THE RELIGIOUS THOUGHT
OF THE GREEKS

FROM HOMER TO THE TRIUMPH
OF CHRISTIANITY

BY
CLIFFORD HERSCHEL MOORE

PROFESSOR OF LATIN IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY

CAMBRIDGE
HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS

LONDON: HUMPHREY MILFORD
Oxford University Press

1916

COPYRIGHT, 1916
HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS

First impression issued November, 1916
Second impression issued December, 1916

TO MY WIFE

PREFACE

In this book eight lectures given before the Lowell Institute in Boston during the late autumn of 1914 are combined with material drawn from a course of lectures delivered the previous spring before the Western Colleges with which Harvard University maintains an annual exchange—Beloit, Carleton, Colorado, Grinnell, and Knox. The lecture form has been kept, even at the cost of occasional repetition.

The purpose of these lectures is to present within a moderate compass an historical account of the progress of Greek religious thought through something over a thousand years. No attempt has been made to give a general treatment of Greek religion, or to deal with pre-Hellenic origins, with religious antiquities, or with mythology. The discussions are confined rather to the Greeks’ ideas about the nature of the gods, and to their concepts of the relations between gods and men and of men’s obligations toward the divine. The lectures therefore deal with the higher ranges of Greek thought and at times have much to do with philosophy and theology.

Yet I have felt free to interpret my subject liberally, and, so far as space allowed, I have touched on whatever seemed to me most significant. Ethics has been included without hesitation, for the Greeks themselves, certainly from the fifth century b.c., regarded morals as closely connected with religion. A treatment of the oriental religions seemed desirable, since the first two centuries and a half of our era cannot be understood if these religions are left out of account. Still more necessary was it to include Christianity. In my handling of this I have discussed the teachings of Jesus and of Paul with comparative fullness, in order to set forth clearly the material which later under the influence of secular thought was transformed into a philosophic system. Origen and Plotinus represent the culmination of Greek religious philosophy.

Such a book as this can be nothing more than a sketch; in it the scholar will miss many topics which might well have been included. Of such omissions I am fully conscious; but limitations of subject and of space forced me to select those themes which seemed most significant in the development of the religious ideas of the ancient world.

It is not possible for me to acknowledge all my obligations to others. I wish, however, to express here my gratitude to Professor C. P. Parker, who has shared his knowledge of Plato with me; to Professor J. H. Ropes, who has helped me on many points in my last two lectures, where I especially needed an expert’s aid; and to Professor C. N. Jackson, who has read the entire book in manuscript and by his learning and judgment has made me his constant debtor. The criticism which these friends have given me has been of the greatest assistance even when I could not accept their views; and none of them is responsible for my statements.

The translations of Aeschylus are by A. S. Way, Macmillan, 1906-08; those of Euripides are from the same skilled hand, in the Loeb Classical Library, Heinemann, 1912; for Sophocles I have drawn on the version by Lewis Campbell, Kegan Paul, Trench and Company, 1883; and for Thucydides and Plato I have used the classic renderings of Jowett with slight modifications in one or two passages.

In an appendix will be found selected bibliographies for each lecture. To these lists I have admitted, with one or two exceptions, only such books as I have found useful from actual experience; and few articles in periodicals have been named.

Clifford Herschel Moore.

Cambridge, Mass.
August 1, 1916.

CONTENTS

THE RELIGIOUS THOUGHT
OF THE GREEKS

I
HOMER AND HESIOD

“Homer and Hesiod created the generations of the gods for the Greeks; they gave the divinities their names, assigned to them their prerogatives and functions, and made their forms known.” So Herodotus describes the service of these poets to the centuries which followed them.[1] But the modern historian of Greek religion cannot accept the statement of the father of history as wholly satisfactory; he knows that the excavations of the last forty years have revealed to us civilizations of the third and second millenia before Christ, the Minoan and Mycenaean cultures, of which the historical Greeks were hardly conscious, but which nevertheless made large contributions to religion in the period after Homer. Yet at the most the Mycenaean and Minoan Ages were for the Greek of the sixth and fifth centuries only a kind of dim background for the remote history of his race. The Homeric poems represented for him the earliest stage of Hellenic social life and religion. We are justified, then, in taking the Iliad and Odyssey as starting points in our present considerations. These matchless epics cast an ineffable spell over the imaginations of the Greeks themselves and influenced religion hardly less than literature.

It is obvious that in this course of lectures we cannot consider together all the multitudinous phases of Greek religion: it will be impossible to discuss those large primitive elements in the practices and beliefs of the ancient Greek folk which are so attractive to many students of religion today, for these things were, by and large, only survivals from a ruder past and did not contribute to the religious progress from age to age; nor can we rehearse the details of worship, or review all the varieties of religious belief which we find in different places and in successive centuries; still less can we concern ourselves with mythology. Alluring as these things are they do not concern our present purpose. I shall invite you rather to trace with me the development of Greek religious thought through something over a thousand years, from the period of the Homeric poems to the triumph of Christianity. In such a survey we must be occupied for the most part with the larger movements and the higher ranges of Greek thought, with the advance which was made from century to century; and we shall try to see how each stage of religious development came to fruition in the next period. To accomplish this purpose we must take into due account the social, economic, and political changes in the Greek world which influenced the course of Hellenic thinking. Ultimately, if our study is successful, we shall have discovered in some measure, I trust, what permanent contributions the Greeks made to our own religious ideas. With these things in mind, therefore, let us return to the Homeric Poems.

Whatever the date at which the Iliad and the Odyssey received their final form, the common view that they belong to a period somewhere between 850 and 700 b.c. is substantially correct. They represent the culmination of a long period of poetic development and picture so to speak on one canvas scenes and deeds from many centuries. Yet the composite life is wrought by poetic art into one splendid whole, so that the ordinary reader, in antiquity as today, was unconscious of the variety and contradictions in the poems; only the analytic mind of the scholar detects the traces of the varied materials which the epic poet made his own. It is important that we should realize the fact that the Homeric poems made the impression of a consistent unity upon the popular mind in antiquity, for the influence of these epics through the recitations of rhapsodes at great public festivals and through their use in school was enormous. The statement of Herodotus, with which I began, was very largely true.

These poems were composed to be recited at the courts of princes in Ionia for the entertainment of the nobles at the banquet or after the feast was over. This purpose naturally influenced the poet in depicting life and religion, for the incidents chosen, the adventures recounted, all the life represented, of necessity had to be consonant with the interests and life of the bard’s audience. His lays were for the ears of men who had not yet lost the consciousness that they were in a new land, who knew that they were living in stirring times, and who feeling the spirit of adventure still fresh within them responded joyously to tales of heroic combat. This fact explains in part why it is that we find so little that is primitive or savage in Homer. Such elements were deliberately left out by the bard as unsuited to his audience; he chose to neglect them, not because of any antagonism toward them, but because they did not agree with his artistic aim. Again, the antiquity of the themes, even at the time of composition, made a freedom and picturesqueness of treatment possible, which a narrative of contemporaneous events could never have possessed. Furthermore since the peoples of Ionia, on migrating from the mainland of Greece, had left behind their sacred places and had carried with them their gods, severed from their ancient homes, the epic poet could treat religion with a liberty and could exercise a freedom of selection among the divinities, could use his poetic imagination to modify forms and to emphasize certain attributes, as he never could have done if singing for a people long resident in an ancient home where their gods had been localized and fixed in character time out of mind. A poet singing of Hera in the Argolid would have found himself bound by the traditions of the Heraeum where the goddess had been domiciled from prehistoric time, but the Homeric bard in Ionia was under no such limitation.

Therefore we find that the Iliad and Odyssey present to us a picture of life and religion composed of selected elements and so universalized that it was understood everywhere and at all later times. Exactly as the Homeric dialect, probably never spoken in any place or period, was universally comprehended, so the contents of the poems seemed nothing strange or difficult to audiences in the remotest parts of the Greek world; in the Greek colonies in Sicily, along the western shores of the Mediterranean, or on the borders of the Black Sea, the epic tales were as easily understood as at Delos, Olympia, or Athens.

Yet we have no warrant for using the Homeric poems as sources for the full history of Greek religion in the ninth and eighth centuries b.c. We must remember that the epic bard was least of all composing systematic treatises about religion; on the contrary he was narrating heroic tales, such as the wrath of Achilles, the death of Hector and the ransoming of his body, and the return of Odysseus; he introduced the gods solely as mighty actors in the struggles and adventures of his mortal heroes. The divinities who play their parts in the Iliad, for example, were summoned, like the Achaean princes, so to speak, from many places to take part in the combat before Troy, and in the Odyssey only those gods appear who are required by the story. In short, the poet used the gods and religion exactly as he used his other materials, drawing from a great stock of beliefs and practices that which suited his tale, disregarding all the rest, and troubling little about consistency. Homer’s aim, like that of most poets, was primarily artistic, and least of all didactic.

Furthermore every reader of the Homeric epics is struck by the freshness of the treatment; indeed, scholars of an earlier day thought that the Iliad and the Odyssey were the first fruits of European poetic inspiration. Today we know that Homer represents the culmination of a long fine of bards, that his artistry was won by effort and was not simply the incredible inspiration of one untaught; but this knowledge does not diminish in the slightest degree our appreciation of the freshness and directness of treatment which that art realized. These qualities are obtained in part by a freedom from reflection, by a lack of self-consciousness in the poems. They do not deal with the origin of the gods, they present no theogonies, any more than they concern themselves with the descent of man. It is true that Zeus is the son of Cronos, as Hera is the daughter of Cronos and Rhea, and that it is said that Zeus drove Cronos beneath the earth and sea, but we have no account of the rule of the elder gods or of the struggle by which Zeus won his place. For the epic poet the world of gods, men, and nature simply is; he does not indulge in speculation himself nor does he make his heroes debate questions of whence or whither; the living present with its actions, its struggles, victories, and defeats filled the compass of the poet’s thought and of his audience’s desire.

The Iliad and the Odyssey then must not be considered as treatises or as reflective and philosophical works. This elementary point must be emphasized here, for there is always danger of losing the true perspective when we are considering a single theme. The poems derive their great significance for the history of Greek religion from the fact that through recitations they became the chief popular literature of Greece, and that from the sixth century they were the basis of education, as I have already said. Thus they were universally known and universally influential; they created a common Olympic religion beside the local religions; and through the individualities which they gave the gods they fixed the types which poets were to recall and which artists were to embody in marble or in wood, ivory, and gold at the centers of the Greek world.

With these facts in mind we may ask what are the nature and characteristics of the gods in Homer. Excavations have shown us that the Mycenaean Age had already passed beyond the ruder stages and had conceived some at least of its divinities in anthropomorphic fashion. In Homer the gods are frankly made in man’s image. They are beings larger, wiser, and stronger than mortals; they have a superhuman but not complete control over nature and mankind. Their chief preëminence over man lies in this superior power and in the possession of immortality as well as of that eternal youth and beauty which is appropriate to immortals. In their veins flows a divine ichor instead of blood; their food and drink are not the bread and wine which mortals need. Yet for all this they are hardly more independent of physical needs than men: they must sleep and eat, and they need the light of the sun. The passions hold sway over them to such an extent that the morality of the gods, of Zeus in particular, is distinctly inferior to that of mortal princes. The divinities can suffer pain and indignities. Diomedes was able to wound both Aphrodite and Ares, whereat the valiant god of war bawled out as loud, the poet says, “as nine or ten thousand men shout in battle,” and fled into the broad heaven to appeal to Zeus.[2] In the twenty-first book of the Iliad Athena hits Ares in the neck with a large boundary stone and overthrows him, adding insult to injury by laughing merrily at the god’s discomfiture; then when Aphrodite would lead him off groaning, Athena hurries after and with a blow of her stout hand lays goddess and god prostrate on the ground.[3] Nor are the gods more just and honorable than men; they are moved by caprice; and their godhead does not prevent their quarreling or making up their differences in very human fashion, as the domestic jar between Zeus and Hera in the first book of the Iliad shows.[4]

Furthermore the Homeric gods are neither omniscient nor omnipotent. “The gods know all things” is a pious tribute of the poet, but the narrative shows it to be untrue. In the thirteenth book of the Iliad, when Zeus is gazing off into Thrace he fails to notice that Poseidon enters the battle on the plain immediately below him.[5] In the fifth book of the Odyssey the tables are turned in a sense, for Poseidon finds that during his absence among the Ethiopians the Olympians have taken action favorable to Odysseus, whose return the god of the sea would fain prevent.[6] For nine years Thetis and Eurynome alone among the gods knew where Hephaestus was concealed: when he had been thrown from heaven by his mother in shame for his lameness, they hid him in a grotto where the sound of the stream of Oceanus drowned the noise of his smithy.[7] Apollo arrives too late to save Rhesus from his fate;[8] and we are told that in the previous generation Ares was imprisoned by the giants Otus and Ephialtes in a bronze jar, like an Oriental jinn, for thirteen months. There he had perished if it had not been for the friendly aid of Hermes who stole him from his prison.[9] The gods at times thwart one another’s purposes, and, as we have seen, they may even be wounded or frightened like human beings.[10] In such ways as these do the Homeric divinities show their limitations.

Not only can the gods thwart one another, but they are all at times subject to Fate or Destiny, which, although vaguely conceived by the poet, is none the less inexorable. It seems usually to be an impersonal power, although sometimes it is identified with the will of an indefinite god (δαἰμονος αἶσα) or with that of Zeus himself (Διὸς αἶσα). It was fated that Sarpedon, the son of Zeus, should die, and Zeus, in spite of his grief, yielded him up to his doom, not because he could not have opposed Fate successfully, but because he feared that other divinities would wish to save their children if he saved his.[11] Yet in the Odyssey Athena disguised as Mentor declares to Telemachus that not even the gods can save a man they love whenever the fatal doom of death lays hold on him.[12] So naturally inconsistent is the poet, for in his day men had not reached the stage where they could form any adequate notion of unity in the world. Fate therefore is not conceived to be an inexorable power which is constantly operative, as we find it represented at a later time among the Greeks and among the Romans, notably in Virgil.

At times we find a more or less fatalistic view of life, Fate being conceived as a destiny fixed at birth, for the notion that the thread of life was spun already existed. So Hecuba, wailing for her son, cries that mighty Fate spun Hector’s doom at the hour she gave him birth;[13] and Alcinous declares that under Phaeacian escort Odysseus shall reach his home, but that there he will suffer all that Fate and the cruel spinsters spun for him when his mother bore him.[14] This fatalism is most clearly expressed in passages such as that where Odysseus on Circe’s isle cheers his companions by reminding them that they shall not enter the house of Hades until their fated day shall come,[15] and especially in those lines in which Hector comforts his wife Andromache who would have restrained his impetuous desire for battle:[16] “My good wife, grieve not overmuch for me in thy heart, for no man shall send me to Hades contrary to my fate; and I say that none, be he a coward or brave, has ever escaped his doom, when once it comes.” Still the Homeric bard had not arrived at any consistent view of destiny; he gave utterance to that feeling which men had vaguely then as now, that beyond all lies something fixed and invariable to which all things and beings are ultimately subject.

As we have seen, the divinities may work at cross purposes; there is nothing in the Homeric poems like monotheism or pantheism in any true sense. When the Homeric man said that a thing happened “with god’s help,” he was simply recognizing the agency of the gods in everything. Not knowing the special divinity concerned, he left him nameless; least of all had he any concept of a complete divine polity. There is, therefore, no such thing in the epics as a divine providence in the way of a definite purpose or plan such as we shall later find in the fifth century. Like mortals the Homeric gods discuss their plans, without being able to see the end from the beginning; they are moved by caprice, so that Zeus changes sides twice on the second day of the great battle between the Achaeans and Trojans.[17] The vacillating and capricious character of the gods is not offset by the protection that a divinity may give a favorite, such as Athena gave to Odysseus in his long wanderings and on his return to Ithaca. Throughout both poems we find the assumption constantly held that every blessing comes from the gods, that they give every distinction. In like fashion men believed that all misfortunes were due to divine anger or hostility. So Odysseus was kept from home for nearly ten years by Poseidon’s hate; the favor of Athena toward the Achaeans turned to wrath because of the violence done her shrine in the sack of Troy so that she caused an evil return for her former favorites. Indeed in misfortune the Homeric hero’s first question was as to what god he had offended. The problem of evil therefore was a simple one—all depended on the will or whim of some divinity.

But there are other things which we should note with regard to these divinities. As has been said, they are universalized, not attached to definite localities; in fact the epics contain few traces of that localization which was the rule in the common religion of Greece. Although Hera declares:[18] “Verily three cities there are most dear to me, Argos and Sparta and broad-streeted Mycenae,” she is in no sense regarded as bound to these localities. In Demodocus’ song of the love of Ares and Aphrodite it is said that when released from the bonds in which Hephaestus had ensnared them, the god of war fled to Thrace and laughter-loving Aphrodite to Paphos in Cyprus,[19] but these places are not their homes in any strict sense. And so with the other gods. The Olympians are rather free, universal divinities, unhampered by local attachments. Olympus itself is in the upper heaven more than in Thessaly. It is of course true that lesser divinities, like river-gods and mountain-nymphs, are localized, but these beings have little influence on the affairs of men.

Let us now consider briefly the most important Homeric gods. At the head of the divine order stands Zeus, “father of gods and of men” (πατὴρ ἀνδρῶν τε θεῶν τε), “most exalted of rulers” (ὔπατε κρειόντων), “most glorious and most mighty” (κύδιστε μέγιστε), as he is called.[20] To him the elements are subject and at his nod great Olympus trembles. He is the guardian of oaths, the protector of the stranger and the suppliant. Famed for his prowess and might he never in person enters battle, but indirectly he takes a hand in the strife between the Greeks and the Trojans. Although he surpasses all in wisdom and power, at times he is outwitted by other divinities. Like a mortal chieftain he presides at council on Olympus in his great hall, whither he may on occasion summon the divinities of every class to attend a general assembly.[21] Olympus indeed is conceived as loosely organized after the fashion of an aristocratic state with Zeus as chief (βασιλεύς), the Olympians as members of the council (βουλή), and the whole body of minor divinities as making up the assembly (ἀγορή).

Hera, the queen of Olympus, is at once both sister and wife of Zeus; they are the only wedded pair on Olympus. She belongs, however, distinctly to the second class of Olympians. She takes no part in the Odyssey; and in the Iliad, although she favors the Achaeans most vehemently, she is less active than Athena. In character she is a good deal of a scold, so that Zeus fears her jealous anger.[22] He knows that she is accustomed to block his plans, although on one occasion he had punished her by stringing her up by the wrists and tying anvils to her feet! Of this he indignantly reminds her: “Dost thou not remember when I strung thee up aloft and from thy feet I hung two anvils, and round thy wrists I bound a golden bond unbreakable? And thou wast hung in the upper air and the clouds. Wroth were the gods throughout high Olympus, but still they could not approach and free thee.”[23] Again he had beaten her, and when Hephaestus tried to intervene, Zeus seized the meddler by the foot and threw him out of Olympus. Hephaestus himself recalls the experience: “All the day long I fell and at setting of the sun I dropped in Lemnos, and there was little life left in me.”[24]

Athena is above all the goddess of war, and she plays a large part in both the Iliad and Odyssey. In the latter poem she is the special guardian of Odysseus, whose ready mind wins her admiration. She is also the most skilled of all divinities, the patroness of every handicraft.[25] She is perhaps the chief divinity of Troy; on the Trojan citadel stands her temple to which the noble matrons bring a gift of a beautiful robe with the promise of generous sacrifice if the goddess will give them her protection against Diomedes.[26] She also has a home on the acropolis at Athens.[27]

Apollo, the archer god, is a patron of war and of bowmen. In the Iliad he is a violent enemy of the Achaeans and gives most effective aid to the Trojans; but in the Odyssey he plays no active part. He also inspires seers and prophets; and he is the god of the lyre and the teacher of bards. In prayers he is named with Zeus and Athena when an object is most earnestly desired.[28]

These three are the greatest of the Homeric divinities, although there is no close connection among them. Apollo’s virgin sister, Artemis, plays a part much inferior to that of her brother, but in many ways she is similar to him. Her arrows bring a quick and peaceful end to women as Apollo’s do to men. In the chase she is preëminent: she is the fair goddess of wood and mountain.

Ares and Aphrodite also belong to a lower rank. In function they are limited to an appeal to a single passion each, Ares to rage for slaughter, Aphrodite to the passion of love. They are both treated with a certain contempt and are mocked by the other gods.

Hephaestus is the god of fire, the lame craftsman of Olympus. It was he who built the homes of the gods; but his skill was especially shown in the wondrous works he wrought in gold and silver. Such were the mixing-bowl which Phaedimus, the Sidonian king, gave to Menelaus;[29] wonderful automata, twenty golden tripods, which on occasion would go of their own accord to the assemblage of the gods and then return;[30] or the gold and silver dogs which guarded the palace of Alcinous.[31] Still more marvellous were the golden maidens endowed with reason, speech, and cunning knowledge, which supported their maker as he limped from his forge to his chair;[32] and above all the splendid armor wrought for Achilles.[33]

Poseidon, the brother of Zeus, has as his special province the sea; but he appears on Olympus at the councils of the gods. In the Iliad he supports the Achaeans vigorously; no doubt from anger at the Trojans whose king Laomedon had once cheated him of the pay which was his due for building the walls of Troy;[34] in the Odyssey, angry at the blinding of his son, Polyphemus, he holds Odysseus far from Ithaca, until at last the Phaeacians bring him home. Then in wrath he turns their vessel into stone.[35]

Such in brief are the eight great gods of the Homeric poems. Of these Zeus is easily the first, but in the first rank also are Athena and Apollo; Hera and Poseidon hold a second place; and Hephaestus, Ares, and Aphrodite belong to the third class. Many other divinities there are, but all of lesser rank, like Hermes whose duties are those of a higher servant or messenger. He is sent to escort King Priam to the tent of Achilles to ransom Hector’s body,[36] and he is despatched to Calypso’s isle to bid her let Odysseus go.[37] There are some indications that he is already the patron of thieves, as he is of servants. Dionysus and Demeter, so prominent in later Greece, have not yet won a place in the Olympic circle. There is no hint in the epics of the mysteries and the orgiastic cults which were afterwards of great significance. Hades, the brother of Zeus and Poseidon, holds as his realm the dark abode of the dead, where he reigns with Persephone as queen. His murky kingdom is now represented as beneath the earth, again as far out on the bounds of Oceanus. But Hades takes no active part in either poem.

Besides these there is a host of divinities, some named but most unnamed, who cause all the phenomena of the visible world. In fact, the Homeric man could not conceive of a natural world obeying laws whose operation was fixed; on the contrary, he could only think of animated beings as the causes of all events. For him every occurrence was the manifestation of the will of some divinity; the natural and the miraculous were one.

It is evident from this hasty review of the Homeric gods that we have in the epics no complete and fully organized pantheon. Zeus is regarded as supreme but he is thwarted and outwitted by lesser members of the Olympic circle, even as they block one another. In fact Homer’s view of the gods abounds in contradictions of which however only the scholar and the critic have ever been very conscious. From our modern standpoint we notice the moral inconsistencies above all. Although Zeus is the guardian of justice, he is deceitful and treacherous if occasion arises, as when at the request of Thetis he sends a delusive dream to Agamemnon to urge him to give battle, in spite of the fact that he cannot be successful.[38] It is Zeus also who is responsible for the faithless breaking of the truce between the Achaeans and Trojans[39]; and many other instances might be cited to illustrate his utter untrustworthiness. On his lack of domestic morality I need hardly dwell.

Yet we must remind ourselves that to the Homeric Age there was little connection, if any, between morals and religion. Religion is concerned with man’s relation to the gods, morality with his relation to his fellow men. Morality is therefore developed through the social relations first of all, and only later is brought into relation to religion. In Homer the sense of social obligations is much more keenly realized than is that of religious sanctions. The cardinal virtues are bravery, wisdom, love of home and family, and regard for hospitality. In a life of action, filled with war, bravery is of prime importance; by it wealth, power, and honor are won. Proper to such a life are practical wisdom and even cunning. The highest praise is to be called “first in council and first in battle.”[40] Agamemnon is lauded by Helen as “both a good king and a mighty warrior.”[41] The standing epithets of Odysseus, “very crafty” (πολύμητις) and “the man of many devices” (πολυμήχανος), show the qualities which were deemed praiseworthy. Yet Odysseus had won this distinction by his skill in lying and deceiving—practices still deemed highly laudable in our own world if employed against a foe, or sometimes even when used as acts of caution. Yet if our modern views do not wholly coincide with the ancient on these points, we can feel only admiration for the regard for home and family, the unselfish generosity, and the universal hospitality toward strangers which the epic heroes display.

The poems also set a high value on personal honor. The outrage done Menelaus by Paris, who violated the most sacred laws of hospitality by carrying away his host’s wife, was the whole cause of the Trojan War. To avenge this outrage all the princes of the Achaeans rallied as if the wrong suffered had been their own. Agamemnon’s high-handed act in taking the captive Briseis from Achilles roused that wrath which is the first word of the Iliad. The Odyssey is the epic of a personal will which, triumphing over all disasters, finally wreaked a terrible vengeance on the insolent suitors who had wooed Odysseus’ wife, devoured his substance, plotted against his son, and at the end shamefully insulted Odysseus himself. The punishment of the suitors is the victory of justice over lawlessness, and possesses a moral significance which was not lost on antiquity.

In what I have just been saying I have already implied that man’s relation to the gods was not ethical but ritualistic. We must remember that when we speak of “sin” or a “consciousness of guilt,” we are presupposing a self-conscious and self-searching individual. This the Homeric man was not; on the contrary he was in the highest degree natural, unreflective, and unconscious of self. In fact the Homeric concept of sin touches our moral ideas at hardly more than three points. Disregard for an oath, failure to honor one’s father and mother, and disrespect for the stranger and suppliant were high offenses against heaven and brought down divine wrath on the transgressor. But in general sin is failure to recognize man’s absolute dependence on the immortals, to give them due honor, to pay them proper sacrifice, and to walk humbly on the earth. Sacrifice is tribute whereby man acquires merit with divinity; of such meritorious credit the priest Chryses reminds Apollo in his prayer at the beginning of the Iliad:[42] “Hear me, Lord of the silver bow, ... if ever I have roofed over a temple pleasing to thee, or if ever I have burnt in thy honor fat thighs of bulls or of goats, then accomplish this my prayer.” Agamemnon in the stress of battle reproaches Zeus for bringing his present disaster upon him in spite of the fact that he made sacrifice on every altar as he hurried to Ilion;[43] and many other illustrations might be cited. Failure to make due offering might bring serious disaster. Menelaus, on his way home from Troy, omitted sacrifice before leaving Egypt; so he was forced to return from the island of Pharos and repair his failure, after which he accomplished his voyage easily.[44] When Oeneus neglected Artemis, she sent the Calydonian boar to afflict his land: “Artemis of the golden throne sent a plague upon them, angry that Oeneus did not offer her the first fruits of his rich land. All the other gods had their feast of hecatombs, and only to the daughter of mighty Zeus did he fail to make offering, whether he forgot or had no thought of the matter. But he showed great folly in his soul.”[45] Again the plague sent by Apollo on the Achaean host before Troy suggests to Achilles that the god may be angered at a failure to perform some vow or to offer a hecatomb.[46] It is little wonder that the enlightened Plato felt horror and disgust at such notions as these and that he condemned this kind of worship as an “art of trafficking” (ἐμπορικὴ τέχνη).[47] Still this Homeric idea of the relations between men and gods—an idea which has not wholly disappeared from the world today—rests on the notion that gods and men belong to one common society in which the obligations are binding on both sides.

Especially to be avoided was insolent pride; man must not boast himself overmuch; there were fixed bounds set for him which he might not transgress. So Ajax met his fate because of his insolent defiance: “Even so he had escaped his doom, hateful though he was to Athena, if he had not let fall an insolent speech and committed great folly. He said that in spite of the gods he had escaped the great gulf of the sea; but Poseidon heard his loud boasting. Straightway then he took his trident in his mighty hands and struck the Gyraean rock and cleft it in twain. Part remained in its place, but a portion fell in the deep, that part on which Ajax first sat and uttered his great folly; but it now bore him down beneath the vast billowy sea.”[48] But Achilles showed the approved attitude of mind when he thus addressed the dead Hector: “Lie now dead; but my doom I will accept whenever it please Zeus and the other immortal gods to send it.”[49] This fear of punishment from heaven, of that which Aeschylus and Herodotus call “the envy of the gods,” long operated to keep in check excess of speech and added no doubt to the comfort of Greek society. Of magic whereby man can compel the gods there is nothing in Homer; the inferiority of mortals to the immortals is complete.

We may now properly consider the Homeric view of life after death. The epic psychology made no sharp distinction between the soul and the body; on the whole the body was identified with the self rather than the soul (ψυχή), which goes to the realm of Hades when the man is dead. There in the world of shadows beneath the earth or far out by the stream of Oceanus the shades, pale images of the men who were, exist; they do not live. The pathetic plaints of the shades that come up to Odysseus in the eleventh book of the Odyssey show how hopeless is their lot. Though Orion pursue the wild beasts over the cheerless plains of asphodel and Minos hold his golden staff and sit in judgment over the dead, yet all is insubstantial and far less than life. The often quoted words of Achilles’ shade sum up the whole matter: “Speak not to me of death, glorious Odysseus. For so I might be on earth, I would rather be the servant of another, of a poor man who had little substance, than to be lord over all the dead.”[50]

There is no system of future punishment or rewards, although a few individuals have won supreme suffering like Tityus, Sisyphus, and Tantalus or gained high station like Minos, the judge. Therefore beyond the grave there was for the Homeric man no hope, no satisfaction. Only here under the light of the sun and in the glory of action could the epic hero find his joy. This is, in no small measure, the cause of that pathos which strikes us occasionally in the poems. Man is spoken of as the most pitiful of creatures, the feeblest of all beings which the earth nourishes. Evil and suffering sent by the gods are his lot, unrelieved by any prospect of the future.[51]

Let us now summarize briefly the matter we have thus far been considering together. As I said at the beginning of this lecture, religion in the Homeric poems shows the influence of the conditions under which the poems were composed. Intended for Ionian princes of Asia Minor, emigrants who had lost the support which local attachment always gives, the Iliad and Odyssey present those traits of religion which were everywhere understood and which made a universal appeal. Therefore the Homeric gods have a synthetic character; they are, as has been aptly said, “composite photographs” of local Zeus’s, Apollos, Athenas, and so on. Again since the epics were intended for entertainment, the gods are represented not as remote, but human and real; they have characters and personalities which local divinities did not possess. In picturing them as more human, in rehearsing their quarrels, intrigues, passions, and even physical peculiarities, the poet not only amused his carefree audience, but brought the gods closer to men; he made them more comfortable creatures to live with, even if they were moved by whims and fancies. Their worship was sacrifice associated with the banquet which men and gods shared in common fellowship; the gods were thought to wish man’s offerings and service just as man desired communion with them. Malevolent divinities, daemons of the earth, rites of riddance by which man seeks to avert the wrath of some spiteful or angry being, all the great mass of practices unquestionably common to the folk-religion of the age, were for the most part omitted by the poet as unsuited or uninteresting to his aristocratic audience. There is almost nothing bearing on the cult of the dead save possibly in connection with the funeral of Patroclus; incantation proper is mentioned only once; and Circe’s potent herbs by which she transformed Odysseus’s companions into beasts, like Circe herself, belong to fairyland. The Homeric religion, therefore, is largely a social religion of this world, of sunlight and of action.

Yet if Homer’s gods are human, they are still impressive; they have the dignity which comes from unchanging age and superhuman power; they are conceived in the grand way. So true was this that as the Homeric poems became popular literature, studied in school and known to all men, they created a universal religion. They also influenced the types under which the Greek artists represented their great gods. Tradition says that when Phidias was asked by his associate Panaenus what type he had selected for his Zeus at Olympia, he replied with Homer’s lines: “The son of Cronos spoke and nodded under his dark brows; and the ambrosial locks of the king fell down from his immortal head, and he shook great Olympus.”[52] Such was the effect of this statue after it had stood for five centuries and a half that the orator Dio Chrysostom said of it: “Whoever among mankind is wholly weary in soul, whoever has experienced many misfortunes and sorrows in life, and may not find sweet sleep, he, methinks, if he stood before this statue, would forget all the calamities and griefs that come in the life of man.”[53]

We must, however, recognize that the spiritual contribution of the Homeric poems to later Greece was inevitably less than the artistic. No inspired bard was needed to teach the lessons of man’s inferiority to the gods and of his dependence on them, although these are constantly emphasized; yet the epics also inculcate the necessity of moderation in act and speech; and they teach that Zeus is the guardian of oaths and of hospitality. Furthermore they express the half-realized belief that Zeus is the protector of all justice; and they bring home the fact that the individual must pay for his sin, however he may have been led into it. But the greatest contribution which the poems made to later religious thought was paradoxically due to the fact that they made their gods so thoroughly human, for it inevitably followed in due season that the gods were measured by the same standards of right and wrong that were applied to men. This eventually ennobled man’s concept of divinity, so that he required of the gods a perfection to match their immortal nature.

Herodotus names Homer and Hesiod together as the great theological teachers of Greece. But when we compare the later poet with the earlier we find a marked contrast between them. Homer looks backward to an earlier day; his poems reflect the glory of that splendid age when the Achaean princes, like Agamemnon in golden Mycenae, ruled at home in power, or on the plains of Troy contended with divine and human foes. Homer is aristocratic, universal, objective, with little self-consciousness, hardly concerned with the origins of gods and men or with the possible goals toward which the world was moving. Hesiod was the son of a farmer, who according to tradition had come from Cyme in Asia Minor to Boeotian Ascra which lay on a spur of the range of Helicon near a shrine of the Muses. When Hesiod wrote, the land had felt the exhaustion of war, the coming of ruder tribes from the north and west had swamped the earlier civilization, and both noble and peasant were finding life harder. These conditions are reflected in the Hesiodic poetry: it deals with fact rather than fancy; for the splendid dramatic deeds of men and gods it substitutes homely adage, reasoned reflection, and moral tale. Hesiod is self-conscious and reflective. He uses the first person, whereas Homer never names himself. A dour son of the soil, born in gloomy days, he is the first writer of Europe to speak for the common man.

The two chief poems which bear the name of Hesiod are the Theogony and the Works and Days. The former deals with the origin of the world and the generations of the gods. It is an attempt to bring order into current myths by sifting and arranging them into a system. The material Hesiod found ready to his hand; his task was to systematize and set it forth to his audience. The Theogony is the first extant work of European literature to present the idea that dynasties of the gods have succeeded each other in time, the rule of Uranus giving way to the sway of Cronos, who in his turn was displaced by Zeus. We have seen that Homer did not concern himself about such matters as these; that only vague references to such ideas are found in the Iliad and Odyssey. Hesiod, however, represents another age and another aspect of the Greek mind, a desire to bring harmony into the varied and inconsistent tales of current mythology and thus in a way to render the gods intelligible to men.

The gods of the Theogony are hardly moral beings; on the contrary much of the theology there presented is far ruder than that of the Iliad and Odyssey. Some of the tales are on the level of primitive mythology, such as the account of the way in which earth and heaven were separated and of the manner in which the earth was fertilized; others retain more offensive elements like that of Cronos devouring his children, or of Zeus swallowing his wife Metis when she was about to give birth to Athena, for it was fated that her child should be the equal of its father in wit and cunning. In general the poet gives no sign of being conscious that this work might have moral or religious significance. The word justice (δίκη), which is so frequent in the Works and Days, occurs but twice in the Theogony. The wives of Zeus are in succession Wisdom (Μῆτις) and Right (Θέμις), but his constant attendants are Violence (Κράτος) and Force (Βίη). In neither case, however, is any moral conclusion drawn therefrom. The only beings to whom moral functions are assigned are the Fates, “Goddesses who visit transgressions of men and gods and never cease from their fearful wrath until they have inflicted dire punishment on the sinner.”[54] Save for this passage and one in which the punishment of the gods for perjury is described, the Theogony is less ethical than even the Iliad and Odyssey, for they have regard for certain social sanctions. The work is nevertheless significant and requires notice here because it bears witness to the critical mind that set the myths in order, and because it shows that the age of Hesiod was a reflective one.

Hesiod’s other poem, the Works and Days, is of high moral import. It owes its title to the fact that it gives directions for various kinds of occupations and that it also contains a kind of peasant’s calendar. By bribing his judges the poet’s brother Perses had deprived the poet of the inheritance which was properly his. To this unjust brother Hesiod addresses his poem, but he rises constantly from the particular case to general moral considerations; indeed the poet’s ethical lessons gain in force because they start with a personal application.

Work, justice, right social relations, and piety toward the gods are the cardinal themes of the Works and Days. At the very opening of the poem Hesiod points out that there are two kinds of Strife or Rivalry on earth, the one good and praiseworthy, the other evil. Evil strife leads to war and to discord, but the good, implanted by Zeus in the very order of things, ever urges men on to work. Hesiod delights in emphasizing the value of toil; he has given enduring expression to the natural dignity of labor in the verse,

Εργον δ' οὐδὲν ὂνειδος, ἀεργίη δέ τ' ὂνειδος.

Work is no disgrace, but laziness is a disgrace.[55]

By constant toil alone, he says, can the many misfortunes of life be relieved; by it riches and honor are won; and the worker is beloved by the gods. The lazy man on the contrary has hunger for his portion and is detested by gods and men: “Gods and mortals are alike indignant with the man who lives without toiling; he is like in energy to the stingless drones, for they without toiling waste and devour the product of the honey-bees’ work. But do thou (Perses), love all seemly toil that thy barns may be filled with food in the proper seasons.”[56] For the poor man the poet, and apparently his contemporaries, had little compassion, since he regards poverty as proof of a lack of industry, of a failure to work unceasingly with a determined spirit, which he holds to be the only way in which man can acquire the comforts which give dignity to life. In his mind shame is the natural lot of the poor, but self-respect the proper possession of the successful worker. And toil has for him a divine sanction; it is a moral duty imposed on men by the gods. By it alone men attain not only material prosperity but virtue as well. “I perceive the good and will tell it thee, Perses, very foolish though thou art. Wickedness men attain easily and in great numbers, for level is the road to her and she dwells very near; but before Virtue the immortal gods have set the sweat of toil. Long and steep is the path to her and rough at the outset; but when one has reached the summit, thereafter it is easy, hard though it was before.”[57]

Smarting under the injustice done him by his unjust brother and the venal judges, Hesiod naturally praised justice (δίκη) in his work. He repeats the word again and again. In the name of outraged universal justice he protests against the particular wrong he has suffered, but in his handling of this theme he passes far beyond the matter between him and his brother, and treats justice in a universal and impressive manner. He thus exhorts Perses: “Perses, harken to justice, and make not insolence prosper. For insolence is baneful even to the humble; nor can the noble easily bear the burden of it, but he sinketh beneath its weight, meeting doom. Yet the road that leadeth in the opposite direction, toward justice, is better to travel. Justice prevaileth over insolence in the end; even the fool knoweth from experience.”[58] He presses home the truth that wrong harms the doer no less than him who suffers the wrong: “The man who worketh evil to another, worketh evil to himself, and evil counsel is most evil for him who counselled it.”[59] Again he teaches that even if retribution is slow in coming, Zeus accomplishes it in the end: “Finally Zeus imposes due requital for the wicked man’s unjust deeds.”[60] On the other hand Hesiod in a famous passage pictures with satisfaction the prosperity of the just: “But for those who render straight judgments to both strangers and citizens and never depart from justice, their city flourishes and their people prosper in it. Peace, which nurtures youth, dwells in the land and never does far-seeing Zeus bring fearful war upon the inhabitants. Never does famine or woe attend men who do justice, but in good cheer do they perform their due tasks. For them the earth yields abundant food, the oak on the mountains bears them acorns in its topmost branches, and its trunk is the honey-bees’ home; fleecy sheep are heavy with wool, wives bear children who are like their parents. The just flourish in prosperity continually; nor do they go away on ships, for the fruitful earth gives them its product.”[61]

The last sentence shows that trading in ships was less highly regarded than agriculture. The reason is to be found not alone in the comparatively undeveloped state of commerce, but also in the very nature of such commerce as the poet saw it, for he admits commerce into his plan rather unwillingly. He knows that the sea is treacherous and often wrecks ships and causes ruin; he holds that only men’s inordinate desires and folly tempt them to venture across the waters and to stake all on the chances of loss and death. More than this, he feels a moral defect in transmarine trading, even when profitable, for one may gain wealth by a single venture. Such is not his ideal; rather he would see material prosperity won by the long toil and frugality which make agriculture successful.

But to return to justice. Hesiod, as we have already seen, makes this the whole basis of man’s relation to his fellows; on just actions and labor depends all prosperity; injustice injures the doer no less than the object of the wrong, and in the end is sure of punishment. Indeed according to the poet justice is what distinguishes man from the lower animals: “Perses, put these words now in thy heart, and harken to justice, but forget violence utterly. For this the son of Cronos has established as a rule for men. Fishes and wild beasts and winged birds he ordained should devour one another, since there is no justice among them; but to man he has given justice, which is by far the best.”[62] The theme of justice in human relations is developed into injunctions to be kind to the stranger, the suppliant, and the orphan, to respect parents, to regard another’s bed, and to give hospitality to one’s friends. Yet it must be said that Hesiod’s social morality is strictly utilitarian, not altruistic; indeed there is something in his poem which reminds us of the maxim “An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth,” as when he writes: “If thy friend is the first to do thee an unkindness either in word or deed, remember to return him twofold; but if he would bring thee again into friendship and consent to render thee justice, accept it.”[63] But we must remember that this was the almost universal teaching among the Greeks down to the end of the fifth century.

Justice, however, is more than a social virtue between men; it is the chief attribute of Zeus, personified as his daughter and constant attendant: “Justice is the daughter of Zeus, glorified and honored by the gods who hold Olympus; and whenever anyone does her wrong with perverse blame, straightway she sits by Zeus, son of Cronos, and she tells him the thoughts of unjust men, that the people may pay for the folly of the princes who by their wrongful purposes and crooked speeches turn judgments from the right course.”[64] In his work of defending justice Zeus is aided not only by his daughter, but by a host of watchful guardians, intermediaries who report mortals’ deeds: “Thrice ten thousand are the immortal servants of Zeus upon the rich earth, who watch mortal men. Clad in mist they fare to and fro on the earth watching deeds of justice and wrongful acts.”[65] Justice then never fails to bring sooner or later the due return to right and wrong actions; from her and the watchful messengers of Zeus there is no escape. The Homeric man had recognized that righteousness is better than evil and that the wicked are constantly threatened by punishment; but Hesiod in his Works and Days goes somewhat further than Homer, in that he makes justice a necessary attribute of the gods as well as of men.

Man’s dependence on the gods is naturally recognized in Hesiod as elsewhere by the obligations of sacrifice, libation, and prayer, for these are universal modes of religious expression. The poet betrays the unimaginative character of a peasant by the baldness with which he says that material prosperity is the whole purpose of religious observance as well as of justice: “According to thy ability offer sacrifice to the immortal gods with thy person pure and undefiled, and burn the goodly thigh-pieces; again propitiate them with libations and with sacrifices, both when thou liest down and when the sacred light comes, that they may have a heart and mind kindly disposed toward thee; that thus thou mayest buy the land of others and not another thine.”[66] Yet we must remember that this huckster’s mind, as Plato might have called it, was common enough in Greece, that it was the ordinary attitude of the official Roman religion throughout Rome’s history, and that it has not disappeared from men’s thought today.

In the Iliad and Odyssey evil, like the good, comes from the gods. The simple fact is unquestionably recognized. But Hesiod searches more deeply for the origin of evil which he pessimistically regards as omnipresent. The story of Prometheus and Pandora contains in part the poet’s answer to this eternal riddle. The myth was already ancient and familiar to all. Once men lived without effort and free from evils, but when led by crafty Prometheus they had endeavored to cheat Zeus of the better part of the sacrificed bullock, the god withheld fire from them. Yet the cunning Titan stole a spark of this divine fire and delivered it to mortals. This Zeus allowed men to keep; by its aid they created all industries, but only at the cost of constant toil and struggle. Prometheus he punished harshly. To work his vengeance on mortals he caused Hephaestus to create a woman on whom the gods bestowed all gifts so that she was named Pandora. She opened a jar containing every kind of evil, which straightway flew out among mankind. Only Ἐλπίς remained therein—a word hardly equivalent to our Hope, but rather meaning “anticipation of misfortune.” It then is the only plague to which man is not subjected.[67] He is obliged to suffer, having been involved in the original sin of Prometheus, who wished to cheat Zeus of the sacrifice due him. Such is the sacred tale offered as an explanation of the presence of evils on earth. To us it seems childish, and indeed it did not completely satisfy Hesiod.

A second explanation of a very different sort was given, one which was in reality a profound attempt to trace man’s origin as well as to explain his actual condition.[68] This is the story of the five ages of man, beginning with the age of gold in which gods and men dwelt together. Then mortals lived like the gods with hearts untroubled, far from toil and suffering, and the earth yielded them of its own accord abundant food. Over them Cronos reigned. But the men of this Utopian age died in painless sleep; and the silver age under Zeus followed. Compared with the former it was an age of degeneracy in which men showed insolence toward one another and failed to sacrifice to the gods. Zeus in his anger destroyed these mortals. The three remaining ages—the bronze, the heroic, and the iron, show both decay and advance. The men of the bronze age were fierce, wild creatures, unapproachable in their savagery. To these succeeded a better and juster race, that of the heroes, who however met their fate in war beneath seven-gated Thebes or at Troy for fair-haired Helen’s sake. And now they dwell care-free in the Islands of the Blest. Finally Hesiod pictures his own age, that of iron. Now no longer do men spend their effort in war and battle, but they have come to a selfish individualism, “when father and children will not agree together, nor guest with host, nor friend with friend, nor brother longer be dear as aforetime.”[69] But this unlimited egoism, which Hesiod pictures, presupposes an intellectual evolution beyond the stage where men fought in masses as in the heroic time. Thus faithfully and relentlessly he describes his own day. Yet the poet is not without confidence that there are good as well as evil elements in the age of iron; but on the whole he is despondent and exclaims: “Would that I were not living in the fifth age of men, but that I had either died before them or been born later.”[70]

Thus Hesiod takes ancient myths and by his genius makes them epitomize the stages of man’s evolution downward morally, but forward intellectually. The faint hope expressed at the end of the exclamation just quoted shows that the poet saw the possibility of a better age to come, and therein he showed himself a prophet. He apparently did not regard the present age of iron as eternal, but perhaps, in accordance with the cyclical theory of the world, thought that the ages might revolve and the Golden Age return again. Furthermore, although he regards man’s course as largely one of degeneration, he sees that it has also been one in which intellectual progress has been made and law developed.

When we come to the question of life beyond the grave we must acknowledge that herein Hesiod shows no advance over Homer. For ordinary mortals oblivion in the dank halls of Hades seems to be the relentless doom. Only a few, the heroes of that earlier age are allowed by divine favor to dwell with hearts free from trouble in the Islands of the Blest.

Yet if we consider the Hesiodic poetry as a whole it does bear witness to a great change from the world of Homer. It shows clearly that by the seventh century b.c. man was coming to self-consciousness, that he was endeavoring by reflection to solve some of the deepest problems of life, and that he had already developed a moral code that demanded righteousness in the individual. Hesiod depicts for us a more thoughtful and a more reflective time than that shown us by Homer. How significant this change was I shall try to show in my next lecture.

II
ORPHISM, PYTHAGOREANISM, AND THE MYSTERIES

The seventh and sixth centuries before Christ were marked by important social, philosophic, and religious movements. Of the many causes which brought about these changes, the most easily traced are those of a political and economic nature.

The form of government which is pictured in the Homeric poems is one in which the king and nobles alone have an effective voice. The humbler folk meet to hear the decision of the few, which they are expected to accept without a murmur. On only one occasion does a common man, Thersites, venture to raise his voice against his betters, and then he is made the laughing-stock of his fellows and is beaten into a sad silence by Odysseus. But the Homeric organization of society was gradually superseded by aristocracies in which the power of wealth ultimately claimed a position beside nobility of birth. The development of industry and trade in Ionia and on the mainland of Greece proper created a new wealthy class which was a rival of the old nobility whose riches had been in herds and lands. The political struggles which accompanied these changes were highly educative to considerable bodies of citizens, who were expending their efforts in improving the condition of their own class or of themselves rather than in maintaining the advantage of some prince or noble. In this way there was developed a political and social self-consciousness. When kings were superseded by aristocracies, magistracies, limited in scope and duration, had necessarily been employed. Thus political machinery and organization developed. These political changes and the failure of ancient customs to fit new social and economic conditions naturally led to a demand for written law, which alone can be the basis of even justice and protection. So we hear of many “law-givers” in Greece during the seventh and sixth centuries b.c., of whom the most famous were Zaleucus among the western Locrians, Charondas of Catane, and Draco of Athens, followed about thirty years later by Solon. Now written law usually tends to become ultimately the embodiment of rules for all, not simply for one class alone, so that the written codes marked a long step in the advance of the common man toward equality with the noble. It is true that the aristocracies in many parts of Greece were later followed by the rule of tyrants, but the tyrannies themselves fostered the development of the lower classes on whose well-being and support the existence of the tyrannies depended.

Of the law-givers I have just mentioned one belonged to Catane, a Greek city in Sicily. This fact suggests another important movement which demands our notice. I mean the planting of colonies. The great era of Hellenic colonization fell between the eighth and sixth centuries, and was in a sense but a continuation of that earlier wave of expansion which had carried the Greeks to Cyprus and to the nearer shores of Asia Minor. Among the causes which led to the establishment of colonies the chief seem to have been defects in the land system, whereby many were deprived of a share in their ancestral estates, political conditions often oppressive, and trade, which was now coming largely into the hands of Greeks because of the disasters which were inflicted on their former rivals, the Phoenicians, by their eastern neighbors. From Megara and Miletus, from Chalcis and Eretria, began an outpouring of eager traders, of the landless, the needy, the discontented, and the adventurous, who eventually planted colonies entirely around the Mediterranean and Euxine Seas. Between these colonies and the mother cities a rich stream of traffic flowed; the growth of trade stimulated manufactures and increased wealth. In the colonies there existed from the beginning greater equality than in the older communities, the land system was more equitable, and many men of humble birth came to wealth and power. Furthermore, with travel and success in new communities there was an expansion of mind, a sense of power acquired by prosperity, such as can always be observed under similar conditions. These developments had their reflex influence on the society of the mother cities, and both at home and in the colonies there came to pass those political and social changes to which I have referred above. But the most important result of these things for our present consideration was the fact that by these developments large numbers of men were awakened to self-consciousness, and that the first period of individualism in Greece was begun.

Whenever individuals come to self-consciousness, and have the leisure and security which were enjoyed in many Greek cities of this time as the result of improved social and economic conditions, men find not only the opportunity but also the occasion for reflection. This was the case in our period. Men began to think and question about themselves and the world around them, to reflect not only concerning the political and social world in which they lived, to ask what their place in it was, but also to inquire still deeper into the meaning of things. They debated with themselves questions relating to the gods, the nature and justice of their rule; and most significant for our present interest they began to ask whence men came and whither they were going. One great monument of this period is Hesiod’s “Works and Days,” of which I spoke in my last lecture. It is also important to remember that the seventh and sixth centuries were the age of the so-called Seven Wise Men, to whom were assigned many moral precepts which became revered proverbs in Greece. These sayings, no less than the works of Hesiod and the Gnomic Poets, bear witness to an age of increasing reflection.

In the seventh century Ionia controlled the trade between Asia and Europe. Its chief center was Miletus. Here in the first half of the sixth century before our era began Greek philosophy, with Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes as the leaders. The modest task which they set themselves was nothing less than the solution of the universe. Their philosophic views are of no special interest to us now; but it is a fact of supreme importance that here for the first time in Greece appeared men whose reflection had made them bold enough to wrestle with the whole problem of nature including man, and to propose solutions entirely at variance with the traditional views. This philosophic development was one result of the factors which we have been considering—factors which produced also new ethical and religious movements that do concern us directly.

With the emergence of Greece in the seventh century from the dark ages that followed the Mycenaean civilization, we find that certain beliefs, expressed or only hinted at in the Homeric poems, come to the surface, and that religious ideas imported from without make themselves manifest. The cult of the dead for example is almost passed over in silence by the Homeric poems. At the funeral pyre of Patroclus Achilles offered jars of oil and honey, and slew horses, dogs, and twelve Trojan youths[71]; but nowhere else is such a sacrifice mentioned in the Iliad. Likewise in the Odyssey the only instance of any similar offering is in the description of Odysseus’ visit to the borders of the realm of Hades to consult the shade of the seer Teiresias, where it is said that he dug a square pit, poured into it a triple chrism, and then after prayer and vows let the blood of a ram and a black ewe flow into it to attract the shades.[72] Yet we know from archeological and other evidence that the worship of the dead was common in Greece from the Minoan and Mycenaean times throughout antiquity. Ceremonial purification also, of which there are but few instances in Homer—and none of these is magical—now appears common, as a notion of impurity attaches to many conditions and acts which require expiation. The change in sentiment with regard to murder will serve as an illustration. In the Homeric poems killing brought no pollution either to the murderer or to his land; but in the Cyclic epics, which date from the seventh and sixth centuries b.c., bloodguilt required expiation just as in the later tragedies. So in the Aethiopis Achilles went to Lesbos to be cleansed from the stain of having slain Thersites. In fostering and directing rites of purification the oracle of Apollo at Delphi played an important part. There was developing, indeed there had been developing from an unknown period, a sense of defilement and of the necessity of cleansing. At this point, however, I must again speak a word of caution. We need to remember that morality develops slowly. It is undoubtedly a far cry from the morality of the seventh century to Plato’s definition of the impure man as the one whose soul is base, or to that motto which in a later century was written over the entrance of the shrine of Aesculapius at Epidaurus, “Piety consisteth in holy thoughts.” We must bear in mind that to the man of the seventh and sixth century sin and purification were primarily if not wholly ceremonial matters, and that his concept of future happiness was largely material. But the consequence of his feeling was great in future centuries.

Other phenomena of the seventh and sixth centuries require our notice at this point. We saw in the preceding lecture that the gaze of the Homeric man was fixed on this world with its victories and its defeats, that he viewed splendid action on the field and wise counsel in the assembly of the princes as the individual’s highest province and his supreme happiness. The world beyond this had no rewards comparable with those of this life; the greatest boon man could hope from the future was that his exploits here might become the subject of song for coming generations. Suffering he regarded as necessary that a higher purpose might be attained. “The will of Zeus was accomplished” was the explanation beyond which man might not go; he must find his comfort in such unity as that thought gave to the world. Hence arises that pathos and sadness which strike us again and again in Homer. But the new age sought relief by shifting its gaze from this world to the next and by expecting there the recompenses and balances which make life just and complete; for it the future life furnished an escape from the sufferings of this present existence. Moreover under the manifold influences which I have tried to sketch above, men began to be impressed with the unity which apparently underlay the variety of the phenomenal world. This is the problem of philosophy. It is true that the early Greek philosophers devoted themselves chiefly to the material world, of which they regarded man as a part; but in religion there resulted a tendency to pantheism, which saw behind the multitude of divinities one all-embracing god. Moreover there were not lacking thinkers to struggle with the question as to the way in which man could bring himself into accord with the unity of the world. So in spite of the individualism of this age we find it also an age of mysticism—which is the very opposite of individualism. The mystic always holds in greater or less degree the belief that by destroying that which sets off the individual from his fellows, that is, by uprooting personality through the destruction of the passions, or by some ecstatic state which takes one out of himself, man may attain to union with god and therefore to salvation. This belief may lead even to a religion without gods, or it may be bound to a belief in divinity. In Greece these tendencies were not fully developed for a considerable time, but we can see that in the seventh and sixth centuries the longing for future happiness, the desire for salvation, and the mystic means thereto were already potent elements in Greek thought. They showed themselves in various ways; one outlet for the religious longing was found in the religion of Dionysus, especially as it was incorporated in the beliefs of the Orphic sect.

Dionysus came late into Greek religion. As we have seen, in Homer he was not a member of the Olympic circle. Mythology has preserved many stories which bear witness to the opposition which his worship received as it spread over Greece. The newcomer, like Ares and the Muses, was a Thracian. His worship was introduced by immigrants and spread gradually to the south. Apparently the cult of the god was brought into Greece by more than one wave of immigration, and by more than one route. Thebes and Orchomenos in Boeotia were early centers of his worship, from which Delphi was later influenced. In the Peloponnesus probably Argolis received the new comer first. Even before the god was established in southern Greece he may have been carried to Crete directly from his northern home. The islands of the Aegean, the cities of Asia Minor, and ultimately the remote colonies knew the divinity. In Attica tradition said that his first home was in the country demes, notably at Icaria, where Americans excavated his shrine over twenty-five years ago. Probably the early rulers at Athens received the god into the city, but it was the Pisistratidae who especially favored his worship and gave him a home on the south side of the Acropolis, where the fifth century saw presented all the glories of the Attic stage.

The new god came as the god of all living things, of plants, trees, the lower animals, as well as of man. In short he was a nature divinity whose death was seen in the dead vegetation of winter and whose rebirth appeared with the revival of spring. His orgiastic rites no doubt were originally, in part at least, intended to recall the dead god to life. But in all such religions there is the tendency to see in the rebirth of the dead god the warrant of man’s future life. The hope is easily awakened that as the vegetation, whose life disappears in the ground, is revivified in the spring, so man, whose body also is laid in the earth, may be recalled to new life. The Dionysiac myth set forth the story of the god’s death and rebirth. It was natural then that men should feel that if they could secure union with the god, lose themselves in the divine, they too might attain immortality. Herodotus tells us that among the Thracian peoples the Getae believed that men at death went to dwell with their chief divinity beneath the earth.[73] Such hope of immortality Dionysus brought with him from his Thracian home.

The worship of this god was wholly unlike that of the Olympian gods. Under his influence his devotees, mostly women, in divine madness left their homes and daily tasks to roam the wild mountainside, clad no longer in their ordinary dress but wearing the skins of wild beasts, their flowing hair bound with ivy and wild bryony. In their excitement they were unconscious of time and place, unfettered by the normal limitations of human powers and sensibilities. Wild music stimulated their orgiastic dance; in frenzy they tore living creatures limb from limb, and devoured the raw dripping flesh, calling meantime on the god by name. This mad revel was continued until the participants fell exhausted to the ground.

We can well understand how these things shocked the earliest Hellenic spectators and why it was that in becoming a Greek god, Dionysus lost much of his wilder Thracian nature and the more savage elements of his cult. To this amelioration the Delphic oracle doubtless contributed. Yet it is certain that the ecstatic rites were known on Mt. Cithaeron and on the heights of Parnassos down to a late date. Elsewhere for the most part the excesses of the cult were checked and ordered by law. The Greeks had come to see that there was something more than extravagant madness in the wild Dionysiac revel. The possessed devotee was set free for the moment from the tangled net of daily life, gained for a brief time new and superhuman powers, a very foretaste of immortality. Not least of all he was made one with all nature that united to worship the one god. Now this escape from the daily round of human affairs, this desire for union with divinity, has constantly made its appearance in various times and under varied conditions; as we all know, it has led to extraordinary religious outbursts in both pagan and Christian ages.

Dionysus came also as god of wine. In the revival and elevation of the man, which the moderate use of wine gives, the Greek saw a divine mystery. Of course this use of wine is exactly parallel to the use of hashish and other narcotics for religious ends, and the ecstasy produced by music and the dance is familiar in the history of religion as a means to put individuals or whole companies into direct communication with the spirits or into union with a god.

Now it will readily be seen that this idea that the soul can be separated from the body and united with the god implies two things: first, a belief in a difference between soul and body which sets them off against each other, and secondly, a belief in the divine nature of the human soul. The former clearly established for the first time in Greek thought the concept of the dual ego, the double self, the significance of which we can hardly overestimate. We shall be concerned with it throughout the entire course of our considerations. The second made it easy for men to explain the source and destiny of the soul and to point out the means by which the soul must be set free to seek its natural destiny. The possibility that the soul, escaping from the body during the Dionysiac frenzy, might unite itself with god, might indeed become a god, so that the orgiastic devotee was given the divine name βάκχος—this showed the way by which man could secure immortality. He must loose his divine soul from the body that it might ultimately enjoy its divine life unhampered by earthly bonds and be forever with god.

According to the Dionysiac myth, which naturally varies much in details, the god was pursued by the Titans, the warring powers opposed to Zeus; in his distress Dionysus changed himself into various forms, finally into that of a bull which was torn to pieces and devoured by the Titans. But Athena saved the heart and gave it to Zeus who swallowed it. Hence sprang the new Dionysus. The Titans were ultimately destroyed by the thunderbolt of Zeus and their ashes scattered to the winds. You will at once notice the parallelism between this myth of Dionysus and those of Osiris, Attis, and Adonis. These are all gods who die and live again, and so become gods of life and death, divinities through whom man gains assurance of his own immortality. You will also notice in this myth of Dionysus how most ancient and crudest elements are united with a rather advanced attempt to wrestle with the problems of the world, and particularly with the problem of evil. Over against the beneficent divinity, or divinities, are set the Titans, powers of ill.

The myth became the basis of the spiritual belief and of the mystic ceremonial, and was made the center of that movement which we call Orphism. Who the founder, Orpheus, was, we cannot say. The ancients knew him as a Thracian, a magical musician, and also as a priest of Dionysus. In the popular tradition the musician overshadowed the priest. Yet he was regarded as the founder of the Bacchic or Dionysiac rites. The truth we can never know; but thus much is certain, that in the sixth century, possibly because of a second wave of Dionysiac religion, a movement appeared in which the religion of Dionysus was spiritualized and ennobled, and in which consecration, ceremonial holiness in this life, became the chief concern as the means of securing that immortality which would follow. The movement, however, which may have been stimulated by a feeling of dissatisfaction with the traditional religion, was only one prominent manifestation of the general mysticism which showed itself in many forms during the sixth century. Pythagoreanism was closely allied to it. Indeed some think Orphism only a collective name for the mysticism of the time.

Our information as to the beginning and earliest forms of Orphism is scanty and mostly late. But considering the influence which Orphic ideas had in the fifth century, for example on Pindar, Empedocles, and Plato, not to speak of the latter Neoplatonists, we are justified in regarding the sect as of great significance. And we have a warrant for attributing to the sixth century doctrines which are consistently set forth by our witnesses, especially by Empedocles and Plato, so that with due caution we may use also the fragmentary Orphic literature with some confidence.

We do not know where Orphism started. In Greece proper, Delphi, Thebes, and Athens were prominent centers; in greater Greece, Croton in southern Italy, Camarina and Syracuse in Sicily. Some would regard southern Italy, and specifically the city of Croton, as the home of the movement; possibly they are correct, for tradition told of three great Orphics at the court of Pisistratus. They were Zopyrus of Heraclea, Orpheus of Croton, and Onomacritus, who formed part of the commission which is said to have arranged the Homeric poems at the orders of the Athenian tyrant. Whatever the truth of the tradition in detail is, it is significant that two of the three came from southern Italy; and the name of one of the commission, Orpheus, marks him as a devotee. Yet Athens became the literary center, if I may use the term, for the diffusion of Orphism.

The Orphic religion was distinguished from the popular religions by having a body of belief and a method of life. Undoubtedly the beliefs of the sect were enlarged and modified from age to age; but the Orphics had a unity which is remotely comparable to that of Christian churches. Of the organization of the brotherhoods we know little, but probably they were loosely bound together in a manner similar to those of the religious associations known to us from later times. Nor can we tell whether the Orphics were numerous. Probably they were not; but in any case their mysteries and teachings were important and influential; they introduced new ideas which were destined to produce profound changes in Greek religious thought.

With the varied details of the grotesque Orphic theogonies we are not now concerned. They were similar to those of Hesiod and others in their main lines, but they owe their importance for us now to the fact that they exhibit a pantheism which is opposed to the common polytheistic theology of the time; they endeavor to show that deity is one and universal under whatever form or appearance. To this universal divinity they give the name now of Zeus, now of Dionysus, the greatest of the children of Zeus; at times he is called also Zagreus. Certain Orphic verses clearly express this pantheistic thought: “One Zeus, one Hades, one Sun, one Dionysus, one god in all.”[74] And again: “Zeus was the first, Zeus of the flashing lightning bolt the last; Zeus the head, Zeus the middle; from Zeus have all things been made. Zeus was the foundation of the earth and of the starry heaven; Zeus was male, Zeus was the bride immortal; Zeus the breath of all things, Zeus the rush of the flame unwearied; Zeus the source of the sea, Zeus the sun and the moon; Zeus the king, Zeus of the flashing lightning the beginning of all things. For he concealed all and again brought them forth from his sacred heart to the glad light, working wondrous things.”[75]

You will remember that in the myth of the rending of Dionysus by the Titans, these powers of evil were burned to ashes by the thunderbolt of Zeus. According to one version of the story man is formed from these ashes, which contain the element of the divine, taken in by the Titans when they devoured the god. Thus man is of a two-fold nature, his soul divine, Dionysiac, his body evil, Titanic. On an Orphic tablet found in a grave in southern Italy the soul declares: “I am a child of earth and the starry heaven, but my race is from heaven. This ye know yourselves.” Here we have a complete expression of man’s duality: his body is of the earth, but his soul is of celestial origin. The descent of the soul was due to sin; wind-borne—as Empedocles says of himself, “an exile from god and a wanderer,”[76] it entered into the body, in which prison it was condemned to live until such time as it might be delivered. Clement of Alexandria, quoting the Pythagorean Philolaus of the fifth century b.c., reports: “The ancient theologians and seers bear witness that for a punishment the soul is yoked with the body and buried in it as in a tomb.”[77] This figure of the body as the prison-house or the tomb of the soul was used by Plato, as we shall have occasion to see in a later lecture.

Man’s hope, therefore, according to the Orphic, lies in deliverance from his body, the Titan element of his nature, that the Dionysiac part, his soul, may be free and untrammelled. Yet one might not of his own motion cast off his body by a physical act, for a round is prescribed by necessity.

After death the soul was fated to pass to Hades and then from its sojourn there into another body, and so on. This doom was the result of sin. To hasten the process and escape from evil, “to end the cycle and have respite from sin,” a course of life was necessary, which was defined by the Orphic teaching. The requirements of the Orphic life seem to us trivial and absurd for the most part. Apparently abstinence from flesh was required, except perhaps at certain sacramental festivals; this prohibition was of course due to the doctrine of metempsychosis. No bloody sacrifices were allowed for the same reason. The use of eggs and beans was forbidden, for these articles were associated with the worship of the dead; and burial in woolen garments was likewise wrong. Besides these taboos certain rites existed of which we get only hints. There were liturgies, initiations, magic incantations which seem to show that in time at least an elaborate ritual was developed. All these things were the means by which the soul might be purified from its sin which condemned it to the prison of the body, and which pursued it through incarnation after incarnation.

After death, as I have said, the soul awaited in Hades its rebirth, but its stay in Hades, like its life on earth, was a period of reward or punishment: “They who are righteous beneath the rays of the sun, when they die have a gentler lot in a fair meadow by deep-flowing Acheron.... But they who have worked wrong and insolence beneath the rays of the sun are led down beneath Cocytus’s watery plain into chill Tartarus.”[78] So this stay in Hades was a period of punishment and of purification, as life itself was a period of penance. The duration of this intermediate stay in Hades was conceived perhaps as a thousand years. In any case, after due season the soul entered upon a new incarnation, which apparently was determined by the innocence or guilt of its former life. Rebirth was not always into human form, as the Orphic verses show: “Wherefore the changing soul of man, in the cycles of time, passes into various creatures: sometimes it enters a horse, ... again it is a sheep, then a bird dread to see; again it has the form of a dog with heavy voice, or as a chill snake creeps along the ground.”[79] The poet-philosopher Empedocles declared that before his present existence he had been “a youth, a maiden, a bush, a bird, and a fish of the sea.”[80] So the soul was buffeted from birth to death and back to birth again. Of those who had been guilty of most grievous sins Empedocles says: “There is an oracle of Necessity, an ancient, eternal decree of the gods sealed with strong oaths: when one in sin stains his hands with murder, or when another joining in strife swears falsely, they become the spirits who have long life as their portion, who are doomed to wander thrice ten thousand seasons far from the blessed, being born in the course of time into all forms of mortal creatures, shifting along life’s hard paths. For the might of the air drives them to the sea and the sea spews them on the ground, and the land bares them to the rays of the bright sun, and the sun throws them in whirls of ether. One receives them from another, but all hate them. Of this number am even I now, an exile from god and a wanderer, for I put my trust in mad strife.”[81] The number of reincarnations was not fixed so far as we know, though apparently ten thousand years was thought to be the limit of the process for the ordinary soul. Probably it was believed that there was no end of rebirths for the wicked, but that they were condemned to their repeated fate forever; or that they were doomed to endless punishment without rebirths.

But you may ask, what was the ultimate fate of the purified soul? To this, too, we can give no complete answer. Apparently the soul, stripped at last of all that was earthly and defiling, was then thought to be first truly free and alive. On Orphic tablets of the fourth century before our era found in southern Italy we read these words of the triumphant soul: “I have escaped from the sorrowful, weary round, I have entered with eager feet the ring desired. I have passed to the bosom of the mistress queen of the lower world.” And it is greeted in answer: “O happy and blessed one, thou shalt be god instead of mortal.”[82] Apparently the purified soul left earth and Hades behind. There is no hint of absorption into god; no idea of Nirvana. The spirit of Greek thought required that the individuality of the soul should be retained. No doubt the Orphics conceived of every kind of heaven that was possible, many of them of most materialistic nature. Indeed, Plato reproaches some of them for believing future happiness to be a perpetual drunken round.

For the sinful, torments of a most fearful sort were reserved: not only did they lie in mud and filth, but they were exposed to most terrible creatures who rent their vitals. In short, the Orphic hell was not less awful physically than that of the medieval and later Christian, which in no small part was inherited from the Orphics.

Before we go on to consider other movements of the sixth century, let us summarize briefly the contributions of the Orphics to Greek religious thought. In the first place they definitely shifted man’s look from this world to the world beyond. In Homer, as we have seen, this world offered all for which man could hope; but to the Orphic, as to the devoted sectaries of all redemptive religions, this world was unimportant compared with the next in which he was to realize his fondest desires. Again the Orphics emphasized the duality of man, regarding him as a divine soul imprisoned in a sinful body. They made the divinity of the soul a motive for the religious life, the aim of which was to free the spirit of man from the sin which visits him in the prison-house of the flesh. Thereby they started the tendency to religious asceticism which was to be sharply emphasized by Christianity when a thousand years had past. Their doctrine of the divine nature of the soul they also made the basis of their belief in the soul’s immortality; for if the soul is divine, it must be eternally so. Furthermore, so far as we can know, they introduced the idea of pre-natal sin for which the individual soul must pay the penalty. It needs no argument to show the intrinsic importance of these ideas; as we go on, we shall have occasion to observe their significance in Greek religious thought.

Less valuable in itself, but not less persistent, as we can still see in our own Christian church, was the notion that only the initiates, who by purificatory rites had been received into the sacred association, could hope for salvation. Union with the divine nature and future blessedness were thus made to depend on sacraments rather than on virtue. Indeed, we need not suppose that here any more than in the mysteries at Eleusis there was originally any requirement of a virtuous life. But reason and an awakened ethical sense among the Greeks began early to demand of the initiates compliance with the recognized standards of morality, as the passages already quoted show; and there can be no doubt that in due time most of the various mysteries contributed to the ethical life. Yet the inevitable tendency in the opposite direction made itself felt and there were many Orphic charlatans and quacks who promised salvation to all who would undergo the cheap rites of their initiations.

We must now glance at a contemporaneous and related movement—I mean Pythagoreanism, which will have sprung into the thoughts of many of you already.

Whether Orphism learned from Pythagoras or Pythagoras from Orphism cannot be determined; but it seems probable that Croton was already an Orphic center when about 530 b.c. Pythagoras of Samos after long travels established there an association which combined in a way hitherto unknown religious and philosophic aims. Pythagoras may have attached himself to some group of Orphics already in existence and have inspired it with his political and philosophic interests. In any case his society, which was opposed to the democratic temper of Croton, became in time important enough to be regarded with suspicion and forced to move to Metapontum; ultimately the members were dispersed carrying their doctrines with them throughout the Greek world.

Our knowledge of the philosophic ideas of Pythagoras himself amounts to little. It is clear that in contrast to the emotional Orphics he was interested in intellectual pursuits, especially in mathematics; more than that we cannot say; our present concern lies rather in the ethical and religious views and practices of the society which he established. This set high store on ethical discipline, following a strict course of life, for the ultimate aim was identical with that of the Orphics—salvation and release from sin. Like them the Pythagoreans also held to the doctrine of the transmigration of souls. Their rules enjoined simplicity of food, rare use of meat, and abstention from the eating of beans and eggs. But more important was the discipline which was prescribed for the mind and soul. The applicant for admission to the brotherhood was first tested to determine his fitness. The neophyte was bound to silence and obedience. “The master said it” was argument enough for him. The members devoted themselves to reflection, to self-examination, to the pursuit of the truth. Their highest aim was “to follow god.” Although the Pythagoreans fixed their gaze more on this world than the Orphics did, they also were of great religious significance. They emphasized the duality of man, the moral obligation of the individual, and especially the possibility of training and purifying the soul, and so helped to establish a spiritual heritage for later centuries.

Now I shall invite your attention to a third manifestation of the mystic tendency of this age. Fourteen miles northwest of Athens, between a fertile plain and the sea, lies the ancient town of Eleusis, the center of the most important mysteries in Greece. The story of Demeter is familiar to us all—the goddess whose daughter, Persephone or Kore, was carried off by the god of the lower world. According to the Homeric hymn to Demeter, the mother wandered fasting in search of her daughter over the earth. She came to Eleusis in the guise of an old woman, where she was found by the daughters of the king, Keleos, who took her to their home. There she was kindly received, and was installed as nurse to the infant son of the king. Under her care the child prospered and grew marvellously, for quite secretly Demeter anointed him with ambrosia, breathed upon him, and cherished him in her bosom. By night she hid him “like a brand in the fire ..., for she would have made him free from age and death forever.”

But the queen saw her and cried out in dismay. The goddess was angry, yet none the less promised glory imperishable; she declared herself: “I am the honored Demeter, who am the greatest good and joy to immortals and mortals alike. Come, let all the people build me a mighty temple and hard by it an altar beneath your town and its steep wall, above Callichoros on the jutting spur. But the rites I will myself prescribe, that here ever after you may duly perform them and appease my will.” So the temple and altar to the goddess were built, but she still mourned for her lost daughter. In her sorrow she held back the seedgrain in the ground and all man’s plowing was vain, so that the race of men had nearly perished from the earth if it had not been for Zeus, who interposed and finally restored Persephone to her mother—but not forever. Before she left the house of the dead, Pluto had made her eat a pomegranate seed by which she was bound to return beneath the earth. So she spent two-thirds of each year with her mother on the earth, coming “when the ground blossomed with fragrant flowers,” but returning to the lord of the dead when the flowers faded and the grass withered before the coming of winter. Zeus then summoned Demeter to join the immortal gods on Olympus; but before she went, “she quickly sent up the grain from the fertile ground, and all the broad earth was heavy with leaves and with flowers. And the goddess went and taught the kings who deal out justice, Triptolemus and Diocles the charioteer, mighty Eumolpus, and Keleos, leader of the people. To them she showed the manner of her rites and to them all her mysteries, holy, which none may transgress or enquire into or make known. For a great curse of the gods restrains men’s speech. Happy is he whoever of men dwelling on this earth has seen these things! But he who is uninitiate in these holy rites, who has no share in them, never hath equal lot in death in the shadowy gloom.” So says the Homeric hymn to Demeter, which was composed, according to the general opinion of scholars, in the seventh century before our era.

Thus we see that before this hymn was written the myth was fully developed at Eleusis. There Demeter, Kore, and Pluto had their place, and with them were associated certain heroic personages. A temple and altar to the two goddesses already existed, and mysteries were celebrated which gave to those who might see them and share in them the warrant of a better lot in death than that for which the uninitiate might hope. The date at which the mysteries were established cannot be determined. This is no place for the speculations of the learned in detail, but they seem to have existed as early as the eighth century, and indeed they probably go back to a much remoter antiquity; yet there is no mention of them in Homer or Hesiod. In their earliest form they evidently consisted of certain religious ceremonies connected with agriculture by which the dead grain was called to life in the spring. The grain and the earth from which it sprang were worshipped as the corn-mother, Demeter, and then by a development natural in such religions the goddess was doubled and Kore, the maiden, came into existence beside Demeter. In the cult of these goddesses various rites had developed—fasting, purifications, and night vigils; a myth grew up to explain the ritual and the relation of the two goddesses, with whom a god of the dead was early associated; so something like the story in the Homeric hymn came into being. The agricultural festival was gradually transformed into one of profound meaning, by partaking in which one gained an assurance of future happiness. The wonderful miracle of reviving vegetation, of the grain which dies in the ground and springs anew to life, has often served as the warrant of man’s longing for a revival of his own life, as an assurance of his hope of immortality. So gods and goddesses of agriculture or of vegetation, which grows and dies and grows again, have become for men the lords of life and death, as we have already seen in the case of Dionysus.

The English word mystery is somewhat misleading in such a connection. A mystery in the Greek sense is a secret ritual to which only those may be admitted who have first been prepared by some rites of purification or probation. Such, for example, is the Christian Eucharist to which the Greek word μυστήριον was freely applied. After the proper ritual of initiation, through which the neophyte is guided by one previously initiate and expert, he may take part in the secret performances, which are thought to confer some special power or to bring him into close and privileged relation to divinity.

Originally the festival at Eleusis belonged to a noble Eleusinian family, or possibly to two families. In the seventh century Eleusis was incorporated with Attica; an Eleusinion, a shrine to Demeter of Eleusis, was built near the city; and the privilege of sharing in the festival was apparently given to all Athenians. The mysteries were especially fostered in the sixth century by the tyrant Pisistratus, who built a new hall of initiation which was destroyed by the Persians during their great invasion. Under Pisistratus the mysteries may have been opened to the whole Hellenic world. In the fifth century the broad formula of admission was: “Whoever has pure hands and speaks our tongue.” Eleusis shared in the glory of Athens’ greatest period, and even in the time of Athenian weakness and decay the mysteries retained much of their ancient prestige. Many Romans, including some of the imperial house, were initiated, and the popularity of Eleusis continued as late as the third and fourth centuries. Julian the Apostate in his youth was here initiated. In 364 a.d. the Emperor Valentinian I forbade all nocturnal festivals, including that at Eleusis, but when the pro-consul of Achaea declared that the people could not live without the mysteries, he relaxed his prohibition so far as they were concerned. Thirty-two years later Alaric destroyed the sanctuary, and its long history, which began before history, seemed closed. Yet Eleusis was true to Demeter, for in spite of the iconoclastic tendencies of the Greek Church, the inhabitants continued to worship as St. Demetra a mutilated ancient statue of the goddess, until in 1801 the Englishmen Clarke and Cripps carried it off to its present resting-place in the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge.

The mysteries were under the general charge of the King Archon and his assistants at Athens, but the officials proper continued to be drawn from the two sacred families of the Eumolpidae and Ceryces. From the former was selected the highest official, the hierophant, who held office for life. He alone had the right to show or to explain the secret objects and ceremonies. The next three priests were taken from the Ceryces, and like the hierophant were chosen for life; they were the torch-bearer, dadouchos, who carried the sacred torch at sacrifices and purifications, the altar-priest, and the sacred herald, hieroceryx. Besides these four high officials we know of a considerable number of lesser priests and priestesses, heralds, and secular officers who do not concern us now.

The would-be initiate applied to someone belonging to either of the sacred Eleusinian families to act as mystagogue and lead him through the preliminary purification, which seems to have been essentially identical with that employed to purify any unclean person; this done, the mystagogue duly presented the novice to the officials and recommended him as a proper person to be initiated. There were two degrees of the secret rites: in the first the novices were initiated and became mystae; in the second they advanced to be epoptae, those to whom were made special revelations not vouchsafed to the mystae.

Each year there were two celebrations of the mysteries, one at Agrae, a suburb of Athens, in the month Anthesterion, which corresponds roughly to our February-March, and the greater celebration at Eleusis in Boëdromion, our September. The initiate was ordinarily obliged to take part in the lesser celebration before he could be admitted at Eleusis. The great festival lasted eight or nine days, from the fifteenth to the twenty-second or twenty-third of the month Boëdromion. On the first day the participants assembled before the Painted Porch in Athens to listen to the formal proclamation, in which the officials ordered all unclean persons and all foreigners to withdraw, and enjoined secrecy on all who were to share in the festival. The sixteenth was a day of purification when the participants washed in the sea; the seventeenth and eighteenth were spent as holidays at Athens, during which various sacrifices were made; so that it was not until the nineteenth that the festal procession started for Eleusis, carrying the image of Iacchos, a form of the infant Dionysus. Although the Sacred Way is less than fourteen miles in length, so many stops were made at shrines that Eleusis was not reached until evening. The ceremonies there continued three days and nights. There were sacrifices and offerings to many divinities. In memory of Demeter’s hunt for her daughter the devotees roamed the shore by night carrying lighted torches; and finally like the goddess, they broke their fast by drinking a holy potion of meal and water. The consummation of the festival was the celebration in the Great Hall, where some three thousand might find place on the seats which rose in banks on all four sides. There were two sorts of representations—one for the mystae, who were witnessing the festival for the first time, and the other for those who were more expert, the epoptae. What went on in the Hall we do not know; we can, however, conjecture in general the nature of the celebrations. They consisted of “things done,” δρώμενα, and “things said,” λεγόμενα. The former may well refer to some kind of mystery play, or of tableaux, in which incidents from the myth were represented, such for example as the rape and the recovery of Kore, the mourning of Demeter, the birth of the child Iacchos, and so forth. In fact Clement of Alexandria tells us: “Deo and Kore became persons in a mystic drama, and Eleusis with its torch-bearer celebrates the wandering, the abduction, and the sorrow.”[83] From this and other notices we may conclude that some simple mystery play was acted or tableaux vivants presented before the eyes of the company. In any case there was nothing elaborate. Sacred objects were doubtless exhibited, and apparently handled by some of the spectators. The formula: “I fasted, I drank the potion, I took it from the chest and having tasted I put it away in the basket and from the basket into the chest”[84] gives a hint of certain sacraments, but we cannot now clearly determine their nature. There was no preaching or exhortation. At most the “things said” were a simple ritual, or explanation of the objects exhibited. There may have been music and singing. On the last day of the festival two jars were filled with water and set up, one to the east and the other to the west of the great hall. Then these were overturned with the words, ὓε κύε, “rain,”“conceive.”[85] Here we have a bit of ancient agricultural ritual, of magic, intended to secure abundant rains and the prosperity of the crops. A similar rite was the solemn exhibition of an ear of grain as a symbol of the initiates’ hope.[86]

We inevitably inquire as to what the nature of the teaching of these mysteries was. As a matter of fact, there was probably little if any instruction given. Life beyond the grave was certainly taken for granted. The mystic ritual consisted of only certain simple symbolical ceremonies and representations which each initiate might interpret according to his own impressions. The spectators were put into a certain frame of mind; the celebration touched their emotions and not their intellects. So Aristotle says: “The initiates are not to learn anything, but they are to be affected and put into a certain frame of mind.”[87] This we can understand from the effect of a Christian Mass, which, full of the richest meaning to the devout Catholic, to another may seem of no significance.

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.

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]

Truth also belongs to god: indeed she is “the daughter of Zeus”, “the foundation of virtue.” Of Apollo it is said that he “lays not hold of lies.”[120] Here is a great advance over Homer’s ideas of the godhead. Pindar’s attitude in this respect is not dissimilar to that of Hesiod, who, as we have seen, first gave poetic expression to the idea that justice is an attribute and handmaid of Zeus.

Consonant with these higher views of divinity is Pindar’s treatment of the myths. The grosser elements he leaves aside as being unworthy of the gods. At times he openly protests, as for example in the first Olympian Ode where he declares that he will not treat the story of Pelops in the traditional way, which made Tantalus offer his son’s flesh at a dinner given the immortals: “I will speak differently from those who have gone before. I may not call any one of the blessed gods a cannibal.”[121] This revolt against the current forms of myths was due in part to his belief in the moral perfection of divinity, in part to his moral sense concerning man. His rule was, as laid down by himself, that man should say only good things of the gods, and he shrank from attributing to the divinities things which it would be base for men to do. So in his fifth Nemean Ode he was unwilling to tell of the fratricide of the heroes Peleus and Telamon, but broke off his narrative abruptly, just as he rejected with indignation the shameful tales told of Tantalus. Furthermore Pindar subjected the myths and religious beliefs with which he had to deal to the test of reason; among the several versions which he found current he recognized that some must be false, and so he endeavored to separate the good from the evil, to control the traditions of his people, and thus to practise a free criticism in his work.

On the nature of sin Pindar, as the Greeks in general, holds that whenever man passes the bounds appointed between a mortal and a god, or between man and his fellowmen, he becomes thereby a sinner. Excess is the form of sin which he makes repeatedly his theme. When he praises Lampon of Aegina for “pursuing the mean with his thought and maintaining it in his acts,”[122] he is recalling the principle laid down in Hesiod’s verse, which had passed long since into a proverb: “Keep a middle course; the seasonable in all things is best.”[123]

Again and again in varied forms he warns us to remember that man is mortal: “If one prosper and enjoy a good name, still seek not to become Zeus. Thou hast all, if ever perchance the fate to possess these honors should come to thee. Mortal things befit a mortal.”[124] And again he says: “But if a man shall have wealth and excel other men in beauty, and if in the games he hath exhibited his strength and gained distinction, let him still remember that his garment wraps mortal limbs and that earth shall be the raiment of all in the end.”[125] Sin then is presumption, and as such is punished by the gods. That “envy of the gods,” which seems in Homer almost a childish resentment, is thus given an ethical value which coincides very closely with Aeschylus’ interpretation of this belief. The moral character of Pindar’s form of this doctrine is secured in part by the poet’s apparent belief that man is a free moral agent. The sinner sometimes, like Ixion, might not be able to endure prosperity, and so fall into insolent pride, and thence into blind infatuation. In like fashion Bacchylides teaches that the giants were destroyed by insolent pride, whereas the path to happiness is open to all who will follow justice: “Warriors of Troy, Zeus, who rules on high and beholds all things, is not the author of grievous woes for mortals; no, open before all men is the path that leads to unswerving Justice, attendant of holy Eunomia and prudent Themis: happy the land whose sons take her to dwell with them. But insolence—the spirit void of reverence, who luxuriates in shifty wiles and illicit follies—who swiftly gives a man his neighbor’s wealth and power, but anon plunges him into a gulf of ruin—she it was who destroyed the Giants, overweening.”[126]

On the question of man’s freedom Pindar is not entirely clear. And yet he seems to hold that man, and not some god, is responsible for his initial wrongdoing. But he also points out that when man has once given way to that insolent pride, which is presumptuous sin, then the gods in punishing him may drive him on his wrong course until the man is utterly ruined. This doctrine appears more clearly in Aeschylus.

When we come to Pindar’s view of the life after death, we find that he has a more exalted vision than the poets of an earlier day. The ideas of immortality, of future rewards and punishments, of rebirth, and of a possible final bliss, which were current from the early sixth century at least, had not failed to have their effect on our poet. In a remarkable fragment he sets forth a doctrine as to the relation of body and soul which is very similar to that held by the Orphics, under whose influence he had evidently come: “The bodies of all men follow all-conquering death; but life’s image still liveth on, for that only is from the gods. It sleeps when the limbs are active, but ofttimes in dreams it shows to the sleeper coming judgment, a judgment of peace and pain.”[127] That is, when the body is awake it hampers the soul so that the soul is numbed in sleep; but when the soul is free from the domination of the imprisoning flesh, it then enjoys its proper powers. There is a famous passage in the second Olympian which sets forth Pindar’s views of future reward and punishment. According to this passage, sins committed on the earth are punished beneath the earth, and those done beneath the earth are punished in the soul’s next reincarnation. So heaven and hell are always present to man’s soul, whether here in the light of the sun, or in the darkness of Hades. Those from whom atonement is accepted in the lower world are allowed to return to the earth in high positions; when they have accomplished this rebirth thrice, if they have been just, they may enter into their final happiness. These are Pindar’s words: “The guilty souls of the dead straightway pay the penalty here on earth; and the sins done in this kingdom of Zeus are judged by one beneath the ground, who delivereth his judgment to hateful necessity. But ever in the night and in the day alike the good receive as their lot a life free from toil, enjoying the light of the sun. They vex neither the ground nor the water of the sea for food that does not satisfy, but among the honored gods, those who have found their pleasure in keeping their oaths, enjoy a life free from tears; but the others bear suffering too great to look upon. Yet all those who have tarried thrice on either side (of death) and have persevered in keeping their souls wholly free from unjust deeds, travel the road of Zeus to the tower of Cronos. There the ocean breezes blow around the islands of the blest, golden flowers bloom, some from glorious trees on the land, others water feeds. With garlands the blest entwine their hands and crown their temples.”[128]

We need not pause here to point out in detail the great contrast between Pindar’s ideas of religion and those expressed in the Homeric and Hesiodic poetry. He presented a higher doctrine of future rewards and punishments, which was binding upon men in all the relations of this life; and he expressed a higher conception of morality and of justice, to whose obligations the gods as well as men were subject. The baser elements of mythology he refined away and elevated thereby men’s ideas of the divine; and by making righteousness and truth the prime attributes of the gods, in accordance with which they punished the wicked and blessed the good, he lifted morality and religion to a nobler plane.

When we turn to the two older tragic poets, Aeschylus and Sophocles, we find that they teach doctrines very like those of Pindar, although naturally they dwell on those elements in religion and morality that are adapted to their tragic themes; and they differ between themselves in the points which they emphasize. Aeschylus makes prominent the punitive aspect of divine justice; he dwells upon the punishment which must inevitably follow sin, and which pursues a guilty line from generation to generation. The poet displays a moral earnestness and intensity like that of a Hebrew prophet, and he shows an extraordinary profundity in his handling of moral and religious themes; furthermore he is consciously a religious teacher. Sophocles keeps religion more in the background, using it as one of the materials which he as a literary artist can employ in his dramas; yet he is important as a religious poet for he lays especial stress on the necessity of purity of heart, which for him is the substance of piety toward the gods.

The elder tragedian, Aeschylus, was born at Eleusis about the year 525 b.c. Tradition told that he fought in the Persian wars and was wounded at Marathon. He began to present tragedies about the year 500, and continued to produce them until about three years before his death in 456. Aeschylus was a man of mighty concepts and massive thought, to which his condensed and pregnant style corresponds; a man of a profound and religious nature, strongly influenced by the Mysteries, he thought deeply upon the problems of men and of gods. He faced with honesty the contradictions involved in the current notions with regard to the moral nature of the gods, and in the ethical standards of men. Like Pindar he elevated and refined the traditional myths and made them a medium for the teaching of great moral truths.

Aeschylus regards the order of the universe as moral throughout. This view appears even in the Prometheus Bound, that unique drama of revolt. When we now read this tragedy alone, it seems as if Zeus were represented as a lawless tyrant, using his power and might in most unjust ways. But it is evident that if we had the other two plays of the trilogy, the sympathy which we feel with the Titan Prometheus would be lessened, that we should realize that the extant play represents the transition from violence to law, and that in reality the rule of Zeus is not one of might but one subject ultimately to the law of justice.

Although Aeschylus, like all of his day, was a polytheist, he exalts Zeus far above all other divinities. He regards him as preëminent, the possessor of all majesty and power, whose will always prevails, so that, when he speaks, the thing he wishes comes to pass. The poet uses the highest and most comprehensive epithets of him throughout his plays; in the Supplices the chorus appeal to Zeus as “King of kings, most blessed of the blessed, most perfect power of perfect powers; blessed Zeus”; and again they address him as “the one who rules through infinite time.”[129] In other passages the poet seems to feel as if language were unequal to the task of describing adequately the majesty and power of this supreme god. In his mind Zeus surpasses the other gods so much that his will represents the whole of the divine laws; to him man inevitably turns in doubt and perplexity. As the chorus say in the Agamemnon:

Zeus—whate’er ’Zeus’ expresseth of His essence— If the name please him on the lips of prayer, With his name on my lips I seek his presence, Knowing none else I may with him compare.

Yea, though I ponder, in the balance laying All else, no help save Zeus alone I find, If I would cast aside the burden weighing, All to no profit, ever on my mind.[130]

It is not impossible that Aeschylus cherished ideas of divinity which approached the pantheism or the henotheism of a later age. Clement of Alexandria has preserved two of his verses which are so extraordinary that we are glad to have them attested also by Philodemus.[131] When in these the poet says: “Zeus is the ether, Zeus the earth also; also the sky. Zeus is all things, and that which is above all things as well,” this syncretistic expression may well be due to the influence of Orphism or of the philosopher Heraclitus; but whatever the source of the idea it stands at diameter with popular tradition. Of course it does not exclude the gods of the popular belief, who could be included in the divine unity, as later thought usually conceived them. That Aeschylus uses the gods of the people in his plays is not surprising, for the dramatic poet, whatever his personal belief, must always use material familiar to his audience and suited to his dramatic and poetic purpose.

In the Prometheus Bound the Titan threatens Zeus with Fate and declares that even he cannot escape Necessity. But we must remember that the Prometheus, as I have said before, is a drama which represents transition from the old order to the new, and that at the end of the trilogy there was no conflict between Zeus and Fate; and in general Aeschylus, though not always clear, most often represents Fate either as the will of Zeus himself or as his assistant. The former idea is again and again expressed in the Supplices, where the will of the supreme god is shown as something mighty and absolute which none may transgress.

But if Zeus is exalted to this supreme position, it is as a god of supreme justice. With the poet the ideas of justice and piety, injustice and impiety are equivalent. Like Hesiod he makes Justice the daughter of Zeus, whom Zeus always supports and avenges, “allotting duly ill to the wicked, blessing to the righteous.” To the poet it is inconceivable that a god of perfect justice could desire anything in the world except what is right and just; and therefore he conceives that man’s obligation is to strive after that which is just and righteous, and so to put himself into harmony with the divine will. A failure to do this is sin. Indeed the poet says that when men disregard justice they injure the gods, and more than once sin is spoken of as a disease of the mind. The sinner is a vain creature, laboring under a delusion which oftentimes springs from o’erweening pride and is doomed to bear tears for its fruit. The envy of the gods, which seems in Homer a childish thing, is in Aeschylus only the resentment which they feel toward a sinner who has been led away by success into insolent pride and so is doomed to punishment. In the Persians Xerxes is represented as having been swept away by his haughty insolence so that he lacked discretion (σωφροσύνη) and came to his doom. The shade of Darius says to the chorus:

Zeus sits above, a chastener of thoughts Exceeding proud, a stern inquisitor. Wherefore, since Heaven’s warning bids be prudent, Admonish him with counsel of wise speech To cease from flouting Gods with reckless pride.[132]

And Xerxes’ armies were likewise doomed to pay the price of insolence and of their godless thoughts.

Furthermore Aeschylus teaches that good men must avoid the wicked, and illustrates the truth by the fact that it was evil companions who urged Xerxes to his folly. There is a striking passage in the Septem in which Eteocles, when informed that the seer Amphiaraus is among the heroes who are besieging Thebes, says:

Woe for the omen that with impious men Joineth a righteous man in fellowship! Than evil converse, in all enterprise Nothing is worse; its harvest let none reap. Infatuation’s field hath death for fruit. If the godfearing man for shipmates hath A crew hot-hearted in iniquity, With that god-hated tribe he perisheth: The righteous man who dwells with citizens Traitrous to guests and reckless of the Gods, Is justly taken in the selfsame net, Lashed by the same impartial scourge of God.[133]

We have just seen that Pindar shows a tendency to make man responsible for his sin, quite in contrast to the popular belief which still kept the Homeric view that the gods were responsible for all things. With this popular idea Aeschylus seems at times in accord. But if we consider his plays in their entirety, he makes man responsible for the first step. In the Eumenides, for example, the Furies declare that no just man has ever put his hands justly to any deed and met their wrath. The lesson is that when men have taken the initial downward step themselves an evil divinity or daemon drives them on, but that the first step no man is forced to take. When, however, he has taken it, then the poet represents the sinner as through god’s will infatuated with his sin. No other extant poet shows so impressively how sin relentlessly persists through generation after generation.

The most familiar illustration is found in Aeschylus’ treatment of the story of the bloody line of Atreus, who sinned by slaying his brother’s sons and offering their flesh, an unholy banquet, to their father; then Agamemnon’s queen, with her paramour Aegisthus, slew her lord on his return from Troy; and finally Agamemnon’s son Orestes murdered his mother and Aegisthus to avenge his sire. Thus through three generations the curse ran, each generation adding its own crime until only the divine intervention of Apollo and Athena could stay the course of sin and its doom. When in the Choephoroe Orestes has exacted his vengeance and stained himself with his mother’s blood, the chorus finally sings:

Lo, how upon the palace royal hath burst The third storm that fulfils the house’s fate! First, wretch Thyestes at a feast accurst Of his own children ate:

Then shrieked the second storm the agony Of that king in that laver hacked to death, When the Achaians’ chief to treachery There yielded up his breath:

Now on the third storm’s wild wings down doth sweep A Saviour—or a Doom shall he be named? Where shall the Curse end?—how be lulled to sleep Its fury?—how be tamed?[134]

A similar theme was handled by him in his tragedies which dealt with the history of the royal house of Thebes. Against the warning of the oracle Laius married Jocasta; their son Oedipus slew his father and wed his own mother who bore him children. Under the burden of Oedipus’ curse their two sons, Eteocles and Polynices, fell in fratricidal strife. These are dark bloody tales, but in the tragedies of Aeschylus they were given a fearful moral import. It is true that the same stories were handled by other tragedians, but by none with such moral impressiveness.

The mind of the poet was too searching and earnest to avoid the difficult problems which appear in real life when there is a conflict of duties. Such a conflict arises when Agamemnon has to choose between slaying his daughter and failing to do his duty by his country; again when Antigone at the close of the Seven against Thebes has to decide whether she will disobey the higher law which requires that the dead shall be buried, or resist the edict of the state which forbids her the service to her dead. Throughout the Choephoroe and Eumenides Orestes has to face the duty of avenging his father’s death laid upon him by Apollo, and the pious reverence which he should show his mother. The poet offers no satisfactory solution to such problems as these—indeed, his purpose in bringing them out clearly was probably dramatic rather than moral. Yet whatever his purpose, it is important for us to note that he realized the moral conflict clearly as a part of man’s common experience.

I have already said that Aeschylus dwells chiefly upon the retributory nature of punishment, teaching that the sinner must suffer for his own deeds. “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” was no less binding in Greek than Hebrew justice:

Destinies, Mighty Ones, grant that from Zeus may the issue betide Even as Justice requireth, who now is arrayed on our side. ‘Ever the tongue of hate shall the tongue of hate requite: Aye for the stroke of murder the stroke of murder shall smite’ Justice exacting her dues cries ringing-voiced this law. ‘Doers must suffer’—so sayeth the immemorial saw.

A law saith, ‘Murder-drops of blood-libation On earth spilt, cry for blood in expiation.’ The Avenging Sprite shrieks, hastening Havoc on Which brings from graves of men dead long agone Ruin to crown the work of ruin done.[135]

This principle runs through the entire trilogy of the Oresteia. Agamemnon lost his life as recompense for the life of his daughter Iphigenia whom he slew with his own hand, and the murder of Agamemnon was avenged by the slaughter of Clytemnestra and her paramour. Throughout the three plays doom follows the criminal relentlessly and only divine interference in the end clears the account. And yet at times Aeschylus teaches a gentler belief, that wisdom comes through suffering and constraint, and that it is through the discipline of pain that we travel the road to understanding.

Although Aeschylus lays overwhelming emphasis on the truth that punishment for sin falls upon the sinner in this life, he also teaches that there is punishment for the wicked in the world below. In his description of the dead there are many reminiscences of Homer. But his Hades is not Homeric; there is reality in punishment there no less than upon earth. In the Eumenides the Furies threaten Orestes thus:

Nay, I shall suck—thou canst not choose but pay the penalty— The red gore from thy living limbs, and win me out of thee The banquet of a draught that shall with awful anguish flow. Yea, I will waste thy living frame, then drag thee far below, There to pay all thy penalty, the mother-murder’s woe. So shall all else that have transgressed, Have sinned against a God, a guest, Or parents, mark how each receives The dues of sin that Justice gives. For Hades ’neath the earth waits every soul, A mighty judge who watcheth to enscroll All sins on his eternal memory’s roll.[136]

Of the rewards of the righteous in the next life Aeschylus has no word to say. There is no Elysium or Islands of the Blest.

Aeschylus represents the Athens of the Persian Wars; Sophocles belongs to the Periclean age. He was born fifteen years before the battle of Salamis and led the chorus which sang a paean to celebrate the Greek victory. To his contemporaries his life seemed happy, as if he were beloved by the gods above all other men. In 468 b.c. he was successful in contending for the tragic prize with Aeschylus, and he continued to write until his death in 406. Instead of the rugged strength and passion that we find in Aeschylus, Sophocles displays a sunny and gentle nature that naturally sought out the kindly and mediating elements in life. A conservative, he was not an innovator, critic, or teacher, as both Aeschylus and Euripides were; he does not make his characters reason much on the deeper things of life or criticize the traditional order.

Yet in one sense he is the most religious of the Greek poets, showing a faith in divine government and a wide outlook on the universe which the two other tragedians did not display. He does not break with the traditional belief as to the nature of the gods; indeed at most points he follows closely the Homeric conception; they are still to his mind the givers of evil as well as of good to men, and in fact his chorus in the Antigone quotes with approval the ancient saying that evil seems good soon or late to him whose mind the god draws to mischief.[137] Although he does not follow Pindar and Aeschylus in ascribing to divine beings a pure morality, yet he is inclined to believe with the elder poets that “Justice revealed from of old sits with Zeus in the might of the eternal laws.”[138] There are only two passages in which his characters may be said to criticize the gods. In the first Philoctetes, smarting under his suffering and neglect, exclaims:

No evil yet was crushed. The Heavens will ever shield it. ’Tis their sport To turn back all things rancorous and malign From going down to the grave, and send instead The good and true. Oh, how shall we commend Such acts, how construe them? When I extol Things god-like, I find evil in the Gods.[139]

But it must be observed that any other sentiment would have been out of character for Philoctetes at this point. The second is a fragment from his lost play, Aleites, in which some speaker, contemplating the prosperity of the wicked and the misfortunes of the good, declares that the gods ought not to order things thus for mortals, but that on the contrary the pious should have some evident profit from their piety and the unjust should pay the penalty for their wrongs that all might see.[140] But this fragment is so at variance in sentiment with Sophocles’ general attitude that it has been conjectured, not without probability, that it came from Euripides. Even if we reject this conjecture, as I think we must, we need not suppose that the sentiments which the poet puts into the mouths of his characters always represent his real view. A dramatist, as we must remind ourselves, should make the speakers in his play express sentiments in harmony with their characters and for the most part will have them utter moral ideas with which most of his audience is in sympathy, unless indeed he would play the part of innovator or prophet. As a matter of fact Sophocles’ own attitude seems to be expressed in another fragment: “No man is wise save him whom god honors; but if one look unto the gods, even if the god bid him depart from justice, there he must go. For nothing to which the gods lead men is base.”[141] This seems the key to Sophocles’ religious attitude. He is confident that however things may seem to us in our short-sightedness, if we could only see the purposes of the gods in their totality, we should know that they are good.

The bases of man’s life and action, his highest duty, Sophocles teaches is piety and discretion, σωφροσύνη. When in the Philoctetes Heracles appears, he urges upon the heroes that when they return to Troy they be mindful, in laying waste the land, to show reverence towards the gods:

But, take good heed, Midst all your spoil to hold the gods in awe. For our great Father counteth piety Far above all. This follows men in death, And fails them not when they resign their breath.[142]

And the chorus sings at the end of the Antigone:

Wise thought hath the first place in happiness Before all else, and piety to Heaven Must be preserved. High boastings of the proud Bring sorrows to the height to punish pride:— A lesson men shall learn when they are old.[143]

In the Ajax Athena says:

Then, warned by what thou seest, be thou not rash To vaunt high words toward Heaven, nor swell thy port Too proudly, if in puissance of thy hand Thou passest others, or in mines of wealth. Since Time abases and uplifts again All that is human, and the modest heart Is loved by Heaven, who hates the intemperate will.[144]

There is an extraordinary passage in the Oedipus Coloneus where Oedipus is made to say, when his strength fails him and he cannot go to the altar to sacrifice, but must send one of his daughters: “For I think that one soul suffices to pay this debt for ten thousand, if it come with good will (purity) to the shrine.”[145] Piety, reverence, and purity, these to Sophocles are the highest qualities of man.

For the poet the moral order was unchanging, dependent not upon caprice but having a divine source and a divine sanction; the laws of heaven are therefore superior to those of man, and man’s obedience to the higher law is made his duty and the means of his consecration. In an ode in Oedipus the King, which is called forth by the king’s harshness and by the suspicion that he is not wholly guiltless, as well as by the queen’s bold contempt for Apollo’s oracle, the chorus sings:

O may I live Sinless and pure in every word and deed Ordained by those firm laws, that hold their realm on high! Begotten of Heaven, of brightest Ether born, Created not of man’s ephemeral mould, They ne’er shall sink to slumber in oblivion. A Power of God is there, untouched by Time.[146]

That is, the chorus here pray that they may always show their piety and reverence by obeying the divine laws. This sentiment is repeated more than once in the extant tragedies; as when Odysseus warns Agamemnon not to refuse burial to the body of Ajax: “’Tis not he, ’tis the law of heaven that thou would’st hurt.”[147] Through this belief Sophocles justified Antigone in her decision to defy the edict of the state, for Creon had ordained that her brother Polynices might not be buried, since he had attacked Thebes. But Greek belief regarded it as a sacred duty of the next of kin to bury their dead, and this duty Antigone could not but fulfil, although she knew that death would be her lot. When Creon asks her if she did indeed dare to transgress his edict, she replies:

I heard it not from Zeus, nor came it forth From Justice, where she reigns in the Underworld. They too have published to mankind a law. Nor could I think thine edict of such might That one who is mortal thus could overrule The infallible, unwritten laws of Heaven. Their majesty begins not from today But from eternity, and none can tell The hour that saw their birth.[148]

It was for this same principle that Socrates, a generation later, gave up his life. In his defense he told his jury why: “Perhaps someone may say, ‘But Socrates, can you not go off and live in exile, give up talking and be quiet?’ This is the very point on which it is hardest to persuade some of you, for if I say that this is exile to be disobeying the god and therefore that it is impossible to keep quiet, you will not believe me, but will say that I am ironical.”[149] Socrates believed that he had a divine commission to question and examine others, and that duty he must perform as the heroine in the tragedy must perform hers, cost him what it might.

The eternal problem of human suffering, the fact that pain and misfortune are not always the result of wrong doing, but that the innocent suffer while the guilty escape, was a matter with which Sophocles was much concerned. His predecessor Aeschylus had tried to show in opposition to experience that sin always preceded pain; and in Sophocles the doom of Creon and his house is due to the king’s proud resentment wherein he sinned against heaven’s law. But in the same play the heroine Antigone, who has obeyed the divine mandates, is forced to suffer a most pathetic fate. King Oedipus was not intentionally guilty, and the fate of the innocent queen Deianeira surpasses in pathos that of any other tragic heroine. She was impelled by the tender desire to recall the love of her faithless husband, and the poet acquits her of blame, “She erred, though she intended well.”[150] But none the less she involved both husband and herself in dreadful doom.

The tragic poet found his solution of this ancient perplexing problem only in the larger view, which regarded the individual as but a slight factor in the economy of the whole. At times suffering was regarded as a means of discipline: “The soul that has been bedded in misfortune sees many things.”[151] Thus through pain one learns and has his nature developed. Theseus, in the Oedipus Coloneus, offers a kindly welcome to the exile Oedipus and his daughters, for his own sufferings in exile have produced a spirit of kindliness and charity in him. Oedipus himself in the same play is unlike the headstrong king of the earlier tragedy; suffering and time have chastened and enlightened him, though they have not made him mild in spirit.

Sophocles also displays great sympathy with human weakness and suffering. This appears in his treatment of the character of Deianeira, and above all in the tender pathos with which he brings out the human longings of Antigone, who though she has nobly obeyed heaven’s unwritten law, yet shrinks from suffering and death and from the loss of all that youth promises. It is not surprising, therefore, that we find in Sophocles mercy emphasized as a divine attribute, and this quality in the gods held up as an example to men. On this Polynices makes his appeal to Oedipus:

But seeing that Zeus on his almighty throne Keeps Mercy in all he does to counsel him, Thou, too, my father, let her plead with thee![152]

The sentiment is not far from Portia’s plea:

It is enthroned in the hearts of kings, It is an attribute to God himself; And earthly power doth then show likest God’s When mercy seasons justice.

Sophocles’ sympathy for undeserved suffering, his understanding of the weakness of men, of their liability to error, and his faith in the gods, all led him to try to take the larger view of the ills of life, to which the philosopher Heraclitus had already given expression when he said that god does all things for the harmony of the whole; and that while men regard some things as right and others wrong, to god all things are fair and good and right. The individual is only a part of the great whole, and when human experiences are regarded sub specie aeternitatis, we shall find that that which seems evil is only permitted to make a just and harmonious unity. The poet tried to conceive of the life of man,

As a great whole, not analyzed to parts But each part having reference to all.

Looked at from this universal point of view the sufferings of Philoctetes, Antigone, Deianeira, and Oedipus are justified to men.

It was natural that Sophocles should use many Homeric concepts with reference to the condition of men and the life after death. In the Antigone alone is there any personal hope of future happiness. It may well be that the poet’s sense of what was fitting dramatically is responsible for his conservative attitude; he was dealing with traditional material, and using themes and incidents which were far remote in time from his audience. It may have seemed to him that fidelity to his subject and the requirements of artistic unity prevented his putting into the mouths of his characters sentiments which an early age could hardly have conceived. Sophocles was not animated by the iconoclasm which we shall find in the bolder Euripides; but if the future life is not pictured in Sophocles’ extant tragedies, we need not doubt for a moment that he believed in immortality. He had been initiated into the Mysteries and one of the finest expressions of the ecclesiastical confidence which the initiates felt came from his pen: “Thrice blessed are those mortals 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.”[153]

Such, in brief, were the teachings of some of the greatest poets of the sixth and fifth centuries before our era. But these represent only one side of Greek thought in this time. In Athens there were influences, political, social, and intellectual, which were working profound changes. Pindar, Aeschylus, and Sophocles belonged to an older order; the voices of the new age will concern us in our next lecture.

IV
THE FIFTH CENTURY AT ATHENS

The defeat of the Persians at Salamis in 480 b.c. made Athens the first state in Greece. Not only had she suffered enormous losses in the ruin of her city and lands for the common cause, but she had borne the brunt of the naval fight at Salamis, as ten years before, with the brave men from Plataea, she had driven the Persian hordes from the plain of Marathon into the sea. The Athenians had acquitted themselves well, for they had shown the loftiest patriotism and loyalty to the cause of Hellas; now their high position was recognized even by their jealous rivals. Athens entered on a brilliant period of fifty years which has never been equalled in the world’s history. Within that time she produced statesmen, architects, artists, and poets who have never been surpassed since in any state in the same length of time. Her naval power, her wealth and culture, placed her in a supreme position.

Neither the Athenians nor the other Greeks forgot the gods to whom they believed that they owed their victory over the Persians. To Apollo at Delphi the allies sent a golden tripod set on a pillar of three bronze serpents bearing the names of those who made the offering; the Athenians on their own account erected a trophy there, and on the Acropolis they deposited the broken cables of the bridge which the Persians had built across the Hellespont. Soon they set up in the same place a colossal bronze statue of Athena made from the spoils captured at Marathon. A new temple to the goddess in place of the one destroyed by the Persians was planned by Cimon; but his ostracism in 461 b.c. stopped its building. When Pericles was able to carry out his plans for adorning Athens, he determined to enlarge the structure; as a result the Parthenon with its wondrous sculptures and great chryselephantine statue of the goddess was completed in 438 b.c. At the entrance of the Acropolis a splendid propylaea was begun and many other public buildings were erected to adorn the city. The chief divinity of Athens, the goddess Athena, now held her position without a rival; all the other gods were in second place. The conception of the goddess was essentially that fixed by the Homeric poems, and as such Phidias represented her with aegis, spear, and shield, carrying victory in her hand. She became the embodiment of the power and the glory of the state.

In an earlier lecture I referred to the part which Pisistratus played during the sixth century in fostering Orphism at Athens and in developing the mysteries at Eleusis. Now the Athenian success in driving back the Persian invaders had filled the citizens with a spirit which had little desire for the sacraments of the Orphics, and furthermore the mysteries at Eleusis satisfied all longing for mystic assurance of security and of future happiness. But Pisistratus had also emphasized the Olympian religion as set forth in the Homeric poems. Indeed, we may say that he produced a Homeric revival; for whatever the truth may be in the tradition that he had the Homeric text fixed and written down in the Attic alphabet, there can be little question that he made the Iliad and Odyssey more widely known by ordaining that the rhapsodes should recite them at the great Panathenaic festival. The emphasis given by him to the Olympian divinities resulted in the exaltation of Athena and the subordination of most local cults to her worship upon the Acropolis. It was Pisistratus also who developed and gave new magnificence to the Panathenaic festival. This was annual, but was celebrated with special splendor every fourth year. At these festivals the recitation of the Homeric poems brought before the people in impressive manner the whole pageantry of Olympus. The great procession with which the festival culminated—that procession known to us from Phidias’ frieze upon the Parthenon—had as its objective point the Acropolis, where the sacred robe and other gifts were offered to the patron goddess, Athena. Her old temple on the site once occupied by the goodly house of Erectheus was adorned at the tyrant’s orders with a peristyle and new pediment sculptures. The battle of Athena Polias and the gods against the giants replaced the old sculptures of Zeus encountering a three-headed monster and of Heracles destroying the Hydra. Thus Pisistratus made the temple of Athena the center of the united Athenian state, and established the goddess as the chief divinity of Attica.

This Olympian religion was well suited to the state in the fifth century. The Athenian success in saving Greece from the Persians had magnified the importance of Athens in the eyes of all her citizens. Their life was now one of action; they were proudly conscious of their expanding empire, their growing power, and increasing wealth. The joy which they felt in their present existence had something of the epic quality in it. Furthermore the growth of free democracy, which opened up many channels of successful activity through the state, had not yet resulted in that individualism with its disintegrating tendencies which marked the fourth century, and the common interests of the Athenians made the state the center of their thought. They regarded it as an organization existing for the benefit of all free citizens. Its unity and its power, so far as Athens was concerned, were symbolized by the goddess Athena. On her home and on her worship the resources of the state were lavished. It was inevitable that her religion should be regarded as primarily a state affair, and that at the same time she and the other protecting gods should seem to the individual citizen somewhat more removed from human interests and sympathy as they gained in the august majesty which the wealth of the empire lent them. Exactly as to many a Christian the wealth and magnificence of a splendid cathedral seem to put God farther away than the bare simplicity of some beloved chapel, so the Parthenon undoubtedly made Athena seem more august and more remote to many an Athenian than the rude and simple protecting deity of his country home.

The result of these various causes which were operative in the fifty years of Athens’ greatness was that a part of religion became a state concern, and that men’s loyalty was centered on the state. Patriotism and pride in empire took the place to a considerable extent of what may be roughly described as personal religion. This, of course, does not mean that a belief in the gods among the mass of the people had died out in any sense. The ordinary Athenian continued his worship as before at the local shrines and joined with the other citizens in paying tribute to the great divinities. But especially with many of the intellectual and leading men religion was absorbed, so to speak, into patriotism, exactly as has been the case in our own time in France and Italy. This attitude of mind finds supreme expression in the funeral oration of Pericles, which he pronounced over those who had died in the first year of the Peloponnesian War. His speech is devoted to glorifying the Athenians and to celebrating the noble service which the fallen rendered when they gave up their lives for their fatherland. There is not one syllable about the gods, one word of gratitude to heaven, or a single expression of solace to the relatives of the dead based on any hope of immortality. In the service of the state Pericles saw every incentive and every reward. This will be clear from the following paragraphs:[154]

“Such was the end of these men; they were worthy of Athens, and the living need not desire to have a more heroic spirit, although they may pray for a less fatal issue. The value of such a spirit is not to be expressed in words. Any one can discourse to you forever about the advantages of a brave defence, which you know already. But instead of listening to him I would have you day by day fix your eyes upon the greatness of Athens, until you become filled with the love of her; and when you are impressed by the spectacle of her glory, reflect that this empire has been acquired by men who knew their duty and had the courage to do it, who in the hour of conflict had the fear of dishonor always present to them, and who, if they failed in an enterprise, would not allow their virtues to be lost to their country, but freely gave their lives to her as the fairest offering which they could present at her feast. The sacrifice which they collectively made was individually repaid to them; for they received again each one for himself a praise which grows not old, and the noblest of all sepulchres—I speak not of that in which their remains are laid, but of that in which their glory survives, and is proclaimed always and on every fitting occasion both in word and deed. For the whole earth is the sepulchre of famous men; not only are they commemorated by columns and inscriptions in their own country, but in foreign lands there dwells also an unwritten memorial of them, graven not on stone, but in the hearts of men. Make them your examples, and esteeming courage to be freedom and freedom to be happiness, do not weigh too nicely the perils of war. The unfortunate who has no hope of a change for the better has less reason to throw away his life than the prosperous who, if he survive, is always liable to a change for the worse, and to whom any accidental fall makes the most serious difference. To a man of spirit, cowardice and disaster coming together are far more bitter than death, striking him unperceived at a time when he is full of courage and animated by the general hope.

Wherefore I do not now commiserate the parents of the dead who stand here; I would rather comfort them. You know that your life has been passed amid manifold vicissitudes; and that they may be deemed fortunate who have gained most honour, whether an honorable death like theirs, or an honorable sorrow like yours, and whose days have been so ordered that the term of their happiness is likewise the term of their life. I know how hard it is to make you feel this, when the good fortune of others will too often remind you of the gladness which once lightened your hearts. And sorrow is felt at the want of those blessings, not which a man never knew, but which were a part of his life before they were taken from him. Some of you are of an age at which they may hope to have other children, and they ought to bear their sorrow better; not only will the children who may hereafter be born make them forget their own lost ones, but the city will be doubly a gainer. She will not be left desolate, and she will be safer. For a man’s counsel cannot have equal weight or worth, when he alone has no children to risk in the general danger. To those of you who have passed their prime I say: ‘Congratulate yourselves that you have been happy during the greater part of your days; remember that your life of sorrow will not last long, and be comforted by the glory of those who are gone. For the love of honour alone is ever young, and not riches, as some say, but honour is the delight of men when they are old and useless.’”

The loyalty to the state, however, which animates this oration we must remember actually resulted in the glorification of Athena and the other great gods. For they, too, were a part of the state, and had a share in its reputation and prosperity. But I must point out again that in this exaltation of the Olympic gods there was nothing of that personal relation of the individual to divinity, such as must exist in every really religious age.

Yet at the risk of repetition, I would recall the fact that the practice of religion by individuals had not ceased at Athens. The common man still paid devotion to his guardian gods, made offerings to the dead, and shared in many forms of worship. Furthermore the spread of the Eleusinian mysteries in this century, so that a new and larger initiation hall had to be erected at Eleusis, shows that thoughts of the future life and the deepest religious feelings still existed in large numbers of the citizens. We have here, then, an apparent contradiction, such as has appeared many times and in many places in the religious history of man. Many of the leaders of the state were interested in religion only as it was an affair of state, in the same way in which the army and navy were. On the other hand there were large numbers who felt a more personal interest in religion and who cultivated a more personal relation to divinity. Nor were there lacking men of the most intellectual class to deal with the higher concepts of religion which had been developing during the recent centuries. These ideas find their truest utterance in the work of the poets, and we have already seen how Pindar, Aeschylus, and Sophocles interpreted nobler views with regard to the gods, human conduct, and man’s relation to the divinities, to all Greece and especially to Athens which had now become the intellectual center of the Hellenic world.

But another new force had been developing among the Greeks during the sixth century which was destined to deal a far greater blow to traditional religion than any other—I mean philosophy. This began in Ionia and was cultivated in other parts of greater Greece before it came to Athens. But after the Persian Wars the prominence and prosperity of that city was so great and her intellectual eminence was so high that she attracted the men of note in many departments of life. Among them was the philosopher Anaxagoras of Clazomenae who made Athens his home for about thirty years (c. 462-432 b.c.). He became a member of the most intellectual Athenian society of his day, a friend of Euripides, and an intimate of Pericles. When dangers began to threaten the state, with the prospect of war looming on the horizon, the people began to blame their great leader; to injure him, they banished one and another of his friends. The two most noted were Phidias the sculptor, of whose art the marbles of the Parthenon are still the unsurpassed witnesses, and Anaxagoras the philosopher; the charge against both was impiety. Anaxagoras taught that the sun was a red hot mass of rock, as the moon was a cold mass, like the earth. According to this teaching the sun and moon could no longer be regarded as gods, so that a charge of impiety was as easily based on such doctrines as it was on the teaching of Galileo twenty centuries later. But although the philosopher was driven out, philosophy could not be so easily banished. The eager intellectual life of Athens had caught the spark, and the flame of philosophy was never extinguished on the Athenian altars for almost a thousand years, until the Emperor Justinian closed the philosophic schools in 529 a.d.

Now philosophy aimed from the very first to explain the origin and structure of the universe by reducing all things to a single principle, or to a few principles at most. The purpose of the philosopher was to carry out a more systematic search for unity than the thought of the poet or of the ordinary man could accomplish. We have seen how Hesiod and the Orphics tried by cosmogonies to explain the origin of the world. The philosophers turned to physical science for their explanation. But in every case their work was from its very nature antagonistic to popular polytheism, which saw a separate divinity in every phenomenon. It was inevitable that the conflict should become an open one sooner or later.

Xenophanes of Colophon (flor. c. 540 b.c.) was the first to enter the lists. Driven into exile by civil disturbances at about the age of twenty-five, he lived most of his life in Sicily. He was as much a social and religious reformer and satirist as philosopher. With a frankness which passed beyond the freedom of his age he struck at the popular beliefs with regard to the gods, which taught that the gods were born and had clothes and voices and forms like mortals. He illustrated the folly of the Greeks in making the gods after their own image by reminding them that the Ethiopians made their gods flat-nosed and black, and the Thracians theirs blue-eyed and red-haired, while if cattle and horses and lions had but hands and could draw and mould and fashion like men, then each would draw and fashion the gods in his own image.[155] For the current notions of divinity he held Homer and Hesiod responsible and charged that these poets had attributed to the gods everything that was reckoned as shame and reproach among men—stealing, adultery, and cheating.[156] He likewise opposed the doctrine that the gods had taught men their knowledge, but declared that man had always learned through experience and investigation the better way for himself.[157] Xenophanes went even further than this and used the science of his day to prove that what was regarded as the appearances of the gods was merely meteorological phenomena. In the place of many gods he declared that there was but one, and he not like mortal men either in form or intelligence, but that he was wholly sight, wholly intelligence, wholly hearing—that is to say, god and the universe are identical, and the cosmos is eternal, sentient, and intelligent.[158] There could hardly have been a greater contrast than between this pantheism and the polytheism of the day. It is true that Xenophanes offers no adequate explanation of the way in which phenomena arise; he does not solve the problem of deriving the transient out of that which is permanent and fixed. But nevertheless he crudely anticipated the thought of later philosophers and theologians and began the open struggle with polytheism which was to continue for many centuries.

Another philosopher who deserves our attention here is Heraclitus of Ephesus who flourished in the early fifth century. As he surveyed the world he was impressed with the variety of phenomena that moved before him, with the fact that nothing is stable but that everything is always in process of change. He declared therefore that nothing is permanent but that all things in reality are in a state of flux and flow (πάντα ῥεῖ). The explanation for this constant change he apparently found in the crude science of the day which observed that changes in temperature cause changes of form, some solids becoming liquid and liquids gaseous. This phenomenon he thought was due to fire. Fire he regarded as universal in the cosmos—indeed, as identical with it, and he is reported as saying that this universe, which is the same for all beings, no god or mortal has made, but it has always been and is and ever will be eternal fire, which sometimes grows the brighter and again is quenched. This fire he is willing to call god; it is to him the principle which permeates the universe and causes all change within it. Such being the case, Heraclitus maintains that true knowledge is not concerned with many things but solely with the unity in the world which his teachings set forth. In his scorn for his predecessors he outdoes Xenophanes. Not only Homer and Hesiod, but Pythagoras, Xenophanes, Archilochus, and Hecateus are alike condemned. Homer and Archilochus he declares deserve to be driven from the games and flogged, such folly had they taught.[159] In his assaults on the popular religion Heraclitus did not concern himself so much with mythology as with the rites and ceremonies current in his time. He evidently attacked the representatives of the mystery religions, calling them night walkers, magi, priests of Bacchus, devotees of the wine-vat, and mystery-mongers. In another fragment he ridicules those who pray to the images of the gods, for that is as if one were to pray to a man’s house; and again he declares that if men on ordinary occasions sang songs like the hymns which they raise in honor of Dionysus they would be acting most shamelessly. Man’s duty to his mind is to devote himself wholly to the apprehension of the divine unity in the world, of that wisdom to which alone he would consent to give the name of Zeus.[160]

We have now seen from these two representatives how philosophy regarded traditional polytheism, and taught that the unity of the universe was identical with god. But neither Xenophanes nor Heraclitus offered any satisfactory explanation of the way in which multiplicity could arise out of unity. Still less did they conceive of a personal god. This concept was reserved for Plato or possibly for his great teacher. A slight approach toward an explanation of variety was made, it is true, by Heraclitus, through his “fire” and also through a doctrine which I have not mentioned, namely that “strife,” the action of opposites, is the cause of change. Now another philosopher, Empedocles of Agrigentum, whom we have already met as a mystic, offered an explanation of the cause of phenomena not dissimilar to that of Heraclitus, and yet one that marked an advance. For his elements Empedocles took the four of popular belief—earth, air, fire, water, which he said were combined in various forms by the principles of “friendship” and of “strife”; or, as we should say today in less symbolic language, by affinity and incompatibility. But like Heraclitus Empedocles fails to make clear how or why these principles act at all on his elements. In short before Anaxagoras no thinker conceived of any satisfactory formative or motive principles to explain phenomena; likewise none had arrived at a well defined distinction between a material principle and a formative principle. Anaxagoras solved the problem in a way highly satisfactory for his age and in a manner which unconsciously anticipated many of the principles of modern science. According to him all substances are elementary, existing in seeds or germs, infinite in number, infinitesimal in size. Aristotle and the ancients in general understood him to mean that these seeds or germs are minute particles of the things which we know in the mass, as for example bread or water, or flesh and bones. Some modern scholars think that he meant that the original mass of matter was infinitely divided and that every atom had in it a portion of everything else: the various combinations of these seeds, atoms, we name bread, water, or flesh and bones according to the predominance of these things in the seeds which make up the whole. Yet whether Aristotle and the ancients or the moderns be right is a matter of little moment to us now. Anaxagoras thought that these “seeds,” whatever they were, were set in motion and combined to produce the infinite diversity of the natural objects by Mind (Νοῦς).

Anaxagoras’ great service, then, was his introduction of Mind into philosophy as a formative, a motive principle to provide the cause for change and diversity. It is not to be denied that Anaxagoras conceived his principle to be as material as the elements themselves, and that he did not employ his principle fully, even after he introduced it into the world. Indeed, he did not advance beyond a mechanical concept of the cause of phenomena. But nevertheless he is significant in the history of European thought as the founder of the dualistic system which largely prevailed thereafter. His contemporaries, too, recognized him as an innovator, for we are told that the wits of Athens nicknamed him “Mind.” With the consequences of this new dualism we shall be much concerned hereafter.

Another group of men contributed to the intellectual life of that wonderful fifty years of Athenian history which began with the defeat of the Persians and ended with the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War. How keen the intellectual life of that time was is shown by the high excellence of the plays to which the masses of the common citizens listened in the theater. Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides were not enjoyed by the few but by the great body of Athenian citizens, and their plays were known even among the remote Greek colonies. The intellectual spirit of the age was stimulated to inquiry and to scepticism. Herodotus is wholly sceptical, and the agnostic tendency of the time is shown by the entire lack of mythology and superstition displayed by Thucydides. A further stimulus was furnished by the development of a higher education given by professional teachers—the Sophists.

The last half of the fifth century is often called with good reason the “Age of the Sophists.” We must understand clearly just what we mean by this term as applied to the men of this time, for today the word sophist has an unfavorable connotation. The Sophists of the fifth century neither formed a philosophic school nor were they charlatans. The most prominent among them was Protagoras of Abdera whose ability and character is shown by the fact that Pericles selected him to draw up the laws for Thurii in 444-43 b.c. Gorgias of Leontini in Sicily enjoyed such high reputation that in 427 he was sent at the head of an embassy to Athens. These Sophists were simply men devoted to the pursuit of wisdom, frequently professional teachers who undertook to give a general culture, to train their pupils to take part in society and the state. For the old training which had been gained by observation they substituted a formal discipline; they offered instruction in rhetoric, politics, music, in short in all the higher branches, as we should call them. But they had no unity of doctrine. By the close of the fifth century they had fallen somewhat into disrepute and were under suspicion, since in the Athenian state all the youths who could afford to pay the fees which these professional teachers charged belonged to the aristocratic class, which frequently voted against the democracy. The Sophists owed their great influence to the fact that they met an actual need in the small society of Athens which included an unusual number of men with eager alert minds and great intellectual curiosity. Now it should be observed that rhetoric, which formed a considerable part of the new education introduced by these professional teachers since political life was the chief career open to a young Athenian, led to habits of examination, analysis, and definition. We are all familiar with the fact that any attempt to analyze and define customary beliefs and practices is pretty certain to detect inconsistencies unobserved before; to lead, at first at least, to confusion and to doubt as to the validity of the practice or belief under consideration; and that when applied to traditional morality or religion it is likely to loosen the obligations which men have hitherto regarded. For illustrations of this truth we have only to look about us and to see how in this generation, as in the generations of our fathers, long accepted beliefs have crumbled before examination, as for example the institution of slavery, the justice of which few questioned a century and a quarter ago. So it was inevitable that in Athens some of the effects of the sophistic teaching should be destructive. And these effects were exaggerated by the great store which was set on skill in disputation. When moral or religious themes were under discussion, the point at issue was not the value of this or that position, but rather the relative skill of the disputants. We are so familiar with this in academic life, in college debates, for example, that the question of the moral effect does not rise in our minds. But it is little wonder that in the fifth century in Athens the Sophists were charged with making the worse cause the better.

Furthermore the Sophists were sceptical as to the possibility of acquiring absolute knowledge about anything. This scepticism may have been due to a failure on the part of the science of the day which led individuals to turn from nature to man as the object of their inquiry. Protagoras maintained that all knowledge was relative, since the only way in which a man can know anything is through his senses; through them he perceives that an object is hot or cold, round or square, sweet or bitter. He pointed out, also, that the same object will not always appear the same even to the same individual; hence he declared that there is no such thing as absolute truth, but that whatever seems true to you or to me at the moment is the truth for you or for me, and that it is not at all necessary that you and I should hold the same thing to be true at one and the same time. Whatever seems to the individual true is true, according to him. From this came his famous dictum that man, that is the individual, is the measure of all things.[161] It is clear that this doctrine when applied to politics, morals, or religion was upsetting.

So long as men studied nature, they were concerned with discovering the inflexible laws which govern the world. But when they turned their attention from nature to society or government, they realized that human institutions seemed to be the result on the whole of conventions agreed upon and adopted by mankind. The Sophists held in general that the form of the state, the current moral and religious beliefs and social customs had no absolute validity; that they were the results of convention; and that their only warrant was that they worked well in practice, that they were profitable to the individual and to society. This pragmatic view of institutions fell in well with the temper of the last half of the fifth century, both in the period of Athens’ imperial supremacy and in the time of her trial during the Peloponnesian War, when in passion or despair the people disregarded law and, as in the case of the Melians, all that humanity had counted sacred. It was an age when many held that might and right were identical, and for this view the Sophists, even though unwittingly, furnished arguments; for if the test of an institution or act is that it works well when put into practice, success proves validity. The Sophists, too, taught that virtue (ἀρετή) was nothing else than what we call today efficiency. It is not strange that the conservative Athenians came to look on them with suspicion.

With regard to the gods Protagoras was naturally agnostic. He began his “Treatise on the Gods” with the words: “So far as the gods are concerned, I cannot know whether they exist or do not exist; or what their nature is. Many things prevent our knowing. The matter is obscure and life is short.”[162] One may be curious to know what large matter Protagoras found for his discussion when he began with this frank confession of ignorance; but it should be observed that in this confession there is nothing necessarily antagonistic to the popular theology of his day. It only shows what the words plainly declare, that a belief in the gods cannot depend upon knowledge. Another Sophist, Prodicus, maintained that the divinities were nothing but the kindly powers of nature which man had deified;[163] and the “Gentle Critias,” one of the worst of the Thirty Tyrants, and a ready pupil of the earlier Sophists, is said to have set forth in a satyric drama the theory that the gods were the clever invention of someone who wished to scare men out of their desire to do evil.[164] The effect of such scepticism and agnosticism we can easily imagine.

Many things had been wrongly laid at the door of the Sophists, but it is small wonder that the conservative Athenian citizens came to look with distrust and alarm on these new-fangled subversive notions; that they banished Protagoras and burned his books in the market place; or finally that they should have put Socrates to death.

Into this age of intellectual ferment and readjustment, of scepticism and eager inquiry, the age of Anaxagoras and the Sophists, Socrates entered. He was at once the child of his time and the greatest fecundator of men’s minds that Europe had yet known. He was born in 469 b.c. and was forced to drink the hemlock in March, 399, so that he had completed the allotted span of life. The son of a sculptor, we are told that he followed his father’s profession in his youth, but apparently he did not continue this long. Whence he derived the means of livelihood we do not know. He received the regular Athenian education, was interested especially in geometry and astronomy; the works of the philosophers he had read, but professed that he gained little from them. One is tempted to dwell on the picturesque characteristics of this man—his refusal to teach for pay, as did the ordinary teachers, his profession of complete ignorance—his only claim to wisdom, he said himself,—his ugliness of feature, and his beauty of soul, his omnivorous interest in the work of the humble craftsmen, above all on his belief that he had a warning spirit, a daemon, which checked him when his course was wrong. Although in obedience to this inward monitor Socrates refrained from politics, he fulfilled all his civic duties in peace and in war. He conformed to the traditional religion, sacrificing and praying to the traditional gods, although he undoubtedly did not hold that they were the limited and sensual creatures of the popular belief. When he prayed he asked not for gold or silver or power, but for what the gods knew was good for him. At the close of Plato’s Phaedrus he offers this appeal: “Beloved Pan, and all ye other gods who haunt this place, grant me beauty of the inward soul, and make the outward and the inward man to be but one.” This was the man who was charged with corrupting the youth of Athens.

Socrates had much in common with the Sophists. Although it is evident that in his earlier years he had been interested in physical science, we know that he turned away from that in the course of time, convinced that man alone was more than man could understand. He rather confined his attention to man himself, and made man and his conduct the center of philosophic inquiry. With the Sophists Socrates held that the cultivation of excellence, of virtue, whatever that might be, was the chief thing. He also identified virtue and knowledge, and like the Sophists was sceptical as to man’s ability to attain absolute knowledge. Practicability was the test he applied to various opinions. If one notion as to the state or society or anything else worked better than another, it was, therefore, in his view the better; and according to him it was by the adoption of such useful opinions that the individual became the wiser man. He held that education does not consist in putting things into people’s heads, but in leading them to discover the truths which they already possess. He therefore employed discussion as to the validity of hypotheses to bring out the latent knowledge in the minds of his young friends. This method of his—dialectic—was not identical with that of the Sophists apparently, but was not unlike theirs. It was, therefore, natural that his own time should have reckoned him as one of the professional class.

How then was he distinguished from these Sophists? Externally, first of all, by the fact that he did not teach for pay, that his purpose was unselfish, his interest being solely the elucidation of truth and so the establishment of virtue. He himself believed that he had a divine commission to serve the Athenians as a missionary. Plato makes him declare in his defence before his judges: “Men of Athens, I should be guilty of a crime indeed if through fear of death or anything else I should desert the post to which I am assigned by the god. For the god ordains ... that I should follow after wisdom and examine myself and others.”[165] He conceived of himself as the physician of the soul, and maintained that his whole business was “to persuade all, both young and old, not to care about the body or riches, but first and foremost about the soul—how to make the soul as good as possible.”[166]

As I have already said, he believed that if men could only know what justice, goodness, and temperance were they would naturally and inevitably be just and good and temperate. Vice he thought was due to a lack of knowledge; therefore he employed his questioning, dialectic, to endeavor to secure clear definitions of these and other virtues, for he was convinced that if only he and his associates could discover what virtue was, they would at once pursue virtue and flee from all wrongdoing. We may smile at the naïveté of this belief, that virtue is something that can be taught, that to be practised it needs only to be seen; but we must remind ourselves that his confidence was based on another belief, which was that virtue is the best and the most profitable for the individual; and that since each man desires the best for himself, if he sees what is right, he will follow that course unswervingly to the end. It may be said with reason that this is a utilitarian view, and so it is; but in Socrates it was combined with a power of will which enabled him to translate his convictions into reality, for it was in obedience to this conviction that the great teacher gave up his life.

Thus far we have seen that in the ferment of the last part of the fifth century in Athens there were two forces which were in a sense opposed to each other, the Sophists with their inevitable scepticism, who taught that all truth was subjective, that justice and goodness were only that which seemed just and good to the individual; opposed to them in reality was Socrates, not only in spirit but also by the doctrine which he endeavored to establish; for his search was always directed at finding the reality, was always aimed at knowledge in opposition to opinion. These objective truths, the universals, which to him were the only real things in the world, he endeavored to obtain by a process of definition which was not wholly adequate; but he turned men away from mere observation, from what seemed to be true, to search for permanent objective reality. How fruitful his teaching was, was shown by many schools, but above all by his greatest pupil, Plato. His followers have lasted to the present day.

The last third of the fifth century was a new era for Greece. The Peloponnesian War broke out in the year 431, and lasted until 404. On the one side was Athens with the empire which she had boldly built and somewhat ruthlessly held; on the other was a large number of allied states of Greece with Sparta at their head. The war ended with the complete humiliation of Athens. She lost her empire, her wealth, and a large part of her population. These disasters gave opportunity and occasion for new forces to come to the front. Early in the war the mercurial Athenians had shown themselves impatient of the leadership which had made Athens great, and they rejected Pericles. They were easily led astray by wild schemes, as when they followed the imperialistic party headed by Alcibiades and sent out the Sicilian expedition in 415, which was to meet irreparable disaster two years later. In time of distress, under the burden of political and economic misfortune, men often turn to reconsider the bases of their beliefs and actions, to test the validity of the doctrines which have hitherto guided them. This was the case at Athens. The old beliefs went by the board; society, government, and religion all became subjects of doubt and of reexamination.

The greatest spokesman of this time was Euripides. Although he was the younger contemporary of Sophocles, who outlived him by a few months, Euripides belongs to a new age. The former represents imperial Athens of the age of Pericles, the latter the Athens of the Peloponnesian War. Born of a family apparently well-to-do he certainly received a liberal education. Politics and society seem never to have attracted him to active participation in them, but the intellectual life of his time he shared to the full; and more than any extant writer of his day, he shows that he felt the force of the movements which were transforming Athenian thought. It has been aptly said that in Sophocles the poetical course of traditional religion culminated; in Euripides we have for the first time the poetic and philosophical development fully combined. He was a profound thinker, troubled by the most difficult problems of humanity, and approaching tradition with the liberal frankness of the new age. Yet we must always bear in mind that he was a dramatic poet, not a systematic theologian or moral teacher. Again and again fidelity to his art made him put sentiments into the mouths of his characters which must have been abhorrent to him. Nor have we any right to search for some hidden meaning in his plays. Yet after all allowances have been made, we cannot doubt that in his dramas he frequently expresses his personal views on politics, morals, and religion, which were quite at variance with the views of tradition.

Toward the gods of the current mythology no one could have been more frankly sceptical or scornful than he. As Nestle, a German critic, has pointed out, the basic principle of his attacks is found in his verse:

εἰ θεοί τι δρωσιν αἰσχρόν, οὐκ εἰσὶν θεοί.[167]

If the gods do aught that is base, then they are not gods.

That is, as the same critic says, for Euripides “God and sin are mutually exclusive terms.” Sophocles held the same belief, yet his point of view was wholly different, as is shown by his verse:

αἰσχρὸν μὲν οὐδὲν ὧν ὑφηγοῦνται θεοί.[168]

Nothing to which the gods lead men is base.

That is, whatever the gods do is good no matter how it may seem to man. There is then a fundamental difference between the two tragedians: the elder has faith to believe in the righteousness of the traditional gods, the younger is ready to throw tradition over. The unreasonableness and immorality of popular beliefs and the baffling existence of evil in the world Euripides could not reconcile with a faith in the existence of all powerful and just beings such as he held the gods must be, if they exist at all. His firm conviction that divinity, if it have any existence, must be absolutely just, explains the poet’s boldness in holding up to scorn the popular notions. In the Hippolytus he exhibits the goddess of love in a shameful light, and makes Artemis join with the innocent hero of the play in condemning her.

Indeed throughout the tragedy the traditional beliefs are treated with powerful irony. When Phaedra is filled with shame at the passion for her step-son with which Aphrodite has inspired her, the nurse tempts her to yield, quoting ancient tales of the celestials’ amours as examples:

Whoso have scrolls writ in the ancient days, And wander still themselves by paths of song, They know how Zeus of yore desired the embrace Of Semele; they know how radiant Dawn Up to the gods snatched Cephalus of yore, And all for love; yet these in Heaven their home Dwell, neither do they flee the face of Gods, Content, I trow, to be love’s vanquished ones. Thou—wilt not yield?[169]

Nay, darling, from thy deadly thoughts refrain, And from presumption—sheer presumption this, That one should wish to be more strong than Gods. In love flinch not; a God hath willed this thing.[170]

But Phaedra dies by her own hand rather than yield to the goddess’s design. The innocent Hippolytus, second victim of divine injustice, cries out as he dies:

Innocent I, ever fearing the Gods, who was wholly heart-clean Above all men beside,— Lo, how am I thrust Unto Hades, to hide My life in the dust! All vainly I reverenced God, and in vain unto man was I just.[171]

What greater condemnation of the traditional gods could there be than this!

In the Hercules Hera drives the hero mad and makes him the slayer of his own innocent children, all because of the goddess’s jealousy of Zeus. Small wonder that Hercules cries when the truth is brought home to him:

To such a Goddess Who shall pray now? who, for a woman’s sake Jealous of Zeus, from Hellas hath cut off Her benefactors, guiltless though they were.[172]

The hero refuses to find any consolation for his woes in the suggestion that the gods too have sinned and suffered for their wrongs—“if minstrel legends be not false.” Whereat he exclaims:

I deem not that the Gods for spousals crave Unhallowed: tales of Gods’ hands manacled Ever I scorned nor ever will believe, Nor that one God is born another’s lord. For God hath need, if God indeed he be, Of naught: these be the minstrels’ sorry tales.[173]

This play then like the Hippolytus is a condemnation through Hera and Zeus of the whole system of gods.

In these sentiments there is something more than direct defiance of tradition. Euripides does not, like Pindar, refine away the baser elements of legends; or, like Aeschylus and Sophocles, obscure the uglier features of the ancient mythology. On the contrary, constrained by his profession as dramatic poet to draw his themes from the dark tales of gods and heroes in a mythological age—tales whose immorality was wholly hateful to him—he accomplishes his purpose by showing these gods and heroes on his stage engaged in actions and prompted by motives which are so base as to destroy the spectator’s regard for beings of such a sort, and to win the onlooker’s sympathy for the mortal victim against the higher power. To the shameless natures of the gods the poet bluntly gives fitting characterizations: he names them cruel, vengeful, treacherous, licentious.

Euripides is no less iconoclastic in dealing with current religious practices; there is none that escapes his scorn. Sacrifices and votive offerings seem to him unworthy of true gods. The folly of popular wonder at the riches of temples is brought out in a fragment of the lost Philoctetes, in which the hero sarcastically bids his hearers see how even the gods prize gain, and therefore men should not hesitate to get profit and thereby make themselves equal to the gods.[174] That it is not the size of the gift, but piety which secures the favor of just Heaven, is the lesson of another couplet.[175] Temples and statues, and all the sacred privileges attached thereto are treated with equal disregard for tradition; and the sacred institution of blood-vengeance is most emphatically condemned. For the common trust in omens given by dreams and the flight of birds he has only ridicule. So in the Tauric Iphigenia when Iphigenia learns from Orestes that her brother lives, she cries:

False dreams, avaunt! So then ye were but naught.[176]

To which Orestes answers:

Ay, and not even Gods, whom men call wise, Are less deceitful than be fleeting dreams. Utter confusion is in things divine And human. Wise men grieve at this alone When—rashness?—no, but faith in oracles Brings ruin—how deep, they that prove it know.[177]

The condemnation of the interpreter of signs given by birds is made the more effective in the Phoenissae by putting it into the mouth of the seer Tirisias:

Who useth the diviner’s art Is foolish. If he heraldeth ill things, He is loathed of those to whom he prophesies. If pitying them that seek to him, he lie, He wrongs the Gods.[178]

In the Iphigenia at Aulis Achilles bitterly asks, “What is a seer?” and answers his own question, “A man who speaks few truths and many lies.”[179] Even prayer is sometimes regarded as of doubtful aid, although naturally Euripides’ characters often appeal to the Gods.

At times, too, the poet is more openly atheistic or agnostic with reference to the popular religion. The most striking illustration is found in the prayer which he puts into the mouth of Hecuba, the Trojan queen:

O Earth’s Upbearer, thou whose throne is Earth, Whoe’er thou be, O past our finding out, Zeus, be thou Nature’s Law, or Mind of Man, To thee I pray; for treading soundless paths, In justice dost thou guide all mortal things.[180]

You will observe that although this prayer rejects all current polytheism, it is far from denying the existence of a divine power—rather it maintains in poetic language the existence of such a principle—the reason of the universe which shows itself in nature as law and in the mind of man as reason. This pantheism finds expression elsewhere in his poetry. In illustration I will quote two fragments. The first identifies divinity with all embracing ether:

Seest thou the boundless ether there on high, That folds the earth around with dewy arms? This deem thou Zeus, this reckon one with God.[181]

The second identifies god with the intelligence which pervades the world:

Thee, self-begotten, who in ether rolled Ceaselessly round, by mystic links dost blend The nature of all things, whom veils enfold Of light, of dark night flecked with gleams of gold, Of star-hosts dancing round thee without end.[182]

The last three passages show how the poet’s mind was filled with the philosophic thought of the day. In identifying divinity with the ether he was apparently giving poetic expression to the views of his contemporary, the philosopher Diogenes of Apollonia, whom he must have known at Athens. Diogenes followed Anaximenes in making “Air” (or the “Ether”) the basic element of the world, but advanced beyond his predecessor in attributing to “Air” intelligence and movement—indeed he held that it could only be conceived as intelligent; and he further said that this intelligent “Air,” which was the cause and, by virtue of its intelligence, the director of all things, seemed to him to be god. In the mind of man therefore the divine principle shows itself as intellect, in nature it is law. But in Hecuba’s prayer there is a higher conception of god than even this—the divine reason is also world-ruling Justice: Justice and God are one. This identification in a sense is as old as Hesiod, but Euripides conceives of Justice not as the daughter of Zeus but as identical with the cosmic reason, immanent in all things, forming and directing all things. When the poet speaks of Justice in ways more natural to the ordinary man, he combats the current notion that Justice dwells in heaven where men’s sins are recorded in a book; rather, he says, she is here on earth with men, unseen but seeing all.[183] Yet he never carried out this idea and reconciled it with the actual moral condition of the world and the undeserved sufferings of mankind. The problem of evil and doubt constantly vexed him; neither faith nor reason gave him rest:

When faith overfloweth my mind, God’s providence all-embracing Banisheth griefs: but when doubt whispereth ‘Ah but to know!’ No clue through the tangle I find of fate and of life for my tracing: There is ever a change and many a change, And the mutable fortune of men evermore sways to and fro Over limitless range.[184]

On death and the possibility of a future life Euripides again gives us no consistent views. He thought that men fear the great transition from inexperience with it; but he found some comfort in the fact that death comes in obedience to nature’s universal law, and therefore should cause no alarm.[185] Still he felt that the possibility of life beyond the grave gave no certainty of joy, for many, like Macaria in the Heraclidae, might say:

If in the grave aught be: But ah that naught might be!—for if there too We mortals who must die shall yet have cares, I know not whither one shall turn; since death For sorrow is accounted chiefest balm.[186]

Sometimes he expresses or hints at the view that our souls return to the air or ether from which they sprang.[187] Again he uses the Homeric pictures of a cheerless other world. Once he refers to the Orphic doctrine in the cryptic utterance, “Who knows but life be death, and death be reckoned life below?”—verses which Plato and other philosophers were to interpret after him.

If space allowed, we might gladly dwell on Euripides’ sympathy with human poverty and suffering, on the hints he gives that he perceived the common brotherhood of man. In his noble ideals of womanhood he surpasses his contemporaries. Above all these matters it is important for us with our present interest to note that more than once the tragedian seems to wish to inculcate the truth that the standard of morality among men was far superior to that of the traditional pantheon. No other poet of his age sets forth the true nobility of man so perfectly as Euripides.

The last play of the long list he wrote was the Bacchae. Composed in Macedonia, it was first produced at Athens after the poet’s death. As was fitting for a tragedy written in the home of Dionysus, the drama deals with the Dionysiac possession, enthusiasm, the “divine madness,” on which the Greeks ever set high store. No play has so baffled interpretation. Some scholars think it a recantation; others vigorously deny it. Personally I am inclined to hold with Adam that Dionysus in the play “stands for the spirit of enthusiasm in the ancient Greek meaning of the word,” and that the principal lesson of the drama is to be found in the verse, “Not with knowledge is wisdom bought”[188] —that is, reason is not all in man, but there is something greater—enthusiasm, inspiration.[189]

From what we have been considering thus far, it is evident that Euripides’ spirit was primarily iconoclastic; there can be no question that he contributed to the decay of the ancient beliefs and that he helped drive the Olympians from their thrones in the minds of thinking men. For fifty years he openly uttered his criticisms in the theater at the high festival of Dionysus before the quick-witted Athenians. The effect must have been great, for no poet enjoyed more widespread popularity.

On the positive side Euripides offers no system of religion or of morals. Indeed, he seems never to have arrived at any complete unity in his thought. But he is stimulating now, and in his own day unquestionably goaded men to reflection, just because he raises so often fundamental questions—the questions which reflecting men were asking then and have been asking ever since—questions which are never wholly answered, but which always demand an answer. The stimulating character of his dramas makes him indeed one of the great religious poets of the world.

V
PLATO AND ARISTOTLE

Socrates became the father of many philosophic schools. His pupils naturally differed from one another in the emphasis which they gave to this or that side of their master’s teaching and in the ways in which they combined his doctrines with principles laid down by earlier thinkers, but all agreed in this, that they directed their attention to man as the center of thought and inquiry. From this time ethics and religion became the dominant themes of philosophy. Our subject bids us confine our attention to the greatest of these pupils, Plato.

Plato was born at Athens in the year 428/7 b.c. of an ancient family, which was related to the law-giver Solon. After being educated in the best Athenian fashion, he attached himself to Socrates in his twentieth year, when the latter was already about sixty years old, and he continued to associate with his master for ten years until the latter’s condemnation and death. Probably he was not one of the inner circle, but he tells us that he was present at his master’s trial and with other followers of Socrates was prepared to go bondsman, if a fine were inflicted. Sickness prevented him from sharing in the discussion of the last day, which is related to us in the Phaedo. After Socrates ’ death, Plato was absent from Athens for about twelve years, residing first in the neighboring city of Megara, where his association with Euclides, one of Socrates’ oldest pupils, must have contributed to the development of his own philosophy. Later in southern Italy, if we accept the traditional account of his travels, he had an opportunity to study more closely in their home the Orphic-Pythagorean systems and doctrines, many of which no doubt he had often heard Socrates discuss. At Syracuse in Sicily he won over Dion, the young brother-in-law of the tyrant Dionysius. The latter, however, found his moral teachings offensive, seized him, and had him offered for sale as a prisoner of war in the slave market at Aegina. But a friend, Anniceris, bought him and set him free. When Plato’s other friends wished to repay to Anniceris the money he had spent, the latter refused, and the sum was used to purchase a grove sacred to the hero Academus, in which Plato opened a philosophic school. There, save for the interruptions caused by two journeys to Sicily, he continued to teach for about forty years, dying in 347 b.c. at the age of eighty.

To this school came pupils from almost every part of the Greek world. The chief subjects studied were the various branches of mathematics—including of course astronomy and harmonics,—and dialectics, by which is meant “the art of question and answer, the art of giving a rational account of things and of receiving such an account from others.” The distinctive methods employed were those of analysis and division which Plato seems to have developed so far that the invention of the former was actually, but erroneously, attributed to him. The purpose of analysis was to secure an explanation or proof of a proposition; that of division was to arrive at a proper classification or division of the object under consideration. Plato’s instruction was evidently given in considerable part by lectures, of which his hearers took notes; there was also scientific research on the part of the pupils who worked out the problems or difficulties set them by their master. Nor were these researches wholly mathematical and astronomical, for there is good reason to believe that studies in natural history were also pursued. Indeed, Aristotle, for twenty years a member of the Academy, must have had opportunities here to carry on those researches which interested him most in the early part of his life. But whatever the studies, the purpose was to lead the pupils to the discovery and contemplation of Reality, of Being, of the fundamental and permanent as against the individual and transitory phenomenon. Of Plato’s lectures we know virtually nothing; his Dialogues represent those parts of his doctrine which he wished to give to the outside world; it is probable that they in no sense adequately reproduce his teachings to his disciples.

How much of his philosophy Plato received from his master Socrates, how much he developed for himself cannot now be determined. Socrates left no writings; we know him only from the writings of others, and above all from the dialogues of Plato. There he is the chief spokesman, who leads his associates along various paths toward truth; and certainly no pupil ever built a nobler monument to his teacher than Plato did. Among modern scholars there are many views as to the extent of Plato’s debt to his master: one extreme wing, which has many adherents, would limit the Socratic elements in the Platonic doctrine to the ethical interest, the search for universals, and the dialectic method; the other wing, of which the eminent English Platonist Burnet is the chief representative, would attribute to Socrates practically everything found in the dialogues which Plato wrote before he began his teaching in the Academy. Indeed Burnet holds that Plato’s chief purpose in the earlier dialogues was to set forth the life and teaching of Socrates; he therefore claims that the “doctrine of ideas,” with all its consequences, and much besides, are purely Socratic, taken over by Plato in developed form. Few of us can accept either of these extreme views; it seems more probable that the truth lies between, that Plato learned much relating to “ideas” and their Pythagorean origins from his teacher, just as he derived from him his ethical interest and his method. But to reduce the brilliant pupil to a mere reporter of his master’s views with little philosophy of his own until he was past forty, is quite incredible, and such a procedure has no proper warrant. When speaking of Socrates in my previous lecture I avoided this question, for a discussion of it there would have been unprofitable and confusing; and even now for convenience I propose to treat that part of Plato’s philosophy which immediately concerns us as if it were wholly his own, begging you, however, to keep in mind always that undoubtedly much in germ or developed form was derived directly from Plato’s chief teacher. Furthermore I must ask you to remember that Plato had been given to poetry when a youth, and that although he renounced the practice of the art, he remained a poet in spirit to the end of his life; all his thoughts were touched with poetry, enlivened with humour, and fired with religious zeal. He was a consummate literary artist, and a man of many sides. It was natural therefore that he should nowhere set forth a crystallized system of philosophy such as a less imaginative and duller person might have done; he was apparently a man who grew through all his eighty years. The result is that in spite of the fact that we may properly speak of “the unity of Plato’s thought,” we find in his works variety, variation, and even contradiction. The requirements of our present situation, however, force us to consider our themes categorically, though that procedure is somewhat unfair to Plato.

Let us then first examine the central thought of Plato’s philosophy—the “doctrine of ideas.” Developing the doctrines of earlier philosophers, especially those of Heraclitus and Anaxagoras, Plato held that the world is dual. In it is the phenomenal world visible to us, which includes all natural objects and those made by man, a transient and unreal world which we know only through our senses. But beside it, or rather behind it, is another world invisible but permanent and real, which can be grasped only by the reason. This is the world of ideas. Yet the two worlds are not separate, for the world of the senses owes its existence wholly to its dependence on the world of ideas. To understand Plato’s view we must consider in an elementary way what he meant by “ideas.” The words which he uses (εἶδος, ἰδέα) signify “form,” and in logic are used in the sense of “class,” “kind,” “species,” “the general principle for the classification of objects.” The translation “idea” is traditional, and there is no adequate reason for preferring “form” or any other English equivalent. Now Plato’s statement that the world of phenomena depends on the invisible world of ideas seems at first sight paradoxical, for by it he means that the individual tree, book, desk, chair, good man, or whatever you please, is not the real being at all, but that the ideas of tree, book, desk, chair, and goodness alone possess reality. It may be made plain by an illustration which shall be Plato’s own. At the beginning of the tenth book of the Republic Socrates and Glaucon are conversing together. The master wins Glaucon’s assent first to the proposition that although there are many beds and tables in the world, there are only two ideas, one of a bed, the other of a table. He then goes on to show that the workman makes a bed or table by shaping his material according to the idea of a bed or a table, but that he does not create the ideas themselves. That is done by God who is the real maker of the real bed, that is, of the idea of a bed. The carpenter makes only the particular bed which owes its temporary existence to the eternal idea—the real bed—which is in Nature, in the mind of God. Or if Plato should appear before us tonight, he might say, “Suppose we take a dozen books of different sizes and different shapes and appearance, how do we recognize that these diverse objects are all books?” Then when we hesitated to give an answer, as we probably should, he would reply, “It is because each one of these individual books partakes of the idea of book. The idea is present in the individual example and thereby gives the individual its existence; the individual depends therefore on the idea, not the idea on the individual. If this dozen, or indeed if all the books in the entire world were to be destroyed, the idea of book would still remain, and new books could be made by causing the materials, out of which books are constructed, to partake of the idea of book. That is, all individual books are transitory, impermanent, unreal; the idea of book is permanent, eternal, it alone has reality; and all individual things, therefore, exist, so far as they have any real existence, only by partaking of the ideas. So all things come into being and owe their existence to sharing in the eternal ideas.”

We should be unjust to Plato if we thought that he regarded this doctrine as a perfect explanation of the relation between the visible and invisible worlds. Far from holding such a view he himself evidently held it to be a “guess at truth,” which served to show in its way that there is a permanent reality behind the phenomena of the visible world and a truth which is beyond sense. Indeed Plato is very conscious of troublesome questions which arise in connection with the doctrine, and in three dialogues—his Philebus, Parmenides, and Sophist—he endeavors to meet some of these questions, and there he offers admirable criticism of his own views.

With reference to the source of the doctrine, as I have said above, we cannot tell how much Plato derived from Socrates or how much he developed for himself. Socrates was evidently always searching for universals, trying to determine what goodness is in itself in contrast to the goodness embodied in a good man, what are virtue, courage, and such qualities. The teacher or the pupil may have extended the ideas, the universals, to include all things, even the humble articles of furniture which are the examples in the Republic. But in any case by this doctrine of “ideas,” “forms,” Plato secured a basis for reality, a means of attaining absolute knowledge in contrast to that relative knowledge, which according to the Sophists was the utmost which man could attain. Plato would have quite agreed with Protagoras that if the senses were our only avenues to knowledge, then indeed man would be the measure of all things and his knowledge would be limited to the transient phenomenal world; that is, he could have no knowledge of reality; but by apprehending through our reason the ideas—that is, the realities—on which the phenomenal world depends, we can gain genuine knowledge and free ourselves from subjection to mere opinion.

Plato also teaches that there are various grades of ideas, some being subordinate to others; the highest of all is that of the Good, identified by him with the Beautiful. This supreme idea is at once the cause of all existence and knowledge, and comprehends within itself all other ideas; as the sun in the visible world, so in the world of true knowledge the Good “is the universal author of all things right and beautiful, itself the source of truth and intelligence.” It is the Absolute, the universal Reason, God.[190]

We have seen that Plato sets the world of ideas apprehended by reason over against the world of phenomena, known to us through our senses. The latter world is material, the former immaterial. This concept of the immateriality of ideas was something new in philosophy. Anaxagoras had thought his formative principle (Νοῦς), as his predecessors had thought theirs, to be as material as the “seeds” out of which all things were made; but Plato developed an immaterial, an ideal world, wherein are found all cause and all reality.

Now the Platonic ideas are apprehended by the human intellect. What are the consequences of this fact? It must follow that man’s reason has a nature similar to that of the ideas; like them it must belong to the world which is above the senses; and with them it must partake of the Absolute. But Plato shows that the ideas are eternal and immortal, and draws therefrom the logical conclusion that man’s intellect, his reasoning soul, likewise knows no creation and is free from death.