Chapter I: Beliefs About the Soul and Cult of Souls in the Homeric Poems (2)

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\1]--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\1] 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\1] 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\1] 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\1] Remains of burnt sacrificial animals (sheep and goats) have also been found in the graves at Nauplia and elsewhere.[50\1] 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\1]

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\1] 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 (~bômo/s~) such as was in use in the worship of the gods above, but a sacrificial hearth (~escha/ra~) 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\1] 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\1] 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\1] 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\1] 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 (~moi=ra~). 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" (~phrê/n, phre/nes~) to most of the phenomena of will or feeling and even to those of the intellect. The "heart" (~ê=tor, kê=r~) 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\1] And so we often find mentioned side by side with the "midriff" and in the closest conjunction with it, the ~thumo/s~, 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 (~no/os-noei=n-no/êma, boulê/, me/nos, mê=tis~) 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\1] 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\1] It is essentially the same mode of thought that leads him to say "midriff" (~phre/nes~) 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]

§ 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\1] 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\1] 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\1] 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\1] 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\1] 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\1] lamentation, and sorrow.[67\1] 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\1] 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\1] 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\1] 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\1] {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\1] 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 (~haimakouri/a~) 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\1] 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\1] 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\1] 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\1] 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\1] 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\1] 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" (~ei/dôla~) 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\1] 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\1] {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\1] 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\1] 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.