The Twelve Olympians Read online

  Cunningly wrought by the crafty Hephaistos descended upon them:

  Suddenly gone was the power of lifting a limb, or of moving.

  Then at the last they perceived it when all too late to escape it;

  Ay, and already at hand was the famed deft-handed Hephaistos,

  Back from his journey returned ere reaching the island of Lemnos.

  Helios, still on the watch, had remained and had brought him the tidings.

  Homeward straight he returned with a heart sore troubled within him;

  Up to the portal he strode, and he stood; fierce anger possessed him;

  Then with a terrible cry to the gods of Olympus he shouted:

  “Father Zeus and ye other immortals eternally blessed,

  Come and behold! ‘Tis a matter to laugh at, but not to be suffer’d.

  Lo now, me that am lame this daughter of Zeus, Aphrodite,

  Ever dishonours and loveth instead man-murdering Ares,

  Since he is fair to the sight and in limb he is straight; but a body

  Weakly was mine from my birth—nor verily blame I another,

  Only my parents. I would they had never begotten and borne me!

  Come! ye shall see these twain now lying in loving embracement;

  Here on my bed they are mounted—behold! At the sight I am maddened!

  Scarce for a moment more, do I think, they are longing to lie here,

  E’en though hotly in love—nor quickly again will be longing

  Thus to be bedded together. But here they are trapped and imprisoned

  Till that her father repay, to the last one, every bride-gift,

  All that I left in his hands as the price of the impudent baggage—

  Ay, for his daughter is fair, but she knows not to bridle her passions.”

  Thus did he speak, and the gods to his brass-floor’d mansion collected:

  Hither Poseidon himself, Earth-shaker, hastened and Hermes,

  Bringer of fortune, and hither the prince, far-shooting Apollo,

  While that at home with womanly shame stay’d every goddess.

  Soon at the porch were standing the deities, bringers of blessings.

  Then an unquenchable laughter rose mid the blessed immortals

  While they beheld the device that was wrought by the cunning Hephaistos,

  Looking whereon thus whispered the one to the other beside him:

  “Ill deed prospereth never; the slow oft catcheth the nimble:

  Even as now by the tardy Hephaistos o’ertaken is Ares,

  Ares, the swiftest of all of the gods that inhabit Olympus,

  Caught in the toils of the Limper—and compensation he oweth.”

  Thus conversing together, they whispered the one to the other;

  Then spake lordly Apollo, the son of great Zeus, to Hermes:

  “Zeus-born Hermes, herald of heaven and bringer of blessings,

  Say now, feel you a longing in such strong fetters imprisoned

  Lying beside her in bed to embrace Aphrodite the golden?”

  Him thus answered the herald of heaven, the Slayer of Argos:

  “Had I but only the luck, O lord, far-darting Apollo!

  E’en though triple in number the toils—yea endless—that held me;

  E’en though all of you gods stood gazing, and every goddess,

  Give me to lie by her side and embrace Aphrodite the golden!”{71}

  And now Poseidon, senior god of Olympus, brought his tact to bear in order to end the scandal, for he persuaded Hephaistos to loosen the magical net and release the lovers.

  Then did the twain, set free from the grievous constraint of the netting,

  Spring straight upward and vanish. To Thracia Ares departed,

  She to the Cyprian isle, Aphrodite, lover of laughter—

  Even to Paphos—for here is her shrine and her altar of incense.

  Here did the Graces receive her and bathe and anoint her with unguent

  Not of the earth; but it lieth as bloom on the limbs of immortals.

  Then did they clothe her in beautiful raiment, a wonder to gaze at.

  Here is a strange tale to tell about gods, for though Ares is disliked, Hephaistos is truly admired, and Aphrodite adored. Yet it is certain that Homer is neither a cynic nor is he detached and sophisticated. The best comment has been made by the most recent translator of the epics:{72}

  He does believe in his gods, and that very vividly, but whereas the Christian conception of godhead is based on our creation by God in his image and likeness, with imperfections introduced by Satan, Homer regards his gods, though immortal, as made in the image and likeness of man. Mixed with his deep respect for their almost unlimited powers and his ӕsthetic appreciation of their beauty, he betrays a very tolerant understanding of their motives and frailties. This leads quite often, as in the famous Lay of Demodokos, to a treatment that we can only regard as humorous. But it was neither flippant nor irreverent. These powerful beings, who were so intimately connected with men’s passions and desires, were there to administer, not necessarily to obey, man’s moral code. Christian apologists of a later age made a mistake when they suggested that the pagans had invented the gods and their iniquities as an excuse for themselves. Homer never censures a god nor lets a mortal use a god’s misdeeds as a pretext for his own.

  Ares, the undesirable alien, was a god of Thracian origin, and his worship extended thence, through Macedonia, into the northern portion of Greece, down to Thebes, in which city he was held to be the husband of Aphrodite rather than her paramour. In Athens too, since Hephaistos had virtually become the mate of Athene, Ares and Aphrodite were associated. There were temples for him in several cities of Peloponnesus, especially, of course, in Sparta. But even the Spartans, most warlike of all Greeks—Greeks who were then, and still are, the best fighters of the Mediterranean peoples—even the Spartans treated Ares roughly and with suspicion. Near his temple there was a statue of the god in fetters, for it was the notion of the Spartans that if they kept him in chains he could never run away from them. No one even felt confidence that he would support a fighter who showed courage, and in the sixth century B.C. the poet Anacreon wrote a brief epitaph for a friend who fell in battle:

  Timokritos fought well. This is his grave.

  For Ares spares the coward; not the brave.

  It was in the war-god’s character to be a great pursuer of women, though in this respect he did not differ from the other Olympians. His sons, however, grew up as violent and outrageous men, murderers, brigands, impious raiders, and ferocious fighters. They were generally unpopular.

  When Greeks and Romans came into frequent contact with one another Ares was naturally identified with the Roman Mavors, or Mars, a deity of far greater importance and one held in high esteem, for in Rome Mars was second in importance only to Jupiter himself. But, like the half-civilised Thracians from whom Ares was derived, the Romans were generally partial to war, wherein, owing to the superior organisation of their military machine, they were almost uniformly successful. There were no purely Roman tales of the amorous deeds of Mars, until such time as his identification with Ares was established, whereupon the whole mythology of Ares was taken over and given to Mars as well.

  One may well ask how it came about that a people with such views as the ancient Greeks held—a people who had as great a fundamental hatred of war as the English have—should have persisted in the cult of an unpopular god. The answer, perhaps, is that there are sometimes historical and vital crises in the lives of nations when ultimate values must be assessed and ultimate decisions taken and when a whole nation knows—as we in our time have twice known—that the choice lies between Ares and ‘slavery’. Yet, except for Satan, there never was, and surely never can be, a ‘god of servitude’. Add to this the emotional factors of the deadly tedium of security and the exhilaration of danger; and sometimes—though happily not too often—even the best may be driven, like Rupert Brooke in 1914, to welcome Ares:

&
nbsp; Blow, bugles, blow! They brought us, for our dearth,

  Holiness, lacked so long, and Love, and Pain.

  Honour has come back, as a king, to earth,

  And paid his subjects with a royal wage;

  And Nobleness walks in our ways again;

  And we have come into our heritage.

  Seven Olympians have so far been passed in review: Hera, Zeus, Athene, Hermes, Aphrodite, and her two mates Hephaistos and Ares. Before proceeding to tell about five more yet to come, we may pause and attempt an assessment as to which deities—among the seven described—held the highest place in the minds and hearts of the Greeks. First one must put Zeus. Before the end of the fifth century B.C. a thoughtful Greek’s view of Zeus would be much like a thoughtful modern believer’s view of his God. Many a Greek would hold that poetry, music, temples, statues, and all other works were things offered by creative man to the glory of Zeus; for the relation of Zeus to the world was both that of Creator Artist and of Father and Ruler of mankind. The poet Epimenides wrote already by about 500 B.C. the famous words, “In Him we live and move and have our being”.

  Second one must put Aphrodite. The view that one of the other highest concepts of godhead appears embodied in the Paphian is, I am aware, much more difficult of acceptance in our time. That is because men have for so long clothed and cloaked and muffled themselves in the wrappings of sin-belief; and have held sex to be at worst the most sinful of all phenomena, and at best something to be deplored in whispers. As the result the modern world has too frequently offered Aphrodite its insults and now pictures her through the symbols of celluloid dolls and molls with meaningless Hollywooden faces. This is an impious attitude to a Power whom even the Immortals feared, and whom mortals adored because they had no tendency to regard what was pleasant and pleasurable as suspect and sinful. Total abstinence seemed as hateful as total indulgence, for of all things the Greeks despised the violence of excess. Moderation and self-knowledge were of as great value in the service of Aphrodite as they were in that of the god next to be described—one who stood as high as Zeus and Aphrodite in the thoughts of men—Apollo.”

  IX—APOLLO

  IN historical times Apollo became a great Panhellenic god second only to Zeus himself. The other Olympians who were held to be the sons of Zeus—Hermes, Ares, Dionysos—seemed, as it were, younger sons who were never regarded with quite so much awe and reverence as the Greeks gave to Apollo. Indeed, he is the embodiment of the Hellenic spirit, because almost everything which distinguished the Greek outlook on life from that of other peoples around them—sensitivity in art, music, and poetry, a deep interest in the health and gaiety of youth, respect for law, love of moderation—all these things are symbolised by Apollo. Nevertheless, he may not have been in origin a Greek god, even if one of the divine concepts which contributed to the Apollo-godhead came from a Dorian source. Opinions about him among modern students of Greek religion are more sharply divided than are opinions about any other deity, and the authorities are found to be ranged in two camps which favour, the one a Northern, the other an Eastern origin of the god. If controversy has not raged with the uttermost force of an odium theologicum, it has nevertheless raged.

  More than twenty-five years ago Professor Gilbert Murray suggested that a compromise might be found in the view that Apollo might derive from both regions,{73} and there is more recent evidence to support such a view. About 1100 B.C. Dorians, the last wave of Greek-speaking people to come down from the North, entered Greece, and a number of them got as far south as Crete, which thenceforward became a predominantly Dorian island. These people had the custom of holding an Assembly of all adult male voters—rather like an Anglo-Saxon Shire-moot—which was named the apella. In the Dorian-Greek dialect Apollo was always called Apellon, and it is almost certain that the two words are closely connected, which means that Apellon is in origin a Dorian tribal deity, and Nordic.

  Yet in Central Asia Minor, in that Hittite region from which—as we have already seen—strange tales were derived and incorporated in the myths of Kronos, Zeus, and Aphrodite, an Apollo-like god also once existed. From Lycia, one of the strongest centres of his cult in the south-west corner of Asia Minor, came his surname Lykios, by which the Greeks constantly called him; and farther east on the high plateau have been found Hittite dedications to a god called Apulunas. Here is the most powerful of a cumulative mass of reasons for saying that the god is Eastern, or Anatolian.{74} It was always one of the agreeable characteristics of the Greeks to welcome the god or gods of a stranger and to say to him, But of course! Your gods x, y, and ɀ are obviously the very same as my gods a, b, and c!” Therefore, if Ionian Greeks, living in the Islands and on the coast of Asia Minor, became familiar with a god of Hittite origin named Apulunas they would be ready to point out to Dorian Greeks, of other Islands and the Greek mainland, that this was unmistakably the same god as Apellon, and the Dorians would readily concur. Thus the coincidence of like-sounding names would hasten the process of merging two separate divine concepts into one undivided godhead.

  Apollo’s twofold origin is stressed by the fact that there were two distinct and separate primary holy places devoted to him—his Ionian sanctuary of Delos and his Dorian shrine at Delphi. To the former he owed such appellatives as Phoibos, or Shining (which seems to make him akin to a sun-god), Delian and Lycian; to the latter names like Delphinian, Pythian, Ambiguous, and Founder. One might, indeed, compare the two centres of his cult with the Roman Vatican and the Byzantine Phanar, though Delphi and Delos never enjoyed thundering at one another retaliatory excommunications, and no Delian Photios caught out a Delphic Leo subscribing to heresy.{75} In times of war the two places might find themselves backing the politics of rival states, but beliefs remained entirely unaffected.

  One particular point of difference between the two holy places deserves notice. Apollo had a twin-sister, Artemis, who among the Ionians and in Delos was of greater importance than she was among Dorians and at Delphi. It will therefore be convenient to consider Delian Apollo in the next chapter, in company with Artemis, but to devote the present chapter to the story of Delphic, or Pythian, Apollo. What the god meant to the ancient Greeks can still be perceived to some extent today, for it is open to anyone who can travel to Greece to visit Delphi, to linger there, to drink in the air of that extraordinary place, and to learn a little of the feelings men have had about the god.

  There is a shelf of land, stony and sloping, on which Dorians from Crete built the god’s Sanctuary of Delphi beside the Castalian Spring. Looking from the shelf to the south-west, one may see the distant Gulf of Corinth and some of the mountains of North Arcadia beyond. Below the shelf is a drop of near 2,000 feet into the deep and narrow gorge of the River Pleistos. A traveller may descend with difficulty, ford the river, and climb more easily the south side of the gorge in order to get from the south, looking north, the best view of the ancient sanctuary and the modern village of Kastri beside it. Then one sees the cliffs towering behind Delphi to the height of another 2,000 feet. Later, the ascent of those same cliffs having been made by a rock-track called ‘the Bad Stair’, the traveller comes on to a high undulating plain at about 4,000 feet above sea-level. There are patches of forest, small tarns, meadows covered with the perfect wild-flowers of a Greek spring and early summer; and beyond and over all this, to the east, there rises the great snow-capped dome of Parnassus, yet another 4,000 feet above the plain on which it stands.

  That very condensed description of the situation within Greece of the Holiest Place of the Greeks is needed, because the position and the atmosphere of awe created for them a sense of the numinous combined with authority such as gave the place much power in historical Greece. Delphi, always one of the very little Greek towns, exercised an influence on the rest of Greece which now appears—and in the ancient world often appeared—most disproportionate to its small size; and this influence was derived very largely from a curious procedure: the employment of the Spirit of Divination in the serv
ice of Politics. It is of considerable interest to study the mechanism of prophecy and the results achieved by its careful application to the lives and actions of individuals and states.

  Apollo, god of the place in historical times, had replaced earlier female divinities who were thought to have prophesied. The legend told that he had slain Python, a great she-serpent, and received the title of Pythian Apollo, for which reason his priestess was known as the Pythia. In later times such a title could be given to lesser women, like the young slave-girl who followed Paul and his companions at Philippi, causing them much trouble, and who was described as possessing a “Python” spirit.{76} But only the inspired official priestess at Delphi was really entitled to such a name. Successive Pythian priestesses were thought of as mystical brides of Apollo and were in earlier times virgins; but, after a young Pythia had been raped by a rough laird from the mountains of Thessaly, a change was introduced, and the prophetess was always elderly—over fifty—though dressed symbolically in the garb of a young girl. In the days when Greek states and neighbouring kingdoms and empires flourished there were usually two or three Pythias available to take turns of duty in the adyton—the oracular vault situated below floor-level in the basement of the temple.

  Nowadays if one stands beside the theatre of Dionysos and looks down on to the huge platform of Apollo’s temple—several Doric columns of which stand up at the east end—one may see, nearer to the west end, a deep, dark cavity which was approached by a steep stair. Later one may scramble down into it and wonder at its small size. But in ancient days this adyton was the Holy of Holies to which few but a Pythia and her priest-interpreter might have access. In the small room of about 8 by 12 feet there was in the natural rock of the floor a long fissure, while in one corner stood the empty tomb of Dionysos, wherein they said the god’s divine remains had been kept after the giants tore him in pieces and before his father Zeus ordained his resurrection. A bronze statue of Apollo, gilt all over and glittering in the dim light of smoking oil-lamps, stood somewhere near the centre, while in another corner was the holiest object of all: the omphalos, the navel-stone, inscribed in very early letters with the word ‘A D S’ meaning ‘of Earth’, the great goddess whose cult preceded that of Apollo. This little ancient limestone fetish, once believed to mark the true centre of the earth, is only 15½ inches in diameter and 11¼ inches high. It was covered in a net of thick fillets of wool which almost concealed it, and flanked by a pair of solid golden eagles. Last in the catalogue of strange paraphernalia, and not least in interest, was the Holy Tripod upon which the Pythia sat.{77} Certain early Fathers of the Church—Origen and St. John Chrysostom—who entertained their flocks with the recording of such details, reported that the Pythia was deemed to be physically impregnated by a divine essence from Apollo rising from the fissure in the rock, and consequently prophesied. Be that as it may, she had washed in water from the Castalian Spring, she had drunk from a silver bowl water of Kassotis, while the priest-interpreter started to burn, over an oil-flame, barley-grains, hemp, and chopped bay-leaves, the fumes of which filled the little vault with clouds of smoke; and at that moment she began to chew the leaves of a bay-sprig in her hand. Cyanide of potassium is the name we give now to the essence she got from those leaves—a small quantity, of course, or she would die, but insidious, exciting, and intoxicating. The adyton filled up with smoke, a small grating in the ceiling allowed some fumes to escape, otherwise the celebrants would have suffocated, but the escaping fumes exercised their dizzy influence on the postulants anxiously awaiting above the answer of the Prophetess. According to another view, however, there was room for one postulant within the adyton. Now we may imagine that the Pythia has attained ‘ecstasy’ and has gone under—under the ‘influence’; she talks, talks, and talks—incoherently, but not entirely so. She has heard the question that was put and, since she has a ‘spirit of divination’ in which she herself completely believes, since she is possessed of ‘second sight’, since she has got that ‘something’ which we have all at some time met in some otherwise-foolish fortune-teller—’something’ we have failed to explain—since she has all this, the Pythia is saying things often well above the nonsense-level. The priest-interpreter memorises or takes down her words as quickly as may be; then there is a pause, for the words require editing and interpreting by another, the prophētēs, or ‘speaker’ for the god, who may give them out either in verse or in prose. Lastly, there awaits the postulant an exēgētēs Pythochrēstos—another member of the staff, doubtless appointed for natural good manners and adroitness—whose job it is to explain the obscure and difficult bits to the satisfaction, if possible, of the serious enquirer, for these obscurities caused Apollo to be referred to frequently as ‘Loxias’, the Ambiguous.