§ 4
Thus it may be that under many a Hero whose grave was shown in the Temple of a god an ancient local-god was hidden, whose abode beneath the earth had been converted into a “grave” now that he himself had sunk from a deity of higher rank to a human chieftain. It depended upon the circumstances of the case whether his humanization was complete or whether the memory of his former god-head (preserved in cult) secured for him a second elevation to the heavenly regions[51] among the Olympian gods whose nature was originally quite foreign to that of the old earth-daimon. Such conceptions, differing widely according to the circumstances of place and time, are shown most clearly in the different views taken of Asklepios. For Homer and the poets he is generally a great chieftain, a mortal who had learnt the art of healing from Cheiron. In religious cult he was generally set on a level with the upper gods. In reality he, too, is a local earth-dwelling deity from Thessaly, who from beneath the earth dispenses, like so many earth-spirits, healing from the ills of the flesh and knowledge of the future[52]—the two being closely connected in antiquity. He, too, easily bore the change from god to Hero. Asklepios was struck by Zeus’ lightning which in this, as in many cases, did not destroy life, but translated the person affected to a higher existence outside the visible world.[53] [101] We can now easily understand what it means when even this ancient earth-deity is said to be “buried”—his grave being shown at different places.[54] Many peculiarities of the worship paid to him show clearly the original character of Asklepios as an ancient god living below the earth.[55] One essential characteristic indeed of such earth-spirits he lacks—he is not bound to any one particular place. An enterprising priesthood, wandering in company with the rest of their tribe, had taken with them this old established worship of theirs, and spread it far and wide, so that Asklepios himself became at home in many different places.
Now, in closest relationship, though they remained more faithful to their original character, with this Zeus Asklepios stood those Boeotian earth-spirits with whom this discussion began. Trophonios, and Amphiaraos, too, might have been described as an Asklepios, who had stayed at home in his old cavern dwelling.[56] They, too, Amphiaraos and Trophonios, had become mortal men of a past age in the imagination of a time which could no longer properly understand such cave-spirits. But we never hear of their “graves”; for the generation which made them Heroes knew nothing of mortal chieftains who after dying and being buried yet lived on with undiminished powers. But it was the belief in their uninterrupted potency that gave those strange cavern deities a secure place in men’s memory. In the epic and in legends inspired by the epic they are recognized as human beings that had not died but had been translated, without any division of soul from body, to everlasting life in the depths of the earth. Ever afterwards—even when they are not only called immortal, but actually “gods”—they are reckoned as men who have become immortal or godlike.[57] And they have become the patterns of what other mortals too may rise to. In the Electra of Sophokles (836 ff.) the chorus wishing to justify the hope of a continued life for the departed, expressly appeal to the example of Amphiaraos, who still rules below the earth with all his spiritual powers intact. For the same reason these and other examples offered by ancient legend and poetry of the “translation” of individual great men to a life below the earth are important for our inquiry too. In them, as it did (in another sense) in the case of those translated to the Islands of the Blest, the Epic points beyond its own resigned and gloomy conception of the state after death towards a higher life after the visible world has been left behind. It took isolated cases of the once numerous class of cavern deities worshipped in Greek countries, and deprived [102] them of their god-head, though not of the superhumanly continued existence and (especially mantic) powers claimed for them by the belief and cult of their countrymen. Thus reduced to mortal rank, it interwove them in the fabric of the heroic mythology, and in so doing instituted a class of outstanding human individuals who had been raised to a godlike existence, far, indeed, from the upper world, but, at least, not condemned to the common realm of the souls. Instead they were given a home beneath the earth, each in a definite place in Greek territory, near living men, and able to help them. The descent from god to mortal Hero resulted, since the essential point of continued existence was not denied, in a corresponding exaltation of the mortal and the heroic to the divine. Thus the epic leads us in this instance towards a range of conceptions which the poems themselves treated as though it never existed, and which now suddenly comes into view.