Is it joy or terror, ye storm-swift feet? To the dear lone lands untroubled of men, Where no voice
sounds, and amid the shadowy green The little things of the woodland live unseen.Before repeating that the Greeks were "serene," try to imagine the matrons of Philadelphia
behaving in this manner, even in a play by Eugene O'Neill.
The Orphic is no more "serene" than the unreformed worshipper of Bacchus. To the Orphic, life in
this world is pain and weariness. We are bound to a wheel which turns through endless cycles of
birth and death; our true life is of the stars, but we are tied to earth. Only by purification and
renunciation and an ascetic life can we escape from the wheel and attain at last to the ecstasy of
union with God. This is not the view of men to whom life is easy and pleasant. It is more like the
Negro spiritual:
I'm going to tell God all of my troubles When I get home.Not all of the Greeks, but a large proportion of them, were passionate, unhappy, at war with
themselves, driven along one road by the intellect and along another by the passions, with the
imagination to conceive heaven and the wilful self-assertion that creates hell. They had a maxim
"nothing too much," but they were in fact excessive in everything--in pure thought, in poetry, in
religion, and in sin. It was the combination of passion and intellect that made them great, while
they were great. Neither alone would have transformed the world for all future time as they
transformed it. Their prototype in mythology is not Olympian Zeus, but Prometheus, who brought
fire from heaven and was rewarded with eternal torment.
If taken as characterizing the Greeks as a whole, however, what has just been said would be as
one-sided as the view that the Greeks were characterized by "serenity." There were, in fact, two
tendencies in Greece, one passionate, religious, mystical, other-worldly, the other cheerful,
empirical, rationalistic, and interested in acquiring knowledge of a diversity of facts. Herodotus
represents this latter tendency; so do the earliest Ionian philosophers; so, up to a point, does
Aristotle. Beloch (op. cit. I, 1, p. 434), after describing Orphism, says: