FINIT—AMEN—FINIT.
PART II
1. The Classical Tradition
The legend which forms the ground-plan of the Vision of Adamnán and of the Commedia of Dante, can claim a pedigree of great antiquity that may be traced back along several widely divergent lines. The principal of these may be grouped roughly under the heads of the Classical Tradition, the Eastern Tradition, the Ecclesiastical Tradition, resulting from the fusion in the early Christian Church of Hellenic and Oriental schools of thought; and the Irish Tradition, which last does not so much represent an entirely independent growth of the legend, as a new departure, whereby the Ecclesiastical Tradition, transplanted to Ireland, and there coming into contact with certain cognate ideas which were prominent in the native mythology and romantic literature, acquired a fresh development, and reappeared in several forms which became the most popular exponents of the mediæval theories of the Otherworld, until the revival of classical learning, in the twelfth and following centuries, enabled Dante to carry the leading idea, common to all forms alike, to its culmination.
The Classical Tradition was preserved in the Middle Ages chiefly through the sixth book of Virgil’s Æneid, which relates the visit of Æneas to Hades; but this episode was itself suggested by the similar adventure of Odysseus, told in the eleventh book of the Odyssey. The fundamental conception, a visit paid to the Otherworld by a living man, appears in many of the Greek myths: e.g. in the journey to Hades of Demeter, in the course of her search after her daughter Persephone, stolen away by Pluto; of Orpheus in quest of Eurydice; of Theseus and Peirithoos in their attempt to abduct Persephone; of Herakles, Castor and Pollux, and others. Like most of the myths that have contrived to ‘make their fortune’ by virtue of their strong appeal to the human imagination, these legends, when the myth-making age had long departed from the Hellenic peoples, and the age of creative imagination had given place to one of literary culture, passed into the domain of literature pure and simple. As such they entered upon a new life in the writings of the Latin authors; for even in Virgil the literary aspect of the legend predominates, though not to the exclusion of its more serious elements. This merely literary character is yet more apparent in the treatment of the legend by the tragic poets, and by Lucan and Claudian, while Apuleius, the Perrault of antiquity, found in it a theme for the play of his graceful fancy.
The early descriptions of the Otherworld, being originally myths of spontaneous growth, and not composed to be the vehicles of instruction or edification, contain little of eschatological or ethical significance,[38] the few stock examples which they give of the penalties attached to guilt being rather instances of the private vengeance of Zeus upon those who had rebelled against him, or had outraged the dignity of some member of the divine family of which he was the head. In these accounts the abode of the departed appears as a dreary region, wherein they lead a shadowy and undesirable existence;[39] and although, side by side with this conception, another theory subsisted, assigning to the happy dead a serene existence in the Elysian plain, or in the enchanted isle of Leuke, this belief did not go beyond the notion, vaguely, however beautifully, expressed, of a bright and happy region of perpetual calm, where death or decay or care was unknown, and the departed spirits dwelt in flowery and fragrant meadows, beneath blossoming trees, beside calm seas or smoothly flowing streams, while soft breezes were perpetually blowing. The Greek poets, from Homer downwards, contain innumerable references to this Elysium,[40] but although we sometimes find a hint, as in Pindar and some of the tragic poets, that these joys are reserved for those who have deserved them by a righteous life on earth, the later instances show scarcely any advance upon the earlier in the direction of a systematic eschatology, and consequently brought the Vision legend little, if any, further on its way.[41]
Our legend, however, received fuller development in another school of Hellenic thought. Simultaneously with the mythology of the Greeks, and on one side distinct from it, though on the other side closely connected with it, existed a tradition of a more essentially religious character; religion being distinguished from philosophical speculation on the one hand, and myth and legend on the other. Hence, apparently, proceeded the Neo-platonising tendency in Greek philosophy—to adopt the familiar and convenient name, though the thing is older than the Neo-Platonists, or than Plato himself—the tendency to regard the old myths as a repository of the ‘Wisdom of the Ancients,’ and to disengage from the husk of fable the moral and scientific truths which it was supposed to contain. In so doing, the philosophic schools were not merely attempting to read their own notions into the traditions of antiquity, but were also, to some extent, endeavouring to develop germs which already existed in the best and most serious thought of their own and earlier times. This side of the Hellenic religion would appear to have existed in its purest and most highly developed form in the Mysteries, especially those practised at Eleusis, and at other places in which the Eleusinian rites prevailed.