Rambles and Studies in Greece

by J. P. Mahaffy

Salamis from Across the Bay

The wretched modern village of Eleusis is picturesquely situated near the sea, on the old site, and there are still to be seen the ruins, not only of the famous temple of Demeter, but also of the Propylæa, built apparently in imitation of that of Mnesicles on the Acropolis at Athens, though the site of both [pg 208]temple and Propylæa are at Eleusis low, and in no way striking.

These celebrated ruins are wretchedly defaced. Not a column or a wall is now standing, and we can see nothing but vast fragments of pillars and capitals, and a great pavement, all of white marble, along which the ancient wheel-tracks are distinctly visible. There are also underground vaults of small dimensions, which, the people tell you, were intended for the Mysteries. We that knew what vast crowds attended there would not give credence to this ignorant guess; and indeed we knew from distinct evidence that the great ceremony took place in a large building specially constructed for the purpose. The necessary darkness was obtained by performing the more solemn rites at night; not by going down beneath the surface of the earth.

The Greek savants have at last laid open, and explained, the whole plan of the temple, which was built by Ictinus, in Pericles’s time, but apparently restored after a destructive fire by Roman architects copying faithfully the ancient style. The excavators have shown that the shrine had strange peculiarities. And this is exactly what we should expect. For although no people adhered more closely to traditional forms in their architecture, no people were more ready to modify these forms with a view to practical requirements. Thus, as a rule, the cella, or inner chamber of the temple, only con[pg 209]tained the statue of the god, and was consequently small and narrow. In the temple at Eleusis has been found a great inner chamber about 59 yards by 54, hewn out of the rock in the rear of the edifice, and capable of accommodating a large assembly.[79] Here then it seems the initiated—probably those of the higher degree, epoptæ as they were called—witnessed those services “which brought them peace in this world, and a blessed hope for the world to come.”

The way into the temple was adorned with two Propylæa—one of the classical period, and by Philo (311 B. C.), another set up by a Roman, App. Claudius Pulcher, in 48 B. C., after you had passed through the former. The great temple, raised upon a natural platform, looks out toward Salamis, and the narrow line of azure which separates it from the land. Turning to the left as you stand at the temple front, the eye wanders over the rich plain of Eleusis, now dotted over with villages, and colored (in April) with the rich brown of ploughing and the splendid green of sprouting wheat. This plain had multiplied its wealth manifold since I first saw it, and led us to hope that the peasants were waking up to the great market which is near them at Athens. The track of the old sacred way along the Thriasian plain is often visible, for much of the sea-coast is [pg 210]marshy, so the road was cut out in many places along the spurs of the rocky hill of Daphne. The present road goes between the curious salt-lakes (Rheitoi) and the shore—salt-lakes full of sea-fish, and evidently fed by great natural springs, for there is a perpetual strong outflow to the tideless sea. I know not whether this natural curiosity has been explained by the learned.

It is, of course, the celebrated Mysteries—the Greater Eleusinia, as they were called—which give to the now wretched village of Eleusis, with its hopeless ruins, so deep an interest. This wonderful feast, handed down from the remotest antiquity, maintained its august splendor all through the greater ages of Greek history, down to the times of decay and trifling—when everything else in the country had become mean and contemptible. Even Cicero, who was of the initiated himself, a man of wide culture and of a skeptical turn of mind—even Cicero speaks of it as the great product of the culture of Athens. “Much that is excellent and divine,” says he,[80] “does Athens seem to me to have produced and added to our life, but nothing better than those Mysteries, by which we are formed and moulded from a rude and savage life to humanity; and indeed in the Mysteries we perceive the real principles of life, and learn not only to live happily, but to die with a fairer hope.” These are the words [pg 211]of a man writing, as I have said; in the days of the ruin and prostration of Greece. Can we then wonder at the enthusiastic language of the Homeric Hymn,[81] of Pindar,[82] of Sophocles,[83] of Aristophanes,[84] of Plato,[85] of Isocrates,[86] of Chrysippus[87]? Every manner of writer—religious poet, worldly poet, skeptical philosopher, orator—all are of one mind about this, far the greatest of all the religious festivals of Greece.

To what did it owe this transcendent character? It was not because men here worshipped exceptional gods, for the worship of Demeter and Cora was an old and widely diffused cult all over Greece: and there were other Eleusinia in various places. It was not because the ceremony consisted of mysteries, of hidden acts and words, which it was impious to reveal, and which the initiated alone might know. For the habit of secret worship was practised in every state, where special clans were charged with the care of special secret services, which no man else might know. Nay, even within the ordinary homes of the Greeks there were these Mysteries. Neither was it because of the splendor of the temple and its appointments, which never equalled the Panathenæa at the Parthenon, or the riches of Delphi, or Olympia. There is only one reasonable [pg 212]cause, and it is that upon which all our serious authorities agree. The doctrine taught in the Mysteries was a faith which revealed hopeful things about the world to come; and which—not so much as a condition, but as a consequence, of this clearer light, this higher faith—made them better citizens and better men. This faith was taught them in the Mysteries through symbols,[88] through prayer and fasting, through wild rejoicings; but, as Aristotle expressly tells us, it was reached not by intellectual persuasion, but by a change into a new moral state—in fact, by being spiritually revived.

Here, then, we have the strangest and most striking analogy to our religion in the Greek mythology; for here we have a higher faith publicly taught,—any man might present himself to be initiated,—and taught, not in opposition to the popular creed, but merely by deepening it, and showing to the ordinary worldling its spiritual power. The belief in the Goddess Demeter and her daughter, the queen of the nether world, was, as I have said, common all over Greece; but even as nowadays we are told that there may be two kinds of belief of the same truths—one of the head and another of the heart—just [pg 213]as the most excellent man of the world, who believes all the creeds of the Church, is called an unbeliever, in the higher sense, by our Evangelical Christians; so the ordinary Greek, though he prayed and offered at the Temple of Demeter, was held by the initiated at the Mysteries to be wallowing in the mire of ignorance, and stumbling in the night of gloom—he was held to live without real light, and to die without hope, in wretched despair.[89]

Temple of Mysteries, Eleusis