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When men were distinguished egregiously by any favorable token, they were called god-like or divine: Agamemnon was so named in virtue of the power and the scepter he held from Jove; Ulysses, for the wisdom which he shared in equal measure with the same god; Paris and Helen, for the exceeding favor of Venus, who granted them an extraordinary share of beauty-the last of these, even on the confession of the Trojan elders and peers of Priam, being "wondrously like to the goddesses immortal."

Let us see the Homeric faith as to the influence of the gods in bringing misfortune and annoyance. If sun stroke and pestilence decimated the Greeks, it was Phoebus the Far-darter, angry on account of insults offered to his priest, who was shooting at them with his pointed shafts, and feeding the ever-burning funeral pyres with heaps of dead. If the spear of Menelaus failed of its mark, when aimed at the "prime sinner" Paris, the disappointed hero reproached Jove with loud groaning and heaven-turned glances in such words as these:

"Father Jove, no god more baleful than thyself my
plans hath marred.

Now, indeed, I looked to punish Alexander for his
sin,
But, instead, my sword hath shivered in my hands,
my spear hath been
Hurled in vain," etc.

And presently, when he had seized Paris
by the helmet, and was triumphantly
dragging him along to the Greek host,
Venus came to the rescue of her favorite,
snapping the thong which bound the helm
beneath his chin, and (such things being,
as Homer interjects, mere bagatelle to the
gods) hiding and carrying him away in a
cloud, thus again confounding the at-all-
points-thwarted Menelaus. After the en-
counter, when Paris was safely reclining
in his perfumed chamber, Venus compelled
the reluctant Helen to visit him, and
caused her reproaches to sink abruptly
into tenderness. When a person was
born, married, or slain; sick or in health,
weak or strong, the gods were intimately
and directly connected with these events
or accidents. It was in virtue of their

kindly interference that a man enjoyed a
jest or a laugh, or sneezed with security;
and it was equally by their unpropitious
offices, that the mariner was driven out of
his course; the wind, which was the me-
chanical agency, being regarded merely
as the breath of a hostile deity. These
direct and powerful operations of the
gods reached also to the thoughts, and
desires, and judgment. If Jove wished
to avenge the dishonor put upon Achilles,
he sent a hostile and lying dream (itself a
deity) to Agamemnon; that it might,
standing by the king's bed in the guise of
the sage and friendly Nestor, the better
prevail upon him to commit himself to
destructive or injurious measures. If a
hero was deceived, a god had perverted
his judgment, and befooled him; if injured,
a god, not so much the human instrument,
had wrought the ill. It will be seen that
the Greeks afforded no exception to the
universality of the theocratic element in
the first stages of all peoples. Even at
the period at which we contemplate them,
the principle of direct god-government in
political matters is only formally invalidat-
ed. Though Agamemnon is the appar-
ent and human king, he is so only in vir-
tue of his inheritance of the identical
scepter, which Vulcan had formerly fash-
ioned for the great king of gods and

men.

Homer enables us to identify the scep- | far, the awkwardness of the Greek theoloter, by reciting its various holders during the interval between its manufacture and its possession by Agamemnon:

"Vulcan first this staff had given to King Jove, old Saturn's heir;

Jove to his messenger presented it, him who great

Argus killed;

Mercury gave it up to Pelops, in the hippodrome
well-skilled';

Pelops yielded it to Atreus, king and shepherd of
the flock;
Atreus, dying, to Thyestes left it, rich in pastoral

stock;

And at length Thyestes yielded it to Agamemnon's

hand."

gy, arising from the want of a spirit of evil, some being analogous to the Ahriman of the Persians or the Devil of the Christians, who should, either in his own person, or by a counter-constitution of evil spirits of which he was the head, array himself against Jove and all the inhabitants of heaven, not as individuals, but as a class; working against each and all, not from pique or caprice, but from deep-set, unwavering hate. If the divine superiority had been so proudly sufficient as to have allowed the Titans, or any other anti-theic powers, to range the What weight this scepter carried, and world, and endeavor to controvert the bewith what dignity it invested its possessor, to thwart their designs for man's happinificence and good-will of the gods, and may be gathered from the words of Ulysses, when engaged in chiding the Greeks, ness, instead of keeping them basely both princes and soldiers, for their too growling beneath volcanoes, (where, at great eagerness to return to Greece. He least, a later age localized them,) the puthus concluded the "gentle reproof," rity, and unanimity, and peace of heaven which he made a point of administering to had been wonderfully enhanced. Men the kings and chiefs; whilst further on, in would not then have been tempted to evil the same quotation, will be seen the more all doubtful cases-of morals, at least-an by the gods, and they would have had in uncompromising manner in which he reproached the common people. We pre-final safety, instead of finding themselves alternative of honor, moral right, and mise that Ulysses had, for the occasion, borrowed this "indestructible" scepter to enforce his personal authority—

"Most dreadful is the vengeance that a Jove-bred sovereign wreaks,

obliged, on every debatable point, to select for their proper patron one out of two or more deities of conflicting interests. This is a remark extremely likely of suggestion, when the warm sensuous Polytheism of Homer is looked at com

Since from Jove he holds his honor-Jove, the allcounseling, loves him well. When he heard a base-born fellow with loud fac-paratively with a more abstract Panthe

tious shouts rebel,

He would beat him with the scepter, and thus give him reprimand:

'Wretch, keep quiet, and obedient, do what other men command,

Who in station are thy betters. Thou, unwarlike, imbecile,

Neither in the field nor council art accounted aught

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ism; or from the locus of any monotheistic system. But the Greek himself was not likely to be very acutely sensible of such a defect. His problem was to manufacture gods (as the ingenious harmonic artist a base-viol "out of his own head") from the depths of his moral consciousness: what could he do but transfer to the divine an indefinite multiple of the good and evil of his own nature?

Keeping this well in view, we may, as we proceed to unvail the attributes of the of the moral qualities of their worshipers. gods, come to a tolerably correct estimate "Tell me with whom you go, and I'll you you what you are," is, as it stands, a very respectable proverb; but it would lose nothing of its weight or verity if the first moiety ran, "Tell me whom you worship." Nay, we incline rather to the emendation than to the original; for the fear of consequences, and a whole host of little conventional arguments, may keep a man within the limits of what he calls the be

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coming; but, if once he exposes the deity | ed even severally, or all combined, to or the quality that he enshrines within the essay their powers against him. Thus: temple of his heart, then, indeed, may con- "Come, gods, and try me : hang a golden fidently be declared what he is, or what chain from heaven, and all ye gods and he resembles. goddesses suspend yourselves therefrom; yet would you not draw from heaven to earth your supreme counselor Jove, even with your utmost labor: but whenever I willed to do so, I could draw it up, together with earth and ocean, and you all, and binding the chain around the top of Olympus, suspend all these dangling in the air."

Two simple mental processes will give us, as we prosecute our inquiry into the political, social, domestic, and moral life of the gods, the same results as applied to mortals. We have first to consider what was the state of morals and manners which could coëxist and consort with the deification of certain qualities that were reckoned divine; and secondly to estimate the reciprocal and reäctionary influence of the creed which recognized these upon the lives and habits of its believers.

Jove was "the supreme ruler both of gods and men, and stood to the former exactly in the same relation that an absolute monarch does to the aristocracy of which he is the head. His will was the grand originating center of all great movements in the physical and moral world; and besides the peculiar functions which he exercised as god of the upper air, he had a general superintendence over the conduct of all the other gods, and over all the thoughts, purposes, and actions of men." He seems even to have enjoyed a kind of suzerainty over his co-heirs, Neptune and Pluto; to whom had fallen, at the division of power consequent upon the dethronement of "wily Saturn," the empire of the Sea and the Infernal Regions, respectively. Vulcan, the cunning artist of the gods, bore witness to this supremacy, when, counseling his mother Juno to make peace with Jove, he rather ludicrously reminded her of his own mis-adventure, which had arisen from former opposition to Jove in her behalf:

"Once, in former time, assistance when to thee I would have given,

Having seized my foot, he hurled me from the threshold high of heaven.

And the submission of the awed assembly asserted that this was no idle boast. Yet was not Jove almighty, in a strict, defined sense of the term; his title being rather most, and very, not all powerful. He had known difficulties, and been driven to straits by far less formidable combinations than the whole united strength of heaven. The following passage from the appeal which Achilles made in his sorrow to his mother Thetis, shows how that silver-footed goddess had once relieved him from great dishonor and extremity. For when

"Juno, Neptune, and Minerva would have closely
fettered him,
Thou then coming didst, O goddess! from the chains

release his limb;

Calling up the Hundred-handed quickly to the Olym-
pian height,
Surnamed by the gods Briareus, by all men Egeon
hight."

And the liberator of Jove was thereupon advanced to a seat of honor and distinction by the side of the grateful god. For the want of consistency and homogeneity in the myths which have their place in Homer, we can only plead that it was not his province to systematize or articulate his religious creed, so much as to embel the most effective and dramatic episodes. lish his account of the main action, by Whatever the traditional temporary weaknesses of Jove may have been, he does not appear in Homer to suffer any diminution of power or dignity from the remembrance of them; the gods, upon pain of his displeasure, dared not receive him otherwise The unfortunate god was, however, than standing; and they followed meekly kindly tended by the Sentians, but never in his train to and from the celestial banrecovered a lameness which, in conse- quets. Juno alone would venture directquence of his fall, seized both his legs. ly and in his presence to oppose him, and Jove also, with a proud consciousness of take him to task for his supposed delinhis individual superiority to all the rest quencies: but even this more in the chaof the gods, on one occasion threatened racter of an injured and petulant wife, that he would hurl any offending or dis- than a god in persistent opposition to his obedient deity to Tartarus; and challeng-measures. And though it was common

All day was I hurried headlong, and with the declining day

Fell on Lemnos, with but little life left in me, as I lay."

for the gods to take various sides in the Homeric contests, yet in all, according to the poet," the purpose of Jove was being fulfilled;" his will overriding and overruling, whilst conniving at, their active expressions of partisanship. This was the crown of Jove; the will, namely, that would and must finally bend every thing to itself, and out of every contradictory and opposing influence assert itself in ultimate and grand fulfillment. The peculiar moral functions of Jove were to befriend and protect those who were otherwise friendless; to avenge all infractions of the laws of hospitality and kindness; to give rewards to those who deserved well, and, conversely, to punish the doers of evil. "Whatsoever, in short, rendered man an object of interest and love to man, came from Jove. He was god in a sense that_belonged to no other deity. Without him men were wild beasts, life an uninterrupted war, and Olympus a mere

bedlam."

The doctrine of a fortune or fate, which came afterwards to be so elaborated by the tragedians of Greece, is found in Homer only in a very elementary and unformed state. The "essay of the human mind to satisfy its innate longing for a monotheistic view of the universe," had not become, in the days of Homer, so essential to man as to necessitate the conception of a power before which even the divine power and will must bow, and within the limits of which these must revolve. This longing, in his time only rudimentary, easily found its correlate in the indefinite supremacy of the one Jove over the subordinate forces of earth and heaven.

"The gods know all things," is the Homeric epitome of the doctrine of divine omniscience; which, however, no more than the like assertion as to their power, ("the gods can do all things,") is to be taken as of strict and literal application. For we are supplied with instances which must operate against the reception of this as an all-embracing or universal proposition. Here is an example. The" windfooted" Iris, running down from Olympus, came with a message to Achilles, the purport of which was, that he should arm himself" unknown to Jove and the other gods." Iris did this at the command of Juno; who, however, with the sharpened eye and ear of a jealous wife, and withal a slightly shrewish one, had on a former occasion easily discovered a meeting

which Jove had arranged and held, clandestinely, as he flattered himself, with Thetis. These attempts at secresy, whether successful or not, show sufficiently that the planners of them hoped to remain undiscovered, and demonstrate, therefore, their belief in the limited knowledge of those whom they wished to deceive. No monotheist would avow in theory, or proceed upon in practice, the hope of deceiving God; full well knowing that a hope entertained in contravention of absolute divine omniscience must necessarily prove abortive.

The friendship of the gods, whom we may, after having entered this caveat, regard generally as omniscient and omnipotent, was, of course, a thing to be coveted, and when gained, to be highly prized and anxiously preserved. But the winning and the preservation of this favor was a task of no slight difficulty. An answer was often long withheld, even from a worshiper who for the moment enjoyed their protection and patronage, until the gods supplicated had opportunity to revolve the petition in their minds, and decide how far it were expedient, from their own co-working or antagonistic relations with other deities, to reply favorably or otherwise. Thus Thetis was obliged to urge Jove to cut short her dubiety by a word, which should at once either grant or refuse her application. Jove having been thus urged, although with some degree of misgiving and gloomy anticipations of a curtain-lecture, promised to signify his approval of her petition by nodding his head, the pledge

"That most binding is; whatever I have by a nod Firm shall stand irrevocably, both by guile and fate approved

unmoved."

But this divine favor once gained, was by no means therefore perpetual. It was not the glory of the Homeric gods that they were slow to anger; on the contrary, they were easily irascible, jealous of slights and petty insults, and relentless in their persecutions of the luckless wight who had the misfortune to offend them. Over and above these drawbacks, their proverbial guile and deceit rendered it politic in the man who had so far succeeded in winning the good graces of the gods, to exact an oath as security for their performance of the good he craved. Ulysses, the crafty suspector of craft, demanded from

"And her love-inflaming bosom, and her fiery flashing eyes,"

Calypso and Circe an oath in confirmation | general eye, they were capable of being of what he hesitated to take upon their seen and recognized in their divine characunsupported words. It was not against ter by the opened eye of their pious the nature and practice of the gods to se- worshipers." Thus, Venus manifested duce men, not only into misfortunes and herself to Helen at first in the guise of calamities, but even into crimes; that of an old dame who had formerly been a perjury not excepted-although it was a wool-carder in her husband's palace at sin for which they reserved in a future Lacedæmon; till, at length, her all-radiant state the most severe punishments. On neck, the other hand, since the gods were the dispensers of good to men, they were to be reckoned of a beneficent disposition, and their placability was implicitly asserted by the attempts made to propitiate them. It was to be presumed that the cases in which they inflicted evil on particular individuals were exceptional; and notable instances of their accessibility and readiness to oblige those whose lives were mainly good and devoted to their service, are recorded in the pages of Homer. Here is the form of the very first prayer in the "Iliad," which Chryses offered up to Apollo, supplicating vengeance upon the Greeks, for the wrong he had suffered at their hands by the unjust detention of his daughter:

"God of the silver bow,

List to my prayer;
Thou who of old, as now,
Makest thy care
Chrysa and Cilla divine;
Who dost in Tenedus
Mighty reign;

If ever, Sminthius,
Roofs for thy graceful fane
Have been a care to me:
If e'er I burned to thee
(Offering the fatted thigh)
He-goats and kine,
Favor my upward cry,
Honor thy shrine:

May the Greeks feel thy darts
Piercing their hearts,

Smarting for tears of mine."

To which prayer Phoebus promptly and cordially responded, by sending the pestilence, or, Homericé, shooting the pointed shafts which we have before had occasion to notice.

The relations which the gods bore to men, and the close and constant intimacy with them and their affairs, suggest the questions, How was this intimacy affected, and these relations made manifest? First, of the first: "The gods visited the earth, and often appeared in a visible shape to mortals; generally, however, under some human mask, in such a manner that, while their godhead was vailed to the

revealed and confessed the goddess. Iris, again, visited Helen in the semblance of Laodice," the fairest of all Priam's daughters." Minerva, in propriâ persond, and yet in human form, prevented Achilles from taking a deadly vengeance upon Agamemnon, even whilst he was in the act of unsheathing his sword to slay haustless of the gods indulging in this that "king of men." Instances are exmethod of effecting their purposes, and of working upon the passions and plans of the objects of their visitations by articulate and viva voce injunctions. It was the custom of all the gods, with Jove at their head, to spend annually a period of twelve days in banqueting amongst the "blameless Ethiops," a people whose correctness of life and manners seems to have recommended them, in spite of any prejudice which might attach to the color of their epidermis, to the divine inhabitants of Olympus.

These theophanic revelations marked the highest and closest degree of intimacy; but there were other methods known to the Greeks by which the gods were accustomed to reveal their will to mankind. When the Greeks met in council to deliberate upon the means to be employed for getting rid of the pestilential visitation sent by Apollo, Achilles advised

them to

"Seek the counsel of some priest or prophet true, Or of one by dreams enlightened, for dreams also are from Jove."

The italicized portion of the above quotation embodies shortly the article of faith under cover of which it was reasonable for Agamemnon to act upon the message and advice of the "hostile Oneiros, or lying dream god, which Jove sent purposely to mislead him; whilst the other part indicates a belief in the inspiration of certain men to unravel and fore

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