A History of Ancient Greek Literature. Gilbert Murray

we have the second stage of the story: the real ancestor was Poseidon, only he visited Tyro disguised as the river! The comparatively stable human ancestresses form the safest basis for cataloguing the shifting divine ancestors. There were five books in the Alexandrian edition of the Catalogues of Women,* the last two being what is called Eoiai.* This quaint title is a half-humorous plural of the expression ᾔ οι+’′η, 'Or like,' . . . which was the form of transition to a new heroine, "Or like her who dwelt in Phthia, with the Charites' own loveliness, by the waters of Pênêus, Cyrene the fair." There are one hundred and twenty-four fragments of the Catalogue* and twenty-six of the 'Or likes.'* If they sometimes contradict each other, that is natural enough, and it cannot be held that the Alexandrian five books had all the women there ever were in the Hesiodic lists. When once the formula 'Or like' was started, it was as easy to put a new ancestress into the list as it is, say, to invent a new quatrain on the model of Edward Lear's. Further more, it was easy to expand a given Eoiê* into a story, and this is actually the genesis of our third Hesiodic poem, the Shield of Heracles, the ancestress being, of course, the hero's mother, Alcmênê.

      The Shieldbegins: "Or like Alcmênê, when she fled her home and fatherland, and came to Thebes;" it goes on to the birth of Heracles, who, it proceeds to say, slew Kyknos, and then it tells how he slew Kyknos. In the arming of Heracles before the battle comes a long description of the shield.

There were rejected poems in Hesiod's case as well as in Homer's. The anonymous Naupactia,* a series of expanded genealogies, is the best known of them; but there were Hesiodic elements in some of the Argive and Corinthian collections attributed to 'Eumêlus.' His main rival rejoices in the fictitious name of Kerkêps ('Monkey-face') of Miletus. The Ergais Hesiod's Iliad,the only work unanimously left to him. The people of Helicon showed Pausanias, or his authority, a leaden tablet of the Ergawithout the introduction, and told him that nothing else was the true Hesiod.6

      The Bridal of Keyx,* about a prince of Trachis, who entertained Heracles, was probably also an expanded Eoiê'very like the Shield; and the same perhaps holds of the Aigimios,* which seems to have narrated in two books the battle of that ancestor of the Dorians against the Lapithæ. The Descent to Hades* had Theseus for its hero. The Melampodia* was probably an account of divers celebrated seers. More interesting are the scanty remains of the Advices of Chiron* to his pupil Achilles. The wise Centaur recommended sacrificing to the gods whenever you come to a house, and thought that education should not begin till the age of seven.

      The Ergawas known in an expanded form, The Great Erga.* There were poems on Astronomy* and on Augury by Birds,* on a journey round the World,* and on the Idæan Dactyli,* who attended Zeus in Crete. The names help us to realise the great mass of poetry of the Bæotian school that was at one time in existence. As every heroic story tended to take shape in a poem, so did every piece of art or knowledge or ethical belief which stirred the national interest or the emotions of a particular poet.

      ORPHEUS -- REVELATION AND MYSTICISM

      In studying the social and the literary history of Greece, we are met by one striking contrast. The social history shows us the Greeks, as the Athenians thought themselves, 'especially god-fearing,' or, as St. Paul put it, 'too superstitious.' The literature as preserved is entirely secular. Homer and Hesiod mention the gods constantly; but Homer treats them as elements of romance, Hesiod treats them as facts to be catalogued. Where is the literature of religion, the literature which treated the gods as gods? It must have existed. The nation which had a shrine at every turn of its mountain paths, a religious ceremony for every act of daily life, spirits in every wood and river and spring, and heroes for every great deed or stirring idea, real or imagined; which sacrificed the defence of Thermopylæ rather than cut short a festival; whose most enlightened city at its most sceptical time allowed an army to be paralysed and lost because of an eclipse of the moon, and went crazy because the time-honoured indecencies of a number of statues were removed without authority -- that nation is not adequately represented by a purely secular literature. As a matter of fact, we can see that the religious writings were both early and multitudinous.

      The Vedic hymns offer an analogy. Hymns like them are implied by the fact that the titles of the Homeric gods, ἐκαεργòς 'Απóλλων, ßοωπις πóτνια "Hρη, ἐκατηßελέταο ἄνακτος, are obviously ancient, and are constructed with a view to dactylic metre. We know that the early oracles spoke in verse. We know that there were sacred hymns in temples, quite distinct from our secular Homeric preludes. We have evidence that the Mysteries at Eleusis depended in part on the singing of sacred music.

      The Mysteries are not mentioned by Homer. That does not mean that they are late: it means that they are either too sacred or else too popular. The discoveries of anthropologists now enable us to see that the Eleusinian Mysteries are a form of that primitive religion, scarcely differentiated from 'sympathetic magic,' which has existed in so many diverse races. The Mysteries were a drama. The myth of the Mother of Corn and the Maid, the young corn who comes up from beneath the earth and is the giver of wealth, was represented in action. At the earliest time we hear of, the drama included a vine-god, or perhaps a tree-god in general, Dionysus. This is corn-worship and vegetation-worship: it is not only early, but primitive.

      There were other Mysteries, Orphic or Bacchic. The common opinion of antiquity and the present day is that the Bacchic rites were introduced to Greece from abroad -- the god of the Thracian brought, in spite of opposition, into Greece. If so, he came very early. But it seems more likely that Dionysus is rather a new-comer than a foreigner: he is like the new year, the spring, the harvest, the vintage. He is each year, in every place, a stranger who comes to the land and is welcomed as a stranger; at the end of his time he is expelled, exorcised, cut to pieces or driven away. At any rate he is early, and for the real religion of Greece he is of overwhelming importance. A real religion is a people's religion. The great complex conception Dionysus-Bacchus was a common folk's god, or rather had united in himself an indefinite number of similar conceptions which were worshipped by common folk all over Greece. We hear of him mostly through Alexandrian and Roman sources, sceptical through and through, in which he is merely the god of wine. But this is degradation by narrowing. He is a wine-god; he is a tree-god; but above all he is one of the personifications of the spirit of ecstasy, the impulse that is above reason, that lifts man beyond himself, gives him power and blessedness, and lets loose the immortal soul from the trammels of the body. The same spirit, in a tamer, saner, and more artistic form, was absorbed in the very different conception of Apollo. This religion doubtless had the most diverse forms. The gods it worshipped varied in names and attributes as they varied in their centres of initiation. But the most important aspects of it seem to have been more or less united in the religious revelations of 'Orpheus.'

      Most of the old religious poems belonged to Orpheus or his kinsman Musæus, as the heroic poems to Homer, and the didactic to Hesiod. But we know nothing of them before the great religious revival of the sixth century, associated with the name of Onomacritus. The old separate cults of tribe and family had been disturbed by increasing intercourse. Agglomerated in the Homeric theology, they lost their sanctity; and they could scarcely survive Hesiod and his catalogues. Hence came, on the one hand, scepticism embodied in the Ionian philosophy, and the explanation of the world by natural science; on the other hand, a deeper, more passionate belief. It was all very well for Thales to be saved by knowledge; the common man could not look that way. Amid the discouragements of the sixth century, the ebb of colonisation, the internal wars, the fall of Sybaris and of the half-divine Nineveh, came the turning away from this life to the next, the setting of the heart on supernatural bliss above the reach of war and accident.

      Hence arose a great wave of religious emotion scarcely represented in our tradition, but affecting every oracle and popular temple from Caria to Italy. The main expression of this movement was Orphism. It appears first as an outburst of personal miracle-working religion in connection with Dionysus-worship. We can make out many of the cardinal tenets. It believed in sin and the sacerdotal purging of sin; in the immortality and divinity