4 Early Greek Philosophy
they renewed their youth, and with it, as it proved, the
youth of the world, at a time when the world seemed
in its dotage.
The marvel is that they were able to do this so thoroughly as they did. A savage myth might be pre- served here and there to the scandal of philosophers ; fetishes, totems, and magic rites might lurk in holes and corners with the moles and with the bats, to be unearthed long afterwards by the curious in such matters. But the all-pervading superstition, which we call primitive because we know not how or whence it came, was gone for ever ; and we find Herodotos noting with unfeigned surprise the existence among “ barbarians” of beliefs and customs which, not so long ago, his own forefathers had taught and practised quite as zealously as ever did Libyan or Scyth. Even then, he might have found most of them surviving on the “high places” of Hellas.
III. In one respect the way had been prepared
already. Long before history begins, the colonisation
of the islands and the coasts of Asia Minor had
brought about a state of things that was not favour-
able to the rigid maintenance of traditional customs and
ways of thought. -A myth is essentially a local thing,
and though the emigrants might give the names of
ancestral sanctuaries to similar spots in their new homes,
they could not transfer with the names the old senti-
ment of awe. Besides, these were, on the whole, stir-
ring and joyful times. The spirit of adventure is not
favourable to superstition, and men whose chief
occupation is fighting are not apt to be oppressed
by that “fear of the world” which some tell us is the
normal state of the savage mind. Even the savage
becomes in great measure free from it when he is really happy.
That is why we find so few traces of the primitive 1. Homer.
view of the world in Homer. The gods have become
frankly human, and everything savage is, so far as may
be, kept out of sight. There are, of course, vestiges of
early beliefs and practices, but they are exceptional.
In that strange episode of the Fourteenth Book of
the /ézad known as The Deceiving of Zeus we find a
number of theogonical ideas which are otherwise quite
foreign to Homer, but they are treated with so little
seriousness that the whole thing has even been re-
garded as a parody or burlesque of some primitive
poem on the birth of the gods. That, however, is to
mistake the spirit of Homer. He finds the old myth
ready to his hand, and sees in it matter for a “ joyous
tale,” just as Demodokos did in the loves of Ares and
Aphrodite. There is no antagonism to traditional
views, but rather a complete detachment from them.
It has often been noted that Homer never speaks
of the primitive custom of purification for bloodshed.
The dead heroes are burned, not buried, as the kings of
continental Hellas were. Ghosts play hardly any part.
In the //ad we have, to be sure, the ghost of Patroklos,
in close connexion with the solitary instance of human
sacrifice in Homer. All that was part of the traditional
story, and Homer says as little about it as he can.
There is also the Wekyia in the Eleventh Book of the
Odyssey, which has been assigned to a late date on the
ground that it contains Orphic ideas. The reasoning
does not appear cogent. As we shall see, the Orphics
did not so much invent new ideas as revive old ones,
and if the legend took Odysseus to the abode of the
See ππἀμὰ
2. Hesiod.
6 Early Greek Philosophy
dead, that had to be described in accordance with the accepted views about it.
In fact, we are never entitled to infer from Homer's
silence that the primitive view was unknown to him.
The absence of certain things from the poems is due.
to reticence rather than ignorance; for, wherever
anything to his purpose was to be got from an old
story, he did not hesitate to use it. On the other
hand, when the tradition necessarily brought him into
contact with savage ideas, he prefers to treat them with
reserve. We may infer, then, that at least in a certain
society, that of the princes for whom Homer sang, the
primitive view of the world was already discredited by
a comparatively early date.’
IV. When we come to Hesiod, we seem to be in
another world. We hear stories of the gods which are
not only irrational but repulsive, and these stories are
told quite seriously. Hesiod makes the Muses say:
_“We know how to tell many false things that are like
the truth ; but we know too, when we will, to utter what
is true.” This means that he was quite conscious of
the difference between the Homeric spirit and his own.
The old light-heartedness is gone, and it is important
to tell the truth about the gods. Hesiod knows, too,
that he belongs to a later and a sadder time than
Homer. In describing the Ages of the World, he inserts
a fifth age between those of Bronze and Iron. That
is the Age of the Heroes, the age Homer sang of. It
was better than the Bronze Age which came before it,
1 On all this, see especially Rohde, Psyche, pp. 14 sqq.
2 Hes. Zheog. 27. They are the same Muses who inspired Homer, which means, in our language, that Hesiod wrote in hexameters and used the Epic dialect. The new literary gezve has not yet found its appropriate vehicle, which is elegy.
- Introduction 7
and far better than that which followed it, the Age of
Iron, in which Hesiod lives.! He also feels that he is
singing for another class. It is to shepherds and
husbandmen he addresses himself, and the princes for
whom Homer sang have become ‘remote persons who
give “crooked dooms.” For common men there is no
hope but in hard, unceasing toil. It is the voice of the
people we now hear for the first time, and of a people
for whom the romance and splendour of the Greek
Middle Ages meant nothing. The primitive view of the
world had never really died out among them ; so it was
natural for their first spokesman to assume it in his
poems. That is why we find in Hesiod these old,
savage tales, which Homer disdained to speak of.
Yet it would be wrong to see in the Theogony a
mere revival of the old superstition. Nothing can ever
be revived just as it was; for in every reaction there is
a polemical element which differentiates it completely
from the earlier stage it vainly seeks to reproduce.
Hesiod could not help being affected by the new
spirit which trade and adventure had awakened over the
sea, and he became a pioneer in spite of himself. The
rudiments of what grew into Ionic science and history
are to be found in his poems, and he really did more
than any one to hasten that decay of the old ideas which
he was seeking to arrest! The Z7heogony is an attempt
to reduce all the stories about the gods into a single
system, and system is necessarily fatal to so wayward
‘a thing as mythology. Hesiod, no less than Homer,
teaches a~panhellenic polytheism ; the only difference
1 There is great historical insight here. It was Hesiod, not our modern historians, who first pointed out that the “Ὁ Greek Middle Ages were a break in the normal development.
8 Early Greek Philosophy
is that with him this is more directly based on the legends attached to the local cults, which he thus sought to invest with a national significance. The result is that the myth becomes primary and the cult secondary, a complete inversion of the primitive relation. _Herodotos tells us that it was Homer and Hesiod who made a theogony for the Hellenes, who gave the gods their names, and distributed among them their offices and arts,’ and it is perfectly true. The Olympian pantheon took the place of the old local gods in men’s minds, and | \ this was as much the doing of Hesiod as of Homer. Li The ordinary man had no ties to this company of gods, but at most to one or two of them; and even these ἡ ; / he would hardly recognise in the humanised figures, detached from all local associations, which poetry had substituted for the older objects of worship. The gods of Greece had become a splendid subject for art ; but they came between the Hellenes and their ancestral religions. They were incapable of satisfying the needs d of the people, and that is the secret of the religious : revival which we shall have to consider in the sequel. | Cosmogony. ΡΝ. Nor is it only in this way that Hesiod shows himself a child of his time. His Theogony is at the same time a Cosmogony, though it would seem that ᾿ here he was following others rather than working out a thought of his own. At any rate, he only mentions the two great cosmogonical figures, Chaos and Eros, and does not really bring them into connexion with his system. The conception of Chaos represents a distinct effort to picture the beginning of things. It is not a formless mixture, but rather, as its etymology indicates, the yawning gulf or gap where nothing is as
1 Herod. ii. 53.
Po
Introduction 9
yet. We may be sure that this is not primitive.
Savage man does not feel called upon to form an idea
of the very beginning of all things; he takes for
granted that there was something to begin with. The
other figure, that of Eros, was doubtless intended to
explain the impulse to production which gave rise to
the whole process. That, at least, is what the Maoris
mean by it, as may be seen from the following
remarkable passage? :—
From the conception the increase,
From the increase the swelling,
From the swelling the thought,
From the thought the remembrance,
From the remembrance the desire.
The word became fruitful,
It dwelt with the feeble glimmering,
It brought forth the night.
Hesiod must have had some such primitive speculation
to work on, but he does not tell us anything clearly
on the subject.
We have records of great activity in the production
of cosmogonies during the whole of the sixth century
ΒΟ, and we know something of the systems of
Epimenides, Pherekydes,> and Akousilaos. As there
were speculations of this kind even before Hesiod, we
need have no hesitation in believing that the earliest
Orphic cosmogony goes back to that century too.’
1 The word χάος certainly means the “‘ gape” or “ yawn,” the Orphic χάσμα πελώριον. Grimm compared it with the Scandinavian Ginnunga- Gap,
2 Quoted from Taylor's Mew Zealand, pp. 110-112, by Mr. Andrew Lang, in A4th, Ritual, and Religion, vol. ii. p. 52 (2nd ed.).
8 For the remains of Pherekydes, see Diels, Vorsokratiker, pp. 506 sqq. (1st ed.), and the interesting account in Gomperz, Greek 7) hinkers, vol. i. pp. 85 sqq.
4 This was the view of Lobeck with regard to the so-called ‘* Rhapsodic Theogony” described by Damaskios, and was revived by Otto Kern (De Orphei Epimenidis Pherecydis Theogoniis, 1888). Its savage character is the best proof of its antiquity. Cf. Lang, Adyth, Ritual, and Religion, vol. i. chap. x.
a. α,,.» 4». a
General char-
acteristics of
early Greek
_ cosmology.
10 Early Greek Philosophy
The feature which is common to all these systems is
the attempt to get behind the gap, and to put Kronos
or Zeus in the first place. This is what Aristotle
has in view when he distinguishes the “theologians ”
from those who were half theologians and half philo-
sophers, and who put what was best in the begin-
ning.’ It is obvious, however, that this process is the
very reverse of scientific, and might be carried on
indefinitely; so we have nothing to do with the
cosmogonists im our present inquiry, except so far
as they can be shown to have influenced the course of
more sober investigations. Indeed, these speculations
are still based on the primitive view of the world,
and so fall outside the limits we have traced for
ourselves.
VI. What, then, was the step that placed the Ionian
cosmologists once for all above the level of the Maoris ἢ
Grote and Zeller make it consist in the substitution- of
impersonal causes acting according to law for personal
causes acting arbitrarily. But the distinction between
_ personal and impersonal was not really felt in antiquity,
and it is a mistake to lay much stress on it. It seems
rather that the real advance made by the scientific men
of Miletos was that they left off telling tales. They
gave up the hopeless task of describing what was when |