PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
THE publication of a second edition of this book affords me a welcome opportunity of making my account more exact and to the point in certain places; of adding some points that had been overlooked or omitted; and of noticing with approval or disapproval some divergent opinions that had obtained currency in the interval. Controversy is, however, confined within the narrowest limits and to points of minor importance (and only then in answer to more serious and significant objections). The plan and—if I may say so—the style of the whole book demanded throughout, and more especially in the great points at issue, a purely positive statement of my own views and the results of my own studies. Such a statement, it may well be imagined, was not arrived at without being preceded in the mind of the author by a controversial reckoning with the manifold views and doctrines of others upon the subjects here dealt with—views which in some cases he felt obliged to reject. Controversy in this sense lies behind every page of the book, though as a rule only in a latent condition. In this condition I have been content to let it remain in this revised edition of the book. My opinions were not arrived at without toil and much careful reflection; one view being made to reinforce another till they were all bound together in a single closely-knitted whole. Neither further reflection on my part nor the criticisms of others have shaken my belief in the tenability of opinions reached in this way. I have therefore ventured to leave my account unaltered in all its main points. I hope that it contains its own justification and defence in itself without further vindication on my part.
Nothing in the plan or execution of the whole or its parts has been altered; neither have I taken anything away. The book contained nothing that was superfluous to the attainment of the object that I had in view. This object, it will be apparent, was not in the least to provide a brief and compendious statement of the most indispensable facts about the cult of Souls and the belief in immortality among the Greeks for the benefit of those who wished to take a hasty [xii] glance over the subject. Such a hasty picker-up of knowledge who regards himself—I cannot imagine why—as peculiarly fitted to criticise my book, has ingenuously besought me, in view of a second edition which he was kind enough to think probable, to throw overboard most of what he considered the superfluous parts of the book. With this request I have not felt myself able to comply. My book was written for maturer readers who have passed beyond the school stage and look for something more than an elementary handbook, and who would be able to understand and appreciate the plan and intention which led me to draw my material so widely from many departments of literary and cultural history. The first edition of the book found many such readers: I may hope and expect that the second will do the same.
In its revised form the book has been divided for the convenience of those who use it into two volumes (which correspond with the two parts in which it was first published). I was urged to take away the notes that stand at the foot of the text and relegate them to a place by themselves in a separate appendix. I found, however, that I could not bring myself to adopt this fashionable modern practice, which so far as I have experience of it in books published in recent years seems to me to be inconvenient and to hinder rather than help that undisturbed appreciation of the text which such an arrangement is intended to serve. Independent readers who in using the book are working out the subject for themselves would certainly not desire the separation of the documentary evidence from the statement of the author’s view. The book has also, to my peculiar satisfaction, attracted a large number of readers from outside the immediate circle of professional philologists. Such readers have evidently not been seriously disturbed by the elaborate and perhaps rather pedantic aspect of the mysterious disquisitions at the foot of the page, and have been able to fix their attention upon the clearer language of the text above. I have therefore decided to remove a few only of the notes which had grown to independent dimensions to an appendix at the end of each of the two volumes.
ERWIN ROHDE.
HEIDELBERG.
November 27th, 1897.