When a god means a noble house to raze,
He frames one rather than he'll want a cause:
(From the "Niobe" of Aeschylus, Frag. 151.)
these passages, I say, express their judgment and belief who thereby discover and suggest to us the ignorant or mistaken apprehensions they had of the Deities. Moreover, almost every one knows nowadays, that the portentous fancies and contrivances of stories concerning the state of the dead are accommodated to popular apprehensions,—that the spectres and phantasms of burning rivers and horrid regions and terrible tortures expressed by frightful names are all mixed with fable and fiction, as poison with food; and that neither Homer nor Pindar nor Sophocles ever believed themselves when they wrote at this rate:—
There endless floods of shady darkness stream
From the vast caves, where mother Night doth teem;
and,
There ghosts o'er the vast ocean's waves did glide,
By the Leucadian promontory's side;
("Odyssey," xxiv. 11.)
and,
There from th' unfathomed gulf th' infernal lake
Through narrow straits recurring tides doth make.
And yet, as many of them as deplore death as a lamentable thing, or the want of burial after death as a calamitous condition, are wont to break out into expressions of this nature:—
O pass not by, my friend; nor leave me here
Without a grave, and on that grave a tear;
("Odyssey," xi. 72.)
and,