In vague and general terms, the gods of Homer are represented as givers of blessings, particularly of external goods. Sometimes they are rashly and wildly charged as the authors of calamities[746], which the folly of man himself has caused. But according to the more grave and serious teaching of the day, they were conceived to enforce, as against mortals, laws from which they were certainly themselves exempt; and allow to mankind no alternative, except that of mixed good or else unmixed evil. Two caskets stand upon the floor by Jupiter: one of them is filled with wretchedness and shame; the other is vicissitude, which oscillates incessantly between prosperity and sorrow. And there rankles in the mind of mankind a sentiment, which tells them that the gods, while they thus dispense afflictions upon earth which are neither sweetened by love, nor elevated by a distinct disciplinary purpose, take care to keep themselves beyond all touch of grief or care[747]:
ὣς γὰρ ἐπεκλώσαντο θεοὶ δειλοῖσι βροτοῖσι,
ζώειν ἀχνυμένοις· αὐτοὶ δέ τ’ ἀκηδέες εἰσίν.
It lent considerable support to virtue.
The best thing that can be said for their fainthearted encouragement to virtue is, that the good man is certainly understood in most cases, though not always, to prosper in the end: let us take, for example, Nestor, Menelaus, or Ulysses. Ajax and Agamemnon meet unhappy ends; but Ajax was stern and sullen, while Agamemnon cannot be acquitted of cupidity and selfishness. On the other hand, as punishers of wrong, the gods of Olympus do not visit all wrongs and all vices alike. Especially they take little notice, in their moral government as in their lives, of the law of purity: there is no express notice of their displeasure against the crime of Paris; and Jupiter, the guardian of the judgment seat, the friend of the suppliant, the stranger, and the poor, makes no pretension to defend the marriage bed from the contamination he had himself so often wrought. However, in a very aggravated instance, namely, that of Ægisthus, his adulterous marriage with Clytemnestra[748] is noticed explicitly in the Olympian Council, as contributing to the enormity of his offence. But in such a case many other elements, besides that of purity, are involved: the whole social and political order of the world is at stake.
Thus upon the whole there was but little more in the sentiments than in the conduct of the Immortals, to maintain among men a sense of piety towards Heaven. Yet a good deal of authority and support were lent to important principles of relative duty, by the belief that the deities would or might avenge its infraction. We must in short fully embrace the fact that man, as represented in Homer, was inconsistent with respect to his religion, in the sense opposite to that in which inconsistency commonly affects that relation. He had more still remaining in him of ancient and natural morality, than his belief could either adequately account for in theory, or permanently sustain in action.
It should at the same time be borne in mind, that, while the vices of Olympus appertain to the individual deities, its obscure and qualified virtues, in the championship of duty, and the avenging of crime upon earth, are not the properties of this or that mythological impersonation, but either of the deities considered as a whole with one united will, or else of those among them in whose characters Homer still enables us to read the vestiges of primitive tradition.
Their course with respect to Troy.
Saint Augustine observes[749], that some defenders of the Pagan mythology in later times quoted the fall of Troy as an instance of Divine retribution coming upon the descendants of Laomedon for his perjury, and some, to the same effect, as a punishment of the adultery committed by Paris. To which he replies truly, that the heathen deities had no right to punish in Paris an act which had the sanction of Venus, as she bore Æneas to Anchises, and of Mars as the father of Romulus: Æneas and Romulus being the two great reputed fountain-heads of the highest Roman lineage.