Let us then consider the notes of moral superiority which the Heroic age of Greece presents to us.
Human sacrifices were not then offered upon bloody altars to the gods. Not even the direst extremity of suffering suggested the thought of cannibalism as an alternative of escape from death[903]. Wailing infants were not then exposed to avoid the burden of their nurture. The grey hairs of parents were treated with reverence and care; and if their weakness brought down insult upon them, it stung the souls of their children, even after death. To age in general a deep and hearty reverence was paid by the young. Woman, the grand refining element of society, had not then been put down in the estimation of any man, far less of the wisest men, to the level of persons degraded by the habits of captivity, and was not held to be a ζῶον ἔμψυχον. Slavery itself was mild and almost genial. It implied the law of labour, and possibly, in ordinary cases, a prohibition to rise in life: but of positive oppression, and of suffering in connection with it, or of any penal system directed to its maintenance, we have no trace whatever. Marriage was the honourable and single tie between man and his helpmate[904]. Connections with very near relations were regarded with horror; the wife was the representative, the intelligent companion and friend, of her husband; adultery was held in aversion, a crime rarer then than in most after-periods: and the sacred bond between husband and wife was not liable to be broken by the poor invention of divorce.
Organized unchastity had not then become a kind of devil’s law for society. The very name and nature of unnatural lusts appear to have been unknown in Greece, centuries after Sodom had been smitten for its crimes. The detestable invention, which set gladiators to kill one another for the amusement of enraptured spectators, was reserved for times more vain of their philosophy and their artificial culture. The rights of the poor were acknowledged in the form of an unlimited obligation to relieve them, under pain of the divine displeasure: and no stranger or suppliant could be repelled from the door of any one, who regarded either the fear of God or the fear of man.
As respects the gods, the remains of ancient piety still in some degree checked the activity of the critical faculty, and the reverence for the Power that disposes events and hates the wicked was not yet derided by speculation, nor wholly buried beneath fable and corruption. True, sacrifice was regarded as the indispensable and effective basis of religion: but in general, as between Greek and Greek, those who were most careful of virtue were also most regular in their offerings. Men were believers in prayer: they thought that, if in need they humbly betook themselves to supplication, they would be heard and helped. In short, they kept their hold upon a higher power, which we see to have been real, because they resorted to it at those times when human nature eschews illusion, and cries out for reality. Ulysses, in affliction or in need, addresses himself to the gods: even Ægisthus, when alarmed, begins to think much of them: but Cicero or Quintilian, when the arrow of grief has touched them to the quick, seek for comfort in philosophical calculations on the great woe and little weal of life.
Yet, even while all this was so, there lay in the accumulating mythology the thickly scattered seeds of destruction, both for belief and for duty. How could marriage continue single, pure, or permanent, in the face of the promiscuous lusts of Jupiter? Why should not helpless infants be exposed, when Juno, disgusted with the form of Vulcan, threw him down into the sea? Why should not man make a joyous spectacle of blood and wounds, when they were already beheld with amusement by the highest of the gods? The examples of rebellion, of discord, of luxury and selfish ease, were all of them ready to forward the process of corruption among men; and this armoury of curses was prepared too in the very quarter, where his eye should behold nothing but what is august and pure.
Again. In all descriptions of tender feelings the Greeks of the Homeric age are much nearer than those of later times to the standard of truth and nature.
The heroes of Homer weep freely; but, says the Agamemnon of Euripides[905], while he complains of the restriction, weeping is the recognised privilege of humble life only;
ἡ δυσγένεια τ’ ὡς ἔχει τι χρήσιμον·
καὶ γὰρ δακρύσαι ῥᾳδίως αὐτοῖς ἔχει
ἔγω γὰρ ἐκβαλεῖν μὲν αἰδοῦμαι δάκρυ.