Part 6

Although we have no reason to believe that there was formal teaching at Eleusis, we have abundant evidence of the convictions of the initiates. They clearly enjoyed peace of mind and happiness, and they believed that in the future life their blessedness would be secure, and that they could dance in the sacred dance, while the uninitiate would be wretched. As the Homeric hymn to Demeter promised: “Blessed is he among mortal men who has seen these rites.”[88] And Pindar, at the beginning of the fifth century, declared: “Happy he who has seen these things, and then goes beneath the earth. For he knows the end of life and its Zeus-given beginning.”[89] Sophocles too says: “Thrice blessed are they who have seen these rites and then go to the house of Hades, for they alone have life there; but all others have only woe.”[90] In the Frogs of Aristophanes the chorus of mystae sing: “For we alone have a sun and a holy light, we who were initiated and who live toward friends and strangers with reverence towards the gods.”[91] And finally I would offer you the evidence of an inscription set up in the third century of our era by an Eleusinian hierophant: “Verily glorious is that mystery vouchsafed by the blessed gods, for death is no ill for mortals, but rather a good.”[92]

There were branches of the Eleusinian mysteries established in the Peloponnesus, of which that at Andania in Messenia is best known to us through a long inscription happily preserved.[93] But it never rivalled Eleusis. Of the other mysteries dating from an early period, those of Samothrace were most important and influential, being second only to the Eleusinian. Herodotus tells us that the Samothracians got these mysteries from the Pelasgians; among modern scholars it has been the fashion to regard the two male divinities there worshipped, the Kabeiroi, as Phoenician in origin; but whatever the source from which they sprang, in the period in which they are known to us neither the gods nor the mysteries betray foreign elements. With the Kabeiroi were associated Demeter and Kore, and in general the mysteries seem to have resembled those of Eleusis. As elsewhere the initiates were of two grades, mystae and epoptae; there were “things done” and “things said,” and the assurance of safety here and hereafter was equally potent. Branches were established, notably in Thebes, as early as the middle of the sixth century B.C.

You will observe that the mysteries did not interfere in any sense with a faith in the many gods of popular belief or with their worship. We should also note that here no less than in Orphism ecclesiastical exclusiveness was evident: only those who had been initiated and had partaken of the sacraments could hope for salvation. Yet by the end of the fifth century the Eleusinian Mysteries had gained a moral significance, as is shown by the passage from the Frogs of Aristophanes quoted just now. A few years later Andocides in his speech On the Mysteries appealed to his jurors, reminding them that the purpose of their initiation was that they might punish the impious and save those who had done no wrong.[94] Still there was undoubtedly abundant warrant for the sarcastic joke of Diogenes who asked: “Shall the robber Pataecion have a better lot after death than Epaminondas, just because he has been initiated?”[95]

We have now considered three manifestations of the mysticism which became prominent in the sixth century before our era—Orphism, Pythagoreanism, and the Greater Mysteries. We have seen how a new religious sense arose which turned men’s thoughts toward the next world and future happiness. This happiness the Orphics and Pythagoreans endeavored to secure by a prescribed mode of life, by ceremonial purifications, and by sacraments. The Mysteries likewise offered assurance through initiation and participation in their sacred ritual. In every case the devotees were inspired with confident hope, not by reason, but by ceremonies and emotional experiences. Philosophy was not yet united with religion.

FOOTNOTES:

[71] _Il._ 23, 170-176.

[72] _Od._ II, 24-36.

[73] Herod. 4, 94 ff.

[74] _Frg._ 7 A.

[75] _Frg._ 46 A.

[76] _Frg._ 115.

[77] _Frg._ 14.

[78] _Frg._ 154 A.

[79] _Frg._ 223 A.

[80] _Frg._ 117.

[81] _Frg._ 115.

[82] _Or._ 18.

[83] Clem. _Protrep._ p. 12 P.

[84] _Ibid._ p. 18 P.

[85] Ath. XI, 93, p. 496: Proclus ad Plat. _Tim._ p. 293 C. It is not certain that the notices in Athenaeus and in Proclus refer to the same rite, but I have ventured so to interpret them.

[86] Hippol. _Philos._ p. 115 M.

[87] _Frg._ 45 Rose.

[88] 480 f.

[89] _Frg._ 137.

[90] _Frg._ 753.

[91] 454 ff.

[92] _Eph. Arch._ III (1883), p. 81, 8.

[93] Ditt. _Syll._^2, 653.

[94] _De mys._ 31.

[95] Plut. _de aud. poet._ 21 F.

III

RELIGION IN THE POETS OF THE SIXTH AND FIFTH CENTURIES B.C.

In the preceding lecture we considered together various manifestations of the mystic tendencies which developed in Greece during the seventh and sixth centuries B.C. Now we must turn back and ask what evidence we have from the poets of these centuries as to the course of morality and religion. To the epic poetry of Homer and the didactic verse of Hesiod succeeded the elegiac, iambic, and melic poets. The individualism of the age, the spirit of reflection, political changes, personal ambitions and passions are all mirrored in their verses. When we summon them as witnesses to their day, we must remember that the evidence they can offer is only incidental and frequently partial; that it reflects the temper of the audience as well as the views of the poet. In this fact, indeed, lies our chief warrant for consulting them, for while poets may be leaders in thought far in advance of their time, a contemporary hearing is secured by them only when their hearers sympathize with the ideas which they express. Again it must be borne in mind that we have for the most part only fragments of the poetry of this time, preserved by quotations, and that we cannot therefore form adequate judgments of the whole.

When, however, we examine the scanty remains that we possess, we find that on the whole there is little evidence of progress in morality and religion beyond Homer and Hesiod. The concepts of the gods are essentially the Homeric, except that Zeus plays a larger part in the divine economy than in Homer. In the Iliad and Odyssey, as we have seen, he is often thwarted and outwitted by the other gods, some of whom seem at times almost on an equality with him. But in the poets of the seventh and sixth centuries the will of Zeus is unquestionably supreme. No god hopes to oppose him successfully; all the rest play minor rôles. Indeed, it is not too much to say that we have here a developed sense of unity in the world, although the poets of this time did not by any means reach the position of the philosophers or attain to any real pantheism. Yet an advance is made: not only is Zeus supreme, but Zeus and Fate are now more closely identified, so that there is no conflict between them, such as we noticed in the Homeric poems.

Of all the poetry that has been preserved to us from the sixth century the elegiac verses which have been handed down under the name of Theognis show most reflection. The poet himself was an aristocrat of Megara, who about the middle of the century was driven into exile by the violent struggles between the aristocratic and the democratic

## parties. Much of the verse which we have is addressed to a youth,

Cyrnus, and is of a didactic or gnomic character. The poet undertakes to teach his young friend conduct in life, so that the verses consist largely of rules for living adapted to various situations and of a universal nature. Although it is probably true that much of what passes under the name of Theognis was not written by him, on the whole the tenor of the verses is such that we may use them with a good deal of confidence to illustrate the thought and the spirit of his age. Xenophon in commenting on this poet but slightly exaggerated the truth when he said that he was concerned with nothing else but virtue and wickedness, and that his poetry is a treatise on man, just as if a horse-fancier should write a treatise on horses.[96]

Theognis, like Homer, teaches that it is from the gods that all things come, both good and evil. He declares that no mortal man can be either wealthy or poor, base or good, apart from divinity. He bids his young friend pray to the gods, for they have all power and without them are no blessings or misfortunes to men.[97] A similar view is expressed by Simonides who insists that no one, neither state nor mortal man, has ever attained to virtue without the gods;[98] likewise by Archilochus, who in verses, imitated by Horace centuries later, exhorts his hearer to trust fully to the gods, and reminds him that oftentimes the gods set upright men who as a result of misfortune are prostrate on the black earth, and oftentimes they overthrow those who are very prosperous.[99] And again he declares that from Zeus come all things to mortals, and that no one should be surprised at any marvel which Zeus brings to pass.[100] In fact, from Homer on, the poets regard Zeus and the other gods as the source of all things, both good and evil. It is only later that the doctrine of man’s complete responsibility for his sin supplants this earlier view.

It was natural that Theognis and his contemporaries should regard the lot of man with a pessimism exceeding that of Homer. As they looked about them they saw evil everywhere, the good afflicted, the wicked prosperous. They were oppressed by the weakness of humanity, so that their verses with regard to man and his lot are gloomy indeed—so much so that in one passage Theognis declares that in reality no mortal man on whom the sun shines is truly happy. Again he holds that man can have no foresight into the future, for it is hardest of all, he says, to learn the end of a thing as yet unaccomplished, to know how god will bring that to pass; a mist is stretched before men’s eyes, and there is no way for mortals to test and try the outcome of the future.[101] The poet feels a deep despair, when he reflects that no knowledge or foresight for mortals is possible, but the gods accomplish everything according to their will; and because there is little hope of implanting virtue in men, then it were better not to be born at all and never to have seen the bright rays of the sun. But since this may not be, then he is most fortunate who enters Hades most quickly, and has a high mound of earth heaped over him.[102] Still there are other passages which show that man’s case was not considered wholly hopeless. There is an appeal to self-pride, an expression of the view that poverty is the test of a man, that has a tonic sound. The poet says that poverty reveals the worthless man and the superior whenever need of money comes on them, for the mind of the good man, whose thought is ever upright in his heart, thinks only of justice.[103] In another place he assures his young friend that the good man ever has his wit with him, and his courage, whether he be in adversity or in good fortune. But if a god gives abundance and riches to a base creature, then he in his folly cannot restrain his baseness.[104] Again the poet exhorts his own soul: “Endure, my soul, although thou hast suffered unendurable things at the hands of the wicked”; he bids it not be distressed or angry over misfortune and disaster, nor to blame friends or cheer enemies by failure: “For mortal man may not easily escape the fated gifts of the gods, though he dive into the very depth of the purple sea, or even when the dark shadow of Tartarus holds him.”[105] Thus we see that the poet, in spite of his pessimism and of his realization of the hardship and injustice in the world, still urged his young friend to face it in the same spirit in which the later Stoics like Marcus Aurelius exhorted themselves to endure.

Although in the world as seen by the poets of the sixth century Zeus is supreme and the gods are the source of all things for mortals, their rule nevertheless is based on justice, which the gods love and which is their chief attribute. Opposed to justice is insolence (ὓβρις), which they detest and which they wish to punish. Archilochus addresses Father Zeus, declaring that his is the rule of heaven, and that he oversees all the works of man, both those which are base and those which are lawful, and has a care even for insolence and justice among wild beasts.[106] The statesman Solon assures the Athenians that their city will never come to ruin contrary to the will and intention of Zeus and the immortal gods; that ruin only can be brought upon the city by the citizens themselves, by the unjust spirit of the leaders of the people, whose mighty insolence will bring great suffering upon them. Like Aeschylus Solon believes and teaches that insolence must fail in the end and that Justice, who in silence knows all things both present and future, will recompense completely in due season.[107] In another passage Solon dwells on the fact that the riches which are sought with insolence bring doom quickly, and in striking verses compares the beginning of destruction with the spark which springs from a little fire, slight at first, but finally consuming all; even so are the results of insolence that fall upon mortals; for Zeus sees the end of all things: as the wind suddenly in the springtime quickly scatters the clouds, stirs up the sea, and works destruction over the grainbearing earth, reaching to very heaven, the steep home of the gods, and makes the bright sky appear again, and the brilliant sun shine far over the rich earth, so that there are no longer any clouds to be seen; even so is the vengeance that comes from Zeus. Zeus is not quick to anger over each fault like mortal man, but whoever has a wicked heart never escapes his notice, but in the end is utterly destroyed.[108] It would be possible to cite similar passages from other poets which show a deepening of that sense of the inevitableness of punishment which was first expressed in Hesiod.

Yet the problems of evil and of the justice of the gods were not satisfactorily solved for Theognis and his contemporaries. In two striking passages he criticizes Zeus, saying first: “Dear Zeus, I wonder at thee, for thou rulest over all things, having thrice great honor and great power, and thou knowest well the mind and will of each man, and thy own power is supreme over all, O King. How is it, then, son of Cronos, that thy mind endures to keep wicked men and the just subject to the same lot? Whether the mind of the one be turned to prudence or of the other, who trusts in unjust action, to insolence, there is no distinction made by god or mortals; nor is there any road which one may travel and please the gods.”[109] In the second passage his reproach is the keener from the form of its expression: “Father Zeus, would that it might be the will of the gods that insolence be the pleasure of the wicked, and would that it might be their pleasure, that whoever contriveth wicked deeds in heart and thought, having no regard for the gods, should pay for his wickedness himself; and the folly of the father not harm the children thereafter; and would that the children of an unjust father, who themselves have just purposes and regard for thy wrath, Son of Cronos, they who from childhood love justice along with their fellow citizens, might not pay for the insolence of their sires. I would that such might be the will of the blessed gods. But as it is, the man who does evil escapes, and another then bears the evil. How then is this just, King of the Immortals, that a man who has no part in unjust deeds should himself be treated unjustly?”[110] Here we have not only a recognition of the fact that the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children even to the third and fourth generations—a truth which Solon had earlier enunciated,[111]—but also a protest against the injustice of it.

These are some of the conflicting expressions on morality, justice, and religion, which we find among the fragments of these early poets. The contradictions which they show need not surprise us, for we are drawing, as I have already said, from mere fragments written on various themes and for different occasions; so the record is inevitably imperfect. Nor must we suppose that the poets of this time had arrived at any clearer conceptions with regard to these fundamental questions than thinkers of a later age; the problem of evil, the justice of the divine economy, the prosperity of the wicked and the sufferings of the good are matters which still baffle men as they did more than twenty-five centuries ago.

But let us now turn to the poets of the fifth century, above all to Pindar, Aeschylus, and Sophocles, of whose works we have considerable portions. These were poets whose position and genius made them the truest witnesses to the highest thoughts of Greece, and especially of Athens in that glorious period of her supremacy from the time of the Persian Wars through the Periclean age. The poetry of Pindar and of the tragedians was by its very nature connected with the service of the gods. The former wrote his odes to the victors who had won renown at the great national festivals of Zeus, Apollo, and Poseidon, or composed his hymns and paeans in honor of the divinities. The tragedians produced their plays for performance at the great festival of Dionysus. And yet we must be cautious here, as everywhere, since we are not always justified in attributing to the poet the sentiments which he puts into the mouths of his speakers. The tragedian’s purpose was first of all artistic. While it is true that his own beliefs inevitably colored and tempered his work, still he never became a preacher. He dealt with traditional material, which he might modify somewhat, but in large measure his themes were determined for him. Yet there are many passages both in choral songs and in single speeches which certainly reflect the poet’s own thought or his interpretation of the views held by his audience. The very strength of personality which Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides possessed made it impossible that they should not voice their own conceptions, and that too without violence to their poetic purpose. Pindar’s work lay in different fields, but he no less than the tragedians helped to interpret and mould the moral and religious sentiments of his audience.

Pindar was born about 522 B.C. of a noble family near Thebes in Boeotia; but he belonged to all Greece. He wrote in the first half of the fifth century when the influence of the preceding century was still strong upon men’s minds, and he also shared the great stimulus which their country’s victory over the Persians imparted to the Greeks. Of his personal devotion to the gods we have abundant evidence. He spent a part of his fortune in dedications at Thebes. There in the second century of our era the traveller Pausanias saw three statues which the poet had set up, one in honor of Apollo, another to Hermes, and a third, by the famous sculptor Calamis, which stood in the shrine of Zeus Ammon. To the Asiatic Cybele and to the new Arcadian Pan Pindar erected a shrine before his own door; there, as he himself tells us, the Theban maidens came by night and sang their hymns.[112]

Pindar shows throughout the pervasive influence of Homer, both in his conception of the gods and in his style as well. He makes no break with the Homeric anthropomorphism, and his divinities are subject to the needs and desires of mortals; but his concept is a noble one, for his gods are mighty and permanent, while men are transitory and weak: “One is the race of men and of gods; from one mother we have the breath of life. Yet in power we are wholly diverse: for man is nothing, but the brazen heaven abides, a home ever unshaken. Still we resemble somewhat the immortals either in lofty mind or in nature; yet we know not in the day or in the night what course fate has marked out for us to run.”[113]

The power and the knowledge of the gods are in fact complete and perfect; they are not the limited creatures of the Homeric pantheon. With them resides all power, so that they easily bring things to pass beyond man’s expectation. Their might may cause man’s wonder, but “nothing ever appears to be incredible”;[114] and in his second Pythian Ode the poet writes: “God bringeth every end to pass according to his desires. He overtaketh even the winged eagle and passeth the dolphin in the sea; and he bringeth low many a proud man, granting to others glory that grows not old.”[115] And in the ninth Pythian Ode he addresses Apollo thus: “Thou who knowest the final destiny of all things and all the paths thereto; all the leaves that the earth sends up in the spring, and all the sands whirled by the waves in sea and rivers and by the blasts of the winds; thou seest well the future and whence it shall come to pass.”[116]

Pindar’s gods are thus all-wise and all-powerful. At times he shows a certain tendency toward pantheism, for he speaks of god or divinity in a general sense, as if his mind conceived the divine nature to be one, so that the divinities were no longer several gods, but, as it were, bound together in a common divine unity. But we must not deceive ourselves into thinking that this pantheistic tendency was at all clearly developed in Pindar, or that he broke with polytheism. Rather he seems to have conceived of divinity as something which presents itself in many persons, the varied gods of the traditional pantheon. If we accept as genuine the fragment preserved by Clement of Alexandria,[117] in which the poet asks, “What is God?” and answers “The all,” we can hardly think that this pantheistic definition means more than the universal cause; unless indeed it resulted from the Orphic pantheism. But whatever Pindar’s views as to the unity of the divine, his teachings as to the gods’ power are clear. He warns men that they cannot hope to avoid the gods’ watchful eyes: “For if man expects to escape god’s notice when he does aught, he is mistaken.”[118] Moreover, Pindar teaches that the gods, though the givers of both good and evil to men, like Homer’s divinities, are nevertheless just and truthful beings who reward the righteous and reverent and punish the wicked: “The bliss of men who feel reverence lives longer, but he who associates with wicked purposes prospers not forever.”[119]