[89] δ 584, χεῦ’ Ἀγαμέμνονι τύμβον ἷν’ ἄσβεστον κλέος εἴη. λ 75 f., σῆμά τέ μοι χεῦαι πολιῆς ἐπὶ θινὶ θαλάσσης, ἀνδρὸς δυστήνοιο, καὶ ἐσσομένοισι πύθεσθαι. Achilles in the second Nekyia, ω 30 ff., says to Agam.: Would thou hadst died before Troy, for then the Achaeans would have set up a tomb for thee and καὶ σῷ παιδὶ μέγα κλέος ἤρα’ ὀπίσσω (cf. 93 f., where Agam. says to Achilles ὡς σὺ μὲν οὐδὲ θανὼν ὄνομ’ ὤλεσας ἀλλά τοι αἰεὶ πάντας ἐπ’ ἀνθρώπους κλέος ἔσσεται ἐσθλὸν Ἀχιλλεῦ). The words of Hektor, Η 84 ff., show how the σῆμα ἐπὶ πλατεῖ Ἑλλησπόντῳ served to remind sailors as they passed, ἀνδρὸς μὲν τόδε σῆμα πάλαι κατατεθνηῶτος κτλ. and to suggest that this was the proper and principal purpose of such erections.—In contrast with this cf. what is stated of the inhabitants of the Philippine Islands: “they laid their illustrious dead in a chest and set them up on a high place or on a rock by the bank of a river in order that they might be worshipped by the pious”: Lippert, Seelencult, p. 22.
CHAPTER II
ISLANDS OF THE BLEST
TRANSLATION
The Homeric picture of the shadow-life of the disembodied soul is the work of resignation, not of hope. Hope would never have beguiled itself with the anticipation of a state of things which neither afforded men the chance of further activity after death, nor, on the other hand, gave them rest from the toil of life; one which promised them only a restless, purposeless fluttering to and fro, an existence, indeed, but without any of the content that might have made it worthy of the name of life.
Was there never any aspiration after a more consolatory picture of the life after death? Did the tremendous vital energies of that time really devote themselves so completely to the realms of Zeus that not even a ray of hope penetrated to the House of Hades? We should have had to suppose so were it not for a single passing glimpse which we get of a distant land of hearts’ desire, such as even the Greece that lay under the sway of the Homeric order of things still imagined for itself.
When Proteus, the sea-god who could foretell the future, has finished informing Menelaos, on the sea-shore of Egypt, of the circumstances of his return home to his country and of the fate of his dearest companions, he adds the prophetic words—so Menelaos himself informs Telemachos in the fourth book of the Odyssey (560 ff.): “But thou, god-like Menelaos, art not ordained to die in horse-pasturing Argos or to meet thy fate there; for the immortals shall send thee far away to the Elysian plain, to the ends of the world where dwells fair-haired Rhadamanthys, and where life is most easy for men. There is neither snow nor heavy storms nor rain, but Okeanos ever sends zephyrs with soft-breathing breezes to refresh men—because thou hast Helen to wife and art thereby in their eyes the son-in-law of Zeus.”
These verses allow us a glimpse into a world about which the Homeric poems are otherwise silent. At the end of the [56] world, by the River Okeanos, lies the “Elysian Plain”, a land where the sky is always clear, as in the land where the gods live.[1] There dwells the great Rhadamanthys, not alone, one may suppose as “men” are spoken of (565, 568). Thither shall the gods some day send Menelaos—he is not to die (562); that is to say, he is to reach that place alive nor shall he suffer death there. The place to which he is to be sent is not a part of the realm of Hades, but a land on the surface of the earth set apart as the abode not of disembodied “souls”, but of men whose souls have not been separated from their visible selves—for only thus can they feel and enjoy the sense of life (565). The picture which fancy has drawn here is the precise opposite of the blessed immortality of the soul in its separate existence. Just because such an idea remained quite unthinkable for Homeric singers, hope sought and found an exit from the shadow-world which swallows up all living energy. Hope imagined a land at the end of the world, but still of this world, to which occasionally some few favourites of the gods might be “translated” without the psyche being separated from its body and descending to Hades.
The actual mention of such miraculous “translation” stands alone in the Homeric poems, and the passage in the Odyssey seems to have been introduced by a later hand.[2] But the conditions of such a miracle are all implied within the range of Homeric ideas. Menelaos is carried off by the power of the gods and lives an eternal life far from the world of mortals. The belief that a god could suddenly withdraw his earthly favourite from the eyes of men and invisibly waft him away on the breeze not infrequently finds its application in the battle-scenes of the Iliad.[3] The gods could also make a mortal “invisible” for a prolonged period. When Odysseus has been so long lost to his friends they suspect that the gods have “made him invisible” (Od. i, 235 ff.); they do not regard him as “dead” but “the Harpies have carried him away”, and he is consequently withdrawn from all human ken (Od. i, 241 f.; xiv, 371). Penelope, in her grief, prays either for swift death through the arrows of Artemis, or that a storm wind may lift her up and carry her away on dark pathways to the mouths of Okeanos, that is, to the entrance of the Land of the Dead (Od. xx, 61–5; 79 ff.).[4] To explain her wish she recalls a fairy tale of the kind that must often have been told in the women’s quarters; how the daughters of Pandareos, after the violent death of their parents, were brought up to lovely maidenhood by Aphrodite and provided by Hera, Artemis, and Athene with all kinds of gifts and [57] accomplishments; till one day when Aphrodite had gone to Olympos to ask Zeus to make a match for them, the Harpies came and carried them off and made them the hand-maidens of the hated Erinyes.[5] This folk-tale reveals more clearly than is usual with the generally cultured Homeric narrative the popular belief that men might be carried off permanently from the land of the living, and, without seeing death, live on in another dwelling-place. For the daughters of Pandareos are carried away alive—to the Kingdom of the Dead, it is true, for that is where they must go if they become the servants of the Erinyes, the spirits of the underworld.[6] That is where Penelope wishes to be carried off, and without dying first—away from the land of the living which has become intolerable for her. Such a translation is accomplished by means of the Harpies or the Stormwind, which is the same thing, since the Harpies are nothing else but wind-deities of a peculiarly sinister kind. They may be compared to the Devil’s Bride or the “Whirlwind’s Bride” of German folk-tales, who rides in the whirlwind and also carries off men with her.[7] The Harpies and what we are here told of them, belong to the “vulgar mythology” which so seldom finds any expression in Homer; a popular folk-lore that could tell of many things between heaven and earth of which the Homeric “grand style” takes little notice. In Homer the Harpies never act on their own authority; only as the servants of the gods or of a single god do they transport mortals where no word of man, no human power, can reach.[8]
The prophesied removal of Menelaos to the Elysian fields at the end of the world is only another example of such a “translation” by the will and the might of the gods. Even the fact that prolonged habitation in that happy land, inaccessible to other men, is promised to him, does not differentiate the fate of Menelaos from that of the daughters of Pandareos, or from that which Penelope wishes for herself. For Menelaos, however, immortal life is promised not in Hades, or even at its entrance, but in a special country of the blest, as though in a new kingdom of the gods. He is to become a “god”; for since to the Homeric poets “god” and “immortal” are interchangeable terms, a man who is granted immortality (that is, whose psyche is never separated from his visible self) becomes for them a god.
It is also a Homeric belief that gods can raise mortals to their own realm, to immortality. Kalypso wishes to make Odysseus “immortal and ageless for all time”, that he may remain for ever by her side (Od. v, 135 f.; 209 f.; xxiii, 335 f.), [58] that is to say, make him a god like herself. The immortality of the gods is conditioned by the eating of the magic food ambrosia and nectar;[9] man, too, by eating continually the food of the gods, becomes an immortal god. What Odysseus in his longing for the earthly home, to which he is drawn by loyalty and duty, rejects, has been attained by other mortals. The Homeric poems can tell of more than one mortal promoted to immortal life.