History as past ethics; an introduction to the history of morals

by P. V. N. Myers

The qualities of character with which, as worthy of admiration, the poet invests his heroes show that, notwithstanding the great advance already achieved in many of the arts of life, in morality the Greeks of this age were still in some respects on a level with savages. Thus the poet extols the “good Autolycus” for his skill in thievery and perjury.[464] But stealing and lying, as with uncivilized people generally, to be proper and right, must be adroit and “for the good of friends and the harm of enemies.” Piracy was an honorable occupation.[465] The bodies of enemies slain in battle were maltreated, as is the wont of savages.[466] Conceptions of deity were crude and unethical, the gods being represented as capricious, profligate, partial, and unjust.

But there was a sound core in this morality. Clan virtues were firmly inwrought in character. The virtue of loyalty to comrades was strong; the ethical qualities of courage and self-devotion for the common good, and of hospitality to strangers were well developed; and the domestic virtues of chastity and constancy in woman are portrayed in such a way as to show that, if not common, they were at least held in high esteem and reverence.

Reprobation by the philosophers and later poets of the Homeric tales of the gods

From the Homeric Age onward there was a progressive purification of the moral feelings. One evidence of this ethical progress is found in the repudiation by the later moral consciousness of the primitive myths of the gods. These tales, as we have just noted, were coarse, sensual, and immoral. The philosophers of the sixth and following centuries, and the poets of this later time, denounced these stories as unworthy and unethical conceptions of deity. Pythagoras is said, upon his return from Hades, to have reported seeing there the souls of Homer and Hesiod undergoing punishment for what they had said of the gods. Pindar purges the tales of their grosser immoral elements. Others sought to relieve the poets of the charge of impiety by reading the myths as allegories. The Sophists and Stoics moralized them, giving them an ethical aim and purpose.[467] Plato, in reprobating what Hesiod says of Uranus, declared it “the greatest of all lies in high places.” He would strike out from the poets all passages in which they told these lies about the gods and heroes, before allowing the boys and men to read them.[468] In the hands of the later Attic tragedians the whole traditionary religious mythology was spiritualized and given a deeper ethical content and meaning.

This purifying of the Greek moral consciousness finds an exact parallel in what is taking place in the modern Christian world respecting the conceptions of deity found in the early chronicles of the Hebrew Bible and transmitted as a religious bequest to the European peoples. These ideas of God are rejected by the truer moral consciousness of to-day as the crude notions of a gross and morally immature age. Just as this modern rejection of these unworthy primitive conceptions of the divine character register our own moral advance, so does the rejection, by the later Greek thinkers and teachers, of the Homeric and Hesiodic conceptions of the gods register the advance in ethical thought in Greece during the interval that separates the era of these poets from the Solonian and Platonic Ages.

Ethical significance of the transition from the continuance to the retribution theory

In an earlier chapter we spoke of the continuance theory of life after death, and of the retribution theory as marking an advance upon this in ethical feeling.[469] At the opening of the historical period in Greece we find the primitive unethical continuance theory in existence, but in a state of transition into the retribution theory. The early Greek Hades, like the Babylonian Arallu and the Hebrew Sheol, was a place where moral distinctions were not recognized. The same phantom life was the lot of all alike who went down to the world of shadows. The Elysian Fields, it is true, had already been created, but these were simply a sort of aristocratic heaven, a “Greek Valhalla,” the abode of the great heroes of the race;[470] and Tartarus also had been called into existence, but this was a prison house only for those who had incurred the special enmity of the gods. The fables of Tantalus, Ixion, and the Danaïdes show that the belief in an after life had no ethical significance for the masses.[471]

But already in Pindar these ideas of the after life, through virtue of an ethical necessity, have undergone great changes.[472] Just as the poet moralizes the Homeric conception of the gods, so does he moralize the Homeric conception of the underworld. Alongside the continuance theory we find now the retribution theory. The life beyond the grave is conceived as a life of rewards and punishments. The Elysian Fields have been “opened to moral worth,” and a tribunal, called into existence by a growing moral consciousness like that which created the Egyptian Judgment of the Dead, has been set up, and Rhadamanthus apportions the destiny of souls according to their merit and demerit.[473] From the Persian war on, the life after death had ethical significance for all men, and not simply for exceptional cases. In the literature there are allusions in growing numbers to the retribution awaiting the wicked and the blessedness in store for those “unstained with vice.”

In Plato this moral evolution attains a stage almost identical with that reached by medieval Christian ethics. We find in the Republic a threefold division of the realm of the dead corresponding closely to the Schoolmen’s purgatory, heaven, and hell.[474] Punishment is conceived as having for aim and end, in all save cases of abominable and incurable wickedness, the purification of earth-stained souls.

All these modifications in the topography, the classifications, and the arrangements of the underworld, like the similar changes effected by the modern spirit in the medieval conception of hell, were the work of a gradually clarifying moral sense, and bear witness to the progressive development of Greek ethical thought between the Homeric and the Alexandrian Age.