§ 5
Hesiod’s description, then, of the five Ages of Men gives us the most important information about the development of Greek belief in the soul. What he tells us of the spirits of the Silver and Golden race shows that from the earliest dawn of history down to the actual lifetime of the poet, a form of ancestor-worship had prevailed, based upon the once living belief in the elevation of disembodied and immaterial souls to the rank of powerful, consciously active spirits. But the company of these spirits receives no additions from the life of the present day. For centuries now the souls of the dead have been claimed by Hades and his vain shadow world. The worship of the soul is stationary; it affects only the souls of the long-since departed; it no longer increases the number of the objects of its worship. In other words, the belief has changed; the Homeric poems have triumphed and the view they held, and to which they gave authority, and, as it were, official sanction, now prevails. They teach men that the psyche once separated from the body loses all its powers and consciousness; the strengthless shadows are received into a distant Underworld. For them, no action, no influence upon the world of men is possible, and therefore no cult can be paid to them. Only on the farthest horizon faintly appear the Islands of the Blest, but the circle of the fortunate, who, according to the visionary fancy of the poets, are translated alive there, is now closed, just as the circle of epic story is complete also. Such miracles no longer happen.
Nothing in this evolutionary process so clearly depicted in the poem of Hesiod contradicts what we have learned from Homer. One thing only is new and immensely important; in spite of everything the memory survives that once the souls of departed generations of men had achieved a higher, [79] undying life. Hesiod speaks in the present tense of their being and working and of the worship paid to them after their death; if they are believed to be immortal, men will naturally continue to worship them. And the opposite also is true; if the worship of such spirits had not survived into the present, no one would have held them to be deathless and eternally potent.
In a word, we are in the old Greek mainland, the land of Boeotian peasants and urban farmers, among a stay-at-home race which neither knows nor desires to know of the seafaring life that tempts men to foreign lands whence they bring back so much that is new and strange. Here in the central uplands vestiges of ancient custom and belief remained that had been forgotten in the maritime cities of new Greece on the Asiatic coast. Even here, however, the new learning had penetrated to this extent: the structure of ancient belief, transported into the distant past, interwoven with fanciful tales of the earliest state of mankind, like the expiring echo of half-forgotten song lives on only in memory. But the cult of Souls, is not yet quite dead; the possibility remains that it may yet renew its strength and expand into fresh life when once the magic influence of the Homeric view of the world shall have been broken.