Their thoughts were bent on violence alone,
The deed of battle, and the dying groan.
Bloody their feasts, with wheaten food unblessed.”
According to Hesiod, who is followed by the later poets, the “immortals inhabiting the Olympian mansions” feast ever on the pure and bloodless food of Ambrosia, and their drink is Nectar, which may be taken to be a sort of refined dew. He represents the divine Muses of Helicon, who inspire his song, as reproaching the shepherds, his neighbours, “that tend the flocks,” with the possession of “mere fleshly appetites.”
Ovid, amongst the Latins, is the most charming painter of the innocence of the “Golden Age.” Amongst our own poets, Pope, Thomson, and Shelley—the last as a prophet of the future and actual rather than the poet of a past and fictitious age of innocence—have contributed to embellish the fable of the Past and the hope of the Future.
II.
PYTHAGORAS. 570–470 B.C.
“A GREATER good never came, nor ever will come, to mankind, than that which was imparted by the gods through Pythagoras.” Such is the expression of enthusiastic admiration of one of his biographers. To those who are unacquainted with the historical development of Greek thought and Greek philosophy it may seem to be merely the utterance of the partiality of hero-worship. Those, on the other hand, who know anything of that most important history, and of the influence, direct or indirect, of Pythagoras upon the most intellectual and earnest minds of his countrymen—in particular upon Plato and his followers, and through them upon the later Jewish and upon very early Christian ideas—will acknowledge, at least, that the name of the prophet of Samos is that of one of the most important and influential factors in the production and progress of higher human thought.
There is a true and there is a false hero-worship. The latter, whatever it may have done to preserve the blind and unreasoning subservience of mankind, has not tended to accelerate the progress of the world towards the attainment of truth. The old-world occupants of the popular Pantheon—“the patrons of mankind, gods and sons of gods, destroyers rightlier called and plagues of men”—are indeed fast losing, if they have not entirely lost, their ancient credit, but their vacant places have yet to be filled by the representatives of the most exalted ideals of humanity. Whenever, in the place of the representatives of mere physical and mental force, the true heroes shall be enthroned, amongst the moral luminaries and pioneers who have contributed to lessen the thick darkness of ignorance, barbarism, and selfishness, the name of the first western apostle of humanitarianism and of spiritualism must assume a prominent position.
It is a natural and legitimate curiosity which leads us to wish to know, with something of certainty and fulness, the outer and inner life of the master spirits of our race. Unfortunately, the personality of many of the most interesting and illustrious of them is of a vague and shadowy kind. But when we reflect that little more is known of the personal life of Shakspere than of that of Pythagoras or Plato—not to mention other eminent names—our surprise is lessened that, in an age long preceding the discovery of printing, the records of a life even so important and influential as that of the founder of Pythagoreanism are meagre and scanty.