ere, then, we have the six primary
goddesses of the Greek mythology. It will be said that, even according to the highest poetic treatment, these deities had their imperfections. Certainly it was their crowning merit, for it made them persons, and not mere
abstractions. Their traits were all in keeping; their faults belonged to their
temperaments. Doubtless these characters grew up in the early fancy of
that people as fictitious characters grow up in the mind of a novelist; after a
little while they get beyond his control, take their destiny into their own hands, and if he tries to make them monotonously faultless, they rebel. So that
wondrous artist we call the Greek nation found itself overmastered by the
vivid personality of these creations of its own. It was absolutely obliged to
give Hera, the wife, her jealous imperiousness, and Artemis, the maid, her
cruel chastity. Zeus and Actaeon were the sufferers, because consistency and
nature willed it so, and refused to omit these slight excesses. So Athena, the
virgin, must be a shade too cold, and Aphrodite, the lover, several shades too
warm, that there might be reality and human interest. Demeter, the mother,
will sacrifice the whole human race for her child; and even Hestia is pitiless
to those who profane the sacred altar of home. Each of these qualities is
the stamp of nature upon the goddess, holding fast the ideal, lest it recede
beyond human ken.
So perfect was this prism of feminine existence, it comprised every primary color. So well did this series of divinities cover all the functions of
womanly life, that none could fail at finding her tutelary goddess in some
shrine. An imaginative Greek girl had not an epoch nor an instant that was
not ennobled. Every act of her existence was glorified in some temple;
every dream of her silent hours took garlands and singing robes around it.
In her yet childish freedom she was Artemis; "in maiden meditation, fancy
free," she was Athena; when fancy-bound, she was Aphrodite; when her life was hound in wedlock, she was Hera; when enriched by motherhood, she became Demeter, and she was thenceforth the Hestia of her own
home, at least. Her life was like a revolving urn, upon which she could
always see one great symbolic image sculptured, though each in its turn
gave way to another.
And this influence was enhanced by the actual participation of Greek
women in the ceremonies of religion, when conducted upon a scale that our
modern imaginations can hardly reproduce. The little five-year-old maids,
yellow-clad, who chanted lines from Homer at the festival of Artemis Brauronia; the virgins who from seven to eleven dwelt on the rock of the
Acropolis, and wove the sacred garment of Athena, themselves robed in
white, with ornaments of old; the flower-wreathed girls who bore baskets
through the streets at the Panathenaea; the matrons who directed the festival
of Hera at Elis; the maidens who ran in that sacred race, knowing, that the
victor's portrait would be dedicated in the temple; the high-priestess of Hera
at Argos, from whose accession the citizens dated their calendar of years;
the priestesses of Demeter, who alone of all women might attend the Olympic
games ; -- all these saw womanhood deified in their goddesses and dignified in
themselves. The vast religious ceremonial appealed alike to the high-born
maidens who ministered at the altars, and to the peasant-girls through whom
the oracles spoke. Every range of condition and of culture might be comprised among the hundreds who assembled before daybreak to bathe the image of Pallas in the sacred river, or the thousands who walked with consecrated feet in the long procession to Eleusis. In individual cases, the service brought
out such noble virtue as that of the
priestess Theano, who, when Alcibiades was exiled from Athens and was
sentenced to be cursed by all who served at the altar, alone refused to obey, saying that she was consecrated to bless and not to curse. But even
among the mass of Greek women, where so much time was spent in sharing or observing this ritual of worship, life must have taken some element of elevation through contact with the great ideal women of the sky.
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