Mosaics of Grecian History Part 10

THE SUFFERINGS OF PROMETHEUS.

We close this subject with a brief extract from the Prometheus Bound of the English poet Sh.e.l.lEY, in which the sufferings of the defiant captive are vividly portrayed:

"No change, no pause, no hope! yet I endure.

I ask the Earth, have not the mountains felt?

I ask yon Heaven, the all-beholding Sun, Has it not seen? The Sea, in storm or calm, Heaven's ever-changing shadow, spread below, Have its deaf waves not heard my agony?

Ah me! alas, pain, pain ever, forever!

The crawling glaciers pierce me with the spears Of their moon-freezing crystals; the bright chains Eat with their burning gold into my bones.

Heaven's winged hound, polluting from thy lips His beak in poison not his own, tears up My heart; and shapeless sights come wandering by-- The ghastly people of the realm of dream Mocking me; and the Earthquake fiends are charged To wrench the rivets from my quivering wounds When the rocks split and close again behind; While from their loud abysses howling throng The genii of the storm."

Returning now to the poet Ovid, we present the account which he gives of the Deluge, or the destruction of mankind by a flood, called by the Greeks,

THE DELUGE OF DEUCALION.

Deucalion is represented as the son of Prometheus, and is styled the father of the Greek nation of post-diluvian times. When Jupiter determined to destroy the human race on account of its impiety, it was his first design, OVID tells us, to accomplish it with fire.

But his own safety demanded the employment of a less dangerous agency.

Already had Jove tossed the flaming brand, And rolled the thunder in his s.p.a.cious hand, Preparing to discharge on seas and land; But stopped, for fear, thus violently driven, The sparks should catch his axle-tree of heaven-- Remembering, in the Fates, a time when fire Should to the battlements of heaven aspire, And all his blazing worlds above should burn, And all the inferior globe to cinders turn.

His dire artillery thus dismissed, he bent His thoughts to some securer punishment; Concludes to pour a watery deluge down, And what he durst not burn resolves to drown.

In all this myth, it will be seen, Jupiter may very properly be considered as a personification of the elemental strife that drowned a guilty world. Deucalion, warned, by his father, of the coming deluge, thereupon made himself an ark or skiff, and, putting provisions into it, entered it with his wife, Pyrrha. The whole earth is then overspread with the flood of waters, and all animal life perishes, except Deucalion and his wife.

The northern breath that freezes floods, Jove binds, With all the race of cloud-dispelling winds: The south he loosed, who night and horror brings, And fogs are shaken from his flaggy wings.

From his divided beard two streams he pours; His head and rheumy eyes distil in showers.

The skies, from pole to pole, with peals resound; And showers enlarged come pouring on the ground.

Nor from his patrimonial heaven alone Is Jove content to pour his vengeance down: Aid from his brother of the seas he craves, To help him with auxiliary waves.

The watery tyrant calls his brooks and floods, Who roll from mossy caves, their moist abodes, And with perpetual urns his palace fill; To whom, in brief, he thus imparts his will:

Small exhortation needs; your powers employ, And this bad world (so Jove requires) destroy.

Let loose the reins to all your watery store; Bear down the dams and open every door."

The floods, by nature enemies to land, And proudly swelling with their new command, Remove the living stones that stopped their way, And, gus.h.i.+ng from their source, augment the sea.

Then with his mace their monarch struck the ground: With inward trembling Earth received the wound, And rising stream a ready pa.s.sage found.

The expanded waters gather on the plain, They float the fields and overtop the grain; Then, rus.h.i.+ng onward, with a sweepy sway, Bear flocks and folds and laboring hinds away.

Nor safe their dwellings were; for, sapped by floods, Their houses fell upon their household G.o.ds.

The solid hills, too strongly built to fall, High o'er their heads behold a watery wall.

Now seas and earth were in confusion lost-- A world of waters, and without a coast.

One climbs a cliff; one in his boat is borne, And ploughs above where late he sowed his corn.

Others o'er chimney-tops and turrets row, And drop their anchors on the meads below; Or, downward driven, they bruise the tender vine, Or, tossed aloft, are hurled against a pine.

And where of late the kids had cropped the gra.s.s, The monsters of the deep now take their place.

Insulting Ner'e-ids on the cities ride, And wondering dolphins o'er the palace glide.

On leaves and masts of mighty oaks they browse, And their broad fins entangle in the boughs.

The frighted wolf now swims among the sheep, The yellow lion wanders in the deep; His rapid force no longer helps the boar, The stag swims faster than he ran before.

The fowls, long beating on their wings in vain, Despair of land, and drop into the main.

Now hills and vales no more distinction know, And levelled nature lies oppressed below.

The most of mortals perished in the flood, The small remainder dies for want of food.

Deucalion and Pyrrha were conveyed to the summit of Mount Parna.s.sus, the highest mountain in Central Greece. According to Ovid, Deucalion now consulted the ancient oracle of Themis respecting the restoration of mankind, and received the following response: "Depart from the temple, veil your heads, loosen your girded vestments, and cast behind you the great bones of your parent." At length Deucalion discovered the meaning of the oracle--the bones being, by a very natural figure, the stones, or rocky heights, of the earth. The poet then gives the following account of the abatement of the waters, and of the appearance of the earth:

"When Jupiter, surveying earth from high, Beheld it in a lake of water lie-- That, where so many millions lately lived, But two, the best of either s.e.x, survived-- He loosed the northern wind: fierce Boreas flies To puff away the clouds and purge the skies: Serenely, while he blows, the vapors driven Discover heaven to earth and earth to heaven; The billows fall while Neptune lays his mace On the rough sea, and smooths its furrowed face.

Already Triton [Footnote: Son of Neptune.] at his call appears Above the waves: a Tyrian robe he wears, And in his hands a crooked trumpet bears.

The sovereign bids him peaceful sounds inspire, And give the waves the signal to retire.

The waters, listening to the trumpet's roar, Obey the summons, and forsake the sh.o.r.e.

A thin circ.u.mference of land appears, And Earth, but not at once, her visage rears, And peeps upon the seas from upper grounds: The streams, but just contained within their bounds, By slow degrees into their channels crawl, And earth increases as the waters fall: In longer time the tops of trees appear, Which mud on their dishonored branches bear.

At length the world was all restored to view, But desolate, and of a sickly hue: Nature beheld herself, and stood aghast, A dismal desert and a silent waste.

When the waters had abated Deucalion left the rocky heights behind him, in obedience to the direction of the oracle, and went to dwell in the plains below.

MORAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE G.o.dS, AND OF THEIR RULE OVER MANKIND.

It is a prominent feature of the polytheistic system of the Greeks that the G.o.ds are represented as subject to all the pa.s.sions and frailties of human nature. There were, indeed, among them personifications of good and of evil, as we see in A'te, the G.o.ddess of revenge or punishment, and in the Erin'nys (or Furies), who avenge violations of filial duty, punish perjury, and are the maintainers of order both in the moral and the natural world; yet while these moral ideas restrained and checked men, the G.o.ds seem to have been almost wholly free from such control. "The society of Olympus, therefore," says MAHAFFY, "is only an ideal Greek society in the lowest sense--the ideal of the school-boy who thinks all control irksome, and its absence the greatest good--the ideal of a voluptuous man, who has strong pa.s.sions, and longs for the power to indulge them without unpleasant consequences. It appears, therefore, that the Homeric picture of Olympus is very valuable, as disclosing to us the poet's notion of a society freed from the restraints of religion; for the rhapsodists [Footnote: Rhapsodist, a term applied to the reciters of Greek verse.] were dealing a death-blow (perhaps unconsciously) to the received religious belief by these very pictures of sin and crime among the G.o.ds. Their idea is a sort of semi-monarchical aristocracy, where a number of persons have the power to help favorites, and thwart the general progress of affairs; where love of faction overpowers every other consideration, and justifies violence or deceit. [Footnote: "Social Life in Greece," by J. P. Mahaffy.]

MR. GLADSTONE has given us, in the following extract, his views of what he calls the "intense humanity" of the Olympian system, drawn from what its great expounder has set forth in the Iliad and the Odyssey. "That system," he says, "exhibits a kind of royal or palace life of man, but on the one hand more splendid and powerful, on the other more intense and free. It is a wonderful and a gorgeous creation. It is eminently in accordance with the signification of the English epithet--rather a favorite, apparently, with our old writers--the epithet jovial, which is derived from the Latin name of its head. It is a life of all the pleasures of mind and body, of banquet and of revel, of music and of song; a life in which solemn grandeur alternates with jest and gibe; a life of childish willfulness and of fretfulness, combined with serious, manly, and imperial cares; for the Olympus of Homer has at least this one recommendation to esteem--that it is not peopled with the merely lazy and selfish G.o.ds of Epicurus, but its inhabitants busily deliberate on the government of man, and in their debates the cause of justice wins.

"I do not now discuss the moral t.i.tles of the Olympian scheme; what I dwell upon is its intense humanity, alike in its greatness and its littleness, its glory and its shame. As the cares and joys of human life, so the structure of society below is reflected, by the wayward wit of man, on heaven above. Though the names and fundamental traditions of the several deities were wholly or in great part imported from abroad, their characters, relations, and attributes pa.s.sed under a h.e.l.lenizing process, which gradually marked off for them special provinces and functions, according to laws which appear to have been mainly original and indigenous, and to have been taken by a.n.a.logy from the division of labor in political society. The Olympian society has its complement of officers and servants, with their proper functions. He-phaes'tus (or Vulcan) moulds the twenty golden thrones which move automatically to form the circle of the council of the G.o.ds, and builds for each of his brother deities a separate palace in the deep-folded recesses of the mighty mountain. Music and song are supplied by Apollo and the Muses; Gan-y-me'de and He'be are the cup-bearers, Hermes and Iris are the messengers; but Themis, in whom is impersonated the idea of deliberation and of relative rights, is the summoner of the Great a.s.sembly of the G.o.ds in the Twentieth Iliad, when the great issue of the Trojan war is to be determined." [Footnote: Address to the Edinburgh University, November 3, 1865.]

But, however p.r.o.ne the G.o.ds were to evil pa.s.sions, and subject to human frailties, they were not believed to approve (in men) of the vices in which they themselves indulged, but were, on the contrary, supposed to punish violations of justice and humanity, and to reward the brave and virtuous. We learn that they were to be appeased by libations and sacrifice; and their aid, not only in great undertakings, but in the common affairs of life, was to be obtained by prayer and supplication. For instance, in the Ninth Book of HOMER'S Iliad the aged Phoe'nix--warrior and sage--in a beautiful allegory personifying "Offence" and "Prayers," represents the former as robust and fleet of limb, outstripping the latter, and hence roaming over the earth and doing immense injury to mankind; but the Prayers, following after, intercede with Jupiter, and, if we avail ourselves of them, repair the evil; but if we neglect them we are told that the vengeance of the wrong shall overtake us. Thus, Phoenix says of the G.o.ds,

"If a mortal man Offend them by transgression of their laws, Libation, incense, sacrifice, and prayer, In meekness offered, turn their wrath away.

Prayers are Jove's daughters, Which, though far distant, yet with constant pace Follow Offence. Offence, robust of limb, And treading firm the ground, outstrips them all, And over all the earth before them runs, Hurtful to man. They, following, heal the hurt.

Received respectfully when they approach, They yield us aid and listen when we pray; But if we slight, and with obdurate heart Resist them, to Saturinian Jove they cry.

Against us, supplicating that Offence May cleave to us for vengeance of the wrong."

--COWPER'S Trans.

In the Seventeenth Book, Men-e-la'us is represented going into battle, "supplicating, first, the sire of all"--that is, Jupiter, the king of the G.o.ds. In the Twenty-third Book, Antil'ochus attributes the ill-success of Eu-me'lus in the chariot-race to his neglect of prayer. He says,

"He should have offered prayer; then had be not Arrived, as now, the hindmost of us all."

Numerous other instances might be given, from the works of the Grecian poets, of the supposed efficacy of prayer to the G.o.ds.

The views of the early Greeks respecting the dispensations of an overruling Providence, as shown in their belief in retributive justice, are especially prominent in some of the sublime choruses of the Greek tragedians, and in the "Works and Days" of Hesiod.

For instance, aeschylus says,

The ruthless and oppressive power May triumph for its little hour; But soon, with all their vengeful train, The sullen Furies rise, Break his full force, and whirl him down Thro' life's dark paths, unpitied and unknown.

--POTTER'S Trans.

The following extracts from Hesiod ill.u.s.trate the certainty with which Justice was believed to overtake and punish those who pervert her ways, while the good are followed by blessings. They also show that the crimes of one are often "visited on all."

Earth's crooked judges--lo! the oath's dread G.o.d Avenging runs, and tracks them where they trod.

Rough are the ways of Justice as the sea, Dragged to and fro by men's corrupt decree; Bribe-pampered men! whose hands, perverting, draw The right aside, and warp the wrested law.