Chapter XIV: Part 14

An important part of these definite rights belongs immediately to the relations between the private person and the civil power. But the capacity of any human authority to do justice, even where the will cannot be found fault with, is of necessity defective: and no government can do its duties for a day, irrespective of the aid which each private person renders to it in reference to every other. Nor is this enough; it wants, and cannot dispense with, the assistance of an auxiliary within the breast, in order to guard itself against delusion, and to secure the requisite conformity between thought, word, and act. In other words, the state wants an instrument by which to induce men to speak the truth.

No such end can be reached by force. Force, in the shape of torture, will doubtless in the long run avail to make men asseverate that, be it what it may, by which they may obtain release from an intolerable suffering. But the first effect of torture is to make the sufferer indifferent to the truth or falsehood of his confessions, so he can but obtain relief by means of them. The second, and still more detrimental effect, must be to undermine the very basis of inward truthfulness, and to create a mental habit of indifference as between what is true and what is false.

~_And on political relations._~

Hence, the _desideratum_ for the state can only be found in some power which works in and with the will of the private person.

It has indeed been argued, and I believe with justice, that the atheist ought on his own principles to speak the truth; that is, if he does not shut his eyes to the testimony borne by the daily experience of life to the existence of a moral government in the world, even on this side of the grave. But this supposes, at any rate, some degree of mental culture; and it is essential to public order to find the means of operating upon those who have received no such training.

The question is how to obtain the voluntary disclosure of truth, in cases where neither interest or inclination are of themselves sufficient to secure it.

To this question the experience of the world, up to this time, renders one and but one answer. The requisite influence may be found, and can only be found, in an appeal to the Majesty on high, and to the sanctions of a future life.

Here, then, does the Venerable Oath stand forth in all its majesty. The act of calling the Deity in the most solemn of its various forms to witness, has been found at once to make the word of a man the stoutest bond of human society: for the perjurer strips himself of all divine aid[755];

[755] Il. iv. 235.

οὐ γὰρ ἐπὶ ψευδέσσι πατὴρ Ζεὺς ἔσσετ’ ἀρωγὸς,

and exposes himself to the most terrible penalties[756];

[756] Il. xix. 264.

εἰ δέ τι τῶνδ’ ἐπίορκον, ἐμοὶ θεοὶ ἄλγεα δοῖεν
πολλὰ μάλ’, ὅσσα διδοῦσιν, ὅτις σφ’ ἀλίτηται ὀμόσσας.

Under the operation of the oath, the chances, so to speak, are doubled in favour of the veracity of the witness: first, he may not be wicked enough to forswear himself; and secondly, if he is wicked enough, yet he may not have the requisite amount of daring in his wickedness.

These views will, I think, receive material confirmation when we come to consider the relative positions of the oath in Greece and in Troy. For the present, I leave the subject with the observation, that four short words describe the props of human society: they are, γάμος, ὅρκος, θέμις, θεός.

All these sanctions, however partial and remote, thus given to human duty by belief in the gods, could not but be of great practical value.

And indeed it may with truth be said, that the mere idea of the presence of an overruling power in the world was of inestimable advantage in repressing human passion, in moderating desire, and in limiting the excesses of caprice, wilfulness, and violence.

But it is obvious that these beneficial results from belief in the gods belonged not to the particular development, but to the theistical principle which lay within and under it. The idea of a moral Governor of the universe was, and ever will be, an unfailing seed of good wherever it may exist. The Pagan mythology, at every step of its unfolding into detail, enfeebled and degraded that great idea, but it could not be destroyed all at once. _Nemo repente fuit turpissimus_; and a system, like a man, requires time to reach the extreme of depravation. As, among men, a judge is not supposed to lose all regard for justice, because it may be that in some particular of private life he has transgressed, so the Olympian divinities might have credit as administrators of moral government, even after they had begun to be charged with instances of immorality. But an unscrupulous order and succession of judges, would in time put an end to the idea of public justice; and so the continuing and growing degradation of the Immortals, in time put an end to the sense of religion, and made even its fanes[757] smoky, and its pomps contemptible.

[757] Propertius, El. II. v. 27. Hor. Od. III. vi. 3, 4. Sat. II. ii. 103-5.

And certainly, when we look at the evils, of which the mythological system was the source, we cannot but be struck with their overwhelming magnitude, and with the highly instructive fact, that in every case they so manifestly belong, not to the original principle of belief and worship due from man to his Creator, but to the departure from a pure, and the lapse into an impure belief.

~_Moral bearing of the Religion on the poems._~

The credit for moral results, which has thus been allowed to the probable operation of the Homeric Theo-mythology in the world, must be steadily denied to its influence upon the poems, where it appears before us as in the main a lowering and corrupting agency. In fact, the religion and the morality of the Homeric poems appear to separate, and to run in opposite directions. The rights of the question at issue, in an ethical point of view, are plainly with the Greeks: they vindicate by arms not one only, but two principles, both of them vital to the order of society, and to individual happiness and virtue: the sanctity, first, of the family and of marriage ties; secondly, of the relation created by the rites of hospitality. And with the rights go the fortunes of the cause. The capture and fall of Troy constitute a great triumph of justice over wrong.

But the mythological elements of the question are cast in a mould entirely different. The royal family of Troy has been all along in singular favour with the deities, notwithstanding the perjury of Laomedon; and that favour does not appear to be in any degree diminished by the gross and shameful crimes that stand against Paris in the poem, or by the unfailing and extraordinary obtuseness of his moral sense. Ganymede, Tithonus, Anchises, as well as Paris, have all been especial objects of divine regard. Not only did a full half of the other deities take part with the Trojans in the war, but Jupiter himself, apart from his concession to Thetis, was concerned for them, and says[758], ‘They interest me even while they perish’ (μέλουσί μοι ὀλλύμενοί περ).

[758] Il. xx. 21.

Again, in the meeting of the gods, he describes Hector[759] as dear to them for his regular and abundant sacrifices, taking no note whatever of his personal virtues. Of the three deities who were actively hostile to Troy, Neptune, Juno, and Minerva, all had personal causes of offence: the first, the fraud of Laomedon, which, however, was also an offence against the moral law; both the others had the _spretæ injuria formæ_, and Juno had also special predilections to gratify. The fall of Ilios, and the death of Hector, are just: but the wonder is, with the favourable relations that subsisted between the Trojans and the father of gods, as well as men, which were in no respect impaired by crime, how Hector came to die, or Troy to fall. While the fall of Troy is justice, it does not seem to come about because it is agreeable to justice, but rather as the result of the balance of force among the gods, and of their remembrance of personal injuries. It appears all along, as though it were the right-mindedness of the Poet which keeps the wheels of the machine going, while those who should be the drivers are at fault.

[759] Il. xxiv. 66. xxii. 170.

Again, in the Odyssey, the Providence of the poem, if we may so speak, is on the side of Virtue; and a prosperous remainder of life, with a happy death, is promised to the hero. Of this providence Minerva, with the approval of Jupiter, is the wise and indefatigable organ. But while the general idea of providence moves in the right direction, the polytheistic formations work powerfully in a wrong one. David and his companions ate the show-bread in the temple, and were blameless, because it was to relieve a hunger that they had no other means of satisfying: but even impending famine does not excuse or palliate the offence of the companions of Ulysses, who use for food a portion of the oxen of the Sun. The jealousy and cruelty of Neptune, the gifts of Mercury to Autolycus, the savage crimes of Polyphemus, which do not detract from his relation to a deity of the highest rank, the disparagement of the highest human virtues in Calypso, the hostility to human peace and happiness in Circe and the Sirens, place the divine life of the Odyssey on a much lower level than the human and heroic, and to a certain extent depress by their admixture the sound ethical tone of the poem. All along, while Homer luxuriates, poetically, in the abundance and brilliancy of his materials, he has morally to repair their deficiencies, and to contend with and overrule their bias.

I cannot therefore but differ greatly from Nitzsch, who, in his Essay on the Anger of Neptune[760], seems to elevate it to the dignity of a providential resentment, and to conceive of the sufferings of Ulysses as a punishment for a moral offence in the treatment of Polyphemus. In this way I grant that a sort of parallel is established between his case and the chastisements which Achilles receives in the Iliad, through the death of Patroclus, and the surrender of the body of Hector. Both heroes seem thus to stand upon a level: both favoured children of the gods, honoured in the main, but chastised for their faults. But even this seeming parallelism fails when we remember the respective sequels. The curtain of the Iliad falls on the eve of the premature death of Achilles: as that of the Odyssey is dropping over the head of Ulysses, we perceive, in perspective, the picture of his serene old age.

[760] Nitzsch, Odyssee, Vol. III. p. xiv.

As regards the important question of purity, the impression made on my own mind in reading the poems of Homer is this: that, but for his mythology, they would have been unimpeachable, at least in one point of virtue; they would have been absolutely pure. Whatever is dissolute in their moral tendency as regards this particular subject, evidently and directly flows from that source. We rarely meet a sentiment that can arouse anything like revulsion: the worst by far that has struck me is the advice given to Achilles by his mother Thetis (Il. xxiv. 130), as a mode of solace for his grief. The narrative of the Net of Vulcan in the Odyssey is one, that Homer would have been far too modest to recite with reference to human beings: and the only other passage, which seems to be marked with a tinge of grossness, is that which relates to the stratagem of Juno in the Fourteenth Iliad.

~_Its bearing as to poetic effect._~

We may, however, justly distinguish between the influence of mythology on the morality of the Poems, and its operation with regard to poetic effect. In this view the consequences of its introduction, though mixed, are upon the whole highly favourable. There is indeed more or less of descent from the usual grandeur of Homer, when we find his deities mingling in actual conflict: because they never sustain in the field of battle a part at all corresponding to their celestial dignity and presumed power. Nor is the Theomachy proper, in the Twenty-first book of the Iliad, among the most successful parts of the poem. But the principal portion of their agency takes effect upon the elements or other material objects, or upon animals, or upon the human mind by way of influence and suggestion: and its tendency is in general to impart interest and variety, as well as poetic elevation, to the scenery and narrative. The plot of each epic is worked out simultaneously in two different forms upon two different arenas: in Olympus by divine counsel, and on earth by human effort and execution. Yet no confusion results from the double action, while the play and counterplay of the divine and human elements communicate a remarkable elasticity to the movement of the poems. Their value is particularly felt in the Iliad, which, from its limited scene and subject, lies in danger of the sameness which, by this means among others, it on the whole escapes. In particular, the relation between the assisting or patron deities, and the hero or protagonist of each poem, is conducted with great consistency and effect: but the most sublime uses of supernatural machinery to be found throughout the poems are those in which the traces of it are the most shadowy and faintly drawn. Take for example the manner in which Achilles is sent out unarmed to the field, and again, to the manner of his arming, in the Iliad: in the Odyssey, the wonderful picture of divine displeasure and incumbent malediction seeming to gather around and hem in the Suitors of Penelope, concurrently with the preparations for human vengeance: as if the scene were too dark for eyes like theirs to catch the true meaning of these lowering signals, which give a gloomy but majestic sanction to the terrible swoop of retributive justice alighting upon crime.

~_Its earliest and latest forms._~

It would be most interesting to pursue the comparison between the believing or credulous infancy of Paganism as we see it in Homer, and its cold and jealous decrepitude as we find it in the writers of its latest period, when the light of the lamp was fading before the already risen Sun.

In Homer we find the gods offering in their conduct every sort of example of weakness, passion, and fraud. But they take an active share in the government of the world, and men look up to them, collectively or individually, with more or less of confusion indeed, both intellectual and moral, but still truly and actually as exercising some sort of providential government over the world. The mythology of the time of Homer is a weak, faulty, and corrupt religion, I admit, but still it is a religion, a bond which associates man with the unseen world, and brings some, at least, of its influences to bear upon his conduct and character. And if the Greeks of Homer were not shocked by those immoralities of the Immortals which afterwards came to be thought intolerable, it was not because they were more impure than their posterity, for they were far purer: but the principle of belief in the invisible was in them alike lively and inconsequent; and it was not yet even conscious of a load which, in later times, with enfeebled force, and an augmented critical activity, it could not carry.

In the time of Plutarch, about one hundred years after our Lord’s nativity, we find the change complete. There was now no principle of belief in men’s minds which could endure either the good or the evil of the ancient system: and a quickened intelligence, as well as the streaming in of rays from Revelation, had made the human intellect more painfully alive to its moral solecisms, without rendering it able to suggest a remedy. Accordingly, Plutarch relieves the Homeric deities from the faults imputed to them by saying, that the Poet has made use of these fictions to excite the fancy[761]: ἐκεῖνα πέπλασται πρὸς ἐκπλῆξιν ἀνθρώπων. Or, again, it was, he says[762], because the name of Τύχη, Fortune or Chance, was not yet in use, that men referred to the gods what they did not know how to account for in any other manner. Alas for mankind! sad is the state of those, who must reckon the invention of that name among their blessings. In the fact, however, that Homer and his age knew nothing of the word or the idea, he discloses to us one of the many points in which infancy is practically wiser than old age. Let us, Plutarch goes on to say, cure these errors by other passages of the Poet in which he gives us the truth, the ὑγιαίνουσαι περὶ θεῶν δόξαι καὶ ἀληθεῖς: but the passages, which he cites with this view, are not passages where the deities are represented as in any active relations of good towards the world: they are simply those which exhibit them as living in a repose undisturbed by care, while they leave for us a destiny of trouble: they are those which relate to the θεοὶ ῥεῖα ζώοντες, the αὐτοὶ δέ τ’ ἀκηδέες εἰσίν. Stripped of active vice, but yet not adorned with virtue, they become merely cold and selfish, hopeless and inaccessible abstractions.

[761] De Aud. Poet. 20.

[762] Ibid. 23.

There is in all this a certain logical sequence. The starting point is that of belief in a moral Governor of the universe, good himself, and enjoining goodness upon others. But his own goodness fails, and his agency among men for the original purpose becomes more and more feeble and equivocal, while the human intellect, sharpened by discussion, and puffed up with knowledge, or with the supposition and phantasm of it, becomes more and more exacting: so that the abstract gods in Cicero are (without doubt) far more elevated than the personal gods of Homer. But they are mere works of art: and, after all, the personal gods of Homer were the only ones that had been really worshipped by men: and when their case becomes so bad that they can no longer be exhibited to the people as rulers of the world, a refuge is found in the Epicurean theory, which relegates them to a heaven of enjoyment and abundance, and on pretence of mental ease denies them any prerogative of intervention in human affairs[763]. The gain of more careful and comprehensive theory is much more than counterbalanced by the practical loss of the personal element, and therefore of the belief in a real Providence, overseeing the affairs of men. So the next onward step is to the doctrine of the Academicians. In the _De Naturâ Deorum_, where that sect is represented by Cotta in the discussion with the champions of the Epicureans and the Stoics, Cicero himself, and the ruling tendency, if not opinion, of his day, are evidently exhibited to us under Cotta’s name. The transition now made is from gods with a sinecure to no gods at all: and Paganism ends in nullity, just as a moving mass finds its final equilibrium in repose.

[763] Lucret. i. 57-62.

~_Its gloomy view of human destiny._~

Even while heroic Greece and its great Poet existed, the deepest problems of our being were far too dark for man to penetrate. The picture which I have rudely drawn, and which is not wholly a joyless picture, was liable to be blackened, even for this world, by many a storm of crime and of calamity; at the very best it was a picture for this world only, for the mortality and not the immortality of man. But that scene has its close: and most touching it is to see that, with all his creative power, with all his imaginative brightness, with all the advantage he derived from living in the youth of the world, before mankind had fully sounded the depth of their own fall, or had begun to accumulate the sad records of their miseries and crimes; even Homer could not solve the enigma of our condition, or disperse the clouds that gathered round our destiny. There are two profoundly memorable passages in the poems, which have set their double seal on this truth. One of them is in the Odyssey: it is a confession from the mouth of that Achilles, in whose mind and person, as they are delineated by Homer, our humanity has been carried perhaps to a higher point of grandeur, than it has ever since attained. ‘Do not, illustrious Ulysses, do not palter with me about death,’ says the mournful shade. ‘Rather would I serve for hire under a master, aye and a needy master, upon the face of earth, than be lord of the whole world of the departed[764]:’

[764] Od. xi. 488.

μὴ δή μοι θάνατόν γε παραύδα, φαίδιμ’ Ὀδυσσεῦ·
βουλοίμην κ’ ἐπάρουρος ἐὼν θητευέμεν ἄλλῳ
ἀνδρὶ παρ’ ἀκλήρῳ, ᾧ μὴ βίοτος πολὺς εἴη,
ἢ πᾶσιν νεκύεσσι καταφθιμένοισιν ἀνάσσειν.

A trail of heavenly light indeed so far played upon the heroic world, that we hear of those few who had already been translated to the skies; and of two more, one a son of Jupiter, already in the peaceful Elysian plains, and the other Menelaus, who, as his daughter’s husband, was likewise to be carried thither on his decease. But it is the mouth of Achilles, the illustrious, the godlike Achilles, which here utters, in tones so deeply mournful, the common voice of the children of Adam.

It was the very same conclusion which, as we find in another place[765], this favoured mortal had formed on earth.

[765] Il. xxiv. 525.

The second passage is one spoken by Jupiter himself. As the commonest epithets used by Homer for βροτοὶ, mortals, are δειλοὶ and οἰζυροὶ, so the highest god lays down the law of their condition, describing it as that than which there is nothing more wretched among all that live and move upon the earth[766]:

[766] Il. xvii. 446. Compare Od. xvii. 129, where ἀκιδνότερον is substituted.

οὐ μὲν γάρ τί πού ἐστιν ὀϊζυρώτερον ἀνδρὸς
πάντων, ὅσσα τε γαῖαν ἔπι πνείει τε καὶ ἕρπει.

Such as we have seen, and so glorious, was the wisdom, and the valour, and the beauty, and the power, that dwelt in man; but only that through life he might, upon the whole, be paramount in woe above all meaner creatures, and then that he might die in a gloom unrelieved by hope. None have illustrated this piercing truth by contrasts so sharp as Homer, between the chill and dismal tone of the general destiny of man on the one hand, and on the other, the joy and cheerfulness which the effort of an elastic spirit can for a time create. But the woe which he could only exhibit, it was reserved for One greater than he, yet only by sorrow and suffering, to remove.

~_The personal belief of Homer._~

I have forborne in this Essay from entering at large into the often agitated question, whether Homer believed in the deities of whom he speaks so largely. He may express his own childlike creed; and such a creed by no means requires for its support in the individual mind, that it should have been visibly represented by facts within its own experience. Or he may use as the material of poetry that which, without approving itself to his own heart, was, nevertheless, to his hearers in general, a real and substantial system of religion. Nay, he might even be dealing with what had ceased to be believed in his day, but had still a retrospective life, because it had been the hearty, and was still the conventional, worship of the people. The truth may lie in, or it may lie between, any of these suppositions. The one thing of which I feel most assured is, that he was not, as to his religion, a mere allegorist when speaking of his Jupiter and Minerva, any more than he was a mere hypocrite, when he ascribed occurrences in human life to Providence under the name of ‘the deity,’ or ‘the deities.’ He represents what either was or had been, for his people, a belief in the unseen under particular forms, and what still in some way represented a reality for them and for himself. It is this belief of which I have spoken throughout, and which, under any of the suppositions I have made, seems to me to warrant all the stress I have laid upon it.

To attempt a formal solution of the question, whether he believed or not in the dress of his religion, as well as in the religion itself, would, I fear, be frivolous. It is a case in some degree parallel to the disputes whether Shakspeare adhered, in the controversies of the sixteenth century, to the side of the Romish or the Reformed. Neither Shakspeare nor Homer ought to be judged as if they had been theologians _ex professo_. Both followed the law of their sublime art, and represented in forms of beauty and delight, or of majesty and gloom, as the case required, such materials as they found ready to hand. Critical analysis, nice equipoises, strict definitions, were for neither the one nor the other. But in the works of neither do the cold tones of scepticism find an echo: and probably the mental frame of both with reference to the substance of their religion may have been not very different from that of the poor, the maidens, and the children of their day.

SECT. VII.

_On the traces of an origin abroad for the Olympian Religion._

Let me now attempt to divide the principal deities of Homer with reference to their origin, or to the channel of their introduction into Greece; premising, however, that all such classification of them is admitted to be founded upon evidence, at best presumptive, and often also slight.

The classes will be as follows:

1. Of those who were worshipped by the Hellenic and Pelasgian races, and probably by all others known in the inner Homeric world.

These were,

1. Jupiter.
2. Minerva.
3. Apollo.
4. Latona.
5. Diana.
6. Neptune.

The three first of these may be considered as deities of immemorial and universal worship. Neptune was far more Hellenic than Pelasgian: and indeed his place in the list is doubtful.

2. Of immemorial Hellenic worship.

1. Juno.
2. Persephone.
3. Pluto or Aidoneus.

3. Of established Pelasgian worship.

1. Demeter or Ceres.
2. Venus, more recent than the former.

4. Of worship introduced to the Greek races within the memory of man.

_a._ Brought in from Phœnicia, or through the channel of the Phœnicians.

1. Hermes, or Mercury.
2. Hephæstus, or Vulcan.
3. Dionysus, or Bacchus.

_b._ From Thrace.

Mars.

_c._ Paieon has no note of country, except in so far as he may be connected with Egypt by the declaration that the Egyptians were of his race.

Ἠέλιος, the Sun, appears to be placed in connection, by the various notes he bears, both with Egypt and with the Persian name.

All these deities were, with some others, more or less naturalized among the Greeks within Homer’s lifetime. Themis was probably a pure Hellenic creation, as Vesta seems to have been Pelasgian: the latter exhibiting the genius of domestic order, the former, its fuller development in political society. But Vesta is, though an Homeric idea, not an Homeric goddess.

Now while Homer fails, or more probably avoids, to give us any direct information about the derivation of the Greek races or deities, he notwithstanding establishes by partial and incidental notices many traces of exterior affinity, not always the less secure and trustworthy because they are negative.

While going through the divinities in detail, I have remarked upon such traits of their character, history, or worship, as appeared to connect them with any particular origin; but the question remains, can we find, through however rude a resemblance, any general model abroad for the Olympian system, or, in the absence of such a model, any presumptive evidence from Homer, which may serve to connect it with any national or local root or roots in particular?

~_The Olympian Gods and the Ethiopians._~

It is well worthy of remark, that he has associated the body of the Greek deities, as a body, with one, and one only, point, exterior to the Greek nation. That point is the country of the Ethiopians.

Homer has shown a peculiar interest in these Ethiopians. They are ἀμύμονες: an epithet which he appears to connect especially with purity of blood. In the First Iliad, the whole body of the gods are absent from Olympus for eleven days, to enjoy the sacrifices offered by that people. In the Twenty-second Iliad, the statement is less express as to time; but again they are apparently enjoying themselves in the same quarter, during the funeral rites of Patroclus, and Iris is in haste to go thither, that she may not lose her share. In the First Odyssey, Neptune is among the same people for the same purpose, while the other deities are in Olympus. In the Fifth Odyssey, he is coming from among them, when he espies Ulysses on his raft. The time intervening is so considerable, that we must presume the two last-mentioned passages to refer to two separate visits.

The following points may be considered as established:

1. The Ethiopians, visited as above, must be supposed by Homer in the main to worship the same body of deities as the Greeks.

2. The Ethiopians extend from the rising to the setting sun; but those Ethiopians of whom Homer speaks particularly, are in connection with sacrifices in the East; for the Solyman mountains[767], as conceived by him, probably border upon Lycia, and they are on Neptune’s route[768], from the Ethiopian country back to the sea, which, as I hope to show elsewhere, runs along the double line of the Mediterranean and the Euxine.

[767] Il. vi. 184.

[768] Od. v. 282.

3. They are further fixed in a southern country by their name, which indicates darkness or swarthiness of countenance, and by the visit of Menelaus to them in the course of his adventures, which lay exclusively to the southward.

4. They are evidently distinguished by great liberality or high favour in the sacrificial service of the gods.

5. They are defined to be by the Ocean, and thus in the farthest situation to the South-east that was conceived of by Homer and the Greeks.

6. At the same time, although they are the farthest men in that direction[769], they are nowhere described as lying at a very great absolute distance. They are simply τηλόθ’ ἐόντες.

[769] Od. i. 23.

Now it is not only possible, but on every ground likely, that in his conception of the South-eastern Ethiopians, Homer mixed up together various traditions, belonging to different places and nations. Even as, in his conception of the Mouth of Ocean, which is with him always one single mouth, he seems to have blended and amalgamated geographical reports founded upon more than one original, or prototype, in nature.

The Solyman name has suggested to some critics a connection with the Salem of the Hebrews. But the name is much more likely to be derived from the Soliman Koh, a ridge of mountains running to the south-west from Caubul, and sometimes defined as extending into Persia. The liberality in sacrifice ill accords with the early Persian religion, but finds a probable original in that of the Medes with their order of Magians. But upon the whole, it would seem that Homer must have had a reason for the peculiar prominence he has given to these South-eastern Ethiopians, in connection with the gods of Olympus; for the association, unless suggested by a reason, is neither natural, nor in the manner of the Poet. Could it have been any other than this, that he regarded their country, however indeterminate its place in his imagination, as the original seat of the religion of his own, and that he therefore referred it thither bodily without notice of details? Now this would mean as the original seat, also, of the ancestors of the Hellenic tribes. We are not, in the event of accepting such a supposition, to imagine that he intended to make the assertion that the Olympian system had been derived from Persia and Media as it stood, but only to imply that there, according to national tradition, lay its root. The Trojans, it will be remembered, have their not Olympian but Idæan Jove: and the Ethiopians are the only foreign race, with whom he associates Olympus and its band of Immortals.

I have already stated elsewhere grounds for supposing that the Achæans, as they were immediately an Hellenic, were also primarily, as well as the other Hellenes, a Persian race. We have seen the existence of the Persian name in Greece, and its connection, according to Homer, with what Homer thought the remotest East, by the shore of Ocean. We have also seen its connection with the Sun, the prime deity of the Persians. This visible head of creation, standing next to the Supreme Being, we find that the Greeks speedily identify with their Apollo, who is so prominent as the son of Jupiter, in dignity, in obedience, and in his father’s favour, as to stand in a class entirely distinct from that of his other sons.

On the one hand, we seem to find here matter confirmatory of the Persian origin of the Hellenic tribes; and on the other, a general indication of the derivation of the earliest Greek religion from a certain part of the East. But still we must beware of any over-broad inference. The religion, it is likely, grew largely as it travelled, and was developed freely after it had reached its home in the Greek peninsula. And it would be contrary to all reason to suppose that Homer was in a condition to refer back to each of the Eastern races their proper contribution towards the aggregate, though we may justly suppose him able to draw some kind of line between the system as it was flourishing in Greece, with all its additions, elaborations and refinements, and the crude undigested materials as they had been imported from abroad; perhaps we might say, between the system as he found it, and the same system as he left it.

Considering, however, that Homer had a quasi-geographical knowledge of Egypt, I do not suppose that that country enters at all into his conception of the Ethiopians. If so, then the representation of an unity of religion with the Ethiopians, affords a presumption, conformable undoubtedly to such other presumptions as we have been able to gather from the poems, that Homer did not regard Egypt as the principal source of the religious system of Greece.

~_Herodotus on the Scythian religion._~

I do not pretend to find, in any ancient system handed down to us, even a skeleton of the Olympian scheme; and I conclude it to be most probable, that the Greeks had to form, or to reform, various members of it, as well as merely to clothe and embellish them. Yet it appears well worth while to refer to the account of the Scythian religion given by Herodotus, whose works form the great depository of knowledge of this kind beyond the borders of Greece.

The ordinary Scythians, it will be remembered, seem to be of the same race with the Medes, and to form the stock from which the Pelasgians separated to turn towards the south of Europe for settlements. They lived in that pastoral state, anterior to tillage, which Mommsen observes, through the forms of the Latin language, to have marked the point before the severance[770]. From the sign of feeding on milk, the Glactophagi and Hippemolgi of Il. xiii. 5, 6, would appear to belong to them, and the peaceful habits of the Pelasgians are also represented in the character that Homer gives, in the same passage, to their neighbours the Abians.

[770] Mommsen, Römische Geschichte, vol. I. ch. ii.

The gods of the Scythians, according to Herodotus[771], were:

[771] Herod. iv. 59.

1. Vesta.
2. Jupiter.
3. Earth, the supposed wife of Jupiter.
4. Apollo.
5. Celestial Venus.
6. Hercules.
7. Mars.

Even in this very late picture, we find a strong resemblance to what, from the Homeric text, would appear to have been the primitive cluster of the Pelasgian divinities. Earth is represented in Demeter, (Γῆ μήτηρ,) who appears in Il. xiv. 326 as one of the wives of Jupiter. The Celestial Venus may include traditions of Minerva, and of Artemis,--for the Scythians called her Artimpasa,--along with those which came to be represented in the Greek Ἀφροδίτη. All the deities, which from Homer’s text have appeared to be especially Hellenic, are also, it will be observed, absent from this list: Juno, Neptune, Aidoneus, Persephone, Vulcan, and Mercury.

But there were among these Scythians a tribe, called the Βασιλήϊοι Σκύθαι. It would seem plain from the name, that these must have held among the Scythians a position, in great measure analogous to that of the Hellenic tribes among the mass of the Pelasgian population. And certainly it is not a little curious, that these kingly Scythians added to the list of properly Pelasgian deities the worship of Thamimasidas, a god of the sea, apparently equivalent to the Hellenic Poseidon.

Again, let us take the account given by Herodotus of the information he obtained in Egypt about the Greek mythology. He states to us that, with certain exceptions, the names of the Greek deities had been known in Egypt from time immemorial. His exceptions are, Neptune and Juno, the Dioscuri, Vesta, Themis, the Graces and the Nereids. The statement may at least be accepted as good to this extent, that the deities here named were not drawn from Egypt. They include, as will be seen, only one personification of an idea which we have found cause to consider Pelasgian, namely, Ἱστίη or _home_; with this Neptune and Juno, who were Hellic deities; the Dioscouroi, representing in an early stage the deification of national heroes; the Graces, or the impersonations of ideas; and the Nereids, or the personification of natural objects. All of these persons and processes we have already referred to the influence of the Hellic tribes.

Upon the whole, we appear to have in these accounts a much clearer representation of the contribution made by the Pelasgian part of the nation to the Olympian system than we can find gathered elsewhere. The Egyptian resemblances are chiefly isolated, though it may have been from that quarter that Pelasgian Attica learned the name and worship of the deity, which was afterwards developed into the Homeric Pallas-Athene: but among these Scythians we appear to find a group, who exhibit to us in combination nearly all that we have reason to believe specially Pelasgian, and, with the obscure exception of Hercules, nothing besides. While this group, as being Scythian, would have the Arian country for its point of origin, it may still be probable that other parts of the Olympian religion, besides the worship of Neptune, such as the Juno and the Persephone in particular, had come from the ‘Kingly’ Arians of the hills.

Thus far as to the relation between the Homeric theo-mythology and any religious system or combination to be found elsewhere. Let us now consider how it stands with reference to each of the principal elements, out of which the religions of the world were habitually formed.

~_Four several bases of religious systems._~

There appear to be four leading forms in which, either single or combined, religion has attracted, and more or less commanded, the mind of man. It is scarcely needful to add that one alone of these is genuine, and that the three others are essentially depraved, and finally self-destructive.

The first is the worship of the Divine Being: of which the Holy Scriptures form, down to the period with which they close, the principal record.

The second is the worship of man; founded, of course, upon his deification. Of this the Greek mythology affords the most conspicuous and weighty instance.

The third is the worship of external and inanimate nature, which I mention next, not because of its place in the order of ideas, but because of its great extension and influence over races of vast numerical strength, antiquity, and importance.

The fourth is the worship of the inferior creation, or of animate nature in its lower ranks.

We have considered, in a former section, how far the Greek mythology was indebted to the first of these sources, the true and pure one.

The second, or anthropophuism, appears to have formed its most proper and distinctive characteristic. Further, it was the intellectual rather than the carnal nature of man, which originally determined a law for the construction of the Olympian system. The great traditive deities were remodelled according to what Scripture calls the ‘lust of the mind,’ long before the ‘lust of the flesh’ had touched them. We see, too, that, of the deities of invention, those which were purely Hellenic, such as Juno and Themis in particular, represent either noble and commanding, or else pure, ideas, connected with the development of human life and society; while it is generally in deities that have not undergone a full Hellenic remodelling, that we see animal passion prevail; such as Mars, Venus, Ceres, and Aurora.

~_Nature-worship._~

The third basis of religion is admirably described, together with its apology, and its condemnation, in the Book entitled the Wisdom of Solomon[772]:

[772] Wisdom xiii. 1-9.

‘Neither by considering the works did they acknowledge the
workmaster; but deemed either fire, or wind, or the swift air, or the
circle of the stars, or the violent water, or the lights of heaven,
to be the gods which govern the world. With whose beauty if they
being delighted took them to be gods; let them know how much better
the Lord of them is: for the first author of beauty hath created
them. But if they were astonished at their power and virtue, let them
understand by them, how much mightier he is that made them. For, by
the greatness and beauty of the creatures, proportionably the maker
of them is seen. But yet for this they are the less to be blamed;
for they peradventure err, seeking God, and desirous to find him.
For, being conversant in his works, they search him diligently, and
believe their sight: because the things are beautiful that are seen.
Howbeit, neither are they to be pardoned. For if they were able to
know so much, that they could aim at the world; how did they not
sooner find out the Lord thereof?’

And then the Wise Man proceeds to show, that far inferior, again, to this, is the worship of mere images as gods.

The worship of the elemental powers enters, I think, only as a very secondary ingredient into the Homeric or Olympian system: it is everywhere surmounted and circumscribed by developments drawn from tradition or from the principle of anthropophuism.

It is true that most of the great physical agents are either personified by him, or else are in immediate connection with some one of his deities: but there is every appearance that the Greeks sometimes expelled, sometimes reduced and depressed the principle of Nature-worship, in their adaptation of foreign materials to Hellenic uses.

1. Jupiter and Neptune, as we have seen, preside over elements, but they are not elemental. Their relations to air and sea are entirely different from those of Vulcan to fire, and yet even he very greatly transcends the dimensions of a merely elemental god. Their brotherhood with Aidoneus, who is not elemental at all, indicates, together with all other signs, that the air and sea are their respective territories, and are not the basis of their divinity.

2. It seems quite impossible but that, if Nature-worship had been the basis of the system, the Sun, as the visible king of nature, must have had a prominent and commanding position in the system; whereas his place in Homer is even less than secondary. Looking at the realm of nature, to search out a varied organism, which would supply a powerful apparatus of instruments operative upon man to a presiding intelligence, the Greek naturally made Ζεὺς the king of Air. But had he merely wanted a symbol by which nature itself was to speak, how could he have forborne to choose the Sun?

3. There is, indeed, an extended use in Homer of the imagery of Nature-Powers. But however prominent as poetry, this is altogether subordinate as religion. His Nymphs and River-gods people the unseen, adorn his verse, and even supply a kind of drapery to the scheme of religious observances; but it is not by them that the world is governed. And with them may very well be classed, as far as the present argument is concerned, the crowd of Homer’s metaphysical impersonations.

4. That Neptune in particular is not properly an elemental power, seems to be made clear by three things at the least:

a. He can act by land as well as sea; witness his building the wall of Troy, and appearing as a warrior on the battle-field.

b. The θάλασσα, with which he is connected, is decidedly inferior, in its merely elemental character, to Oceanus; yet Oceanus has no share in the government of the world, and no moral personality, while Neptune has equal dignity with Jupiter, and is not far behind him in strength.

c. The true elemental gods of the θάλασσα, it is plain, according to Homer, are Nereus and Amphitrite; of whom the first is locally confined to the depths of the sea, and the other is scarcely a person, and cannot ideally be disengaged from the curly-headed billows.

5. In the Olympian Court, which is the real centre, according to Homer, of the government of the world, there is scarcely to be found a pure example of a Nature-power; there is no one leading deity, in whom that idea is not wholly subordinate; and in many of the leading deities, such as Minerva, Apollo, and even Juno, it is hardly to be perceived at all.

6. As to Juno in particular. When we compare the Greek with the Eastern religions, it appears that, if the former had been conceived in the same spirit as the latter, Juno ought to have been the earth, continually impregnated by the heaven, and yielding those fruits which would then stand as the proper results of her maternity.

But instead of this, in the great lottery of the universe, earth is actually left out, and remains undisposed of. It never appears in Homer, except in a formula of adjuration, in which we may naturally enough look to find antique ideas; and this seems like a stray vestige of another system, really founded on Nature-worship. But there Γαῖα remains, so far as the Greeks are concerned, isolated and undeveloped.

Meantime, for the vegetative life of Earth, wedded to the Heavens, and bearing herbs and fruits, the Greek mind substitutes the intelligent life of a Queen-divinity, who with her husband becomes the nucleus of the Olympian order, and marks the transition from elemental religion to anthropophuism.

~_Secondary in the Olympian religion._~

There is then a greatly qualified sense, in which assent may be given to the proposition, that the Olympian dynasty of Homer sits enthroned upon the ruins of a more ancient Nature-worship, and the sense is this: that, before Hellenism had an historical existence, there were systems founded on Nature-worship in the east; that these systems were tributary to the religion of Olympus, and that its framers made such use of them as they found convenient.

But from Homer we are not authorized to believe that such a system of Nature-worship ever preceded in Greece the Olympian system. On the contrary, the Κρόνος and Ῥέα, the Oceanus and Tethys of Homer, appear to be younger and not older than his chief Olympian gods; that is, they appear to be metaphysical creations, called into being to supply an ideal basis, a _matrix_ or mould, walled in with time and space, for Jupiter and his wife and brothers to be cast in.

It is not before, but after the time of Homer, namely, in Hesiod, that we see such development given to this pseudo-archaic system as can alone allow it to be taken for the image of something that had really existed as a religion. For example, it would be quite out of keeping with the tone of Homer were we to find in him the sentiment which is contained in a fragment of Euripides[773];

[773] Eurip. Fr. i.

ὁρᾶς τὸν ὑψοῦ τόνδ’ ἄπειρον αἰθέρα;
τοῦτον νόμιζε Ζῆνα.

~_Brute-worship._~

We have still to consider the relation of the Olympian scheme to the last of the four στοιχεῖα. The principle of brute-worship was so marked a characteristic of the Egyptian idolatry, that it seems to lie at the very foundation of the system. Perhaps we should be justified in associating with this principle the inability of the Egyptians to attain to any high conceptions of beauty. They scarcely could soar in this respect above the standard of that which they regarded as a tabernacle meet for divinity to dwell in.

The same principle appears to have found its way into Persia probably at a late date, and from the Median, not the Eteo-persian, source of the religious traditions of the country. Malcolm[774] has given us the copies, from remains found in the country, of the Persian representations, probably however late ones, of their divinities, exhibiting strange mixtures of human form with that of the brute.

[774] Malcolm’s Hist. of Persia, vol. i.

It would therefore be wonderful if we failed to find in the Greek mythology some traces, however faint, of an element that not only existed in Asia, but displayed so much vigour there, as to have entered deeply into the religion that even now sways a considerable portion of its population, if not, indeed, to form the one really capital and operative article of that religion.

Döllinger[775] has noted the points connected with the state and being of animals, which might suggest ideas capable of being developed into this repulsive system. Such are the unity and tranquillity of animal life--it being borne in mind that domesticated animals were those which supplied the chief type of deity. Such, again, is the instinct of the future, bearing a nearer outward resemblance to foreknowledge than would any anticipations founded on forethought, reasoning, and experience. Above all, there seems to be force in the remark that man, by his marked individuality, and by the freedom of the will, is, as it were, disabled from becoming the mere organ of another existence. The gods in assuming human form, assumed in a great degree human nature also. But the passive and neutral nature of animals offered itself as a medium without taste or colour, such as needed not in any manner to alter or modify the powers of which it was to be the vehicle.

[775] Döllinger, Heid. u. Jud. b. vi. 130. p. 424.

Had the idea been in its origin that of an inherent sacredness of animals as such, it is not probable that we should have seen such extraordinary anomalies in its development as those which permitted the same animal to be adored in one province of Egypt, and immolated in the next[776].

[776] Döllinger, ibid. 132.

~_Its vestiges in the Olympian religion._~

The grossness of brute-worship was completely refined away by the Greeks during the process of transfer to their own mythology. The vestiges of the system, and they are no more than vestiges, still traceable in the Homeric poems, are apparently as follows:

1. I find the chief note of it in the extraordinary sacredness of the oxen of the Sun: a sacredness inconsistent and inexplicable, if it be tried only by the circumjacent incidents of the Odyssey, and by the laws of the Greek mythology.