Book: Greek Studies: A Series of Essays

W >> Walter Horatio Pater >> Greek Studies: A Series of Essays




The statues of the supposed priestess, and of the enthroned Demeter,
are of more than the size of life; the figure of Persephone is but
seventeen inches high, a daintily handled toy of Parian marble, the
miniature copy perhaps of a much larger work, which might well be
reproduced on a magnified scale. The conception of Demeter is
throughout chiefly human, and even domestic, though never without a
hieratic interest, because she is not a goddess only, but also a
priestess. In contrast, Persephone is wholly unearthly, the close
companion, and even the confused double, of Hecate, the goddess of
midnight terrors,--Despoena,--the final mistress of all that lives;
and as sorrow is the characteristic sentiment of Demeter, so awe of
Persephone. She is compact of sleep, and death, and flowers, but of
narcotic flowers especially,--a revenant, who in the garden of
Aidoneus has eaten of the pomegranate, and bears always the secret of
decay in her, of return to the grave, in the mystery of those
swallowed seeds; sometimes, in later work, holding in her hand the
key of the great prison-house, but which unlocks all secrets also;
(there, finally, or through oracles revealed in dreams;) sometimes,
like Demeter, the poppy, emblem of sleep and death by its [149]
narcotic juices, of life and resurrection by its innumerable seeds,
of the dreams, therefore, that may intervene between falling asleep
and waking. Treated as it is in the Homeric hymn, and still more in
this statue, the image of Persephone may be regarded as the result of
many efforts to lift the old Chthonian gloom, still lingering on in
heavier souls, concerning the grave, to connect it with impressions
of dignity and beauty, and a certain sweetness even; it is meant to
make men in love, or at least at peace, with death. The Persephone
of Praxiteles' school, then, is Aphrodite-Persephone, Venus-Libitina.
Her shadowy eyes have gazed upon the fainter colouring of the under-
world, and the tranquillity, born of it, has "passed into her face";
for the Greek Hades is, after all, but a quiet, twilight place, not
very different from that House of Fame where Dante places the great
souls of the classical world; Aidoneus himself being conceived, in
the highest Greek sculpture, as but a gentler Zeus, the great
innkeeper; so that when a certain Greek sculptor had failed in his
portraiture of Zeus, because it had too little hilarity, too little,
in the eyes and brow, of the open and cheerful sky, he only changed
its title, and the thing passed excellently, with its heavy locks and
shadowy eyebrows, for the god of the dead. The image of Persephone,
then, as it is here composed, with the tall, tower-like head-dress,
from which the veil depends--the corn-basket, [150] originally
carried thus by the Greek women, balanced on the head--giving the
figure unusual length, has the air of a body bound about with grave-
clothes; while the archaic hands and feet, and a certain stiffness in
the folds of the drapery, give it something of a hieratic character,
and to the modern observer may suggest a sort of kinship with the
more chastened kind of Gothic work. But quite of the school of
Praxiteles is the general character of the composition; the graceful
waving of the hair, the fine shadows of the little face, of the eyes
and lips especially, like the shadows of a flower--a flower risen
noiselessly from its dwelling in the dust--though still with that
fulness or heaviness in the brow, as of sleepy people, which, in the
delicate gradations of Greek sculpture, distinguish the infernal
deities from their Olympian kindred. The object placed in the hand
may be, perhaps, a stiff, archaic flower, but is probably the partly
consumed pomegranate--one morsel gone; the most usual emblem of
Persephone being this mystical fruit, which, because of the multitude
of its seeds, was to the Romans a symbol of fecundity, and was sold
at the doors of the temple of Ceres, that the women might offer it
there, and bear numerous children; and so, to the middle age, became
a symbol of the fruitful earth itself; and then of that other seed
sown in the dark under-world; and at last of that whole hidden
region, so thickly sown, which Dante visited, Michelino painting him,
[151] in the Duomo of Florence, with this fruit in his hand, and
Botticelli putting it into the childish hands of Him, who, if men "go
down into hell, is there also."

There is an attractiveness in these goddesses of the earth, akin to
the influence of cool places, quiet houses, subdued light,
tranquillising voices. What is there in this phase of ancient
religion for us, at the present day? The myth of Demeter and
Persephone, then, illustrates the power of the Greek religion as a
religion of pure ideas--of conceptions, which having no link on
historical fact, yet, because they arose naturally out of the spirit
of man, and embodied, in adequate symbols, his deepest thoughts
concerning the conditions of his physical and spiritual life,
maintained their hold through many changes, and are still not without
a solemnising power even for the modern mind, which has once admitted
them as recognised and habitual inhabitants; and, abiding thus for
the elevation and purifying of our sentiments, long after the earlier
and simpler races of their worshippers have passed away, they may be
a pledge to us of the place in our culture, at once legitimate and
possible, of the associations, the conceptions, the imagery, of Greek
religious poetry in general, of the poetry of all religions.

NOTES

117. +Transliteration: kalykopis. Liddell and Scott definition:
"Like a flower-bud, blushing, roseate."

118. +Transliteration: charis. Liddell and Scott definition:
"favour, grace ... loveliness."

118. +Transliteration: theai semnai. Translation: "august
goddesses."

124. *The great Greek myths are, in truth, like abstract forces,
which ally themselves to various conditions.

129. +Transliteration: kore arretos. Translation: "Kore the
mysterious, the horrible." Another meaning of arretos, as Pater
points out, is "unsaid, not to be spoken."

136. *With this may be connected another passage of Ovid--
Metamorphoses, v. 391-408.

138. *On these small objects the mother and daughter are hard to
distinguish, the latter being recognisable only by a greater delicacy
in the features and the more evident stamp of youth.

140. *A History of Discoveries at Halicarnassus, Cnidus, and
Branchidae.

141. +Transliteration: hoi theoi para Damatri. Pater's translation:
"the gods with Demeter."

143. +Transliteration: katadesmoi. Liddell and Scott definition: "a
tie or band: a magic knot, love-knot."

145. +Transliteration: Deo. Liddell and Scott definition: the verb
deo means "I shall find," while the proper noun refers to Demeter.

147. +Transliteration: petra agelastos. Translation: "sullen rock."

147. *Pallere ligustra, / Exspirare rosas, decrescere lilia vidi.



HIPPOLYTUS VEILED: A STUDY FROM EURIPIDES

[152] CENTURIES of zealous archaeology notwithstanding, many phases
of the so varied Greek genius are recorded for the modern student in
a kind of shorthand only, or not at all. Even for Pausanias,
visiting Greece before its direct part in affairs was quite played
out, much had perished or grown dim--of its art, of the truth of its
outward history, above all of its religion as a credible or
practicable thing. And yet Pausanias visits Greece under
conditions as favourable for observation as those under which later
travellers, Addison or Eustace, proceed to Italy. For him the
impress of life in those old Greek cities is not less vivid and
entire than that of medieval Italy to ourselves; at Siena, for
instance, with its ancient palaces still in occupation, its public
edifices as serviceable as if the old republic had but just now
vacated them, the tradition of their primitive worship still unbroken
in its churches. Had the opportunities in which Pausanias was [153]
fortunate been ours, how many haunts of the antique Greek life
unnoticed by him we should have peeped into, minutely systematic in
our painstaking! how many a view would broaden out where he notes
hardly anything at all on his map of Greece!

One of the most curious phases of Greek civilisation which has thus
perished for us, and regarding which, as we may fancy, we should have
made better use of that old traveller's facilities, is the early
Attic deme-life--its picturesque, intensely localised variety, in the
hollow or on the spur of mountain or sea-shore; and with it many a
relic of primitive religion, many an early growth of art parallel to
what Vasari records of artistic beginnings in the smaller cities of
Italy. Colonus and Acharnae, surviving still so vividly by the magic
of Sophocles, of Aristophanes, are but isolated examples of a
widespread manner of life, in which, amid many provincial
peculiarities, the first, yet perhaps the most costly and telling
steps were made in all the various departments of Greek culture.
Even in the days of Pausanias, Piraeus was still traceable as a
distinct township, once the possible rival of Athens, with its little
old covered market by the seaside, and the symbolical picture of the
place, its Genius, visible on the wall. And that is but the type of
what there had been to know of threescore and more village
communities, each having its own altars, its special worship and
[154] place of civic assembly, its trade and crafts, its name drawn
from physical peculiarity or famous incident, its body of heroic
tradition. Lingering on while Athens, the great deme, gradually
absorbed into itself more and more of their achievements, and passing
away almost completely as political factors in the Peloponnesian war,
they were still felt, we can hardly doubt, in the actual physiognomy
of Greece. That variety in unity, which its singular geographical
formation secured to Greece as a whole, was at its utmost in these
minute reflexions of the national character, with all the relish
of local difference--new art, new poetry, fresh ventures in political
combination, in the conception of life, springing as if straight from
the soil, like the thorn-blossom of early spring in magic lines over
all that rocky land. On the other hand, it was just here that
ancient habits clung most tenaciously--that old-fashioned, homely,
delightful existence, to which the refugee, pent up in Athens in the
years of the Peloponnesian war, looked back so fondly. If the
impression of Greece generally is but enhanced by the littleness of
the physical scene of events intellectually so great--such a system
of grand lines, restrained within so narrow a compass, as in one of
its fine coins--still more would this be true of those centres of
country life. Here, certainly, was that assertion of seemingly small
interests, which brings into free play, and gives his utmost value
[155] to, the individual; making his warfare, equally with his more
peaceful rivalries, deme against deme, the mountain against the
plain, the sea-shore, (as in our own old Border life, but played out
here by wonderfully gifted people) tangible as a personal history, to
the doubling of its fascination for those whose business is with the
survey of the dramatic side of life.

As with civil matters, so it was also, we may fairly suppose, with
religion; the deme-life was a manifestation of religious custom and
sentiment, in all their primitive local variety. As Athens,
gradually drawing into itself the various elements of provincial
culture, developed, with authority, the central religious position,
the demes-men did but add the worship of Athene Polias, the goddess
of the capital, to their own pre-existent ritual uses. Of local and
central religion alike, time and circumstance had obliterated much
when Pausanias came. A devout spirit, with religion for his chief
interest, eager for the trace of a divine footstep, anxious even in
the days of Lucian to deal seriously with what had counted for so
much to serious men, he has, indeed, to lament that "Pan is dead":--
"They come no longer!"--"These things happen no longer!" But the
Greek--his very name also, Hellen, was the title of a priesthood--had
been religious abundantly, sanctifying every detail of his actual
life with the religious idea; and as Pausanias goes on his way he
finds many a remnant of that [156] earlier estate of religion, when,
as he fancied, it had been nearer the gods, as it was certainly
nearer the earth. It is marked, even in decay, with varieties of
place; and is not only continuous but in situ. At Phigaleia he
makes his offerings to Demeter, agreeably to the paternal rites of
the inhabitants, wax, fruit, undressed wool "still full of the sordes
of the sheep." A dream from heaven cuts short his notice of the
mysteries of Eleusis. He sees the stone, "big enough for a little
man," on which Silenus was used to sit and rest; at Athens, the
tombs of the Amazons, of the purple-haired Nisus, of Deucalion;--"it
is a manifest token that he had dwelt there." The worshippers of
Poseidon, even at his temple among the hills, might still feel the
earth fluctuating beneath their feet. And in care for divine things,
he tells us, the Athenians outdid all other Greeks. Even in the days
of Nero it revealed itself oddly; and it is natural to suppose that
of this temper the demes, as the proper home of conservatism, were
exceptionally expressive. Scattered in those remote, romantic
villages, among their olives or sea-weeds, lay the heroic graves, the
relics, the sacred images, often rude enough amid the delicate
tribute of later art; this too oftentimes finding in such retirement
its best inspirations, as in some Attic Fiesole. Like a network over
the land of gracious poetic tradition, as also of undisturbed
ceremonial usage surviving late for those who cared to seek it, the
[157] local religions had been never wholly superseded by the worship
of the great national temples. They were, in truth, the most
characteristic developments of a faith essentially earth-born or
indigenous.

And how often must the student of fine art, again, wish he had the
same sort of knowledge about its earlier growth in Greece, that he
actually possesses in the case of Italian art! Given any development
at all in this matter, there must have been phases of art, which, if
immature, were also veritable expressions of power to come,
intermediate discoveries of beauty, such as are by no means a mere
anticipation, and of service only as explaining historically larger
subsequent achievements, but of permanent attractiveness in
themselves, being often, indeed, the true maturity of certain amiable
artistic qualities. And in regard to Greek art at its best--the
Parthenon--no less than to the art of the Renaissance at its best--
the Sistine Chapel--the more instructive light would be derived
rather from what precedes than what follows such central success,
from the determination to apprehend the fulfilment of past effort
rather than the eve of decline, in the critical, central moment which
partakes of both. Of such early promise, early achievement, we have
in the case of Greek art little to compare with what is extant of the
youth of the arts in Italy. Overbeck's careful gleanings of its
history form indeed [158] a sorry relic as contrasted with Vasari's
intimations of the beginnings of the Renaissance. Fired by certain
fragments of its earlier days, of a beauty, in truth, absolute, and
vainly longing for more, the student of Greek sculpture indulges the
thought of an ideal of youthful energy therein, yet withal of
youthful self-restraint; and again, as with survivals of old
religion, the privileged home, he fancies, of that ideal must have
been in those venerable Attic townships, as to a large extent it
passed away with them.

The budding of new art, the survival of old religion, at isolated
centres of provincial life, where varieties of human character also
were keen, abundant, asserted in correspondingly effective incident--
this is what irresistible fancy superinduces on historic details,
themselves meagre enough. The sentiment of antiquity is indeed a
characteristic of all cultivated people, even in what may seem the
freshest ages, and not exclusively a humour of our later world. In
the earliest notices about them, as we know, the people of Attica
appear already impressed by the immense antiquity of their occupation
of its soil, of which they claim to be the very first flower. Some
at least of those old demes-men we may well fancy sentimentally
reluctant to change their habits, fearful of losing too much of
themselves in the larger stream of life, clinging to what is
antiquated as the work of centralisation goes on, needful as that
work was, [159] with the great "Eastern difficulty" already ever in
the distance. The fear of Asia, barbaric, splendid, hardly known,
yet haunting the curious imagination of those who had borrowed thence
the art in which they were rapidly excelling it, developing, as we
now see, in the interest of Greek humanity, crafts begotten of
tyrannic and illiberal luxury, was finally to suppress the rivalries
of those primitive centres of activity, when the "invincible armada"
of the common foe came into sight.

At a later period civil strife was to destroy their last traces. The
old hoplite, from Rhamnus or Acharnae, pent up in beleaguered Athens
during that first summer of the Peloponnesian war, occupying with his
household a turret of the wall, as Thucydides describes--one of many
picturesque touches in that severe historian--could well remember the
ancient provincial life which this conflict with Sparta was bringing
to an end. He could recall his boyish, half-scared curiosity
concerning those Persian ships, coming first as merchantmen, or with
pirates on occasion, in the half-savage, wicked splendours of their
decoration, the monstrous figure-heads, their glittering freightage.
Men would hardly have trusted their women or children with that
suspicious crew, hovering through the dusk. There were soothsayers,
indeed, who had long foretold what happened soon after, giving shape
to vague, supernatural terrors. And then he had crept [160] from his
hiding-place with other lads to go view the enemies' slain at
Marathon, beside those belated Spartans, this new war with whom
seemed to be reviving the fierce local feuds of his younger days.
Paraloi and Diacrioi had ever been rivals. Very distant it all
seemed now, with all the stories he could tell; for in those
crumbling little towns, as heroic life had lingered on into the
actual, so, at an earlier date, the supernatural into the heroic.
Like mist at dawn, the last traces of its divine visitors had then
vanished from the land, where, however, they had already begotten
"our best and oldest families."

It was Theseus, uncompromising young master of the situation, in
fearless application of "the modern spirit" of his day to every phase
of life where it was applicable, who, at the expense of Attica, had
given Athens a people, reluctant enough, in truth, as Plutarch
suggests, to desert "their homes and religious usages and many good
and gracious kings of their own" for this elect youth, who thus
figures, passably, as a kind of mythic shorthand for civilisation,
making roads and the like, facilitating travel, suppressing various
forms of violence, but many innocent things as well. So it must
needs be in a world where, even hand in hand with a god-assisted
hero, Justice goes blindfold. He slays the bull of Marathon and many
another local tyrant, but also exterminates that delightful creature,
the Centaur. The Amazon, whom Plato will [161] reinstate as the type
of improved womanhood, has no better luck than Phaea, the sow-pig of
Crommyon, foul old landed-proprietress. They exerted, however, the
prerogative of poetic protest, and survive thereby. Centaur and
Amazon, as we see them in the fine art of Greece, represent the
regret of Athenians themselves for something that could never be
brought to life again, and have their pathos. Those young heroes
contending with Amazons on the frieze of the Mausoleum had best make
haste with their bloody work, if young people's eyes can tell a true
story. A type still of progress triumphant through injustice, set on
improving things off the face of the earth, Theseus took occasion to
attack the Amazons in their mountain home, not long after their
ruinous conflict with Hercules, and hit them when they were down.
That greater bully had laboured off on the world's highway, carrying
with him the official girdle of Antiope, their queen, gift of Ares,
and therewith, it would seem, the mystic secret of their strength.
At sight of this new foe, at any rate, she came to a strange
submission. The savage virgin had turned to very woman, and was
presently a willing slave, returning on the gaily appointed ship in
all haste to Athens, where in supposed wedlock she bore King Theseus
a son.

With their annual visit--visit to the Gargareans!--for the purpose of
maintaining their [162] species, parting with their boys early, these
husbandless women could hardly be supposed a very happy, certainly
not a very joyous people. They figure rather as a sorry measure of
the luck of the female sex in taking a hard natural law into their
own hands, and by abnegation of all tender companionship making shift
with bare independence, as a kind of second-best--the best
practicable by them in the imperfect actual condition of things. But
the heart-strings would ache still where the breast had been cut
away. The sisters of Antiope had come, not immediately, but in
careful array of battle, to bring back the captive. All along the
weary roads from the Caucasus to Attica, their traces had remained in
the great graves of those who died by the way. Against the little
remnant, carrying on the fight to the very midst of Athens, Antiope
herself had turned, all other thoughts transformed now into wild
idolatry of her hero. Superstitious, or in real regret, the
Athenians never forgot their tombs. As for Antiope, the conscience
of her perfidy remained with her, adding the pang of remorse to her
own desertion, when King Theseus, with his accustomed bad faith to
women, set her, too, aside in turn. Phaedra, the true wife, was
there, peeping suspiciously at her arrival; and even as Antiope
yielded to her lord's embraces the thought had come that a male child
might be the instrument of her anger, and one day judge her cause.

[163] In one of these doomed, decaying villages, then, King Theseus
placed the woman and her babe, hidden, yet secure, within the Attic
border, as men veil their mistakes or crimes. They might pass away,
they and their story, together with the memory of other antiquated
creatures of such places, who had had connubial dealings with the
stars. The white, paved waggon-track, a by-path of the sacred way to
Eleusis, zigzagged through sloping olive-yards, from the plain of
silvered blue, with Athens building in the distance, and passed the
door of the rude stone house, furnished scantily, which no one had
ventured to inhabit of late years till they came there. On the
ledges of the grey cliffs above, the laurel groves, stem and foliage
of motionless bronze, had spread their tents. Travellers bound
northwards were glad to repose themselves there, and take directions,
or provision for their journey onwards, from the highland people, who
came down hither to sell their honey, their cheese, and woollen
stuff, in the tiny market-place. At dawn the great stars seemed to
halt a while, burning as if for sacrifice to some pure deity, on
those distant, obscurely named heights, like broken swords, the rim
of the world. A little later you could just see the newly opened
quarries, like streaks of snow on their russet-brown bosoms. Thither
in spring-time all eyes turned from Athens devoutly, intent till the
first shaft of lightning gave signal for the departure of the [164]
sacred ship to Delos. Racing over those rocky surfaces, the virgin
air descended hither with the secret of profound sleep, as the child
lay in its cubicle hewn in the stone, the white fleeces heaped warmly
round him. In the wild Amazon's soul, to her surprise, and at first
against her will, the maternal sense had quickened from the moment of
his conception, and (that burst of angry tears with which she had
received him into the world once dried up), kindling more eagerly at
every token of manly growth, had at length driven out every other
feeling. And this animal sentiment, educating the human hand and
heart in her, had become a moral one, when, King Theseus leaving her
in anger, visibly unkind, the child had crept to her side, and
tracing with small fingers the wrinkled lines of her woebegone brow,
carved there as if by a thousand years of sorrow, had sown between
himself and her the seed of an undying sympathy.

She was thus already on the watch for a host of minute recognitions
on his part, of the self-sacrifice involved in her devotion to a
career of which she must needs drain out the sorrow, careful that he
might taste only the joy. So far, amid their spare living, the
child, as if looking up to the warm broad wing of her love above him,
seemed replete with comfort. Yet in his moments of childish
sickness, the first passing shadows upon the deep joy of her
motherhood, she teaches him betimes to soothe [165] or cheat pain--
little bodily pains only, hitherto. She ventures sadly to assure him
of the harsh necessities of life: "Courage, child! Every one must
take his share of suffering. Shift not thy body so vehemently.
Pain, taken quietly, is easier to bear."

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