The poet may have wished to remain permanently upon the sublime heights of this Pantheistic vision; but he must, in his peculiar all-embracing spirit that never held fast to any one view with enduring persistence, have experienced too often the truth of the saying of Protagoras that every statement calls forth its equally legitimate opposite,[158] to have become an unswerving adherent of any single opinion. Death, and whatever may reveal itself after death, is beyond the experience of any man.[159] It may be that complete disappearance into nothingness follows death; that the dead man becomes simply nothing.[160] It may be that in the permanence of the human race the great name and the renown of glorious deeds lives on undying.[161] Whether there may remain besides a vestige of life in a spirit world, who can tell? Perhaps such a thing is hardly even to be wished.[162] It is just what makes death such a comforting thing, that it puts an end to all feeling and therefore to all pain and every care. We should not lament over our fate if, like the harvests that follow each other in the course of the years, one generation of men after another flowers, fades, and is carried off. So it is ordered in the course of Nature, and we ought not to be dismayed by anything that is rendered inevitable by her laws.[163]
NOTES TO CHAPTER XII
[1] The learned and more particularly the philosophers of later ages paid special attention to utterances of the older poetry that gave expression to belief of a spiritualist tendency. Just as they selected and preserved passages from Pindar (and from Melanippides in the case soon to be [mentioned]), which bore witness to an advanced view of the soul, so they must also have given us similar passages from other melic or from iambic and elegiac poets—if such passages had existed. They must, for example, have been absent from the θρῆνοι of Simonides which were famous as the models of this kind of poetry. And so with all the rest.
[2] Hades puts an end to all pleasure for every man; hence the warning that man should enjoy his youth upon earth: Thgn. 973 ff.; cf. 877 f., 1191 ff., 1009 f.; Sol. 24; Thgn. 719 ff.
[3] θανάτῳ πάντες ὀφειλόμεθα—an ancient saying often repeated; cf. Bergk on Simon. 122, 2; Nauck on Soph., El. 1173 [Blaydes ad loc.].
[4] Hades himself plays the part of Thanatos and carries off the souls to the lower world. Thus as early as Semon. i, 13 f., τοὺς δ’ Ἄρει δεδημένους πέμπει μελαίνης Ἀΐδης ὑπὸ χθονός. In metaphorical language Ἅιδης for θάνατος is quite regular from the time of Pindar onwards. This, in turn, lent support to the use of the name of Ἅιδης instead of the personified Θάνατος. So esp. in Pi., O. ix, 33–5; cf. besides, Epigr. Gr. 89, 3–4. τόνδε . . . μάρψας Ἅιδης οἱ σκοτίας ἀμφέβαλεν πτέρυγας; cf. 201, 2; 252, 1–2. (And therefore in Eur., Alc. 261, we should not alter the πτερωτὸς Ἅιδας who is named instead of Thanatos—not even in favour of the otherwise ingenious βλέπων . . . ᾅδαν.)
[5] δηρὸν ἔνερθεν γῆς ὀλέσας ψυχὴν κείσομαι ὥστε λίθος ἄφθογγος Thgn. 567 f.—the condition of things in Hades is regarded exactly as in the Homeric pictures: Thgn. 704–10.
[6] See esp. Sol. 13, 29 ff.: Thgn. 731–42; 205 ff.
[7] Mimn. ii, 13: ἄλλος δ’ αὗ παίδων ἐπιδεύεται, ὧντε μάλιστα ἱμείρων κατὰ γῆς ἔρχεται εἰς Ἀΐδην. Without children there can be no assurance that the cult of the soul will be carried on. But we may well believe that the attaching of so much importance to offspring was assisted by the natural human belief that the man who left children behind him on earth did not completely perish in death (hence ἀειγενές ἐστι καὶ ἀθάνατον ὡς θνητῷ ἡ γέννησις as in Plato, Smp. 206 E). This alone gives a meaning and a reason for the widespread belief among the Greeks that the wicked man who is punished after his death in his children and children’s children himself feels that punishment.
[8] Semon. 1; 3. Mimn. 2. Sol. 13, 63 ff.; 14. Thgn. 167 f.; 425 ff. We may also add here the expressions of resignation, Hdt. vii, 46; i, 31.