VII
Psyche was, to begin with, a Greek word for “life,” in the sense of individual human life, and occurs in Homer in such phrases as “to risk one’s life” and “to save one’s life.” Homer also uses it of the ghosts of the underworld—the weak, almost-not-there shades of those who once were men. In the works of the early scientist-philosophers, psyche can refer to the ultimate substance, the source of life and consciousness, the spirit of the universe. By the fifth century B.C., psyche had come to mean the “conscious self,” the “personality,” even the “emotional self,” and thence it quickly takes on, especially in Plato, the meaning of “immortal self”—the soul, in contrast to the body. Psyche was also used by the Greeks as their word for butterfly because of a common belief that butterflies were the souls of the dead. And, finally, Psyche was the name of a girl.
This girl appears in a story by Apuleius, contained in his picaresque novel The Golden Ass, the only Latin novel to survive complete, though we are fairly sure Apuleius derived the Psyche story from much older Greek material. Psyche was so beautiful that she incurred the jealousy of Venus, the Roman Aphrodite, who sent her son Cupid to bewitch her. Cupid, whose name refers to cupidity or sexual desire, is the Roman equivalent of Eros and was depicted, as he is to this day, as a childlike god with wings and a quiverful of arrows with which he can make mortals fall in love against their will. His task was to doom Psyche by making her fall in love with the basest of men, but on sight of her the god of Love was himself smitten. To keep his passion on the q.t., he installed Psyche in a magical palace and visited her bed every night, though only in darkness, and warned her that she must never attempt to see him in the light, for his splendor would be too much for her. Psyche’s two older sisters, once they saw Psyche’s magical new circumstances, were overcome by jealousy and tried to convince the poor girl that she must be sleeping not with a god but with a monstrous snake that could not bear to be seen. Psyche, deeply in love with her mysterious visitor, was nonetheless confused by her sisters’ theory and resolved to learn the truth. The next night she took a lamp and looked on her godly visitor while he slept, falling even more deeply in love with him. But a drop of hot oil fell from her lamp to his shoulder, and the god awoke. Angered by Psyche’s disobedience, he towered above her in all his magnificence, spread his shining wings, and disappeared. Needless to say, in Apuleius’s conception, Cupid was no fat cherub but a most impressive adolescent.
Psyche, desolate, tried to drown herself in the first river she came to but was saved and upbraided by the shepherd god Pan. After many miseries, she fell into the hands of Venus, who made her a slave, beat her savagely, and sent her to carry out impossible tasks—all of which she was able to accomplish with the help of the beneficent powers of the universe. After the final trial, however, which brought her to Hades itself, Psyche fainted away in a deadly sleep. Cupid, forgiving her at last, came to her aid and petitionedJupiter to allow their marriage, which Venus was then forced to consent to. Psyche was revived; and Cupid and Psyche, of course, lived happily ever after.
For many in the ancient world, the story of Cupid and Psyche was a Platonic allegory of the journey of the human soul through the trials of life. Having glimpsed the immortal splendor of divinity, she is condemned to banishment and extreme suffering, made all the more acute by her separation from divinity, of which she has had such an unforgettable taste; and she can be reunited with her perfect lover only after the sleep of death. In the later, Christian centuries, the story of Psyche stood as a metaphor of the yearning of the soul for God. Great mystics such as Catherine of Siena, Teresa of Ávila, and John of the Cross, who described in their writings their experience of betrothal and marriage to Christ in highly colored, even carnal terms, were influenced, whether they knew it or not, by a pagan story in a wonderfully trashy Latin novel.
WHAT DID THEY BELIEVE, these Greeks? Were the gods real to them or just metaphors? Certainly, they did not have creeds or dogmas, confessional or doctrinal positions such as we have come to expect from religions. And just as certainly, there was a gradated spectrum of interpretation, as there must always be in things religious, that spanned classes and communities and that shifted in emphasis from one period to another. What is so striking about the Homeric gods—as opposed to the One that most of us are familiar with (though familiar is surely the wrong word)—is their lack of godliness. Oh sure, they have power beyond the dreams of the world’s most powerful king, but they exercise this power just the way he would—heavy-handedly, often mercilessly, even spitefully. And they are taken up with their own predictable domestic crises—who’s sleeping with whom, who’s getting back at whom, who’s belittling whom. Could anyone actually believe in such gods?
In the absence of something better, yes. It is hard for us—after so many centuries of monotheism (and more recent centuries of agnosticism and atheism)—to retroject ourselves into the Greek religious consciousness. The stories of the gods, which were multiform and seemingly limitless, came down to the Greeks from many streams of oral tradition, which they had no way of critiquing. They could not say, for instance, as we can, that the story with which this book began, of Demeter and her daughter, Persephone, was just a clever metaphor that gave a preliterate society an “explanation” for the changing seasons—in a class with such things as “Why the Snake Has No Legs” or “How the Giraffe Got Its Neck,” which we have long since banished to the nursery. But if we look seriously at the Demeter story, we may find ourselves even in the twenty-first century captivated by its poetry and depth of emotion—which may lead us to exclaim something like “Well, this doesn’t explain anything scientifically, but there is something very satisfying about it. It has the truth of a dream.”
Dreams, we all know, can be very truthful, even if at the level of conscious critique they are full of mad illogic. Some such thoughts surely occurred to men like Socrates and Plato, who advised their followers to reconceive the myths as metaphors—not metaphors as naive explanations of natural phenomena but as attempts by society’s dreamers to find a language that can penetrate to the heart of reality. These philosophers understood that though the myths were naive in the sense that they were anthropomorphic, presenting the gods as if they were men, the myths were also attempting—at a deeper level—to feel the intangible and say the unsayable.
The Greek gods changed as the Greeks themselves were changed by the events of their history. The rigid figures of the archaic kouroi have much in common with the gods of Homer, Hesiod, Solon, and even Aeschylus: these gods are human beings made gigantic, as full of needs as of power and requiring the stateliness of ritual—soothing actions performed in the same way over and over again—in order to be assuaged. Such actions always require loss for men and gain for the gods—libation, animal sacrifice, in great crises even human sacrifice—but there is also an exchange, an economy of the divine. For by our ritual, carried out with punctilious sincerity, we may avoid divine displeasure and find ourselves the recipients of heavenly grace.
When the house of Oedipus is plunged into confusion over what seem to be conflicting oracles, Jocasta emerges from the palace, carrying her suppliant’s branch, wound in wool, determined to perform the ritual of supplication that can avert the wrath of the god. She addresses the chorus, as she makes her way to Apollo’s shrine:
Lords of the realm, it occurred to me,
just now, to visit the temples of the gods,
so I have my branch in hand and incense too.
Oedipus is beside himself. Racked with anguish,
no longer a man of sense, he won’t admit
the latest prophecies are hollow as the old—
he’s at the mercy of every passing voice
if the voice tells of terror.
I urge him gently, nothing seems to help,
so I turn to you, Apollo, you are nearest.
She places her branch on the altar of Apollo and continues her prayer:
I come with prayers and offerings … I beg you,
cleanse us, set us free from defilement!
Look at us, passengers in the grip of fear,
watching the pilot of the vessel go to pieces.
Though Jocasta performs the prescribed rites, we know that these cannot avail because the defilement within the palace is too grave to be washed away by a few prayers and a well-placed olive branch. Lord Apollo, principle of justice and the terrifyingly unseen presence throughout the play—“nearest” in a way Jocasta has failed to reckon with—will not, in the end, be mocked. He will bring his justice to perfection, and this will entail the suicide of Jocasta, the blinding of Oedipus, and the permanent humiliation of the entire family. Jocasta cannot know all this at this point and therefore cannot be aware how insufficient are her paltry rites. At the center of Greek religion is the belief that, though we can at times successfully invoke the mercy of the gods on us and our causes, we must pay for our sins, whether these are conscious or not—and if the sins are big, we must pay big time. How different is this from common belief and practice even in our day, whatever the particular doctrines of a given religion may be? We can understand Greek religion because, at its heart, it operates on the same internal dynamic that fuels all (or certainly almost all) religion. The aboriginal Christian prayer Kyrie eleison (Lord, have mercy) is a Greek prayer far more ancient than Christianity.
But there is also an undercurrent in Jocasta’s speech that suggests a shift in religious perspective—not so much in the time of the tyrants as in the time of Sophocles, the play’s author. For there is something a tad slapdash about Jocasta’s approach to the gods. She doesn’t believe in oracles, which she finds “hollow.” It has “just now” “occurred” to her “to visit the temples of the gods,” and she chooses the temple of Apollo because it’s “nearest” to her palace. Does she believe or doesn’t she? She seems a skeptic in trouble beyond her usual coping mechanisms, the sort of person who in our day might slip into a church when her world is falling apart but would otherwise give scant thought to divinity.
In the period when Sophocles was writing Oedipus, Athens was reaching the acme of its aretē, its moment of supreme artistic and political confidence. Its empire was booming: the Athenian colonies and sister cities from mainland Greece to Italy, from the Aegean coast of Asia to the coast of the Black Sea, were creating greater general wealth through the growing exchanges of staples and exotica, and Athenian democracy and military power—which went hand in hand—were the envy of the world. Athenians held themselves, not the gods, responsible for this turn of events; and though they certainly continued to fulfill the rites and rituals of Greek religion, as does Jocasta, they relied on their own native strengths and smarts to keep their enterprise going. They had become an essentially secular people.
There is a speech, probably the most famous speech in all of Western history, that sheds much light on the Athenian esprit of the fifth century, Pericles’s Funeral Oration over the Athenian dead in the first year of the Peloponnesian War. Though it is a speech of some length (if brief by Greek standards), I quote it in full, because there is no other single cultural expression that so enables us to penetrate the Athenian frame of mind. Thucydides, in whose exacting History of the Peloponnesian War the speech occurs, explains “the ancient custom” of the Athenians, carried out annually over the bones of those who had died for Athens in the previous year: “When the bones have been laid in the earth, a man chosen by the city for his intellectual gifts and for his general reputation makes an appropriate speech in praise of the dead, and after the speech all depart.” Pericles, coming “forward from the tomb and, standing on a high platform, so that he might be heard by as many people as possible in the crowd,” began:
Most of those who have stood in this place before me have praised the tradition of this speech that closes our ceremony. It is good, they have felt, that solemn words should be spoken over our fallen soldiers. I do not share this sentiment. Acts deserve acts, notwords, in their honor; and to me a state funeral, such as you have witnessed, would have been honor enough. Our trust in the great bravery of this great number of the fallen should not depend on one man’s eloquence. Moreover, it is very hard to speak appropriately when many of a speaker’s hearers will scarce believe that he is truthful. For those who have known and loved the dead may think his words scant justice to the memories they would hear honored, while those who did not know them may occasionally, from jealousy, suspect me of overstatement when they hear of feats beyond their own powers. For it is only human for men not to bear praise of others beyond the point at which they still feel they can rival their exploits. Transgress that boundary and they are jealous and incredulous. But since the wisdom of our ancestors enacted this law I too must submit and try to suit as best I can the wishes and feelings of every member of this gathering.
My first words shall be for our ancestors; for it is both just to them and fitting that on an occasion such as this our tribute of memory should be paid to them. For, dwelling always in this country, generation after generation in unchanging and unbroken succession, they have, by their hard work and courage, handed down to us a free country. So they are worthy of our praise; and still more so are our fathers. For they added to our ancestral patrimony the empire that we hold today and they delivered it, not without blood and toil, into the hands of our own generation; while it is we ourselves, those of us now in midlife, who consolidated our power throughout the greater part of the empire and secured our City’s complete independence both in war and peace.
Of the battles that we and our fathers fought, whether we were winning power abroad or gallantly withstanding nearby enemies, whether Greek or foreign, I will say no more: these are too familiar to you all. I’d rather set forth the spirit in which we faced them, and the Athenian constitution and Athenian way of life that brought us to greatness, and to pass from these things to the dead themselves. For I think it not unfitting for these things to be recalled in today’s solemnity; and it is appropriate that this whole assembly of both citizens and strangers should hear these things.
For our system of government does not copy the systems of our neighbors: we are a model to them, not they to us. Our constitution is called a democracy, because power rests in the hands not of the few but of the many. Our laws guarantee equal justice for all in their private disputes; and as for the election of public officials, we welcome talent to every arena of achievement, nor do we make our choices on the grounds of class but on the grounds of excellence alone. And as we give free play to all in our public life, so we carry the same spirit into our daily relations with one another. We have no black looks or angry words for our neighbor if he enjoys himself in his own way, and we even abstain from little acts of churlishness that, though they do no mortal damage, leave hurt feelings in their wake. Open and tolerant in our private lives, in our public affairs we keep within the law. We acknowledge the restraint of reverence; we are obedient to those in authority and to the laws, especially to those that give protection to the oppressed and those unwritten laws of the heart whose transgression brings admitted shame.
Yet ours is no workaday city only. No other city provides so many recreations for the spirit—contests and sacrifices all the year round, and beauty in our public buildings to cheer the spirit and delight the eye day by day. Moreover, the City is so large and powerful that all the wealth of all the world flows in to her, so that our own Attic products seem no more familiar to us than the fruits of the labors of other nations.
And how different from our enemies is our attitude toward military security! The gates of our City are flung open to the world. We practice no periodic deportations, nor do we prevent our visitors from observing or discovering whatever “secrets” might prove of military advantage to an enemy. For we do not place our trust in secret weapons but in our own faithful courage.
So too with education. The Spartans toil from early childhood in the laborious pursuit of courage, while we, free to live and wander as we please, march out nonetheless to face the selfsame dangers. Here is the proof of my words: when the Spartans advance into our country, they do not come alone but with all their allies; but when we invade our neighbors we have little difficulty as a rule, even on foreign soil, in defeating men who are fighting for their own homes. Moreover, no enemy has ever met us in our full strength, for we have our navy to look after at the same time that our soldiers are sent on service to many scattered possessions; but if our enemies chance to encounter some portion of our forces and defeat a few of us, they boast that they have driven back our whole army, or, if they are defeated, that the victors were in full strength. Indeed, if we choose to face danger with an easy mind rather than after rigorous training and to trust rather in our native manliness than in state-sponsored courage, the advantage lies with us; for we are spared all the tedium of practicing for future hardships, and when we find ourselves among them we are as brave as our plodding rivals. Here as elsewhere, then, the City sets an example that deserves admiration.
We are lovers of beauty without extravagance, and lovers of wisdom without effeminacy. Wealth to us is not mere material for vainglory but an opportunity for achievement; and we think poverty nothing to be ashamed of unless one makes no effort to overcome it. Our citizens attend both to public and private duties and do not allow absorption in their own affairs to diminish their knowledge of the City’s business. We differ from other states in regarding the man who keeps aloof from public life not as “private” but as useless; we decide or debate, carefully and in person, all matters of policy, and we hold, not that words and deeds go ill together, but that acts are foredoomed to failure when undertaken undiscussed. For we are noted for being at once most adventurous in action and most reflective beforehand. Other men are bold in ignorance, while reflection will stop their going forward. But the bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what lies before them, glory and danger alike—and yet go forth to meet it.
In doing good, too, we are the exact opposite of the rest of mankind. We secure our friends not by accepting favors but by granting them. And so this makes friendship with us something that can be counted on: for we are eager, as creditors, to cement by continued kindness our relation to our friends. If they do not respond with the same warmth, it is because they feel that their services will not be given spontaneously but only as repayment of a debt. We are alone among mankind in doing men benefits, not on calculation of self-interest, but in the fearless confidence of freedom.
In a word, I say our City as a whole is an education to Greece, and that our citizens yield to none, man by man, for independence of spirit, many-sidedness of attainment, and complete self-reliance in limbs and brain.
That this is no vainglorious phrase but actual fact is proven by the universal leadership that our way of life has won us. No other city of the present day goes out to her ordeal greater than ever man dreamed; no other is so powerful that the invader feels no bitterness when he suffers at her hands, and her subjects no shame at the indignity of their dependence. Great indeed are the signs and symbols of our power. Men of the future will wonder at us, as all men do today. We need no Homer or other man of words to praise us; for such give pleasure for a moment, but the truth will put to shame their imaginings of our deeds. For our pioneers have forced a way into every sea and every land, establishing among all mankind, in punishment or beneficence, eternal memorials of their settlement.
Such then is the City for whom, lest they should lose her, the men whom we celebrate died a soldier’s death; and it is but natural that each of us, who survive them, should wish to spend ourselves in her service. That, indeed, is why I have spent many words on the City. I wished to show that we have more at stake than men who have no such inheritance, and to support my praise of the dead by making clear to you what they have done. For if I have chanted the glories of the City, it was these men, and men like them, who have adorned her with such splendor. With them, as with few among Greeks, words cannot magnify the deeds that they have done.
Such an end as we have here seems indeed to show us what a good life is, from its first signs of power to its final consummation. For even where life’s previous record showed faults and failures, it is just to weigh the last full measure of devotion against them all. There they wiped out evil with good and did the City more service as soldiers than they did her harm in private life. There no hearts grew faint because they loved their riches more than honor; no poor man shirked his duty in the hope of future wealth. All these they put aside to strike a blow for the City. Counting the quest to avenge her honor as the most glorious of all ventures, and leaving Hope, the uncertain goddess, to send them what she would, they faced the foe as they drew near him in the strength of their own manhood; and when the shock of battle came, they chose rather to suffer the utmost than to win life by weakness. So their memory has escaped the reproaches of men’s lips, but they bore instead on their bodies the marks of men’s hands, and in a moment of time, at the climax of their lives, were rapt away from a world filled, for their dying eyes, not with terror but with glory.
Such were the men who lie here and such the City that inspired them. We survivors may pray to be spared their bitter hour but must disdain to meet the foe with a spirit less daring. Fix your eyes on the greatness of Athens as you have it before you day by day, fall in love with her, and when you feel her great, remember that this greatness was won by men with courage, with knowledge of their duty, and with a sense of honor in action, who, if they failed in private life, disdained to deprive the City of their services but sacrificed their lives as their best offerings on her behalf. So they gave their bodies to the commonwealth and received, each for his own memory, praise that will never die, and with it the grandest of all sepulchres, not that in which their mortal bones are laid, but a home in the minds of men, where their glory remains fresh to stir to speech or action as the occasion may require.
For the whole earth is the sepulchre of famous men; and their story is not graven only on stone over their native earth but lives on far away, without visible symbol, woven into the stuff of other men’s lives. For you now, it remains to rival what they have done and, knowing that the secret of happiness is freedom and the secret of freedom a brave heart, not idly to stand aside from the enemy’s onslaught. For it is not the poor and luckless, the ones who have no hope of prosperity, who have most cause to reckon death as little loss, but those for whom fortune may yet keep reversal in store and who would feel the change most if trouble befell them. Moreover, weakly to decline the trial is more painful to a man of spirit than death coming sudden and unperceived in the hour of strength and confidence.
Therefore I do not mourn with the parents of the dead who are here with us. Rather, I will comfort them. For they know that they have been born into a world of manifold chances and that he is to be accounted happy to whom the best lot falls—the best sorrow, such as is yours today, or the best death, such as fell to these, for whom life and happiness were bound together. I know it is not easy to give you comfort. I know how often in the joy of others you will have reminders of what was once your own, and how men feel sorrow, not for the loss of what they have never tasted, but when something that has grown dear to them has been snatched away. But you must keep a brave heart in the hope of other children, those of you who are still of an age to bear them. For the newcomers will help you forget the gap in your own circle, and will help the City to fill up the ranks of its workers and its soldiers. For no man is fitted to give fair and honest advice in council if he has not, like his fellows, a family at stake in the hour of the City’s danger. To you who are past the age of vigor I would say: count the long years of happiness so much gain to set off against the brief space that yet remains, and let your burden be lightened by the glory of the dead. For the love of honor alone is not staled by age, and it is by honor, not, as some say, by gold, that the helpless end of life is cheered.
I turn to those among you who are children or brothers of the fallen, for whom I foresee a mighty contest with the memory of the dead. Their praise is in all men’s mouths; and even if you should rise to heroic heights, you will be judged harshly for achieving less than they. For the living have the jealousy of rivals to contend with, but the dead are honored with unchallenged admiration.
If I must speak a word to those who are now in widowhood on the powers and duties of women, I will cast all my advice into one brief sentence. Great will be your glory if you do not lower the nature that is within you—hers greatest of all whose praise or blame is least bruited on the lips of men.
I have said what I had to say, according to the law, and the graveside offerings to the dead have been duly made. Henceforward the City will support their children till they come of age: such is the crown and benefit she holds out to the dead and to their kin for the trials they have undergone for her. For where the prize is highest, there, too, will you find the best and the bravest.
And now, when you have finished your lamentation, let each of you depart.
Pericles’s words are echoed in other critical speeches of later Western history. His modest beginning cannot but remind us of Lincoln at Gettysburg—“The world will little note nor long remember what we say here”—even to the point of Lincoln’s exact phrase “the last full measure of devotion.” Pericles’s resolve—“the secret of happiness is freedom and the secret of freedom a brave heart”—and his rhetorical emphases on blood and toil are so very reminiscent of Churchill’s in his repeated promise to the British people during the Second World War of “blood, toil, tears, and sweat.” And no wonder, for both orators knew their Thucydides and knew this speech.
For me at least, the most obvious later parallel is the 1961 presidential inauguration address of John F. Kennedy. America was then at the height of its power and prestige, the unembarrassed leader of the free world, whose classless way of life, civil tolerance, and freedom of speech were the envy of humanity. We were, or so we thought, without peer or precedent, an open society dedicated to “the pursuit of happiness,” the opposite of the secretive Soviet Union and its dreary militarism, generous in victory, openhanded to those who sought our help. Kennedy’s cadences were as measured—and as tough—as those of Pericles: “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” When Kennedy admitted that his was “a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out,” he exhibited Periclean modesty and balance, and there was none of the exaggeration and bombast that clangs through current political discourse. When he told of sacrifices yet to come, like Pericles he pulled no punches. It is hard today to imagine an American president reminding individuals of their obligations to the nation as a whole—or even daring to suggest that we must give up something as trivial as our SUVs for the sake of the common good. What an incredible moment it would be if we were once more to hear a president say with a straight face, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.”
Kennedy may remind us, if distantly, of Pericles in other ways as well. Known as the First Citizen of Athens and fifteen times elected stratēgos, Pericles [43] dominated not only Athenian politics but Athenian imagination. For he was not merely a political animal but a man of genuine intellectual and artistic interests, and he counted among his close friends the sculptor Phidias (who created the great statue of Athēnē Promachos at his request), the dramatist Sophocles (who gave us the skeptical Jocasta), Herodotus (the father of history), and the debunking philosopher Anaxagoras, who had called into question the existence of the gods. Though his first marriage ended in divorce, Pericles formed a lasting union with the cultivated Aspasia, an Athenian celebrity who had once been a courtesan (and therefore a woman of far more freedom and worldly experience than most of her sisters). The call to share the company of this romantic couple and the conversation of their table was the invitation most prized by fifth-century Athenians. Pericles’s death—by plague in the second year of the war—was a blow from which Athens never completely recovered, as it drifted politically and militarily from one disaster to another till the unthinkable happened and the empire itself was irrecoverably lost and with it most of the city’s power and prestige.
Of course, all ages and all leaders have their blind spots. The City of Freedom that Pericles lauded was full of slaves—and of freeborn women whose lives were lived in an obscurity that Pericles’s closing reference makes all too clear. But the Athenian empire was for Pericles an unquestioned good. The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave that Kennedy presided over was a land where dark-skinned people were relegated to a fearful obscurity that was not so far from slavery—and women, if known at all, were normally known as their husband’s wives. But American power was in Kennedy’s presentation always on the side of right.
One cannot fail to note how secular are the language and the overall approach of Pericles. The gods are hardly mentioned; Athenians must rely on themselves. No more does Kennedy take refuge in invocations of divinity; and only at the very end of his speech does he mention God: “Here on earth God’s work must truly be our own.” In other words, let’s stick to the world as we know it and leave God out of it. This is not a theology (or an anti-theology) but a strategy. In neither case is there a confession of atheism, just an implied acknowledgment that a politician is no oracle and has no business speaking on behalf of heaven. It was this lack of knee-jerk religiosity that prompted Harvey Cox, then a young, little-known Baptist minister, to write admiringly of Kennedy in The Secular City as the ideal secular politician, who refused, in a religiously diverse society, to tart up his speeches with pious cant: “Though there can be little doubt that [Kennedy’s] Christian conscience informed many of his decisions, especially in the area of racial justice, he stalwartly declined to accept the semireligious halo that Americans, deprived of a monarch who reigns gratia dei, have often tried to attach to their chief executive.”
After the Age of Pericles, as Athenian confidence dimmed, that famous confidence was all too often replaced by cynicism, modesty by cockiness, sincerity by manipulation, strength by bluster. Though the gods were more and more loudly invoked, the prayers rang hollow, the appeal to conscience turned mute, and any reference to social justice tended to be met with a knowing smirk. And though the parallels to our present day are only partial, they are vivid enough to give us pause, as God, now strangely shorn of his justice, appears to direct our every national move.1
THE FINAL CRUMBLING of Athenian confidence left a large social vacuum. In the arts, as we have seen, idealism was succeeded by realism, realism by a jaded desire for momentary stimulation (as in the surprise hermaphrodites—of which there were many), flagging desire by crabbed pessimism. In philosophy, the loss of Athenian independence precipitated a narrowing of subject matter. No longer did philosophers aspire to the deep spiritual insights and broad moral vision of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. They divided into conflicting schools and wandered through the Greco-Roman world as permanent immigrants, picking up tutoring jobs as they could. The names of their schools are still with us, not so much as descriptions of current schools of philosophy as of human temperaments and mind-sets. There were the Sophists, who taught their charges how to win an argument without regard to the truth; the Skeptics, who believed that no certain knowledge was possible; the Cynics, who taught self-sufficiency; the Stoics, who taught virtuous detachment from material things; the Epicureans, who taught that “pleasure is the beginning and end of living happily.” All these schools (and many more) were in competition with one another—for the minds of men as well as for tutoring jobs—and within each school were serious thinkers whose philosophies were far more modulated and subtle than my broadside characterizations of their teachings would suggest. But the upshot was a debased intellectual climate, fragmented and agnostic. Well, the Stoics may be right, so I think I’ll spend the rest of the day practicing self-denial. On the other hand, the Epicureans may be right, so I think I’ll tuck into another plate of that scrumptious wild boar.
Religion also fragmented. The Greeks and the Romans tended to interact with one another in prickly, high-handed ways. The conquered Greeks, knowing they were the cultural and intellectual superiors of their conquerors, could be touchy, resentful, and unbending. The Romans, having the inferiority complex of all arrivistes, took refuge too easily in shouting, bullying, and otherwise throwing their weight around. Greek artists and philosophers, dependent as they now were on Roman wealth and patronage, were not unlike contemporary Frenchmen who cannot bear to acknowledge that France is no longer the cultural and economic navel of the world. Often enough, in the eyes of the Romans, there seemed no way to placate Greek outrage. But the Romans did try. They sat at the feet of Greek tutors to improve their minds, they read and imitated Greek literature, and they commissioned myriad copies of Greek buildings and sculptures to enhance their simple towns. And they copied, insofar as they could, the external manifestations of Greekreligion.
Of the many peoples of Earth, the Romans may have had the most boring religion of all. They had a pantheon of gods, patron-protectors of various families and tribes, but most of these gods were little more than names. Contact with the impressive stories of Greek mythology and the thrilling art that accompanied them—a contact that began as a result of the Greek colonization of southern Italy—encouraged the Romans to dress up their own religion in Greek fashions. Their high God, Jupiter, they reinterpreted as a variant of Greek Zeus. (In this, they were certainly right. The prehistoric people who lived in an area of southern Russia and spoke the original Indo-European language worshiped the Sky-Father and called him “Diespiter”—the word that became “Zeu Pater,” or “Father Zeus,” to their primeval Greek-speaking descendants and “Jup-piter” to their primeval Latin-speaking descendants.) Roman Venus was assigned the Greek stories about Aphrodite, Juno took on the stories of Hera, Minerva those of Athena, Mars those ofAres, Vulcan those of Hephaestus, and so forth. This instant mythmaking gave the Roman gods faces as well as stories and considerably enlivened Roman imagination.
Roman religion was basically a businessman’s religion of contractual obligations. Though scrupulous attention was paid to the details of the public rituals, which had been handed down from time immemorial, it was all pretty much in the spirit of “You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours”—rituals for favors. Not only were there few Roman myths, there was virtually no theology or interest in the theoretical aspects of religion, the very enigmas that had sparked the speculations of the earliest Greek philosophers. Sometimes, even the name of a god was forgotten. In the Aeneid Virgil presents the Trojan prince Aeneas, the supposed ancestor of the Romans, being led by Evander, a local Latin king, to the Capitoline Hill, where the king informs the Trojan: “This grove, this hill, tree-topped, are some god’s home … although we do not know which god.”
The Romans, being practical, can-do folk, did at length take some interest in the ethical end of philosophy—the question of how best to live—which encouraged them to sit still long enough to gain some tips from the later Greek philosophers, especially the self-denying Stoics and the pleasure-loving Epicureans—the two philosophical vogues that most caught Roman fancy (such as it was). Love of Order, the very quality that made the Romans such skilled administrators of their vast empire, limited their aptitude for things intellectual and artistic. The creative curiosity that made the Greeks such cultural giants limited and, finally, undid their earlier imperial successes. Their vibrant energy was far more stirred by art, ideas, and political innovation than it ever was by the day-to-day business of empire.
But the diminution of Greek religion preceded Roman influence. Religion for the Greeks, though certainly more exciting than the Roman variety, was a public exercise, a demonstration that at some level all Greeks were united in their reverence for the same gods—and it tended toward the bland predictability of a stadium of Americans reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. There were, however, many alternatives, not a few of them shadowy and fugitive. These were called “the Mysteries” (from the Greek mystēs, an initiate, andmysteria, the rites of initiation). The Mysteries were secret cults into which one had to be initiated—and they have kept their secrets. To this day, we have little more than informed speculation as to what the majority of them entailed.
The most populous of the Mysteries was held at Eleusis, about twelve miles from Athens, in honor of Demeter, goddess of the harvest, and her daughter Persephone, goddess of springtime. The rites began in Athens in late September at the time of sowing. The devotees of Demeter purified themselves by bathing in the sea. After a tremendous sacrifice of piglets, the initiates set off on their procession to Eleusis along the Sacred Way, reenacting scenes from the myth of Demeter and Persephone, as Christians reenact theWay of the Cross on Good Friday. We know that the initiates fasted, then broke their fast with mint tea; we know that obscene jokes were told along the procession—of an old crone who had got the sorrowing harvest goddess to laugh by twisting her ancient labia into a smile—and that there was some connection between Demeter of the grain and Dionysus of the grape. We know that when the great procession reached Eleusis, the initiates poured into the Telesterion, a hall that held several thousand, and that the culmination of the festival was the exhibition of “sacred things” by the initiating priest. But what the initiates were shown we do not know. Their secret was kept through the thousand years the rites took place—till their suppression by a Christian emperor in A.D. 393, after which the sanctuary itself was leveled by Alaric and his Visigoths. And the Eleusinian secret is now safe with the dead.
The Eleusinian Mysteries were the most public and popular of the Mysteries. Most Athenians were initiates, and women and even metics were welcome. Only murderers and dyed-in-the-wool barbarians (“those who speak an incomprehensible tongue”) were kept out. Many other Mysteries owned no designated sanctuary and were far more secretive. What went on in them is more obscure to us than the rites of Demeter. By the time Rome conquered Greece, even more exotic religious rites were being imported from Egypt and Asia. Not a few of these shadowy religions made the men who ran the Roman imperial machinery nervous, for they gave off a smell of political dissent and sometimes even the noxious threat of insurrection. They provided intellectual and cultural harbors for the powerless and dispossessed. Women and slaves, mercenaries and foreigners flocked to their underground rituals and listened attentively to god-knows-what rubbish that might undermine the security of the state. One particularly obscure and troublesome sect was gaining a foothold in important cities throughout the Greco-Roman world. It was led by Jews from the Roman province of Syria-Palestine. In time, it would come to be called Christianity.
WE HAVE REACHED the Meeting of the Waters, the point at which the two great rivers of our cultural patrimony—the Greco-Roman and the Judeo-Christian—flow into each other to become the mighty torrent of Western civilization. It is an irony of our cultural history that the plodding Romans became the channel through which all the delicacies and distinctions of Greek culture flowed into the West. It is no less ironic that, given its subsequent history of Jew-hatred, Christianity should become the vehicle by which Jewish values entered the mainstream. But such and so are the case.
Many aspects of this immense confluence are dealt with in earlier books in this series. The seminal Jewish contribution to our common Western history—without which nothing else could have happened—is the subject of Volume II, The Gifts of the Jews. The contribution of early Christianity and its dependence on ancient Judaism are the subjects of Volume III, Desire of the Everlasting Hills. Nor have the Romans been neglected. Even if they don’t have a volume of their own, they are the subject of the first two chapters of the introductory Volume I, How the Irish Saved Civilization, and they form an important strand throughout Desire of the Everlasting Hills. (Nor are we quite done with them: they are scheduled to make another appearance—early in Volume V, when we investigate the question of how the Romans became the Italians.) It remains for me here and now to tie up only a few loose ends.
The obscure “mystery” religion of Christianity went from being a threat to the Roman establishment—scapegoated by the emperor Nero in A.D. 64—to becoming part of the establishment 249 years later when it was adopted by its most illustrious convert, the emperor Constantine. Despite its exceedingly Jewish roots, Christianity became a player in the Greco-Roman world, a world shaped by Greek culture and Roman power. Greek, not ancient Hebrew (nor even the Aramaic of the first Christians), became the language of Christianity. Its sacred writings, which came to be known as the New Testament, were written in Greek, and the gospel—the “good news” of Jesus Christ—was preached throughout the ancient world in the Greek tongue. The terms of this new religion, though based on Hebrew models, were Greek terms. Christ, Ekklēsia (Church), Baptism, Eucharist, Agapē (Lovingkindness)—all of Christianity’s central words were Greek words. Christian patterns of thought, like strips of precious inlaid wood, could indeed be traced to their Jewish origins in the coastal Levant, but they often shone with a Greek patina. Paul and Luke, who together account for about fifty percent of the writings of the New Testament, display a familiarity with Greek philosophy and even an attachment to Stoicism. This philosophy of self-denial also taught the brotherhood of man, based on the Stoical belief that every human being without distinction possesses a spark of divinity that is in communion with God, who in the Stoical system is calledLogos (Word, Reason, Meaning)—the word John’s Gospel uses to describe Jesus.
In the first five centuries of Christianity, whenever theological controversy erupted, it almost always erupted in Greek. The Christians of what would become “the Latin West” were not terribly interested in fine intellectual distinctions; it was “the Greek East” that was the sizzling hotbed of theological strife. Was Jesus God or man or both? If both, how so? The terms that flew back and forth were Greek terms—person, substance, nature. The man Jesus, it was finally decided, was homo-ousios patri (of the same substance as the Father God). Ousia (substance), a term forged by the Presocratic philosophers of the sixth century B.C. to designate immutable reality, was drafted to settle a Christian theological argument more than a thousand years later, as it is still drafted each Sunday in Christian churches throughout the world when the Creed is recited.
The Christian world became a world of Greek vocabulary, Greek distinctions, Greek categories. Nor was it only a question of language. Languages carry values with them; and the Greek divisions between matter and spirit, body and soul, lived in Christian consciousness and shaped Christian sensibility, breaking out repeatedly like an inescapable virus—which owed its origins not to Jesus the Jew but to a Greek language of discourse, shaped by Plato, by his philosophical predecessors, and before them by the large cultural context of Greek perceptions and prejudices. Indeed, the categories of “matter” and “spirit” were so expertly woven into the Greek language by the time Christianity came along that they were unquestioned and unseen.
It is no coincidence that Christian monasticism began in the Greek East in imitation of the Pythagoreans and their spiritual sons the Platonists, who sometimes lived in communities under vow, renounced a normal life in the world, and waited in some lonely place for a final revelation. Even the special appurtenances of Christian monasticism—silence, meditation, chanting, distinctive costumes, beads, incense, kneeling, hands joined in prayer—all too likely go back to the Pythagoreans and beyond them to theirinfluences, the Indian Buddhists and their predecessors. (To find the ultimate source of Christian monasticism, we might better look to the Dalai Lama than to anything we know of Jesus.) The liturgies elaborated in these monasteries certainly built on pagan Greek models of public prayer and ritual in their litanies, hymns, pageants, and processions.
But these developments were exceptional. For the most part, in the union of Greco-Roman with Judeo-Christian, the Greco-Roman turn of mind combined with Judeo-Christian values. While the outward form of the Western world remained Greco-Roman, its content became gradually Judeo-Christian. The worldview that underlay the New Testament was so different from that of the Greeks and the Romans as to be almost its opposite. It was a worldview that stressed not excellence of public achievement but the adventure of a personal journey with God, a lifetime journey in which a human being was invited to unite himself to God by imitating God’s justice and mercy. It was far more individualized than anything the Greeks had ever come up with and stressed the experience of a call, a personal vocation, a unique destiny for each human being. The one God of the Jews had created the world and everyone in it, and God would bring the world to its end. There was no eternal cosmos, circling round and round. Time is real, not cyclical; it does not repeat itself but proceeds forward inexorably, which makes each moment—and the decisions I make each moment—precious. I am not merely an instance of Man, I am this particular, unrepeatable man, who never existed before and will never exist again. I create a real future in the present by what I do now. Whereas fate was central to Greeks and Romans, hope is central to Jews and Christians. Anyone who doubts the great gulf between these two worldviews has only to reread the speeches Hector makes to Andromache (in Chapter I) and to realize the impossibility of putting such speeches on the lips of any believing Jew or Christian:
“And fate? No one alive has ever escaped it,
neither brave man nor coward, I tell you—
it’s born with us the day that we are born.”
Everything about the core values of the Jews and Christians was foreign to the Greeks and Romans, who in their philosophy had decided that whatever is unique is monstrous and unintelligible. Only that which is forever is truly intelligible and worthy of contemplation. The ideal is what is interesting; the individual is beside the point. But as Greek confidence ebbed and Greek philosophy split into scores of yip-yapping schools, the Greeks became more and more puzzled. They had lost their way, philosophically—and the Romans, who were just aping them, had nothing original to propose by way of saving them all from their dilemmas.
Christianity, at first, seemed just another woo-woo wave to cultivated Greeks. Some Greeks had begun to hope faintly for the happiness of their souls in a spiritual afterlife—and this was just what Mysteries like Demeter’s promised. But the idea ofphysicalresurrection struck them as ghoulish. Who wants his body back, anyway, once he’s got rid of it? Matter is the very principle of unintelligibility. Best to be done with it. For the Jews, who had little or no belief in the immortality of the soul, only salvationin one’s body could have any meaning. For a long time, the Greeks and the Jews talked at cross-purposes.
Gradually, however, as men educated in Greek learning began to explain Judeo-Christian beliefs, the beliefs came to hold out more meaning to the Greeks and Romans in a time when their own traditional religions were being drained of vigor. The philosophers knitted their brows and moaned about the impossibility of reaching truth; Christianity seemed to offer answers. The result of all this was that, just as the Judeo-Christian world had learned the Greek language and internalized Greek categories, the Greco-Roman world gradually abandoned its dying gods and became monotheist. At times, this union of two such disparate cultures went smoothly enough; at other times the union was (and still can be) bizarre and even internally contradictory.
In A.D. 330, Constantine, the first Christian emperor, transferred his capital from Rome to Byzantium and renamed the city Constantinople. In 395, the empire was permanently divided between the sons of Theodosius the Great, the emperor Arcadius ruling the Greek East from Constantinople, the Emperor Honorius ruling the Latin West from Rome. From then on, there was a complete separation of administration and even succession between the two realms. Less than a century later, in 476, the Western empire fell permanently to the northern barbarians, the pillaging Germanic tribes. But life in the Byzantine empire continued more or less unchanged till the mid-fifteenth century, when it fell at last to the Ottoman Turks. This was an ornate, refined, stratified, and largely static society that had less and less to do with Western Europe. Sadly, its form of Christianity, which came to be called Orthodoxy and is full of rarefied spiritual insight, has never been well known in the West.
In the West, Christianity found itself confronting the barbarian hordes, who in their crazy way redirected the Judeo-Christian stream at least as much as the Greeks had done. There is an early Irish lyric called “The Hag of Beare,” spoken by an old woman who has become a nun and who spends her last days doing penance. She’s actually a goddess from Ireland’s pagan past, now attempting to adjust to the new Christian order, and her ancient mind keeps mourning, at first ambivalently, over scenes of her lusty youth when she was a beautiful, much beloved princess:
These arms, now bony, thin
And useless to younger men,
Once caressed with skill
The limbs of princes!
Finally, she gives vent to her real feelings about her pagan past, her joy in what once was—even though it might gain her disapproval in the new order:
So God be praised
That I misspent my days!
For whether the plunge be bold
Or timid, the blood runs cold.
Nothing this red-blooded ever issued from Byzantium, where poetry (except for hymnody) was virtually unknown, drama had died, speculation was strictly confined, art had turned into imitation of past models, and the draperies that had once revealed goddesses in all their splendor were used to cloak every figure in layers of virtuous solemnity. Even the one relatively undraped figure, the dour John the Baptist, speaks of the transformation that a Plato-influenced Christianity wrought on Greek art. In Dinner with Persephone, Patricia Storace’s delicious repast, a contemporary Greek woman comments: “Think how our ideal of the body changed with Christianity from the beautiful athlete’s body to the ruined emaciated saint’s body you see in icons. John the Baptist is always shown nearly naked, like the old gods and the boy athletes, but his arms and legs are sticklike, tortured-looking, as if he is diseased. And yet this body is a kind of ideal, the ideal Christian body, with its hollow throat, the sacralized misery of its limbs and the sacred torment on its face, with which it bargains for the eternal life that beauty couldn’t win.” The Greeks no longer strove to emulate Apollo and Aphrodite; they came to resemble more and more the frowning, storm-browed Christs and sad, resigned Madonnas of their own icons. They even stopped calling themselves Greeks (or Hellenes); they were Christians, nothing else.
In this last stage, there was some continuity with the Greece that had been, if only in a pushing of the body-soul duality to logical, if absurd, conclusions, but there was also dreadful calcification in the building of this Byzantine “artifice of eternity.” In another of history’s terrible ironies, the barbarian influence on Western Christianity enlivened it beyond anything the diluted Greeks of Byzantium were now capable of. The mad barbarians pushed Western Christianity into retaining some of the pluralistic abundance, the inventive plasticity, the fathomless versatility that had once been incomparably characteristic of the Greeks. If these currents were not always ascendant in the new Christian order, they were never entirely lost; and by such indirect means was the lambent flame of the Greek legacy kept alight in the West.
But to find something Greek that is as emotional and singular as “The Hag,” we must go back to the lyric poets. Here, then, one last time, is Sappho—in an apostrophe to Hesperus, the god who lights the evening sky, her poem as bold and, especially in the way it builds to its resonant last line, as tender as anything from the barbarians:
Star of Evening, herd them home
whom Dawn dispersed, now Day is over:
kid to its, lamb to its, child to its
mother.
Human connectedness to all of nature has an immediacy here that we seldom experience today—even if this ritual is still repeated every evening as shepherd children and their flocks descend the forested slopes of Lesbos.
Of course, it is the Greeks who came after Sappho who were largely responsible for the levels of cerebral mediation that now intervene between us and nature. To understand why the Greeks matter to us today, we must appreciate their careering variety of human responses—the lightning-quick transmutations, the Odyssean resourcefulness, the inexhaustible creativity—that came to its final end only in the contractions of the Byzantine state after so many centuries of constant change and renewal. There was nothing the ancient Greeks did not poke their noses into, no experience they shunned, no problem they did not attempt to solve. When the world was still young, they set off at the first light and returned early from the agora, their arms full and their carts loaded down with every purchase, domestic and foreign, natural and artificial, they could lay their hands on. Whatever we experience in our day, whatever we hope to learn, whatever we most desire, whatever we set out to find, we see that the Greeks have been there before us, and we meet them on their way back.
1 The Second Gulf War has sent classicists scurrying back to their Thucydides, where they have found frightening parallels between the hubris of seemingly unbeatable Athens—in its fearless resolve to dominate the world even without allies—and the dismissive attitude of the Bush administration toward America’s traditional friends, toward the UN and its member nations, and toward world opinion. See, for instance, “The Melian Dialogue,” Book V, History of the Peloponnesian War, in which the Athenian delegates, brushing aside all appeals to fairness, threaten the existence of the small state of Melos, if the Melians do not do exactly what the Athenians demand and join their exceedingly underpopulated alliance: “We recommend that you should try to get what it is possible for you to get, taking into consideration what both of us really do think; since you know as well as we do that, when these matters are discussed by practical people, the standard of justice depends on the equality of power to compel and that in fact the strong do what they have the power to do and the weak accept what they have to accept.” When Donald Rumsfeld, a practical imperialist if ever there was one, took over the Pentagon, he commissioned a study of how ancient empires maintained their hegemony. Might he more profitably study how they lost all they had gained?