“Ye springs,” she saith, “give water cool, and give me snow, ye mountains,
Ye fruit-wives in your garden-plots, give apples and give quinces.
For unto me a dear one comes down from the world above us;
Not from a strange land cometh he, nor from among strange people,
He is the child of mine own child, right dear and deep-beloved.”[1376]’
From these passages and from many others conceived in the same spirit it will readily be seen that the thought of death as a kind of marriage, however mystical it may seem to us, is familiar to the modern Greek peasants. Nor has that thought become crystallised into a set form of words to be repeated without heed or understanding of their meaning. The very variety of treatment given to the idea proves that we are not dealing with a mere traditional expression or unmeaning commonplace, but with a vital belief still capable of stirring the ballad-maker’s imagination. Further it is this thought which almost alone strikes a note of cheerfulness and of hope in the popular dirges. The usual picture of the lower world is nothing but gloom and despair. It is a place of darkness on which the sun never shines, a place of ice and snow, and full of cob-webs. There are no churches there with bright golden icons; no quoits for the young men to throw; no looms for the women to ply. Hunger is not appeased, thirst not quenched, and sleep is denied. All is mourning and regret for the warm stirring life of the upper world, and anxious fears for wife or children left behind. Happy those who are allowed even to taste of the river of death, and to forget their homes and orphaned little ones. Thus with strange medley of ancient and modern is the dirge-singer wont to describe that lower world to which all the dead without distinction go. Yet even into these dirges, which—in order to excite the mourners to wilder displays of grief—purposely emphasize the gloomiest aspects of death, there is allowed to enter the one cheering thought that the departed for whom lamentation is made is not dead nor yet fallen on eternal sleep, but wedded in a new world; and it is worthy of notice that it is with this thought that many of the dirges end, as if this one consolation and hope were designed to assuage the pangs of sorrow which the first part of the dirge had excited.
Thus a brief study of the modern Greek dirges reveals to us the curious fact that a mystic conception of death is widely prevalent among the simple-minded peasants of Greece, and that, with all their naïveté in pourtraying the horrors of the lower world, it is from a recondite doctrine that they draw consolation. How came they to be the stewards of a doctrine so strange, so remote from the primitive simplicity of their ordinary life?
Once more we must look back to a pre-Christian antiquity, and seek again in Greek Tragedy the evidence of popular belief. Just as Aeschylus above all others has preserved to us the awful doctrine of future retribution for the deadly sin of blood-guilt, so from Sophocles we may learn the more comfortable doctrine that death, while it involves a parting from friends in this upper world, is also the means of drawing nearer, in an union as it were of wedlock, to the denizens of the lower world. The locus classicus for this conception is the Antigone. Throughout the latter part of that play, when once the doom of Antigone has been pronounced, the thought of her death as a wedding, and of the rock-hewn tomb where she is to be immured as a bridal-chamber, finds repeated and emphatic expression.
Of course it may be said that Antigone was the promised bride of Haemon, and that the poet in speaking of her tomb as a bridal-chamber was seeking to accentuate the pathetic contrast between her hopes and her destiny. That is true; but perhaps it is not the whole truth; perhaps Sophocles rather utilised the evident pathos of the situation for the purpose of covert allusion to doctrines which were in themselves unspeakable, such as Herodotus would have passed over with the words εὔστομα κείσθω. For we must not forget that the majority of an Athenian audience, initiated as they naturally would be in the Eleusinian mysteries, were familiar with religious teachings of which none might make explicit mention in the pages of literature open to the profane, but at which a poet might well hint in words which beneath their superficial meaning hid a truth intelligible to such as had ears to hear. Aeschylus indeed had once ventured too far in his allusions to the mysteries[1377]; but there is no improbability, or rather there is on that account an increased probability, in the supposition that a discreet and veiled allusion to unspeakable doctrines was permitted to the Tragic poet. Let us turn to the actual passages of the Antigone.
The first suggestion of the thought comes ironically enough, though it is but a faint suggestion, from the lips of Creon, who to Ismene’s exclamation, “Wilt thou indeed bereave thine own son of her?” retorts “’Tis Hades’ part to arrest this wedding[1378].” The thought is taken up later by the Chorus, who, after their hymn in honour of unconquerable Love, revert to words of pity for the woman there before them, and tell how they can no longer check the founts of tears, when they behold Antigone drawing near to ‘the bed-chamber where all must sleep’ (τὸν παγκοίταν θάλαμον)[1379]. Here the expression of the idea is becoming plainer, and it is no accident that the word θάλαμος, so commonly used of the bride-chamber, is here selected. But yet clearer words are to follow; for Antigone herself, in response to these words of compassion from the Chorus, interprets more boldly that at which they hint. ‘Me doth Hades, with whom all must sleep, bear off yet alive to Acheron’s shore, me that have had no part in wedlock, whose name hath never rung forth in bridal hymn, but ’tis Acheron I shall wed[1380].’