III
[60] A more detailed statement and documentation of the following analysis of the Nekyia in Od. λ will be found in Rh. Mus. 1, 600 ff. (1895). [Kl. Schr. ii, 255.]
[61] The information given by Teiresias, λ 107 ff., about Thrinakia and the cattle of Helios seems to be put in such a brief and inadequate form just because the fuller account given by Kirke, μ 127, was already known to the poet who did not wish to repeat this word for word.
[62] A final example of such pictures intended to suggest the background of the Odyssey is the conversation between Achilles and Agamemnon in the “second Nekyia”, ω 19 ff. The composer of these lines has understood quite correctly the meaning and purpose of his model, the original Nekyia of λ, though his continuation of it is certainly very clumsy.
[63] κ 539–40 is borrowed from δ 389–90, 470.—I find after writing this that Kammer had already suggested imitation of δ in the Nekyia: Einheit d. Od., 494 f.
[64] It is striking (and may have some special reason) that in Kirke’s account there is no mention of the Kimmerians. It is easier to see why the careful description of the country in Kirke’s speech, κ 509–15, is not afterwards repeated but merely recalled to the memory of the reader in a few words (λ 21–2).
[65] I can see no essential difference between the conception and situation of Hades as indicated in the Iliad and the account given in the Nekyia of the Odyssey. J. H. Voss and Nitzsch were right in this matter. Nor do the additional details given in the “second Nekyia” of ω essentially “conflict” (as Teuffel, Stud. u. Charact., thinks) with the description of the first Nekyia. It does not adhere [52] slavishly to its original, but it rests upon the same fundamental conceptions.
[66] Sch. H.Q., κ 514, Πυριφλεγέθων, ἤτοι τὸ πῦρ τὸ ἀφανίζον τὸ σάρκινον τῶν βροτῶν, cf. Apollodor., π. θεῶν, ap. Stob., Ecl. i, p. 420, 9 W. Πυριφλεγέθων εἴρηται ἀπὸ τοῦ πυρὶ φλέγεσθαι τοὺς τελευτῶντας.
[67] Acheron, too, seems to be regarded as a river. The soul of the unburied Patroklos, which has already departed, ἀν’ εὐρυπυλὲς Ἄϊδος δῶ, and has therefore passed over Okeanos, is prevented by the other souls from passing over “the river”, Ψ 72 f. This can hardly be the Okeanos, and must, therefore, be Acheron (so, too, Porph. ap. Stob., Ecl. i, p. 422 f., 426 W.). κ 515 does not in the least prove that Acheron was thought of as a lake and not a river, as Bergk, Opusc. ii, 695, thinks.
[68] Cf. λ 206 ff., 209–393 ff., 475.
[69] See Π 851 ff. (Patroklos), X 358 ff. (Hektor), λ 69 ff. Behind each of these there lies the ancient belief that the soul in the moment of escape achieves a higher state of being and returns to a form of knowledge independent of sense-perception (cf. Artemon ap. Sch., Π 854, Arist. fr. 12 (10) R.). Otherwise this power belongs to gods and, strictly, only to Zeus, who can foresee everything (in Homer). But the statements are intentionally modified to suggest an undefined middle position between prophecy in the full sense and mere στοχάζεσθαι (cf. Sch. B.V., X 359)—X 359 at the most may go beyond this point.
[70] λ 218–24.
[71] ὄϊν ἀρνειὸν ῥέζειν, θῆλύν τε μέλαιναν, εἰς Ἔρεβος στρέψας, κ 527 f. From the word μέλαιναν the ὄϊν ἀρνειὸν is also to be understood ἀπὸ κοινοῦ as being, more precisely, black (and so again in 572)—the ram offered to the gods (or Souls) of the underworld is regularly black. εἰς Ἔρεβος στρέψας, i.e. bending the head downwards (not towards the west) = ἐς βόθρον, λ 36—as Nitzsch rightly explains it. Everything corresponds to the regular ἔντομα of later times for the underworld beings (cf. Stengel, Ztsch. f. Gymn., 1880, p. 743 f.).
[72] κοινή τις παρὰ ἀνθρώποις ἐστὶν ὑπόληψις ὅτι νεκροὶ καὶ δαίμονες σίδηρον φοβοῦνται, Sch. Q., λ 48. It is really the sound of the bronze or iron that drives away spirits: Luc., Philops. 15 (cf. O. Jahn, Abergl. d. bös. Blicks, 70). But even the mere presence of iron objects is sufficient: [Aug.] Hom. de sacrileg. (about the seventh century), 22, states that to the sacrilegi belong among others those who wear rings or armlets of iron, aut qui in domo sua quaecumque de ferro, propter ut daemones timeant, ponunt.
[73] The idea that the Thesprotian νεκυομαντεῖον by the river Acheron was the original of the Homeric picture was first started by Paus. 1, 17, 5. He was followed by K. O. Müller, Introd. to a Scientific System of Myth., pp. 297–8 (E. T., Leitch), who has been followed by many others. But it has scarcely more justification than has e.g. the localization of the Homeric entrance to Hades at Cumae, Herakleia Pont. (cf. Rh. Mus. 36, 555 ff.), or other places of ancient worship of the dead (e.g. Pylos). At such places the traditional names of Acheron, Kokytos, Pyriphlegethon were easily introduced—but taken from Homer and not coming thence into Homer. The fact that it is just this Thesprotian oracle of the dead that is mentioned in Hdt.’s well-known story (v, 92 η) does not at all prove that this was the oldest of all such oracles.
[74] To this extent Lobeck’s denial of necromancy to the Homeric poems (Agl. 316) may, perhaps, require to be modified; but so modified it may be accepted. [53]
[75] In accordance with primeval sacrificial custom. To the dead only female (or castrated) animals are offered (see Stengel, Chthon. u. Todtenc., 424). Here it is a στεῖρα βοῦς, ἄγονα τοῖς ἀγόνοις (Sch.). So among the Indians, “to the Manes that are without the powers of life and procreation” a wether instead of a ram was offered: Oldenberg, Rel. d. Ved., 358 [= 306 Fr. T.].
[76] Ω 592 ff. Achilles says to the dead Patroklos μή μοι Πάτροκλε σκυδμαινέμεν αἴ κε πύθηαι εἰν Ἄϊδός περ ἐὼν ὅτι Ἕκτορα δῖον ἔλυσα πατρὶ φίλῳ, ἔπει οὔ μοι ἀεικέα δῶκεν ἄποινα. σοὶ δ’ αὖ ἐγὼ καὶ τῶνδ’ ἀποδάσσομαι ὅσσ’ ἐπέοικεν. The possibility that the dead in Hades may be able to know what is happening in the upper world is referred to only hypothetically (αἴ κε)—not so, however, the intention of giving the dead man a share in the gifts of Priam (δι’ ἐπιταφίων εἰς αὐτὸν ἀγώνων as Sch. B.V. on 594 thinks). The strangeness of such a promise seems to have been one of the reasons that made Aristarch. (unjustly) athetize ll. 594–5.
[77] 40–1. This is not un-Homeric, cf. esp. Ξ 456. Thus on many vase-paintings we see the psyche of a fallen warrior flying over the corpse, often clad in full armour, but very diminutive in size—to express invisibility.
[78] Strictly speaking Odysseus is supposed to enter into conversation with the women while each informs him of her fate (231-4); every now and then comes a φάτο 236, φῆ 237, εὔχετο 261, φάσκε 306. But the whole section is little more than a review at which Odysseus assists without taking any real part.
[79] Cf. Rh. Mus. 1, 625 ff. The nearest parallel to such a distinction between an εἴδωλον and the fully animated αὐτός is to be found in what Stesichoros (and Hesiod before him: see Paraphr. ant. Lyc., 822, p. 71, Scheer, and PLG. iii, p. 215) relates of Helen and her εἴδωλον. Prob. this latter story gave rise to the insertion of these lines, λ 602 ff.
[80] Cf. 623 ff.
[81] Welcker, Gr. Götterl. i, 818, and others following him.
[82] [Apollod.] 1, 9, 3, 2; Sch., Α 180 (p. 18b, 23 ff., Bekk.) gives as reason for the punishment of Sisyphos that he betrayed to Asopos the rape of his daughter Aigina by Zeus. This, however, does not rest upon good epic tradition. Another story follows up the betrayal with the myth of the outwitting of Death and then Hades by S., after which he is sent down to Hades again and punished by the task of the endless stone-rolling. The story of the double outwitting of the powers of death (cf. the similar fairy tale of Spielhansel: Grimm, Fairy Tales, n. 82, and Anm., vol. ii, p. 163, ed. 1915) is obviously intended humorously, and so it seems to have been treated in a satyr-drama of Aesch., the Σίσυφος δραπέτης [Sch., Ζ 153.] The fact that this story ends in the punishment of the stone-rolling ought to be sufficient warning against taking it in the serious and edifying sense in which Welcker and his followers interpret it. It is quite contrary to ancient ideas to suppose that Sis. is punished for his cunning as a warning to other crafty (as well as good) men. In Ζ 153 he is called κέρδιστος ἀνδρῶν as praise and not blame: so Aristarch. rightly maintained and supported his case by clear ἀναφορά to the line of the Nekyia (see Sch., Ζ 153, Κ 44, Lehrs, Aristarch.3, p. 117 and λ 593). The idea that the adj. refers to the κακότροπον of S. is merely a misunderstanding of Porph. ap. Sch., λ 385. How little anyone thought of S. as a criminal, even with the Homeric story in his mind, is shown by the Platonic Sokrates who rejoices (Apol., 41 C) over the fact that in Hades he will meet, amongst others, Sisyphos (cf. also [54] Thgn., 702 ff.). The case of Sis. presents the most serious difficulties that face any attempt to give a moralizing sense (quite outside the poet’s intention) to the section of the “three penitents”. (See also Rh. Mus. 1, 630.)
[83] Γ 279, Τ 260 (cf. Rh. Mus. 1, 8). Nitzsch, Anm. z. Od. iii, p. 184 f., vainly employs all the arts of interpretation and criticism to deny their obvious meaning to both passages.
[84] K. O. Müller, Aeschylus Eumenides, p. 167 = E.T., 1853, p. 159.
[85] It should be remembered also that no legal penalties against perjury existed in Greece, any more than in Rome. They were unnecessary in face of the general expectation that the deity whom the perjurer had invoked against himself would take immediate revenge upon the criminal. (Esp. instructive are the words of Agamemnon on the Trojan breach of faith, Δ 158 ff.) Such revenge would be taken either during the life time of the perjurer—in which case the instruments of vengeance would be the spirits of Hell, the Erinyes: Hes., Op., 802 ff.—or else after death.
[86] The oath as a bond in favour of the oath-gods: Thgn., 1195 f., μήτι θεοὺς ἐπίορκον ἐπόμνυθι, οὐ γὰρ ἀνυστὸν ἀθανάτους κρύψαι χρεῖος ὀφειλόμενον. Perjury would be εἰς θεοὺς ἁμαρτάνειν, Soph. fr. 431 (472 P.).
[87] Eust., Od., p. 1614–15, has understood this. He calls attention to Pi., P. 4, 159, κέλεται γὰρ ἑὰν ψυχὰν κομίζαι Φρίξος ἐλθόντας πρὸς Αἰήτα θαλάμους—on which passage the Sch. refers us back again to Homer. Both passages imply the same belief: τῶν ἀπολομένων ἐν ξένῃ γῇ τὰς ψυχὰς εὐχαῖς τισιν ἐπεκαλοῦντο ἀποπλεόντες οἱ φίλοι εἰς τὴν ἐκείνων πατρίδα καὶ ἐδόκουν κατάγειν αὐτοὺς πρὸς τοὺς οἰκείους (Sch. ι 65 f., Sch. Η, ι 62). Nitzsch, Anm. iii, 17–18, vainly attempts to get out of the necessity of seeing in this act the fulfilment of a religious duty. He supposes that Odysseus is merely satisfying a “need of the heart”, etc. The real meaning of religious performance is too often obscured by such “ethical” interpretation.
[88] The command of Athene to Telem., α 291, presupposes as universally customary the erection of a cenotaph for those who die in foreign lands unless their bodies can be obtained by their friends. Menelaos erects an empty tomb to Agamemnon in Egypt, δ 584.
[89] δ 584, χεῦ’ Ἀγαμέμνονι τύμβον ἷν’ ἄσβεστον κλέος εἴη. λ 75 f., σῆμά τέ μοι χεῦαι πολιῆς ἐπὶ θινὶ θαλάσσης, ἀνδρὸς δυστήνοιο, καὶ ἐσσομένοισι πύθεσθαι. Achilles in the second Nekyia, ω 30 ff., says to Agam.: Would thou hadst died before Troy, for then the Achaeans would have set up a tomb for thee and καὶ σῷ παιδὶ μέγα κλέος ἤρα’ ὀπίσσω (cf. 93 f., where Agam. says to Achilles ὡς σὺ μὲν οὐδὲ θανὼν ὄνομ’ ὤλεσας ἀλλά τοι αἰεὶ πάντας ἐπ’ ἀνθρώπους κλέος ἔσσεται ἐσθλὸν Ἀχιλλεῦ). The words of Hektor, Η 84 ff., show how the σῆμα ἐπὶ πλατεῖ Ἑλλησπόντῳ served to remind sailors as they passed, ἀνδρὸς μὲν τόδε σῆμα πάλαι κατατεθνηῶτος κτλ. and to suggest that this was the proper and principal purpose of such erections.—In contrast with this cf. what is stated of the inhabitants of the Philippine Islands: “they laid their illustrious dead in a chest and set them up on a high place or on a rock by the bank of a river in order that they might be worshipped by the pious”: Lippert, Seelencult, p. 22.
CHAPTER II
ISLANDS OF THE BLEST
TRANSLATION
The Homeric picture of the shadow-life of the disembodied soul is the work of resignation, not of hope. Hope would never have beguiled itself with the anticipation of a state of things which neither afforded men the chance of further activity after death, nor, on the other hand, gave them rest from the toil of life; one which promised them only a restless, purposeless fluttering to and fro, an existence, indeed, but without any of the content that might have made it worthy of the name of life.
Was there never any aspiration after a more consolatory picture of the life after death? Did the tremendous vital energies of that time really devote themselves so completely to the realms of Zeus that not even a ray of hope penetrated to the House of Hades? We should have had to suppose so were it not for a single passing glimpse which we get of a distant land of hearts’ desire, such as even the Greece that lay under the sway of the Homeric order of things still imagined for itself.
When Proteus, the sea-god who could foretell the future, has finished informing Menelaos, on the sea-shore of Egypt, of the circumstances of his return home to his country and of the fate of his dearest companions, he adds the prophetic words—so Menelaos himself informs Telemachos in the fourth book of the Odyssey (560 ff.): “But thou, god-like Menelaos, art not ordained to die in horse-pasturing Argos or to meet thy fate there; for the immortals shall send thee far away to the Elysian plain, to the ends of the world where dwells fair-haired Rhadamanthys, and where life is most easy for men. There is neither snow nor heavy storms nor rain, but Okeanos ever sends zephyrs with soft-breathing breezes to refresh men—because thou hast Helen to wife and art thereby in their eyes the son-in-law of Zeus.”
These verses allow us a glimpse into a world about which the Homeric poems are otherwise silent. At the end of the [56] world, by the River Okeanos, lies the “Elysian Plain”, a land where the sky is always clear, as in the land where the gods live.[1] There dwells the great Rhadamanthys, not alone, one may suppose as “men” are spoken of (565, 568). Thither shall the gods some day send Menelaos—he is not to die (562); that is to say, he is to reach that place alive nor shall he suffer death there. The place to which he is to be sent is not a part of the realm of Hades, but a land on the surface of the earth set apart as the abode not of disembodied “souls”, but of men whose souls have not been separated from their visible selves—for only thus can they feel and enjoy the sense of life (565). The picture which fancy has drawn here is the precise opposite of the blessed immortality of the soul in its separate existence. Just because such an idea remained quite unthinkable for Homeric singers, hope sought and found an exit from the shadow-world which swallows up all living energy. Hope imagined a land at the end of the world, but still of this world, to which occasionally some few favourites of the gods might be “translated” without the psyche being separated from its body and descending to Hades.
The actual mention of such miraculous “translation” stands alone in the Homeric poems, and the passage in the Odyssey seems to have been introduced by a later hand.[2] But the conditions of such a miracle are all implied within the range of Homeric ideas. Menelaos is carried off by the power of the gods and lives an eternal life far from the world of mortals. The belief that a god could suddenly withdraw his earthly favourite from the eyes of men and invisibly waft him away on the breeze not infrequently finds its application in the battle-scenes of the Iliad.[3] The gods could also make a mortal “invisible” for a prolonged period. When Odysseus has been so long lost to his friends they suspect that the gods have “made him invisible” (Od. i, 235 ff.); they do not regard him as “dead” but “the Harpies have carried him away”, and he is consequently withdrawn from all human ken (Od. i, 241 f.; xiv, 371). Penelope, in her grief, prays either for swift death through the arrows of Artemis, or that a storm wind may lift her up and carry her away on dark pathways to the mouths of Okeanos, that is, to the entrance of the Land of the Dead (Od. xx, 61–5; 79 ff.).[4] To explain her wish she recalls a fairy tale of the kind that must often have been told in the women’s quarters; how the daughters of Pandareos, after the violent death of their parents, were brought up to lovely maidenhood by Aphrodite and provided by Hera, Artemis, and Athene with all kinds of gifts and [57] accomplishments; till one day when Aphrodite had gone to Olympos to ask Zeus to make a match for them, the Harpies came and carried them off and made them the hand-maidens of the hated Erinyes.[5] This folk-tale reveals more clearly than is usual with the generally cultured Homeric narrative the popular belief that men might be carried off permanently from the land of the living, and, without seeing death, live on in another dwelling-place. For the daughters of Pandareos are carried away alive—to the Kingdom of the Dead, it is true, for that is where they must go if they become the servants of the Erinyes, the spirits of the underworld.[6] That is where Penelope wishes to be carried off, and without dying first—away from the land of the living which has become intolerable for her. Such a translation is accomplished by means of the Harpies or the Stormwind, which is the same thing, since the Harpies are nothing else but wind-deities of a peculiarly sinister kind. They may be compared to the Devil’s Bride or the “Whirlwind’s Bride” of German folk-tales, who rides in the whirlwind and also carries off men with her.[7] The Harpies and what we are here told of them, belong to the “vulgar mythology” which so seldom finds any expression in Homer; a popular folk-lore that could tell of many things between heaven and earth of which the Homeric “grand style” takes little notice. In Homer the Harpies never act on their own authority; only as the servants of the gods or of a single god do they transport mortals where no word of man, no human power, can reach.[8]
The prophesied removal of Menelaos to the Elysian fields at the end of the world is only another example of such a “translation” by the will and the might of the gods. Even the fact that prolonged habitation in that happy land, inaccessible to other men, is promised to him, does not differentiate the fate of Menelaos from that of the daughters of Pandareos, or from that which Penelope wishes for herself. For Menelaos, however, immortal life is promised not in Hades, or even at its entrance, but in a special country of the blest, as though in a new kingdom of the gods. He is to become a “god”; for since to the Homeric poets “god” and “immortal” are interchangeable terms, a man who is granted immortality (that is, whose psyche is never separated from his visible self) becomes for them a god.
It is also a Homeric belief that gods can raise mortals to their own realm, to immortality. Kalypso wishes to make Odysseus “immortal and ageless for all time”, that he may remain for ever by her side (Od. v, 135 f.; 209 f.; xxiii, 335 f.), [58] that is to say, make him a god like herself. The immortality of the gods is conditioned by the eating of the magic food ambrosia and nectar;[9] man, too, by eating continually the food of the gods, becomes an immortal god. What Odysseus in his longing for the earthly home, to which he is drawn by loyalty and duty, rejects, has been attained by other mortals. The Homeric poems can tell of more than one mortal promoted to immortal life.
As he is struggling in the stormy sea rescue comes to Odysseus in the person of Ino Leukothea, once the daughter of Kadmos, “who had formerly been a mortal woman, but now in the waves of the sea shares in the honour of the gods” (Od. v, 333 ff.).[10] Did some god of the sea bear her away and imprison her for ever in his own element? The belief existed that a god might descend from heaven even upon an earthly maiden and carry her off for ever as his spouse (Od. vi, 280 f.).[11]
Ganymede, the most beautiful of mortals, had been carried away by the gods to Olympos to dwell among immortals, as the cup-bearer of Zeus (Il. xx, 232 ff.).[12] He was a scion of the old Trojan royal house, to which Tithonos also belonged, whom both the Iliad and the Odyssey already know as the husband of Eos; from his side the goddess arose every morning to bring the light of day to gods and men.[13] It appears that she had “translated” her beloved not to Olympos but to the distant dwelling-place by the River Okeanos from which she sets out in the morning.[14] It was Eos who had once borne off the beautiful Orion, and in spite of the jealousy of the other gods had enjoyed his love until Artemis “on Ortygia” had slain him with her gentle arrow (Od. v, 122 ff.). The story may be derived from ancient star-myths, which represented in the language of myth what is actually to be observed in the morning sky. But in such myths the elements and celestial phenomena are thought of as living and animate like men. And in the same way, these star-spirits, in accordance with the regular development of legend, have long ago sunk, for the Homeric poet, to the level of earthly youths and heroes. If the goddess can raise Orion into her own kingdom, then, according to the belief of the time (which is all that matters to us here), the same thing might happen to any mortal through the favour of the gods. A simple imitation of the same legend in a purely human setting is the story of Kleitos, a youth of the family of the seer Melampous, whom Eos has carried off for the sake of his beauty that he may dwell among the gods (Od. xv, 249 f.). [59]