These remarks of Plato are valuable, not simply because they point out the uselessness of digging for a supposed basis of truth in the mythes, but because they at the same time suggest the true reason for mistrusting all such tentatives. The mythes form a class apart, abundant as well as peculiar: to remove any individual mythe from its own class into that of history or philosophy, by simple conjecture, and without any collateral evidence, is of no advantage, unless you can perform a similar process on the remainder. If the process be trustworthy, it ought to be applied to all; and e converso, if it be not applicable to all, it is not trustworthy as applied to any one specially; always assuming no special evidence to be accessible. To detach any individual mythe from the class to which it belongs, is to present it in an erroneous point of view; we have no choice except to admit them as they stand, by putting ourselves approximatively into the frame of mind of those for whom they were destined and to whom they appeared worthy of credit.
If Plato thus discountenances all attempts to transform the mythes by interpretation into history or philosophy, indirectly recognizing the generic difference between them—we find substantially the same view pervading the elaborate precepts in his treatise on the Republic. He there regards the mythes, not as embodying either matter-of-fact or philosophical principle, but as portions of religious and patriotic faith, and instruments of ethical tuition. Instead of allowing the poets to frame them according to the impulses of their own genius, and with a view to immediate popularity, he directs the legislator to provide types of his own for the characters of the gods and heroes, and to suppress all such divine and heroic legends as are not in harmony with these preëstablished canons. In the Platonic system, the mythes are not to be matters of history, nor yet of spontaneous or casual fiction, but of prescribed faith: he supposes that the people will believe, as a thing of course, what the poets circulate, and he therefore directs that the latter shall circulate nothing which does not tend to ennoble and improve the feelings. He conceives the mythes as stories composed to illustrate the general sentiments of the poets and the community, respecting the character and attributes of the gods and heroes, or respecting the social relations, and ethical duties as well as motives of mankind: hence the obligation upon the legislator to prescribe beforehand the types of character which shall be illustrated, and to restrain the poets from following out any opposing fancies. “Let us neither believe ourselves (he exclaims), nor permit any one to circulate, that Thêseus son of Poseidôn and Peirithöus son of Zeus, or any other hero or son of a god, could ever have brought themselves to commit abductions or other enormities such as are now falsely ascribed to them. We must compel the poets to say, either that such persons were not the sons of gods, or that they were not the perpetrators of such misdeeds.”[991]
Most of the mythes which the youth hear and repeat (according to Plato) are false, but some of them are true: the great and prominent mythes which appear in Homer and Hesiod are no less fictions than the rest. But fiction constitutes one of the indispensable instruments of mental training as well as truth; only the legislator must take care that the fiction so employed shall be beneficent and not mischievous.[992] As the mischievous fictions (he says) take their rise from wrong preconceptions respecting the character of the gods and heroes, so the way to correct them is to enforce, by authorized compositions, the adoption of a more correct standard.[993]
The comments which Plato has delivered with so much force in his Republic, and the enactments which he deduces from them, are in the main an expansion of that sentiment of condemnation, which he shared with so many other philosophers, towards a large portion of the Homeric and Hesiodic stories.[994] But the manner in which he has set forth this opinion, unfolds to us more clearly the real character of the mythical narratives. They are creations of the productive minds in the community, deduced from the supposed attributes of the gods and heroes: so Plato views them, and in such character he proposes to amend them. The legislator would cause to be prepared a better and truer picture of the foretime, because he would start from truer (that is to say, more creditable) conceptions of the gods and heroes. For Plato rejects the mythes respecting Zeus and Hêrê, or Thêseus and Peirithöus, not from any want of evidence, but because they are unworthy of gods and heroes: he proposes to call forth new mythes, which, though he admits them at the outset to be fiction, he knows will soon be received as true, and supply more valuable lessons of conduct.
We may consider, then, that Plato disapproves of the attempt to identify the old mythes either with exaggerated history or with disguised philosophy. He shares in the current faith, without any suspicion or criticism, as to Orpheus, Palamêdês, Dædalus, Amphiôn, Thêseus, Achilles, Cheirôn, and other mythical personages;[995] but what chiefly fills his mind is, the inherited sentiment of deep reverence for these superhuman characters and for the age to which they belonged,—a sentiment sufficiently strong to render him not only an unbeliever in such legends as conflict with it, but also a deliberate creator of new legends for the purpose of expanding and gratifying it. The more we examine this sentiment, both in the mind of Plato as well as in that of the Greeks generally, the more shall we be convinced that it formed essentially and inseparably a portion of Hellenic religious faith. The mythe both presupposes, and springs out of, a settled basis, and a strong expansive force of religious, social, and patriotic feeling, operating upon a past which is little better than a blank as to positive knowledge. It resembles history, in so far as its form is narrative; it resembles philosophy, in so far as it is occasionally illustrative; but in its essence and substance, in the mental tendencies by which it is created as well as in those by which it is judged and upheld, it is a popularized expression of the divine and heroic faith of the people.
Grecian antiquity cannot be at all understood except in connection with Grecian religion. It begins with gods and it ends with historical men, the former being recognized not simply as gods, but as primitive ancestors, and connected with the latter by a long mythical genealogy, partly heroic and partly human. Now the whole value of such genealogies arises from their being taken entire; the god or hero at the top is in point of fact the most important member of the whole;[996] for the length and continuity of the series arises from anxiety on the part of historical men to join themselves by a thread of descent with the being whom they worshipped in their gentile sacrifices. Without the ancestorial god, the whole pedigree would have become not only acephalous, but worthless and uninteresting. The pride of the Herakleids, Asklêpiads, Æakids, Nêleids, Dædalids, etc. was attached to the primitive eponymous hero and to the god from whom they sprung, not to the line of names, generally long and barren, through which the divine or heroic dignity gradually dwindled down into common manhood. Indeed, the length of the genealogy (as I have before remarked) was an evidence of the humility of the historical man, which led him to place himself at a respectful distance from the gods or heroes; for Hekatæus of Milêtus, who ranked himself as the fifteenth descendant of a god, might perhaps have accounted it an overweening impiety in any living man to claim a god for his immediate father.
The whole chronology of Greece, anterior to 776 B. C., consists of calculations founded upon these mythical genealogies, especially upon that of the Spartan kings and their descent from Hêraklês,—thirty years being commonly taken as the equivalent of a generation, or about three generations to a century. This process of computation was altogether illusory, as applying historical and chronological conditions to a case on which they had no bearing. Though the domain of history was seemingly enlarged, the religious element was tacitly set aside: when the heroes and gods were chronologized, they became insensibly approximated to the limits of humanity, and the process indirectly gave encouragement to the theory of Euêmerus. Personages originally legendary and poetical were erected into definite landmarks for measuring the duration of the foretime, thus gaining in respect to historical distinctness, but not without loss on the score of religious association. Both Euêmerus and the subsequent Christian writers, who denied the original and inherent divinity of the pagan gods, had a great advantage in carrying their chronological researches strictly and consistently upwards—for all chronology fails as soon as we suppose a race superior to common humanity.
Moreover, it is to be remarked that the pedigree of the Spartan kings, which Apollodôrus and Eratosthenês selected as the basis of their estimate of time, is nowise superior in credibility and trustworthiness to the thousand other gentile and family pedigrees with which Greece abounded; it is rather indeed to be numbered among the most incredible of all, seeing that Hêraklês as a progenitor is placed at the head of perhaps more pedigrees than any other Grecian god or hero.[997] The descent of the Spartan king Leonidas from Hêraklês rests upon no better evidence than that of Aristotle or Hippocratês from Asklêpius,[998]—of Evagoras or Thucydidês from Æakus,—of Socratês from Dædalus,—of the Spartan heraldic family from Talthybius,—of the prophetic Iamid family in Elis from Iamus,—of the root-gatherers in Pêlion from Cheirôn,—and of Hekatæus and his gens from some god in the sixteenth ascending line of the series. There is little exaggeration in saying, indeed, that no permanent combination of men in Greece, religious, social, or professional, was without a similar pedigree; all arising out of the same exigences of the feelings and imagination, to personify as well as to sanctify the bond of union among the members. Every one of these gentes began with a religious and ended with an historical person. At some point or other in the upward series, entities of history were exchanged for entities of religion; but where that point is to be found we are unable to say, nor had the wisest of the ancient Greeks any means of determining. Thus much, however, we know, that the series taken as a whole, though dear and precious to the believing Greek, possesses no value as chronological evidence to the historian.
When Hekatæus visited Thêbes in Egypt, he mentioned to the Egyptian priests, doubtless with a feeling of satisfaction and pride, the imposing pedigree of the gens to which he belonged,—with fifteen ancestors in ascending line, and a god as the initial progenitor. But he found himself immeasurably overdone by the priests “who genealogized against him.”[999] They showed to him three hundred and forty-one wooden colossal statues, representing the succession of chief priests in the temple in uninterrupted series from father to son, through a space of 11,300 years. Prior to the commencement of this long period (they said), the gods dwelling along with men, had exercised sway in Egypt; but they repudiated altogether the idea of men begotten by gods or of heroes.[1000]
But these counter-genealogies, are, in respect to trustworthiness and evidence, on the same footing. Each represents partly the religious faith, partly the retrospective imagination, of the persons from whom it emanated; in each, the lower members of the series (to what extent we cannot tell) are real, the upper members fabulous; but in each also the series derived all its interest and all its imposing effect from being conceived unbroken and entire. Herodotus is much perplexed by the capital discrepancy between the Grecian and Egyptian chronologies, and vainly employs his ingenuity in reconciling them. There is no standard of objective evidence by which either the one or the other of them can be tried: each has its own subjective value, in conjunction with the faith and feelings of Egyptians and Greeks, and each presupposes in the believer certain mental prepossessions which are not to be found beyond its own local limits. Nor is the greater or less extent of duration at all important, when we once pass the limits of evidence and verifiable reality. One century of recorded time, adequately studded with authentic and orderly events, presents a greater mass and a greater difficulty of transition to the imagination than a hundred centuries of barren genealogy. Herodotus, in discussing the age of Homer and Hesiod, treats an anterior point of 400 years as if it were only yesterday; the reign of Henry VI. is separated from us by an equal interval, and the reader will not require to be reminded how long that interval now appears.