As he is struggling in the stormy sea rescue comes to Odysseus in the person of Ino Leukothea, once the daughter of Kadmos, “who had formerly been a mortal woman, but now in the waves of the sea shares in the honour of the gods” (Od. v, 333 ff.).[10] Did some god of the sea bear her away and imprison her for ever in his own element? The belief existed that a god might descend from heaven even upon an earthly maiden and carry her off for ever as his spouse (Od. vi, 280 f.).[11]
Ganymede, the most beautiful of mortals, had been carried away by the gods to Olympos to dwell among immortals, as the cup-bearer of Zeus (Il. xx, 232 ff.).[12] He was a scion of the old Trojan royal house, to which Tithonos also belonged, whom both the Iliad and the Odyssey already know as the husband of Eos; from his side the goddess arose every morning to bring the light of day to gods and men.[13] It appears that she had “translated” her beloved not to Olympos but to the distant dwelling-place by the River Okeanos from which she sets out in the morning.[14] It was Eos who had once borne off the beautiful Orion, and in spite of the jealousy of the other gods had enjoyed his love until Artemis “on Ortygia” had slain him with her gentle arrow (Od. v, 122 ff.). The story may be derived from ancient star-myths, which represented in the language of myth what is actually to be observed in the morning sky. But in such myths the elements and celestial phenomena are thought of as living and animate like men. And in the same way, these star-spirits, in accordance with the regular development of legend, have long ago sunk, for the Homeric poet, to the level of earthly youths and heroes. If the goddess can raise Orion into her own kingdom, then, according to the belief of the time (which is all that matters to us here), the same thing might happen to any mortal through the favour of the gods. A simple imitation of the same legend in a purely human setting is the story of Kleitos, a youth of the family of the seer Melampous, whom Eos has carried off for the sake of his beauty that he may dwell among the gods (Od. xv, 249 f.). [59]
§ 2
The translation, then, of Menelaos, while still alive, to the ends of the earth to live there in perpetual blessedness is indeed a miracle, but a miracle that finds its justification and precedent in the range of Homeric belief. The only thing new about it is that Menelaos has a special dwelling-place assigned to him, not in the land of the gods, the proper realm of immortality, nor as in the case of Tithonos and as Kalypso desired for Odysseus, in the company of a deity, but in a separate place specially allotted to the translated hero, the Elysian fields. Nor does this appear to be the invention of the writer of these lines. He refers so briefly to the “Land of the Departed”[15] and its delights that we are forced to believe that he did not himself originate so enticing a vision.[16] He can only, in the case of Menelaos, have added a fresh companion to the company of the blessed. That Rhadamanthys the Just dwells there seems to be known to him from ancient tradition, for he evidently only intends to recall the fact and does not think it necessary to justify this selection of the brother of Minos.[17] It might even be supposed that the picture of such a wonderland had been invented and embellished by older poets simply for the benefit of Rhadamanthys. The only novelty is that this picture, which has been fully adopted into the circle of Homeric poetry, now includes a hero of the Trojan epic cycle among the number of those translated to that land of ever unclouded happiness. The lines were inserted, as has already been remarked, at a later date, into the prophecy of Proteus, and it is hard not to suppose that the whole idea lay far from the thoughts of previous Homeric singers. Would the flower of the heroic chivalry, including Achilles himself, have been doomed to that dim shadow-world in which we see them wandering in the Nekyia of the Odyssey, if a way out into a life exempt from death had already revealed itself to imagination at the time when the Epic gave the stamp of its approval to the stories which dealt with the fate of the greater number of the heroes? Because the poem of the Trojan War and the adventures of the Return from Troy had not yet decided upon the fate of Menelaos, a later poet could speak of his “translation” to the—since “discovered”—Land of Destiny. It is highly probable that even at the time of the composition of the Journey to Hades of Odysseus this conception—afterwards so important for the development of the Greek belief in immortality—of a secluded resting-place of living and translated heroes had not yet been completely [60] formulated. It fits easily into the framework of belief prevailing in the Homeric poems, but it is not necessarily required by that framework. It is natural on this account to suppose that it entered the Epic from without. And, remembering the Babylonian story of Hasisatra and the Hebrew one of Enoch,[18] both of whom without suffering death were translated into the realm of immortal life—either to “Heaven” or to the “End of the Rivers” to the gods—we might be inclined to follow the fashion that prevails in some quarters nowadays, and believe that these earliest Greek translation legends were borrowed from Semitic tradition. Little, however, would be gained by such a mechanical derivation. Here and in all such cases the main question remains still unanswered: what were the reasons which led the Greek mind to wish to borrow this particular idea at this particular time from abroad? In the present instance at least, nothing argues specially for the handing on of the belief in translation from one nation to another rather than for its independent origin in the different countries out of similar needs.
This new idea did not contradict the normal Homeric beliefs about the soul but on the contrary presupposed them and supplemented them without incongruity. It was also, as we have seen, based upon conceptions that were familiar and natural to Greek thought. There was, indeed, no need for any stimulus from without to produce from these materials the undoubtedly new and peculiarly attractive idea of which we receive the earliest intimation in the prophecy of Proteus.
§ 3
The importance of this new creation for the later development of Greek belief makes it all the more necessary to be quite clear as to what exactly this novelty really was. Was it a Paradise for the pious and the just? A sort of Greek Valhalla for the bravest heroes?—or was it that a reconciliation and adjustment between virtue and happiness such as this life never knows had revealed itself to the eyes of hope in a Land of Promise? Nothing of the kind is warranted by these lines. Menelaos was never particularly remarkable for those virtues which the Homeric age rated highest.[19] He is only to be transported to Elysium because he has Helen to wife and is therefore the son-in-law of Zeus; such is Proteus’ prophecy to him. We are not told why Rhadamanthys has reached the place of happiness; nor do we learn it through the title by which he was referred to almost invariably by [61] later poets, the “Just”. We may, however, remind ourselves that as brother of Minos he was also a son of Zeus.[20] It was not virtue or merit that gave him a claim to blessedness after this life; indeed, of any such claim we never find the least trace. Just as the retention of the psyche in the body and the consequent avoidance of death can occur only as a miracle or by magic—that is, as an exceptional case—so does translation into the “Land of Destiny” remain a privilege of a few special favourites of the gods. No one could deduce from such cases any article of faith of universal application. The nearest parallel to this miraculous preservation of life for a few individuals in a land of blessed repose is to be found in the equally miraculous preservation of consciousness in those three enemies of the gods in Hades whom we hear of in the Nekyia of the Odyssey. The Penitents in Erebos and the blessed in Elysium correspond: both represent exceptions which do not destroy the rule and do not affect the main outline of Homeric belief. In the first case, as in the second, the omnipotence of Heaven has broken through the rule. Those, however, who owe to the special favour of the gods their escape from death and their translation to Elysium are near relatives of the gods. This seems to be the only reason for the favour shown to them.[21] If therefore any more general reason beyond the capricious good-will of some god is to account for the translation of these individuals it might perhaps be found in the belief that near relationship with the gods, that is, the very highest nobility of lineage, could preserve a man from the descent into the common realm of hopeless nothingness after the separation of the psyche from the body. In the same way the beliefs of many primitive peoples represent the ordinary man as departing to a joyless country of the dead (if he is not annihilated altogether) while the descendants of gods and kings, or the aristocracy, go to a land of unending happiness.[22] Such a fancy, however, is only dimly apparent in the promise made to Menelaos; nowhere is anything said of a general rule from which the individual case might be deduced.—
§ 4
But the individuals who are admitted to an everlasting life in the Elysian land at the end of the world are much too distantly removed from the habitations of the living for them to be credited with the power of influencing the world of men.[23] They resemble the gods only in the enjoyment accorded to them of an unendingly conscious life. Of the omnipotence of [62] the gods they have not the smallest share[24] any more than the dwellers in Erebos, from whose fate their own is otherwise so different. We must not suppose, therefore, that the origin of the stories of the promotion of individual heroes above their companions and their translation into a distant dwelling-place, is to be sought in any cultus offered to those individuals in their previous earthly dwelling-place. Every religious cult is the worship of something real and powerful; no popular religion and no poet’s fancy would have given the national heroes, if they were to be regarded as powerful and worshipped accordingly, such a distant and inaccessible home.
It was the free activity of the poetic fancy which created and embellished this last refuge of human aspiration upon the Elysian plain. The needs which this new creation was chiefly intended to satisfy were poetical and not religious.