Their relation to him, and the combination in themselves of the plural with the singular, are very curious. His immediate concern is with the lyre, theirs with the voice. They sometimes appear as one; for instance, in the first verse of each of the poems: sometimes as many; for instance, in the invocation before the Catalogue. Even their action is so combined, that what at one time they do as one, at others they do as many. It is the Muses who maim Thamyris: it is the Muse, who greatly loves Demodocus, who lays upon him the burden of blindness, but endows him with the gift of song: and again, who instructs and loves the tribe of Bards in general[68].
The Muses are, with Homer, of Olympian rank; but we can hardly deal with them as to many distinct impersonations: or at least we must not follow out that idea to its consequences. And for this reason; they were not in contact with the popular mind, and formed no part of the public religion: they were formations of the Poet for his own purposes, whom he might make and unmake at his will, and the conditions of whose existence he might modify, without being bound to any further degree of consistency than might for the occasion answer the purpose of his art. We must not, then, ask him whether he really means his Muse to be one or many, and if many, how many (it is, indeed, only in the second νεκυΐα that he mentions them as nine[69]), but must simply take them as a poetical, rather than mythological, impersonation of Vocal Music.
And here we at once perceive both the ground of their plurality, and their ministerial relation to Apollo. The former, probably, lay in the nature of harmony, or simultaneous combination of tones, requiring, of course, a combination of different voices, to effect what on the instrument is done by different strings. And if it did not spring from, it was at least suited to, that succession of alternate parts, which was, as we know, used in Israel even more anciently than in Homer’s time, and which may, though I do not, for one, feel certain that it must, have been signified by the term ἀμειβόμεναι, a name clearly relating to part-singing in one sense or another. Their subordinate relation to Apollo is represented in the combination[70] of the voice with the instrument. He, as the Original, remains in possession of the indivisible gift: they assist him in one which is essentially distributive. And as they share in his music, so also in his knowledge: but only in that which relates to the past: with the future they have no concern[71]. But as either Minerva or Vulcan can teach a smith, so either Apollo or the Muse can inspire a bard[72].
Argument from the Secondaries.
Such then are the Olympian Secondaries. None of them, it will be observed, are properly derivative beings. All of them represent, in some sense, traditions, or imaginations, distinct from those respecting their principal deity: nor are they in the same kind of subservience to them as the Eilithuiæ to Juno, who have no worship paid them, and are of doubtful personality; or as the metal handmaids to Vulcan himself. But they are deities, each of whom singly in a particular province administers a function, which also belongs to a deity of higher dignity. And though a difference is clearly discernible in the form of the possession and administration, yet there still remains a clear and manifest duplication, a lapping over of divinities, which is entirely at variance with the symmetry that we might reckon upon finding in an homogeneous conception of the Greeks.
This irregular duplication is kept in some degree out of view, if we set out with the determination to refer the Homeric deities to a single origin, to make a regular division of duties among them, and to pare down this, or enlarge that, till we have brought them and their supposed gifts into the requisite order. But as it stands in Homer, free from later admixtures, and from prepossessions of ours, it is a most curious and significant fact, and raises at once a serious inquiry as to its cause.
I submit that it may be referred to the joint operation of two circumstances. First, to the particular form of the early traditions that were incorporated into the invented or Olympian system. Secondly, to the principle of economy, or family and social order, reflected back from the human community upon the divine.
If the primitive tradition, even when disfigured by the lapse of time, yet on its arrival in Greece still visibly appropriated to one sublime person, distinguishable from the supreme God, and femininely conceived, the attributes of sovereign wisdom, strength, and skill; and to another, in the form of man, the gifts of knowledge, reaching before and after, and identified in early times with that of Song, as well as that of healing or deliverance from pain and death; then we can understand why it is that, when these great personages take their places as of right in the popular mythology, they continue to keep hold on certain great functions, in which their attributes are primarily developed.
Picture of human society in Olympus.
But on the other hand, the divine society must be cast into the form of the human; and this especially must take effect in three great organic particulars. First, by means of the family, which brings the members of the body into being: secondly, by political association, involving the necessity of a head, and of a deliberative organ: thirdly, by the existence of certain professions, which by the use of intellectual gifts provide for the exigencies of the community. The merely labouring classes, in whose place and idea there is nothing of the governing function, are naturally without representation, in the configuration of the divine community, as to the forms of their particular employments: though the people at large bear a rude analogy to the mass of inferior deities not included in the ordinary meeting of the gods, yet summoned to the great Chapter or Parliament. Olympus must, in short, have its δημιόεργοι.