The clearest token of the part-human character of the divinities was their association with a partly terrestrial home, or rather headquarters: Mount Olympus, that enormous massif which separates Thessaly from Macedonia. It seems that this persistent association was due to the unusual splendour of the physical phenomena arising in that Greek climate among those mountains beside that ever-present sea. I have come round the spur of a mountain in North-east Peloponnesus to find myself facing a full moon so vastly magnified as to cause a gasp of astonishment, for it seemed four or five times the diameter of a big English harvest moon. One knew that the iridescent dust of Athens and all Attica was rising from the hot earth into a cold sky and producing a fantasy of magnification; but the eye did see the huge moon. Again, I have left Itea, the port of Delphi, before dawn in a small lateen-rigged fishing-boat, to cross the Gulf of Corinth for Achaia. We were half-way across when the sun came up with a jerk over the isthmus far to the east, slid into an inky cloud-bank which turned imperial purple edged with cardinal red; and, as the sun came out above the bank, such massed and solid colours were given to the eye as pass description, while the sea itself had been changing from lead to a wine-dark tone, to a turquoise blue. To the north the vast snow-capped dome of Parnassus glowed coldly, and to the south-east the icy cone of Mount Kyllene stood against a deeper blueing sky.
In South-western Peloponnesus Mount Ithome rises to over 2,600 feet, and from its summit one may often clearly see Cephalonia; or from the top of Attic Pentelicon’s 3,600 feet Melos is visible to the south; and in both cases the distance is over one hundred miles. Such phenomena in quantity, with colour, solid colour everywhere, are the almost unique possession of Greece today, as in ancient times. And they meant even more to the brilliant, alert minds of the Greeks than they do to us; for we can find the physical explanation of those visible splendours in Nature; but the Greeks knew these as visions from the realm of the gods. And Olympus itself was—and is today—producing its own strange divine-seeming phenomena.
Viewed from the wide plain of Thessaly against a northern sky, the mountain has magnificence. Viewed from the Jugoslav frontier and the wide valley of the Vardar against a southern sky, the huge mass is even more impressive. But many will agree that the grandest effect of all is obtained when Olympus is seen from some ancient site in the Macedonian peninsula named Chalcidice, because from there one sees the snow-capped ten-thousand feet rising straight out of the sea, fifty miles away across the long, deep Gulf of Salonica.
Varied atmospheric effects occur, and a description of them can be helped by simple diagrams. Fig. A symbolises Olympus completely free of cloud, a rare event which I have observed twice from the north, and on both occasions shortly before sunrise after a cold, clear night. Fig. B symbolises the ten-thousand-foot mountain cut by a heavy layer of cloud. Below the cloud is rain or grey weather, above it glowing sunlight. Apart from times when the whole mass is hidden in mist, this is one of the most usual aspects of Olympus, and there is abundant evidence{121} to show that the Greeks interpreted this phenomenon after a special fashion which really conditioned the whole of their conception of the Olympian gods. That which lay below the long cloud-layer was called aer; that which was above the clouds and into which the summit of Olympus protruded was called aither. It is not enough to use the English derivatives ‘air’ and ‘ether’, for the original Greek words had other connotations. Now, aer with its moisture, cloud, and mist is what mortals dwell in; the gods, however, dwell over the cloud in aitker; and within that vast brightness they move freely and fast. This Greek concept has been most admirably expounded by Guthrie, whose words must be quoted:
The distinction was relative rather than absolute, but it remained as real as the distinction between dark and bright, and, I think we may say, between mortal and immortal. It remained also as a local distinction. Living in England we might be pardoned for supposing that the soft atmosphere in which we move, at times thickening into mist or cloud, or dissolving about us in rain, constituted the whole depth of the sky. Not so the Greek. In his climate it was possible to see beyond these impure vapours, and what he saw as he looked up into the dazzling vault of a clear Mediterranean sky was so striking that he felt as if he was seeing into something generically different from the air and vapours which hang around the earth. This it was which he named the brilliant, or blazing, element aither. To discover therefore whether the summit of Olympus pertained for the Greeks to earth or heaven we have to decide (if the discovery is to have any significance) whether they regarded it as situated in the aer or the aither. The answer, beyond a doubt, is that it was in the aither. Zeus, who holds court on Olympus, is at the same time Zeus the dweller in the aither.{122}
There is, however, a third phenomenon, which is symbolised by Fig. C. I have only personally observed it once, on a late spring evening about sundown when looking west from the acropolis of ancient Olynthus across the gulf. Innumerable billions of dust particles wafted into the aither produced, at great height, a strong ‘screen’ that magnified; and thus—over the cloud-layer—the mountain summit was vastly enlarged, even as its snow-cap was being illuminated by the westering sun setting beyond it. Not only did it seem several thousand feet higher, but it gave the illusion of being far too big to fit on to its base, which rose from solid earth to the cloud-belt. How many a Greek and Macedonian seeing such a vision must have felt that he had looked if only briefly upon the dwelling of the Olympian gods!
Thus and thus the mountain appears from below; but how does it seem to those few who have made the ascent? Not many have climbed it, for, until after the Balkan War of 1912, brigandage was rife in the whole region. The summit (Plate XIII) was photographed by F. Boissonnas in 1920, and his picture shows the ‘Throne of Zeus’ and ‘Mytika’, the two highest peaks. A fine description of the view from the summit was provided by Urquhart, who climbed the mountain in 1830.{123}
I spent no more than an hour at this giddy height, where the craving of my eyes would not have been satisfied under a week. I seemed to stand perpendicularly over the sea, at the height of 10,000 feet. Salonica was quite distinguishable, lying north-east; Larissa appeared under my very feet. The whole horizon from north to south-west was occupied by mountains, hanging on, as it were, to Olympus. This is the range that runs westward along the north of Thessaly, ending in the Pindus. The line of bearing of these heaved-up strata seems to correspond with that of the Pindus, that is, to run north and south, and they presented their escarpment to Olympus. Ossa, which lay like a hillock beneath, stretched away at right-angles to the south; and, in the interval, spread far, far in the red distance, the level lands of Thessaly, under that peculiar dusty mist which makes nature look like a gigantic imitation of an unnatural effect produced on the scene of a theatre. When I first reached the summit and looked over the warm plains of Thessaly, this haze was of a pale yellow hue. It deepened gradually, and became red, then brown, while similar tints, far more vivid, were reproduced higher in the sky. But, when I turned round to the east, up which the vast shadows of night were travelling, the cold ocean looked like a plain of lead; the shadow of the mighty mass of Olympus was projected twenty miles along its surface; and I stood on the very edge.
Imagination in the Homeric age pictured each deity as owner of a separate house, which was a superlatively designed and furnished royal residence. But as the earthly palace changed—with the fading of kingship in Greece—into a temple, so on Olympus the divine mansions, invisible to mortal eyes, were thought of as mighty temples in the aither. Men built famous houses on earth for the gods so that, when they sped like lightning through aither and floated down in aer, they might find a worthy lodging among men and bestow their blessings. For the Spirit that is Zeus there was a habitation at Olympia or in the Olympieion at Athens, for Hera there were Argos and Samos, for Athene there were the Parthenon in Athens and smaller houses on many citadels. Apollo could dwell at Delphi or Delos or beside Miletus; Artemis had her splendid house at Ephesus and lesser
ones elsewhere; Aphrodite had lodgings on Acrocorinthus and Eryx, at Ægina and Cnidus; while Hephaistos had one fine building in Athens, though elsewhere he dwelt in a simple gas-jet. Poseidon found welcome in great temples at Sunium and Poseidonia; Demeter in the House of Initiation at Eleusis, or her dwelling at Megalopolis. Only the restless gods—the good Hermes and the bad Ares—had in general small insignificant shrines, because they were for ever on the move. And the latest of the dwellers on Olympus, Dionysos, could find lodging in every theatre throughout Hellas.
The Athenians of the Court of Areopagus who examined the claims of Paul could agree with many of his views, especially that Divinity did not dwell in temples made with hands. But even as the devout experience in cathedral and church an Immanence as of a Real Presence, so the ancient Greeks might feel a Presence within some great and holy temple. The Greeks were not idolaters,{124} for the image was in the shrine to suggest divinity but not to receive direct worship; and if the image was of high æsthetic merit, that was only because the Greeks happened to possess an unusual amount of sensibility for what was fine.
Olympus was for long imagined by the average man and woman to be the headquarters of gods wayward and enigmatic; bound by no human codes of conduct—for that, indeed, would be absurd among gods—yet, with few exceptions, benevolent to men, courteous, kind, and civilised; divine Beings whose divinity was tempered by humanity. And so for a few centuries one European people devised a genial theology called pagan, enlivened by carefree humour and unexampled in that it assumed the existence of a company of the gods who understood the foolish as well as the splendid qualities that are constitutional to Creation’s most complicated mammalian masterpiece.
When a historian attains a certain age he may be permitted, as a rare treat, to take a wide sweep across the centuries, especially if that which he has been describing appears to him to have some relevance for our own day. Readers who have read as far as these words have perhaps wondered whether I could seriously approve a going back to earlier ways in religious practice. Advocacy of such a thing must be sheer folly, for modern man would fit ill into any cultus pattern of the past. He would be as uncomfortable in God-denying revolutionary Paris as among God-fearing Tudor Protestants; under Peter the Great as under Pope Boniface VIII. The moderation of mediæval Manichees in France or the fanaticism of malodorous monks in fourth-century Alexandria, the grossness of Inquisitors or the obscurities of Gnostics, would all be equally difficult for him to stomach.
Neither could he return to paganism with its oracles, animal sacrifices, and multiplicity of gods.
But there remains a question of great moment to be asked. Has the study of paganism anything to offer that may help us now, at the present time, within the framework of our society built upon a Christian basis? In the early days of Christianity the contribution which pagan thought made to it was tremendous, for it was this which transmuted a Jewish sectarian Christianity into a Hellenised form capable of becoming a world-religion. Yet to some historians it appears that Christianity unlearnt not all, but many, of its Greek lessons; and that after Constantine there was a real slipping-back. The Western Pontifical experiment which overshadowed mediæval Europe was from the Christian angle not so much a wrong tendency as a false emphasis, which placed obedience to authority and conformity above the salvation of humanity and happiness. The Renaissance restored much of the goodness of the ancient world, while the Protestant Reformation—of which, in its purity, Erasmus was unwittingly the true begetter—brought back much more of goodness, only to stray away again into too many follies akin to those that had beset the post-Constantinian age.
For twenty years I have lived in the rooms which were once occupied by Erasmus, the prince of Northern humanists, who devoted himself with equal zeal to pagan and to Christian letters. His example is adequate to justify the view that a study of Greek paganism has still plenty to teach us about the value of a group of principles that make for humanism.
First, mankind must recapture a zeal for the Truth, even though Truth discovered often shocks the seeker. There are today far too many professing adherents to Christian form who echo the words of a certain Procurator of Judæa. Pilate put the question “What is truth?” in a mood of cynicism; his modern imitators put it in a mood of fear. And they think they can evade it by way of a wry smile, a deprecating gesture, and a vague reference to Faith as superior to Truth or Knowledge. At times fear of Truth produces a swift, impatient thrust of the ostrich-head into the sands of mortified mysticism. No Greek ever allowed religious prohibitions to curtail his passionate search for knowledge and for truth, come what may.
Second, humility, which the Church too often demands from men, would better become the Church herself. As a famous Anglican bishop once said, “The assertion that any Church is infallible is both impudent and dangerous.”
Third, let all active proselytism and all patronising attitudes towards men of other faiths be forever abandoned.
Fourth, let the all-out emphasis on sin be modified, and let the early Christian and Erasmian transmutation of the concept into ‘folly’ become the new Christian one. The word in the Greek New Testament means no more than ‘fault’ or ‘error of judgment’. That is a tremendous lesson to be learnt from the ancient Greeks.
Fifth, there should be more trust in the frequent good intentions of mankind which do sometimes get implemented. There is no more vicious proverb than the one which asserts that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.
Sixth, toleration—and honest toleration—must abound. Not that dubious toleration which is patronising, conditional, and permissive; but a mentally unreserved and total toleration of views that seem utterly wrong. To exchange this with Jews, Moslems, and Buddhists is apparently easy; but the Catholic must tolerate the Protestant gladly, and the Protestant must tolerate the Catholic gladly, even as Paul suffered fools gladly. Pythian Apollo was happy and proud to tolerate Delian Apollo; Delian Apollo showed enthusiastic toleration for one whom he looked upon as his other self, Pythian Apollo.
This is where ancient Greek paganism can supply the best, the finest, and the most valuable lesson of all.
The study of the beliefs of the Greeks, of their cults, and of their genial, healthy way of life is something that gives us confidence in humanity within the framework of history. It is something which can knock the frightened mood of self-depreciation out of mankind—a mood that would have repelled self-respecting Greeks, whose code of conduct was summed up in “Know thyself”, “Don’t exceed”—precepts conducive to the practice of good manners. Indeed, few will deny that our present civilisation’s gravest fault is a shortage of these; for good manners are a trouble to acquire and, like toleration, difficult to keep. One maxim has been invented within the Christian dispensation which Apollo would gladly have added to the others inscribed in his temple at Delphi:
Manners maketh man.
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{1} OCD, p. 729.
{2} For a recent account of this matter see H. St. J. Hart, A Foreword to the Old Testament, 1951, Chapter V.
{3} Matthew, xxiii, 15.
{4} CAH, XII, p. 517.
{5} Guthrie, The Greeks and their Gods, p. 121.
{6} AGA, p. 29.
{7} H. Bossert, AAC, pp. 10 ff.
{8} H. G. Güterbock in AJA, 1948, pp. 123 ff. See also A. Goetze in Ancient Near Eastern Texts relating to the Old Testament (Princeton), 1950, pp. 120 ff.
{9} See Plate VIII.
{10} Acts, xvii, 28.
{11} That is one
view. But other explanations have been advanced.
{12} Genesis, vi, 2–4; Job, i, 6–12 and ii, 1–6.
{13} Guthrie, The Greeks and their Gods, p. 118.
{14} Genesis, xviii, 20 ff.
{15} Numbers, xiv, 11 ff.
{16} Translation by E. V. Rieu.
{17} W. Leaf, Iliad, ii, p. 53.
{18} See Guthrie, op. cit., p. 55.
{19} Song of Solomon, iv, 7 ff.
{20} See Seltman in Cornhill Magazine, 1950, pp. 296 ff.
{21} Fynes Moryson, An Itinerary, Containing his Ten Yeares Travell, London, 1617, pp. 180 ff.
{22} Genesis, i, 27.
{23} Cook, Zeus, iii, pp. 960 ff.
{24} Cook, Zeus, i, ii and iii.
{25} Pp. 29 ff.
{26} ι Kings, xi, 1 and 3.
{27} Seltman, NC, 1946, p. 101.
{28} See p. 40 above.
{29} Cook, Zeus, iii, figs. 474 ff., and Plates L to LVI.
{30} A. W. Lawrence, Classical Sculpture, pp. 195 ff.
{31} Cook, Zeus, iii, p. 588.
{32} H. J. Rose in OCD, p. 114.
{33} See p. 30 above.
{34} May 21, 1951, p. 5.
{35} Jacqueline Chittenden in Hesperia, 1947, pp. 89 ff., and in AJA, 1948, pp. 24 ff.
{36} Chittenden, loc. cit., Plate XV. See also Guthrie, The Greeks and their Gods, p. 90.
{37} Especially by Chittenden, loc. cit.
{38} See pp. 26 ff.
{39} My version of the passages selected is adapted from the late H. G. Evelyn-White’s translation in the Loeb volume.
The Twelve Olympians Page 19