Mosaics of Grecian History by Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson

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"I have indeed, methinks, said much in vain,
For still thy heart, beneath my showers of prayers,
Lies dry and hard! nay, leaps like a young horse
Who bites against the new bit in his teeth,
And tugs and struggles against the new-tried rein,
Still fiercest in the weakest thing of all,
Which sophism is--for absolute will alone,
When left to its motions in perverted minds,
Is worse than null for strength! Behold and see,
Unless my words persuade thee, what a blast
And whirlwind of inevitable woe
Must sweep persuasion through thee! For at first
The Father will split up this jut of rock
With the great thunder and the bolted flame,
And hide thy body where the hinge of stone
Shall catch it like an arm! and when thou hast passed
A long black time within, thou shalt come out
To front the sun; and Zeus's winged hound,
The strong, carnivorous eagle, shall wheel down
To meet thee--self-called to a daily feast--
And set his fierce beak in thee, and tear off
The long rags of thy flesh, and batten deep
Upon thy dusky liver!

"Do not look
For any end, moreover, to this curse,
Or ere some god appear to bear thy pangs
On his own head vicarious, and descend
With unreluctant step the darks of hell,
And the deep glooms enringing Tartarus!
Then ponder this: the threat is not growth
Of vain invention--it is spoken and meant!
For Zeus's mouth is impotent to lie,
And doth complete the utterance in the act.
So, look to it, thou! take heed! and nevermore
Forget good counsel to indulge self-will!

To which Prometheus answers as follows:

"Unto me, the foreknower, this mandate of power,
He cries, to reveal it!
And scarce strange is my fate, if I suffer from hate
At the hour that I feel it!
Let the rocks of the lightning, all bristling and whitening,
Flash, coiling me round!
While the ether goes surging 'neath thunder and scourging
Of wild winds unbound!
Let the blast of the firmament whirl from its place
The earth rooted below--
And the brine of the ocean, in rapid emotion,
Be it driven in the face
Of the stars up in heaven, as they walk to and fro!
Let him hurl me anon into Tartarus--on--
To the blackest degree,
With necessity's vortices strangling me down!
But he cannot join death to a fate meant for me!"
--Trans. by ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING.

THE SUFFERINGS OF PROMETHEUS.

We close this subject with a brief extract from the Prometheus
Bound of the English poet SHELLEY, 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 spacious 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, gushing 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 passage found.
The expanded waters gather on the plain,
They float the fields and overtop the grain;
Then, rushing 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 gods.
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 grass,
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 Parnassus,
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 sex, 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 shore.
A thin circumference 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 GODS, AND OF THEIR RULE OVER MANKIND.

It is a prominent feature of the polytheistic system of the Greeks
that the gods are represented as subject to all the passions and
frailties of human nature. There were, indeed, among them
personifications of good and of evil, as we see in A'te, the
goddess 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 gods 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 passions, 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 gods. 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 gods 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 titles 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 passed under a Hellenizing 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 analogy 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 gods, 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 Assembly of the gods 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 prone the gods were to evil passions, 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 gods,

"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 gods. 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 gods.

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 illustrate 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 god
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.

Though while Corruption on their sentence waits
They thrust pale Justice from their haughty gates,
Invisible their steps the Virgin treads,
And musters evil o'er their sinful heads.
She with the dark of air her form arrays,
And walks in awful grief the city ways:
Her wail is heard; her tear, upbraiding, falls
O'er their stained manners and devoted walls.

But they who never from the right have strayed--
Who as the citizen the stranger aid--
They and their cities flourish: genial peace
Dwells in their borders, and their youth increase;
Nor Jove, whose radiant eyes behold afar,
Hangs forth in heaven the signs of grievous war;
Nor scath, nor famine; on the righteous prey--
Peace crowns the night, and plenty cheers the day.
Rich are their mountain oaks: the topmost tree
The acorns fill, its trunk the hiving bee;
Their sheep with fleeces pant; their women's race
Reflect both parents in the infant face:
Still flourish they, nor tempt with ships the main;
The fruits of earth are poured from every plain.

But o'er the wicked race, to whom belong
The thought of evil and the deed of wrong,
Saturnian Jove, of wide-beholding eyes,
Bids the dark signs of retribution rise;
And oft the deeds of one destructive fall--
The crimes of one--are visited on all.
The god sends down his angry plagues from high--
Famine and pestilence--in heaps they die!
Again, in vengeance of his wrath, he falls
On their great hosts, and breaks their tottering walls;

Scatters their ships of war; and where the sea
Heaves high its mountain billows, there is he!

Ponder, O Judges! in your inmost thought
The retribution by his vengeance wrought.
Invisible, the gods are ever nigh,
Pass through the midst, and bend th' all-seeing eye.
The man who grinds the poor, who wrests the right,
Aweless of Heaven, stands naked to their sight:
For thrice ten thousand holy spirits rove
This breathing world, the delegates of Jove;
Guardians of man, their glance alike surveys
The upright judgments and the unrighteous ways.

A virgin pure is Justice, and her birth
August from him who rules the heavens and earth--
A creature glorious to the gods on high,
Whose mansion is yon everlasting sky.
Driven by despiteful wrong she takes her seat,
In lowly grief, at Jove's eternal feet.
There of the soul unjust her plaints ascend:
So rue the nations when their kings offend--
When, uttering wiles and brooding thoughts of ill,
They bend the laws, and wrest them to their will.
Oh! gorged with gold, ye kingly judges, hear!
Make straight your paths, your crooked judgments fear,
That the foul record may no more be seen--
Erased, forgot, as though it ne'er had been.
--Trans. by ELTON.

OATHS.

As in the beginning of the foregoing extract, so the poets
frequently refer to the oaths that were taken by those who entered
into important compacts, showing that then as now, and as in Old
Testament times, some overruling deity was invoked to witness
the agreement or promise, and punish its violation. Sometimes
the person touched the altar of the god by whom he swore, or the
blood that was shed in the ceremonial sacrifice, while some walked
through the fire to sanctify their oaths. When Abraham swore unto
the King of Sodom that he would not enrich himself with any of
the king's goods, he lifted up his hand to heaven, pointing to
the supposed residence of the Deity, as if calling on him to
witness the oath. When he requires his servant to take an oath
unto him he says, "Put, I pray thee, thy hand under my thigh: and
I will make thee swear by the Lord, the God of heaven and earth;"
and Jacob requires the same ceremony from Joseph when the latter
promises to carry his father's bones up out of Egypt.

When the goddess Vesta swore an oath in the very presence of
Jupiter, as represented in Homer's hymn, she touched his head,
as the most fitting ceremonial.

Touching the head of AEgis-bearing Jove,
A mighty oath she swore, and hath fulfilled,
That she among the goddesses of heaven
Would still a virgin be.

We find a military oath described by AEschylus in the drama of
"The Seven Chiefs against Thebes":

O'er the hollow of a brazen shield
A bull they slew, and, touching with their hands
The sacrificial stream, they called aloud
On Mars, Eny'o, and blood-thirsty Fear,
And swore an oath or in the dust to lay
These walls, and give our people to the sword,
Or, perishing, to steep the land in blood!

That there was sometimes a fire ordeal to sanctify the oath, we
learn from the Antig'o-ne of SOPHOCLES. The Messenger who brought
tidings of the burial of Polyni'ces says,

"Ready were we to grasp the burning steel,
To pass through fire, and by the gods to swear
The deed was none of ours, nor aught we knew
Of living man by whom 'twas planned or done."

In the Twelfth Book of VIRGIL'S AEne'id, when King Turnus enters
into a treaty with the Trojans, he touches the altars of his
gods and the flames, as part of the ceremony:

"I touch the sacred altars, touch the flames,
And all these powers attest, and all their names,
Whatever chance befall on either side,
No term of time this union shall divide;
No force nor fortune shall my vows unbind,
To shake the steadfast tenor of my mind."

The ancient poets and orators denounce perjury in the strongest
terms, and speak of the offence as one of a most odious character.

THE FUTURE STATE.

The future state in which the Greeks believed was to some extent
one of rewards and punishments. The souls of most of the dead,
however, were supposed to descend to the realms of Ha'des, where
they remained, joyless phantoms, the mere shadows of their former
selves, destitute of mental vigor, and, like the spectres of the
North American Indians, pursuing, with dreamlike vacancy, the
empty images of their past occupations and enjoyments. So cheerless
is the twilight of the nether world that the ghost of Achilles
informs Ulysses that it would rather live the meanest hireling
on earth than be doomed to continue in the shades below, even
though as sovereign ruler there. Thus Achilles asks him--

"How hast thou dared descend into the gloom
Of Hades, where the shadows of the dead,
Forms without intellect, alone reside?"

And when Ulysses tries to console him by reminding him that he
was even there supreme over all his fellow-shades, he receives
this reply:

"Renowned Ulysses! think not death a theme
Of consolation: I would rather live
The servile hind for hire, and eat the bread
Of some man scantily himself sustained,
Than sovereign empire hold o'er all the shades."
--Odyssey, by COWPER, B. XI.

But even in Hades a distinction is made between the good and the
bad, for there Ulysses finds Mi'nos, the early law-giver of Crete,
advanced to the position of judge over the assembled shades--
absolving the just, and condemning the guilty.

High on a throne, tremendous to behold,
Stern Minos waves a mace of burnished gold;
Around, ten thousand thousand spectres stand,
Through the wide dome of Dis, a trembling band;
Whilst, as they plead, the fatal lots he rolls,
Absolves the just, and dooms the guilty souls.
--Odyssey, by POPE, B. XI.

The kinds of punishment inflicted here are, as might be expected,
wholly earthly in their nature, and may be regarded rather as
the reflection of human passions than as moral retributions by
the gods. Thus, Tan'talus, placed up to his chin in water, which
ever flowed away from his lips, was tormented with unquenchable
thirst, while the fruits hanging around him constantly eluded
his grasp. The story of Tantalus is well told by PROFESSOR BLACKIE,
as follows:

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