Psyche: The Cult of Souls and Belief in Immortality among the Greeks

by Erwin Rohde

§ 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] 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] 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] 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.