from ethnic myths, instead of deriving both from a common Aryan or pro-ethnic source, my words might have been liable to misapprehension.* But as they stand in my essay, they were only intended to point out that after tracing the Harits to their most primitive source, and after showing how, starting from thence, they entered on their mythological career in India, we might discover there, in their earliest form, the mould in which the myth of the Greek Charites was cast, while such epithets as the sisters,' and 'with beautiful wings,' might indicate how conceptions that remained sterile in Indian mythology, grew up under a Grecian sky into those charming human forms which we have all learned to admire in the Graces of Hellas. That I had recognised the personal identity, if we may say so, of the Greek Charis, the Aphrodite, the Dawn, and the Sanskrit Ushas, the dawn, will be seen from a short sentence towards the end of my essay, p. 86: 'He (Eros) is the youngest of the gods, the son of Zeus, the friend of the Charites, also the son of the chief Charis, Aphrodite, in whom we can hardly fail to discover a female Eros (an Ushâ, dawn, instead of an Agni aushasya)'. Dr. Sonne will thus perceive that our roads, even where they do not exactly coincide, run parallel, and that we work in the same spirit and with the same objects in view. *I ought to mention, however, that Mr. Cox, in the Introduction to his Tales of the Gods and Heroes, p. 67, has understood my words in the same sense as Dr. Sonne. "The horses of the sun,' he writes, 'are called Harits; and in these we have the prototype of the Greek Charites-an inverse transmutation, for while in the other instances the human is changed into a brute personality, in this the beasts are converted into maidens.' 384 T LECTURE IX. THE MYTHOLOGY OF THE GREEKS. those who are acquainted with the history of Greece, and have learnt to appreciate the intellectual, moral, and artistic excellencies of the Greek mind, it has often been a subject of wonderment how such a nation could have accepted, could have tolerated for a moment, such a religion. What the inhabitants of the small city of Athens achieved in philosophy, in poetry, in art, in science, in politics, is known to all of us; and our admiration for them increases tenfold if, by a study of other literatures, such as the literatures of India, Persia, and China, we are enabled to compare their achievements with those of other nations of antiquity. The rudiments of almost everything, with the exception of religion, we, the people of Europe, the heirs to a fortune accumulated during twenty or thirty centuries of intellectual toil, owe to the Greeks; and, strange as it may sound, but few, I think, would gainsay it, that to the present day the achievements of these our distant ancestors and earliest masters, the songs of Homer, the dialogues of Plato, the speeches of Demosthenes, and the statues of Phidias stand, if not unrivalled, at least unsurpassed by anything that has been achieved by their descendants and pupils. How the Greeks came to be what they were, and how, alone of all other nations, prose they opened almost every mine of thought that has since been worked by mankind; how they invented and perfected almost every style of poetry and which has since been cultivated by the greatest minds of our race; how they laid the lasting foundation of the principal arts and sciences, and in some of them achieved triumphs never since equalled, is a problem which neither historian nor philosopher has as yet been able to solve. Like their own goddess Athene, the people of Athens seems to spring full armed into the arena of history, and we look in vain to Egypt, Syria, or India for more than a few of the seeds that burst into such marvellous growth on the soil of Attica. But the more we admire the native genius of Hellas, the more we feel surprised at the crudities and absurdities of what is handed down to us as their religion. Their earliest philosophers knew as well as we that the Deity, in order to be Deity, must be either perfect or nothing-that it must be one, not many, and without parts and passions; yet they believed in many gods, and ascribed to all of them, and more. particularly to Jupiter, almost every vice and weakness that disgraces human nature. Their poets had an instinctive aversion to everything excessive or monstrous; yet they would relate of their gods what would make the most savage of the Red Indians creep and shudder:-how that Uranos was maimed by his son Kronos-how Kronos swallowed his own children, and, after years of digestion, vomited out alive his whole progeny-how Apollo, their fairest god, hung Marsyas on a tree and flayed him alivehow Demeter, the sister of Zeus, partook of the shoulder of Pelops who had been butchered and CC roasted by his own father, Tantalus, as a feast for the gods. I will not add any further horrors, or dwell on crimes that have become unmentionable, but of which the most highly cultivated Greek had to tell his sons and daughters in teaching them the history of their gods and heroes. It would indeed be a problem, more difficult than the problem of the origin of these stories themselves, if the Greeks, such as we know them, had never been startled by this, had never asked, How can these things be, and how did such stories spring up? But be it said to the honour of Greece, that although her philosophers did not succeed in explaining the origin of these religious fables, they certainly were, from the earliest times, shocked by them. Xenophanes, who lived, as far as we know, before Pythagoras, accuses Homer and Hesiod of having ascribed to the gods everything that is disgraceful among men-stealing, adultery, and deceit. He remarks that † men seem to have created their gods, and to have given to them their own mind, voice, and figure; that the Ethiopians made their gods black and flat-nosed, the Πάντα θεοῖς ἀνέθηκαν "Ομηρός θ' Ησίοδός τε, κλέπτειν μοιχεύειν τε καὶ ἀλλήλους ἀπατεύειν. Cf. Sextus Emp. adv. Math. i. 289, ix. 193. t ̓Αλλὰ βροτοὶ δοκέουσι θεοὺς γεγενῆσθαι, τὴν σφετέρην τ' αἴσθησιν ἔχειν φωνήν τε δέμας τε. . . . . ἢ γράψαι χείρεσσι καὶ ἔργα τελεῖν ἅπερ ἄνδρες, καί κε θεῶν ἰδέας ἔγραφον καὶ σώματ ̓ ἐποίουν τοιαῦθ ̓ οἷόν περ καὐτοὶ δέμας εἶχον ὁμοῖον, ἵπποι μέν θ ̓ ἵπποισι, βόες δέ τε βουσίν ὁμοῖα. Cf. Clem. Alex. Strom. v. p. 601 C. * Thracians red-haired and blue-eyed-just as cows or lions, if they could but draw, would draw their gods like cows and lions. He himself declares, in the most unhesitating manner-and this nearly 600 years before our era-that God is one, the greatest among gods and men, neither in form nor in thought like unto men.' He calls the battles of the Titans, the Giants, and Centaurs, the inventions of former generations † (πλάσματα τῶν προτέρων), and requires that the Deity should be praised in holy stories and pure strains. Similar sentiments were entertained by most of the great philosophers of Greece. Heraclitus seems to have looked upon the Homeric system of theology, if we may so call it, as flippant infidelity. According to Diogenes Laertius, Heraclitus declared that Homer, as well as Archilochus, deserved to be ejected from public assemblies and flogged. The same author relates § a story that Pythagoras saw the soul of Homer in the lower world hanging on a tree, and surrounded by serpents, as a punishment for what he had said of the gods. No doubt the views of these philosophers about the gods were far more Εἷς θεὸς ἔν τε θεοῖσι καὶ ἀνθρώποισι μέγιστος, Cf. Clem. Alex. l. c. † Cf. Isocrates, ii. 38 (Nägelsbach, p. 45). † Τόν θ' Ομηρον ἔφασκεν ἄξιον ἐκ τῶν ἀγώνων ἐκβάλλεσθαι καὶ ῥαπίζεσθαι, καὶ ̓Αρχίλοχον ὁμοίως.-Diog. Laert. ix. 1. Ἠσέβησε εἰ μὴ ἠλληγόρισε, Ὅμηρος. Bertrand, Les Dieux Fro tecteurs, p. 143. § Φησὶ δ' Ιερώνυμος κατελθόντα αὐτὸν εἰς ᾅδου τὴν μὲν Ἡσιόδου ψυχὴν ἰδεῖν πρὸς κίονι χαλκῷ δεδεμένην καὶ τρίζουσαν, τὴν δ ̓ Ομήρου κρεμαμένην ἀπὸ δένδρου καὶ ὄφεις περὶ αὐτὴν ἀνθ' ὧν εἶπον περὶ Oeur. Diog. Laert. viii. 21. |