CHAPTER XV.
HISTORY AND MYTHOLOGY.
Tradition, [373]—Poetry, [375]—Fact in Fiction, [377]—Earliest Poems and Writings, [381]—Ancient Chronicle and History, [383]—Myths, [387]—Interpretation of Myths, [396]—Diffusion of Myths, [397].
History is no longer looked to for a record of the earliest ages of man. As the first chapter of this volume shows, we moderns know what was hidden from the ancients themselves about the still more ancient ancients. Yet it does not at all follow that ancient history has lost its value. On the contrary, there are better means than ever of confirming what is really sound in it by such evidence as that of antiquities and language, while masses of very early writings are now newly opened to the historian. It was never more necessary to have clear ideas of what tradition, poetry, and written records can teach as to the times when history begins.
The early history of nations consists more or less of traditions handed down by memory from ages before writing. Our own experience does not tell us much as to what such oral tradition may be worth, for it has so fallen out of use in the civilised world, that now one knows little of what happened beyond one’s great-grandfather’s time, unless it has been written down. But writing has not yet quite overspread the globe, and there are still peoples left whose whole history is the tradition of their ancestors. Thus the South Sea Islanders, who till quite lately had no writing, were intelligent barbarians, much given to handing down recollections of bygone days, and in one or two cases which it has been possible to test among them, it seems as though memory may really keep a historical record long and correctly. It is related by Mr. Whitmee the missionary that in the island of Rotuma there was a very old tree, under which according to tradition, the stone seat of a famous chief had been buried; this tree was lately blown down, and, sure enough, there was a stone seat under its roots, which must have been out of sight for centuries. In the Ellice group, the natives declared that their ancestors came from a valley in the distant island of Samoa generations before, and they preserved an old worm-eaten staff, pieced to hold it together, which in their assemblies the orator held in his hand as the sign of having the right to speak; this staff was lately taken to Samoa, and proved to be made of wood that grew there, while the people of the valley in question had a tradition of a great party going out to sea exploring, who never came back. Among these Polynesian traditions the best known are those handed down by the Maoris as to the peopling of New Zealand by their ancestors. They tell how, after a civil war, their forefathers migrated in canoes from Hawaiki in the far north-east; they give the names of the builders and crews of these vessels and show the places where they landed; they repeat, generation by generation, the names of the chiefs descended from those who came in the canoes, by which they reckon about eighteen generations, or 400 to 500 years, since their taking possession of the islands. Notwithstanding that, as might be expected, the traditions of various districts disagree a good deal, they are admitted as the title-deeds by which the natives hold land in the right of their ancestors who landed in the canoes Shark (Arawa) and God’s-Eye (Mata-atua), and it can hardly be doubted that such genealogies, constantly repeated among people whose lands depended on them, are founded on fact. Yet these Maori traditions are about half made up of the wildest wonder-tales; when the builder of one of the canoes cuts down a great tree to make the hull, on coming back to the forest next morning he finds that the tree has got up again in the night; and when the canoe is finished and puts to sea, a certain magician is left behind, but on getting to New Zealand there he is before them on the shore, having come across the ocean on the back of a sea-monster, like Arion on his dolphin. These traditions of a modern barbarous people may give us not an unfair idea of the mixture of real memory and mythic fancy in the early history of Egypt or Greece, where it has come down by tradition from the distant past when there was as yet no scribe to engrave on a stone tablet even the names of kings.
Traditions are yet more lasting when handed down in fixed words, which is especially when the poets have set them in verse. Even now in England some notable event may be made into a ballad and sung through the length and breadth of the land. In days before printing, the importance of the poet as historian was far greater, and many an old European chant has touches of true chronicle. The old songs of Brittany are often very true to history, as where in one there is mention of Bertrand du Guesclin’s hair being like a lion’s mane, and in another, Jeanne de Montfort (Jeanne-la-Flamme) going forth from Hennebont with sword and burning brand to fire the French camp, is described as putting on her suit of armour, which history elsewhere records that she really wore. But though the poet or minstrel preserves many picturesque incidents like these, he has not the historian’s conscience about facts. Eager to rouse and delight his audience, to flatter the national pride of his people and the family pride of the chieftain in whose halls he sang, the singer brought in real names and events, but he shifted them as would best suit his dramatic scenery, or he even made his own history outright. The great German epic, the Nibelungen Lied, begins in Burgundy, where the three kings hold court at Worms on the Rhine, their sister is the lovely Kriemhilt, whose husband Sîfrit is treacherously slain at the well by Hagen’s spear; afterwards she marries Attila the Hun-king, and the tale of blood, ending with her vengeance and death, leaves Attila and Theodoric of Verona (Etzel and Dietrich von Bern) weeping together over the slaughter of their men. Here are places and personages historical enough to make a poem history, if history could be made by such means; but the reader of Gibbon knows that Attila really died two years before Theodoric was born. In fact the poem is a late version of a story preserved in an earlier shape in Scandinavia as the saga of the Volsungs; the court at Worms, and the tournament, and the rest of the historic names and local circumstances, are worked in to give poetic substance and colour. If poets ventured thus to falsify history in the middle ages, when the chronicles were there to convict them, how are we to tell fact from fiction in the poems of ages where the check of history is wanting? The Iliad and the Odyssey may contain many memories of real men and their deeds, an Agamemnon may have reigned in Mykēnai, there may have been a real siege of Troy, perhaps round the very mound where Schliemann has dug out the golden cups and necklace. But it is too hard a task to sift out historic truth in Homer, where natural events are as hopelessly mixed up with miracles as in the Maori legends. It is too hard to judge how far chronicles of old nations are impartially preserved by a bard whose rule it is (as Mr. Gladstone points out in his Primer of Homer) that no considerable Greek chieftain is ever slain in fair fight by a Trojan. Were nothing to be had out of ancient poetry except distorted memories of historical events, the anthropologist might be wise to set it aside altogether. Yet, looked at from another point of view, it is one of his most perfect and exact sources of knowledge.
Although what the poet relates may be fiction, what he mentions is apt to be history. In the names of nations and countries and cities, he is unconsciously pourtraying for us the world and its inhabitants as they were in his time. The catalogue of ships and men in the second book of the Iliad is a chart and census of the Mediterranean. Homer knows of the Ægyptians, their irrigated fields and their skill in medicine, and of the ship-famed Phœnicians and their purple stuffs. The name of Kadmos belongs to the Phœnician tongue, and signifies the “Eastern,” while the “seven-gated” Thebes built by his people shows that they had that reverence for the mystic number seven, which has its origin in the worship of the seven planets in Babylon. The poet can hardly have thought, when he told his wonder-tales with the circumstances of the actual world around him, how future ages would prize for itself that record of real life. Odysseus, clinging under the belly of the great ram, or sailing to the land of Hades to the weak shades of the dead, is mere myth. Yet the description of Polyphēmos is one of the few ancient pictures of the manners of low barbarians, and the visit to Hades is a chapter of old Greek religion, recording what men thought of the dull ghost-life beyond the tomb. So it is with the descriptions of life and manners. Nausikaa, the king’s daughter, drives the wain with the pair of mules down to the river’s mouth to carry the clothes to be washed. Odysseus walks through the streets of the seafaring Phaiakians, wondering at the haven and the mighty walls and bastions, till he crosses the bronze threshold of the palace of Alkinoos, and entering, clasps the knees of Queen Arētē; then he crouches on the hearthstone in the ashes, till the king, mindful of Zeus the Thunderer standing near to care for the suppliant, takes the guest by the hand, and makes him sit by him on his own son’s glittering seat. Thus following the romantic fortunes of the many-wiled Odysseus, we see as in the scenes of a dissolving-view how the heroes of old days went spear in hand with their swift dogs at their heel, how at the house-door they threw aside their garments to go into the bath-chamber, and came forth anointed with oil to the feast where with no such refinements as plates or knives they ate their fill of roast meat and cakes of bread; how they diverted themselves with throwing quoits on the smooth turf, or lounged on outspread hides in the sunshine playing merells; how in solemn rites they poured the libations of dark wine and burned the meat in sacrifice, with prayers for what their hearts desired, yet knowing all the while that the gods would, as they listed, this grant and that deny. All this is not only history, but history of the finest kind. Looked at by the student of culture, even the wild mixture of the natural and supernatural, so bewildering to the modern mind, is the record of an early stage of religious thought. The gods meet in council in the halls of cloud-gathering Zeus, to settle what shall be done with their contending armies of worshippers on the plains below. In the very fray of mortal warriors divine beings take part; Poseidōn plucks out the bronze-tipped spear from the shield of Aineias, lifts up the Trojan hero and bears him away unharmed over the heads of the warriors; even the goddesses set on one another like mortal shrews, when Hērē tears away the bow and quiver of Artemis, and with scornful laughter boxes her ears with them till the virgin huntress goes off in tears, leaving her bow behind. It would be wrong to think that all this seemed mere make-believe and poetic ornament to the men who first listened to the wondrous rhapsodies. They were in the changing state of religion described in the last chapter (see [p. 362]) when the spiritual beings, which to their ruder forefathers had served as personal causes of nature and events, were passing away from their first clearness, yet were still regarded as divinities presiding over nature and interfering with men’s lives. Contrasting such a state of thought with that of the present day will help us to realize one of the greatest events in all history, the change of men’s minds from the mythological temper to the historical temper. This change did not happen all at once, but has for many ages been gradually coming about. There is hardly a more instructive chapter in Grote’s History of Greece, than that in which he describes the philosophic age, when the Greeks were beginning to notice with perplexity and pain that the Homeric poems, become to them a sacred book, agreed but ill with their own experience of life, so that they asked themselves, can the world have really so changed since the days when men sat at table with the gods?
Much of what is called ancient history has to be looked at in this way. Historical criticism, that is, judgment, is practised not for the purpose of disbelieving but of believing. Its object is not to find fault with the author, but to ascertain how much of what he says may be reasonably taken as true. Thus a modern reader may have a sounder opinion about early Roman history than the Romans themselves had in the time of Livy and Cicero. We see more plainly than they, that the name of Rome is less likely to have been given from a man called Romulus, than that the name of Romulus was invented to account for the city being called Rome. To modern minds, the whole famous story of the wolf-fostermother of Romulus and Remus collapses when it is known to be only a version of the same old wonder-tale told by Herodotus as the story of the birth of Cyrus. Yet here again may be seen the indirect value of history even where its events are most questionable. Though there may never have been any such person as Romulus, the legend of the tracing of the city walls by his bronze ploughshare is a true record of the ceremony with which cities were anciently founded. Even later history, where the historian had written records to go upon, must often be sifted in this way. Suppose a class reading the 35th book of Livy. Such matters as Hannibal’s oath, and the preparations for war with Antiochus, are taken without question as good history. But when it comes to the story that about this time an ox belonging to one of the consuls uttered the awful words “Roma, cave tibi!” there is a laugh. Here it is not enough for the form-master simply to pass the story by as Livy’s nonsense. He has to admit that the historian probably took it from the official record of prodigies, so that at any rate it is good historical evidence that in ancient Rome men not only believed that an ox might speak, but that its so doing would be a divine portent, and notions of this kind had so become part of the national religion and government, that the augurs took care a regular supply of such omens should be forthcoming to guide the rulers of the state, or at least to enable them to impose upon the multitude. Thus the passages of history which seem at first sight most silly and false, may be solid facts in the history of civilisation.
It is plain that the compositions which serve as records of old-world life need not have been intended as history. If only the genuine words and thoughts of the ancients about anything have been handed down, it is for the moderns to extract history from them. Thus the Sanskrit hymns collected in the Veda serve as a record of the daily life of the early Aryans who chanted them. For when a hymn to the wind gods brings them in as driving in chariots with strong felloes and well-fashioned reins and cracking whips, then it is plain to the modern reader that the Aryan people among whom the hymn was made drove themselves in such chariots. Where the bright gods have gold chains on their breasts for beauty, carry spears on their shoulders and daggers at their sides, this mythical fancy gives a real picture of the accoutrement of the Aryan warrior. Thus, piece by piece, this præhistoric hymn-book shows the old patriarchal Aryan life, with the herds of cattle roaming over wide pastures or shut in the winter cow-stall, the ploughing of the fields and the reaping of the corn, the family ties and legal rights, the worship of the great nature-gods of sky and earth, sun and dawn, fire and water and winds, the intense belief in the shining regions of the immortal dead, the honour to the almsgiver and praise to the just man. In the sacred books of the old Persians, collected in the Avesta, have come down the long-remembered traditions of another branch of the Aryan race, who, dividing off from their Brahman kinsfolk, followed the faith of Zarathustra. The deep schism between the two religions is seen in the Zarathustrians having degraded the bright gods (deva) of the Brahmans into evil demons (daeva). Their horror of defiling the sacred fire by burning corpses as the Brahmans do had already led them to expose the dead to be devoured by wild beasts and carrion birds, as the Parsis still do in their “towers of silence.” In the beginning of the Avesta, there is mentioned as first and best of the good regions created by the good deity, the country called Airyana vaejo, the “Aryan seed,” which afterwards the evil deity cursed with ten months’ winter; this description of the climate looks as though the old Persians believed their early Aryan home was on the bleak slopes of Central Asia toward the sources of the Oxus and Yaxartes. Here and there among the sacred verses comes a touch of the life of these proud fierce herdsmen and tillers of the soil, little like the corrupt Persian and the thrifty Parsi of modern times. Their enthusiasm for the rough work of making the earth fit for man’s abode is quaintly shown where they sing of the delight the earth feels when the husbandman drains the wet soil and waters the dry, how she brings wealth to him who tills her with the right arm and the left, with the left arm and the right:
“When the corn grows, then the demons hiss;
When the shoots sprout, then the demons cough;