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Achilles (search for this): chapter 10
The Greek goddesses. That heroic virtue For which antiquity hath left no names But patterns only, such as Hercules, Achilles, Theseus. Carew. The Greek goddesses, like all other mythologic figures, have been very fully discussed, in all their less interesting aspects. Their genealogies have been ransacked, as if they had lived in Boston or Philadelphia. Their symbolic relations to the elements and to the zodiac and to all the physical phenomena have been explored, as if there were tove been ill-used by them, and perhaps deserved it, while his own pictures of womanhood, from Alcestis downward, show the finest touches of appreciation. Iphigenia refuses to be saved from the sacrifice, and insists on dying for her country; and Achilles, who would fain save and wed her, says: I deem Greece happy in thee, and thee in Greece; nobly hast thou spoken. In the Troades, Hecuba warns Menelaus that, if Helen is allowed on the same ship with him, she will disarm his vengeance; he disput
Minerva (search for this): chapter 10
e known from all others by the length of the hair, whence the Greek oath, by the tresses of Athena. In the descriptions, she alone is blue-eyed, to show that she dwells above all clouds, while even the auburn-haired Aphrodite, in the Iliad, has large black eyes. She is more heavily armed than the fleet-footed Artemis, and sometimes, for added protection, there are serpents clinging to her robe, while a dragon watches at her feet. This is the Greek Athena, transformed in Rome to a prosaic Minerva, infinitely useful and practical, teaching the mechanic arts, and the unwearied patroness of schoolmasters. But Athena's maiden meditation is simply one stage in a woman's life, not its completion. It is the intellectual blossoming of existence, for man or woman, this earlier epoch, unvowed as yet to family or state. But a career that seeks completeness pauses not here. When love touches and transforms the destiny, what then? Then comes the reign of Aphrodite, the beautiful, the w
Venus (search for this): chapter 10
gination to see what they represented to the Greek mind. In their simplest aspect, they are but so many types of ideal womanhood, taken at successive epochs. Woman's whole earthly career may be considered as depicted, when we portray the girl, the maiden, the lover, the wife, the mother, and the housekeeper or queen of home. These, accordingly, are represented — to give both the Greek and the more familiar but more deceptive Latin namesby Artemis or Diana, Athena or Minerva, Aphrodite or Venus, Hera or Juno, Demeter or Ceres, and Hestia or Vesta. First comes the epoch of free girlhood, symbolized by Artemis, the Roman Diana. Her very name signifies health and vigor. She represents early youth, and all young things find in her their protector. She goes among the habitations of men only that she may take newborn infants in her arms; and the young of all wild creatures must be spared in her honor, religion taking the place of game-laws. Thus she becomes the goddess of hunters,
Ceres (search for this): chapter 10
ented to the Greek mind. In their simplest aspect, they are but so many types of ideal womanhood, taken at successive epochs. Woman's whole earthly career may be considered as depicted, when we portray the girl, the maiden, the lover, the wife, the mother, and the housekeeper or queen of home. These, accordingly, are represented — to give both the Greek and the more familiar but more deceptive Latin namesby Artemis or Diana, Athena or Minerva, Aphrodite or Venus, Hera or Juno, Demeter or Ceres, and Hestia or Vesta. First comes the epoch of free girlhood, symbolized by Artemis, the Roman Diana. Her very name signifies health and vigor. She represents early youth, and all young things find in her their protector. She goes among the habitations of men only that she may take newborn infants in her arms; and the young of all wild creatures must be spared in her honor, religion taking the place of game-laws. Thus she becomes the goddess of hunters, and learns of her brother Phoeb
Proclus (search for this): chapter 10
the Saturday Review. We must seek them in the remains of Greek sculpture, in Hesiod and Homer, in the Greek tragedians, in the hymns of Orpheus, Callimachus, and Proclus, and in the Anthology. We are apt to regard the Greek myths as only a chaos of confused fancies. Yet it often takes very little pains to disentangle them, at ssey, as a relief from graver song, and half disavows it, as if knowing its irreverence. The true Aphrodite is to be sought in the hymns of Homer, Orpheus, and Proclus. The last invokes her as yet a virgin. *basilhi/da kourafrodi/thn Proclus, Hymn 3. 1. It is essential to her very power that she should have the provocation of Proclus, Hymn 3. 1. It is essential to her very power that she should have the provocation of modesty. She represents that passion which is the basis of purity, for the author of Ecce Homo admirably says, that No heart is pure which is not passionate. Accordingly, married love is as sacred to Aphrodite as the virgin condition; *)afrodi/th ga/mou plokai=s h(/detai. Tatian,Orat. contra Graecos, c. 8. if she misleads, it
Semele (search for this): chapter 10
gnity for the institution in the Greek mind. But woman's career is incomplete even as a wife; she must also be a mother. Then comes before us the great mystical and maternal deity of Greece, Demeter of the Eleusinian mysteries, the Roman Ceres. Her very name signifies mother, probably gh= mh/thr, Mother Earth. Euripides says, in his Bacchanals, that the Greeks honor chiefly two deities,one being Demeter (who is the Earth, he says, if you prefer to call her so), and the other the son of Semele. Demeter is, like Hera, both sister and in a manner wife of Zeus, to bring her into equality with him. Yet she is a virgin, even when she bears a child, Persephone or Proserpine. In a sense this maiden is the child of Zeus, but not in a mortal manner,--by an ineffable conception, a)/rrh/thoisi gonai=s. Hymn 29.7. says the Orphic Hymn. All Demeter's existence is concentrated on this motherhood. She feeds the human race, but when she is deprived of her daughter, she stops the course of
Nestorius (search for this): chapter 10
r every altar. Softened and beautified from the elder image, it is still the same,--the same indeed with all the mythologic mothers, with the Maternal Goddess who sits, with a glory round her head and a babe on her bosom, in every Buddhist house in China, or with Isis who yet nurses Horus on the monuments of Egypt. As far as history can tell, this group first appeared in Christian art when used as a symbol, in the Nestorian controversy, by Cyril, who had spent most of his life in Egypt. Nestorius was condemned in the fifth century, for asserting Mary to be the mother of the human nature of Jesus, and not also of the divine; and it was at this time that the images of the Virgin and Child were multiplied, to protest against the heretic who had the minority of votes. After all, Christian ritualism is but a palimpsest, and if we go an inch below the surface anywhere, there is some elder sanctity of Greece or Rome. I remember how this first flashed upon me, when I saw, in a photograp
Nausicaa (search for this): chapter 10
ating the events of a semi-barbarous epoch, when woman was the prize of the strongest, he yet concedes to her a dignity and courtesy far more genuine than are shown in the medieval romances, for instance, in which the reverence seldom outlasts marriage. Every eminent woman, as viewed by Homer, partakes of the divine nature. The maiden is to be approached with reverence for her virgin purity; the wife has her rightful place in the home. When Odysseus, in his destitution, takes refuge with Nausicaa's parents, the princess warns him to kneel at her mother's feet, not her father's, the mother being the central figure. Perhaps the crowning instance of this recognized dignity is in the position occupied by Helen after her return to her husband's house, when the storm of the war she excited has died away. There is a singular modernness and domesticity about this well-known scene, though the dignity and influence assigned to the repentant wife are perhaps more than modern. In the Fourth
Actaeon (search for this): chapter 10
cy of that people as fictitious characters grow up in the mind of a novelist; after a little while they get beyond his control, take their destiny into their own hands, and if he tries to make them monotonously faultless, they rebel. So that wondrous artist we call the Greek nation found itself overmastered by the vivid personality of these creations of its own. It was absolutely obliged to give Hera, the wife, her jealous imperiousness, and Artemis, the maid, her cruel chastity. Zeus and Actaeon were the sufferers, because consistency and nature willed it so, and refused to omit these slight excesses. So Athena, the virgin, must be a shade too cold, and Aphrodite, the lover, several shades too warm, that there may be reality and human interest. Demeter, the mother, will sacrifice the whole human race for her child; and even Hestia is pitiless to those who profane the sacred altar of home. Each of these qualities is the stamp of nature upon the goddess, holding fast the ideal, le
Thirlwall (search for this): chapter 10
them; but it is hard to find in any language an essay which lays all these abstruser things aside, and treats the deities in their simplest aspect, as so many Ideals of Womanhood. But we must charitably remember that the Greek goddesses are rather new acquaintances, in their own proper personalities. Till within thirty years their very names had been merged for us in the Latin substitutes, as effectually as if each had married into a Roman family. It is only since the publication of Thirlwall's Greece, in 1835, that they have generally appeared in English books under their own proper titles. With the Latin names came a host of later traditions, mostly foreign to the Greek mind, generally tending toward the trivial and the prosaic. Shakespeare in French does not more instantly cease to be Shakespeare, than the great ideals vacate their shrines when Latinized. Jeanne d'arc, in the hands of Voltaire, suffers hardly more defamation of character than the Greek goddesses under the
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