“Pride, that lifts itself unduly.”
I will not multiply citations here to show the reader how this pride or insolence of disposition, ὓβρις (the German Uebermuth), is marked by the Greek moralists as the great source of all the darker crimes with which the annals of our floundering race are stained (See Note, [p. 349] above). They are wrong who tell us that Humility is a Christian and not a Heathen virtue: no doubt the name ταπεινοφροσύνη, used in the New Testament, was not the fashionable one among the Greeks: but that they had the thing, every page of their poetry testifies, with this difference, however, to be carefully noted, that while Heathen humility is founded solely on a sense of dependence, Christian humility proceeds also, and perhaps more decidedly, from a sense of guilt. Neither does the phraseology of Heathen and Christian writers on this subject differ always so much as people seem to imagine; between the μη ὐπερφρον(ε)ιν παρ ὃ δεῖ φρονεῖν of St. Paul (Rom. xii. 3), and the ὀυδεπώποτε ὐπερ ἄνθρωπον ἐφρόνησα of Xenophon (Cyropaed. VIII), it were a foolish subtlety that should attempt to make a distinction.
“Give the air-shattering Tyrrhene trump free voice.”
“It is a correct and significant observation made by the Scholiast on Iliad XVIII. 219, that Homer never mentions the trumpet (σάλπιγξ) in the narrative part of his poem, but only for a comparison: familiar as he was with the instrument, he was not ignorant that the use of it was new, and not native in Greece. Indeed, it was never universally adopted in that country: the Spartans and Cretans marching into battle, first to the accompaniment of the lyre, and afterwards of the flute. The tragedians again are quite familiar with the Tuscan origin of the trumpet, though they make no scruple of introducing it into their descriptions of the Hellenic heroic age”—Müll.; Etrusker I. p. 286.
Enter Apollo. Here commences a debate between the daughters of Night and the god accusing and defending, which, as Grote (History of Greece, I. 512) remarks, is “eminently curious.” And not only curious, but unfortunately, to our modern sense at least, not a little ludicrous in some places. The fact is, that the strange moral contradictions and inconsistencies so common in the Greek mythology, so long as they are concealed or palliated under a fair imaginative show, give small offence; but when placed before the understanding, in order to be interrogated by the strict forms of judicial logic, they necessarily produce a collision with our practical reason and a smile is the result.
“. . . himself did bind