§ 4
Hesiod says nothing of any influence upon this world exerted by the souls of the Translated in the Islands of the Blest, such as is attributed to the Daimones of the Golden [77] race, nor of any religious worship, which would be implied by such influence if it existed, such as the underworld spirits of the Silver Age receive. All relations with this world are broken off, for any influence from this side would completely contradict the whole conception of these blessed departed. Hesiod faithfully sets down the conception of the Translated exactly as poetic fancy, without any interference from religious cultus, or the folk-belief founded on it, had instinctively shaped it.
Supposing, then, that he follows Homeric and post-Homeric poetic tradition in this particular, whence did he derive his ideas about the Daimones and spirits of the Golden and Silver Ages? He did not and could not have got these from Homeric or semi-Homeric sources, for they (unlike the idea of Translation) do not simply expand, but actually contradict Homeric beliefs about the soul. To this question we may answer with certainty; he derived them from cultus. There survived, in spite of Homer, at least in central Greece where the Hesiodic poetry had its home, a religious worship paid to the souls of certain departed classes of men; and this cultus preserved alive, at least as a vague tradition, a belief which Homer had obscured and dispossessed. It only reached the Boeotian poet, whose own conceptions spring entirely from the soil of Homeric belief, as from a far distance. Already in the days of the Bronze race, he tells us, the souls of the dead were swallowed up in the dread House of Hades, and this (with a few miraculous exceptions) applies to the Heroic race as well. And for the poet, standing as he does, at the opening of the Iron Age, to which he himself belongs, nothing remains but dissolution in the nothingness of Erebos. That such is his view is proved by his silence about the fate after death of his generation—a silence that is all the more oppressive because the grim picture that he gives of the misery and ever-increasing depravity of real and contemporary life might seem to require a brighter and more hopeful picture of future compensation, if only to balance it and make it endurable. But he is silent about all such future compensation; he has no such hope to offer. Though in another part of the same poem Hope alone of all the blessings of an earlier and better age still remains among men, such Hope no longer illuminates the next world, at any rate, with its beams. The poet, more deeply distressed by the common realities of life, can by no means dispense so easily as the singers of the epic tradition enclosed in the magic circle of their poetry, with such hopes of the future. He can draw comfort only from what poetry [78] or religious myth tell him of the far distant past. It never enters his head to believe that the miracle of the translation of living men could transcend the limits of the Heroic Age and repeat itself in the common and prosaic present day. And the time when, according to a law of nature no longer (so it seems) in operation, the souls of the dead became Daimones and lived a higher life upon and beneath the earth, is situated far back in the distant past. Another law rules now; the men of to-day may still worship the immortal spirits of the Golden and the Silver Age, but they themselves will never be added to the number of those illuminated and exalted souls.