Studies of the Greek Poets (Vol 1 of 2)

by John Addington Symonds

It has been remarked with justice that, when we use the word mythology, we are too apt to think of a Pantheon, of a well-defined hierarchy of gods and demigods and heroes, all fabulous indeed, but all arranged in one coherent system. This conception of Greek mythology arises partly from the fact that we learn to know it in dictionaries, compiled from the works of authors who lived long after the age in which myths were produced, and partly from the fact that the conditions under which myth-making was a possibility are so far removed from us as to be almost unintelligible. Yet there is some truth in what, upon the whole, is an erroneous view. Although the Greek myths, in their origin, were not a well-digested system, still they formed a complete body of national thought, on which the intelligence of the Greek race, in its art and its religion, was continually working, until it took the final form in which we have it in our dictionaries. What remained in the Pantheon of Apollodorus and Hyginus, remained there by no freak of accident. What was omitted by Homer and by Hesiod was omitted by no operation of blind chance. The spirit of the Greeks was concerned in the purification and the preservation of their myths, and the unity of that spirit constitutes the unity of their mythology.

Two great poets gave to Greek mythology the form which it maintained in the historic period. Herodotus says that "Homer and Hesiod named the gods, and settled their genealogies for the Hellenes." What this means is, that at a certain prehistoric epoch, the epoch of epic poetry, mythology had passed from the primitive and fluid state, and had become the subject-matter of the arts. Between the mythopœic liberty of creation and the collections of the grammarians was interposed the poetry, the sculpture, and the religious ritual of the historic Greeks. What we have to deal with at the present moment is, not mythology as it appears in art, but the genesis of the myths conceived as a body of Greek thought and fancy in their infantine or rudimentary stages.

What was mythology before Homer? How did it come into existence? How were the Greeks brought to believe that there was a supreme father of gods and men called Zeus, a wise patroness of arts and sciences called Pallas, a pure and glorious and far-darting deity called Phœbus? There is no one who does not acknowledge something sublime and beautiful in this part of the Greek mythology. Even those who do not care to comprehend the growth of these conceptions admit that the genius of the race shone with splendor peculiar to itself in their creation.

To this question must be counterpoised another. What are we to think about the many repulsive, grotesque, and hideous elements of Greek mythology—the incest and adultery of Zeus, the cannibalism of Kronos, the profligacy of Aphrodite, the cruelty of Phœbus? When thought began to be conscious of itself in Greece these abominations moved the anger of the philosophers. Xenophanes, Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Pindar, and Plato, in succession, recognized that the mythical fables were incompatible with the notion of deity, and rejected them forthwith. Modern students have been so disgusted by the same indecencies that some of them have abandoned Greek mythology as hopeless, while others have taken refuge in the extraordinary paradox that myths are a disease of language. These methods of dealing with the problem are alike unphilosophical. It is impossible for the historian to reject what formed the groundwork of religious and artistic thought in Greece. It is childish to represent the human mind as a sort of bound Mazeppa, stretched helpless on the wild horse, Language, which carries it away into the wilderness.

In order to understand the two questions which have been propounded, we must make a demand upon our imagination, and endeavor to return, in thought at least, to the conditions of a people in the mythopœic age—the age, that is to say, in which not only were myths naturally made, but all the thinking of a nation took the form of myths. We must go back to a time when there were no written records, when there were no systems of thought, when language had not been subjected to analysis of any kind, when abstract notions were unknown, when science had not begun to exist, when history was impossible, and when the whole world was a land of miracles. There was no check then laid upon fancy, because nothing as yet was conceived as thought, but everything existed as sensation. In this infancy the nation told itself stories, and believed in them. The same faculties of the mind which afterwards gave birth to poetry and theology, philosophy and state-craft, science and history, were now so ill-defined and merely germinal that they produced but fables. Yet these faculties were vigorous and vivid. The fables they produced were infinite in number and variety, beautiful, and so pregnant with thought under the guise of fancy that long centuries scarcely sufficed for disengaging all that they contained. In dealing with Greek mythology it must be remembered that the nation with whose mythopœic imagination we are concerned was the Greek nation.[8] It had already in itself all Hellas, as the seed enfolds the plant.

A famous passage in Vico's work Della Metafisica Poetica may here be paraphrased, in order to make the conditions under which we must imagine myths to have arisen more intelligible:[9] "Poetry, which was the first form of wisdom, began with a system of thought, not reasoned or abstract, as ours is now, but felt and imagined, as was natural in the case of those primitive human beings who had developed no reasoning faculties, but were all made up of senses in the highest physical perfection, and of the most vigorous imaginations. In their total ignorance of causes they wondered at everything; and their poetry was all divine, because they ascribed to gods the objects of their wonder, and thought that beings like themselves, but greater, could alone have caused them. Thus they were like children whom we notice taking into their hands inanimate things, and playing and talking with them as though they were living persons. When thunder terrified them, they attributed their own nature to the phenomenon; and being apt to express their most violent passions by howls and roarings, they conceived heaven as a vast body, which gave notice of its anger by lightnings and thunderings. The whole of nature, in like manner, they imagined to be a vast animated body, capable of feeling and passion." Vico then proceeds to point out how difficult it is for us, who, through long centuries, have removed ourselves as far as possible from the life of the instincts, senses, and imagination, whose language has become full of abstract terms, whose conception of the universe has been formed by science, whose thought is critical and reflective, and who have been educated in a rational theology, to comprehend the attitude of primitive humanity in its personifying stage of thought.

In this childhood of the world, when the Greek myths came into existence, the sun was called a shepherd, and the clouds were his sheep; or an archer, and the sunbeams were his arrows. It was easier then to think of the sea as a husky-voiced and turbulent old man, whose true form none might clearly know, because he changed so often and was so secret in his ways, who shook the earth in his anger, and had the white-maned billows of the deep for horses, than to form a theory of the tides. The spring of the year became a beautiful youth, beloved by the whole earth, or beloved, like Hyacinthus, by the sun, or, like Adonis, by the queen of beauty, over whom the fate of death was suspended, and for whose loss annual mourning was made. Such tales the Greeks told themselves in their youth; and it would be wrong to suppose that deliberate fiction played any part in their creation. To conceive of the world thus was natural to the whole race; and the tales that sprang up formed the substance of their intellectual activity. Here, then, if anywhere, we watch the process of a people in its entirety contributing to form a body of imaginative thought, projecting itself in a common and unconscious work of art. Nor will it avail to demur that behind the Greeks there stretched a dim and distant past, that many of their myths had already taken shape, to some extent, before the separation of the Aryan families. That is now an ascertained fact, the bearings of which will have to be discussed farther on in this chapter. For the moment it is enough to reply that not the similarities, but the differences, brought to light by the study of comparative mythology are important for the historian of each several race. The raw material of silk may interest the merchant or the man of science; the artist cares for the manufactured fabric, with its curious patterns and refulgent hues.

In order further to illustrate the conditions of the mythopœic age, a passage from the Dichtung und Wahrheit of Goethe might be quoted. If it is not a mere fancy to suppose that the individual lives, to some extent at least, in his own self the life of humanity, and therefore to conclude that the childhood of the world can be mirrored in the childhood of a man, a poet like Goethe is precisely fitted, by the record of his own boyhood, to throw light upon the early operations of the human mind. For, in one sense of the term, the mythopœic faculty never dies with poets. In their own persons they prolong the youth and adolescence of the race, retaining the faculty, now lost to nearly all, of looking on the universe as living. Goethe, then, relates that when he was at school at Frankfort, he used to invent stories about himself and the places he frequented, half consciously, and half by a spontaneous working of his fancy. These stories he told to his school-fellows so vividly that they accepted them as fact. "It greatly rejoiced them," he says, "to know that such wonderful things could befall one of their own playmates; nor was it any harm that they did not understand how I could find time and space for such adventures, as they must have been pretty well aware of all my comings and goings, and how I was occupied the whole day." He goes on to recount one of these marvellous narratives. The scene of it was laid in Frankfort, in a street familiar to his school-fellows. Down this street, which had a long blank wall surmounted by trees, he supposed himself to have been walking one day, and to have found a door in the wall, not noticed by him on any previous occasion. His curiosity being aroused, he knocked at the door, and, after some delay, was admitted. Inside he found a garden full of wonders—fountains and fair nymphs, exotic shrubs and quaint old men, magicians, knights, sylphs, and all the proper furniture of a romance. Goethe's comrades, the first time that they heard him describe this enchanted pleasure-ground in glowing terms, already more than half believed in its existence; "and," says the poet, "each of them visited alone the place, without confiding it to me or to the others, and discovered the nut-trees," but none found the door. Still, they did not disbelieve what Goethe told them, but preferred to imagine that the magic door had once, at least, been seen by him, and opened for him only, though it remained invisible and closed for them. And herein they were literally right, for Goethe trod an enchanted ground of poetry which few can hope to win. The story proved so fascinating that he had to tell it over and over again, always repeating the same order of events, until, he says, "by the uniformity of the narrative I converted the fable into truth in the minds of my hearers."

This, then, may be used as an illustration of the mythopœic faculty. All that was needed for the growth of myths was creative mind on the one side and receptive and believing mind on the other. It did not, probably, require a Goethe to make a myth, though we may still believe that the greatest and best myths owed their form to the intervention at some period of unknown and unacknowledged Goethes. When the logical faculty was in abeyance, when the critical faculty had not been aroused, when sympathy was quick, language fertile, fancy exuberant, and belief sincere, there was nothing to check mythopœtry. The nation had to make the step from boyhood to adolescence before the impulse ceased. Nor was there any education from without in a fixed body of systematized knowledge to coerce its freedom. Forming the first activity of the intellect, it held in solution, as it were, the rudiments of religion and morality, of psychological reflection, of politics, geography, and history. Had there been any one to ask the myth-maker: Who told you this strange tale? what is your authority for imposing it upon us? he would have answered: The goddess told me, the divine daughter of memory, as I walked alone. And this he would sincerely and conscientiously have believed; and those who heard him would have given credence to his words; and thus his intuitions became their intuitions. Creative faculty and credence, insight and sympathy, two forms of the same as yet scarcely divided operation of the mind, gave permanence to myths. What the fathers received they transmitted to their sons. Successive generations dealt freely with them, moulding and remodelling, within the limits set upon the genius of the race. Hundreds may have been produced simultaneously, and among them must have raged a fierce struggle for existence, so that multitudes perished or were hopelessly defaced, just as in the animal and vegetable kingdoms whole species disappear or survive only in fragments and fossils.

It cannot be too often repeated that the power which presided over the transmission of the myths was the spirit of the people. An inherent selective instinct in the nation determined which of them should ultimately survive; and thus a body of legend, truly national, was formed, in which the nation saw itself reflected. When, therefore, we say that Greek mythology is Hellenic and original, we are admitting this unconscious, silent, steady, irresistible faculty of the mind to fashion gods in its own image, to come to a knowledge of itself in its divinities, to create a glorified likeness of all that it admires in its own nature, to deify its truest and its best, and to invest its thought in an imperishable form of art. Nor will it here again avail to demur that Zeus was originally the open sky, Pallas the dawn, Phœbus and Artemis the sun and moon. The student of the Greeks accepts this information placidly and gratefully from the philologer; but he passes immediately beyond it. For him Zeus, Pallas, Phœbus, Artemis are no longer the sky and dawn, the sun and moon. Whatever their origin may have been, the very mythopœic process placed them in quite a different and more important relation to Greek thought when it handed them over to Hesiod and Homer, to Pindar and Æschylus, to Pheidias and Polygnotus.