Gods and Heroes of Ancient Greece Read online

  Thus the author goes back to the most various antique sources. Many of the myths are taken from the dramas of the three great Athenian masters of tragedy: Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides (fifth century B.C.). Others are borrowed from later, post-classical writers of the Hellenistic age—the legend of the Argonauts, for instance, which is told according to the epic of Apollonius of Rhodes (third century B.C.). But Schwab has treated his material with the greatest freedom. Frequently he introduces episodes taken from various poets of antiquity into a story whose main outlines he took from another source. In other words, he does just what his predecessors of old did—mythographers such as Apollodorus, for example. An instance of this is the story of Prometheus. While it follows Hesiod in the main, the description of the hero is enriched by borrowings from other sources. Plato relates that Prometheus secretly stole fire from the smithy of Hephaestus; Aeschylus also has Prometheus steal it from Hephaestus and bring it to earth in a hollow fennel stalk. But Sappho knew another version of this incident. According to her, Prometheus brought fire from heaven to earth after lighting a torch at one of the fiery wheels of the sun chariot, and this is the version Schwab blended into Hesiod’s story. The concept of Prometheus, as not only the faithful aide but also the creator of man, he took from Aeschylus. This version of the role of Prometheus can also be found in other literary sources and in Greek vase painting. Schwab follows Aeschylus in making Hesiod’s story of the fire-thief symbolize the beginning of civilization. The author practiced the same eclecticism in the telling of other legends. For instance, the story of the Argonauts, as we already know, is based on the epic of Apollonius of Rhodes, but for the Medea episode the author drew largely on Euripides’ play Medea. We do not intend to enumerate all the sources Schwab used for one reason or another, but only to suggest to the reader that the many different themes his ear will catch in the development of the tales are all part of the rich symphony of the poets of antiquity.

  We have already indicated that in classical antiquity myths were a part of poetry, and poetry was closely connected with myth. In later centuries this relation came to mean little more than a law of style. From the period of Greek enlightenment on, that is, from the fifth century B.C., the Greeks took myth to mean everything which was legendary and miraculous, everything which could not be proven as a fact or demonstrated through reason. And the word retained this meaning forever after. “Mythical” came to mean “unreal,” and with this the world of poetry became an imaginary world. That is why the poetry of the ancients, their gods, and their heroes, were tolerated by Christianity: to them they had merely aesthetic significance; they were not true. But this devaluation of the myth had begun long before the Christian era. It was initiated by the Greeks themselves as soon as they replaced mythical tradition by their own experience, and imagination by reasoning. The earlier ages accepted the myth as something true and actual. Then the word mythoi—if it was used at all—did not mean fables but merely tales, because these stories were transmitted by telling, by word of mouth. Other words for them were phemé, which indicates rumor, and kleos, which means glory. These names suggest the true nature of legend itself, for the legends of heroes, as well as those which dealt with the gods, were a message from the dark long ago. They preserved the memory of glorious deeds.

  Even centuries before Homer there must have been singers such as Homer describes in his epics, who appeared at the courts of princes or in the market places of cities and celebrated in song the heroes of the past. This oldest poetry was known as “Praise of the Deeds of Gods and Men.” Homer himself tells us this in the verses of the Odyssey which deal with the calling of the singer and his place in his environment. Thus it was the “myth,” as it was later called, which originally constituted the essential content of epic song. The poet proclaimed the fame of heroic areté, that is of those powers and virtues of man which enabled him to attain to the highest achievements. This vocation of the poet’s made him the true carrier of tradition and the expounder of legend. These primitive songs in praise of heroes, then, were the precursors of Homer’s epics, which aimed at a more comprehensive vision of human life; but even later developments of Greek poetry still show the unchanged close relationship of the poet to mythical tradition. Not only was the glorification of the heroes of the past a fitting tribute due from the present generation, but it also provided a glowing example for imitation. The Greeks believed that the poet or singer whose words stirred the heart with a desire for glory was the true educator of men. Examples drawn from myths, especially when used as arguments in the speeches of the characters in the Homeric epic, clearly prove that this purpose of presenting noble models for emulation was inherent in mythical tradition from the beginning. In early Greece the myth had the value of factual truth and was accepted as the norm. By idealized pictures of heroes and their deeds and destinies the poetry of ancient times bodied forth those truths which later philosophical ages expressed as general ideas and precepts. That is why the poets of Greece were able to present all the problems of human life in the form of mythical happenings and characters. The memory of legend and the thought and feeling of each new generation were always indissolubly joined.

  It is understandable that this dual character of the myth has given rise to extreme and one-sided interpretations of its essence. Either it was denied historical verity altogether and declared mere poetic fiction, or it was claimed to be history and nothing else. The truth of the matter is that the mythical tradition which we find in Greek poetry is a complicated structure made up of very different elements. It is easy to see that the heroic myth has in it much of the fairy tale, and that a portion of it is of a purely imaginary character. This also holds for another aspect of legend, the legends concerning the gods. These constituted a part of religion and sprang from the speculation on nature and the origin of the gods. But even these legends of the gods contain a germ of empirical reality, for they are connected with cosmic phenomena, such as the sky, the stars, earth, and sea, or they take for their point of departure religious rites and institutions and relate a mythical story to explain their origins. But the part of the myth of greatest interest to us here is that which is concerned with heroes. Many of the most famous legends of this kind are based on historical fact and go back to civilizations earlier than the Greek itself. It has often been stated that the body of Greek legend includes different legend cycles bound up with different localities. The legends which were rooted in the pre-Greek civilizations of Troy, Mycenae, Argos, Tiryns, and Thebes, throve in greatest abundance. Excavations in these places have brought to light pre-Homeric settlements and palaces of powerful kings. These discoveries prove the historical reality of certain legends, such as those which tell of the destruction of Troy by the Achaeans, coming overseas from Argos, or those of the campaign of the “Seven against Thebes,” which also started from Argos. Attic legend has preserved the memory of Minos, of Crete’s supremacy over the sea, and of the dynasts whose palaces Evans excavated in Knossos on Crete. In the course of centuries legendary happenings crystallized around such memories, and poetic fancy came to adorn the historical fact.

  This process of poetic adornment began in the very earliest phase, when the wonder tales of the days of old lived only in the hearts of the people. The so-called historical core of the legend probably never existed pure of any alloy of imaginative interpretation, and whether one person or many were concerned in this process of admixture hardly matters. Legend remains legend whether individual singers or entire guilds of rhapsodists transmit it in the form of epic song. The only prerequisite is that this process through which “memory” is constantly being shaped and reshaped into poetry springs from the life of the people. Considered from this point of view, the poems of Homer and of the Greek tragic poets are genuine myths even when they alter the mythical tradition with the help of creative imagination and introduce into it new characters and motifs. But very early a tendency to compile and set down legends as a body of knowledge appeared alongside of thi
s impulse toward molding legends through fancy, for they were, after all, regarded as true reports of the past. Taking over Homer’s style, certain poets wrote lengthy epics on those bodies of legend which had not yet been worked into poems. With these works, the so-called “cyclic poems,” they filled the gaps in the account of events before and after the Trojan War, or supplemented the picture Homer gave of the war since he only covered the last period of the struggle for Troy. Thus the epic and the legend along with it were made historical. Other post-Homeric poets invented genealogies for their mythical heroes, which they traced back to a divine ancestor or ancestress and on to a noble house with living scions. In this way they tried to bridge the chasm between the age of legend and the present. From this kind of poetry it was only a small step to converting these epics, which were more or less genealogies and catalogues, into prose books that form the transition to the beginnings of historiography. It is due to this scholarly preoccupation with myths that so many contradictory variants concerning the father or mother of famous heroes appear in Greek mythical tradition. These prose redactions of myths, which count among their best-known authors such writers as Pherecydes, Acusilaus, and Hecataeus (fifth century B.C.), do not exist except in a few fragments, which is true also of the cyclic poems which followed Homer’s work. But both served as sources for later mythographers of antiquity, such as Apollodorus, whose works have survived. It is evident that what these later books of legend took over from such genealogical works was not all true legend, but was partly based on the artificial and arbitrary constructions of these older pseudo-historians. In other words, it was, to some extent, a product of the rational thinking of the early redactors whose logic ironed out the incredible element of the tradition.

  It is amazing proof of the inexhaustible vitality of legend that subsequent to, and side by side with this development whose external symptom was the decline of epic production, a great new form of poetry sprang up in Attica toward the end of the sixth century B.C., which woke the myth to new life. This new form was the tragedy. The powerful dramatic impulse which now leaped into being was born of the increased intensity of the spiritual struggle with the problems of actual life. But this life projected its reality into the world of ancient legend, just as at an earlier stage Homer’s era had projected itself into the epic. For the generation of Aeschylus and Sophocles this world of ancient legend became the ideal mirror of their own concept of man, the gods, and the world. Thus legend, dramatized in tragedy, experienced a radiant rebirth and proved its indestructible power to survive. The vase painting and choral songs of the sixth century were the first symptoms of the people’s new and increased interest in the old myths which formed the content of the epic. The manner in which the writers of Attic tragedy used these myths gave the characters of legend their final form. What constituted the tragic in tragedy? The passionate awareness of destiny, the sense of how freedom and limitation are mixed in life, and the way in which man reaches heroic stature under the impact of his appointed fate. The great masters of Greek tragedy found the outlines of this basically “tragic” attitude toward life clearly limned in the myths of their people. And so the tragedians gave the old vocation of the singer as a carrier of the tradition a new and deeper significance. Homer himself presented the poet as far more than a man who glorifies the deeds of heroes. To him he was an interpreter of human destiny, and this idea he embodied in his treatment of Achilles and Odysseus. Plato was, therefore, quite right in calling Homer the father of tragedy. This aspect of legend was brought to the peak of perfection only by the tragic poetry of the Greeks of the fifth century.

  This development from legend to tragedy brings to light still another force latent in Greek myth, the inimitable plastic vigor of the characters of legend, which were shaped into living and acting persons by the tragedians. For the dramatist the characters of legend were a most fruitful subject. The heroes in Greek legends are not majestic but insubstantial apparitions, such as we sometimes find in the legends of other peoples. They are amazingly real, individual, and convincing. That was why, in his famous epistle on poetry, Horace advised the younger generation of poets in Rome to give up the ambition of inventing their own dramatic characters, for these so often lacked all individual life and were nothing but shadows. It would be better, he said, for them to utilize the characters in Greek legend, who were indestructibly actual. And no one can fail to agree with this Roman critic, at least in his evaluation of the myth as potential poetry, for even after so many centuries the heroes and heroines of Greek legend are still as clear, as three-dimensional to us, as though we had met them in the flesh: Achilles and Patroclus, Odysseus and Penelope, Oedipus and Antigone, Prometheus, Agamemnon, Clytaemnestra, Orestes, Iphigenia, Electra, Ajax, Medea. Jason, and many more. It is true, of course, that these figures are, in part, the creations of great poets; for us it is hardly possible to distinguish between their share in the formation of these characters and that of the mythical tradition. Still, though the myths do not give the fully developed features of these characters, they contain the seeds which flower later in tragedy.

  The myth also contained another important trait of the characters of Greek tragedy: their universality. For not one of them is merely individual. They are convincing because they represent the coincidence of individuality and type. The Greek mind had the capacity of detecting the basic law, not only in all human beings, but in all things. They called this “idea” inherent in every thing and every human creature the “form of its being.” Aeschylus saw Prometheus as a creative genius, inspired by warm love for suffering humanity, always ready to help the weak but defiant toward the higher powers and egregiously self-confident. Antigone is the idealist who readily sacrifices herself to the claims of divine law. Full of tender love for her dead brother to whom his fellow-citizens deny the rites of burial because they regard him as a traitor, she is fanatically inflexible in her opposition to the laws of worldly power which claim her as their victim. Achilles, a character of heroic greatness, is essentially noble, and just because of this, he loves honor and is given to sudden anger against everyone who offends this sense of honor. Oedipus has an agile and penetrating brain and solves every riddle with the greatest ease; but he is nevertheless blind to his own share in the disaster he unwittingly brings upon his city and his people. Bellerophon is a great hero in his fight against all external dangers and resists every temptation devised by feminine shrewdness and desire. But a strain of melancholy in his blood separates him from his fellow men and finally drives him, the radiant hero, to go his lonely way sick and bewildered, like one who is hated by all the gods, and finally to destroy himself to no purpose. Thus the philosophic mind of the Greek people shaped the characters of legend into a series of ideal types which serve as significant examples for the understanding of human nature.

  The great poetry of the classical period of Greek literature clung to the primitive myth because it was intimately related to it. The myth was its soul as well as its body. But the increasingly rational criticism which the fifth century directed against all tradition likewise affected the myth, not only its gods and the picture it gave of the world, but also its heroes and its tragic concept of life. In the plays of Euripides, the last of these three great writers of tragedies, the rational doubting spirit invades even the shaping of the myth itself. His characters were modernized and in this process became less profound. These so-called “heroes” are unashamedly loquacious and discussed the everyday problems of the burghers of the poet’s own day and age. Under such circumstances it was difficult for them to maintain their heroic poise. It became merely a pose, and their words degenerated to empty declamation. The next step on this path was necessarily the abandonment of the myth. Drama became a mirror of modern middle-class life, and comedy with its happy ending carried the day against heroic tragedy. There were, to be sure, still some poets who in a highly artificial style wrote dramas based on myths, but they were ineffective. The only successful use of the tradition was the parod
ying of mythical content and characters which we find in the comedies of the time. Not until the post-classical period of Greek literature did serious poetry turn to the myth again to produce romantic and sentimental epics and elegies on mythical themes. But this poetry was academic, and the living myth had been converted into “mythology.” That was all the myth was to the Romans and to Roman poets.

  It remained for the Romantic Movement of the nineteenth century to rediscover the true greatness of the mythical tradition. Since Romanticism was fundamentally opposed to the exaggerated rationalism of the preceding epoch, it tended to regard myths as a sort of primordial wisdom of mankind, a form of wisdom which modern man had impiously sacrificed in his arrogant pride of reason. It was in this spirit that a large part of modern research in the field of mythology was dedicated to the attempt to penetrate to the roots of mythical thinking and reveal its true meaning.

  I have already pointed out that the book we have here is untouched by this speculative and symbolical conception of myths. The investigator of myths along the lines laid down by the Romantic School will think that the naïve teller of these tales has often ignored profundities. But this book is meant not only for children but also for the childlike spirit of the young and old alike. It conveys a breath of the imperishable strength of youth in Greek genius, which is perhaps most alive and beautiful in the myth. The Greeks felt this themselves. Plato called the mythical period of Greek poetry the flowering time of his people. In a certain sense this strength has never left the Greeks. “You Greeks are always children; there is no such thing as an old Greek,” said an Egyptian priest, the representative of an age-old civilization, to Solon, the sage of Athens, who came to Egypt by ship to see the wonders of the land of the Nile. These words of Plato’s are quoted from the Timaeus, the work of his old age, and Plato himself bears surpassing witness to the inexhaustible impulse of the Greeks to create myths in an era (the fourth century B.C.) in which the mythical tradition seemed to be dying off everywhere else. In his dialogues he invented a new kind of myth which blends old mythical elements of symbolic force with new philosophical ideas. Even Aristotle, Plato’s greatest pupil, the master of pure reason, once said: “The friend of wisdom (philosophos) is also a friend of the myth (philomythos).” That is how the most profound spirits among the Greeks thought at the zenith of their civilization. In a letter to an intimate friend this same Aristotle made a more personal confession. He wrote: “The lonelier I am, the more of a recluse I become, the greater is my love for myths.”