Pindar (Morice)/Chapter 8
CHAPTER VIII.
THE IAMIDS.—DIAGORAS OF RHODES.
Among the many religious antiquities of Olympia in Pindar's time was an oracle, far less celebrated indeed than that of Apollo at Delphi, yet greatly venerated, and frequently consulted by such competitors in the games as desired to anticipate the verdict of the judges. Its answers were given, not as at Delphi by an inspired priestess, but by a sacerdotal caste or family who watched the sacrifices burning on the great altar of Olympian Zeus, and interpreted the phenomena which these presented according to certain traditional rules handed down as a family secret from father to son.
The family tie in Greece was exceedingly strong, and it was much cemented by the practice which prevailed of keeping certain sciences and religious rites confined as a sort of heirloom to particular families. Thus the medical art of Greece remained for a long time chiefly in the hands of the Asclepiads, who claimed descent from the hero Asclepius, the mythical inventor of medicine. Again, at Athens, the state religion was administered chiefly by a family known as the Eumolpids, who professed to have inherited their functions from Eumolpus, founder of the Eleusinian mysteries, and first priest at Athens of Demeter (Ceres) and Dionysus (Bacchus). Every Greek house of any distinction had its own particular religious rites, and these, it was believed, could only be performed by members of the family. Accordingly, if such a set of rites was for any reason incorporated in a state religion, the members of the house to which it was attached became, as it were, a sacerdotal caste in the state, enjoying certain privileges and immunities, and reverenced as the channels through which the favour of particular deities passed to the community. Still it was not necessary that they should make their priesthood their main profession, or be excluded by reason of it from the ordinary occupations and functions of a citizen. With some few exceptions, the members of a priestly family might marry, might engage in any pursuits that they thought fit, and might even serve in the army. No such duties of instructing the laity, and the like, as have been associated in modern times with the clerical profession, were assigned to the Greek priesthoods. Nor were they in any way specially called upon, either by example or by precept, to influence or direct their neighbours in matters of morality. Beyond the maintenance of their peculiar religious rites, and the care of the temples and altars with which these were associated, a sacerdotal family had no distinctive duties to the state; and a few of its members, specially appointed to discharge such functions, would in practice suffice to fulfil all that was required of them in this respect. The priesthood of the others was probably a mere honourable sinecure, a sort of honorary canonry in the temple-chapter, procuring for them a certain consideration m the eyes of their fellow-citizens, but no more necessarily connected with the performance of religious duties than a "courtesy title" in England with the functions of the legislature.
Again, the different sacerdotal families in the various states of Greece at no time constituted a collective national priesthood. Greek religion was, in fact, not so much an organised system as an aggregate of separate systems in a loose permissive communion. Between tribes of the same stock there was, however, more approach to uniformity of religious belief and ritual; and in these, accordingly, the several priesthoods were drawn into some sort of informal intercourse and connection. And when, as often happened, a state desired to incorporate into its own religion some part of a neighbour's ritual, some members of the priesthood attached to this were usually invited over to introduce and maintain it in its new home. Such persons and their descendants thenceforward enjoyed a distinguished and often lucrative position in their adopted state. And thus in Grecian history we meet with frequent instances of a sacerdotal family widely dispersed among the different nations of a common stock, retaining wherever they went their original family name, meeting from time to time at the altar of their original "cultus," and cherishing by mutual intercourse the memory of their common descent.
Such a family were the Iamids, hereditary priests of Olympian Zeus, and custodians and interpreters of his oracle at Olympia. We find various members of this race engaged, from time to time, during the course of Greek history, as soothsayers in the many scattered communities of Dorian Greeks, not only in Sparta or Messenia or Mantinea in the Peloponnese, but in the distant colonies of the west, at Sybaris and Croton in South Italy. When Archias the Corinthian sailed for Sicily and founded the important town of Syracuse, one or more representatives of the Iamid stock accompanied the expedition, assisted in the religious ceremonies with which the new settlement was inaugurated, and obtained a share in the heroic honours assigned, according to universal Greek custom, to the founder.
Iamus, the legendary ancestor of this priestly house, was a son of Apollo, the god of divination, and inspirer of the great oracle at Delphi. The Olympian oracle was connected, as we have seen, with the worship of Zeus; but inasmuch as for some reason the old idea of Zeus as an inspirer of prophecy[1] had to some extent been obscured, and Apollo, the god of Delphi, had gradually occupied the place which Zeus in this aspect had formerly filled in the imagination of the Greeks, it was to Apollo, and not to Zeus, that the Iamids saw fit to trace their origin. Their priesthood at Olympia they described as an office to which the Delphian god had specially appointed their ancestor, and their family traditions represented him as designated for it even before the institution of the Olympic festival. Among the rituals which members of their family had inaugurated in other states of Greece, was a peculiar cultus of Hermes (Mercury) at Stymphalus in Arcadia. And it was the special branch of Iamids settled at Stymphalus to maintain this worship which supplied to Archias the priests or soothsayers who assisted him in inaugurating with due rites the foundation of his colony at Syracuse.
The Sixth Olympian Ode commemorates a victory of one of these Syracusan Iamids—Agesias, the son of Archestratus, winner in the race of mule-cars. Probably Agesias occupied an important religious position at Syracuse, and his visit to Olympia would naturally bring him into connection with the original branch of his family established there to maintain the original oracle and altar. He had also, it appears, taken occasion on his visit to Greece to renew acquaintance with his kinsmen, the priests of Stymphalus, and had received from the inhabitants of that town welcome and recognition as a fellow-citizen. With a mind full of all the associations which could be suggested by such a resumption of old family ties, he had now returned to Syracuse. And in the Ode which Pindar sent to him from Thebes for performance by a chorus in Syracuse, these associations are again recalled to him; the poet recognising in the family traditions of the Iamids a theme at once adapted to gratify his patron, and to furnish himself with an admirable opportunity for displaying the choicest treasures of his genius. It is plain, from the mere opening of this Ode, that Pindar designed it for a masterpiece: and it exhibits in a remarkable degree all the most characteristic features of his poetry—as well those which the severest criticism must admit to be beauties, as those which to a modern, though not to an ancient reader, must seem defects. The passage describing the infancy of Iamus is probably the most touching and beautiful in the whole range of Pindaric poetry. The profusion and originality of the poet's fancy are exhibited through the Ode to an extent which, even in Pindar, is truly amazing. But the rapidity of its transitions from theme to theme; the abundance of unexplained allusions; the mixture of myth, fact, and allegory throughout the poem; and the amazing audacity of expression—verging more than once on the grotesque, or even the ludicrous,—will excite in a modern reader sensations of astonishment rather than of pleasure.
Several of Pindar's longer Odes open with an elaborate metaphorical description of his poetry. He compares it to wine in a golden goblet presented by some rich lord to his daughter's spouse;[2] to a bath prepared by a skilful physician to refresh the weary athlete;[3] to a stingless arrow launched in love and not in hate.[4] Elsewhere he contrasts his own art favourably with that of the sculptor, whose images remain motionless on the pedestal, while his fly far and wide through Greece.[5] On this occasion it is architecture that supplies his metaphor:—
"As who would frame some gorgeous hall, uproars its porch with shapely wall
On golden pillars hung:
Our song's proud front must glitter from afar."
And then an allusion to the victor's success, and the sacerdotal honours of his family at Syracuse and Olympia, suggests a comparison of him to the hero-prophet Amphiaraus, "warrior both and seer," whose death, foreseen of himself, had deprived the famous Seven against Thebes of the very "eye" of their expedition.
But the poet will not linger on this theme. With an apostrophe of amazing vigour and originality he calls on Phintias, the victor's charioteer, to yoke his mules for a new course. But it is not the mere material car, with which they had triumphed at Olympia, that they are now to draw. They are to be attached to a nobler chariot—the ideal car of the Muses. Their victory has, as it were, "sublimated their essence," and raised them into ideal beings, suitable for the ideal task demanded of them. So then through the gates of Song, whose bars fly back to admit them, the spiritualised mules and the spiritual chariot must pass, and bear the poet far away to Pitanè.
Pitanè was in sober fact a suburb or parish of Sparta; but Pindar's present purpose was not a visit to the city beside the Eurotas. In ancient Greece, as in modern Cornwall, nine-tenths of the names of places were believed to be derived from legendary saints, or, as the Greeks called them, heroes, whose shrines or tombs were still exhibited to believers as evidence for the truth of their legends. So it was at Pitanè; the name of the place was given also to a local nymph, bride of Poseidon and mother of Evadne. It was in this latter sense of the name, as referring to a person and not to a place, that Pindar wishes to "come to Pitanè." Availing himself of the ambiguity of the name, Pindar sustains as long as possible the illusion of a journey to the place Pitanè, and then all at once the veil is withdrawn, and the object of the allegorical journey is explained. For Pitanè was the mother of Evadne, and Evadne was the mother of Iamus! that Iamus whose story Pindar had all along designed as the centre of his poem—the prophet-hero from whom Agesias claimed descent.
For reasons of her own, Pitanè had intrusted Æpytus, an Arcadian prince, with the charge of the maiden Evadne. In his care she grew up, fair and gentle, with tresses dark as the iris. Apollo saw, and loved her; but her secret was hid from Æpytus till she became a mother. In vain did the guardian inquire her lover's name. But the strange irony of fate sent him at last to ask counsel in this matter from the lover himself!
"Forth with rage and grief at heart, to Pytho speeding fast,
Counsel he sought of the god that might such woes remove."
Ere long he returned delighted and amazed. "The god had owned his child. The child was to be a prophet, unrivalled among men, and the parent of an imperishable race. But where was the child?"
Where was he?
Specially protected by Ilithyia, the kind goddess of Birth, who stays the mother's pains, and by the Moiræ or Fates, who take charge of the new-born child and ordain his future lot, Evadne had borne a child inspired of heaven, deep in the "azure" thicket. But in her utter despair the poor mother laid her child upon the ground, and turned weeping away. Like Hagar, she could not see the child die.
And now the king was asking for the child. But four days had passed since that miserable parting of child and mother, and none had seen him since. Where was he now?
Apollo had not forgotten the son, whom his very mother had forsaken. She had
"Left him laid on earth
But thither, lo! with honey's harmless bane
To feed him, came two heaven-sent bright-eyed snakes."
And so, when the seekers came upon him,—
"There he lay
Safe couched in reeds amid the trackless wild,
His soft limbs bathed in gold and purple ray
Of violets. So the mother bade him bear
Ever the violets' name:"
—i.e., she named him Iamus: IA being the Greek name for some sort of flowers, which, if not identical with our violets, sufficiently correspond to them for the purposes of readers who are not professed botanists.
The promises of the god were fulfilled. The child became a man, and Apollo granted him a double portion of prophetic gifts. His predictions were at first to be guided by direct intimations vouchsafed to him by the god; afterwards he was to read the future in the sacrifices which Heracles should ordain at Olympia.
Then come allusions to the after-glory of the Iamids, and especially to their pious observance of the rites of Hermes at Stymphalus, which had won Agesias the special favour of Hermes and his father Zeus. But the thought of Stymphalus reminds Pindar of a legendary connection between his own city and Stymphalus; for was not Thebè, whose pleasant waters he is drinking even now, a daughter of the Stymphalian nymph Metopa? Here is a theme on which he cannot be silent—
"Meseemeth a whetstone shrills at my tongue!"
And, full of this patriotic fervour, he bursts into an ardent protest against the scornful nickname which their livelier neighbours had fixed on the proverbially slow-witted Bœotians.[6] "Surely, Æneas," he cries, apostrophising the chorus-master who superintends the performance of the Ode—"surely we shall now escape that ancient jeer—Bœotian swine!" Then, in two far-fetched but ingenious metaphors, he describes the functions of Æneas, who is charged with the commission of carrying his Ode to Syracuse and training the chorus there. First, he calls his chorus-master "a Muses' mission-staff," alluding to a Greek practice of rolling paper spirally along a stick, and then writing a despatch upon it. When the paper was unrolled, the letters on it appeared, of course, scattered in confusion over it. The receiver rolled the paper once more round a similar stick, and was thus able to read it. It formed, in fact, a rude anticipation of our "cipher-despatches." Æneas, as interpreting Pindar's inspirations to the chorus, is compared to the stick by whose help the despatch was read. For a similar reason Pindar further addresses Æneas as the "mixing-bowl," from which the wine of song is ladled out into those smaller vessels, the members of the chorus, through which at last it reaches Agesias and his friends.
Last follow praises of Syracuse and Hiero, whom he pictures as welcoming Agesias, newly returned in triumph from Stymphalus—returned "home from a home." Agesias, with his double citizenship, Syracusan and Stymphalian, recalls to Pindar the image of a vessel doubly moored at stern and prow, defying the utmost fury of the elements. And still maintaining this little allegory, he prays the deities of the ocean to bring that vessel home with joy:—
"Grant, god of the seas, fair journey to these;—
And bid my songs new blooms of grace unfold!"
Diagoras of Rhodes, for whom the Seventh Olympian Ode was written, belonged to a noble, and, in older days, even a royal family in that island. Two curious stories attest the athletic renown of his house. His son Dorieus, a famous athlete, was captured by the Athenians in a sea-fight. Greek morality did not forbid the massacring of prisoners of war, and fortunate was the captive who could escape by payment of a ransom. But the Athenians, though embittered by a long series of disasters, instantly, and without exacting a ransom, set the distinguished captive at liberty.[7]
We are informed also, by numerous ancient authors, that a female member of this family, a daughter apparently of Diagoras himself, named Pherenicè, ventured to transgress a law which forbade the presence of women at Olympia, through anxiety to witness the performance of her son in the lists. The boy was successful, but his mother was detected. Such an offence, according to law, should have been punished with death—the offender to be hurled headlong from a neighbouring height. But the culprit pleaded the exceptional athletic position of her family, and the plea was allowed to prevail. Permission was even added—a permission granted to no woman before or since—that Pherenicè should be admitted to witness any future Olympic festival.
Allusion has already been made to the exordium of this Ode:—
"As some wealthy lord in greeting of his daughter's spouse should lift
In his hand a brimming beaker, where the grape's bright juices foam,
Passing to the youth a gift,
Erst the crown of all his riches, destined now to other home,
For the honour of his banquet, pleased his new-made son to make
Envied of each friendly feaster for his happy wedlock's sake:
So to champions crowned at Pytho and Olympia I send
Draughts of Nectar sweet, the Muses' boon, the soul's delicious fruit,
Gladdening each victor-friend!"
Pindar had now (B.C. 464) reached the climax of his fame. Even to such a hero as Diagoras he could adopt the tone of an equal, almost of a superior. Nor did the haughty Rhodians resent the poet's boasts. They engraved this Ode in golden letters on their temple of the Lindian Athenè.
Three legends follow, all connected with the mythical history of Rhodes. First we hear how Tlepolemus, fleeing from his native Tiryns in expiation of a hasty homicide, was directed by the Delphian oracle to the beautiful isle of Rhodes, the birthplace of the goddess Athenè. Next follows the tale of the settlement founded by Tlepolemus. The oracle had enjoined the perpetual offering of burnt-sacrifices to the goddess who had been born there, and to her father Zeus. But "blind oblivion" obscured the memory of this ordinance, and the altars remained unkindled. Yet the neglected deities were not alienated. Zeus rained riches on the land, and Athenè made its inhabitants matchless in the arts. A curious description follows of "figures like to things that live and move" which filled their streets. Pindar seems to imply that these figures were actually locomotive automata. But he is careful to defend the artificers from the imputation of magical practices. Theirs was legitimate skill, marvellous indeed, yet no encroachment upon the prerogative of Deity—the right of granting life to such things only as seems good to it. Lastly, Pindar tells of a day, ere yet the gods had portioned among themselves the new-created earth,—a day when not as yet
"Towered the Rhodian isle conspicuous over Ocean's waves, but still
Deep it lay beneath the whelming brine."
One deity alone was accidentally absent from the allotment. It was the Sun-god Helios:—
"None was there to claim a portion for the absent God of Light.
Him, the pure and holy one, they left disfranchised of his lot."
The oversight was unintended, and Zeus would have cast the lots again. But the Sun-god declined the offer. He saw, he said, a land rising from the depths of ocean—
"Rich in sustenance for man and plenteous pasturage for sheep."
And then, addressing the Goddess of Pate who presided over the allotment, he invoked her to lift her hands and swear that, when such country appeared, it should be assigned to him. The promise was given, and Rhodes appeared from the waters—the portion of Helios.
With the island appeared also its tutelary nymph, Rhodos (i. e., the Rose). Readers may remember some years ago in the Exhibition of the Royal Academy a beautiful picture[8] in illustration of the tale—the emerging island, the nymph surrounded with the flowers from which her name was taken, the Sun-god descending to claim his bride.
From the union of Helios and Rhodos sprang, says Pindar, seven noble sons. And to three of these sons he traces the three independent communities which in his own day occupied the island, the cities of Lindus, Ialysus, and Camirus.
A dazzling enumeration of Diagoras's victories closes the Ode. Olympia and Pytho had been already mentioned as scenes of his triumph; now we hear of prizes brought by him from the Isthmus, Nemea, Argos, Athens, Arcadia, Thebes, Pellene, Ægina, Megara—a marvellous list indeed. Yet the poet adds a word of caution; he dares not finish with a boast. Let Diagoras remain true to his inherited principles, a loyal, law-abiding citizen. Thus he may hope to avoid the special dangers of success, the fatal pride which too often intoxicates the victor, and alienates his countrymen. All is well with him now. May it but remain so!—
"For now the state holds festival,
With the Eratids rejoicing: yet full oft in shortest space
Veers with sudden sweep the fickle gale!"
It is to be hoped that Diagoras was wise enough to profit by the poet's warning. We find in the history of Greece enough gloomy records of aristocratic lawlessness, and fierce reprisals on the part of the oppressed classes when at last the crash came, to assure us that such warnings were often needed.
- ↑ His oracle at Dodona, reputed the most ancient in Greece, was extremely famous in early times; but its fame was afterwards completely eclipsed by that of Apollo's oracle at Delphi.
- ↑ Ol. vii.; cf. Isthm. v.
- ↑ Nem. iv.
- ↑ Ol. ix.; cf. Ol. ii. 89.
- ↑ Nem. v.
- ↑ Themistius says: "Men called Bœotia 'a sow,' mocking the people, I suppose, for their want of culture. However, Pindar and Corinna and Hesiod were not defiled by contact with the sow."—(Orat. xxvii.) Dionysius of Halicarnassus thus enumerates the characteristics ot various tribes: "An Athenian—sharp, talkative, clever; an Ionian—luxurious; a Bœotian—stupid."
- ↑ Grote, Hist. of Greece, Part II., chap. lxiv.
- ↑ Helios and Rhodos, by Sir F. Leighton, P. R. A.