Greek Studies A Series of Essays 8

Greek Studies A Series of Essays 8

"So I, and Eucritus, and the fair Amyntichus, turned aside into the

house of Phrasidamus, and lay down with delight in beds of sweet

tamarisk and fresh cuttings from the vines, strewn on the ground.

Many poplars and elm-trees were waving over our heads, and not far

off the running of the sacred water from the cave of the nymphs

warbled to us; in the shimmering branches the sun-burnt grasshoppers

were busy with their talk, and from afar the little owl cried softly,

out of [127] the tangled thorns of the blackberry; the larks were

singing and the hedge-birds, and the turtle-dove moaned; the bees

flew round and round the fountains, murmuring softly; the scent of

late summer and of the fall of the year was everywhere; the pears

fell from the trees at our feet, and apples in number rolled down at

our sides, and the young plum-trees were bent to the earth with the

weight of their fruit. The wax, four years old, was loosed from the

heads of the wine-jars. O! nymphs of Castalia, who dwell on the

steeps of Parnassus, tell me, I pray you, was it a draught like this

that the aged Chiron placed before Hercules, in the stony cave of

Pholus? Was it nectar like this that made the mighty shepherd on

Anapus' shore, Polyphemus, who flung the rocks upon Ulysses' ships,

dance among his sheepfolds?--A cup like this ye poured out now upon

the altar of Demeter, who presides over the threshing-floor. May it

be mine, once more, to dig my big winnowing-fan through her heaps of

corn; and may I see her smile upon me, holding poppies and handfuls

of corn in her two hands!"

 

Some of the modifications of the story of Demeter, as we find it in

later poetry, have been supposed to be due, not to the genuine action

of the Greek mind, but to the influence of that so-called Orphic

literature, which, in the generation succeeding Hesiod, brought, from

Thessaly and Phrygia, a tide of mystical ideas into the Greek [128]

religion, sometimes, doubtless, confusing the clearness and

naturalness of its original outlines, but also sometimes imparting to

them a new and peculiar grace. Under the influence of this Orphic

poetry, Demeter was blended, or identified, with Rhea Cybele, the

mother of the gods, the wilder earth-goddess of Phrygia; and the

romantic figure of Dionysus Zagreus, Dionysus the Hunter, that most

interesting, though somewhat melancholy variation on the better known

Dionysus, was brought, as son or brother of Persephone, into her

circle, the mystical vine, who, as Persephone descends and ascends

from the earth, is rent to pieces by the Titans every year and

remains long in Hades, but every spring-time comes out of it again,

renewing his youth. This identification of Demeter with Rhea Cybele

is the motive which has inspired a beautiful chorus in the Helena--

the new Helena--of Euripides, that great lover of all subtle

refinements and modernisms, who, in this play, has worked on a

strange version of the older story, which relates that Helen had

never really gone to Troy at all, but sent her soul only there, apart

from her sweet body, which abode all that time in Egypt, at the court

of King Proteus, where she is found at last by her husband Menelaus,

so that the Trojan war was about a phantom, after all. The chorus

has even less than usual to do with the action of the play, being

linked to it only by a sort of parallel, which may be understood,

[129] between Menelaus seeking Helen, and Demeter seeking Persephone.

Euripides, then, takes the matter of the Homeric hymn into the region

of a higher and swifter poetry, and connects it with the more

stimulating imagery of the Idaean mother. The Orphic mysticism or

enthusiasm has been admitted into the story, which is now full of

excitement, the motion of rivers, the sounds of the Bacchic cymbals

heard over the mountains, as Demeter wanders among the woody valleys

seeking her lost daughter, all directly expressed in the vivid Greek

words. Demeter is no longer the subdued goddess of the quietly-

ordered fields, but the mother of the gods, who has her abode in the

heights of Mount Ida, who presides over the dews and waters of the

white springs, whose flocks feed, not on grain, but on the curling

tendrils of the vine, both of which she withholds in her anger, and

whose chariot is drawn by wild beasts, fruit and emblem of the earth

in its fiery strength. Not Hecate, but Pallas and Artemis, in full

armour, swift-footed, vindicators of chastity, accompany her in her

search for Persephone, who is already expressly, korê arrêtos+--"the

maiden whom none may name." When she rests from her long wanderings,

it is into the stony thickets of Mount Ida, deep with snow, that she

throws herself, in her profound grief. When Zeus desires to end her

pain, the Muses and the "solemn" Graces are sent to dance and sing

before her. It is then [130] that Cypris, the goddess of beauty, and

the original cause, therefore, of her distress, takes into her hands

the brazen tambourines of the Dionysiac worship with their Chthonian

or deep-noted sound; and it is she, not the old Iambe, who with this

wild music, heard thus for the first time, makes Demeter smile at

last. "Great," so the chorus ends with a picture, "great is the

power of the stoles of spotted fawn-skins, and the green leaves of

ivy twisted about the sacred wands, and the wheeling motion of the

tambourine whirled round in the air, and the long hair floating

unbound in honour of Bromius, and the nocturns of the goddess, when

the moon looks full upon them."

 

The poem of Claudian on the Rape of Proserpine, the longest extant

work connected with the story of Demeter, yet itself unfinished,

closes the world of classical poetry. Writing in the fourth century

of the Christian era, Claudian has his subject before him in the

whole extent of its various development, and also profits by those

many pictorial representations of it, which, from the famous picture

of Polygnotus downwards, delighted the ancient world. His poem,

then, besides having an intrinsic charm, is valuable for some

reflexion in it of those lost works, being itself pre-eminently a

work in colour, and excelling in a kind of painting in words, which

brings its subject very pleasantly almost to the eye of the reader.

The mind of this late votary [131] of the old gods, in a world

rapidly changing, is crowded with all the beautiful forms generated

by mythology, and now about to be forgotten. In this after-glow of

Latin literature, lighted up long after their fortune had set, and

just before their long night began, they pass before us, in his

verses, with the utmost clearness, like the figures in an actual

procession. The nursing of the infant Sun and Moon by Tethys;

Proserpine and her companions gathering flowers at early dawn, when

the violets are drinking in the dew, still lying white upon the

grass; the image of Pallas winding the peaceful blossoms about the

steel crest of her helmet; the realm of Proserpine, softened somewhat

by her coming, and filled with a quiet joy; the matrons of Elysium

crowding to her marriage toilet, with the bridal veil of yellow in

their hands; the Manes, crowned with ghostly flowers yet warmed a

little, at the marriage feast; the ominous dreams of the mother; the

desolation of the home, like an empty bird's-nest or an empty fold,

when she returns and finds Proserpine gone, and the spider at work

over her unfinished embroidery; the strangely-figured raiment, the

flowers in the grass, which were once blooming youths, having both

their natural colour and the colour of their poetry in them, and the

clear little fountain there, which was once the maiden Cyane;--all

this is shown in a series of descriptions, like the designs in some

unwinding tapestry, like Proserpine's own [132] embroidery, the

description of which is the most brilliant of these pictures, and, in

its quaint confusion of the images of philosophy with those of

mythology, anticipates something of the fancy of the Italian

Renaissance.

 

"Proserpina, filling the house soothingly with her low song, was

working a gift against the return of her mother, with labour all to

be in vain. In it, she marked out with her needle the houses of the

gods and the series of the elements, showing by what law, nature, the

parent of all, settled the strife of ancient times, and the seeds of

things disparted into their places; the lighter elements are borne

aloft, the heavier fall to the centre; the air grows bright with

heat, a blazing light whirls round the firmament; the sea flows; the

earth hangs suspended in its place. And there were divers colours in

it; she illuminated the stars with gold, infused a purple shade into

the water, and heightened the shore with gems of flowers; and, under

her skilful hand, the threads, with their inwrought lustre, swell up,

in momentary counterfeit of the waves; you might think that the sea-

wind flapped against the rocks, and that a hollow murmur came

creeping over the thirsty sands. She puts in the five zones, marking

with a red ground the midmost zone, possessed by burning heat; its

outline was parched and stiff; the threads seemed thirsty with the

constant sunshine; on either side lay the two zones proper for human

life, [133] where a gentle temperance reigns; and at the extremes she

drew the twin zones of numbing cold, making her work dun and sad with

the hues of perpetual frost. She paints in, too, the sacred places of

Dis, her father's brother, and the Manes, so fatal to her; and an

omen of her doom was not wanting; for, as she worked, as if with

foreknowledge of the future, her face became wet with a sudden burst

of tears. And now, in the utmost border of the tissue, she had begun

to wind in the wavy line of the river Oceanus, with its glassy

shallows; but the door sounds on its hinges, and she perceives the

goddesses coming; the unfinished work drops from her hands, and a

ruddy blush lights up in her clear and snow-white face."

 

I have reserved to the last what is perhaps the daintiest treatment

of this subject in classical literature, the account of it which Ovid

gives in the Fasti--a kind of Roman Calendar--for the seventh of

April, the day of the games of Ceres. He tells over again the old

story, with much of which, he says, the reader will be already

familiar; but he has something also of his own to add to it, which

the reader will hear for the first time; and, like one of those old

painters who, in depicting a scene of Christian history, drew from

their own fancy or experience its special setting and accessories, he

translates the story into something very different from the Homeric

hymn. The writer of the Homeric [134] hymn had made Celeus a king,

and represented the scene at Eleusis in a fair palace, like the

Venetian painters who depict the persons of the Holy Family with

royal ornaments. Ovid, on the other hand, is more like certain

painters of the early Florentine school, who represent the holy

persons amid the more touching circumstances of humble life; and the

special something of his own which he adds, is a pathos caught from

homely things, not without a delightful, just perceptible, shade of

humour even, so rare in such work. All the mysticism has

disappeared; but, instead, we trace something of that "worship of

sorrow," which has been sometimes supposed to have had no place in

classical religious sentiment. In Ovid's well-finished elegiacs,

Persephone's flower-gathering, the Anthology, reaches its utmost

delicacy; but I give the following episode for the sake of its

pathetic __EXPRESSION__.

 

"After many wanderings Ceres was come to Attica. There, in the

utmost dejection, for the first time, she sat down to rest on a bare

stone, which the people of Attica still call the stone of sorrow.

For many days she remained there motionless, under the open sky,

heedless of the rain and of the frosty moonlight. Places have their

fortunes; and what is now the illustrious town of Eleusis was then

the field of an old man named Celeus. He was carrying home a load of

acorns, and wild berries shaken down from the [135] brambles, and dry

wood for burning on the hearth; his little daughter was leading two

goats home from the hills; and at home there was a little boy lying

sick in his cradle. 'Mother,' said the little girl--and the goddess

was moved at the name of mother--'what do you, all alone, in this

solitary place?' The old man stopped too, in spite of his heavy

burden, and bade her take shelter in his cottage, though it was but a

little one. But at first she refused to come; she looked like an

old woman, and an old woman's coif confined her hair; and as the man

still urged her, she said to him, 'Heaven bless you; and may children

always be yours! My daughter has been stolen from me. Alas! how

much happier is your lot than mine'; and, though weeping is

impossible for the gods, as she spoke, a bright drop, like a tear,

fell into her bosom. Soft-hearted, the little girl and the old man

weep together. And after that the good man said, 'Arise! despise not

the shelter of my little home; so may the daughter whom you seek be

restored to you.' 'Lead me,' answered the goddess; 'you have found

out the secret of moving me;' and she arose from the stone, and

followed the old man; and as they went he told her of the sick child

at home--how he is restless with pain, and cannot sleep. And she,

before entering the little cottage, gathered from the untended earth

the soothing and sleep-giving poppy; and as she gathered it, it is

said that she [136] forgot her vow, and tasted of the seeds, and

broke her long fast, unaware. As she came through the door, she saw

the house full of trouble, for now there was no more hope of life for

the sick boy. She saluted the mother, whose name was Metaneira, and

humbly kissed the lips of the child, with her own lips; then the

paleness left its face, and suddenly the parents see the strength

returning to its body; so great is the force that comes from the

divine mouth. And the whole family was full of joy--the mother and

the father and the little girl; they were the whole household.*

 

Three profound ethical conceptions, three impressive sacred figures,

have now defined themselves for the Greek imagination, condensed from

all the traditions which have now been traced, from the hymns of the

poets, from the instinctive and unformulated mysticism of primitive

minds. Demeter is become the divine sorrowing mother. Kore, the

goddess of summer, is become Persephone, the goddess of death, still

associated with the forms and odours of flowers and fruit, yet as one

risen from the dead also, presenting one side of her ambiguous nature

to men's gloomier fancies. Thirdly, there is the image of Demeter

enthroned, chastened by sorrow, and somewhat advanced in age,

blessing the earth, in her joy at the return of Kore. The myth has

[137] now entered on the third phase of its life, in which it becomes

the property of those more elevated spirits, who, in the decline of

the Greek religion, pick and choose and modify, with perfect freedom

of mind, whatever in it may seem adapted to minister to their

culture. In this way, the myths of the Greek religion become parts

of an ideal, visible embodiments of the susceptibilities and

intuitions of the nobler kind of souls; and it is to this latest

phase of mythological development that the highest Greek sculpture

allies itself. Its function is to give visible aesthetic __EXPRESSION__

to the constituent parts of that ideal. As poetry dealt chiefly with

the incidents of the story, so it is with the personages of the

story--with Demeter and Kore themselves--that sculpture has to do.

 

For the myth of Demeter, like the Greek religion in general, had its

unlovelier side, grotesque, unhellenic, unglorified by art,

illustrated well enough by the description Pausanias gives us of his

visit to the cave of the Black Demeter at Phigalia. In his time the

image itself had vanished; but he tells us enough about it to enable

us to realise its general characteristics, monstrous as the special

legend with which it was connected, the black draperies, the horse's

head united to the woman's body, with the carved reptiles creeping

about it. If, with the thought of this gloomy image of our mother

the earth, in our minds, we take up one of those coins [138] which

bear the image of Kore or Demeter,* we shall better understand what

the function of sculpture really was, in elevating and refining the

religious conceptions of the Greeks. Looking on the profile, for

instance, on one of those coins of Messene, which almost certainly

represent Demeter, and noting the crisp, chaste opening of the lips,

the minutely wrought earrings, and the delicately touched ears of

corn,--this trifling object being justly regarded as, in its

aesthetic qualities, an epitome of art on a larger scale,--we shall

see how far the imagination of the Greeks had travelled from what

their Black Demeter shows us had once been possible for them, and in

making the gods of their worship the objects of a worthy

companionship in their thoughts. Certainly, the mind of the old

workman who struck that coin was, if we may trust the testimony of

his work, unclouded by impure or gloomy shadows. The thought of

Demeter is impressed here, with all the purity and proportion, the

purged and dainty intelligence of the human countenance. The mystery

of it is indeed absent, perhaps could hardly have been looked for in

so slight a thing, intended for no sacred purpose, and tossed lightly

from hand to hand. But in his firm hold on the harmonies of the

human face, the designer of this tranquil head of [139] Demeter is on

the one road to a command over the secrets of all imaginative pathos

and mystery; though, in the perfect fairness and blitheness of his

work, he might seem almost not to have known the incidents of her

terrible story.

 

It is probable that, at a later period than in other equally

important temples of Greece, the earlier archaic representation of

Demeter in the sanctuary of Eleusis, was replaced by a more beautiful

image in the new style, with face and hands of ivory, having

therefore, in tone and texture, some subtler likeness to women's

flesh, and the closely enveloping drapery being constructed in

daintily beaten plates of gold. Praxiteles seems to have been the

first to bring into the region of a freer artistic handling these shy

deities of the earth, shrinking still within the narrow restraints of

a hieratic, conventional treatment, long after the more genuine

Olympians had broken out of them. The school of Praxiteles, as

distinguished from that of Pheidias, is especially the school of

grace, relaxing a little the severe ethical tension of the latter, in

favour of a slightly Asiatic sinuosity and tenderness. Pausanias

tells us that he carved the two goddesses for the temple of Demeter

at Athens; and Pliny speaks of two groups of his in brass, the one

representing the stealing of Persephone, the other her later, annual

descent into Hades, conducted thither by the now pacified mother.

All alike have perished; though perhaps some [140] more or less faint

reflexion of the most important of these designs may still be traced

on many painted vases which depict the stealing of Persephone,--a

helpless, plucked flower in the arms of Aidoneus. And in this almost

traditional form, the subject was often represented, in low relief,

on tombs, some of which still remain; in one or two instances, built

up, oddly enough, in the walls of Christian churches. On the tombs

of women who had died in early life, this was a favourite subject,

some likeness of the actual lineaments of the deceased being

sometimes transferred to the features of Persephone.

 

Yet so far, it might seem, when we consider the interest of this

story in itself, and its importance in the Greek religion, that no

adequate __EXPRESSION__ of it had remained to us in works of art. But in

the year 1857, the discovery of the marbles, in the sacred precinct

of Demeter at Cnidus, restored to us an illustration of the myth in

its artistic phase, hardly less central than the Homeric hymn in its

poetical phase. With the help of the descriptions and plans of Mr.

Newton's book,* we can form, as one always wishes to do in such

cases, a clear idea of the place where these marbles--three statues

of the best style of Greek sculpture, now in the British Museum--were

found. Occupying a ledge of rock, looking towards the sea, at the

base of a [141] cliff of upheaved limestone, of singular steepness

and regularity of surface, the spot presents indications of volcanic

disturbance, as if a chasm in the earth had opened here. It was this

character, suggesting the belief in an actual connexion with the

interior of the earth (local tradition claiming it as the scene of

the stealing of Persephone), which probably gave rise, as in other

cases where the landscape presented some peculiar feature in harmony

with the story, to the dedication upon it of a house and an image of

Demeter, with whom were associated Kore and "the gods with Demeter"--

hoi theoi para Damatri+--Aidoneus, and the mystical or Chthonian

Dionysus. The house seems to have been a small chapel only, of

simple construction, and designed for private use, the site itself

having been private property, consecrated by a particular family, for

their own religious uses, although other persons, servants or

dependents of the founders, may also have frequented it. The

architecture seems to have been insignificant, but the sculpture

costly and exquisite, belonging, if contemporary with the erection of

the building, to a great period of Greek art, of which also it is

judged to possess intrinsic marks--about the year 350 before Christ,

the probable date of the dedication of the little temple. The

artists by whom these works were produced were, therefore, either the

contemporaries of Praxiteles, whose Venus was for many centuries the

glory of [142] Cnidus, or belonged to the generation immediately

succeeding him. The temple itself was probably thrown down by a

renewal of the volcanic disturbances; the statues however remaining,

and the ministers and worshippers still continuing to make shift for

their sacred business in the place, now doubly venerable, but with

its temple unrestored, down to the second or third century of the

Christian era, its frequenters being now perhaps mere chance comers,

the family of the original donors having become extinct, or having

deserted it. Into this later arrangement, clearly divined by Mr.

Newton, through those faint indications which mean much for true

experts, the extant remains, as they were found upon the spot, permit

us to enter. It is one of the graves of that old religion, but with

much still fresh in it. We see it with its provincial superstitions,

and its curious magic rites, but also with its means of really solemn

impressions, in the culminating forms of Greek art; the two faces of

the Greek religion confronting each other here, and the whole having

that rare peculiarity of a kind of personal stamp upon it, the place

having been designed to meet the fancies of one particular soul, or

at least of one family. It is always difficult to bring the every-

day aspect of Greek religion home to us; but even the slighter

details of this little sanctuary help us to do this; and knowing so

little, as we do, of the greater mysteries of [143] Demeter, this

glance into an actual religious place dedicated to her, and with the

air of her worship still about it, is doubly interesting. The little

votive figures of the goddesses, in baked earth, were still lying

stored in the small treasury intended for such objects, or scattered

about the feet of the images, together with lamps in great number, a

lighted lamp being a favourite offering, in memory of the torches

with which Demeter sought Persephone, or from some sense of inherent

darkness in these gods of the earth; those torches in the hands of

Demeter being indeed originally the artificial warmth and brightness

of lamp and fire, on winter nights. The dirae or spells,--katadesmoi+-

-binding or devoting certain persons to the infernal gods, inscribed

on thin rolls of lead, with holes, sometimes, for hanging them up

about those quiet statues, still lay, just as they were left,

anywhere within the sacred precinct, illustrating at once the

gloomier side of the Greek religion in general, and of Demeter and

Persephone especially, in their character of avenging deities, and as

relics of ancient magic, reproduced so strangely at other times and

places, reminding us of the permanence of certain odd ways of human

thought. A woman binds with her spell the person who seduces her

husband away from her and her children; another, the person who has

accused her of preparing poison for her husband; another devotes one

who has not restored a borrowed [144] garment, or has stolen a

bracelet, or certain drinking-horns; and, from some instances, we

might infer that this was a favourite place of worship for the poor

and ignorant. In this living picture, we find still lingering on, at

the foot of the beautiful Greek marbles, that phase of religious

temper which a cynical mind might think a truer link of its unity and

permanence than any higher aesthetic instincts--a phase of it, which

the art of sculpture, humanising and refining man's conceptions of

the unseen, tended constantly to do away. For the higher side of the

Greek religion, thus humanised and refined by art, and elevated by it to the sense of beauty, is here also.