Studies of the Greek Poets (Vol 2 of 2)

by John Addington Symonds

ἁδύ τι τὸ ψιθύρισμα καὶ ἁ πίτυς, αἰπόλε, τήνα.

These pines are few and far between. Growing alone or in pairs, they stand like monuments upon the hills, their black forms sculptured on the cloudlike olive-groves, from which at intervals spring spires and columns of slender cypress-trees.

Here and there in this bright garden of the age of gold white villages are seen, and solitary cottage roofs high up among the hills—dwellings, perhaps, of Amaryllis, whom the shepherds used to serenade. Huge fig-trees lean their weight of leaves and purple fruit upon the cottage walls, while cherry-trees and apricots snow the grass in spring with a white wealth of April blossoms. The stone walls and little wells in the cottage gardens are green with immemorial moss and ferns, and fragrant with gadding violets that ripple down their sides and checker them with blue. On the wilder hills you find patches of ilex and arbutus glowing with crimson berries and white waxen bells, sweet myrtle rods and shafts of bay, frail tamarisk and tall tree-heaths that wave their frosted boughs above your head. Nearer the shore the lentisk grows, a savory shrub, with cytisus and aromatic rosemary. Clematis and polished garlands of tough sarsaparilla wed the shrubs with clinging, climbing arms; and here and there in sheltered nooks the vine shoots forth luxuriant tendrils bowed with grapes stretching from branch to branch of mulberry or elm, flinging festoons on which young loves might sit and swing, or weaving a lattice-work of leaves across the open shed. Nor must the sounds of this landscape be forgotten—sounds of bleating flocks, and murmuring bees, and nightingales, and doves that moan, and running streams, and shrill cicadas, and hoarse frogs, and whispering pines. There is not a single detail which a patient student may not verify from Theocritus.

Then, too, it is a landscape in which sea and country are never sundered. This must not be forgotten of idyllic scenery; for it was the warm seaboard of Sicily, beneath protecting heights of Ætna, that gave birth to the bucolic muse. The intermingling of pastoral and sea life is exquisitely allegorized in the legend of Galatea; and on the cup which Theocritus describes in his first idyl the fisherman plays an equal part with the shepherd youths and the boy who watches by the vineyard wall. The higher we climb upon the mountain-side the more marvellous is the beauty of the sea, which seems to rise as we ascend and stretch into the sky. Sometimes a little flake of blue is framed by olive-boughs, sometimes a turning in the road reveals the whole broad azure calm below. Or after toiling up a steep ascent we fall upon the undergrowth of juniper, and lo! a double sea, this way and that, divided by the sharp spine of the jutting hill, jewelled with villages along its shore, and smiling with fair islands and silver sails. Upon the beach the waves come tumbling in, swaying the corallines and green and purple sea-weeds in the pools. Ceaseless beating of the spray has worn the rocks into jagged honeycombs, on which lazy fishermen sit perched, dangling their rods like figures in Pompeian frescos.

In landscapes such as these we are readily able to understand the legends of rustic gods; the metamorphoses of Syrinx, Narcissus, Echo, Hyacinthus, and Adonis; the tales of slumbering Pan and horned satyrs and peeping fauns with which the idyllists have adorned their simple shepherd songs. Here, too, the Oread dwellers of the hills and dryads and sylvans and water-nymphs seem possible. They lose their unreality and mythic haziness; for men themselves are more a part of Nature here than in the North, more fit for companionship with deities of stream and hill. Their labors are lighter and their food more plentiful. Summer leaves them not, and the soil yields fair and graceful crops. There is surely some difference between hoeing turnips and trimming olive-boughs, between tending turkeys on a Norfolk common and leading goats to browse on cytisus beside the shore between the fat pasturage and bleak winters of our midland counties and the spare herbage of the South dried by perpetual sunlight. It cannot be denied that men assimilate something from their daily labor, and that the poetry of rustic life is more evident upon Mediterranean shores than in England.

Nor must the men and women of classical landscape be forgotten. When we read the idyls of Theocritus, and wish to see before us Thestylis and Daphnis and Lycidas, we have but to recall the perfect forms of Greek sculpture. We may, for instance, summon to our mind the Endymion of the Capitol, nodding in eternal slumber, with his sheep-dog slumbering by: or Artemis stepping from her car; her dragons coil themselves between the shafts and fold their plumeless wings: or else Hippolytus and Meleager booted for the boar-chase: or Bacchus finding Ariadne by the sea-shore; mænads and satyrs are arrested in their dance; flower-garlands fall upon the path; or a goat-legged satyr teaches a young faun to play; the pipe and flute are there, and from the boy's head fall long curls upon his neck. Or Europa drops anemone and crocus from her hand, trembling upon the bull as he swims onward through the sea: or tritons blow wreathed shells, and dolphins splash the water: or the eagle's claws clasp Ganymede, and bear him up to Zeus: or Adonis lies wounded, and wild Aphrodite spreads hungry arms, and wails with rent robes tossed above her head. From the cabinet of gems we draw a Love, blind, bound, and stung by bees; or a girl holding an apple in her hand; or a young man tying on his sandal. Then there is the Praxitelean genius of the Vatican who might be Hylas, or Uranian Eros, or Hymenæus, or curled Hyacinthus—- the faun who lies at Munich overcome with wine, his throat bare, and his deep chest heaving with the breath of sleep—Hercules strangling the twin snakes in his cradle, or ponderous with knotty sinews and huge girth of neck—Demeter, holding fruits of all sorts in one hand and cornstalks in the other, sweeping her full raiment on the granary floor. Or else we bring again the pugilist from Caracalla's bath—bruised faces and ears livid with unheeded blows—their strained arms bound with thongs, and clamps of iron on their fists. Processions move in endless line, of godlike youths on prancing steeds, of women bearing baskets full of cakes and flowers, of oxen lowing to the sacrifice. The Trojan heroes fall with smiles upon their lips; the athlete draws the strigil down his arm; the sons of Niobe lie stricken, beautiful in death. Cups, too, and vases help us, chased with figures of all kinds—dance, festival, love-making, rustic sacrifice, the legendary tales of hate and woe, the daily idyls of domestic life.

Such are some of the works of Greek art which we may use in our attempt to realize Theocritus. Nor need we neglect the monuments of modern painting—Giorgione's pastoral pictures of piping men and maidens crowned with jasmine-flowers, Raphael's Triumph of Galatea, and Tintoretto's Marriage of Ariadne, or the Arcadians of Poussin reading the tale of death upon the gravestone, and its epitaph—"Et ego."

To reconstruct the mode of life of the Theocritean dramatis personæ is not a matter of much difficulty. Pastoral habits are singularly unchangeable, and nothing strikes us more than the recurrence of familiar rustic proverbs, superstitions, and ways of thinking which we find in the idyllic poets. The mixture of simplicity and shrewdness, of prosaic interest in worldly affairs and of an unconscious admiration for the poetry of nature, which George Sand has recently assigned with delicate analysis to the bucolic character in her Idyls of Nohant, meets us in every line of the Sicilian pastorals. On the Mediterranean shores, too, the same occupations have been carried on for centuries with little interruption. The same fields are being ploughed, the same vineyards tilled, the same olive-gardens planted, as those in which Theocritus played as a child. The rocks on which he saw old Olpis watching for the tunnies, with fishing-reed and rush basket are still haunted through sunny hours by patient fishermen. Perhaps they cut their reeds and rushes in the same river-beds; certainly they use the same sort of κάλαμος. The goats have not forgotten to crop cytisus and myrtle, nor have the goatherds changed their shaggy trousers and long crooks. You may still pick out a shepherd lad among a hundred by his skin and cloak. It is even said that the country ditties of the Neapolitans are Greek; and how ancient is the origin of local superstitions who shall say? The country folk still prefer, like Comatas in the fifth idyl, garden-grown roses to the wild eglantine and anemones of the hedgerow, scorning what has not required some cost or trouble for its cultivation. Gretchen's test of love by blowing on thistle-down does not differ much from that of the shepherd in the third idyl. Live blood in the eye is still a sign of mysterious importance (Idyl iii. 36). To spit is still a remedy against the evil eye (vii. 39). Eunica, the town girl, still turns up her nose at the awkward cowherd; city and country are not yet wholly harmonized by improved means of locomotion. Then the people of the South are perfectly unchanged—the fisher boys of Castellamare; the tall, straight girls of Capri singing as they walk with pitchers on their heads and distaffs in their hands; the wild Apulian shepherds; the men and maidens laughing in the olive-fields or vineyards; the black-browed beauties of the Cornice trooping to church on Sundays with gold earrings, and with pink tulip-buds in their dark hair. One thing, however, is greatly altered. Go where we will, we find no statues of Priapus and the Nymphs. No lambs are sacrificed to Pan. No honey or milk is poured upon the altars of the rustic muse. The temples are in ruins. Aloes and cactuses have invaded the colonnades of Girgenti, and through the halls of Pæstum winds whistle and sunbeams stream unheeded. But though the gods are gone, men remain unaltered. A little less careless, a little more superstitious they may be; but their joys and sorrows, their vices and virtues, their loves and hates, are still the same.