§ 2
The translation, then, of Menelaos, while still alive, to the ends of the earth to live there in perpetual blessedness is indeed a miracle, but a miracle that finds its justification and precedent in the range of Homeric belief. The only thing new about it is that Menelaos has a special dwelling-place assigned to him, not in the land of the gods, the proper realm of immortality, nor as in the case of Tithonos and as Kalypso desired for Odysseus, in the company of a deity, but in a separate place specially allotted to the translated hero, the Elysian fields. Nor does this appear to be the invention of the writer of these lines. He refers so briefly to the “Land of the Departed”[15] and its delights that we are forced to believe that he did not himself originate so enticing a vision.[16] He can only, in the case of Menelaos, have added a fresh companion to the company of the blessed. That Rhadamanthys the Just dwells there seems to be known to him from ancient tradition, for he evidently only intends to recall the fact and does not think it necessary to justify this selection of the brother of Minos.[17] It might even be supposed that the picture of such a wonderland had been invented and embellished by older poets simply for the benefit of Rhadamanthys. The only novelty is that this picture, which has been fully adopted into the circle of Homeric poetry, now includes a hero of the Trojan epic cycle among the number of those translated to that land of ever unclouded happiness. The lines were inserted, as has already been remarked, at a later date, into the prophecy of Proteus, and it is hard not to suppose that the whole idea lay far from the thoughts of previous Homeric singers. Would the flower of the heroic chivalry, including Achilles himself, have been doomed to that dim shadow-world in which we see them wandering in the Nekyia of the Odyssey, if a way out into a life exempt from death had already revealed itself to imagination at the time when the Epic gave the stamp of its approval to the stories which dealt with the fate of the greater number of the heroes? Because the poem of the Trojan War and the adventures of the Return from Troy had not yet decided upon the fate of Menelaos, a later poet could speak of his “translation” to the—since “discovered”—Land of Destiny. It is highly probable that even at the time of the composition of the Journey to Hades of Odysseus this conception—afterwards so important for the development of the Greek belief in immortality—of a secluded resting-place of living and translated heroes had not yet been completely [60] formulated. It fits easily into the framework of belief prevailing in the Homeric poems, but it is not necessarily required by that framework. It is natural on this account to suppose that it entered the Epic from without. And, remembering the Babylonian story of Hasisatra and the Hebrew one of Enoch,[18] both of whom without suffering death were translated into the realm of immortal life—either to “Heaven” or to the “End of the Rivers” to the gods—we might be inclined to follow the fashion that prevails in some quarters nowadays, and believe that these earliest Greek translation legends were borrowed from Semitic tradition. Little, however, would be gained by such a mechanical derivation. Here and in all such cases the main question remains still unanswered: what were the reasons which led the Greek mind to wish to borrow this particular idea at this particular time from abroad? In the present instance at least, nothing argues specially for the handing on of the belief in translation from one nation to another rather than for its independent origin in the different countries out of similar needs.
This new idea did not contradict the normal Homeric beliefs about the soul but on the contrary presupposed them and supplemented them without incongruity. It was also, as we have seen, based upon conceptions that were familiar and natural to Greek thought. There was, indeed, no need for any stimulus from without to produce from these materials the undoubtedly new and peculiarly attractive idea of which we receive the earliest intimation in the prophecy of Proteus.