πολλὰ μάλ’, ὅσσα διδοῦσιν, ὅτις σφ’ ἀλίτηται ὀμόσσας.
Under the operation of the oath, the chances, so to speak, are doubled in favour of the veracity of the witness: first, he may not be wicked enough to forswear himself; and secondly, if he is wicked enough, yet he may not have the requisite amount of daring in his wickedness.
These views will, I think, receive material confirmation when we come to consider the relative positions of the oath in Greece and in Troy. For the present, I leave the subject with the observation, that four short words describe the props of human society: they are, γάμος, ὅρκος, θέμις, θεός.
All these sanctions, however partial and remote, thus given to human duty by belief in the gods, could not but be of great practical value.
And indeed it may with truth be said, that the mere idea of the presence of an overruling power in the world was of inestimable advantage in repressing human passion, in moderating desire, and in limiting the excesses of caprice, wilfulness, and violence.
But it is obvious that these beneficial results from belief in the gods belonged not to the particular development, but to the theistical principle which lay within and under it. The idea of a moral Governor of the universe was, and ever will be, an unfailing seed of good wherever it may exist. The Pagan mythology, at every step of its unfolding into detail, enfeebled and degraded that great idea, but it could not be destroyed all at once. Nemo repente fuit turpissimus; and a system, like a man, requires time to reach the extreme of depravation. As, among men, a judge is not supposed to lose all regard for justice, because it may be that in some particular of private life he has transgressed, so the Olympian divinities might have credit as administrators of moral government, even after they had begun to be charged with instances of immorality. But an unscrupulous order and succession of judges, would in time put an end to the idea of public justice; and so the continuing and growing degradation of the Immortals, in time put an end to the sense of religion, and made even its fanes[757] smoky, and its pomps contemptible.
And certainly, when we look at the evils, of which the mythological system was the source, we cannot but be struck with their overwhelming magnitude, and with the highly instructive fact, that in every case they so manifestly belong, not to the original principle of belief and worship due from man to his Creator, but to the departure from a pure, and the lapse into an impure belief.
Moral bearing of the Religion on the poems.
The credit for moral results, which has thus been allowed to the probable operation of the Homeric Theo-mythology in the world, must be steadily denied to its influence upon the poems, where it appears before us as in the main a lowering and corrupting agency. In fact, the religion and the morality of the Homeric poems appear to separate, and to run in opposite directions. The rights of the question at issue, in an ethical point of view, are plainly with the Greeks: they vindicate by arms not one only, but two principles, both of them vital to the order of society, and to individual happiness and virtue: the sanctity, first, of the family and of marriage ties; secondly, of the relation created by the rites of hospitality. And with the rights go the fortunes of the cause. The capture and fall of Troy constitute a great triumph of justice over wrong.
But the mythological elements of the question are cast in a mould entirely different. The royal family of Troy has been all along in singular favour with the deities, notwithstanding the perjury of Laomedon; and that favour does not appear to be in any degree diminished by the gross and shameful crimes that stand against Paris in the poem, or by the unfailing and extraordinary obtuseness of his moral sense. Ganymede, Tithonus, Anchises, as well as Paris, have all been especial objects of divine regard. Not only did a full half of the other deities take part with the Trojans in the war, but Jupiter himself, apart from his concession to Thetis, was concerned for them, and says[758], ‘They interest me even while they perish’ (μέλουσί μοι ὀλλύμενοί περ).