J. C. Lawson

“ It is impossible to conceive of a people so cynical or so distempered as to darken the wedding-day with grim reminders of death. But to transfer some of the usages of marriage to the funeral-scene was to infuse one ray of hope where all else was sorrow and darkness, to teach that, though the dead and the mourners might grieve for their parting, yet by that parting from the old home the dead was to enter upon a new life, a life of wedded happiness, in the unseen world. ”

“ The fast is over; the dead has been restored to life before men’s eyes; well may they rejoice even to ecstasy. For have they not felt the ecstasy of sorrow? This was no tableau on which they looked, no drama in which they played a part. It was all true, all real. The figure on the bier was indeed the dead Christ; the figure on the altar-steps was indeed the risen Christ. In these simple folk religion has transcended reason; they have reached the heights of spiritual exaltation; they have seen and felt as minds more calm and rational can never see nor feel. ”

“ When I find in Sophocles the same thought, almost the same words, which may be gathered to-day from the lips of any unlettered lament-maker the whole Greek world over, I am compelled by my conviction of the continuity of all things Greek to believe that Sophocles adapted to his own use a thought which in his time even as now was uttered in many a funeral-dirge, and that while the phrases of the Antigone gained in his hands a new lustre from the pathos of their setting, they themselves were not new nor the invention of Sophocles’ genius, but an old heritage of the Greek race. ”

“ There had been days indeed when their gods walked the earth with men and counselled them in troubles and fought in their battles; there had been days when the chiefest of all the gods sought a hero’s aid against his giant foes; there had been days when men and women might aspire even to wedlock with immortals, and to possess children half-divine. In those days too death was not the only path by which the heavens or the house of Hades might be gained. Kings and prophets, warriors and fair women passed thither by grace of the gods living and unscathed ”

“ Slowly, haltingly, led by the dirge of priests, now in darkness, now lighted by the torches’ flare and intermittent beams from cottage doorways, groping at corners, stumbling in ill-paved by-ways, the mourners follow their God to his grave. The circuit of the town is done. All have taken their last look upon the dead. The sepulchre is reached—a vault beneath the church from which the funeral started. ”

“ When the drama of Demeter and Kore was played before the eyes of the initiated at Eleusis, were not they too uplifted in mind until amid the magic of night they were no longer spectators of a drama but themselves had a share in Demeter’s sorrow and wandering and joy? For the pagan story is not unlike the Christian story in its power to move both tears and gladness. As now men mourn beside the bier of Christ, so in old time may men have shared Demeter’s mourning for her child who though divine had suffered the lot of men and passed away to the House of Hades. ”

“ The peasant makes the sign of the cross as he passes any scorched and blackened tree-trunk; but if a man has the fortune to be struck and not killed, he may indulge a taste for idleness for the rest of his life—his neighbours will support him—and enjoy at the same time the reputation of being something more than human.
But in spite of the reverent awe which the victim of the lightning excites, the thunderbolt is often viewed now, as in old time, as the instrument of divine vengeance. ”

“ Indeed no one who has been to the great centres of miraculous healing can fail to be impressed by the unquailing faith of the pilgrims. Year by year they come in their thousands, bringing the maimed and the halt and the blind, and, more pitiful still, the hopelessly deformed, for whose healing a miracle indeed were needed. Year by year these are laid to sleep in the church or in its precincts on the eve of the festival. Year by year they are carried where the shadow of the icon as it passes in procession may perchance fall on them. ”

“ We should be misled by the modern devotion to dogma and definite formulae of faith, were we to think that so vague a religion as Greek polytheism was any the less an abiding force, any the less capable of inspiring genuine enthusiasm and reverence. It is not hard to imagine the worshipper animated for the time by one emotion only, his mind void of all else and flooded with the one idea incarnate in the divine being at whose altar he sat in supplication. ”

“ Custom, it is true, often outlives its parent belief; but custom itself is not invulnerable nor deathless if it has to battle against sentiments irreconcilably opposed to that original belief. If the purpose of propitiating a wolf-god with human flesh was rendered null and void by the modifications which the conception of Lycaean Zeus had undergone, how could the crude and savage rite have still flourished in the uncongenial soil of an humaner civilisation—unless of course some new stream of religious thought, instead of the original motive, had watered and revived it? ”

“ The dead man became in popular belief a revenant, a wanderer from out the grave, pitiable in his loneliness, cut off from all friendly intercourse with living men, not yet admitted to the fellowship of the departed, the sorriest of outcasts. Such was the misery to which the murderer by his act of violence had brought his victim; such therefore too the misery which the murderer himself must taste in his wanderings and loneliness here on earth, though it were but a foretaste of more consummate misery hereafter. Truly even in life the murderer was made to suffer as he had wrought. ”

“ They feel perhaps that the existence of Charos is one of the stern facts which men must face; and even the more educated classes retain sometimes, I think, an instinctive fear of making light of his name, lest he should assert his reality. For Charos is Death. He is not now, what classical literature would have him to be, merely the ferryman of the Styx. He is the god of death and of the lower world.
Hades is no longer a person but a place, the realm over which Charos rules. But the change which has befallen the old monarch’s name is the only change in the Greek conception of that realm. ”

“ If anyone should attempt to classify ancient Greek literature in modern fashion, under the headings of religion, science, history, drama, and so forth, he would remark one apparent deficiency. While history, philosophy, and poetry of every kind are amply represented and, however much has perished to be read no more, the choicest blossoms and richest fruit of Greek toil in these fields have been preserved to us, religion seems at first sight to have been almost barren of literary produce. ”

“ Was it the same as that which the old peasant of Santorini assigned for the performance of a like act in his own experience—that conception of the victim as a messenger with which he can have been familiar only from native and oral tradition? Assuredly some strong religious motive must have compelled the ancients to a rite which in the absence of such motive would have been an indelible stigma upon their civilisation, refuting all their claims to emancipation of thought and freedom of intellect, and branding them the very bond-slaves of grossest superstition. ”

“ Further it is this thought which almost alone strikes a note of cheerfulness and of hope in the popular dirges. The usual picture of the lower world is nothing but gloom and despair. It is a place of darkness on which the sun never shines, a place of ice and snow, and full of cob-webs. There are no churches there with bright golden icons; no quoits for the young men to throw; no looms for the women to ply. Hunger is not appeased, thirst not quenched, and sleep is denied. ”

“ A nation so conspicuous for their love of human beauty and their delight in the human form could not have viewed the extinction thereof with any feeling other than the most poignant regret—a feeling which, as we know, the Homeric doctrine did actually inspire in those who accepted it. The more thoughtful and hopeful religion of the Pelasgians, unless it had anticipated the philosophy of Plato in decrying the body and exalting the soul—an idea of which there is no trace—was bound to give promise that body as well as soul should survive death and dissolution. ”

“ Greater honour might be paid to one god, less to another; but from no immortal should service be wholly withheld: even unconscious oversights should be remedied by offerings ‘to an unknown god.’ Such in its essence was the popular religion, inconsistent it may be and not deeply intellectual, but in sympathies very broad—broad enough to encompass the worship of all immortals, broad as the earth and the sky and the sea wherein they dwelt and moved. ”

“ A strongly conservative attachment to ancient tradition and custom was strangely blended with that progressive spirit which made the intellectual development of the Athenians unique in its swiftness, as in its scope, among all peoples known to history. Their minds welcomed new speculations, new doctrines; but their hearts clung to the old unreasonable faith. Ancestral ideas remained for them the sole foundation of religion. Each poet or philosopher in drama or in dialogue, each man in his own heart, was free to build upon it and to ornament his superstructure as he would ”

“ And in general it will, I think, be admitted that the main tendency of Greek religious thought was to draw gods and men nearer together, alike by an anthropomorphic conception of the gods and by an apotheosis of human beauty; that it was to subserve this end that Art became the handmaid of Religion, and strove to express the divine in terms of the human, to discover in man the potentialities of godhead. All religious hope and ambition and effort turned upon communion with the gods. How then in the next world should hope be fulfilled, ambition satisfied, effort rewarded? ”

“ Happy those who are allowed even to taste of the river of death, and to forget their homes and orphaned little ones. Thus with strange medley of ancient and modern is the dirge-singer wont to describe that lower world to which all the dead without distinction go. Yet even into these dirges, which—in order to excite the mourners to wilder displays of grief—purposely emphasize the gloomiest aspects of death, there is allowed to enter the one cheering thought that the departed for whom lamentation is made is not dead nor yet fallen on eternal sleep, but wedded in a new world ”

“ The author of those high hopes, the founder of that blessedness, he proclaims, is none other than Love—Love that appealed not to the soul only of the initiated, but to the whole man, both soul and body—Love that meant not only the yearning after wisdom and holiness and spiritual equality with the gods, but that same passion which drew together man and woman, god and goddess—the passion of mankind for their deities, fed in this life by manifold means of communion and even by sacramental union, satisfied hereafter in the full fruition of wedded bliss. ”

“ Indeed, not only in war but in all conditions of life, any personal eminence or distinction has been apt to turn the head of a Greek. ‘The abundant enjoyment of power or wealth,’ said the ancients not without knowledge of the national character, ‘begets lawlessness and arrogance’; and in humbler phrase the modern proverb sums up the same qualities of the race,—καλὸς δοῦλος, κακὸς ἀφέντης, ‘a good servant and a bad master.’ In all periods of Greek history there have been few men who have attained to power without abusing it. ”

“ The stump of a candle burnt on some high religious festival, or a shred of the Holy Shroud used on Good Friday, is by no means to be despised; and the bones of a bat or a snake’s skin over which a witch has muttered her incantations acquire thereby an equal merit. But such charms as these are objets de luxe; the ordinary man contents himself with the commoner articles whose virtue is in themselves. No midwife, I understand, would go about her business without a plentiful supply of garlic. ”

“ And to them did Poseidon the earth-shaker open speech: “Father Zeus, is there now one mortal on the boundless earth, that will henceforth declare unto immortals his mind and purpose? Seest thou not that contrariwise the long-haired Achaeans have built a wall to guard their ships and driven a trench about it, and have not offered unto the gods fair sacrifice? Verily their wall shall be famed far as Dawn spreads her light; and that which I with Phoebus Apollo toiled to build for the hero Laomedon will men forget.” ”

“ In short, it is not on any special branch of Greek literature, but rather upon the whole bulk thereof, that the student of Greek religion must rely. He must recognize that a religious spirit pervades the whole; that there is hardly a book in the language but has some allusion to religious beliefs and customs, to cults and ceremonies and divine personalities. And while recognizing this, he must still admit the fact that nowhere is there found any definite exposition of accepted beliefs as a whole, any statement of doctrine, any creed which except a man believe he cannot be saved. ”

“ For though she be a good wife in commonplace estimation—and the Greek view of matrimony is in general commonplace to the verge of sordidness—though her skill in domestic duties be as proverbial as her beauty, she either turns her charms and her cunning to such account as to discover the hiding-place of her stolen kerchief, or, failing this, so mopes and pines over her work that her husband worn down by her sullenness and persistent silence decides to risk all if he can but restore her lightheartedness. ”