§ 5
We cannot at this late date trace the reawakening of the cult of souls in post-Homeric times or the varying stages it may have gone through in its development. Still, some of the facts are plain. Indications have already been noticed that point to the view that the cult of the dead was carried on in the days when the aristocratic regime still held sway in Greece with greater pomp and seriousness than in the centuries—the fifth and sixth—beyond which our knowledge hardly extends. In these earlier times, we are forced to conclude, there must also have been a livelier belief in the power and importance of the souls corresponding with the greater vigour of religious cult. It seems as if at this time ancient usage and belief broke violently through the suppression and neglect under which they lay in the times that speak to us in the Homeric poems. There is no reason to suppose that any one member of the Greek peoples was specially responsible for the change. At the same time, different districts in accordance with their varying natural proclivities and civilization differed in the cult they paid their dead. In Attica, with the spread of democracy, the ideas at the bottom of such practice tended more and more in the direction of mere affectionate piety. In Laconia and Boeotia[134] and in other places where primitive life and customs maintained themselves for a long time, more serious notions of the nature and reality of the disembodied spirits remained in force and a more serious cult was paid to them. Elsewhere, as in Locris and on the island of Keos,[135] the [174] cult of the dead seems to have maintained itself only in a very much weakened form. When advancing culture made individuals less dependent on the traditional beliefs of their own country many temperamental variations and gradations in belief and conception made their appearance. Homeric ideas on the subject, universally familiar from poetry, may have entered into the question and added to the confusion; even where the cult of the dead was practised with the greatest fervour, ideas radically incompatible with that cult—as that the souls of the worshipped dead are “in Hades”[136]—are sometimes revealed unintentionally. At quite an early period we find expressions of the view, which goes beyond anything said in Homer, that nothing at all survives after death. Attic orators, for example, are allowed to speak to their audience in a tone of hesitation and doubt about hopes commonly cherished of continued consciousness and sensation after death. Such doubts, however, only affect the theoretic consideration of the soul’s future life; the cult of the souls was still carried on inside the family. Even an unbeliever, if he were in other respects a true son of his city and deeply rooted in its ancient customs, might in his last will and testament provide seriously for the perpetual cult of his own soul and those of his near relatives—as Epicurus did in his will, to the astonishment of after ages.[137] Thus, even unbelief still clung to cult as to other old established customs, and in many an individual the cult still tended to awaken the beliefs which alone could justify it.