The geography of Greece forbade that deadly centralization which has so disastrously weighed upon most other civilizations. Nature divided the Hellenic land into states—fashioned the Greek group of peoples on the federal principle. The results were that the distinct races and families of men set about taking care of their own destinies—began to make their municipal arrangements, and lift up their ideas to the great argument of self-government. Each nationality was small enough to be within the ken and influence of all its citizens. Every man in the state—slaves excepted—had an intimate personal interest in its welfare—the people were all politicians or soldiers, and could be statesmen—if necessary. Their minds were thus nursed in independence—educated in the true school of civil liberty; and, even in monarchies as well as republics, the power, intelligence, and influence of the people, constituted the life and vigor of the state. The warlike and religious games of Greece perfected the strength and symmetry of the human body. Its climate and soil were eminently calculated to produce happy results on the minds of men so organized and educated; and the national character became reflected in the graceful arts and superstitions of the people. In the East and Egypt, the vague idea of some supreme divinity, which hovered over all nations from the beginning, and never seems to have been absent from the world, was degraded by the degraded souls of the people. Their notions of supernal things were monstrous, grotesque, and inhuman—gathered evidently from their experience of kings and crocodiles. To express them the slavish race accepted the shapes of birds and beasts—winged bulls, cows, cats, hawks, alligators, and so forth. How different the cheerful and eminently human mythologies of Greece, born of the elements of the clime—autochthonous of that immortal ground! The Orientals, Egyptians, etc., bowed down to brutal shapes, congenial with the gross conceptions of their own laborious ignorance. But the Greek looked up, with a dignified sense of things—admired his own splendid symmetry in the olympic festivals, and, with a glorious egotism, invested the many manifestations of the universal spirit with the finest forms of men that ran or fought naked in the palestræ. Pan was no monstrous deity—he was a jolly rustic divinity—of the earth, earthy—a bucolic bizarrerie, coming naturally from the gay, gross genius of agrarianism; a little caper-footed, to be sure; but therefore only the more in character, and a very respectable divinity, indeed, for the country parts.
Berenger, the French poet, fables that it was Cyprus wine which first gave birth to the gods of Greece—stating that Hesiod had warmed his veins with the liquor before he began to embody his Olympian theories. But Hesiod, after all, only transcribed and touched up the popular belief; it was the bright, sensuous genius of Greece, transfiguring the happy elements of the clime, that brought forth the theogonies—peopled with immortal dwellers the
Elysian, windless, fortunate abodes,
Beyond heaven’s constellated wilderness.
The Greeks deified the best attributes of mankind, and adored the Supreme Spirit in the reflections of their own cheerful and elevated minds. In the vastness and power of the sea they saw Poseidon on his car, drawn by sea-horses, and girt by his conch-bearing Tritons, sounding in response to what the old Greek dramatist calls “the innumerable laughter of the waves”—anarithmon kymaton gelasma—Jupiter thundered from the acroceraunian top of Olympus,
Soaring all snow-clad through his native sky
In the wild pomp of mountain majesty;
Phœbus-Apollo and Diana, his sister, moved, beautiful unspeakably, in the sun and moon; gods blew in the four great winds and in the breeze; every fountain had its Naiad, and every oak its Hamadryad. Pan shouted on the mountains—especially whenever good came to Greece; and on the day of Marathon his mighty vociferations were heard at wonderful distances!—and the Fauns, Satyrs, Dryads, Oreads and so forth, his subjects and followers, wandered over every meadow, and were seen peeping from the glades and openings of every forest.
Much of the power and civilization of Greece grew from her commerce and maritime enterprise—from the sea. Dr. Arnold, the historian, says very truly, that the sea has always been one of the greatest agents of liberty and civilization. The supremacy of Athens over Sparta, then, and in the memory of all future time, was due to the port of the Piræus. The crowning glories of the Attic metropolis—her immortal sculptures and temples and her splendid philosophies—were owing to a refining intercourse with other peoples, and to the maritime exactions, somewhat tyrannically levied from those sea-born states that, from the waters and shores of the Mediterranean, looked to Athens as their mother city and protectress. Tyre, Carthage, Syracuse and other seaports—ancient and modern—have owed their wealth, celebrity and distinguishing character to their respective geographical positions.
If we follow the movements of the human family through Germany and up to the high latitudes of Europe, we find that the severe elements of the north and the peculiarities of soil were able to imbue the human mind with a portion of their own character. The life of the great Scandinavian race was necessarily divided between war and plunder; and the ideas which they entertained of the superior powers and a future state were reflected from their circumstances. These corsairs and kempions believed the Valhalla of departed spirits was a place where the happy warriors fought one another during the day, and feasted together at night, (eating flesh and drinking mead from deer’s horns) after Odin had miraculously put together the severed limbs and healed all the wounds; till the morrow should once more renew these murdering beatitudes of the boreal heaven! Again—the iron hills of the Northern region helped to form the mythologies and superstitions originally so distinctive of the Scandinavian mind. The Lapps, Finns, and other peoples of the high latitudes, were in a great measure miners and smiths. Æschylus, we believe it is, who says that the sword is “the child of Scythia”—a saying not more figurative than matter-of-fact. Jornades, a Goth, says Scandinavia was the Forge of Mankind—humani generis officium—indicating the metallurgic nature of that influence exerted on the fate of the more Southern European nations. The men who mined, and who hammered into shape the swords of the Northmen, were small in their physical proportions, and usually had their stithies near the mouths of the mines among the hills. Hence the kobold-workers, the hill-folk, the goblins, trolls, dwarfs, wee men and so forth, of a superstition which has overflowed the rest of Europe, almost as extensively as the military migrations from the same places did, once upon a time. These little hyperborean diableries have wandered all over the fields of the South and permanently tinged the currents of its various literature.