Five Stages of Greek Religion Part 6

[54:1] Ridgeway, _Origin and Influence of the Thoroughbred Horse_, 1905, pp. 287-93; and _Early Age of Greece_, 1901, p. 223.

[54:2] Cf. Plut. _Q. Conv._ ix. 6; Paus. ii. 1. 6; 4. 6; 15. 5; 30. 6.

[54:3] So in the non-Homeric tradition, Eur. _Troades_ init. In the _Iliad_ he is made an enemy of Troy, like Athena, who is none the less the Guardian of the city.

[56:1] _Od._ ? 339 ff.

[56:2] See Paus. viii. 32. 4. _Themis_, pp. 295, 296.

[56:3] For the connexion of ??a ???? ??a???? (????a??? in Sophron, fr.

142 K) see especially A. B. Cook, _Cla.s.s. Review_, 1906, pp. 365 and 416. The name ??a seems probably to be an 'ablaut' form of ??a: cf.

phrases like ??a te?e?a. Other literature in Gruppe, pp. 452, 1122.

[57:1] _Prolegomena_, p. 315, referring to H. D. Muller, _Mythologie d.

gr. Stamme_, pp. 249-55. Another view is suggested by Mulder, _Die Ilias und ihre Quellen_, p. 136. The jealous Hera comes from the Heracles-saga, in which the wife hated the b.a.s.t.a.r.d.

[57:2] P. Gardner, in _Numismatic Chronicle_, N.S. xx, 'Ares as a Sun-G.o.d'.

[57:3] Chadwick, _Heroic Age_, especially pp. 414, 459-63.

[59:1] Chap. xviii.

[59:2] Introduction to his edition of the _Choephoroe_, p. 9.

[61:1] The spirit appears very simply in Eur. _Iph. Taur._ 386 ff., where Iphigenia rejects the G.o.ds who demand human sacrifice:

These tales be false, false as those feastings wild Of Tantalus, and G.o.ds that tare a child.

This land of murderers to its G.o.ds hath given Its own l.u.s.t. Evil dwelleth not in heaven.

Yet just before she has accepted the loves of Zeus and Leto without objection. 'Leto, whom Zeus loved, could never have given birth to such a monster!' Cf. Plutarch, _Vit. Pelop._ xxi, where Pelopidas, in rejecting the idea of a human sacrifice, says: 'No high and more than human beings could be pleased with so barbarous and unlawful a sacrifice. It was not the fabled t.i.tans and Giants who ruled the world, but one who was a Father of all G.o.ds and men.' Of course, criticism and expurgation of the legends is too common to need ill.u.s.tration. See especially Kaibel, _Daktyloi Idaioi_, 1902, p. 512.

[62:1] Aristophanes did much to reduce this element in comedy; see _Clouds_, 537 ff.: also _Albany Review_, 1907, p. 201.

[62:2] _R. G. E._,{3} p. 139 f.

[64:1] Justin, _Cohort._ c. 15. But such pantheistic language is common in Orphic and other mystic literature. See the fragments of the Orphic ??a???a? (pp. 144 ff. in Abel's _Hymni_).

[65:1] I have not attempted to consider the Cretan cults. They lie historically outside the range of these essays, and I am not competent to deal with evidence that is purely archaeological. But in general I imagine the Cretan religion to be a development from the religion described in my first essay, affected both by the change in social structure from village to sea-empire and by foreign, especially Egyptian, influences. No doubt the Achaean G.o.ds were influenced on their side by Cretan conceptions, though perhaps not so much as Ionia was. Cf.

the Cretan influences in Ionian vase-painting, and e. g. A. B. Cook on 'Cretan Axe-cult outside Crete', _Transactions of the Third International Congress for the History of Religion_, ii. 184. See also Sir A. Evans's striking address on 'The Minoan and Mycenaean Element in h.e.l.lenic Life', _J. H. S._ x.x.xii. 277-97.

[66:1] See _R. G. E._,{3} p. 58 f.

[68:1] 2 Sam. vi. 6. See S. Reinach, _Orpheus_, p. 5 (English Translation, p. 4).

[72:1] Cf. Sam Wide in Gercke and Norden's _Handbuch_, ii. 217-19.

[73:1] The ???es?? in which the Chorus finds it hard to believe, _Hippolytus_, 1105. Cf. _Iph. Aul._ 394, 1189; _Herc._ 655; also the ideas in _Suppl._ 203, Eur. Fr. 52, 9, where ???es?? is implanted in man by a special grace of G.o.d. The G.o.ds are ???et??, but of course Euripides goes too far in actually praying to ???es??, Ar. _Frogs_, 893.

[77:1] Cf. the beautiful defence of idols by Maximus of Tyre, Or. viii (in Wilamowitz's _Lesebuch_, ii. 338 ff.). I quote the last paragraph:

'G.o.d Himself, the father and fashioner of all that is, older than the Sun or the Sky, greater than time and eternity and all the flow of being, is unnameable by any lawgiver, unutterable by any voice, not to be seen by any eye. But we, being unable to apprehend His essence, use the help of sounds and names and pictures, of beaten gold and ivory and silver, of plants and rivers, mountain-peaks and torrents, yearning for the knowledge of Him, and in our weakness naming all that is beautiful in this world after His nature--just as happens to earthly lovers. To them the most beautiful sight will be the actual lineaments of the beloved, but for remembrance' sake they will be happy in the sight of a lyre, a little spear, a chair, perhaps, or a running-ground, or anything in the world that wakens the memory of the beloved. Why should I further examine and pa.s.s judgement about Images? Let men know what is divine (t?

?e??? ?????), let them know: that is all. If a Greek is stirred to the remembrance of G.o.d by the art of Pheidias, an Egyptian by paying worship to animals, another man by a river, another by fire--I have no anger for their divergences; only let them know, let them love, let them remember.'

III

THE GREAT SCHOOLS OF THE FOURTH CENTURY, B. C.

There is a pa.s.sage in Xenophon describing how, one summer night, in 405 B. C., people in Athens heard a cry of wailing, an _oimoge_, making its way up between the long walls from the Piraeus, and coming nearer and nearer as they listened. It was the news of the final disaster of Kynoskephalai, brought at midnight to the Piraeus by the galley Paralos.

'And that night no one slept. They wept for the dead, but far more bitterly for themselves, when they reflected what things they had done to the people of Melos, when taken by siege, to the people of Histiaea, and Skione and Torone and Aegina, and many more of the h.e.l.lenes.'[79:1]

The echo of that lamentation seems to ring behind most of the literature of the fourth century, and not the Athenian literature alone. Defeat can on occasion leave men their self-respect or even their pride; as it did after Chaeronea in 338 and after the Chremonidean War in 262, not to speak of Thermopylae. But the defeat of 404 not only left Athens at the mercy of her enemies. It stripped her of those things of which she had been inwardly most proud; her 'wisdom', her high civilization, her leadership of all that was most h.e.l.lenic in h.e.l.las. The 'Beloved City'

of Pericles had become a tyrant, her nature poisoned by war, her government a by-word in Greece for brutality. And Greece as a whole felt the tragedy of it. It is curious how this defeat of Athens by Sparta seems to have been felt abroad as a defeat for Greece itself and for the hopes of the Greek city state. The fall of Athens mattered more than the victory of Lysander. Neither Sparta nor any other city ever attempted to take her place. And no writer after the year 400 speaks of any other city as Pericles used to speak of fifth-century Athens, not even Polybius 250 years later, when he stands amazed before the solidity and the 'fortune' of Rome.

The city state, the Polis, had concentrated upon itself almost all the loyalty and the aspirations of the Greek mind. It gave security to life.

It gave meaning to religion. And in the fall of Athens it had failed. In the third century, when things begin to recover, we find on the one hand the great military monarchies of Alexander's successors, and on the other, a number of federations of tribes, which were generally strongest in the backward regions where the city state had been least developed. ?? ?????? t?? ??t???? or t?? ??a??? had become more important than Athens or Corinth, and Sparta was only strong by means of a League.[80:1] By that time the Polis was recognized as a comparatively weak social organism, capable of very high culture but not quite able, as the Covenant of the League of Nations expresses it, 'to hold its own under the strenuous conditions of modern life'. Besides, it was not now ruled by the best citizens. The best had turned away from politics.

This great discouragement did not take place at a blow. Among the practical statesmen probably most did not form any theory about the cause of the failure but went on, as practical statesmen must, doing as best they could from difficulty to difficulty. But many saw that the fatal danger to Greece was disunion, as many see it in Europe now. When Macedon proved indisputably stronger than Athens Isocrates urged Philip to accept the leadership of Greece against the barbarian and against barbarism. He might thus both unite the Greek cities and also evangelize the world. Lysias, the democratic and anti-Spartan orator, had been groping for a similar solution as early as 384 B. C., and was prepared to make an even sharper sacrifice for it. He appealed at Olympia for a crusade of all the free Greek cities against Dionysius of Syracuse, and begged Sparta herself to lead it. The Spartans are 'of right the leaders of h.e.l.las by their natural n.o.bleness and their skill in war. They alone live still in a city unsacked, unwalled, unconquered, uncorrupted by faction, and have followed always the same modes of life. They have been the saviours of h.e.l.las in the past, and one may hope that their freedom will be everlasting.'[81:1] A great and generous change in one who had 'learned by suffering' in the Peloponnesian War. Others no doubt merely gave their submission to the stronger powers that were now rising. There were openings for counsellors, for mercenary soldiers, for court savants and philosophers and poets, and, of course, for agents in every free city who were prepared for one motive or another not to kick against the p.r.i.c.ks. And there were always also those who had neither learned nor forgotten, the unrepentant idealists; too pa.s.sionate or too heroic or, as some will say, too blind, to abandon their life-long devotion to 'Athens' or to 'Freedom' because the world considered such ideals out of date. They could look the ruined Athenians in the face, after the lost battle, and say with Demosthenes, ''??? ?st??, ??? ?st?? ?p?? ???tete.

It cannot be that you did wrong, it cannot be!'[82:1]

But in practical politics the currents of thought are inevitably limited. It is in philosophy and speculation that we find the richest and most varied reaction to the Great Failure. It takes different shapes in those writers, like Plato and Xenophon, who were educated in the fifth century and had once believed in the Great City, and those whose whole thinking life belonged to the time of disillusion.

Plato was disgusted with democracy and with Athens, but he retained his faith in the city, if only the city could be set on the right road.

There can be little doubt that he attributes to the bad government of the Demos many evils which were really due to extraneous causes or to the mere fallibility of human nature. Still his a.n.a.lysis of democracy is one of the most brilliant things in the history of political theory. It is so acute, so humorous, so affectionate; and at many different ages of the world has seemed like a portrait of the actual contemporary society.

Like a modern popular newspaper, Plato's democracy makes it its business to satisfy existing desires and give people a 'good time'. It does not distinguish between higher and lower. Any one man is as good as another, and so is any impulse or any idea. Consequently the commoner have the pull. Even the great democratic statesmen of the past, he now sees, have been ministers to mob desires; they have 'filled the city with harbours and docks and walls and revenues and such-like trash, without Sophrosyne and righteousness'. The sage or saint has no place in practical politics. He would be like a man in a den of wild beasts. Let him and his like seek shelter as best they can, standing up behind some wall while the storm of dust and sleet rages past. The world does not want truth, which is all that he could give it. It goes by appearances and judges its great men with their clothes on and their rich relations round them. After death, the judges will judge them naked, and alone; and then we shall see![83:1]

Yet, in spite of all this, the child of the fifth century cannot keep his mind from politics. The speculations which would be scouted by the ma.s.s in the marketplace can still be discussed with intimate friends and disciples, or written in books for the wise to read. Plato's two longest works are attempts to construct an ideal society; first, what may be called a City of Righteousness, in the _Republic_; and afterwards in his old age, in the _Laws_, something more like a City of Refuge, uncontaminated by the world; a little city on a hill-top away in Crete, remote from commerce and riches and the 'bitter and corrupting sea'

which carries them; a city where life shall move in music and discipline and reverence for the things that are greater than man, and the songs men sing shall be not common songs but the preambles of the city's laws, showing their purpose and their principle; where no wall will be needed to keep out the possible enemy, because the courage and temperance of the citizens will be wall enough, and if war comes the women equally with the men 'will fight for their young, as birds do'.

This hope is very like despair; but, such as it is, Plato's thought is always directed towards the city. No other form of social life ever tempts him away, and he antic.i.p.ates no insuperable difficulty in keeping the city in the right path if once he can get it started right. The first step, the necessary revolution, is what makes the difficulty. And he sees only one way. In real life he had supported the conspiracy of the extreme oligarchs in 404 which led to the rule of the 'Thirty Tyrants'; but the experience sickened him of such methods. There was no hope unless, by some lucky combination, a philosopher should become a king or some young king turn philosopher. 'Give me a city governed by a tyrant,' he says in the _Laws_,[84:1] 'and let the tyrant be young, with a good memory, quick at learning, of high courage, and a generous nature. . . . And besides, let him have a wise counsellor!' Ironical fortune granted him an opportunity to try the experiment himself at the court of Syracuse, first with the elder and then, twenty years later, with the younger Dionysius (387 and 367 B. C.). It is a story of disappointment, of course; bitter, humiliating and ludicrous disappointment, but with a touch of that sublimity which seems so often to hang about the errors of the wise. One can study them in Seneca at the court of Nero, or in Turgot with Louis; not so well perhaps in Voltaire with Frederick. Plato failed in his enterprise, but he did keep faith with the 'Righteous City'.

Another of the Socratic circle turned in a different direction.

Xenophon, an exile from his country, a brilliant soldier and adventurer as well as a man of letters, is perhaps the first Greek on record who openly lost interest in the city. He thought less about cities and const.i.tutions than about great men and nations, or generals and armies.

To him it was idle to spin cobweb formations of ideal laws and communities. Society is right enough if you have a really fine man to lead it. It may be that his ideal was formed in childhood by stories of Pericles and the great age when Athens was 'in name a democracy but in truth an empire of one leading man'. He gave form to his dream in the _Education of Cyrus_, an imaginary account of the training which formed Cyrus the Great into an ideal king and soldier. The _Cyropaedeia_ is said to have been intended as a counterblast to Plato's _Republic_, and it may have provoked Plato's casual remark in the _Laws_ that 'Cyrus never so much as touched education'. No doubt the book suffered in persuasiveness from being so obviously fict.i.tious.[85:1] For example, the Cyrus of Xenophon dies peacefully in his bed after much affectionate and edifying advice to his family, whereas all Athens knew from Herodotus how the real Cyrus had been killed in a war against the Ma.s.sagetae, and his head, to slake its thirst for that liquid, plunged into a wineskin full of human blood. Perhaps also the monarchical rule of Cyrus was too absolute for Greek taste. At any rate, later on Xenophon adopted a more real hero, whom he had personally known and admired.

Agesilaus, king of Sparta, had been taken as a type of 'virtue' even by the bitter historian Theopompus. Agesilaus was not only a great general.

He knew how to 'honour the G.o.ds, do his duty in the field, and to practise obedience'. He was true to friend and foe. On one memorable occasion he kept his word even to an enemy who had broken his. He enjoined kindness to enemy captives. When he found small children left behind by the barbarians in some town that he occupied--because either their parents or the slave-merchants had no room for them--he always took care of them or gave them to guardians of their own race: 'he never let the dogs and wolves get them'. On the other hand, when he sold his barbarian prisoners he sent them to market naked, regardless of their modesty, because it cheered his own soldiers to see how white and fat they were. He wept when he won a victory over Greeks; 'for he loved all Greeks and only hated barbarians'. When he returned home after his successful campaigns, he obeyed the orders of the ephors without question; his house and furniture were as simple as those of a common man, and his daughter the princess, when she went to and fro to Amyclae, went simply in the public omnibus. He reared chargers and hunting dogs; the rearing of chariot horses he thought effeminate. But he advised his sister Cynisca about hers, and she won the chariot race at Olympia.

'Have a king like that', says Xenophon, 'and all will be well. He will govern right; he will beat your enemies; and he will set an example of good life. If you want Virtue in the state look for it in a good man, not in a speculative tangle of laws. The Spartan const.i.tution, as it stands, is good enough for any one.'

But it was another of the great Socratics who uttered first the characteristic message of the fourth century, and met the blows of Fortune with a direct challenge. Antisthenes was a man twenty years older than Plato. He had fought at Tanagra in 426 B. C. He had been friends with Gorgias and Prodicus, the great Sophists of the Periclean age. He seems to have been, at any rate till younger and more brilliant men cut him out, the recognized philosophic heir of Socrates.[87:1] And late in life, after the fall of Athens and the condemnation and death of his master, the man underwent a curious change of heart. He is taunted more than once with the lateness of his discovery of truth,[87:2] and with his childish subservience to the old _jeux d'esprit_ of the Sceptics which professed to prove the impossibility of knowledge.[87:3]

It seems that he had lost faith in speculation and dialectic and the elaborate superstructures which Plato and others had built upon them; and he felt, like many moralists after him, a sort of hostility to all knowledge that was not immediately convertible into conduct.

But this scepticism was only part of a general disbelief in the world.

Greek philosophy had from the first been concerned with a fundamental question which we moderns seldom put clearly to ourselves. It asked 'What is the Good?' meaning thereby 'What is the element of value in life?' or 'What should be our chief aim in living?' A medieval Christian would have answered without hesitation 'To go to Heaven and not be d.a.m.ned', and would have been prepared with the necessary prescriptions for attaining that end. But the modern world is not intensely enough convinced of the reality of Sin and Judgement, h.e.l.l and Heaven, to accept this answer as an authoritative guide in life, and has not clearly thought out any other. The ancient Greek spent a great part of his philosophical activity in trying, without propounding supernatural rewards and punishments, or at least without laying stress on them, to think out what the Good of man really was.

The answers given by mankind to this question seem to fall under two main heads. Before a battle if both parties were asked what aim they were pursuing, both would say without hesitation 'Victory'. After the battle, the conqueror would probably say that his purpose was in some way to consolidate or extend his victory; but the beaten party, as soon as he had time to think, would perhaps explain that, after all, victory was not everything. It was better to have fought for the right, to have done your best and to have failed, than to revel in the prosperity of the unjust. And, since it is difficult to maintain, in the midst of the triumph of the enemy and your own obvious misery and humiliation, that all is well and you yourself thoroughly contented, this second answer easily develops a third: 'Wait a little, till G.o.d's judgement a.s.serts itself; and see who has the best of it then!' There will be a rich reward hereafter for the suffering virtuous.