Greek Studies A Series of Essays1

Greek Studies A Series of Essays1

Greek Studies: A Series of Essays

Author: Walter Horatio Pater

 

CONTENTS

 

GREEK STUDIES: A SERIES OF ESSAYS

 

WALTER PATER

 

London: Macmillan, 1910. (The Library Edition.)

 

E-text Editor: Alfred J. Drake, Ph.D.

 

Electronic Version 1.0 / Date 10-12-01

 

Disclaimer of Damages for All Texts on This Web

 

E-text Editor's Note

 

Preface by Charles Shadwell

 

A Study of Dionysus: The Spiritual Form of Fire and Dew: 9-52

 

The Bacchanals of Euripides: 53-80

 

The Myth of Demeter and Persephone I. 81-112

 

The Myth of Demeter and Persephone II. 113-151

 

Hippolytus Veiled: A Study from Euripides: 152-186

 

The Beginnings of Greek Sculpture--I. The Heroic Age of Greek Art:

187-223

 

The Beginnings of Greek Sculpture--II. The Age of Graven Images: 224-

250

 

The Marbles of Aegina: 251-268

 

The Age of Athletic Prizemen: A Chapter in Greek Art: 269-end

 

 

 

 

 

PREFACE BY CHARLES L. SHADWELL

 

[1] THE present volume consists of a collection of essays by the

late Mr. Pater, all of which have already been given to the public in

various Magazines; and it is owing to the kindness of the several

proprietors of those Magazines that they can now be brought together

in a collected shape. It will, it is believed, be felt, that their

value is considerably enhanced by their appearance in a single

volume, where they can throw light upon one another, and exhibit by

their connexion a more complete view of the scope and purpose of Mr.

Pater in dealing with the art and literature of the ancient world.

 

The essays fall into two distinct groups, one dealing with the

subjects of Greek mythology and Greek poetry, the other with the

history of Greek sculpture and Greek architecture. But these two

groups are not wholly distinct; they mutually illustrate one another,

and serve to enforce Mr. Pater's conception of the essential [2]

unity, in all its many-sidedness, of the Greek character. The god

understood as the "spiritual form" of the things of nature is not

only the key-note of the "Study of Dionysus"* and "The Myth of

Demeter and Persephone,"* but reappears as contributing to the

interpretation of the growth of Greek sculpture.* Thus, though in

the bibliography of his writings, the two groups are separated by a

considerable interval, there is no change of view; he had already

reached the centre of the problem, and, the secret once gained, his

mode of treatment of the different aspects of Greek life and thought

is permanent and consistent.

 

The essay on "The Myth of Demeter and Persephone" was originally

prepared as two lectures, for delivery, in 1875, at the Birmingham

and Midland Institute. These lectures were published in the

Fortnightly Review, in Jan. and Feb. 1876. The "Study of Dionysus"

appeared in the same Review in Dec. 1876. "The Bacchanals of

Euripides" must have been written about the same time, as a sequel to

the "Study of Dionysus"; for, in 1878, Mr. Pater revised the four

essays, with the intention, apparently, of publishing them

collectively in a volume, an intention afterwards abandoned. [3] The

text now printed has, except that of "The Bacchanals," been taken

from proofs then set up, further corrected in manuscript. "The

Bacchanals," written long before, was not published until 1889, when

it appeared in Macmillan's Magazine for May. It was reprinted,

without alteration, prefixed to Dr. Tyrrell's edition of the Bacchae.

"Hippolytus Veiled" first appeared in August 1889, in Macmillan's

Magazine. It was afterwards rewritten, but with only a few

substantial alterations, in Mr. Pater's own hand, with a view,

probably, of republishing it with other essays. This last revise has

been followed in the text now printed.

 

The papers on Greek sculpture* are all that remain of a series which,

if Mr. Pater had lived, would, probably, have grown into a still more

important work. Such a work would have included one or more essays

on Phidias and the Parthenon, of which only a fragment, though an

important fragment, can be found amongst his papers; and it was to

have been prefaced by an Introduction to Greek Studies, only a page

or two of which was ever written.

 

[4] This is not the place to speak of Mr. Pater's private virtues,

the personal charm of his character, the brightness of his talk, the

warmth of his friendship, the devotion of his family life. But a few

words may be permitted on the value of the work by which he will be

known to those who never saw him.

 

Persons only superficially acquainted, or by hearsay, with his

writings, are apt to sum up his merits as a writer by saying that he

was a master, or a consummate master of style; but those who have

really studied what he wrote do not need to be told that his

distinction does not lie in his literary grace alone, his fastidious

choice of language, his power of word-painting, but in the depth and

seriousness of his studies. That the amount he has produced, in a

literary life of thirty years, is not greater, is one proof among

many of the spirit in which he worked. His genius was "an infinite

capacity for taking pains." That delicacy of insight, that gift of

penetrating into the heart of things, that subtleness of

interpretation, which with him seems an instinct, is the outcome of

hard, patient, conscientious study. If he had chosen, he might,

without difficulty, have produced a far greater body of work of less

value; and from a worldly point of view, he would have been wise.

Such was not his understanding [5] of the use of his talents. Cui

multum datum est, multum quaeretur ab eo. Those who wish to

understand the spirit in which he worked, will find it in this

volume. C.L.S.

 

Oct. 1894.

 

NOTES

 

2. *See p. 34.

 

2. *See p. 100.

 

2. *See pp. 220, 254.

 

3. *"The Beginnings of Greek Sculpture" was published in the

Fortnightly Review, Feb. and March 1880; "The Marbles of Aegina" in

the same Review in April. "The Age of Athletic Prizemen" was

published in the Contemporary Review in February of the present year.

 

 

 

 

 

A STUDY OF DIONYSUS:

THE SPIRITUAL FORM OF FIRE AND DEW

 

[9] WRITERS on mythology speak habitually of the religion of the

Greeks. In thus speaking, they are really using a misleading

__EXPRESSION__, and should speak rather of religions; each race and class

of Greeks--the Dorians, the people of the coast, the fishers--having

had a religion of its own, conceived of the objects that came nearest

to it and were most in its thoughts, and the resulting usages and

ideas never having come to have a precisely harmonised system, after

the analogy of some other religions. The religion of Dionysus is the

religion of people who pass their lives among the vines. As the

religion of Demeter carries us back to the cornfields and farmsteads

of Greece, and places us, in fancy, among a primitive race, in the

furrow and beside the granary; so the religion of Dionysus carries us

back to its vineyards, and is a monument of the ways and thoughts of

people whose days go by beside the winepress, and [10] under the

green and purple shadows, and whose material happiness depends on the

crop of grapes. For them the thought of Dionysus and his circle, a

little Olympus outside the greater, covered the whole of life, and

was a complete religion, a sacred representation or interpretation of

the whole human experience, modified by the special limitations, the

special privileges of insight or suggestion, incident to their

peculiar mode of existence.

 

Now, if the reader wishes to understand what the scope of the

religion of Dionysus was to the Greeks who lived in it, all it

represented to them by way of one clearly conceived yet complex

symbol, let him reflect what the loss would be if all the effect and

__EXPRESSION__ drawn from the imagery of the vine and the cup fell out of

the whole body of existing poetry; how many fascinating trains of

reflexion, what colour and substance would therewith have been

deducted from it, filled as it is, apart from the more aweful

associations of the Christian ritual, apart from Galahad's cup, with

all the various symbolism of the fruit of the vine. That supposed

loss is but an imperfect measure of all that the name of Dionysus

recalled to the Greek mind, under a single imaginable form, an

outward body of flesh presented to the senses, and comprehending, as

its animating soul, a whole world of thoughts, surmises, greater and

less experiences.

 

[11] The student of the comparative science of religions finds in the

religion of Dionysus one of many modes of that primitive tree-worship

which, growing out of some universal instinctive belief that trees

and flowers are indeed habitations of living spirits, is found almost

everywhere in the earlier stages of civilisation, enshrined in legend

or custom, often graceful enough, as if the delicate beauty of the

object of worship had effectually taken hold on the fancy of the

worshipper. Shelley's Sensitive Plant shows in what mists of

poetical reverie such feeling may still float about a mind full of

modern lights, the feeling we too have of a life in the green world,

always ready to assert its claim over our sympathetic fancies. Who

has not at moments felt the scruple, which is with us always

regarding animal life, following the signs of animation further

still, till one almost hesitates to pluck out the little soul of

flower or leaf?

 

And in so graceful a faith the Greeks had their share; what was crude

and inane in it becoming, in the atmosphere of their energetic,

imaginative intelligence, refined and humanised. The oak-grove of

Dodona, the seat of their most venerable oracle, did but perpetuate

the fancy that the sounds of the wind in the trees may be, for

certain prepared and chosen ears, intelligible voices; they could

believe in the transmigration of souls into mulberry and laurel, mint

and hyacinth; and the dainty Metamorphoses of Ovid [12] are but a

fossilised form of one morsel here and there, from a whole world of

transformation, with which their nimble fancy was perpetually

playing. "Together with them," says the Homeric hymn to Aphrodite,

of the Hamadryads, the nymphs which animate the forest trees, "with

them, at the moment of their birth, grew up out of the soil, oak-tree

or pine, fair, flourishing among the mountains. And when at last the

appointed hour of their death has come, first of all, those fair

trees are dried up; the bark perishes from around them, and the

branches fall away; and therewith the soul of them deserts the light

of the sun."+

 

These then are the nurses of the vine, bracing it with interchange of

sun and shade. They bathe, they dance, they sing songs of

enchantment, so that those who seem oddly in love with nature, and

strange among their fellows, are still said to be nympholepti; above

all, they are weavers or spinsters, spinning or weaving with airiest

fingers, and subtlest, many-coloured threads, the foliage of the

trees, the petals of flowers, the skins of the fruit, the long thin

stalks on which the poplar leaves are set so lightly that Homer

compares to them, in their constant motion, the maids who sit

spinning in the house of Alcinous. The nymphs of Naxos, where the

grape-skin is darkest, weave for him a purple robe. Only, the ivy is

never transformed, is visible as natural ivy to the last, pressing

the [13] dark outline of its leaves close upon the firm, white, quite

human flesh of the god's forehead.

 

In its earliest form, then, the religion of Dionysus presents us with

the most graceful phase of this graceful worship, occupying a place

between the ruder fancies of half-civilised people concerning life in

flower or tree, and the dreamy after-fancies of the poet of the

Sensitive Plant. He is the soul of the individual vine, first; the

young vine at the house-door of the newly married, for instance, as

the vine-grower stoops over it, coaxing and nursing it, like a pet

animal or a little child; afterwards, the soul of the whole species,

the spirit of fire and dew, alive and leaping in a thousand vines, as

the higher intelligence, brooding more deeply over things, pursues,

in thought, the generation of sweetness and strength in the veins of

the tree, the transformation of water into wine, little by little;

noting all the influences upon it of the heaven above and the earth

beneath; and shadowing forth, in each pause of the process, an

intervening person--what is to us but the secret chemistry of nature

being to them the mediation of living spirits. So they passed on to

think of Dionysus (naming him at last from the brightness of the sky

and the moisture of the earth) not merely as the soul of the vine,

but of all that life in flowing things of which the vine is the

symbol, because its most emphatic example. At Delos he bears a son,

from whom [14] in turn spring the three mysterious sisters Oeno,

Spermo, and Elais, who, dwelling in the island, exercise respectively

the gifts of turning all things at will into oil, and corn, and wine.

In the Bacchae of Euripides, he gives his followers, by miracle,

honey and milk, and the water gushes for them from the smitten rock.

He comes at last to have a scope equal to that of Demeter, a realm as

wide and mysterious as hers; the whole productive power of the earth

is in him, and the explanation of its annual change. As some embody

their intuitions of that power in corn, so others in wine. He is the

dispenser of the earth's hidden wealth, giver of riches through the

vine, as Demeter through the grain. And as Demeter sends the airy,

dainty-wheeled and dainty-winged spirit of Triptolemus to bear her

gifts abroad on all winds, so Dionysus goes on his eastern journey,

with its many intricate adventures, on which he carries his gifts to

every people.

 

A little Olympus outside the greater, I said, of Dionysus and his

companions; he is the centre of a cycle, the hierarchy of the

creatures of water and sunlight in many degrees; and that fantastic

system of tree-worship places round him, not the fondly whispering

spirits of the more graceful inhabitants of woodland only, the nymphs

of the poplar and the pine, but the whole satyr circle, intervening

between the headship of the vine and the mere earth, the grosser,

less human [15] spirits, incorporate and made visible, of the more

coarse and sluggish sorts of vegetable strength, the fig, the reed,

the ineradicable weed-things which will attach themselves, climbing

about the vine-poles, or seeking the sun between the hot stones. For

as Dionysus, the spiritual form of the vine, is of the highest human

type, so the fig-tree and the reed have animal souls, mistakeable in

the thoughts of a later, imperfectly remembering age, for mere

abstractions of animal nature; Snubnose, and Sweetwine, and Silenus,

the oldest of them all, so old that he has come to have the gift of

prophecy.

 

Quite different from them in origin and intent, but confused with

them in form, are those other companions of Dionysus, Pan and his

children. Home-spun dream of simple people, and like them in the

uneventful tenour of his existence, he has almost no story; he is but

a presence; the spiritual form of Arcadia, and the ways of human life

there; the reflexion, in sacred image or ideal, of its flocks, and

orchards, and wild honey; the dangers of its hunters; its weariness

in noonday heat; its children, agile as the goats they tend, who run,

in their picturesque rags, across the solitary wanderer's path, to

startle him, in the unfamiliar upper places; its one adornment and

solace being the dance to the homely shepherd's pipe, cut by Pan

first from the sedges of the brook Molpeia.

 

Breathing of remote nature, the sense of which [16] is so profound in

the Homeric hymn to Pan, the pines, the foldings of the hills, the

leaping streams, the strange echoings and dying of sound on the

heights, "the bird, which among the petals of many-flowered spring,

pouring out a dirge, sends forth her honey-voiced song," "the crocus

and the hyacinth disorderly mixed in the deep grass"+--things which

the religion of Dionysus loves--Pan joins the company of the Satyrs.

Amongst them, they give their names to insolence and mockery, and the

finer sorts of malice, to unmeaning and ridiculous fear. But the

best spirits have found in them also a certain human pathos, as in

displaced beings, coming even nearer to most men, in their very

roughness, than the noble and delicate person of the vine; dubious

creatures, half-way between the animal and human kinds, speculating

wistfully on their being, because not wholly understanding themselves

and their place in nature; as the animals seem always to have this

__EXPRESSION__ to some noticeable degree in the presence of man. In the

later school of Attic sculpture they are treated with more and more

of refinement, till in some happy moment Praxiteles conceived a

model, often repeated, which concentrates this sentiment of true

humour concerning them; a model of dainty natural ease in posture,

but with the legs slightly crossed, as only lowly-bred gods are used

to carry them, and with some puzzled trouble of youth, you might wish

for a moment [17] to smoothe away, puckering the forehead a little,

between the pointed ears, on which the goodly hair of his animal

strength grows low. Little by little, the signs of brute nature are

subordinated, or disappear; and at last, Robetta, a humble Italian

engraver of the fifteenth century, entering into the Greek fancy

because it belongs to all ages, has expressed it in its most

exquisite form, in a design of Ceres and her children, of whom their

mother is no longer afraid, as in the Homeric hymn to Pan. The puck-

noses have grown delicate, so that, with Plato's infatuated lover,

you may call them winsome, if you please; and no one would wish those

hairy little shanks away, with which one of the small Pans walks at

her side, grasping her skirt stoutly; while the other, the sick or

weary one, rides in the arms of Ceres herself, who in graceful

Italian dress, and decked airily with fruit and corn, steps across a

country of cut sheaves, pressing it closely to her, with a child's

peevish trouble in its face, and its small goat-legs and tiny hoofs

folded over together, precisely after the manner of a little child.

 

There is one element in the conception of Dionysus, which his

connexion with the satyrs, Marsyas being one of them, and with Pan,

from whom the flute passed to all the shepherds of Theocritus, alike

illustrates, his interest, namely, in one of the great species of

music. One form of that wilder vegetation, of which the Satyr race

is the soul made visible, is the reed, which [18] the creature plucks

and trims into musical pipes. And as Apollo inspires and rules over

all the music of strings, so Dionysus inspires and rules over all the

music of the reed, the water-plant, in which the ideas of water and

of vegetable life are brought close together, natural property,

therefore, of the spirit of life in the green sap. I said that the

religion of Dionysus was, for those who lived in it, a complete

religion, a complete sacred representation and interpretation of the

whole of life; and as, in his relation to the vine, he fills for them

the place of Demeter, is the life of the earth through the grape as

she through the grain, so, in this other phase of his being, in his

relation to the reed, he fills for them the place of Apollo; he is

the inherent cause of music and poetry; he inspires; he explains the

phenomena of enthusiasm, as distinguished by Plato in the Phaedrus,

the secrets of possession by a higher and more energetic spirit than

one's own, the gift of self-revelation, of passing out of oneself

through words, tones, gestures. A winged Dionysus, venerated at

Amyclae, was perhaps meant to represent him thus, as the god of

enthusiasm, of the rising up on those spiritual wings, of which also

we hear something in the Phaedrus of Plato.

 

The artists of the Renaissance occupied themselves much with the

person and the story of Dionysus; and Michelangelo, in a work still

remaining in Florence, in which he essayed [19] with success to

produce a thing which should pass with the critics for a piece of

ancient sculpture, has represented him in the fulness, as it seems,

of this enthusiasm, an image of delighted, entire surrender to

transporting dreams. And this is no subtle after-thought of a later

age, but true to certain finer movements of old Greek sentiment,

though it may seem to have waited for the hand of Michelangelo before

it attained complete realisation. The head of Ion leans, as they

recline at the banquet, on the shoulder of Charmides; he mutters in

his sleep of things seen therein, but awakes as the flute-players

enter, whom Charmides has hired for his birthday supper. The soul of

Callias, who sits on the other side of Charmides, flashes out; he

counterfeits, with life-like gesture, the personal tricks of friend

or foe; or the things he could never utter before, he finds words for

now; the secrets of life are on his lips. It is in this loosening of

the lips and heart, strictly, that Dionysus is the Deliverer,

Eleutherios; and of such enthusiasm, or ecstasy, is, in a certain

sense, an older patron than Apollo himself. Even at Delphi, the

centre of Greek inspiration and of the religion of Apollo, his claim

always maintained itself; and signs are not wanting that Apollo was

but a later comer there. There, under his later reign, hard by the

golden image of Apollo himself, near the sacred tripod on which the

Pythia sat to prophesy, was to be seen a strange object--a sort [20]

of coffin or cinerary urn with the inscription, "Here lieth the body

of Dionysus, the son of Semele." The pediment of the great temple

was divided between them--Apollo with the nine Muses on that side,

Dionysus, with perhaps three times three Graces, on this. A third of

the whole year was held sacred to him; the four winter months were

the months of Dionysus; and in the shrine of Apollo itself he was worshipped with almost equal devotion.