PRELIMINARY VIEW OF THE INFLUENCE OF MYTHOLOGY OVER THE EARLY GREEKS. in receiving WHO that considers the masculine vigour of the Hellenic mind and Greek facility its political energies, would imagine that so constituted, it could place legend. faith in untested fables, the wild creations of unrestrained imagination? -that the subtle genius of Themistocles and the intellectual majesty of Pericles, would placidly hail traditions discarded by the historic mind as transparent fictions? Yet so it was. The same judgment that so profoundly harmonised with the severe grandeur of the Olympian Jove, enthroned by Phidias amid the marshalled columns of the national temple, bowed to the legend of Aphrodite, the foam-born Queen of Love, and the genesis of monsters, endowed with godlike powers, but debased by monstrous passions. Strange as this anomaly may appear, it is reconcilable with the noble sincerity of the Hellenic attributes. The early Greek was essentially a creature of imagination, by which he was captivated before his judgment was formed. To surrender himself to her glowing charms, without a doubt of her sincerity [H. G.] B Its effects upon the Greek. Sources of -to draw arguments for her truth from the pliant melody of his language-such was his delight; but whilst he thus wooed and won Tradition, History was lost to him. Endowed with the most active sensibilities, the Greek sought to satisfy the ardent aspirations of his devotional and warlike spirit; he yearned to be enrolled amongst the band of heroes whom their valour had exalted to the dazzling halls of Olympus. How deeply the grand reality of this reward was impressed upon the most powerful intellect, is shown by the awful apostrophe of Demosthenes to the heroes who fell at Marathon, and the breathless attention which then absorbed the very soul of the Athenian. But if the genius of the Greek was profoundly emulative, it was not his worship. less devotional. The first-born son of Hellas found his scripture in unclouded skies, and in the solemnities of night, which, expounded by the high-priest of Poetry,' taught him to adore the golden-haired Phoebus, and the silvery brightness of Artemis. To his sensitive imagination, the fairest objects of nature became invested with a living personality. Local habitation, linked with presiding spirituality, actuated his glowing fancy. The Naiads, with their fountains; the Dryads and their groves; the Fawns, Satyrs, and Oreades, with their mountains; these he indissolubly associated in a creation that teemed with wonders; and even the starry cope was peopled with visionary beings, the offspring of legend. Powerful religious agency of Homer. There is no instance of the agency of mind in moulding a nation to uniformity of worship parallel to that produced by the great Epic poet of Greece. At his awakening touch the world of gods and of heroes sprang into a vitality so perfect and so noble, as to command the faith and homage of myriads. But the true secret of the godlike sway of Homer, lay in those sympathies which he implanted in the bosom of frail humanity, and then touched with life. The love of country; the love of kindred; the love of glory; these were the influences that made his countrymen willing and devout believers in the mythology he had imagined; whilst the dignity with which he clothed his creations gave to them the charm of reality, and stamped them an everlasting model of intellectuality. But it is not sufficient to consider Homer merely as the moral benefactor of his species. To say, that the great poet gave to his countrymen a religious system, and to the world an heritage of glorious imaginations, would be to mete out but scanty praise. No poetry of We shall often have occasion to notice the fondness for bending language to suit mythology exhibited by the Greeks. 2 Καὶ γάρ τίς θ ̓ ἕνα μῆνα μένων ἀπὸ ἧς ἀλόχοιο Absent from her whom in each thought he sees tics of his poetry. sculpture. equal extent is marked with less ideality than his--none so strongly Characteriswith breathing life and actual, recognisable, personality; abstract sentimentalisms are rare,—the scene is full of animated forms, instinct with passion. They seem even to us to be less pictures than substantial existences. How admirable the models which they presented to the statuary! and what a noble material did Hellas dedicate to eternise the grandeur of the poet's conceptions! Hard by, on one side of Athens, lay the marble quarries of the lucid Pentelic and the veined Carystian; and, on the other side, the snow-white Megarean. And now Effects of his pregnant with the majesty of Homer, Attica, the mighty mother of Poetry upon civilization, gave forth from her marble womb, a second birth of heroes stamped with the grandeur of their glorious parent.' Thus did Homer in after ages invest with an imperishable reality those awful gods of his country, who took cognizance of broken vows; and through the sublime ministration of Pericles, made them ever present to the eye of guilt. But if the creative intellect of the Homeric sculptor filled with substantial life the noble forms bequeathed to him by the great poet, his most subtle energies were to be tasked in embodying conceptions opposed to nature -the Sphinx, the Centaur, the Satyr, were demanded by the national faith, and the struggling laws of anatomy were to be vanquished: the effort was great, but it was successful; and eighteen centuries have passed in admiration of the achievement. But there is yet another peculiarity in the Homeric Individuality system that distinguishes it from the corporate religious crafts of Egypt Hellenic and of India ;—that system cast its hallowed spell over country and over religion. home, making a sanctuary of each hearth, and each father the highpriest of his domestic temple. How dear to the men of Marathon must have been a country such as this! Nor was this all; by linking humanity with the deity from whom the heroic nature derived its being, the poet held out to the warrior the most exalted reward. He Its effects upon warlike might now aspire to emulate the mighty achievements of those heroes, enterprise. from whom his faith taught him that he had sprung; whose deeds of high emprise glowed before his vision in the war scenes of The Greeks, who were singularly significant in the application of terms, styled a metrical composer Torns, a maker, or inventor, highly descriptive of the creative power of the art; the old term in Homer's day was doidos, "songster;" Herodotus is the first who uses the term "inventor." The genius of the East is recognised by styling the poet (shair) "one who knows," reminding us less of the imaginative invention, than the recitation of previous stores of song, while the Hindoos, whose classic language is based upon a poetic structure, give him the synonym of "wise," or learned, fa (kavi). It is singular that this should likewise signify the "Sun;" a similar mental process amongst the Greeks must have connected the god of Day and the god of Poetry. With the Celts, he was the "fear dana," or learned man. 2 Hence the general alarm at Athens, in the time of Alcibiades, on the mutilation of the Hermæ, when not only the priests, but every individual, felt terrified at the impending vengeance of the gods. of the Greek belief in the Homeric Mæonides. It was this that exalted the dauntless spirit of Miltiades,' and inspired with resistless energy the lofty daring of Themistocles. The gods, from whom they had descended, were from Olympus gazing upon them in the battle-field, and how could they fail? Were they not those very deities, who had been the tutelary guardians of their ancestors on the plains of Troy? It must be so; they doubted not the glorious record of the inspired bard of Ionia. We have seen that the Greek held the Homeric tissue of genealogy a sacred truth, and again and again was he confirmed in this cherished genealogy. faith by the tangible evidences of place and substance; and these evidences bore on nature human and divine: and so lifelike was the impression made upon the Hellenic mind by the princely poet who bestowed upon Greece its great legendary charter, that it received, with the same grateful confidence, the privileged enlargements of his Application of the Hellenic faith. Legendary faith in the historic ages. successors. 3 On the towering summit of Acrocorinthus the Greek could realize the daring acts of Medea; near the well Callichorus, at Eleusis, he saw the very stone on which the goddess Dēmēter, worn down with weariness and grief, rested on her reaching Attica, in search of her unhappy daughter Persephone; while round the well his eye of faith could still discern the Eleusinian women singing hymns to the goddess and performing their chorus. These gracious evidences of his faith ranged up to the most venerable ancestry of the gods; for the very stone which Cronos swallowed in lieu of Jupiter, was to be seen near the temple of Delphi.5 Jove planted firmly 'mid the expansive earth Beneath Parnassus' rifts, in Pytho the divine! 6 The public and decided testimony as a thing not to be disputed, of the high functionary of the Ephesian temple as to "the image that fell down from Jupiter," demonstrates the firm popular belief in these relics, even in that historic age. Nay, the enlightened Xenophon observes, that as the returning expedition of the Ten Thousand sailed along the coast between Sinope and Heracleia, it beheld the very anchoring1 Miltiades traced his origin to Ajax. The Roman lyrist had the same idea of the tutelary supervision of the national deity Hes. Theog., 498. 6 Acts xix. 35. The term "Neōkoros," originally "temple-sweepers" (translated "High Clerk "), soon became applied to priestly functionaries of high rank, holding the supreme superintendence of the treasures lodged in the temple, as well as the chief direction in templar arrangements. Plat. vi. p. 769. places of the Argo; while in the historical ages, the identical olive tree, planted by Minerva, could be proudly pointed to by the Athenian. Nor were the Phocians less confident in their national Phocian faith. faith: they truly were much favoured by the gods; for they showed to Pausanias the historian (who settled at Rome B. C. 170), several hardened lumps of clay, the leavings of Prometheus when employed in making man. This current of belief, appears to have run freely even in the time of Arnobius (A. D. 300), who speaks of a rock in Phrygia, whence Pyrrha and Deucalion had taken the stones that reproduced mankind; while at Athens, within the temple of the Athenian Olympian Jove, a large cavity in the earth was to be seen, through which the waters of the deluge had retired.* To these instances of national faith not a few might be added: these will suffice to demonstrate the tendencies and the products of the Homeric writings, through the continued agency of Hesiod and the Cyclic poets. relics. tendencies Nor were the Greeks indebted to Homer merely for the sublimity of Moral their statuary, and the whole cycle of their imitative arts: his narra- of Homer. tives were often weighty judgments, solemnly impressive to moral consciousness; often did the frequent wanderings of his heroes in strange lands, amid foreign rites, inculcate a national toleration to the devotional practices of other realms; a toleration nowhere more fully evinced than in the writings of Herodotus. The advice, the friendly intercourse, the powerful tutelage of the guardian god is ever vouchsafed to the pious hero; but then piety is the condition-injustice would forfeit his claim. One of the most amiable traits in the Religious theogony of Homer (if to him we may apply so artificial a term) is tendencies the general benevolence of his deities towards mankind; they condescend to visit the human race in the form of men; they wander among them, share their banquet or their business, and take pleasure in their amusements, while they are gratified in being presented with the same gifts that please frail mortality. In honour of these divinities they indulged in the festivities of dance or song; hence their worship assumed a cheerful character. Such principles are laid down by Homer in no dull didactic form; they spring gracefully and unbidden from his narrative. But that which was the condition of their success, that which made them enter the very soul of the nation, was the impressive nature of their form and growth. Their wide dissemination orally, the frequency of their repetitions, attended by the charm of song and lyre, proved a wider and more efficient publication than could possibly have been attained at that time by the artificial form of writing. And to what an exalted height of valour was the Greek thereby elevated! His national poetry told him of men who entered the conflict with the 1 Ενθα ἡ ̓Αργὼ λέγεται ὁρμίσασθαι, vi. 2, alias v. 10. 2 Pausan. x. 4, 3. 3 Gent. c. v. p. 158. of the Poet. |