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

484 Themis [ch.
Barley and wheat, and vines whose mighty juice
Swells the rich clusters when the rain of Zeus
Gives increase ; and among that race are kept
No common councils nor are laws in use.
That is what is wrong with the Cyclopes :
they
reverence the
gods, they are earth-w-orshippers, and earth for them brings forth
her increase, but they are aOe/MiaTes, they have no customs, no
conventions, binding by common consent, they have no agora.
That for the Greek was the last desolation. We hear the chorus
in remote barbarian Tauri cry 1
for a kind Greek market-place again !
Not only were the Cyclopes god-fearing and god-trusting
exceedingly, but they excelled in family life. To each Cyclops
his house wT as his castle, each Cyclops wras master in his own
patriarchal home.
For on the high peaks and the hillsides bare
In hollow caves they live, and each one there
To his own wife and children deals the law,
Neither has one of other any care.
The only Themis was of the hearth and home, and to the Greek
that was no Themis at all. Themis was the use and wont of full-
growm men, citizens, made effective in the councils of the agora.
Themis was of course at first of the tribe, and then she was
all powerful. Later when the tribal system, through wars and
incursions and migrations, broke up, its place was taken less
polis set itself
dominantly, more effectively, by the polis 2 . The
to modify and inform all those primitive impulses and instincts
that are resumed in Earth-w T orship. It also set itself, if un-
consciously, as a counterbalance to the dominance of ties of near
kinship. Antigone 3 stands for kinship and the dues of Earth,
Creon for patriarchalism incarnate in the Tyrant and for the Zeus
religion that by that time had become its expression.
We no longer w ronder why in Homer Themis convenes the
assembly. She is no herald like Hermes, no messenger like Iris,
1 Supra, p. 116.
2 For the emergence of the polis from the debris of the shattered group-system
see Prof. Murray, Rise of the Greek Epic 2 , pp. 31, 37.
3 This has been very ably worked out by Dr Zielinski in his Der Gedankenfortschritt
in den Chorliedern der Antigone in Festschrift fur Theodor Gomperz,
1901.
577.
See also his Exkurse zu den Trachinierinnen, Philologus lv. 1896, pp. 491,