Psyche: The Cult of Souls and Belief in Immortality among the Greeks

by Erwin Rohde

§ 5

We were obliged to assume that the poet who inserted these inimitably smooth, melodious verses in the Odyssey was not the first inventor or discoverer of the Elysian paradise beyond [64] the realm of mortality. But though he followed in the footsteps of others, when he introduced into the Homeric poem a reference to this new belief, he was giving this idea for the first time an enduring place in Greek imagination. Other poems might disappear, but anything that appeared in the Iliad or the Odyssey was assured of perpetual remembrance.

The imagination of Greek poets or Greek people never gave up the alluring fancy of a distant land of blessedness into which individual mortals might by the favour of the gods be translated. Even the scanty notices which have come down to us of the contents of the heroic poems that led up to, continued, or connected the two Homeric Epics and linked them up with the whole cycle of Theban and Trojan legend enable us to see how this post-Homeric poetry took pleasure in the recital of still further examples of translation.

The Kypria first described how the army of the Achæans for the second time encamped in Aulis, was detained by adverse winds sent by Artemis; and how Agamemnon on the advice of Kalchas would have sacrificed his own daughter Iphigeneia to the goddess. Artemis, however, snatched away the maiden and transported her to the land of the Taurians, and there made her immortal.[26]

The Aithiopis, a continuation of the Iliad, tells of the help brought to the Trojans by Penthesileia and her Amazons, and after her death by Memnon the Æthiopian prince, an imaginary representative of the eastern monarchies of inner Asia. Antilochos, the new favourite of Achilles, falls in the war, but Achilles slays Memnon himself. Thereupon Eos the mother of Memnon (and known as such already to the Odyssey) obtains the permission of Zeus to give immortality to her son.[27] It may be supposed that the poet described what we see so often represented upon Greek vases: the mother bearing through the air the dead body of her son. According to the story told in the Iliad, Apollo, with the help of Sleep and Death, the twin brothers, bore off the body of Sarpedon, the son of Zeus, to his Lycian home after he had been slain by Achilles, merely in order that he might be buried in his own country. But the poet of the Aithiopis has tried to outdo the story in the Iliad in impressiveness (for it was evidently his model),[28] and has made Eos, with the permission of Zeus, not merely carry off the dead to his far-off home in the East, but there awaken him to immortal life.

Soon after the death of Memnon fate overtakes Achilles himself. When his body, rescued by his friends after much hard fighting, is laid upon its bier, Thetis, his mother, with [65] the Muses and the other sea-goddesses come and sing the funeral dirge. Of this we are told in the last book of the Odyssey (xxiv, 47 ff.) which relates further how his body was burnt, his bones gathered together and entombed under a mound, and the psyche of Achilles departed to the House of Hades; the whole story being told to him in the underworld by the psyche of Agamemnon. But the author of the Aithiopis—always remarkable for his bold innovations in the traditional material—here ventures upon an important new touch. From the funeral pyre, he tells us, Thetis carried off the body of her son and brought him to Leuke.[29] That she restored him to life again there and made him immortal the one meagre extract which accident has preserved to us does not say. But there can be no question that that is what the poet narrated—all later accounts conclude the story in this way.

The parallel is clear: the two opponents, Achilles and Memnon, are both set free from the fate of mortals by their goddess-mothers. In bodies once more restored to life they continue to live, not among men, nor yet among the gods, but in a distant wonderland—Memnon in the east, Achilles in the “White Island”. The poet himself can hardly have imagined Achilles’ Island to have been in the Euxine Sea, where, however, later Greek sailors located this purely mythical spot.

The translation of Menelaos is still more closely paralleled by the story told in the Telegoneia, which was the final and the latest-written of the Cyclic poems, of the fate which attended the family of Odysseus. Telegonos, the son of Odysseus and Kirke, slays his father unwittingly; when he discovers his mistake he brings the body of Odysseus with Penelope and Telemachos to his mother, Kirke, who makes them immortal; and there they dwell now (in the Isle Aiaia, far away over the sea, we must suppose)—Penelope as the wife of Telegonos, and Kirke with Telemachos.[30]