The men of the Golden Age, after sleep has overcome them and they have died and been laid in the earth, become by the will of Zeus “Daimones”—Daimones upon earth, watchers of men, wandering over all the earth, veiled in clouds, [71] observing justice and injustice,[34] dispensing riches like kings. These men of the earliest times have then become effective realities. They are not spirits confined to an inaccessible region beyond this world, but powers acting and working amongst men. In this exalted state Hesiod calls them Daimones, and thus describes them by a name which is otherwise applied by him as well as by Homer only to the immortal gods. The name so employed is not to be understood as implying a separate class of immortals, an intermediate class of beings between gods and men, as later speculation used the word.[35] These later beings of an intermediate class were thought of as possessing an originally immortal nature like the gods, and as dwelling in an intermediate region of their own. Hesiod’s Daimones, on the contrary, have once been men and have only after their death become immortals invisibly[36] roaming the earth. When they are given the name Daimones nothing more is implied than that they now share the invisible might and unending life of the gods, and to that extent may be called gods—with as much right as Ino Leukothea, for instance, who, according to Homer, became a goddess after being a mortal; or as Phaëthon, who, according to the Hesiodic Theogony, was raised by Aphrodite from the world of mortality and is now called a “godlike Daimon” (Th., 991). On the other hand, these immortals who were once men are clearly distinguished from the everlasting gods, “who have their Olympian dwellings,” by being called Daimones “who rule upon earth”.[37] And though they are given the name, familiar to everybody from Homer, of Daimones, i.e. gods, they, nevertheless, form a class of beings which is entirely unknown to Homer. Homer knows of certain individual men who are raised or translated, body and soul together, to undying life. The later Epos can tell of certain also who, like Memnon or Achilles, receive a new life after their death and now live on in undivided unity of body and soul. But that the soul outside Erebos could carry on a conscious life of its own and influence living men—of this there is no mention in Homer. Yet this is exactly what has happened according to the Hesiodic poem. The men of the Golden Age have died and now live on divided from their bodies, invisible and godlike, and therefore called gods. Just as in Homer, the gods themselves assume manifold shapes and visit the cities of men, observing the good and evil deeds of men,[38] so also do the souls of the dead in Hesiod. For the beings who here, after their separation from the body, have become Daimones, are Souls—that is to say, beings who after their [72] death have entered in any case upon a higher existence than was theirs while they were united to the body. This, however, is an idea that we never meet with in the Homeric poems.
And yet it is quite unthinkable that this remarkable conception is the independent and passing invention of the Boeotian poet. He comes back to it again later on in the course of his poem. “Thirty thousand,” that is, innumerable immortal Watchers over mortal men wander invisibly in the service of Zeus over the earth, taking note of right and wrong (Op., 252 ff.). The conception is important to him for ethical reasons; if he is to make use of it in his argument he must not have invented it himself. And, in fact, nothing that belongs to the sphere of religious belief and cultus, or even the lower levels of superstition, has been invented by this earnest-minded poet. The Boeotian school of poetry to which he belonged was far removed from, and indeed, hostile to the free inventiveness and roaming fancy with which the Homeric school “. . . know how to put forward many lies and make them seem like truth” (Th., 27). In pursuance of their purpose not simply to please but always in some sense to teach, the Boeotian poets never innovate in the region of the purely mythical, but simply order or piece together, or merely register what they find in the tradition. In religion especially invention lies farthest from their minds, though they do not by any means deny themselves the right of independent speculation about the traditional. Thus, what Hesiod tells us about the men of a previous age, whose souls after death become Daimones, came to him from tradition. It might still be objected that this tradition while being older than Hesiod may, nevertheless, be more recent than Homer, and be the result of post-Homeric speculation. It is unnecessary to develop the reasons which make such a view untenable; the course of our inquiry up to the present has made it possible for us to maintain decidedly that in what Hesiod here says we have a fragment of primitive belief reaching back far beyond Homer and surviving in the secluded Boeotian countryside. We have found even in the poems of Homer vestiges of a cult of the dead sufficient to make us believe that once in a distant past the Greeks resembled the majority of other nations and believed in the continued, conscious existence of the psyche after its separation from the body and in its powerful influence upon the world of men. We found, too, that in accordance with this belief, religious honours of various sorts were paid to the disembodied souls. In Hesiod’s narrative we simply have documentary confirmation of [73] what could only be with difficulty extracted from the study of Homer. Here we encounter the still living belief in the elevation of the soul after death to a higher life. They are the souls, it must be noted, of a race of men long since disappeared, about whom this belief is held. The belief in their godlike after-life must therefore be long-standing, and the worship of these souls as powerful beings still continues. For when it is said of the souls of the second race “these also receive worship”[39] (Op., 142), it is distinctly implied that the Daimones of the first or Golden generation a fortiori received worship.
The men of the Silver generation, on account of their refusal to pay due honour to the Olympians, are “hidden” by Zeus under the earth, and are now called “mortal Blessed Ones that live below the earth, second in rank, yet worship is paid to them also” (141-2). Thus, the poet knows of the souls of men who likewise belonged to the distant past, whose home is in the bowels of the earth, who receive religious honour and who must therefore have been conceived as powerful. The poet has not specified the nature of their influence upon the upper world. It is true that he does not distinctly call the spirits of this second generation “good”, as he had done the first (122), and he makes them spring from the less perfect Silver age and seems to have given them inferior rank. But it does not follow that he here anticipated later speculation and thought of the second generation as a class of wicked demons whose nature it is to work evil.[40] Only to the Olympians do they seem to stand in a rather more distant relationship—almost one of hostility. They had before paid the gods none of their pious dues, and so now they are not called, like the souls of the first race, “Daimones appointed by Zeus to be Watchers of men.” The poet refers to them with a remarkable expression, “mortal Blessed Ones,” that is, mortal gods. This very singular denomination, the two parts of which really cancel one another, points to a certain embarrassment felt by the poet in making use of an expression taken from the Homeric vocabulary (to which the poet felt himself confined) to designate clearly and effectively a class of beings that was unknown to Homer.[41] The disembodied souls of the first race he had simply called Daimones. But this name, common as it was both to the race of those who from mortality had achieved immortality and to the immortal gods, left the essential difference between the two classes of immortal beings unexpressed. For that very reason the name was never employed in Hesiod’s fashion by later ages,[42] who always [74] called such as, not having been born immortal, had achieved immortality, by the name of “Heroes”. Hesiod, who could not use the word in this sense, described them by the bold oxymoron: mortal Blessed Ones, human gods. As immortal spirits they resembled the gods in their new state of being. But their nature was still mortal, and hence their bodies had to die, and this constituted their difference from the everlasting gods.[43]
The name Daimones then does not appear to involve any essential distinction between the spirits of the men of the Silver generation and the Daimones of the Golden Age. Only the place where the two classes of spirits have their dwelling is different—the Daimones of the Silver race live in the depths of the earth. The expression “of the underworld”, used of them, is a vague one, and only suffices to differentiate them from the spirits of the “upper world” who were derived from the first race. Still, the abode of the souls of the Silver Age is in any case not thought of as being the distant meeting-place of the unconscious, vegetating shadow-souls—the House of Hades; the “phantoms” that hover about that place could not have been called Daimones or “mortal gods”, nor do they receive any kind of worship after their death.
§ 3
The Silver Age, then, belongs to a long-since vanished past.[44] The stalwarts of the Bronze Age, we are told, destroyed by their deeds, went down into the gloomy home of the dreadful Hades, nameless. Black Death seized them, for all their violence, and they left the light of the sun.
Except for the addition of the adjective “nameless” one might, indeed, suppose that this was a description of the fate of the souls of the Homeric heroes. Perhaps, however, the word[45] only means that no honourable and distinctive title, such as belonged to the souls of the first and second as well as to the fourth race, was attached to those who had gone down into the shadow-world of annihilation and become as nothing.
There follows “the divine race of Heroes who were called the Demigods”. The wars at Thebes and Troy destroyed these. Part were “enfolded in the destiny of Death”; others received life and a home far from men at the hand of Zeus Kronides, who gave them a dwelling-place at the ends of the world. There they live, free from care, in the Islands of the Blest, by the deep-flowing Okeanos; favoured Heroes, for whom the Earth, of her own accord, brings forth her sweet fruits three times a year. [75]
Here, at last, for the first time we have reached a clearly definable period of legendary history. The poet means to speak of the Heroes whose adventures were narrated in the Thebais, the Iliad and kindred poems. What we notice here specially is how little the Greeks yet knew of their history. Immediately after the disappearance of the Heroes the poet begins the age in which he himself must live. Where the realm of poetry ends, there is an end of all further tradition; there follows a blank, and to all appearances the present age immediately begins. That explains why the Heroic Age is the last before the fifth, to which the poet himself belongs, and why it does not, for example, precede the (undated) Bronze Age. It connects itself conveniently with the Bronze Age also in what is related of the fate suffered by a part of its representatives, for the subject which here particularly interests the poet is the fate of the departed. Some of the fallen Heroes simply die—that is to say (there can be no doubt of it) they enter the realm of Hades like the members of the Bronze race or the Heroes of the Iliad. But when others are distinguished from those whom “Death took” in that they reach the Islands of the Blest, it is impossible not to suppose that these last have not suffered death, that is, the separation of the Psyche from the visible Self, but have been carried away alive in the flesh. The poet is thinking of such cases as those we have met with in the Odyssean narrative of Menelaos, or, in the Telegoneia, of Penelope, Telemachos and Telegonos. These few exceptional instances could hardly have made such a deep impression on him that he felt himself bound on their behalf to erect a special class of the Translated to be set over against those who simply died. There can be no doubt that he had many more examples before him of this same mysterious mode of separation from the world of men that did not involve death. We have already seen how the lines in the Odyssey in which the translation of Menelaos is foreshadowed, point back to other and earlier poems of the same kind. Further, the references to the subject which we found in the remains of the Cyclic Epics make it easy to suppose that later Heroic poetry had been continually widening the circle of those who enjoyed translation and illumination.
Only from such a poetical source can Hesiod have derived his conception of a common meeting-place where the Translated enjoy for ever their untroubled existence. He calls that place the “Islands of the Blest”; and these lie far removed from the world of men, in the Ocean, on the confines of the earth, just where the Odyssey puts the Elysian [76] plain, another meeting-place of the still-living Translated, or rather the same under a different name. Its name does not oblige us to regard the “Elysian plain” as an island, but neither does it exclude that assumption. Homer never expressly calls the land of the Phæacians an island,[46] but the imagination of most readers will picture Scheriê as such, and so did the Greeks perhaps already at the time of the Hesiodic school of poets. In the same way a poet may have thought of the “Land of Destiny” that receives passing mention in Homer as an island, or group of islands; only an island surrounded and cut off by the sea can give the full impression of a distant asylum far from the world, inaccessible to all save those specially called thither. And accordingly the mythology of many peoples, especially those who live by the sea, has made a distant island the dwelling-place of the souls of the departed.