Essays and Lectures | Page 5

sacred writings as
an essentially dangerous method, proving either too much or too little,
Plato himself returns to the earlier mode of attack, and re-writes history
with a didactic purpose, laying down certain ethical canons of historical
criticism. God is good; God is just; God is true; God is without the
common passions of men. These are the tests to which we are to bring
the stories of the Greek religion.
'God predestines no men to ruin, nor sends destruction on innocent
cities; He never walks the earth in strange disguise, nor has to mourn
for the death of any well-beloved son. Away with the tears for

Sarpedon, the lying dream sent to Agamemnon, and the story of the
broken covenant!' (Plato, REPUBLIC, Book ii. 380; iii. 388, 391.)
Similar ethical canons are applied to the accounts of the heroes of the
days of old, and by the same A PRIORI principles Achilles is rescued
from the charges of avarice and insolence in a passage which may be
recited as the earliest instance of that 'whitewashing of great men,' as it
has been called, which is so popular in our own day, when Catiline and
Clodius are represented as honest and far-seeing politicians, when
EINE EDLE UND GUTE NATUR is claimed for Tiberius, and Nero is
rescued from his heritage of infamy as an accomplished DILETTANTE
whose moral aberrations are more than excused by his exquisite artistic
sense and charming tenor voice.
But besides the allegorising principle of interpretation, and the ethical
reconstruction of history, there was a third theory, which may be called
the semi-historical, and which goes by the name of Euhemeros, though
he was by no means the first to propound it.
Appealing to a fictitious monument which he declared that he had
discovered in the island of Panchaia, and which purported to be a
column erected by Zeus, and detailing the incidents of his reign on
earth, this shallow thinker attempted to show that the gods and heroes
of ancient Greece were 'mere ordinary mortals, whose achievements
had been a good deal exaggerated and misrepresented,' and that the
proper canon of historical criticism as regards the treatment of myths
was to rationalise the incredible, and to present the plausible residuum
as actual truth.
To him and his school, the centaurs, for instance, those mythical sons
of the storm, strange links between the lives of men and animals, were
merely some youths from the village of Nephele in Thessaly,
distinguished for their sporting tastes; the 'living harvest of panoplied
knights,' which sprang so mystically from the dragon's teeth, a body of
mercenary troops supported by the profits on a successful speculation
in ivory; and Actaeon, an ordinary master of hounds, who, living before
the days of subscription, was eaten out of house and home by the
expenses of his kennel.
Now, that under the glamour of myth and legend some substratum of
historical fact may lie, is a proposition rendered extremely probable by
the modern investigations into the workings of the mythopoeic spirit in

post-Christian times. Charlemagne and Roland, St. Francis and William
Tell, are none the less real personages because their histories are filled
with much that is fictitious and incredible, but in all cases what is
essentially necessary is some external corroboration, such as is afforded
by the mention of Roland and Roncesvalles in the chronicles of
England, or (in the sphere of Greek legend) by the excavations of
Hissarlik. But to rob a mythical narrative of its kernel of supernatural
elements, and to present the dry husk thus obtained as historical fact, is,
as has been well said, to mistake entirely the true method of
investigation and to identify plausibility with truth.
And as regards the critical point urged by Palaiphatos, Strabo, and
Polybius, that pure invention on Homer's part is inconceivable, we may
without scruple allow it, for myths, like constitutions, grow gradually,
and are not formed in a day. But between a poet's deliberate creation
and historical accuracy there is a wide field of the mythopoeic faculty.
This Euhemeristic theory was welcomed as an essentially philosophical
and critical method by the unscientific Romans, to whom it was
introduced by the poet Ennius, that pioneer of cosmopolitan
Hellenicism, and it continued to characterise the tone of ancient
thought on the question of the treatment of mythology till the rise of
Christianity, when it was turned by such writers as Augustine and
Minucius Felix into a formidable weapon of attack on Paganism. It was
then abandoned by all those who still bent the knee to Athena or to
Zeus, and a general return, aided by the philosophic mystics of
Alexandria, to the allegorising principle of interpretation took place, as
the only means of saving the deities of Olympus from the Titan assaults
of the new Galilean