But there is a more sinister variety of intercourse with the souls or spirits of the dead. They sometimes appear unsought to the living; they can be compelled by the force of magic to use their powers in the service of the living. Both these possibilities apply more particularly to those unquiet souls whom fate or their own hands have deprived of life violently and before their time; to those who have not been consigned to the peace of the grave by ceremonious burial.[84] The enlightened of the time do indeed refuse to believe in ghosts and haunting spirits of the dead that wander without rest about the place of their tragic fate, and make their presence disagreeably felt by the living.[85] But the populace, even in such enlightened days, gave the fullest credence to stories in which the existence of a spirit-world seemed to reveal its sinister reality, trespassing at times upon the world of the living. Regular folk-tales of spectral apparitions, vagrant ghosts of unfortunate souls, vampire-like spirits of the grave,[86] are preserved to us in some numbers—chiefly such as appealed to a perverted philosophy, the insaniens sapientia of an outworn age, as seeming to confirm its fancies of an invisible world between heaven and earth. In Lucian’s Lover of Lies the grey-beard [534] philosophers entertain each other in portentous seriousness with such communications from the spirit world.[87] Plutarch himself is quite seriously convinced of the reality of some ghostly appearances.[88] Philosophy, which at this time was going back to Plato, found in its system of demonology a means of making such old wives’ tales intelligible and credible to itself.

Finally, the time arrives when the violent and arbitrary interference with the unseen world—sorcery and spirit-raising—becomes a part of orthodox philosophy. The popular imagination of the Greeks did not have to wait for instruction from their barbarian neighbours, who had reduced the irrational to a system, before they could believe in the summoning of spirits from the deep. Magic in this sense was of extreme antiquity in Greece.[89] But in the fusion and intermixture of Greeks with barbarians which marked the Hellenistic age similar and cognate superstitions from all the corners of the earth met together and acquired strength from their union. It was foreign sources rather than Greek which chiefly contributed to swell the turbid and noxious stream of sorceries and spirit-raisings, the practical application of an irrational theory of the nature and being of the soul in separation from the body. The lofty heaven of the old Greek gods was beginning to grow dim before the troubled vision of this later age; more and more their place was taken by a mob of idols and an obscure rabble of lesser devils. In this chaotic medley of Greek and barbarian demonology the companies of unquiet souls and ghosts of the dead easily found a place. The ghost was no longer an alien when the Gods themselves had become ghostly. When both Gods and spirits have to answer to the spells of the sorcerer the souls of the dead are seldom left in peace.[90] We possess some relics of the art of spirit-raising in the Græco-Egyptian magic books; and we can now see with our eyes specimens which illustrate the practical outcome of this delusion in the magic charms and exorcisms that were scratched on tablets of lead or gold and placed in the graves—as the natural abode of the spirits which were to be compelled—where they have been found in considerable quantities in modern times. Among the sinister influences that are thus conjured to do the work of vengeance, punishment, or destruction upon the conjurer’s enemy, the unquiet souls of the dead are also regularly mentioned. To them is attributed the power and the will to intervene with malevolence and obstruction in the life of men, no less than to the other spiritual [535] powers of heaven and hell in company with whom they are summoned.[91]

§ 4

The Cult of Souls for all its expansion gave no assistance to the picturing of what might be the condition of the departed souls independently of their connexion with the living. Those who troubled themselves about such matters and sought further information were obliged to have recourse, if not to the systems of theologians and philosophers, then to the imaginative accounts and pictures of ancient poetry and legend.

The idea of a distant realm of the souls into which the strengthless shadows of those who had departed this life disappeared had not lost its hold on the popular imagination even of these later ages—difficult as it might be to reconcile[92] such an idea with the pre-suppositions of cultus with its customary worship and sustenance of the souls confined within the grave. The belief in a distant kingdom of the dead could not but continue to be current among men for whom the Homeric poems remained the earliest manual and school-book in the hands of youth and the source of instruction and entertainment to every age. The passionate indignation with which philosophers of the Stoic as well as the Epicurean faith attacked the beliefs resting on the teaching of Homer cannot be explained except by supposing that Homer and his picture had remained a guiding force with the masses who were uninstructed in philosophy. And, in fact, ancient writers use language which shows that the ancient conception of Hades was by no means discarded but on the contrary was still vigorously alive among the populace.[93]

As to what might go on down below and the general appearance of the underworld—these were questions that the invention of theological and semi-philosophic fancy, each according to its special lights and preconceptions, strove to answer in eager competition.[94] But such attempts to picture the condition of things in the kingdom of the souls—attempts which reached their highest point in the elaborate chiaroscuro of Vergil’s Hades—remained the exercises of ingenious fancy and rarely pretended to be anything else. A distinct and authoritative popular system of belief on these points was scarcely possible when the orthodox religion of the state formally and dogmatically rejected everything of the kind.

It would, indeed, have been more natural if in connexion with the idea of the congregation of souls enclosed in the [536] kingdom of the underworld deities a belief in a compensatory justice to be found in this after-life of the dead, had grown up and obtained popular currency. The oppressed and needy who feel themselves deprived of their share in this world’s goods think only too easily that somewhere there must be a place where they too will some day enjoy the fruits that others alone are allowed to pluck upon earth—and place that “somewhere” beyond the boundaries of this world and of reality. Pious belief in the gods expects to obtain the prize, so often denied upon earth, in a realm of the spirit. If indeed such a conviction of a compensatory justice to come[95]—reward of the virtuous and punishment of the wicked in a hereafter—was really more widely and seriously held in this age than it had been before,[96] then the cult of the underworld deities as it was practised in the mysteries of the states and the various religious societies must have contributed in a large degree to bring this about. And contrariwise, the belief that the punishing and rewarding omnipotence of the gods would be felt in a hereafter must have brought an unbroken stream of adherents to those mysteries which in fact offered their help and mediation in the life to come. Those only could imagine that they had detailed knowledge of the enigmas that lie beyond the reach of all experience, who could surrender themselves entirely to the dogmatic teaching of a closed sect. We may in fact take leave to doubt whether the gruesome pictures of a place of torment in Hades, with its undying punishment in devouring flames, and the similar fancies that later authors sometimes express, were in reality anything more than the private imaginations with which exclusive and superstitious conventicles sought to terrorize their members.[97] The charming pictures of a “Land of Arrival” to which death sends the much-tried children of men, may have been more widely accepted. Homer, the universal instructor, had stamped them upon men’s memories. For the poet the Elysian plain had been a place situated upon the surface of the earth to which the occasional favour of the gods was able to translate a few of their dearest favourites, that they might there enjoy, without seeing death, unending bliss.[98] In imitation of the Homeric fancy, the poetry of the following ages had imagined the translation of many other Heroes and heroic women of the legendary past to a secret life of bliss in Elysium or in the Islands of the Blest.[99] Later fancy, which saw in Elysium the Land of Promise to which all men who had lived in a manner pleasing to the gods [537] would be taken after their death,[100] now placed its Elysium or Islands of the Blest in the interior of the earth beyond the reach of all save disembodied souls. In later times this became the currently accepted view, but the subject remained undefined and subject to variation. Men must still, in fact, have imagined The Isles of the Blest, the abode of privileged spirits, to be situated upon the surface of the earth (though, indeed, far away beyond the limits of the discovered countries of the globe), when attempts could be made to find the way there and to bring back news to the living. The attempt attributed to Sertorius was only the most famous of such voyages of discovery.[101] Why, indeed, should these magic Isles remain for ever undiscovered upon the borders of the inhabited world that yet offered so wide a field for discovery, when everybody knew of the island in the Black Sea, often visited by living men, where Achilles, the supreme example of miraculous translation, lived for ever in perpetual enjoyment of his youth? For centuries the island of Leukê, the separate Elysium of Achilles and a few select among the Heroes, was visited and reverenced with religious awe.[102] Here men thought they could discern in immediate perception, and in actual physical contact, something of the mysterious existence of blessed spirits. The belief in the possibility of miraculous translation to an eternity of unbroken union of body and soul, thus palpably and visibly substantiated, could not completely die even in this prosaic age. The educated did indeed find this conception so strange and unintelligible that when they come to speak of translation legends of the past they profess themselves unable to say what exactly the ancients had supposed to occur when such miracles took place.[103] But the populace, which finds nothing easier to believe in than the impossible, once more naively accepted the miracle. Did not the examples of Amphiaraos and Trophonios plainly establish the fact of translation to underground retreats? And to them as being still alive in their caves beneath the earth a cult was offered until an advanced period.[104] The translation of beautiful youths to everlasting life in the kingdom of the nymphs and spirits was the subject of many folk-tales.[105] Even in contemporary life the miracle of translation seemed not altogether impossible.[106] When the kings and queens of the Macedonian empire of the East began to receive divine honours in imitation of the great Alexander himself, it was not long before men ventured to affirm that at the end of his earthly existence the Divine Ruler everywhere [538] does not die but is merely “carried away” by the gods and still lives on.[107] It is the peculiar property of divinity, as Plato clearly expresses it,[108] to live for ever in the indivisible unity of body and soul. A court-bred theology could the more easily make such demands upon the belief of subject peoples in the Semitic East, and possibly in Egypt too, because native[109] legends had already told of the translation to immortal life of individual men dear to the gods and akin to the gods in nature; just as similar stories became common in Italian legends too,[110] though possibly only under the influence of Greek models. Indeed, quite apart from obsequious courtliness, Greeks and half-Greeks were quite capable of entertaining the idea[111] that the darlings of their fancy, such as Alexander the Great, had not suffered death but had been translated alive to the realm of imperishable physical existence. This is shown clearly enough by the success which attended the appearance, in Moesia at the beginning of the third century A.D., of another Alexander. This imposter travelled from land to land with a great train of Bacchants, and everywhere men believed in his identity with the great monarch.[112] A little earlier they had believed with equal credulity in the reappearance upon earth of the Emperor Nero,[113] who, it was thought, had not died but had merely disappeared. When Antinous, the beautiful youth beloved by the Emperor Hadrian, sank and disappeared in his watery grave he was at once regarded as a god who had, in fact, not died but had been translated.[114] The miraculous translation of Apollonios of Tyana is reported with the utmost seriousness;[115] like the other marvels and mysteries in the strange and enigmatic existence of this prophetic figure, it found believers enough.[116]

But such unbroken continuance of the united life of body and soul, begun upon earth and carried on in a mysterious abode of bliss (the oldest form taken by the idea of human immortality in the Greek mind), was never attributed to more than a few specially favoured and specially gifted individuals. An immortality of the human soul as such, by virtue of its nature and composition—as the imperishable force of divinity in the mortal body—never became a real part of the belief of the Greek populace. When approximations to such a belief do occasionally find expression in popular modes of thought, it is because a fragment of theology or of the universally popular philosophy has penetrated to the lower strata of the uninstructed populace. Theology and philosophy remained the sole true repositories of the belief in the [539] immortality of the soul. In the meeting together and conjunction of Greek and foreign ideas in the Hellenized Orient it was not Greek popular tradition but solely the influence of Greek philosophy, that, finding favour even outside the limits of Greek nationality, communicated to foreign nations the arresting concept of the divine, imperishable vitality of the human soul—upon the impressionable Jewish people, at least, it had the profoundest and most deeply penetrating influence.[117]

§ 5

All the various modes of conceiving the life enjoyed by the soul after the death of the body, as they had been explored, modified, and developed in the course of centuries, were admitted on an equal footing to the consciousness of the Greeks in this late period of their maturity. No formulated body of religious doctrine had by a process of exclusion and definition given the victory to any one conception at the expense of the others. But where so much was permitted and so little proscribed it is still possible to ask how these various formulations of belief, expectation, and hope stood in relation to each other. Were any more popular and more readily received than others? To answer this question it is natural to suppose that we have only to turn to the numerous inscriptions from the gravestones of the people. Here, especially in these later times, individuals give unhampered expression to their own feelings and thus reveal the extent and character of popular belief. But information derived from this source must be carefully scrutinized if it is not to lead to misconception.