The earth was wet
with slaughter, and the gods abandoned it, one by one, till Astraea* alone
was left, and finally she also took her departure.
* The goddess of innocence and purity. After leaving earth, she
was placed among the stars, where she became the constellation
Virgo- the Virgin. Themis (Justice) was the mother of Astraea. She
is represented as holding aloft a pair of scales, in which she
weighs the claims of opposing parties.
It was a favourite idea of the old poets that these goddesses would one day
return, and bring back the Golden Age. Even in a Christian hymn, the
"Messiah" of Pope, this idea occurs:
"All crimes shall cease, and ancient fraud shall fail,
Returning Justice lift aloft her scale,
Peace o'er the world her olive wand extend,
And white-robed Innocence from heaven descend."
See, also, Milton's "Hymn on the Nativity," stanzas xiv. and xv.
Jupiter, seeing this state of things, burned with anger. He summoned the
gods to council. They obeyed the call, and took the road to the palace of
heaven. The road, which any one may see in a clear night, stretches across
the face of the sky, and is called the Milky Way. Along the road stand the
palaces of the illustrious gods; the common people of the skies live apart,
on either side. Jupiter addressed the assembly. He set forth the frightful
condition of things on the earth, and closed by announcing his intention to
destroy the whole of its inhabitants, and provide a new race, unlike the
first, who would be more worthy of life, and much better worshippers of the
gods. So saying he took a thunderbolt, and was about to launch it at the
world, and destroy it by burning; but recollecting the danger that such a
conflagration might set heaven itself on fire, he changed his plan, and
resolved to drown it. The north wind, which scatters the clouds, was
chained up; the south was sent out, and soon covered all the face of heaven
with a cloak of pitchy darkness. The clouds, driven together, resound with
a crash; torrents of rain fall; the crops are laid low; the year's labour
of the husbandman perishes in an hour. Jupiter, not satisfied with his own
waters, calls on his brother Neptune to aid him with his. He lets loose the
rivers, and pours them over the land. At the same time, he heaves the land
with an earthquake, and brings in the reflux of the ocean over the shores.
Flocks, herds, men, and houses are swept away, and temples, with their
sacred enclosures, profaned. If any edifice remained standing, it was
overwhelmed, and its turrets lay hid beneath the waves. Now all was sea,
sea without shore. Here and there an individual remained on a projecting
hilltop, and a few, in boats, pulled the oar where they had lately driven
the plough. The fishes swim among the tree-tops; the anchor is let down
into a garden. Where the graceful lambs played but now. unwieldy sea calves
gambol. The wolf swims among the sheep, the yellow lions and tigers
struggle in the water. The strength of the wild boar serves him not, nor
his swiftness the stag. The birds fall with weary win, into the water,
having found no land for a resting-place. Those living beings whom the
water spared fell a prey to hunger.
Parnassus alone, of all the mountains, overtopped the waves; and there
Deucalion, and his wife Pyrrha, of the race of Prometheus, found refuge- he
a just man, and she a faithful worshipper of the gods. Jupiter, when he saw
none left alive but this pair, and remembered their harmless lives and
pious demeanour, ordered the north winds to drive away the clouds, and
disclose the skies to earth, and earth to the skies. Neptune also directed
Triton to blow on his shell, and sound a retreat to the waters. The waters
obeyed, and the sea returned to its shores, and the rivers to their
channels. Then Deucalion thus addressed Pyrrha: "O wife, only surviving
woman, joined to me first by the ties of kindred and marriage, and now by a
common danger, would that we possessed the power of our ancestor
Prometheus, and could renew the race as he at first made it! But as we
cannot, let us seek yonder temple, and inquire of the gods what remains for
us to do." They entered the temple, deformed as it was with slime, and
approached the altar, where no fire burned. There they fell prostrate on
the earth, and prayed the goddess to inform them how they might retrieve
their miserable affairs. The oracle answered, "Depart from the temple with
head veiled and garments unbound, and cast behind you the bones of your
mother." They heard the words with astonishment. Pyrrha first broke
silence: "We cannot obey; we dare not profane the remains of our parents."
They sought the thickest shades of the wood, and revolved the oracle in
their minds. At length Deucalion spoke: "Either my sagacity deceives me, or
the command is one we may obey without impiety. The earth is the great
parent of all; the stones are her bones; these we may cast behind us; and I
think this is what the oracle means. At least, it will do no harm to try."
They veiled their faces, unbound their garments, and picked up stones, and
cast them behind them. The stones (wonderful to relate) began to grow soft,
and assume shape. By degrees, they put on a rude resemblance to the human
form, like a block half finished in the hands of the sculptor. The moisture
and slime that were about them became flesh; the stony part became bones;
the veins remained veins, retaining their name, only changing their use.
Those thrown by the hand of the man became men, and those by the woman
became women. It was a hard race, and well adapted to labour, as we find
ourselves to be at this day, giving plain indications of our origin.
The comparison of Eve to Pandora is too obvious to have escaped
Milton, who introduces it in Book IV. of "Paradise Lost":
"More lovely than Pandora, whom the gods
Endowed with all their gifts; and O, too like
In sad event, when to the unwiser son
Of Japhet brought by Hermes, she insnared
Mankind with her fair looks, to be avenged
On him who had stole Jove's authentic fire."
Prometheus and Epimetheus were sons of Iapetus, which Milton changes
to Japhet.
Prometheus has been a favourite subject with the poets. He is represented
as the friend of mankind, who interposed in their behalf when Jove was
incensed against them, and who taught them civilisation and the arts. But
as, in so doing, he transgressed the will of Jupiter, he drew down on
himself the anger of the ruler of gods and men. Jupiter had him chained to
a rock on Mount Caucasus, where a vulture preyed on his liver, which was
renewed as fast as devoured. This state of torment might have been brought
to an end at any time by Prometheus, if he had been willing, to submit to
his oppressor; for he possessed a secret which involved the stability of
Jove's throne, and if he would have revealed it, he might have been at once
taken into favour. But that he disdained to do. He has therefore become the
symbol of magnanimous endurance of unmerited suffering, and strength of
will resisting oppression.
Byron and Shelley have both treated this theme. The following are Byron's
lines:
"Titan! to whose immortal eyes
The sufferings of mortality,
Seen in their sad reality,
Were not as things that gods despise;
What was thy pity's recompense?
A silent suffering, and intense;
The rock, the vulture, and the chain;
All that the proud can feel of pain;
The agony they do not show;
The suffocating sense of woe.
"Thy godlike crime was to be kind;
To render with thy precepts less
The sum of human wretchedness,
And strengthen man with his own mind.
And, baffled as thou wert from high,
Still, in thy patient energy
In the endurance and repulse
Of thine impenetrable spirit,
Which earth and heaven could not convulse,
A mighty lesson we inherit."
Byron also employs the same allusion, in his "Ode to Napoleon Bonaparte":
"Or, like the thief of fire from heaven,
Wilt thou withstand the shock?
And share with him - the unforgiven -
His vulture and his rock?"
The Sphinx and Oedipus
Laius, king of Thebes, was warned by an oracle that there was danger to his
throne and life if his new-born son should be suffered to grow up. He
therefore committed the child to the care of a herdsman with orders to
destroy him; but the herdsman, moved with pity, yet not daring entirely to
disobey, tied up the child by the feet and left him hanging to the branch
of a tree. In this condition the infant was found by a peasant, who carried
him to his master and mistress, by whom he was adopted and called Oedipus,
or Swollen-foot.
Many years afterwards Laius being on his way to Delphi, accompanied only by
one attendant, met in a narrow road a young man also driving in a chariot.
On his refusal to leave the way at their command the attendant killed one
of his horses, and the stranger, filled with rage, slew both Laius and his
attendant. The young man was Oedipus who thus unknowingly became the
slayer
of his own father.
Shortly after this event the city of Thebes was afflicted with a monster
which infested the highroad. It was called the Sphinx. It had the body of a
lion and the upper part of a woman. It lay crouched on the top of a rock,
and arrested all travellers who came that way, proposing to them a riddle,
with the condition that those who could solve it should pass safe, but
those who failed should be killed. Not one had yet succeeded in solving it,
and all had been slain.