Ionic Greek

“ The cult of Dionysos has penetrated the leading communities and most of the byways of Greece; and nearly everywhere he has been partially tamed and the Mænads either suppressed or disciplined to the more sober purposes of civic worship. {88} But the two most striking phenomena in the spiritual history of the sixth century were, first, the rise and expansion of Ionic philosophy and physical speculation, and, secondly, the development of a new form of literature that came to be known as the Attic Drama. And both must be reckoned with among the forces affecting the life of the popular religion. ”

“ Much more different from the original type is the other leading dialect of the Greek language, the Ionic, which took its origin in the mother-country, and was by the Ionic colonies, which sailed from Athens, carried over to Asia Minor, where it underwent still further changes. Its characteristics are softness and liquidness of sound, arising chiefly from the concurrence of vowels, among which, not the broad a and o, but the thinner sounds of e and u, were most prevalent; among the consonants the tendency to the use of s is most discernible. ”

“ That is, through the great mass of the poems the habit and tradition of the Æolic pronunciation is preserved; in a small part the Ionic asserts itself.
These facts have been the subject of hot controversy; but the only effective way to minimise their importance is to argue that we have no remains of Æolic of the seventh century, and that the apparent Æolisms may be merely 'old Greek' forms dating from a period before the scattered townships on the coast of Asia massed themselves into groups under the names of Iônes and Aioleis—an historical hypothesis which leads to difficulties. ”

“ But we may readily conceive that the public solemnities in which the Ionic Greeks intermingled, in place of those gay and richly-decked crowds which the Homeric hymn describes in the preceding century as assembled at Delos, presented scenes of marked despondency: one of their wisest men, indeed, Bias of Priênê, went so far as to propose, at the Pan-Ionic festival, a collective emigration of the entire population of the Ionic towns to the island of Sardinia. Nothing like freedom, he urged, was now open to them in Asia ”

“ The situation of Greece proper and of the islands was favorable to the maintenance of such a system,—not so the shores of Asia with a wide interior country behind. The Ionic Greeks were at this time different from what they became during the ensuing century, little inferior in energy to Athens or to the general body of European Greeks, and could doubtless have maintained their independence, had they cordially combined. ”

“ Further, the old Greek literature has a striking completeness, due to the fact that each great branch of the Hellenic race bore a characteristic part in its development. Ionians, Aeolians, Dorians, in turn contributed their share. Each dialect corresponded to a certain aspect of Hellenic life and character. Each found its appropriate work.
The Ionians on the coast of Asia Minor—a lively and genial people, delighting in adventure, and keenly sensitive to everything bright and joyous—created artistic epic poetry out of the lays in which Aeolic minstrels sang of the old The dialects. ”

“ Greek philosophy was to prove the greatest intellectual asset of humanity. No other civilization or language before the Greek had invented the abstract ideas: time, will, space, beauty, truth, and the others. And from these wonderful, though imperfect, word ideas the vigorous and subtle Greek intellect rapidly raised a structure which found its supreme expression in Plato, Aristotle, and Zeno. But from the close of the Fourth Century before Christ, the time of Aristotle and his pupil Alexander the Great, Greek began to lose its vitality and to decay. ”

“ Thus, what was a certainty in the East, became a proposition in Ionia, and ultimately a doubt, at Athens. In Greece, indeed, as everywhere, religion was connected with the first researches of philosophy. From the fear of the gods, to question of the nature of the gods, is an easy transition. The abundance and variety of popular superstitions served but to stimulate curiosity as to their origin; and since in Egypt the sole philosophers were the priests, a Greek could scarcely converse with an Egyptian on the articles of his religion without discussing also the principles of his philosophy. ”

“ The Greeks, then, do not give passion, do not give character, do not give refined or naïve beauty. But you may think that the absence of these is intended to give dignity to the gods and nymphs; and that their calm faces would be found, if you long observed them, instinct with some expression of divine mystery or power.
I will convince you of the narrow range of Greek thought in these respects, by showing you, from the two sides of one and the same coin, images of the most mysterious of their Deities, and the most powerful,—Demeter and Zeus. ”

“ This gives us the distinction between the Æolians and the Athenians: among the former, individuality was developed in the aristocracy alone; among the latter, in all the citizens. The Æolians added to the crown of Greek literature one of the brightest of its jewels-lyric poetry, as we understand lyric in modern times, that is, the expression of the poet's feelings, on any subject whatever, as his individual feeling. ... But it was the Ionians who rendered the greatest services to Greek literature. They were a quick-witted race, full of enterprise, full of resources. ”

“ THE SOURCES AND THE EVIDENCE The foundation of a serious and scientific study of Greek religion, as distinct from the mere mythology of Hellas, may almost be said to have been an achievement of the last generation of scholars. And it is only through recent research that the Hellenic spirit, so creative and imperial in the domains of literature, art and science, can be recognised as manifesting itself not unworthily in the sphere of religion. ”

“ Having thus the means of destroying you in our hands, and having nevertheless bound ourselves by solemn oaths to save you, we shall not be fools and knaves enough to attempt it now, when we should draw upon ourselves the just indignation of the gods. It is my peculiar affection for my neighbors, the Greeks,—and my wish to attach to my own person, by ties of gratitude, the Greek soldiers of Cyrus,—which have made me eager to conduct you to Ionia in safety. ”

“ And at the very last there is the attempt, rather respectable than successful, to re-create at once the language and the literature, for the use of Greeks who are at least questionably Hellenic, in relation to forms and subjects separated by more than a millennium—by nearly two millennia—from the forms and the subjects in regard to which Greek was once a living speech. ”

“ Only two gods are respectfully handled—Apollo, who, though an ally of Troy, is a figure genuinely divine; and Poseidon, who moves in a kind of rolling splendour. The reason is not far to seek: they are the real gods of the Ionian. The rest are, of course, gods; but they are 'other peoples' gods,' and our view of them depends a good deal on our view of their worshippers. Athena comes a good third to the two Ionians; in the Odyssey and K she outstrips them. Athens could manage so much, but not more: she could not make the Ionian poetry accept her stern goddess in her real grandeur ”

“ Nothing could be more glorious and beautiful than the Grecian development; nothing more unlike it that the stale, wearisome, repetitious imitations of it in modern times. The Greek productions themselves have a living power to this day; but all imitations of them are cold and tiresome. These old Greeks made such beautiful things, because they did not imitate. That mysterious vitality which still imbues their remains, and which seems to enchant even the fragments of their marbles, is the mesmeric vitality of fresh, original conception. ”

“ Now it is not to be inferred that this was always the case, nor indeed that the intellect of highest development may not in the past, at least, have habitually thought in images, as the unlettered do to-day; and in Greece it appears that the picture language of the mind, as one may call it, held a place more important than with us, and perhaps equivalent to our own idea language. The Greek, as every one knows, peopled the earth with presiding geniuses, of more or less exalted rank, from Oread and Naiad, to the great Zeus of Olympus. ”

“ The Ionians, on the other hand, were open as the sea, and had as many moods. They were eminently susceptible to beauty in all its forms, to the charm of change and to novelty. They were ever ready to put any belief or institution to the test of discussion, and were governed as much by ideas as by sentiments. Keenness of intellect, taste in all matters of literature and art, grace in expression, and measure in everything distinguished them above all Greeks. ”

“ The Greeks of the present day, though they may not lay claim to, or boast of all the attributes of the Greeks of antiquity, must certainly be allowed to possess that quality for which the latter were ever so celebrated, namely, cunning and wariness: for although no modern Greek can be said to have any resemblance to Achilles, Ajax, Patroclus, or Nestor, in point of courage, strength, fidelity, or wisdom, he may nevertheless boast of being a close copier of the equally renowned chief of Ithaca. ”

“ Athens had never had a great statesman or soldier in her since the time of Phocion, but her philosophers and orators still went on discoursing in the schools, and for four hundred years at least Athens was a sort of university town, where the rich young men from Rome, Carthage, Alexandria, Asia Minor, and Syria came to see the grand old buildings and works of art, and to finish their education. For though the great men of Greece were all dead, their works, both in stone and in writing, still remained, and were the models of all the world, and their language was spoken all over the East. ”

“ And sometimes linguistic science will be able to assign the different personalities of the polytheism to its different {25} ethnic strains, by determining the group of languages to which the divine name in question belongs. Those that can be explained with certainty or probability as of ‘Aryan’ or Indo-Germanic and may therefore be presumed to have penetrated Greece from the north, are Zeus, Hera, Ares, Demeter, Hestia, Dionysos, probably Poseidon and Apollo. ”

“ But, at any rate, these various evolutions had already happened indefinitely before the two strains—the Northern and the Mediterranean—had blended into the Hellenic race. The higher and the lower, the more complex and the simpler, forms of religious imagination {55} operate together throughout Hellenic history; and the higher, though dominant, never wholly absorbs the lower, both being an intellectual tradition of an indefinite past. Much work on the origins of Greek religion has been wasted because its chronology is anachronistic. ”

“ The other great Italic philosophers just named, living, as we have seen, in the previous century, can scarcely have thought of Athens as a centre of Greek thought. Indeed, the very fact that these men lived in Italy made that peninsula, rather than the mother-land of Greece, the centre of Hellenic influence. ”

“ Be that as it may, legend and language alike connected the Athenians with the Ionians, though by the 5th century B.C. the Athenians no longer cared to be known by the name (Hdt. i. 143) . Lemnos, Imbros and Scyros, which had long belonged to Athens, were Athenian also in language. The great island of Euboea and all the islands of the central Aegean between Greece and Asia were Ionic. Chios, the most northerly Ionic island on the Asiatic coast, seems to have been originally Aeolic, and its Ionic retained some Aeolic characteristics. ”

“ From this time they passed under the dominion of the successive Macedonian rulers of Asia, but continued, with the exception of Miletus (q.v.) , to enjoy great prosperity both under these Greek dynasties and after they became part of the Roman province of Asia.
Ionia has laid the world under its debt not only by giving birth to a long roll of distinguished men of letters and science (see Ionian School of Philosophy) , but by originating the distinct school of art which prepared the way for the brilliant artistic development of Athens in the 5th century. ”

“ When we think of the debt which mankind owes to the Greeks, we are apt to think too exclusively of the masterpieces in literature and art which they have left us. But the Greek genius was many-sided; the Greek, with his insatiable love of knowledge, his determination to see things as they are and to see them whole, his burning desire to be able to give a rational explanation of everything in heaven and earth, was just as irresistibly driven to natural science, mathematics, and exact reasoning in general, or logic. ”

“ Of the literature produced by the Greeks in the fifth century B.C., we possess about a twentieth part; of that produced in the seventh, sixth, fourth, and third, not nearly so large a proportion. All that has reached us has passed a severe and far from discriminating ordeal. It has secured its life by never going out of fashion for long at a time; by appealing steadily to the book-trade throughout a number of successive epochs of taste—fourth-century Greece, pre-Christian Alexandria, Augustan Rome, the great Hellenic revival of the Antonines, the narrower Attic revival of the later sophists. ”