Poetical Works of Akenside by Mark Akenside (suggested reading TXT) 📕

that he hath ventured to differ from them in this particular, though in other respects he professeth to imitate their manner and conform to their opinions; for, in these great points of natural theology, they differ no less remarkably among themselves, and are perpetually confounding the philosophical relations of things with the traditionary circumstances of mythic history; upon which very account Callimachus, in his hymn to Jupiter, declareth his dissent from them concerning even an article of the national creed, adding, that the ancient bards were by no means to be depended on. And yet in the exordium of the old Argonautic poem, ascribed to Orpheus, it is said, that 'Love, whom mortals in later times call Phanes, was the father of the eternally-begotten Night;' who is generally represented by these mythological poets as being herself the parent of all things; and who, in the 'Indigitamenta,' or Orphic Hymns, is said to be the same with Cypris, or Love itself. Moreover, in the body of this Argonautic poem, where the personated Orpheus introduceth himself singing to his lyre in reply to Chiron, he celebrateth 'the obscure memory of Chaos, and the natures which it contained within itself in a state of perpetual vicissitude; how the heaven had its boundary determined, the generation of the earth, the depth of the ocean, and also the sapient Love, the most ancient, the self-sufficient, with all the beings which he produced when he separated one thing from another.' Which noble passage is more directly to Aristotle's purpose in the first book of his metaphysics than any of those which he has there quoted, to show that the ancient poets and mythologists agreed with Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and the other more sober philosophers, in that natural anticipation and common notion of mankind concerning the necessity of mind and reason to account for the connexion, motion, and good order of the world. For though neither this poem, nor the hymns which pass under the same name, are, it should seem, the work of the real Orpheus, yet beyond all question they are very ancient. The hymns, more particularly, are allowed to be older than the invasion of Greece by Xerxes, and were probably a set of public and solemn forms of devotion, as appears by a passage in one of them which Demosthenes hath almost literally cited in his first oration against Aristogiton, as the saying of Orpheus, the founder of their most holy mysteries. On this account, they are of higher authority than any other mythological work now extant, the Theogony of Hesiod himself not excepted. The poetry of them is often extremely noble; and the mysterious air which prevails in them, together with its delightful impression upon the mind, cannot be better expressed than in that remarkable description with which they inspired the German editor, Eschenbach, when he accidentally met with them at Leipsic: --'Thesaurum me reperisse credidi,' says he, 'et profecto thesaurum reperi. Incredibile dictu quo me sacro horrore afflaverint indigitamenta ista deorum: nam et tempus ad illorum lectionem eligere cogebar, quod vel solum horrorem incutere animo potest, nocturnum; cum enim totam diem consumserim in contemplando urbis splendore, et in adeundis, quibus scatet urbs illa, viris doctis; sola nox restabat, quam Orpheo consecrare potui. In abyesum quendam mysteriorum venerandae antiquitatis descendere videbar, quotiescunque silente mundo, solis vigilantibus astris et luna, [Greek: melanaephutous] istos hymnos ad manus sumsi.']

[Footnote B: ' Love, the sire of Fate .'--L. 25. Fate is the universal system of natural causes; the work of the Omnipotent Mind, or of Love: so Minucius Felix:--'Quid enim aliud est fatum, quam quod de unoquoque nostrum deus fatus est.' So also Cicero, in the First Book on Divination:--'Fatum autem id appello, quod Graeci EIMAPMENIIN: id est, ordinem seriemque causarum, cum causa causae nexa rem ex se gignat--ex quo intelligitur, ut fatum sit non id quod superstitiose, sed id quod physice dicitur causa asterna rerum.' To the same purpose is the doctrine of Hierocles, in that excellent fragment concerning Providence and Destiny. As to the three Fates, or Destinies of the poets, they represented that part of the general system of natural causes which relates to man, and to other mortal beings: for so we are told in the hymn addressed to them among the Orphic Indigitamenta, where they are called the daughters of Night (or Love), and, contrary to the vulgar notion, are distinguished by the epithets of gentle and tender-hearted. According to Hesiod, Theog. ver. 904, they were the daughters of Jupiter and Themis: but in the Orphic hymn to Venus, or Love, that goddess is directly styled the mother of Necessity, and is represented, immediately after, as governing the three Destinies, and conducting the whole system of natural causes.]

[Footnote C: ' Chaos .'--L. 26. The unformed, undigested mass of Moses and Plato; which Milton calls 'The womb of nature.']

[Footnote D: ' Born of Fate was Time .'--L. 26. Chronos, Saturn, or Time, was, according to Apollodorus, the son of Caelum and Tellus. But the author of the hymns gives it quite undisguised by mythological language, and calls him plainly the offspring of the earth and the starry heaven; that is, of Fate, as explained in the preceding note.]

[Footnote E: ' Who many sons ... devour'd .'--L. 27. The known fable of Saturn devouring his children was certainly meant to imply the dissolution of natural bodies, which are produced and destroyed by Time.]

[Footnote F: ' The Child of Rhea .'-L. 29. Jupiter, so called by Pindar.]

[Footnote G: ' Drove him from the upper sky .'--L. 29. That Jupiter dethroned his father Saturn is recorded by all the mythologists. Phurnutus, or Cornutus, the author of a little Greek treatise on the nature of the gods, informs us that by Jupiter was meant the vegetable soul of the world, which restrained and prevented those uncertain alterations which Saturn, or Time, used formerly to cause in the mundane system.]

[Footnote H: ' Then social reign'd The kindred powers .'--L. 31. Our mythology here supposeth, that before the establishment of the vital, vegetative, plastic nature (represented by Jupiter), the four elements were in a variable and unsettled condition, but afterwards well-disposed, and at peace among themselves. Tethys was the wife of the Ocean; Ops, or Rhea, the Earth; Vesta, the eldest daughter of Saturn, Fire; and the Cloud-Compeller, or [Greek: Zeus nephelaegeretaes], the Air, though he also represented the plastic principle of nature, as may be seen in the Orphic hymn inscribed to him.]


NOTE I.

' The sedgy-crowned race .'--L. 34.

The river-gods, who, according to Hesiod's Theogony, were the sons of Oceanus and Tethys.


NOTE J.

' From them are ye, O Naiads .'--L. 37.

The descent of the Naiads is less certain than most points of the Greek mythology. Homer, Odyss. xiii. [Greek: kourai Dios]. Virgil, in the eighth book of the AEneid, speaks as if the Nymphs, or Naiads, were the parents of the rivers: but in this he contradicts the testimony of Hesiod, and evidently departs from the orthodox system, which represented several nymphs as retaining to every single river. On the other hand, Callimachus, who was very learned in all the school-divinity of those times, in his hymn to Delos, maketh Peneus, the great Thessalian river-god, the father of his nymphs: and Ovid, in the fourteenth book of his Metamorphoses, mentions the Naiads of Latium as the immediate daughters of the neighbouring river-gods. Accordingly, the Naiads of particular rivers are occasionally, both by Ovid and Statius, called by patronymic, from the name of the river to which they belong.


NOTE K.

' Syrian Daphne .'--L. 40.

The grove of Daphne in Syria, near Antioch, was famous for its delightful fountains.


NOTE L.

' The tribes beloved by Paeon .'--L. 40.

Mineral and medicinal springs. Paeon was the physician of the gods.


NOTE M.

' The winged offspring .'--L. 43.

The winds; who, according to Hesiod and Apollodorus, were the sons of Astraeus and Aurora.


NOTE N.

' Hyperion .'--L. 46.

A son of Caelum and Tellus, and father of the Sun, who is thence called, by Pindar, Hyperionides. But Hyperion is put by Homer in the same manner as here, for the Sun himself.


NOTE O.

' Your sallying streams .'--L. 49.

The state of the atmosphere with respect to rest and motion is, in several ways, affected by rivers and running streams; and that more especially in hot seasons: first, they destroy its equilibrium, by cooling those parts of it with which they are in contact; and secondly, they communicate their own motion: and the air which is thus moved by them, being left heated, is of consequence more elastic than other parts of the atmosphere, and therefore fitter to preserve and to propagate that motion.

NOTE P.

' Delian king .'--L. 70.

One of the epithets of Apollo, or the Sun, in the Orphic hymn inscribed to him.

NOTE Q.

' Chloris .'--L. 79.

The ancient Greek name for Flora.

NOTE R.

' Amalthea .'--L. 83.

The mother of the first Bacchus, whose birth and education was written, as Diodorus Siculus informs us, in the old Pelasgic character, by Thymoetes, grandson to Laomedon, and contemporary with Orpheus. Thymoetes had travelled over Libya to the country which borders on the western ocean; there he saw the island of Nysa, and learned from the inhabitants, that 'Ammon, King of Libya, was married in former ages to Rhea, sister of Saturn and the Titans: that he afterwards fell in love with a beautiful virgin whose name was Amalthea; had by her a son, and gave her possession of a neighbouring tract of land, wonderfully fertile; which in shape nearly resembling the horn of an ox, was thence called the Hesperian horn, and afterwards the horn of Amalthea: that fearing the jealousy of Rhea, he concealed the young Bacchus in the island of Nysa;' the beauty of which, Diodorus describes with great dignity and pomp of style. This fable is one of the noblest in all the ancient mythology, and seems to have made a particular impression on the imagination of Milton; the only modern poet (unless perhaps it be necessary to except Spenser) who, in these mysterious traditions of the poetic story, had a heart to feel, and words to express, the simple and solitary genius of antiquity. To raise the idea of his Paradise, he prefers it even to--

'That Nysean isle
Girt by the river Triton, where old Cham
(Whom Gentiles Ammon call, and Libyan Jove)
Hid Amalthea and her florid son,
Young Bacchus, from his stepdame Rhea's eye.'


NOTE S.

' Edonian band .'--L. 94.

The priestesses and other ministers of Bacchus: so called from Edonus, a mountain of Thrace, where his rites were celebrated.

NOTE T.

' When Hermes .'--L. 105.

Hermes, or Mercury, was the patron of commerce; in which benevolent character he is addressed by the author of the Indigitamenta in these beautiful lines:--

[Greek:
Ermaeuen panton, kerdempore, lusimerimue,
O? cheiresthiu echei? oplun aremphe ?]


NOTE U.

'Dispense the mineral treasure' .--L. 121.

The merchants of Sidon and Tyre made frequent voyages to the coast of Cornwall, from whence they carried home great quantities of tin.

NOTE V.

'Hath he not won' ?--L. 136.

Mercury, the patron of commerce, being so greatly dependent on the good offices of the Naiads, in