In questions of this character, seeing that the Greek gods were guilty of every form of immorality and the Greeks themselves were one of the most sensual nations that ever existed, the presumption is in favour of impurity: the onus of proof is on those who allege purity. I have not undertaken the heavy work of looking up the innumerable references to the Charites in Greek literature, but I know of nothing that supports the prevalent conception of those deities. Apart from the fact that Theocritus uses the word himerophonos, Meleager (Anth. Pal, V, 195) speaks of himeros as conferred by the Charites. There is nothing in the meaning of charis, or the verb charizesthai to support the current idea (both being even used in an immodest sense); Homer identifies Charis with Aphrodite, with whom Hesiod also identifies Aglaia, since each is made the wife of Hephaestus; the Charites are constantly associated with Aphrodite and Erôs (and consequently with Himeros, the personification of passion) so that the maxim Noscitur a sociis applies; Sappho repeatedly claims them as her patrons; as regards the representation of the Charites in art, girl friendship would be a subject quite alien to the Greek mind.
If the view suggested is correct our authorities with their preconceived ideas presume to correct Theocritus and Sappho! They not only give a wrong view of the Charites, but also hide the coarseness of the compliment paid by Theocritus to his lady friend—in each case distorting the truth.
Mr. Livingstone may have another reason for altering the meaning of “himerophonos.” He appears to hold the opinion that a Greek writer would not ascribe intelligence or emotion to a bird, as Mrs. Browning does in “To a Seamew.” (I quite agree with him as to the false, feminine sentiment in this poem. It is mainly the “Sonnets from the Portuguese” that raise Mrs. Browning above the minor poets.) Mr. Livingstone, for example, translates ἡμερόφων’ ἀλέκτωρ, “O cock that criest at dawn.” This should surely mean “that announceth the dawn;” the attitude and the very crow of the bird would suggest this to the Greeks; and the fowl did, as a matter of fact, serve in place of an alarm-clock to them (see, for instance, Aristophanes’ Birds, 488). Does not Mr. Livingstone forget that the Greeks attributed not only intelligence but also miraculous powers to animals ([see p. 370])? If so, this illustrates another fact noticeable among classical authorities. They often fail to consider all the premises before arriving at a conclusion. Taking another illustration from Mr. Livingstone, he says that the Greeks had little of the feeling of wonder, did not “muse on the strangeness of the world,” and would not have experienced the emotion Pascal felt when viewing the starry heavens, “The eternal silence of those infinite spaces terrifies me.” The premise he appears to omit here is the fact of the intense ignorance of the Greeks. Their world was a very limited one, with its flat earth and solid lid, certain bright objects conceived as gods or otherwise moving in the intermediate space. To illustrate this, Herodotus (II, 24) believes that the sun-god is forced by the cold winds in winter to move to the warm sky above Libya; and in 434 B.C. (about the same time) the great advanced thinker, Anaxagoras, is arrested for blasphemy and exiled because he taught that the sun must be a mass of blazing metal larger than the Peloponnesus! Everything in nature had its god, whose action explained whatever happened. If the Greeks had once realized the awful infinity of the universe their whole outlook on nature would have changed, and I cannot think that so highly intellectual a people would not have been moved by wonder. I cannot see any element in “the Greek genius” that would indicate this. (Observe Ptolemy’s epigram on [p. 10].)
Returning to the Sappho quotation, Mr. Livingstone translates ἦρος ἄγγελος literally as “the messenger of spring.” Does he mean the messenger “sent by spring” or “announcing spring”? Presumably he does not mean the latter, as it would impute intelligence or emotion to the bird. But, if we accept the former interpretation, it leads to the curious result that the poet, not content with a Goddess of Spring and the Hours who represent the seasons, intends still further to personify spring. Is not the true meaning of Sappho’s words “the nightingale with its passionate song sent (by Proserpine) to let men know that spring is approaching”? This is not mere captious criticism. To Sappho the goddess Proserpine was a concrete being with some sort of corporeal form, who brings a thing called spring, and who actually does send the nightingale ahead to sing of the passion of the pairing-time, and thus let men know that spring is coming. There is no poetic imagery, no imaginative picture in the poet’s mind, but the statement of an actual fact. See also the reference to the halcyon, [p. 370]. It seems to me that, in this as in other cases, our classical authorities fail to place themselves in the position of the Greeks. Here they interpret as imagination what was meant as reality. (However, as I have said before, the above are merely suggestions which I myself hope to consider further; but, until we knew exactly what Sappho’s verse meant, it could not be brought into the discussion of Mr. Livingstone’s views.)
Ah! the weariness and weight of tears,
The crying out to God, the wish for slumber,
They lay so deep, so deep! God heard them all;
He set them unto music of his own.