Singularly instructive and suggestive is the comparison of these Hellenic pictures of the under-world with those which our ancestors of the Middle Ages painted on the walls and in the windows of their churches. There we see the ecstatic bliss of the saved, conducted by angels to the abode of God and the saints, and the fearful tortures inflicted upon the damned by hosts of hideous and malignant demons, who bind, burn, tear, and outrage them with fiendish ingenuity. In the Christian paintings there is no mean, everything is extreme. The destiny to eternal life or eternal torment seems to hang upon a decision by no means easy: angels and devils dispute the possession of souls, and the latter are at least as successful as the former in their raids. Our ancestors can scarcely have taken these representations as seriously as we are disposed to take them, or life shadowed by such a terrific future would have been unendurable. But still they embodied the teaching of the Church, which few dared dispute, at all events openly. They give us a glimpse at the terrible moral pressure necessary in order that the realities of the moral and spiritual life should be burned into the heart of the European peoples.
In the Greek pictures, on the other hand, nothing is extreme, but everything is in moderation. Setting aside the torments of a few legendary heroes, like Tityus and Tantalus, which had little relation to actual life, there was no torture, as there was certainly no bliss, in Hades. Between the punishment of the uninitiated and the reward of the initiated there is not very much difference. Whether Megara and her children belong to the class of the happy or the wretched we do not know. They bear the marks of suffering, but as one of the boys carries the oil-flask and strigil of the athlete, he would seem to pass his time in Hades as suitably as the little boy of the initiated pair who trundles his toy. The only unpleasant feeling which is roused by our vase-painting or the more exquisite Hades of Polygnotus is that its tenants must suffer from infinite ennui, and the same reproach has been brought sometimes against the heaven of the Middle Ages. But probably only highly civilized people learn to realize that ennui may become a torment.
In particular, we may compare the swarms of black and hideous devils, with horn and hoof of the mediaeval pictures, with the Greek Poenae. We can trace the genealogy of these latter from early times. The Oriental imagination had from very early times delighted in depicting evil spirits in the form of monsters and winged beasts, who are overcome and slain by the gods in human form. For winged monsters the Greek artists of the sixth century had tended to substitute winged human beings of hideous aspect, Gorgons and Harpies, Eris and Phobos, and the like. It was Aeschylus who, wishing to bring on the stage in bodily form in his Eumenides the powers that avenge kindred blood, transformed the Erinnyes, who had hitherto been worshipped at Athens as the Eumenides or gentle goddesses, in beautiful and dignified form[39]. He took as his models the Gorgons and Harpies of earlier art. So he himself tells us in the Eumenides[40], where his priestess thus describes the sleeping visitors: ‘I call them not women, but Gorgons; yet cannot I quite liken them to the forms of Gorgons. In a picture once I saw Harpies painted bearing off the food of Phineus: these, however, are unwinged in aspect, but black and utterly abominable.’
Pausanias too says, when speaking of the shrine of the Eumenides at Athens[41]: ‘It was Aeschylus who first wreathed snakes in their hair; but in their statues there is nothing terrible, nor in the other statues set up in honour of the nether gods.’ In a series of vase-paintings which represent the flight to Delphi and the purification of Orestes, the Erinnyes appear sometimes in Aeschylean guise as women, unwinged, but with snakes in their hair and of terrible aspect. With these the Poenae of our vase-painting are almost identical in dress, though the ugliness is softened down. And as Polygnotus knows not the Poenae, it seems likely that it was in part the influence of Aeschylus which introduced them as ministrants of evil in the realm of Hades. But the Poenae certainly fill very inefficiently the place of the Christian demons. Greek art loved to soften, to generalize, while mediaeval art rejoiced, like Dante, in exact detail. Greek art was always ready to sacrifice precise meaning to beauty and grace, while mediaeval art had little sense of beauty, but tried to work on the emotions of fear and horror.
Side by side with the evidence derived from the works of ancient painters we must place that derived from ancient poets and other writers. The philosophers are outside our scope, except so far as they testify to the opinions of ordinary men: to regard the views of Plato and Epicurus as ordinary Greek opinions would of course be as absurd as to regard John Stuart Mill or Herbert Spencer as representatives of the ordinary Englishman.
In ordinary Greek belief, then, we find abundant traces of the eternal conflict between the priest and the prophet, between ritual and ethics. There was a general feeling that those who died nobly or after a well-spent life were sure of a friendly reception in Hades. Xenophon says of Agesilaus[42], ‘He ever feared the gods, being of opinion that those who lived nobly were not yet happy, but that those who had died with good name were at once among the blessed.’ The chorus in the Alcestis speak of their mistress immediately after her death as a blessed spirit. And a multitude of epitaphs[43] express the conviction that those who had lived nobly were sure of a favourable reception from Persephone. Beside this ethical view we find the opinion of the sacerdotal party that initiation in the Mysteries or attachment to the cultus of some deity was necessary for the attainment of future bliss. This was especially the view of the Orphists, and as such it is ridiculed by Plato in the Republic[44]: ‘They persuade not individuals merely, but whole cities also, that men may be absolved and purified from crimes, both while they are still alive and even after their decease, by means of certain sacrifices and pleasureable amusements which they call Mysteries: which deliver us from the torments of the other world, while the neglect of them is punished by an awful doom.’ We have seen that Polygnotus gives some countenance to those who regarded the Mysteries as the gate of future happiness. And there was certainly in Greece a generally spread conviction, which may be well traced in the Frogs of Aristophanes, that initiation was, if not a passport to future happiness, at least a safeguard amid the dangers which surround the soul from the moment of its departure from the body until its final doom is fixed.
In the mentions of Hades to be found in the Tragedians, it appears more especially as the place of the reassembling of families. Sophocles’ Antigone expresses a hope of being well received in Hades by the relations to whom at her peril she has performed the rites of burial. The Oedipus of Sophocles wants to blind himself in order that in Hades he may not see the father and mother whom he has so deeply though ignorantly injured. In the Agamemnon of Aeschylus, Clytemnestra anticipates the meeting of Agamemnon in Hades with his daughter Iphigeneia. Hyperides, in his Funeral Oration, takes a somewhat wider view. He imagines the fallen heroes of the Lamian War as received in friendly fashion in Hades not merely by their kinsfolk, but by the worthies of Troy and of Marathon, and by the tyrannicides Harmodius and Aristogeiton.
As regards the imagery and geography of Hades the ordinary Greeks do not seem to have greatly troubled themselves. There were the views of poets and painters, and there were the more definite and dogmatic views of the professors of Orphic lore. These the people received or neglected as suited the bent of the mind of each. Hades was a realm of the imagination, as to the nature of which each man might innocently indulge his own hopes and aspirations.
In the epitaphs of later times we find, as will be shown in a future chapter[45], numerous allusions to the realm of Hades and Persephone. But they do not strike the reader as embodying strong belief; often they are of an epideictic or rhetorical character, like the statements which also occur that the soul of the dead has made its way to the Islands of the Blest or to the abodes of the gods. The beliefs which confined the spirits of the dead to the tomb and its neighbourhood belong to a lower and worse-educated stratum of the population, but have more vitality.
Greek religion and tradition knew of many mortals who had gone down alive into the earth, and there abode, giving for the most part oracles from their hiding-places. Such was Amphiaraus, the Argive hero, who after the bootless siege of Thebes went down with chariot and horses into the ground, and whose shrine was in later times a great oracular seat. Such was Trophonius of Lebadeia, whose cave is described for us by Pausanias. Caeneus, when overwhelmed with rocks by the Centaurs, vanished alive into the earth, and there lived on. It is, in fact, a marked feature of the cultus of heroes that their power is exercised only at the place where they disappeared or where their bodies were laid. They are intensely local, earth-daemons who possess a piece of land, and whose favour must be conciliated by any one who expects that land to yield him increase. Pelopidas, in the course of a campaign against the Spartans[46], unwittingly slept near the graves of some virgins of Leuctra, who had in old time been violated and slain by the Spartans. They appeared at night to the Theban general, and promised him victory if he made them the sacrifice of a foal. This is but one among a hundred instances of the fact that a hero had power only at his spot of burial: elsewhere he was helpless.