the events of that age very seriously, and also that the events are transparent, allowing the hearer to
discern through them the will and working of the gods, as he cannot in ordinary life. The few known
historical tragedies, such as the Persae of Aeschylus, dealt with the Persian conquest and disasters, events
on so vast a scale that they seemed to reveal the working of the divine in human history, and so to
resemble myths. A final consideration is that everybody was familiar with the persons and stories which
figured in the epic.
The total effect of all these considerations was to make the heroic period the natural setting for serious
poetry. The Homeric epic handled the myths in one way, smoothing away the bizarre, the monstrous, the
horrible; incest, killing of kindred, human sacrifice, are all reduced to a minimum or excluded altogether-
Homer does not mention the sacrifice of Iphigenia, and though the Odyssey repeatedly dwells on Orestes'
killing of Aegisthus, it never says that he killed his mother Clytemnestra. Homosexual love is also
excluded from the epics. They do, however, deal with the position of men in the world, aspiring to be
'godlike', struck down by the gods when they attempt to go too far, and doomed in the end to die. The
lyric tradition of Stesichorus was more picturesque, less tragic, sometimes pathetic. Pindar sheds radiance
on his athletic victors by juxtaposing their triumph with some story from the career of a hero; the
achievement of victory raises the athlete for a moment to a stature and significance which puts him beside
the heroes, humdrum ordinary existence transfigured with the timeless splendour of the mythical world.
Aeschylus is able to express his most profound broodings on the true nature of war in the odes in the
Agamemnon about the fall of Troy, and Sophocles finds in the story of Oedipus a vehicle to represent a
view of human life which is at once both bleak and terrifying, and also, as we experience the courage and
resolution of the hero, and his capacity for suffering, strangely exhilarating. Epic had tended to purify the
myth of precisely the things which tragedy emphasized in it, and almost every possible variety of incest,
killing of kindred, and human sacrifice, is presented in the tragedies known to us. The dark colouring of
tragedy as a form, with its ritual lamentations and masks of woe, explains this in part; but no doubt it is
right to see also a new attitude, questioning and exploring, and delighting in extreme actions and painful
conflicts.
In the myths men and gods were close. Heroes were sons of gods, greater than modern men, aspiring to
fight with the gods themselves: Achilles says to Apollo in the Iliad 'How I would pay you out for this, if
only I had the power', and both Diomede and Patroclus attack gods and are sharply called to order by
Apollo: 'Remember what you are! Gods and men can never be equal' {Iliad, 21.20, 5. 440, 16. 705).
In the myths we constantly see men tempted to go beyond mortal limits: we feel pleasure as they enlarge
our conception of human powers, and then a different pleasure at their inevitable defeat or destruction.
Agamemnon walking on the precious tapestries, Ajax telling Athena he has no need of her, Hippolytus
defying Aphrodite, the Greek commanders in the Troades behaving with arrogant cruelty in ignorance of
the ruin the gods have planned for them, Achilles at the end of the Iliad forced to come to terms with the
mortality which links him with his enemies-all these and many more are examples of a use of myth which
became central to Greek culture. The same idea of human limitation is expressed in a less tragic way in
the myths which say that life could indeed be what we wish it to be-peaceful, beautiful, eternal-only it
must be somewhere cut off from us in time (the Golden Age), or in place (the Hyperboreans at the back of
the North Wind; the Ethiopians where the sun rises and sets). The existence of such images is like the