Part 7

In Crete art dwelt in palaces; in classical Greece it haunted the market-place and the temple. For the present art is confined to the home. If we may judge by the charming “interior” pictures which Homer most skilfully introduces as a counterfoil to the everlasting clash of arms in the Iliad, domestic life was at its richest and best in the age of the epics. Every one has been struck with the dignified and important part played by women in Homer, contrasted with their seclusion and neglect in historical Greece. No one but Shakespeare has given us so charming a series of feminine portraits as Andromache, Helen, Penelope, Nausicaa, Thetis, and Calypso. The ingenious Samuel Butler actually attempted to prove that the Odyssey was written by a woman, so sympathetic is the poet’s insight into the feminine point of view. But the same is equally true of the Iliad; and, indeed, the respect for women becomes part of the heroic tradition even in Attic tragedy, so that the audience in the theatre of Athens must have seen the heroines on their stage acting with a freedom and treated with a deference which was quite alien to their own homes.

But even at this, its highest point, the domesticity of Greek life falls far short of modern ideas, and the dignity of the heroes’ wives is somewhat illusory. Possibly the inconsistencies are due once more to the many hands and many successive generations which have had their part in building up the epic. Certainly, for monogamists, the matrimonial ideas of the heroes are far from exclusive. Agamemnon announces his intention of taking Chryseis home, for he likes her better than his dear wife Clytæmnestra, and makes no secret of the position she is to occupy. He does actually take Cassandra home to his wife. In the Odyssey, too, we get a hint of arrangements decidedly Oriental in what Penelope says about her son and the fifty handmaidens. Again, there is a singular contrast between the tender conjugal devotion of Hector and Andromache, or Odysseus and Penelope, and the extraordinary callousness sometimes indicated with regard to feminine charms. It is often remarked as an instance of Homer’s subtlety that he nowhere describes the beauty of Helen, whose face

“Launched a thousand ships And shook the topmost towers of Ilium,”

only indicating it by making the old men of Troy look at her as she walks past and say to one another, “No wonder that the Greeks and Trojans should suffer pain so long for such a woman. Her countenance is wondrous like the immortal goddesses.” These traditions of the power of love and beauty must belong to the original epic story; for the whole plot of the Iliad, so far as it has a plot, turns on the beauty of Helen, as the whole plot of the Odyssey depends on the love of Odysseus for his wife and the constancy of Penelope. Thus both epics have a basis which might be the foundation of modern romantic fiction. Nevertheless, the spirit of romance is as completely absent from Homer as it is from all true Greek art and literature. Though Agamemnon is very angry at losing Chryseis he has no love for her. Odysseus simply gets tired of the lovely nymph Calypso, and parts from the charming Nausicaa without a pang. Such shocks as these are constantly in store for the modern reader, who is fed upon romance in the nursery.

If we look at the houses in which the domestic scenes of Homer are set we shall find that they are of a simplicity in strong contrast with the elaborate palaces of Crete or Tiryns; and this in spite of the obvious intention of the bard to depict them on a scale of heroic magnificence. They are mainly built of wood. The palace of Paris consists of three parts--_thalamos_, _dōma_, and _aule_. The _thalamos_ is the private part of the house, and contains the marriage-bed of the royal couple. The _dōma_, or _megaron_, is the public hall for meals and receptions. The _aule_ is the court with colonnades surrounding it. Priam had a large family: fifty sons slept with their wives in fifty _thalamoi_ of polished stone built outside his court, while his daughters slept with their husbands in twelve _roofed_ chambers within the court. The palace of Odysseus is more elaborate, and is so intended, for the disguised wanderer says: “Verily, this is the fair house of Odysseus, and easily may it be known and distinguished even among many. For there is building beyond building, and the court of the house is cunningly wrought with a wall and copings, and there are well-fitting double doors.” Standing outside the front door he can perceive by the smell of roast meat that there is a banquet going on. No great magnificence here. In front of the “well-fitting doors” there is a heap of manure, with an aged hound asleep upon it (a similar dung-heap, it may be remarked, graces the court of the palace of Priam in Troy City). Inside the doors there is the _megaron_, where the banquet is going on. Odysseus sits down on the ashen threshold, leaning against a pillar of cypress wood, specially commended for its straightness. Telemachus takes a lump of meat, “as much as his two hands can grasp,” and a whole loaf out of the fair basket, and Odysseus (who is disguised as a beggar) devours it on his dirty wallet as he sits on the threshold. This threshold under the portico of the hall is the regular meeting-place of beggars, and it is there that strangers are put to sleep. Within the hall there is an upper chamber where Penelope sleeps and lives with her maidens. The wooers set up three braziers in the hall to give them light, and heap them with wood and pine-brands; consequently the hall is so full of smoke that the weapons have to be removed to a storeroom to keep them useful. Odysseus, sleeping in the “prodomos” of the hall, can hear a remark made by one of the twelve grinding-women who have their hand-mills in the house next door. Under the same echoing colonnade where Odysseus sleeps goats and cattle are tethered by day. The walls of the hall itself are of wood, the ceiling is of wood, and the floor is of stamped earth, for it is cleaned with a spade, and fires are raked out of the braziers on to the floor. As for the bridal chamber, Odysseus had built it himself with stone, and it contained a marvellous bed wrought by the hero out of a living olive-tree. Finally, there was a rather obscure postern-gate set high in the wall of the hall above a stone threshold, and opening on to an open gallery. Thus the feature of the house of Odysseus is that it is of two stories; otherwise it consists, as usual, of three parts--hall, court, and chamber.

Our learned archæologists have been setting their intellects to the task of making these Homeric houses fit in with the palaces of Mycenæ and Tiryns, but they have found it hard work. They have had to admit that the palace of Odysseus is a good deal simpler than the meanest of the Ægean palaces. And yet our poet has deliberately advertised it as something out of the common. Does not that betray singular poverty of imagination? He could not even make his heroic domiciles as splendid as the actual buildings in which he sang his lays. What should we think of a novelist who professed to write about duchesses and described them as sitting in sumptuous front parlours? Of course we know the explanation. It is hopeless to attempt to synchronise the Homeric age with the ages of Ægean palaces. Homer lived in an altogether lower civilisation as regards wealth and comfort. Just as we saw that his “kings” were only country squires, so his “palaces” are no more than farmhouses, with all their picturesque squalor and simplicity. Dirt and magnificence may go hand in hand, as in our own mediæval halls, but in the Homeric civilisation the magnificence is only in the poet’s heart. His material surroundings are fitly typified by the Dipylon vases.

HESIOD’S WORLD

Hesiod is the Cinderella of Greek poets, neglected alike by editors and schoolboys. And yet once he stood on a level with Homer. He is in reality the complement of Homer, and no picture of the Greek Middle Ages can be complete without him. The Parian Marble sets Hesiod thirty years earlier than Homer, Herodotus places them both about 850-800 B.C. Hesiod’s principal works are two, the “Works and Days” and the “Generations of Gods” or “Theogony.” The “Works and Days” is generally supposed to be a treatise on husbandry, but it seems to be in origin a letter of remonstrance to a wicked brother, Persis, who had ousted Hesiod from his property. The letter is embroidered freely with morals, maxims, and examples from mythology. Persis is exhorted to practise industry and good farming, for which some proverbial hints are given. But the main purport of this curious jumble is the reiteration of complaints against the “bribe-devouring kings”--always in the plural--who have given a corrupt judgment against the poet on his brother’s lawsuit. No one pretends to see real monarchy or anything but oligarchy in Hesiod, yet his rulers are called βασιλεῖς, just as are Homer’s. The “Works and Days” contains also the earliest versions of two most famous legends which together make up the Greek story of creation, the story of how Prometheus stole fire from heaven and the story of Pandora, the Eve of Greek mythology. The chief interest for modern readers lies in a very quaint and curious list of taboos and some personal reminiscences which form, I suppose, the oldest piece of autobiography in existence. He has already described seafaring as a very disagreeable business, to be avoided if possible; he now advises his brother to “wait for a seasonable sailing day, and when it comes, then drag down thy swift ship to the sea, and have a fit cargo stowed away on it, that thou mayest return home with profit; even as my father and thine, most witless Persis, used to make voyages for an honest living. Once he came even to this country, after a long voyage in a black ship from Cyme, in Æolis, turning not from rich resources and prosperity, but from dire poverty, which Zeus gives to men. And he dwelt near Helicon in this beggarly hamlet of Ascra--Ascra, vile in winter, uncomfortable in summer, and good never at all. But do thou, my Persis, be seasonable in all thy doings, but above all in seafaring praise a small ship, but put thy cargo in a great one. The freight will be greater and the profit greater if the winds keep off their dreadful storms. Whenever thou turnest thy rash heart to trade, wishing to escape debt and joyless famine, I will show thee the limits of the thundering main without being skilled at all in seafaring or in ships, for I have never sailed the broad sea in a ship except when I crossed to Eubœa from Aulis, where the Achæans in times long past were storm-bound when they gathered a mighty host from holy Hellas for Troy of the fair women. There did I take passage for Chalcis to try for the prizes of wise Amphidamas” (_i.e._ prizes offered at his funeral games), “the many well-prepared prizes which his lordly sons offered. There I boast to have won the prize for the hymn, and brought home a tripod with handles which I set up to the Muses of Helicon where first they taught me to be a clear-voiced bard. So little trial have I made of well-caulked ships, but still I shall declare the mind of Zeus who bears the ægis, for the Muses have taught me to sing a hymn without bounds.”

Quaint old Hesiod! How like the literary man of all ages! He has never been to sea except on the channel ferry, but in virtue of his literary gifts he is competent to instruct other landsmen in navigation. So by help of the Muses he declares the mind of Zeus--“Never put to sea in a storm!”

Well, this is the reverse of Homer’s medal: the god-nurtured kings frankly revealed as corrupt nobles, the unrelenting toil on the stony farm, the perilous commercial enterprises in small unseaworthy ships, the emigrant returning home to Bœotia in poverty from his Eldorado in Æolis, the superstition, and the pessimism.

III

THE AGES OF TRANSITION

οὐ μὴν οὐδ’ ὑπαρχόντων τούτων ἁπάντων ἤδη πόλις, ἀλλ’ ἡ τοῦ εὖ ζῆν κοινωνία.--ARISTOTLE.

THE COMING OF APOLLO

“He bringeth to men and women cures for their grievous sicknesses, he giveth the harp, and he granteth the Muse to whomsoever he will; he ruleth his oracular shrine, bringing peace and lawful order into our hearts; he stablished the descendants of Heracles and Ægimius in Lacedæmon and Argos and most holy Pylos.” Such is the Theban poet’s summary of the attributes of the Dorian god. Healing, harp-music and lyric poetry, discipline fostered by the Delphic oracle, and the Dorian government of Sparta, Argos, and Messenia--these are the gifts of Apollo to Greece. There is nothing here to connect him with Nature-worship. He is not even connected with light or sun.

We have already seen something of the earliest strata of religious beliefs on Greek soil. The Ægean worship was principally “aniconic fetishism”--that is, the worship of inanimate, possibly symbolical, objects, such as stones, pillars, crosses, axes, horns, and trees. Then there were animal deities, possibly totemistic in origin, such as the snake-goddess, the dove-goddess, and the bull-man, or Minotaur, powers mainly representing fecundity. There was certainly also ghost-worship; for the dead in the tholos tombs were certainly honoured by sacrifices, and very likely by human sacrifices at first. There seem to have been no temples at all in these stages of religion; it was rather a system of private local cults in great and bewildering variety. But it is certain that the Ægean peoples had developed some wholly anthropomorphic deities before the end. Some of the regular Olympian deities of historical Greece seem to belong partially, and some wholly, to this earlier civilisation. Poseidon, the sea-god, Hermes, the Arcadian shepherd-god, and Demeter or Mother Earth, are of the latter class, with mysterious forms like the Fates, the Curses, the Harpies, and the Sirens. But there was little exclusiveness about ancient religion; new deities are quite readily accepted into polytheistic systems, though in some cases there was a protracted struggle to keep them out. Hesiod remarks that the deities have many names for a single shape, and often a double name reveals assimilation, such as Phœbus Apollo or Pallas Athene. In most cases, indeed, the great name of an Olympian god covers a host of minor deities with varying and sometimes quite opposite attributes. Thus the national Zeus has swallowed up countless local heroes, as when the Laconians worshipped Zeus Agamemnon.

All these processes of change are reflected in mythology. It would seem as if mythologists, or, as we should say, expert theologians, set out to reconcile the people to new forms of worship by inventing delightful stories to account for the change. Homer and Hesiod were doing precisely that sort of work. For example, the introduction of the Northern Zeus was effected by means of a curious myth. It was agreed that he had not always been King of Heaven; formerly his old father Cronos had ruled, he whose wife was the earth. Zeus was born in Crete--that is, he was attached to

an ancient Cretan story of a divine nativity in which a she-goat suckled a babe. That indicates the transition from an animal deity to an anthropomorphic one, just as does the old Mother Wolf of Roman legend. Doubtless some artistic representations of a she-goat and a she-wolf play their part in such stories. Again, Cronos is said to have tried to crush the usurper in the bud by swallowing his dangerous child, but to have swallowed a stone instead. That may cover the transition from stone-and pillar-worship. Still more instructive are the legends of contest between deities for worship at a particular shrine. The ordinary device for the introduction of Zeus was to make him the father of the local hero. “God,” says Voltaire, “first made man in His own likeness, and man has been returning the compliment ever since.” It is the secret of anthropomorphic religion that the worshipper is worshipping himself, or rather an idealised vision of himself projected upon the public conception of his god. The human heart has an unlimited power of thus adapting its faith to its habits. Anthropologists are continually telling us of the persistence of ancient cults in spite of pretended changes of faith, rituals that belong to Artemis transferred to the Virgin, dirges for Adonis transformed into mourning for Christ. Often when the polite antiquarian Pausanias asked the Greeks of his day about the objects of their worship he got conflicting answers. That is how it becomes easy to make converts if you are content to leave ritual unchanged, and that was how Apollo got himself accepted as the young man’s god all over Greece. There was, indeed, a rival young man’s god in Hermes, a very ancient deity. Remnants of antique aniconic worship attach themselves to Hermes: his statues even in classical times are three parts pillar to one part god. He is the shepherd-god of Arcady,[15] and the Arcadians represent more purely than any other peoples of Greece the aboriginal Ægean stratum. Hermes is a god of music too, but his instrument

is the lyre, which in shape and construction resembles the modern mandoline, for the body was made from the shell of a tortoise, an indigenous Greek creature, with a sounding-board of parchment stretched over it. Apollo properly plays on the cithara, or Northern harp. The popularity of Hermes persisted throughout because he became identified with Luck, and Luck is the one god we all worship. He is also associated with commerce; he it is who drives a sharp bargain; and, as we saw, the aboriginal stratum of Greece provided the trading element in the Hellenic races. This attribute the trade-despising warriors of the dominant race turned to his discredit, for poor Hermes in Homer, and generally in literature, becomes a sharper of the worst description. If you ask “Who stole the cows?” the answer is, “Hermes.” He is the messenger of Zeus, but he is also his spy. Hermes, then, was much too strongly planted to be uprooted by the intruding Apollo. But it seems that some male god of the older race was swallowed up and bodily incorporated under that name. For in classical Greece there are two rival Apollos, one the Delian or Cynthian Apollo, the centre of whose cult was the island of Delos, the other the true Dorian god, called Pythian Apollo, and worshipped above all at Delphi. The Delian shrine was a centre of the Ionians, and Delos afterwards became the headquarters of the maritime league of Athens and the Ionian States. Delos boasted itself to have been the god’s birthplace, and mythology presented an elaborate nativity for this Apollo and his sister Artemis. “Homeric” hymns to both Apollos are preserved, and it is interesting to notice how the Ionian bard who is praising the Apollo of Delos mentions all the centres of his worship in a longish list which tallies closely with the list of Athenian allies in the Delian confederacy. But this Delian Apollo is not the important one; in many respects he is only a pale reflection of the other, and his vogue principally depended on the extreme sanctity of the little island of Delos.

The true Apollo is the Northern god who had his home at Delphi. He and his worship play such a prominent part in the making of classical as distinct from prehistoric and heroic Greece that I put him in the forefront of this age of transition. Delphi is one of the most impressive sites in Greece, lying high in a narrow glen with precipitous and almost awe-inspiring crags on every side.[16] Several times in Greek history rash invaders failed to penetrate into this mysterious shrine. The god’s majesty and the terrors of his abode were sufficient protection. It is clear from the mythological presentation of his coming that before Apollo there was already an ancient oracle at Delphi, the source of which was a snake called Pytho. Snakes figure largely in the animistic worship of the old race, as typifying the spirits of the dead issuing from the earth. The myth described how Apollo came and conquered this serpent. He built a great temple in this valley of Parnassus, and took the place of Earth, or Themis, as Pythian Apollo, lord of the Delphic oracle.

Apollo is the most virile god on Olympus, as he is the representative god of the most manly race in Hellas, the Dorians. He is the young athlete god. If we trace the history of his type in art we see him at first a rudimentary male figure, only just evolved out of the pillar shape. He is always nude in these early statues, and it is not easy to say how many of the so-called early Apollos represent the god, and how many are simply statues of male athletes. It makes little difference, for the god and his worshipper are one. At first there is little expression, as in the “Apollo of Orchomenos,”[17] for the artist is still struggling with his stubborn material, happy if his chisel can get the semblance of human shape out of the marble. In the next stage, represented by the “Tenean Apollo,” the sculptor has attained considerable mastery over his tools, and has succeeded in his main object, namely, a faithful expression of the muscles of the male body.[18] The reader will notice “the archaic grin” on the faces of all gods and goddesses of this period. This is probably an attempt to indicate the benevolence of the deity; the god smiles when he intends to grant the prayer of his suppliant. Apollo was always the god of healing; Æsculapius was his son and Hygiæa his daughter. By-and-by the artists learn how to express benevolence less crudely,[19] and all the time they are learning more anatomy and a fuller mastery over their tools, until in the glorious fifth century Alcamenes (who, by the way, was an Athenian) could make a noble figure such as stands calm and powerful, every inch a god, in the midst of battle on the West Pediment of the great temple at Olympia.[20] Study this god. If you can love him you will have learnt the secret of Dorian greatness. He is very simple, serious, and severe; he has the asceticism of a good athlete who knows what discipline means for the sake of his club or country. You must judge him as archaic work, you must allow, when you criticise the stiffness of his hair, for the use of tinting and the crown of gilt bay-leaves which once passed through the hollow underneath his hair. You will perceive that there is something wrong with the angle of his eyelids, which meet without overlapping. Sculptors of the next generation learnt to correct that, but they never conceived a grander figure of the sort of god that a gentleman and a Spartiate might fitly worship. Of course this is not a temple image; it is only one detail of a piece of ornament under the gable at the back of a temple, but it is the conception of a great artist. After that they began to think too much about the beauty of Apollo and young athletes in general, worshipping both with extravagant devotion. Hermes as a more graceful and sensuous young god began to supplant Apollo in the favour of Art. At last we get to the dandified young swell with the elaborate coiffure and the studied

[Ilustration: PLATE XV. “APOLLO,” FROM ORCHOMENUS

_English Photo Co., Athens_]

theatrical pose, the Apollo Belvedere, who seemed to our great-grandfathers the most perfect of Greek statues, though he was carved to suit a decadent taste in the days when Greece had lost the very memory of manliness. Another conflicting, but, I believe, equally Dorian type of Apollo represents him in the flowing and almost feminine robes of a musician. This is Apollo the artist, not the athlete, the Apollo who leads the choir of Muses on Parnassus.