The age immediately prior to this unsettled condition of thought is the really mythopœic age; in which the creative faculties of the society know no other employment, and the mass of the society no other mental demand. The perfect expression of such a period, in its full peculiarity and grandeur, is to be found in the Iliad and Odyssey,—poems of which we cannot determine the exact date, but which seem both to have existed prior to the first Olympiad, 776 B. C., our earliest trustworthy mark of Grecian time. For some time after that event, the mythopœic tendencies continued in vigor (Arktinus, Leschês, Eumêlus, and seemingly most of the Hesiodic poems, fall within or shortly after the first century of recorded Olympiads); but from and after this first century, we may trace the operation of causes which gradually enfeebled and narrowed them, altering the point of view from which the mythes were looked at. What these causes were, it will be necessary briefly to intimate.
The foremost and most general of all is, the expansive force of Grecian intellect itself,—a quality in which this remarkable people stand distinguished from all their neighbors and contemporaries. Most, if not all nations have had mythes, but no nation except the Greeks have imparted to them immortal charm and universal interest; and the same mental capacities, which raised the great men of the poetic age to this exalted level, also pushed forward their successors to outgrow the early faith in which the mythes had been generated and accredited.
One great mark, as well as means, of such intellectual expansion, was the habit of attending to, recording, and combining, positive and present facts, both domestic and foreign. In the genuine Grecian epic, the theme was an unknown and aoristic past; but even as early as the Works and Days of Hesiod, the present begins to figure: the man who tills the earth appears in his own solitary nakedness, apart from gods and heroes—bound indeed by serious obligations to the gods, but contending against many difficulties which are not to be removed by simple reliance on their help. The poet denounces his age in the strongest terms as miserable, degraded and profligate, and looks back with reverential envy to the extinct heroic races who fought at Troy and Thêbes. Yet bad as the present time is, the Muse condescends to look at it along with him, and to prescribe rules for human life—with the assurance that if a man be industrious, frugal, provident, just and friendly in his dealings, the gods will recompense him with affluence and security. Nor does the Muse disdain, while holding out such promise, to cast herself into the most homely details of present existence and to give advice thoroughly practical and calculating. Men whose minds were full of the heroes of Homer, called Hesiod in contempt the poet of the Helots; and the contrast between the two is certainly a remarkable proof of the tendency of Greek poetry towards the present and the positive.
Other manifestations of the same tendency become visible in the age of Archilochus (B. C. 680-660). In an age when metrical composition and the living voice are the only means whereby the productive minds of a community make themselves felt, the invention of a new metre, new forms of song and recitation, or diversified accompaniments, constitute an epoch. The iambic, elegiac, choric, and lyric poetry, from Archilochus downwards, all indicate purposes in the poet, and impressibilities of the hearers, very different from those of the ancient epic. In all of them the personal feeling of the poet and the specialties of present time and place, are brought prominently forward, while in the Homeric hexameter the poet is a mere nameless organ of the historical Muse—the hearers are content to learn, believe, and feel, the incidents of a foregone world, and the tale is hardly less suitable to one time and place than to another. The iambic metre (we are told) was first suggested to Archilochus by the bitterness of his own private antipathies; and the mortal wounds inflicted by his lampoons, upon the individuals against whom they were directed, still remain attested, though the verses themselves have perished. It was the metre (according to the well-known judgment of Aristotle) most nearly approaching to common speech, and well suited both to the coarse vein of sentiment, and to the smart and emphatic diction of its inventor.[852] Simonidês of Amorgus, the younger contemporary of Archilochus, employed the same metre, with less bitterness, but with an anti-heroic tendency not less decided. His remaining fragments present a mixture of teaching and sarcasm, having a distinct bearing upon actual life,[853] and carrying out the spirit which partially appears in the Hesiodic Works and Days. Of Alkæus and Sapphô, though unfortunately we are compelled to speak of them upon hearsay only, we know enough to satisfy us that their own personal sentiments and sufferings, their relations private or public with the contemporary world, constituted the soul of those short effusions which gave them so much celebrity:[854] and in the few remains of the elegiac poets preserved to us—Kallinus, Mimnermus, Tyrtæus—the impulse of some present motive or circumstance is no less conspicuous. The same may also be said of Solôn, Theognis and Phokylidês, who preach, encourage, censure, or complain, but do not recount—and in whom a profound ethical sensibility, unknown to the Homeric poems, manifests itself: the form of poetry (to use the words of Solôn himself) is made the substitute for the public speaking of the agora.[855]
Doubtless all these poets made abundant use of the ancient mythes, but it was by turning them to present account, in the way of illustration, or flattery, or contrast,—a tendency which we may usually detect even in the compositions of Pindar, in spite of the lofty and heroic strain which they breathe throughout. That narrative or legendary poetry still continued to be composed during the seventh and sixth centuries before the Christian æra is not to be questioned; but it exhibited the old epical character without the old epical genius; both the inspiration of the composer and the sympathies of the audience had become more deeply enlisted in the world before them, and disposed to fasten on incidents of their own actual experience. From Solôn and Theognis we pass to the abandonment of all metrical restrictions and to the introduction of prose writing,—a fact, the importance of which it is needless to dwell upon,—marking as well the increased familiarity with written records, as the commencement of a separate branch of literature for the intellect, apart from the imagination and emotions wherein the old legends had their exclusive root.
Egypt was first unreservedly opened to the Greeks during the reign of Psammetichus, about B. C. 660; gradually it became much frequented by them for military or commercial purposes, or for simple curiosity, and enlarged the range of their thoughts and observations, while it also imparted to them that vein of mysticism, which overgrew the primitive simplicity of the Homeric religion, and of which I have spoken in a former chapter. They found in it a long-established civilization, colossal wonders of architecture, and a certain knowledge of astronomy and geometry, elementary indeed, but in advance of their own. Moreover it was a portion of their present world, and it contributed to form in them an interest for noting and describing the actual realities before them. A sensible progress is made in the Greek mind during the two centuries from B. C. 700 to B. C. 500, in the record and arrangement of historical facts: an historical sense arises in the superior intellects, and some idea of evidence as a discriminating test between fact and fiction. And this progressive tendency was further stimulated by increased communication and by more settled and peaceful social relations between the various members of the Hellenic world, to which may be added material improvements, purchased at the expense of a period of turbulence and revolution, in the internal administration of each separate state. The Olympic, Pythian, Nemean, and Isthmian games became frequented by visitors from the most distant parts of Greece: the great periodical festival in the island of Dêlos brought together the citizens of every Ionic community, with their wives and children, and an ample display of wealth and ornaments.[856] Numerous and flourishing colonies were founded in Sicily, the south of Italy, the coasts of Epirus and of the Euxine Sea: the Phokæans explored the whole of the Adriatic, established Massalia, and penetrated even as far as the south of Ibêria, with which they carried on a lucrative commerce.[857] The geographical ideas of the Greeks were thus both expanded and rectified: the first preparation of a map, by Anaximander the disciple of Thalês, is an epoch in the history of science. We may note the ridicule bestowed by Herodotus both upon the supposed people called Hyperboreans and upon the idea of a circumfluous ocean-stream, as demonstrating the progress of the age in this department of inquiry.[858] And even earlier than Herodotus, Xanthus had noticed the occurrence of fossil marine productions in the interior of Asia Minor, which led him to reflections on the changes of the earth’s surface with respect to land and water.[859]
If then we look down the three centuries and a half which elapsed between the commencement of the Olympic æra and the age of Herodotus and Thucydidês, we shall discern a striking advance in the Greeks,—ethical, social and intellectual. Positive history and chronology has not only been created, but in the case of Thucydidês, the qualities necessary to the historiographer, in their application to recent events, have been developed with a degree of perfection never since surpassed. Men’s minds have assumed a gentler as well as a juster cast; and acts come to be criticized with reference to their bearing on the internal happiness of a well-regulated community, as well as upon the standing harmony of fraternal states. While Thucydidês treats the habitual and licensed piracy, so coolly alluded to in the Homeric poems, as an obsolete enormity, many of the acts described in the old heroic and Theogonic legends were found not less repugnant to this improved tone of feeling. The battles of the gods with the Giants and Titans,—the castration of Uranus by his son Kronus,—the cruelty, deceit and licentiousness, often supposed both in the gods and heroes, provoked strong disapprobation. And the language of the philosopher Xenophanês, who composed both elegiac and iambic poems for the express purpose of denouncing such tales, is as vehement and unsparing as that of the Christian writers, who, eight centuries afterwards, attacked the whole scheme of paganism.[860]
Nor was it alone as an ethical and social critic that Xenophanês stood distinguished. He was one of a great and eminent triad—Thalês and Pythagoras being the others—who, in the sixth century before the Christian æra, first opened up those veins of speculative philosophy which occupied afterwards so large a portion of Grecian intellectual energy. Of the material differences between the three I do not here speak; I regard them only in reference to the Homeric and Hesiodic philosophy which preceded them, and from which all three deviated by a step, perhaps the most remarkable in all the history of philosophy. In the scheme of ideas common to Homer and to the Hesiodic Theogony (as has been already stated), we find nature distributed into a variety of personal agencies, administered according to the free-will of different Beings more or less analogous to man—each of these Beings having his own character, attributes and powers, his own sources of pain and pleasure, and his own especial sympathies or antipathies with human individuals; each being determined to act or forbear, to grant favor or inflict injury in his own department of phænomena, according as men, or perhaps other Beings analogous to himself, might conciliate or offend him. The Gods, properly so called, (those who bore a proper name and received some public or family worship,) were the most commanding and capital members amidst this vast network of agents visible and invisible, spread over the universe.[861] The whole view of nature was purely religious and subjective, the spontaneous suggestion of the early mind. It proceeded from the instinctive tendencies of the feelings and imagination to transport, to the world without, the familiar type of free-will and conscious personal action: above all, it took deep hold of the emotions, from the widely extended sympathy which it so perpetually called forth between man and nature.[862]
The first attempt to disenthral the philosophic intellect from this all-personifying religious faith, and to constitute a method of interpreting nature distinct from the spontaneous inspirations of untaught minds, is to be found in Thalês, Xenophanês and Pythagoras, in the sixth century before the Christian æra. It is in them that we first find the idea of Person tacitly set aside or limited, and an impersonal Nature conceived as the object of study. The divine husband and wife, Oceanus and Têthys, parents of many gods and of the Oceanic nymphs, together with the avenging goddess Styx, are translated into the material substance water, or, as we ought rather to say, the Fluid: and Thalês set himself to prove that water was the primitive element, out of which all the different natural substances had been formed.[863] He, as well as Xenophanês and Pythagoras, started the problem of physical philosophy, with its objective character and invariable laws, to be discoverable by a proper and methodical application of the human intellect. The Greek word Φύσις, denoting nature, and its derivatives physics and physiology, unknown in that large sense to Homer or Hesiod, as well as the word Kosmos, to denote the mundane system, first appears with these philosophers.[864] The elemental analysis of Thalês—the one unchangeable cosmic substance, varying only in appearance, but not in reality, as suggested by Xenophanês,—and the geometrical and arithmetical combinations of Pythagoras,—all these were different ways of approaching the explanation of physical phænomena, and each gave rise to a distinct school or succession of philosophers. But they all agreed in departing from the primitive method, and in recognizing determinate properties, invariable sequences, and objective truth, in nature—either independent of willing or designing agents, or serving to these latter at once as an indispensable subject-matter and as a limiting condition. Xenophanês disclaimed openly all knowledge respecting the gods, and pronounced that no man could have any means of ascertaining when he was right and when he was wrong, in affirmations respecting them:[865] while Pythagoras represents in part the scientific tendencies of his age, in part also the spirit of mysticism and of special fraternities for religious and ascetic observance, which became diffused throughout Greece in the sixth century before the Christian æra. This was another point which placed him in antipathy with the simple, unconscious and demonstrative faith of the old poets, as well as with the current legends.
If these distinguished men, when they ceased to follow the primitive instinct of tracing the phænomena of nature to personal and designing agents, passed over, not at once to induction and observation, but to a misemployment of abstract words, substituting metaphysical eideôla in the place of polytheism, and to an exaggerated application of certain narrow physical theories—we must remember that nothing else could be expected from the scanty stock of facts then accessible, and that the most profound study of the human mind points out such transition as an inevitable law of intellectual progress.[866] At present, we have to compare them only with that state of the Greek mind[867] which they partially superseded, and with which they were in decided opposition. The rudiments of physical science were conceived and developed among superior men; but the religious feeling of the mass was averse to them; and the aversion, though gradually mitigated, never wholly died away. Some of the philosophers were not backward in charging others with irreligion, while the multitude seems to have felt the same sentiment more or less towards all—or towards that postulate of constant sequences, with determinate conditions of occurrence, which scientific study implies, and which they could not reconcile with their belief in the agency of the gods, to whom they were constantly praying for special succor and blessings.