[118] In spite of its entry into χρήματα, νοῦς is yet said to remain “unmixed” and unaffected by them: αὐτοκράτορα γὰρ αὐτὸν ὄντα καὶ οὐδενὶ μεμιγμένον πάντα φησὶν αὐτὸν κοσμεῖν τὰ πράγματα διὰ πάντων ἰόντα, Pl., Crat. 413 C. We thus have at the same time διὰ πάντων ἰόντα and denial of mixture which is reiterated in stronger and stronger language. Thus νοῦς even so remains still ἐφ’ ἑωυτοῦ (εἰ μὴ γὰρ ἐφ’ ἑωυτου ἦν, ἄλλῳ τέῳ ἐμέμικτο ἄν· μετεῖχε δὲ ἂν ἁπάντων χρημάτων εἰ ἐμέμικτό τεῳ· ἐν παντὶ γὰρ παντὸς μοῖρα ἕνεστι κτλ. So perhaps we should read fr. 6 [12] restoring a completed syllogism. In the traditional text the clause εἰ ἐμέμικτό τεῳ is superfluous and in the way). It takes no particle of the others into itself.
[119] [Plu.] Plac. Phil. 5, 25, 2 (Aët., Dox. 437; Vors. 397, 18), in the chap. ποτέρου ἐστὶν ὕπνος καὶ θάνατος ψυχῆς ἢ σώματος; Anaxag. taught: εἶναι δὲ καὶ ψυχῆς θάνατον τὸν διαχωρισμόν. Nothing else can be meant by the words—the theme of the chapter alone shows it—than: the death of the soul (as well as of the body) occurs with its separation (from the body). τὸν διαχωρισμόν is subject and εἶναι τῆς ψυχῆς θάνατον predicate of the sentence (not the other way round as Siebeck seems to think: Ges. d. Psychol. i, 285). The violent alteration proposed by Wyttenbach (de immort. animi, Opusc. ii, 597 f.) has not the smallest justification: εἶναι δὲ καὶ τὸν θάνατον ψυχῆς διαχωρισμὸν καὶ σώματος. There could have been no reason at all in appealing specially to Anaxagoras for a confirmation of the popular conception of death (it would be nothing more). Further, in this particular connexion such a definition of death is quite out of place; since the theme of the chap. is only to ask the question whether death also affects the soul, not what it is. ψυχή here must mean the individual soul, not the νοῦς which is the basis of the individual souls. Anaxag. made the individual soul perish at death—so much is certain. It must be admitted that we cannot say for certain whether the Placita are referring to an actual utterance of Anaxag. or are only drawing conclusions from his teaching.
[120] fr. 17 [17].
CHAPTER XII
THE LAY AUTHORS
Theology and Philosophy, each in its own way attempting to go beyond inadequate popular belief, could only very gradually transcend the limits of those narrow communities within which their influence was first felt and reach the circles in which that popular belief held sway. During the earliest successes of the theological and philosophical spirit hardly a voice was raised that might have suggested that the belief in the imperishability and divine nature of the human Soul, of the inherence of all things spiritual in one imperishable, fundamental substance, might become something more than a mystery known to the wise and illuminated, and enter into the convictions of the people and the unlearned. “After the death of the body, the Image of Life remains alive; for that alone is descended from the gods”—such is the announcement of Pindar. But for all the confidence with which, as though anticipating no contradiction, he here proclaims the view of the soul’s immortality and bases it upon its divine nature, such an opinion can at that time have been no more than the persuasion of isolated communities formed and instructed in that particular doctrine. It cannot be merely accidental,[1] that in the fragments which have come down to us of the lyric and semi-lyric (elegiac and iambic) poetry—poetry intended for a wide and unspecialized public and expressing feelings and ideas in language that all could understand—hardly a trace appears of that enhanced conception of the worth and nature of the Soul. Reflexion does not linger over such dark subjects; whenever they are illuminated for a passing moment, we discern the outlines of those figures from the spirit world just as the Homeric imagination had given them shape.
Life and light are only to be found in this world;[2] Death, to which we are all “owing”,[3] leads the soul into a realm of nothingness.[4] Inarticulate, voiceless, the dead man lies in the grave like a statue.[5] Upon earth, and not in any shadowy hereafter, is completed that judgment[6] which divine Justice passes upon the criminal himself, or upon his descendants in whom something of him still lives on. It is the lack of such descendants that forms the bitterest pang, as he goes down to Hades, of the man who passes childless out of this life.[7] [412]
More distinctly and bitterly, in this age of advancing civilization and growing sensibility, sounds the wail over the pain and affliction of life, the obscurity of its ways, and the uncertainty of its outcome.[8] Silenos, the prophetic wood-spirit, so went the ancient legend, when captured by King Midas in his rose-gardens at Bermios earned his release with the judgment of melancholy wisdom that the Greek was never tired of repeating in ever-varying forms—not to be born is the best thing for men, but having been born, let him pray that he may return as soon as possible to the kingdom of Night,[9] and of Hades.[10] The cheerful enjoyment of life is no longer so sure of itself as once it had been in the days of its naïve confidence: and yet there is no substitute attempted, no compensatory hereafter in a next world of justice and untroubled happiness. We rather hear the opinion expressed that rest is the greatest of all earthly blessings; and rest is brought by Death. Nevertheless there is little demand for consolation; a robust and virile sense of life that can put up with whatever may befall of evil or hardship in healthy indifference, is in the air, and speaks to us from many a page of this poetic legacy with unpretending veracity. No attempt is made to smooth over the hardship and cruelty of life. Man’s power is small, his efforts go unrewarded, one necessity after another besets his short life: over all alike hangs the shadow of inevitable death. All things come at last to the awful chasm—the bravest virtue and the highest authority in the world.[11] Yet life is good and death an evil; else, why do the blessed gods not die? asks Sappho[12] with feminine naiveté; though indeed, her life’s path had lain through the deepest valley of the shadow. Even the dead man, if he wishes to be preserved from utter nothingness, must depend upon the world of the living as the only place of reality; the fame of his virtues and his deeds is all that outlasts his death.[13] Perhaps some dim perception of that fame reaches even to the dead.[14] They themselves are for the living as though they had passed into nothingness; we should not, thinks a poet, give them another thought after we have buried them.[15]
Here even the time-honoured conventions associated with the cult of souls seem to be perversely cast aside. In general, the poet with his wide-ranging observation of mankind had small occasion to be reminded of the cult of the soul that the narrow circles of family or city offered to their dead, or of the conceptions thereby encouraged of the continued life enjoyed by the departed. The omission is supplied by the Orators of the fifth and fourth centuries and by what they say—and do [413] not say—of the state of things hereafter. The greatest period of lyric poetry was by that time already fading into the past, and yet whoever wished in speaking before a citizen assembly to meet with general agreement and understanding was still obliged to refrain from speaking of the blessed immortality, the eternity and divinity of the soul. The Orators[16] never pass beyond the conceptions of the survival, power, and rights of the souls of the departed which were called forth and maintained in existence by the cult of the soul. The continued existence of the souls in the next world is not called in question; but the opinion that the souls still preserve their consciousness and have any knowledge of what happens on this earth is only expressed with the most cautious avoidance of definiteness.[17] What—apart from the sacrificial offerings of their relatives—still binds the dead to the life upon earth, is little more than the fame accorded to them among the living.[18] Even in the elevated language of solemn funeral orations the consolations offered to the survivors omit all mention of any enhanced state of being, any thought of immortal life in fully-conscious blessedness, that might belong now to the glorious departed.[19] Such high visions and hopes for the future were still, it appears, as little necessary or demanded for the comfort of the people as they had been in the times of the great wars of liberty.[20] The beloved dead who had given their lives for their country in those wars, as well as many others of the time whom death had overtaken, were the recipients of the epitaphs composed by Simonides the master of brilliant and condensed inscriptions. Nevertheless, not once does he vouchsafe a word that might point forward to a land of blessed immortality for the departed. There is a vestige of life still remaining for the dead—but it is in this world; the memory of the living and their own great name honoured by after generations is all that can prolong their existence.
It seems like an echo from another world when (about the middle of the fifth century) Melanippides the dithyrambic poet addresses a god in the words: “Hear me Father, marvel of all mortal men, Thou that rulest over the everliving Souls.” The words must be addressed to Dionysos;[21] for such as entered into the magic circle of his nightly festival those visions of the imperishability of the human soul and its divine power acquired reality. Such wisdom received but partial assent from those who lived unaffected by the conceptions of isolated sects of the theologically or philosophically minded. [414]