III RELIGION IN THE POETS OF THE SIXTH AND FIFTH CENTURIES B.C.

In the preceding lecture we considered together various manifestations of the mystic tendencies which developed in Greece during the seventh and sixth centuries b.c. Now we must turn back and ask what evidence we have from the poets of these centuries as to the course of morality and religion. To the epic poetry of Homer and the didactic verse of Hesiod succeeded the elegiac, iambic, and melic poets. The individualism of the age, the spirit of reflection, political changes, personal ambitions and passions are all mirrored in their verses. When we summon them as witnesses to their day, we must remember that the evidence they can offer is only incidental and frequently partial; that it reflects the temper of the audience as well as the views of the poet. In this fact, indeed, lies our chief warrant for consulting them, for while poets may be leaders in thought far in advance of their time, a contemporary hearing is secured by them only when their hearers sympathize with the ideas which they express. Again it must be borne in mind that we have for the most part only fragments of the poetry of this time, preserved by quotations, and that we cannot therefore form adequate judgments of the whole.

When, however, we examine the scanty remains that we possess, we find that on the whole there is little evidence of progress in morality and religion beyond Homer and Hesiod. The concepts of the gods are essentially the Homeric, except that Zeus plays a larger part in the divine economy than in Homer. In the Iliad and Odyssey, as we have seen, he is often thwarted and outwitted by the other gods, some of whom seem at times almost on an equality with him. But in the poets of the seventh and sixth centuries the will of Zeus is unquestionably supreme. No god hopes to oppose him successfully; all the rest play minor rôles. Indeed, it is not too much to say that we have here a developed sense of unity in the world, although the poets of this time did not by any means reach the position of the philosophers or attain to any real pantheism. Yet an advance is made: not only is Zeus supreme, but Zeus and Fate are now more closely identified, so that there is no conflict between them, such as we noticed in the Homeric poems.

Of all the poetry that has been preserved to us from the sixth century the elegiac verses which have been handed down under the name of Theognis show most reflection. The poet himself was an aristocrat of Megara, who about the middle of the century was driven into exile by the violent struggles between the aristocratic and the democratic parties. Much of the verse which we have is addressed to a youth, Cyrnus, and is of a didactic or gnomic character. The poet undertakes to teach his young friend conduct in life, so that the verses consist largely of rules for living adapted to various situations and of a universal nature. Although it is probably true that much of what passes under the name of Theognis was not written by him, on the whole the tenor of the verses is such that we may use them with a good deal of confidence to illustrate the thought and the spirit of his age. Xenophon in commenting on this poet but slightly exaggerated the truth when he said that he was concerned with nothing else but virtue and wickedness, and that his poetry is a treatise on man, just as if a horse-fancier should write a treatise on horses.[96]

Theognis, like Homer, teaches that it is from the gods that all things come, both good and evil. He declares that no mortal man can be either wealthy or poor, base or good, apart from divinity. He bids his young friend pray to the gods, for they have all power and without them are no blessings or misfortunes to men.[97] A similar view is expressed by Simonides who insists that no one, neither state nor mortal man, has ever attained to virtue without the gods;[98] likewise by Archilochus, who in verses, imitated by Horace centuries later, exhorts his hearer to trust fully to the gods, and reminds him that oftentimes the gods set upright men who as a result of misfortune are prostrate on the black earth, and oftentimes they overthrow those who are very prosperous.[99] And again he declares that from Zeus come all things to mortals, and that no one should be surprised at any marvel which Zeus brings to pass.[100] In fact, from Homer on, the poets regard Zeus and the other gods as the source of all things, both good and evil. It is only later that the doctrine of man’s complete responsibility for his sin supplants this earlier view.

It was natural that Theognis and his contemporaries should regard the lot of man with a pessimism exceeding that of Homer. As they looked about them they saw evil everywhere, the good afflicted, the wicked prosperous. They were oppressed by the weakness of humanity, so that their verses with regard to man and his lot are gloomy indeed—so much so that in one passage Theognis declares that in reality no mortal man on whom the sun shines is truly happy. Again he holds that man can have no foresight into the future, for it is hardest of all, he says, to learn the end of a thing as yet unaccomplished, to know how god will bring that to pass; a mist is stretched before men’s eyes, and there is no way for mortals to test and try the outcome of the future.[101] The poet feels a deep despair, when he reflects that no knowledge or foresight for mortals is possible, but the gods accomplish everything according to their will; and because there is little hope of implanting virtue in men, then it were better not to be born at all and never to have seen the bright rays of the sun. But since this may not be, then he is most fortunate who enters Hades most quickly, and has a high mound of earth heaped over him.[102] Still there are other passages which show that man’s case was not considered wholly hopeless. There is an appeal to self-pride, an expression of the view that poverty is the test of a man, that has a tonic sound. The poet says that poverty reveals the worthless man and the superior whenever need of money comes on them, for the mind of the good man, whose thought is ever upright in his heart, thinks only of justice.[103] In another place he assures his young friend that the good man ever has his wit with him, and his courage, whether he be in adversity or in good fortune. But if a god gives abundance and riches to a base creature, then he in his folly cannot restrain his baseness.[104] Again the poet exhorts his own soul: “Endure, my soul, although thou hast suffered unendurable things at the hands of the wicked”; he bids it not be distressed or angry over misfortune and disaster, nor to blame friends or cheer enemies by failure: “For mortal man may not easily escape the fated gifts of the gods, though he dive into the very depth of the purple sea, or even when the dark shadow of Tartarus holds him.”[105] Thus we see that the poet, in spite of his pessimism and of his realization of the hardship and injustice in the world, still urged his young friend to face it in the same spirit in which the later Stoics like Marcus Aurelius exhorted themselves to endure.

Although in the world as seen by the poets of the sixth century Zeus is supreme and the gods are the source of all things for mortals, their rule nevertheless is based on justice, which the gods love and which is their chief attribute. Opposed to justice is insolence (ὓβρις), which they detest and which they wish to punish. Archilochus addresses Father Zeus, declaring that his is the rule of heaven, and that he oversees all the works of man, both those which are base and those which are lawful, and has a care even for insolence and justice among wild beasts.[106] The statesman Solon assures the Athenians that their city will never come to ruin contrary to the will and intention of Zeus and the immortal gods; that ruin only can be brought upon the city by the citizens themselves, by the unjust spirit of the leaders of the people, whose mighty insolence will bring great suffering upon them. Like Aeschylus Solon believes and teaches that insolence must fail in the end and that Justice, who in silence knows all things both present and future, will recompense completely in due season.[107] In another passage Solon dwells on the fact that the riches which are sought with insolence bring doom quickly, and in striking verses compares the beginning of destruction with the spark which springs from a little fire, slight at first, but finally consuming all; even so are the results of insolence that fall upon mortals; for Zeus sees the end of all things: as the wind suddenly in the springtime quickly scatters the clouds, stirs up the sea, and works destruction over the grainbearing earth, reaching to very heaven, the steep home of the gods, and makes the bright sky appear again, and the brilliant sun shine far over the rich earth, so that there are no longer any clouds to be seen; even so is the vengeance that comes from Zeus. Zeus is not quick to anger over each fault like mortal man, but whoever has a wicked heart never escapes his notice, but in the end is utterly destroyed.[108] It would be possible to cite similar passages from other poets which show a deepening of that sense of the inevitableness of punishment which was first expressed in Hesiod.

Yet the problems of evil and of the justice of the gods were not satisfactorily solved for Theognis and his contemporaries. In two striking passages he criticizes Zeus, saying first: “Dear Zeus, I wonder at thee, for thou rulest over all things, having thrice great honor and great power, and thou knowest well the mind and will of each man, and thy own power is supreme over all, O King. How is it, then, son of Cronos, that thy mind endures to keep wicked men and the just subject to the same lot? Whether the mind of the one be turned to prudence or of the other, who trusts in unjust action, to insolence, there is no distinction made by god or mortals; nor is there any road which one may travel and please the gods.”[109] In the second passage his reproach is the keener from the form of its expression: “Father Zeus, would that it might be the will of the gods that insolence be the pleasure of the wicked, and would that it might be their pleasure, that whoever contriveth wicked deeds in heart and thought, having no regard for the gods, should pay for his wickedness himself; and the folly of the father not harm the children thereafter; and would that the children of an unjust father, who themselves have just purposes and regard for thy wrath, Son of Cronos, they who from childhood love justice along with their fellow citizens, might not pay for the insolence of their sires. I would that such might be the will of the blessed gods. But as it is, the man who does evil escapes, and another then bears the evil. How then is this just, King of the Immortals, that a man who has no part in unjust deeds should himself be treated unjustly?”[110] Here we have not only a recognition of the fact that the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children even to the third and fourth generations—a truth which Solon had earlier enunciated,[111] —but also a protest against the injustice of it.

These are some of the conflicting expressions on morality, justice, and religion, which we find among the fragments of these early poets. The contradictions which they show need not surprise us, for we are drawing, as I have already said, from mere fragments written on various themes and for different occasions; so the record is inevitably imperfect. Nor must we suppose that the poets of this time had arrived at any clearer conceptions with regard to these fundamental questions than thinkers of a later age; the problem of evil, the justice of the divine economy, the prosperity of the wicked and the sufferings of the good are matters which still baffle men as they did more than twenty-five centuries ago.

But let us now turn to the poets of the fifth century, above all to Pindar, Aeschylus, and Sophocles, of whose works we have considerable portions. These were poets whose position and genius made them the truest witnesses to the highest thoughts of Greece, and especially of Athens in that glorious period of her supremacy from the time of the Persian Wars through the Periclean age. The poetry of Pindar and of the tragedians was by its very nature connected with the service of the gods. The former wrote his odes to the victors who had won renown at the great national festivals of Zeus, Apollo, and Poseidon, or composed his hymns and paeans in honor of the divinities. The tragedians produced their plays for performance at the great festival of Dionysus. And yet we must be cautious here, as everywhere, since we are not always justified in attributing to the poet the sentiments which he puts into the mouths of his speakers. The tragedian’s purpose was first of all artistic. While it is true that his own beliefs inevitably colored and tempered his work, still he never became a preacher. He dealt with traditional material, which he might modify somewhat, but in large measure his themes were determined for him. Yet there are many passages both in choral songs and in single speeches which certainly reflect the poet’s own thought or his interpretation of the views held by his audience. The very strength of personality which Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides possessed made it impossible that they should not voice their own conceptions, and that too without violence to their poetic purpose. Pindar’s work lay in different fields, but he no less than the tragedians helped to interpret and mould the moral and religious sentiments of his audience.

Pindar was born about 522 b.c. of a noble family near Thebes in Boeotia; but he belonged to all Greece. He wrote in the first half of the fifth century when the influence of the preceding century was still strong upon men’s minds, and he also shared the great stimulus which their country’s victory over the Persians imparted to the Greeks. Of his personal devotion to the gods we have abundant evidence. He spent a part of his fortune in dedications at Thebes. There in the second century of our era the traveller Pausanias saw three statues which the poet had set up, one in honor of Apollo, another to Hermes, and a third, by the famous sculptor Calamis, which stood in the shrine of Zeus Ammon. To the Asiatic Cybele and to the new Arcadian Pan Pindar erected a shrine before his own door; there, as he himself tells us, the Theban maidens came by night and sang their hymns.[112]

Pindar shows throughout the pervasive influence of Homer, both in his conception of the gods and in his style as well. He makes no break with the Homeric anthropomorphism, and his divinities are subject to the needs and desires of mortals; but his concept is a noble one, for his gods are mighty and permanent, while men are transitory and weak: “One is the race of men and of gods; from one mother we have the breath of life. Yet in power we are wholly diverse: for man is nothing, but the brazen heaven abides, a home ever unshaken. Still we resemble somewhat the immortals either in lofty mind or in nature; yet we know not in the day or in the night what course fate has marked out for us to run.”[113]

The power and the knowledge of the gods are in fact complete and perfect; they are not the limited creatures of the Homeric pantheon. With them resides all power, so that they easily bring things to pass beyond man’s expectation. Their might may cause man’s wonder, but “nothing ever appears to be incredible”;[114] and in his second Pythian Ode the poet writes: “God bringeth every end to pass according to his desires. He overtaketh even the winged eagle and passeth the dolphin in the sea; and he bringeth low many a proud man, granting to others glory that grows not old.”[115] And in the ninth Pythian Ode he addresses Apollo thus: “Thou who knowest the final destiny of all things and all the paths thereto; all the leaves that the earth sends up in the spring, and all the sands whirled by the waves in sea and rivers and by the blasts of the winds; thou seest well the future and whence it shall come to pass.”[116]

Pindar’s gods are thus all-wise and all-powerful. At times he shows a certain tendency toward pantheism, for he speaks of god or divinity in a general sense, as if his mind conceived the divine nature to be one, so that the divinities were no longer several gods, but, as it were, bound together in a common divine unity. But we must not deceive ourselves into thinking that this pantheistic tendency was at all clearly developed in Pindar, or that he broke with polytheism. Rather he seems to have conceived of divinity as something which presents itself in many persons, the varied gods of the traditional pantheon. If we accept as genuine the fragment preserved by Clement of Alexandria,[117] in which the poet asks, “What is God?” and answers “The all,” we can hardly think that this pantheistic definition means more than the universal cause; unless indeed it resulted from the Orphic pantheism. But whatever Pindar’s views as to the unity of the divine, his teachings as to the gods’ power are clear. He warns men that they cannot hope to avoid the gods’ watchful eyes: “For if man expects to escape god’s notice when he does aught, he is mistaken.”[118] Moreover, Pindar teaches that the gods, though the givers of both good and evil to men, like Homer’s divinities, are nevertheless just and truthful beings who reward the righteous and reverent and punish the wicked: “The bliss of men who feel reverence lives longer, but he who associates with wicked purposes prospers not forever.”[119]

Truth also belongs to god: indeed she is “the daughter of Zeus”, “the foundation of virtue.” Of Apollo it is said that he “lays not hold of lies.”[120] Here is a great advance over Homer’s ideas of the godhead. Pindar’s attitude in this respect is not dissimilar to that of Hesiod, who, as we have seen, first gave poetic expression to the idea that justice is an attribute and handmaid of Zeus.

Consonant with these higher views of divinity is Pindar’s treatment of the myths. The grosser elements he leaves aside as being unworthy of the gods. At times he openly protests, as for example in the first Olympian Ode where he declares that he will not treat the story of Pelops in the traditional way, which made Tantalus offer his son’s flesh at a dinner given the immortals: “I will speak differently from those who have gone before. I may not call any one of the blessed gods a cannibal.”[121] This revolt against the current forms of myths was due in part to his belief in the moral perfection of divinity, in part to his moral sense concerning man. His rule was, as laid down by himself, that man should say only good things of the gods, and he shrank from attributing to the divinities things which it would be base for men to do. So in his fifth Nemean Ode he was unwilling to tell of the fratricide of the heroes Peleus and Telamon, but broke off his narrative abruptly, just as he rejected with indignation the shameful tales told of Tantalus. Furthermore Pindar subjected the myths and religious beliefs with which he had to deal to the test of reason; among the several versions which he found current he recognized that some must be false, and so he endeavored to separate the good from the evil, to control the traditions of his people, and thus to practise a free criticism in his work.

On the nature of sin Pindar, as the Greeks in general, holds that whenever man passes the bounds appointed between a mortal and a god, or between man and his fellowmen, he becomes thereby a sinner. Excess is the form of sin which he makes repeatedly his theme. When he praises Lampon of Aegina for “pursuing the mean with his thought and maintaining it in his acts,”[122] he is recalling the principle laid down in Hesiod’s verse, which had passed long since into a proverb: “Keep a middle course; the seasonable in all things is best.”[123]

Again and again in varied forms he warns us to remember that man is mortal: “If one prosper and enjoy a good name, still seek not to become Zeus. Thou hast all, if ever perchance the fate to possess these honors should come to thee. Mortal things befit a mortal.”[124] And again he says: “But if a man shall have wealth and excel other men in beauty, and if in the games he hath exhibited his strength and gained distinction, let him still remember that his garment wraps mortal limbs and that earth shall be the raiment of all in the end.”[125] Sin then is presumption, and as such is punished by the gods. That “envy of the gods,” which seems in Homer almost a childish resentment, is thus given an ethical value which coincides very closely with Aeschylus’ interpretation of this belief. The moral character of Pindar’s form of this doctrine is secured in part by the poet’s apparent belief that man is a free moral agent. The sinner sometimes, like Ixion, might not be able to endure prosperity, and so fall into insolent pride, and thence into blind infatuation. In like fashion Bacchylides teaches that the giants were destroyed by insolent pride, whereas the path to happiness is open to all who will follow justice: “Warriors of Troy, Zeus, who rules on high and beholds all things, is not the author of grievous woes for mortals; no, open before all men is the path that leads to unswerving Justice, attendant of holy Eunomia and prudent Themis: happy the land whose sons take her to dwell with them. But insolence—the spirit void of reverence, who luxuriates in shifty wiles and illicit follies—who swiftly gives a man his neighbor’s wealth and power, but anon plunges him into a gulf of ruin—she it was who destroyed the Giants, overweening.”[126]

On the question of man’s freedom Pindar is not entirely clear. And yet he seems to hold that man, and not some god, is responsible for his initial wrongdoing. But he also points out that when man has once given way to that insolent pride, which is presumptuous sin, then the gods in punishing him may drive him on his wrong course until the man is utterly ruined. This doctrine appears more clearly in Aeschylus.

When we come to Pindar’s view of the life after death, we find that he has a more exalted vision than the poets of an earlier day. The ideas of immortality, of future rewards and punishments, of rebirth, and of a possible final bliss, which were current from the early sixth century at least, had not failed to have their effect on our poet. In a remarkable fragment he sets forth a doctrine as to the relation of body and soul which is very similar to that held by the Orphics, under whose influence he had evidently come: “The bodies of all men follow all-conquering death; but life’s image still liveth on, for that only is from the gods. It sleeps when the limbs are active, but ofttimes in dreams it shows to the sleeper coming judgment, a judgment of peace and pain.”[127] That is, when the body is awake it hampers the soul so that the soul is numbed in sleep; but when the soul is free from the domination of the imprisoning flesh, it then enjoys its proper powers. There is a famous passage in the second Olympian which sets forth Pindar’s views of future reward and punishment. According to this passage, sins committed on the earth are punished beneath the earth, and those done beneath the earth are punished in the soul’s next reincarnation. So heaven and hell are always present to man’s soul, whether here in the light of the sun, or in the darkness of Hades. Those from whom atonement is accepted in the lower world are allowed to return to the earth in high positions; when they have accomplished this rebirth thrice, if they have been just, they may enter into their final happiness. These are Pindar’s words: “The guilty souls of the dead straightway pay the penalty here on earth; and the sins done in this kingdom of Zeus are judged by one beneath the ground, who delivereth his judgment to hateful necessity. But ever in the night and in the day alike the good receive as their lot a life free from toil, enjoying the light of the sun. They vex neither the ground nor the water of the sea for food that does not satisfy, but among the honored gods, those who have found their pleasure in keeping their oaths, enjoy a life free from tears; but the others bear suffering too great to look upon. Yet all those who have tarried thrice on either side (of death) and have persevered in keeping their souls wholly free from unjust deeds, travel the road of Zeus to the tower of Cronos. There the ocean breezes blow around the islands of the blest, golden flowers bloom, some from glorious trees on the land, others water feeds. With garlands the blest entwine their hands and crown their temples.”[128]

We need not pause here to point out in detail the great contrast between Pindar’s ideas of religion and those expressed in the Homeric and Hesiodic poetry. He presented a higher doctrine of future rewards and punishments, which was binding upon men in all the relations of this life; and he expressed a higher conception of morality and of justice, to whose obligations the gods as well as men were subject. The baser elements of mythology he refined away and elevated thereby men’s ideas of the divine; and by making righteousness and truth the prime attributes of the gods, in accordance with which they punished the wicked and blessed the good, he lifted morality and religion to a nobler plane.

When we turn to the two older tragic poets, Aeschylus and Sophocles, we find that they teach doctrines very like those of Pindar, although naturally they dwell on those elements in religion and morality that are adapted to their tragic themes; and they differ between themselves in the points which they emphasize. Aeschylus makes prominent the punitive aspect of divine justice; he dwells upon the punishment which must inevitably follow sin, and which pursues a guilty line from generation to generation. The poet displays a moral earnestness and intensity like that of a Hebrew prophet, and he shows an extraordinary profundity in his handling of moral and religious themes; furthermore he is consciously a religious teacher. Sophocles keeps religion more in the background, using it as one of the materials which he as a literary artist can employ in his dramas; yet he is important as a religious poet for he lays especial stress on the necessity of purity of heart, which for him is the substance of piety toward the gods.

The elder tragedian, Aeschylus, was born at Eleusis about the year 525 b.c. Tradition told that he fought in the Persian wars and was wounded at Marathon. He began to present tragedies about the year 500, and continued to produce them until about three years before his death in 456. Aeschylus was a man of mighty concepts and massive thought, to which his condensed and pregnant style corresponds; a man of a profound and religious nature, strongly influenced by the Mysteries, he thought deeply upon the problems of men and of gods. He faced with honesty the contradictions involved in the current notions with regard to the moral nature of the gods, and in the ethical standards of men. Like Pindar he elevated and refined the traditional myths and made them a medium for the teaching of great moral truths.

Aeschylus regards the order of the universe as moral throughout. This view appears even in the Prometheus Bound, that unique drama of revolt. When we now read this tragedy alone, it seems as if Zeus were represented as a lawless tyrant, using his power and might in most unjust ways. But it is evident that if we had the other two plays of the trilogy, the sympathy which we feel with the Titan Prometheus would be lessened, that we should realize that the extant play represents the transition from violence to law, and that in reality the rule of Zeus is not one of might but one subject ultimately to the law of justice.

Although Aeschylus, like all of his day, was a polytheist, he exalts Zeus far above all other divinities. He regards him as preëminent, the possessor of all majesty and power, whose will always prevails, so that, when he speaks, the thing he wishes comes to pass. The poet uses the highest and most comprehensive epithets of him throughout his plays; in the Supplices the chorus appeal to Zeus as “King of kings, most blessed of the blessed, most perfect power of perfect powers; blessed Zeus”; and again they address him as “the one who rules through infinite time.”[129] In other passages the poet seems to feel as if language were unequal to the task of describing adequately the majesty and power of this supreme god. In his mind Zeus surpasses the other gods so much that his will represents the whole of the divine laws; to him man inevitably turns in doubt and perplexity. As the chorus say in the Agamemnon:

Zeus—whate’er ’Zeus’ expresseth of His essence— If the name please him on the lips of prayer, With his name on my lips I seek his presence, Knowing none else I may with him compare.

Yea, though I ponder, in the balance laying All else, no help save Zeus alone I find, If I would cast aside the burden weighing, All to no profit, ever on my mind.[130]

It is not impossible that Aeschylus cherished ideas of divinity which approached the pantheism or the henotheism of a later age. Clement of Alexandria has preserved two of his verses which are so extraordinary that we are glad to have them attested also by Philodemus.[131] When in these the poet says: “Zeus is the ether, Zeus the earth also; also the sky. Zeus is all things, and that which is above all things as well,” this syncretistic expression may well be due to the influence of Orphism or of the philosopher Heraclitus; but whatever the source of the idea it stands at diameter with popular tradition. Of course it does not exclude the gods of the popular belief, who could be included in the divine unity, as later thought usually conceived them. That Aeschylus uses the gods of the people in his plays is not surprising, for the dramatic poet, whatever his personal belief, must always use material familiar to his audience and suited to his dramatic and poetic purpose.

In the Prometheus Bound the Titan threatens Zeus with Fate and declares that even he cannot escape Necessity. But we must remember that the Prometheus, as I have said before, is a drama which represents transition from the old order to the new, and that at the end of the trilogy there was no conflict between Zeus and Fate; and in general Aeschylus, though not always clear, most often represents Fate either as the will of Zeus himself or as his assistant. The former idea is again and again expressed in the Supplices, where the will of the supreme god is shown as something mighty and absolute which none may transgress.

But if Zeus is exalted to this supreme position, it is as a god of supreme justice. With the poet the ideas of justice and piety, injustice and impiety are equivalent. Like Hesiod he makes Justice the daughter of Zeus, whom Zeus always supports and avenges, “allotting duly ill to the wicked, blessing to the righteous.” To the poet it is inconceivable that a god of perfect justice could desire anything in the world except what is right and just; and therefore he conceives that man’s obligation is to strive after that which is just and righteous, and so to put himself into harmony with the divine will. A failure to do this is sin. Indeed the poet says that when men disregard justice they injure the gods, and more than once sin is spoken of as a disease of the mind. The sinner is a vain creature, laboring under a delusion which oftentimes springs from o’erweening pride and is doomed to bear tears for its fruit. The envy of the gods, which seems in Homer a childish thing, is in Aeschylus only the resentment which they feel toward a sinner who has been led away by success into insolent pride and so is doomed to punishment. In the Persians Xerxes is represented as having been swept away by his haughty insolence so that he lacked discretion (σωφροσύνη) and came to his doom. The shade of Darius says to the chorus:

Zeus sits above, a chastener of thoughts Exceeding proud, a stern inquisitor. Wherefore, since Heaven’s warning bids be prudent, Admonish him with counsel of wise speech To cease from flouting Gods with reckless pride.[132]

And Xerxes’ armies were likewise doomed to pay the price of insolence and of their godless thoughts.

Furthermore Aeschylus teaches that good men must avoid the wicked, and illustrates the truth by the fact that it was evil companions who urged Xerxes to his folly. There is a striking passage in the Septem in which Eteocles, when informed that the seer Amphiaraus is among the heroes who are besieging Thebes, says:

Woe for the omen that with impious men Joineth a righteous man in fellowship! Than evil converse, in all enterprise Nothing is worse; its harvest let none reap. Infatuation’s field hath death for fruit. If the godfearing man for shipmates hath A crew hot-hearted in iniquity, With that god-hated tribe he perisheth: The righteous man who dwells with citizens Traitrous to guests and reckless of the Gods, Is justly taken in the selfsame net, Lashed by the same impartial scourge of God.[133]

We have just seen that Pindar shows a tendency to make man responsible for his sin, quite in contrast to the popular belief which still kept the Homeric view that the gods were responsible for all things. With this popular idea Aeschylus seems at times in accord. But if we consider his plays in their entirety, he makes man responsible for the first step. In the Eumenides, for example, the Furies declare that no just man has ever put his hands justly to any deed and met their wrath. The lesson is that when men have taken the initial downward step themselves an evil divinity or daemon drives them on, but that the first step no man is forced to take. When, however, he has taken it, then the poet represents the sinner as through god’s will infatuated with his sin. No other extant poet shows so impressively how sin relentlessly persists through generation after generation.

The most familiar illustration is found in Aeschylus’ treatment of the story of the bloody line of Atreus, who sinned by slaying his brother’s sons and offering their flesh, an unholy banquet, to their father; then Agamemnon’s queen, with her paramour Aegisthus, slew her lord on his return from Troy; and finally Agamemnon’s son Orestes murdered his mother and Aegisthus to avenge his sire. Thus through three generations the curse ran, each generation adding its own crime until only the divine intervention of Apollo and Athena could stay the course of sin and its doom. When in the Choephoroe Orestes has exacted his vengeance and stained himself with his mother’s blood, the chorus finally sings:

Lo, how upon the palace royal hath burst The third storm that fulfils the house’s fate! First, wretch Thyestes at a feast accurst Of his own children ate:

Then shrieked the second storm the agony Of that king in that laver hacked to death, When the Achaians’ chief to treachery There yielded up his breath:

Now on the third storm’s wild wings down doth sweep A Saviour—or a Doom shall he be named? Where shall the Curse end?—how be lulled to sleep Its fury?—how be tamed?[134]

A similar theme was handled by him in his tragedies which dealt with the history of the royal house of Thebes. Against the warning of the oracle Laius married Jocasta; their son Oedipus slew his father and wed his own mother who bore him children. Under the burden of Oedipus’ curse their two sons, Eteocles and Polynices, fell in fratricidal strife. These are dark bloody tales, but in the tragedies of Aeschylus they were given a fearful moral import. It is true that the same stories were handled by other tragedians, but by none with such moral impressiveness.

The mind of the poet was too searching and earnest to avoid the difficult problems which appear in real life when there is a conflict of duties. Such a conflict arises when Agamemnon has to choose between slaying his daughter and failing to do his duty by his country; again when Antigone at the close of the Seven against Thebes has to decide whether she will disobey the higher law which requires that the dead shall be buried, or resist the edict of the state which forbids her the service to her dead. Throughout the Choephoroe and Eumenides Orestes has to face the duty of avenging his father’s death laid upon him by Apollo, and the pious reverence which he should show his mother. The poet offers no satisfactory solution to such problems as these—indeed, his purpose in bringing them out clearly was probably dramatic rather than moral. Yet whatever his purpose, it is important for us to note that he realized the moral conflict clearly as a part of man’s common experience.

I have already said that Aeschylus dwells chiefly upon the retributory nature of punishment, teaching that the sinner must suffer for his own deeds. “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” was no less binding in Greek than Hebrew justice:

Destinies, Mighty Ones, grant that from Zeus may the issue betide Even as Justice requireth, who now is arrayed on our side. ‘Ever the tongue of hate shall the tongue of hate requite: Aye for the stroke of murder the stroke of murder shall smite’ Justice exacting her dues cries ringing-voiced this law. ‘Doers must suffer’—so sayeth the immemorial saw.

A law saith, ‘Murder-drops of blood-libation On earth spilt, cry for blood in expiation.’ The Avenging Sprite shrieks, hastening Havoc on Which brings from graves of men dead long agone Ruin to crown the work of ruin done.[135]

This principle runs through the entire trilogy of the Oresteia. Agamemnon lost his life as recompense for the life of his daughter Iphigenia whom he slew with his own hand, and the murder of Agamemnon was avenged by the slaughter of Clytemnestra and her paramour. Throughout the three plays doom follows the criminal relentlessly and only divine interference in the end clears the account. And yet at times Aeschylus teaches a gentler belief, that wisdom comes through suffering and constraint, and that it is through the discipline of pain that we travel the road to understanding.

Although Aeschylus lays overwhelming emphasis on the truth that punishment for sin falls upon the sinner in this life, he also teaches that there is punishment for the wicked in the world below. In his description of the dead there are many reminiscences of Homer. But his Hades is not Homeric; there is reality in punishment there no less than upon earth. In the Eumenides the Furies threaten Orestes thus:

Nay, I shall suck—thou canst not choose but pay the penalty— The red gore from thy living limbs, and win me out of thee The banquet of a draught that shall with awful anguish flow. Yea, I will waste thy living frame, then drag thee far below, There to pay all thy penalty, the mother-murder’s woe. So shall all else that have transgressed, Have sinned against a God, a guest, Or parents, mark how each receives The dues of sin that Justice gives. For Hades ’neath the earth waits every soul, A mighty judge who watcheth to enscroll All sins on his eternal memory’s roll.[136]

Of the rewards of the righteous in the next life Aeschylus has no word to say. There is no Elysium or Islands of the Blest.

Aeschylus represents the Athens of the Persian Wars; Sophocles belongs to the Periclean age. He was born fifteen years before the battle of Salamis and led the chorus which sang a paean to celebrate the Greek victory. To his contemporaries his life seemed happy, as if he were beloved by the gods above all other men. In 468 b.c. he was successful in contending for the tragic prize with Aeschylus, and he continued to write until his death in 406. Instead of the rugged strength and passion that we find in Aeschylus, Sophocles displays a sunny and gentle nature that naturally sought out the kindly and mediating elements in life. A conservative, he was not an innovator, critic, or teacher, as both Aeschylus and Euripides were; he does not make his characters reason much on the deeper things of life or criticize the traditional order.

Yet in one sense he is the most religious of the Greek poets, showing a faith in divine government and a wide outlook on the universe which the two other tragedians did not display. He does not break with the traditional belief as to the nature of the gods; indeed at most points he follows closely the Homeric conception; they are still to his mind the givers of evil as well as of good to men, and in fact his chorus in the Antigone quotes with approval the ancient saying that evil seems good soon or late to him whose mind the god draws to mischief.[137] Although he does not follow Pindar and Aeschylus in ascribing to divine beings a pure morality, yet he is inclined to believe with the elder poets that “Justice revealed from of old sits with Zeus in the might of the eternal laws.”[138] There are only two passages in which his characters may be said to criticize the gods. In the first Philoctetes, smarting under his suffering and neglect, exclaims:

No evil yet was crushed. The Heavens will ever shield it. ’Tis their sport To turn back all things rancorous and malign From going down to the grave, and send instead The good and true. Oh, how shall we commend Such acts, how construe them? When I extol Things god-like, I find evil in the Gods.[139]

But it must be observed that any other sentiment would have been out of character for Philoctetes at this point. The second is a fragment from his lost play, Aleites, in which some speaker, contemplating the prosperity of the wicked and the misfortunes of the good, declares that the gods ought not to order things thus for mortals, but that on the contrary the pious should have some evident profit from their piety and the unjust should pay the penalty for their wrongs that all might see.[140] But this fragment is so at variance in sentiment with Sophocles’ general attitude that it has been conjectured, not without probability, that it came from Euripides. Even if we reject this conjecture, as I think we must, we need not suppose that the sentiments which the poet puts into the mouths of his characters always represent his real view. A dramatist, as we must remind ourselves, should make the speakers in his play express sentiments in harmony with their characters and for the most part will have them utter moral ideas with which most of his audience is in sympathy, unless indeed he would play the part of innovator or prophet. As a matter of fact Sophocles’ own attitude seems to be expressed in another fragment: “No man is wise save him whom god honors; but if one look unto the gods, even if the god bid him depart from justice, there he must go. For nothing to which the gods lead men is base.”[141] This seems the key to Sophocles’ religious attitude. He is confident that however things may seem to us in our short-sightedness, if we could only see the purposes of the gods in their totality, we should know that they are good.

The bases of man’s life and action, his highest duty, Sophocles teaches is piety and discretion, σωφροσύνη. When in the Philoctetes Heracles appears, he urges upon the heroes that when they return to Troy they be mindful, in laying waste the land, to show reverence towards the gods:

But, take good heed, Midst all your spoil to hold the gods in awe. For our great Father counteth piety Far above all. This follows men in death, And fails them not when they resign their breath.[142]

And the chorus sings at the end of the Antigone:

Wise thought hath the first place in happiness Before all else, and piety to Heaven Must be preserved. High boastings of the proud Bring sorrows to the height to punish pride:— A lesson men shall learn when they are old.[143]

In the Ajax Athena says:

Then, warned by what thou seest, be thou not rash To vaunt high words toward Heaven, nor swell thy port Too proudly, if in puissance of thy hand Thou passest others, or in mines of wealth. Since Time abases and uplifts again All that is human, and the modest heart Is loved by Heaven, who hates the intemperate will.[144]

There is an extraordinary passage in the Oedipus Coloneus where Oedipus is made to say, when his strength fails him and he cannot go to the altar to sacrifice, but must send one of his daughters: “For I think that one soul suffices to pay this debt for ten thousand, if it come with good will (purity) to the shrine.”[145] Piety, reverence, and purity, these to Sophocles are the highest qualities of man.

For the poet the moral order was unchanging, dependent not upon caprice but having a divine source and a divine sanction; the laws of heaven are therefore superior to those of man, and man’s obedience to the higher law is made his duty and the means of his consecration. In an ode in Oedipus the King, which is called forth by the king’s harshness and by the suspicion that he is not wholly guiltless, as well as by the queen’s bold contempt for Apollo’s oracle, the chorus sings:

O may I live Sinless and pure in every word and deed Ordained by those firm laws, that hold their realm on high! Begotten of Heaven, of brightest Ether born, Created not of man’s ephemeral mould, They ne’er shall sink to slumber in oblivion. A Power of God is there, untouched by Time.[146]

That is, the chorus here pray that they may always show their piety and reverence by obeying the divine laws. This sentiment is repeated more than once in the extant tragedies; as when Odysseus warns Agamemnon not to refuse burial to the body of Ajax: “’Tis not he, ’tis the law of heaven that thou would’st hurt.”[147] Through this belief Sophocles justified Antigone in her decision to defy the edict of the state, for Creon had ordained that her brother Polynices might not be buried, since he had attacked Thebes. But Greek belief regarded it as a sacred duty of the next of kin to bury their dead, and this duty Antigone could not but fulfil, although she knew that death would be her lot. When Creon asks her if she did indeed dare to transgress his edict, she replies:

I heard it not from Zeus, nor came it forth From Justice, where she reigns in the Underworld. They too have published to mankind a law. Nor could I think thine edict of such might That one who is mortal thus could overrule The infallible, unwritten laws of Heaven. Their majesty begins not from today But from eternity, and none can tell The hour that saw their birth.[148]

It was for this same principle that Socrates, a generation later, gave up his life. In his defense he told his jury why: “Perhaps someone may say, ‘But Socrates, can you not go off and live in exile, give up talking and be quiet?’ This is the very point on which it is hardest to persuade some of you, for if I say that this is exile to be disobeying the god and therefore that it is impossible to keep quiet, you will not believe me, but will say that I am ironical.”[149] Socrates believed that he had a divine commission to question and examine others, and that duty he must perform as the heroine in the tragedy must perform hers, cost him what it might.

The eternal problem of human suffering, the fact that pain and misfortune are not always the result of wrong doing, but that the innocent suffer while the guilty escape, was a matter with which Sophocles was much concerned. His predecessor Aeschylus had tried to show in opposition to experience that sin always preceded pain; and in Sophocles the doom of Creon and his house is due to the king’s proud resentment wherein he sinned against heaven’s law. But in the same play the heroine Antigone, who has obeyed the divine mandates, is forced to suffer a most pathetic fate. King Oedipus was not intentionally guilty, and the fate of the innocent queen Deianeira surpasses in pathos that of any other tragic heroine. She was impelled by the tender desire to recall the love of her faithless husband, and the poet acquits her of blame, “She erred, though she intended well.”[150] But none the less she involved both husband and herself in dreadful doom.

The tragic poet found his solution of this ancient perplexing problem only in the larger view, which regarded the individual as but a slight factor in the economy of the whole. At times suffering was regarded as a means of discipline: “The soul that has been bedded in misfortune sees many things.”[151] Thus through pain one learns and has his nature developed. Theseus, in the Oedipus Coloneus, offers a kindly welcome to the exile Oedipus and his daughters, for his own sufferings in exile have produced a spirit of kindliness and charity in him. Oedipus himself in the same play is unlike the headstrong king of the earlier tragedy; suffering and time have chastened and enlightened him, though they have not made him mild in spirit.

Sophocles also displays great sympathy with human weakness and suffering. This appears in his treatment of the character of Deianeira, and above all in the tender pathos with which he brings out the human longings of Antigone, who though she has nobly obeyed heaven’s unwritten law, yet shrinks from suffering and death and from the loss of all that youth promises. It is not surprising, therefore, that we find in Sophocles mercy emphasized as a divine attribute, and this quality in the gods held up as an example to men. On this Polynices makes his appeal to Oedipus:

But seeing that Zeus on his almighty throne Keeps Mercy in all he does to counsel him, Thou, too, my father, let her plead with thee![152]

The sentiment is not far from Portia’s plea:

It is enthroned in the hearts of kings, It is an attribute to God himself; And earthly power doth then show likest God’s When mercy seasons justice.

Sophocles’ sympathy for undeserved suffering, his understanding of the weakness of men, of their liability to error, and his faith in the gods, all led him to try to take the larger view of the ills of life, to which the philosopher Heraclitus had already given expression when he said that god does all things for the harmony of the whole; and that while men regard some things as right and others wrong, to god all things are fair and good and right. The individual is only a part of the great whole, and when human experiences are regarded sub specie aeternitatis, we shall find that that which seems evil is only permitted to make a just and harmonious unity. The poet tried to conceive of the life of man,

As a great whole, not analyzed to parts But each part having reference to all.

Looked at from this universal point of view the sufferings of Philoctetes, Antigone, Deianeira, and Oedipus are justified to men.

It was natural that Sophocles should use many Homeric concepts with reference to the condition of men and the life after death. In the Antigone alone is there any personal hope of future happiness. It may well be that the poet’s sense of what was fitting dramatically is responsible for his conservative attitude; he was dealing with traditional material, and using themes and incidents which were far remote in time from his audience. It may have seemed to him that fidelity to his subject and the requirements of artistic unity prevented his putting into the mouths of his characters sentiments which an early age could hardly have conceived. Sophocles was not animated by the iconoclasm which we shall find in the bolder Euripides; but if the future life is not pictured in Sophocles’ extant tragedies, we need not doubt for a moment that he believed in immortality. He had been initiated into the Mysteries and one of the finest expressions of the ecclesiastical confidence which the initiates felt came from his pen: “Thrice blessed are those mortals who have seen these rites and then go to the house of Hades, for they alone have life there; but all others have only woe.”[153]

Such, in brief, were the teachings of some of the greatest poets of the sixth and fifth centuries before our era. But these represent only one side of Greek thought in this time. In Athens there were influences, political, social, and intellectual, which were working profound changes. Pindar, Aeschylus, and Sophocles belonged to an older order; the voices of the new age will concern us in our next lecture.