Nothing in the plan or execution of the whole or its parts has been altered; neither have I taken anything away. The book contained nothing that was superfluous to the attainment of the object that I had in view. This object, it will be apparent, was not in the least to provide a brief and compendious statement of the most indispensable facts about the cult of Souls and the belief in immortality among the Greeks for the benefit of those who wished to take a hasty [xii] glance over the subject. Such a hasty picker-up of knowledge who regards himself—I cannot imagine why—as peculiarly fitted to criticise my book, has ingenuously besought me, in view of a second edition which he was kind enough to think probable, to throw overboard most of what he considered the superfluous parts of the book. With this request I have not felt myself able to comply. My book was written for maturer readers who have passed beyond the school stage and look for something more than an elementary handbook, and who would be able to understand and appreciate the plan and intention which led me to draw my material so widely from many departments of literary and cultural history. The first edition of the book found many such readers: I may hope and expect that the second will do the same.
In its revised form the book has been divided for the convenience of those who use it into two volumes (which correspond with the two parts in which it was first published). I was urged to take away the notes that stand at the foot of the text and relegate them to a place by themselves in a separate appendix. I found, however, that I could not bring myself to adopt this fashionable modern practice, which so far as I have experience of it in books published in recent years seems to me to be inconvenient and to hinder rather than help that undisturbed appreciation of the text which such an arrangement is intended to serve. Independent readers who in using the book are working out the subject for themselves would certainly not desire the separation of the documentary evidence from the statement of the author’s view. The book has also, to my peculiar satisfaction, attracted a large number of readers from outside the immediate circle of professional philologists. Such readers have evidently not been seriously disturbed by the elaborate and perhaps rather pedantic aspect of the mysterious disquisitions at the foot of the page, and have been able to fix their attention upon the clearer language of the text above. I have therefore decided to remove a few only of the notes which had grown to independent dimensions to an appendix at the end of each of the two volumes.
ERWIN ROHDE.
HEIDELBERG.
November 27th, 1897.
PRELIMINARY NOTE TO THE SEVENTH AND EIGHTH EDITIONS
IN supervising together this reprint of “Psyche” we have found ourselves faced with the question which Schöll and Dieterich had to decide in bringing out the third edition—whether changes or additions would be admissible. It went without saying that the text must remain untouched in the form last given to it by Rohde’s own hand. Nor was it possible to make any additions to the notes without seriously disturbing the carefully considered architecture of the whole book. It would have been more possible to add an appendix or supplementary pamphlet recording the literature of the subject which has appeared since 1898 and giving an account of the present state of the questions dealt with by Rohde: as has been done with the “Griechische Roman” by W. Schmid. But on making the attempt we soon found that the problem was a different one in the case of “Psyche” with which (much more than in the other case) all subsequent study of the history of religion as pursued by all nations has had to reckon, and from which such study has in no small degree taken its starting point. We have therefore refrained; and we have also refrained from remodelling the citations to make them correspond with critical editions that have since appeared. This process could not be carried through without, in some places, introducing contradictions with Rohde’s interpretation that would have necessitated more detailed discussion. Rohde’s own method of citation was only seriously inconvenient in the case of Euripides: here he evidently, as we observed from about the middle of the first volume onwards, made use of more than one edition at the same time, and has consequently quoted lines in accordance with different enumerations. For the greater assurance and convenience of the reader the lines are uniformly referred to according to the numbering of Nauck. This task has been undertaken by our devoted helper Frl. Emilie Boer, who has also verified, with a very few exceptions, the whole of the references to ancient writers and inscriptions; [xiv] a considerable number of errors missed by the author or later editors have thus been corrected. The minor changes introduced in the third and following editions—the recording on the margin of the pagination of the first edition and the valuable enlargement of the index due to W. Nestle with the assistance of O. Crusius—have all naturally been retained.
F. BOLL.
O. WEINREICH.
HEIDELBERG.
November, 1920.