It is in Pindar, however (518–442 B.C.), that we first find such a mental process plainly avowed by a believer. In his first Olympic Ode he expressly declares the need for bringing afterthought to bear on poetic lore, that so men may speak nought unfitting of the Gods; and he protests that he will never tell the tale of the blessed ones banqueting on human flesh.[54] In the ninth Ode he again protests that his lips must not speak blasphemously of such a thing as strife among the immortals.[55] Here the critical motive is ethical, though, while repudiating one kind of scandal about the Gods, Pindar placidly accepts others no less startling to the modern sense. His critical revolt, in fact, is far from thoroughgoing, and suggests rather a religious man’s partial response to pressure from others than any independent process of reflection.[56]
“He [Pindar] was honestly attached to the national religion and to its varieties in old local cults. He lived a somewhat sacerdotal life, labouring in honour of the Gods, and seeking to spread a reverence for old traditional beliefs. He, moreover, shows an acquaintance with Orphic rites and Pythagorean mysteries, which led him to preach the doctrine of immortality, and of rewards and punishments in the life hereafter. [Note.—The most explicit fragment (θρῆνοι, 3), is, however, not considered genuine by recent critics.]... He is indeed more affected by the advance of freethinking than he imagines; he borrows from the neologians the habit of rationalizing myths, and explaining away immoral acts and motives in the Gods; but these things are isolated attempts with him, and have no deep effect upon his general thinking” (Mahaffy, Hist. of Greek Lit. i, 213–14).
For such a development we are not, of course, forced to assume a foreign influence: mere progress in refinement and in mental activity could bring it about; yet none the less it is probable that foreign influence did quicken the process. It is true that from the beginnings of the literary period Greek thought played with a certain freedom on myth, partly perhaps because the traditions visibly came from various races, and there was no strong priesthood to ossify them. After Homer and Hesiod, men looked back to those poets as shaping theology to their own minds.[57] But all custom is conservative, and Pindar’s mind had that general cast. On the other hand, external influence was forthcoming. The period of Pindar and Æschylus [525–455 B.C.] follows on one in which Greek thought, stimulated on all sides, had taken the first great stride in its advance beyond all antiquity. Egypt had been fully thrown open to the Greeks in the reign of Psammetichos[58] (650 B.C.); and a great historian, who contends that the “sheer inherent and expansive force” of “the” Greek intellect, “aided but by no means either impressed or provoked from without,” was the true cause, yet concedes that intercourse with Egypt “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 that from Asia Minor in turn they had derived “musical instruments and new laws of rhythm and melody,” as well as “violent and maddening religious rites.”[59] And others making similar à priori claims for the Greek intelligence are forced likewise to admit that the mental transition between Homer and Herodotos cannot be explained save in terms of “the influence of other creeds, and the necessary operation of altered circumstances and relations.”[60] In the Persae of Æschylus we even catch a glimpse of direct contact with foreign skepticism;[61] and again in the Agamemnon there is a reference to some impious one who denied that the Gods deigned to have care of mortals.[62] It seems unwarrantable to read as “ridicule of popular polytheism” the passage in the same tragedy:[63] “Zeus, whosoever he be; if this name be well-pleasing to himself in invocation, by this do I name him.” It may more fitly be read[64] as an echo of the saying of Herakleitos that “the Wise [= the Logos?] is unwilling and willing to be called by the name of Zeus.”[65] But in the poet’s thought, as revealed in the Prometheus, and in the Agamemnon on the theme of the sacrifice of Iphigeneia, there has occurred an ethical judgment of the older creeds, an approach to pantheism, a rejection of anthropomorphism, and a growth of pessimism that tells of their final insufficiency.
The leaning to pantheism is established by the discovery that the disputed lines, “Zeus is sky, earth, and heaven: Zeus is all things, yea, greater than all things” (Frag. 443), belonged to the lost tragedy of the Heliades (Haigh, Tragic Drama of the Greeks, 1896, p. 88). For the pessimism see the Prometheus, 247–51. The anti-anthropomorphism is further to be made out from the lines ascribed to Æschylus by Justin Martyr (De Monarchia, c. 2) and Clemens Alexandrinus (Stromata, v, 14). They are expressly pantheistic; but their genuineness is doubtful. The story that Æschylus was nearly killed by a theatre audience on the score that he had divulged part of the mysteries in a tragedy (Haigh, The Attic Theatre, 1889, p. 316; Tragic Drama, pp. 49–50) does not seem to have suggested to Aristotle, who tells it (Nicomachean Ethics, iii, 2), any heterodox intention on the tragedian’s part; but it is hard to see an orthodox believer in the author either of the Prometheus, wherein Zeus is posed as brutal might crucifying innocence and beneficence, or of the Agamemnon, where the father, perplexed in the extreme, can but fall back helplessly on formulas about the all-sufficiency of Zeus when called upon to sacrifice his daughter. Cp. Haigh, Tragic Drama, p. 86 sq. “Some critics,” says Mr. Haigh (p. 88), “have been led to imagine that there is in Æschylus a double Zeus—the ordinary God of the polytheistic religion and the one omnipotent deity in whom he really believed. They suppose that he had no genuine faith in the credibility of the popular legends, but merely used them as a setting for his tragedies; and that his own convictions were of a more philosophical type,” as seen in the pantheistic lines concerning Zeus. To this Mr. Haigh replies that it is “most improbable that there was any clear distinction in the mind of Æschylus” between the two conceptions of Zeus; going on, however, to admit that “much, no doubt, he regarded as uncertain, much as false. Even the name ‘Zeus’ was to him a mere convention.” Mr. Haigh in this discussion does not attempt to deal with the problem of the Prometheus.
The hesitations of the critics on this head are noteworthy. Karl Ottfried Müller, who is least himself in dealing with fundamental issues of creed, evades the problem (Lit. of Anc. Greece, 1847, p. 329) with the bald suggestion that “Æschylus, in his own mind, must have felt how this severity [of Zeus], a necessary accompaniment of the transition from the Titanic period to the government of the Gods of Olympus, was to be reconciled with the mild wisdom which he makes an attribute of Zeus in the subsequent ages of the world. Consequently, the deviation from right ... would all lie on the side of Prometheus.” This nugatory plea—which is rightly rejected by Burckhardt (Griech. Culturgesch. ii, 25)—is ineffectually backed by the argument that the friendly Oceanides recur to the thought, “Those only are wise who humbly reverence Adrasteia (Fate)”—as if the positing of a supreme Fate were not a further belittlement of Zeus.
Other critics are similarly evasive. Patin (Eschyle, éd. 1877, p. 250 sq.), noting the vagaries of past criticism, hostile and other, avowedly leaves the play an unsolved enigma, affirming only the commonly asserted “piety” of Æschylus. Girard (Le sentiment religieux en Grèce, pp. 425–29) does no better, while dogmatically asserting that the poet is “the Greek faithful to the faith of his fathers, which he interprets with an intelligent and emotional (émue) veneration.” Meyer (iii, §§ 257–58) draws an elaborate parallel between Æschylus and Pindar, affirming in turn the “tiefe Frömmigkeit” of the former—and in turn leaves the enigma of the Prometheus unsolved. Professor Decharme, rightly rejecting the fanciful interpretations of Quinet and others who allegorize Prometheus into humanity revolting against superstition, offers a very unsatisfying explanation of his own (p. 107), which practically denies that there is any problem to solve.
Prof. Mahaffy, with his more vivacious habit of thought, comes to the evaded issue. “How,” he asks, “did the Athenian audience, who vehemently attacked the poet for divulging the mysteries, tolerate such a drama? And still more, how did Æschylus, a pious and serious thinker, venture to bring such a subject on the stage with a moral purpose?” The answers suggested are: (1) that in all old religions there are tolerated anomalous survivals; (2) that “a very extreme distortion of their Gods will not offend many who would feel outraged at any open denial of them”; (3) that all Greeks longed for despotic power for themselves, and that “no Athenian, however he sympathized with Prometheus, would think of blaming Zeus for ... crushing all resistance to his will.” But even if these answers—of which the last is the most questionable—be accepted, “the question of the poet’s intention is far more difficult, and will probably never be satisfactorily answered.” Finally, we have this summing-up: “Æschylus was, indeed, essentially a theologian ... but, what is more honourable and exceptional, he was so candid and honest a theologian that he did not approach men’s difficulties for the purpose of refuting them or showing them weak and groundless. On the contrary, though an orthodox and pious man, though clearly convinced of the goodness of Providence, and of the profound truth of the religion of his fathers, he was ever stating boldly the contradictions and anomalies in morals and in myths, and thus naturally incurring the odium and suspicion of the professional advocates of religion and their followers. He felt, perhaps instinctively, that a vivid dramatic statement of these problems in his tragedies was better moral education than vapid platitudes about our ignorance, and about our difficulties being only caused by the shortness of our sight” (Hist. of Greek Lit. i, 260–61, 273–74).
Here, despite the intelligent handling, the enigma is merely transferred from the great tragedian’s work to his character: it is not solved. No solution is offered of the problem of the pantheism of the fragment above cited, which is quite irreconcilable with any orthodox belief in Greek religion, though such sayings are at times repeated by unthinking believers, without recognition of their bearing. That the pantheism is a philosophical element imported into the Greek world from the Babylonian through the early Ionian thinkers seems to be the historical fact (cp. Whittaker, as last cited): that the importation meant the dissolution of the national faith for many thinking men seems to be no less true. It seems finally permissible, then, to suggest that the “piety” of Æschylus was either discontinuous or a matter of artistic rhetoric and public spirit, and that the Prometheus is a work of profound and terrible irony, unburdening his mind of reveries that religion could not conjure away. The discussion on the play has unduly ignored the question of its date. It is, in all probability, one of the latest of the works of Æschylus (K. O. Müller, Lit. of Anc. Greece, p. 327; Haigh, Tragic Drama, p. 109). Müller points to the employment of the third actor—a late development—and Haigh to the overshadowing of the choruses by the dialogue; also to the mention (ll. 366–72) of the eruption of Etna, which occurred in 475 B.C. This one circumstance goes far to solve the dispute. Written near the end of the poet’s life the play belongs to the latest stages of his thinking; and if it departs widely in its tone from the earlier plays, the reasonable inference is that his ideas had undergone a change. The Agamemnon, with its desolating problem, seems to be also one of his later works. Rationalism, indeed, does not usually emerge in old age, though Voltaire was deeply shaken in his theism by the earthquake of Lisbon; but Æschylus is unique even among men of genius; and the highest flight of Greek drama may well stand for an abnormal intellectual experience.
In this primary entrance of critical doubt into drama we have one of the sociological clues to the whole evolution of Greek thought. It has been truly said that the constant action of the tragic stage, the dramatic putting of arguments and rejoinders, pros and cons—which in turn was a fruit of the actual daily pleadings in the Athenian dikastery—was a manifold stimulus alike to ethical feeling and to intellectual effort, such as no other ancient civilization ever knew. “The appropriate subject-matter of tragedy is pregnant not only with ethical sympathy, but also with ethical debate and speculation,” to an extent unapproached in the earlier lyric and gnomic poetry and the literature of aphorism and precept. “In place of unexpanded results, or the mere communication of single-minded sentiment, we have even in Æschylus, the earliest of the great tragedians, a large latitude of dissent and debate—a shifting point of view—a case better or worse—and a divination of the future advent of sovereign and instructed reason. It was through the intermediate stage of tragedy that Grecian literature passed into the Rhetoric, Dialectics, and Ethical speculation which marked the fifth century B.C.”[66]
This development was indeed autochthonous, save insofar as the germ of the tragic drama may have come from the East in the cult of Dionysos, with its vinous dithyramb: the “Greek intellect” assuredly did wonderful things at Athens, being placed, for a time, in civic conditions peculiarly fitted for the economic evocation of certain forms of genius. But the above-noted developments in Pindar and in Æschylus had been preceded by the great florescence of early Ionian philosophy in the sixth century, a growth which constrains us to look once more to Asia Minor for a vital fructification of the Greek inner life, of a kind that Athenian institutions could not in themselves evoke. For while drama flourished supremely at Athens, science and philosophy grew up elsewhere, centuries before Athens had a philosopher of note; and all the notable beginnings of Hellenic freethought occurred outside of Hellas proper.