The origin and development of the moral ideas

The gods of ancient Greece were on the whole beneficent beings, who conferred blessings upon those who secured their goodwill. Zeus protects the life of the family, city, and nation; he is a god of victory and victorious peace, who gathers the hosts against Troy, and saves Greece from Persia; he brings the ships to land; he is “the warder off of evil.”131 But neither he nor the other gods bestow their favours for nothing; Xenophon says that they assist with good advice those who worship them regularly,132 but take revenge on those who neglect them.133 They punish severely even offences committed against them accidentally,134 and not infrequently they display actual malevolence towards men by seducing them into sin135 or inflicting harm upon them out of sheer envy.136 In other respects, also, they are by no means models of morality; but this does not prevent them from acting as administrators of justice any more than, among men, a judge is supposed to lose all regard for justice because he himself transgresses the rules of morality in some particular of private life.137 “For great crimes,” says Herodotus, “great punishments at the hands of the gods are in store.”138 Dike, or Justice, the terrible virgin “who breathes against her enemies a destructive wrath,”139 is represented sometimes as the daughter, sometimes as the companion of the all-seeing Zeus;140 and, as Welcker observes, Zeus was not only a god among other gods, but also the deity solely and abstractedly.141 We have noticed above that from ancient times the murder of a kinsman was an offence against Zeus and under

the ban of the Erinyes, and that later on all bloodshed, if the victim had any rights at all within the city, became a sin which needed purification.142 Zeus protected guests and suppliants,143 he punished children who reproached their aged parents,144 he was a guardian of the family property,145 he protected boundaries,146 he was no friend of falsehood,147 he punished perjury.148 According to earlier beliefs retribution was exclusively restricted to this earthly existence, and if the guilty person himself escaped the punishment for his deed it fell on some of his descendants.149 The transference of Menelaus to the Elysian plain, spoken of in the Odyssey,150 was not a reward for his virtue—indeed, he was not particularly conspicuous for any of the Homeric virtues—but a privilege resulting from his being married to Zeus’ daughter Helena;151 and if the perjurer was tortured in Hades152 the simple reason was that he had called down upon himself such torture in his oath.153 In later times we meet with the doctrine of retribution after death, not only in the speculations of isolated philosophers, but as a popular belief;154 but this belief seems to have been quite unconnected with any notion of Olympian justice.155 The souls in the world beyond the grave are sentenced by special judges;156 Aeschylus expressly says that it is another Zeus that administers justice there.157 For him Hades with the powers by which it is governed exists only as a place where the guilty are punished, whereas for the virtuous he has no word of true hope;158 and other writers also have much more to

tell about future punishments than about future rewards.159 Particularly prominent among the offences which are punished in Hades are, besides perjury,160 injuries to parents161 and guests,162 that is, offences which in this world are visited with the most powerful curses.163 According to Aeschylus, the retribution which the Erinyes—personifications of curses—have begun on earth is completed in the nether world, and according to Pythagoras unpurified souls are kept chained there by the Erinyes without any hope of escape.164 We are, moreover, told that painters used to represent “allegorical figures of curses in connection with their images of wicked dead.165 From all these facts I conclude that the notion of punishments in Hades did not arise from a belief in the justice of gods, but from the idea that the efficacy of a curse may extend beyond the grave—an idea which we have already met with both in Vedic texts and among certain savages, and of which the supposed punishment of perjury in Hades is only a particular instance.166 As for the gods it should be added that the vulgar opinion of their character was not shared by all.

Euripides affirms that the legends about them which tend to confuse human ideas as to right and wrong are not literally true.167 “I think,” he says, “that none of the gods is bad”;168 “if the gods do aught that is base, they are not gods.”169 Plato opposes the popular views that the deity induces men to commit crimes,170 that he is capable of feeling envy,171 and that evil-doers may avert divine punishments by sacrifices offered to the gods as bribes.172 God is good, he is never the author of evil to any one, and if the wicked are miserable the reason is that they require to be punished and are benefited by receiving punishment from God.173 Plutarch likewise asserts in the strongest terms that God is perfectly good and least of all wanting in justice and love, “the most beautiful of virtues and the best befitting the Godhead.”174