In slumber profound.
Now this idea, born in some long-forgotten pagan age, fostered by Homer and Hesiod and no less tenderly by the Christian Church, familiar to every Greek mind for full three thousand years, harmonizes well with the belief that body as well as soul survives death. Beyond the superficial resemblance in the inert figures of the dead man laid out for burial and of one who sleeps soundly, there was another and profounder resemblance in the manner of their waking to fresh activity, the one in this world, the other in the under-world. Homer, with his belief that the soul alone, survives, notes only the first resemblance. The twofold property of laying men to sleep and of raising them therefrom resided fitly in the wand of Hermes the escorter of the dead; but though he escorted men’s souls to the house of Hades and might at will summon their souls thence[1365], there is no suggestion of a bodily awakening from the sleep of death. But Virgil, even in his close imitation of Homer, adds to the Homeric description of Hermes’ wand one phrase of his own. ‘Therewith doth he summon forth from Orcus the pale spirits of the dead, and others doth he send down to gloomy Tartarus; therewith he giveth sleep and taketh it away’—so far does Virgil follow Homer, but he adds—‘and unsealeth men’s eyes from death[1366].’ The Homeric picture is enriched by a new thought, foreign to the Achaean religion but proper to that other belief which inspired Pindar’s description of the future life, the thought that after death and dissolution, men’s eyes should open upon a brighter world and a life of renewed bodily activity.
Such was the thought with which the pagans of ancient Greece had comforted themselves long before Christianity availed itself of the same imagery. But the Hellenic religion went yet further, and found in this thought not only peace and contentment but vivid joy. The sleep of death was the means whereby men should attain to closer communion with their gods. The grave was a bed, but a bed of delight rather than of rest, a bridal bed. They should not sleep alone, but in the very embrace of the gods to whom in this life they had striven to draw nigh. The darkness of the tomb was but the wedding-night. Full union in the other world should be the consummation of partial communion in this. The marriage of men with their gods was the ideal to which Greek piety dared aspire.
Such an ideal may well seem bold even to the verge of impious presumption. But Greek religion, even in its highest developments, was the natural and spontaneous expression of the beliefs and hopes of a whole people; it differed from all the great religions of the modern world in having no founder. Great teachers no doubt arose, as Orpheus or Pythagoras, who influenced the course of religious thought; but they were not the founders of new religions. The old self-grown faiths of the people were the stocks upon which they grafted, as it would seem, even their new doctrines; they founded schools indeed, but schools which did not sever themselves from the received religion and become sects. The Orphic mysteries differed so little from the old Pelasgian mysteries of Eleusis that Orpheus was sometimes even reputed to be their founder too; yet, as we shall see, the Eleusinian rites were merely one presentment of a conception common to the whole Greek people. If then this ideal of marriage between men and gods in the future life was no invented or imported doctrine, but simply the highest development of purely popular aspirations towards close communion with the gods, its audacity is less surprising. From time immemorial down to this day[1367] Greece has had its popular stories of nuptial union even in this life between gods and mortal women, between goddesses and mortal men; and educated Greeks, who could not credit such occurrences in their own times, might well believe that a joy, which had been granted to the brave men and fair women of a former and better age even during their life-time upon earth, was still reserved for the righteous in the world to come. Pausanias tells us with a wonderful simplicity that in his time owing to the increase of iniquity in all the world no one was changed from a man into a god, and that the wrath of the gods against the unrighteous was laid up against the time when they should quit this earth[1368]. If then there was believed to be a postponement of punishment for those who offended the gods, there might well be a reservation of blessedness for those who pleased them. It would have imposed no strain upon the faith of such as Pausanias to look forward to the enjoyment in a future life of the same bliss as had been enjoyed in old time upon earth by men ‘who by reason of their uprightness and piety sat at the same hospitable board as gods, and whom the gods openly visited with honour for their goodness even as they visited the wicked with their displeasure[1369],’ men who, as many an old legend told, had shared not the board only but even the bed of deities.
This curious Greek conception of death as a form of marriage was first borne in upon me by the funeral-dirges of the modern peasants. Examples may be found in any collection of Greek folk-songs. The actual expression of the thought varies considerably, but it would probably be hard to find in Greece any professional mourner in whose elaborations the idea did not occupy an important place. It is utilised with equal frequency in regard to persons of either sex, whether married or unmarried at the time of death. The two following specimens from Passow’s collection are fairly representative.
‘Ah me! ah me! the hours of youth and days all past and over,
Haply shall they return again, those hours of youth regretted?’
‘Nay when the crow dons plumage white, when crow to dove is changèd,
Then only shall they come again, those hours of youth lamented.’
‘Oh fare ye well, high mountain-tops and fir-trees rich in shadow,