Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/204

172 BOOK imperfect his conceptions may have been, it is certain that the swineherd Eumaios did not derive his religious convictions from mythical phrases, when he told Odysseus that God gives and withholds according to his pleasure and in the plenitude of his power. Nor can too great a stress be laid on the fact that, as the mythology grew more complicated and more repulsive, ideas of morality and religion became more reasonable and more pure. Nowhere is this conclusion so clearly forced upon us as in the Hesiodic Works and Days. In this poem the teacher who bids his friend to deal with all men after the rule of righteousness which comes from Zeus,^ who tells him that justice and truth shall in the end prevail,^ and that they who do evil to others inflict evil on themselves,'' who is sure that the eyes of God are in every place, that the way of evil is broad and smooth, and the path of good rough and narrow at the first, tells us also how Zeus bade the gods to make Pandora fair to look upon but all evil within, and laughed at the thought of the miseries which should overtake mankind when all the evils should be let loose from her box, while, to crush them utterly, hope should remain a prisoner within it So conscious apparently is the poet that the Zeus who thus cheats mankind is not the Zeus who commands them to do justice and mercy, that he can use the same name without a thought that he is dishonouring the just and holy God whom he reverences. It seems impossible to ignore a distinction without which the Hesiodic poem becomes unintelligible. With our Homeric poets the contrast is not so marked, simply because their thoughts 'were not so earnest and their hearts were not so wakened by the sterner experiences of human life. With these moral indifference would naturally find expression in confusion of language, and they might lead others to think, as they themselves may have fancied, that the Zeus to whom they prayed in moments of real anguish was the Zeus who laughed at the %Tetchedness and the ruin of mankind.

The Zeus But if it be true generally that the Greek, especially in the Traeic prehistoric ages, " was not aware that there were different tributaries poets. which entered from different points into the central idea of Zeus," * it was far otherwise with the few to whom a belief in the righteousness of God was no empty phrase but a profound and practical conviction.

of the Charitcs or the Harpyias ? Could gods, ' who hate cruel deeds, but honour he have tolil who was the father of justice and the righteous works of Aphrodite, who were her husbands and men.'" — Lectures on Language, second her children ? I doubt it ; and when Homer introduces him to us, speaking of this life and the higher powers that rule it, Eumaios knows only of just series, 453. ' 35- » 215, ' 203. «442