Volume II Part 19 (1/2)

As to the religious sentiment towards Zeus of a truly devout man in that remote age, Homer has left us no doubt. In Eumaeus the swineherd of Odysseus, a man of n.o.ble birth stolen into slavery when a child, Homer has left a picture of true religion and undefiled. Eumaeus attributes everything that occurs to the will of the G.o.ds, with the resignation of a child of Islam or a Scot of the Solemn League and Covenant.***

”From Zeus are all strangers and beggars,” he says, and believes that hospitality and charity are well pleasing in the sight of the Olympian.

When he flourishes, ”it is G.o.d that increaseth this work of mine whereat I abide”. He neither says ”Zeus” nor ”the G.o.ds,” but in this pa.s.sage simply ”G.o.d”. ”Verily the blessed G.o.ds love not froward deeds, but they reverence justice and the righteous acts of men;” yet it is ”Zeus that granteth a prey to the sea-robbers”. It is the G.o.ds that rear Telemachus like a young sapling, yet is it the G.o.ds who ”mar his wits within him”

when he sets forth on a perilous adventure. It is to Zeus Cronion that the swineherd chiefly prays,**** but he does not exclude the others from his supplication.*****

* _Iliad_, iv. 160.

** Ibid., iv. 236.

*** _Odyssey_, xiv. pa.s.sim,

**** Ibid., 406.

***** _Odyssey_, iv. 423.

Being a man of scrupulous piety, when he slays a swine for supper, he only sets aside a seventh portion ”for Hermes and the nymphs” who haunt the lonely uplands.** Yet his offering has no magical intent of constraining the immortals. ”One thing G.o.d will give, and another withhold, even as he will, for with him all things are possible.”***

Such is a Homeric ideal of piety, and it would only gain force from contrast with the blasphemy of Aias, ”who said that in the G.o.d's despite he had escaped the great deep of the sea ”.****

** Ibid., xiv. 435.

*** Ibid., 444, 445.

**** Ibid., iv. 504.

The epics sufficiently prove that a n.o.ble religion may coexist with a wild and lawless mythology. That ancient sentiment of the human heart which makes men listen to a human voice in the thunder and yearn for immortal friends and helpers, lives its life little disturbed by the other impulse which inspires men when they come to tell stories and romances about the same transcendent beings.

As to the actual original form of the faith in Zeus, we can only make guesses. To some it will appear that Zeus was originally the clear bright expanse which was taken for an image or symbol of the infinite.

Others will regard Zeus as the bright sky, but the bright sky conceived of in savage fas.h.i.+on, as a being with human parts and pa.s.sions, a being with all the magical accomplishments of metamorphosis, rain-making and the rest, with which the medicine-man is credited. A third set of mythologists, remembering how G.o.ds and medicine-men have often interchangeable names, and how, for example, the Australian Biraark, who is thought to command the west wind, is himself styled ”West Wind,” will derive Zeus from the ghost of some ancestral sorcerer named ”Sky”. This euhemerism seems an exceedingly inadequate explanation of the origin of Zeus. In his moral aspect Zeus again inherits the quality of that supernatural and moral watcher of man's deeds who is recognised (as we have seen) even by the most backward races, and who, for all we can tell, is older than any beast-G.o.d or G.o.d of the natural elements. Thus, whatever Zeus was in his earliest origin, he had become, by the time we can study him in ritual, poem or sacred chapter, a complex of qualities and attributes, spiritual, moral, elemental, animal and human.

It is curious that, on our theory, the mythical Zeus must have morally degenerated at a certain period as the Zeus of religion more and more approached the rank of a pure and almost supreme deity. On our hypothesis, it was while Greece was reaching a general national consciousness, and becoming more than an aggregate of small local tribes, that Zeus attracted the worst elements of his myth. In deposing or relegating to a lower rank a crowd of totems and fetishes and ancestral ghosts, he inherited the legends of their exploits. These were attached to him still more by the love of genealogies derived from the G.o.ds. For each such pedigree an amour was inevitably invented, and, where totems had existed, the G.o.d in this amour borrowed the old b.e.s.t.i.a.l form. For example, if a Thessalian stock had believed in descent from an ant, and wished to trace their pedigree to Zeus, they had merely to say, ”Zeus was that ant”. Once more, as Zeus became supreme among the other deities of men in the patriarchal family condition, those G.o.ds were grouped round him as members of his family, his father, mother, brothers, sisters, wife, mistresses and children. Here was a n.o.ble field in which the mythical fancy might run riot; hence came stories of usurpations, rebellions, conjugal skirmishes and jealousies, a whole world of incidents in which humour had free play. Nor would foreign influences be wanting. A wandering Greek, recognising his Zeus in a deity of Phoenicia or Babylon, might bring home some alien myth which would take its place in the general legend, with other myths imported along with foreign objects of art, silver bowls and inlaid swords. Thus in all probability grew the legend of the Zeus of myth, certainly a deplorable legend, while all the time the Greek intellect was purifying itself and approaching the poetical, moral and philosophical conception of the Zeus of religion. At last, in the minds of the philosophically religious, Zeus became pure deity, and the details of the legend were explained away by this or that system of allegory; while in the minds of the sceptical, Zeus yielded his throne to the ”vortex” of the Aristophanic comedy. Thus Zeus may have begun as a kindly supreme being; then aetiological and totemistic myths may have accrued to his legend, and, finally, philosophic and pious thought introduced a rational conception of his nature. But myth lived on, ritual lived on, and human victims were slain on the altars of Zeus till Christianity was the established religion. ”Solet it be,” says Pausanias, ”as it hath been from the beginning.”

The G.o.ds who fill the court of Zeus and surround his throne are so numerous that a complete account of each would exceed the limits of our s.p.a.ce. The legend of Zeus is typical, on the whole, of the manner in which the several mythical chapters grew about the figures of each of the deities. Some of these were originally, it is probable, natural forces or elemental phenomena, conceived of at first as personal beings; while, later, the personal earth or sun shaded off into the informing genius of the sun or earth, and still later was almost freed from all connection with the primal elemental phenomenon or force. In these processes of evolution it seems to have happened occasionally that the G.o.d shed, like a sh.e.l.l or chrysalis, his original form, which continued to exist, however, as a deity of older family and inferior power. By such processes, at least, it would not be difficult to explain the obvious fact that several G.o.ds have ”under-studies” of their parts in the divine comedy. It may be well to begin a review of the G.o.ds by examining those who were, or may be supposed to have been, originally forces or phenomena of Nature.

APOLLO.

This claim has been made for almost all the Olympians, but in some cases appears more plausible than in others. For example, Apollo is regarded as a solar divinity, and the modes in which he attained his detached and independent position as a brilliant anthropomorphic deity, patron of art, the lover of the nymphs, the inspirer of prophecy, may have been something in this fas.h.i.+on. First the sun may have been regarded (in the manner familiar to savage races) as a personal being. In Homer he is still the G.o.d ”who sees and hears all things,”* and who beholds and reveals the loves of Ares and Aphrodite. This personal character of the sun is well ill.u.s.trated in the Homeric hymn to Hyperion, the sun that dwells on high, where, as Mr. Max Muller says, ”the words would seem to imply that the poet looked upon Helios as a half-G.o.d, almost as a hero, who had once lived upon earth”.** It has already been shown that this mythical theory of the origin of the sun is met with among the Aztecs and the Bushmen.*** In Homer, the sun, Helios Hyperion, though he sees and hears all things,**** needs to be informed by one of the nymphs that the companions of Odysseus have devoured his sacred cattle. In the same way the supreme Baiame of Australia needs to ask questions of mortals.

Apollo then speaks in the Olympian a.s.sembly, and threatens that if he is not avenged he will ”go down to Hades and s.h.i.+ne among the dead”. The sun is capable of marriage, as in the Bulgarian _Volkslied_, where he marries a peasant girl,***** and, by Perse, he is the father of Circe and aeetes.******

* _Odyssey_, viii. 270.

** _Selected Essays_, i. 605, note 1.

*** ”Nature Myths,” antea.

**** _Iliad_, iii. 277.

***** Dozon, _Chansons Bulgares_.