Chapter II: Islands of the Blest (2)

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\2] 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\2] 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\2] 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\2] 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\2: It is not for nothing that what is here said of the "climate", if one may so call it, of the Elysian plain, ~d~ 566-8, reminds us so strikingly of the description of the abode of the Gods on Olympos, ~z~ 43-5.]

[2\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\2: 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, ~G~ 380 ff.; Aeneas, by Apollo, ~E~ 344 f.; Idaios, son of Dares, the priest of Hephaistos, by Heph., ~E~ 23; Hektor, by Apollo, ~U~ 443 f.; Aeneas, by Poseidon, ~U~ 325 ff.; Agenor, by Apollo, ~Ph~ 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, ~U~ 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, ~L~ 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 (~P~ 436), but refrains owing to the warning of Hera (440 ff.).]

[4\2: The wish to die quickly is expressly _contrasted_ with the wish to be carried off by the Harpies, 63 ~ê\ e/peita~--"or if not," i.e. if quick death is denied to me. (v. _Rh. Mus._ 50, 2, 2.) Again 79-80: ~hôs e/m' _aïstô/seian_ Olu/mpia dô/mat' e/chontes êe/ m' eüplo/kamos ba/loi A/rtemis~. Thus the Harpies (= ~thu/ella~ 63) in this case do not bring death but carry away men alive (~anarpa/xasa oi/choito~ 63 f., ~ha/rpuiai anêrei/psanto~ 77 = ~ane/lonto thu/ellai~ 66, and they carry them off ~kat' êero/enta ke/leutha~ 64 to the ~prochoai\ apsorro/ou Ôkeanoi=o~ 65 ~e/dosan stugerê=|sin Erinu/sin amphipoleu/ein~ 78). At the "mouths of Okeanos" (where it goes into the sea is the entrance to the world of the dead; ~k~ 508 ff., ~l~ 13 ff. To be carried off by the storm-spirits used proverbially as a wish: ~Z~ 345 ff. ~hô=s m' o/phel' ê/mati tô=| ho/te me prô=ton te/ke mê/têr oi/chesthai prophe/rousa kakê\ ane/moio _thu/ella_ eis o/ros ê\ eis ku=ma poluphloi/sboio thala/ssês~ (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.--~hupo\ pneuma/tôn sunarpage/nta a/phanton gene/sthai~ is a reason for ~timai\ atha/natoi~, in the only half-rationalized story of Hesperos in D.S. 3, 60, 3.]

[5\2: One would like to know more of this strange story, but what we learn elsewhere of Pandareos and his daughters (Sch. ~u~ 66-7; ~t~ 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 (~t~ 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\2: The Erinyes live normally in Erebos, as is shown esp. by ~I~ 571 f.; ~T~ 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: ~l~ 278--for "working at a distance" seems impossible--as in Hes., Op., 803 f.--~Erinu/sin amphipoleu/ein~ (78) cannot be anything but "serve the Erinyes", "become their ~amphi/poloi~". 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 ~Erinu/si~ joined closely with ~amph.~ (~theai=s amphipolô=n~ Soph., _O.C._, 680, is different.)]

[7\2: "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\2: On the Harpies, see _Rh. Mus._, 50, 1-5.]

[9\2: 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\2: 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\2: Only temporary translation (~anê/rpase~) of Marpessa by Apollo ~I~ 564.]

[12\2: Ganymedes, ~anê/rpase the/spis _a/ella_~, _h. Ven._, 208, as the ~thu/ella~ (= ~Ha/rpuia~) did the daughters of Pandareos. The eagle is the addition of later poetry.]

[13\2: ~L~ 1; ~e~ 1.]

[14\2: ~Êô\s . . . ap' Ôkeanoi=o rhoa/ôn ô/rnuth', hi/n' athana/toisi pho/ôs phe/roi êde\ brotoi=sin~, ~T~ 1 f.: cf. ~ps~ 244 (_h. Merc._, 184 f.). So also _h. Ven._, 224 ff., says of Tithonos: ~Êoi= terpo/menos chrusothro/nô| êrigenei/ê| nai=e par' Ôkeanoi=o rhoê=|s epi\ pei/rasi gai/ês~, in good Homeric style. It seems that the magic island Aiaia was considered the home of Eos (and of Tithonos): ~m~ 3: ~nê=so/n t' Aiai/ên, ho/thi t' Êou=s êrigenei/ês {82} oiki/a kai\ choroi/ eisi antolai\ êeli/oio~. 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\2: Among innumerable unsuccessful attempts made by the ancients at finding an etymological derivation for the word ~Êlu/sion~ (Sch., ~d~ 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: ~para\ tê\n e/leusin, e/ntha hoi eusebei=s paragi/nontai~. 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 ~Êlu/sion~ from the fact that there the ~psuchai\ _lelume/nai_ tô=n sôma/tôn dia/gousi~: 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 ~psuchê/~ 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: ~Êlu/sion oulu/sion, ho/ti ou dialu/ontai apo\ tô=n sôma/tôn hai psuchai/~. Hesych. (cf. _E.M._, 428, 34-5; Sch., ~d~ 563; Procl. on Hes., _Op._, 169).]

[16\2: ~ou mê\n phai/netai/ ge (ho poiêtê/s) proagagô\n to\n lo/gon es ple/on hôs heu/rêma a/n tis oikei=on, prosapsa/menos de\ autou= mo/non ha/te es ha/pan ê/dê diabeboême/nou to\ Hellêniko/n~--to adopt the words that Pausanias (10, 31, 4) uses of a similar case.]

[17\2: 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 ~ê~ 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: ~pro/teron de\ e/ti Rhada/manthun entau=tha hê/kein~; 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\2: 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: ~gene/sthai aphanê= {83} (to\n Xi/southron) meta\ tô=n theô=n oikê/sonta~, Beros. ap. Sync., p. 55, 6, 11 Di.; ~theoi/ min ex anthrô/pôn aphani/zousi~, Abydenus ap. Syncell., p. 70, 13. Of Enoch we read, Gen. 5^24: ~ouch heuri/sketo ho/ti mete/thêken auto\n ho theo/s (metete/thê~, Ecclus., 44^16; Hebr. 11^5); ~anelê/phthê apo\ tê=s gê=s~, Ecclus. 49^14; ~anechô/rêse pro\s to\ thei=on~, Jos., _AJ._ i, 3, 4 (of Moses: ~aphani/zetai~, 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\2: ~malthako\s aichmêtê/s~, ~R~ 588.]

[20\2: ~X~ 321-2.]

[21\2: One might even suspect that Menelaos is translated to everlasting life not merely because he has Helen, Zeus' daughter, to wife: ~hou/nek' e/cheis Hele/nên~ 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. 149_a_, 37 Bk.; 42; 149_b_, 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\2: Cf. Tylor, ii, 85: J. G. Müller, _Ges. d. Americ. Urrelig._, 660 f.; Waitz, _Anthrop._ v, 2, 114; vi, 302, 307.]

[23\2: We are told that Rhadamanthys was once conveyed by the Phaeacians to Euboea ~epopso/menos Tituo\n Gaiê/ïon huio/n~ (~ê~ 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\2: The possessor of ~athanasi/a~ did not necessarily possess also ~du/namin iso/theon~ (Isoc. 10, 61).]

[25\2: To identify ~Ortugi/ê~, ~o~ 404, with Delos, and ~Suri/ê~ 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 ~ho/thi tropai\ êeli/oio~ 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\2: ~A/rtemis de\ autê\n hexarpa/xasa eis Tau/rous metakomi/zei~ (cf. the ~mete/thêken auto\n ho theo/s~ of Enoch, Gen. 5^24) ~kai\ atha/naton poiei=, e/laphon de\ anti\ tê=s ko/rês pari/stêsi tô=| bômô=|~, Procl., _Chrest._ ap. Kinkel _Epic. Fr._, p. 19: [Apollod.] _Epit._ iii, 22. Wagn.]

[27\2: ~tou/tô| (tô=| Me/mnoni Êô\s para\ Dio\s aitêsame/nê athanasi/an di/dôsi~ says Proclus with regrettable brevity (p. 33, Kinkel).]

[28\2: It cannot be doubted (in spite of Meier, _Annali dell' Inst. Arch._, 1883, p. 217 ff.) that the story given in ~P~ 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 ~thu/ella, a/ella, Ha/rpuia~, 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 ~hu/pnos e/chei se, ma/kar . . . kai\ ne/kus ouk ege/nou~. 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 ~Dio\s apa/tê~, ~X~ 231.]

[29\2: ~ek tê=s pura=s hê The/tis anarpa/sasa to\n pai=da eis tê\n Leukê\n nê=son diakomi/zei~, Procl., _Chrest._, p. 34, Kink. Then he continues, ~hoi de\ Achaioi\ to\n _ta/phon_ chô/santes agô=na tithe/asin~. Thus a grave-mound is set up though the body of Achilles has been translated: evidently a concession to the older narrative (~ô~ 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 ~chô=ma~ made for him, though no bones were found upon the ~pura/~, 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\2: 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\2: The _Aithiopis_ is later than the Hades scenes in ~ô~, and consequently later still than the Nekyia of ~l~. The prophecy of the Translation of Menelaos in ~d~ is likewise later than the Nekyia but to all appearance older than the _Aithiopis_.] {85}

[32\2: 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\2: 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\2: It does not seem to me absolutely necessary to strike out lines 124 f. (~hoi/ rha phula/ssousi/n te di/kas kai\ sche/tlia e/rga, êe/ra hessa/menoi pa/ntê phoitô=ntes ep' ai=an~). 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\2: Plu., _D.O._, 10, p. 415 B, in obvious error, takes Hesiod's ~dai/mones~ for such an intermediate class of beings; he supposes that Hesiod distinguishes four classes ~tô=n logikô=n, theoi/, dai/mones, hê/rôes, a/nthrôpoi~. In this Platonist division the ~hê/rôes~ would correspond rather with Hesiod's ~dai/mones~ 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 ~dai/mones~ and the Platonic. Plato himself is very decided about the difference (_Crat._ 397 E-398 C).]

[36\2: ~êe/ra hessa/menoi~ 125 (cf. 223; ~X~ 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\2: These daimones are called ~epichtho/nioi~ in contrast (not to the ~hupochtho/nioi~ of l. 141, but) to the ~theoi\ epoura/nioi~, as Proclus on l. 122 rightly remarks. Thus in Homer we have ~epichtho/nioi~ regularly used as an adjective, or, standing alone, as an equivalent of men as distinguished from gods. Then the ~hupochtho/nioi~ of 141 are brought in to form another and secondary contrast with the ~epichtho/nioi~.]

[38\2: ~r~ 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. ~Epi/klêr.~, Mein. _Com._ iii, p. 543 f. (ii, p. 420 K.).]

[39\2: ~timê\ kai\ toi=sin opêdei=~ 142. ~timê/~ in the sense not of simple honour but of practical worship, as frequently in Homer, e.g. in such phrases as: ~timê\ kai\ ku=dos opêdei=~, ~R~ 251; ~timê=s aponê/menos~, ~ô~ 30: ~timê\n de\ lelo/gchasin i=sa theoi=sin~, ~l~ 304; ~e/chei timê/n~, ~l~ 495, etc. In the same way here, l. 138: ~hou/neka tima\s ouk edi/doun maka/ressi theoi=s~.]

[40\2: Light and dark, i.e. good and bad, ~dai/mones~ 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\2: l. 141: ~toi\ me\n hupochtho/nioi (epichtho/nioi~ all MSS. except one, see Köchly's Apparatus; also Tz.) ~ma/kares thnêtoi\ kale/ontai.--phu/lakes thnêtoi\~ was read and explained by Proclus. This is clearly wrong, and is corrected to ~phu/lakes thnêtô=n~ (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. ~ma/kares~ does not look like a corruption; it is more likely that ~phu/lakes~ is an accidental alteration. ~hup. ma/kares thnêtoi=s kale/ontai~ is the reading of the latest editor: but here to say the least of it the addition of ~thnêtoi=s~ is superfluous. We should rather try to understand and explain the traditional text and show how the poet came by the remarkable expression.]

[42\2: When philosophers and philosophizing poets of a later age occasionally refer to the soul when freed from the body as a ~dai/môn~, the expression has a totally different sense.]

[43\2: Similarly, though the oxymoron is much less daring in his case, Isocrates, 9, 72, has ~dai/môn thnêto/s~. In order to describe a daimon who has originally been a mortal later ages boldly invented the compound ~anthrôpodai/môn~ which corresponds fairly well with the Hesiodic ~ma/kar thnêto/s~: [Eur.] _Rhes._, 971; Procop., _An._ 12, p. 79, 17 D. (~nekudai/môn~ 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) ~_theo\n broto\n_ anthrô/poisin~.]

[44\2: 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, ~epi\ Kro/nou ho/t' ouranô=| embasi/leuen~ (l. 111); and in this sense "Orpheus" understood the words of Hesiod when he ~tou= argurou= ge/nous basileu/ein phêsi\ to\n Kro/non~ (Proclus on l. 126). But it would be very difficult to reconcile l. 138 ~Zeu\s Kroni/dês ktl.~ 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\2: ~nô/numnoi~ 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\2: 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. ~z~ 204 (compared with ~d~ 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 ~Scheri/ê~, connected with ~schero/s~, 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\2: 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\2: ~lu=se de\ Zeu\s a/phthitos Tita=nas~ 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\2: 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 ~Alkmeôni/s~, 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.)]

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