Greek Studies: a Series of Essays

by Walter Pater

These two tendencies, then, met and struggled and were harmonised in the supreme imagination, of Pheidias, in sculpture—of Aeschylus, in the drama. Hence, a series of wondrous personalities, of which the Greek imagination became the dwelling-place; beautiful, perfectly understood human outlines, embodying a strange, delightful, lingering sense of clouds and water and sun. Such a world, the world of really imaginative Greek sculpture, we still see, reflected in many a humble vase or battered coin, in Bacchante, and Centaur, and Amazon; [36] evolved out of that "vasty deep"; with most command, in the consummate fragments of the Parthenon; not, indeed, so that he who runs may read, the gifts of Greek sculpture being always delicate, and asking much of the receiver; but yet visible, and a pledge to us, of creative power, as, to the worshipper, of the presence, which, without that material pledge, had but vaguely haunted the fields and groves.

This, then, was what the Greek imagination did for men's sense and experience of natural forces, in Athene, in Zeus, in Poseidon; for men's sense and experience of their own bodily qualities—swiftness, energy, power of concentrating sight and hand and foot on a momentary physical act—in the close hair, the chastened muscle, the perfectly poised attention of the quoit-player; for men's sense, again, of ethical qualities—restless idealism, inward vision, power of presence through that vision in scenes behind the experience of ordinary men—in the idealised Alexander.

To illustrate this function of the imagination, as especially developed in Greek art, we may reflect on what happens with us in the use of certain names, as expressing summarily, this name for you and that for me—Helen, Gretchen, Mary—a hundred associations, trains of sound, forms, impressions, remembered in all sorts of degrees, which, through a very wide and full experience, they have the power of bringing with [37] them; in which respect, such names are but revealing instances of the whole significance, power, and use of language in general. Well,—the mythical conception, projected at last, in drama or sculpture, is the name, the instrument of the identification, of the given matter,—of its unity in variety, its outline or definition in mystery; its spiritual form, to use again the expression I have borrowed from William Blake—form, with hands, and lips, and opened eyelids—spiritual, as conveying to us, in that, the soul of rain, or of a Greek river, or of swiftness, or purity.

To illustrate this, think what the effect would be, if you could associate, by some trick of memory, a certain group of natural objects, in all their varied perspective, their changes of colour and tone in varying light and shade, with the being and image of an actual person. You travelled through a country of clear rivers and wide meadows, or of high windy places, or of lowly grass and willows, or of the Lady of the Lake; and all the complex impressions of these objects wound themselves, as a second animated body, new and more subtle, around the person of some one left there, so that they no longer come to recollection apart from each other. Now try to conceive the image of an actual person, in whom, somehow, all those impressions of the vine and its fruit, as the highest type of the life of the green sap, had become incorporate;—all the scents and colours of its flower and fruit, and [38] something of its curling foliage; the chances of its growth; the enthusiasm, the easy flow of more choice expression, as its juices mount within one; for the image is eloquent, too, in word, gesture, and glancing of the eyes, which seem to be informed by some soul of the vine within it: as Wordsworth says,

Beauty born of murmuring sound
Shall pass into her face—

so conceive an image into which the beauty, "born" of the vine, has passed; and you have the idea of Dionysus, as he appears, entirely fashioned at last by central Greek poetry and art, and is consecrated in the Oinophoria and the Anthestêria,+ the great festivals of the Winepress and the Flowers.

The word wine, and with it the germ of the myth of Dionysus, is older than the separation of the Indo-Germanic race. Yet, with the people of Athens, Dionysus counted as the youngest of the gods; he was also the son of a mortal, dead in childbirth, and seems always to have exercised the charm of the latest born, in a sort of allowable fondness. Through the fine-spun speculations of modern ethnologists and grammarians, noting the changes in the letters of his name, and catching at the slightest historical records of his worship, we may trace his coming from Phrygia, the birthplace of the more mystical elements of [39] Greek religion, over the mountains of Thrace. On the heights of Pangaeus he leaves an oracle, with a perpetually burning fire, famous down to the time of Augustus, who reverently visited it. Southwards still, over the hills of Parnassus, which remained for the inspired women of Boeotia the centre of his presence, he comes to Thebes, and the family of Cadmus. From Boeotia he passes to Attica; to the villages first; at last to Athens; at an assignable date, under Peisistratus; out of the country, into the town.

To this stage of his town-life, that Dionysus of "enthusiasm" already belonged; it was to the Athenians of the town, to urbane young men, sitting together at the banquet, that those expressions of a sudden eloquence came, of the loosened utterance and finer speech, its colour and imagery. Dionysus, then, has entered Athens, to become urbane like them; to walk along the marble streets in frequent procession, in the persons of noble youths, like those who at the Oschophoria bore the branches of the vine from his temple, to the temple of Athene of the Parasol, or of beautiful slaves; to contribute through the arts to the adornment of life, yet perhaps also in part to weaken it, relaxing ancient austerity. Gradually, his rough country feasts will be outdone by the feasts of the town; and as comedy arose out of those, so these will give rise to tragedy. For his entrance upon this new stage of his career, his coming into the town, is from the [40] first tinged with melancholy, as if in entering the town he had put off his country peace. The other Olympians are above sorrow. Dionysus, like a strenuous mortal hero, like Hercules or Perseus, has his alternations of joy and sorrow, of struggle and hard-won triumph. It is out of the sorrows of Dionysus, then,—of Dionysus in winter—that all Greek tragedy grows; out of the song of the sorrows of Dionysus, sung at his winter feast by the chorus of satyrs, singers clad in goat-skins, in memory of his rural life, one and another of whom, from time to time, steps out of the company to emphasise and develope this or that circumstance of the story; and so the song becomes dramatic. He will soon forget that early country life, or remember it but as the dreamy background of his later existence. He will become, as always in later art and poetry, of dazzling whiteness; no longer dark with the air and sun, but like one eskiatrofêkôs+—brought up under the shade of Eastern porticoes or pavilions, or in the light that has only reached him softened through the texture of green leaves; honey-pale, like the delicate people of the city, like the flesh of women, as those old vase-painters conceive of it, who leave their hands and faces untouched with the pencil on the white clay. The ruddy god of the vineyard, stained with wine-lees, or coarser colour, will hardly recognise his double, in the white, graceful, mournful figure, weeping, chastened, lifting up his arms in yearning+ [41] affection towards his late-found mother, as we see him on a famous Etruscan mirror. Only, in thinking of this early tragedy, of these town- feasts, and of the entrance of Dionysus into Athens, you must suppose, not the later Athens which is oftenest in our thoughts, the Athens of Pericles and Pheidias; but that little earlier Athens of Peisistratus, which the Persians destroyed, which some of us perhaps would rather have seen, in its early simplicity, than the greater one; when the old image of the god, carved probably out of the stock of an enormous vine, had just come from the village of Eleutherae to his first temple in the Lenaeum—the quarter of the winepresses, near the Limnae—the marshy place, which in Athens represents the cave of Nysa; its little buildings on the hill-top, still with steep rocky ways, crowding round the ancient temple of Erechtheus and the grave of Cecrops, with the old miraculous olive-tree still growing there, and the old snake of Athene Polias still alive somewhere in the temple court.

The artists of the Italian Renaissance have treated Dionysus many times, and with great effect, but always in his joy, as an embodiment of that glory of nature to which the Renaissance was a return. But in an early engraving of Mocetto there is for once a Dionysus treated differently. The cold light of the background displays a barren hill, the bridge and towers of [42] an Italian town, and quiet water. In the foreground, at the root of a vine, Dionysus is sitting, in a posture of statuesque weariness; the leaves of the vine are grandly drawn, and wreathing heavily round the head of the god, suggest the notion of his incorporation into it. The right hand, holding a great vessel languidly and indifferently, lets the stream of wine flow along the earth; while the left supports the forehead, shadowing heavily a face, comely, but full of an expression of painful brooding. One knows not how far one may really be from the mind of the old Italian engraver, in gathering from his design this impression of a melancholy and sorrowing Dionysus. But modern motives are clearer; and in a Bacchus by a young Hebrew painter, in the exhibition of the Royal Academy of 1868, there was a complete and very fascinating realisation of such a motive; the god of the bitterness of wine, "of things too sweet"; the sea-water of the Lesbian grape become somewhat brackish in the cup. Touched by the sentiment of this subtler, melancholy Dionysus, we may ask whether anything similar in feeling is to be actually found in the range of Greek ideas;—had some antitype of this fascinating figure any place in Greek religion? Yes; in a certain darker side of the double god of nature, obscured behind the brighter episodes of Thebes and Naxos, but never quite forgotten, something corresponding to this deeper, more refined idea, [43] really existed—the conception of Dionysus Zagreus; an image, which has left, indeed, but little effect in Greek art and poetry, which criticism has to put patiently together, out of late, scattered hints in various writers; but which is yet discernible, clearly enough to show that it really visited certain Greek minds here and there; and discernible, not as a late after- thought, but as a tradition really primitive, and harmonious with the original motive of the idea of Dionysus. In its potential, though unrealised scope, it is perhaps the subtlest dream in Greek religious poetry, and is, at least, part of the complete physiognomy of Dionysus, as it actually reveals itself to the modern student, after a complete survey.

The whole compass of the idea of Dionysus, a dual god of both summer and winter, became ultimately, as we saw, almost identical with that of Demeter. The Phrygians believed that the god slept in winter and awoke in summer, and celebrated his waking and sleeping; or that he was bound and imprisoned in winter, and unbound in spring. We saw how, in Elis and at Argos, the women called him out of the sea, with the singing of hymns, in early spring; and a beautiful ceremony in the temple at Delphi, which, as we know, he shares with Apollo, described by Plutarch, represents his mystical resurrection. Yearly, about the time of the shortest day, just as the light begins to increase, [44] and while hope is still tremulously strung, the priestesses of Dionysus were wont to assemble with many lights at his shrine, and there, with songs and dances, awoke the new-born child after his wintry sleep, waving in a sacred cradle, like the great basket used for winnowing corn, a symbolical image, or perhaps a real infant. He is twofold then—a Döppelganger; like Persephone, he belongs to two worlds, and has much in common with her, and a full share of those dark possibilities which, even apart from the story of the rape, belong to her. He is a Chthonian god, and, like all the children of the earth, has an element of sadness; like Hades himself, he is hollow and devouring, an eater of man's flesh—sarcophagus—the grave which consumed unaware the ivory-white shoulder of Pelops.