Evil in Greek Mythology

THERE are two methods of studying mythology. One considers its origin, and the other examines, not the manufacture of myths, which was an unconscious process, but the ethical meaning attached to them when men began to think. While the first method is important in establishing the kinship of races, the second is necessary to show wherein the individuality of each cultus consists. Whence the Greeks obtained their myths, therefore, is a question less pertinent to the analysis of their conception of evil than an inquiry as to how they interpreted them.

When Mephistopheles, in Goethe’s Faust, arrives on the plains of Erichtho to attend the classical Walpurgis night, his first remark is that here, as in the North, he is at home. But after searching about among the griffins and sirens of Greece, he confesses that he feels himself entirely strange. Of late years scientists have been so engrossed in upholding the resemblance between the mythologies of Aryan nations that, unlike Mephistopheles, they have neglected those minor particulars which make them in reality so different. They dwell upon the soil from which myths spring, and forget the light, air, and climate which give them, as living organisms, their vitality, and impress each development with its specific qualities. Greek mythology had its roots in Sanskrit soil, but its sunshine and rain and air came from a clime which was neither frozen as in Iceland, nor heated with furnace heat as in India. It was fresh, wholesome, and temperate, its winters being just long and severe enough to prevent people from feeling satiated with roses and soft winds. As a poet out of the simplest words in daily use can make a melodious song, so, from those mythical germs which in the East developed into exaggerated supernaturalisms, and in the North into rugged home truths, the Greeks evolved poetry. Their struggle for existence was not so easy that they could become dreamers, like the Hindus. They could not afford to ignore the visible world in useless speculations as to the invisible. They might, with the companions of Odysseus, sometimes long for repose and forgetfulness, but the requirements of life forced them into action, even as the Ithacan chief compelled his unwilling men to leave the shores of the lotus-land. On the other hand they were not met by those bodily hardships which are so engrossing as to hinder intellectual growth. Physical beauty and mental culture developed side by side, the latter finding its fullest and fairest expression in the idealization of the former. This equilibrium between mind and body made men form natural and human theories of life and the world. They studied objects for their beauty and fitness, instead of ruthlessly tearing them to pieces to discover some inner and hidden meaning. Virtue and vice were not analyzed in reference to eternal rewards and punishments, but that their influence upon earthly happiness might be understood. If life gave pain as well as pleasure, they were equally fearless in enjoying the one and bearing the other. They felt the “ wild joys of living ” ‘too keenly to spend their time bemoaning what had been and what might be, and they were too wise to deteriorate into mere slaves of their senses. They took the evil with the good in nature, and made the best of it; and they treated their mythology in the same spirit, receiving it much as we receive history, and not as a revealed definition of practical morality. Many of their legends related incidents in the career of the gods which were foreign to Hellenic ideals, but to the people, who never questioned their authenticity, these seemed to be as inevitable as the ills of life. They were themes for the poet, and not for the moralist. The truth is, religion and ethics were never really made to coalesce in Greece.

The contrast between light and darkness, storm and sunshine, winter and summer, was the first natural phenomenon that attracted the attention of men, and the first problem in their own lives that puzzled them was the coexistence of good and evil, crime and virtue, health and disease. When the elements were personified, the powers of light became the creators of good, both spiritual and temporal, while the powers of darkness reappeared as the principles of evil. This personification supplied the majority of men with what seemed a sufficient solution of their problem. But it meant little to Greeks, who made human life the stand-point from which they reasoned, and whose identification of man’s spiritual with his physical life rendered it impossible for them to represent the world as one large battle-field for two opposite and irreconcilable powers. Mr. Conway, in his Demonology, explains the difference between devils and demons by defining the former as those who love evil for its own sake, and the latter as those who, even when hostile to the human race, have no more moral character than a man-eating tiger. According to this definition, Greek mythology differs from all others in the fact that, though it abounds in demons, it is absolutely without devils. The enumeration of all the demoniacal beings figuring in the different myths and legends would here be useless and impossible. The Greek conception of evil in the supernatural world can best be understood by considering, first, the demons, pur et simple ; secondly, those creatures associated with a scheme of moral retribution; and thirdly, the nature ascribed to the gods.

“ From Harz to Hellas cousins we discover ! ” cries Mephistopheles. There were in Greece creatures as grotesque, as improbable, as hideous, as any to be found in India or in Scandinavia. There were dragons with seven heads, and great giants with but one eye in the middle of their foreheads. Strange beings, partly birds, partly women, haunted hill and valley, and the calm blue sea concealed terrible monsters. At first it seems as if sirens and lamiæ, griffins, hell-hounds, and cyclopes, must be the same in every respect as the Asuras in the East, or the grotesque demons of mediæval Europe, whom they resemble in outward form. But they are in reality as distinct from them as classic is from oriental and romantic poetry. Goethe, in pointing out the likeness, has also analyzed the difference between Greek and Northern demons. This dualism has never been so tersely explained as when he makes Mephistopheles, on the mountains of Hellas, miss the smell of pitch and brimstone, to which he is accustomed on the Blocksberg, while he wonders what can be the nature of their hell-fire. The wiles and wickedness of the “ cousins ” he there encounters do not originate in hell; they are not, like his friends of the Brocken, sworn allies of an arch-fiend, whose kingdoms they would fill with the souls of sinners. Partly from the effect of mythical tradition, partly from their own poetic instinct, the Greeks pictured nature as alive with legions of supernatural beings. They filled the woods with dryads and sileni, fauns and satyrs, creatures half god,half brute, while Pan, the noise-loving, the dance-loving, held all living things spellbound with the melody of his “ sweet pipings.” These sylvan deities were not without a spice of joyous, rollicking mischief, but they were untainted by evil. They were in such close relationship to the earth that they became intoxicated with her beauty, and in their rich exuberance of animal spirits played tricks which were in keeping with their cloven feet, their tails and horns. Sometimes the satyrs robbed sheepfolds ; at other times they danced among the trees, and, in goblin form, jumped out before poor, timid women, to terrify them as they walked homewards in the twilight.¹ Notwithstanding their pranks, they were really personifications of the kindly elements, just as nymphs and tritons represented the sea when fair and friendly. But, as poisonous plants grow side by side with anemones and violets, and as the placid water is often lashed by the fury of the tempest into angry waves, so hideous monsters were supposed to wander upon the land, and the ocean had its Scylla and Charybdis. Yet, while the physical characteristics of the demon monsters were described in all their repulsiveness, no effort was made to give them souls or minds, or to define their emotions. Poets would as soon have thought of studying the morals of wild beasts. They looked at them with what Heine would call objective eyes, and never through the clouds of mysticism or superstition.

The legendary dragons and impossible beasts were direct descendants of the Vedic Ahi or Vritra, but there was as little ethical value attached to them as an English farmer would lay to the account of the fox who had carried off his geese. Myths which had the same beginning for Hellenes and Hindus, when distilled through Greek æsthetic ideals and Indian pessimism, acquired very different forms. The storm serpent of the Vedas multiplied in India into an interminable demonology. In Persia it became Angro-Mainyus, the arch-devil. In both these countries the personified conflict between light and darkness was treated subjectively, and represented a spiritual duel. If the evil spirits in the East tormented man’s body, the end they clamored for was his soul. But the demons of Greece, just as if they had been ordinary lions or reptiles, had no desire beyond catering to an insatiable physical appetite. While AngroMainyus might be put to flight by sacrifices of Homa and the recital of magical incantations, and while Hindu demons might be conquered by the twirls and leaps of devil-dancers, the Pytho and Minotaur succumbed only before the arrows and spears of Apollo and Theseus. A glance at the myths relating to these creatures will show them to be devoid of any intention to connect them with the moral welfare of man. The legend of the Pythian dragon, since the victor in it was a god, would seem the most likely to contain a spiritual meaning. But, with the exception of a few miracles which would not be added nowadays, the incidents in the story might be told of a nineteenth-century hero. Heracles strangled snakes in his very cradle, encountered and overcame the Cithæron and Nemean lions, and slew the Lernæan hydra and the Erymanthian boar. In his choice of hardships and labor in preference fo pleasure and ease, and in the devotion of his strength to the cause of others, the myth of Heracles teaches a fine moral lesson ; but his slaying of deadly animals could no more influence the laws of human virtue and vice than the shooting of a wolf in Russia could affect the fate of the Greek church. Perseus destroyed the Libyan dragon, Theseus the Minotaur, Œdipus the Sphinx, and Bellerophon the Chimæra, because heroes of legendary fame would have been only half heroes had they not met and conquered enemies of more than natural power, or else, according to comparative or Müller mythology, because their exploits were but different versions of the solar myth. But where Persians and Hindus made devils, Greeks introduced barbarians and monsters. The difference between the dangers in the path of an Odysseus and the snares surrounding a Saint Anthony is an admirable illustration of the distinction between the demons born of a religion occupied entirely with thought of another world, and those sprung from a cultus interested chiefly in life as it is. In the one case they use all their wiles to make a man sin ; whereas, in the other, they aim at overwhelming him with physical hardships.

It is when we consider those beings to whom the Greeks ascribed influence over man’s moral nature that the superiority of their mythological theory of sin and retribution is made apparent. At the dawning of moral consciousness, when men begin to question the origin and in-being of right and wrong, and really reflect upon the religion of which they find themselves possessed, they, like Omar Khayyam, send their souls, through the Invisible,

“Some letter of that after-life to spell.”

The mental bias of a people is indicated in the conclusions then formed, since they are arguing for themselves their own doctrines of the supernatural, and not simply accepting stories which have come to them from unknown sources. Men are ruled by fear before they feel the influence of a law of love, and hence the first reasoning as to the fate awaiting men after death has usually resulted in a belief in a hell and in the creation of devils, or beings who are no longer governed by animal impulses, but inspired by a keen sense of evil and a desire to make men as corrupt as themselves, and to suffer in consequence an eternity of misery. Like Milton’s fallen angels, ever to do evil is their sole delight. Eastern races, being naturally more cruel than the Western, have made cruelty the principal element in their doctrines of the soul’s destiny. All the wild luxuriance of Hindu imagination was let loose in the description of the numerous hells into which the wicked were plunged, and of the hideous, pitiless demons who presided over these torture-chambers. Christianity, unfortunately inheriting the Jewish vindictiveness, vented on dead sinners the bitterness which Hebrew rabbis had expended on living Goyim. The Greeks as a race were not cruel. They had none of the intolerance which seems, indeed, to be the special property of Semitic races, and which we see in the hatred the Mohammedan has for the Giaour, the Jew for the Gentile. From the words of the Rabbi Shimon ben Yochai, “ Kill the best of Gentiles and crush the head of the best of serpents,” the Greeks, whose cardinal virtue was moderation, would have recoiled in horror. They were therefore kept from developing any very elaborate system of future punishment. Though most men probably agreed with Euripides, that what came after this life lay

they still had their hell, which many of the poets described with great accuracy and vividness. There were streams of fire, blood, and tears in Hades, and the sufferings there destined for such offenders as Tantalus or Sisyphus were as substantial and as intense as those that awaited Hindu or Christian. But these horrors never became weapons in the hands of priests and moralists, as the sulphur and brimstone of hell did with the mediæval clergy. The latter treated the faithful like children, who could be forced into good behavior only by constant reminder of the whip ; their idea of discipline being not unlike that of the father in Wilhelm Meister, who thrashed his boy in order to insure good conduct, and not because of any misdemeanor. But in Greece men were held to be rational beings, who, knowing the value of right and wrong, must choose for themselves between them. Goodness born of fear did not agree with their ideals, and, human hopes being directed to a known present rather than to an unknown future, Tartarus and its torments were subjects never brought into great prominence. In the times of Homer it was believed that saints and sinners alike were doomed to Hades, and the visit of Odysseus to the underworld and his interview with the shades of Achilles and the other heroes made the fate awaiting the good seem as gloomy as that reserved for the wicked. Later, however, the doctrine generally accepted was that the souls of the saved wandered through the Isles of the Blest, while only the condemned were sent to Tartarus. The very idea of rewards and punishments necessitated the belief in beings who distributed them, and Hades soon had its rulers, judges, and minor officials. But none of these were actually devils. Pluto and Persephone were sovereigns of the regions under the earth, but they were gods as great and as worthy of worship as Zeus and Here. Minos, Eacus, and Rhadamanthus judged the damned, but they were never, like the French police as described by Canler, the cause of the deeds which brought men to their tribunal. The Greeks could as easily have imagined human judges forcing a man to commit a crime, that they might have the pleasure of sentencing him, as to represent the administrators of eternal justice plotting and planning the destruction of souls. There were demons who rushed to the battle-field and haunted all scenes of human carnage in order to feed upon the slain. There was a horrible Eurynomus, who devoured the flesh of dead men until only their bones were left. The gates of hell were guarded by the three-headed Cerberus, whose hunger was so great that the dead were provided with cakes of honey to appease his appetite. Charon ferried the shades across the awful Styx. But among all the creatures who lived in the kingdom of Pluto, there were none who, like Satan and his hosts, wandered through the world in order to snare men into sin. The temptation of souls and the undermining of an individual’s morality were ideas unknown to the Greeks. Not reveling in cruelty themselves, they could not conceive of a spiritual being deliberately and with malice prepense leading men to eternal damnation. In their demonology there was no suggestion of hellish glee over the loss of human souls, and there was none of that righteous triumph which the just are usually supposed to feel at the punishment of the wicked. The story of Lazarus and Dives as illustrated in mediæval pictures, where Lazarus is smiling with satisfaction at the sight of Dives’ soul tormented by demons, would have been incomprehensible to Hellenes.

Other religions taught that men sinned because devils tempted them ; the Greek, that the tormentors came because man had sinned. Gautama, before he could become Buddha, had to fight the armies of Mara, which surrounded him as he sat under the Bo tree. Christ was thrice tried by Satan before the latter was vanquished. It was hatred of purity and perfection, and a desire to destroy them, that led Buddhist and Christian devils to make their attacks. But in the Greek legend it was not until the hero Orestes had become a murderer that the dread Furies began to persecute him. They came as ministers of justice, and not as enemies of virtue. Beings like Nemesis, Ate, the Furies, and the Fates had many attributes which seem devilish, but they were not devils in the real sense of the word. The Greeks, with thorough appreciation of their true character, called them gods, and offered them divine honors. The Furies, or Erinnys, the “ bloodfaced, snake-encircled women,” are perhaps the most typical of all the Greek demon-like divinities. They were untiring in their persecutions once they began them, but their wild ferocity was never aroused save in the pursuit of those men who, by their own actions, deserved to suffer. In the song of the Eumenides, Æschylus makes them define the real nature of their fierce fury : —

“ Swift of foot t' avenge are we!
He whose hands are clean and pare,
Naught our wrath to dread hath he ;
Calm his cloudless days endure.
But the man that seeks to hide,
Like him, his gore-bedewèd hands,
Witnesses to them that died,
The blood avengers at his side,
The Furies’ troop forever stands ! ”

Because of the despair and anguish they awoke in the hearts of the guilty they seemed hateful, and therefore were represented with serpent-covered heads and blood-dripping eyes, or else as dog-visaged goddesses. But even when they appeared most vindictive, then they were really most merciful; for in punishing the wicked they were avenging the innocent, and therefore they were beloved and worshiped by those who cried for justice. This was why they were called the Eumenides, the “well-meaning;” and it explains the declaration of Æschylus that “ he who has not found them gentle knows not whence come the ills of life.” In the hymns of Orpheus they are addressed as “holy and pure; ” and Sophocles, in his Œdipus Coloneus, has described the grove of the Furies as a lovely place, where the bay, the olive, and the vine bloomed luxuriantly, where nightingales sang their sweetest songs, and all was quiet and peaceful. Their very frenzy insured justice and order for mortals. Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos, who brought good or evil to a man at his birth, and who pursued the transgressions of gods and men, were, like the Furies, guardians of the harmony of the universe. They made every deed bear its due result, and were at enmity with miracle working. They would have opposed any schemes of the gods to make grapes grow on thistles, or to let thorns choke the roses. Adrastia, who sat in the vestibule of Night, holding her brazen drumsticks and cymbals, at whose sound all things obeyed her laws, was another personification of Fate, or, as this power was understood by the Greeks, the law of divine order.

While the demon monsters were as purely physical enemies as storms and volcanoes, and the demon-like divinities were, notwithstanding the horror they inspired, man’s truest friends, the high gods of Olympus were the beings most capable of inflicting evil from moral, or perhaps immoral, motives. Many human miseries came from them, and at times they are closely allied in malevolence to Persian or Hebrew devils. But still there was no Loki in Olympus, no Satan in Hades. The extreme anthropomorphism of their deities and their own clear mental vision made it impossible for the Greeks to believe in one being solely evil in motives and actions, opponent of gods and enemy of man, whose mission was to counteract the beneficence of deities, and to drag mortals down to hell. But, on the other hand, divinity did not imply capacity for good alone. In the first place, it was boldly recognized that a god in bestowing a blessing on one man was by so doing overwhelming another perhaps equally innocent person with wretchedness. The rain that saves the farmer’s crops may blast the mariner’s hopes; the saviour must necessarily be the destroyer. And in the second place, gods and goddesses were represented as idealized men and women, whose impulses and passions were like those of mortals in all respects, save in strength, which was increased in proportion as Olympus exceeded Hellas in greatness. Divinity was nourished with nectar and ambrosia, and was immortal; humanity was fed with earthly food, and was mortal : beyond this there was but little difference. The Greeks themselves were quite ready to admit that gods were immortal men, and men mortal gods. To them the three Fates seemed real necessities, since capriciousness, tempered with but little sense of justice, was a characteristic of the high gods. They were all keenly sensitive to any personal insult or injury, while they had none of the self-command which men are forced to practice. They were quite as quick in imagining slights as they were in revenging them, and therefore their protection and enmity were both apt to be short-lived, and were not to be relied upon. Athene was the faithful ally of the Greeks throughout the Trojan war; but as soon as the contest was over she leagued with Poseidon against them, simply because, in the first moments of victory, they had neglected to pay her that attention which she felt to be her due. In the Iliad we are constantly reminded of the very human nature of the deities, who were warm partisans, but possessed very limited powers.

Zeus was the greatest of all the Olympian deities, the merciful father, the divine judge ; yet in the legend of Prometheus he appears as the creator of all earthly evils. Not because he was incensed at the sins or short-comings of mankind, but because his wrath was aroused at the sight of their increased happiness and prosperity. It may be that at first the story was that of a demon, who brought fire to earth in some malignant form ; but there is no proof of this, and in the legend as it has come to us, Prometheus is the demiurgus and Zeus is the devil. The laugh of the latter, when he sends woman — to him the greatest of all evils — to earth, is like that of a Satan exulting over the woe he has wrought. But his malignant glee is as isolated a fact in Greek mythology as the two human sacrifices offered by Themistocles at Salamis were in Athenian history. Here the queen of heaven became a fiend through jealousy. Her life with Zeus, with his constant infidelities, and her bitter resentment of them all, reads absurdly like the incidents of a French novel. But Hermes, the “ schemer, subtle beyond all belief,” manifested more than any other god the qualities usually credited to devils, while at the same time he was the most useful and devoted member of the Hellenic Pantheon. He was the patron of stealing and trickery, but he was also the messenger of the gods, janitor of Olympus, and guide of the souls of the dead to Hades. He was the hardest worked of all the deities, and it may have been the hard work that saved him from developing into an entirely evil being, as the Northern Loki did. If he stole the flocks of Phœbus Apollo, he could also win his friendship by

At one time he ran off with the garments of the bathing nymphs, or played tricks on Aphrodite and Zeus. But he alone of all the gods could face the dangers of the under-world to bring Persephone back to the sorrowing Demeter. It was Hermes who, through his persuasive entreaties, moved Priam to intercede with Achilles for the body of Hector, who gave the magic moly to Odysseus, and who armed Theseus with the winged sandals. In these myths more than any other we see how impossible it was for the Greeks to represent good and evil as distinct and antagonistic powers. But the incongruity in the divine character did not trouble the faith of the people, nor lessen their respect for their gods. Poets described the contentions in Olympus, and dramatists took for their themes the divine vengeance inflicted on such heroes as Pentheus, Hippolytus, or Heracles; and yet the sacrifices and rites of Dionysus, Aphrodite, and Athene, who in these legends appear no better than devils, continued to be celebrated with the same fervor and devotion. We are constantly puzzled by the sang froid with which highly cultured Greeks described the horrid crimes of the gods they worshiped. But it must be borne in mind that their own morality had no relation to that of the deities. They never made the character of an Apollo or an Aphrodite the standard upon which they based their own conduct, as Christians do with that of Christ. The morals of Hellas were very different from the morals of Olympus. The divinities were, as Heine says, “festival gods, around whom the world danced merrily, and who could only be praised at feasts.” That which the people were really honoring by their sacrifices and sacred games, their drama and bacchanalia, their graceful dances and garlands of flowers, their music and incense, was the idealization of the beautiful forces in nature. In Apollo the beauty of the human form was made divine, and in Aphrodite love became immortal; Dionysus and Demeter were personifications of the earth’s fertility. The true worship of the Greek was the worship of beauty. In the working of the natural elements, where other men found chaos, Hellenes saw order; and thus, though they would not have recommended the imitation of the divine character, they never questioned its fitness. In their myths, as in a painted picture, there were lights and shadows, and to them the shadow had its æsthetic value as well as the light. They understood, too, that what seems to us evil is often in reality a great good, and that the destructive forces are as essential as the productive. It was this belief that caused them to appoint the same deity to preside over two opposites. Thus Demeter was sometimes associated with the Furies, and known as Erinnys Demeter, as if to show that the barrenness of winter was to be loved as well as the fruitfulness of summer. If Apollo was the healer, he was also the destroyer. Athene was the patron of arts and war. Aphrodite was at times identified with Persephone, this union of love and death agreeing with the VenusLibitina of the Romans. The same union of extremes was found even in the minor mythological beings. “ Never,” writes Mr. J. E. Harrison, in his Myths of the Odyssey, “ perhaps so keenly as in the conception of the sirens are we made to feel how fluctuating, how almost antithetic, are the elements which go to form a Greek myth. The sinister demon of one moment is the gracious goddess of the next; the boundary between good and evil is a soft shadow to a people whose moral standard was in the main æsthetic.”

Gods who obtained their power only after a long-protracted struggle with Titans, in which, indeed, they were unsuccessful until assisted by strong allies; who shed tears, and whose influence ceased during their sleep ; who fought in earthly combats, and who, like mortals, could be wounded, — such gods were not omnipotent or omniscient. Just as Odysseus, though able to subdue the Cyclops, could not regulate his own destiny, so the gods, who could control men, were themselves in turn governed by a superior force. The Greeks felt that there was something greater than divinity and humanity, — something which caused the mortality of the one and the immortality of the other. Good and evil, pleasure and pain, as abstract powers were not the creations of Zeus and Apollo, though these gods could give their clients concrete forms of happiness or unhappiness. All forces, whether natural or supernatural, were based on the law of necessity, and weighed by the measures of cause and effect. Certain actions would inevitably be followed by certain results, and the seeds that were sown in the beginning of time would bring forth their own fruit, in spite of men and gods.

Hector cried when parting with Andromache. Thetis might beseech Zeus to hinder the success of the Greeks, but she would not ask him to prolong the life of Achilles, since fate decreed that if he stayed at Troy he must be the shortest-lived of mortals. Crœsus consulted the oracle at Delphi, only to be told that it was impossible even for a god to escape the lot appointed by fate. Notwithstanding their mysticism, the hymns of Orpheus clearly declare fate to be greater than gods and celestial spheres, and above even the primal Triad and the One. There was no need of a doctrine of original sin and a redeemer, or the creation of hordes of demons, for men who believed right and wrong to be innate in human nature, and order and disorder inherent in the elements. Physical phenomena and moral discord were not chance work of gods and devils, but were subject to a law which mortals could not altogether understand, and which, for want of a better name, might be called fate. Greek fatalism had nothing in common with Eastern pessimism or modern so-called Schopenhauerism, nor was it strengthened with the sternness of Presbyterian predestination. Belief in fate usually implies hopelessness in struggling against the ills of life, and a strong conviction that misery must exceed pleasure. To the Greeks it meant confidence in the supremacy of order and harmony, for it was the power which insured the symmetrical sequence of events. Hindu philosophers proclaimed life to be an evil, and therefore tried to free themselves from the chains of the senses by inflicting suffering upon their bodies. But penance and humiliation meant nothing to the Greeks, who held that their lives were ruled by a law against which their resistance would have been useless. If trouble and sin must be, they felt there was no true wisdom in thinking only of them, when the world was still beautiful and human pleasures were sweet: —

The analysis of evil in Greek mythology bears an important relation to the science of ethics. It supplies a substantial proof to the modern argument that morality per se is a growth apart from religion, though the two have often seemed identical. In Greece it may be said that morality grew in spite of religion. The vilest actions and lowest passions were attributed to the gods ; and when we remember the peculiar rites held in honor of Hermes, Dionysus, or Aphrodite, we must confess that, while art would have lost immeasurably had the early myths been forgotten, morality might have gained thereby. If the conception of divinity was purified, and the sense of right and wrong made more definite, it was not owing to priest, ritual, or dogma, but because of philosophers, poets, and artists. It was no learned Brahman or Angelic Doctor who declared Zeus to be the creator of heaven and earth, the god of justice, the omnipotent, the lord of all. These were the words of Æschylus, of Pindar, of Therpander; and Phidias was the divinely inspired, who, by his chisel, taught the people that the qualities which are truly godlike are strength, wisdom,and benevolence. The fact that it is impossible to draw a distinct line of separation between the good and evil powers in their mythology gives us the key to Greek culture. Their religion was never more than a collection of traditions. Mystics introduced strange doctrines from Asia and Egypt, endeavoring to turn men’s thoughts to the future life, and philosophers threw doubts upon the truth of old myths and beliefs. But the number of the initiated was never very large, and schools of philosophy were formed only to give way to new ones. The popular religion, however, still lived on ; it was dear to the people, because its legends of gods and goddesses were inextricably blended with the early history of Hellas. All the thoughts and hopes of the Greeks were centred upon Hellas and upon the present. Their religious philosophy may be summed up in this maxim of Theognis, which, to show that the sentiment received divine sanction, was inscribed in the temple of Leto, at Delos : “ That which is most just is most noble; health most preferable; but the gaining the object of one’s desires is the most pleasant feeling.” Now men who love the world in which they live will contribute more to its improvement than those who despise it. The reason of the perfection of Greek art and literature, and of the joyousness and serenity of Hellenes as a race, was their honest, earnest love of life. According to Spinoza, “ the free man thinks of nothing so little as of death, and his wisdom is a meditation not of death, but of life.” If this be true, then the Greeks alone attained perfect wisdom and freedom.

Elizabeth Robins.