218 THE GODS OF GREECE. 66 ATHENE. APHRODITE. HEBE. IF Hera represented the matronly dignity, and Artemis the virgin innocence, of womanhood, and both were types of that future race which should create, and be in turn created by, their influence, Athene comes before us with something of a Celtic hardness mixed up with her Hellenic beauty-with a northland strength of will and nerve to lend her more mystic attributes a physical reality. Yet she was one of the most intellectual of the Greek deities, not even excepting the "bright-haired" son of Leto; and she expressed to the fullest one portion of Greek character, in her patronage of those who thronged through the Stoai, or Porticoes, and gathered beneath the olive trees of the Academe, listening to the words of Socrates and of Plato, of Aristotle and of Epicurus-of those who held WISDOM to be the divine thing of life. And so it is; but not under that particular manifestation. As love, truly; but not as a mere intellectual creation-not as a subtle sophism, a cold unloving mind, which philosophers, aye, and later Christians too, have so falsely made it! ; Under this form of abstract wisdom Athene is peculiarly Greek; as a humanity she is less national, wanting in the refinement, the gentleness, the affection, of the other dwellers in Olympos, but possessing as much individuality, with more of an universal character in her combination. You may find her under other climes than those of Hellas-but not among other gods than the Kronids for the Scandinavian, the Hindoo, the Chinese, and the Persian, may bring copies of all save the virgin-warrior, the blue-eyed Tritogeneia! A present human life still dwells with her, visible especially to us of the rough northman race; and it gives individuality to that which else were but the emblem of immaterial truths, or the impersonation of natural phenomena. And not only with Athene, but with all the gods of Greece, dwells this intense individualism, visible even through their highest point of ideality, teaching us to love where else had been only wonder; to possess, where else had been only worship. They live still-they live ever-those gracious deities! You may find them in your pathway of life, standing before you under some bright form of youth or maiden, dazzling with their beauty, subduing with their purity, abashing with their dignity, or conquering with their strength. And the same divinity which the Greeks knew of, and expressed under god-like forms and names, still exists, even in living beauty. It is well that this cold hard day of the actual has left us this for our bosom mate! As a snowdrop in the winter, as the acacia in the desert, beauty, and its love, beam on us through the dull deadness around; reminding us that there is a higher and a holier life than the present, and that GOD has given us other than mere gain for our aim, mere sensuous pleasures for our enjoyments. Even simple beauty of form is something divine; let it not be mated with any deeper-lying loveliness,-of itself, simply as a superficial thing, it is a portion of the great court of heaven,-one of the brightest flowers which wave therein ! And under no form is it so lovely as under the female. The most beautiful of the characters and the idealities in the past, set forth as men, owe half their perfections to the union of the feminine with their masculine attributes. The Apollo Sauroctonos, the youthful Hermes, the Dionysos, the Lycian and Pythian Apollos, and all the crowd of youths and genii, Ampelus, Ganymede, Hyacinthus, and others, have much that is woman-like in their characteristics and their conceptions. On the other hand, Athene, and Artemis in some of her statues, possess a certain manly form, which gives them great strength an vigour, but does not beautify. Though Athene is so Greek in one of her intentions--the purely mental force which she embodies-yet the northern shrewdness and hardness which distinguishes her, given by the utter absence of all passion, and of all individual temperament, except itself, make her as easily comprehended by us, as Hera, or Hebe, Aphrodite, or Artemis. Her hard blue eye, her muscular frame, the firm planting of her broad foot, her rigid modesty, a little savage perhaps and more masculine than effeminate, her unrelentingness in the cause of justice, yet, as in the case of Arachne, a certain rough-hewn pity coming in after her first anger all these make her so thoroughly northern, that we might believe her our own tall Scotch nurse, affectionate but hard, sternly proper in her notions, strong-limbed and staunch-hearted, a rigid disciplinarian, and an unappeasable moralist-a worthy, but scarce loveable woman. Nothing could be more pure or free from any stain of mortal passion than the idea of Athene, as represented by Pheidias. As the Promachus, or armed champion of the city, whose glittering spear the sailor coasting round Cape Sunium could distinguish, far above all the marble columns and glorious statues of the Acropolis-and as the milder Athene Parthenos, grand, severe, serene, and dignified, standing with her weapons deposed, holding a winged Nike, or Victory, in her outstretched hand-and even as that most strange and mystic olive-wood statue which fell from heaven, the blackened Athene Polias, for whom the Peplos was worked and the great Panathenæa instituted—as these three particular forms might the goddess be found in her favourite city; and these three particular forms expressed the whole of her attributes,-ideal, human, and mystic. 66 The Amazons were the humanised embodiment of her strength and valorous energy. Muscular and unpitying women, despising their womanly beauties, and searing off at once their loveliness and their love, living a life of harsh actualities, unsoftened by art, by poetry, or by passion, they are types of what even women, gentle and tender as they are, may become, when they have learnt to look on softness as a disgrace, and on love as a crime. Now Athene had much of this same temperament. With more idealism, as was fitted for a divine conception, she had the same actual and utilitarian bias as these warrior dames whom Theseus slew, and who expressed, in their own rough warrior fashion, that class of Mothers of Modern Gracchi, female lecturers, strong-minded women, champions of female privileges," and retailers of "women's missions," with which society is deluged in our present nineteenth century. The gods send us soon the Theseus who shall put them to the rout, and give us genuine women, and no counterfeits, half men, in their stead! The Amazons might be fine specimens of animal life, but they fell short of all womanly moralities, as these are comprised in womanly love and maternal instincts. They knew nothing of either, and so were imperfect: their chiefest beauties both of mind and body mangled and foregone. These, together with their divine prototype, expressed the philosophic and the practical parts of the Greek nature, but left the passionate unembodied. This was for Corinth and Cyprus, and Lesbos and Paphos, where nought but temples and statues to Aphrodite and Eros filled the groves and gardens-this was for these to deify; and right well did they perform their task! But for Athene, unloving, unwedded, the virgin-warrior, type of a calm. clear intellect, springing forth full-armed from the head of the Great Father-she, at whose birth the clouds rained down goldAthene, who fought for the subtle Greeks against hapless Troy, and smote the " laughter-loving" queen so rudely on her breastwho with the hands that drove the javelin home, wrought Hera's robe so cunningly, and, by the same token, chastised Arachne so ungently who slew the giants, and buried Enceladus beneath the Isle of Sicily;-Athene, who formed the flute in imitation of the plaintive hissing of Medusa's snaky curls, and flung it beneath the flood in anger at its distortion-who dropped Mount Lycabettus from her stalwart arms, and deprived the unhappy Teiresias of his sight-for her was no love-song raised to her no maiden paid her young vows-no lover breathed his passion at her shrine. The games instituted to her in Athens had the same hearty character, the same absence of anything enervating or impassioned, the same influence of simplicity with herself. The Apaturia, a political or state festival, on the second day of which libation was made to Athene in concert with Zeus, Dionysos, and partly with Hephaistos,-the Panathenæa, that most gorgeous and most glorious spectacle, eleven days of which were devoted to games and contests in poetry, music, gymnastics, and other manly exercises, and the last, the twelfth, to the procession of the Peplos, or sacred robe with which the statue of Athene Polias was indued the Arrephoria, in which were chosen the four young "well-born" maids, who should weave that same sacred peplos, and bear the holy vessels of the goddess—the Chalkeia, originally a national festival to her, then changed into one sacred only to Hephaistos, a festival of all the working classes, a festival of the practical, the operative part of society:-these and other such show right well in what the Athenian's worship of the Blueeyed Pallas consisted, and how far it was removed from any connexion with æsthetic love, or more sensuous passion. Intellect, on the one hand, unencumbered by form, and on the other, the useful, the actual, the real-these were the two sides of the medal on which was graven Athene's nature! Have we no parallel in our gradual unfolding of society? Have we nothing that reminds us of Athene's diverse characteristics in the education of our time-the change which has come over us from abstract monkish learning to our present deification of the useful? Not that such deification is wholly good, wholly perfect! It wants much to render it worthy of its present large place in life; it wants somewhat of that purely mental grace, that intellectual elegance, which formerly had too excessive and exclusive cultivation, and so led to its own destruction-but without which there can be no perfection. BEAUTY is the magic zone which compasses the universe; strip life of this, and you deprive the goddess of her spell. And as in grander, so in minor matters; as in the boundless spheres, so in the atom-like dealings of man; without beauty-call it what you will, grace, refinement, taste, cultivation-there is no perfection, there is no wholeness. Athene's character as a woman is evident enough; as a goddess it is extremely difficult to understand in its higher ideal. We can see her as the armed heroine, the peaceful protectress of arts and trades, the victorious champion of her favourites; but as the mystic child of Metis, absorbed by Zeus, and from him reproduced the same myth as the birth of Dionysos, though with a somewhat different signification-it is almost too subtle for our grosser intellects to comprehend. Like the Brahminical impersonations, over which is flung the veil of Maya, or Delusion, the higher divinities of Greece fade away into an ethereal essencea thought, an idea, when we think to grasp them as bodily materialities. But are these the only divinities which thus elude the bodily eye, which thus fade from the sensuous vision as we look nearer, and become mere spiritualities, mere mental ideas, and no impersonations after all? Are these the only divinities which connect men and gods-the one so imperceptibly blended with the other, that none may say where earth begins or heaven ends? Nay! Nay! Again the limitation of humanity meets us— again are we humbled, abashed, struck down with shame, at the finiteness of man's mind! Other names, other forms, a strange garment, a new fashion-and all the past is forgotten, and men fall down in wondering awe at the New Thing, the Only Truth presented to them. Poor foolish children! That on which ye have hung your souls, in conviction of its truth, by its birth now in full time, is only the transcript, altered by local fashions, of the truths of all ages! Man cannot create; he does but adapt, from the material and the spiritual, according as his mind and the different education and the different climate under which he lives, would modify; but his gods of the East are the gods of the West; his mythology now is the mythology of the past. Aye, and further than this, may the parallel be drawn. As this education |