10 Sentences of Stobaus, Sermo CXIX.
fields, plaintive songs were sung, their wild melancholy notes and snatches borne abroad by the breeze and their echoes dying at last in the distance. In every instance, these mournful strains were the annual lamentation of the people over the death of some mythical boy of extraordinary beauty and promise, who, in the flower of youth, was suddenly drowned, or torn in pieces by wild beasts, "Some Hyacinthine boy, for whom Morn well might break and April bloom."
Among the Argives it was Linus. With the Arcadians it was Scephrus. In Phrygia it was Lityerses. On the shore of the Black Sea it was Bormus. In the country of the Bithynians it was Hylas. At Pelusium it was Maneros. And in Syria it was Adonis. The untimely death of these beautiful boys, carried off in their morning of life, was yearly bewailed, their names re echoing over the plains, the fountains, and among the hills. It is obvious that these cannot have been real persons whose death excited a sympathy so general, so recurrent. "The real object of lamentation," says Muller, "was the tender beauty of spring destroyed by the raging heat, and other similar phenomena, which the imagination of those early times invested with a personal form."11 All this was woven into the Mysteries, whose great legend and drama were that every autumn Persephone was carried down to the dark realm of the King of Shadows, but that she was to return each spring to her mother's arms. Thus were described the withdrawal and reappearance of vegetable life in the alternations of the seasons. But these changes of nature typified the changes in the human lot; else Persephone would have been merely a symbol of the buried grain and would not have become the Queen of the Dead.12 Her return to the world of light, by natural analogy, denoted a new birth to men. Accordingly, "all the testimony of antiquity concurs in saying that these Mysteries inspired the most animating hopes with regard to the condition of the soul after death."13 That the fate of man should by imagination and sentiment have been so connected with the phenomena of nature in myths and symbols embodied in pathetic religious ceremonies was a spontaneous product. For how "Her fresh benignant look Nature changes at that lorn season when, With tresses drooping o'er her sable stole, She yearly mourns the mortal doom of man, Her noblest work! So Israel's virgins erst With annual moan upon the mountains wept Their fairest gone!"
And soon again the birds begin to warble, the leaves and blossoms put forth, and all is new life once more. In every age the gentle heart and meditative mind have been impressed by the mournful correspondence and the animating prophecy.
11 History of the Literature of Ancient Greece, ch. iii. sects. 2 3.
12 For the connection of the Eleusinian goddesses with agriculture, the seasons, the under world, death, resurrection, etc., see "Demeter and Persephone," von Dr. Ludwig Preller, kap. i. sects. 9 11.
13 Muller, Hist. Gr. Lit., ch. xvi. sect. 2.
But not only was the changing recurrence of dreary winter and gladsome summer joined by affecting analogies with the human doom of death and hope of another life. The phenomena of the skies, the impressive succession of day and night, also were early seized upon and made to blend their shadows and lights, by means of imaginative suggestions, into an image of the decease and resurrection of man. Among the Mystical Hymns of Orpheus, so called, there is a hymn to Adonis, in which that personage is identified with the sun alternately sinking to Tartarus and soaring to heaven. It was customary with the ancients to speak of the setting of a constellation as its death, its reascension in the horizon being its return to life.14 The black abysm under the earth was the realm of the dead. The bright expanse above the earth was the realm of the living. While the daily sun rises royally through the latter, all things rejoice in the warmth and splendor of his smile. When he sinks nightly, shorn of his ambrosial beams, into the former, sky and earth wrap themselves in mourning for their departed monarch, the dead god of light muffled in his bier and borne along the darkening heavens to his burial. How naturally the phenomena of human fate would be symbolically interwoven with all this! Especially alike are the exuberant joy and activity of full life and of day, the melancholy stillness and sad repose of midnight and of death.
The sun insists on gladness; but at night, When he is gone, poor
Nature loves to weep."
Through her yearly and her diurnal round alike, therefore, does mother Nature sympathize with man, and picture forth his fate, in type of autumnal decay, and wintry darkness, and night buried seed, in sign of vernal bud, and summer light, and day bursting fruit.