Volume II Part 17 (1/2)
* _Postea_, ”Zeus”.
It is G.o.d that takes from man half his virtue on the day of slavery; it is G.o.d that gives to each his lot in life, and ensures that as his day is so shall his strength be. This spiritual conception of deity, undifferentiated by shape or attributes, or even by name, declares itself in the Homeric terms (------------) and in the (------) of Herodotus. These are spiritual forces or tendencies ruling the world, and these conceptions are present to the mind, even of Homer, whose pictures of the G.o.ds are so essentially anthropomorphic; even of Herodotus, in all things so cautiously reverent in his acceptation of the popular creeds and rituals. When Socrates, therefore, was doomed to death for his theories of religion, he was not condemned so much for holding a pure belief in a spiritual divinity, as for bringing that opinion (itself no new thing) into the marketplace, and thereby shocking the popular religion, on which depended the rites that were believed to preserve the fortune of the state.
It is difficult or impossible quite to unravel the tangled threads of mythical legend, of sacerdotal ritual, of local religion, and of refined religious sentiment in Greece. Even in the earliest doc.u.ments, the Homeric poems, religious sentiment deserts, in moments of deep and serious thought, the brilliant a.s.sembly of the Olympians, and takes refuge in that fatherhood of the divine ”after which all men yearn”.*
* _Odyssey_, iii. 48.
Yet, even in Pausanias, in the second century of the Christian era, and still more in Plutarch and Porphyry, there remains an awful acquiescence in such wild dogmas and sacred traditions as antiquity handed down. We can hardly determine whether even Homer actually believed in his own turbulent cowardly Ares, in his own amorous and capricious Zeus. Did Homer, did any educated Greek, turn in his thoughts, when pain, or sorrow, or fear fell on him, to a hope in the help of Hermes or Athene?
He was ready to perform all their rites and offer all the sacrifices due, but it may be questioned whether, even in such a G.o.d-fearing man as Nicias, this ritualism meant more than a desire to ”fulfil all righteousness,” and to gratify a religious sentiment in the old traditional forms.
In examining Greek myths, then, it must be remembered that, like all myths, they have far less concern with religion in its true guise--with the yearning after the divine which ”is not far from any one of us,”
after the G.o.d ”in whom we live, and move, and have our being”--than with the _religio_, which is a tissue of old barbarous fears, misgivings, misapprehensions. The religion which retained most of the myths was that ancient superst.i.tion which is afraid of ”changing the luck,” and which, therefore, keeps up acts of ritual that have lost their significance in their pa.s.sage from a dark and dateless past. It was the local priesthoods of demes and remote rural places that maintained the old usages of the ancient tribes and kindreds--usages out of keeping with the mental condition of the splendid city state, or with the national sentiment of h.e.l.lenism. But many of the old tales connected with, and explanatory of, these ritual practices, after ”winning their way to the mythical,” as Thucydides says, won their way into literature, and meet us in the odes of Pindar, the plays of aeschylus and Sophocles, the notes of commentators, and the apologetic efforts of Plutarch and Porphyry.
It is with these antique stories that the mythologist is concerned. But even here he need not loose his reverence for the n.o.bler aspects of the G.o.ds of Greece. Like the archaeologist and excavator, he must touch with careful hand these--
Strange clouded fragments of the ancient glory, Late lingerers of the company divine; For even in ruin of their marble limbs They breathe of that far world wherefrom they came, Of liquid light and harmonies serene, Lost halls of heaven and far Olympian air.*
”Homer and Hesiod named the G.o.ds for the Greeks;” so Herodotus thought, and constructed the divine genealogies. Though the G.o.ds were infinitely older than Homer, though a few of them probably date from before the separation of the Indo-Aryan and h.e.l.lenic stocks, it is certain that Homer and Hesiod stereotyped, to some extent, the opinions about the deities which were current in their time.**
* Ernest Myers, Hermes, in _The Judgment of Prometheus_.
** As a proof of the Pre-Homeric antiquity of Zeus, it has often been noticed that Homer makes Achilles pray to Zeus of Dodona (the Zeus, according to Thrasybulus, who aided Deucalion after the deluge) as the ”Pelasgian” Zeus (Iliad, xvi. 233). ”Pelasgian” may be regarded as equivalent to ”
pre-historic Greek ”. Sophocles (Trach., 65; see Scholiast) still speaks of the Selli, the priests of Dodonean Zeus, as ”mountain-dwelling and couching on the earth ”. They retained, it seems, very primitive habits. Be it observed that Achilles has been praying for confusion and ruin to the Achaeans, and so invokes the deity of an older, perhaps hostile, race. Probably the oak-oracle at Dodona, the message given by ”the sound of a going in the tree-tops” or by the doves, was even more ancient than Zeus, who, on that theory, fell heir to the rites of a peasant oracle connected with tree-wors.h.i.+p. Zeus, according to Hesiod, ”dwelt in the trunk of the oak tree” (cited by Preller, i. 98), much as an Indian forest-G.o.d dwells in the peepul or any other tree. It is rather curious that, according to Eustathius (_Iliad_, xvi. 233), ”Pelargicus,” ”connected with storks,” was sometimes written for Pelasgicus; that there was a Dodona in Thessaly, and that storks were sacred to the Thessalians.
Hesiod codified certain priestly and Delphian theories about their origin and genealogies. Homer minutely described their politics and society. His description, however, must inevitably have tended to develop a later scepticism. While men lived in city states under heroic kings, acknowledging more or less the common sway of one king at Argos or Mycenae, it was natural that the G.o.ds (whether in the dark backward of time Greece knew a Moral Creative Being or not) should be conceived as dwelling in a similar society, with Zeus for their Agamemnon, a ruler supreme but not absolute, not safe from attempts at resistance and rebellion. But when Greek politics and society developed into a crowd of republics, with nothing answering to a certain imperial sway, then men must have perceived that the old divine order was a mere survival from the time when human society was similarly ordained. Thus Xenophanes very early proclaimed that men had made the G.o.ds in their own likeness, as a horse, could he draw, would design his deity in equine semblance. But the detection by Xenophanes of the anthropomorphic tendency in religion could not account for the instinct which made Greeks, like other peoples, as Aristotle noticed, figure their G.o.ds not only in human shape, but in the guise of the lower animals. For that zoomorphic element in myth an explanation, as before, will be sought in the early mental condition which takes no great distinction between man and the beasts. The same method will explain, in many cases, the other peculiarly un-h.e.l.lenic elements in Greek divine myth. Yet here, too, allowance must be made for the actual borrowing of rites and legends from contiguous peoples.
The Greeks were an a.s.similative race. The alphabet of their art they obtained, as they obtained their written alphabet, from the kingdoms of the East.* Like the Romans, they readily recognised their own G.o.ds, even under the barbarous and brutal disguises of Egyptian popular religion; and, while recognising their G.o.d under an alien shape, they may have taken over legends alien to their own national character.** Again, we must allow, as in India, for myths which are really late, the inventions, perhaps, of priests or oracle-mongers. But in making these deductions, we must remember that the later myths would be moulded, in many cases, on the ancient models. These ancient models, there is reason to suppose, were often themselves of the irrational and savage character which has so frequently been ill.u.s.trated from the traditions of the lower races.
The elder dynasties of Greek G.o.ds, Ura.n.u.s and Cronos, with their adventures and their fall, have already been examined.***
* Helbig, _Homerwche Epos cms dem Denhmalern_. Perrot and Chipiez, on Mycenaean art, represent a later view.
** On the probable amount of borrowing in Greek religion see Maury, Religions de la Greece, iii. 70-75; Newton, Nineteenth Century, 1878, p. 306. Gruppe, Griech. Culte u. Mythen., pp. 153-163
*** ”Greek Cosmogonic Myths,” antea.
Ura.n.u.s may have been an ancient sky-G.o.d, like the Samoyed Num, deposed by Cronus, originally, perhaps, one of the deputy-G.o.ds, active where their chief is otiose, whom we find in barbaric theology. But this is mere guess-work. We may now turn to the deity who was the acknowledged sovereign of the Greek Olympus during all the cla.s.sical period from the date of Homer and Hesiod to the establishment of Christianity. We have to consider the legend of Zeus.
It is necessary first to remind the reader that all the legends in the epic poems date after the time when an official and national Olympus had been arranged. Probably many tribal G.o.ds, who had originally no connection with G.o.ds of other tribes, had, by Homer's age, thus accepted places and relations.h.i.+ps in the Olympic family. Even rude low-born Pelasgian deities may have been adopted into the highest circles, and fitted out with a divine pedigree in perfect order.
To return to Zeus, his birth (whether as the eldest or the youngest of the children of Cronus) has already been studied; now we have to deal with his exploits and his character.
About the meaning of the name of Zeus the philologists seem more than commonly harmonious. They regard the Greek Zeus as the equivalent of the Sanskrit Dyaus, ”the bright one,” a term for the sky.*
* Max Muller, _Selected Essays_, ii. 419; Preller, Gr.
Myth., i. 92.
He was especially wors.h.i.+pped on hill-tops (like the Aztec rain-G.o.d); for example, on Ithome, Parnes, Cithgeron, and the Lycaean hill of Arcadia.
On the Arcadian mountain, a centre of the strangest and oldest rites, the priest of Zeus acted as what the African races call a ”rainmaker”.