History of Western Philosophy - Bertrand Russell [18]
The conventional tradition concerning the Greeks is that they exhibited an admirable serenity, which enabled them to contemplate passion from without, perceiving whatever beauty it exhibited but themselves calm and Olympian. This is a very one-sided view. It is true, perhaps, of Homer, Sophocles, and Aristotle, but it is emphatically not true of those Greeks who were touched, directly or indirectly, by Bacchic or Orphic influences. At Eleusis, where the Eleusinian mysteries formed the most sacred part of Athenian State religion, a hymn was sung, saying:
With Thy wine-cup waving high,
With Thy maddening revelry,
To Eleusis' flowery vale,
Contest Thou—Bacchus, Paean, hail!
In the Bacchae of Euripides, the chorus of Maenads displays a combination of poetry and savagery which is the very reverse of serene. They celebrate the delight in tearing a wild animal limb from limb, and eating it raw then and there:
O glad, glad on the Mountains
To swoon in the race outworn,
When the holy fawn-skin clings
And all else sweeps away,
To the joy of the quick red fountains,
The blood of the hill-goat torn,
The glory of wild-beast ravenings
Where the hill-top catches the day,
To the Phrygian, Lydian mountains
'Tis Bromios leads the way.
(Bromios was another of the many names of Dionysus.) The dance of the Maenads on the mountain side was not only fierce; it was an escape from the burdens and cares of civilization into the world of non-human beauty and the freedom of wind and stars. In a less frenzied mood they sing:
Will they ever come to me, ever again,
The long, long dances,
On through the dark till the dim stars wane?
Shall I feel the dew on my throat, and the stream
Of wind in my hair? Shall our white feet gleam
In the dim expanses?
O feet of the fawn to the greenwood fled,
Alone in the grass and the loveliness;
Leap of the hunted, no more in dread,
Beyond the snares and the deadly press.
Yet a voice still in the distance sounds,
A voice and a fear and a haste of hounds,
O wildly labouring, fiercely fleet,
Onward yet by river and glen—
Is it joy or terror, ye storm-swift feet?
To the dear lone lands untroubled of men,
Where no voice sounds, and amid the shadowy green
The little things of the woodland live unseen.
Before repeating that the Greeks were 'serene', try to imagine the matrons of Philadelphia behaving in this manner, even in a play by Eugene O'Neill.
The Orphic is no more 'serene' than the unreformed worshipper of Dionysus. To the Orphic, life in this world is pain and weariness. We are bound to a wheel which turns through endless cycles of birth and death; our true life is the stars, but we are tied to earth. Only by purification and renunciation and an ascetic life can we escape from the wheel and attain at last to the ecstasy of union with God. This is not the view of men to whom life is easy and pleasant. It is more like the Negro spiritual:
I'm going to tell God all of my troubles
When I get home.
Not all of the Greeks, but a large proportion of them, were passionate, unhappy, at war with themselves, driven along one road by the intellect and along another by the passions, with the imagination to conceive heaven and the wilful self-assertion that creates hell. They had a maxim 'nothing too much', but they were in fact excessive in everything—in pure thought, in poetry, in religion, and in sin. It was the combination of passion and intellect that made them great, while they were great. Neither alone would have transformed the world for all future time as they transformed it. Their prototype in mythology is not Olympian Zeus, but Prometheus, who brought fire from heaven and was rewarded with eternal torment.
If taken as characterizing the Greeks as a whole, however, what has just been said would