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.