CHAPTER VIII
RELIGION AND EDUCATION IN HELLAS
The greater part of the religious instruction in Hellas was given outside the schools, in the home and in public life. The child learnt the current ritual observances proper to each particular deity or occasion by participating in them himself. His religious devotion was practised and stimulated by the festivals and sacred songs and dances which made up so large a part of Hellenic life. In a religion like the Hellenic, which was so largely a matter of forms and ceremonies, there was little dogma to be learnt by children; no catechism, no sectarian teaching was necessary. Such dogma as there was consisted in the myths which were current about the various deities and heroes; and of these myths there were so many varieties that heterodoxy about them became almost impossible.
Such as it was, this dogma, consisting of manifold and often contradictory myths, was enshrined in the poetry of the race, so that most of the poems became sacred books, regarded by the orthodox as inspired. This sacred literature, as we have seen, was the chief object of study in the primary schools at Athens, where it was read, written, and learnt by heart. At Sparta almost the whole of literary and intellectual education consisted of sacred songs in honour of gods and heroes. The myths were the very essence of primary education in Hellas.
In order to understand the attitude of the educational theorists towards these myths which run through most of the Hellenic poetry, it is necessary to realise the extraordinary authority which was given to the poets, and especially to Homer and Hesiod. Every word of them was regarded as inspired and strictly true: their authority was indisputable. At the beginning of the sixth century an interpolated line in the Iliad was made the main support of the Athenian claim to the Island of Salamis. Gelon, the tyrant of Syracuse, according to the current legend, was refused the command of the Hellenic forces against Persia because, as the Spartan envoy put it, Agamemnon would groan if he heard of such a thing, and because Homer had said that an Athenian was the best man at drawing up and marshalling a host, for which cause the Athenians now claimed the command.[655] That such arguments could be employed shows in what veneration Homer was held. He was considered to be especially inspired.[656] His admirers asserted that he had educated Hellas, and that his works provided fit instruction for the whole conduct of life.[657] More specifically, it was said that “The divine Homer won his glory and renown from this, that he taught good things, drill, valour and the arming of troops.”[658] He was misquoted to support peculiar views, as in Plato.[659] People had their favourite texts: Sokrates’ was “In due proportion to thy means pay honour to the gods.” It was a not unheard-of accomplishment to know the whole Iliad and Odyssey by heart. Moral lessons were drawn from them. Thus the story of Kirké was a warning against self-indulgence. Kirké made the companions of Odusseus swine through their over-indulgence in the pleasures of the table; Odusseus himself, by Hermes’ advice and his own self-restraint in such matters, escaped this fate.[660]
In time, however, the higher morality of the leading Hellenic thinkers revolted against the low morality, to say nothing more, of much of the mythology embodied in the poets. Xenophanes began the attack. “Homer and Hesiod,” he cries, “ascribed to the gods all that is considered disgraceful among men.” Herakleitos declared that Homer deserved a thrashing. Even the pious Pindar tried to alter some of the myths to suit his own morality, and Aeschylus fights hard for an underlying monotheism. In the next generation the storm broke: awakening intelligence, fostered by the Sophists and the philosophers, shrank away from the horrors of the Theogony. Tragedy, by bringing mythology before the eyes, had made its impossibility more apparent. The researches of the earlier historians in comparative mythology had undermined the bases of belief. Herodotos had found that a god named Herakles had been recognised in Egypt 17,000 years before his time; consequently the Hellenic Herakles, only six centuries before the historian’s age, must be only a man of the same name.[661] Rationalism began to master the mythology: Thucydides tried to apply scientific methods to the Trojan War, making, for example, its duration due to the difficulty of obtaining supplies for so large a force. The rationalism of Euripides is well known. Metrodoros, a pupil of Anaxagoras, made the gods natural forces and varieties of matter—a device already employed by Empedokles for poetical convenience. In this way Sokrates rationalises the Boreas-myth in the Phaidros,[662] where Plato states that the wise disbelieve such tales; but Sokrates was too busy studying his own personality to raise all these numerous questions, so he accepts the customary belief. The defenders of Homer, led by Metrodoros and Stesimbrotos,[663] tried to allegorise him, declaring that the worst myths had a moral meaning in the background. The allegories were often ludicrous: Plato rejects them wholly for educational purposes, as children always take the literal interpretation.
But public opinion was still fiercely attached to the old deities, as the incident of the Hermai and the condemnation of Anaxagoras, Protagoras, and Sokrates showed. The deities could not be sacrificed: consequently it was the myths that had to go. The myths said that Zeus dethroned his own father and committed adultery: if the myth is true, since Zeus is Supreme God, these crimes are justifiable.[664] Therefore the myth must be untrue. Homer and Hesiod lied: their works are mainly a blasphemous fiction.[665] Isokrates[666] sums up this new attitude. “The poets,” he declares, “blasphemously represented the sons of the Immortals as having done and suffered worse deeds than the most impious of men: they spoke such things about the gods as no one would venture to allege of his worst enemy; not only do they make them steal, commit adultery, and fall into slavery to mortals, but even represent them as eating their children, mutilating their fathers, and binding their mothers in chains.… For this the poets did not go unpunished, but some of them were wanderers and begged their bread, some became blind, another was an exile all his life long, and Orpheus, who devoted himself especially to such stories, was torn in pieces.”[667]
The greatest objection to these immoral legends was that they were taught in the nursery and the elementary school, at the most impressionable age.[668] Hence Plato wishes to lay down strict canons for the myths, legends, and fables which are to be taught to children. “For the beginning of everything is half the battle, especially in the case of what is young and tender. Young children are like soft wax, ready to take a clear and deep impression of any seal which is laid upon them. Hence the immense importance of the earliest stages of education, the myths and stories taught in the nursery and at school.… The compositions of Homer and Hesiod are fiction, and unlovely fiction at that; even if true, they had better not be told to the young and undiscerning.… The myths must be improving on the surface, not by allegory.”[669]