Indianapolis Times, Volume 39, Number 183, Indianapolis, Marion County, 9 December 1927 — Page 16

PAGE 16

MVILI^TION

' | ■'HE last phase of Greece brings X us to the Olympian deities, a set of heroes and heroines invented quite independently of the vegetation gods and the spirits of the sky. To the Greeks no impassable barrier separated jgods and men; a great man could become a god and be •worshipped so (like Alexander) even in his lifetime; and the gods themselves did not differ much from lusty men and adventurous women, except that they never died. When a great man breathed his last he became at once a minor deity; and since every family looked upon its dead progenitors as great, ancestor worship became a vital part of nearly all ancient cults, and onq of the most carefully nursed forces of conservatism in the state. When various groups were united in cities or nations the Ancestor gods they worshipped were merged into a general pantheon (i. e., ah the gods), in which heroic ancestors were superimposed upon the nature deities of ancient days It was in this way that the Olympians came. They did not, like later and more philosophical gods, exist from the beginning. The first god of all, says old Hesiod, was Chaos (“The earth was without form, and void,” says Genesis, “and darkness was upon the face of the deep”). Next came Gaea, the earth, who gave birth to Uranos, the sky. Gasa, with no regard for morals, married Jier own son (the earth mingled with the sky), an<jt begot twelve Titans— Oceanus, Hyperion, Kronus wind other giants. But Uranos did not like these vast sons, and buried them resolutely in the cavities of the earth. Their mother resented this, and managed to have Kronos escape and interrupt the amours of his father. Kronos performed a villainous operation upon Uranos, and threw the bleeding parts into the sea. There, miraculous to relate, they sprouted into Aphrodite, goddess of love. # * * HAVING deposed his father, Kronos (Time) married his sister Rhea, and had by her several children, of whom the last was Zeus. But Kronos feared that one of his children would destroy him as he had destroyed Uranos; and to guard against this beyond peradventure he swallowed each child as it was born. Rhea, however, did not agree with him, or with Dean Swift, about the advisabilty of using children as articles of food. f So when Zeus came into existence she concealed him in a cave, and

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in his stead presented to Kronos a stone tenderly wrapped in swaddling clothes; and Kronos consumed the stone. When Zeus grew up he led a revolution against Kronos and the Titans, deposed them and exiled them from heaven; and to this day nobody knows where they are. It is a story akin to that of Satan’s rebellion against Jehovah, except that here the rebel won. One speculates what would have happened to the cosmos if Satan had triumphed like Zeus. Perhaps he did, if we may judge from the way of the world. Zeus, now supreme, took up his residence in the clouds of Mount Olympus and divided the universe among his brothers and other noble gods on the analogy of the feudal arrangements obtaining arflong the Greeks, who had created him. Poseidon (Neptune, as the Romans called him), took charge of the ‘ocean and made it froth and roll

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and roar so that every one, even to this day, pays him tribute; Ares (Mars) inspired warriors to kill and die; Hephaistos (Vulcan) became the god of village blacksmiths and superintended the thunder; Artemis (Diana) protected hunters, Hermes (Mercury) inspired messengers and Athene (Minerva) inspired the Greeks to “create reason, as they had created beauty.” Hera (Juno) married herself to Zeus and devoted her life to restraining his passion for polygamy. It was very much like a presidential cabinet; Poseidon was secretary of the navy, Ares of the army, Vulcan of labor, Demeter of agriculture, Athene was secretary of state, Hermes was director of the postoffice, Hera was secretary of the interior and Zeus was president. We must not suppose, however, that this antheon was to the Greeks a matter of humor and poetry; it was taken seriously enough to beget many tragedies, and as each god

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had to have his share in worship, sacrifice, ritual and prayer it was no easy thing to be a pious Greek. Anatole France, if we may believe secretaries, once said: “I dislike the first article of the Decalogue, ‘One god alone thou shalt adore . . ’ No; all gods, all temples and all gooddesses.” The master liked all the gods because he did not have to pray to them. But the Greeks prayed. ’ u a THE GODS AND THE PHILOSOPHERS NO wonder they rebelled. Gradually, as science and philosophy grew among the Greeks, the educated strata of Athenian society ceased to believe in these multitudinous gods. We have seen elsewhere, and need not tell again, how Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Pythagoras, Empedocles, Heraclitus and Anaxagoras broke away from supernatural conceptions and attempted the first naturalist interpretation of the world; ho v Protagoras, Gorgias, Hippias and other ’Sophists” subjected the ancient faith to criticism and ridicule; how Leucippus and Democritus went to

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the extreme of reducing man and the world to the level of machines; how Socrates was put to death for believing in only one god, and how Plato had to wander for twelve years before venturing to return to intolerant Athens. The philosophers nearly lost their lives and nearly won their case. “By the time of Plato,” says Gilbert Murray, '‘the original religion of the Greeks was bankrupt.” During the rule of Pericles skepticism spread so swiftly that a moral interregnum set in, remarkably parallel in nature and cause to that which characterizes our own age. The decay of the old faith was not replaced by any sounder basis for cooperation, responsibility and decency; and a reckless individualism flourished in morals and politics, and even in the imperial policy of the state. Moral conservatives pointed to the career of Alcibiades as typical of the unscrupulous selfishness that seemed to come as a corollary with unbelief; here was one of the most able and brilliant pupili of Socrates, and his most scandalous lover; he had been born with every advantage of

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wealth and ancestry; he had received every aid of education and opportunity; yet he fomented war with Sparta recklessly, he deliberately deceived ‘their ambassadors by shameless lying, he joined in every manner of debauchery and impious revelry, he sold himself to the enemies of his country, and died prematurely (and yet not too soon) in a welter of treachery. What was to become of a nation that had no other god than self, and no other virtue than a calculating intellect? h n n THE dramatists struggled to keep -the old deities alive, if only as gods from the machine, conveniences in the disentanglement of a tale or the rounding of a period. In their majestic trilogies the gods were remolded in a finer image than before; Zeus became greater and nobler when he had been passer through the fiery imagination cf Aeschylus and had been clothed with the serene wisdom of Sophocles. But in Euripides even the dramatic survival of the gods became precarious; it was not for nothing that Prfttagoras had read in the home of Euripides his book

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"On the Gods,” whose first words had been, "Whether there are gods or not we cannot know;” and the reckless dramatist had an entire audience to its feet in protest when he, opened a play with the insolent line;— “O Zeus—if there be a Zeus—for I know of him only by report. ’ Even in the Theater of Dionysus the philosophers had won. It was among the artists that the new conception of the world as the realm at onct cf life and law reached a synthesis of form and vitality in which rebel and conservative alike might find unity and peace. Religion had helped to generate the arts —architecture in \ temples, sculpture in sacred monuments, music in ritual —and the arts cancelled their debt by lifting religion to heights unrealized before. In the hands of Phidias, Zeus became the embodiment of power and justice, of creative vision and strength-, and Athene seemed to. be wisdom itself after Phidias had carved her in her calm and majesty. When Phryne posed to Praxiteles

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DEC. 9, 1927

0 % for the Cnidian Aphrodite, and some handsome youth became anew Hermes under the sculptor’s hand, a new religion was born, a worship of reason and beauty, and the gods of Greece became worthy of her geniuses. The common mind had made ferocious and ridiculous deities, of whose morals the philosophers had forgivably complained, but the artists slowly chiselled a pantheon in which philosophy joined with poetry to give form and symbol to all Ideal perfections. It was not her statesmen that' lifted Greece on high, not her merchants, nor her generals; it was her philosophers, her poets and her artists. Let us turn to them. (Copyright, 1927, by Dr. Will Durant) (To Be Continued)

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