The Twelve Olympians Read online

  Much later the Greeks, whose sense of humour always mixed thoroughly into their religion, said that Zeus wooed Hera for three hundred years before he married her. However, this may in a fashion represent the time it took for the Zeus-religion and the Hera-religion to achieve ‘canonical’ unity. Once they had done this a kind of gospel, or myth, about Hera could grow up; and this deserves some consideration.

  It begins with a repulsive story which is now known to be neither Greek nor Minoan-pre-Greek, but to have derived from quite another source. In the central region of the high plateau of Anatolia—or Asia Minor—was a culture known as Hittite, flourishing about 1300 B.C., and preceded by an earlier culture called Hurrian as far back as 1500 B.C. A collection of tablets in the languages of these people contains crude tales about Middle Eastern gods, some of which got into Greek myth; but this is a story of rebellion, murder, and cannibalism in heaven which may incorporate some Babylonian matter as far back, at least, as 2000 B.C. The stories on the tablets are not an assemblage of popular tales but a product of learned theologians with prurient minds, and they were passed on from Hittites to Phœnicians.{8} Cyprus—part Greek, part Phoenician about 800 B.C.—contained plenty of people speaking both languages, and any interested Cypriot trader or seaman might have passed on the legends to numerous Greeks, including Hesiod, whose family—somewhere between 800 and 750 B.C.—migrated from North-west Asia Minor to Boeotia, where he composed his Theogony, or ‘Birth of the Gods’, flinging into his ‘stockpot’ any bits of offal he could collect.

  When we come to consider the myth of Aphrodite we shall have more to say about this group of Hittite theological yams, which are actually a very recent archæological discovery. For the moment we can only deplore the bad taste of the Bœotian farmer-poet, Hesiod, for using rubbish.

  Hera, so he said, was the sister of Zeus, who had older sisters and brothers, Hestia, Demeter, Poseidon, and Hades, all being the children of Kronos and Rhea. ‘Fate’ had foretold that Kronos would be dispossessed by one of his children, who would cast him from the Throne of the Almighty and succeed him; therefore Kronos, compelling Rhea to hand over each child as it was born, swallowed it whole. By the time the sixth child appeared, Rhea, being a little discouraged, resorted to a stratagem and gave Kronos a stone wrapped in a blanket to swallow. The live infant—Hesiod says he was Zeus—was clandestinely reared, and, having grown up at a great speed, attacked his father Kronos, obliging him to regurgitate the undigested older children, one of whom was Hera. She, after prolonged courtship, married Zeus. This was the hieros gamos, the ‘Holy Marriage’, commemorated annually at Argos, her chief sanctuary, and at her other important sanctuary in Samos as well as in several other Greek cities and states. By the union of Zeus and Hera marriage was, for the first time in Greece, sanctioned by divine example, became more than a tribal custom, and was dignified as a rite—indeed, almost sanctified as a sacrament. About this Argive and Greek attitude there is, of course, nothing Hurrian or Hittite!

  Devotees remembered certain things about the Lady Hera that dated back to her pre-Greek days when her life was untrammelled by a sky-god husband. Of such was the story that by bathing in the spring Kanathos at Nauplia she annually renewed her virginity, for the concept of the Virgin Mother has always been acceptable in Southern Europe. Hephaistos was her son, virgin-born without union with Zeus, but she was not very fond of him. Nor was her marriage very fruitful, though some said Ares, god of war, and Hebe, goddess of health, were their children.

  Hera was a competitor against Athene and Aphrodite for the golden apple which was to be awarded to the loveliest, young Paris being the judge. But it was no part of the Greek story that the three goddesses showed themselves naked to Paris, as in the famous painting by Rubens in the National Gallery in London. That detail is a late invention of the atheist cynic Lucian, who was born about A.D. 120, in the days of the Roman Empire. Hera was always on good terms with Athene, but certainly not with Aphrodite, and in the Trojan War the two former helped the Greeks, while the latter abetted the Trojans. Her myth, in fact, was short; and very properly, since the Lady who is to be the pattern and exemplar for all good married women should lead a life of virtuous obscurity,’ the past forgiven because it is forgotten—or almost.

  The reflections which occur about Hera are simple. After the fusion of the Northern and Mediterranean races she was established above all as the goddess of marriage, married life, and the home. Some long time before 600 B.C. it had become clear to most of the Greeks that marriage—not love, which need have nothing whatsoever to do with it—was the greatest stabiliser of their social order. Concerned mainly with the humdrum life of women in the home, Hera was not the kind of goddess to move poets to enchanting hymns such as were written for other deities. In art she is normally represented as the Queenly Bride, diademed, a veil over her head, discreetly draped, and with a sceptre in her hand. No remarkable early or classical statue of her happens to have survived, but there are pleasing pictures of her on many Athenian vases. Very enchanting is the figure of her on an ointment-pot, in New York, painted by the Penthesileia Painter, on which she is a girl-bride, the more attractive for the untidy strand of hair that escapes from under the veil.{9}

  It is worth remembering too that the cult of the Great Goddess which grew into the Greek worship of Hera is evidence that the idea of personal divinity has been in the minds of men and women since an age very remote indeed, long before the concept of Zeus, the Personified Sky, began to be imagined. Deity at first was female; and her male consort or consorts played only the minor roles of servitors.

  III—ZEUS

  Zeus is the Sky and Weather, and he dwells in the sky. Long ago Homer said, “The portion of Zeus is the broad heaven in brightness and in cloud”; and within the great age of Greek civilisation from 600 B.C. onward Zeus is constantly conceived either as the sky itself or as the Being who lives in the sky, whence comes the weather. Yet when he descends upon the world he rests on the very highest point of Greek earth that rises up towards the sky, and therefore it is upon the glittering summit of Olympus—rising out of the sea to near ten thousand feet—that he and the other gods dwell. He is the ‘cloud-gatherer’ who sends rain, lightning, thunder, and the bolt that blasts and destroys. The thunderbolt is his grandest and most frightening attribute. Then, as human thought, reflection, and philosophy grow, it gradually appears that Zeus is a Life Force expressing himself in matter and evolving organisms in pursuance of his own purpose, whence there develops a philosophy and a religion of optimism calling men to co-operate with God. And out of this arises the greater concept of pure, eternal all-embracing Divinity—which is Zeus. A Greek poet, Epimenides, about 500 B.C., wrote of Zeus, “In Him we live and move and have our being”; and about 300 B.C. Cleanthes in his hymn to Zeus said, “For we also are Thine offspring”. These are the quotations{10} that Paul himself used, drawing on Greek sources to explain to Greeks his Christian conception of Almighty God.

  The Greeks came down into Hellas in two main groups between 2000 and 1200 B.C., though each of these probably filtered down fairly slowly over periods of years. The first we call the Minyan group of Greeks, the second the Achæan. The name of Zeus is associated most definitely with the latter, but he had actually arrived already as the chief god of the former or Minyan group. The Great Goddess of the pre-Hellenic folk had possessed, as we saw, one nature, but many different names. Zeus possessed one name, but there were many variants. The ‘first’ Zeus, who came with the Minyan group, was called Dān, and his wife was Dā; there are local variants between the ‘first’ and the ‘second’ Zeus in which he appears as Zān or (perhaps) ‘sDān’, The name ‘Zeus’ itself was in places pronounced ‘sDeus’, and the genitive case may be either ‘Dios’ or ‘sDēnos’ (=Zēnos), the accusative either ‘Dia’ or ‘sDēna’ (=Zēna). So the Greeks had a varied repertoire of names, but all the emphasis was on the ‘Da’ or ‘Di’ sounds. The wife who came down with the ‘second’ or Achaean Zeus was named Di�
�ne.

  It is here that one may in passing observe a remarkable Italian parallel; for another Indo-European group of people, later called the Latins, moved into Italy with gods of very similar names. ‘Diu-pater’ and his wife ‘Diu-no’, who became known as ‘Jupiter’ and ‘Juno’, were, without any doubt, deities of the same origin.

  But, one may ask, what happened to ‘Dān’ and ‘Dā’, who came down with the first Greek group from about 2000 B.C. onwards? Titles were attached to them, and Dān was addressed as Potei-Dān—the first word meaning Master—and so became Poteidān, the regular early form of Poseidon. His wife, beginning to take to herself some of the characteristics of the Great Goddess of the pre-Hellenic folk, began to be known as ‘Mother Dā’, or—so it seems—’Dā Mater’, and thus became in classical Greek days the famous Demeter.{11}

  When five or six hundred years later the second group, the Achaean Greeks, came down with Sky-god Zeus, they, of course, failed to observe the identity of their god with the Poteidān of the Minyan Greeks, whom they now made their subjects. “He is the elder brother of our Zeus,” they said, “but he cannot be the sky, for that is Zeus: let him therefore be the sea. This is most suitable, for you Minyans are obviously splendid sailors, which we are not.” Therefore Dān, the proto-Zeus, quietly assumed, as Poseidon, dominion of the sea.

  This episode gives no cause for surprise, because divine identity is not always apparent on the surface. A learned theologian from Tibet or Afghanistan, paying a visit to England in order to study our religious customs, might enter first a small building the incumbent of which was an Anglo-Catholic, and then a Four Square conventicle having no stipendiary minister. In the ancient parish church he might smell the inebriating Oriental perfume of incense and see a crucifix upon the altar, a light burning before a reserved Host, and an image of Our Lady in one aisle. In the other place—the defiant chapel of the Plymouth Brethren, pulpited and pewed in pitch-pine—the enquiring Asiatic would discover the hard, clean smell of scrubbing-soap, and would see nothing set apart as holy except for one Great Book upon the desk, and it would be hard for him to believe that both buildings were devoted to the cultus of the same God.

  In the early days before the Greeks began to move into Greece, Zeus, like Elohim in the Old Testament, had a family; but whereas Elohim’s was mostly masculine,{12} Zeus was companioned mainly by female dependants—a wife, a maiden sister, and a daughter. As his worshippers came south they acquired a great shrine at Dodona in Epirus; and this was as far as Diōne, his first wife, got; for her worship was almost unknown, or only insignificant, farther south. But Zeus moved on to meet at Argos the Great Goddess whom they now named Hera, or ‘Our Lady’, and ultimately—as already recounted—to marry her. It was this wedding which greatly altered his character for a very long while, for people began to attach to Zeus, the husband of Hera, all too many of the stories and myths which had appertained to the many consorts and lovers whom the Great Goddess had had in remoter days. It was an admirable rehabilitation of the now-reformed goddess of married life and the sanctity of the home to be able to say, “Ah yes, but those adventures she is alleged to have had with this lover and that, disguised betimes as this bird or that, why—don’t you see?—it was really Zeus! Don’t forget that he was courting her for three hundred years”. Thus, to save the good name of his consort, a reputation for meaningless and morbid ornitho-morphology was foisted upon Zeus, who at the same time began to figure as a fickle—though philoprogenitive—gallant of a god. In the latter role he naturally resembled his worshippers, for princely Greek Achæans already possessed many of the customs and privileges which one associates with the feudality of Northern Europe in the Middle Ages.

  Zeus virtually left his Northern wife, Diōne, at Dodona, but his daughter came with him—a Valkyrie-like goddess perhaps, a virgin warrior—who became of immense importance in Greek religion and history. After a while this girl goddess became identified with an older, pre-Hellenic warrior-goddess generally known as Athene; and a later chapter must tell of this. But when the Greek girl-warrior, daughter of Zeus, came south she may have been spoken of generally simply as Pallax—meaning ‘the Maid’—which more often took the form of ‘Pallas’. The third female dependant of Zeus was Hestia, goddess of the hearth. It must not be forgotten that in those remote days the maintenance of the household fire was of great importance, for if it once went out a rekindling was rather complicated. Each household was, therefore, fussy about the house fire, and an unmarried daughter, sister, or aunt was the proper person to be put in charge of it. There was something sacred about that fire in the home; and the little township or big city kept the town or city hearth going as a community-hearth. All such fires were sacred to Hestia, goddess of hearths, for it was she herself who tended the fire of the family of gods upon Olympus. In fact, Hestia was inconspicuous but exceedingly important; and she was both originally and in reality one of the ‘Twelve Olympians’. Yet she was, by virtue of her office and employment, the one and only stay-at-home. When the other gods went out, this gentle Cinderella, this restful ‘sitter-in’, remained behind. And when the last of the great gods appeared on the scene—Dionysos, son of Zeus most high—someone had to make way. So Dionysos became, as it were, a member of the official list of the Twelve, and Aunt Hestia stepped down; though of course she continued to live on Olympus because of that divine hearth.

  It has already been observed that just as these ‘Dios’ and ‘Diōne’ divinities came down to Greece, kindred Indo-Europeans moving into Italy took with them their gods, Diu-pater (Jupiter) and Diu-nō (Juno). There, in some of the central Italian lands, it became customary to set up in each township a Capitol, ‘head-or chief-temple’, for the worship of three particular gods, Jupiter, his consort Juno, and his daughter Minerva—a warrior maid like the child of Zeus. They were invariably grouped together; and in sight of their chief shrine in Rome itself was the celebrated Temple of Vesta with the eternal fire upon the City’s hearth. Vesta was in name, as in fact and function, identical with the Greek Hestia. From the Italian end, the Sky-god is observed to arrive with wife, daughter, and sister, but with no other obvious divine relative. In Greece it is much the same with a like set of female dependants. Was there a son? Conceivably there was a Northern ‘Apollon’ whose personality and cult were fused with those of an East Greek Apolline god. Yet it is not possible to say more than this: half the Apollo-concept, including his role as son of Zeus, may have come down from the North to get mingled with another kindred cult.

  ZEUS was, ZEUS is, ZEUS shall be,

  men sang in the Hymn of Cleanthes; and it is time to return to consider him in three consecutive aspects: Zeus the Despot, Zeus the Creator, and Zeus the Eternal God.

  I. Zeus the Despot. That is his nature in the Homeric epics, for he is the god of the kings and chieftains of Homeric society, and his actions and thoughts correspond, on a higher level, to theirs. Indeed, the gods of high Olympus, the princes and leaders of the people, the commonalty and the serfs, formed together one compact society “organised on a basis of strongly-marked class-distinctions”.{13} The gods and the princes were the upper class, the rest the lower; and princes claimed descent from gods—from Potei-Dān (Poseidon) in the very ancient families, and from Zeus in the more powerful Achaean families. That is why they were bracketed with gods rather than with common men, and that is why they gloried in tales of some ancestress loved by Zeus and honoured above her sisters by the receipt of his favour, a mortal princess who bare a ‘son of god’, a Hero, from whom they traced descent. There could be no possible stigma in this, since there was no stain upon a mortal man of rank who took a girl of the people, and nothing but high regard for the lucky girl whom he singled out; nor was there any taint in bastardy.

  Since, however, there were no ‘higher gods’ above and beyond the Olympians, it was evident that the immortals were less subject to restraint and at times more violent than mortals would be; and it has rightly been pointed out that in the Homeric
poems mortals like Diomede or Ajax sometimes show more of nobility and generosity than does Zeus. The very same thing is found in early tales about Yahweh, the God of Israel, for Abraham in his attempts to intercede for the men of Sodom and Gomorrah sought mercy from the Inexorable,{14} and Moses with true nobility restrained Yahweh from the total slaughter of Israel by reminding Him that He was long-suffering and of great mercy, forgiving iniquity and transgression.{15}

  If Zeus the Despot could be wayward in his dealings with men, he could also act tyrannically to the other gods over whom he took absolute precedence. But the goddesses could and did wheedle him, exactly as noble ladies were able to ‘manage’ their lords. Nothing can better illustrate this than the superb passage in the fourteenth book of Homer’s Iliad which tells how Hera—full of guile because of an ulterior motive—aroused with daintily sensual skill her lord and husband’s desire for her, and, having satisfied it, lulled him gently to sleep. One may picture the Hera of this enchanting story as not unlike the little goddess shown in Plate VIII.

  Hera went in and closed the polished doors behind her. She began by removing every stain from her comely body with ambrosia, and anointing herself with the delicious and imperishable olive-oil she uses. It was perfumed and had only to be stirred in the Palace of the Bronze Floor for its scent to spread through heaven and earth. With this she rubbed her lovely skin; and then she combed her hair, and with her own hands set her shining locks and let them fall in their divine beauty from her immortal head. Next she put on a fragrant robe of delicate material that Athene with her skilful hands had made for her and lavishly embroidered. She fastened it over her breast with golden clasps and, at her waist, with a girdle from which a hundred tassels hung. In the pierced lobes of her ears she fixed two earrings, each a thing of lambent beauty with its cluster of three drops. She covered her head with a beautiful new head-dress which was as bright as the sun; and last of all, the Lady goddess bound a fine pair of sandals on her shimmering feet.