§ 4
We ought to be able to observe the change which had come over the conception of the future life since the days of Homer from a consideration of the picture of the Underworld which Polygnotos of Thasos painted on one of the walls of the Hall of the Knidians at Delphi. The details of this picture are precisely known to us from the account given by Pausanias. The first impression that we get from it is the extraordinary vagueness and undeveloped state of the mythology of the underworld at this period, about the middle of the fifth century. On the wall was represented the questioning of Teiresias by Odysseus; the companies of heroes, the men and women of poetry, occupied the greater part of the space. The divine judgment of heaven was illustrated by the figures of the Homeric “Sinners”, Tityos, Tantalos, and Sisyphos. Outside the ranks of the Heroic company is Oknos and his [242] she-ass. But where is the reward of virtue, the punishment of wickedness? In expiation of the worst excesses, those committed against gods and parents, a temple-robber receives a cup of poison from a sorceress,[22] and an undutiful son is being choked by his own father.[23] Apart from these evil-doers are the “uninitiated”, those who have made light of the Eleusinian mysteries. Because they have missed the “completion” of the initiation they are now forced, men and women, to pour water from broken pitchers into a (perforated) jar in ever-unavailing endeavour.[24] There is no sign anywhere of a judge who should separate the souls into two classes; and of the monsters of the underworld there only appears the corpse-devouring daimon Eurynomos who must have been known to the artist from some local legend.[25] Of the reward of the “virtuous” there is not a trace, and even the hopes of the initiated in the mysteries are only vaguely alluded to in the casket which Kleoboia, as she crosses the river in Charon’s boat with Tellis, is holding on her knee.[26] This is a symbol of the sacred mysteries of Demeter which Kleoboia once brought from Paros to Thasos, the home of Polygnotos.
With this series of pictures, hardly altered at all from Homer,[27] contrast for a moment the scenes of torment represented in Etruscan pictures of the Underworld, or the pedantic details of the trial of the dead on the day of judgment as the Egyptians elaborated them in picture and writing. From such gloomy severity, from the rigid and overpowering dogmatism that a people without imagination had constructed for itself out of religious speculations and visions won by much labour and thought, the Greeks were fortunately preserved by their own genius. Their fancy is a winged god whose nature it is to pass lightly over things—not to fall heavily to earth and there remain ponderously prostrate. Nor were they very susceptible during their best centuries to the infectious malady of a “sick conscience”. What had they to do with pictures of an underworld of purgatory and torment in expiation of all imaginary types and degrees of sin, as in Dante’s ghastly Hell? It is true that even such dark fancies of the Christian Hell are in part derived from Greek sources. But it was only the misguided fancy of particular isolated sects that could call forth such pictures as these, and recommend itself to a philosophic speculation which in its worst excesses violently contradicted all the most fundamental principles of Greek culture. The people and the religion of Greece, the mysteries which her cities organized and deemed holy, may be freely acquitted of all such aberrations.