The deliverance of the soul from the bondage of the body, the divorce of spirit from matter, is an idea which has appealed and does appeal to many, and would therefore furnish a motive of considerable intrinsic probability for the treatment which the Greek people have consistently accorded to their dead; the dissolution of the body, it might be supposed, was desired and hastened in order that the soul might be freed from its last link with this material world and pass away winged and unburdened towards things ethereal.
But such an explanation savours too much of philosophy and too little of popular religion. ‘The rehearsal of death,’ that is of the severance of soul from body, was according to Socrates the proper occupation of the philosopher; and death itself was welcome to him as a final release of the soul, the true self, from the fetters of physical existence. But the very emphasis which the whole of the Phaedo gives to this idea, the insistence of Socrates that his real self is that which converses with his friends and seeks to convince them of his views, and not the corpse which they will soon be burying or burning as seemeth them good[1292], suggest, if anything, that in the popular religion the severance of soul from body was not desired, and the true self was not conceived as a thing apart from body. At any rate the reason for desiring dissolution must be sought from more popular sources.
I return therefore to a passage[1293] on which I have already touched more than once, the earliest passage of extant literature, in which a dead man is represented as craving the dissolution of his body. Why was it that the soul of Patroclus desired so urgently the last rites for his body? Was it for the benefit of his soul only? Popular religion, as we have seen, did not reckon death a final severance of soul and body; for the soul might return and re-animate the body. Was then dissolution believed to complete the severance, annihilating the body and emancipating the soul? Did the future happiness of the soul depend upon such emancipation? Did Patroclus, in the case before us, crave dissolution in order that his soul, finally severed from his body, might find happiness?
Homer certainly peoples the lower world with souls only, severed from their former bodies. It is clearly the soul only of Patroclus which will pass the gates of Hades, when once his request for the burial of his body has been fulfilled; for it is ‘the souls, the semblances of the dead[1294],’ who bar his entrance thereto meanwhile. But those souls are not happy souls. The house of Hades is not a place of happiness; it is dank, murky, mouldering; and the souls themselves are not of a nature to enjoy anything; they are feeble, impotent wraiths, mere semblances of men, all doomed to the same miserable travesty of life; the bodies from which they are now severed were their real selves[1295], and there remain now only impalpable joyless phantoms. ‘Sooner,’ cries the spirit of Achilles to Odysseus, ‘would I be a serf bound to the soil, in the house of a portionless man whose living were but scant, than lord over all the dead that are perished[1296]’; for the old valour even of Achilles avails him no more; his soul fares in the house of Hades even as all others fare; all alike are doomed to everlasting futility in a land of everlasting gloom. Fitly is the soul of Patroclus said to have sped, at the moment of death, towards Hades’ realm ‘bewailing its fate in that it had left vigour and manhood[1297].’
How then comes it that anon the same soul is eager to pass the gates of Hades? Surely the wanderings of the dead Patroclus, whether in the form of a revenant as the popular belief would have had it, or, according to Homer’s version, as a disembodied spirit, would hardly be more pitiable than the lot which he in common with all the dead must suffer below. Why then this eagerness?
I can find nothing in Homer to justify it; it appears to me wholly inconsistent with the Homeric conception of the under-world.
And this inconsistency is of wide bearing. The cases of Patroclus and Elpenor are not isolated. The same eagerness for dissolution on the part of the dead has, as we have seen, been steadily recognised in all the relations between the living and the dead from the days of Homer until now. That which is at variance with the Homeric conception of the hereafter is not merely the petition of Patroclus, but the idea on which the funeral-customs of a whole people have been based for nearly three thousand years.
Such a discrepancy cannot but force upon us the question how far the Homeric conception of the hereafter was the popular conception.
That the whole picture of the house of Hades and of the condition of the departed therein was not an Homeric invention is, I suppose, indisputable. Its two main features are the gloom of the place and the lack of distinction between the lots of those who dwell there[1298]. Of these the first at any rate is frequent enough in later literature, and indeed held so firm a place in the Greek mind that ‘to see the light’ became synonymous with ‘to live in this upper world’; and even down to the present day both ideas live on. The constant epithets which Homer applies to the house of Hades, ‘cold’ (κρυερός) and ‘mouldering’ (εὐρώεις), are exactly reproduced in the epithets with which Hades, now a place instead of a person, is described in modern dirges—κρυοπαγωμένος, ‘frozen,’ and ἀραχνιασμένος, ‘thick with spiders’ webs’[1299]; and the same uniform misery of all the departed is likewise a common theme in the many songs that deal with Charon and the lower world. All this could not have been effected by the influence of Homer alone, great though it was, if he had himself invented the whole conception. It is clear that he utilised a conception which was before his time, and still is, a popular conception.
But there is equally good evidence of a totally different presentation of the future state. A fragment of one of Pindar’s dirges contradicts the Homeric description of the lower world in every point. ‘Upon the righteous the glorious sun sheddeth light below while night is here, and amid meadows red with roses lieth the space before their city’s gate, all hazy with frankincense and laden with golden fruits; and some take their joy in horses and feats of prowess, and others at the draught-board, and others in the music of lutes, and among them every fair flower of happiness doth blossom; and o’er that lovely land spreadeth the savour of all manner of spices that be mingled with far-gleaming fire on the gods’ altars[1300].’ So then this under-world is not cold and murky, but is warmed and lighted by the sun; its inhabitants are not frail spirits incapable of joy, but take their pleasure as aforetime in the world above; nor is the lot of all the same, for it is only the righteous who enjoy this bliss.