The “grave” under the Omphalos means in the case of Python the overthrow of an earth-dwelling Chthonic Daimon by the cult of Apollo. The “grave” of Zeus, which had thrust itself into the place of an older legend of the dwelling of Zeus in the cave of the mountain, expresses the same idea as this legend, but expresses it in a form current in later ages which knew of many “Heroes” who after their death and from their graves gave proof of a higher existence and a powerful influence. The Zeus that died and is buried is only a god reduced to a Hero;[34] remarkable and paradoxical is only the fact that unlike Zeus Amphiaraos, Zeus Trophonios (and Zeus Asklepios), he has not, in the usual fashion, dropped his title of god, which directly contradicted his “Hero” [98] nature. It is possible that in the case of this cave-Zeus, half-god half-Hero, a conception has been transferred merely on analogy from other cases where it was applied more properly, after they had become fully “Heroized”, to gods who according to the no longer intelligible theory had once been dwellers in the depths of the earth.
We have several accounts of Heroes who were buried in temples of gods and were sometimes associated with the cult of the higher god to whom the temple was dedicated. The way in which such legends could arise may be seen unusually clearly from the case of Erechtheus.
The Ship-Catalogue in the Iliad (ii, 546 ff.) tells us that Erechtheus was the son of the Earth, but that Athene brought him up and “settled him in her rich temple”,[35] where the Athenians every year honour him with sacrifice of sheep and bulls.[36] It is plain that Erechtheus is here thought of as still living; to honour a dead man with such offerings, repeated every year and attended by the whole community, would be a custom quite unknown to Homer. Erechtheus is, therefore, thought of as dwelling alive in the temple in which Athene has set him down, i.e. the ancient temple on the Acropolis which was enclosed in the “strong house of Erechtheus”, to which, according to the Odyssey, Athene betakes herself as her own home. On the old citadel of the Kings, royal residence and sanctuary of the goddess were combined; its foundation walls have recently been discovered on the spot where later joint worship was paid to Athene and Erechtheus in the “Erechtheion”.[37] Erechtheus dwells below the ground in a crypt of this temple,[38] like other earth-deities, in the form of a snake, immortally. He is not dead, for as Euripides still says, in a story which otherwise follows different lines, “the earth gaped and covered him over,”[39] i.e. he was translated and lived on under the earth. On the analogy of the examples already discussed it is clear that this is also a case of a primitive local deity,[40] once supposed to have been living always in a cave on the mountain-side, transformed to a Hero who has been brought there and raised to immortal life. The later belief in Heroes required a grave at which the continued existence and potency of the “Hero” was localized; by a natural process of development the Hero Erechtheus translated alive and made immortal is thought of as buried in a grave. Erichthonios, who was expressly identified with the Homeric Erechtheus, was by later ages supposed to be buried in the Temple of Polias, i.e. the oldest temple of Athene, on the Acropolis.[41] We have clearly before us the steps by which the [99] aboriginal deity, dwelling beneath the ground, the son of Earth, is made into a mortal Hero, translated to immortality and placed under the protection of the Olympian goddess who has now become more powerful than he; and finally transferred, cave and all, to the precincts of her temple, and finally reduced to the condition of a Hero like another, who had died and lies peacefully buried in the temple of the goddess on the citadel.
With this example before us we may explain several other analogous cases, in which we have only the last stage of the process, the grave of a Hero in a god’s temple, without any of the intermediate steps. A single example may be given.
At Amyklai, not far from Sparta, in the holiest temple of Laconia, stood the ancient bronze statue of Apollo upon an altar-shaped base, within which, according to legend, Hyakinthos lay buried. Through a bronze door in the side of the altar offerings for the dead were sent down to “Hyakinthos” buried below every year at the festival of the Hyakinthia.[42] The recipient of these offerings has little resemblance to the gentle youth of popular legend. The Hellenistic poets tell how he was beloved by Apollo and died by a cast of Apollo’s discus and was changed into a flower. The fable, almost destitute of local reference, has been put together from many popular themes.[43] The sculpture on the above-mentioned altar, on the other hand, represents among many gods and heroes Hyakinthos and his sister Polyboia as they are being carried up to heaven—which will not square with the metamorphosis story. Further, he is represented as bearded, and so not as the boy whom Apollo loved,[44] but as a grown man (of whose daughters indeed other legends make mention).[45] The true story of this Hyakinthos has disappeared almost without leaving a trace. But in what the monument reveals and in what we know of the yearly festival held in honour of Hyakinthos significant features emerge which perhaps can tell us the real character of the Daimon that was honoured at Amyklai together with, and as our information clearly shows, before Apollo himself.[46] Hyakinthos was given offerings that were otherwise peculiar to the gods that ruled the lower world.[47] These offerings were let down directly into the underground place where, in fact, Hyakinthos himself was supposed to dwell. In the great festival of the Hyakinthia the alternate worship of Apollo and Hyakinthos (after whom as the chief personage the festival is named) points to the incomplete amalgamation of two originally distinct cults; and the plain and unadorned, almost dismal, ceremonies of [100] the days devoted to Hyakinthos—contrasted with the more cheerful worship paid to Apollo on the middle day of the feast[48]—allow us to see clearly the real nature of Hyakinthos as a Daimon related to the gods of the underworld. On the altar-relief Polyboia was represented as his sister: she was a goddess of the underworld like Persephone.[49] Hyakinthos was, then, an old local deity of the Amyklaian countryside, dwelling below the earth, and his worship at Amyklai was older than that of Apollo. But he is a dim figure. The Olympian god (probably not before the Doric conquest of the Achæan land) has set himself down beside, and indeed over, the ancient earth-spirit, and now outshines him without quite being able to banish his worship. The divine existence of the latter under the ground could not be imagined by later ages, except as the after-existence of the psyche of a dead and buried Hero whose body lay in the “grave” under the statue of the god. Next, in order to explain their association in cult, poetic legend made the god a lover, just as in another case, and for similar reasons, it had made him the lover of Daphne.[50]
§ 4
Thus it may be that under many a Hero whose grave was shown in the Temple of a god an ancient local-god was hidden, whose abode beneath the earth had been converted into a “grave” now that he himself had sunk from a deity of higher rank to a human chieftain. It depended upon the circumstances of the case whether his humanization was complete or whether the memory of his former god-head (preserved in cult) secured for him a second elevation to the heavenly regions[51] among the Olympian gods whose nature was originally quite foreign to that of the old earth-daimon. Such conceptions, differing widely according to the circumstances of place and time, are shown most clearly in the different views taken of Asklepios. For Homer and the poets he is generally a great chieftain, a mortal who had learnt the art of healing from Cheiron. In religious cult he was generally set on a level with the upper gods. In reality he, too, is a local earth-dwelling deity from Thessaly, who from beneath the earth dispenses, like so many earth-spirits, healing from the ills of the flesh and knowledge of the future[52]—the two being closely connected in antiquity. He, too, easily bore the change from god to Hero. Asklepios was struck by Zeus’ lightning which in this, as in many cases, did not destroy life, but translated the person affected to a higher existence outside the visible world.[53] [101] We can now easily understand what it means when even this ancient earth-deity is said to be “buried”—his grave being shown at different places.[54] Many peculiarities of the worship paid to him show clearly the original character of Asklepios as an ancient god living below the earth.[55] One essential characteristic indeed of such earth-spirits he lacks—he is not bound to any one particular place. An enterprising priesthood, wandering in company with the rest of their tribe, had taken with them this old established worship of theirs, and spread it far and wide, so that Asklepios himself became at home in many different places.
Now, in closest relationship, though they remained more faithful to their original character, with this Zeus Asklepios stood those Boeotian earth-spirits with whom this discussion began. Trophonios, and Amphiaraos, too, might have been described as an Asklepios, who had stayed at home in his old cavern dwelling.[56] They, too, Amphiaraos and Trophonios, had become mortal men of a past age in the imagination of a time which could no longer properly understand such cave-spirits. But we never hear of their “graves”; for the generation which made them Heroes knew nothing of mortal chieftains who after dying and being buried yet lived on with undiminished powers. But it was the belief in their uninterrupted potency that gave those strange cavern deities a secure place in men’s memory. In the epic and in legends inspired by the epic they are recognized as human beings that had not died but had been translated, without any division of soul from body, to everlasting life in the depths of the earth. Ever afterwards—even when they are not only called immortal, but actually “gods”—they are reckoned as men who have become immortal or godlike.[57] And they have become the patterns of what other mortals too may rise to. In the Electra of Sophokles (836 ff.) the chorus wishing to justify the hope of a continued life for the departed, expressly appeal to the example of Amphiaraos, who still rules below the earth with all his spiritual powers intact. For the same reason these and other examples offered by ancient legend and poetry of the “translation” of individual great men to a life below the earth are important for our inquiry too. In them, as it did (in another sense) in the case of those translated to the Islands of the Blest, the Epic points beyond its own resigned and gloomy conception of the state after death towards a higher life after the visible world has been left behind. It took isolated cases of the once numerous class of cavern deities worshipped in Greek countries, and deprived [102] them of their god-head, though not of the superhumanly continued existence and (especially mantic) powers claimed for them by the belief and cult of their countrymen. Thus reduced to mortal rank, it interwove them in the fabric of the heroic mythology, and in so doing instituted a class of outstanding human individuals who had been raised to a godlike existence, far, indeed, from the upper world, but, at least, not condemned to the common realm of the souls. Instead they were given a home beneath the earth, each in a definite place in Greek territory, near living men, and able to help them. The descent from god to mortal Hero resulted, since the essential point of continued existence was not denied, in a corresponding exaltation of the mortal and the heroic to the divine. Thus the epic leads us in this instance towards a range of conceptions which the poems themselves treated as though it never existed, and which now suddenly comes into view.
NOTES TO CHAPTER III
[1] Pi., N. ix, 24 ff., x, 8 f., [Apollod.] iii, 6, 8, 4 (σὺν τῷ ἅρματι καὶ τῷ ἡνιόχῳ Βάτωνι . . . ἐκρύφθη καὶ Ζεὺς ἀθάνατον αὐτὸν ἐποίησεν) etc. The expressions used to describe the translation and continued conscious existence of A. are noteworthy: κατὰ γαῖ’ αὐτόν τέ νιν καὶ φαιδίμους ἵππους ἔμαρψεν, Pi., O. vi, 14. Ζεὺς κρύψεν ἅμ’ ἵπποις, N. ix, 25. γαῖα ὑπέδεκτο μάντιν Οἰκλείδαν, x, 8. μάντις κεκευθὼς πολεμίας ὑπο χθονός, A., Th., 588. ἐδέξατο ῥαγεῖσα Θηβαία κόνις, S. fr., 873 (= 958 P.). θεοὶ ζῶντ’ ἀναρπάσαντες ἐς μύχους χθονὸς αὐτοῖς τεθρίπποις εὐλογοῦσιν ἐμφανῶς, E. Supp., 928 f. ἥρπασεν χάρυβδις οἰωνοσκόπον, τέθριππον ἅρμα περιβαλοῦσα χάσματι, 501 f. (Eriphyle) Ἀμφιάραον ἔκρυψ’ ὑπὸ γῆν αὐτοῖσι σὺν ἵπποις, Oracle in Ephorus ap. Ath., 232 F. Ἀμφιαράου ζῶντος τὸ σῶμα καταδέξασθαι τὴν γῆν, Agatharch., p. 115, 21 Mü. ἐπεσπάσατο ἡ γῆ ζῶντα, Philostr., V. Ap., 2, 37, p. 79, 18 Kays. ἀφανισμός of A., St. Byz. s. Ἅρπυια.—πάμψυχος ἀνάσσει, S., El., 841; ἀεὶ ζῶν τιμᾶται, Xen., Cyn. i, 8.