W. E. Gladstone

“ But even then, when we consider that she supremely administers political society, personal conduct, war, and skilled industry, in fact that the whole intelligence of the world, individual and collective, appears to be under her paramount guidance, besides all the power she exercises over inanimate and animate nature, and even in the innermost sphere of personal action, we perceive that, apart from the elevation and glory of her position, the range of her gifts goes to an extent which, simply as such, could never have been assigned by mere human invention to any deity but the supreme one. ”

“ Earth was heavy, inactive; and was the prime representative of matter as opposed to mind. Hence the personality of the tradition was severed by the Greeks from its material groundwork; and Earth, the Nature-power, remained beneath, while the figure of Juno, relieved from this incumbrance, and invested with majestic and vigorous attributes, soared aloft and took the place of eldest sister and first wife of Jupiter. Hence doubtless it is that the Γαῖα of Homer is so inanimate and weakling: because she was but the exhausted residue of a tradition, from which the higher life had escaped. ”

“ As time went on, and the eidola of succeeding generations were heaped one upon another, the truly theistic element in the Pagan mythology was more and more hidden and overborne, until at length its association with evil was so inveterate and thorough, that the images, which the citizen or matron of the Roman empire had before the mind as those of gods, bore no appreciable resemblance to their divine original, but more and more amply corresponded with that dark side of our nature, on which we are accessible to, and finally may assume the likeness of, the evil one. ”

“ I cannot but think, however, that we see here at work that principle of disintegration, which solved all riddles of character by making one individual into more than one: beginning, at least for earth, with that Helen in Egypt, who was made the depository of the better qualities that post-Homeric times could not recognise in Helen of Troy. Although the son of Jupiter, Hercules had on earth, through a sheer mistake, been subject to a destiny of grinding toil. His original extraction and personality stand in sharp contrast with the restless and painful destiny of his life. ”

“ Human life is cheap; so cheap that even a mild and gentle youth may be betrayed, upon a casual quarrel over some childish game with his friend, into taking it away. And even so throughout his life, should some occasion come that stirs up his passions from their depths, a wild beast, as it were, awakes within him, and he loses his humanity for the time until reason has re-established her control. ”

“ We find in the island and in its history no poverty, no grief, no care, no want; all is fair to see and to enjoy. But we feel thankful to Homer that he has not here, as in the case of the Cyclops, made kin with the gods entail a marked moral or intellectual inferiority upon the sons of men; no purer or more graceful piece of humanity is to be found among the creations of the human brain, than his picture of Nausicaa. ”

“ And, besides, the position of the Greek woman of the heroic age is in itself so remarkable, as even on special grounds to require separate and detailed notice. It is likewise so elevated, both absolutely and in comparison with what it became in the historic ages of Greece and Rome amidst their elaborate civilization, as to form in itself a sufficient confutation of the theories of those writers who can see in the history of mankind only the development of a law of continual progress from intellectual darkness into light, and from moral degradation up to virtue. ”

“ While on the one hand it has deities, such as Latona, without any attributes at all, on the other hand, we find in it both gods and goddesses, with an assemblage of such attributes and functions as have no common link by which invention could have fastened them together. They are such, likewise, as to bring about cross divisions and cross purposes, that the Greek force of imagination, and the Greek love of symmetry, would have alike eschewed. How could invention have set up Pallas as the goddess at once of peace and its industries, of wisdom, and of war? ”

“ Thus, therefore, when Christianity wrought out for woman, not a social identity, but a social equality, not a rivalry with the function of man, but an elevation in her own function reaching as high as his, it made the world and human life in this respect also a true image of the Godhead.
Within the pale of that civilization which has grown up under the combined influence of the Christian religion as paramount, and of what may be called the Teutonic manners as secondary, we find the idea of woman and her social position raised to a point even higher than in the poems of Homer. ”

“ When, in the Twenty-First Iliad, the great battle of the gods begins, Jupiter has no part to take. He sits aloft in his independent security, while they contend together, even as he was afterwards supposed to keep aloof from trouble and responsibility for human affairs. The same sentiment appears in the determination of Neptune and Apollo not to quarrel on account of mortals. But in the case of Jupiter, the selfish principle comes out with greater force: he is not merely indifferent, but he absolutely rejoices in the strife of the Immortals ”

“ But who will venture to say that the duties of man to the Deity, or the larger claims of man upon man, were better understood in the age of Pericles or Alexander, of Sylla or of Augustus, than in the days of Homer?
It is to be expected that, when the elements of wealth are for the most part such as nature offers, when man has hardly left the mark of his hand upon the earth, when little has been appropriated, and that little indeterminately, then the description of right which is least understood should also be least respected ”

“ To appreciate the importance of this consideration, we must bear in mind that there is no one of the purely invented deities, who is not at one time or another subject in some form to disparagement. Mars is worsted by Minerva, through Diomed, as well as directly subject to her control; Vulcan is laughed at by the gods in general; Mercury dares not encounter Latona; Ceres sees her lover slain by Jupiter; Venus is not only smitten to the ground by Minerva, but beaten by Diomed without his having any divine aid to strengthen him, and befooled by Juno; Juno outwits Jupiter himself ”

“ The chastity of the traditive deities, Minerva, Diana, Latona, and probably Apollo, I take for one of the noblest and most significant proofs of the high origin of the materials which they respectively embody.
There is also in the deities of Homer not merely a dependance upon physical nourishment, but even a passion of gluttony connected with it. The basis of this idea is laid in the conception which made feasting the normal occupation of Olympus. It followed that they were not only bound by something in the nature of necessity to food, but also enslaved to it by greediness as a rooted habit. ”

“ In short, the Greek mythology is represented as a corrupt edition, not of original revealed religion, but of a Nature-worship which, as it seems to be assumed, was separated by a gulf never measured, and never passed, from the primitive religious traditions of our race. Further it seems to be held, that the faults and imperfections of the pagan religion have their root only in a radical inability of the human mind to produce pure deity; that they do not represent the depravation of an ancient and divine gift, but rather the simple failure of man in a work of invention. ”

“ But the intellectual and social developments of man are there represented in the simplest and the slightest, nay, even in the narrowest forms. With the exception of Solomon, who, in spite of his wisdom, was enticed away from God by lust, and of the two illustrious specimens of uncorrupted piety in the midst of dangerous power, Joseph and Daniel, I know not whether we can, on the authority of Holy Scripture, point to any character of the Mosaic or Judaic history as great in any other sense, than as the organs of that Almighty One, with whom nothing human is either great or small. ”

“ They have not been thought through even to their legitimate consequences, and far less to those which appear to arise from the following out, not of a full truth, but of some particular and severed aspect of it. Taken at the worst, Destiny in Homer broods like a cloud in a distant quarter of the sky, silently gathering the might which, when ripe, is to engage in obstinate and unending conflict with deity. But for this work the material is not yet prepared; and practically neither μοῖρα nor αἶσα much crosses the work of Divine government, such as it is conceived and exhibited in Homer. ”

“ The Homeric poems are like a broad lake outstretched in the distance, which provides us with a mirror of one particular age and people, alike full and marvellous, but which is entirely dissociated by an interval of many generations from any other records, except such as are of the most partial and fragmentary kind. In respect of the influence which they have respectively exercised upon mankind, it might appear almost profane to compare them. ”

“ But the intention of the allusion here is manifest: for when the Suitors see her, it is passion which prompts them to vie with one another in courting her favour through the medium of costly gifts. How, then, came the sad Penelope thus to deck herself? It was not her own thought: it was the suggestion of a deity, and if Venus had been recognised by Homer as an established object of worship in Greece, Venus would most properly have made the suggestion: for she, says Achilles, is supreme in beauty, as Minerva is in industry and skill [471] . ”

“ She is, when we contemplate her critically, the goddess of motherhood and of nothing else. And in truth, as the fire made Vulcan, and war made Mars, her mythological children, so motherhood made Juno, and is her type in actual nature. She became a goddess, to give effect to the principle of œconomy, to bring the children of Jupiter into the world, to enable man, in short, to construct that Olympian order, which he was to worship. ”