Indianapolis Times, Volume 39, Number 182, Indianapolis, Marion County, 8 December 1927 — Page 11

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THE spots on the sun of Greek civilization were the slavery of the workers and the seclusion of women. From the time of Homer the status of women had risen no higher, and had perhaps sunk a little lower; in every tank the wives were domestic servants, or at best the superintendents of servants, and confined in every case to the narrow circle of their prosaic homes. When Xanthippe reproached her husband, philosopher and guide, but not her friend, because he left her in dreary solitude every day and many nights, and led his life in lofty independence of her, she represented, however, humbly, the dissatisfaction which Greek women felt in their domestic incarceration. The other aspects of this national divorce were the hetairai and “Greek love.” A greek could fall romantically in love with a woman, as half the world had done with Helen. But in the normal routine of Athenian life such enthusiasm was exceptional; it was difficult to see a goddess in a cook; and the characteristic attitude of the average citizen to women was one of secret distaste and scorn. More

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and more the custom arose of channelling love into passionate friendship within each sex; half the poetry of love among the Greeks circled about the heretical attachment of man to man, and (as in the Lesbian Sappho) of woman to woman. • The hetairai were a protest against this development. % They were courtesans; but neither such common women as walked the streets at the Piraeus (Athens’ port) nor such exalted ladies as in the temples of Corinth upheld the ancient trade in service and honor to the gods; they were women who had refused to accept the restricted' life of the Greek housewife, and had combined with their promiscuity a certain redeeming devotion ta letters and the arts. Some of them were women x>f great beauty, who lent their loveliness to Greek sculptors for the visualization of Aphrodite’s grace; others attached themselves to supreme writers like Sophocles and Demosthenes, who spent their modest, fortunes on them; one of them became a student

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and teacher of philosophy and the second wife of Pericles. How profound a thinker Aspasia was we cannot know; courtesy and cynicism conflict in assigning reasons for the frequency with which Socrates and * other thinkers sat humbly at her feet. But we may take it as a reasonable assumption that any woman for whom Pericles would brave the slings and arrows of'popular hostility must have had charms for the mind as well as lures for the flesh. Story has it that wflen Pericles confessed to his wife that he loved Aspasia she consented readily to a separation, having had her eye upon anew romance herselfr So the dance of life changed partners, and writers told how the enamored statesman, despite his imperial dignity, never left or returned to his home without kissing his philosophical wife. Here was an admirable opening for political revenge. The opponents of Pericles discovered that Aspasia was not as pious as she was beautfiul, and brought against her the charge that she denied the gods. Pericles himself conducted the case for Aspasia; and though he was known as never showing strong emotion publicly, he broke into passion and tears as he pleaded for the life of his mate. (For according to Athenian law—seldom used except for political purposes—refusal to accept the traditional religion was punishable with death.) The trial was one of the great affairs of Athenian history; it stirred and stimulated the minds of thousands; and it made clearer than ever before the bitter division that had arisen between the emancipated intelligence of Athens and the ob-

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scurantism and conservatism of the mob. U tt M THE GODS OF GREECE WHAT was this religion that challenged Anaxagoras, exiled Protagoras and Aristotle, threatened Aspasia and poisoned Socrates? It had begun, like most religions of the ancient world, in the worship of spirits in trees and stars and beasts and the plants of the field. Strange magic rites and charming -myths had grown out of this simple animism. So the earth made fertile by spring showers was pictured for the Greek imagination as the Princess Danae, shut up in a tower and visited by Zeus in the form of a golden rain. And the -bounty of the soil was visioned as the return from Hades of the fair Persephone, stolen after every harvest from her mourning mother, Demeter (Ceres), the goddess of the corn. k In like manner the reproductive energies 6f nature were pesonifled in Aphrodite, goddess of beauty and love. We can trace her splendid worship back to the Babylonian goddess Ishtar, or Astarte, spirit of fertility, whom we still unconsciously commemorate at Easter—once the feast of the reawakening spring. So definitely were Astarte and Aphrodite worshiped as embodying the mystic power of reproduction that it became a solemn religious duty for every woman, in many parts of the ancient world, to submit to the embraces of a stranger, and “to dedicate to the goddess the wages earned by this sacrificial harlotry. The sacred precinct,” says Sir James Frazer, “was crowded with women waiting to observe the custom. Some of them had to wait there for years.’ The Middle Ages were to worship chastity; antiquity suspected it, and valued better a plentiful fertility. The Greeks feared and reverenced the power of Eros and Aphrodite, and predicted evil (as in Euripides’ Hippolytus) for those who shunned the fine frenzy of love. Adonis was also stolen from Babylon. Among the Semites he had been Tammuz, the youthful lover of Ishtar; they called him Adon or

Lord, and the Greeks took over the title as the name of their imported god. Shakespeare speaks of Venus and Adonis; Bacon would have spoken of Aphrodite; it is one of a thousand minutiae that disprove the identity of the playwright and the philosopher. Adonis, like Persephone, was supposed to spend part of each year exiled in Hades—that dark underworld in the bowels of the earth to which good and bad alike departed after death. Annually the Greeks celebrated the death of Adonis, his descent into Hell, and his resurrection—the last again a symbol of the renaissance of spring. Throughout the development of religion we find an impersonal process or force transformed poetically into a person, and phrased imaginatively in legend. u n n SO again the growth of the vine seemed to the simpler Greeks to be the work of the god Dionysus; and they loved him not only because he served as patron deity of an industry vital to the life of Greece, but because his ritual frolicked with license and sanctioned the alcoholic recreations of the people. Dionysus, too, like the other gods of vegetation, was believed to have died a violent death, and then to have risen again to life; and his feast was celebrated by enacting the pageant of bis sufferings and his resurrection. Out of this ceremony rose the drama of the Greeks, and all those somber tragedies with which Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and others filled the great Theatre of Dionysus. Phallic worship was the essence of the Dionysian cult, and the phallic emblem was carried at the head of the procesison that honored him Such a festival was called a Comus: out of its Rabelaisian humor and song (oidos) came Greek comedy In fgrm \nd name. Hence the indecency of the comic stage in Athens and the absence of respectable women from the theater; it was a stag drama, in honor of the goat god. For Dionysus, like so many gods, had taken the place of a sacred goat [in the gradual transforation of toI temism—the worship of animals—

into the worship of human deities. But, as in other cases, the animal ancestor of the god clung to him in myth and ritual; a goat was sacrificed to Dionysus, he was often represented as a goat, and was called the “Kid,” and those who led his procession dressed themselves in masks representing goats. Hence the plays which celebrated his feast were named tragedies—i. e., goat songs. The basis of Greek religion, then, was the growth of the soil, the flourishing of cortr’ and vine; and upon this splendid foundation the mythmaking passion of the people reared an edifice of poetry that reached to the sun and the stars. Phoebus (i. e., bright)' Apollo was the god who shone in the sun; Selene was the gentle lady, who ruled in the moon, and sent her, soft rays down to capture Endymion and fill every lover with lunar lunacy. Even as late as the Stoics (220 B. C.) we find the philosopher Chrysippus listing as divinities “the Sun, the Moon, the Stars, Law and men, who have turned into gods.” (To Be Continued.)

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