§ 2
The soul, then, being safely arrived on the other bank and Kerberos passed by—what awaited it there? Those who had been initiated into the mysteries now counted upon enjoying the glad future that their hopes had formerly pictured. In reality this blessed future, vouchsafed by the grace of the deities who rule below, was not very hard to obtain. So many were initiated and recommended to divine favour that the picture of Hades, once so gloomy, began to assume a more genial aspect. Quite early we meet with the general name of “Blessedness” as applied to the future life; while the dead without much distinction are called the “Blessed”.[10]
Of course, anyone who had been so foolish as to neglect or despise initiation has “not the same fate below”, as the Hymn to Demeter discreetly puts it. Only the initiated have life, says Sophokles: the uninitiated, with whom it goes ill in the land below, can hardly have been thought of otherwise than as floating in the glimmering half-life of the shadows in the Homeric Erebos. Well-meaning modern efforts to read a moral meaning into things Greek have sought to prove that the Greeks, too, had a genuine popular belief in a future judgment and recompense for the past deeds and character of the dead. Homer makes hardly the most distant allusion to such a belief. The perjurer alone suffers in Homer the punishment at the hands of the gods of the underworld which he had invoked upon himself in his oath. Even the “Sinners” and their punishment which later imitation added to the story of Odysseus’ Journey to Hades, considered without prejudice, do not support the opinion that Homeric poetry knew of a belief in retribution hereafter. Later poets were only following this model when they made other enemies of the gods endure eternal punishment in Hades—Thamyris, for example, or Amphion (as the Minyas related), and later Ixion in particular.[11] All this does not, even in the slightest degree, suggest a general belief in future rewards and punishment. Of course, there is the judgment that is given in Hades by “One” according to Pindar (Ol. ii, 65), but this occurs in connexion with a description of the “last things” which the poet has borrowed from the teachings of mystic separatists. Aeschylus[12] knows of a judgment pronounced by Hades himself; but his thoughts about divine retribution both on earth and hereafter are derived from his own religious temperament which was entirely opposed to the popular beliefs of his day and more inclined to accept the speculative doctrines of the theologians. The [239] first precise account of the three judges in Hades, Minos, Rhadamanthys, and Aiakos, who judge the deeds of men done in their lifetime upon earth occurs in Plato in a description of the other world which reproduces anything rather than the popular beliefs of the time.[13] Later on, the picture of the judges in Hades (to whom Triptolemos was also added),[14] like many other details of the Platonic eschatological myths, became a real part of popular fancy, as allusions in later literature and even, perhaps, pictures of the underworld on vase-paintings from Southern Italy, bear witness. But the idea that in the supreme period of Greek culture the belief in a judgment and judges in Hades, who passed sentence on the deeds of men done on earth, had really any root in popular belief, is quite unproved and can be shown to be erroneous from the argument ex silentio. And where there are no judges no judgment can take place.
We often see it asserted that the belief in a future state of compensation for the good and evil deeds of this world was obtained by the Greeks from the Eleusinian mysteries. In reality the opposite is true; if and in so far as the Greeks ever received or entertained such a belief in future rewards and punishments the mysteries of Eleusis had nothing whatever to do with the matter. We have only to remember the simple fact that the Eleusinian mysteries admitted to initiation, with the single exception of those stained by the crime of murder, Greeks of all sorts without any inquiry into their past life and actions, or even their character. The initiated were promised a blessed life hereafter; a gloomy fate awaited the uninitiated. The difference was not made by goodness or badness; “Pataikion the thief will have a better fate after his death because he has been initiated at Eleusis than Agesilaos or Epameinondas” sneered Diogenes the Cynic. Not political or moral worth but “spiritual” merit alone is decisive. Nor will anyone be very surprised at that. It is so in most religions. But in any case, the idea of a sentence passed on virtue or vice in Hades had been forestalled by the system of rewards and punishments in the lower world which the mysteries had already formulated from quite a different point of view. Where the mysteries were seriously and conscientiously taken they would rather have thrown their weight into the scales against any such idea, if it began to make itself felt, of compensation for good and evil deeds in Hades; they certainly contained nothing that fostered such a belief.
No doubt in the long run, among a spiritually alert people, [240] the morality inculcated by religion allied itself freely and without reluctance to the morality of the citizen in its independent development. Only in this way could the former maintain its ascendancy. Thus, in the minds of many of the Greeks the idea of religious justification (through the mysteries) may have lent its support to the idea of civic just dealing; and, at the same time, the company of the unblest who had neglected the sacred mysteries and their future salvation as well, was increased by the not unimportant body of those who receive the wages of sin in Hades and expiate their crimes against the gods, the family, and the civil society of men. Those who have taken a false oath, parricides, violators of the laws of hospitality are made by Aristophanes (in the Frogs) to “lie in the mud”—a form of penalty originally anticipated for the uninitiated in some Orphic private mysteries, but now transferred by him to those guilty of moral misdemeanours.[15] The inconsistency with the promises made in the mysteries themselves involved in such conceptions may have been the less observed just because the idea of a future system of compensation in accordance with the requirements of morality was never seriously or fully developed, but remained merely a matter of vague suggestion. In circumstances of real need that ideal never satisfied anyone in Greece. Men expected to see the retributive power of the gods visibly active upon earth; those in whom experience weakened this belief would not have derived much comfort from the idea of compensation hereafter. Everyone knows the typical case of Diagoras, the “Atheist”.[16]
§ 3
The picturing of the future life, however seriously it might be carried on by adherents of certain mystical sects, remained for the poets and the public at Athens in the fifth century little more than an amusement of idle fancy in which a man might indulge his own whim with perfect freedom. The comic poets from Pherekrates onwards regarded a Descent into the Unknown country as a suitable framework for a burlesque play.[17] According to their fancy a Paradise, like that of the golden age on earth when Kronos still ruled, awaited the “Blessed” in the world below;[18] a “City of Delight”[19] such as men hoped to meet with at the ends of the world, or even somewhere upon the real world. It is from a comedy, the Frogs of Aristophanes, in connexion with the Descent to Hades of a typical commonplace Athenian citizen, who for the time being plays the part of Dionysos, that we get a clearer outline of the geography of the lower regions. Beyond [241] the Acherousian Sea with its cross-grained ferryman dwell snakes and monsters of all kinds. Having passed by the darkness and putrescence of the slough in which wallow perjurers and those who have committed crimes against father or stranger, the way leads to the palace of Plouton, near which lives the chorus of those who have been initiated into the mysteries. For them even in Hades the sun dispenses a brilliant light; they dance in myrtle groves and sing to the sound of the flute hymns of praise to the gods of the underworld.[20] A separation of the inhabitants of the lower regions into two classes as taught by the mysteries, is here also carried through: at least clear consciousness is implied in the case of the Mystai which in itself marks clearly the change which has taken place since the Nekyia of the Odyssey. Then there are other regions in Hades besides the places where the initiated and the impious dwell. There is a reference to the plain of Lethe,[21] and to the place where Oknos is plaiting the rope which his she-ass gnaws to pieces as fast as he plaits it. This is a parody, half humorous, half pathetic, of the Homeric figures of Sisyphos and Tantalos; a sort of bourgeois counterpart of that Homeric aristocracy of the enemies of heaven, whose punishment, as Goethe remarked, is a type of ever-unrewarded labour. But, we may ask, what had honest Oknos done to deserve this fate of eternally fruitless toil? He is only a man like other men, but he “typifies all human endeavour.” That anyone could have introduced such quaint inventions of innocent humour into the realm of Hades shows how far all this was from theological seriousness.
§ 4
We ought to be able to observe the change which had come over the conception of the future life since the days of Homer from a consideration of the picture of the Underworld which Polygnotos of Thasos painted on one of the walls of the Hall of the Knidians at Delphi. The details of this picture are precisely known to us from the account given by Pausanias. The first impression that we get from it is the extraordinary vagueness and undeveloped state of the mythology of the underworld at this period, about the middle of the fifth century. On the wall was represented the questioning of Teiresias by Odysseus; the companies of heroes, the men and women of poetry, occupied the greater part of the space. The divine judgment of heaven was illustrated by the figures of the Homeric “Sinners”, Tityos, Tantalos, and Sisyphos. Outside the ranks of the Heroic company is Oknos and his [242] she-ass. But where is the reward of virtue, the punishment of wickedness? In expiation of the worst excesses, those committed against gods and parents, a temple-robber receives a cup of poison from a sorceress,[22] and an undutiful son is being choked by his own father.[23] Apart from these evil-doers are the “uninitiated”, those who have made light of the Eleusinian mysteries. Because they have missed the “completion” of the initiation they are now forced, men and women, to pour water from broken pitchers into a (perforated) jar in ever-unavailing endeavour.[24] There is no sign anywhere of a judge who should separate the souls into two classes; and of the monsters of the underworld there only appears the corpse-devouring daimon Eurynomos who must have been known to the artist from some local legend.[25] Of the reward of the “virtuous” there is not a trace, and even the hopes of the initiated in the mysteries are only vaguely alluded to in the casket which Kleoboia, as she crosses the river in Charon’s boat with Tellis, is holding on her knee.[26] This is a symbol of the sacred mysteries of Demeter which Kleoboia once brought from Paros to Thasos, the home of Polygnotos.
With this series of pictures, hardly altered at all from Homer,[27] contrast for a moment the scenes of torment represented in Etruscan pictures of the Underworld, or the pedantic details of the trial of the dead on the day of judgment as the Egyptians elaborated them in picture and writing. From such gloomy severity, from the rigid and overpowering dogmatism that a people without imagination had constructed for itself out of religious speculations and visions won by much labour and thought, the Greeks were fortunately preserved by their own genius. Their fancy is a winged god whose nature it is to pass lightly over things—not to fall heavily to earth and there remain ponderously prostrate. Nor were they very susceptible during their best centuries to the infectious malady of a “sick conscience”. What had they to do with pictures of an underworld of purgatory and torment in expiation of all imaginary types and degrees of sin, as in Dante’s ghastly Hell? It is true that even such dark fancies of the Christian Hell are in part derived from Greek sources. But it was only the misguided fancy of particular isolated sects that could call forth such pictures as these, and recommend itself to a philosophic speculation which in its worst excesses violently contradicted all the most fundamental principles of Greek culture. The people and the religion of Greece, the mysteries which her cities organized and deemed holy, may be freely acquitted of all such aberrations.