History of the Intellectual Development of Europe Volume I Part 4

Already Europe was preparing a repet.i.tion of those events of which Asia from time immemorial has been the scene. Already among the nations bordering on the Mediterranean, inhabitants of a pleasant climate, in which life could be easily maintained--where the isothermal of January is 41 F., and of July 73-1/2 F.--civilization was commencing. There was an improving agriculture, an increasing commerce, and, the necessary consequence thereof, germs of art, the acc.u.mulation of wealth. The southern peninsulas were offering to the warlike chieftains of middle Europe a tempting prize.

[Sidenote: and first religious opinions.]

Under such influences Europe may be considered as emerging from the barbarian state. It had lost all recollection of its ancient relations with India, which have only been disclosed to us by a study of the vocabularies and grammar of its diverse tongues. Upon its indigenous sorcery an Oriental star-wors.h.i.+p had been ingrafted, the legends of which had lost their significance. What had at first been feigned of the heavenly bodies had now a.s.sumed an air of personality, and had become attributed to heroes and G.o.ds.

The negro under the equinoctial line, the dwarfish Laplander beyond the Arctic Circle--man everywhere, in his barbarous state, is a believer in sorcery, witchcraft, enchantments; he is fascinated by the incomprehensible. Any unexpected sound or sudden motion he refers to invisible beings. Sleep and dreams, in which one-third of his life is spent, a.s.sure him that there is a spiritual world. He multiplies these unrealities; he gives to every grotto a genius; to every tree, spring, river, mountain, a divinity.

[Sidenote: Localization of the invisible.]

Comparative theology, which depends on the law of continuous variation of human thought, and is indeed one of its expressions, universally proves that the moment man adopts the idea of an existence of invisible beings, he recognizes the necessity of places for their residence, all nations a.s.signing them habitations beyond the boundaries of the earth. A local heaven and a local h.e.l.l are found in every mythology. In Greece, as to heaven, there was a universal agreement that it was situated above the blue sky; but as to h.e.l.l, much difference of opinion prevailed.

There were many who thought that it was a deep abyss in the interior of the earth, to which certain pa.s.sages, such as the Acherusian cave in Bithynia, led. But those who with Anaximenes considered the earth to be like a broad leaf floating in the air, and who accepted the doctrine that h.e.l.l was divided into a Tartarus, or region of night on the left, and an Elysium, or region of dawn on the right, and that it was equally distant from all parts of the upper surface, were nearer to the original conception, which doubtless placed it on the under or shadowy side of the earth. The portals of descent were thus in the west, where the sun and stars set, though here and there were pa.s.sages leading through the ground to the other side, such as those by which Hercules and Ulysses had gone. The place of ascent was in the east, and the morning twilight a reflection from the Elysian Fields.

[Sidenote: The anthropocentric stage of thought.]

The picture of Nature thus interpreted has for its centre the earth; for its most prominent object, man. Whatever there is has been made for his pleasure, or to minister to his use. To this belief that every thing is of a subordinate value compared with himself, he clings with tenacity even in his most advanced mental state.

Not without surprise do we trace the progress of the human mind. The barbarian, as a believer in sorcery, lives in incessant dread. All Nature seems to be at enmity with him and conspiring for his hurt. Out of the darkness he cannot tell what alarming spectre may emerge; he may, with reason, fear that injury is concealed in every stone, and hidden behind every leaf. How wide is the interval from this terror-stricken condition to that state in which man persuades himself of the human destiny of the universe! Yet, wonderful to be said, he pa.s.ses that interval at a single step.

In the infancy of the human race, geographical and astronomical ideas are the same all over the world, for they are the interpretation of things according to outward appearances, the accepting of phenomena as they are presented, without any of the corrections that reason may offer. This universality and h.o.m.ogeneity is nothing more than a manifestation of the uniform mode of action of human organization.

[Sidenote: From h.o.m.ogeneous ideas the comparative sciences emerge.]

But such h.o.m.ogeneous conclusions, such similar pictures, are strictly peculiar to the infancy of humanity. The reasoning faculty at length inevitably makes itself felt, and diversities of interpretation ensue.

Comparative geography, comparative astronomy, comparative theology thus arise, h.o.m.ogeneous at first, but soon exhibiting variations.

[Sidenote: Introduction of personified forms.]

To that tendency for personification which marks the early life of man are due many of the mythologic conceptions. It was thus that the Hours, the Dawn, and Night with her black mantle bespangled with stars, received their forms. Many of the most beautiful legends were thus of a personified astronomical origin; many were derived from terrestrial or familiar phenomena. The clouds were thus made to be animated things; a moving spirit was given to the storm, the dew, the wind. The sun setting in the glowing clouds of the west became Hercules in the fiery pile; the morning dawn extinguished by the rising sun was embodied in the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. These legends still survive in India.

[Sidenote: The gradual and affiliated advance of Greek theological ideas.]

[Sidenote: The composite nature of the resulting mythology.]

But it must not be supposed that all Greek mythology can be thus explained. It is enough for us to examine the circ.u.mstances under which, for many ages, the European communities had been placed, to understand that they had forgotten much that their ancestors had brought from Asia.

Much that was new had also spontaneously arisen. The well-known variations of their theogony are not merely similar legends of different localities, they are more frequently the successive improvements of one place. The general theme upon which they are based requires the admission of a primitive chaotic disturbance of incomprehensible gigantic powers, brought into subjection by Divine agency, that agency dividing and regulating the empire it had thus acquired in a harmonious way. To this general conception was added a mult.i.tude of advent.i.tious ornaments, some of which were of a rude astronomical, some of a moral, some, doubtless, of a historical kind. The primitive chaotic conflicts appear under the form of the war of the t.i.tans; their end is the confinement of those giants in Tartarus; whose compulsory subjection is the commencement of order: thus Atlas, the son of Iapetos, is made to sustain the vault of heaven in its western verge. The regulation of empire is shadowed forth in the subdivision of the universe between Zeus and his brothers, he taking the heavens, Poseidon the sea, and Hades the under world, all having the earth as their common theatre of action. The moral is prefigured by such myths as those of Prometheus and Epimetheus, the fore-thinker and the after-thinker; the historical in the deluge of Deucalion, the sieges of Thebes and of Troy. A harmony with human nature is established through the birth and marriage of the G.o.ds, and likewise by their sufferings, pa.s.sions, and labours. The supernatural is gratified by Centaurs, Gorgons, Harpies, and Cyclops.

It would be in vain to attempt the reduction of such a patchwork system to any single principle, astronomical or moral, as some have tried to do--a system originating from no single point as to country or to time.

The gradual growth of many ages, its diversities are due to many local circ.u.mstances. Like the romances of a later period, it will not bear an application of the ordinary rules of life. It recommended itself to a people who found pleasure in accepting without any question statements no matter how marvellous, impostures no matter how preposterous. G.o.ds, heroes, monsters, and men might figure together without any outrage to probability when there was no astronomy, no geography, no rule of evidence, no standard of belief. But the downfall of such a system was inevitable as soon as men began to deal with facts; as soon as history commenced to record, and philosophy to discuss. Yet not without reluctance was the faith of so many centuries given up. The extinction of a religion is not the abrupt movement of a day, it is a secular process of many well-marked stages--the rise of doubt among the candid; the disapprobation of the conservative; the defence of ideas fast becoming obsolete by the well-meaning, who hope that allegory and new interpretations may give renewed probability to what is almost incredible. But dissent ends in denial at last.

[Sidenote: Primitive astronomy and geography.]

[Sidenote: The under world and its spectres.]

Before we enter upon the history of that intellectual movement which thus occasioned the ruin of the ancient system, we must bring to ourselves the ideas of the Greek of the eighth century before Christ, who thought that the blue sky is the floor of heaven, the habitation of the Olympian G.o.ds; that the earth, man's proper abode, is flat and circularly extended like a plate beneath the starry canopy. On its rim is the circ.u.mfluous ocean, the source of the rivers, which all flow to the Mediterranean, appropriately in after ages so called, since it is in the midst, in the centre of the expanse of the land. "The sea-girt disk of the earth supports the vault of heaven." Impelled by a celestial energy, the sun and stars, issuing forth from the east, ascend with difficulty the crystalline dome, but down its descent they more readily hasten to their setting. No one can tell what they encounter in the land of shadows beneath, nor what are the dangers of the way. In the morning the dawn mysteriously appears in the east, and swiftly spreads over the confines of the horizon; in the evening the twilight fades gradually away. Besides the celestial bodies, the clouds are continually moving over the sky, for ever changing their colours and their shape. No one can tell whence the wind comes or whither it goes; perhaps it is the breath of that invisible divinity who launches the lightning, or of him who rests his bow against the cloud. Not without delight men contemplated the emerald plane, the sapphire dome, the border of silvery water, ever tranquil and ever flowing. Then, in the interior of the solid earth, or perhaps on the other side of its plane--under world, as it was well termed--is the realm of Hades or Pluto, the region of Night. From the midst of his dominion, that divinity, crowned with a diadem of ebony, and seated on a throne framed out of ma.s.sive darkness, looks into the infinite abyss beyond, invisible himself to mortal eyes, but made known by the nocturnal thunder which is his weapon. The under world is also the realm to which spirits retire after death. At its portals, beneath the setting sun, is stationed a numerous tribe of spectres--Care, Sorrow, Disease, Age, Want, Fear, Famine, War, Toil, Death and her half-brother Sleep--Death, to whom it is useless for man to offer either prayers or sacrifice. In that land of forgetfulness and shadows there is the unnavigable lake Avernus, Acheron, Styx, the groaning Cocytus, and Phlegethon, with its waves of fire. There are all kinds of monsters and forms of fearful import: Cerberus, with his triple head; Charon, freighting his boat with the shades of the dead; the Fates, in their garments of ermine bordered with purple; the avenging Erinnys; Rhadamanthus, before whom every Asiatic must render his account; aeacus, before whom every European; and Minos, the dread arbiter of the judgment-seat. There, too, are to be seen those great criminals whose history is a warning to us: the giants, with dragons' feet extended in the burning gulf for many a mile; Phlegyas, in perpetual terror of the stone suspended over him, which never falls; Ixion chained to his wheel; the daughters of Danaus still vainly trying to fill their sieve; Tantalus, immersed in water to his chin, yet tormented with unquenchable thirst; Sisyphus despairingly labouring at his ever-descending stone. Warned by such examples, we may learn not to contemn the G.o.ds. Beyond these sad scenes, extending far to the right, are the plains of pleasure, the Elysian Fields; and Lethe, the river of oblivion, of which whoever tastes, though he should ascend to the eastern boundary of the earth, and return again to life and day, forgets whatever he has seen.

[Sidenote: The Argonautic voyage.]

If the interior or the under side of the earth is thus occupied by phantoms and half-animated shades of the dead, its upper surface, inhabited by man, has also its wonders. In its centre is the Mediterranean Sea, as we have said, round which are placed all the known countries, each full of its own mysteries and marvels. Of these how many we might recount if we followed the wanderings of Odysseus, or the voyage of Jason and his heroic comrades in the s.h.i.+p _Argo_, when they went to seize the golden fleece of the speaking ram. We might tell of the Harpies, flying women-birds of obscene form; of the blind prophet; of the Symplegades, self-shutting rocks, between which, as if by miracle, the Argonauts pa.s.sed, the cliffs almost entrapping the stern of their vessel, but destined by fate from that portentous moment never to close again; of the country of the Amazons, and of Prometheus groaning on the rock to which he was nailed, of the avenging eagle for ever hovering and for ever devouring; of the land of aeetes, and of the bulls with brazen feet and flaming breath, and how Jason yoked and made them plough, of the enchantress Medea, and the unguent she concocted from herbs that grew where the blood of Prometheus had dripped; of the field sown with dragons' teeth, and the mail-clad men that leaped out of the furrows; of the magical stone that divided them into two parties, and impelled them to fight each other; of the scaly dragon that guarded the golden fleece, and how he was lulled with a charmed potion, and the treasure carried away; of the River Phasis, through whose windings the _Argo_ sailed into the circ.u.mfluous sea, of the circ.u.mnavigation round that tranquil stream to the sources of the Nile; of the Argonauts carrying their sentient, self-speaking s.h.i.+p on their shoulders through the sweltering Libyan deserts, of the island of Circe, the enchantress; of the rock, with its grateful haven, which in the height of a tempest rose out of the sea to receive them; of the arrow shot by Apollo from his golden bow; of the brazen man, the work of Hephaestos, who stood on the sh.o.r.e of Crete, and hurled at them as they pa.s.sed vast fragments of stone; of their combat with him and their safe return to Iolcos; and of the translation of the s.h.i.+p _Argo_ by the G.o.ddess Athene to heaven.

[Sidenote: Union of the geographical and the marvellous.]

Such were some of the incidents of that celebrated voyage, the story of which enchanted all Greece before the Odyssey was written. I have not s.p.a.ce to tell of the wonders that served to decorate the geography of those times. On the north there was the delicious country of the Hyperboreans, beyond the reach of winter; in the west the garden of the Hesperides, in which grew apples of gold; in the east the groves and dancing-ground of the sun; in the south the country of the blameless Ethiopians, whither the G.o.ds were wont to resort. In the Mediterranean itself the Sirens beguiled the pa.s.sers-by with their songs near where Naples now stands; adjoining were Scylla and Charybdis; in Sicily were the one-eyed Cyclops and cannibal Laestrygons. In the island of Erytheia the three-headed giant Geryon tended his oxen with a double-headed dog.

I need not speak of the lotus-eaters, whose food made one forget his native country; of the floating island of aeolus; of the happy fields in which the horses of the sun were grazing; of bulls and dogs of immortal breed; of hydras, gorgons, and chimeras; of the flying man Daedalus, and the brazen chamber in which Danae was kept. There was no river, no grotto that had not its genius; no island, no promontory without its legend.

[Sidenote: Earliest Greek theological ideas indicate a savage state.]

It is impossible to recall these antique myths without being satisfied that they are, for the most part, truly indigenous, truly of European growth. The seed may have been brought, as comparative philologists a.s.sert, from Asia, but it had luxuriantly germinated and developed under the sky of Europe. Of the legends, many are far from answering to their reputed Oriental source; their barbarism and indelicacy represent the state of Europe. The outrage of Kronos on his father Uranos speaks of the savagism of the times; the story of Dionysos tells of man-stealing and piracy; the rapes of Europa and Helen, of the abduction of women.

The dinner at which Itys was served up a.s.sures us that cannibalism was practised; the threat of Laomedon that he would sell Poseidon and Apollo for slaves shows how compulsory labour might be obtained. The polygamy of many heroes often appears in its worst form under the practice of sister-marriage, a crime indulged in from the King of Olympus downward.

Upon the whole, then, we must admit that Greek mythology indicates a barbarian social state, man-stealing, piracy, human sacrifice, polygamy, cannibalism, and crimes of revenge that are unmentionable. A personal interpretation, such as man in his infancy resorts to, is embodied in circ.u.mstances suitable to a savage time. It was not until a later period that allegorical phantasms, such as Death, and Sleep, and Dreams were introduced, and still later when the whole system was affected by Lydian, Phrygian, a.s.syrian, and Egyptian ideas.

[Sidenote: Their gradual improvement in the historic times.]

[Sidenote: The inevitable tendency is to the Ionic philosophy.]

Not only thus from their intrinsic nature, but also from their recorded gradual development, are we warranted in imputing to the greater part of the myths an indigenous origin. The theogony of Homer is extended by Hesiod in many essential points. He prefixes the dynasty of Uranos, and differs in minor conceptions, as in the character of the Cyclops. The Orphic theogony is again another advance, having new fictions and new personages, as in the case of Zagreus, the horned child of Jupiter by his own daughter Persephone. Indeed, there is hardly one of the great and venerable G.o.ds of Olympus whose character does not change with his age, and, seen from this point of view, the origin of the Ionic philosophy becomes a necessary step in the advance. That philosophy, as we shall soon find, was due not only to the expansion of the Greek intellect and the necessary improvement of Greek morals; an extraneous cause, the sudden opening of the Egyptian ports, 670 B.C., accelerated it. European religion became more mysterious and more solemn. European philosophy learned the error of its chronology, and the necessity of applying a more strict and correct standard of evidence for ancient events.

It was an ominous circ.u.mstance that the Ionian Greeks, who first began to philosophize, commenced their labours by depersonifying the elements, and treating not of Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades, but of Air, Water, Fire.

The destruction of theological conceptions led irresistibly to the destruction of religious practices. To divinities whose existence he denied, the philosopher ceased to pray. Of what use were sacrificial offerings and entreaties directed to phantasms of the imagination? but advantages might accrue from the physical study of the impersonal elements.

[Sidenote: Inevitable destruction of Greek religious ideas]

Greek religion contained within itself the principles of its own destruction. It is for the sake of thoroughly appreciating this that I have been led into a detail of what some of my readers may be disposed to regard as idle and useless myths. Two circ.u.mstances of inevitable occurrence insured the eventual overthrow of the whole system; they were geographical discovery and the rise of philosophical criticism. Our attention is riveted by the fact that, two thousand years later, the same thing again occurred on a greater scale.

[Sidenote: by geographical discovery.]

As to the geographical discovery, how was it possible that all the marvels of the Mediterranean and Black Seas, the sorcerers, enchanters, giants, and monsters of the deep, should survive when those seas were daily crossed in all directions? How was it possible that the notion of a flat earth, bounded by the horizon and bordered by the circ.u.mfluous ocean, could maintain itself when colonies were being founded in Gaul, and the Phoenicians were bringing tin from beyond the Pillars of Hercules? Moreover, it so happened that many of the most astounding prodigies were affirmed to be in the track which circ.u.mstances had now made the chief pathway of commerce. Not only was there a certainty of the destruction of mythical geography as thus presented on the plane of the earth looking upward to day; there was also an imminent risk, as many pious persons foresaw and dreaded, that what had been a.s.serted as respects the interior, or the other face looking downward into night, would be involved in the ruin too. Well, therefore, might they make the struggle they did for the support of the ancient doctrine, taking the only course possible to them, of converting what had been affirmed to be actual events into allegories, under which, they said, the wisdom of ancient times had concealed many sacred and mysterious things. But it is apparent that a system forced to this necessity is fast hastening to its end.

[Sidenote: Fict.i.tious marvels replaced by grand actualities.]

Nor was it maritime discovery only that thus removed fabulous prodigies and gave rise to new ideas. In due course of time the Macedonian expedition opened a new world to the Greeks and presented them with real wonders; climates in marvellous diversity, vast deserts, mountains covered with eternal snow, salt seas far from the ocean, colossal animals, and men of every shade of colour and every form of religion.

The numerous Greek colonies founded all over Asia gave rise to an incessant locomotion, and caused these natural objects to make a profound and permanent impression on the h.e.l.lenic mind. If through the Bactrian empire European ideas were transmitted to the far East, through that and other similar channels Asiatic ideas found their way to Europe.

[Sidenote: Development of Mediterranean commerce.]

At the dawn of trustworthy history, the Phoenicians were masters of the Mediterranean Sea. Europe was altogether barbarous. On the very verge of Asiatic civilization the Thracians scalped their enemies and tattooed themselves; at the other end of the continent the Britons daubed their bodies with ochre and woad. Contemporaneous Egyptian sculptures show the Europeans dressed in skins like savages. It was the instinct of the Phoenicians everywhere to establish themselves on islands and coasts, and thus, for a long time, they maintained a maritime supremacy. By degrees a spirit of adventure was engendered among the Greeks. In 1250 B.C. they sailed round the Euxine, giving rise to the myth of the Argonautic voyage, and creating a profitable traffic in gold, dried fish, and corn. They had also become infamous for their freebooting practices. From every coast they stole men, women, and children, thereby maintaining a considerable slave-trade, the relic of which endures to our time in the traffic for Circa.s.sian women. Minos, King of Crete, tried to suppress these piracies. His attempts to obtain the dominion of the Mediterranean were imitated in succession by the Lydians, Thracians, Rhodians, the latter being the inventors of the first maritime code, subsequently incorporated into Roman law. The manner in which these and the inhabitants of other towns and islands supplanted one another shows on what trifling circ.u.mstances the dominion of the eastern basin depended. Meantime Tyrian seamen stealthily sailed beyond the Pillars of Hercules, visiting the Canaries and Azores, and bringing tin from the British Islands. They used every precaution to keep their secret to themselves. The adventurous Greeks followed those mysterious navigators step by step; but in the time of Homer they were so restricted to the eastern basin that Italy may be said to have been to them an unknown land. The Phocaeans first explored the western basin; one of their colonies built Ma.r.s.eilles. At length Coleus of Samos pa.s.sed through the frowning gateway of Hercules into the circ.u.mfluous sea, the Atlantic Ocean. No little interest attaches to the first colonial cities; they dotted the sh.o.r.es from Sinope to Saguntum, and were at once trading depots and foci of wealth. In the earliest times the merchant was his own captain, and sold his commodities by auction at the place to which he came. The primitive and profitable commerce of the Mediterranean was peculiar--it was for slaves, mineral products, and articles of manufacture; for, running coincident with parallels of lat.i.tude, its agricultural products were not very varied, and the wants of its populations the same. But tin was brought from the Ca.s.siterides, amber from the Baltic, and dyed goods and worked metals from Syria.

Wherever these trades centred, the germs of taste and intelligence were developed; thus the Etruscans, in whose hands was the amber trade across Germany, have left many relics of their love of art. Though a mysterious, they were hardly a gloomy race, as a great modern author has supposed, if we may judge from their beautiful remains.

[Sidenote: Effect of philosophical criticism.]

Added to the effect of geographical discovery was the development of philosophical criticism. It is observed that soon after the first Olympiad the Greek intellect very rapidly expanded. Whenever man reaches a certain point in his mental progress, he will not be satisfied with less than an application of existing rules to ancient events. Experience has taught him that the course of the world to-day is the same as it was yesterday; he unhesitatingly believes that this will also hold good for to-morrow. He will not bear to contemplate any break in the mechanism of history; he will not be satisfied with a mere uninquiring faith, but insists upon having the same voucher for an old fact that he requires for one that is new. Before the face of History Mythology cannot stand.

[Sidenote: Secession of literary men from the public faith.]

The operation of this principle is seen in all directions throughout Greek literature after the date that has been mentioned, and this the more strikingly as the time is later. The national intellect became more and more ashamed of the fables it had believed in its infancy. Of the legends, some are allegorized, some are modified, some are repudiated.

The great tragedians accept the myths in the aggregate, but decline them in particulars; some of the poets transform or allegorize them; some use them ornamentally, as graceful decorations. It is evident that between the educated and the vulgar cla.s.ses a divergence is taking place, that the best men of the times see the necessity of either totally abandoning these cherished fictions to the lower orders, or of gradually replacing them with something more suitable. Such a frittering away of sacred things was, however, very far from meeting with public approbation in Athens itself, although so many people in that city had reached that state of mental development in which it was impossible for them to continue to accept the national faith. They tried to force themselves to believe that there must be something true in that which had been believed by so many great and pious men of old, which had approved itself by lasting so many centuries, and of which it was by the common people a.s.serted that absolute demonstration could be given. But it was in vain; intellect had outgrown faith. They had come into that condition to which all men are liable--aware of the fallacy of their opinions, yet angry that another should remind them thereof. When the social state no longer permitted them to take the life of a philosophical offender, they found means to put upon him such an invisible pressure as to present him the choice of orthodoxy or beggary. Thus they disapproved of Euripides permitting his characters to indulge in any sceptical reflections, and discountenanced the impiety so obvious in the 'Prometheus Bound' of aeschylus. It was by appealing to this sentiment that Aristophanes added no little to the excitement against Socrates. They who are doubting themselves are often loudest in public denunciations of a similar state in others.

[Sidenote: Secession of the philosophers.]