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Religious festivals of the Greek tribes.

All these beings with a thousand others were to the Greeks objects of love or fear, of veneration, reverence, or worship; and the worship of some among them may be regarded as the very foundation of the brilliant social life on which, in some of its aspects, in spite of its failure to waken the Greeks to a national life, we still look with undiminished admiration. In the magnificent gatherings of Olympia, in the contests of the Corinthian isthmus, in the Nemean and Pythian games, the Hellenic race received an education, which, regarded in the light of the purpose which it was designed to serve, has fallen to the lot of no other people upon earth. Here strength of body was used not as a means for supplying the bloody and brutal pleasures of a Roman amphitheatre, but as an instrument for a systematic training which brought out all its powers. Here the painter and the sculptor could feed his genius in the study of the most splendid of human models; and here the simple wreath which formed the prize of victory in the games carried with it a glory which kings might envy and a power which struck terror into the mind of the barbarian.1

Inconsistencies and

contradic

tions of

Greek

myths.

For working purposes then it may be said that the mythical or popular beliefs about the gods and the heroes formed a kind of religion, which no one felt it to be to his interest, and perhaps none regarded it as his duty, to gainsay or to weaken. But in no other sense can we identify Hellenic religion or morality with Hellenic mythology. The so-called Hesiodic poems give us some of the most repulsive of these legends, and string together the loves of Zeus, his fight with his father Kronos, his struggles with the giants, and his cheating of mankind. But when the poet betakes himself to his work as a teacher, we hear no more of these stories; and we are told simply that the eyes of Zeus are in every place beholding the evil and the good; that his even justice requites every man according to his work, and that all are bound to avoid the smooth road to evil and to choose the strait path of good, which, rough at first, becomes easy to those who walk in it.2

If, however, these popular traditions are not to be taken as embodiments of either religious faith or moral convictions or philosophical thought, by the vast mass of the Greeks they were

cept in its bearing on the intellectual and religious growth of the people, this mythology cannot be regarded as a part of Greek history. For the myths connected with these gods and heroes, and their origin,

I must refer the reader to the Mythology of the Aryan Natiors and the Tales of Ancient Greece.

1 Herod. viii. 26.

2 Works and Days, 35, 215, 263. Myth. Ar. Nat. i. 351.

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THE FORMATION OF HELLAS.

Dynastic and tribal legends.

The

unquestionably received as genuine and veritable history. strongest sentiment of the Hellenic mind was that of the absolute independence of each city from all other cities; and each town had its founder or heroic Eponymos whose name it bore and whose exploits shed a lustre on his The Argives looked back to the glorious descendants for ever. days of Perseus, the child of the golden shower, who, bearing the sword of Chrysâôr in his hand and the sandals of the Nymphs on his feet, journeyed away to the land of the gloaming and there by the merciful stroke of his weapon brought to an end the woes of the mortal Gorgon.' The Theban legend told the tale of Laios and Oidipous from the day when the babe was cast forth to frost and heat on the slopes of Kithairon to the hour when, after the slaughter of the Sphinx and his unwitting offence against the sanctities of law, the blind old man departed on the wanderings which were to end in the holy grove of the Erinyes. The Athenian pointed proudly to a richer inheritance. He could tell of the Dragon-kings Kekrops and Erechtheus and recount the sorrows of the gentle Prokris and the wrongs done to the beautiful Aithra. He could dwell on the glorious career of the child Theseus, how, on reaching the vigour of full manhood, he raised the great stone and, taking in his hand the sword of destiny, proved, like Arthur, that he was rightwise born a king,3 how he cast in his lot with the doomed tribute-children, and sailing to Krete trod the mazes of the labyrinth and smote the horrible Minotauros.*

But the mere naming of a few such mythical stories can scarcely give an idea of the stupendous fabric reared by later poets and Greek tribal mythographers, when they came to cement together the stones which they found more or less ready hewn

legends.

Not only were there myths which belonged to to their hand. particular families, clans, or cities; but around these flowed the stream of a tradition which in a certain sense may be called national, and which professed to furnish a continuous history in the tales of the Kalydonian boar hunt, of the voyage of the Argonauts, of the rescuing of Helen, the returns of the heroes, the banishment of the Herakleidai, and their triumphant restoration to their ancient home. But the fact on which we have now to lay stress is that all these stories were to the several tribes or cities genuine records of actual events, the independent chronicles of kings and heroes whose fortunes ran each in its own peculiar channel; and yet that, regarded as a whole, these traditions strictly

1 Myth. Ar. Nat. ii. 58 et seq.

2 lb. ii. 68 et seq.

3 Popular Romances of the Middle

Ages. Introduction.
4 Myth. Ar. Nat. ii. 61.

resemble a prism in which a thousand pictures flash from a few planes while all are reflected from a single piece of glass.1

Historical value of Greek

It is therefore no part of the historian's task to relate at length the mythical tales which make up the great fabric of Hellenic tradition. Grains of fact may lie buried in its stupendous mass; but the means of separating the fact from the fiction are lacking. It is, of course, pos- myths. sible that there may have been a war undertaken to avenge the wrongs of an earthly Helen, that this war lasted ten years, that ten years more were spent by the leaders in their return homewards, and even that the chief incident in this war was the quarrel of the greatest of all the heroes with a mean-spirited king. But for this war we have confessedly no contemporary historical evidence, and it is of the very essence of the narrative, as given by the poets, that Paris, who had deserted Oinônê, and before whom the three queens of the air had appeared as claimants of the golden apple, steals from Sparta the divine sister of the Dioskouroi; that the chiefs are summoned together for no other purpose than to avenge her woes and wrongs; that the seanymph's son, the wielder of invincible weapons and the lord of undying horses, goes to fight in a quarrel which is not his own; that his wrath is roused because he is robbed of the maiden Briseis; that henceforth he takes no part in the strife until his friend Patroklos has been slain; and that then he puts on the new armour which Thetis brings to him from the anvil of Hephaistos and goes forth to win the victory. But this is a tale which we find with all its essential features in every Aryan land: and therefore, if such a war took place, it must be carried back to a time preceding the dispersion of the Aryan tribes, and its scene can be placed neither in the Penjab (the land of the Five Streams), nor on the plains of the Asiatic Troy, not in Germany, or Norway, or Wales. It has, therefore, in strictness of speech, nothing to do with Greek history. The poems may, and undoubtedly do, tell us much of the state of society and law at the time when they took shape. The pictures of Andromache and Nausikaa may be fairly taken as proof that the condition of women in the days of the poets was indefinitely higher than that of Athenian women in the days of Perikles. The Boule or Council of the chiefs may be regarded as the germ of the great assemblies of the future Athenian people; and in spite of the manifest working of feudal tyranny we see in the Achaians

1 See further Myth. Ar. Nat. book i. ch. x.

The proposition is a sweeping For the proof of it I must refer the reader to my Aryan My

one.

C

thology, and the Introductions to the
Popular Romances of the Middle
Ages, and the Tales of the Teutonic
Lands.

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the forefathers of the conquerors of Xerxes. We may even allow that the poet rightly gives the names of dynasties of which he speaks as flourishing in his own day; but these names can give us no knowledge of the deeds which may have been done by those who bore them.

The return of the Herakleids.

Pre-eminent among the traditions for which a larger amount of credibility has been claimed, stands the legend which relates the return of the Herakleidai. Of this event it is enough to say that it is the last in the series of movements which balanced each other in the popular stories of the Greeks, and that the object of all these movements is to regain a stolen treasure or to recover a lost inheritance.1 But we cannot venture to say that we have these traditions in their They were altered, almost at will, by later poets original form. and mythographers in accordance with local or tribal prejudices or fancies, and forced into arrangements which were regarded as chronological. The story ran that when Herakles died, his tyrant and tormentor Eurystheus insisted on the surrender of his sons, and that Hyllos the son of Deianeira with his brothers hastily fled and after wandering to many other places found a refuge at last in the only city where the children of Herakles could be safe. Eurystheus marches with his hosts against Athens, and the Athenians come forth to meet him led by Theseus, the great solar-hero of the land, who is accompanied by Iolaos, the son of Iphikles the twin brother of Herakles, as well as by the banished Hyllos. Eurystheus is slain, and Hyllos carries his head back to Alkmênê. In other words, the children of the sun return to the evening land with the treasure which the dark powers had carried away to the east; but day and night follow each the other, and thus the Herakleidai cannot maintain their footing in the Peloponnesos for more than a year and then by an irresistible necessity find their way back to Athens. These alternations, which represent simply the succession of day and night, might be, and would have been, repeated any number of times, if the myths had not at length become mixed up with traditions of the local settlement of the country,-in other words, if certain names found in the myths had not become associated with particular spots or districts in the Peloponnesos. To follow all the versions and variations of these legends is a task not more profitable than threading the mazes of a labyrinth; but we may trace in many, probably in most of them, the working of the same ideas. Thus the version which after the death of Eurystheus takes Hyllos to Thebes makes him dwell by the Elektrian, or Amber, Gates. The next stage in the history is

1 Myth. Ar. Nat. book ii. ch. iii.

another homeward journey of the children of Herakles which ends in the slaughter of Hyllos in single combat with Echemos; and the Herakleidai are bound by compact to forego all attempts at return for fifty or a hundred years, periods which are mere multiples of the ten years of the Trojan war and of the Nostoi or homeward wanderings of the Achaian chiefs. The subsequent fortunes of Kleodaios and Aristomachos, the son and grandson of Herakles, simply repeat those of Hyllos; but at length in the next generation the myth pauses, and the repetition of the whole drama is prevented by the gradual awakening of the historical sense in the Hellenic tribes. For this last return the preparations are on a scale which may remind us in some degree of the brilliant gathering of the Achaian chieftains with their ships in Aulis. A fleet is built at the entrance of the Corinthian gulf, at a spot which hence bore the name of Naupaktos, and the three sons of Aristomachos, -Aristodemos, Temenos, and Kresphontes,-make ready for the last great enterprise. But Aristodemos is smitten by lightning before he can pass over into the heritage of his fathers, and his place is taken by his twin sons Eurysthenes and Prokles, the progenitors of the double line of Spartan kings. The sequel exhibits yet other points of resemblance to the tale of the Trojan war. The soothsayer Chryses reappears in the prophet Karnos, whose death by the hand of Hippotes answers to the wrong done to Chryses by Agamemnon. In either case the wrath of Apollon is roused, and a plague follows. The people die of famine, nor is the hand of the god lifted off them until, as for Chryses, a full atonement is made. Hippotes is banished, and the chiefs are then told to take as their guide the three-eyed man who is found in the Aitolian Oxylos who rides on a one-eyed horse. But as the local myth exhibited Tisamenos the son of Orestes as at this time the ruler of Peloponnesos, that prince must be brought forward as the antagonist of the returning Herakleids. A great battle follows, in which he is slain, while, according to one version, Pamphylos and Dymas, the sons of the Dorian Aigimios, fall on the side of the invaders. With the partition of the Peloponnesos among the conquerors the myth comes to an end. Argos falls to the lot of Temenos, while Sparta becomes the portion of the sons of Aristodemos, and Messênê that of Kresphontes. A sacrifice is offered by way of thanksgiving by these chiefs on their respective altars; and as they draw near to complete the rite, on the altar of Sparta is seen a serpent, on that of Argos a toad, on that of Messênê a fox. The soothsayers were, of course, ready with their interpretations. The slow and sluggish toad denoted the dull and unenterprising disposition of the future Argive people; the serpent betokened the

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