The popular character of this conception is equally clear. The distinction between the varying fortunes of the dead—the hope of happiness for some in contrast with the universal misery of the Homeric under-world—is an idea which finds expression throughout ancient literature; and if the house of Hades often remains none the less a place of gloom, that is because the abode of the righteous is often transferred to the islands of the blest, and the dark under-world left as a place of punishment for the wicked. At the present day too the same ideas are widely current among the common-folk. It is true that the dirges more generally pourtray the lower world as wrapped in Homeric gloom, and the condition of the departed as monotonously miserable; but the express purpose of these dirges, recited beside the dead body before it is carried out to burial, is to excite the mourners to a frenzy of grief, and the professional dirge-singer (for there are still women in some parts of Greece who follow that calling) would soon lose her work if, instead of harrowing the feelings of the mourners, she took upon herself to comfort them; her whole business is to move to tears those whom the bereavement itself has left unmoved, or to stimulate to fresh outbursts of lamentation those who are already spent with sorrow. But in a few folk-songs is found the more cheerful belief that the departed still continue the pursuits which they followed in this life[1301]; while as for their abode, any peasant who should have the Pindaric description of the future home of the blessed explained to him, would unhesitatingly identify it with that which he himself calls Paradise. Some points perhaps in that description would surprise him no less than they would please him, as for example the permission to play draughts, but they would not obscure his recognition; the place of fair flowers and fruits and scents could be none other than Paradise. “The people of modern Greece,” says a Greek writer[1302], ... “unable to comprehend the idea of spiritual joys, consider Paradise a place of largely material and sensuous pleasures. The Paradise of the Greek folk is watered by great rivers, ... and in it there grow trees which diffuse odours sweet past telling.... Agreeably with this reception of the idea of Paradise by the people, the fathers of the church also were compelled to describe Paradise in terms of the senses as well as of the spirit, thus making certain concessions to popular feeling and ideas. ‘Some,’ says John of Damascus[1303], ‘have imagined a sensuous Paradise, others a spiritual Paradise. For my part I think that, just as man himself has been created with senses as well as with spirit, so the most holy close (ἱερώτατον τέμενος) to which he has access appeals alike to the senses and to the spirit.’” The compromise in this passage is cleverly justified, but it has not lasted; the pagan part of it alone has survived, and the Paradise of the modern folk is none other than that abode which Pindar described. Even the rivers thereof, which are naturally desired above all things by the inhabitants of a dry and dusty land, were probably not absent from Pindar’s picture; for Plutarch, to whom we owe the preservation of the fragment, passes in one passage from actual quotation of the opening lines to a mention of smooth and tranquil rivers flowing through the land[1304]; and in the kindred picture of the Islands of the Blest, which Pindar paints elsewhere, he does not omit to mention the water wherewith the golden flowers are refreshed[1305]; for in his eyes too water was the best of earth’s gifts, even as gold was the brightest of wrought treasures[1306].
It was this high appreciation of water which first informed a custom prevalent all over Greece on the occasion of funerals. As the bier passes along the road, the friends and neighbours of the dead man empty at their doorway or from their windows a vessel of water, and usually throw down the vessel itself to be broken on the stones of the road. This custom is evidently very old, for in some places the use of the water, the very essence of the rite, has become obsolete, and all that remains of the custom is the breaking of a piece of crockery. And even though in most places the custom is observed in full, its meaning has generally been forgotten, and curious conjectures have been made to explain it. Some interpret the custom as a symbol of that which has befallen the dead man; the vessel is his body, the water is his soul; the pouring out of the water symbolises the vanishing of the soul, and the dead body will fall to pieces like the broken crock. Others say that they pour out the water ‘in order to allay the burning thirst of the dead man[1307],’ a notion ominously suggestive of the boon which Dives sought of Lazarus. But the real purpose of the rite is still known in some of the Cyclades, where exactly the same custom is followed also on the occasion of a man’s departure from his native village[1308], to live, as they say, in exile. And the purpose is to promote the well-being of the dead or of the exile in the new land to which he is going. The pouring out of the water is in fact a rite of sympathetic magic designed to secure that the unknown land shall also be well-watered and pleasant and plentiful; and the breaking of the vessel which held the water is due, I suppose, to a feeling that an instrument which has served a magical purpose must not thereafter be put to profane and mundane uses. This custom then in itself bears witness how wide-spread is, or has been, the conception of the other world as a land of delight wherein the pleasant things of this world shall still abound.
Thus then it must be acknowledged that two contradictory popular conceptions of the hereafter have survived side by side as a twofold inheritance from the ancient world. The one pervades the whole of Homer; the other is best expounded in a fragment of Pindar[1309]; and the fundamental difference between them is this, that the one consigns all the dead alike to gloom and misery, while the other distinguishes between the future fortunes of the righteous and the unrighteous, and holds out the hope of happiness in a yet brighter world than this. Whence came these two conceptions?
The world which Homer describes is the Achaean world, and I suspect that his under-world is likewise the Achaean under-world. The Achaean religion, as exhibited in Homer, is in no way profound. The gods are only Achaean princes on a yet grander scale, endowed with immortality. Men’s relations with them are eminently simple and practical; sacrifice is expected if prayers are to be answered. But both gods and men are concerned with this upper world only; death closes all relations between them. The gods are unconcerned, unless it be for some special favourite; they live on Olympus as aforetime amid feasting, quarrelling, laughter, and love; but men leave these pursuits and pastimes, and go down to the misery of Hades’ house; their souls which fled lamenting from their limbs at the hour of death still exist, else could they not appear to living men in the visions of night; but their existence is all misery, for they lack all that made this life pleasant. Their joys had been the joys of a strenuous, full-blooded life, the joys of battle, of feasting, of song, of comradeship; and these joys were no more. The future existence of the soul was, to the Achaeans, simply the negation of the present bodily life.
But the religion of a later age was by no means so simple. The Homeric gods were still worshipped in the old way, and received their sacrifices in exchange for favours desired or granted. But there was another element in religion of which Homer shows little trace—an element of awe and mystery. Homer indeed names the Erinyes as beings concerned with the punishment of certain sins; but he shows no knowledge of that awful doctrine of blood-guilt which Aeschylus associates with them; the murdered man’s power of vengeance is wholly ignored; for among the Achaeans the next of kin might accept a price at the hands of the murderer, and allow him to remain in the land[1310], without himself incurring any pollution or any manifestation of his dead kinsman’s wrath. Again Homer knows indeed of Demeter as a goddess connected with the crops; but there is nothing in his casual mention of her to suggest that the mysteries of her worship transcended the rites of all the Olympian gods. Yet no one, I suppose, would imagine that these profounder elements in ancient religion were of post-Homeric growth or could possibly have been evolved from the transparently simple religion of the Achaeans.
On the contrary it is known that the more mysterious rites and doctrines of the Greek religion were a legacy from the Pelasgians. That the mysteries of Demeter were Pelasgian in origin is proved by the localities in which her worship most flourished, and is corroborated by the explicit statement of Herodotus[1311], who was disposed to refer other mystic cults also to the same source[1312]. In fact the co-existence, or even the conflict, of the old Pelasgian and the newer Achaean religions is constantly recognised in ancient literature, and to the Pelasgian is ascribed all that most touched men’s hearts, be it with awe or with pity—with awe as in the conflict between the Erinyes and the new dynasty of gods whom Apollo and Athene represent, with pity in the dolorous struggle of Prometheus against the tyrant Zeus. The Pelasgian religion, with all its horrors, drew the real sympathies of the mystic Aeschylus; he could worship in deepest reverence Demeter and her mysteries[1313]; he could worship perhaps even the ‘reverend goddesses,’ horrible though they were in their displeasure; but his heart must have been cold towards the usurping Olympian gods. There is true insight in that passage of Aristophanes[1314] where Aeschylus summarises the benefits conferred by great poets on the Greek race, and praises Homer, the Achaean poet, for his lessons in discipline and valour and warfare, but Orpheus, sometimes reputed the founder of the Pelasgian mysteries, for instituting religious rites and teaching men to abstain from bloodshed. And the feelings of Aeschylus were the feelings of his countrymen. The Athenians boasted of a great Achaean goddess as the foundress and patroness of their city, but their personal hopes of future happiness centred in the Pelasgian Demeter. The same generation of Athenians listened with delight to Aristophanes’ ridicule of those gods whom Homer accounted greatest, and were aghast at the thought that the mysteries had been profaned. The Achaean gods, it would seem, made good figure-heads for the official religion of the state; they served as majestic patrons of a city, or of a great national festival where religion was of less real account than horse-racing, athletics, and commerce; but the hearts of the people clave to the older, more awful, more mysterious deities of the Pelasgians, and the holiest sanctuaries[1315] were those which had been holy long before the intrusion of the Achaean gods.
It was to this Pelasgian element in Hellenic religion that the doctrine of future rewards and punishments belonged; for, as we shall see more fully in the next chapter, participation in the Pelasgian mysteries of Demeter at Eleusis was held to be an earnest of future bliss, from which the impure or uninitiated were excluded.
Thus then there were two popular conceptions of the future life—the Achaean conception of universal misery in a cold and gloomy under-world, and the Pelasgian conception which distinguished between the lots of the righteous and the unrighteous, and held out to some men the promise of bliss. Now with the former conception, as we have already seen, the belief that the dead eagerly desired dissolution is utterly inconsistent; none could be in haste to pass the gates of Hades with the prospect of nothing but misery within. But where there were hopes of happiness, the eagerness for dissolution as a means of attaining thereto is at once intelligible. This desire then, which has constantly pervaded the mind of the Greek people and has furnished the single motive of their funeral-rites down to the present day, is of Pelasgian origin; and if Homer borrowed it and incongruously combined it with a purely Achaean presentation of the under-world, we must no more judge of its real meaning by the Homeric setting of it than we would form an opinion of the place of the Erinyes or of Demeter in Greek religion by Homer’s occasional references to them.
The fact then that Homer, in accordance with the Achaean religion, considered the dissolution of the body to mean the annihilation of the body and represented the soul as alone entering into the lower world is wholly immaterial to the present enquiry. It is the Pelasgian conception of future bliss with which we are concerned; for that alone can account for the eagerness of the dead to obtain dissolution. What then are the blissful occupations of the righteous in the other world? ‘Some,’ says Pindar, ‘take their joy in horses and feats of prowess, and others at the draught-board, and others in the music of lutes.’ Clearly these dead are very different beings from the souls which peopled the Homeric under-world. Athletics could be no pastime for feeble unsubstantial spirits; the game of draughts would be ill suited to them that have no mind in them[1316]; and those whose thin utterance is like the squeak[1317] of a bat would get and give little pleasure by singing to the lute. No; the pursuits of the dead as depicted by Pindar are the pursuits which men of flesh and blood enjoy; and the abode in which they dwell, the paradise of flowers and fruits and sweet odours, is an abode to gladden men of flesh and blood. But a people whose ideal of future bliss lay in bodily enjoyments cannot surely have looked forward to the annihilation of the body and the survival of the soul alone; the joys which they anticipated hereafter presupposed the continuance of some kind of bodily existence.
Such a notion moreover cannot but seem more in harmony with the whole spirit of the Greek world than the Homeric doctrine of the survival of the soul only. A nation so conspicuous for their love of human beauty and their delight in the human form could not have viewed the extinction thereof with any feeling other than the most poignant regret—a feeling which, as we know, the Homeric doctrine did actually inspire in those who accepted it. The more thoughtful and hopeful religion of the Pelasgians, unless it had anticipated the philosophy of Plato in decrying the body and exalting the soul—an idea of which there is no trace—was bound to give promise that body as well as soul should survive death and dissolution.