Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea

by Thomas Cahill

  VII

  THE WAY THEY WENT

  GRECO-ROMAN MEETS JUDEO-CHRISTIAN

  Psyche was, to begin with, a Greek word for “life,” in the sense of individual human life, and occurs in Homer in such phrases as “to risk one’s life” and “to save one’s life.” Homer also uses it of the ghosts of the underworld—the weak, almost-not-there shades of those who once were men. In the works of the early scientist-philosophers, psyche can refer to the ultimate substance, the source of life and consciousness, the spirit of the universe. By the fifth century B.C., psyche had come to mean the “conscious self,” the “personality,” even the “emotional self,” and thence it quickly takes on, especially in Plato, the meaning of “immortal self”—the soul, in contrast to the body. Psyche was also used by the Greeks as their word for butterfly because of a common belief that butterflies were the souls of the dead. And, finally, Psyche was the name of a girl.

  This girl appears in a story by Apuleius, contained in his picaresque novel The Golden Ass, the only Latin novel to survive complete, though we are fairly sure Apuleius derived the Psyche story from much older Greek material. Psyche was so beautiful that she incurred the jealousy of Venus, the Roman Aphrodite, who sent her son Cupid to bewitch her. Cupid, whose name refers to cupidity or sexual desire, is the Roman equivalent of Eros and was depicted, as he is to this day, as a childlike god with wings and a quiverful of arrows with which he can make mortals fall in love against their will. His task was to doom Psyche by making her fall in love with the basest of men, but on sight of her the god of Love was himself smitten. To keep his passion on the q.t., he installed Psyche in a magical palace and visited her bed every night, though only in darkness, and warned her that she must never attempt to see him in the light, for his splendor would be too much for her. Psyche’s two older sisters, once they saw Psyche’s magical new circumstances, were overcome by jealousy and tried to convince the poor girl that she must be sleeping not with a god but with a monstrous snake that could not bear to be seen. Psyche, deeply in love with her mysterious visitor, was nonetheless confused by her sisters’ theory and resolved to learn the truth. The next night she took a lamp and looked on her godly visitor while he slept, falling even more deeply in love with him. But a drop of hot oil fell from her lamp to his shoulder, and the god awoke. Angered by Psyche’s disobedience, he towered above her in all his magnificence, spread his shining wings, and disappeared. Needless to say, in Apuleius’s conception, Cupid was no fat cherub but a most impressive adolescent.

  Psyche, desolate, tried to drown herself in the first river she came to but was saved and upbraided by the shepherd god Pan. After many miseries, she fell into the hands of Venus, who made her a slave, beat her savagely, and sent her to carry out impossible tasks—all of which she was able to accomplish with the help of the beneficent powers of the universe. After the final trial, however, which brought her to Hades itself, Psyche fainted away in a deadly sleep. Cupid, forgiving her at last, came to her aid and petitioned Jupiter to allow their marriage, which Venus was then forced to consent to. Psyche was revived; and Cupid and Psyche, of course, lived happily ever after.

  For many in the ancient world, the story of Cupid and Psyche was a Platonic allegory of the journey of the human soul through the trials of life. Having glimpsed the immortal splendor of divinity, she is condemned to banishment and extreme suffering, made all the more acute by her separation from divinity, of which she has had such an unforgettable taste; and she can be reunited with her perfect lover only after the sleep of death. In the later, Christian centuries, the story of Psyche stood as a metaphor of the yearning of the soul for God. Great mystics such as Catherine of Siena, Teresa of Ávila, and John of the Cross, who described in their writings their experience of betrothal and marriage to Christ in highly colored, even carnal terms, were influenced, whether they knew it or not, by a pagan story in a wonderfully trashy Latin novel.

  WHAT DID THEY BELIEVE, these Greeks? Were the gods real to them or just metaphors? Certainly, they did not have creeds or dogmas, confessional or doctrinal positions such as we have come to expect from religions. And just as certainly, there was a gradated spectrum of interpretation, as there must always be in things religious, that spanned classes and communities and that shifted in emphasis from one period to another. What is so striking about the Homeric gods—as opposed to the One that most of us are familiar with (though familiar is surely the wrong word)—is their lack of godliness. Oh sure, they have power beyond the dreams of the world’s most powerful king, but they exercise this power just the way he would—heavy-handedly, often mercilessly, even spitefully. And they are taken up with their own predictable domestic crises—who’s sleeping with whom, who’s getting back at whom, who’s belittling whom. Could anyone actually believe in such gods?

  In the absence of something better, yes. It is hard for us—after so many centuries of monotheism (and more recent centuries of agnosticism and atheism)—to retroject ourselves into the Greek religious consciousness. The stories of the gods, which were multiform and seemingly limitless, came down to the Greeks from many streams of oral tradition, which they had no way of critiquing. They could not say, for instance, as we can, that the story with which this book began, of Demeter and her daughter, Persephone, was just a clever metaphor that gave a preliterate society an “explanation” for the changing seasons—in a class with such things as “Why the Snake Has No Legs” or “How the Giraffe Got Its Neck,” which we have long since banished to the nursery. But if we look seriously at the Demeter story, we may find ourselves even in the twenty-first century captivated by its poetry and depth of emotion—which may lead us to exclaim something like “Well, this doesn’t explain anything scientifically, but there is something very satisfying about it. It has the truth of a dream.”

  Dreams, we all know, can be very truthful, even if at the level of conscious critique they are full of mad illogic. Some such thoughts surely occurred to men like Socrates and Plato, who advised their followers to reconceive the myths as metaphors—not metaphors as naive explanations of natural phenomena but as attempts by society’s dreamers to find a language that can penetrate to the heart of reality. These philosophers understood that though the myths were naive in the sense that they were anthropomorphic, presenting the gods as if they were men, the myths were also attempting—at a deeper level—to feel the intangible and say the unsayable.

  The Greek gods changed as the Greeks themselves were changed by the events of their history. The rigid figures of the archaic kouroi have much in common with the gods of Homer, Hesiod, Solon, and even Aeschylus: these gods are human beings made gigantic, as full of needs as of power and requiring the stateliness of ritual—soothing actions performed in the same way over and over again—in order to be assuaged. Such actions always require loss for men and gain for the gods—libation, animal sacrifice, in great crises even human sacrifice—but there is also an exchange, an economy of the divine. For by our ritual, carried out with punctilious sincerity, we may avoid divine displeasure and find ourselves the recipients of heavenly grace.

  When the house of Oedipus is plunged into confusion over what seem to be conflicting oracles, Jocasta emerges from the palace, carrying her suppliant’s branch, wound in wool, determined to perform the ritual of supplication that can avert the wrath of the god. She addresses the chorus, as she makes her way to Apollo’s shrine:

  Lords of the realm, it occurred to me,

  just now, to visit the temples of the gods,

  so I have my branch in hand and incense too.

  Oedipus is beside himself. Racked with anguish,

  no longer a man of sense, he won’t admit

  the latest prophecies are hollow as the old—

  he’s at the mercy of every passing voice

  if the voice tells of terror.

  I urge him gently, nothing seems to help,

  so I turn to you, Apollo, you are nearest.

  She places her branch on the alta
r of Apollo and continues her prayer:

  I come with prayers and offerings … I beg you,

  cleanse us, set us free from defilement!

  Look at us, passengers in the grip of fear,

  watching the pilot of the vessel go to pieces.

  Though Jocasta performs the prescribed rites, we know that these cannot avail because the defilement within the palace is too grave to be washed away by a few prayers and a well-placed olive branch. Lord Apollo, principle of justice and the terrifyingly unseen presence throughout the play—“nearest” in a way Jocasta has failed to reckon with—will not, in the end, be mocked. He will bring his justice to perfection, and this will entail the suicide of Jocasta, the blinding of Oedipus, and the permanent humiliation of the entire family. Jocasta cannot know all this at this point and therefore cannot be aware how insufficient are her paltry rites. At the center of Greek religion is the belief that, though we can at times successfully invoke the mercy of the gods on us and our causes, we must pay for our sins, whether these are conscious or not—and if the sins are big, we must pay big time. How different is this from common belief and practice even in our day, whatever the particular doctrines of a given religion may be? We can understand Greek religion because, at its heart, it operates on the same internal dynamic that fuels all (or certainly almost all) religion. The aboriginal Christian prayer Kyrie eleison (Lord, have mercy) is a Greek prayer far more ancient than Christianity.

  But there is also an undercurrent in Jocasta’s speech that suggests a shift in religious perspective—not so much in the time of the tyrants as in the time of Sophocles, the play’s author. For there is something a tad slapdash about Jocasta’s approach to the gods. She doesn’t believe in oracles, which she finds “hollow.” It has “just now” “occurred” to her “to visit the temples of the gods,” and she chooses the temple of Apollo because it’s “nearest” to her palace. Does she believe or doesn’t she? She seems a skeptic in trouble beyond her usual coping mechanisms, the sort of person who in our day might slip into a church when her world is falling apart but would otherwise give scant thought to divinity.

  In the period when Sophocles was writing Oedipus, Athens was reaching the acme of its aretē, its moment of supreme artistic and political confidence. Its empire was booming: the Athenian colonies and sister cities from mainland Greece to Italy, from the Aegean coast of Asia to the coast of the Black Sea, were creating greater general wealth through the growing exchanges of staples and exotica, and Athenian democracy and military power—which went hand in hand—were the envy of the world. Athenians held themselves, not the gods, responsible for this turn of events; and though they certainly continued to fulfill the rites and rituals of Greek religion, as does Jocasta, they relied on their own native strengths and smarts to keep their enterprise going. They had become an essentially secular people.

  There is a speech, probably the most famous speech in all of Western history, that sheds much light on the Athenian esprit of the fifth century, Pericles’s Funeral Oration over the Athenian dead in the first year of the Peloponnesian War. Though it is a speech of some length (if brief by Greek standards), I quote it in full, because there is no other single cultural expression that so enables us to penetrate the Athenian frame of mind. Thucydides, in whose exacting History of the Peloponnesian War the speech occurs, explains “the ancient custom” of the Athenians, carried out annually over the bones of those who had died for Athens in the previous year: “When the bones have been laid in the earth, a man chosen by the city for his intellectual gifts and for his general reputation makes an appropriate speech in praise of the dead, and after the speech all depart.” Pericles, coming “forward from the tomb and, standing on a high platform, so that he might be heard by as many people as possible in the crowd,” began:

  Most of those who have stood in this place before me have praised the tradition of this speech that closes our ceremony. It is good, they have felt, that solemn words should be spoken over our fallen soldiers. I do not share this sentiment. Acts deserve acts, not words, in their honor; and to me a state funeral, such as you have witnessed, would have been honor enough. Our trust in the great bravery of this great number of the fallen should not depend on one man’s eloquence. Moreover, it is very hard to speak appropriately when many of a speaker’s hearers will scarce believe that he is truthful. For those who have known and loved the dead may think his words scant justice to the memories they would hear honored, while those who did not know them may occasionally, from jealousy, suspect me of overstatement when they hear of feats beyond their own powers. For it is only human for men not to bear praise of others beyond the point at which they still feel they can rival their exploits. Transgress that boundary and they are jealous and incredulous. But since the wisdom of our ancestors enacted this law I too must submit and try to suit as best I can the wishes and feelings of every member of this gathering.

  My first words shall be for our ancestors; for it is both just to them and fitting that on an occasion such as this our tribute of memory should be paid to them. For, dwelling always in this country, generation after generation in unchanging and unbroken succession, they have, by their hard work and courage, handed down to us a free country. So they are worthy of our praise; and still more so are our fathers. For they added to our ancestral patrimony the empire that we hold today and they delivered it, not without blood and toil, into the hands of our own generation; while it is we ourselves, those of us now in midlife, who consolidated our power throughout the greater part of the empire and secured our City’s complete independence both in war and peace.

  Of the battles that we and our fathers fought, whether we were winning power abroad or gallantly withstanding nearby enemies, whether Greek or foreign, I will say no more: these are too familiar to you all. I’d rather set forth the spirit in which we faced them, and the Athenian constitution and Athenian way of life that brought us to greatness, and to pass from these things to the dead themselves. For I think it not unfitting for these things to be recalled in today’s solemnity; and it is appropriate that this whole assembly of both citizens and strangers should hear these things.

  For our system of government does not copy the systems of our neighbors: we are a model to them, not they to us. Our constitution is called a democracy, because power rests in the hands not of the few but of the many. Our laws guarantee equal justice for all in their private disputes; and as for the election of public officials, we welcome talent to every arena of achievement, nor do we make our choices on the grounds of class but on the grounds of excellence alone. And as we give free play to all in our public life, so we carry the same spirit into our daily relations with one another. We have no black looks or angry words for our neighbor if he enjoys himself in his own way, and we even abstain from little acts of churlishness that, though they do no mortal damage, leave hurt feelings in their wake. Open and tolerant in our private lives, in our public affairs we keep within the law. We acknowledge the restraint of reverence; we are obedient to those in authority and to the laws, especially to those that give protection to the oppressed and those unwritten laws of the heart whose transgression brings admitted shame.

  Yet ours is no workaday city only. No other city provides so many recreations for the spirit—contests and sacrifices all the year round, and beauty in our public buildings to cheer the spirit and delight the eye day by day. Moreover, the City is so large and powerful that all the wealth of all the world flows in to her, so that our own Attic products seem no more familiar to us than the fruits of the labors of other nations.

  And how different from our enemies is our attitude toward military security! The gates of our City are flung open to the world. We practice no periodic deportations, nor do we prevent our visitors from observing or discovering whatever “secrets” might prove of military advantage to an enemy. For we do not place our trust in secret weapons but in our own faithful courage.

  So too with education. The Spartans toil from early childhoo
d in the laborious pursuit of courage, while we, free to live and wander as we please, march out nonetheless to face the selfsame dangers. Here is the proof of my words: when the Spartans advance into our country, they do not come alone but with all their allies; but when we invade our neighbors we have little difficulty as a rule, even on foreign soil, in defeating men who are fighting for their own homes. Moreover, no enemy has ever met us in our full strength, for we have our navy to look after at the same time that our soldiers are sent on service to many scattered possessions; but if our enemies chance to encounter some portion of our forces and defeat a few of us, they boast that they have driven back our whole army, or, if they are defeated, that the victors were in full strength. Indeed, if we choose to face danger with an easy mind rather than after rigorous training and to trust rather in our native manliness than in state-sponsored courage, the advantage lies with us; for we are spared all the tedium of practicing for future hardships, and when we find ourselves among them we are as brave as our plodding rivals. Here as elsewhere, then, the City sets an example that deserves admiration.

  We are lovers of beauty without extravagance, and lovers of wisdom without effeminacy. Wealth to us is not mere material for vainglory but an opportunity for achievement; and we think poverty nothing to be ashamed of unless one makes no effort to overcome it. Our citizens attend both to public and private duties and do not allow absorption in their own affairs to diminish their knowledge of the City’s business. We differ from other states in regarding the man who keeps aloof from public life not as “private” but as useless; we decide or debate, carefully and in person, all matters of policy, and we hold, not that words and deeds go ill together, but that acts are foredoomed to failure when undertaken undiscussed. For we are noted for being at once most adventurous in action and most reflective beforehand. Other men are bold in ignorance, while reflection will stop their going forward. But the bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what lies before them, glory and danger alike—and yet go forth to meet it.