Book: Greek Studies: A Series of Essays

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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.

"And, in her anger, she sent upon the earth a year of grievous
famine. The dry seed remained hidden in the soil; in vain the oxen
drew the ploughshare through the furrows; much white seed-corn fell
fruitless on the earth, and the whole human race had like to have
perished, and the gods had no more service of men, unless Zeus had
interfered. First he sent Iris, afterwards all the gods, one by one,
to turn Demeter from her anger; but none was able to persuade her;
she heard their words with a hard countenance, and vowed by no means
to return to Olympus, nor to yield the fruit of the earth, until her
eyes had seen her lost daughter again. Then, last of all, Zeus sent
Hermes into the kingdom of the dead, to persuade Aidoneus to suffer
his bride to return to the light of day. And Hermes found the king
at home in his palace, sitting on a couch, beside the shrinking
Persephone, consumed within herself by desire for her mother. A
doubtful smile passed over [90] the face of Aidoneus; yet he obeyed
the message, and bade Persephone return; yet praying her a little to
have gentle thoughts of him, nor judge him too hardly, who was also
an immortal god. And Persephone arose up quickly in great joy; only,
ere she departed, he caused her to eat a morsel of sweet pomegranate,
designing secretly thereby, that she should not remain always upon
earth, but might some time return to him. And Aidoneus yoked the
horses to his chariot; and Persephone ascended into it; and Hermes
took the reins in his hands and drove out through the infernal halls;
and the horses ran willingly; and they two quickly passed over the
ways of that long journey, neither the waters of the sea, nor of the
rivers, nor the deep ravines of the hills, nor the cliffs of the
shore, resisting them; till at last Hermes placed Persephone before
the door of the temple where her mother was; who, seeing her, ran out
quickly to meet her, like a Maenad coming down a mountain-side, dusky
with woods.

"So they spent all that day together in intimate communion, having
many things to hear and tell. Then Zeus sent to them Rhea, his
venerable mother, the oldest of divine persons, to bring them back
reconciled, to the company of the gods; and he ordained that
Persephone should remain two parts of the year with her mother, and
one third part only with her husband, in the kingdom of the dead. So
Demeter suffered [91] the earth to yield its fruits once more, and
the land was suddenly laden with leaves and flowers and waving corn.
Also she visited Triptolemus and the other princes of Eleusis, and
instructed them in the performance of her sacred rites,--those
mysteries of which no tongue may speak. Only, blessed is he whose
eyes have seen them; his lot after death is not as the lot of other
men!"

In the story of Demeter, as in all Greek myths, we may trace the
action of three different influences, which have moulded it with
varying effects, in three successive phases of its development.
There is first its half-conscious, instinctive, or mystical, phase,
in which, under the form of an unwritten legend, living from mouth to
mouth, and with details changing as it passes from place to place,
there lie certain primitive impressions of the phenomena of the
natural world. We may trace it next in its conscious, poetical or
literary, phase, in which the poets become the depositaries of the
vague instinctive product of the popular imagination, and handle it
with a purely literary interest, fixing its outlines, and simplifying
or developing its situations. Thirdly, the myth passes into the
ethical phase, in which the persons and the incidents of the poetical
narrative are realised as abstract symbols, because intensely
characteristic examples, of moral or spiritual conditions. [92]
Behind the adventures of the stealing of Persephone and the
wanderings of Demeter in search of her, as we find them in the
Homeric hymn, we may discern the confused conception, under which
that early age, in which the myths were first created, represented to
itself those changes in physical things, that order of summer and
winter, of which it had no scientific, or systematic explanation, but
in which, nevertheless, it divined a multitude of living agencies,
corresponding to those ascertained forces, of which our colder modern
science tells the number and the names. Demeter--Demeter and
Persephone, at first, in a sort of confused union--is the earth, in
the fixed order of its annual changes, but also in all the accident
and detail of the growth and decay of its children. Of this
conception, floating loosely in the air, the poets of a later age
take possession; they create Demeter and Persephone as we know them
in art and poetry. From the vague and fluctuating union, in which
together they had represented the earth and its changes, the mother
and the daughter define themselves with special functions, and with
fixed, well-understood relationships, the incidents and emotions of
which soon weave themselves into a pathetic story. Lastly, in
proportion as the literary or aesthetic activity completes the
picture or the poem, the ethical interest makes itself felt. These
strange persons--Demeter and Persephone--these marvellous incidents--
the translation into Hades, the seeking [93] of Demeter, the return
of Persephone to her,--lend themselves to the elevation and
correction of the sentiments of sorrow and awe, by the presentment to
the senses and the imagination of an ideal expression of them.
Demeter cannot but seem the type of divine grief. Persephone is the
goddess of death, yet with a promise of life to come. Those three
phases, then, which are more or less discernible in all mythical
development, and constitute a natural order in it, based on the
necessary conditions of human apprehension, are fixed more plainly,
perhaps, than in any other passage of Greek mythology in the story of
Demeter. And as the Homeric hymn is the central expression of its
literary or poetical phase, so the marble remains, of which I shall
have to speak by and bye, are the central extant illustration of what
I have called its ethical phase.

Homer, in the Iliad, knows Demeter, but only as the goddess of the
fields, the originator and patroness of the labours of the
countryman, in their yearly order. She stands, with her hair yellow
like the ripe corn, at the threshing-floor, and takes her share in
the toil, the heap of grain whitening, as the flails, moving in the
wind, disperse the chaff. Out in the fresh fields, she yields to the
embraces of Iasion, to the extreme jealousy of Zeus, who slays her
mortal lover with lightning. The flowery town of Pyrasus--the wheat-
town,--an ancient place in Thessaly, is her sacred precinct. But
when [94] Homer gives a list of the orthodox gods, her name is not
mentioned.

Homer, in the Odyssey, knows Persephone also, but not as Kore; only
as the queen of the dead--epaine Persephone+--dreadful Persephone, the
goddess of destruction and death, according to the apparent import of
her name.+ She accomplishes men's evil prayers; she is the mistress
and manager of men's shades, to which she can dispense a little more
or less of life, dwelling in her mouldering palace on the steep shore
of the Oceanus, with its groves of barren willows and tall poplars.
But that Homer knew her as the daughter of Demeter there are no
signs; and of his knowledge of the rape of Persephone there is only
the faintest sign,--he names Hades by the golden reins of his
chariot, and his beautiful horses.

The main theme, then, the most characteristic peculiarities, of the
story, as subsequently developed, are not to be found, expressly, in
the true Homer. We have in him, on the one hand, Demeter, as the
perfectly fresh and blithe goddess of the fields, whose children, if
she has them, must be as the perfectly discreet and peaceful,
unravished Kore; on the other hand, we have Persephone, as the wholly
terrible goddess of death, who brings to Ulysses the querulous
shadows of the dead, and has the head of the gorgon Medusa in her
keeping. And it is only when these two contrasted images have been
[95] brought into intimate relationship, only when Kore and
Persephone have been identified, that the deeper mythology of Demeter
begins.

This combination has taken place in Hesiod; and in three lines of the
Theogony we find the stealing of Persephone by Aidoneus,*--one of
those things in Hesiod, perhaps, which are really older than Homer.
Hesiod has been called the poet of helots, and is thought to have
preserved some of the traditions of those earlier inhabitants of
Greece who had become a kind of serfs; and in a certain shadowiness
in his conceptions of the gods, contrasting with the concrete and
heroic forms of the gods of Homer, we may perhaps trace something of
the quiet unspoken brooding of a subdued people--of that silently
dreaming temper to which the story of Persephone properly belongs.
However this may be, it is in Hesiod that the two images,
unassociated in Homer--the goddess of summer and the goddess of
death, Kore and Persephone--are identified with much significance;
and that strange, dual being makes her first appearance, whose latent
capabilities the poets afterwards developed; among the rest, a
peculiar blending of those two contrasted aspects, full of purpose
for the duly chastened intelligence; death, resurrection,
rejuvenescence.--Awake, and sing, ye that dwell in the dust!

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