and become the Blest of the underworld.* The brazen race, terrible as they were, black Death had seized, and, inglorious, they had descended to the dreary house of chilly Aides.+ The men of the heroic age had either died before seven-gated Thebes, or in the war for fairheaded Helen, or been translated to the Isles of the Blest, where they lived, happy and careless, in a land which thrice a year bore fruit sweet as honey.‡ But no hope of an Elysium cheered the men of the fifth, the poet's own age. § To them death was a dread god, inexorable, iron of heart, a ruthless soul of brass in his breast, hostile even to the immortal gods. || Aides, too, has a relentless heart, ¶ and at death souls descend to his dark and cheerless domain.** Hesiod, then, did little to modify or improve our belief. Yet there are signs of progress. The notion of spirit is clearer and firmer than in Homer. It can exist without body, can live as a dæmon upon or under the earth. The spiritual element in man approximates to the spiritual in God. The heroes are demi-gods. The selecter spirits are immortal.++ Ethical notions, too, are developed. * Hesiod, "Opp. et Di.," 140-143. + Ib., 153-155. ‡ Ib., 161–173. I adopt Welcker's (“ Kleine Schriften,” i. 23) interpretation of 166, 167, which is also Grote's ("History," i. 65), in preference to Heyne's, which makes all the heroes be translated to the Isles of the Blest. § Hesiod, "Opp. et Di.," 174-181. ¶ "Ib.," 455, 456. ** "Theog.," 759-766. Cf. Tacitus, "Agricola," 46: "Si quis piorum manibus locus; si, ut Each age is rewarded according to its works. The belief is nascent. The first green shoots appear. IV. THE MYSTERIES. In the ghostly and gloomy future of the popular and epical faith the Greeks could not permanently believe. The wail of Achilles, the tears of Agamemnon, the contemptuous pity of Zeus, the plaintive sigh of Hesiod over his birth in the age of mortal men,* but give voice to the corrosive misery that lay at the heart of Greece. Every step forward taken by the Greek mind made higher notions of the future destiny of man the more necessary. With the growth of civilization nationality had waned, individuality had waxed. While pictures of a happier past had satisfied the imaginative age, nothing but belief in a conscious future could satisfy the reflective, and save the Greek mind from the epicurean despair that made man festive in life because in death like a voiceless stone. + Had religion developed with mind, the belief would have risen out of their sympathetic and concurrent inter-action; but as the religion had crystallized into a mythology and worship which regarded the present alone, it had as to sapientibus placet, non cum corpore exstinguuntur magnæ animæ." Minds moving upwards to faith, or downwards to doubt, often strangely meet on the road. * 66 "Theognis," 567. the future neither promise to utter nor truth to reveal. Hero-worship, the natural product of a heroic land like Greece, had led to Apotheosis. Elect men had been deified and so immortalized. But this, while helping to naturalize the thought of immortality, did not generalize it into a belief. Only the rarest spirits could be raised to the circle of the immortal gods. Their reward could not become the common inheritance of man. But the Greek mind, determined partly by its own instincts and aspirations interpreting the nature within and without man, and partly by foreign influences stimulating and supplementing native thought, found out a way to the faith that it craved. A new religion was developed, not as antagonistic, but only as supplementary, to the old. A Chthonian court was constructed over against the Olympian, and while from the latter the Greek by public worship craved present prosperity, by secret he craved from the former future. happiness. Of the Mysteries thus formed, the Eleusinian are the product of the native Greek mind, the OrphicDionysian the fruit of foreign influence. 1. THE ELEUSINIAN MYSTERIES. The worship of Father-Heaven had developed into, the Olympian system, of Mother-Earth into the Chthonian. The gods of the first were the products of the creative and combining imagination, those of the second of the intuitive and reflective reason. To the mythical faculty Heaven was the symbol of the active and generative forces, earth of the passive and created. The one was perennial, unchanging, present; the other subject to ceaseless change, the scene of growth and decay, birth and death. Demeter, Aides, and Persephone were not originally gods of the underworld, but of the dying and reviving earth.* Their earliest worship had been festivals at seed-time and harvest. The earth-mother had mourned when the fruits and flowers she loved died, rejoiced when they revived. Aides had borne away from the face of earth and the light of Heaven the daughter Demeter loved, but only to restore her when the Sun bade spring return. Life in man and nature was to the early Greek allied, akin. Earth was to him a mirror-a hieroglyph into which he explained himself. growth and decay of earth ruled the coming and going of man, determined his future state. In his brilliant and heroic youth the bright gods of Olympos had charmed and satisfied the Greek in his sadder and more reflective manhood the stern deities of the underworld occupied his thought. His love of those he had embodied in epic mythology and So the God that ruled the Welcker, "Griechis. Götterl.," i. 385 ff.; 392 ff. Preller, "Griechis. Mythol.," i. 464 ff. worship, his awe of these in mystic sacrifice and ablution.* This new faith and worship finds its earliest embodiment in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter.† The transition from the old earth-worship to a worship which gives a better hope in death, is just being accomplished. The deities which presided over growth and decay above now preside over the life below. Aides is no longer the shadowy king of the Shades known to Homer, but own brother of Zeus, the all-receiver,§ the veritable king of the dead. Worship of the infernal deities is necessary to future happiness. Persephone, as wife of Aides, shall be mistress of all, and enjoy the greatest honour among the immortals. T Vengeance shall follow those who do not propitiate her heart by sacrifices.** He of mortal men who beholds the mystic rites is blest: he who is uninitiated does not participate in felicity, has a very different lot in the murky kingdom of *The controversy as to whether there was any dogmatic teaching connected with the Mysteries, and if so, what, may be regarded as at an end. The public and secret worship of Greece were in this respect very much on a level. Both were spectacular, neither doctrinal in almost any degree whatever. Of course, under the ceremonies and acts of worship certain distinct enough conceptions lay, and it is with these alone that we are now concerned. + See J. H. Voss' "Hymne an Demeter," with an excellent translation and notes; or the Hymn as given in Baumeister's "Hymni Homerici '' |