CHAPTER V
THE TRADITIONS OF THE HOUSE
So Theria’s world was bounded by the house. Fortunate was it then that the house was rich in memories. Rich otherwise it was not. No earnest Greek beautified his own house when he could beautify instead the house and temple of his deathless gods. So the walls of Nikander’s house were of plain stucco, its floors, worn flags.
To be sure the furniture, handed down from olden days, was beautiful. The bedsteads were chastely carved, their coverings were of home-made purple, and Melantho’s chair in which she sat to spin was of exquisite shape and balance. The tables in the men’s aula, where Nikander feasted his guests, were of teak-wood brought from afar by some travelled merchant to the Pythian feast. The vases in every room and put to all possible uses were of a grace and workmanship which only the Greeks knew. They were of the ordinary make, which everyone afforded, from the Delphi pottery below the hill. Upon them were painted pictures of the heroes and the gods—Theria’s charming picture books which sometimes told whole stories.
The plain old house had been built upon, lived in, and loved by a dozen generations of Nikanders. It had absorbed within itself the beauty of their daily life and seemed to give it forth again—a sort of fragrance to be sensed the moment you crossed the threshold. The Nikanders were one of those quiet families of exceeding excellence and highmindedness which always exist in great numbers in the background of an age of genius.
Time had harmonized the house. The lines of wall and ceiling were no longer plumb and level. The grey stucco had been stained lavender, yellow, faint rose by lichen growths. No threshold in the house but was worn deep by the tread of feet now passed beyond. In front of the little altar to Hestia the stone floor was hollowed like a bowl, where father and son, father and son had stood to offer reverent sacrifice to the goddess of the hearth.
Into this atmosphere Theria had been born and in it her spirit grew, keeping itself alive within the straitened, prescribed round.
But through the house were also wafted deep draughts of life from the Oracle—that mysterious shrine which seems to us like some myth, but which to the Greek was business-real.
The manner of divination at Delphi was peculiar in that it gave the priests an opportunity to mould the divine answer without at the same time losing faith in its divineness. The Priestess or Pythoness was a simple girl comprehending nothing of the knowledge which she must impart. In preparation for the day of oracle she was subjected to three days of rite. She fasted, drank of the sacred spring, walked through laurel smoke; and with her perfect faith in these rites, she must often have been in the ecstatic state before mounting the tripod.
Then in the shadowy adytum beneath the temple she was placed upon the golden tripod, the “High Perilous Seat” as it was called. The cold wind blew out of the cleft below her and in ecstasy she spoke words she knew not. It is undoubted that in her state of suspended consciousness she often reflected as in a mirror the knowledge and judgments of the priests. Her marvellous answers often filled priests and questioners alike with awe. The priests afterward were allowed to recast the answers into verse and to remould them. But in spite of the liberty which they occasionally felt obliged to use in the recasting the priests sincerely believed that the responses were genuinely from the god.
It was this mingling of faith and liberty which gave Delphi her power, a power which was for the most part grandly used. At the dawn of Hellas, from this eerie mountain glen the authority began to be exercised. It continued down through all the glory of Hellas and for centuries after her decline. Strong and real indeed must have been the religious impetus which could outlast the race.