These deities are known to us chiefly through the names given to them by the Romans, who adopted them at a later period, or identified them with deities of their own. Zeus was called by them Jupiter; Hera; Juno; Athena, Minerva; Ares, Mars; Artemis, Diana; Hermes, Mercury; Cora, Proserpine; Hephaestus, Vulcan; Poseidon, Neptune; Aphrodite, Venus; Dionysus, Bacchus.
PERIOD FIRST.
FROM REMOTE ANTIQUITY TO HERODOTUS (484 B.C.),
1. ANTE-HOMERIC SONGS AND BARDS.—Many centuries must have elapsed before the poetical language of the Greeks could have attained the splendor, copiousness, and fluency found in the poems of Homer. The first outpourings of poetical enthusiasm were, doubtless, songs describing, in few and simple verses, events which powerfully affected the feelings of the hearers. It is probable that the earliest were those that referred to the seasons and their phenomena, and that they were sung by the peasants at their corn and wine harvests, and had their origin in times of ancient rural simplicity. Songs of this kind had often a plaintive and melancholy character. Such was the song "Linus" mentioned by Homer, which was frequently sung at the grape-picking. This Linus evidently belongs to a class of heroes or demi-gods, of which many instances occur in the religions of Asia Minor. Boys of extraordinary beauty and in the flower of youth were supposed to have been drowned, or devoured by raging dogs, and their death was lamented at the harvests and other periods of the hot season. According to the tradition, Linus sprang from a divine origin, grew up with the shepherds among the lambs, and was torn in pieces by wild dogs, whence arose the festival of the lambs, at which many dogs were slain. The real object of lamentation was the tender beauty of spring, destroyed by the summer heat, and other phenomena of the same kind which the imagination of those times invested with a personal form, and represented as beings of a divine nature. Of similar meaning are many other songs, which were sung at the time of the summer heat or at the cutting of the corn. Such was the song called "Bormus" from its subject, a beautiful boy of that name, who, having gone to fetch water for the reapers, was, while drawing it, borne down by the nymphs of the stream. Such were the cries for the youth Hylas, swallowed up by the waters of a fountain, and the lament for Adonis, whose untimely death was celebrated by Sappho.
The Paeans were songs originally dedicated to Apollo, and afterwards to other gods; their tune and words expressed hope and confidence to overcome, by the help of the god, great and imminent danger, or gratitude and thanksgiving for victory and safety. To this class belonged the vernal Paeans, which were sung at the termination of winter, and those sung in war before the attack on the enemy. The Threnos, or lamentations for the dead, were songs containing vehement expressions of grief, sung by professional singers standing near the bed upon which the body was laid, and accompanied by the cries and groans of women. The Hymenaeos was the joyful bridal song of the wedding festivals, in which there were ordinarily two choruses, one of boys bearing burning torches and singing the hymenaeos to the clear sound of the pipe, and another of young girls dancing to the notes of the harp. The Chorus originally referred chiefly to dancing. The most ancient sense of the word is a place for dancing, and in these choruses young persons of both sexes danced together in rows, holding one another by the hand, while the citharist, or the player on the lyre, sitting in their midst, accompanied the sound of his instrument with songs, which took their name from the choruses in which they were sung.
Besides these popular songs, there were the religious and heroic poems of the bards, who were, for the most part, natives of that portion of the country which surrounds the mountains of Helicon and Parnassus, distinguished as the home of the Muses. Among the bards devoted to the worship of Apollo and other deities, were Marsyas, the inventor of the flute, Musaeus and Orpheus. Many names of these ancient poets are recorded, but of their poetry, previous to Homer, not even a fragment remains.
The bards or chanters of epic poetry were called Rhapsodists, from the manner in which they delivered their compositions; this name was applied equally to the minstrel who recited his own poems, and to him who declaimed anew songs that had been heard a thousand times before. The form of these heroic songs, probably settled and fixed by tradition, was the hexameter, as this metre gave to the epic poetry repose, majesty, a lofty and solemn tone, and rendered it equally adapted to the pythoness who announced the decrees of the deity, and to the rhapsodist who recited the battles of heroes. The bards held an important post in the festal banquets, where they flattered the pride of the princes by singing the exploits of their forefathers.
2. POEMS OF HOMER.—Although seven cities contended for the honor of giving birth to Homer, it was the prevalent belief, in the flourishing times of Greece, that he was a native of Smyrna. He was probably born in that city about 1000 B.C. Little is known of his life, but the power of his transcendent genius is deeply impressed upon his works. He was called by the Greeks themselves, the poet; and the Iliad and the Odyssey were with them the ultimate standard of appeal on all matters of religious doctrine and early history. They were learned by boys at school, and became the study of men in their riper years, and in the time of Socrates there were Athenians who could repeat both poems by heart. In whatever part of the world a Greek settled, he carried with him a love for the great poet, and long after the Greek people had lost their independence, the Iliad and the Odyssey continued to maintain an undiminished hold upon their affections. The peculiar excellence of these poems lies in their sublimity and pathos, in their tenderness and simplicity, and they show in their author an inexhaustible vigor, that seems to revel in an endless display of prodigious energies. The universality of the powers of Homer is their most astonishing attribute. He is not great in any one thing; he is greatest in all things. He imagines with equal ease the terrible, the beautiful, the mean, the loathsome, and he paints them all with equal force. In his descriptions of external nature, in his exhibitions of human character and passion, no matter what the subject, he exhausts its capabilities. His pictures are true to the minutest touch; his men and women are made of flesh and blood. They lose nothing of their humanity for being cast in a heroic mould. He transfers himself into the identity of those whom he brings into action; masters the interior springs of their spiritual mechanism; and makes them move, look, speak, and do exactly as they would in real life.
In the legends connected with the Trojan war, the anger of Achilles and the return of Ulysses, Homer found the subjects of the Iliad and Odyssey. The former relates that Agamemnon had stolen from Achilles, Briseis, his beloved slave, and describes the fatal consequences which the subsequent anger of Achilles brought upon the Greeks; and how the loss of his dearest friend, Patroclus, suddenly changed his hostile attitude, and brought about the destruction of Troy and of Hector, its magnanimous defender. The Odyssey is composed on a more artificial and complicated plan than the Iliad. The subject is the return of Ulysses from a land beyond the range of human knowledge to a home invaded by bands of insolent intruders, who seek to kill his son and rob him of his wife. The poem begins at that point where the hero is considered to be farthest from his home, in the central portion of the sea, where the nymph Calypso has kept him hidden from all mankind for seven years. Having by the help of the gods passed through innumerable dangers, after many adventures he reaches Ithaca, and is finally introduced into his own house as a beggar, where he is made to suffer the harshest treatment from the suitors of his wife, in order that he may afterwards appear with the stronger right as a terrible avenger. In this simple story a second was interwoven by the poet, which renders it richer and more complete, though more intricate and less natural. It is probable that Homer, after having sung the Iliad in the vigor of his youthful years, either composed the Odyssey in his old age, or communicated to some devoted disciple the plan of this poem.
In the age immediately succeeding Homer, his great poems were doubtless recited as complete wholes, at the festivals of the princes; but when the contests of the rhapsodists became more animated, and more weight was laid on the art of the reciter than on the beauty of the poem he recited, and when other musical and poetical performances claimed a place, then they were permitted to repeat separate parts of poems, and the Iliad and Odyssey, as they had not yet been reduced to writing, existed for a time only as scattered and unconnected fragments; and we are still indebted to the regulator of the poetical contests (either Solon or Pisistratus) for having compelled the rhapsodists to follow one another according to the order of 'the poem, and for having thus restored these great works to their pristine integrity. The poets, who either recited the poems of Homer or imitated him in their compositions, were called Homerides.