It was natural that Sophocles should use many Homeric concepts with reference to the condition of men and the life after death. In the Antigone alone is there any personal hope of future happiness. It may well be that the poet’s sense of what was fitting dramatically is responsible for his conservative attitude; he was dealing with traditional material, and using themes and incidents which were far remote in time from his audience. It may have seemed to him that fidelity to his subject and the requirements of artistic unity prevented his putting into the mouths of his characters sentiments which an early age could hardly have conceived. Sophocles was not animated by the iconoclasm which we shall find in the bolder Euripides; but if the future life is not pictured in Sophocles’ extant tragedies, we need not doubt for a moment that he believed in immortality. He had been initiated into the Mysteries and one of the finest expressions of the ecclesiastical confidence which the initiates felt came from his pen: “Thrice blessed are those mortals who have seen these rites and then go to the house of Hades, for they alone have life there; but all others have only woe.”[153]
Such, in brief, were the teachings of some of the greatest poets of the sixth and fifth centuries before our era. But these represent only one side of Greek thought in this time. In Athens there were influences, political, social, and intellectual, which were working profound changes. Pindar, Aeschylus, and Sophocles belonged to an older order; the voices of the new age will concern us in our next lecture.
IV
THE FIFTH CENTURY AT ATHENS
The defeat of the Persians at Salamis in 480 b.c. made Athens the first state in Greece. Not only had she suffered enormous losses in the ruin of her city and lands for the common cause, but she had borne the brunt of the naval fight at Salamis, as ten years before, with the brave men from Plataea, she had driven the Persian hordes from the plain of Marathon into the sea. The Athenians had acquitted themselves well, for they had shown the loftiest patriotism and loyalty to the cause of Hellas; now their high position was recognized even by their jealous rivals. Athens entered on a brilliant period of fifty years which has never been equalled in the world’s history. Within that time she produced statesmen, architects, artists, and poets who have never been surpassed since in any state in the same length of time. Her naval power, her wealth and culture, placed her in a supreme position.
Neither the Athenians nor the other Greeks forgot the gods to whom they believed that they owed their victory over the Persians. To Apollo at Delphi the allies sent a golden tripod set on a pillar of three bronze serpents bearing the names of those who made the offering; the Athenians on their own account erected a trophy there, and on the Acropolis they deposited the broken cables of the bridge which the Persians had built across the Hellespont. Soon they set up in the same place a colossal bronze statue of Athena made from the spoils captured at Marathon. A new temple to the goddess in place of the one destroyed by the Persians was planned by Cimon; but his ostracism in 461 b.c. stopped its building. When Pericles was able to carry out his plans for adorning Athens, he determined to enlarge the structure; as a result the Parthenon with its wondrous sculptures and great chryselephantine statue of the goddess was completed in 438 b.c. At the entrance of the Acropolis a splendid propylaea was begun and many other public buildings were erected to adorn the city. The chief divinity of Athens, the goddess Athena, now held her position without a rival; all the other gods were in second place. The conception of the goddess was essentially that fixed by the Homeric poems, and as such Phidias represented her with aegis, spear, and shield, carrying victory in her hand. She became the embodiment of the power and the glory of the state.
In an earlier lecture I referred to the part which Pisistratus played during the sixth century in fostering Orphism at Athens and in developing the mysteries at Eleusis. Now the Athenian success in driving back the Persian invaders had filled the citizens with a spirit which had little desire for the sacraments of the Orphics, and furthermore the mysteries at Eleusis satisfied all longing for mystic assurance of security and of future happiness. But Pisistratus had also emphasized the Olympian religion as set forth in the Homeric poems. Indeed, we may say that he produced a Homeric revival; for whatever the truth may be in the tradition that he had the Homeric text fixed and written down in the Attic alphabet, there can be little question that he made the Iliad and Odyssey more widely known by ordaining that the rhapsodes should recite them at the great Panathenaic festival. The emphasis given by him to the Olympian divinities resulted in the exaltation of Athena and the subordination of most local cults to her worship upon the Acropolis. It was Pisistratus also who developed and gave new magnificence to the Panathenaic festival. This was annual, but was celebrated with special splendor every fourth year. At these festivals the recitation of the Homeric poems brought before the people in impressive manner the whole pageantry of Olympus. The great procession with which the festival culminated—that procession known to us from Phidias’ frieze upon the Parthenon—had as its objective point the Acropolis, where the sacred robe and other gifts were offered to the patron goddess, Athena. Her old temple on the site once occupied by the goodly house of Erectheus was adorned at the tyrant’s orders with a peristyle and new pediment sculptures. The battle of Athena Polias and the gods against the giants replaced the old sculptures of Zeus encountering a three-headed monster and of Heracles destroying the Hydra. Thus Pisistratus made the temple of Athena the center of the united Athenian state, and established the goddess as the chief divinity of Attica.
This Olympian religion was well suited to the state in the fifth century. The Athenian success in saving Greece from the Persians had magnified the importance of Athens in the eyes of all her citizens. Their life was now one of action; they were proudly conscious of their expanding empire, their growing power, and increasing wealth. The joy which they felt in their present existence had something of the epic quality in it. Furthermore the growth of free democracy, which opened up many channels of successful activity through the state, had not yet resulted in that individualism with its disintegrating tendencies which marked the fourth century, and the common interests of the Athenians made the state the center of their thought. They regarded it as an organization existing for the benefit of all free citizens. Its unity and its power, so far as Athens was concerned, were symbolized by the goddess Athena. On her home and on her worship the resources of the state were lavished. It was inevitable that her religion should be regarded as primarily a state affair, and that at the same time she and the other protecting gods should seem to the individual citizen somewhat more removed from human interests and sympathy as they gained in the august majesty which the wealth of the empire lent them. Exactly as to many a Christian the wealth and magnificence of a splendid cathedral seem to put God farther away than the bare simplicity of some beloved chapel, so the Parthenon undoubtedly made Athena seem more august and more remote to many an Athenian than the rude and simple protecting deity of his country home.
The result of these various causes which were operative in the fifty years of Athens’ greatness was that a part of religion became a state concern, and that men’s loyalty was centered on the state. Patriotism and pride in empire took the place to a considerable extent of what may be roughly described as personal religion. This, of course, does not mean that a belief in the gods among the mass of the people had died out in any sense. The ordinary Athenian continued his worship as before at the local shrines and joined with the other citizens in paying tribute to the great divinities. But especially with many of the intellectual and leading men religion was absorbed, so to speak, into patriotism, exactly as has been the case in our own time in France and Italy. This attitude of mind finds supreme expression in the funeral oration of Pericles, which he pronounced over those who had died in the first year of the Peloponnesian War. His speech is devoted to glorifying the Athenians and to celebrating the noble service which the fallen rendered when they gave up their lives for their fatherland. There is not one syllable about the gods, one word of gratitude to heaven, or a single expression of solace to the relatives of the dead based on any hope of immortality. In the service of the state Pericles saw every incentive and every reward. This will be clear from the following paragraphs:[154]