§ 1
Prominent among the chieftains, who, under the leadership of Adrastos, came to the help of Polyneikes and laid siege to Thebes, was Amphiaraos the Argive hero and seer descended from the mysterious priest and prophet Melampous. He was drawn into the war against his will, for he foresaw its unhappy end. After the decisive struggle in which the opposing brothers fell slain by each other’s hand, the Argive host turned to flight, and with them fled Amphiaraos. But before Periklymenos, who was pursuing him, could drive his spear into the fugitive’s back, Zeus made the earth open before him in a flash of [90] lightning and Amphiaraos with his horses, his chariot, and his charioteer, was swallowed up in the depths where Zeus made him immortal. So runs the legend of the fate of Amphiaraos as we learn it from innumerable sources from Pindar onwards,[1] and we may be sure that thus it was told in the Thebaïs, the old epic poem of the war of the Seven against Thebes, which was taken up into the Epic Cycle.[2]
At Thebes, then, Amphiaraos lived on for ever under the earth. Northwards in the Boeotian countryside, near Lebadeia, men told of a similar marvel. In a cave of the mountainous ravine, before which Lebadeia lies, lived Trophonios for ever immortal. The legends that professed to explain his miraculous cave-existence do not quite agree among themselves, as, indeed, is generally the case with those figures who were not early taken up by the poets and given a fixed place in the narratives of heroic adventure. But all accounts (the oldest of which perhaps go back to the “Telegoneia”) agree in the assumption that Trophonios, like Amphiaraos, was first a man, a famous master-builder, who while flying from his foes, had dived underground at Lebadeia and now lives for ever in the depths of the earth whence he foretells the future to those who come and question him there.
These stories, then, claim to speak of men who during their lifetime were swallowed up by the earth, and who now live on for ever at the places where they were taken down into the depths—places situated in quite definite localities of the Greek countryside.
We are not entirely without other legends of a similar character. One of the wild spirits of the Lapith people from Thessalia, Kaineus by name, having been made invulnerable by Poseidon (who had before this transformed him from a woman into a man), was cudgelled with tree-trunks in a battle with the Centaurs; but they could do nothing to him, and with “upright foot” (i.e. standing upright, alive, not lying at full length like a dead man or one mortally wounded) he clove the earth under him and went down alive into the depths.[3] In Rhodes Althaimenes was honoured as the “founder” of the Greek cities on that island; he had not died but had vanished into a chasm in the ground.[4] Like Amphiaraos, his son Amphilochos, the heir of his prophetic power, appears to have had a legend according to which he still dwelt alive under the earth either in Akarnania or Cilicia.[5] A few more examples of the same type might be produced,[6] but the number of such stories remains small, and they only make their appearance here and there, as if by [91] accident, in the tradition. Epic poetry without whose co-operation such local legends rarely achieved widespread or lasting popularity, with few exceptions left such narratives out of account. In fact, they conflicted with the normal Homeric outlook. The belief, however, that immortality when it was miraculously bestowed by the favour of heaven upon certain individual men, was absolutely conditioned by the non-occurrence of death, i.e. the separation of the psyche from the visible man—this belief has helped to shape these stories too. They never speak of an undying existence of the soul by itself in separation from the body. Thus far they are firmly rooted in orthodox Homeric belief.
But the heroes of these stories have their everlasting existence in special abodes under the surface of the earth, in subterranean chambers[7]—not in the common meeting place of the departed; they each have their own peculiar domain far from the House of Aïdoneus. Such isolation of individuals below the earth does not agree with Homeric ideas; though it almost seems as if a dim echo of these stories of seers like Amphiaraos and Amphilochos, translated alive and with consciousness undestroyed, could be discerned in what the Homeric Nekyia says of Teiresias the Theban seer, in whom alone of all the shadows Persephone had allowed consciousness and intelligence (the essential vital powers) to remain undiminished.[8] But even he is fast bound in Erebos, the general home of the dead, and cut off from all connexion with the upper world, as is demanded by the Homeric view of the world. Amphiaraos and Trophonios, on the other hand, are released from Hades; not having suffered death they have not entered the world of the strengthless dead. They are also translated out of this life (besides out of Hades). But this “subterranean translation” is in its nature and in the origin of the belief in it quite distinct from that “translation to Islands of the Blest” of which we spoke in the last [chapter]. Those Heroes dwelling alone or in company on holy islands far out over the sea are far removed from human life and beyond the reach of prayers and desires. No influence upon the things of this world is attributed to them, and consequently no cult is offered to them: there never existed a cult of the dwellers in Elysium as such. They glimmer in the distance like visions of the poet’s fancy from which no one anticipates active interference with the world of reality. It is quite different with these dwellers in the caves. They are actually alive under the surface of the earth; not far away in the inaccessible, spectral world of Hades, but here in the midst of Greece. Questions and prayers [92] can reach down to them, and they can send up aid to those who call to them. To them, accordingly, as powerful and effectual Spirits a cult is paid.
We have detailed information of the manner in which Amphiaraos was worshipped, more especially in later times, when, in addition to the neighbourhood of Thebes, where the original legend of his descent beneath the earth was localized, Oropos also, the boundary town between Boeotia and Attica, was with overwhelming success identified as the place of his disappearance and made a centre of his influence.[9] We have also a certain amount of information, again from later ages, about the cult of Trophonios. With the passage of time, the details of the worship grew and multiplied, but among them all certain features stand out as especially characteristic and allow us to understand the religious ideas lying behind them. To Amphiaraos and Trophonios were offered just those sacrifices which were also paid to the Chthonic deities, i.e. those deities who dwelt in the depths of the earth.[10] Aid was not expected from them in the details of the daily life of individuals or states. Only in the actual locality of their descent were they effectual, and only there because they revealed the future. Kroisos had already, and Mardonios after him, sent inquiries to the most famous oracles of the day,[11] and among them to Amphiaraos at his ancient oracular seat near Thebes and to Trophonios at Lebadeia. Of Amphiaraos it was believed that he revealed the future by visions sent in dreams to those who after making offering laid themselves down to sleep in his temple. To question Trophonios, it was necessary to pass through a narrow passage into his cave. Inside, the inquirer expected to see Trophonios in person or, at least, to hear his instructions.[12] He dwelt, like a spirit confined to the scene of his magical existence, in bodily person at the bottom of his cave. In fact, the method of Incubation, or temple-sleep, by which Amphiaraos (like many other daimones and Heroes) was questioned, was based on the assumption that the daimon, who was only visible indeed to mortal eyes in the higher state achieved by the soul in dreams, had his permanent dwelling at the seat of his oracle.[13] That is why his appearance can only be expected at this particular place and nowhere else. Originally, too, it was only the dwellers in the depths of the earth who were thus visible in dreams to those who lay down to sleep in the temple over the place where they had their subterranean abode. Homer knows nothing of either gods or daimones who live permanently under the ground in definite places in the inhabited world, near mankind; and for that [93] reason he betrays no knowledge of Incubation-oracles.[14] There is some ground for the belief that this method, inherent in the divinatory power, of getting into touch with the spirit world, was one of the oldest types of Greek oracular art—certainly not later than the Apolline mantikê of inspiration. And it is precisely in the legend of Amphiaraos, as we may believe it to have been related as early as the cyclic poem of the Thebaïs, that we have a proof that already in the days when the quasi-Homeric poetry was still popular, people believed in deathless dwellers below the earth and in their active potency in the mantic art.
It is clear, then, that the worship of Amphiaraos and the belief in his subterranean existence was not due to the influence of the Epic. Rather the reverse was the case; the cult already existed and provided the idea of the daimon and this gave rise to the Epic narrative. The Epic found an existing cult of an oracular daimon who dwelt beneath the earth near Thebes ready to its hand. It reduced this fact to a form which it could understand in a manner typical of the relation which frequently existed between the facts of religious life and Epic poetry. The cult was connected with an event in legendary history, and so brought into harmony with the Epic outlook. The Epic knew nothing of gods attached in this way to a particular earthly spot, and so the spirit worshipped in the cult became in the epic imagination a chieftain and Seer who had not always lived beneath the earth in that place, but had only been transported there subsequently by a miraculous fiat of the supreme god, who had also accorded an eternal life in the depths to the translated hero.[15]
We may perhaps find a parallel in more recent Saga story that will throw light on the question. German mythology is perfectly familiar with such figures for ever, or until the day of judgment, alive in caverns of the mountains or subterranean chambers. Thus, Charlemagne, or it may be Charles the Fifth, still has his abode in Odenberg or in Unterberg, near Salzburg, Frederick II (or, in more recent versions of the legend, Frederick I Barbarossa) in Kyffhäuser, Henry the Fowler in Sudemerberg, near Goslar. Thus, too, King Arthur, Holger Danske, and many other favourite characters of popular tradition dwell in subterranean caverns.[16] Occasionally, we can still plainly see how these were originally ancient gods who according to pagan belief dwelt in hollow mountains and whose place has been taken by these heroes and holy men “translated” beneath the earth.[17] So, too, Greek tradition allows us to see even now that those ancient [94] translated mortals, Amphiaraos and Trophonios, are only Epic substitutes for ancient deities who did not owe their everlasting life and subterranean abode to the favour of heaven, but had possessed these from the beginning. At least, at the site of his worship men knew that the prophetic dweller in the cave was a god; one of them is called Zeus Trophonios or Trephonios, not only by learned authorities, but in inscriptions from Lebadeia;[18] Amphiaraos, too, is once called Zeus Amphiaraos and more often a god.[19] In the Translation legends of Christianized people the kings have usurped the place of the ancient gods because the gods themselves, fallen into neglect, have been dethroned. For reasons not so very different from these the ancient gods on Greek soil were turned into heroes.
Surrounded by the unending multiplicity of contemporary notions of divinity the imagination of the Epic poet had fashioned for itself a generalized picture of a divine kingdom. This was at that time a solitary attempt to erect a Panhellenic theological system, but it had the greatest influence upon the mental conceptions of Greeks of every race, for the Epic poet addressed them all. He stood as though on a height looking down on all the narrow valleys and mountainous countrysides cut off from the rest of the world, and a wide prospect opened out before his eyes. He soars above all the innumerable contradictory and conflicting details of local cult and belief, and finds something universal beyond. The name and conception of Zeus, Apollo, Hermes, Athena, and all the gods represented innumerable diversities in the myths and ritual of the different cities and races; their outward shapes and personalities differed widely according to their localization and the manner of their influence. Instead of all these the Epic poet sees only one Zeus, Apollo, etc., reduced in each case to a single unified personality. And just as he had looked beyond the multiplicity of local deities so he did not confine his gods to particular local habitations and centres of influence in the Greek countries; they did not belong to one locality more than another. True they worked and ruled in the world, but they were for all that free to move where they would. They dwell and meet together on the heights of Olympos, the Pierian Holy Mountain, which, however, became in the imagination of Homer, unfettered by attachment to any particular place, more and more an ideal mountain of fancy. So the broad sea is the dwelling-place of Poseidon; he is not confined to any one place. Even the rulers of the spirit world. Aïdes and Persephoneia, have their abode, not, indeed, on [95] Olympos, and certainly not here or there beneath the surface of the Greek countryside, but far away in a land of fancy; they, too, are not bound to any particular locality of the actual world. At the end of this enormous work of unification and idealization, that, out of all the infinite special manifestations of the name Zeus, each worshipped only in its narrow little circle in Greece, had evolved the single almighty figure of Zeus Father of Gods and Men—how could one who had imagined all this be able to understand, if he met with such a creature, a special Zeus, calling himself Zeus Trophonios, who passed his undying existence in a cave near Lebadeia and was only powerful in that one spot?
Of course, the inhabitant of such a holy spot would not allow himself to be deprived of the belief in the existence and presence of the god on his native soil. Though he might be ready enough in general and in respect of other men’s local deities to regulate conceptions of the nature of the gods in accordance with the Homeric picture, yet he refused absolutely to be shaken in his belief in his own local deity, however unknown to the Olympian family of gods in Homer that deity might be. The local worship in its unaltered, undisturbed persistence, witnessed to the objective truth of his belief. Thus there were preserved in the pious faith of their worshippers large numbers of local deities whose circle of influence was, however, very limited. They had not been raised with the other gods to the heights of Olympos, but had remained faithful to the soil in which they had their home,[20] witnesses to a far distant past in which the members of every remote little community had their separate god bound to the soil beyond which their thoughts did not stray. We shall see how in post-Homeric times many such ancient earth-gods, i.e. gods thought of as living below the surface of the ground, were given new and in some cases a more wide-reaching lease of life. The Epic in its prime knew nothing of these earth-dwelling deities. When it could not close its eyes to their existence it changed them into translated heroes, and beyond the immediate locality of the cult this version of them became the commonly accepted one throughout the rest of Greece.