§ 4
The Cult of Souls for all its expansion gave no assistance to the picturing of what might be the condition of the departed souls independently of their connexion with the living. Those who troubled themselves about such matters and sought further information were obliged to have recourse, if not to the systems of theologians and philosophers, then to the imaginative accounts and pictures of ancient poetry and legend.
The idea of a distant realm of the souls into which the strengthless shadows of those who had departed this life disappeared had not lost its hold on the popular imagination even of these later ages—difficult as it might be to reconcile[92] such an idea with the pre-suppositions of cultus with its customary worship and sustenance of the souls confined within the grave. The belief in a distant kingdom of the dead could not but continue to be current among men for whom the Homeric poems remained the earliest manual and school-book in the hands of youth and the source of instruction and entertainment to every age. The passionate indignation with which philosophers of the Stoic as well as the Epicurean faith attacked the beliefs resting on the teaching of Homer cannot be explained except by supposing that Homer and his picture had remained a guiding force with the masses who were uninstructed in philosophy. And, in fact, ancient writers use language which shows that the ancient conception of Hades was by no means discarded but on the contrary was still vigorously alive among the populace.[93]
As to what might go on down below and the general appearance of the underworld—these were questions that the invention of theological and semi-philosophic fancy, each according to its special lights and preconceptions, strove to answer in eager competition.[94] But such attempts to picture the condition of things in the kingdom of the souls—attempts which reached their highest point in the elaborate chiaroscuro of Vergil’s Hades—remained the exercises of ingenious fancy and rarely pretended to be anything else. A distinct and authoritative popular system of belief on these points was scarcely possible when the orthodox religion of the state formally and dogmatically rejected everything of the kind.
It would, indeed, have been more natural if in connexion with the idea of the congregation of souls enclosed in the [536] kingdom of the underworld deities a belief in a compensatory justice to be found in this after-life of the dead, had grown up and obtained popular currency. The oppressed and needy who feel themselves deprived of their share in this world’s goods think only too easily that somewhere there must be a place where they too will some day enjoy the fruits that others alone are allowed to pluck upon earth—and place that “somewhere” beyond the boundaries of this world and of reality. Pious belief in the gods expects to obtain the prize, so often denied upon earth, in a realm of the spirit. If indeed such a conviction of a compensatory justice to come[95]—reward of the virtuous and punishment of the wicked in a hereafter—was really more widely and seriously held in this age than it had been before,[96] then the cult of the underworld deities as it was practised in the mysteries of the states and the various religious societies must have contributed in a large degree to bring this about. And contrariwise, the belief that the punishing and rewarding omnipotence of the gods would be felt in a hereafter must have brought an unbroken stream of adherents to those mysteries which in fact offered their help and mediation in the life to come. Those only could imagine that they had detailed knowledge of the enigmas that lie beyond the reach of all experience, who could surrender themselves entirely to the dogmatic teaching of a closed sect. We may in fact take leave to doubt whether the gruesome pictures of a place of torment in Hades, with its undying punishment in devouring flames, and the similar fancies that later authors sometimes express, were in reality anything more than the private imaginations with which exclusive and superstitious conventicles sought to terrorize their members.[97] The charming pictures of a “Land of Arrival” to which death sends the much-tried children of men, may have been more widely accepted. Homer, the universal instructor, had stamped them upon men’s memories. For the poet the Elysian plain had been a place situated upon the surface of the earth to which the occasional favour of the gods was able to translate a few of their dearest favourites, that they might there enjoy, without seeing death, unending bliss.[98] In imitation of the Homeric fancy, the poetry of the following ages had imagined the translation of many other Heroes and heroic women of the legendary past to a secret life of bliss in Elysium or in the Islands of the Blest.[99] Later fancy, which saw in Elysium the Land of Promise to which all men who had lived in a manner pleasing to the gods [537] would be taken after their death,[100] now placed its Elysium or Islands of the Blest in the interior of the earth beyond the reach of all save disembodied souls. In later times this became the currently accepted view, but the subject remained undefined and subject to variation. Men must still, in fact, have imagined The Isles of the Blest, the abode of privileged spirits, to be situated upon the surface of the earth (though, indeed, far away beyond the limits of the discovered countries of the globe), when attempts could be made to find the way there and to bring back news to the living. The attempt attributed to Sertorius was only the most famous of such voyages of discovery.[101] Why, indeed, should these magic Isles remain for ever undiscovered upon the borders of the inhabited world that yet offered so wide a field for discovery, when everybody knew of the island in the Black Sea, often visited by living men, where Achilles, the supreme example of miraculous translation, lived for ever in perpetual enjoyment of his youth? For centuries the island of Leukê, the separate Elysium of Achilles and a few select among the Heroes, was visited and reverenced with religious awe.[102] Here men thought they could discern in immediate perception, and in actual physical contact, something of the mysterious existence of blessed spirits. The belief in the possibility of miraculous translation to an eternity of unbroken union of body and soul, thus palpably and visibly substantiated, could not completely die even in this prosaic age. The educated did indeed find this conception so strange and unintelligible that when they come to speak of translation legends of the past they profess themselves unable to say what exactly the ancients had supposed to occur when such miracles took place.[103] But the populace, which finds nothing easier to believe in than the impossible, once more naively accepted the miracle. Did not the examples of Amphiaraos and Trophonios plainly establish the fact of translation to underground retreats? And to them as being still alive in their caves beneath the earth a cult was offered until an advanced period.[104] The translation of beautiful youths to everlasting life in the kingdom of the nymphs and spirits was the subject of many folk-tales.[105] Even in contemporary life the miracle of translation seemed not altogether impossible.[106] When the kings and queens of the Macedonian empire of the East began to receive divine honours in imitation of the great Alexander himself, it was not long before men ventured to affirm that at the end of his earthly existence the Divine Ruler everywhere [538] does not die but is merely “carried away” by the gods and still lives on.[107] It is the peculiar property of divinity, as Plato clearly expresses it,[108] to live for ever in the indivisible unity of body and soul. A court-bred theology could the more easily make such demands upon the belief of subject peoples in the Semitic East, and possibly in Egypt too, because native[109] legends had already told of the translation to immortal life of individual men dear to the gods and akin to the gods in nature; just as similar stories became common in Italian legends too,[110] though possibly only under the influence of Greek models. Indeed, quite apart from obsequious courtliness, Greeks and half-Greeks were quite capable of entertaining the idea[111] that the darlings of their fancy, such as Alexander the Great, had not suffered death but had been translated alive to the realm of imperishable physical existence. This is shown clearly enough by the success which attended the appearance, in Moesia at the beginning of the third century A.D., of another Alexander. This imposter travelled from land to land with a great train of Bacchants, and everywhere men believed in his identity with the great monarch.[112] A little earlier they had believed with equal credulity in the reappearance upon earth of the Emperor Nero,[113] who, it was thought, had not died but had merely disappeared. When Antinous, the beautiful youth beloved by the Emperor Hadrian, sank and disappeared in his watery grave he was at once regarded as a god who had, in fact, not died but had been translated.[114] The miraculous translation of Apollonios of Tyana is reported with the utmost seriousness;[115] like the other marvels and mysteries in the strange and enigmatic existence of this prophetic figure, it found believers enough.[116]
But such unbroken continuance of the united life of body and soul, begun upon earth and carried on in a mysterious abode of bliss (the oldest form taken by the idea of human immortality in the Greek mind), was never attributed to more than a few specially favoured and specially gifted individuals. An immortality of the human soul as such, by virtue of its nature and composition—as the imperishable force of divinity in the mortal body—never became a real part of the belief of the Greek populace. When approximations to such a belief do occasionally find expression in popular modes of thought, it is because a fragment of theology or of the universally popular philosophy has penetrated to the lower strata of the uninstructed populace. Theology and philosophy remained the sole true repositories of the belief in the [539] immortality of the soul. In the meeting together and conjunction of Greek and foreign ideas in the Hellenized Orient it was not Greek popular tradition but solely the influence of Greek philosophy, that, finding favour even outside the limits of Greek nationality, communicated to foreign nations the arresting concept of the divine, imperishable vitality of the human soul—upon the impressionable Jewish people, at least, it had the profoundest and most deeply penetrating influence.[117]