Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/95

 MORAL AND SOCIAL FEELING. /o 2. The stat j of moral and social feeling, prevalent in legendary Greece, exhibits a scene in harmony with the rudimentary po- litical fabrics just described. Throughout the long stream of legendary narrative on which the Greeks looked back as their past history, the larger social motives hardly ever come into play : either individual valor and cruelty, or the personal attach- ments and quarrels of relatives and war-companions, or the feuds of private enemies, are ever before us. There is no sense of obligation then existing, between man and man as such, and very little between each man and the entire community of which he is a member ; such sentiments are neither operative in the real world, nor present to the imaginations of the poets. Per- sonal feelings, either towards the gods, the king, or some near and known individual, fill the whole of a man's bosom : out of them arise all the motives to beneficence, and all the internal restraints upon violence, antipathy, or rapacity : and special communion, as well as special solemnities, are essential to their existence. The ceremony of an oath, so imposing, so paramount, and so in- dispensable in those days, illustrates strikingly this principle. And even in the case of the stranger suppliant, in which an apparently spontaneous sympathy manifests itself, the succor and kindness shown to him arise mainly from his having gone through the consecrated formalities of supplication, such as that of sitting down in the ashes by the sacred hearth, thus obtaining a sort of privilege of sanctuary. 1 That ceremony exalts him 1 Seuthes, in the Anabasis of Xenophon (vii. 2, 33), describes how, when an orphan youth, he formerly supplicated Medokos, the Thracian king, to grant him a troop of followers, in order that he might recover his lost do- minions, EKa&e^ojiriv iv6i(ppiof av-ti LKsrr}( 6ovvai /not uvSpaf. Thucydides gives an interesting description of the arrival of the exile Themistokles, then warmly pursued by the Greeks on suspicion of treason, at the house of Admetus, king of the Epirotic Molossians. The wife of Admetus herself instructed the fugitive how to supplicate her husband in form: the child of Admetus was placed in his arms, and he was directed to sit down in this guise close by the consecrated hearth, which was of the nature of an altar. While so seated, he addressed his urgent entreaties to Ad- metus for protection : the latter raised him up from the ground and promised what was asked. "That (says the historian} was the most powerful form of supplication." Admetus, uKovsaf uviarrjal re avrbv fiera rov tavrov vieof, vairefi nai s%uv avrbv tKatie^To, nai /ieyiarov iKETtv/ia ijv