Themis, a study of the social origins of Greek ... - Warburg Institute

386 From Daimon to Olympian [ch.
the play, the conflict between the new order and the old, the
daimones of Earth, the Erinyes, and the theoi of Olympos, Apollo
and his father Zeus, and further necessarily and inherently the
conflict of the two social orders of which these daimones and
theoi are in part the projections—matriarchy or, as it is better
called, the matrilinear system and patriarchy. The conflict
between the daimones of Earth and the Olympian Apollo will
be discussed in the present chapter; the conflict of the two
social orders as reflected in mythology must be reserved for
the next.
The statement of ^Eschylus is necessarily somewhat ex parte.
He is a monotheist and moreover he is 'all for the Father.' In
dealing with the religion of Delphi he is confronted with the
awkward fact that Zeus at Delphi had no official cult, the oracle
was in the hands of Apollo. Moreover that oracle was actually
delivered by a woman seated over a cleft in the Earth and
inspired not only by the laurel she chewed but by mephitic
vapours that rose from the earth. In all this Zeus was—nowhere.
Yet the supremacy of Zeus was to ^Eschylus the keystone of
his beautiful faith in a right that was beyond might, a thing
to be preserved even in the face of seeming facts. A lesser soul
would have turned obscurantist, would have juggled with facts
a more conventional mind would have accepted orthodox tradition
and claimed that Apollo conquered by force. That to ^Eschylus
was no conquest at all. The solution he gives us in the prologue
is utterly vEschylean and in a sense strangely modern. There
has been not a fight but a development 1
, not even, as in the agon
of the play, a reconciliation and sudden conversion, but a gradual
emergence and epiphany of godhead from strength to strength,
from Gaia to Zeus. And, an interesting thing, ^Eschylus, as will
shortly appear, was right. He gives us by the mouth of his
priestess a sequence of cults which not only existed at Delphi
1 The same notion of development comes out in the Prometheus, as has been
well observed by Miss Janet Case (Class. Rev. 1902, p. 195). It has not, I think,
been recognized in the Supplices, but Prof. Murray points out to me that the keynote
of the play is the transition from violence to persuasion. Ares, who is ^Xd^rj
—violence and hurt personified—must give way to Aphrodite as Peitho. So only
can the Danaides, fertility-nymphs like the Semnae, bring peace and prosperity to
the barren land. See also for the same idea in the story of Io, Rise of the Greek
Epic 2 , p. 291.
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