Odysseus in greek mythology by edith hamilton
Or a monstrous mysterious sphinx, aloof from all that lives. Or a rigid figure, a woman with a cat’s head suggesting inflexible, inhuman cruelty. In Egypt, a towering colossus, immobile, beyond the power of the imagination to endow with movement, as fixed in the stone as the tremendous temple columns, a representation of the human shape deliberately made unhuman. Until then, gods had had no semblance of reality. That had not entered the mind of man before. The Greeks made their gods in their own image. In Greece man first realized what mankind was. Human beings had counted for little heretofore. With the coming forward of Greece, mankind became the center of the universe, the most important thing in it. We know only that in the earliest Greek poets a new point of view dawned, never dreamed of in the world before them, but never to leave the world after them.
Why it happened, or when, we have no idea at all. The Greeks, unlike the Egyptians, made their gods in their own image. “Old things are passed away behold, all things are become new.” Something like that happened in Greece. People often speak of “the Greek miracle.” What the phrase tries to express is the new birth of the world with the awakening of Greece. Nothing we learn about them is alien to ourselves. They do throw an abundance of light upon what early Greeks were like-a matter, it would seem, of more importance to us, who are their descendants intellectually, artistically, and politically, too. The tales of Greek mythology do not throw any clear light upon what early mankind was like. The Iliad is, or contains, the oldest Greek literature and it is written in a rich and subtle and beautiful language which must have had behind it centuries when men were striving to express themselves with clarity and beauty, an indisputable proof of civilization. Greek mythology begins with Homer, generally believed to be not earlier than a thousand years before Christ. The first written record of Greece is the Iliad. The myths as we have them are the creation of great poets. We do not know when these stories were first told in their present shape but whenever it was, primitive life had been left far behind. Only a few traces of that time are to be found in the stories. But what the myths show is how high they had risen above the ancient filth and fierceness by the time we have any knowledge of them. Of course they too once lived a savage life, ugly and brutal. Of course the Greeks too had their roots in the primeval slime. How briefly the anthropologists treat the Greek myths is noteworthy. The study of the way early man looked at his surroundings does not get much help from the Greeks. This dark picture is worlds apart from the stories of classical mythology. Mankind’s chief hope of escaping the wrath of whatever divinities were then abroad lay in some magical rite, senseless but powerful, or in some offering made at the cost of pain and grief.
Terror lived there, with its close attendant, Magic, and its most common defense, Human Sacrifice. Horrors lurked in the primeval forest, not nymphs and naiads. Nothing is clearer than the fact that primitive man, whether in New Guinea today or eons ago in the prehistoric wilderness, is not and never has been a creature who peoples his world with bright fancies and lovely visions. Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.Īnd we for a moment can catch, through the myths he made, a glimpse of that strangely and beautifully animated world.īut a very brief consideration of the ways of uncivilized peoples everywhere and in all ages is enough to prick that romantic bubble. Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea In that infinitely remote time primitive man could The prospect of traveling back to this delightful state of things is held out by nearly every writer who touches upon classical mythology, above all by the poets. The imagination was vividly alive and not checked by the reason, so that anyone in the woods might see through the trees a fleeing nymph, or bending over a clear pool to drink, behold in the depths a naiad’s face. When the stories were being shaped, we are given to understand, little distinction had as yet been made between the real and the unreal. Through it, according to this view, we can retrace the path from civilized man who lives so far from nature, to man who lived in close companionship with nature and the real interest of the myths is that they lead us back to a time when the world was young and people had a connection with the earth, with trees and seas and flowers and hills, unlike anything we ourselves can feel. GREEK and Roman mythology is quite generally supposed to show us the way the human race thought and felt untold ages ago.