Greek Studies A Series of Essays 5

Greek Studies A Series of Essays 5

"And thy mother, when she heard the lowing of the kine, stood up in

the midst of them, and cried to them to shake off sleep. And they,

casting slumber from their eyes, started upright, a marvel of beauty

and order, young and old and maidens yet unmarried. And first, they

let fall their hair upon their shoulders; and those [72] whose

cinctures were unbound re-composed the spotted fawn-skins, knotting

them about with snakes, which rose and licked them on the chin.

Some, lately mothers, who with breasts still swelling had left their

babes behind, nursed in their arms antelopes, or wild whelps of

wolves, and yielded them their milk to drink; and upon their heads

they placed crowns of ivy or of oak, or of flowering convolvulus.

Then one, taking a thyrsus-wand, struck with it upon a rock, and

thereupon leapt out a fine rain of water; another let down a reed

upon the earth, and a fount of wine was sent forth there; and those

whose thirst was for a white stream, skimming the surface with their

finger-tips, gathered from it abundance of milk; and from the ivy of

the mystic wands streams of honey distilled. Verily! hadst thou seen

these things, thou wouldst have worshipped whom now thou revilest.

 

"And we shepherds and herdsmen came together to question with each

other over this matter--what strange and terrible things they do.

And a certain wayfarer from the city, subtle in speech, spake to us--

'O! dwellers upon these solemn ledges of the hills, will ye that we

hunt down, and take, amid her revelries, Agave, the mother of

Pentheus, according to the king's pleasure?' And he seemed to us to

speak wisely; and we lay in wait among the bushes; and they, at the

time appointed, began moving their wands for the Bacchic dance, [73]

calling with one voice upon Bromius!--Iacchus!--the son of Zeus! and

the whole mountain was moved with ecstasy together, and the wild

creatures; nothing but was moved in their running. And it chanced

that Agave, in her leaping, lighted near me, and I sprang from my

hiding-place, willing to lay hold on her; and she groaned out, 'O!

dogs of hunting, these fellows are upon our traces; but follow me!

follow! with the mystic wands for weapons in your hands.' And we, by

flight, hardly escaped tearing to pieces at their hands, who

thereupon advanced with knifeless fingers upon the young of the kine,

as they nipped the green; and then hadst thou seen one holding a

bleating calf in her hands, with udder distent, straining it asunder;

others tore the heifers to shreds amongst them; tossed up and down

the morsels lay in sight--flank or hoof--or hung from the fir-trees,

dropping churned blood. The fierce, horned bulls stumbled forward,

their breasts upon the ground, dragged on by myriad hands of young

women, and in a moment the inner parts were rent to morsels. So,

like a flock of birds aloft in flight, they retreat upon the level

lands outstretched below, which by the waters of Asopus put forth the

fair-flowering crop of Theban people--Hysiae and Erythrae--below the

precipice of Cithaeron."--

 

A grotesque scene follows, in which the [74] humour we noted, on

seeing those two old men diffidently set forth in chaplet and fawn-

skin, deepens into a profound tragic irony. Pentheus is determined

to go out in arms against the Bacchanals and put them to death, when

a sudden desire seizes him to witness them in their encampment upon

the mountains. Dionysus, whom he still supposes to be but a prophet

or messenger of the god, engages to conduct him thither; and, for

greater security among the dangerous women, proposes that he shall

disguise himself in female attire. As Pentheus goes within for that

purpose, he lingers for a moment behind him, and in prophetic speech

declares the approaching end;--the victim has fallen into the net;

and he goes in to assist at the toilet, to array him in the ornaments

which he will carry to Hades, destroyed by his own mother's hands.

It is characteristic of Euripides--part of his fine tact and

subtlety--to relieve and justify what seems tedious, or constrained,

or merely terrible and grotesque, by a suddenly suggested trait of

homely pathos, or a glimpse of natural beauty, or a morsel of form or

colour seemingly taken directly from picture or sculpture. So here,

in this fantastic scene our thoughts are changed in a moment by

the singing of the chorus, and divert for a while to the dark-haired

tresses of the wood; the breath of the river-side is upon us; beside

it, a fawn escaped from the hunter's net is flying swiftly in [75]

its joy; like it, the Maenad rushes along; and we see the little head

thrown back upon the neck, in deep aspiration, to drink in the dew.

 

Meantime, Pentheus has assumed his disguise, and comes forth tricked

up with false hair and the dress of a Bacchanal; but still with some

misgivings at the thought of going thus attired through the streets

of Thebes, and with many laughable readjustments of the unwonted

articles of clothing. And with the woman's dress, his madness is

closing faster round him; just before, in the palace, terrified at

the noise of the earthquake, he had drawn sword upon a mere fantastic

appearance, and pierced only the empty air. Now he begins to see the

sun double, and Thebes with all its towers repeated, while his

conductor seems to him transformed into a wild beast; and now and

then, we come upon some touches of a curious psychology, so that we

might almost seem to be reading a modern poet. As if Euripides had

been aware of a not unknown symptom of incipient madness (it is said)

in which the patient, losing the sense of resistance, while lifting

small objects imagines himself to be raising enormous weights,

Pentheus, as he lifts the thyrsus, fancies he could lift Cithaeron

with all the Bacchanals upon it. At all this the laughter of course

will pass round the theatre; while those who really pierce into the

purpose of the poet, shudder, as they see the victim thus grotesquely

clad going to his doom, [76] already foreseen in the ominous chant of

the chorus--and as it were his grave-clothes, in the dress which

makes him ridiculous.

 

Presently a messenger arrives to announce that Pentheus is dead, and

then another curious narrative sets forth the manner of his death.

Full of wild, coarse, revolting details, of course not without

pathetic touches, and with the loveliness of the serving Maenads, and

of their mountain solitudes--their trees and water--never quite

forgotten, it describes how, venturing as a spy too near the sacred

circle, Pentheus was fallen upon, like a wild beast, by the mystic

huntresses and torn to pieces, his mother being the first to begin

"the sacred rites of slaughter."

 

And at last Agave herself comes upon the stage, holding aloft the

head of her son, fixed upon the sharp end of the thyrsus, calling

upon the women of the chorus to welcome the revel of the Evian god;

who, accordingly, admit her into the company, professing themselves

her fellow-revellers, the Bacchanals being thus absorbed into the

chorus for the rest of the play. For, indeed, all through it, the

true, though partly suppressed relation of the chorus to the

Bacchanals is this, that the women of the chorus, staid and temperate

for the moment, following Dionysus in his alternations, are but the

paler sisters of his more wild and gloomy votaries--the true

followers of the mystical Dionysus--the real chorus of Zagreus; the

idea that their [77] violent proceedings are the result of madness

only, sent on them as a punishment for their original rejection of

the god, being, as I said, when seen from the deeper motives of the

myth, only a "sophism" of Euripides--a piece of rationalism of which

he avails himself for the purpose of softening down the tradition of

which he has undertaken to be the poet. Agave comes on the stage,

then, blood-stained, exulting in her "victory of tears," still quite

visibly mad indeed, and with the outward signs of madness, and as her

mind wanders, musing still on the fancy that the dead head in her

hands is that of a lion she has slain among the mountains--a young

lion, she avers, as she notices the down on the young man's chin, and

his abundant hair--a fancy in which the chorus humour her, willing to

deal gently with the poor distraught creature. Supported by them,

she rejoices "exceedingly, exceedingly," declaring herself

"fortunate" in such goodly spoil; priding herself that the victim has

been slain, not with iron weapons, but with her own white fingers,

she summons all Thebes to come and behold. She calls for her aged

father to draw near and see; and for Pentheus himself, at last, that

he may mount and rivet her trophy, appropriately decorative there,

between the triglyphs of the cornice below the roof, visible to all.

 

And now, from this point onwards, Dionysus himself becomes more and

more clearly discernible [78] as the hunter, a wily hunter, and man

the prey he hunts for; "Our king is a hunter," cry the chorus, as

they unite in Agave's triumph and give their sanction to her deed.

And as the Bacchanals supplement the chorus, and must be added to it

to make the conception of it complete; so in the conception of

Dionysus also a certain transference, or substitution, must be made--

much of the horror and sorrow of Agave, of Pentheus, of the whole

tragic situation, must be transferred to him, if we wish to realise

in the older, profounder, and more complete sense of his nature, that

mystical being of Greek tradition to whom all these experiences--his

madness, the chase, his imprisonment and death, his peace again--

really belong; and to discern which, through Euripides' peculiar

treatment of his subject, is part of the curious interest of this

play.

 

Through the sophism of Euripides! For that, again, is the really

descriptive word, with which Euripides, a lover of sophisms, as

Aristophanes knows, himself supplies us. Well;--this softened

version of the Bacchic madness is a sophism of Euripides; and

Dionysus Omophagus--the eater of raw flesh, must be added to the

golden image of Dionysus Meilichius--the honey-sweet, if the old

tradition in its completeness is to be, in spite of that sophism, our

closing impression; if we are to catch, in its fulness, that deep

undercurrent of horror which runs below, all through [79] this masque

of spring, and realise the spectacle of that wild chase, in which

Dionysus is ultimately both the hunter and the spoil.

 

But meantime another person appears on the stage; Cadmus enters,

followed by attendants bearing on a bier the torn limbs of Pentheus,

which lying wildly scattered through the tangled wood, have been with

difficulty collected and now decently put together and covered over.

In the little that still remains before the end of the play, destiny

now hurrying things rapidly forward, and strong emotions, hopes and

forebodings being now closely packed, Euripides has before him an

artistic problem of enormous difficulty. Perhaps this very haste and

close-packing of the matter, which keeps the mind from dwelling

overmuch on detail, relieves its real extravagance, and those who

read it carefully will think that the pathos of Euripides has been

equal to the occasion. In a few profoundly designed touches he

depicts the perplexity of Cadmus, in whose house a god had become an

inmate, only to destroy it--the regret of the old man for the one

male child to whom that house had looked up as the pillar whereby

aged people might feel secure; the piteous craziness of Agave; the

unconscious irony with which she caresses the florid, youthful head

of her son; the delicate breaking of the thing to her reviving

intelligence, as Cadmus, though he can but wish that she might live

on for ever in her visionary enjoyment, [80] prepares the way, by

playing on that other horrible legend of the Theban house, the

tearing of Actaeon to death--he too destroyed by a god. He gives us

the sense of Agave's gradual return to reason through many glimmering

doubts, till she wakes up at last to find the real face turned up

towards the mother and murderess; the quite naturally spontaneous

sorrow of the mother, ending with her confession, down to her last

sigh, and the final breaking up of the house of Cadmus; with a result

so genuine, heartfelt, and dignified withal in its __EXPRESSION__ of a

strange ineffable woe, that a fragment of it, the lamentation of

Agave over her son, in which the long-pent agony at last finds vent,

were, it is supposed, adopted into his paler work by an early

Christian poet, and have figured since, as touches of real fire, in

the Christus Patiens of Gregory Nazianzen.

 

NOTES

 

64. +Transliteration: autika ga pasa choreusei. E-text editor's

translation: "Straightway all the earth shall dance." Euripides,

Bacchae 114. Euripidis Fabulae, ed. Gilbert Murray, vol. 3.

Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913.

 

66. +Transliteration: poi dei choreuein; poi kathistanai poda; kai

krata seisai polion. Translation: "Where must I dance? Where must

I stand and shake my white locks?" Euripides, Bacchae 184-85.

Euripidis Fabulae, ed. Gilbert Murray, vol. 3. Oxford: Clarendon

Press, 1913.

 

69. +Transliteration: ti m' anainei, ti me pheugeis. Translation:

"Why do you reject me, why do you run from me?" Bacchae 519. Euripidis

Fabulae, ed. Gilbert Murray, vol. 3. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913.

 

 

 

THE MYTH OF DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE: I

 

[81] No chapter in the history of human imagination is more curious

than the myth of Demeter, and Kore or Persephone. Alien in some

respects from the genuine traditions of Greek mythology, a relic of

the earlier inhabitants of Greece, and having but a subordinate place

in the religion of Homer, it yet asserted its interest, little by

little, and took a complex hold on the minds of the Greeks, becoming

finally the central and most popular subject of their national

worship. Following its changes, we come across various phases of

Greek culture, which are not without their likenesses in the modern

mind. We trace it in the dim first period of instinctive popular

conception; we see it connecting itself with many impressive elements

of art, and poetry, and religious custom, with the picturesque

superstitions of the many, and with the finer intuitions of the few;

and besides this, it is in itself full of [82] interest and

suggestion, to all for whom the ideas of the Greek religion have any

real meaning in the modern world. And the fortune of the myth has

not deserted it in later times. In the year 1780, the long-lost text

of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter was discovered among the manuscripts

of the imperial library at Moscow; and, in our own generation, the

tact of an eminent student of Greek art, Sir Charles Newton, has

restored to the world the buried treasures of the little temple and

precinct of Demeter, at Cnidus, which have many claims to rank in the

central order of Greek sculpture. The present essay is an attempt to

select and weave together, for those who are now approaching the

deeper study of Greek thought, whatever details in the development of

this myth, arranged with a view rather to a total impression than to

the debate of particular points, may seem likely to increase their

stock of poetical impressions, and to add to this some criticisms on

the __EXPRESSION__ which it has left of itself in extant art and poetry.

 

The central __EXPRESSION__, then, of the story of Demeter and Persephone

is the Homeric hymn, to which Grote has assigned a date at least as

early as six hundred years before Christ. The one survivor of a whole

family of hymns on this subject, it was written, perhaps, for one of

those contests which took place on the seventh day of the Eleusinian

festival, and in which a bunch of [83] ears of corn was the prize;

perhaps, for actual use in the mysteries themselves, by the

Hierophantes, or Interpreter, who showed to the worshippers at

Eleusis those sacred places to which the poem contains so many

references. About the composition itself there are many difficult

questions, with various surmises as to why it has remained only in

this unique manuscript of the end of the fourteenth century.

Portions of the text are missing, and there are probably some

additions by later hands; yet most scholars have admitted that it

possesses some of the true characteristics of the Homeric style, some

genuine echoes of the age immediately succeeding that which produced

the Iliad and the Odyssey. Listen now to a somewhat abbreviated

version of it.

 

"I begin the song of Demeter"--says the prize-poet, or the

Interpreter, the Sacristan of the holy places--"the song of Demeter

and her daughter Persephone, whom Aidoneus carried away by the

consent of Zeus, as she played, apart from her mother, with the deep-

bosomed daughters of the Ocean, gathering flowers in a meadow of soft

grass--roses and the crocus and fair violets and flags, and

hyacinths, and, above all, the strange flower of the narcissus, which

the Earth, favouring the desire of Aidoneus, brought forth for the

first time, to snare the footsteps of the flower-like girl. A

hundred [84] heads of blossom grew up from the roots of it, and the

sky and the earth and the salt wave of the sea were glad at the scent

thereof. She stretched forth her hands to take the flower; thereupon

the earth opened, and the king of the great nation of the dead sprang

out with his immortal horses. He seized the unwilling girl, and bore

her away weeping, on his golden chariot. She uttered a shrill cry,

calling upon her father Zeus; but neither man nor god heard her

voice, nor even the nymphs of the meadow where she played; except

Hecate only, the daughter of Persaeus, sitting, as ever, in her cave,

half veiled with a shining veil, thinking delicate thoughts; she, and

the Sun also, heard her.

 

"So long as she could still see the earth, and the sky, and the sea

with the great waves moving, and the beams of the sun, and still

thought to see again her mother, and the race of the ever-living

gods, so long hope soothed her, in the midst of her grief. The peaks

of the hills and the depths of the sea echoed her cry. And the

mother heard it. A sharp pain seized her at the heart; she plucked

the veil from her hair, and cast down the blue hood from her

shoulders, and fled forth like a bird, seeking Persephone over dry

land and sea. But neither man nor god would tell her the truth; nor

did any bird come to her as a sure messenger.

 

"Nine days she wandered up and down upon the earth, having blazing

torches in her hands; [85] and, in her great sorrow, she refused to

taste of ambrosia, or of the cup of the sweet nectar, nor washed her

face. But when the tenth morning came, Hecate met her, having a

light in her hands. But Hecate had heard the voice only, and had

seen no one, and could not tell Demeter who had borne the girl away.

And Demeter said not a word, but fled away swiftly with her, having

the blazing torches in her hands, till they came to the Sun, the

watchman both of gods and men; and the goddess questioned him, and

the Sun told her the whole story.

 

"Then a more terrible grief took possession of Demeter, and, in her

anger against Zeus, she forsook the assembly of the gods and abode

among men, for a long time veiling her beauty under a worn

countenance, so that none who looked upon her knew her, until she

came to the house of Celeus, who was then king of Eleusis. In her

sorrow, she sat down at the wayside by the virgin's well, where the

people of Eleusis come to draw water, under the shadow of an olive-

tree. She seemed as an aged woman whose time of child-bearing is

gone by, and from whom the gifts of Aphrodite have been withdrawn,

like one of the hired servants, who nurse the children or keep house,

in kings' palaces. And the daughters of Celeus, four of them, like

goddesses, possessing the flower of their youth, Callidice,

Cleisidice, Demo, and Callithoe the eldest of them, coming to draw

water that they [86] might bear it in their brazen pitchers to their

father's house, saw Demeter and knew her not. The gods are hard for

men to recognise.

 

"They asked her kindly what she did there, alone; and Demeter

answered, dissemblingly, that she was escaped from certain pirates,

who had carried her from her home and meant to sell her as a slave.

Then they prayed her to abide there while they returned to the

palace, to ask their mother's permission to bring her home.

 

"Demeter bowed her head in assent; and they, having filled their

shining vessels with water, bore them away, rejoicing in their

beauty. They came quickly to their father's house, and told their

mother what they had seen and heard. Their mother bade them return,

and hire the woman for a great price; and they, like the hinds or

young heifers leaping in the fields in spring, fulfilled with the

pasture, holding up the folds of their raiment, sped along the hollow

road-way, their hair, in colour like the crocus, floating about their

shoulders as they went. They found the glorious goddess still

sitting by the wayside, unmoved. Then they led her to their father's

house; and she, veiled from head to foot, in her deep grief, followed

them on the way, and her blue robe gathered itself as she walked, in

many folds about her feet. They came to the house, and passed

through the sunny porch, where their mother, Metaneira, was [87]

sitting against one of the pillars of the roof, having a young child

in her bosom. They ran up to her; but Demeter crossed the threshold,

and, as she passed through, her head rose and touched the roof, and

her presence filled the doorway with a divine brightness.

 

"Still they did not wholly recognise her. After a time she was made

to smile. She refused to drink wine, but tasted of a cup mingled of

water and barley, flavoured with mint. It happened that Metaneira

had lately borne a child. It had come beyond hope, long after its

elder brethren, and was the object of a peculiar tenderness and of

many prayers with all. Demeter consented to remain, and become the

nurse of this child. She took the child in her immortal hands, and

placed it in her fragrant bosom; and the heart of the mother

rejoiced. Thus Demeter nursed Demophoon. And the child grew like a

god, neither sucking the breast, nor eating bread; but Demeter daily

anointed it with ambrosia, as if it had indeed been the child of a

god, breathing sweetly over it and holding it in her bosom; and at

nights, when she lay alone with the child, she would hide it secretly

in the red strength of the fire, like a brand; for her heart yearned

towards it, and she would fain have given to it immortal youth.

 

"But the foolishness of his mother prevented it. For a suspicion

growing up within her, she awaited her time, and one night peeped in

upon [88] them, and thereupon cried out in terror at what she saw.

And the goddess heard her; and a sudden anger seizing her, she

plucked the child from the fire and cast it on the ground,--the child

she would fain have made immortal, but who must now share the common

destiny of all men, though some inscrutable grace should still be

his, because he had lain for awhile on the knees and in the bosom of

the goddess.

 

"Then Demeter manifested herself openly. She put away the mask of

old age, and changed her form, and the spirit of beauty breathed

about her. A fragrant odour fell from her raiment, and her flesh

shone from afar; the long yellow hair descended waving over her

shoulders, and the great house was filled as with the brightness of

lightning. She passed out through the halls; and Metaneira fell to

the earth, and was speechless for a long time, and remembered not to

lift the child from the ground. But the sisters, hearing its piteous

cries, leapt from their beds and ran to it. Then one of them lifted

the child from the earth, and wrapped it in her bosom, and another

hastened to her mother's chamber to awake her: they came round the

child, and washed away the flecks of the fire from its panting body,

and kissed it tenderly all about: but the anguish of the child ceased

not; the arms of other and different nurses were about to enfold it.

 

"So, all night, trembling with fear, they [89] sought to propitiate

the glorious goddess; and in the morning they told all to their

father, Celeus. And he, according to the commands of the goddess,

built a fair temple; and all the people assisted; and when it was

finished every man departed to his own home. Then Demeter returned,

and sat down within the temple-walls, and remained still apart from

the company of the gods, alone in her wasting regret for her daughter Persephone.