Studies of the Greek Poets (Vol 1 of 2)

by John Addington Symonds

The Homeric and Hesiodic poems were interposed between the reflective consciousness of the Greeks in the historic age and the mass of myths already existent in Hellas at the time of their composition, and thus mythology passed into the more advanced stage of art. It did not, however, cease on that account to retain some portion of its original plasticity and fluidity. It is clear from Pindar and the fragments of the minor lyric poets, from the works of the dramatists, from Plato, and from other sources, that what Herodotus reports about Homer and Hesiod having fixed the genealogies of the gods cannot be taken too literally. Non-Homeric and non-Hesiodic versions of the same tales were current in various parts of Greece. The same deities in different places received different attributes and different forms of worship; and the same legends were localized in widely separated spots. Each division of the Hellenic family selected its own patron deities, expressing in their cult and ritual the specific characteristics which distinguished Dorian, Æolian, and Ionian Hellas. At the same time certain headquarters of worship, like the shrine of Delphi and the temple of Olympian Zeus, were strictly Panhellenic. In this way it is clear that while Greek mythology acquired the consistence of a natural religion, it retained its free poetic character in a great measure. The nation never regarded their myths as a body of fixed dogma, to alter which was impious. Great liberty, consequently, was secured for artists; and it may be said with truth that the Greeks arrived through sculpture at a consciousness of their gods. A new statue was, in a certain sense, a new deity, although the whole aim of the sculptor must, undoubtedly, have been to render visible the thoughts contained in myths and purified by poetry, and so to pass onward step-wise to a fuller and fuller realization of the spiritual type. It is this unity, combined with difference, that makes the study of Greek sculpture fascinating in itself, and fruitful for the understanding of the Greek religion.

It lies beyond the scope of this chapter to consider how the Greek intelligence was first employed upon the articulation of its mythology, and next upon its criticism. The tradition of a Titanomachy, or contest between nature-powers and deities of reason, marks the first step in the former process. The cosmogonical forces personified in the Titans gave place to the presiding deities of political life and organized society, in whom the human reason recognized itself as superior to mere nature. Olympus was reserved for gods of intellectual order, and thus the Greeks worshipped what was best and noblest in themselves. At the same time the cosmogonical divinities were not excluded from the Greek Pantheon, and so there grew up a kind of hierarchy of greater and lesser deities. Oceanus, Poseidon, Proteus, the Tritons and the Nereids, Amphitrite and Thetis, for example, are all powers of the sea. They are the sea conceived under different aspects, its divine personality being multitudinously divided and delicately characterized in each case to accord with the changes in the element. The same kind of articulation is observable in the worship of deities under several attributes. Aphrodite Ourania and Aphrodite Pandemos are one as well as two. Eros and Himeros and Pothos are not so much three separate loves, as love regarded from three different points of view. Here the hierarchy is psychological, and represents an advance made in reflection upon moral qualities; whereas in the former case it was based on the observation of external nature. To this inquiry, again, belongs the question of imported myths and foreign cults. The worship of Corinthian Aphrodite, for example, was originally Asiatic. Yet, on entering Greek thought, Mylitta ceased to be Oriental and assumed Hellenic form and character. Sensuality was recognized as pertaining to the goddess whose domain included love and beauty and the natural desires.

More than the vaguest outlines of such subjects of interest cannot be indicated here. It is enough to have pointed out that as Greek mythology was eminently imaginative, fertile in fancy and prolific in dramatic incident, so it found its full development in poetry and art. Only through art can it be rightly comprehended; and the religion for which it supplied the groundwork was itself a kind of art. It is just this artistic quality which distinguished the Greeks from the Romans. As Mommsen well observes, "there was no formation of legend in the strict sense in Italy." The Italian gods were in their origin more matter-of-fact than Greek gods. They contained from the first a prosaic element which they never threw aside; nor did they give occasion to the growth of fable with its varied fabric of human action and passion. Thus the legal and political genius of the Latin race worshipped its own qualities in these allegorical beings.

The process hitherto described has been the passage of mythology into religion and the expression of religion by art. When the Greek intelligence became reflective in the first dawn of philosophy, it recognized that the notion of divinity, τὸ θεῖον, was independent and in some sense separable from the persons of the Pantheon in whom it inhered. This recognition led to a criticism of the myths by the standard of ideal godhead. Just as the Olympic deities, as representative of pure intellect or spirit, had superseded the bare nature-forces, so now the philosophers sought to distil a refined conception of God from the myths in general. Their polemic was directed against Homer, in whom, like Herodotus, they recognized the founder of the current mythological theology. Both Pythagoras and Heraclitus are reported to have said that Homer ought to be publicly thrust from the assembly and scourged. Xenophanes plainly asserted that the Greek anthropomorphism was no better than a worship of humanity with all its vices, illustrating his critique by adding that just in the same way might lions adore lions and horses horses. His own conception of the deity was monotheistic, to this extent, at least, that he abstracted from the universe a notion of divine power and wisdom, and ascribed to it the only reality. Plato, in the Republic, unified these points of view, severely criticising Homer for the immorality of his fictions, and attributing to his own demiurgic deity those qualities of goodness, truth, and beauty which are the highest ideals of the human spirit. In connection with this polemic against poetical theology, we have to notice the attempts of physical philosophers to explain the universe by natural causes, and the great saying of Anaxagoras that reason rules the world. Thus the speculative understanding, following various lines of thought and adopting diverse theories, tended to react upon mythology and to corrode the ancient fabric of Greek polytheism. In the course of this disintegrating process a new and higher religion was developed, which Plato expressed by saying that we ought "to become like God, as far as this is possible; and to become like him is to become holy and just and wise." At the same time those who felt the force of the critique, but could not place themselves at the new scientific point of view, remained sceptical; and against this kind of scepticism, which implied personal lawlessness, Aristophanes directed his satire. Whatever may have been the attitude of philosophers in their schools, mythology meanwhile retained its hold upon the popular mind. It was bound up with the political traditions, the gentile customs, the ritual, and the arts of the whole race. To displace it by a reasoned system of theology, enforced by nothing stronger than the theories of the sages, was impossible. The extent to which philosophy permanently affected the creed of thinking and religious men in Greece by substituting theism for the fabulous theology of the poets has been well expressed in Plutarch's Life of Pericles. "So dispassionate a temper," he observes, "a life so pure and unblemished in authority, might well be called Olympian, in accordance with our conceptions of the divine beings to whom, as the natural authors of all good and of nothing evil, we ascribe the rule and government of the world—not as the poets represent, who, while confounding us with their ignorant fancies, are themselves confuted by their own poems and fictions, and call the place, indeed, where they say the gods make their abode, 'a secure and quiet seat, untroubled with winds or clouds,' and 'equally through all time illumined with a soft serenity and a pure light,' as though such were a home most agreeable for a blessed and immortal nature; and yet, in the meanwhile, affirm that the gods themselves are full of trouble and enmity and anger, and other passions which no way become or belong to even men that have any understanding." It is clear that when the religious consciousness had reached this point of purified clairvoyance the race was ready for a more spiritual theology, which philosophers like Marcus Aurelius found in natural religion, while the common folk accepted Christianity.

After flowing side by side for many centuries, the currents of mythological belief and of philosophical speculation reunited at Alexandria, where a final attempt was made to animate the Homeric Pantheon with the spirit of metaphysical mysticism. Homer became a priest as well as poet, and the Iliad was made to furnish allegories for an age grown old in intellectual subtlety. This was the last period of mythology. While Hypatia was lecturing on Homer, the Christians were converting the world. To keep the gods of Greece alive was no longer possible. Regarded from the beginning as persons with a body corresponding to their spiritual substance, they had in them the certainty of dissolution. Though removed ideally beyond the sphere of human chance and change, they remained men and women with passions like our own. Pure spirit had not been realized in them; and blind fate had from the first been held to be supreme above them. Unlike the incarnate God of Christianity, they had not passed forth from the spiritual world to abide here for a season and return to it again. Therefore they perished. During the domination of mediæval Christianity the utmost they could do was to haunt the memory like wraiths and phantoms, to linger in neglected and unholy places like malignant powers of evil. But when the force of ascetic Christianity declined, and the spirit of humane culture re-awoke in Europe, these old gods reasserted their ascendency—no longer as divinities indeed, but as poems forming an essential element of the imagination. The painters and sculptors of Italy gave once more in breathing marble and fair color form to those immortal thoughts. The poets sang the old songs of Hellas in new language to new measures. Even the Churchmen invoked God from Roman pulpits as Summus Jupiter, and dignified Madonna with the attributes of Artemis and Pallas.

Such is the marvellous vitality of this mythology. Such is its indissoluble connection with the art and culture which sprang from it, of which it was the first essential phase, and to which we owe so much. Long after it has died as religion, it lives on as poetry, retaining its original quality, though the theology contained in it has been forever superseded or absorbed into more spiritual creeds.

Note.—I wish to qualify what I have said upon pp. [67]-[80] by stating that my critique of the linguistic and solar theories is not, as I hope, directed in any impertinent spirit against the illustrious teacher to whom, in common with most Englishmen, I owe nearly all my knowledge of comparative mythology, but rather against notions which have gained currency through a too exclusive attention to the origin of Greek mythology. I want to remind students of Greek literature that, after all they may have learned from Sanscrit, they are still upon the threshold of mythology as it was determined by the genius of the Greek race. There is a danger of diverting the mind from questions of thoughts to questions of words, and leading people to fancy that etymological solutions are final.

FOOTNOTES:

[8] For this reason the analogy of existing barbarous races will not help us much, inasmuch as they are not Greeks nor destined to be Greeks. This consideration ought to weigh with those who, struck by the depth and beauty of some Greek myths, theorize a corruption of primitive revelation or pure theology to explain them. They ought to remember that they are dealing with the myths of Greeks—our masters in philosophy and poetry and art.