Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea

by Thomas Cahill

  But the diminution of Greek religion preceded Roman influence. Religion for the Greeks, though certainly more exciting than the Roman variety, was a public exercise, a demonstration that at some level all Greeks were united in their reverence for the same gods—and it tended toward the bland predictability of a stadium of Americans reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. There were, however, many alternatives, not a few of them shadowy and fugitive. These were called “the Mysteries” (from the Greek mystēs, an initiate, and mysteria, the rites of initiation). The Mysteries were secret cults into which one had to be initiated—and they have kept their secrets. To this day, we have little more than informed speculation as to what the majority of them entailed.

  The most populous of the Mysteries was held at Eleusis, about twelve miles from Athens, in honor of Demeter, goddess of the harvest, and her daughter Persephone, goddess of springtime. The rites began in Athens in late September at the time of sowing. The devotees of Demeter purified themselves by bathing in the sea. After a tremendous sacrifice of piglets, the initiates set off on their procession to Eleusis along the Sacred Way, reenacting scenes from the myth of Demeter and Persephone, as Christians reenact the Way of the Cross on Good Friday. We know that the initiates fasted, then broke their fast with mint tea; we know that obscene jokes were told along the procession—of an old crone who had got the sorrowing harvest goddess to laugh by twisting her ancient labia into a smile—and that there was some connection between Demeter of the grain and Dionysus of the grape. We know that when the great procession reached Eleusis, the initiates poured into the Telesterion, a hall that held several thousand, and that the culmination of the festival was the exhibition of “sacred things” by the initiating priest. But what the initiates were shown we do not know. Their secret was kept through the thousand years the rites took place—till their suppression by a Christian emperor in A.D. 393, after which the sanctuary itself was leveled by Alaric and his Visigoths. And the Eleusinian secret is now safe with the dead.

  The Eleusinian Mysteries were the most public and popular of the Mysteries. Most Athenians were initiates, and women and even metics were welcome. Only murderers and dyed-in-the-wool barbarians (“those who speak an incomprehensible tongue”) were kept out. Many other Mysteries owned no designated sanctuary and were far more secretive. What went on in them is more obscure to us than the rites of Demeter. By the time Rome conquered Greece, even more exotic religious rites were being imported from Egypt and Asia. Not a few of these shadowy religions made the men who ran the Roman imperial machinery nervous, for they gave off a smell of political dissent and sometimes even the noxious threat of insurrection. They provided intellectual and cultural harbors for the powerless and dispossessed. Women and slaves, mercenaries and foreigners flocked to their underground rituals and listened attentively to god-knows-what rubbish that might undermine the security of the state. One particularly obscure and troublesome sect was gaining a foothold in important cities throughout the Greco-Roman world. It was led by Jews from the Roman province of Syria-Palestine. In time, it would come to be called Christianity.

  WE HAVE REACHED the Meeting of the Waters, the point at which the two great rivers of our cultural patrimony—the Greco-Roman and the Judeo-Christian—flow into each other to become the mighty torrent of Western civilization. It is an irony of our cultural history that the plodding Romans became the channel through which all the delicacies and distinctions of Greek culture flowed into the West. It is no less ironic that, given its subsequent history of Jew-hatred, Christianity should become the vehicle by which Jewish values entered the mainstream. But such and so are the case.

  Many aspects of this immense confluence are dealt with in earlier books in this series. The seminal Jewish contribution to our common Western history—without which nothing else could have happened—is the subject of Volume II, The Gifts of the Jews. The contribution of early Christianity and its dependence on ancient Judaism are the subjects of Volume III, Desire of the Everlasting Hills. Nor have the Romans been neglected. Even if they don’t have a volume of their own, they are the subject of the first two chapters of the introductory Volume I, How the Irish Saved Civilization, and they form an important strand throughout Desire of the Everlasting Hills. (Nor are we quite done with them: they are scheduled to make another appearance—early in Volume V, when we investigate the question of how the Romans became the Italians.) It remains for me here and now to tie up only a few loose ends.

  The obscure “mystery” religion of Christianity went from being a threat to the Roman establishment—scapegoated by the emperor Nero in A.D. 64—to becoming part of the establishment 249 years later when it was adopted by its most illustrious convert, the emperor Constantine. Despite its exceedingly Jewish roots, Christianity became a player in the Greco-Roman world, a world shaped by Greek culture and Roman power. Greek, not ancient Hebrew (nor even the Aramaic of the first Christians), became the language of Christianity. Its sacred writings, which came to be known as the New Testament, were written in Greek, and the gospel—the “good news” of Jesus Christ—was preached throughout the ancient world in the Greek tongue. The terms of this new religion, though based on Hebrew models, were Greek terms. Christ, Ekklēsia (Church), Baptism, Eucharist, Agapē (Lovingkindness)—all of Christianity’s central words were Greek words. Christian patterns of thought, like strips of precious inlaid wood, could indeed be traced to their Jewish origins in the coastal Levant, but they often shone with a Greek patina. Paul and Luke, who together account for about fifty percent of the writings of the New Testament, display a familiarity with Greek philosophy and even an attachment to Stoicism. This philosophy of self-denial also taught the brotherhood of man, based on the Stoical belief that every human being without distinction possesses a spark of divinity that is in communion with God, who in the Stoical system is called Logos (Word, Reason, Meaning)—the word John’s Gospel uses to describe Jesus.

  In the first five centuries of Christianity, whenever theological controversy erupted, it almost always erupted in Greek. The Christians of what would become “the Latin West” were not terribly interested in fine intellectual distinctions; it was “the Greek East” that was the sizzling hotbed of theological strife. Was Jesus God or man or both? If both, how so? The terms that flew back and forth were Greek terms—person, substance, nature. The man Jesus, it was finally decided, was homo-ousios patri (of the same substance as the Father God). Ousia (substance), a term forged by the Presocratic philosophers of the sixth century B.C. to designate immutable reality, was drafted to settle a Christian theological argument more than a thousand years later, as it is still drafted each Sunday in Christian churches throughout the world when the Creed is recited.

  The Christian world became a world of Greek vocabulary, Greek distinctions, Greek categories. Nor was it only a question of language. Languages carry values with them; and the Greek divisions between matter and spirit, body and soul, lived in Christian consciousness and shaped Christian sensibility, breaking out repeatedly like an inescapable virus—which owed its origins not to Jesus the Jew but to a Greek language of discourse, shaped by Plato, by his philosophical predecessors, and before them by the large cultural context of Greek perceptions and prejudices. Indeed, the categories of “matter” and “spirit” were so expertly woven into the Greek language by the time Christianity came along that they were unquestioned and unseen.

  It is no coincidence that Christian monasticism began in the Greek East in imitation of the Pythagoreans and their spiritual sons the Platonists, who sometimes lived in communities under vow, renounced a normal life in the world, and waited in some lonely place for a final revelation. Even the special appurtenances of Christian monasticism—silence, meditation, chanting, distinctive costumes, beads, incense, kneeling, hands joined in prayer—all too likely go back to the Pythagoreans and beyond them to their influences, the Indian Buddhists and their predecessors. (To find the ultimate source of Christian monasticism, we might better look to the Dal
ai Lama than to anything we know of Jesus.) The liturgies elaborated in these monasteries certainly built on pagan Greek models of public prayer and ritual in their litanies, hymns, pageants, and processions.

  But these developments were exceptional. For the most part, in the union of Greco-Roman with Judeo-Christian, the Greco-Roman turn of mind combined with Judeo-Christian values. While the outward form of the Western world remained Greco-Roman, its content became gradually Judeo-Christian. The worldview that underlay the New Testament was so different from that of the Greeks and the Romans as to be almost its opposite. It was a worldview that stressed not excellence of public achievement but the adventure of a personal journey with God, a lifetime journey in which a human being was invited to unite himself to God by imitating God’s justice and mercy. It was far more individualized than anything the Greeks had ever come up with and stressed the experience of a call, a personal vocation, a unique destiny for each human being. The one God of the Jews had created the world and everyone in it, and God would bring the world to its end. There was no eternal cosmos, circling round and round. Time is real, not cyclical; it does not repeat itself but proceeds forward inexorably, which makes each moment—and the decisions I make each moment—precious. I am not merely an instance of Man, I am this particular, unrepeatable man, who never existed before and will never exist again. I create a real future in the present by what I do now. Whereas fate was central to Greeks and Romans, hope is central to Jews and Christians. Anyone who doubts the great gulf between these two worldviews has only to reread the speeches Hector makes to Andromache (in Chapter I) and to realize the impossibility of putting such speeches on the lips of any believing Jew or Christian:

  “And fate? No one alive has ever escaped it,

  neither brave man nor coward, I tell you—

  it’s born with us the day that we are born.”

  Everything about the core values of the Jews and Christians was foreign to the Greeks and Romans, who in their philosophy had decided that whatever is unique is monstrous and unintelligible. Only that which is forever is truly intelligible and worthy of contemplation. The ideal is what is interesting; the individual is beside the point. But as Greek confidence ebbed and Greek philosophy split into scores of yip-yapping schools, the Greeks became more and more puzzled. They had lost their way, philosophically—and the Romans, who were just aping them, had nothing original to propose by way of saving them all from their dilemmas.

  Christianity, at first, seemed just another woo-woo wave to cultivated Greeks. Some Greeks had begun to hope faintly for the happiness of their souls in a spiritual afterlife—and this was just what Mysteries like Demeter’s promised. But the idea of physical resurrection struck them as ghoulish. Who wants his body back, anyway, once he’s got rid of it? Matter is the very principle of unintelligibility. Best to be done with it. For the Jews, who had little or no belief in the immortality of the soul, only salvation in one’s body could have any meaning. For a long time, the Greeks and the Jews talked at cross-purposes.

  Gradually, however, as men educated in Greek learning began to explain Judeo-Christian beliefs, the beliefs came to hold out more meaning to the Greeks and Romans in a time when their own traditional religions were being drained of vigor. The philosophers knitted their brows and moaned about the impossibility of reaching truth; Christianity seemed to offer answers. The result of all this was that, just as the Judeo-Christian world had learned the Greek language and internalized Greek categories, the Greco-Roman world gradually abandoned its dying gods and became monotheist. At times, this union of two such disparate cultures went smoothly enough; at other times the union was (and still can be) bizarre and even internally contradictory.

  In A.D. 330, Constantine, the first Christian emperor, transferred his capital from Rome to Byzantium and renamed the city Constantinople. In 395, the empire was permanently divided between the sons of Theodosius the Great, the emperor Arcadius ruling the Greek East from Constantinople, the Emperor Honorius ruling the Latin West from Rome. From then on, there was a complete separation of administration and even succession between the two realms. Less than a century later, in 476, the Western empire fell permanently to the northern barbarians, the pillaging Germanic tribes. But life in the Byzantine empire continued more or less unchanged till the mid-fifteenth century, when it fell at last to the Ottoman Turks. This was an ornate, refined, stratified, and largely static society that had less and less to do with Western Europe. Sadly, its form of Christianity, which came to be called Orthodoxy and is full of rarefied spiritual insight, has never been well known in the West.

  In the West, Christianity found itself confronting the barbarian hordes, who in their crazy way redirected the Judeo-Christian stream at least as much as the Greeks had done. There is an early Irish lyric called “The Hag of Beare,” spoken by an old woman who has become a nun and who spends her last days doing penance. She’s actually a goddess from Ireland’s pagan past, now attempting to adjust to the new Christian order, and her ancient mind keeps mourning, at first ambivalently, over scenes of her lusty youth when she was a beautiful, much beloved princess:

  These arms, now bony, thin

  And useless to younger men,

  Once caressed with skill

  The limbs of princes!

  Finally, she gives vent to her real feelings about her pagan past, her joy in what once was—even though it might gain her disapproval in the new order:

  So God be praised

  That I misspent my days!

  For whether the plunge be bold

  Or timid, the blood runs cold.

  Nothing this red-blooded ever issued from Byzantium, where poetry (except for hymnody) was virtually unknown, drama had died, speculation was strictly confined, art had turned into imitation of past models, and the draperies that had once revealed goddesses in all their splendor were used to cloak every figure in layers of virtuous solemnity. Even the one relatively undraped figure, the dour John the Baptist, speaks of the transformation that a Plato-influenced Christianity wrought on Greek art. In Dinner with Persephone, Patricia Storace’s delicious repast, a contemporary Greek woman comments: “Think how our ideal of the body changed with Christianity from the beautiful athlete’s body to the ruined emaciated saint’s body you see in icons. John the Baptist is always shown nearly naked, like the old gods and the boy athletes, but his arms and legs are sticklike, tortured-looking, as if he is diseased. And yet this body is a kind of ideal, the ideal Christian body, with its hollow throat, the sacralized misery of its limbs and the sacred torment on its face, with which it bargains for the eternal life that beauty couldn’t win.” The Greeks no longer strove to emulate Apollo and Aphrodite; they came to resemble more and more the frowning, storm-browed Christs and sad, resigned Madonnas of their own icons. They even stopped calling themselves Greeks (or Hellenes); they were Christians, nothing else.

  In this last stage, there was some continuity with the Greece that had been, if only in a pushing of the body-soul duality to logical, if absurd, conclusions, but there was also dreadful calcification in the building of this Byzantine “artifice of eternity.” In another of history’s terrible ironies, the barbarian influence on Western Christianity enlivened it beyond anything the diluted Greeks of Byzantium were now capable of. The mad barbarians pushed Western Christianity into retaining some of the pluralistic abundance, the inventive plasticity, the fathomless versatility that had once been incomparably characteristic of the Greeks. If these currents were not always ascendant in the new Christian order, they were never entirely lost; and by such indirect means was the lambent flame of the Greek legacy kept alight in the West.

  But to find something Greek that is as emotional and singular as “The Hag,” we must go back to the lyric poets. Here, then, one last time, is Sappho—in an apostrophe to Hesperus, the god who lights the evening sky, her poem as bold and, especially in the way it builds to its resonant last line, as tender as anything from the barbarians:

  S
tar of Evening, herd them home

  whom Dawn dispersed, now Day is over:

  kid to its, lamb to its, child to its

  mother.

  Human connectedness to all of nature has an immediacy here that we seldom experience today—even if this ritual is still repeated every evening as shepherd children and their flocks descend the forested slopes of Lesbos.

  Of course, it is the Greeks who came after Sappho who were largely responsible for the levels of cerebral mediation that now intervene between us and nature. To understand why the Greeks matter to us today, we must appreciate their careering variety of human responses—the lightning-quick transmutations, the Odyssean resourcefulness, the inexhaustible creativity—that came to its final end only in the contractions of the Byzantine state after so many centuries of constant change and renewal. There was nothing the ancient Greeks did not poke their noses into, no experience they shunned, no problem they did not attempt to solve. When the world was still young, they set off at the first light and returned early from the agora, their arms full and their carts loaded down with every purchase, domestic and foreign, natural and artificial, they could lay their hands on. Whatever we experience in our day, whatever we hope to learn, whatever we most desire, whatever we set out to find, we see that the Greeks have been there before us, and we meet them on their way back.

  1 The Second Gulf War has sent classicists scurrying back to their Thucydides, where they have found frightening parallels between the hubris of seemingly unbeatable Athens—in its fearless resolve to dominate the world even without allies—and the dismissive attitude of the Bush administration toward America’s traditional friends, toward the UN and its member nations, and toward world opinion. See, for instance, “The Melian Dialogue,” Book V, History of the Peloponnesian War, in which the Athenian delegates, brushing aside all appeals to fairness, threaten the existence of the small state of Melos, if the Melians do not do exactly what the Athenians demand and join their exceedingly underpopulated alliance: “We recommend that you should try to get what it is possible for you to get, taking into consideration what both of us really do think; since you know as well as we do that, when these matters are discussed by practical people, the standard of justice depends on the equality of power to compel and that in fact the strong do what they have the power to do and the weak accept what they have to accept.” When Donald Rumsfeld, a practical imperialist if ever there was one, took over the Pentagon, he commissioned a study of how ancient empires maintained their hegemony. Might he more profitably study how they lost all they had gained?