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

by Erwin Rohde

§ 6

It is natural to feel surprise that in none of these stories is there any mention of translation to a common meeting-place of the Elect, such as the Elysian plain seemed to be. We must on that account be content to leave unanswered the question to what precise extent these lines of the Odyssey which describe the translation of Menelaos to Elysium may have influenced the development of translation stories in the post-Homeric Epics. The influence must clearly have been [66] considerable.[31] The stories of the translation of individual heroes to a solitary after-life in secluded abodes of immortality show, at any rate, the same direction of fancy as that which produced the fields of Elysium. No longer does Eos, after she has snatched him from Hades, raise her son to be among the gods as once she had raised Kleitos and others of her favourites. Memnon enters upon a peculiar state of being that differentiates him from the rest of mankind as much as from the gods. The same applies to Achilles and the other translated heroes. Thus did poetry increase the number of those who belonged to this middle realm; who, born in mortality have, outside the realms of Olympos, achieved immortality. It is still only favoured individuals who enter this kingdom; it is still poetical aspiration, giving free rein to its creative instinct, that continues to transport an ever-increasing number of the bright figures of Legend into the illumination of everlasting life. Religious worship can have had no more influence in the development of these stories than it had in the narrative of the translation of Menelaos. Achilles, for example, may in later times have had a cult paid to him on an island at the mouth of the Danube, supposed to be Leuke. But the cult was the result and not the motive or the cause of the story. Iphigeneia was certainly the epithet of a Moon-goddess; but the poet who told of the translation of her namesake, the daughter of Agamemnon, had no suspicion of the latter’s identity with a goddess—otherwise he would never have regarded her as Agamemnon’s daughter. Nor, we may be fairly certain, can it have been an accidental meeting with the cult of the goddess Iphigeneia, which induced him to invent an immortality iure postlimini for his mortal Iphigeneia, by the machinery of translation. Both for the poet and his contemporaries the importance and the essence of his narrative—whether free invention or a reconstruction out of older material—lay in the fact that it told of the raising of a mortal maiden, the daughter of mortal parents, to immortal life, and not to religious veneration which could not have made itself very apparent to the maiden relegated to the distant Tauric country.

The busy expansion of the legendary material went on in epics that finally lost themselves in genealogical poems. To what extent it may have made use of the motif of translation or transfiguration we can no longer accurately judge. The materials at our disposal are quite insufficient to warrant any conclusion. When such a misty figure as Telegonos is deemed worthy of immortality, it may be supposed that in the mind [67] of the poet all the heroes of Epic tradition had come to be possessed of a virtual claim to a share in this mode of continued existence in a life after death. Certainly the more important among them could not be left out—those at least of whose end the Homeric poems themselves had not already given a different version. The poem of the Return of the Heroes from Troy may especially have given scope for many translation stories.[32] We may, for example, ask whether Diomedes, at least, whose immortality is often vouched for by later mythology, was not already added to the number of the immortals in the epics of the Heroic cycle. An Attic folk-song of the fifth century can speak with assurance of Diomedes as not having died but as living in the “Islands of the Blest”. Thus a far greater company of the Heroes of the Trojan War was thought of by the poetry of Homeric tradition as gathered together in “Isles of the Blest”, far out to sea, than we should guess from the summaries of the post-Homeric Epics which accident has preserved to us. This conclusion must be drawn from the lines of a Hesiodic poem which give us some remarkable information about the oldest Greek forms of the Cult of the Souls and belief in immortality, and the lines, therefore, must be subjected to a closer examination.