Although in our sources infernal topography is occasionally somewhat confused, certain essential features, which we will here merely indicate, can be recognised in it. We will return to them one after the other, and speak of them in greater detail, in later lectures. When the souls, or rather the shades, descend to the depths of the earth, they reach first a provisional abode where they await a decision as to their lot, an intermediate region through which all of them pass but in which some are kept for a considerable time.[[181]] They then cross the Styx, and a road which is also common to all of them leads them to the court which determines their lot.[[182]] This judging of the dead is foreign to Homeric poetry: the idea of it was perhaps borrowed by Greece from Egypt, but from ancient Orphism onwards it was an essential element of infernal eschatology. Infallible judges, from whom no fault is hid, divide into two companies the multitude of the souls appearing before them. The guilty are constrained to take the road to the left which leads to dark Tartarus, crossing its surrounding river of fire, the Pyriphlegethon. There those who have committed inexpiable crimes are condemned to eternal chastisement.[[183]] But the road to the right leads the pious souls to the Elysian Fields where, among flowered meadows and wrapped in soft light, they obtain the reward of their virtues, whether, having attained to perfection, they are able to dwell for ever with the heroes, or whether, being less pure, they are obliged to return later to the earth in order to reincarnate themselves in new bodies after they have drunk the water of Lethe and lost the memory of their previous existence.
The philosophical criticism of the Greeks had early attacked these traditional beliefs, but such negative attitude became more definite among the thinkers of the surpassingly rationalistic period which came after Aristotle.[[184]] The Peripatetics, who admitted at most the survival of reason, rejected in consequence all the myths dealing with the descent of the shades into the kingdom of Pluto. The Epicureans were even more radical, for, as we have seen (p. 7), they condemned the soul to dissolution at the moment of death, thus destroying the very foundation of the belief in Hades. Their campaign against stories in which they saw only the lugubrious inventions of priests and poets, was one of the capital points of their polemics against popular religion, and they flattered themselves that by destroying faith in the pains of Tartarus they freed mankind from vain terrors which obsessed its minds and poisoned its joys. The Stoics, we know (p. 13), taught that the soul is a burning breath of the same nature as the ether and as the stars which shine in the sky. As to whether this ardent fluid was lost after death in the universal fire, or kept its individuality until the final conflagration of the world, the doctrine of the Porch varied. But one thing was certain: the fiery nature of the soul must prevent it from going down into the underground and impel it to rise to higher spheres. If it were weighed down by its contact with the body and laden with matter, it might float for some time in the dense air surrounding the earth but could never descend into its depths.[[185]] The impossibility of admitting literally the truth of the stories as to the infernal realm was thus proved.
The same psychological doctrine as to the soul’s kinship with the fire of the heavenly bodies was admitted in the Alexandrian age by the sect which paid one and the same veneration to Pythagoras and to Plato and was thus more attached than any other to belief in immortality. It gave in, to some extent, to contemporary rationalism and was brought to modify its ideas as to life beyond the grave. Ancient Pythagorism, the heir of Orphism, made much of the sufferings reserved for sinners in the infernal abysses. A book attributed to Periktione still shows the daughter who has despised her parents as condemned to suffer, beneath the earth and in the company of the impious, the eternal evil inflicted by “Dike and the gods of down below.”[[186]] But in the first century before our era the pseudo-Timaeus of Locri declares that such tales are fictions—salutary, it is true—imagined by Homer in order to divert from evil those to whom truth alone was not a sufficient guide.[[187]] The only penalty which can overtake the sinning soul is, according to these Neo-Pythagoreans, metempsychosis, which forces it to reincarnate itself in a fleshly prison.[[188]]
This doctrine of transmigration claims to transport hell to earth and to explain, as moral allegories, all the fables which the poets had invented.[[189]] The Inferi are nothing else than the dwellings of our globe, which is the lowest of the nine circles of the world. The true Hades is the wicked man’s life in which he is tortured by his vices. The rivers of hell—Cocytus, Acheron, Pyriphlegethon and Styx—are anger, remorse, sadness and hate, which cause man to suffer. The Furies are the passions, scourging him with whips and burning him with torches; and similarly an ingenious interpretation is given to each of the pains suffered by Tantalus, Sisyphus, the Danaïdes and the others.[[190]]
This exegesis led finally to an absolute denial of the existence of hell, but such radical scepticism was in too flagrant contradiction to the old beliefs to be willingly accepted by the minds which remained attached to them. Hence arose attempts to bring these beliefs into harmony with the psychology generally admitted.
A first theory, to which we will have to return when speaking of the nature of the surviving souls,[[191]] seems to have been invented in Alexandria and to have been inspired by Egyptian religion.[[192]] The authors who first allude to it, one Greek and one Roman, are contemporaries who wrote about the year 200 B. C., the critic Aristarchus and the poet Ennius, but the transmission of the doctrine can be traced through literary traditions down to the end of antiquity. It divides the human composite not into two but into three parts—the body, the soul and the shade. The body is destroyed beneath the earth; the soul, which is a particle of the divine ether, rises after death towards its place of origin; but a form (εἴδωλον) of subtle matter detaches itself from the corpse, and it is this semblance (simulacrum) or shade (umbra) which goes down to the infernal regions. The existence of these regions could thus be maintained, but they were no longer held to receive the celestial principle which gave intelligence.
Others allowed that it was impossible that the earth should contain subterranean caverns large enough to hold Tartarus, the Elysian Fields and the infinite multitude of the dead. But they explained that the word subterranean (ὑπόγειος) had been misunderstood, that it denoted not the bowels of the earth but the lower half of the terrestrial globe, the southern hemisphere, which was unknown to the ancients, or even the whole celestial hemisphere, curved below this globe which hung motionless in the centre of the universe.[[193]] This hemisphere is always invisible,—so the ancients might say,—which is exactly the sense of the word Hades (= ἀειδής). The Axiochos, an apocryphal work attributed to Plato, was first to reveal this doctrine, claiming that it had been communicated to Socrates by the Mage Gobryes. It was in reality borrowed by the Greeks of the Alexandrian age from the astral theology of the Semitic peoples. According to this theology the world is divided into two halves by the line of the horizon; the upper hemisphere is the domain of the living and the higher gods, the lower that of the dead and the infernal gods. Descent to it and ascent from it are by way of two gates, situated west and east, where the sun appears and disappears. The marshes of the Acheron, the river Styx, and Charon and his boat are constellations which the souls cross when they have passed through the “gate of Hades.”
The ancient Greeks had placed the Islands of the Blessed, whither the heroes were borne by the favour of the gods, somewhere far away in the ocean. These islands were now supposed to lie in the Antipodes, in the unknown half of the earth. All the poets’ stories of the fragrant and melodious gardens of this abode of delights were applied to these marvellous countries which no sailor had ever reached.[[194]] On the other hand, Tartarus was placed at the bottom of the celestial abysses, near the lowest point of the lower hemisphere, that is, diametrically opposite to Olympus, the dwelling of the gods, who were throned on the summit of the starry vault. It was into this sombre gulf that the wicked were flung; there yawned the bottomless pit in which the demons of the dusky world inflicted eternal torture on the guilty.
This theory claimed to bring the ancient Hellenic beliefs into agreement with the cosmography of astronomers, but this cosmography itself undermined the foundations of the system, in so far as it refuted the hypothesis of a physical opposition between the two halves of the universe. It was observed that a single sky revolved about our earth; that the same atmosphere, composed of the same elements, enveloped it entirely; that every part of it was, in turn, equally in the light and in the shade. Therefore physical phenomena must be identical over the whole surface of our globe; the climate of the Antipodes must be like that of our lands; if the Antipodes were peopled, it was by races like those of men and the beasts. Their inhabitants therefore were not the dead but living beings. The marvels of the Fortunate Isles did not exist and there was no reason for regarding the lower rather than the upper part of the heavens as the vast reservoir of souls.