priesthood, with the result that the Classical cities, when they arose, were intellectually dominated by a knightly and not a religious literature. The original doctrines of this religion, which out of opposition to Homer linked themselves with the (probably) still older name of Orpheus, were never written down.
All the same, they existed. Who knows what and how much is hidden behind the figures of Calchas and Tiresias? A mighty upheaval there must have been at the beginning of this Culture, as at that of others — an upheaval extending from the Ægean Sea as far as Etruria — but the Iliad shows as few signs of it as the lays of the Nibelungs and of Roland show of the inwardness and mysticism of Joachim of Floris, St. Francis, and the Crusades, or of the inner fire of that Dies Iræ of Thomas of Celano, which would probably have excited mirth at a thirteenth-century court of love. Great personalities there must have been to give a mystical-metaphysical form to the new world-outlook, but we know nothing of them and it is only the gay, bright, easy side of it that passed into the song of knightly halls. Was the "Trojan War " a feud, or was it also a Crusade? What is the meaning of Helen? Even the Fall of Jerusalem has been looked at from a worldly point of view as well as from a spiritual.
In the nobles' poetry of Homer, Dionysus and Demeter, as priests' gods, are unhonoured.[1] But even in Hesiod, the herdsman of Ascra, the enthusiast-searcher inspired by his folk-beliefs, the ideas of the great early time are not to be found pure, any more than in Jakob Böhme the cobbler.[2] That is the second difficulty. The great early religions, too, were the possession of a class, and neither accessible to nor understandable by the generality; the mysticism of earliest Gothic, too, was confined to small elect circles, sealed by Latin and the difficulty of its concepts and figures, and neither nobility nor peasantry had any distinct idea of its existence. And excavation, therefore, important as it is in respect of the Classical country-faiths, can tell us as little about the Early Classical religion as a village church can tell us about Abelard or Bonaventura.
But Æschylus and Pindar, at any rate, were under the spell of a great priestly tradition, and before them there were the Pythagoreans, who made the Demeter-cult their centre (thereby indicating where the kernel of that mythology is to be sought), and earlier still were the Eleusinian Mysteries and the Orphic reformation of the seventh century; and, finally, there are the fragments of Pherecydes and Epimenides, who were not the first but the last dogmatists of a theology in reality ancient. The idea that impiety was a heritable sin, visited upon the children and the children's children, was known to Hesiod and Solon, as well as the doctrine (Apollinian also) of "Hybris."[3] Plato, however, as an
- ↑ And because they were the gods of the eternal peasant, they outlived the Olympians.
- ↑ Even though Hesiod is two centuries nearer to the source of his Culture than the German mystic is to that of our own. See the article "Boehme," Ency. Brit., XI ed. — Tr.
- ↑ Insolent prosperity tempting Nemesis. — Tr.
