§ 4
The Oracle, then, of the omniscient God sanctified and recommended these rites of expiation; the state regulated its judicial procedure in murder cases on the lines of the old family blood-feud. It was natural, then, that the ideas on which these religious and political institutions were based—the conviction of a continued existence enjoyed by the murdered man’s soul and of his consciousness and knowledge of what occurred among the living who survived, his anger and his powers—that these ideas should attain to something like the position of an article of faith. The confidence with which these beliefs were held still manifests itself to us in the speeches at murder trials in which Antiphon, suiting his language to his real or imagined public, tries to arouse terror and awe, as at the presence of indubitable realities, by calling upon the angry soul of the dead man and the spirits that avenge the dead.[176] About the souls of murdered men indeed, regarded as more than other spirits unable to find rest, a strange and ghostly mythology grew up, of which we shall have some specimens later on. How primitive such beliefs could be we may gather with startling clearness from occasional records of purely savage customs[177] which are derived from them—customs which cannot possibly have been freshly invented in the Greece of this enlightened period, and must be either primitive Greek savagery come to light again, or else barbarisms only too easily welcomed from less civilized neighbours. In any case they imply the most materialistic view of the survival [182] of the murdered man, and of the revenge that might be taken by his soul.
It is evident that what men believed about the souls of murdered men must have had an important influence upon the general belief in a future life as it took shape in the mind of the people. But the extent of such an influence can be more exactly measured in the story which Xenophon tells about the dying Kyros; as the strongest grounds for the hope that an after-life will be the portion of all souls after their separation from the body, the dying king points to the unquestioned facts which, as all admit, prove a special after-life for the souls “of those who have suffered injustice”. In addition to this he lays stress on the argument that the worship of the dead would not have been preserved intact to his own time if their souls had been entirely deprived of all active power.[178] Thus we see how the cult of the souls of the dead was the chief source of the belief in a continued life after death.