The history of Greek culture and religion shows no sudden break or revolution in its course. The Greeks neither at any time experienced a movement from within that caused a violent recoil from the path which they had chosen, nor were they ever diverted by the overwhelming might of an invading force from the natural course of their evolution. Out of their own natural feelings and reflexion this most intellectually gifted nation evolved the great ideas that nourished succeeding centuries. They anticipated all later ages. The profoundest and the boldest, the most devout as well as the most irreverent speculations as to the nature of God, the world and men have their origin among the Greeks. But this excessive many-sidedness led to a general condition of equipoise in which individual factors restrained or balanced each other. Whereas the most violent impacts and sudden revolutions in the history of civilization are given by just those nations who are only able to embrace one idea at a time and who, confined in the narrow limits of their fanaticism, throw everything else overboard.
It is true, indeed, that the Greeks were ever open to influences—whether civilized or the reverse—from abroad. In wave after wave of peaceful invasion foreign ideas and ways of life, especially from the East, flowed over Greece. In one case, at least (that of the ecstatic religion of the Thracian Dionysos-worshippers), a spring flood burst out that broke down all the dykes. In many cases the invading elements might be easily eliminated again from Greek culture; in many others they obtained a permanent footing and influenced it deeply. But never did an influence from abroad obtain in Greece an authority at all comparable to the subversive and transforming power exercised by Buddhism, Christianity, or Islam over the peoples on whom they laid their grip. The Greek genius, as supple as it was tenacious, maintained control over all such foreign influences, in full possession of its original nature, its genial naivety. New ideas, whether introduced from abroad or engendered at home, were taken up and assimilated, but the old were not done away with; they gradually amalgamated with the new so that much was learnt while nothing was quite forgotten. The stream flowed on in its peaceful course, but it still remained the same stream. Nec manet ut fuerat nec formas servat easdem: sed tamen ipse idem est. [89]
The history of Greek culture, then, has no sharply contrasted epochs, no periods of abrupt change, when the old is completely given up and a new era definitely begins. Indeed, the most serious revulsions of Greek history, culture, and religion took place beyond doubt before the time of the Homeric Epos, and in that dim past it is possible that more violent and startling upheavals may have occurred to make the Greeks what we afterwards know them to be. Greek life becomes first clearly known to us in Homer. It is true that the broad uniformity that it has in the picture reflected for us in the poems of Homer vanishes in the course of the years that follow. New forces emerge; much that was forgotten comes to light again now that the Homeric system of ideas, once all powerful, is falling to pieces; out of the very old and the quite new things of which Homer never gives the least hint are being put together. But nowhere during the violent movements of the next troubled centuries after Homer did any absolute break with the Epic or its system take place. Only in the sixth century did the defiant speculation of a few bold spirits begin to seek a way of escape from the thraldom of the Homeric poems which still lay over the whole of Greece. The history of the Greek common people knows nothing of a reaction against Homer and his world. Homeric religion and moral ideas gradually ceased to reign supreme in men’s minds, but they were never violently or completely discarded.
So we, too, though we leave behind us Homer and the Epos and enter upon the tortuous paths of the later history of Greek soul worship and belief in immortality, may still for a time be guided by the Ariadne thread of the epic. In our subject, too, there are links which connect the Homeric with following ages. Soon enough the thread will break, and we shall have to enter the new field of inquiry depending on our own resources. . . .
§ 1
Prominent among the chieftains, who, under the leadership of Adrastos, came to the help of Polyneikes and laid siege to Thebes, was Amphiaraos the Argive hero and seer descended from the mysterious priest and prophet Melampous. He was drawn into the war against his will, for he foresaw its unhappy end. After the decisive struggle in which the opposing brothers fell slain by each other’s hand, the Argive host turned to flight, and with them fled Amphiaraos. But before Periklymenos, who was pursuing him, could drive his spear into the fugitive’s back, Zeus made the earth open before him in a flash of [90] lightning and Amphiaraos with his horses, his chariot, and his charioteer, was swallowed up in the depths where Zeus made him immortal. So runs the legend of the fate of Amphiaraos as we learn it from innumerable sources from Pindar onwards,[1] and we may be sure that thus it was told in the Thebaïs, the old epic poem of the war of the Seven against Thebes, which was taken up into the Epic Cycle.[2]
At Thebes, then, Amphiaraos lived on for ever under the earth. Northwards in the Boeotian countryside, near Lebadeia, men told of a similar marvel. In a cave of the mountainous ravine, before which Lebadeia lies, lived Trophonios for ever immortal. The legends that professed to explain his miraculous cave-existence do not quite agree among themselves, as, indeed, is generally the case with those figures who were not early taken up by the poets and given a fixed place in the narratives of heroic adventure. But all accounts (the oldest of which perhaps go back to the “Telegoneia”) agree in the assumption that Trophonios, like Amphiaraos, was first a man, a famous master-builder, who while flying from his foes, had dived underground at Lebadeia and now lives for ever in the depths of the earth whence he foretells the future to those who come and question him there.
These stories, then, claim to speak of men who during their lifetime were swallowed up by the earth, and who now live on for ever at the places where they were taken down into the depths—places situated in quite definite localities of the Greek countryside.
We are not entirely without other legends of a similar character. One of the wild spirits of the Lapith people from Thessalia, Kaineus by name, having been made invulnerable by Poseidon (who had before this transformed him from a woman into a man), was cudgelled with tree-trunks in a battle with the Centaurs; but they could do nothing to him, and with “upright foot” (i.e. standing upright, alive, not lying at full length like a dead man or one mortally wounded) he clove the earth under him and went down alive into the depths.[3] In Rhodes Althaimenes was honoured as the “founder” of the Greek cities on that island; he had not died but had vanished into a chasm in the ground.[4] Like Amphiaraos, his son Amphilochos, the heir of his prophetic power, appears to have had a legend according to which he still dwelt alive under the earth either in Akarnania or Cilicia.[5] A few more examples of the same type might be produced,[6] but the number of such stories remains small, and they only make their appearance here and there, as if by [91] accident, in the tradition. Epic poetry without whose co-operation such local legends rarely achieved widespread or lasting popularity, with few exceptions left such narratives out of account. In fact, they conflicted with the normal Homeric outlook. The belief, however, that immortality when it was miraculously bestowed by the favour of heaven upon certain individual men, was absolutely conditioned by the non-occurrence of death, i.e. the separation of the psyche from the visible man—this belief has helped to shape these stories too. They never speak of an undying existence of the soul by itself in separation from the body. Thus far they are firmly rooted in orthodox Homeric belief.
But the heroes of these stories have their everlasting existence in special abodes under the surface of the earth, in subterranean chambers[7]—not in the common meeting place of the departed; they each have their own peculiar domain far from the House of Aïdoneus. Such isolation of individuals below the earth does not agree with Homeric ideas; though it almost seems as if a dim echo of these stories of seers like Amphiaraos and Amphilochos, translated alive and with consciousness undestroyed, could be discerned in what the Homeric Nekyia says of Teiresias the Theban seer, in whom alone of all the shadows Persephone had allowed consciousness and intelligence (the essential vital powers) to remain undiminished.[8] But even he is fast bound in Erebos, the general home of the dead, and cut off from all connexion with the upper world, as is demanded by the Homeric view of the world. Amphiaraos and Trophonios, on the other hand, are released from Hades; not having suffered death they have not entered the world of the strengthless dead. They are also translated out of this life (besides out of Hades). But this “subterranean translation” is in its nature and in the origin of the belief in it quite distinct from that “translation to Islands of the Blest” of which we spoke in the last [chapter]. Those Heroes dwelling alone or in company on holy islands far out over the sea are far removed from human life and beyond the reach of prayers and desires. No influence upon the things of this world is attributed to them, and consequently no cult is offered to them: there never existed a cult of the dwellers in Elysium as such. They glimmer in the distance like visions of the poet’s fancy from which no one anticipates active interference with the world of reality. It is quite different with these dwellers in the caves. They are actually alive under the surface of the earth; not far away in the inaccessible, spectral world of Hades, but here in the midst of Greece. Questions and prayers [92] can reach down to them, and they can send up aid to those who call to them. To them, accordingly, as powerful and effectual Spirits a cult is paid.