§ 3
The importance of this new creation for the later development of Greek belief makes it all the more necessary to be quite clear as to what exactly this novelty really was. Was it a Paradise for the pious and the just? A sort of Greek Valhalla for the bravest heroes?—or was it that a reconciliation and adjustment between virtue and happiness such as this life never knows had revealed itself to the eyes of hope in a Land of Promise? Nothing of the kind is warranted by these lines. Menelaos was never particularly remarkable for those virtues which the Homeric age rated highest.[19] He is only to be transported to Elysium because he has Helen to wife and is therefore the son-in-law of Zeus; such is Proteus’ prophecy to him. We are not told why Rhadamanthys has reached the place of happiness; nor do we learn it through the title by which he was referred to almost invariably by [61] later poets, the “Just”. We may, however, remind ourselves that as brother of Minos he was also a son of Zeus.[20] It was not virtue or merit that gave him a claim to blessedness after this life; indeed, of any such claim we never find the least trace. Just as the retention of the psyche in the body and the consequent avoidance of death can occur only as a miracle or by magic—that is, as an exceptional case—so does translation into the “Land of Destiny” remain a privilege of a few special favourites of the gods. No one could deduce from such cases any article of faith of universal application. The nearest parallel to this miraculous preservation of life for a few individuals in a land of blessed repose is to be found in the equally miraculous preservation of consciousness in those three enemies of the gods in Hades whom we hear of in the Nekyia of the Odyssey. The Penitents in Erebos and the blessed in Elysium correspond: both represent exceptions which do not destroy the rule and do not affect the main outline of Homeric belief. In the first case, as in the second, the omnipotence of Heaven has broken through the rule. Those, however, who owe to the special favour of the gods their escape from death and their translation to Elysium are near relatives of the gods. This seems to be the only reason for the favour shown to them.[21] If therefore any more general reason beyond the capricious good-will of some god is to account for the translation of these individuals it might perhaps be found in the belief that near relationship with the gods, that is, the very highest nobility of lineage, could preserve a man from the descent into the common realm of hopeless nothingness after the separation of the psyche from the body. In the same way the beliefs of many primitive peoples represent the ordinary man as departing to a joyless country of the dead (if he is not annihilated altogether) while the descendants of gods and kings, or the aristocracy, go to a land of unending happiness.[22] Such a fancy, however, is only dimly apparent in the promise made to Menelaos; nowhere is anything said of a general rule from which the individual case might be deduced.—