The Greek View of Life | Page 9

to judgment; and I find that I
am not willing to do the first, nor able to do the second.'
"Then said Evangelist, 'Why not willing to die, since this life is
attended with so many evils?' The man answered, 'Because I fear that
this burden that is upon my back will sink me lower than the grave, and
I shall fall into Tophet. And, Sir, if I be not fit to go to prison, I am not
fit to go to judgment, and from thence to execution; and the thoughts of
these things makes me cry.'
"Then said Evangelist, 'If this be thy condition, why standest thou still?'
He answered, 'Because I know not whither to go.' Then he gave him a
parchment roll, and there was written within, 'Fly from the wrath to
come.'"
The whole spirit of the passage transcribed, and of the book from which
it is quoted, is as alien as can be to the spirit of the Greeks. To the
Puritan, the inward relation of the soul to God is everything; to the
average Greek, one may say broadly, it was nothing; it would have
been at variance with his whole conception of the divine power. For the
gods of Greece were beings essentially like man, superior to him not in
spiritual nor even in moral attributes, but in outward gifts, such as
strength, beauty, and immortality. And as a consequence of this his
relations to them were not inward and spiritual, but external and
mechanical. In the midst of a crowd of deities, capricious and
conflicting in their wills, he had to find his way as best he could. There
was no knowing precisely what a god might want; there was no
knowing what he might be going to do. If a man fell into trouble, no
doubt he had offended somebody, but it was not so easy to say whom
or how; if he neglected the proper observances no doubt he would be
punished, but it was not everyone who knew what the proper
observances were. Altogether it was a difficult thing to ascertain or to
move the will of the gods, and one must help oneself as best one could.
The Greek, accordingly, helped himself by an elaborate system of

sacrifice and prayer and divination, a system which had no connection
with an internal spiritual life, but the object of which was simply to
discover and if possible to affect the divine purposes. This is what we
meant by saying that the Greek view of the relation of man to the gods
was mechanical. The point will become clearer by illustration.
Section 7. Divination, Omens, Oracles.
Let us take first a question which much exercised the Greek mind--the
difficulty of forecasting the future. Clearly, the notion that the world
was controlled by a crowd of capricious deities, swayed by human
passions and desires, was incompatible with the idea of fixed law; but
on the other hand it made it possible to suppose that some intimation
might be had from the gods, either directly or symbolically, of what
their intentions and purposes really were. And on this hypothesis we
find developed quite early in Greek history, a complex art of divining
the future by signs. The flight of birds and other phenomena of the
heavens, events encountered on the road, the speech of passers-by, or,
most important of all, the appearance of the entrails of the victims
sacrificed were supposed to indicate the probable course of events. And
this art, already mature in the time of the Homeric poems, we find
flourishing throughout the historic age. Nothing could better indicate its
prevalence and its scope than the following passage from Aristophanes,
where he ridicules the readiness of his contemporaries to see in
everything an omen, or, as he puts it, punning on the Greek word, a
"bird": "On us you depend," sings his chorus of Birds,
"On us you depend, and to us you repair For counsel and aid, when a
marriage is made, A purchase, a bargain, a venture in trade; Unlucky or
lucky, whatever has struck ye, An ox or an ass, that may happen to pass,
A voice in the street, or a slave that you meet, A name or a word by
chance overheard, You deem it an omen, and call it a Bird." [Footnote:
Aristoph. "Birds" 717.--Frere's translation.]
Aristophanes, of course, is jesting; but how serious and important this
art of divination must have appeared even to the most cultivated
Athenians may be gathered from a passage of the tragedian Aeschylus,
where he mentions it as one of the benefits conferred by Prometheus on

mankind, and puts it on a level with the arts of building, metal-making,
sailing, and the like, and the sciences of arithmetic and astronomy.
And