THE PROSPECTIVE No. III. REVIEW. ART. I.-INTRODUCTION TO A SCIENTIFIC SYSTEM OF MYTHOLOGY. By C. O. MÜLLER. Translated from the German, by John Leitch. London 1844. WE could not open this volume, without a renewal of the regret which was felt by every scholar, at the premature close of Ottfried Müller's career. No man ever visited Greece, better qualified by natural talents, or prepared by previous attainments for the instructive study of her antiquities. He knew her mountains and streams by means of his immense reading and genial power of conception, as thoroughly as his own Hainberg or the banks of the Leine; and nothing was wanting, but that the eye should embody and define what the mind had pictured. But he had scarcely begun the researches which promised such rich accessions to the stores of archæology, when he fell a victim to that insidious disease which has made the scenes of classic antiquity so often fatal to the artist and the scholar. We trust it will not be thought that we are about to waste the time of our readers in presenting to them some of the results of the modern investigations of mythology, exhibited in these Prolegomena of Müller. The frivolity of the Greek and Latin fables of the gods and heroes, is a standing topic with those who attack classical education; and we do not mean to claim for Ovid's Metamorphoses the praise of profound wisdom or a moral purpose. Yet mythology, considered only in its details, is inwoven with all the finest poetry of Greece, and essential to the interpretation of its art; it has become a property of CHRISTIAN TEACHER.-No. 29. 2 B all cultivated nations, and meets us everywhere in literature, either as material, illustration or allusion. But were this all, Lemprière and his improvers might serve our turn. Mythology has, in truth, much higher relations. The age of its production usually preceding that of History, it opens to us a glimpse of an early world, of the knowledge, feelings, passions and pursuits of men, before the manifold and complex institutions of society had arisen, when religion and philosophy lay yet undiscriminated in the mind, and fancy was not controlled by reason. It is an ancient language, almost the sole memorial of the times in which it originated, and therefore the means by which alone we can form to ourselves any conception of what they were in themselves, or the relation in which they stood to an historical age. For dark as the mythical period is, and must always remain, it is certain that it contains the elements of the historical; and as the Grecian people presents itself to us, in its earliest literary productions, the Homeric poems, with a national character distinctly formed, and which subsequent events merely modified, our only chance of obtaining an insight into the causes of one of the most remarkable phænomena in history, is from the traditions of a previous state which their mythology may contain. It is not too much to say, that we have only within the last generation begun to apprehend the uses to which the study of the Greek Mythology should be applied, or the mode in which it should be conducted. For many centuries the Greeks themselves received it with the same undoubting faith in which it had originated; their moral sense was not revolted by the incongruities between its narratives and pure conceptions of the divinity; they believed the same supernatural power which had produced its prodigies to be still in operation about them. They were embarrassed by no chronological difficulties, for they had no measure of past time; by no violations of probability, for this implies a reference to human powers and motives, not to the actions of gods and demigods. It was only when the cultivation of philosophy had raised the standard of morals, and made reflecting minds conscious of the absurdities of popular belief, that attempts appear to alter the established mythic tradition. Pindar, whose moral feeling was not less elevated than his poetical genius, avows that he has altered many mythi, because they did not harmonize with his own conceptions of divine and heroic character, and as it appears quite arbitrarily, without any authority of older tradition.* But he transmitted far more than he altered, and as the fables which make the staple of his odes are designed to illustrate the lineage of individuals, his works are a rich store of local and personal legends. The tragic poets were led by the demands of the dramatic art, and the patriotic prejudices of an Athenian audience, to a free handling of the established mythology; Eschylus and Sophocles, with some restraint from a reverential belief; Euripides with the boldness of a philosophical sceptic. The learned poets of Alexandria dealt with the mythic materials which had come down to them, as public literary property, and varied or added to them as their literary purposes demanded. It was an important crisis in the history of the Greek mythi, when, in the sixth century B. C., the Logographers began to use them in the composition of their works, the precursors of regular history. From the works of the Cyclic poets, who, in the age succeeding that of Homer and Hesiod, had framed these legends into a connected series, the Logographers transferred them into prose narratives, the earliest which the Greeks possessed. Although little art and no philosophy was employed in this work, which was undertaken with full belief in the reality of the events related, we see that the endeavour to introduce chronological order and reconcile contradictions, produced a rude sort of criticism, more influenced by patriotic feeling, or a vague notion of credibility, than by a comparison of evidence. Herodotus treats mythic narratives as having a general historical character. Thucydides rarely uses them for special history; but in his introduction, (i. 9.) while protesting against their exaggerations, draws general inferences from them, with a confidence which proves that they were received by the nation as unquestionable evidences, though he affords us no means of judging, whether he himself extended this belief to their supernatural portions. This question might be evaded by one who introduced them only incidentally, but not by writers who, like Ephorus *Pyth. iii. 27; ix. 45. Ol. i. 47. Müller, p. 28. † Müller, p. 31. and Theopompus, admitted them into the texture of their histories. They accordingly set the example, which has been generally followed till very recent times, of decomposing the mythus, by separating the ordinary from the supernatural, and devising human means and motives as substitutes for the divine power and heroic qualities which had evaporated in their analysis. In the end of the 4th century before Christ, scepticism had advanced so far, that men applauded the daring fiction of Euhemerus, who professed to have discovered in the imaginary island of Panchæa, a record of the births, actions and deaths of those who had been honoured as gods.* The name of Euhemerism has been given to that view of mythology which considers the heathen gods as deified men; Euhemerus, however, proposed to himself not a theory of mythology, but an Epicurean attack on the vulgar faith respecting the gods. There is so much superficial plausibility in this view, which seems at once to enrich history and simplify mythology, that it very generally prevailed. And as it was evident that no one Jove, or one Hercules, could have reigned or laboured wherever their worship was found, they were multiplied ad libitum.† The Christian Fathers readily adopted a view, sanctioned by the authority of the Heathens themselves, and affording them such opportunity for cutting invectives against the absurdities and immoralities of polytheism. How long and how firmly it kept its ground in modern times may be judged from the Chronology of Newton, which is wholly built upon it. Every name in the Greek or Egyptian mythology represents to his mind an historical personage, no matter how clearly the name itself may indicate a merely figurative being. Not only is Osiris a king of Egypt and Jupiter a king of Crete, but the Muses are the singing women of Sesac's army, and the Graces the waiting women of Venus, the queen of Cyprus. That work is composed indeed of singularly incongruous materials, astronomical evidence and poetic fiction. Its fundamental assumption is, that a Centaur introduced astronomy among the Greeks, and fixed the position of * Diod. Sic. Fragm. Lib. 6, V. 2, p. 633. ed. Wess. Gillies. History of the World, i. 630. + Cic. N. D. 3, 21-24. Chronology p. 21, 27. the equinoctial points. It was made up like Nebuchadnezzar's image; the head was of gold, but the feet were of clay, and the consequence has been that the whole has fallen asunder. Freret's defence of the received chronology proves, no less than Newton's attack, how entirely and undoubtingly the heroic mythology of Greece was received as history; for he builds upon it with full confidence, in order to restore the War of Troy and the Argonautic Expedition to those early dates, from which Newton had endeavoured to bring them down. During the time which intervened between the revival of learning and the latter end of the 18th century, much elaborate research had been bestowed on mythology, innumerable dissertations had been written, in which all that the classics contained had been brought together, and illustrated from the remains of art. Vossius, in his great work de Idololatria, had employed his immense learning in systematizing these results, but they remained a chaos of opinions, usages and traditions, out of which, from time to time, attempts were made to frame a general theory, which looked plausible enough when applied only to the instances which the author had selected, but was immediately found wanting when submitted to the test of universal application. At one time philosophy, at another agriculture, at another astronomy, were supposed to furnish the key to the origin of mythology, not to mention the history of the Old Testament, from which Noah and Abraham, Joshua and Samson, were thought to have been taken and metamorphosed into gods and heroes.* Heyne, by his papers in the Commentaries of the Royal Society of Gottingen, and his Preface and Notes to Apollodorus, opened the way to a more accurate conception of mythology. He first showed that the true mythus owes its origin to the imperfection of language and to the difficulty of forming abstract ideas, which characterize an early state of mental culture; that it is not the dress which philosophers or priests, themselves placed far above the *This system is detailed with great learning in Fourmont's Reflexions Critiques sur les Histoires des anciens Peuples &c. Paris, 2 vols. 4to. 1735. Bryant and Faber have taken much from it, and it has found favour generally among the English clergy. + Müller, Chap. xv. |