“From the passage referred to, we may judge something of the convivial manners of the Romans, and of the habits of intercourse between the sexes.
“It is remarkable that, in all religious and moral conceptions, the noblest materials of poetry, the philosophers were very far in advance of the poets. ‘The Fables of Hesiod and Homer,’ says Plato, ‘are especially to be censured. They have uttered the greatest falsehoods concerning the greatest beings.’ Referring to the loathsome and abominable fables about Cœlus, Saturn, and Jupiter, he says—‘We must not tell our youth that he who commits the greatest iniquity does nothing strange, nor he who inflicts the most cruel punishment upon his father when injured by him; but that he is only doing what was done by the first and greatest of the gods.’ A little after he subjoins:—‘The chaining of Juno by her son, the throwing of Vulcan from heaven by his father, because he attempted to defend his mother from being beaten, and the battles of the gods described by Homer, are not fictions to be allowed in our city, whether explained allegorically or not.’ ‘Though we praise many things in Homer,’ he says, ‘we shall not praise him when he represents Jupiter as sending a lying dream to Agamemnon, nor Æschylus when he makes Thetis complain of having been deceived by Apollo.’ ‘When any one thus speaks of the gods, we are indignant; we grant no permission for such writings, nor shall we suffer teachers to use them in the instruction of youth.’[447]
“The poets of this nation did not, in Plato’s opinion, represent their heroes as more amiable or respectable than their gods. ‘We shall not,’ he says, ‘suffer those of whom we have the charge to believe that Achilles, the son of a goddess, was so full of evil passions as to unite in himself two opposite vices—avaricious meanness, and insolence towards gods and men. Nor shall we allow it to be said that Theseus, the son of Neptune, and Perithöus, the son of Jove, rushed forth to the commission of such abominable robberies, or that any son of a god or any hero committed those abominable and impious acts which are now imputed to them in the fictions of the poets.’ ‘Such fictions are pernicious to those who hear them; for every bad man finds a license for himself, in the belief that those nearly related to the gods do and have done such deeds. They are, then, to be suppressed, lest they produce a strong tendency to wickedness in our youth.’[448]
“Such were the sentiments of the most poetical of Grecian philosophers concerning the religious and moral character of the poets of his nation; and he remarks in addition upon the gloomy fancies of Homer concerning the state of departed souls, as neither true nor useful, but adapted to produce unmanly fears, and therefore not to be listened to by those who, as freemen, should dread slavery more than death. During the period between Homer and Virgil, a misty brightness had spread over the poetic ideas of the future abodes of the blessed; but the Elysium and Tartarus of poetry were but fictions, awakening no serious hopes nor fears, and having no power over the heart. These imaginations of a future life were connected with no just and ennobling conceptions of the purposes of our existence, of the spiritual nature of man, or of that endless progress to which we may look forward. The heroes of Elysium found their delight in the meaner pleasures of this life,—
‘Quæ gratia currum
Armorumque fuit vivis, quæ cura nitentes
Pascere equos, eadem sequitur tellure repostos.
Conspicit, ecce, alios dextra lævaque per herbam
Vescentes, lætumque chora pæana canentes.’[449]
“Thus the ancient poets were shut out from the whole sphere of religious sentiment; and all those numberless conceptions and feelings that spring from our knowledge of God and the sense of our own immortality, are absent from their writings, while this whole exhaustless domain has been laid open to the poets of later times. A single example may illustrate what has been said. Let us take the concluding verses of Mrs Hemans’s ‘Fountain of Oblivion:’—