[31] In fact the ancient allegorical interpretations of the mysteries differed widely among themselves: Lob., Agl. 136–40.—Even Galen attributed an allegorical sense to the mysteries of Eleusis, but he thinks ἀμυδρὰ ἐκεῖνα πρὸς ἔνδειξιν ὧν σπεύδει διδάσκειν (iv, p. 361 K.). This cannot have been true of the assurances given to the Mystai of a blessed future in Hades.
[32] Such proclamations may have occurred in the ἱεροφάντου ῥήσεις (Sop. διαίρ. ζητ. Walz, viii, 123, 29; cf. Lob., Agl. 189).
[33] Lob., Agl. 52, 58 f.
[34] No one says anything of any kind of moral obligation undertaken by the Mystai or of any consequent moral influence of the festival: not even Andokides in whose warnings addressed to the college of judges composed of Mystai (Myst. 31) the words ἵνα τιμωρήσητε μὲν τοὺς ἀσεβοῦντας κτλ. are not to be taken with the previous μεμύησθε καὶ ἑωράκατε τοῖν θεοῖν τὰ ἱερά but with οἵτινες ὅρκους μεγάλους κτλ., καὶ ἀρασάμενοι κτλ. He speaks, in fact, of the moral obligation of the jury who have taken the oath, as judges not as Mystai. In Ar., Ran., 455 ff., the words ὅσοι μεμυήμεθα stand loosely side by side with εὐσεβῆ διήγομεν τρόπον περὶ τοὺς ξένους καὶ τοὺς ἰδιώτας. (Of the Samothrakian mysteries Diodoros says, 5, 49, 6: γίνεσθαι δέ φασι καὶ εὐσεβεστέρους καὶ δικαιοτέρους καὶ κατὰ πᾶν βελτίονας ἑαυτῶν τοὺς τῶν μυστηρίων κοινωνήσαντας—as it seems without effort on their part by a pure act of grace.)
[35] Formal or verbal instruction of a theological or moral kind was not supplied at Eleusis; so much may be stated without fear of contradiction since the work of Lobeck. Thus, the three commandments of Triptolemos, which acc. to Xenokrates διαμένουσι Ἐλευσῖνι (Porph., Abs. 4, 22) cannot be regarded as moral precepts proclaimed at the mysteries: indeed, there is nothing to lead one to conclude that they had anything to do with the mystery festival at Eleusis. In character these very simple precepts seem related to the laws of Bouzyges, with whom Triptolemos is sometimes confused (Haupt, Opusc. iii, 505) and were very likely, like them, recited at some agricultural festival. Supposing further that the third “law” of Triptolemos: ζῷα μὴ σίνεσθαι was really (as Xenokr. seems to have understood it) intended to recommend a complete ἀποχὴ ἐμψύχων, then it certainly cannot have been proclaimed at the Eleusinia (though this is what Dieterich thinks happened, Nekyia, 165). It is surely unthinkable that the Mystai at Eleusis were, after the Orphic model, absolutely forbidden to eat flesh for the rest of their lives. It remains a possibility that the precept had quite a different meaning—it does not definitely speak of the killing of animals—and that it belongs to some simple farmer’s festival (not to the great festival of Eleusis, but rather, e.g. the Haloa) at which the farmer was recommended to spare his live stock (just as the third of the three laws of Demonassa at Cyprus forbade the farmer μὴ ἀποκτεῖναι βοῦν ἀρότριον, D. Chr. 64, 3 [329 R., 148 Arn.]; Attic law ap. Ael. VH. 5, 14, etc.).—In any case to bring all this into connexion with the mystery festival of Eleusis is absolutely without justification.
CHAPTER VII
IDEAS OF THE FUTURE LIFE
Certain allusions in Plutarch and Lucian[1] would lead us to suppose that the “mystery-drama” of Eleusis included also a visual exhibition of the underworld and its blest, or unblest, inhabitants. But these contemporaries of a final and luxuriant flowering of mystery-religions of every kind can serve as reliable witnesses only for their own period. In their day the Eleusinian festival, in competition it may be with other secret worships which were invading the Greco-Roman world in ever-increasing numbers, seems to have undergone a considerable alteration and extension of its primitive and traditional shape. We may doubt whether in earlier, classical times the Eleusinia can have attempted to bind the imagination with what were always petty details, or confine within formal limits what lay beyond all human experience. Still the solemn promise of future blessedness made in the mystic festival may, at any rate, have stimulated the imagination of its worshippers and given a more definite turn to their own natural efforts to picture the life to come. The ideas cultivated at Eleusis unmistakably contributed to the process by which the picture of Hades acquired colour and distinctness. Even without such stimulus, the natural instinct of the Greeks at all periods to give form even to what was essentially formless, worked in the same direction. The limits set by Homeric beliefs about the future world had made the Odyssean description of a descent to Hades seem a risky experiment only to be undertaken with the greatest caution. Now, however, since the re-establishment of the belief in a conscious after-life of the disembodied soul, such imaginative bodyings-forth of the invisible realm of shadows had become apparently the most natural and innocent employment of poetic fancy.
The story of Odysseus’ journey to Hades and its expansion in conformity with the gradually increasing distinctness with which the life after death was conceived, was followed at an early period in the development of Epic poetry by further accounts of such journeys undertaken by other heroes. A Hesiodic poem described the descent of Theseus and Peirithoös to the underworld.[2] A Nekyia, the details of which are unknown, occurred in the poem of the Return of the heroes [237] from Troy. The epic which went by the name of the “Minyas” seems to have given considerable space to a descent to Hades.[3] The ancient fable of Herakles’ descent to Hades and conflicts in the underworld received embellishment at more than one poet’s hand.[4] As a result of such repeated and rival interpretations of the story the stock of characters and events associated with Hades was gradually and continually being enlarged. Accident has preserved to us the fact about the little-known Minyas that it, too, added to the details of the picture. To what extent popular imagination and mythology, on the one hand, and poetic inventiveness, on the other, may have been responsible for all this we can hardly say. It seems probable that here, as in the development of so many Greek myths, on the whole the balance of invention lay on the side of the poets. Purely poetic visions or pictures like that of the translation of individual heroes to Elysium may have gradually won their way to popular acceptance. “Dearest Harmodios,” said the Athenian Skolion, “thou art not dead indeed, but livest yet, men say, in the Islands of the Blest.” Not that there was anything fixed or dogmatic on the point. In a funeral oration Hyperides represents Leosthenes and his companions in battle as meeting in Hades, among the illustrious dead, the Tyrannicides, Harmodios and Aristogeiton.[5]
Much that may have been the invention of poets for the filling up or furnishing of the desert region so stamped itself upon the general mind that it almost seemed the natural growth of authentic popular belief. Everyone was familiar with the guardian of the gate of Plouton, the malignant hound of Hades who admits everyone but lets no one out again. He is the same creature, long known from the adventure of Herakles, which is already named Kerberos by Hesiod.[6] Like the gate and the gate-keeper, the waters that divide Erebos from the world of the living are already known to Homer. Now they have a Ferryman added to them, the churlish old man Charon, who, like a second Kerberos, safely transports everyone across the water, but lets no one return.[7] The Minyas is the first to mention him: that he became a real figure of popular belief (as he is still in Greece to this day, though with altered significance) is shown by pictures on the Attic vases that were put into the graves with the dead. These represent the soul as it stands upon the sedgy bank and meets the ferryman who will carry it over to the other side whence no man returns.[8] The custom of burying the dead with a small coin fixed between the teeth was also explained as provision for the passage-money that would have to be paid to Charon.[9] [238]