by Walter Pater
And at last Agave herself comes upon the stage, holding aloft the head of her son, fixed upon the sharp end of the thyrsus, calling upon the women of the chorus to welcome the revel of the Evian god; who, accordingly, admit her into the company, professing themselves her fellow-revellers, the Bacchanals being thus absorbed into the chorus for the rest of the play. For, indeed, all through it, the true, though partly suppressed relation of the chorus to the Bacchanals is this, that the women of the chorus, staid and temperate for the moment, following Dionysus in his alternations, are but the paler sisters of his more wild and gloomy votaries — the true followers of the mystical Dionysus — the real chorus of Zagreus; the idea that their violent proceedings are the result of madness only, sent on them as a punishment for their original rejection of the god, being, as I said, when seen from the deeper motives of the myth, only a “sophism” of Euripides — a piece of rationalism of which he avails himself for the purpose of softening down the tradition of which he has undertaken to be the poet. Agave comes on the stage, then, blood-stained, exulting in her “victory of tears,” still quite visibly mad indeed, and with the outward signs of madness, and as her mind wanders, musing still on the fancy that the dead head in her hands is that of a lion she has slain among the mountains — a young lion, she avers, as she notices the down on the young man’s chin, and his abundant hair — a fancy in which the chorus humour her, willing to deal gently with the poor distraught creature. Supported by them, she rejoices “exceedingly, exceedingly,” declaring herself “fortunate” in such goodly spoil; priding herself that the victim has been slain, not with iron weapons, but with her own white fingers, she summons all Thebes to come and behold. She calls for her aged father to draw near and see; and for Pentheus himself, at last, that he may mount and rivet her trophy, appropriately decorative there, between the triglyphs of the cornice below the roof, visible to all.
And now, from this point onwards, Dionysus himself becomes more and more clearly discernible 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 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, 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.
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
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 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 th
e seventh day of the Eleusinian festival, and in which a bunch of 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 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; 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 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 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 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 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 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.