§ 4
Though it is good and profitable in one’s own interest to enlist the sympathy and retain the goodwill of these invisible spirit powers by sacrifice, yet their worship is to a much greater degree conditioned by a sentiment of piety which no longer seeks its own advantage, but the greater honour and welfare of the dead. Such piety certainly takes on a curious form, but it is this which gives its special character to the cult of the souls, and the ideas which lie behind that cult. The souls of the dead are dependent upon the cult paid to them by the members of their family who still live on in this world; their fate is determined by the nature of this cult.[125] The beliefs which nourished the cult of the dead are totally distinct from the mode of thought prevailing in the Homeric poems according to which the souls are banished into the distant realm of Hades and cut off eternally from all attention or care that the living might pay them. It differs again from the beliefs which the mysteries implanted in the minds of their worshippers; for in this case it was not their merit—whether religious or moral—which secured to the disembodied souls their position in the future life. These two streams of religious belief flowed side by side, but never met. The nearest analogue to the cult of the souls and its appropriate beliefs was undoubtedly the cult [172] of Heroes, but even here the difference is profound. It is no longer a special privilege miraculously bestowed upon a few favoured individuals; every soul has a right to the attentive care of its own family, and in each case its fate is settled, not by the character displayed or deeds done during its lifetime, but by the relation to itself of those who survive. As a consequence everybody on the approach of death thinks of the “future state” of his soul, and that means the cult which he would like to make sure will be offered to his departed spirit. Sometimes for this purpose he makes a special foundation, or bequest, which is provided for in his will.[126] Of course, if he leaves a son behind him, the care of his spirit will be amply provided for; until that son comes of age, a guardian will offer the appropriate gifts.[127] Even slaves to whom he has given their freedom will be sure to take part in the permanent and regular cult of their former master.[128] One who has no son to leave behind him will make haste to take a son from another family into his own house, who, together with his property will inherit also the duty of offering a regular and enduring cult to his adopted father, and his new ancestors, and of caring for the needs of their souls. This is the real and original meaning of all adoption; and how seriously such provision for the proper care of the souls of the departed was taken, can best and most clearly be seen from the testamentary speeches of Isaeus, in which with a completeness of art that almost conceals itself expression is given to the genuine and simple feelings of the homely Athenian bourgeoisie whom no enlightenment had ever disturbed in the beliefs of their fathers.[129]
All cult, all prospect of a full life and future well-being—for so we may express the naive conception—of the soul on its separation from the body, depends upon the holding together of the family. To the family itself the souls of its former ancestors are, in a limited sense, of course, gods—its gods.[130] It can hardly be doubted that here we have the root of all belief in the future life of the soul, and we shall be tempted to subscribe to the belief—as a guess tending in the right direction—of those who see in such family worship of the dead one of the most primitive roots of all religious belief—older than the worship of the higher gods of the state and the community as a whole; older even than the worship of Heroes, and of the ancestors of large national groups. The family is older than the state,[131] and among all peoples that have not passed beyond family-organization and formed states, we find this type of belief about the soul invariably present. Among [173] the Greeks, who in the course of their history learnt so much that was new without ever quite discarding the old, this belief lived on in the shadow of the great gods and their cults, even in the midst of the tremendous increase in the power and organized influence of the state. But these larger and wider organizations cramped and hindered its development. Left to itself, and given more freedom to grow, such belief might possibly have elevated the souls of the family ancestors to the position of all-powerful spirits of the house under whose hearth they had once been laid to rest. The Greeks, however, never had anything to correspond exactly with the Italian Lar familiaris.[132] The nearest equivalent to it would be the Good Daimon which the Greek household honoured. Careful examination shows this Daimon to have been originally the soul of an ancestor who has become the good spirit of his house—but the Greeks themselves had forgotten this.[133]
§ 5
We cannot at this late date trace the reawakening of the cult of souls in post-Homeric times or the varying stages it may have gone through in its development. Still, some of the facts are plain. Indications have already been noticed that point to the view that the cult of the dead was carried on in the days when the aristocratic regime still held sway in Greece with greater pomp and seriousness than in the centuries—the fifth and sixth—beyond which our knowledge hardly extends. In these earlier times, we are forced to conclude, there must also have been a livelier belief in the power and importance of the souls corresponding with the greater vigour of religious cult. It seems as if at this time ancient usage and belief broke violently through the suppression and neglect under which they lay in the times that speak to us in the Homeric poems. There is no reason to suppose that any one member of the Greek peoples was specially responsible for the change. At the same time, different districts in accordance with their varying natural proclivities and civilization differed in the cult they paid their dead. In Attica, with the spread of democracy, the ideas at the bottom of such practice tended more and more in the direction of mere affectionate piety. In Laconia and Boeotia[134] and in other places where primitive life and customs maintained themselves for a long time, more serious notions of the nature and reality of the disembodied spirits remained in force and a more serious cult was paid to them. Elsewhere, as in Locris and on the island of Keos,[135] the [174] cult of the dead seems to have maintained itself only in a very much weakened form. When advancing culture made individuals less dependent on the traditional beliefs of their own country many temperamental variations and gradations in belief and conception made their appearance. Homeric ideas on the subject, universally familiar from poetry, may have entered into the question and added to the confusion; even where the cult of the dead was practised with the greatest fervour, ideas radically incompatible with that cult—as that the souls of the worshipped dead are “in Hades”[136]—are sometimes revealed unintentionally. At quite an early period we find expressions of the view, which goes beyond anything said in Homer, that nothing at all survives after death. Attic orators, for example, are allowed to speak to their audience in a tone of hesitation and doubt about hopes commonly cherished of continued consciousness and sensation after death. Such doubts, however, only affect the theoretic consideration of the soul’s future life; the cult of the souls was still carried on inside the family. Even an unbeliever, if he were in other respects a true son of his city and deeply rooted in its ancient customs, might in his last will and testament provide seriously for the perpetual cult of his own soul and those of his near relatives—as Epicurus did in his will, to the astonishment of after ages.[137] Thus, even unbelief still clung to cult as to other old established customs, and in many an individual the cult still tended to awaken the beliefs which alone could justify it.
III
TRACES OF THE CULT OF SOULS IN THE BLOOD-FEUD AND SATISFACTION FOR MURDER
§ 1
In the renewal and development of the cult offered to the dead, an important part was again played by that priestly association which exercised such a decisive influence on the public worship of invisible powers in the Greek states—the priesthood of the Delphic oracle. On the occurrence of disturbing portents in the sky recourse was had to the god, who gave orders that in addition to the gods and Heroes “sacrifice should be made to the dead also on the appointed days, in accordance with custom and tradition, by their relatives.”[138] Individuals in doubt as to what the sacred law [175] required in the observance due to a departed soul applied at Athens to one of the “Exegetai”—probably one of that college of Exegetai that had been founded under the influence of Delphi.[139] The god protected the rights of the dead, too; the fact that his decisions confirmed the sanctity of the cult of the dead must have contributed a good deal to the consideration and awe in which that cult was held by the living.[140]
The decrees of Delphi were even more influential where they concerned a cult to be offered not to one who had died in peace, but to a person who had been robbed of his life through an act of violence. The treatment of such cases shows with striking distinctness the change which had come over the beliefs about the dead since the Homeric period.
In Homer, when a free man has been killed, the State takes no share whatever in the pursuit and punishment of the murderer. It is the duty of the nearest relatives or the friends of the murdered man[141] to carry on the blood-feud against the assailant. As a rule the latter puts himself out of reach of reprisals by flight. He withdraws to a foreign country which is unconcerned in his action. We hear nothing of any distinction between premeditated murder and unintentional or even justifiable homicide;[142] and it seems probable that at that time, when no regular inquiry was made into the nature of the individual case, the relatives of the murdered man took no account of the different varieties of killing. If the guilty man can escape by flight from those whose duty it is to avenge his deed, they on their part may forgo the full toll of vengeance, which would have required the death of the murderer, and may be satisfied with the payment of compensation, after which the doer of the deed is allowed to remain in his own country undisturbed.[143] The requirements of vengeance are thus in essence fulfilled, but the retaliatory murder of the murderer can be bought off. This decided relaxing of the ancient notion of vengeance can only be accounted for by an equally decided weakening of the belief in the continued consciousness, power, and rights of the murdered man, upon which the requirement of vengeance was founded. The soul of the dead is powerless; its claims can be easily satisfied by the payment of “weregild” to the living. In such a satisfaction as this, the departed soul is in reality not concerned at all; it remains a simple business transaction between living people.[144] In the midst of the general declension of the beliefs about the dead—amounting almost to complete extinction—which is found throughout the Homeric poems, this weakening of belief in one particular point is not very surprising. But [176] in this case, as in the general study of Homeric beliefs about the dead, it is clear that the conception of the soul as powerless, shadowlike, and feeble is not the primitive or original one; it has foisted itself gradually in the course of years upon a more ancient mode of conception in which the dead had undiminished sensibility and could influence the condition of the living. Of this older conception we have emphatic witness in the duty—not forgotten even in Homeric Greece—of prosecuting the blood-feud.