Psyche

The Cult of Souls and Belief in Immortality among the Greeks

By

ERWIN ROHDE

LONDON
KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER & CO., LTD.
NEW YORK: HARCOURT, BRACE & COMPANY, INC.
1925

Translated from the eighth edition by

W. B. HILLIS. M.A.

Printed in Great Britain by Stephen Austin & Sons, Ltd., Hertford.

CONTENTS

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION

THIS book offers an account of the opinions held by the Greeks about the life of the human soul after death, and is thus intended as a contribution to the history of Greek religion. Such an undertaking has in a special measure to contend with the difficulties that face any inquiry into the religious life and thought of the Greeks. Greek religion was a natural growth, not a special foundation, and the ideas and feelings which gave it its inward tone and outward shape never received abstract formulation. It expressed itself in religious performances alone: it had no sacred books from which we might determine the inward meaning and interconnexion of the ideas with which the Greeks approached the gods created by their faith. The central essence of the religion held by the Greek people, in spite of this absence of conceptual formulation—or perhaps because of it—preserved its original character to a remarkable degree: the speculations and fancies of Greek poets continually refer to this central nucleus. Indeed the poets and philosophers in such of their writings as have come down to us are our only authorities for the religious thought of the Greeks. In the present inquiry they have naturally had to be our guides for the greater part of the way. But though under the special conditions of Greek life the religious views of poets and philosophers represent an important side of Greek religion, they yet allow us to perceive very clearly the independent and self-determined position with regard to the ancestral religion retained by the individual. The individual believer might always, if his own temper and disposition allowed him, give himself up to the plain and unsophisticated emotions which had shaped and decided the faith of the people and the religious performances of popular εὐσέβεια. But we should know very little of the religious ideas that filled the mind of the believing Greek if we had to do without the evidence of philosophers and poets (and of some Attic orators as well) in whose words dumb and inarticulate emotion finds expression. The inquirer would, however, be entirely on the wrong track [viii] and be led to some remarkable conclusions who ventured without more ado to deduce from the religious ideas that find expression in Greek literature a complete Theology of the Greek people. Where direct literary statements and allusions fail us we are left with nothing but surmises in face of the religion of the Greeks and its inmost guiding forces. Of course there are plenty of people of sanguine temperament and industrious fancy who find no difficulty in producing for our benefit the most admirable solutions of the problem. Others in varying degrees of good faith press the emotions of Christian piety into the service of explaining ancient faith in gods. Thus injustice is done to both forms of religion and an understanding of the essentials of Greek belief in its true and independent reality is made completely impossible. A good example of this is provided by the Eleusinian Mysteries, and by that favourite topic of controversy (which has, indeed, received more than its due share of attention from students of religion), the amalgamation of the worship of gods and the belief in Souls said to have taken place therein. Nowhere else has the complete unprofitableness of the attempt to make use of the shifting ideas and tendencies of modern civilization to explain the underlying motive forces of these significant cult practices, been more strikingly and repeatedly demonstrated. On this head in particular the author of the present work has renounced all attempts to cast a fitful and ambiguous light upon the venerable gloom of the subject by the help of the farthing dip of his own private imaginings. There is no denying that here as in so many departments of ancient εὐσέβεια there is something greater and finer that eludes our grasp. The revealing word, never having been written down, has been lost. Instead of trying to find a substitute in modern catch phrases it seems better simply to describe, in the plainest and most literal fashion, the actual phenomena of Greek piety exactly as they are known to us. There will be plenty of opportunity for the author’s own suggestions and they need not always obtrude themselves. The aim of this work is to make plain the facts of the Greek Cult of Souls and of that belief in immortality the inner workings of which are only partially intelligible to our most sympathetic efforts to understand them. To give a clearer presentation of the origin and development of those practices and those beliefs; to distinguish the transformations through which they passed and their relationship with other and kindred intellectual tendencies; to disentangle the many different lines of thought and speculation from the inextricable [ix] confusion in which they lie in many minds (and in many books) and to let them stand out clearly and distinctly one from another, seemed particularly desirable. Why this design has not been carried out by the same methods throughout; why it has sometimes seemed sufficient to give a bald summary of the essential points, while at other times certain topics are pursued into their most distant ramifications (sometimes with apparently irrelevant prolixity), will be obvious enough to those who are familiar with the subject. Where a more careful examination of the overflowing mass of detail was to be attempted advantage has been taken of the Appendix to achieve a greater, though still only a relative degree of completeness. This was made possible by the lengthy period which elapsed between the publication of the two parts of the book. The first half [to the end of chapter vii] appeared as long ago as the spring of 1890. Unpropitious circumstances have delayed the completion of the remainder till the present moment. The two parts could easily be kept separate (as they have been): in the main they fall apart and correspond to the two sides of the question indicated in the title of the book—Cult of Souls and Belief in Immortality. The Cult of Souls and the faith in immortality may eventually come together at some points, but they have a different origin and travel most of the way on separate paths. The conception of immortality in particular arises from a spiritual intuition which reveals the souls of men as standing in close relationship, and indeed as being of like substance, with the everlasting gods. And simultaneously the gods are regarded as being in their nature like the soul of man, i.e. as free spirits needing no material or visible body. (It is this spiritualized view of the gods—not the belief in gods itself as Aristotle supposes in the remarkable statement quoted by Sextus Empiricus Adv. Mathematicos, iii, 20 ff.—which arises from the vision of its own divine nature achieved by the soul καθ’ ἑαυτήν relieved of the body, in ἐνθουσιασμοί and μαντεῖαι.) And this conception leads far away from the ideas on which the Cult of Souls was based.

The publication of the book in two parts has brought with it a regrettable circumstance for which I must ask the indulgence of well-disposed readers (that the first half found so many of them is a fact which I must gratefully acknowledge). As the dimensions of the whole work grew beyond expectation and almost overstepped the μέτρον αὔταρκες, the sixteen excursuses which were promised in [x] the first volume have had to be dropped: the book would otherwise have been overloaded. So far as they possess independent interest they will find a place elsewhere. They are real excursuses and were intended as such, and the proper understanding of the book will not be affected by their absence.

ERWIN ROHDE.

HEIDELBERG.
November 1st, 1893.

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

THE publication of a second edition of this book affords me a welcome opportunity of making my account more exact and to the point in certain places; of adding some points that had been overlooked or omitted; and of noticing with approval or disapproval some divergent opinions that had obtained currency in the interval. Controversy is, however, confined within the narrowest limits and to points of minor importance (and only then in answer to more serious and significant objections). The plan and—if I may say so—the style of the whole book demanded throughout, and more especially in the great points at issue, a purely positive statement of my own views and the results of my own studies. Such a statement, it may well be imagined, was not arrived at without being preceded in the mind of the author by a controversial reckoning with the manifold views and doctrines of others upon the subjects here dealt with—views which in some cases he felt obliged to reject. Controversy in this sense lies behind every page of the book, though as a rule only in a latent condition. In this condition I have been content to let it remain in this revised edition of the book. My opinions were not arrived at without toil and much careful reflection; one view being made to reinforce another till they were all bound together in a single closely-knitted whole. Neither further reflection on my part nor the criticisms of others have shaken my belief in the tenability of opinions reached in this way. I have therefore ventured to leave my account unaltered in all its main points. I hope that it contains its own justification and defence in itself without further vindication on my part.

Nothing in the plan or execution of the whole or its parts has been altered; neither have I taken anything away. The book contained nothing that was superfluous to the attainment of the object that I had in view. This object, it will be apparent, was not in the least to provide a brief and compendious statement of the most indispensable facts about the cult of Souls and the belief in immortality among the Greeks for the benefit of those who wished to take a hasty [xii] glance over the subject. Such a hasty picker-up of knowledge who regards himself—I cannot imagine why—as peculiarly fitted to criticise my book, has ingenuously besought me, in view of a second edition which he was kind enough to think probable, to throw overboard most of what he considered the superfluous parts of the book. With this request I have not felt myself able to comply. My book was written for maturer readers who have passed beyond the school stage and look for something more than an elementary handbook, and who would be able to understand and appreciate the plan and intention which led me to draw my material so widely from many departments of literary and cultural history. The first edition of the book found many such readers: I may hope and expect that the second will do the same.

In its revised form the book has been divided for the convenience of those who use it into two volumes (which correspond with the two parts in which it was first published). I was urged to take away the notes that stand at the foot of the text and relegate them to a place by themselves in a separate appendix. I found, however, that I could not bring myself to adopt this fashionable modern practice, which so far as I have experience of it in books published in recent years seems to me to be inconvenient and to hinder rather than help that undisturbed appreciation of the text which such an arrangement is intended to serve. Independent readers who in using the book are working out the subject for themselves would certainly not desire the separation of the documentary evidence from the statement of the author’s view. The book has also, to my peculiar satisfaction, attracted a large number of readers from outside the immediate circle of professional philologists. Such readers have evidently not been seriously disturbed by the elaborate and perhaps rather pedantic aspect of the mysterious disquisitions at the foot of the page, and have been able to fix their attention upon the clearer language of the text above. I have therefore decided to remove a few only of the notes which had grown to independent dimensions to an appendix at the end of each of the two volumes.

ERWIN ROHDE.

HEIDELBERG.
November 27th, 1897.

PRELIMINARY NOTE TO THE SEVENTH AND EIGHTH EDITIONS

IN supervising together this reprint of “Psyche” we have found ourselves faced with the question which Schöll and Dieterich had to decide in bringing out the third edition—whether changes or additions would be admissible. It went without saying that the text must remain untouched in the form last given to it by Rohde’s own hand. Nor was it possible to make any additions to the notes without seriously disturbing the carefully considered architecture of the whole book. It would have been more possible to add an appendix or supplementary pamphlet recording the literature of the subject which has appeared since 1898 and giving an account of the present state of the questions dealt with by Rohde: as has been done with the “Griechische Roman” by W. Schmid. But on making the attempt we soon found that the problem was a different one in the case of “Psyche” with which (much more than in the other case) all subsequent study of the history of religion as pursued by all nations has had to reckon, and from which such study has in no small degree taken its starting point. We have therefore refrained; and we have also refrained from remodelling the citations to make them correspond with critical editions that have since appeared. This process could not be carried through without, in some places, introducing contradictions with Rohde’s interpretation that would have necessitated more detailed discussion. Rohde’s own method of citation was only seriously inconvenient in the case of Euripides: here he evidently, as we observed from about the middle of the first volume onwards, made use of more than one edition at the same time, and has consequently quoted lines in accordance with different enumerations. For the greater assurance and convenience of the reader the lines are uniformly referred to according to the numbering of Nauck. This task has been undertaken by our devoted helper Frl. Emilie Boer, who has also verified, with a very few exceptions, the whole of the references to ancient writers and inscriptions; [xiv] a considerable number of errors missed by the author or later editors have thus been corrected. The minor changes introduced in the third and following editions—the recording on the margin of the pagination of the first edition and the valuable enlargement of the index due to W. Nestle with the assistance of O. Crusius—have all naturally been retained.

F. BOLL.
O. WEINREICH.

HEIDELBERG.
November, 1920.

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

ROHDE is very unsystematic in his mode of quoting from ancient authorities: he has, for example, four different ways of referring to the Iliad and the Odyssey, two of referring to Demosthenes and the Orators, etc. In quoting from the lesser authorities he sometimes used editions which have since become antiquated. (He even goes so far as to quote Clem. Alex. by the page and letter of Heinsius’ re-edition of Sylburg.) I have made an attempt to reduce the number of inconsistencies and to give references where possible to modern editions. In these and other small ways I have tried to make the notes—the text I hope is intelligible enough—more accessible to English readers. I have given references to English translations of German works (where I have been able to find them); but I have refrained from adding references to the modern literature of the subject: most readers of the book will prefer to do that for themselves. In order to save space I have used abbreviation pretty freely in quoting names of authors and titles of books. The abbreviated forms agree generally with those given in Liddell and Scott (supplemented by the list drawn up for the new edition of the Lexicon): most of the following may be noted:—

I take this opportunity of thanking my friend Mr. R. Burn, of Glasgow University, for his invaluable help in these matters.

W. B. HILLIS.

PART I

CHAPTER I
ΒELIEFS ABOUT THE SOUL AND CULT OF SOULS IN THE HOMERIC POEMS

I

§ 1

To the immediate understanding of mankind nothing seems so self-evident, nothing so little in need of explanation, as the phenomenon of Life itself, the fact of man’s own existence. On the other hand, the cessation of this so self-evident existence, whenever it obtrudes itself upon his notice, arouses man’s ever-renewed astonishment. There are primitive peoples to whom death whenever it occurs seems an arbitrary abbreviation of life: if it is not due to visible forces, then some invisible magic must have caused it. So difficult is it for such peoples to grasp the idea that the present state of being alive and conscious can come to an end of its own accord.

Once reflection on such problems is aroused, life itself, standing as it does on the threshold of all sensation and experience, soon begins to appear no less mysterious than death—that kingdom into which no experience reaches. It may even come about that when they are regarded too long and too hard, light and darkness seem to change places. It was to a Greek poet that the question suggested itself: “Who knows then whether Life be not Death, and what we here call Death be called Life there below?”

From such jaded wisdom and its doubts Greek civilization is still far removed when, though already at an advanced stage in its development, it first speaks to us in the Homeric poems. The poet and his heroes speak with lively feeling of the pains and troubles of life, both in its individual phases and as a whole. The gods have allotted a life of pain and misery to men, while they themselves remain free from care. On the other hand, to turn aside from life altogether never enters the head of anyone in Homer. Nothing may be said expressly of the joy and happiness of life, but that is because such things [4] go without saying among a vigorous folk engrossed in a movement of progress, whose circumstances were never complicated and where all the conditions of happiness easily fell to the lot of the strong in activity and enjoyment. And, indeed, it is only for the strong, the prudent, and the powerful that this Homeric world is intended. Life and existence upon this earth obviously belongs to them—is it not an indispensable condition of the attainment of all particular good things? As for death—the state which is to follow our life here—there is no danger of anyone mistaking that for life. “Do not try and explain away death to me,” says Achilles to Odysseus in Hades; and this would be the answer any Homeric man would have given to the sophisticated poet, if he had tried to persuade him that the state of things after life on this earth is the real life. Nothing is so hateful to man as death and the gates of Hades: for when death comes it is certain that life—this sweet life of ours in the sunlight—is done with, whatever else there may be to follow.

§ 2

But what does follow? What happens when life departs for ever from the inanimate body?

It is strange that anyone should have maintained (as it has been in recent times[1]) that in any stage of the development of the Homeric poems the belief can be found that with the moment of death all is at an end: that nothing survives death. We are not warranted by any statement in either of the two poems (to be found perhaps in their oldest parts, as is suggested) nor yet by the tell-tale silence of the poet, in attributing such an idea either to the poet or his contemporaries. Wherever the occasion of death is described we are told how the dead man (still referred to by his name), or his “Psyche”, hastens away into the house of Aïdes—into the kingdom of Aïdes and the grim Persephoneia; goes down to the darkness below the earth, to Erebos; or, more vaguely, sinks into the earth itself. In any case, it is no mere nothing that can enter the gloomy depths, nor over what does not exist could one suppose that the divine Pair holds sway below.

But how are we to think of this “Psyche” that, unnoticed during the lifetime of the body, and only observable when it is “separated” from the body, now glides off to join the multitude of its kind assembled in the murky regions of the “Invisible” (Aïdes)? Its name, like the names given to the [5] “soul” in many languages, marks it off as something airy and breathlike, revealing its presence in the breathing of the living man. It escapes out of the mouth—or out of the gaping wound of the dying—and now freed from its prison becomes, as the name well expresses it, an “image” (εἴδωλον). On the borders of Hades Odysseus sees floating “the images of those that have toiled (on earth)”. These immaterial images withdrawing themselves from the grasp of the living, like smoke (Il. xxiii, 100) or a shadow (Od. xi, 207; x, 495), must at least recognizably present the general outlines of the once living person. Odysseus immediately recognizes his mother, Antikleia, in such a shadow-person, as well as the lately dead Elpenor, and those of his companions of the Trojan War who have gone before him. The psyche of Patroklos appearing to Achilleus by night resembles the dead man absolutely in stature, bodily appearance and expression. The nature of this shadowy double of mankind, separating itself from man in death and taking its departure then, can best be realized if we first make clear to ourselves what qualities it does not possess. The psyche of Homeric belief does not, as might have been supposed, represent what we are accustomed to call “spirit” as opposed to “body”. All the faculties of the human “spirit” in the widest sense—for which the poet has a large and varied vocabulary—are indeed only active and only possible so long as a man is still alive: when death comes the complete personality is no longer in existence. The body, that is the corpse, now becomes mere “senseless earth” and falls to pieces, while the psyche remains untouched. But the latter is by no means the refuge of “spirit” and its faculties, any more than the corpse is. It (the psyche) is described as being without feeling, deserted by mind and the organs of mind. All power of will, sensation, and thought have vanished with the disintegration of the individual man into his component parts. So far from it being permissible to ascribe the functions of “spirit” to the psyche, it would be more reasonable to speak of a contrast between the two. Man is a living creature, conscious of himself and intelligently active, only so long as the psyche remains within him. But it is not the psyche which communicates its own faculties to man and gives him capacity for life together with consciousness, will and knowledge. It is rather that during the union of the psyche and the body all the faculties of living and acting lie within the empire of the body, of which they are functions. Without the presence of the psyche, the body cannot perceive, feel, or will, but it does not use these [6] or any of its faculties through or by means of the psyche. Nowhere does Homer attribute any such function to the psyche in living man: it is, in fact, only mentioned when its separation from the living man is imminent or has occurred. As the body’s shadow-image it survives the body and all its vital powers.

If we now ask—as our Homeric psychologists generally do—which, in the face of this mysterious association between a living body and its counterfeit the psyche, is the “real” man, we find that Homer in fact gives contradictory answers. Not infrequently (indeed, in the first lines of the Iliad) the material body is contrasted,[2] as the “man himself”, with the psyche—which cannot therefore be any organ or component part of the living body. On the other hand, that which takes its departure at death and hastens into the realm of Hades is also referred to by the proper name of the person as “himself”[3]—which means that here the shadowy psyche (for nothing else can go down to Hades) is invested with the name and value of the complete personality, the “self” of the man. But those who draw from these phrases the conclusion that either the body or the psyche must be the “real man” have, in either case,[4] left out of account or unexplained one half of the recorded evidence. Regarded without prejudice, these apparently contradictory methods of speaking simply prove that both the visible man (the body and its own faculties) and the indwelling psyche could be described as the man’s “self”. According to the Homeric view, human beings exist twice over: once as an outward and visible shape, and again as an invisible “image” which only gains its freedom in death. This, and nothing else, is the Psyche.

Such an idea—that the psyche should dwell with the living and fully conscious personality, like an alien and a stranger, a feebler double of the man, as his “other self”—this may well seem very strange to us. And yet this is what so-called “savage” peoples,[5] all over the world, actually believe. Herbert Spencer in particular has shown this most decisively. It is therefore not very surprising to find the Greeks, too, sharing a mode of thought that lies so close to the mind of primitive mankind. The earlier age which handed down to the Greeks of Homer their beliefs about the soul cannot have failed any more than other nations to observe the facts upon which a fantastic logic based the conclusion of man’s double personality. It was not the phenomena of sensation, will, perception, or thought in waking and conscious man which led to this conclusion. It was the experience of an apparent [7] double of the self in dreaming, in swoons, and ecstasy, that gave rise to the inference of a two-fold principle of life in man, and of the existence of an independent, separable “second self” dwelling within the viable self of daily life. One has only to listen to the words of a Greek writer of a later period who, far more explicitly than Homer, describes the nature of the psyche and at the same time lets us see the origin of the belief in such an entity. Pindar (fr. 131) tells us that the body obeys Death, the almighty, but the image of the living creature lives on (“since this alone is derived from the gods”: which, of course, is not Homeric belief); for it (this eidôlon) is sleeping when the limbs are active, but when the body is asleep it often reveals the future in a dream. Words could hardly make it plainer that in the activities of the waking and conscious man, the image-soul has no part. Its world is the world of sleep. While the other “I”, unconscious of itself, lies in sleep, its double is up and doing. In other words, while the body of the sleeper lies wrapped in slumber, motionless, the sleeper in his dream lives and sees many strange and wonderful things. It is “himself” who does this (of that there can be no doubt), and yet not the self known and visible to himself and others; for that lies still as death beyond the reach of sensation. It follows that there lives within a man a second self, active in dreaming. That the dream experiences are veritable realities and not empty fancies for Homer is also certain. He never says, as later poets often do, that the dreamer “thought” he saw this or that. The figures seen in dreams are real figures, either of the gods themselves or a “dream spirit” sent by them, or a fleeting “image” (eidôlon) that they allow to appear for a moment. Just as the dreamer’s capacity for vision is no mere fancy, so, too, the objects that he sees are realities. In the same way it is something real that appears to a man asleep as the shape of a person lately dead. Since this shape can show itself to a dreamer, it must of necessity still exist; consequently it survives death, though, indeed, only as a breath-like image, much as we have seen reflections of our own faces mirrored in water.[6] It cannot, indeed—this airy substance—be grasped or held like the once viable self; and hence comes its name, the “psyche”. The primeval argument for such a counterpart of man is repeated by Achilleus himself (Il. xxiii, 103 f.) when his dead friend appears to him and then vanishes again: so, then, ye Gods, there yet lives in Hades’ house a psyche and shadowy image (of man), but there is no midriff in it (and consequently none of the faculties which preserve the visible man alive). [8]

The dreamer, then, and what he sees in his dream proves the existence of an alter ego in man.[7] Man, however, also observes that his body may suffer a deathlike torpor without the second self being occupied with dream experiences. In such moments of “swoon”, according to Greek thought and actual Homeric expression, “the psyche has left the body.”[8] Where had it gone? No man could tell. But on this occasion it comes back again: whereupon the “spirit is gathered again into the midriff”. If ever, as happens in the case of death, the psyche should become completely separated from the visible body, then the “spirit” will never return. But the psyche, which in those temporary separations from the body[9] did not perish, will not vanish into nothingness now.

§ 3

So far experience takes us, from which primitive logic arrived at very much the same conclusions all over the world. But, we may proceed to ask, where does this liberated psyche go? What becomes of it? Here begins “the undiscovered country” and it might appear that at its entrance there was a complete parting of the ways.

Primitive people are accustomed to attribute unlimited powers to the disembodied “soul”—powers all the more formidable because they are not seen. Indeed, they refer in part all invisible forces to the action of “souls”, and strain anxiously by means of the richest offerings within their power to secure for themselves the goodwill of these powerful spirits. Homer, on the contrary, knows nothing of any influence exerted by the psyche upon the visible world, and, consequently, hardly anything of a cult of the psyche. How, indeed, could the souls (as I may venture to call them without further risk of misunderstanding) have any such influence? They are all without exception collected in the realm of Aïdes, far from the living, separated from them by Okeanos and Acheron, guarded by the relentless god himself, the inexorable doorkeeper. Only a fabled hero like Odysseus may for once, perhaps, reach the entrance of that gloomy kingdom alive: the souls themselves, once they have crossed the river, never come back—so the soul of Patroklos assures his friend. How do they get there? The implication seems to be that on leaving the body the soul passes away, unwilling and complaining of its fate, but, nevertheless, unresisting, to Hades; and after the destruction of the body by fire, disappears for ever into the depths of Erebos. It was only a [9] later poet who, in giving the final touches to the Odyssey, introduced Hermes, the “Guide of the Dead”. Whether this is an invention of the poet’s, or, as appears more likely, it is borrowed from the ancient folk-belief of some remote corner of Greece, in the completely rounded circle of Homeric belief at any rate it is an innovation and an important one. Doubt has arisen, it appears, whether indeed all the souls must of necessity pass away into the Unseen; and they are provided with a divine guide who by his mysteriously compelling summons (Od. xxiv, 1) and the power of his magic wand constrains them to follow him.[10]

Down in the murky underworld they now float unconscious, or, at most, with a twilight half-consciousness, wailing in a shrill diminutive voice, helpless, indifferent. Of course, flesh, bones, and sinews,[11] the midriff, the seat of all the faculties of mind and will—these are all gone for ever. They were attached to the once-visible partner of the psyche, and that has been destroyed. To speak of an “immortal life” of these souls, as scholars both ancient and modern have done, is incorrect. They can hardly be said to live even, any more than the image does that is reflected in the mirror; and that they prolong to eternity their shadowy image-existence—where in Homer do we ever find this said? The psyche may survive its visible companion, but it is helpless without it. Is it possible to believe that a realistically imaginative, materially minded people like the Greeks would have regarded as immortal a creature incapable (once the funeral is over) of requiring or receiving further nourishment—either in religious cult or otherwise?

The daylight world of Homer is thus freed from spectres of the night (for even in dreams the psyche is seen no more after the body is burnt); from those intangible and ghostly essences at whose unearthly activity the superstitious of every age tremble. The living are no longer troubled by the dead. The world is governed by the gods alone; not pale and ghostly phantoms, but palpable and fully materialized figures, working powerfully everywhere, and dwelling on the clear mountain tops: “and brightness gleams around them.” No daimonic powers can compare with the gods or can avail against them; and night does not set free the departed souls of the dead. The reader starts involuntarily and begins to suspect the influence of another age, when in a part of Book XX of the Odyssey, added by a later hand, he reads how shortly before the destruction of the suitors the clairvoyant soothsayer beholds in hall and forecourt the soul-phantoms (eidôla) [10] floating in multitudes and hurrying down to the darkness under the earth: “the sun was darkened in the heaven and a thick mist came over all.” The later poet has been very successful in suggesting the terror awakened by a foreboding of tragedy; but such terror in the face of the doings of the spirit world is entirely un-Homeric.

§ 4

Were the Greeks, then, always so untroubled by such fears of the souls of the dead? Was there never any cult of disembodied spirits, such as was not only known to all primitive peoples throughout the world, but was also quite familiar to nations belonging to the same family as the Greeks, for instance, the Indians and the Persians? The question and its answer have more than a passing interest. In later times—long subsequent to Homer—we find in Greece itself a lively worship of ancestors and a general cult of the departed. Were it demonstrable—as it is generally assumed without proof—that the Greeks only at this late period first began to pay a religious cult to the souls of the dead, this fact would give very strong support to the oft-repeated theory that the cult of the dead arose from the ruins of a previous worship of the gods. Anthropologists are accustomed to deny this and to regard the worship of disembodied souls as one of the earliest forms (if not as originally the only form) of the reverence paid to unseen powers. The peoples, however, upon whose conditions of life and mental conceptions such views are generally based, have indeed behind them a long past, but no history. What is to prevent pure speculation and theorizing in conformity with the preconceived idea just mentioned (which is almost elevated to the position of a doctrine of faith by some comparative religionists) from introducing into the dim past of such savage peoples the primitive worship of gods, out of which the worship of the dead may then subsequently arise? But Greek religious development can be traced from Homer onwards for a long period; and there we find the certainly remarkable fact that a cult of the dead, unknown to Homer, only appears later, in the course of a long and vigorous expansion of religious ideas in after times; or, at least, then shows itself more plainly—but not, it is important to notice, as the precipitate of a dying belief in gods and worship of the gods, but rather as a collateral development by the side of that highly developed form of piety.

Are we, then, really to believe that the cult of disembodied [11] spirits was absolutely unknown to the Greeks of pre-Homeric times?

Such an assertion, if made without due qualification, is contradicted by a closer study of the Homeric poems themselves.

It is true that Homer represents for us the earliest great stage in the evolution of Greek civilization of which we have clear evidence. But the poems do not stand at the beginning of that evolution. Indeed, they only stand at the beginning of Greek Epic poetry—so far as this has been transmitted to us—because the natural greatness and wide popularity of the Iliad and the Odyssey secured their preservation in writing. Their very existence and the degree of artistic finish which they show, oblige us to suppose that behind them lies a long history of heroic “Saga” poetry. The conditions which they describe and imply point to a long course of previous development—from nomadic to city life, from patriarchal rule to the organization of the Greek Polis. And just as the maturity of material development tells its tale, so do the refinement and maturity of culture, the profound and untrammelled knowledge of the world, the clarity and simplicity of thought reflected in them. All these things go to show that before Homer, in order to reach Homer, the Greek world must have thought and learned much—must, indeed, have unlearned and undone much. As in art, so in all the products of civilization, what is simple, appropriate, and convincing is not the achievement of beginners, but the reward of prolonged study. It is prima facie unthinkable that during the whole length of Greek evolution before Homer, religion alone, the relationship between man and the invisible world, should have remained stationary at any one point. It is not from the comparison of religious beliefs and their development among kindred nations, nor even from the study of apparently primitive ideas and usages in the religious life of the Greeks themselves of later times, that we are to seek the truth about the religious customs of that remote period which is obscured for us by the intervening mass of the Homeric poems. Comparative studies of this kind are valuable in their way, but must only be used to give further support to the insight derived from less easily misleading methods of inquiry. For us the only completely satisfactory source of information about pre-Homeric times is Homer himself. We are allowed—indeed, we are forced—to conclude that there have been change in conceptions and customs, if, in that otherwise so uniform and rounded Homeric world, we meet with isolated occurrences, customs, forms of speech that contradict the [12] normal atmosphere of Homer and can only be explained by reference to a world in all essentials differently orientated from his own and for the most part kept in the background by Homer. All that is necessary is to open our eyes, freed from preconceived ideas, to the “rudiments” (“survivals”, as they are better called by English scholars) of a past stage of civilization discoverable in the Iliad and Odyssey themselves.

§ 5

Such rudiments of a once vigorous soul-worship are not hard to find in Homer. In particular, we may refer to what the Iliad tells us of the manner in which the dead body of Patroklos is dealt with. The reader need only recall the general outline of the story. In the evening of the day upon which Hektor has been slain, Achilles with his Myrmidons sings the funeral dirge to his dead friend: they go three times in procession round the body, Achilles laying his “murderous hands” on the breast of Patroklos and calling upon him with the words: “Hail, Patroklos mine, even in Aïdes’ dwelling-place; what I vowed to thee before is now performed; Hektor lies slain and is the prey of dogs, and twelve noble Trojan youths will I slay at thy funeral pyre.” After they have laid aside their arms he makes ready the funeral feast for his companions—bulls, sheep, goats, and pigs are killed, “and all around, in beakers-full, the blood flowed round the corpse.” During the night the soul of Patroklos appears to Achilles demanding immediate burial. In the morning the host of the Myrmidons marches out in arms, bearing the body in their midst. The warriors lay locks of their hair, cut off for the purpose, upon the body, and last of all Achilles places his own hair in the hand of his friend—it was once pledged by his father to Spercheios the River-god, but Patroklos must now take it with him, since return to his home is denied to Achilles. The funeral pyre is got ready, many sheep and oxen slaughtered. The corpse is wrapped in their fat, while their carcasses are placed beside it; jars of oil and honey are set round the body. Next, four horses are killed, two dogs belonging to Patroklos, and last of all twelve Trojan youths taken prisoner for this purpose by Achilles. All these are burnt together with the corpse, and Achilles spends the whole night pouring out dark wine upon the earth, calling the while upon the psyche of Patroklos. Only when morning comes is the fire extinguished with wine; the bones of Patroklos are collected and laid in a golden casket and entombed within a mound. [13]

Here we have a picture of the funeral of a chieftain which, in the solemnity and ceremoniousness of its elaborate detail, is in striking conflict with the normal Homeric conception of the nothingness of the soul after its separation from the body. A full and rich sacrifice is here offered to such a soul. This sacrifice is inexplicable if the soul immediately upon its dissolution flutters away insensible, helpless and powerless, and therefore incapable of enjoying the offerings made to it. It is therefore not unnatural that a method of interpretation which isolates Homer as far as possible and adheres closely to his own fixed and determinate range of ideas, should attempt to deny the sacrificial character of the offerings made on this occasion.[12] We may well ask, however, what else but a sacrifice, i.e. a repast offered in satisfaction of the needs of the person honoured (in this case the psyche), can be intended by this stream of blood about the corpse; this slaughtering and burning of cattle and sheep, horses and dogs, and finally of twelve Trojan prisoners on or at the funeral pyre? To explain it all as a mere performance of pious duties, as is often done in interpreting many of the gruesome pictures of Greek sacrificial ceremonies, is impossible here. Besides, Homer often tells us of merely pious observances in honour of the dead, and they are of a very different character. And the most horrible touch of all (the human sacrifice) is not put in simply to satisfy Achilles’ lust for vengeance—twice over does Achilles call to the soul of Patroklos with the words: “To you do I bring what I formerly promised to you” (Il. xxiii, 20 ff., 180 ff.).[13] The whole series of offerings on this occasion is precisely of the kind which we may take as typical of the oldest sort of sacrificial ritual such as we often find in later Greek religion in the cultus of the infernal deities. The sacrificial offerings are completely burnt in honour of the Daimon and are not shared between the bystanders as in the case of other offerings. If such “holocausts”, when offered to the Chthonic and some of the Olympian deities, are to be regarded as sacrificial in character, then it is unjustifiable to invent some other meaning for the performances at the funeral pyre of Patroklos. The offering of wine, oil, and honey, at least, are normal in sacrificial rituals of later times. Even the severed lock of hair spread out over the dead body or laid in the cold hand is a well known sacrificial tribute, and must be supposed such here as much as in later Greek ceremonial or in that of many other peoples.[14] In fact, this gift in particular, symbolically representing as it does a more valuable sacrifice by means of another and less important [14] object (in the giving of which only the goodwill of the giver is to be considered)—this very offering, like all such symbolical substitutions, bears witness to the long duration and past development of the cultus in which it occurs—in this case of the worship of the dead in pre-Homeric times.

The whole narrative presupposes the idea that by the pouring out of streams of blood, by offerings of wine and burnt offerings of human beings and of cattle, the psyche of a person lately dead can be refreshed, and its resentment mollified. At any rate, it is thus thought of as accessible to human prayers and as remaining for some time in the neighbourhood of the sacrifice made to it. This contradicts what we expect in Homer, and, in fact, just in order to make this unusual performance plausible to an audience no longer familiar with the idea, and to make it admissible on a special occasion, the poet (though the actual course of his story does not really require it)[15] makes the psyche of Patroklos appear by night to Achilles. And, in fact, to the end of the narrative Achilles repeatedly greets the soul of Patroklos as though it were present.[16] The unusual way in which Homer deals with this whole affair, so full of primeval, savage ideas as it is, seems, indeed, to betray a certain vagueness about what its real meaning may be. That the writer has certain qualms on the subject is indicated by the brevity—not at all like Homer—with which the most shocking part of the story, the slaughter of human beings, together with horses and dogs, is hurried over. But the thing to be noted particularly is that the poet is certainly not devising such unpleasant circumstances for the first time out of his own imagination. This epic picture of the worship of the dead was adopted by Homer from an earlier source (whatever that source may have been),[17] and not invented by him. He makes it serve his special purpose, which is to provide a satisfactory climax to the series of vivid and emotional scenes beginning with the tragic death of Patroklos and ending with the death and dishonouring of the champion of Troy. After such emotional exaltation the overstrained nerves must not be allowed to relax too suddenly; a last flicker of the superhuman rage and grief that made Achilles rave so furiously against his foes must show itself in the serving up of this awful banquet to the soul of his friend. It is as though a primitive and long-suppressed savagery had broken out again for a last effort. Only when all is over does the soul of Achilles find repose in melancholy resignation. More calmly he calls upon the rest of the Achæans to take their seats “in a wide circle round about”; and there follows the [15] description of those splendid “Games”, a subject that must have awakened the enthusiasm of every experienced athlete in the audience—and was there ever a Greek who was not an athlete? It is true that athletic contests are described by Homer mainly on account of their own peculiar interest and for the sake of the artistic effects that their description allowed. Still, the selection of such games as a fitting conclusion to a chieftain’s funeral cannot be fully understood except as a survival of an ancient and once vigorous worship of the dead. Such athletic contests in honour of the great immediately after their death are often referred to by Homer;[18] indeed, a funeral is the only occasion[19] recognized by him as suitable for the exhibition of athletic prize-competitions. The practice never quite died out, and it became usual in later post-Homeric times to mark the festivals of Heroes and, later of gods, too, by Games which gradually became regularly repeated performances, developed from the traditional contests that had concluded the funeral ceremonies of great men. Now, no one doubts that the Agon at the festival of a Hero or a god formed part of their religious worship. It is only reasonable, then, to suppose that the funeral games which accompany the burial of a chieftain (and are confined to that one occasion) belong to the religious cult of the dead, and to recognize that such a mode of worship can only have been introduced at a time when men regarded the soul, in whose honour the ceremony took place, as capable of sharing consciously in its enjoyment. Even Homer is certainly conscious of the fact that the games, like the rest of the offerings made then, were intended for the satisfaction of the dead and not solely for the entertainment of the living.[20] We may also cite the declared opinion of Varro, who says that the dead in whose honour funeral games are celebrated are thereby proved to have been regarded originally, if not as gods, at least as very powerful spirits.[21] Of course, this feature of the original cultus of the soul was very easily stripped of its real meaning—it recommended itself quite apart from its religious significance—and for that very reason remained longer than other performances of the kind in general use.

If we now survey the whole series of ritual acts directed to the honouring of the soul of Patroklos, we can deduce from the seriousness of these attempts to please the disembodied spirit what must have been the strength of the original conception—how vivid must have been the impression of enduring sensibility, of formidable power possessed by a soul [16] to whom such a cult was offered. It is true of the cult of the dead, as of any other sacrificial custom, that its perpetuation is due solely to the hope of avoiding hurt and obtaining assistance at the hands of the Unseen.[22] A generation that no longer anticipated either help or harm from the “Souls” might be ready to perform last offices of all kinds to the deserted body out of pure piety, and to offer to the dead a certain traditional reverence. But this would testify rather to the grief of those left behind than to any special reverence felt for the departed.[23] This is mostly the case in Homer. It is not, however, what we should call piety, but much rather mistrust of a “ghost” become powerful through its separation from the body, that explains the exaggerated fullness of the funeral offerings that are made at the burial of Patroklos. They cannot be made to fit in with the ordinary circle of Homeric ideas. Indeed, that this circle of ideas excluded all misgiving at the possible action of unseen spirits is quite clearly shown by the fact that the honours paid even to a dead man held in such veneration as Patroklos are confined to the solitary occasion of his funeral. As the psyche of Patroklos himself assures his friend, once the burning of the body is completed, it, the psyche, will take its departure to Hades, never to return.[24] It is easy to see that from this point of view there was no motive whatever that could lead to a permanent cult of the soul such as was common among the Greeks of later times. But it should be noticed further that the luxurious repast offered to the soul of Patroklos on the occasion of his funeral had no point if the goodwill of the soul which was to be assured by that process would never have an opportunity in the future of making itself felt. The contradiction between Homeric belief and Homeric practice on this occasion is complete, and shows decisively that the traditional view that would see in this description of soul-worship at the funeral of Patroklos an effort after new and more lively ideas of the life after death, must certainly be wrong. When new surmises, wishes, conjectures begin to arise and seek a means of expression, the new ideas generally find incomplete utterance in the old and inappropriate external forms, but express themselves more clearly and certainly (generally with some tendency to exaggeration) in the less conservative words and language of men. Here just the opposite occurs: every word the poet utters about the circumstances contradicts the elaborately wrought ceremonial which those circumstances call forth. It is impossible to point to a single touch that accords with the belief implied by the [17] ceremonial. The poet’s bias is a different and, indeed, an opposite one. Of this much at least there cannot be the slightest doubt: the funeral ceremonies over the body of Patroklos are not the first budding of a new principle, but rather represent a “vestige” of a more vigorous worship of the dead in earlier times, a worship that must once have been a complete and sufficient expression of belief in the great and enduring power of the disembodied spirit. It has, however, been preserved unaltered into an age that, with quite other religious beliefs, no longer understands, or at best half-guesses at the sense of such strange ceremonial observances. Thus ritual generally outlives both the state of mind and the belief which originally gave rise to it.

§ 6

Neither the Iliad nor the Odyssey contains anything that can equal the scenes at the funeral of Patroklos as evidence of primitive worship of the dead. But even the ordinary forms of interment of the dead are not entirely without such “vestigial” features. The dead man’s eyes and mouth are closed,[25] the body is washed and anointed, and after being wrapped in a clean linen cloth is laid upon a bier,[26] and the funeral dirge begins.[27] It is hardly possible to see even the remotest, lingering, reminiscence of a once vigorous worship of the dead in such performances as these; or in the very simple burial customs that follow the burning of the body; the bones are collected in a jar or a casket and buried under a mound, and a post set up to mark the place as a “grave-mound”.[28] But when we find that the body of Elpenor, in accordance with the command issued by his psyche to Odysseus (Od. xi, 74), is burned together with his weapons (Od. xii, 13); when, further, we read that Achilles burnt the weapons of his overthrown foe together with his body on the funeral pyre (Il. vi, 418), it is impossible not to feel that we have here, too, survivals of an ancient belief that the soul in some mysterious fashion was capable of making use of these objects that are burnt along with its discarded bodily envelope. No one doubts that this is the reason for such a custom when it meets us in the case of other nations; with the Greeks, too, it must have had an equally good foundation, however little such is to be discovered in the ordinary Homeric view of the soul. The custom, moreover, more precisely described in these cases, was of general observance; we often hear how the completeness of a burial requires the burning of the possessions of the dead along with the body.[29] We cannot [18] tell to what extent the duty of offering to the dead all his movable possessions[30] (a duty originally without doubt interpreted quite literally) had come in Homeric times to be interpreted in a symbolical sense—a process which reached its lowest stage in the custom prevalent in later times of presenting an obol “for the Ferryman of the Dead”. Finally, the “funeral feast” offered by the king to the mourning people either after the funeral of a chieftain (Il. xxiv, 802, 665), or before the burning of his body (Il. xxiii, 29 ff.), could only have derived its full meaning from an ancient belief that the soul of the person thus honoured could itself take a share in the feast. In the banquet in honour of Patroklos the dead man is given a definite portion—the blood of the slaughtered animals which is poured round his body (Il. xxiii, 34). Like the funeral games, this banquet is apparently intended to propitiate the soul of the dead man. Consequently, we find even Orestes, after slaying Aigisthos, his father’s murderer, offering him a funeral feast (Od. iii, 309)—not, surely, in a mood of simple “piety”. The custom of inviting the whole people, on the occasion of important funerals, to such a banquet no longer appears in later times; it has little resemblance to the funeral feasts shared by the relations of the dead man (περίδειπνα) that were afterwards customary; it is far closer to the great cenæ ferales that accompanied the silicernia in Rome, to which the relations of the dead man, if he were an important person, invited the whole population.[31] After all, it is no harder to understand the underlying conception of the soul in this case sharing the feast with the whole people, than it is to understand the same conception when applied to the great sacrifices to the gods which, though the congregation partakes, are, in name and in fact, essentially “Banquets of the Gods” (Od. iii, 336).

Such are the relics of ancient soul-worship to be found within the limits of the Homeric world. Further attention to the spirits of the dead beyond the time of the funeral was prevented by the deeply ingrained conviction that after the burning of the body the psyche was received into the inaccessible world of the Unseen, from which no traveller returns. But, in order to secure this complete departure of the soul, it is necessary for the body to be burnt. Though we do occasionally read in the Iliad or the Odyssey that immediately after death and before the burning of the body “the psyche departed to Hades”,[32] the words must not be taken too literally; the soul certainly flies off at once towards Hades, but it hovers now between the realms of the living and [19] the dead until it is received into the final safekeeping of the latter after the burning of the body. The psyche of Patroklos appearing by night to Achilles declares this; it prays for immediate burial in order that it may pass through the door of Hades. Until then the other shadow-creatures prevent its entrance and bar its passage across the river, so that it has to wander restlessly round the house of Aïs of the wide gate (Il. xxiii, 71 ff.). This hastening off towards the house of Hades is again all that is meant when it is said elsewhere of Patroklos himself (Il. xvi, 856) that the psyche departed out of his limbs to the house of Hades. In exactly the same way it is said of Elpenor, the companion of Odysseus, that “his soul descended to Hades” (Od. x, 560). This soul meets his friend, nevertheless, later on, at the entrance of the Shadow-world, not yet deprived of its senses like the rest of the dwellers in that House of Darkness; not until the destruction of its physical counterpart is complete can it enter into the rest of Hades. Only through fire are the souls of the dead “appeased” (Il. vii, 410). So long, then, as the psyche retains any vestige of “earthliness” it possesses some feeling still, some awareness of what is going on among the living.[33]

But once the body is destroyed by fire, then is the psyche relegated to Hades; no return to this earth is permitted to it, and not a breath of this world can penetrate to it there. It cannot even return in thought. Indeed, it no longer thinks at all, and knows nothing more of the world beyond. The living also forget one so completely cut off from themselves (Il. xxii, 389). What, then, should tempt them, during the rest of their lives here, to try to hold communication with the dead by means of a cult?

§ 7

The practice of cremation itself will perhaps give us one last piece of evidence that there had been a time when the idea of the prolonged sojourn of the disembodied spirit in the realm of the living and its power of influencing the survivors existed among the Greeks. Homer knows of no other kind of funeral than that of fire. On a funeral pyre are burnt the bodies of king or leader with the most solemn ritual; those of the common people fallen in war are given to the flames with less ceremony; none are buried. We may well ask whence comes this custom, and what is its meaning for Greeks of the Homeric age? This means of disposing of the bodies of the dead is not by any means the most simple and obvious; it [20] is far easier to carry out, and far less expensive, to bury them in the earth. It has been suggested that the custom of cremation as observed by Persians, Germans, Slavs, and other peoples, is inherited from a nomadic period. The wandering horde has no permanent habitation in which or near which the body of the beloved dead can be buried and perpetual sustenance offered to his soul. Unless, therefore, as is the custom with some nomadic tribes, the dead body is given up to be the prey of beasts or weather, it might seem a natural idea to reduce it to ashes and carry the remains, preserved in a light jar, along with the tribe on its further journeyings.[34] Whether such practical reasonings can have had so much influence in a connexion that is generally governed entirely by fancy, and in which practical considerations are altogether scouted—I shall leave undecided. But, in any case, if we postulate a nomadic origin for the practice of burning the dead among the Greeks, we should have to go back altogether too far into the past to explain a mode of behaviour that, by no means exclusively practised in early times by the Greeks, becomes absolutely prescriptive in a period when they have long ceased to wander. The Asiatic Greeks, and in particular the Ionians, whose popular beliefs and customs are, in general outline, at least, reproduced for us in Homer, deserted one settled habitation in order to found another. Cremation then must have been so permanently established among them that it never entered their heads to seek any other method of disposing of their dead. In Homer not only the Greeks before Troy and Elpenor, far away from home, are burnt when they die; Eëtion, too, in his own home is given a funeral pyre by Achilles (Il. vi, 418). Hektor’s body is burnt in the middle of Troy and the Trojans themselves in their own native land burn their dead (Il. vii). The box or urn that holds the cremated bones of the dead is buried in a mound; the ashes of Patroklos, Achilles, Antilochos, and Aias rest on foreign soil (Od. iii, 109 ff.; xxiv, 76 ff.). It never occurs to Agamemnon that if Menelaos dies before Ilios his brother’s grave could be anywhere else than at Troy (Il. iv, 174 ff.). There is, therefore, evidently no intention on the part of the living of taking the remains of the dead with them on their return home;[35] and this cannot be the object of cremation. It will be necessary to look for some principle more in accordance with primitive modes of thought than such merely practical considerations. Jakob Grimm[36] suggested that the burning of the corpse might have been intended as an offering of the dead man to the gods. Among [21] the Greeks this could only mean the gods of the lower world; but nothing in Greek belief or ritual suggests such a grim intention.[37] The real purpose aimed at in cremation is not so far to seek. Since the destruction of the body by fire is supposed to result in the complete separation of the spirit from the land of the living,[38] it must be assumed that this result is also intended by the survivors who employ the means in question; and consequently that the complete banishment of the psyche once and for all into the other world is the real purpose and the original occasion of the practice of cremation. Isolated expressions of opinion among the nations that have practised the custom do, as a matter of fact, indicate as its object the speedy and entire separation of soul from body.[39] The exact nature of the intention varies with the state of belief about the soul. When the Indians turned from the custom of burying their dead to that of burning them, they were actuated, it appears, by the idea that the sooner and more completely the soul was freed from the body and its limitations, the more easily would it reach the Paradise of the Just.[40] Of the purifying effects of the fire implied in this conception, the Greeks knew nothing until the idea was revived in later times.[41] The Greeks of the Homeric age, innocent of any such “Kathartic” notion, thought only of the destructive powers of that element to which they entrusted the body of their dead, and of the benefit that they were conferring upon the soul in freeing it by fire from the lifeless body, thus adding their assistance to its own efforts to get free.[42] Nothing can destroy the psyche’s visible counterpart more quickly than fire. If, then, the body is burnt and the most treasured possessions of the dead man consumed along with it, no tie remains that can detain the soul any longer in the world of the living.

Cremation, therefore, is intended to benefit the dead, whose soul no longer wanders unable to find rest; but still more the living, for they will not be troubled by ghosts that are securely confined to the depths of the earth. The Greeks of Homer, accustomed by long usage to the burning of the dead, are free from all fears of haunting “ghostly” presences. But when the practice of the fire-funeral was first adopted, that which was to be guarded against in the future by the destruction of the body with fire must have been a real cause of fear.[43] The souls that were so anxiously relegated to the other world of the Unseen must have been feared as awesome inhabitants of this world. And so, from whatever source it may have come to them,[44] the custom of cremation gives firm ground for [22] supposing that at some period of their history the belief in the power and activity of the spirits of the dead and their influence upon the living—a subject of fear rather than reverence—must have been prevalent amongst the Greeks; even though only a few scattered hints still bear witness to such beliefs in the Homeric poems.

§ 8

And evidence of these ancient beliefs we can now see with our eyes and touch with our hands. Owing to an inestimable series of fortunate circumstances, we are enabled to catch a glimpse of a far distant period of Greek history, which not only supplies a background to Homer, but makes him cease to be the earliest source of our information upon Greek life and thought. He is brought suddenly much nearer, perhaps deceptively nearer, to ourselves. The last decades of excavation in the citadel and lower town of Mycenæ and other sites in the Peloponnese right into the centre of the peninsula and as far northwards as Attica and Thessaly, have resulted in the discovery of graves—shaft-graves, chamber-graves, and elaborately constructed domed vaults, which were built and walled up in the period before the Dorian invasion. These graves prove to us—what was already hinted at by a few isolated expressions in Homer[45]—that the Greek “Age of Burning” was preceded, as in the case of the Persians, Indians, and Germans, by a period in which the dead were buried in the ground intact.[46] The lords and ladies of golden Mycenæ, and lesser folk, too (in the graves at Nauplia, in Attica, etc.), were buried when they died. Chieftains take with them into the grave a rich paraphernalia of gorgeous furniture and ornaments—unburnt like their own bodies; they rest upon a bed of small stones, and are covered by a layer of loam and pebbles;[47] traces of smoke and remains of ashes and charred wood bear witness to the fact that the dead were laid upon the place where the “sacrifice for the dead” had already been made; upon the hearth where offerings had been previously burnt inside the grave chamber.[48] This may very well be a burial procedure of the most primeval antiquity. Our oldest “Giants’” graves, in whose treasures no metal of any kind is found, and whose age is on that account considered to be pre-Teutonic, exhibit similar features. Either on the ground, or, occasionally, on a specially prepared basis of fire-brick, the sacrificial fire is lighted, and, when it has burnt out, the corpse is set down upon the place and given [23] a covering of sand, loam, and stone.[49] Remains of burnt sacrificial animals (sheep and goats) have also been found in the graves at Nauplia and elsewhere.[50] In conformity with such different burial customs, the conceptions then held of the nature and powers of the disembodied spirits must have differed widely from those of the Homeric world. Offerings to the dead at a funeral occur in Homer only on special and isolated occasions and accompanied by an obsolete and half-understood ritual. Here they were the regular procedure both with rich and poor alike. But why should they have made offerings to their dead if they did not believe in their power? And why should they have taken away gold and jewellery and art treasures of all kinds and in astonishing quantities from the living and given them to the dead if they had not believed that the dead could find enjoyment in their former possessions even in the grave? Where the material body still remains intact, there the second self can at least occasionally return. Its treasured possessions laid by its side in the tomb are there to prevent its appearing uninvited in the outer world.[51]

Supposing, however, that the soul could return if and where it liked, it is evident that the cult of the dead would not be confined to the occasion of the funeral. And, indeed, that very circumstance—the prolongation of the cult paid to the dead beyond the time of the funeral—of which we could not find a vestige in Homer, can at last (as it seems to me) be traced in pre-Homeric Mycenæ. Over the middle one of four shaft-graves found on the citadel stands an altar which can only have been placed there after the grave was closed and sealed up.[52] It is a round altar, hollow inside, and not closed in at the bottom; in fact, a sort of funnel standing directly upon the earth. If, now, the blood of the victim, mingled with the various drink-offerings, were poured down into this receptacle, the whole would flow downwards into the ground beneath and to the dead man lying there. This is no altar (βωμός) such as was in use in the worship of the gods above, but a sacrificial hearth (ἐσχάρα) for the worship of the inhabitants of the underworld. This structure corresponds closely with the description we have of the hearths upon which offerings were made in a later age to “Heroes”, i.e. the souls of transfigured human beings.[53] Here, then, we have a contrivance for the permanent and repeated worship of the dead; for such worship alone can this structure have been intended. The funeral offering to the dead had already been completed inside the grave-chamber. We thus find a [24] meaning in the “beehive” tombs, for the vaulted main-chamber, beside which the corpse lay in a smaller chamber by itself. They were evidently intended to allow sacrifices to be made inside them—and not once only.[54] At least this is the purpose which the outer chamber serves elsewhere in double-vaulted graves. The evidence of the eye is therefore able to establish the truth of what could only be made out with difficulty from the Homeric poems. We can thus see that there had been a time in which the Greeks, too, believed that after the separation of body and soul the psyche did not entirely cease from intercourse with the upper world. Such a belief naturally called forth a cult of the soul, which lasted on even when the method of burying the body had changed, and even survived into Homeric times, when, with the prevalence of other beliefs, such observances ceased to have any meaning.

II

Homer consistently assumes the departure of the soul into an inaccessible land of the dead where it exists in an unconscious half-life. There it is without clear self-consciousness and consequently neither desires nor wills anything. It has no influence on the upper world, and consequently no longer receives any share of the worship of the living. The dead are beyond the reach of any feelings whether of fear or love. No means exists of forcing or enticing them back again. Homer knows nothing of necromancy or of oracles of the dead,[55] both common in later Greek life. Gods come into the poems and take part in the action of the story; the souls of the departed never do. Homer’s immediate successors in the Epic tradition think quite differently on this point; but for Homer the soul, once relegated to Hades, has no further importance.

If we think how different it must have been before the time of Homer, and how different it certainly was after him, we can hardly help feeling surprise at finding at this early stage of Greek culture such extraordinary freedom from superstitious fears in that very domain where superstition is generally most deeply rooted. Inquiries, however, into the origin and cause of such an untroubled attitude must be made very cautiously and a completely conclusive answer must not be expected. More especially it must be borne in mind that in these poems we have to do, directly and immediately, at least, only with the poet and his circle. The Homeric Epos can only be called “folk poetry” in the sense that it was adapted to the [25] acceptance of the whole family of Greek-speaking people who welcomed it eagerly and transformed it to their own uses; and not because the “folk” in some mystical sense had a share in its composition. Many hands contributed to the composition of the poem, but they merely carried it further in the general direction which had been given to it not by the “Folk” or by the “Saga” tradition, as is sometimes too confidently asserted, but by the authority of the greatest poetic genius that the Greeks or, indeed, mankind ever knew. The tradition once formed was handed on by a close corporation of master-poets and their pupils who preserved, disseminated, continued and imitated the original great poet’s work. If, then, we find on the whole, and apart from a few vagaries in detail, a single unified picture of the world, of gods and men, life and death, given in these two poems, that is the picture which shaped itself in the mind of Homer and was impressed upon his work, and afterwards preserved by the Homeridai. It is plain that the freedom, almost the freethinking, with which every possible occurrence in the world is regarded in these poems, cannot ever have been characteristic of a whole people or race. And not only the animating spirit, but even the outward shape that is given in the two epic poems to the ideal world surrounding and ruling over the world of men, is the work of the poet. It was no priestly theology that gave him his picture of the gods. The popular beliefs of the time, each peculiar to some countryside, canton, or city, must, if left to themselves, have split up into even more contradictory varieties of thought than they did in later times when there existed some few religious institutions common to all Hellas to act as centres of union. The poet alone must have been responsible for the conception and consistent execution of the picture of a single and unified world of gods, confined to a select company of sharply characterized heavenly beings, grouped together in certain well-recognized ways and dwelling together in a single place of residence above the earth. If we listened to Homer alone we should suppose that the innumerable local cults of Greece, with their gods closely bound to the soil, hardly existed. Homer ignores them almost entirely. His gods are pan-Hellenic, Olympian. In fact, in his picture of the gods, Homer fulfilled most completely his special poetic task of reducing confusion and superfluity to uniformity and symmetry of design—the very task which Greek idealism in art continually set before itself. In his picture Greek beliefs about the gods appear absolutely uniform—as uniform as dialect, political condition, manners, [26] and morals. In reality—of this we may be sure—no such uniformity existed; the main outlines of pan-Hellenism were doubtless there, but only the genius of the poet can have combined and fused them into a purely imaginary whole. Provincial differences in themselves interested him not at all. So, too, in the special question that we are considering, if we find him speaking of a single kingdom of the underworld, the resort of all departed spirits ruled over by a single pair of divinities and removed as far from the world of men and their cities as the Olympian dwelling of the Blessed Ones is in the opposite direction, who shall say how far he represents naive popular belief in such matters? On this side Olympus, the meeting place of all the gods that rule in the daylight;[56] on that the realm of Hades that holds in its grasp the unseen spirits that have left this life behind—the parallel is too apparent to be due to anything but the same simplifying and co-ordinating spirit in the one case as in the other.

§ 2

It would, however, be an equally complete misunderstanding of the relation in which Homer stood to the popular beliefs of his time if we imagined that relation to be one of opposition, or even supposed him to have taken up an attitude resembling that of Pindar or the Attic Tragedians towards the conventional opinions of their time. These later poets often enough allow us to see quite clearly the intentional departure from normal opinion represented by their more advanced conceptions. Homer, on the contrary, is as free from controversy as he is from dogma. He does not offer his pictures of God, the world and fate as anything peculiar to himself; and it is natural, therefore, to suppose that his public recognized them as substantially the same as their own. The poet has not taken over the whole body of popular belief, but what he does say must have belonged to popular belief. The selection and combination of this material into a consistent whole was the poet’s real work. If the Homeric creed had not been so constructed in essentials that it corresponded to the beliefs of the time, or, at least, could be made to correspond, then it is impossible to account (even allowing for the poetic tradition of a school) for the uniformity that marks the work of the many poets that had a hand in the composition of the two poems. In this narrow sense it can be truly said that Homer’s poems represent the popular belief of their time; not, indeed, the belief of all Greece, but only of the Ionian [27] cities of the coasts and islands of Asia Minor in which the poet and his songs were at home. In a similarly restricted sense may the pictures of outward life and manners that we find in the Iliad and the Odyssey be taken as a reflection of the contemporary life of the Greeks with particular reference to that of the Ionians. This life must have differed in many respects from that of the “Mycenæan civilization”, and there can be little doubt that the reasons for this difference are to be sought in the long-continued disturbances which marked the centuries that divide Homer from the age of Mycenæ, more especially in the Greek migrations, both in what they destroyed and what they created. The violent invasion of northern Greek peoples into the central mainland and the Peloponnese, the destruction of ancient empires and their civilization, the foundation of new Dorian states held by right of conquest, the great migrations to the Asiatic coasts, and the institution of a new life on foreign soil—all these violent modifications of the old course of existence must have dealt a severe blow at the whole fabric of that civilization and culture. In the same way we find that the cult of Souls and the conception of the fate of departed spirits which governed this cult did not remain in Ionia (the beliefs of which country are reflected in Homer) what it had been at the height of the Mycenæan period. To this change, as to the others which accompanied it, we may well suppose that the struggles and wanderings of the intermediate period contributed a good deal. Homer’s clear-sighted vision that transcends the limits of city and even of racial gods, faiths, and worships, would hardly be explicable without the freedom of movement beyond the boundaries of country, the common life shared with companions of other races, the widened knowledge of all the conditions of foreign life, such as must have resulted from the dislocations and migrations of whole peoples. It is true that the Ionians of Asia Minor did, as we can prove, take a good many of their religious observances with them to their new homes. The migrations, however, did not preserve the connexion between the old homes and the new country with anything like the closeness that marked the later colonization; and when the colonists left the familiar soil behind, the local cults attached to the soil must often have had to be abandoned, too. Now the worship of ancestors, connected as it was with the actual graves of those ancestors, was essentially a local cult. Remembrance of the great ones of the past might survive transplantation, but not their religious worship, which could only be offered at the one spot [28] where their bodies lay buried and which had now been left behind in an enemy’s country. The deeds of ancestors lived on in song, but they themselves began to be relegated to the domain of poetry and imagination. Imagination might adorn the story of their earthly life, but a world that was no longer reminded of their power by the regularly repeated performance of ceremonial, ceased to pay honour to their disembodied souls. Thus the most highly developed form of the cult of Souls—ancestor worship—died out, and the later version of the same thing, the cult of those of the tribe that had died in the new land and been buried there, was prevented from attaining a similar force and development by the newly-introduced practice of burning the bodies of the dead. It may well be that the origin of this new form of funeral rite lay, as has been suggested, in the wish to dismiss the soul of the dead man as quickly and completely as possible from the realm of the living; but it is beyond doubt that the result of this practice was to cut at the root of the belief in the near presence of the departed and the duty of performing the religious observances that were their right; so that such things being deprived of their support, fell into decay and disappeared.

§ 3

We can thus see at least dimly how it was that the Ionian people of the Homeric age were led by the events of their own history and the alteration in funeral customs into holding that view of the soul which a study of their own poets has persuaded us was theirs. This view can hardly have retained more than a few stray vestiges of the ancient cult of the dead. Still, we should only be in a position to say what were the real reasons for this alteration in belief and custom if we knew and understood more about the intellectual changes that led to the gradual appearance of the Homeric view of the world; a view which included within its range a set of beliefs about the soul. Here it is best to confess our ignorance. We have before us the results only of those changes. From them, however, we can at least perceive that the religious consciousness of the Greeks, among whom Homer sang, had developed in a direction which did not allow much scope to the belief in ghosts and spirits of the dead. The Homeric Greeks had the deepest consciousness of man’s finite nature, of his dependence upon forces that lay without him. To remind himself of this and be content with his lot was his proper form of piety. Over him the gods hold sway, wielding a supernatural power—[29]not infrequently a misguided and capricious power—but a conception of a general world-order is beginning to make its way; of a plan underlying the cross-purposes of individual and common life, working itself out in accordance with measured and appointed lot (μοῖρα). The arbitrary power of individual daimones is thus limited, and it is limited further by the will of the highest of the gods. The belief is growing that the world is, in fact, a cosmos, a perfect organization such as men try to establish in their earthly states. In the face of such conceptions it would be increasingly difficult to believe in the vagaries of a supernatural ghostly order which, in direct opposition to the real heavenly order, is always distinguished by the fact that it stands outside any all-embracing dispensation, and allows full play to the caprice and malice of individual unseen powers. The irrational and the unaccountable is the natural element of the belief in ghosts and spirits; this is the source of the peculiar disquiet inspired by this province of belief or superstition. It owes most of its effect to the instability of its fibres. The Homeric world, on the contrary, lives by reason; its gods are fully intelligible to Greek minds and their forms and behaviour are clearly and easily comprehensible to Greek imagination. And the more distinctly were the gods represented, the more did the spirit-phantoms fade away into empty shadows. There was no one who might have been interested in the preservation and extension of the superstitious side of religion; there was in particular no priesthood with a monopoly of instruction or an exclusive knowledge of the details of ritual and the methods of controlling the behaviour of spirits. If anyone did possess any monopoly of teaching, it was, in this age when all the highest faculties of the spirit found their expression in poetry, the poet and the singer. They, however, showed a completely “secular” outlook even in religious matters. Indeed, these very clear-headed men, belonging to the same stock which in a later age “invented” (if one may be allowed to put it so) science and philosophy, were already displaying a mental attitude that distantly threatened the whole system of that plastic representation of things spiritual which the older antiquity had laboriously constructed.

The earliest view held by primitive man about the activities of willing, feeling, or thinking, regards them simply as the manifestations of something which lives and wills inside the visible man. This something is regarded as embodied in one or other of the organs of the human body or as concealed [30] therein. Accordingly the Homeric poems give the name of the “midriff” (φρήν, φρένες) to most of the phenomena of will or feeling and even to those of the intellect. The “heart” (ἦτορ, κῆρ) is also the name of a variety of feelings that were regarded as located in the heart and even identified with it. But this mode of expression had already for Homer become mere formula; such expressions are not always to be taken literally; the words of the poet often show that as a matter of fact he thought of these functions and emotions as incorporeal, though they were still named after parts of the body.[57] And so we often find mentioned side by side with the “midriff” and in the closest conjunction with it, the θυμός, a name which is not taken from any bodily organ and shows already that it is thought of as an immaterial function. In the same way many other words of this kind (νόος-νοεῖν-νόημα, βουλή, μένος, μῆτις) are used to describe faculties and activities of the will, sense, or thought, and show that these activities are thought of as independent, free-working, and incorporeal. A single thread still attaches the poet to the modes of conception and expression of the older world, but he himself has penetrated adventurously far into the realm of pure spirit. With a less cultured people the identification of the special functions of the will and the intellect only leads to the materialization of these into the notion of special physical entities, and consequently to the association of still other “souls”, in the shape of “Conscience”, it may be, or “Will”, in addition to that other shadowy “double” of mankind, the “second self”.[58] The tendency of the Homeric singers was already setting in just the opposite direction—the mythology of the “inner man” was breaking down altogether. They had only to take a few steps further in the same direction to find that they could dispense with the psyche as well. The belief in the existence of the psyche was the oldest and most primitive hypothesis adopted by mankind to explain the phenomena of dreams, swoons, and ecstatic visions; these mysterious states were accounted for by the intervention of a special material personality. Now, Homer has little interest in premonitions and ecstatic states, and no inclination in that direction whatever. He cannot, therefore, have been very much concerned with the evidence for the existence of a psyche in living men. The final proof of the idea that the psyche must have been dwelling in man is the fact that it is separated from him in death. A man dies when he breathes out his last breath. This breath, something like a breath of air, and not a “nothing”, any more than the wind its relative, [31] but a body with a definite form (though it may not be visible to waking eyes)—this is the psyche, whose shape, the image of the man himself, is well known from dream-vision. One, however, who has become accustomed to the idea of bodiless powers working inside man will, on this last occasion when the powers within man show themselves, be likely to suppose that what brings about the death of a man is not a physical thing that goes out of him, but a power—a quality—which ceases to act; nothing else, in fact, than his “life”. And he would not, of course, think of ascribing an independent continuous existence after the disruption of the body to a mere abstract idea like “life”. Homer, however, never got quite as far as this; for the most part the psyche is for him and always remains a real “thing”—the man’s second self. But that he had already begun to tread the slippery path in the course of which the psyche is transformed into an abstract “concept of life”, is shown by the fact that he several times quite unmistakably uses the word “psyche” when we should say “life”.[59] It is essentially the same mode of thought that leads him to say “midriff” (φρένες) when he no longer means the physical diaphragm, but the abstract concept of will or intellect. To say “psyche” instead of “life” is not the same thing as saying “life” instead of “psyche” (and Homer never did the latter); but it is clear that for him in the process of dematerializing such concepts, even the psyche, a figure once so full of significance, is beginning to fade and vanish away.

The separation from the land of their forefathers, and habituation to the use of cremation, the new direction taken by religious thought, the tendency to turn the once material forces of man’s inner life into attractions—all these things contributed to weaken the belief in a powerful and significant life of the disembodied soul and its connexion with the affairs of this world. And at the same time it caused the decline of the cult of the Souls. So much, I think, we may safely assert. The deepest and most fundamental reasons for this decline in both belief and cult may elude our search, just as it is impossible for us to be sure how far in detail the Homeric poems reflect the beliefs of the people who first listened to them, and where the free invention of the poet begins. But the combination of the various elements of belief into a whole which, though far from being a dogmatically closed system, may yet not unfairly be called the Homeric Theology—this, we may say, is most probably the work of the poet. The poet has a free hand in the picture he gives of the gods and never comes into conflict with any popular doctrine because Greek [32] religion then, as always, consisted essentially in the right honouring of the gods of the country and not in any particular set of dogmas. There could hardly be any general conception of godhead and divinity with which the poet might come into conflict. That the popular mind absorbed thoroughly that picture of the world of gods which the Homeric poems had given, is shown by the whole future development of Greek culture and religion. If divergent conceptions did, in fact, also maintain themselves, they derived their strength not so much from a different religious theory, as from the postulates of a different religious cult that had not been influenced by any poet’s imagination. They might also more particularly have had the effect of causing an incidental obscurity within the epic itself, in the poet’s vision of the Unseen World and its life.

III

A test case of the thorough-going uniformity and consistency of the Homeric conception of the nature and circumstances of the souls of the departed is provided for us, within the limits of the poems themselves, by the story of Odysseus’ Journey to Hades—a test they are hardly likely to survive, it may well be thought. How is the poet in describing a living hero’s dealings with the inhabitants of the shadow-world, going to preserve the immaterial, dreamlike character of the Homeric “Souls”? How keep up the picture of the soul as something that holds itself resolutely aloof and seems to avoid all active intercourse with other folk? It is hard to see what could tempt the poet to try and penetrate with the torch of imagination into this underworld of ineffectual shadows. The matter becomes somewhat more intelligible, however, as soon as it is realized in what manner the narrative arose; how through continual additions from later hands it gradually assumed a form quite unlike itself.[60]

§ 1

It may be taken as one of the few certain results of the critical analysis of the Homeric poems that the narrative of the Descent of Odysseus to the Underworld did not form part of the original plan of the Odyssey. Kirke bids Odysseus undertake the journey to Hades in order that he may see Teiresias there and be told of “the way and the means of his return, and how he may reach his home again over the fish-teeming deep” (Od. x, 530 f.). Teiresias, however, on being [33] discovered in the realm of shadows, fulfils this requirement only very partially and superficially. Whereupon, Kirke herself gives to the returned Odysseus a much fuller account, and as regards the one point already mentioned by Teiresias, a much more precise account, of the perils that lie before him on his homeward journey.[61] The journey to the land of the dead was thus unnecessary, and there can be no doubt that originally it had no place in the poem. It is plain, however, that the composer of this adventure only used the (superfluous) inquiry addressed to Teiresias as a pretext which afforded a more or less plausible motive for the introduction of this narrative into the body of the poem. The real object of the poet, the true motive of the story, must then be sought elsewhere than in the prophecy of Teiresias, which turns out to be so brief and unhelpful. It would be natural to suppose that the aim of the poet was to give the eye of imagination a glimpse into the marvels and terrors of that dark realm into which all men must go. Such an intention would be very intelligible in the case of a medieval or a Greek poet of later times; and there were afterwards plenty of Greek poems which described a Descent to Hades. But it would be hard to account for it in a poet of the Homeric school; for such a poet the realm of the dead and its inhabitants could hardly supply a subject for a narrative. And, in fact, the inventor of Odysseus’ visit to the dead had quite a different object in view. He was anything but a Greek Dante. It is possible to see the purpose which guided him as soon as his poem is stripped of the manifold additions with which later times invested it. The original kernel which thus remains is then seen to be nothing but a series of conversations between Odysseus and the souls of those of the dead with whom he had stood in close personal relationship. Besides Teiresias he speaks with his old ship-companion Elpenor, who had just died, with his mother Antikleia, with Agamemnon and Achilles; and he tries in vain to effect a reconciliation with the implacable Aias. These conversations in Hades are, for the general furtherance of the story of Odysseus’ wanderings and return, quite superfluous, and they serve in a very minor degree and only incidentally to give information about the conditions and character of the inscrutable world beyond the grave. The questions and answers there given are confined entirely to the affairs of the upper world. They bring Odysseus, who has now been wandering so long alone and far from the world of actual humanity, into ideal association with the substantial world of flesh and blood to which his thoughts [34] stretch out, and in which he himself had once been an actor and is soon to play an important part again.[62] His mother informs him of the distracted state of Ithaca, Agamemnon of the treacherous deed of Aigisthos carried out with the help of Klytaimnestra. Odysseus himself is able to console Achilles with an account of the heroic deeds of his son, who is still alive in the daylight; with Aias, resentful even in Hades, he cannot come to terms. Thus the theme of the second part of the Odyssey begins to appear; even to the shadows below there reaches an echo of the great deeds of the Trojan war and of the adventures of the Return from Troy, which occupied the minds of all the singers of the time. The introduction of these stories by means of conversations with the persons who took part in them is the essential purpose of the poet. The impelling instinct to expand in all directions the circle of legend in whose centre stood the adventure of the Iliad, and link it up with other circles of heroic legend, was fully satisfied by later poets in the separate poems of the Epic Cycle. At the time when the Odyssey was composed these other epic narratives were in the full tide of their youthful exuberance. The streams had not yet found a convenient bed in which to run, and they added their individual contributions (for they all related events which preceded it) to the elaborate narration of the return of the last Hero who still wandered vainly and alone. The main object of the story of Telemachos’ journey to meet Nestor and Menelaos (in the third and fourth books of the Odyssey) is manifestly to bring the son into relation with the father’s companions in war, and so to provide occasion for further narratives in which a more detailed picture of some of the events between the Iliad and the Odyssey might be given. Demodokos, the Phæacian bard, is made to recount (in abbreviated form) two adventures that had occurred to the great chieftain. Even when such stories did not immediately add to the picture of Odysseus’ deeds or character, they served to point to the great background from which the adventures of the much-enduring wanderer, now completely isolated, should stand out; and to set these in the ideal framework which could alone give them their full significance. This natural creative instinct of legendary poetry also inspired the poet of the “Journey to Hades”. He, too, saw the adventures of Odysseus not in isolation but in lively and vital connexion with all the other adventures that took their origin from Troy. He conceived the idea of bringing once more, for the last time, the chieftain famed in council and war, into communication with the mightiest king and the noblest [35] hero of that famous expedition; and to do that he had to take him to the realm of the shadows which had long contained them. Nor could he well avoid the tone of pathos which is natural to this interview on the borders of the realm of nothingness to which all the desire and the strength of life must eventually come. The questioning of Teiresias is merely, as has been said, the poet’s pretext for confronting Odysseus with his mother and his former companions, and this meeting was his prime motive. Probably this particular device was suggested by the recollection of the story which Menelaos tells of his meeting with Proteus, the Old Man of the Sea (Od. iv, 351 ff.),[63] where the inquiry from the seer as to the means of reaching home again is also a mere pretext for the narration of Return adventures—those of Aias, Agamemnon, and Odysseus.

§ 2

It is certain that the intention of this poet cannot possibly have been simply the description of the underworld for its own sake. Even the scenery of these mysterious incidents which might well have attracted his fancy, is only given in brief allusions. The ship sails over Okeanos to the people of the Kimmerians[64] that never see the sun, and reaches at last the “barren coast” and the “Grove of Persephone”, with its black poplars and weeping willows. Odysseus with two companions goes on ahead to the entrance of Erebos, where Pyriphlegethon and Kokytos, a branch of the Styx, flow into Acheron. There he digs his sacrificial trench to which the souls flock upward out of Erebos over the asphodel-meadows. It is the same underworld in the bowels of the earth that is presupposed in the Iliad, too, as the dwelling-place of the dead, only more accurately described and more fully realized.[65] The details of the picture are so lightly sketched in that one might well suppose that they, too, had been taken from some older mythical material. At any rate, he borrowed the “Styx”, so well known in the Iliad; and it may be supposed that the same applies to the other rivers as well, whose names are clearly derived from words meaning burning (of dead bodies?),[66] lamentation, and sorrow.[67] The poet himself, interested only in the representation of character, is not at all disposed to dwell upon the merely fanciful, and confines himself to a few brief allusions. Nor does he give any very lengthy account of the dwellers in Erebos, and what he does say of them keeps well within the limits of the usual Homeric belief. The Souls resemble shadow- or dream-pictures, and [36] are impalpable to the human touch.[68] They are without consciousness when they appear. Elpenor alone, whose body still lies unburnt, has for that very reason retained his senses and even shows a form of heightened consciousness that approaches prophecy; resembling in this respect Patroklos and Hektor at the moment when the psyche is parted from the body.[69] This, however, is to leave him as soon as his corpse is destroyed. Teiresias alone, the prophet famed above all others in Theban legend, has preserved his consciousness and prophetic vision even in the Shadow-world through the good-will of Persephone; but this is an exception which only establishes the rule. What Antikleia tells her son of the powerlessness and immateriality of the soul after the burning of the body[70] sounds almost like an official confirmation of the orthodox Homeric view. Everything, in fact, in this poet’s description enforces the truth of this belief, and though the living are, indeed, untroubled by the feeble souls banished to outer darkness, yet out of Erebos itself the piteous knell of this decree reaches us in the lament of Achilles as he refuses his friend’s attempt at comfort—everyone knows the unforgettable words.

§ 3

And yet the poet ventures to go beyond Homer in one important point. What he hints rather than actually says of the condition of things in Hades conflicts in no single point with the conventional Homeric view; but it is an innovation to suggest that this condition of things can even for the briefest moment be interrupted. The blood drunk by the souls gives them back for a moment their consciousness; their remembrance of the upper world returns to them. Their senses must then all the while have been not dead but sleeping. There can be no doubt that the poet for whom this supposition is indispensable to his story did not thereby intend to formulate an entirely new doctrine. But in order to add to his poetic effect, he was led to include in his story some touches which, meaningless within the circle of his own beliefs, pointed elsewhere, and, indeed, backward, to older, quite differently moulded beliefs, and to the usages founded upon them. He makes Odysseus, following the advice of Kirke, dig a grave at the entrance of Hades in which to pour out a solemn drink-offering to “all the dead”, consisting first of all in a mixture of milk and honey, then wine and water, over which white meal is finely sprinkled. Next he slays a ram and a black ewe, bending their heads downwards into the grave.[71] [37] Then the bodies of the animals are burnt, and round the blood collect all the souls, who flutter about it, kept at a distance by Odysseus’ sword[72] till Teiresias has first drunk. Here the drink-offerings constitute undoubtedly a sacrificial offering devoted to the dead and poured out for their satisfaction. The poet indeed does not think of the slaughtered animals as a sacrifice; the tasting of the blood is simply intended to restore to the souls their consciousness; in the case of Teiresias, who retains his senses, the gift of prophetic clairvoyance. But this, we can see clearly, is a fiction of the poet’s: what he here describes is in every detail a sacrifice to the dead, such as we so often find described as such in accounts from later times. The scent of the blood calls up the spirits; their satiation with blood (αἱμακουρία) is the essential purpose of such offerings; and these are what the poet’s imagination dimly recalls as models. Nothing in this picture has been invented. Neither, on the other hand, it is quite clear, has he altered his sacrificial ceremony to make it fit in with novel ideas that were beginning to gain ground; ideas that ascribed a more vital existence to the souls of the dead. For here, too, just as in the case of the offerings to the dead described in the funeral of Patroklos, the poet’s manner of conceiving the life of the dead is not such as could give support to new and more vigorous cult ceremonies. His conception tends rather to contradict the ceremonies that he describes. In fact, what we have here, too, is a “fossilized” and no longer intelligible vestige of a practice that was once rooted in belief—a relic deprived of its original meaning and adapted by the poet to the special purposes of his narrative. The sacrificial ritual used to attract the souls on this occasion strikingly resembles the ritual which was used in later times to conjure up the souls of the dead at those places which were supposed to give entrance to the ghostly world below the earth. It is also not impossible that, even in the time of the poet of the “Journey to Hades”, in some remote corners of Greek lands such calling-up of the dead was still practised as a relic of former belief. But, supposing that the poet had some information of such local cults of the dead, and modelled his story on them,[73] that only makes it the more remarkable that he effaces all trace of the original meaning of his ritual, and in adherence to the strict Homeric doctrine on the point, banishes all thought that the souls may possibly continue in the neighbourhood of the living and can thence be conjured up into the light of day.[74] He knows only of one kingdom of the Dead far off in the dim West, beyond the bounds of sea [38] and ocean, where the legendary hero of romance can, indeed, reach its gateway, but where alone he can have communication with the souls of the dead. The House of Hades never allows its inhabitants to pass out.

And yet all this is hopelessly contradicted by the votive offerings that the poet, by what can only be called an oversight, makes Odysseus promise to all the dead, and particularly to Teiresias, upon his return home (Od. x, 521–6; xi, 29–33). Of what use would it be to the dead to receive the offering of a “barren cow”,[75] of “treasures” burnt upon the funeral pyre; or how could Teiresias enjoy the slaughtering of a black sheep far away in Ithaca—when they are all confined to Erebos and could not taste the offerings made to them? This is the most remarkable and important of all vestiges of an ancient worship of the dead. It proves indubitably that in pre-Homeric times the belief prevailed that even after the funeral of the body the soul is not eternally banished to the inaccessible land of shadows, but is able to approach the sacrificer and to enjoy the sacrifices offered to it, just as much as the gods can. A single obscure allusion in the Iliad[76] suggests what is here much more clearly and almost naïvely revealed—namely that even at the time when the Homeric view of the nothingness of the souls for ever parted from their bodies reigned supreme, the custom of making offerings to the dead after the funeral was over (though in exceptional circumstances only, and not as a regularly recurring performance) had not been entirely forgotten.

§ 4

The contradictions into which he is betrayed by the introduction of such intercourse between the living and the dead proves that the undertaking was rather venturesome for a Homeric poet of strictly orthodox views. Still, in the picture of Odysseus’ meeting with his mother and former companions, which was his main object, the poet hardly strayed at all from the normal Homeric path. This, however, was, as it happened, the very point in which later generations of poetically inclined readers or hearers found his narrative wanting. He himself carefully linked up every detail with his living hero, the central interest of his story, and only made him speak with the souls of such as had some real and close connexion with him. A review of the motley inhabitants of the underworld in their multitude hardly interested him at all. It was the very thing which seemed indispensable to later readers. They made additions to his story and introduced the multitudes of the dead of all ages; the warriors with [39] wounds still visible and in bloodstained armour;[77] or else, more in the manner of a Hesiodic catalogue for the assistance of the memory than making them live in Homeric fashion for the imagination, they pictured a whole host of mothers, the illustrious ancestors of great families, passing before Odysseus, though they had no particular claim upon his sympathy; nor, indeed, is any serious attempt made to bring them into relationship with him.[78] This seemed to improve the picture of the general multitude of the dead, represented in the persons of selected individuals. Next, the condition of things in the world below must at least be illustrated by a few examples. Odysseus casts a glance into the inner recesses of the underworld—which was hardly possible for him, considering that he stood at its outermost gateway—and sees there the heroic figures of those who, like true “images” (εἴδωλα) of the living, still continue the activities of their former lives. There he sees Minos giving judgment among the dead, Orion hunting, Herakles still with the bow in his hand, and the arrow fitted to the string, “like one ever about to shoot.” This is certainly not Herakles, the “Hero-God”, as he was known to later ages. The poet knows nothing as yet of the elevation of the son of Zeus above the lot of all mortals-—any more than the earliest poet of the “Journey” knew of the translation of Achilles out of Hades. The disregard of such things was naturally regarded by later readers as a negligence on the part of the poet. And, in fact, they boldly inserted three verses here which inform us that he “himself”, the real Herakles, dwells among the gods—what Odysseus saw in Hades was only his counterfeit. Whoever wrote this was practising a little original theology on his own account. Such a contrast between a fully animated “self” possessing the original man’s body and soul still united, and a counterfeit presentment of himself (which cannot be his psyche) relegated to Hades, is quite strange both to Homer and to Greek thought of later times.[79] It is, in fact, an example of the earliest “harmonizer’s” solution of a difficulty. The poet does, indeed, attempt to connect Herakles with Odysseus by making the two enter into conversation, in imitation of the conversations with Agamemnon and Achilles. But it is soon evident that these two have really nothing to say to each other; Odysseus, in fact, is silent. There was no real relationship between them, at most an analogy; Herakles, too, having once descended alive into Hades. This analogy alone, in fact, appears to have suggested the introduction of Herakles in this place.[80] [40]

There now remains (inserted after Minos and Orion and before Herakles and probably composed by the same hand that was responsible for them) the incident of the three “penitents” undergoing punishment; a passage that no reader can possibly forget. First Tityos, whose giant frame is preyed upon by two vultures, is seen, then Tantalos, who in the middle of a lake is parched with thirst and cannot reach up to the fruit-laden branches over his head, and last Sisyphos, who is bound to roll up-hill the stone that ever rolls back again. The limits of the Homeric conception (with which the pictures of Minos, Orion, and Herakles might still perhaps be reconciled) are in these pictures definitely overstepped. The souls of these three unfortunates are credited with complete and continuous consciousness. Without this, their punishment would not have been felt and would not have been inflicted. And, observing the extraordinarily matter-of-fact and cursory description, which takes the reasons of the punishment for granted except in the case of Tityos, we cannot help feeling that these examples of punishment after death were not invented for the first time by the composer of these lines. They cannot have been offered to the astonished ears of their hearers as a daring novelty, but were rather recalled briefly to those hearers’ recollection. Probably these three are selected as examples out of a much larger collection of such pictures. Can it be that still older poets (who may still, however, have been more recent than the poet of the earliest parts of the “Journey”) had already dared to desert the Homeric view of the soul?

However that may be, we may be sure that the punishment of the three “penitents” was not intended to contradict flatly the Homeric conception of the unconsciousness and nothingness of the shades. They could not in that case have accommodated themselves so well to a poem that is founded upon such conceptions. They do not disprove the rule because they are, and are only intended to be, exceptions to that rule. This, however, would be impossible if it were justifiable to interpret the poet’s fiction as representing, in the person of these three unfortunates, three types of special sins and classes of sinners; as, for example, unbridled Lust (Tityos), insatiable Gluttony (Tantalos), and Pride of the Intellect (Sisyphos).[81] They would in that case be particular examples of the retribution which one must think of as being extended to all the innumerable hosts of shadows who have been guilty of the same sins. But nothing in the description itself warrants such a theological interpretation; indeed, we have no reason [41] or excuse for attributing to this particular poet such a desire to prove the existence of a compensatory justice in an after life. It is quite strange to Homer, and so far as it ever became known to later Greek theology, it was only introduced very late, through the influence of a speculative mysticism. No, the almighty power of the gods is able in special cases, so this picture assures us, to preserve for individual souls their consciousness; in the case of Teiresias as a reward, in the case of these three objects of the gods’ hatred, in order that they may be capable of feeling their punishment. The real fault for which they are punished can be guessed fairly certainly from what the poet tells us about Tityos—it is in each case a grievous offence committed by them against the gods. The crime of Tantalos we can make out from what we know of him through other sources. It is less easy to discover what was the exact misdeed for which the crafty Sisyphos is punished.[82] In any case, it is clear that retribution has overtaken all three of them for sins against the gods themselves—sins which human beings of later times could not possibly commit. And for this reason alone, neither their deeds nor their punishment can have anything typical or representative about them; they are sheer exceptions, and that is why the poet found them interesting.

The episode of Odysseus’ journey to Hades (even in its latest portions) suggests no acquaintance whatever with any general class of sinners who receive their punishment in that place. If, indeed, it had alluded to the punishment in the after-world of perjurers, orthodox Homeric doctrine would not in that case have been violated. Twice over in the Iliad, on solemn occasions of oath-taking, besides the gods of the upper world, the Erinyes also are called upon as witnesses of the oath; for they punish under the earth those who break their oath.[83] Not without reason have these passages been held to show “that the Homeric conception of the phantasmal half-life of the souls under the earth, where they are without feeling or consciousness, was not a general folk-belief.”[84] We must add, however, that the belief held in Homeric times of the punishment of oath-breakers in the realm of shadows cannot as yet have been very vital, for it was quite unable to prevent the success of the totally incompatible belief in the unconscious nothingness of disembodied spirits. A solemn oath-formula (so much that is primitive persisting, even after it has become dead letter, in formula) preserved a reference to that ancient belief, which had become strange to Homeric ears—a vestige, in fact, of a bygone point of view. It may be [42] that in the dim past, when men still vividly and literally believed in the reality of a punishment in after life for perjury, all the souls in Hades were credited with a conscious existence; but there never was a time when men generally believed that earthly sins (including perjury as only one among many) were punished in Hades. Oath-breaking was not punished as a specially outrageous moral failing—it may well be doubted whether the Greeks ever considered or felt it to be such. The perjurer, rather than any other particular sinner, was the special victim of the dread goddesses, for the simple reason that the perjurer in his desire to emphasize in the most awful manner his aversion to falsehood, has invoked against himself, if he fails to keep his oath, the most terrible fate of all—to suffer torment in the realm of Hades whence is no escape.[85] To the Infernal Spirits of the Underworld, to whom he had condemned himself, he falls a victim if he breaks his word. Belief in the supernatural power of such imprecations,[86] and not any special moral importance attached to truth-telling—an idea quite strange to the older Antiquity—gave to the oath its peculiar terrors.

§ 5

A final example of the tenacity with which custom may outlive the belief on which it is founded is afforded by the story told of Odysseus, that in fleeing from the Kikonian land, he did not leave it until he had called thrice upon those of his companions who had fallen in the battle with the Kikones (Od. ix, 65–6). References to similar callings upon the dead in later literature make the meaning of such behaviour clear. The souls of the dead who have fallen in foreign lands must be “called”;[87] they will then, if this is properly done, follow the caller to their distant home, where an “empty grave” awaits them.[88] This duty is regularly performed in Homer for the benefit of those whose bodies it is impossible to recover and bury in the proper way. But a summons of the dead and the erection of such empty receptacles—intended for whom if not for the souls who must then be accessible to the devotion of their relations?—was natural enough for those who believed in the possibility of the soul’s sojourn in the neighbourhood of its living friends; it was not admissible for supporters of the Homeric belief. Here we have once more a remarkable vestige of an ancient belief, surviving in a custom that has not been entirely given up even in altered times. Here, too, the belief which had given rise to the custom, was extinct. [43] If we ask the Homeric poet for what purpose a mound was heaped up over the grave of the dead and a gravestone set upon it, he will answer us: in order that his fame may remain imperishable among men, and that future generations may not be ignorant of his story.[89] That sounds truly Homeric. When a man dies his soul departs into a region of twilit dream-life; his body, the visible man, perishes. Only his glorious name, in fact, lives on. His praises speak to after ages from the monument to his honour on his grave-mound—and in the song of the bard. A poet would naturally be inclined to think such things.

NOTES TO CHAPTER I

I

[1] E. Kammer, Einheit d. Odyssee, 510 ff.

[2] E.g. Il. Α 3, πολλὰς δ’ ἰφθίμους ψυχὰς (κεφαλάς Apol. Rhod., as in Λ 55: mistakenly) Ἄϊδι προΐαψεν ἡρώων, αὐτοὺς δὲ ἑλώρια τεῦχε κύνεσσιν. Ψ 105, παννυχίη γὰρ μοι Πατροκλῆος δειλοῖο ψυχὴ ἐφεστήκει . . . ἔϊκτο δὲ θέσκελον αὐτῷ (cf. 66).

[3] E.g. Λ 262, ἔνθ’ Ἀντήνορος υἷες ὑπ’ Ἀτρείδῃ βασιλῆι πότμον ἀναπλήσαντες ἔδυν δόμον Ἄϊδος εἴσω. The ψυχή of Elpenor and afterwards that of Teiresias, of his mother, of Agamemnon, etc., is addressed by Odysseus in the Nekyia of the Od. simply as: Ἐλπῆνορ, Τειρεσίη, μῆτερ ἐμή, etc. And cf. such expressions as: Ψ 244, εἰς ὅ κεν αὐτὸς ἐγὼ Ἄϊδι κεύθωμαι, or Ο 251, καὶ δὴ ἔγωγ’ ἐφάμην, νέκυας καὶ δῶμ’ Ἀίδαο ἤματι τῷδ’ ἵξεσθαι . . . or Ξ 456 f., etc.

[4] The first view is Nägelsbach’s, the second that of Grotemeyer.

[5] And of civilized peoples, too, in antiquity. Just such a second self, an εἴδωλον duplicating the visible self of man, were, in their original significance, the genius of the Romans, the Fravashi of the Persians, the Ka of the Egyptians.

[6] ὑποτίθεται (sc. Homer) τὰς ψυχὰς τοῖς εἰδώλοις τοῖς ἐν τοῖς κατόπτροις φαινομένοις ὁμοίας καὶ τοῖς διὰ τῶν ὑδάτων συνισταμένοις, ἃ καθάπαξ ἡμῖν ἐξείκασται καὶ τὰς κινήσεις μιμεῖται στερεμνιώδη δὲ ὑπόστασιν οὐδεμίαν ἔχει εἰς ἀντίληψιν καὶ ἁφήν, Apollod. π. θεῶν ap. Stob., Ecl. i, p. 420 W.

[7] Cf. Cic., Div. i, 63: iacet corpus dormientis ut mortui, viget autem et vivit animus. Quod multo magis faciet post mortem cum omnino corpore excesserit. TD. i, 29: visis quibusdam saepe movebantur eisque maxime nocturnis, ut viderentur ei qui vita excesserant vivere. Here we have precise ancient testimony both for the subjective and the objective elements in dreaming and for their importance for the origin of belief about the soul.

[8] Τὸν δ’ ἔλιπε ψυχή . . . αὖτις δ’ ἀμπνύνθη, Ε 696 f. Τὴν δὲ κατ’ ὀφθαλμῶν ἐρεβεννὴ νὺξ ἐκάλυψεν, ἤριπε δ’ ἐξοπίσω, ἀπὸ δὲ ψυχὴν ἐκάπυσσεν . . . ἔπει οὖν ἄμπνυτο καὶ ἐς φρένα θυμὸς ἀγέρθη—X 466 ff., 475; and ω 348: ἀποψύχοντα.

[9] Speaking of suspirium (= λειποψυχία), Sen., Ep. liv, 2, says, medici hanc “meditationem mortis” vocant. faciet enim aliquando spiritus ille quod saepe conatus est.

[10] A remarkable idea seems to be obscurely suggested in an expression such as that of ξ 207, ἀλλ’ ἤτοι τὸν Κῆρες ἔβαν θανάτοιο φέρουσαι εἰς Ἀΐδαο δόμους; cf. Β 302. Usually the Keres bring death to men: here (like Thanatos himself in later poetry) they conduct the dead into the realm of Hades. They are daimones of Hades, originally and primitively themselves souls of the departed (see below, [p. 168]), and it is a natural idea to make such soul-spirits, hovering in the air, carry off the souls of men just dead to the realm of the souls. In Homer only a stereotyped phrase preserves the vague memory of such a conception. [45]

[11] Of the dead we read in λ 219, οὐ γὰρ ἔτι σάρκας τε καὶ ὀστέα ἶνες ἔχουσι. Taking the words strictly this might mean that the dead possess sinews but not the flesh or bones that should be held together by the sinews. This is how Nauck, in fact, understood the Homeric words: Mélanges Grécorom. iv, 718. But it is very difficult to picture “shadows” which in this manner possess sinews but no body of flesh and bones: the corrupt words of fr. 229, preserved apart from their context, are quite insufficient to prove that Aesch. derived such an unrealizable impression from the Homeric words.—That the poet of these lines from the Nek. simply meant “flesh, bones, and sinews, too, which might have held them together”, is shown quite clearly by what follows: ἀλλὰ τὰ μέν τε πυρὸς κρατερὸν μένος αἰθομένοιο δαμνᾷ, ἐπεί κε πρῶτα λίπῃ λεύκ’ ὀστέα θυμός, ψυχὴ δ’ ἠΰτ’ ὄνειρος ἀποπταμένη πεπότηται. How, then, could the fire help destroying the sinews too?

[12] The sacrificial character of the proceedings at the rogus of Patroklos has again been called in question by v. Fritze, de libatione veterum Graecorum, 71 f. (1893). He admits this interpretation of the pouring of the blood on the pyre, but explains the other circumstances differently. It would be quite easy to disprove in this fashion the sacrificial character of every ὁλοκαύτωμα for χθόνιοι whether Heroes or the dead. It is true that the bodies of sheep and cattle, horses and dogs, thus completely consumed by fire, are not a “food-offering”, but they are a sacrifice for all that, and belong to the class of expiatory offerings in which the flesh is not offered for the food of the daimon but the lives of the victims are sacrificed to him. That Achilles slays the Trojan prisoners at the rogus κταμένοιο χολωθείς (Ψ 23) does not destroy the sacrificial character of this offering intended to appease the wrath (felt also by Achilles) of the dead man.—The whole procedure gives a picture of primitive sacrificial ritual in honour of the dead and differs in no particular from the ritual of sacrifice to the θεοὶ χθόνιοι. This is recognized by Stengel in his Chthonischer und Todtencult (Festschr. Friedländ.), p. 432, who also marks clearly the differences between the two religious ceremonies as they were gradually evolved in the process of time.

[13] It cannot be denied that the libation of wine poured out by Achilles during the night (to which he expressly summons the psyche of Patroklos, Ψ 218–22) is sacrificial in character, like all similar χοαί. The wine with which the embers of the funeral pyre are extinguished may have been intended to serve that purpose alone and not as a sacrifice. But the jars of honey and oil which Achilles has placed upon the pyre (Ψ 170; cf. ω 67–8) can hardly be regarded as anything but sacrificial (cf. Bergk, Opusc. ii, 675; acc. to Stengel, Jahrb. Philol., p. 649, 1887, they only serve to kindle the flames, but the honey, at any rate, seems a strange material for the purpose. For libations at the rogus or at the grave honey and oil are regularly used—see Stengel himself, loc. cit., and Philol. xxxix, 378 ff.). Acc. to v. Fritze, de libat., 72, the jars of honey and oil were intended not as libations but for the “bath of the dead”—in the next world, in the Homeric Hades!—Honey can only have been used for bathing purposes, in Greece as elsewhere, by those who unintentionally fell into it like Glaukos.

[14] On Greek hair offerings see Wieseler, Philol. ix, 711 ff., who rightly regards these offerings as symbolic and as substitutes for primitive human sacrifice. The same explanation of the offering of hair is given in the case of other peoples also; cf. Tylor, ii, 401. [46]

[15] Patroklos’ request for prompt burial (69 ff.) gives no sufficient motive, since Achilles has already given orders for the funeral to take place next day, 49 ff. (cf. 94 f.).

[16] ll. 19; 179. Again, in the night following the erection of the funeral pyre, when the body is burning, Achilles calls to the soul of Patroklos ψυχὴν κικλήσκων Πατροκλῆος δειλοῖο 221. The person thus called upon is evidently supposed to be still close at hand. This is not contradicted by the formula χαῖρε . . . καὶ εἰν Ἀΐδαο δόμοισι (19, 179), for in l. 19. at least, the words cannot mean in Hades, since the soul is still outside Hades, as it tells us itself, 71 ff. The words can only mean “about”, “before” the House of Hades (like ἐν ποταμῷ “by the river”, etc.). In the same way εἰς Ἀΐδαο δόμον often only means towards the house of Hades (Ameis on κ 512).

[17] From descriptions in ancient poetry? or had similar customs—at least, at the funerals of chieftains—survived into the poet’s own time? Especially magnificent, e.g., were the burials of Spartan kings—and also Cretan kings, it appears, so long as there were any; cf. Arist. fr. 476, p. 1556a, 37 ff.

[18] Funeral games for Amarynkeus, Ψ 630 ff., for Achilles, ω 85 ff. Such games are referred to as being quite the usual custom in ω 87 ff. Later poetry is full of descriptions of such ἀγῶνες ἐπιτάφιοι of the heroic age.

[19] As Aristarchos noticed: see Rh. Mus. 36, 544 f. Rather different are the (certainly ancient) games and contests for the hand of a bride (cf. stories of Pelops, Danaos, Ikarios, etc.).

[20] Cf. Ψ 274, εἰ μὲν νῦν ἐπὶ ἄλλῳ ἀεθλεύοιμεν Ἀχαιοί, i.e. in honour of Patroklos; cf. 646: σὸν ἑταῖρον ἀέθλοισι κτερέϊζε. κτερεΐζειν means to give the dead man his κτέρεα, i.e. his former possessions (by burning them). The games are therefore on exactly the same footing as the burning of the personal effects of the dead in which the soul of the dead man was supposed still to take pleasure.

[21] Aug., CD. viii, 26: Varro dicit omnes mortuos existimari manes deos, et probat per ea sacra quae omnibus fere mortuis exhibentur, ubi et ludos commemorat funebres, tamquam hoc sit maximum divinitatis indicium, quod non solent ludi nisi numinibus celebrari.

[22] Quae pietas ei debetur a quo nihil acceperis? aut quid omnino, cuius nullum meritum sit, ei deberi potest? . . . (dei) quamobrem colendi sint non intellego nullo nec accepto ab eis nec sperato bono, Cic., ND. i, 116; cf. Pl., Euthphr. pass. Homer speaks in the same way of the ἀμοιβὴ ἀγακλειτῆς ἑκατόμβης, γ 58–9 (cf. ἀμοιβὰς τῶν θυσιῶν from the side of the gods, Pl. Smp., 202 E).

[23] τοῦτό νυ καὶ γέρας οἷον ὀϊζυροῖσι βροτοῖσιν, κείρασθαί τε κόμην βαλέειν τ’ ἀπὸ δάκρυ παρειῶν, δ 197 f.; cf. ω 188 f., 294 f.

[24] οὐ γὰρ ἔτ’ αὖτις νίσομαι ἐξ’ Ἀΐδαο ἐπήν με πυρὸς λελάχητε, Ψ 75 f.

[25] —ἰόντι εἰς Ἀΐδαο χερσὶ κατ’ ὀφθαλμοὺς ἐλέειν σύν τε στόμ’ ἐρεῖσαι, λ 426; cf. Λ 453, ω 296. To do this is the duty of the next of kin, mother or wife. The necessity for closing the sightless eyes and dumb mouth of the dead is intelligible without reference to any superstitious arrière pensée. Such an idea is, however, dimly discernible in such a phrase as ἄχρις ὅτου ψυχήν μου μητρὸς χέρες εἶλαν ἀπ’ ὄσσων, Epigr. Gr., 314, 24. Was there originally some idea of the “soul” being released by these means?—Seat of the soul in the κόρη of the eye: ψυχαὶ δ’ ἐν ὀφθαλμοῖσι τῶν τελευτώντων, Babr. 95, 35 (see Crusius, Rh. Mus. 46, 319). Augurium non timendi mortem in aegritudine quamdiu oculorum pupillae imaginem reddant, Plin., N.H. 28, 64; cf. Grimm, p. 1181. (If a person can no longer see his or her εἴδωλον [47] in a mirror it is a sign of approaching death, Oldenburg, Rel. d. Ved., 526 [p. 449³ French tr.].)—Among many peoples it is believed that the eyes of the dead must be closed in order to prevent the dead person seeing or haunting anyone in the future: Robinsohn, Psychol. d. Naturv., 44; cf. Cic., Verr. v, 118 (of the Greeks); Vg., A. iv, 684 f.: extremus si quis super halitus errat ore legam. Serv. ad loc.: muliebriter, tamquam possit animam sororis excipere et in se transferre (cf. Epigr. Gr., 547; IG. Sic. et It., 607e, 9–10). ψυχή making its exit through the mouth: I 409; cf. “Among the Seminoles of Florida when a woman died in childbirth the infant was held over her face to receive her parting spirit and thus acquire strength and knowledge for future use,” Tylor, i, 433.

[26] And even ἀνὰ πρόθυρον τετραμμένος, Τ 212, i.e. with feet turned towards the door. The reason for this custom—which existed elsewhere, too, and still exists—is hardly to be sought only in the ritus naturae, as Plin. 7, 46, thinks. This has generally little to do with the customs observed on the solemn occasions of life. The meaning of the practice is much more naively revealed in a statement about the manners of the Pehuenchen Indians in South America given by Pöpig, Reise in Chile, Peru, etc., i, 393. There they carry the dead man feet foremost out of the door “because if the corpse of the dead man were carried out otherwise his wandering ghost might come back into the house”. The Greek custom, though in Homeric times long faded to a mere symbol, must be supposed to have depended originally upon similar fears of the return of the “soul”. (Similar precautions arising from the same belief were customary at funerals elsewhere: Oldenberg, Rel. d. Veda, 573–4 [489 F.T.]. Robinsohn, Psychol. d. Naturv., 45 f.) Belief in the incomplete departure of the soul from this world has dictated these customs, too.

[27] The details of the procedure until the funeral dirge are given in Σ 343–55.

[28] τύμβος and στήλη, Π 457, 675, Ρ 434, Λ 371, μ 14. A heaped-up σῆμα as the burial-place of Eetion round which the Nymphs plant elms: Ζ 419 ff.—which preserves a trace of the custom, obtaining also in later times, of planting trees and even a whole grove round the grave.

[29] κτέρεα κτερεΐζειν in the formula σημά τέ οἱ χεῦαι καὶ ἐπὶ κτέρεα κτερεΐζειν, α 291, β 222. Here the κτερεΐζειν comes after the heaping up of the grave-mound—possibly the κτέρεα are to be burnt on or at the grave-mound. Schol. B on Τ 212 is, however, mistaken in the rule deduced from these cases: προὐτίθεσαν, εἶτα ἔθαπτον, εἶτα ἐτυμβοχόουν, εἶτα ἐκτερέϊζον. All the cases refer to the ceremonial at empty graves. Where the body was obtainable the relatives or friends would have burnt the κτέρεα with the body. This is done in the case of Eetion and Elpenor, and it must be understood in the close connexion of the words ἐν πυρὶ κήαιεν καὶ ἐπὶ κτέρεα κτερίσαιεν, Ω 38, and again ὄφρ’ ἕταρον θάπτοι καὶ ἐπὶ κτέρεα κτερίσειεν, γ 285.

[30]—a custom that originally belonged to all primitive peoples and remained in force for a very long time among many of them. All the possessions of a dead Inca remain his own absolute property: Prescott, Peru⁴, i, 31. Among the Abipones of Paraguay all the possessions of the dead are burnt: Klemm, Culturges. ii, 99. The Albanians of the Caucasus buried all the dead man’s possessions with him, καὶ διὰ τοῦτο πένητες ζῶσιν οὐδὲν πατρῷον ἔχοντες, Str. 503. Of ancient origin are also the extravagant burial customs of the Mingrelians living in what was formerly Albania: Chardin, Voy. en Perse (ed. Langlès), i, 325, 298, 314, 322. [48]

[31] Examples given by O. Jahn, Persius, p. 219 fin.

[32] ψυχὴ δ’ ἐκ ῥεθέων πταμένη Ἄϊδόσδε βεβήκει, ὃν πότμον γοόωσα λιποῦσ’ ἀνδροτῆτα καὶ ἥβην, Π 756. Χ 362 cf. Υ 294, Ν 415. ψυχὴ δ’ Ἀϊδόσδε κατῆλθεν, κ 560, λ 65. Complete departure into the depths of the kingdom of Hades is more clearly expressed in such words as βαίην δόμον Ἄϊδος εἴσω, Ω 246, κίον Ἄϊδος εἴσω, Ζ 422, etc. Again, in λ 150, the soul of Teiresias while speaking to Odysseus is still in Hades in the wider sense but is more exactly on the extreme edge of that region: we are told ψυχὴ μὲν ἔβη δόμον Ἄϊδος εἴσω—now at last it goes back again into the depths of the Kingdom of Hades.

[33] Aristonikos on Ψ 104: ἡ διπλῆ ὅτι τὰς τῶν ἀτάφων ψυχὰς Ὅμηρος ἔτι σωζούσας τὴν φρόνησιν ὑποτίθεται. (Rather too systematically put by Porph. ap. Stob., Ecl. i, p. 422, 20 ff., 425, 25 ff. W.) Elpenor is the first to approach Odysseus’ sacrificial trench οὐ γάρ πω ἐτέθαπτο, λ 52. His ψυχή had not yet been received into Hades (Rh. Mus. 1, 615). Achilles’ treatment of the body of Hektor shows that he thought of his enemy (because he was still unburied) as being able to feel what was done to him: lacerari eum et sentire credo putat, Cic., TD. i, 105.

[34] Plin. vii, 187, explains the change among the Romans from burial to cremation as being due to the fear that in times of war and disturbance the dead might be deprived of their rest. If a man dies in war time, i.e. during a period of temporary nomadism, his body is burnt, but a limb (sometimes the head) is cut off to be taken home and buried ad quod servatum iusta fierent, Paul. Festi, 148, 11; Varro, LL. v, 23; Cic., Lg. ii, 55, 60. The same custom is found among certain German tribes: see Weinhold, Sitzb. Wien. Ac. xxix, 156; xxx, 208. Even among the negroes of Guinea and the South American Indians practices resembling the os resectum of the Romans are found in the case of those who die in war in foreign country; cf. Klemm, Culturg. iii, 297; ii, 98 f. In every case burial is regarded as the ancient and traditional mode of disposing of the dead, and the one strictly required on religious grounds.

[35] Only once is there any mention of taking home the burnt bones, Η 334 f. Aristarch. rightly recognized this as being in conflict with the normal conceptions and practice of Homer and regarded the lines as the composition of a later poet (Sch. A ad loc. and on Δ 174; Sch. EMQ., γ 109). The lines may have been inserted to account for the absence from the Troad of such enormous grave-mounds as the burial of the ashes of both armies should have produced. The same reason—the desire expressed in these lines to bring back those who have died in a foreign country to their own land at last—is implied as the origin of cremation in the illustrative story of Herakles and Argeios, the son of Likymnios, in the ἱστορία (derived from Andron) of Sch. A on Α 52.

[36] Kl. Schr. ii, 216, 220.

[37] It would apply better to Roman beliefs; cf. Vg., A. iv, 698–9—though even that means something else. (Cf. also Oldenberg, Rel. d. Veda, 585, 2.)

[38] Cf. esp. Ψ 75–6, λ 218–22.

[39] Serv. ad A. iii, 68: Aegyptii condita diutius servant cadavera scilicet ut anima multo tempore perduret et corpori sit obnoxia nec cito ad aliud transeat. Romani contra faciebant, comburentes cadavera ut statim anima in generalitatem, i.e. in suam naturam rediret (the pantheistic touch may be neglected).—Cf. the account given by Ibn Foslan of the burial customs of the pagan Russians [49] (quoted from Frähn by J. Grimm, Kl. Schr. ii, 292): the preference for burning was due to the idea that the soul was less quickly set free on its way to Paradise when the body was buried intact, than when it was destroyed by fire.

[40] Cf. the Hymn of the Rigveda (x, 16) which is to be said at a cremation, esp. v. 2, 9 (quoted by Zimmer, Altind. Leben, 402 f.), and also Rigv. x, 14, 8 (Zimmer, p. 409). The Indians also wished to prevent the return of the dead to the world of the living. The feet of the corpse were chained so that the dead could not return (Zimmer, p. 402).

[41] It lies at the root of the stories of Demeter and Demophoon (or Triptolemos), and also that of Thetis and Achilles, when the goddess, laying the mortal child in the fire, περιῄρει τὰς θνητὰς σάρκας, ἔφθειρεν ὃ ἦν αὐτῷ θνητόν, in order to make it immortal (cf. Preller, Dem. u. Perseph., 112); cf. also the custom observed at certain festivals (? of Hecate, cf. Bergk, PLG. iii, 682) of lighting fires in the streets and leaping through the flames carrying children, see Grimm (E.T.), p. 625; cf. also Cic., Div. i, 47: o praeclarum discessum cum ut Herculi contigit mortali corpore cremato in lucem animus excessit! Ov., M., ix, 250: Luc., Herm., 7; Q.S. v, 640 ff. (For more about the “purifying” effects of fire, see below, chap. ix, [n. 127].)

[42] Nothing else than this is implied by the words of Η 409–10, οὐ γὰρ τις φειδὼ νεκύων κατατεθνηώτων γίγνετ’, ἐπεί κε θάνωσι πυρὸς μειλισσέμεν ὦκα. The souls of the dead must be quickly “assuaged with fire” (their longing gratified) and so their bodies are burnt. Purification from what is mortal and unclean, which Dieterich (Nekyia, 197, 3) thinks is referred to in this passage, is certainly not suggested as such by the words of the poet.

[43] Light may be incidentally thrown on the question of the transition from burial to cremation by such a story as that which an Icelandic Saga tells of a man who is buried by his own wish before the door of his house; “but as he returned and did much mischief his body was exhumed and burnt and the ashes scattered over the sea” (Weinhold, Altnord. Leben, 499). We often read in old stories how the body of a dead man who goes about as a vampire is burnt. His soul is then exorcized and cannot come back again.

[44] It is natural to think of Asiatic influence. Cremation hearths have recently (1893) been discovered in Babylonia.

[45] See Helbig, D. Hom. Epos aus d. Denkm. erl., 42 f.

[46] That the men of the “Mycenaean” culture, though much affected by foreign influences, were Greeks—the Greeks of the Heroic age of whom Homer speaks—may now be regarded as certain (see esp. E. Reisch, Verh. Wien. Philol., 99 ff.).

[47] See Schliemann, Mycenae, E.T., 155, 165, 213–14.

[48] Helbig. Hom. Epos², p. 52.

[49] Cf. K. Weinhold, Sitzb. Wien. Ak., 1858 (Phil. hist. Cl.), xxix, pp. 121, 125, 141. The remarkable coincidences between the Mycenaean and these North European burial customs do not seem as yet to have been noticed. (The object of this elaborate foundation and covering may have been to preserve the corpse from decay longer, and especially from the effects of damp.)

[50] Also in the domed grave of Dimini: Ath. Mitth., xii, 138.

[51] The soul of a dead man from whom a favourite possession is withheld returns (equally whether the body and the possessions with it are burnt or buried). The story in Lucian, Philops., xxvii, of the wife of Eukrates (cf. Hdt. v, 92η), is quite in accordance with popular belief. [50]

[52] Schliemann, Myc., 212–13: see plan F. A similar altar in the Hall of the Palace of Tiryus: Schuchhardt, Schliemann’s Exc. (E.T.), p. 107.

[53] ἐσχάρα is essentially ἐφ’ ἧς τοῖς ἥρωσιν ἀποθύομεν, Poll. i, 8; cf. Neanthes ap. Ammon., Diff. Voc., p. 34 V. Such an altar rested directly on the ground without anything intervening (μὴ ἔχουσα ὕψος ἀλλ’ ἐπὶ γῆς ἱδρυμένη), it is round (στρογγυλοειδής) and hollow (κοίλη): cf. esp. Harp., 87, 15 ff. Phot., s.v. ἐσχάρα (2 glosses); AB. 256, 32; EM., 384, 12 ff.; Sch. on ζ 52; Eust., Od., p. 1939 (ψ 71): Sch. Eur., Ph., 284. It is evident that the ἐσχάρα is not very far removed from the sacrificial trench of the cult of the dead: thus it is actually called also βόθρος; Sch. Eur., Ph., 274 (σκαπτή S. Byz., 191, 7 Mein.).

[54] Stengel has a different view (Chthon. u. Todt., 427, 2).

II

[55] It is doubtful whether Homer even knew of dream-oracles (which would be closely related to oracles of the dead). That in Α 63 ἐγκοίμησις is “at least alluded to” (as Nägelsbach, Nachhom. Theol., 172, thinks) is by no means certain. The ὀνειροπόλος would not be a priest who intentionally gave himself up to prophetic sleep and thus ὑπὲρ ἑτέρων ὀνείρους ὁρᾷ, but rather an ὀνειροκρίτης—an interpreter of other men’s unsought dream-visions.

[56] Even the river-gods and Nymphs who are usually confined to their own homes are called to the ἀγορά of all the gods in Olympos, Υ 4 ff. These deities who remain fixed in the locality of their worship are weaker than the Olympians just because they are not elevated with the rest to the ideal summit of Olympos. Kalypso resignedly admits this, ε 169 f., εἴ κε θεοί γ’ ἐθέλωσι, τοὶ οὐρανὸν εὐρὺν ἔχουσιν, οἵ μευ φέρτεροί εἰσι νοῆσαί τε κρῆναί τε. They have sunk to the second rank of deities. They are, however, never thought of as free and independent, but as a mere addition to the kingdom of Zeus and the other Olympians.

[57] Exx. in Nägelsbach, Hom. Theol.², 387 f. (φρένες), W. Schrader, Jb. f. Philol. 1885, p. 163 f. (ἦτορ).

[58] The belief in the existence of more than one soul in the same person is very wide-spread. See J. G. Müller, Americ. Urrelig., p. 66, 207 f., Tylor, i, 432 f. The distinction between the five spiritual powers dwelling within man given by the Avesta rests upon similar grounds (Geiger, Civ. of East. Iran, 1, 124 ff.). Even in Homer Gomperz, Greek Thinkers, i, 249, finds a “two-soul” theory fully developed. According to him Homer recognizes in the θυμός—a word supposed to be derived from the steam rising from freshly shed and still warm blood—a second soul in addition to the ψυχή: a “smoke-soul” side by side with the “breath-soul”. But if by soul a “something” is meant—as it must be in popular psychology—which is added independently to the body and its faculties, something which lives separately in the body and after the death of the body (with which it is not indissolubly united) dissociates itself and goes off independently—then the θυμός of Homer cannot be called a “soul” or a double of the ψυχή. Again and again the θυμός is clearly referred to as a mental faculty of the living body; either thinking or willing or merely feeling (θυμῷ νοέω, θυμῷ δεῖσαι, γηθήσει θυμῷ, ἐχολώσατο θυμῷ, ἤραρε θυμὸν ἐδωδῇ, etc.) is conducted by its means. It is the seat of the emotions (μένος ἔλλαβε θυμόν) and belongs to the body of the living man, and is especially enclosed in the φρένες. In the face of [51] this it is impossible to regard it as something independent of the body or as anything else than a special faculty of the same living body. Once, indeed, Η 131, the θυμός is spoken of, instead of ψυχή as that which goes down to Haides, but this can only be an error or an oversight (see also below, ch. xi, [n. 2]). According to Homeric ideas—and this is a conception repeated over and over again in Greek literature and even in Greek philosophy—the body has all its vital powers in itself, not merely θυμός but μένος, νόος, μῆτις, βουλή. Yet it only acquires life when supplemented by the ψυχή, which is something different from all these bodily powers—something with an independent being of its own and alone deserving the name “soul”, a name which belongs as little to θυμός as to νόος. Gomperz thinks that θυμός, etc., were at first the only recognized faculties of the body and that ψυχή was only (for the Greeks) added later. This is certainly not to be made out from Homer—or any other part of Greek literature.

[59] περὶ ψυχῆς θέον, X 161; περὶ ψυχέων ἐμάχοντο, χ 245; ψυχὴν παραβαλλόμενος, I 322; ψυχὰς παρθέμενοι, γ 74, ι 255; ψυχῆς ἀντάξιον, I 401; and cf. ι 523: αἲ γὰρ δὴ ψυχῆς τε καὶ αἰῶνός σε δυναίμην εὖνιν ποιήσας πέμψαι δόμον Ἄϊδος εἴσω. No one strictly speaking can go into Hades bereft of his ψυχή, for it is the ψυχή alone which goes there. Thus ψυχή here clearly = life, as is shown also by the addition of the words καὶ αἰῶνος for the sake of clearness. It is more doubtful whether this is the explanation of ψυχῆς ὄλεθρος, X 325, or of ψυχὰς ὀλέσαντες, Ν 763, Ω 168. Other passages adduced by Nägelsb., Hom. Th.², 381, and Schrader, Jb. f. Philol. 1885, p. 167, either admit or require the material sense of the word ψυχή: e.g. Ε 696 ff., Θ 123, σ 91, etc.

III

[60] A more detailed statement and documentation of the following analysis of the Nekyia in Od. λ will be found in Rh. Mus. 1, 600 ff. (1895). [Kl. Schr. ii, 255.]

[61] The information given by Teiresias, λ 107 ff., about Thrinakia and the cattle of Helios seems to be put in such a brief and inadequate form just because the fuller account given by Kirke, μ 127, was already known to the poet who did not wish to repeat this word for word.

[62] A final example of such pictures intended to suggest the background of the Odyssey is the conversation between Achilles and Agamemnon in the “second Nekyia”, ω 19 ff. The composer of these lines has understood quite correctly the meaning and purpose of his model, the original Nekyia of λ, though his continuation of it is certainly very clumsy.

[63] κ 539–40 is borrowed from δ 389–90, 470.—I find after writing this that Kammer had already suggested imitation of δ in the Nekyia: Einheit d. Od., 494 f.

[64] It is striking (and may have some special reason) that in Kirke’s account there is no mention of the Kimmerians. It is easier to see why the careful description of the country in Kirke’s speech, κ 509–15, is not afterwards repeated but merely recalled to the memory of the reader in a few words (λ 21–2).

[65] I can see no essential difference between the conception and situation of Hades as indicated in the Iliad and the account given in the Nekyia of the Odyssey. J. H. Voss and Nitzsch were right in this matter. Nor do the additional details given in the “second Nekyia” of ω essentially “conflict” (as Teuffel, Stud. u. Charact., thinks) with the description of the first Nekyia. It does not adhere [52] slavishly to its original, but it rests upon the same fundamental conceptions.

[66] Sch. H.Q., κ 514, Πυριφλεγέθων, ἤτοι τὸ πῦρ τὸ ἀφανίζον τὸ σάρκινον τῶν βροτῶν, cf. Apollodor., π. θεῶν, ap. Stob., Ecl. i, p. 420, 9 W. Πυριφλεγέθων εἴρηται ἀπὸ τοῦ πυρὶ φλέγεσθαι τοὺς τελευτῶντας.

[67] Acheron, too, seems to be regarded as a river. The soul of the unburied Patroklos, which has already departed, ἀν’ εὐρυπυλὲς Ἄϊδος δῶ, and has therefore passed over Okeanos, is prevented by the other souls from passing over “the river”, Ψ 72 f. This can hardly be the Okeanos, and must, therefore, be Acheron (so, too, Porph. ap. Stob., Ecl. i, p. 422 f., 426 W.). κ 515 does not in the least prove that Acheron was thought of as a lake and not a river, as Bergk, Opusc. ii, 695, thinks.

[68] Cf. λ 206 ff., 209–393 ff., 475.

[69] See Π 851 ff. (Patroklos), X 358 ff. (Hektor), λ 69 ff. Behind each of these there lies the ancient belief that the soul in the moment of escape achieves a higher state of being and returns to a form of knowledge independent of sense-perception (cf. Artemon ap. Sch., Π 854, Arist. fr. 12 (10) R.). Otherwise this power belongs to gods and, strictly, only to Zeus, who can foresee everything (in Homer). But the statements are intentionally modified to suggest an undefined middle position between prophecy in the full sense and mere στοχάζεσθαι (cf. Sch. B.V., X 359)—X 359 at the most may go beyond this point.

[70] λ 218–24.

[71] ὄϊν ἀρνειὸν ῥέζειν, θῆλύν τε μέλαιναν, εἰς Ἔρεβος στρέψας, κ 527 f. From the word μέλαιναν the ὄϊν ἀρνειὸν is also to be understood ἀπὸ κοινοῦ as being, more precisely, black (and so again in 572)—the ram offered to the gods (or Souls) of the underworld is regularly black. εἰς Ἔρεβος στρέψας, i.e. bending the head downwards (not towards the west) = ἐς βόθρον, λ 36—as Nitzsch rightly explains it. Everything corresponds to the regular ἔντομα of later times for the underworld beings (cf. Stengel, Ztsch. f. Gymn., 1880, p. 743 f.).

[72] κοινή τις παρὰ ἀνθρώποις ἐστὶν ὑπόληψις ὅτι νεκροὶ καὶ δαίμονες σίδηρον φοβοῦνται, Sch. Q., λ 48. It is really the sound of the bronze or iron that drives away spirits: Luc., Philops. 15 (cf. O. Jahn, Abergl. d. bös. Blicks, 70). But even the mere presence of iron objects is sufficient: [Aug.] Hom. de sacrileg. (about the seventh century), 22, states that to the sacrilegi belong among others those who wear rings or armlets of iron, aut qui in domo sua quaecumque de ferro, propter ut daemones timeant, ponunt.

[73] The idea that the Thesprotian νεκυομαντεῖον by the river Acheron was the original of the Homeric picture was first started by Paus. 1, 17, 5. He was followed by K. O. Müller, Introd. to a Scientific System of Myth., pp. 297–8 (E. T., Leitch), who has been followed by many others. But it has scarcely more justification than has e.g. the localization of the Homeric entrance to Hades at Cumae, Herakleia Pont. (cf. Rh. Mus. 36, 555 ff.), or other places of ancient worship of the dead (e.g. Pylos). At such places the traditional names of Acheron, Kokytos, Pyriphlegethon were easily introduced—but taken from Homer and not coming thence into Homer. The fact that it is just this Thesprotian oracle of the dead that is mentioned in Hdt.’s well-known story (v, 92 η) does not at all prove that this was the oldest of all such oracles.

[74] To this extent Lobeck’s denial of necromancy to the Homeric poems (Agl. 316) may, perhaps, require to be modified; but so modified it may be accepted. [53]

[75] In accordance with primeval sacrificial custom. To the dead only female (or castrated) animals are offered (see Stengel, Chthon. u. Todtenc., 424). Here it is a στεῖρα βοῦς, ἄγονα τοῖς ἀγόνοις (Sch.). So among the Indians, “to the Manes that are without the powers of life and procreation” a wether instead of a ram was offered: Oldenberg, Rel. d. Ved., 358 [= 306 Fr. T.].

[76] Ω 592 ff. Achilles says to the dead Patroklos μή μοι Πάτροκλε σκυδμαινέμεν αἴ κε πύθηαι εἰν Ἄϊδός περ ἐὼν ὅτι Ἕκτορα δῖον ἔλυσα πατρὶ φίλῳ, ἔπει οὔ μοι ἀεικέα δῶκεν ἄποινα. σοὶ δ’ αὖ ἐγὼ καὶ τῶνδ’ ἀποδάσσομαι ὅσσ’ ἐπέοικεν. The possibility that the dead in Hades may be able to know what is happening in the upper world is referred to only hypothetically (αἴ κε)—not so, however, the intention of giving the dead man a share in the gifts of Priam (δι’ ἐπιταφίων εἰς αὐτὸν ἀγώνων as Sch. B.V. on 594 thinks). The strangeness of such a promise seems to have been one of the reasons that made Aristarch. (unjustly) athetize ll. 594–5.

[77] 40–1. This is not un-Homeric, cf. esp. Ξ 456. Thus on many vase-paintings we see the psyche of a fallen warrior flying over the corpse, often clad in full armour, but very diminutive in size—to express invisibility.

[78] Strictly speaking Odysseus is supposed to enter into conversation with the women while each informs him of her fate (231-4); every now and then comes a φάτο 236, φῆ 237, εὔχετο 261, φάσκε 306. But the whole section is little more than a review at which Odysseus assists without taking any real part.

[79] Cf. Rh. Mus. 1, 625 ff. The nearest parallel to such a distinction between an εἴδωλον and the fully animated αὐτός is to be found in what Stesichoros (and Hesiod before him: see Paraphr. ant. Lyc., 822, p. 71, Scheer, and PLG. iii, p. 215) relates of Helen and her εἴδωλον. Prob. this latter story gave rise to the insertion of these lines, λ 602 ff.

[80] Cf. 623 ff.

[81] Welcker, Gr. Götterl. i, 818, and others following him.

[82] [Apollod.] 1, 9, 3, 2; Sch., Α 180 (p. 18b, 23 ff., Bekk.) gives as reason for the punishment of Sisyphos that he betrayed to Asopos the rape of his daughter Aigina by Zeus. This, however, does not rest upon good epic tradition. Another story follows up the betrayal with the myth of the outwitting of Death and then Hades by S., after which he is sent down to Hades again and punished by the task of the endless stone-rolling. The story of the double outwitting of the powers of death (cf. the similar fairy tale of Spielhansel: Grimm, Fairy Tales, n. 82, and Anm., vol. ii, p. 163, ed. 1915) is obviously intended humorously, and so it seems to have been treated in a satyr-drama of Aesch., the Σίσυφος δραπέτης [Sch., Ζ 153.] The fact that this story ends in the punishment of the stone-rolling ought to be sufficient warning against taking it in the serious and edifying sense in which Welcker and his followers interpret it. It is quite contrary to ancient ideas to suppose that Sis. is punished for his cunning as a warning to other crafty (as well as good) men. In Ζ 153 he is called κέρδιστος ἀνδρῶν as praise and not blame: so Aristarch. rightly maintained and supported his case by clear ἀναφορά to the line of the Nekyia (see Sch., Ζ 153, Κ 44, Lehrs, Aristarch.³, p. 117 and λ 593). The idea that the adj. refers to the κακότροπον of S. is merely a misunderstanding of Porph. ap. Sch., λ 385. How little anyone thought of S. as a criminal, even with the Homeric story in his mind, is shown by the Platonic Sokrates who rejoices (Apol., 41 C) over the fact that in Hades he will meet, amongst others, Sisyphos (cf. also [54] Thgn., 702 ff.). The case of Sis. presents the most serious difficulties that face any attempt to give a moralizing sense (quite outside the poet’s intention) to the section of the “three penitents”. (See also Rh. Mus. 1, 630.)

[83] Γ 279, Τ 260 (cf. Rh. Mus. 1, 8). Nitzsch, Anm. z. Od. iii, p. 184 f., vainly employs all the arts of interpretation and criticism to deny their obvious meaning to both passages.

[84] K. O. Müller, Aeschylus Eumenides, p. 167 = E.T., 1853, p. 159.

[85] It should be remembered also that no legal penalties against perjury existed in Greece, any more than in Rome. They were unnecessary in face of the general expectation that the deity whom the perjurer had invoked against himself would take immediate revenge upon the criminal. (Esp. instructive are the words of Agamemnon on the Trojan breach of faith, Δ 158 ff.) Such revenge would be taken either during the life time of the perjurer—in which case the instruments of vengeance would be the spirits of Hell, the Erinyes: Hes., Op., 802 ff.—or else after death.

[86] The oath as a bond in favour of the oath-gods: Thgn., 1195 f., μήτι θεοὺς ἐπίορκον ἐπόμνυθι, οὐ γὰρ ἀνυστὸν ἀθανάτους κρύψαι χρεῖος ὀφειλόμενον. Perjury would be εἰς θεοὺς ἁμαρτάνειν, Soph. fr. 431 (472 P.).

[87] Eust., Od., p. 1614–15, has understood this. He calls attention to Pi., P. 4, 159, κέλεται γὰρ ἑὰν ψυχὰν κομίζαι Φρίξος ἐλθόντας πρὸς Αἰήτα θαλάμους—on which passage the Sch. refers us back again to Homer. Both passages imply the same belief: τῶν ἀπολομένων ἐν ξένῃ γῇ τὰς ψυχὰς εὐχαῖς τισιν ἐπεκαλοῦντο ἀποπλεόντες οἱ φίλοι εἰς τὴν ἐκείνων πατρίδα καὶ ἐδόκουν κατάγειν αὐτοὺς πρὸς τοὺς οἰκείους (Sch. ι 65 f., Sch. Η, ι 62). Nitzsch, Anm. iii, 17–18, vainly attempts to get out of the necessity of seeing in this act the fulfilment of a religious duty. He supposes that Odysseus is merely satisfying a “need of the heart”, etc. The real meaning of religious performance is too often obscured by such “ethical” interpretation.

[88] The command of Athene to Telem., α 291, presupposes as universally customary the erection of a cenotaph for those who die in foreign lands unless their bodies can be obtained by their friends. Menelaos erects an empty tomb to Agamemnon in Egypt, δ 584.

[89] δ 584, χεῦ’ Ἀγαμέμνονι τύμβον ἷν’ ἄσβεστον κλέος εἴη. λ 75 f., σῆμά τέ μοι χεῦαι πολιῆς ἐπὶ θινὶ θαλάσσης, ἀνδρὸς δυστήνοιο, καὶ ἐσσομένοισι πύθεσθαι. Achilles in the second Nekyia, ω 30 ff., says to Agam.: Would thou hadst died before Troy, for then the Achaeans would have set up a tomb for thee and καὶ σῷ παιδὶ μέγα κλέος ἤρα’ ὀπίσσω (cf. 93 f., where Agam. says to Achilles ὡς σὺ μὲν οὐδὲ θανὼν ὄνομ’ ὤλεσας ἀλλά τοι αἰεὶ πάντας ἐπ’ ἀνθρώπους κλέος ἔσσεται ἐσθλὸν Ἀχιλλεῦ). The words of Hektor, Η 84 ff., show how the σῆμα ἐπὶ πλατεῖ Ἑλλησπόντῳ served to remind sailors as they passed, ἀνδρὸς μὲν τόδε σῆμα πάλαι κατατεθνηῶτος κτλ. and to suggest that this was the proper and principal purpose of such erections.—In contrast with this cf. what is stated of the inhabitants of the Philippine Islands: “they laid their illustrious dead in a chest and set them up on a high place or on a rock by the bank of a river in order that they might be worshipped by the pious”: Lippert, Seelencult, p. 22.

CHAPTER II
ISLANDS OF THE BLEST
TRANSLATION

The Homeric picture of the shadow-life of the disembodied soul is the work of resignation, not of hope. Hope would never have beguiled itself with the anticipation of a state of things which neither afforded men the chance of further activity after death, nor, on the other hand, gave them rest from the toil of life; one which promised them only a restless, purposeless fluttering to and fro, an existence, indeed, but without any of the content that might have made it worthy of the name of life.

Was there never any aspiration after a more consolatory picture of the life after death? Did the tremendous vital energies of that time really devote themselves so completely to the realms of Zeus that not even a ray of hope penetrated to the House of Hades? We should have had to suppose so were it not for a single passing glimpse which we get of a distant land of hearts’ desire, such as even the Greece that lay under the sway of the Homeric order of things still imagined for itself.

When Proteus, the sea-god who could foretell the future, has finished informing Menelaos, on the sea-shore of Egypt, of the circumstances of his return home to his country and of the fate of his dearest companions, he adds the prophetic words—so Menelaos himself informs Telemachos in the fourth book of the Odyssey (560 ff.): “But thou, god-like Menelaos, art not ordained to die in horse-pasturing Argos or to meet thy fate there; for the immortals shall send thee far away to the Elysian plain, to the ends of the world where dwells fair-haired Rhadamanthys, and where life is most easy for men. There is neither snow nor heavy storms nor rain, but Okeanos ever sends zephyrs with soft-breathing breezes to refresh men—because thou hast Helen to wife and art thereby in their eyes the son-in-law of Zeus.”

These verses allow us a glimpse into a world about which the Homeric poems are otherwise silent. At the end of the [56] world, by the River Okeanos, lies the “Elysian Plain”, a land where the sky is always clear, as in the land where the gods live.[1] There dwells the great Rhadamanthys, not alone, one may suppose as “men” are spoken of (565, 568). Thither shall the gods some day send Menelaos—he is not to die (562); that is to say, he is to reach that place alive nor shall he suffer death there. The place to which he is to be sent is not a part of the realm of Hades, but a land on the surface of the earth set apart as the abode not of disembodied “souls”, but of men whose souls have not been separated from their visible selves—for only thus can they feel and enjoy the sense of life (565). The picture which fancy has drawn here is the precise opposite of the blessed immortality of the soul in its separate existence. Just because such an idea remained quite unthinkable for Homeric singers, hope sought and found an exit from the shadow-world which swallows up all living energy. Hope imagined a land at the end of the world, but still of this world, to which occasionally some few favourites of the gods might be “translated” without the psyche being separated from its body and descending to Hades.

The actual mention of such miraculous “translation” stands alone in the Homeric poems, and the passage in the Odyssey seems to have been introduced by a later hand.[2] But the conditions of such a miracle are all implied within the range of Homeric ideas. Menelaos is carried off by the power of the gods and lives an eternal life far from the world of mortals. The belief that a god could suddenly withdraw his earthly favourite from the eyes of men and invisibly waft him away on the breeze not infrequently finds its application in the battle-scenes of the Iliad.[3] The gods could also make a mortal “invisible” for a prolonged period. When Odysseus has been so long lost to his friends they suspect that the gods have “made him invisible” (Od. i, 235 ff.); they do not regard him as “dead” but “the Harpies have carried him away”, and he is consequently withdrawn from all human ken (Od. i, 241 f.; xiv, 371). Penelope, in her grief, prays either for swift death through the arrows of Artemis, or that a storm wind may lift her up and carry her away on dark pathways to the mouths of Okeanos, that is, to the entrance of the Land of the Dead (Od. xx, 61–5; 79 ff.).[4] To explain her wish she recalls a fairy tale of the kind that must often have been told in the women’s quarters; how the daughters of Pandareos, after the violent death of their parents, were brought up to lovely maidenhood by Aphrodite and provided by Hera, Artemis, and Athene with all kinds of gifts and [57] accomplishments; till one day when Aphrodite had gone to Olympos to ask Zeus to make a match for them, the Harpies came and carried them off and made them the hand-maidens of the hated Erinyes.[5] This folk-tale reveals more clearly than is usual with the generally cultured Homeric narrative the popular belief that men might be carried off permanently from the land of the living, and, without seeing death, live on in another dwelling-place. For the daughters of Pandareos are carried away alive—to the Kingdom of the Dead, it is true, for that is where they must go if they become the servants of the Erinyes, the spirits of the underworld.[6] That is where Penelope wishes to be carried off, and without dying first—away from the land of the living which has become intolerable for her. Such a translation is accomplished by means of the Harpies or the Stormwind, which is the same thing, since the Harpies are nothing else but wind-deities of a peculiarly sinister kind. They may be compared to the Devil’s Bride or the “Whirlwind’s Bride” of German folk-tales, who rides in the whirlwind and also carries off men with her.[7] The Harpies and what we are here told of them, belong to the “vulgar mythology” which so seldom finds any expression in Homer; a popular folk-lore that could tell of many things between heaven and earth of which the Homeric “grand style” takes little notice. In Homer the Harpies never act on their own authority; only as the servants of the gods or of a single god do they transport mortals where no word of man, no human power, can reach.[8]

The prophesied removal of Menelaos to the Elysian fields at the end of the world is only another example of such a “translation” by the will and the might of the gods. Even the fact that prolonged habitation in that happy land, inaccessible to other men, is promised to him, does not differentiate the fate of Menelaos from that of the daughters of Pandareos, or from that which Penelope wishes for herself. For Menelaos, however, immortal life is promised not in Hades, or even at its entrance, but in a special country of the blest, as though in a new kingdom of the gods. He is to become a “god”; for since to the Homeric poets “god” and “immortal” are interchangeable terms, a man who is granted immortality (that is, whose psyche is never separated from his visible self) becomes for them a god.

It is also a Homeric belief that gods can raise mortals to their own realm, to immortality. Kalypso wishes to make Odysseus “immortal and ageless for all time”, that he may remain for ever by her side (Od. v, 135 f.; 209 f.; xxiii, 335 f.), [58] that is to say, make him a god like herself. The immortality of the gods is conditioned by the eating of the magic food ambrosia and nectar;[9] man, too, by eating continually the food of the gods, becomes an immortal god. What Odysseus in his longing for the earthly home, to which he is drawn by loyalty and duty, rejects, has been attained by other mortals. The Homeric poems can tell of more than one mortal promoted to immortal life.

As he is struggling in the stormy sea rescue comes to Odysseus in the person of Ino Leukothea, once the daughter of Kadmos, “who had formerly been a mortal woman, but now in the waves of the sea shares in the honour of the gods” (Od. v, 333 ff.).[10] Did some god of the sea bear her away and imprison her for ever in his own element? The belief existed that a god might descend from heaven even upon an earthly maiden and carry her off for ever as his spouse (Od. vi, 280 f.).[11]

Ganymede, the most beautiful of mortals, had been carried away by the gods to Olympos to dwell among immortals, as the cup-bearer of Zeus (Il. xx, 232 ff.).[12] He was a scion of the old Trojan royal house, to which Tithonos also belonged, whom both the Iliad and the Odyssey already know as the husband of Eos; from his side the goddess arose every morning to bring the light of day to gods and men.[13] It appears that she had “translated” her beloved not to Olympos but to the distant dwelling-place by the River Okeanos from which she sets out in the morning.[14] It was Eos who had once borne off the beautiful Orion, and in spite of the jealousy of the other gods had enjoyed his love until Artemis “on Ortygia” had slain him with her gentle arrow (Od. v, 122 ff.). The story may be derived from ancient star-myths, which represented in the language of myth what is actually to be observed in the morning sky. But in such myths the elements and celestial phenomena are thought of as living and animate like men. And in the same way, these star-spirits, in accordance with the regular development of legend, have long ago sunk, for the Homeric poet, to the level of earthly youths and heroes. If the goddess can raise Orion into her own kingdom, then, according to the belief of the time (which is all that matters to us here), the same thing might happen to any mortal through the favour of the gods. A simple imitation of the same legend in a purely human setting is the story of Kleitos, a youth of the family of the seer Melampous, whom Eos has carried off for the sake of his beauty that he may dwell among the gods (Od. xv, 249 f.). [59]

§ 2

The translation, then, of Menelaos, while still alive, to the ends of the earth to live there in perpetual blessedness is indeed a miracle, but a miracle that finds its justification and precedent in the range of Homeric belief. The only thing new about it is that Menelaos has a special dwelling-place assigned to him, not in the land of the gods, the proper realm of immortality, nor as in the case of Tithonos and as Kalypso desired for Odysseus, in the company of a deity, but in a separate place specially allotted to the translated hero, the Elysian fields. Nor does this appear to be the invention of the writer of these lines. He refers so briefly to the “Land of the Departed”[15] and its delights that we are forced to believe that he did not himself originate so enticing a vision.[16] He can only, in the case of Menelaos, have added a fresh companion to the company of the blessed. That Rhadamanthys the Just dwells there seems to be known to him from ancient tradition, for he evidently only intends to recall the fact and does not think it necessary to justify this selection of the brother of Minos.[17] It might even be supposed that the picture of such a wonderland had been invented and embellished by older poets simply for the benefit of Rhadamanthys. The only novelty is that this picture, which has been fully adopted into the circle of Homeric poetry, now includes a hero of the Trojan epic cycle among the number of those translated to that land of ever unclouded happiness. The lines were inserted, as has already been remarked, at a later date, into the prophecy of Proteus, and it is hard not to suppose that the whole idea lay far from the thoughts of previous Homeric singers. Would the flower of the heroic chivalry, including Achilles himself, have been doomed to that dim shadow-world in which we see them wandering in the Nekyia of the Odyssey, if a way out into a life exempt from death had already revealed itself to imagination at the time when the Epic gave the stamp of its approval to the stories which dealt with the fate of the greater number of the heroes? Because the poem of the Trojan War and the adventures of the Return from Troy had not yet decided upon the fate of Menelaos, a later poet could speak of his “translation” to the—since “discovered”—Land of Destiny. It is highly probable that even at the time of the composition of the Journey to Hades of Odysseus this conception—afterwards so important for the development of the Greek belief in immortality—of a secluded resting-place of living and translated heroes had not yet been completely [60] formulated. It fits easily into the framework of belief prevailing in the Homeric poems, but it is not necessarily required by that framework. It is natural on this account to suppose that it entered the Epic from without. And, remembering the Babylonian story of Hasisatra and the Hebrew one of Enoch,[18] both of whom without suffering death were translated into the realm of immortal life—either to “Heaven” or to the “End of the Rivers” to the gods—we might be inclined to follow the fashion that prevails in some quarters nowadays, and believe that these earliest Greek translation legends were borrowed from Semitic tradition. Little, however, would be gained by such a mechanical derivation. Here and in all such cases the main question remains still unanswered: what were the reasons which led the Greek mind to wish to borrow this particular idea at this particular time from abroad? In the present instance at least, nothing argues specially for the handing on of the belief in translation from one nation to another rather than for its independent origin in the different countries out of similar needs.

This new idea did not contradict the normal Homeric beliefs about the soul but on the contrary presupposed them and supplemented them without incongruity. It was also, as we have seen, based upon conceptions that were familiar and natural to Greek thought. There was, indeed, no need for any stimulus from without to produce from these materials the undoubtedly new and peculiarly attractive idea of which we receive the earliest intimation in the prophecy of Proteus.

§ 3

The importance of this new creation for the later development of Greek belief makes it all the more necessary to be quite clear as to what exactly this novelty really was. Was it a Paradise for the pious and the just? A sort of Greek Valhalla for the bravest heroes?—or was it that a reconciliation and adjustment between virtue and happiness such as this life never knows had revealed itself to the eyes of hope in a Land of Promise? Nothing of the kind is warranted by these lines. Menelaos was never particularly remarkable for those virtues which the Homeric age rated highest.[19] He is only to be transported to Elysium because he has Helen to wife and is therefore the son-in-law of Zeus; such is Proteus’ prophecy to him. We are not told why Rhadamanthys has reached the place of happiness; nor do we learn it through the title by which he was referred to almost invariably by [61] later poets, the “Just”. We may, however, remind ourselves that as brother of Minos he was also a son of Zeus.[20] It was not virtue or merit that gave him a claim to blessedness after this life; indeed, of any such claim we never find the least trace. Just as the retention of the psyche in the body and the consequent avoidance of death can occur only as a miracle or by magic—that is, as an exceptional case—so does translation into the “Land of Destiny” remain a privilege of a few special favourites of the gods. No one could deduce from such cases any article of faith of universal application. The nearest parallel to this miraculous preservation of life for a few individuals in a land of blessed repose is to be found in the equally miraculous preservation of consciousness in those three enemies of the gods in Hades whom we hear of in the Nekyia of the Odyssey. The Penitents in Erebos and the blessed in Elysium correspond: both represent exceptions which do not destroy the rule and do not affect the main outline of Homeric belief. In the first case, as in the second, the omnipotence of Heaven has broken through the rule. Those, however, who owe to the special favour of the gods their escape from death and their translation to Elysium are near relatives of the gods. This seems to be the only reason for the favour shown to them.[21] If therefore any more general reason beyond the capricious good-will of some god is to account for the translation of these individuals it might perhaps be found in the belief that near relationship with the gods, that is, the very highest nobility of lineage, could preserve a man from the descent into the common realm of hopeless nothingness after the separation of the psyche from the body. In the same way the beliefs of many primitive peoples represent the ordinary man as departing to a joyless country of the dead (if he is not annihilated altogether) while the descendants of gods and kings, or the aristocracy, go to a land of unending happiness.[22] Such a fancy, however, is only dimly apparent in the promise made to Menelaos; nowhere is anything said of a general rule from which the individual case might be deduced.—

§ 4

But the individuals who are admitted to an everlasting life in the Elysian land at the end of the world are much too distantly removed from the habitations of the living for them to be credited with the power of influencing the world of men.[23] They resemble the gods only in the enjoyment accorded to them of an unendingly conscious life. Of the omnipotence of [62] the gods they have not the smallest share[24] any more than the dwellers in Erebos, from whose fate their own is otherwise so different. We must not suppose, therefore, that the origin of the stories of the promotion of individual heroes above their companions and their translation into a distant dwelling-place, is to be sought in any cultus offered to those individuals in their previous earthly dwelling-place. Every religious cult is the worship of something real and powerful; no popular religion and no poet’s fancy would have given the national heroes, if they were to be regarded as powerful and worshipped accordingly, such a distant and inaccessible home.

It was the free activity of the poetic fancy which created and embellished this last refuge of human aspiration upon the Elysian plain. The needs which this new creation was chiefly intended to satisfy were poetical and not religious.

The atmosphere of the younger of the two Homeric epics already differs widely from that of its older companion, the Iliad, with its heroic delight in the untiring manifestation of vital energy. It is likely that the feelings of the conquerors of a new home upon the Asiatic coast may have differed considerably from those of the same people confirmed in undisturbed possession and enjoyment of their conquests. It seems as if the Odyssey reflected the temper and aspiration of these Ionian city-dwellers of a later time. A spirit of contentment and leisure seems to flow like an undercurrent through the whole poem, and has made for itself a haven of rest in the midst of the busy action of the story. When the poet’s own feelings find their true expression they show us idyllic scenes of quiet enjoyment of daily life; magnificent in the country of the Phæacians, gay and more homely at the farm of Eumaios; pictures of quiet repose after the fights of the heroic past, that have now faded into a mere pleasant memory, such as we get in the house of Nestor, or in the Palace of Menelaos and the regained Helen. Or, again, we have a description of nature in a mood of liberality and gentleness, as upon the island of Syriê, the home of Eumaios’ childhood, upon which in ample possession of cattle, wine and corn, a people live free from necessity and pain, till they arrive at a good old age when Apollo and Artemis with their gentlest shafts bring swift death to them (Od. xv, 403 ff.). If you ask the poet where this fortunate island lies he will tell you that it lies over there beyond Ortygiê where the sun turns back. But where is Ortygiê,[25] and who can point out the place where the sun begins his return journey far in the West? The country of idyllic happiness lies indeed almost beyond [63] the limit of this world. Phœnician merchant-men who go everywhere may perhaps reach that land as well (415 ff.), and Ionian seamen in this earliest period of Greek colonization into which the composition of the Odyssey reaches may well have hoped to find far out over the sea such propitious habitations of a new life.

In the same way the country and the life of the Phæacians seem like an ideal picture of an Ionian state newly founded in a distant land far from the turmoil, the restless competition, and all the limitations of their familiar Greek homes. But this unclouded dream-picture, bathed in purest light, lies far away in a distant land all but inaccessible to man. Only by chance is a strange ship cast away on to that coast, and at once the magic ships of the Phæacians carry back the stranger through night and cloud to his own home again. True, there is no reason to see in the Phæacians a sort of ferry-people of the dead, neighbours of the Elysian fields. Still, the poetic fancy which invented the country of the Phæacians is not unrelated to that which gave rise to the idea of an Elysian plain beyond the bounds of the inhabited world. Given the idea that a life of untroubled bliss can only be had in the remotest confines of the earth, jealously guarded from all intrusion, only one more step remains to be taken before men come to believe that such bliss is really only to be found where neither accident nor purpose can ever bring men, more remote even than the Phæacians, than the country of the Æthiopians, the beloved of the gods, or than the Abioi of the North, already known to the Iliad. It must lie beyond the bounds of real life. Such idyllic longings have given rise to the picture of Elysium. The happiness of those who there enjoy everlasting life seemed to be fully safeguarded only if their place of abode were removed for ever beyond the range of all exploration, out of reach of all future discovery. This happiness is imagined as a condition of perfect bliss under the most benignant sky; easy and untroubled says the poet, is the life of men there, in this resembling the life of the gods, but at the same time without aspiration and without activity. It is doubtful whether the poet of the Iliad would have considered such a future worthy of his heroes, or given the name of happiness to such felicity as this.

§ 5

We were obliged to assume that the poet who inserted these inimitably smooth, melodious verses in the Odyssey was not the first inventor or discoverer of the Elysian paradise beyond [64] the realm of mortality. But though he followed in the footsteps of others, when he introduced into the Homeric poem a reference to this new belief, he was giving this idea for the first time an enduring place in Greek imagination. Other poems might disappear, but anything that appeared in the Iliad or the Odyssey was assured of perpetual remembrance.

The imagination of Greek poets or Greek people never gave up the alluring fancy of a distant land of blessedness into which individual mortals might by the favour of the gods be translated. Even the scanty notices which have come down to us of the contents of the heroic poems that led up to, continued, or connected the two Homeric Epics and linked them up with the whole cycle of Theban and Trojan legend enable us to see how this post-Homeric poetry took pleasure in the recital of still further examples of translation.

The Kypria first described how the army of the Achæans for the second time encamped in Aulis, was detained by adverse winds sent by Artemis; and how Agamemnon on the advice of Kalchas would have sacrificed his own daughter Iphigeneia to the goddess. Artemis, however, snatched away the maiden and transported her to the land of the Taurians, and there made her immortal.[26]

The Aithiopis, a continuation of the Iliad, tells of the help brought to the Trojans by Penthesileia and her Amazons, and after her death by Memnon the Æthiopian prince, an imaginary representative of the eastern monarchies of inner Asia. Antilochos, the new favourite of Achilles, falls in the war, but Achilles slays Memnon himself. Thereupon Eos the mother of Memnon (and known as such already to the Odyssey) obtains the permission of Zeus to give immortality to her son.[27] It may be supposed that the poet described what we see so often represented upon Greek vases: the mother bearing through the air the dead body of her son. According to the story told in the Iliad, Apollo, with the help of Sleep and Death, the twin brothers, bore off the body of Sarpedon, the son of Zeus, to his Lycian home after he had been slain by Achilles, merely in order that he might be buried in his own country. But the poet of the Aithiopis has tried to outdo the story in the Iliad in impressiveness (for it was evidently his model),[28] and has made Eos, with the permission of Zeus, not merely carry off the dead to his far-off home in the East, but there awaken him to immortal life.

Soon after the death of Memnon fate overtakes Achilles himself. When his body, rescued by his friends after much hard fighting, is laid upon its bier, Thetis, his mother, with [65] the Muses and the other sea-goddesses come and sing the funeral dirge. Of this we are told in the last book of the Odyssey (xxiv, 47 ff.) which relates further how his body was burnt, his bones gathered together and entombed under a mound, and the psyche of Achilles departed to the House of Hades; the whole story being told to him in the underworld by the psyche of Agamemnon. But the author of the Aithiopis—always remarkable for his bold innovations in the traditional material—here ventures upon an important new touch. From the funeral pyre, he tells us, Thetis carried off the body of her son and brought him to Leuke.[29] That she restored him to life again there and made him immortal the one meagre extract which accident has preserved to us does not say. But there can be no question that that is what the poet narrated—all later accounts conclude the story in this way.

The parallel is clear: the two opponents, Achilles and Memnon, are both set free from the fate of mortals by their goddess-mothers. In bodies once more restored to life they continue to live, not among men, nor yet among the gods, but in a distant wonderland—Memnon in the east, Achilles in the “White Island”. The poet himself can hardly have imagined Achilles’ Island to have been in the Euxine Sea, where, however, later Greek sailors located this purely mythical spot.

The translation of Menelaos is still more closely paralleled by the story told in the Telegoneia, which was the final and the latest-written of the Cyclic poems, of the fate which attended the family of Odysseus. Telegonos, the son of Odysseus and Kirke, slays his father unwittingly; when he discovers his mistake he brings the body of Odysseus with Penelope and Telemachos to his mother, Kirke, who makes them immortal; and there they dwell now (in the Isle Aiaia, far away over the sea, we must suppose)—Penelope as the wife of Telegonos, and Kirke with Telemachos.[30]

§ 6

It is natural to feel surprise that in none of these stories is there any mention of translation to a common meeting-place of the Elect, such as the Elysian plain seemed to be. We must on that account be content to leave unanswered the question to what precise extent these lines of the Odyssey which describe the translation of Menelaos to Elysium may have influenced the development of translation stories in the post-Homeric Epics. The influence must clearly have been [66] considerable.[31] The stories of the translation of individual heroes to a solitary after-life in secluded abodes of immortality show, at any rate, the same direction of fancy as that which produced the fields of Elysium. No longer does Eos, after she has snatched him from Hades, raise her son to be among the gods as once she had raised Kleitos and others of her favourites. Memnon enters upon a peculiar state of being that differentiates him from the rest of mankind as much as from the gods. The same applies to Achilles and the other translated heroes. Thus did poetry increase the number of those who belonged to this middle realm; who, born in mortality have, outside the realms of Olympos, achieved immortality. It is still only favoured individuals who enter this kingdom; it is still poetical aspiration, giving free rein to its creative instinct, that continues to transport an ever-increasing number of the bright figures of Legend into the illumination of everlasting life. Religious worship can have had no more influence in the development of these stories than it had in the narrative of the translation of Menelaos. Achilles, for example, may in later times have had a cult paid to him on an island at the mouth of the Danube, supposed to be Leuke. But the cult was the result and not the motive or the cause of the story. Iphigeneia was certainly the epithet of a Moon-goddess; but the poet who told of the translation of her namesake, the daughter of Agamemnon, had no suspicion of the latter’s identity with a goddess—otherwise he would never have regarded her as Agamemnon’s daughter. Nor, we may be fairly certain, can it have been an accidental meeting with the cult of the goddess Iphigeneia, which induced him to invent an immortality iure postlimini for his mortal Iphigeneia, by the machinery of translation. Both for the poet and his contemporaries the importance and the essence of his narrative—whether free invention or a reconstruction out of older material—lay in the fact that it told of the raising of a mortal maiden, the daughter of mortal parents, to immortal life, and not to religious veneration which could not have made itself very apparent to the maiden relegated to the distant Tauric country.

The busy expansion of the legendary material went on in epics that finally lost themselves in genealogical poems. To what extent it may have made use of the motif of translation or transfiguration we can no longer accurately judge. The materials at our disposal are quite insufficient to warrant any conclusion. When such a misty figure as Telegonos is deemed worthy of immortality, it may be supposed that in the mind [67] of the poet all the heroes of Epic tradition had come to be possessed of a virtual claim to a share in this mode of continued existence in a life after death. Certainly the more important among them could not be left out—those at least of whose end the Homeric poems themselves had not already given a different version. The poem of the Return of the Heroes from Troy may especially have given scope for many translation stories.[32] We may, for example, ask whether Diomedes, at least, whose immortality is often vouched for by later mythology, was not already added to the number of the immortals in the epics of the Heroic cycle. An Attic folk-song of the fifth century can speak with assurance of Diomedes as not having died but as living in the “Islands of the Blest”. Thus a far greater company of the Heroes of the Trojan War was thought of by the poetry of Homeric tradition as gathered together in “Isles of the Blest”, far out to sea, than we should guess from the summaries of the post-Homeric Epics which accident has preserved to us. This conclusion must be drawn from the lines of a Hesiodic poem which give us some remarkable information about the oldest Greek forms of the Cult of the Souls and belief in immortality, and the lines, therefore, must be subjected to a closer examination.

II

The Hesiodic poem known as the “Works and Days” consists of a number of independent pieces of didactic or narrative interest loosely strung together. In it, not far from the beginning, comes the story of the Five Ages of Men. As regards its subject-matter, the train of thought which unites this section to the passages which precede and follow it is hardly discoverable; in form it is quite disconnected.

In the beginning we are there told the gods of Olympos created a Golden race whose members lived like the gods, without care, sickness or decrepitude, and in enjoyment of rich possessions. After their death, which came upon them like sleep to tired men, they became, by the will of Zeus, Daimones and Guardians of mankind. They were followed by a Silver race, far inferior to the first, and unlike them in body as in mind. The men of this race had a long childhood, lasting a hundred years, followed by a short youth, during which their wantonness and pride in their dealings with each other and with the gods brought them much sorrow. Because they refused the honours due to the gods Zeus destroyed them and they are now Daimones of the Underworld, honoured [68] but inferior to the Daimones of the Golden Age. Zeus then created a third race, this time of Bronze—hard-hearted and of great strength; war was their delight, and being destroyed by their own hands they went down unhonoured to the House of Hades. Thereupon Zeus made a fourth race that was juster and better, the race of Heroes, who were called “Demigods”. They fought before Thebes and Troy and some of them died, while others Zeus sent to dwell at the ends of the world on the Islands of the Blest by the river Okeanos, where the Earth brings them her fruits three times in the year. “Would that I did not belong to the fifth Age; would that I had died earlier or been born hereafter,” says the poet, “since now is the Iron Age,” when toil and grief never leave men, when there is enmity of all against all and force conquers right, and Envy, evil-tongued, delighting in wickedness, fierce-eyed, is over everything. Now, Shame and the goddess of retribution, Nemesis, depart from men and go to the gods; every misfortune is left behind for man, and there is no defence against evil.

The author here lays before us the results of gloomy reflection upon the origin and growth of evil in the world of men. He sees the steps of mankind’s degeneration from the height of godlike happiness to the extremes of misery and wickedness. He is following popular conceptions. It is natural to every race of men to lay the scene of earthly perfection in the past, so long, at least, as man gets his information about that past not from distinct historical memory, but from the picturesque stories and beautiful dreams of the poets which encourage the natural tendency of fancy to retain only the more attractive features of the past in the memory. The folk-lore of many lands can tell of a Golden Age and how mankind gradually fell from that high estate; and it is not at all surprising if fanciful speculation starting from the same point and travelling along the same road has reached the same conclusion in the case of more than one people without the aid of any historical connexion. We have a number of expressions of the idea of man’s gradual degeneration through several Ages which present the most striking similarities among themselves and with the Hesiodic picture of the five Ages of Men. Even Homer is sometimes overcome by the mood; it lies, for instance, at the root of such idealizations of the past as are implied when in his description of the heroic life he thinks of “men as they now are” and “how few sons are equal to their fathers in virtue; worse, most of them; few, indeed, are the men who are better than their fathers” [69] (Od. ii, 276 f.). But the epic poet keeps himself and his fancy on the heights of the heroic Past; only occasionally, and in passing, his glance falls upon the commonplace level of real life. But the poet of the “Works and Days” has all his thoughts fixed upon the level plain of real and contemporary life; the glance which he occasionally casts upon the heights of the storied past is all the more bitter on that account.

What he has to say of the first condition of mankind and the gradual process of deterioration is given, not as an abstract exposition of what in the necessary course of things must have occurred, but rather as a traditional account of what had actually happened—in fact, as history.

In this light he himself must certainly have regarded it, though, apart from a few vague memories, no historical tradition is contained in what he says of the nature and deeds of the earlier generations of mankind. His story remains an imaginary picture. And for this reason the development, as he presents it, takes a logically defined and regulated course, based on the idea of a gradual deterioration. The uneventful happiness of the first race of men who know neither virtue nor vice is followed by a second race, which after a prolonged minority displays pride and contempt of the gods. In the third, or brazen age, active wickedness breaks out, with war and murder. The last age, at the beginning of which the poet himself seems to stand, marks the breakdown of all moral restraint. The fourth race of men, to which the heroes of the Theban and Trojan wars belong, is alone among all the others in not being named and ranked after a metal. It is an alien in the evolutionary process. The downward course is checked during the fourth age, and yet in the fifth it goes on again as if it had never been interrupted. It is not apparent why that course should have been interrupted. Most of the commentators have recognized in the story of the fourth age a fragment of different material, originally foreign to the poem of the Ages of Men and added deliberately by Hesiod to this poem, which he may have taken over in its essential features from older poets. But if we adopt this view we have to ask what can have tempted the poet to such serious disturbance and dislocation of the orderly succession of the original speculative poem. It will not be enough to say that the poet, brought up in the Homeric tradition, found it impossible to pass over, in a description of the earlier ages of men, the figures of the heroic poetry which, thanks to the power of song, had acquired in the imagination of the Greeks more reality than the plainest manifestations of actual life. Nor [70] is it likely that, having in his grim description of the Bronze race introduced a darker picture of the Heroic age, drawn from a point of view different from that of the courtly Epos, he wished to set by its side this bright vision of the same age as he saw it in his own mind. If the picture of the Bronze race does really refer to the Heroic age,[33] giving its reverse side, so to speak, Hesiod never seems to have noticed the fact. He must have had stronger grounds than these for the introduction of his narrative. He cannot have failed to perceive that he was breaking the continuity of moral deterioration by his introduction of the Heroic race. It follows that he must have had some aim, other than that of the description of the moral deterioration of men, which he imagined himself to be serving by the introduction of this new section. This other purpose will become plain if we inquire what it is that really interests the poet in the Heroic race. It is not their higher morality—that only interrupted the series of continually worsening generations. Nor would he in that case have dismissed the subject with a few words which barely suffice to connect this section with the theme of moral development. Further, it is not the fights and great deeds done at Thebes or Troy that interest him for he says nothing of their greatness, and at once declares that the cruel war and the dread fury of battle destroyed the Heroes. This, again, does not discriminate between the Heroes and the men of the Bronze age who also, being destroyed by their own deeds, had to go down to Hades. What distinguishes the Heroic age from the others is the way in which some of the Heroes depart from this life without dying. This is the point that interests the poet, and this it must have been that chiefly induced him to bring in here his account of the fourth race of men. He combines clearly enough with his main purpose of describing the advancing moral decline of man, a secondary aim—that of telling what happened after death to the representatives of each successive race. In introducing the Heroic race of men this secondary aim becomes the chief one, and justifies what would otherwise have been merely an intrusive episode. It is this aim, too, which gives the Hesiodic narrative its importance for our present inquiry.

§ 2

The men of the Golden Age, after sleep has overcome them and they have died and been laid in the earth, become by the will of Zeus “Daimones”—Daimones upon earth, watchers of men, wandering over all the earth, veiled in clouds, [71] observing justice and injustice,[34] dispensing riches like kings. These men of the earliest times have then become effective realities. They are not spirits confined to an inaccessible region beyond this world, but powers acting and working amongst men. In this exalted state Hesiod calls them Daimones, and thus describes them by a name which is otherwise applied by him as well as by Homer only to the immortal gods. The name so employed is not to be understood as implying a separate class of immortals, an intermediate class of beings between gods and men, as later speculation used the word.[35] These later beings of an intermediate class were thought of as possessing an originally immortal nature like the gods, and as dwelling in an intermediate region of their own. Hesiod’s Daimones, on the contrary, have once been men and have only after their death become immortals invisibly[36] roaming the earth. When they are given the name Daimones nothing more is implied than that they now share the invisible might and unending life of the gods, and to that extent may be called gods—with as much right as Ino Leukothea, for instance, who, according to Homer, became a goddess after being a mortal; or as Phaëthon, who, according to the Hesiodic Theogony, was raised by Aphrodite from the world of mortality and is now called a “godlike Daimon” (Th., 991). On the other hand, these immortals who were once men are clearly distinguished from the everlasting gods, “who have their Olympian dwellings,” by being called Daimones “who rule upon earth”.[37] And though they are given the name, familiar to everybody from Homer, of Daimones, i.e. gods, they, nevertheless, form a class of beings which is entirely unknown to Homer. Homer knows of certain individual men who are raised or translated, body and soul together, to undying life. The later Epos can tell of certain also who, like Memnon or Achilles, receive a new life after their death and now live on in undivided unity of body and soul. But that the soul outside Erebos could carry on a conscious life of its own and influence living men—of this there is no mention in Homer. Yet this is exactly what has happened according to the Hesiodic poem. The men of the Golden Age have died and now live on divided from their bodies, invisible and godlike, and therefore called gods. Just as in Homer, the gods themselves assume manifold shapes and visit the cities of men, observing the good and evil deeds of men,[38] so also do the souls of the dead in Hesiod. For the beings who here, after their separation from the body, have become Daimones, are Souls—that is to say, beings who after their [72] death have entered in any case upon a higher existence than was theirs while they were united to the body. This, however, is an idea that we never meet with in the Homeric poems.

And yet it is quite unthinkable that this remarkable conception is the independent and passing invention of the Boeotian poet. He comes back to it again later on in the course of his poem. “Thirty thousand,” that is, innumerable immortal Watchers over mortal men wander invisibly in the service of Zeus over the earth, taking note of right and wrong (Op., 252 ff.). The conception is important to him for ethical reasons; if he is to make use of it in his argument he must not have invented it himself. And, in fact, nothing that belongs to the sphere of religious belief and cultus, or even the lower levels of superstition, has been invented by this earnest-minded poet. The Boeotian school of poetry to which he belonged was far removed from, and indeed, hostile to the free inventiveness and roaming fancy with which the Homeric school “. . . know how to put forward many lies and make them seem like truth” (Th., 27). In pursuance of their purpose not simply to please but always in some sense to teach, the Boeotian poets never innovate in the region of the purely mythical, but simply order or piece together, or merely register what they find in the tradition. In religion especially invention lies farthest from their minds, though they do not by any means deny themselves the right of independent speculation about the traditional. Thus, what Hesiod tells us about the men of a previous age, whose souls after death become Daimones, came to him from tradition. It might still be objected that this tradition while being older than Hesiod may, nevertheless, be more recent than Homer, and be the result of post-Homeric speculation. It is unnecessary to develop the reasons which make such a view untenable; the course of our inquiry up to the present has made it possible for us to maintain decidedly that in what Hesiod here says we have a fragment of primitive belief reaching back far beyond Homer and surviving in the secluded Boeotian countryside. We have found even in the poems of Homer vestiges of a cult of the dead sufficient to make us believe that once in a distant past the Greeks resembled the majority of other nations and believed in the continued, conscious existence of the psyche after its separation from the body and in its powerful influence upon the world of men. We found, too, that in accordance with this belief, religious honours of various sorts were paid to the disembodied souls. In Hesiod’s narrative we simply have documentary confirmation of [73] what could only be with difficulty extracted from the study of Homer. Here we encounter the still living belief in the elevation of the soul after death to a higher life. They are the souls, it must be noted, of a race of men long since disappeared, about whom this belief is held. The belief in their godlike after-life must therefore be long-standing, and the worship of these souls as powerful beings still continues. For when it is said of the souls of the second race “these also receive worship”[39] (Op., 142), it is distinctly implied that the Daimones of the first or Golden generation a fortiori received worship.

The men of the Silver generation, on account of their refusal to pay due honour to the Olympians, are “hidden” by Zeus under the earth, and are now called “mortal Blessed Ones that live below the earth, second in rank, yet worship is paid to them also” (141-2). Thus, the poet knows of the souls of men who likewise belonged to the distant past, whose home is in the bowels of the earth, who receive religious honour and who must therefore have been conceived as powerful. The poet has not specified the nature of their influence upon the upper world. It is true that he does not distinctly call the spirits of this second generation “good”, as he had done the first (122), and he makes them spring from the less perfect Silver age and seems to have given them inferior rank. But it does not follow that he here anticipated later speculation and thought of the second generation as a class of wicked demons whose nature it is to work evil.[40] Only to the Olympians do they seem to stand in a rather more distant relationship—almost one of hostility. They had before paid the gods none of their pious dues, and so now they are not called, like the souls of the first race, “Daimones appointed by Zeus to be Watchers of men.” The poet refers to them with a remarkable expression, “mortal Blessed Ones,” that is, mortal gods. This very singular denomination, the two parts of which really cancel one another, points to a certain embarrassment felt by the poet in making use of an expression taken from the Homeric vocabulary (to which the poet felt himself confined) to designate clearly and effectively a class of beings that was unknown to Homer.[41] The disembodied souls of the first race he had simply called Daimones. But this name, common as it was both to the race of those who from mortality had achieved immortality and to the immortal gods, left the essential difference between the two classes of immortal beings unexpressed. For that very reason the name was never employed in Hesiod’s fashion by later ages,[42] who always [74] called such as, not having been born immortal, had achieved immortality, by the name of “Heroes”. Hesiod, who could not use the word in this sense, described them by the bold oxymoron: mortal Blessed Ones, human gods. As immortal spirits they resembled the gods in their new state of being. But their nature was still mortal, and hence their bodies had to die, and this constituted their difference from the everlasting gods.[43]

The name Daimones then does not appear to involve any essential distinction between the spirits of the men of the Silver generation and the Daimones of the Golden Age. Only the place where the two classes of spirits have their dwelling is different—the Daimones of the Silver race live in the depths of the earth. The expression “of the underworld”, used of them, is a vague one, and only suffices to differentiate them from the spirits of the “upper world” who were derived from the first race. Still, the abode of the souls of the Silver Age is in any case not thought of as being the distant meeting-place of the unconscious, vegetating shadow-souls—the House of Hades; the “phantoms” that hover about that place could not have been called Daimones or “mortal gods”, nor do they receive any kind of worship after their death.

§ 3

The Silver Age, then, belongs to a long-since vanished past.[44] The stalwarts of the Bronze Age, we are told, destroyed by their deeds, went down into the gloomy home of the dreadful Hades, nameless. Black Death seized them, for all their violence, and they left the light of the sun.

Except for the addition of the adjective “nameless” one might, indeed, suppose that this was a description of the fate of the souls of the Homeric heroes. Perhaps, however, the word[45] only means that no honourable and distinctive title, such as belonged to the souls of the first and second as well as to the fourth race, was attached to those who had gone down into the shadow-world of annihilation and become as nothing.

There follows “the divine race of Heroes who were called the Demigods”. The wars at Thebes and Troy destroyed these. Part were “enfolded in the destiny of Death”; others received life and a home far from men at the hand of Zeus Kronides, who gave them a dwelling-place at the ends of the world. There they live, free from care, in the Islands of the Blest, by the deep-flowing Okeanos; favoured Heroes, for whom the Earth, of her own accord, brings forth her sweet fruits three times a year. [75]

Here, at last, for the first time we have reached a clearly definable period of legendary history. The poet means to speak of the Heroes whose adventures were narrated in the Thebais, the Iliad and kindred poems. What we notice here specially is how little the Greeks yet knew of their history. Immediately after the disappearance of the Heroes the poet begins the age in which he himself must live. Where the realm of poetry ends, there is an end of all further tradition; there follows a blank, and to all appearances the present age immediately begins. That explains why the Heroic Age is the last before the fifth, to which the poet himself belongs, and why it does not, for example, precede the (undated) Bronze Age. It connects itself conveniently with the Bronze Age also in what is related of the fate suffered by a part of its representatives, for the subject which here particularly interests the poet is the fate of the departed. Some of the fallen Heroes simply die—that is to say (there can be no doubt of it) they enter the realm of Hades like the members of the Bronze race or the Heroes of the Iliad. But when others are distinguished from those whom “Death took” in that they reach the Islands of the Blest, it is impossible not to suppose that these last have not suffered death, that is, the separation of the Psyche from the visible Self, but have been carried away alive in the flesh. The poet is thinking of such cases as those we have met with in the Odyssean narrative of Menelaos, or, in the Telegoneia, of Penelope, Telemachos and Telegonos. These few exceptional instances could hardly have made such a deep impression on him that he felt himself bound on their behalf to erect a special class of the Translated to be set over against those who simply died. There can be no doubt that he had many more examples before him of this same mysterious mode of separation from the world of men that did not involve death. We have already seen how the lines in the Odyssey in which the translation of Menelaos is foreshadowed, point back to other and earlier poems of the same kind. Further, the references to the subject which we found in the remains of the Cyclic Epics make it easy to suppose that later Heroic poetry had been continually widening the circle of those who enjoyed translation and illumination.

Only from such a poetical source can Hesiod have derived his conception of a common meeting-place where the Translated enjoy for ever their untroubled existence. He calls that place the “Islands of the Blest”; and these lie far removed from the world of men, in the Ocean, on the confines of the earth, just where the Odyssey puts the Elysian [76] plain, another meeting-place of the still-living Translated, or rather the same under a different name. Its name does not oblige us to regard the “Elysian plain” as an island, but neither does it exclude that assumption. Homer never expressly calls the land of the Phæacians an island,[46] but the imagination of most readers will picture Scheriê as such, and so did the Greeks perhaps already at the time of the Hesiodic school of poets. In the same way a poet may have thought of the “Land of Destiny” that receives passing mention in Homer as an island, or group of islands; only an island surrounded and cut off by the sea can give the full impression of a distant asylum far from the world, inaccessible to all save those specially called thither. And accordingly the mythology of many peoples, especially those who live by the sea, has made a distant island the dwelling-place of the souls of the departed.

Complete isolation is the essential feature of the whole idea of translation, as Hesiod clearly shows. A later poet has added a line—which does not quite fit into its place—to make this isolation even more marked.[47] According to it, these Blessed Ones live not only “far from men” (167), but also (169) far from the immortals, and are ruled over by Kronos. The writer of this line follows a beautiful legend, later, however, than Hesiod, in which Zeus released the aged Kronos, together with the other Titans,[48] from Tartaros, so that the old king of the gods, under whose rule the Golden Age had once prevailed with peace and happiness upon earth, now wields the sceptre of another Golden Age over the Blessed in Elysium, himself a figure of peaceful contemplation dwelling far away from the stormy world, from the throne of which he has been ousted by Zeus. Hesiod himself has provoked this transference of Kronos from the Golden Age to the land of the Translated; for in the few lines that he devotes to the description of the life of the Blessed a reminiscence of the picture of the Golden Age’s untroubled existence is clearly discernible. Both pictures, the one of a childhood’s paradise in the past, the other of unclouded happiness reserved in the future for the elect, are closely related; it is difficult to say which of them has influenced the other[49] since the colours must have been the same in any case—the purely idyllic having an inevitable uniformity of its own.

§ 4

Hesiod says nothing of any influence upon this world exerted by the souls of the Translated in the Islands of the Blest, such as is attributed to the Daimones of the Golden [77] race, nor of any religious worship, which would be implied by such influence if it existed, such as the underworld spirits of the Silver Age receive. All relations with this world are broken off, for any influence from this side would completely contradict the whole conception of these blessed departed. Hesiod faithfully sets down the conception of the Translated exactly as poetic fancy, without any interference from religious cultus, or the folk-belief founded on it, had instinctively shaped it.

Supposing, then, that he follows Homeric and post-Homeric poetic tradition in this particular, whence did he derive his ideas about the Daimones and spirits of the Golden and Silver Ages? He did not and could not have got these from Homeric or semi-Homeric sources, for they (unlike the idea of Translation) do not simply expand, but actually contradict Homeric beliefs about the soul. To this question we may answer with certainty; he derived them from cultus. There survived, in spite of Homer, at least in central Greece where the Hesiodic poetry had its home, a religious worship paid to the souls of certain departed classes of men; and this cultus preserved alive, at least as a vague tradition, a belief which Homer had obscured and dispossessed. It only reached the Boeotian poet, whose own conceptions spring entirely from the soil of Homeric belief, as from a far distance. Already in the days of the Bronze race, he tells us, the souls of the dead were swallowed up in the dread House of Hades, and this (with a few miraculous exceptions) applies to the Heroic race as well. And for the poet, standing as he does, at the opening of the Iron Age, to which he himself belongs, nothing remains but dissolution in the nothingness of Erebos. That such is his view is proved by his silence about the fate after death of his generation—a silence that is all the more oppressive because the grim picture that he gives of the misery and ever-increasing depravity of real and contemporary life might seem to require a brighter and more hopeful picture of future compensation, if only to balance it and make it endurable. But he is silent about all such future compensation; he has no such hope to offer. Though in another part of the same poem Hope alone of all the blessings of an earlier and better age still remains among men, such Hope no longer illuminates the next world, at any rate, with its beams. The poet, more deeply distressed by the common realities of life, can by no means dispense so easily as the singers of the epic tradition enclosed in the magic circle of their poetry, with such hopes of the future. He can draw comfort only from what poetry [78] or religious myth tell him of the far distant past. It never enters his head to believe that the miracle of the translation of living men could transcend the limits of the Heroic Age and repeat itself in the common and prosaic present day. And the time when, according to a law of nature no longer (so it seems) in operation, the souls of the dead became Daimones and lived a higher life upon and beneath the earth, is situated far back in the distant past. Another law rules now; the men of to-day may still worship the immortal spirits of the Golden and the Silver Age, but they themselves will never be added to the number of those illuminated and exalted souls.

§ 5

Hesiod’s description, then, of the five Ages of Men gives us the most important information about the development of Greek belief in the soul. What he tells us of the spirits of the Silver and Golden race shows that from the earliest dawn of history down to the actual lifetime of the poet, a form of ancestor-worship had prevailed, based upon the once living belief in the elevation of disembodied and immaterial souls to the rank of powerful, consciously active spirits. But the company of these spirits receives no additions from the life of the present day. For centuries now the souls of the dead have been claimed by Hades and his vain shadow world. The worship of the soul is stationary; it affects only the souls of the long-since departed; it no longer increases the number of the objects of its worship. In other words, the belief has changed; the Homeric poems have triumphed and the view they held, and to which they gave authority, and, as it were, official sanction, now prevails. They teach men that the psyche once separated from the body loses all its powers and consciousness; the strengthless shadows are received into a distant Underworld. For them, no action, no influence upon the world of men is possible, and therefore no cult can be paid to them. Only on the farthest horizon faintly appear the Islands of the Blest, but the circle of the fortunate, who, according to the visionary fancy of the poets, are translated alive there, is now closed, just as the circle of epic story is complete also. Such miracles no longer happen.

Nothing in this evolutionary process so clearly depicted in the poem of Hesiod contradicts what we have learned from Homer. One thing only is new and immensely important; in spite of everything the memory survives that once the souls of departed generations of men had achieved a higher, [79] undying life. Hesiod speaks in the present tense of their being and working and of the worship paid to them after their death; if they are believed to be immortal, men will naturally continue to worship them. And the opposite also is true; if the worship of such spirits had not survived into the present, no one would have held them to be deathless and eternally potent.

In a word, we are in the old Greek mainland, the land of Boeotian peasants and urban farmers, among a stay-at-home race which neither knows nor desires to know of the seafaring life that tempts men to foreign lands whence they bring back so much that is new and strange. Here in the central uplands vestiges of ancient custom and belief remained that had been forgotten in the maritime cities of new Greece on the Asiatic coast. Even here, however, the new learning had penetrated to this extent: the structure of ancient belief, transported into the distant past, interwoven with fanciful tales of the earliest state of mankind, like the expiring echo of half-forgotten song lives on only in memory. But the cult of Souls, is not yet quite dead; the possibility remains that it may yet renew its strength and expand into fresh life when once the magic influence of the Homeric view of the world shall have been broken.

NOTES TO CHAPTER II

[1] It is not for nothing that what is here said of the “climate”, if one may so call it, of the Elysian plain, δ 566–8, reminds us so strikingly of the description of the abode of the Gods on Olympos, ζ 43–5.

[2] The announcement of the fate of Menelaos is quite superfluous; it is not necessitated (and not even justified) by his first request (468 ff.), or by his further questions (486 ff.; 551 ff.). Nitzsch already regarded the lines 561–8 as a later addition: Anm. z. Od. iii, p. 352—though indeed on grounds that I cannot regard as conclusive. Others have done the same since.

[3] The following are made invisible (by envelopment in a cloud) and carried away—this, though not always stated, is most probably to be understood in most cases: Paris, by Aphrodite, Γ 380 ff.; Aeneas, by Apollo, Ε 344 f.; Idaios, son of Dares, the priest of Hephaistos, by Heph., Ε 23; Hektor, by Apollo, Υ 443 f.; Aeneas, by Poseidon, Υ 325 ff.; Agenor, by Apollo, Φ 596 ff.—this last appears to be the original copied twice over in the story of this one day of fighting by later poets (in the above-mentioned cases of the use of the motif, Υ 325 ff.; 443 f.). It is remarkable (for no special reason for it suggests itself) that all these cases of translation are found on the Trojan side. Otherwise we only have one instance (and that only in the narrative of a long past adventure), the translation of the Anaktoriones by their father Poseidon, Λ 750 ff. Lastly, a case that hardly goes beyond those already mentioned: Zeus could have translated alive his son Sarpedon out of the fray and placed him in his Lykian home (Π 436), but refrains owing to the warning of Hera (440 ff.).

[4] The wish to die quickly is expressly contrasted with the wish to be carried off by the Harpies, 63 ἢ ἔπειτα—“or if not,” i.e. if quick death is denied to me. (v. Rh. Mus. 50, 2, 2.) Again 79–80: ὡς ἔμ’ ἀϊστώσειαν Ὀλύμπια δώματ’ ἔχοντες ἠέ μ’ ἐϋπλόκαμος βάλοι Ἄρτεμις. Thus the Harpies (= θύελλα 63) in this case do not bring death but carry away men alive (ἀναρπάξασα οἴχοιτο 63 f., ἅρπυιαι ἀνηρείψαντο 77 = ἀνέλοντο θύελλαι 66, and they carry them off κατ’ ἠερόεντα κέλευθα 64 to the προχοαὶ ἀψορρόου Ὠκεανοῖο 65 ἔδοσαν στυγερῇσιν Ἐρινύσιν ἀμφιπολεύειν 78). At the “mouths of Okeanos” (where it goes into the sea) is the entrance to the world of the dead; κ 508 ff., λ 13 ff. To be carried off by the storm-spirits used proverbially as a wish: Ζ 345 ff. ὧς μ’ ὄφελ’ ἤματι τῷ ὅτε με πρῶτον τέκε μήτηρ οἴχεσθαι προφέρουσα κακὴ ἀνέμοιο θύελλα εἰς ὄρος ἢ εἰς κῦμα πολυφλοίσβοιο θαλάσσης (i.e. to some solitary place, Orph., H. 19, 19; 36, 16; 71, 11). Such transportation through the air is elsewhere contrasted with death and dwelling in Hades, as in Penelope’s prayer. (Roscher, Kynanthropie [Abh. d. sächs. Ges. d. Wiss. xvii], p. 67, gives a strange but hardly the correct explanation of this.) Cf. Soph., Tr., 953 ff.; Ai., 1193 ff.; (Phil., 1092 ff.?); cf. also Eur., Hipp., 1279 ff.; Ion, 805 f.; Supp., 833–6. A deeply rooted popular mode of thought, and one of primeval antiquity, lies at the root of all [81] these instances.—ὑπὸ πνευμάτων συναρπαγέντα ἄφαντον γενέσθαι is a reason for τιμαὶ ἀθάνατοι, in the only half-rationalized story of Hesperos in D.S. 3, 60, 3.

[5] One would like to know more of this strange story, but what we learn elsewhere of Pandareos and his daughters (Sch. υ 66–7; τ 518; Ant. Lib. 36) contributes nothing to the understanding of the Homeric narrative and probably belongs in part to another connexion. Pandareos, father of Aëdon (τ 518 ff.), seems to be another person. Even the strange representation of the two daughters of Pandareos in Polygnotos’ picture of the underworld (Paus. 10, 30, 2) casts no light on the Homeric fable. (Cf. Roscher, Kynan., 4 ff., 65 f.)

[6] The Erinyes live normally in Erebos, as is shown esp. by I 571 f.; Τ 259. But when they punish during the lifetime of the criminal acts done in contravention of the laws of family life, it must be supposed that they were sometimes thought of as going about the earth, e.g. I 454: λ 278—for “working at a distance” seems impossible—as in Hes., Op., 803 f.—Ἐρινύσιν ἀμφιπολεύειν (78) cannot be anything but “serve the Erinyes”, “become their ἀμφίπολοι”. To understand it as Roscher does (Kynan., 65, n. 183) following Eustathius, in the sense “fly about in the train of the E.” is forbidden by the use of the simple dative Ἐρινύσι joined closely with ἀμφ. (θεαῖς ἀμφιπολῶν Soph., O.C., 680, is different.)

[7] “When the Bride of the Wind comes by you must throw yourself on the ground as though it were the Muodisheere (on which see Grimm (E.T.), p. 931) otherwise they will carry you off.” Birlinger, Volksthüml. a. Schwaben, i, 192, “She is the Devil’s Bride,” ib. (On the “Bride of the Wind”, etc., see Grimm, pp. 632, 1009.) Such wind-spirits are in unholy alliance with the “Furious Host”, i.e. the unquiet “souls” of the dead that travel through the air by night.

[8] On the Harpies, see Rh. Mus., 50, 1–5.

[9] See Nägelsb., H.T., pp. 42–3, and Roscher, Nektar u. Ambrosia, p. 51 ff., answering Bergk’s objections, Opusc. ii, 669. (Arist. Meta., 1000a, 9–14, is very definite.)

[10] It is not improbable that this Ino Leukothea was originally a goddess who was later turned into a “Heroine” (identified with the daughter of Kadmos for reasons no longer recoverable) and only afterwards turned back again into a goddess. But for the Homeric age she was essentially a mortal who had become a goddess: for this reason, just because she was an example of such deification of mortals, she remained an interesting character to later writers; cf. in addition to the well-known passages in Pindar, etc., Cic., T.D. i, 28. Only what the actual conception of the people and their poets was—not what may possibly be suggested as the doubtful background of such conceptions—concerns me in this as in many other cases.

[11] Only temporary translation (ἀνήρπασε) of Marpessa by Apollo I 564.

[12] Ganymedes, ἀνήρπασε θέσπις ἄελλα, h. Ven., 208, as the θύελλα (= Ἅρπυια) did the daughters of Pandareos. The eagle is the addition of later poetry.

[13] Λ 1; ε 1.

[14] Ἠὼς . . . ἀπ’ Ὠκεανοῖο ῥοάων ὤρνυθ’, ἵν’ ἀθανάτοισι φόως φέροι ἠδὲ βροτοῖσιν, Τ 1 f.: cf. ψ 244 (h. Merc., 184 f.). So also h. Ven., 224 ff., says of Tithonos: Ἠοῖ τερπόμενος χρυσοθρόνῳ ἠριγενείῃ ναῖε παρ’ Ὠκεανοῖο ῥοῇς ἐπὶ πείρασι γαίης, in good Homeric style. It seems that the magic island Aiaia was considered the home of Eos (and of Tithonos): μ 3: νῆσόν τ’ Αἰαίην, ὅθι τ’ Ἠοῦς ἠριγενείης [82] οἰκία καὶ χοροί εἰσι ἀντολαὶ ἠελίοιο. I need not here go into the attempts made even in antiquity to explain the much-discussed difficulty introduced by this verse and to bring it into conformity with the westerly situation of Aiaia implied in the rest of the Odyssey. One thing is certain: the first composer of this verse thought of Aiaia as lying towards the east. Only the last resources of the commentator’s art could situate the place of the “sun’s uprising” and the “dwelling of the Dawn” in the west.

[15] Among innumerable unsuccessful attempts made by the ancients at finding an etymological derivation for the word Ἠλύσιον (Sch., δ 563, Eust., p. 1509, Hesych., s.v., etc., also Cels. ap. Orig., Cels. vii, 28, p. 53 L.) occurs also the right one, E.M., 428, 36: παρὰ τὴν ἔλευσιν, ἔνθα οἱ εὐσεβεῖς παραγίνονται. The grammarians seem to have disputed over the question, did Menelaos live for ever in Elysion? It was agreed on all hands that he reached that abode alive, without separation of psyche from body; but the over-subtle thought that the prophecy meant that he too should die there though not in Argos—not that he should never die at all: so esp. E. Gud., 242, 2 ff. This was the opinion also of those who derived Ἠλύσιον from the fact that there the ψυχαὶ λελυμέναι τῶν σωμάτων διάγουσι: Eust., 1509, 29, E.M., etc. The etymology is as bad as the interpretation of the line. The line remained, however, throughout antiquity as a curiosity; intelligent readers understood the prophecy quite rightly as referring to the translation of Menelaos to everlasting life without separation of ψυχή from body; e.g. Porph. ap. Stob., Ecl. i, p. 422, 8 ff., W. So, too, those who gave the right interpretation of fact, but rested it upon the more dubious etymology: Ἠλύσιον οὐλύσιον, ὅτι οὐ διαλύονται ἀπὸ τῶν σωμάτων αἱ ψυχαί. Hesych. (cf. E.M., 428, 34–5; Sch., δ 563; Procl. on Hes., Op., 169).

[16] οὐ μὴν φαίνεταί γε (ὁ ποιητής) προαγαγὼν τὸν λόγον ἐς πλέον ὡς εὕρημα ἄν τις οἰκεῖον, προσαψάμενος δὲ αὐτοῦ μόνον ἅτε ἐς ἅπαν ἤδη διαβεβοημένου τὸ Ἑλληνικόν—to adopt the words that Pausanias (10, 31, 4) uses of a similar case.

[17] The reasons for the special favour shown to Rhadamanthys are as unknown to us as they evidently were to the Greeks of later times. What is generally said of the “justice” of Rhad. rests upon private opinion only and does not supply the place of the precise legend that should have justified his translation. That he once had a complete legend of his own may be guessed from the allusion to him in η 323, though that passage still leaves us quite in the dark. At any rate, it certainly does not follow from that reference that while dwelling in Elysion he was a neighbour of the Phaeacians as Welcker thinks: nor further that he had always been a dweller in Elysion, as Preller supposes, instead of being transported there. Nothing in the former passage justifies us in regarding him as then dwelling in Elysion; while the other reference to him must be supposed to mean that Rhad. just as much as Menelaos, was translated to Elys. (and so e.g. Paus. understood the poet 8, 53, 5: πρότερον δὲ ἔτι Ῥαδάμανθυν ἐνταῦθα ἥκειν; doubtful: Aesch. fr. 99, 12–13). In fact, we have lost the legends which gave the details of his translation: his figure had become isolated and had not entered into the greater circle of epic figures—and as a consequence his mythical context soon disappeared too.

[18] Hasisatra’s Translation: see the translation of the Babylonian account in Paul Haupt’s Der Keilins. Sintfluthber. (Leip. 1881), p. 17, 18. The expressions used by the Greek-writing reporters are exactly like those common in Greek accounts of translation: γενέσθαι ἀφανῆ [83] (τὸν Ξίσουθρον) μετὰ τῶν θεῶν οἰκήσοντα, Beros. ap. Sync., p. 55, 6, 11 Di.; θεοί μιν ἐξ ἀνθρώπων ἀφανίζουσι, Abydenus ap. Syncell., p. 70, 13. Of Enoch we read, Gen. 5²⁴: οὐχ εὑρίσκετο ὅτι μετέθηκεν αὐτὸν ὁ θεός (μετετέθη, Ecclus., 44¹⁶; Hebr. 11⁵); ἀνελήφθη ἀπὸ τῆς γῆς, Ecclus. 49¹⁴; ἀνεχώρησε πρὸς τὸ θεῖον, Jos., AJ. i, 3, 4 (of Moses: ἀφανίζεται, Jos., AJ. iv, 8, 48). On the translation of Enoch and Elijah, see also Schwally, D. Leben. nach d. Tode n. d. Vorst. d. a. Israel (1892), p. 140. Translation of the living into Sheol often in the O.T., see Schwally, p. 62. Even Enoch has not escaped the fate of being regarded by comparative mythologists as the sun. Enoch may be given up to them, if the Orientalists have no objection; but it seems a pity that the theory, in accordance with the favourite argument from analogy, should be applied to Greek Translation-myths too, so that we should see the whole series of such figures, from Menelaos to Apollonios of Tyana, transformed by magic into mythological suns (or dawns, water-meadows, thunder-clouds, etc.).

[19] μαλθακὸς αἰχμητής, Ρ 588.

[20] Ξ 321–2.

[21] One might even suspect that Menelaos is translated to everlasting life not merely because he has Helen, Zeus’ daughter, to wife: οὕνεκ’ ἔχεις Ἑλένην as Proteus tells him, but in imitation of a much earlier mythical tradition, according to which Helen herself was translated and made immortal. No ancient tradition reports the death of Helen—with the exception of the absurd invention of Ptolemaios Chennos (Phot. Bibl., p. 149a, 37 Bk.; 42; 149b, 1 ff.) and the not very superior aetiological myth in Paus. 3, 19, 10. On the other hand, we often hear of her deification, living on the island Leuke or else in the Islands of the Blest. It was not unnatural that mythological tradition should have at an early period set free the most “daemonic” of women from the usual fate of mankind and that Menelaos should rather have followed her example than she his (as Isoc. 10, 62, definitely says).

[22] Cf. Tylor, ii, 85: J. G. Müller, Ges. d. Americ. Urrelig., 660 f.; Waitz, Anthrop. v, 2, 114; vi, 302, 307.

[23] We are told that Rhadamanthys was once conveyed by the Phaeacians to Euboea ἐποψόμενος Τιτυὸν Γαιήϊον υἱόν (η 321 ff.). We have no grounds and no right to complete this story by supposing that this was when Rh. already lived in Elysion. To regard the Phaeacians as a sort of “ferry-folk of the dead” connected in some way with Elysion is pure unsupported fancy.

[24] The possessor of ἀθανασία did not necessarily possess also δύναμιν ἰσόθεον (Isoc. 10, 61).

[25] To identify Ὀρτυγίη, ο 404, with Delos, and Συρίη with the island Syros as the older commentators and K. O. Müller, Dorier, i, 381 [? not in E.T.], did, is impossible on account of the addition of the words ὅθι τροπαὶ ἠελίοιο alone. These show that Syrie was far away in the fabulous west, the only possible place for such a wonderland. It is evident that Ortygia is originally a purely mythical spot, sacred to Artemis and no more certainly fixed in one place than the Dionysian Nysa, and for that reason always to be found wherever the cult of Artemis was especially popular, in Aetolia, Syracuse, Ephesos, or Delos. Delos is clearly distinguished from O. in h. Ap. 16, and only later identified with O. (Delos being considered the older name, O. Schneider, Nicandr., p. 22, n.), when Artemis had been brought into closer connexion with Apollo, and even then not invariably. Thus in Homer Ortygia never clearly = Delos. [84]

[26] Ἄρτεμις δὲ αὐτὴν ἑξαρπάξασα εἰς Ταύρους μετακομίζει (cf. the μετέθηκεν αὐτὸν ὁ θεός of Enoch, Gen. 5²⁴) καὶ ἀθάνατον ποιεῖ, ἔλαφον δὲ ἀντὶ τῆς κόρης παρίστησι τῷ βωμῷ, Procl., Chrest. ap. Kinkel Epic. Fr., p. 19: [Apollod.] Epit. iii, 22. Wagn.

[27] τούτῳ (τῷ Μέμνονι) Ἠὼς παρὰ Διὸς αἰτησαμένη ἀθανασίαν δίδωσι says Proclus with regrettable brevity (p. 33, Kinkel).

[28] It cannot be doubted (in spite of Meier, Annali dell’ Inst. Arch., 1883, p. 217 ff.) that the story given in Π of Sarpedon’s death and the carrying away of his body, even if it does not belong to the oldest part of the poem (which I cannot regard as certain), is nevertheless earlier than the Aithiopis and was the model for its account of Memnon’s death (cf. also Christ, Chron. altgr. Epos., p. 25). But why do Thanatos and Hypnos carry away the body of Sarpedon (instead of the usual θύελλα, ἄελλα, Ἅρπυια, or the winds, Q.S. ii, 550, in the case of Memnon)? Where these two are found on Attic lekythoi as bearers of the corpse (Robert, Thanatos, 19) they were perhaps intended in some consolatory sense as in the grave inscriptions ὕπνος ἔχει σε, μάκαρ . . . καὶ νέκυς οὐκ ἐγένου. The Homeric poet, however, can hardly have meant anything of the sort, but merely invents the indispensable second bearer to assist Thanatos—an effective touch but not one that rested on any religious grounds. Hypnos as brother of Thanatos is also found in the Διὸς ἀπάτη, Ξ 231.

[29] ἐκ τῆς πυρᾶς ἡ Θέτις ἀναρπάσασα τὸν παῖδα εἰς τὴν Λευκὴν νῆσον διακομίζει, Procl., Chrest., p. 34, Kink. Then he continues, οἱ δὲ Ἀχαιοὶ τὸν τάφον χώσαντες ἀγῶνα τιθέασιν. Thus a grave-mound is set up though the body of Achilles has been translated: evidently a concession to the older narrative (ω 80–4), which knew nothing of the translation of the body but gives prominence to the grave-mound. Besides which, the tumulus of Achilles—a landmark on the seashore of the Troad—required explanation, and the poet accordingly speaks of the erection of a cenotaph. It was not considered a contradiction to erect cenotaphs, not only to those whose bodies were irrecoverable (see above, Ch. I, [n. 88]), but also to Heroes whose bodies had been translated. Thus Herakles, after he has been struck by lightning and snatched up into the sky, has a χῶμα made for him, though no bones were found upon the πυρά, D.S. 4, 38, 5; 39, 1. (The tumuli found in the Troad were not, indeed, originally empty as Schliemann, Troy, etc., pp. 252, 263, supposed; they were not cenotaphs but merely grave-mounds that had once been filled and belong to a type frequently met with in Phrygia; see Schuchhardt, Schliemann’s Excav. [E.T.], p. 84 ff. Kretschmer, Einl. Ges. gr. Spr., 1896, p. 176.)

[30] What became of Odysseus? Proclus is silent on the point, and we have no means of guessing. According to Hyginus 127 he was buried in Aiaia; but if nothing more was going to be done with his body why bring him to Aiaia? Acc. to Sch. Lyc., 805, he was raised to life again by Kirke, but what happened to him then? (Acc. to [Apollod.] Epit. vii, 37 W., the dead Odysseus seems to remain in Ithaka.—We have no grounds for altering the words to suit the Telegoneia as Wagner does, esp. as a complete correspondence with that poem cannot be obtained.) The death and burial of Od. among the Tyrrhenians (Müller, Etruscans iii, 281 tr. Gray) belong to quite another connexion.

[31] The Aithiopis is later than the Hades scenes in ω, and consequently later still than the Nekyia of λ. The prophecy of the Translation of Menelaos in δ is likewise later than the Nekyia but to all appearance older than the Aithiopis. [85]

[32] The extract from the Nostoi in Proclus, Chrest., is particularly inadequate and evidently gives no full idea of the very wide and various subject matter of that poem. Thus, too, the notices of it preserved from other sources give details of its subject matter (esp. of the Nekyia which was included in it) that cannot be fitted into the limits of Proclus’ outline.

[33] The idea that the Bronze age is really identical with the age of Heroes is at first sight attractive (see e.g. Steitz, Die W. u. T. des Hesiod, p. 61); one soon finds, however, that it breaks down on closer examination.

[34] It does not seem to me absolutely necessary to strike out lines 124 f. (οἵ ῥα φυλάσσουσίν τε δίκας καὶ σχέτλια ἔργα, ἠέρα ἑσσάμενοι πάντη φοιτῶντες ἐπ’ αἶαν). They are repeated in lines 254 f., but that is a natural place to repeat them. Proclus does not comment on them; but it does not follow that he did not have them before him; and Plutarch, D.O. 37, p. 431 B, seems to allude to l. 125 in its present context.

[35] Plu., D.O., 10, p. 415 B, in obvious error, takes Hesiod’s δαίμονες for such an intermediate class of beings; he supposes that Hesiod distinguishes four classes τῶν λογικῶν, θεοί, δαίμονες, ἥρωες, ἄνθρωποι. In this Platonist division the ἥρωες would correspond rather with Hesiod’s δαίμονες of the first age. (What Proclus has to say on Hesiod, Op. 121, p. 101, Gaisf., is taken evidently word for word from Plutarch’s commentary on Hesiod and resembles closely the remarks in the passage cited from the Def. Orac.) Modern critics have often failed to notice the difference between the Hesiodic δαίμονες and the Platonic. Plato himself is very decided about the difference (Crat. 397 E–398 C).

[36] ἠέρα ἑσσάμενοι 125 (cf. 223; Ξ 282) is a naive equivalent for “invisible” as Tzet. correctly explains. This is how it is to be understood regularly in Homer whenever there is mention of envelopment in a cloud and the like.

[37] These daimones are called ἐπιχθόνιοι in contrast (not to the ὑποχθόνιοι of l. 141, but) to the θεοὶ ἐπουράνιοι, as Proclus on l. 122 rightly remarks. Thus in Homer we have ἐπιχθόνιοι regularly used as an adjective, or, standing alone, as an equivalent of men as distinguished from gods. Then the ὑποχθόνιοι of 141 are brought in to form another and secondary contrast with the ἐπιχθόνιοι.

[38] ρ 485 ff. It follows that the descriptions of the visits paid by gods to the homes of men are of great antiquity; cf. my Griech. Roman, p. 506 ff. Zeus Philios in particular is fond of visiting men: Diod. Com. Ἐπίκληρ., Mein. Com. iii, p. 543 f. (ii, p. 420 K.).

[39] τιμὴ καὶ τοῖσιν ὀπηδεῖ 142. τιμή in the sense not of simple honour but of practical worship, as frequently in Homer, e.g. in such phrases as: τιμὴ καὶ κῦδος ὀπηδεῖ, Ρ 251; τιμῆς ἀπονήμενος, ω 30: τιμὴν δὲ λελόγχασιν ἶσα θεοῖσιν, λ 304; ἔχει τιμήν, λ 495, etc. In the same way here, l. 138: οὕνεκα τιμὰς οὐκ ἐδίδουν μακάρεσσι θεοῖς.

[40] Light and dark, i.e. good and bad, δαίμονες are acc. to Roth, Myth. v. d. Weltaltern (1860), pp. 16–17, distinguished in Hesiod’s daimones of the golden and silver age. Such a distinction, however, never appears in Hesiod; and it is hardly credible that the gods and spirits of ancient Greek popular belief (which never really admitted the categories good and bad) should in this primitive period have been actually classified in accordance with such categories. At any rate, Greek readers never found anything of the kind expressed in Hesiod: [86] the conception of bad daimones is regularly supported by reference to the philosophers alone (e.g. Plut., D.O., 17, p. 419 A), and the conception is certainly no older than the earliest philosophic speculation.

[41] l. 141: τοὶ μὲν ὑποχθόνιοι (ἐπιχθόνιοι all MSS. except one, see Köchly’s Apparatus; also Tz.) μάκαρες θνητοὶ καλέονται.—φύλακες θνητοὶ was read and explained by Proclus. This is clearly wrong, and is corrected to φύλακες θνητῶν (as in l. 123) by Hagen and Welcker. But this transfers from the first to the second race an expression that we cannot be sure Hesiod meant to be transferred. Not merely the words but the sense, too, is thus corrected, without due ground. μάκαρες does not look like a corruption; it is more likely that φύλακες is an accidental alteration. ὑπ. μάκαρες θνητοῖς καλέονται is the reading of the latest editor: but here to say the least of it the addition of θνητοῖς is superfluous. We should rather try to understand and explain the traditional text and show how the poet came by the remarkable expression.

[42] When philosophers and philosophizing poets of a later age occasionally refer to the soul when freed from the body as a δαίμων, the expression has a totally different sense.

[43] Similarly, though the oxymoron is much less daring in his case, Isocrates, 9, 72, has δαίμων θνητός. In order to describe a daimon who has originally been a mortal later ages boldly invented the compound ἀνθρωποδαίμων which corresponds fairly well with the Hesiodic μάκαρ θνητός: [Eur.] Rhes., 971; Procop., An. 12, p. 79, 17 D. (νεκυδαίμων on a defixio from Carthage, BCH. xii, 299). Later still a king destined to become a god is called, even at his birth, by Manetho (i, 280) θεὸν βροτὸν ἀνθρώποισιν.

[44] The silver race was created by the gods of Olympos, like the golden before them (l. 110; 128); only the third race (l. 143) and then the fourth (158) by Zeus alone. It might be supposed from this that the silver age as well as the golden age occurred in the period before Zeus’ rule, ἐπὶ Κρόνου ὅτ’ οὐρανῷ ἐμβασίλευεν (l. 111); and in this sense “Orpheus” understood the words of Hesiod when he τοῦ ἀργυροῦ γένους βασιλεύειν φησὶ τὸν Κρόνον (Proclus on l. 126). But it would be very difficult to reconcile l. 138 Ζεὺς Κρονίδης κτλ. with this view. Hesiod may then have placed the silver age in the time when sub Iove mundus erat (as Ovid explicitly states, M. i, 113 f.); but all the same it lay for him in the far distant past before all history.

[45] νώνυμνοι 154 may quite as well mean “nameless”, i.e. without name or special title, as “fameless” (as it does for the most part though not invariably in Homer).

[46] See Welcker, Kl. Schr. ii, 6, who, however, in the desire to rule out all possibility of identifying Scherie with Korkyra asserts too positively that it was a part of the mainland. ζ 204 (compared with δ 354) at least comes very close to regarding it as an island. But it is clear that nowhere is it explicitly called an island.—It is possible that Σχερίη, connected with σχερός, may really mean “mainland” (Welcker, loc. cit.; Kretschmer, Einl. Gesch. gr. Spr., 281): but the question still remains whether the Homeric poet, who did not invent the name, understood or respected its original significance. At any rate, it was no longer understood by those who in very early times identified Scherie with the island Korkyra.

[47] The objections to l. 169 as regards its form are brought out by Steitz, Hesiods W. u. T., p. 69. The line is missing in most of the MSS.; it was rejected (together with the line following, which, however, [87] is quite sound) by ancient critics (Proclus on l. 158). Later editors are united in condemning it. But the interpolation is at any rate old: probably even Pindar already knew the line in this place (O. ii, 70).

[48] λῦσε δὲ Ζεὺς ἄφθιτος Τιτᾶνας Pi. (P. iv, 291), in whose time, however, this was a well-known myth to which he is only making a passing allusion for the sake of an example. The Hesiodic Theogony still knows nothing of it.

[49] Before Hesiod we have no mention of the myth of a Golden, Saturnian Age, nor any complete description of the imaginary life upon Blessed Islands. But epic poetry had already, as we have seen, provided him with occasional examples of translation to a place of blessedness, and he only collects these into a combined picture of such a place. To that extent the belief in a blessed life beyond the grave meets us earlier than the myth of a Golden Age. But we have not the slightest ground for saying that the former “must have existed from the beginning among the Greeks” (as Milchhöfer at least thinks, Anf. Kunst, p. 230). On the other hand, it may be mere accident that the myth of the Golden Age has no older authority than Hesiod—the story itself may be much earlier. After Hesiod it was frequently taken up and improved upon; not, however, first by Empedocles as Graf supposes, ad aureæ aet. fab. sym. (Leip. Stud. viii, p. 15), but already in the epic Ἀλκμεωνίς, see Philod. Piet., p. 51 Gp. (See also some remarks by Alfred Nutt, The Voyage of Bran, p. 269 f., 1895, with which I cannot agree.)

CHAPTER III
CAVE DEITIES: SUBTERRANEAN TRANSLATION