The Twelve Olympians

by Dr Charles T. Seltman

  Presently she drew near to the highest crest of lofty Mount Ida near Troy, where Zeus was resting, and he saw her—

  and at the first look his heart was captured by desire as in the days when they had first enjoyed each other’s love and gone to bed together without their parents’ knowledge. He rose to meet her and said: “Hera, what business brings you here from Olympus? And why no horses and no chariot to drive in?...Today let us enjoy the delights of love. Never has such desire, for goddess or woman, flooded and overwhelmed my heart; not even when I loved Ixion’s wife, who bore Peirithous to rival the gods in wisdom; or Danaë of the slim ankles, the daughter of Acrisius, who gave birth to Perseus, the greatest hero of his time; or the far-famed daughter of Phoenix, who bore me Minos, and the god-like Rhadamanthus; or Semele, or Alcmene in Thebes, whose son was the lion-hearted Herakles, while Semele bore Dionysos to give pleasure to mankind; or Demeter, Queen of the Lovely Locks, or the incomparable Leto; or when I fell in love with you yourself—never have I felt such love, such sweet desire, as fills me now for you.”

  “Dread Son of Kronos, you amaze me,” said the Lady Hera, still dissembling. “Suppose we do as you wish and lie down in each other’s arms on the heights of Ida, where there is no privacy whatever, what will happen if one of the eternal gods sees us asleep together and runs off to tell the rest?”...”Here,” said Zeus the Cloud-compeller, “you need not be afraid that any god or man will see us. I shall hide you in a golden cloud too thick for that. Even the Sun, whose rays provide him with the keenest sight in all the world, will not see us through the mist.”

  As he spoke, the Son of Kronos took his Wife in his arms; and the gracious earth sent up fresh grass beneath them, dewy lotus and crocuses, and a soft crowded bed of hyacinths to lift them off the ground. In this they lay, covered by a beautiful golden cloud, from which a rain of glistening dewdrops fell.{16}

  This story, which Sir Walter Leaf once described{17} as “radiant with humour, grace and healthful sensuousness”, is one of the only two amorous episodes in all the forty-eight books of Homer. The other one will be recounted later. It happens, however, to illustrate two phenomena. Firstly, Hera is far from taking umbrage at her lord’s recital of seven other love-affairs, but complimented—even perhaps enchanted—that Zeus finds her more bewitching now than in the early days of their pre-marital amours. Secondly, the story depicts a code and custom of Homeric princely society; for then, and later, the Greeks were a monogamous people, believing in having one lawful wife, but tolerant of outside relationships, and attaching no stigma to the children born of such. A situation which gave to Zeus one wife and numerous mistresses was one which later story-tellers and poets happily developed, but it had no connection with anything but literature,{18} and it did not enter into the Zeus-ward thoughts of the truly devout.

  Anyhow, having reflected on the loves of Zeus and Hera on Mount Ida, one may recall part of a kindred poem set down several centuries later in the Hebrew Song of Songs{19} about love on other mountain-tops—Lebanon and Hermon.

  Thou art all fair, my love:

  There is no spot in thee.

  Come with me from Lebanon, my spouse,

  With me from Lebanon:

  Look from the top of Amana,

  From the top of Shenir and Hermon,

  From the lions’ dens,

  From the mountains of the leopards.

  Thou hast ravished my heart, my sister, my spouse;

  Thou hast ravished my heart with one of thine eyes,

  With one chain of thy neck.

  Zeus the Despot was certainly a lordly god, and the approval of his devotees was in true accord with the civilisation and society to which they belonged. But in due time he seemed to assume a different aspect; the guise of—

  II. Zeus the Creator. This conception began to imply the recognition of a god who loves mankind—a humanist god. But linked with such a conception as this was a general tendency towards admiration for the human species, not only for its mental but also for its physical worth. And this tendency came into operation in a remarkable manner; for at the sanctuary of Olympia first—and afterwards at other famous sanctuaries—something without any real parallel in the world’s history occurred. The institution of organised athletics as an act of worship towards Zeus, and of the body trained to perfection as a thing dedicated to God, was a new and most startling concept in the history of mankind. But it was the necessary prelude to the birth of humanism.

  As we date from the ‘year of Grace’, as the Romans dated from ‘the Foundation of the City’, so the Greeks dated from ‘the First Olympiad’, an Olympiad being the four-year stretch between one great religio-athletic festival and the next at Olympia. When citing a date the name of the victor in the foot-race—the earliest of the various events in the games—was frequently mentioned too, and the first recorded name, Koroibos, was held to mark the First Olympiad, in the year 776 B.C., as the standard Hellenic era. Competitors in the race wore a very brief loin-cloth, until at the fifteenth festival in 720 B.C. a certain athlete, Orsippos, discarded it, ran completely naked, and won the event. From that moment his practice was universally followed, first in the games for Zeus at Olympia, then at other athletic festivals, and so in gymnasia and in many public places, outdoors and in, all over ancient Greece. In Sparta, and possibly in some other states, where athletics for girls and young married women were encouraged by the State, the same custom was presently adopted by them.{20}

  It is natural for men and women to experience an emotion known as ‘modesty’, though of course they have to feel that they have something to be modest about. Frequently it takes the form of a shrinking from exposing certain parts of the body, but, if circumstances should cause that special and particular inhibition to disappear, men and women must value another kind of ‘modesty’ instead, and such is bound to be a modesty of mind and spirit—that which the Greeks called aidōs, which connotes ‘respect, sense of honour, moderation, regard for others’. Such ‘modesty’ entailed the lavishing of no more thought upon any one portion of the human body than upon another portion, its opposite being ‘pudency’, which implies an overwhelming and embarrassing awareness of certain parts of the body. It was, indeed, revolutionary that from about the seventh century B.C. onward modesty should become of the mind and not of the body; that it should be in moderation and not pudency; that it should show a susceptibility to self-respect but not to ashamedness; that it should be preoccupied with honour but not with bawdy. But, as a word of warning, one may add this: that there must have been some Greeks who exceeded, who coddled the body, who felt prudish and ashamed, and who dwelt mentally in a slough of wantonness. Yet the uninhibited framework of their society discouraged repressed persons so naturally that they seem to have been remarkably few in number.

  When the great Hero of the Odyssey was shipwrecked on the shore of Phæacia he was eager to conceal his naked manhood, just as any other Greek would have done in the Homeric age. Nevertheless, in order to understand how the Greeks could so quickly change in a matter of Custom and Conduct—all because one Olympic runner ran without his loin-cloth—one must realise that overdressing, dressing, skimping, and nakedness are simply matters of fluid convention.

  Yet once the convention of athletic nakedness had been adopted, the Greeks maintained it for close on a thousand years, because it seemed to them to be consistent with their principles of liberty, moderation, and good breeding. It seems that a free and aristocratic-minded people, of Northern stock like the Greeks, happening to have acquired a convention of nakedness, is not easily turned from it. Neither the Catholic Church nor the English migrants into Ireland could overthrow the healthy habits of the ancient nobility of Ulster, where, in Queen Elizabeth’s reign, the great O’Cane himself, who spoke fluent Latin as well as his own tongue, welcomed a Bohemian nobleman to the hall of his Great House in which The O’Cane and all his sixteen ladies sat down naked, inviting the embarrassed and unwilling foreigner to undress and be comfortable.{21
}

  It has been necessary to put some emphasis on the ancient Hellenic convention of convenient and natural nakedness, because it had a powerful, even a profound, effect on the Greeks’ religious outlook and on their conception of Zeus and of other deities.

  God created man in his own image,

  In the image of God created he him:

  Male and female created he them.{22}

  A similar idea in the Greeks’ mind caused them to make their gods in the likeness of perfect men and women. In either case, and whichever way you have it, a compliment is implied, a rapprochement is on the way, and a wish is there to love God and be loved of God. Indeed, the Greeks were never idolaters in the sense of worshipping actual images which they had made. Rather was an ancient statue a statement of praise about a god, no more and no less than a hymn was a song of praise about a god, but human language was requisite for the song, and human likeness for the statue. Of course, when man thinks about his gods as a jackal, baboon, or hippopotamus, after the manner of the Egyptians, or as Dagon the Merman, after the manner of the Phœnicians, he is operating in quite another realm of religious thought, and to those of us with European minds he will appear rather eccentric. Fortunately this is no real concern of Hellenism and humanism, and one may let it pass.

  That Greek art operated in the service of anthropomorphic religion is obvious, but it was an exceptionally high standard of anthropomorphism, because athletics in the service of religion had given the Greeks so high a standard of human physical perfection. They felt convinced that the man who came closest to human perfection was the athlete; and therefore to express the divine perfection of Zeus you must depict him too as a divine athlete. That is the explanation of a glorious bronze statue of the naked Zeus.

  In April 1926 some fishermen, plying their trade near Cape Artemision off the north-east coast of Eubœa, drew up in one of their stronger nets the bronze arm and hand of a figure over life-size. With that instinctive sense for the antique which so many Greek peasants and islanders possess, they seemed to know that this was important, and they persuaded a professional sponge-diver to go down and look for more. His observation of a bearded head and a torso satisfied them that the time had come to report their discovery. Accordingly, by the autumn of 1928 the requisite steps had been taken and the splendid statue, which proved to be complete, was raised to the surface and transferred to the National Museum in Athens. There I had the good fortune to be one of the first Englishmen to set eyes upon the figure as it lay in a huge tank of distilled water, which was absorbing impurities from the bronze. Later this great masterpiece, seven feet high and dating from about 460 B.C., was set up as one of the chief glories of Greece. The place of its discovery in the company of some other broken bronzes suggests the possibility that it formed part of shipwrecked loot being conveyed from Greece to Constantinople in the fourth century of our era, or possibly to Rome at a somewhat earlier date.

  All other considerations apart, this Zeus is the most perfect bronze athlete statue that has survived from antiquity. Balance, rhythm, proportion, tension, and restraint—all are blended. In looking at the picture (Plate I) one must allow for the fact that the right shank and the left foot are somewhat out of shape because of injuries sustained in the shipwreck; but having made this allowance, one observes that the nearest approach to perfection for a fully developed, but not overdeveloped, mature male athlete has here been achieved. As a conception of Zeus it holds one thing left over from the past, a thunderbolt—now missing from the right hand—about to be hurled to earth by the god. Zeus was the thunderer; Zeus is the prototype of mankind, sane and healthy, created in his own image; Zeus shall be the one primary Being, who has begotten, and again absorbs into himself, all things and all gods—and such a conception was on the way.

  III. Zeus the Eternal God. This third stage in Greek religious thought about Zeus was already implicit in the ideas which Pheidias expressed when—about thirty years after the bronze Zeus was made—he created a statue, the most famous, not only of any in ancient Greece, but in the history of mankind—the colossal gold-and-ivory god in his temple at Olympia. The upper part of the figure was naked, but a corner of the ample cloak which was round the thighs fell over the left shoulder. Classed as one of the ‘Seven Wonders of the World’ until it perished in A.D. 462, it received more praise from the ancients themselves than any other work of art.{23} Quintilian wrote about A.D. 95:

  The beauty of the Olympian Zeus is thought actually to have added something to the received religion: so far did the majesty of the work go towards equality with godhead.

  Cicero in 55 B.C., speculating in his work on Oratory along Platonic lines, reflected as follows:

  I maintain that nothing is ever so beautiful as not to be beaten in beauty by that from which it is copied as a portrait is copied from a face, that original which cannot be perceived by eye or ear or any other sense but grasped only by thought or mind. Thus we can think of forms more beautiful even than the statues of Pheidias, the most perfect things of their kind that we can see, or than those paintings which I have mentioned. Yet that great artist when he was fashioning the shape of his Zeus or Athene did not fix his gaze on any individual whose likeness he drew. No, in his own mind dwelt an ideal of surpassing beauty. Beholding that and lost in the contemplation thereof, he turned art and hand to the task of reproducing its likeness.

  It was told of a certain Neo-Pythagorean sage named Apollonios of Tyana, who flourished in the first century of our era, that when he first set eyes upon the statue enthroned at Olympia he prayed aloud with the words:

  Hail, All-good Zeus, for good Thou art in this, even that Thou givest Thyself unto men.

  However, among ancient authors one man, Dion, gained most of his fame because of a discourse, a kind of combined lecture and sermon, which he gave in the summer of A.D. 97 before the Greeks assembled at Olympia; since the main part of it concerned the gold-and-ivory statue of Zeus. Dion, a distinguished and well-born citizen of Prusa, was nicknamed ‘mouth-of-gold’ for his fine voice and rounded phrases. He called Pheidias “this wise, inspired maker of a creation at once solemn and supremely fine”. “Of men,” he continued:

  whosoever is utterly weary in soul, having drained many sufferings and sorrows in his life without the solace of sweet sleep, even he, methinks, if he stood over against this statue, would forget all the terrors and hardships of humanity. Aforetime in lack of clear knowledge we dreamed our several dreams and fashioned our individual fancies, or at most combined the unconvincing likenesses produced by previous craftsmen. But you, Pheidias, through the potency of your art, have conquered and combined Hellas first and then the rest of the world by means of this marvel, a work so amazing and brilliant that no man who had once set eyes on it could afterwards find it easy to form another conception of god.

  Finally, Dion puts into the mouth of Pheidias the following words:

  Ours is a god of peace and universal mildness, overseer of a Hellas free from faction and at harmony with itself. By the help of my art, and the counsel of Elis, a State both wise and good, I have established him, gentle and solemn with untroubled mien, the giver of livelihood and life and all good things, the common Father and Saviour and Keeper of mankind, imitating so far as mortal thought can imitate the nature that is divine and beyond our ken.

  Although these writers were of a later age, it had nevertheless come about that already in the fifth century B.C. there were Greeks who thought of Zeus as a god to be loved. Yet he must be loved not by way of unthinking dumb obedience, but by the way of reflection and reason; not by the way of pretence bolstered up by foolish tales of the pointlessly miraculous, but by the way of visible reality contemplated in tranquillity.

  This was in agreement with the trend of Plato’s ideas, for it is possible to regard the Platonic System as the projection of a mental process into an imaginary world of absolute values. The Pheidian Zeus was the result of a mental process expressed in matter by a mighty artist. Did he achiev
e expression by projecting his mind into an imaginary world?

  On the emotional side the thinkers and poets tended to drive more and definitely into a monotheistic theology which was completely developed by the time that the Stoic philosopher Cleanthes wrote—about the middle of the third century B.C.—his celebrated Hymn to Zeus, containing verses such as:

  Oh, Father, cleanse our soul, grant us to find

  Wisdom wherewith Thou governest all aright,

  That honoured thus we too may honour Thee,

  Hymning Thy deeds for ever.

  Lines such as these, and others from the hymn, would slip appropriately into any modern devotional manual. Not so, however, the extraordinary myth of Zeus—violent in its contrast with the high thoughts of philosophic men.

  In the whole history of mankind no obedient believer has allowed himself to be disturbed consciously by glaring inconsistencies in his myths and gospels. But since man is often a reasoning being, these inconsistencies trouble his ‘deep-down’ mind badly; and the firmer his conscious obedience to faith, the more troublesome are his inward doubts, which he may label ‘Furies’, or ‘the Tempter’, or ‘the Subconscious Some of those who are thus troubled become philosophers, some saints; but such are deviators from the norm, for the former drag forth their doubts to examine them, while the latter drive them down to remoter depths, covering them with the dusty veils of muted mysticism. And mysticism can easily become the religion not of hope, but of despair.

  It has just been remarked that man is often a reasoning being; but often he is not. When he is not he is capable of reckless credulity, all too ready to confide in those who, he thinks, ‘know better’, because they are the people who have assured him that they do know better. He questions neither their knowledge nor their motives. There were, of course, plenty of credulous men in ancient Greece who were prepared to accept without question what Hesiod had said as though he were some pontiff or apostle of the gods. It was only his supposed nearness in time to Homer that brought him this measure of attention. Now Hesiod, so it happened, had been a farmer-man living in the eighth century B.C., and having a gift for poetry; and his poem Works and Days was admirable stuff. His Theogony, or ‘Birth of the Gods’, was not, for he was as unsuited to compose a Theogony as Robert Burns would have been to write Paradise Lost. Accordingly, it is not surprising to discover that of all ancient god-myths the Zeus-myth, having regard to the unique nature of Zeus, is the most wildly absurd. But it is probable that not many of the Greeks permitted their sub-conscious minds to be severely troubled by the kind of tale that follows, since none of it was ever de fide.