when he bends to sip,
The envious waves receding sink,
And cheat his pining lip.

Like in character was the punishment inflicted upon Sis'y-phus, "the most crafty of men," as Homer calls him. Being condemned to roll a huge stone up a hill, it proved to be a never-ending, still-beginning toil, for as soon as the stone reached the summit it rolled down again into the plain. So, also, Ix-i'on, "the Cain of Greece," as he is expressly called—the first shedder of kindred blood—was doomed to be fastened, with brazen bands, to an ever-revolving fiery wheel. But the very refinement of torment, similar to that inflicted upon Prometheus, was that suffered by the giant Tit'y-us, who was placed on his back, while vultures constantly fed upon his liver, which grew again as fast as it was eaten.

THE DESCENT OF OR'PHEUS.

Only once do we learn that these torments ceased, and that was when the musician Orpheus, lyre in hand, descended to the lower world to reclaim his beloved wife, the lost Eu-ryd'i-ce. At the music of his "golden shell" Tantalus forgot his thirst, Sisyphus rested from his toil, the wheel of Ixion stood still, and Tityus ceased his moaning. The poet OVID thus describes the wonderful effects of the musician's skill:

The very bloodless shades attention keep,
And, silent, seem compassionate to weep;
Even Tantalus his flood unthirsty views,
Nor flies the stream, nor he the stream pursues:
Ixion's wondrous wheel its whirl suspends,
And the voracious vulture, charmed, attends;
No more the Bel'i-des their toil bemoan,
And Sisyphus, reclined, sits listening on the stone.
—Trans. by CONGREVE.

Pope's translation of this scene from the Iliad is peculiarly melodious:

But when, through all the infernal bounds
Which flaming Phleg'e-thon surrounds,
Love, strong as death, the poet led
To the pale nations of the dead,
What sounds were heard,
What scenes appeared,
O'er all the dreary coasts!
Dreadful gleams,
Dismal screams,
Fires that glow,
Shrieks of woe,
Sullen moans,
Hollow groans,
And cries of tortured ghost!!!

But hark! he strikes the golden lyre;
And see! the tortured ghosts respire!
See! shady forms advance!
Thy stone, O Sisyphus, stands still,
Ixion rests upon his wheel,
And the pale spectres dance;
The Furies sink upon their iron beds,
And snakes uncurled hang listening round their heads.

The Greeks also believed in an Elys'ium—some distant island of the ocean, ever cooled by refreshing breezes, and where spring perpetual reigned—to which, after death, the blessed were conveyed, and where they were permitted to enjoy it happy destiny. In the Fourth Book of the Odyssey the sea god Pro'teus, in predicting for Menelaus a happier lot than that of Hades, thus describes the Elysian plains:

But oh! beloved of Heaven! reserved for thee
A happier lot the smiling Fates decree:
Free from that law beneath whose mortal sway
Matter is changed and varying forms decay,
Elysium shall be thine—the blissful plains
Of utmost earth, where Rhadaman'thus reigns.
Joys ever young, unmixed with pain or fear,
Fill the wide circle of the eternal year.
Stern Winter smiles on that auspicious clime;
The fields are florid with unfading prime;
From the bleak pole no winds inclement blow,
Mould the round hail, or flake the fleecy snow;
But from the breezy deep the blest inhale
The fragrant murmurs of the western gale.
—POPE'S Trans.

Similar views are expressed by the lyric poet PINDAR in the following lines:

All whose steadfast virtue thrice
Each side the grave unchanged hath stood,
Still unseduced, unstained with vice—
They, by Jove's mysterious road,
Pass to Saturn's realm of rest—
Happy isle, that holds the blest;
Where sea-born breezes gently blow
O'er blooms of gold that round them glow,
Which Nature, boon from stream or strand
Or goodly tree, profusely showers;
Whence pluck they many a fragrant band,
And braid their locks with never-fading flowers.
—Trans. by A. MOORE.

There is so much similarity between the mythology of the early Greeks and that of many of the Asiatic nations, that we give place here to the supposed meditations of a Hindu prince and skeptic on the great subject of a future state of existence, as a fitting close of our brief review of the religious beliefs of the ancients. Among the Asiatic nations are to be found accounts of the Creation, and of multitudes of gods, good and evil, all quite as pronounced as those that are derived from the Grecian myths; and while the wildest and grossest of superstitious fancies have prevailed among the common people, skepticism and atheistic doubt are known to have been nearly universal among the learned. The poem which we give in this connection, therefore, though professedly a Hindu creation, may be accepted not only as portraying Hindu doubt and despondency, but also as a faithful picture of the anxiety, doubt, and almost utter despair, not only of the ancient Greeks; but of the entire heathen world, concerning the destiny of mankind.

The Hindu skeptic tells us that ever since mankind began their race on this earth they have been seeking for the "signs and steps of a God;" and that in mystical India, where the deities hover and swarm, and a million shrines stand open, with their myriad idols and, legions of muttering priests, mankind are still groping in darkness; still listening, and as yet vainly hoping for a message that shall tell what the wonders of creation mean, and whither they tend; ever vainly seeking for a refuge from the ills of life, and a rest beyond for the weary and heavy-laden, He turns to the deified heroes of his race, and though long he watches and worships for a solution of the mysteries of life, he waits in vain for an answer, for their marble features never relax in response to his prayers and entreaties; and he says, mournfully, "Alas! for the gods are dumb." The darts of death still fall as surely as ever, hurled by a Power unseen and a hand unknown; and beyond the veil all is obscurity and gloom.

I.

All the world over, I wonder, in lands that I never have trod,
Are the people eternally seeking for the signs and steps of a God?
Westward across the ocean, and northward beyond the snow,
Do they all stand gazing, as ever? and what do the wisest know?

II.

Here, in this mystical India, the deities hover and swarm
Like the wild bees heard in the tree-tops, or the gusts of a gathering storm;
In the air men hear their voices, their feet on the rocks are seen,
Yet we all say, "Whence is the message—and what may the
wonders mean?"

III.

A million shrines stand open, and ever the censer swings,
As they bow to a mystic symbol or the figures of ancient kings;
And the incense rises ever, and rises the endless cry
Of those who are heavy-laden, and of cowards loath to die.

IV.

For the destiny drives us together like deer in a pass of the hills:
Above is the sky, and around us the sound and the shot that kills.
Pushed by a Power we see not, and struck by a hand unknown,
We pray to the trees for shelter, and press our lips to a stone.

V.

The trees wave a shadowy answer, and the rock frowns hollow and grim,
And the form and the nod of the demon are caught in the twilight dim;
And we look to the sunlight falling afar on the mountain crest—
Is there never a path runs upward to a refuge there and a rest?

VI.

The path—ah, who has shown it, and which is the faithful guide?
The haven—ah, who has known it? for steep is the mountain-side.
For ever the shot strikes surely, and ever the wasted breath
Of the praying multitude rises, whose answer is only death!

VII.

Here are the tombs of my kinsfolk, the first of an ancient name—
Chiefs who were slain on the war-field, and women who died in flame.
They are gods, these kings of the foretime, they are spirits who guard our race:
Ever I watch and worship—they sit with a marble face.

VIII.

And the myriad idols around me, and the legion of muttering priests—
The revels and rites unholy, the dark, unspeakable feasts—
What have they wrung from the silence? Hath even a Whisper come
Of the secret—whence and whither? Alas! for the gods are dumb.

Getting no light from the religious guides of his own country, he turns to the land where the English—the present rulers of India—dwell, and asks,

IX.

Shall I list to the word of the English, who come from the uttermost sea?
"The secret, hath it been told you? and what is your message to me?
It is naught but the wide-world story, how the earth and the heavens began—
How the gods are glad and angry, and a deity once was man.

And so he gathers around him the mantle of doubt and despondency; he asks if life is, after all, but a dream and delusion, while ever and ever is forced upon him that other question, "Where shall the dreamer awake?"

X.

I had thought, "Perchance in the cities where the rulers of India dwell,
Whose orders flash from the far land, who girdle the earth with a spell,
They have fathomed the depths we float on, or measured the unknown main—"
Sadly they turn from the venture, and say that the quest is vain.

XI.

Is life, then, a dream and delusion? and where shall the dreamer awake?
Is the world seen like shadows on water? and what if the mirror break?
Shall it pass as a camp that is struck, as a tent that is gathered and gone
From the sands that were lamp-lit at eve, and at morning are level and lone?

XII.

Is there naught in the heaven above, whence the hail and the levin are hurled,
But the wind that is swept around us by the rush of the rolling world—
The wind that shall scatter my ashes, and bear me to silence and sleep,
With the dirge and the sounds of lamenting, and voices of women who weep?
—The Cornhill Magazine.

What a commentary on all this doubt and despondency are the meditations of the Christian, who, "sustained and soothed by an unfaltering trust," approaches his grave

Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams!
—BRYANT.