BOOK II. Zeus Ouranion. The mythical and spiritual Zeus. between them and their worshippers there was no real and direct connexion. Of the Eupatrid families among the Greeks the greater number, perhaps, traced their descent from Zeus himself or from some other god: no Roman patrician ever thought of proclaiming himself as the offspring of the cold and colourless beings who in solitary state presided over the processes and working of the visible world. Nay, even in Rome itself the Greek deities remained only a fashion, and were honoured with an exotic worship. The true Roman ritual was that which had for its object the worshipping of the household gods; and these were practically the spirits of the founder of the house and of those who had followed him in true hereditary succession. The religion of Roman life was influenced by the worship, not of the bright and joyous Phoibos, or of the virgin. daughter of Zeus, but of the Lares and the Penates before that altar of Vesta, the goddess of the hearth, which was the common heritage of the whole Aryan race. But in the literature of Rome the genuine deities of the country are so strangely confused or even jumbled up with the importations from the East, that it becomes difficult sometimes to assign each portion of material to its proper place. In some cases the characteristics of a Greek god have been fitted on to a Latin god with whose character they are inconsistent; but it is probable that even in the days of Ovid or Horace this confusion never troubled the country folk of Samnium or Calabria. The idea of brightness was, however, not the only one suggested by the sight of the clear heaven. If the sky beams with light, it is also spread as a covering over the earth which lies beneath it, and Zeus was thus Ouranion who spread his veil over his bride; but before he came to be spoken of as son of Kronos, the attribute had suggested the idea of a person, and the Western Ouranos corresponded with the Vedic Varuņa. In this case the name remained more transparent in the West than in the East. The Vedic Varuņa becomes the moral ruler of the universe, and the Father and friend of man; but in the Hellenic land the starry Ouranos is the son to whom Gaia gives birth in order that he may cover everything and be a steadfast seat for the blessed gods,1 and we look in vain for the spiritual attributes which belong to Varuna in the hymns of the Rig Veda. But the developement of a personal Zeus was followed necessarily by two results, which long continued astonishingly distinct the one from the other. The thought of Zeus as the one God and Father gave birth to a religion. The many names employed to denote the 1 Hesiod, Theog. 128. WORDS AND MYTHS. 171 1. varying phases of the sky became each the germ of a myth, and CHAP. every one of these myths, when translated into the conditions of human life, tended to degrade the idea of the god as much as the idea of his changeless perfection, rising more and more in the mind, tended to raise it. According to the latter, he would be the righteous Judge, seen by none, yet beholding all, looking down from heaven on the children of men to see if they will understand and seek after God, appointing to them a life of labour for their highest good, and finally recompensing to all men after their works. By the other process he would become all that names applied to outward phenomena must denote when used to signify the actions of a personal and conscious being. As in every land the dews of heaven fertilise the earth, Zeus must be the husband of many brides, the father of countless children in every country. As looking down on the havoc caused by drought or pestilence, storm or war, he would be a god of merciless indifference and disinterested cruelty. He must smile alike over the wealth of a teeming harvest or the withered fruits of a sun-scorched land. But the blighting of a spring-tide fair in its promise is his work, and he would thus become capricious as well as treacherous, while the interchangeable characteristics of the earliest gods would heighten still more the repulsive features of the anthropomorphised Zeus. If the old hymn had praised Aditi as "mother, father, and son," Zeus must become at once the brother and the husband, and his own daughters through many generations would become the mothers of his children. The transference of these phrases to the relations of human life has its necessary result in the fearful horrors of the tale of Oidipous and Iokastê. That the two streams of religion and mythology ran on side by Influence side, or rather that the same words are used to express two wholly of mythology on different lines of thought, is abundantly proved by Greek not less religion. than by Hindu literature. The result was that the same man might seem to speak two languages, and perhaps delude himself into the notion that under the name of Zeus he spoke of one person, and of one person only. This would be the case especially with the classes, which, although familiar, or because they were familiar, with the complicated mythical lore of their country, might not care to analyse. their own thoughts, or fairly to face the difficulties involved in many or most of these ancient stories. But there would be a lower class who, as being perhaps practically ignorant of these narratives, would be saved in great measure from this traditional influence. However 44 What," asks Professor Max Muller, "did the swincherd Eumaios know of the intricate Olympian theo- II. BOOK imperfect his conceptions may have been, it is certain that the swineherd Eumaios did not derive his religious convictions from mythical phrases, when he told Odysseus that God gives and withholds according to his pleasure and in the plenitude of his power. Nor can too great a stress be laid on the fact that, as the mythology grew more complicated and more repulsive, ideas of morality and religion became more reasonable and more pure. Nowhere is this conclusion so clearly forced upon us as in the Hesiodic Works and Days. In this poem the teacher who bids his friend to deal with all men after the rule of righteousness which comes from Zeus,' who tells him that justice and truth shall in the end prevail, and that they who do evil to others inflict evil on themselves, who is sure that the eyes of God are in every place, that the way of evil is broad and smooth, and the path of good rough and narrow at the first, tells us also how Zeus bade the gods to make Pandôra fair to look upon but all evil within, and laughed at the thought of the miseries which should overtake mankind when all the evils should be let loose from her box, while, to crush them utterly, hope should remain a prisoner within it. So conscious apparently is the poet that the Zeus who thus cheats mankind is not the Zeus who commands them to do justice and mercy, that he can use the same name without a thought that he is dishonouring the just and holy God whom he reverences. It seems impossible to ignore a distinction without which the Hesiodic poem becomes unintelligible. With our Homeric poets the contrast is not so marked, simply because their thoughts were not so earnest and their hearts were not so wakened by the sterner experiences of human life. With these moral indifference would naturally find expression in confusion of language, and they might lead others to think, as they themselves may have fancied, that the Zeus to whom they prayed in moments of real anguish was the Zeus who laughed at the wretchedness and the ruin of mankind. The Zeus of the Tragic poets. But if it be true generally that the Greek, especially in the prehistoric ages, "was not aware that there were different tributaries which entered from different points into the central idea of Zeus," it was far otherwise with the few to whom a belief in the righteousness of God was no empty phrase but a profound and practical conviction. MYTHOLOGY AND RELIGION. 173 The fact that national and political institutions were intertwined CHAP. inextricably with the old mythology, if they were not actually based upon it, only brought out its repulsive features more prominently before all who could not bring themselves to believe that the righteous God could issue to men immoral commands or himself do the things which he condemned in them. Whether the difficulties thus involved in the traditional creed should lead them to covert opposition or to open antagonism, would depend much on the temper and the circumstances of those who felt them. There are some who, like Sophokles, are well content if they can express their own convictions without assailing popular ideas; there are others who, like Euripides, cannot rest until they bring others to see inconsistencies which to themselves are palpable and glaring. Yet it cannot be denied that the thoughts of Sophokles are as true and high as those of the younger poet. There is nothing in the latter more outspoken than the words in which Sophokles tells us that the laws of righteousness are established in heaven and that in them God is great and cannot grow old. But where there is an earnest yearning for truth, this happy condition of mind will not probably last long. The thought of the mischief which the popular creeds inflict on ordinary minds will lead them openly to condemn a system which they might otherwise treat with indifference or contempt; and to this sense we may ascribe the protests of Xenophanes and Protagoras, of Anaxagoras and Herakleitos, of Pindar and of Plato. The controversy was brought to an issue, when Euripides said plainly that if the gods are righteous, the stories of the poets are wretched falsehoods, and that if they do the things which the poets ascribe to them, then they are not gods at all: and this issue was anticipated by the conviction of Aschylos that Zeus was a mere name, one of many names, for the One true God, which might serve to convey some faint notion and inadequate idea of his goodness and his greatness.1 Hindu and Greek, then, alike worshipped the same God, of whom The name they also spoke sometimes under other names. But these names Zeus. were in no case borrowed the one from the other. The analysis of language has proved that in some instances Greeks, Latins, or Lithuanians have preserved older forms than any which are exhibited in Sanskrit, while the variations in the incidents and local colouring of the myths carry us back to one common source for all in the home of the yet undivided Aryan tribes. The seed, however, could not germinate while as yet there was no failure of memory; and if, when the meaning of words was in part or wholly forgotten, expressions 1 On this subject see further, Muir, Sanskrit Texts, part iv. p. 41. 1 BOOK Its transformations. not less graceful once than true became coarse and mischievous, we may learn to curb our indignation when we find that both the process and the result were alike inevitable. But the name Zeus is not confined to Greeks and Hindus. The Zeus Patêr of the former and the Dyaus-pitar of the latter represent the Jupiter of the Latins, and the Tuisco, Zio, Tyr and Tiw of the German nations. The etymological changes of the word are indeed almost numberless. The brightness of the heaven reappears in the Latin dies, the Sanskrit dyu, and our day: and from the same root spring the Greek Theos, the Latin Deus, and the Lithuanian Diewas. These changes have been fully traced by Professor Max Müller;1 but we must here note that the Greek Zen, Zenos answers to the Latin Janus, Januspater; that Janus again, resolved into Dianus and Diana, carries us to the Greek digammated forms Acós, AíFa, and appears again in the word divine. With these may be taken the forms connected with Zeus by the transition of dy (Dyaus) into j (Jupiter, Janus, Juno), or dj, as in the Djovis of Oscan inscriptions and the old Italian deity Vedjovis (Vejovis). Akin to all these is the Sanskrit deva, a word which like Dyaus denoted only splendour, but was afterwards used as a name for the gods; but although it had thus acquired the general notion of deity, it was never applied to any but the bright gods who were the companions of Indra. The evil powers of night or darkness are Adeva, atheists, or enemies of the devas; and thus even on Indian soil we find the germ of that moral and spiritual meaning which was imported into a myth purely physical in its origin. While the adeva grew, like Asmodeus, into malignant demons, Vritra the cloud enemy of Indra was gradually passing into the evil god of Iranian theology. If the Diabolos of the New Testament, a word not found in the Septuagint, is to be referred to forms like Dyavan and Diovis, the name deva had lost in the West the meaning of brightness which it retained in the East, though the evil spirit was still regarded as the prince of the powers of the air. The Teutonic devil is thus traced to that Iranian source from which the Jews derived their later complicated demonology. That the term Diabolos, as applied to Satan, should be regarded as identical with the Greek word denoting a slanderer, is a confusion precisely similar to that which turned Lykâôn and his sons into wolves and the seven arkshas or shiners into bears. 1 Lectures on Language, second series, 453. For Mr. Peile's remarks on the connexion of Theos and Deus see note p. 149. 2 Eshem-dev, aêshma-daêva, "le démon de la concupiscence."-Bréal, Hercule et Cacus, 135. 3 Grimm, Deutsche Mythologie, 939. |