II. ISLANDS OF THE BLEST…

II. ISLANDS OF THE BLEST

TRANSLATION

The Homeric picture of the shadow-life of the disembodied soul is the work of resignation, not of hope. Hope would never have beguiled itself with the anticipation of a state of things which neither afforded men the chance of further activity after death, nor, on the other hand, gave them rest from the toil of life; one which promised them only a restless, purposeless fluttering to and fro, an existence, indeed, but without any of the content that might have made it worthy of the name of life.

Was there never any aspiration after a more consolatory picture of the life after death? Did the tremendous vital energies of that time really devote themselves so completely to the realms of Zeus that not even a ray of hope penetrated to the House of Hades? We should have had to suppose so were it not for a single passing glimpse which we get of a distant land of hearts' desire, such as even the Greece that lay under the sway of the Homeric order of things still imagined for itself.

When Proteus, the sea-god who could foretell the future, has finished informing Menelaos, on the sea-shore of Egypt, of the circumstances of his return home to his country and of the fate of his dearest companions, he adds the prophetic words--so Menelaos himself informs Telemachos in the fourth book of the Odyssey (560 ff.): "But thou, god-like Menelaos, art not ordained to die in horse-pasturing Argos or to meet thy fate there; for the immortals shall send thee far away to the Elysian plain, to the ends of the world where dwells fair-haired Rhadamanthys, and where life is most easy for men. There is neither snow nor heavy storms nor rain, but Okeanos ever sends zephyrs with soft-breathing breezes to refresh men--because thou hast Helen to wife and art thereby in their eyes the son-in-law of Zeus."

These verses allow us a glimpse into a world about which the Homeric poems are otherwise silent. At the end of the {56} world, by the River Okeanos, lies the "Elysian Plain", a land where the sky is always clear, as in the land where the gods live.[1\2] There dwells the great Rhadamanthys, not alone, one may suppose as "men" are spoken of (565, 568). Thither shall the gods some day send Menelaos--he is not to die (562); that is to say, he is to reach that place alive nor shall he suffer death there. The place to which he is to be sent is not a part of the realm of Hades, but a land on the surface of the earth set apart as the abode not of disembodied "souls", but of men whose souls have not been separated from their visible selves--for only thus can they feel and enjoy the sense of life (565). The picture which fancy has drawn here is the precise opposite of the blessed immortality of the soul in its separate existence. Just because such an idea remained quite unthinkable for Homeric singers, hope sought and found an exit from the shadow-world which swallows up all living energy. Hope imagined a land at the end of the world, but still of this world, to which occasionally some few favourites of the gods might be "translated" without the psyche being separated from its body and descending to Hades.

The actual mention of such miraculous "translation" stands alone in the Homeric poems, and the passage in the Odyssey seems to have been introduced by a later hand.[2\2] But the conditions of such a miracle are all implied within the range of Homeric ideas. Menelaos is carried off by the power of the gods and lives an eternal life far from the world of mortals. The belief that a god could suddenly withdraw his earthly favourite from the eyes of men and invisibly waft him away on the breeze not infrequently finds its application in the battle-scenes of the Iliad.[3\2] The gods could also make a mortal "invisible" for a prolonged period. When Odysseus has been so long lost to his friends they suspect that the gods have "made him invisible" (Od. i, 235 ff.); they do not regard him as "dead" but "the Harpies have carried him away", and he is consequently withdrawn from all human ken (Od. i, 241 f.; xiv, 371). Penelope, in her grief, prays either for swift death through the arrows of Artemis, or that a storm wind may lift her up and carry her away on dark pathways to the mouths of Okeanos, that is, to the entrance of the Land of the Dead (Od. xx, 61-5; 79 ff.).[4\2] To explain her wish she recalls a fairy tale of the kind that must often have been told in the women's quarters; how the daughters of Pandareos, after the violent death of their parents, were brought up to lovely maidenhood by Aphrodite and provided by Hera, Artemis, and Athene with all kinds of gifts and {57} accomplishments; till one day when Aphrodite had gone to Olympos to ask Zeus to make a match for them, the Harpies came and carried them off and made them the hand-maidens of the hated Erinyes.[5\2] This folk-tale reveals more clearly than is usual with the generally cultured Homeric narrative the popular belief that men might be carried off permanently from the land of the living, and, without seeing death, live on in another dwelling-place. For the daughters of Pandareos are carried away alive--to the Kingdom of the Dead, it is true, for that is where they must go if they become the servants of the Erinyes, the spirits of the underworld.[6\2] That is where Penelope wishes to be carried off, and without dying first--away from the land of the living which has become intolerable for her. Such a translation is accomplished by means of the Harpies or the Stormwind, which is the same thing, since the Harpies are nothing else but wind-deities of a peculiarly sinister kind. They may be compared to the Devil's Bride or the "Whirlwind's Bride" of German folk-tales, who rides in the whirlwind and also carries off men with her.[7\2] The Harpies and what we are here told of them, belong to the "vulgar mythology" which so seldom finds any expression in Homer; a popular folk-lore that could tell of many things between heaven and earth of which the Homeric "grand style" takes little notice. In Homer the Harpies never act on their own authority; only as the servants of the gods or of a single god do they transport mortals where no word of man, no human power, can reach.[8\2]

The prophesied removal of Menelaos to the Elysian fields at the end of the world is only another example of such a "translation" by the will and the might of the gods. Even the fact that prolonged habitation in that happy land, inaccessible to other men, is promised to him, does not differentiate the fate of Menelaos from that of the daughters of Pandareos, or from that which Penelope wishes for herself. For Menelaos, however, immortal life is promised not in Hades, or even at its entrance, but in a special country of the blest, as though in a new kingdom of the gods. He is to become a "god"; for since to the Homeric poets "god" and "immortal" are interchangeable terms, a man who is granted immortality (that is, whose psyche is never separated from his visible self) becomes for them a god.

It is also a Homeric belief that gods can raise mortals to their own realm, to immortality. Kalypso wishes to make Odysseus "immortal and ageless for all time", that he may remain for ever by her side (Od. v, 135 f.; 209 f.; xxiii, 335 f.), {58} that is to say, make him a god like herself. The immortality of the gods is conditioned by the eating of the magic food ambrosia and nectar;[9\2] man, too, by eating continually the food of the gods, becomes an immortal god. What Odysseus in his longing for the earthly home, to which he is drawn by loyalty and duty, rejects, has been attained by other mortals. The Homeric poems can tell of more than one mortal promoted to immortal life.

As he is struggling in the stormy sea rescue comes to Odysseus in the person of Ino Leukothea, once the daughter of Kadmos, "who had formerly been a mortal woman, but now in the waves of the sea shares in the honour of the gods" (Od. v, 333 ff.).[10\2] Did some god of the sea bear her away and imprison her for ever in his own element? The belief existed that a god might descend from heaven even upon an earthly maiden and carry her off for ever as his spouse (Od. vi, 280 f.).[11\2]

Ganymede, the most beautiful of mortals, had been carried away by the gods to Olympos to dwell among immortals, as the cup-bearer of Zeus (Il. xx, 232 ff.).[12\2] He was a scion of the old Trojan royal house, to which Tithonos also belonged, whom both the Iliad and the Odyssey already know as the husband of Eos; from his side the goddess arose every morning to bring the light of day to gods and men.[13\2] It appears that she had "translated" her beloved not to Olympos but to the distant dwelling-place by the River Okeanos from which she sets out in the morning.[14\2] It was Eos who had once borne off the beautiful Orion, and in spite of the jealousy of the other gods had enjoyed his love until Artemis "on Ortygia" had slain him with her gentle arrow (Od. v, 122 ff.). The story may be derived from ancient star-myths, which represented in the language of myth what is actually to be observed in the morning sky. But in such myths the elements and celestial phenomena are thought of as living and animate like men. And in the same way, these star-spirits, in accordance with the regular development of legend, have long ago sunk, for the Homeric poet, to the level of earthly youths and heroes. If the goddess can raise Orion into her own kingdom, then, according to the belief of the time (which is all that matters to us here), the same thing might happen to any mortal through the favour of the gods. A simple imitation of the same legend in a purely human setting is the story of Kleitos, a youth of the family of the seer Melampous, whom Eos has carried off for the sake of his beauty that he may dwell among the gods (Od. xv, 249 f.). {59}

§ 2

The translation, then, of Menelaos, while still alive, to the ends of the earth to live there in perpetual blessedness is indeed a miracle, but a miracle that finds its justification and precedent in the range of Homeric belief. The only thing new about it is that Menelaos has a special dwelling-place assigned to him, not in the land of the gods, the proper realm of immortality, nor as in the case of Tithonos and as Kalypso desired for Odysseus, in the company of a deity, but in a separate place specially allotted to the translated hero, the Elysian fields. Nor does this appear to be the invention of the writer of these lines. He refers so briefly to the "Land of the Departed"[15\2] and its delights that we are forced to believe that he did not himself originate so enticing a vision.[16\2] He can only, in the case of Menelaos, have added a fresh companion to the company of the blessed. That Rhadamanthys the Just dwells there seems to be known to him from ancient tradition, for he evidently only intends to recall the fact and does not think it necessary to justify this selection of the brother of Minos.[17\2] It might even be supposed that the picture of such a wonderland had been invented and embellished by older poets simply for the benefit of Rhadamanthys. The only novelty is that this picture, which has been fully adopted into the circle of Homeric poetry, now includes a hero of the Trojan epic cycle among the number of those translated to that land of ever unclouded happiness. The lines were inserted, as has already been remarked, at a later date, into the prophecy of Proteus, and it is hard not to suppose that the whole idea lay far from the thoughts of previous Homeric singers. Would the flower of the heroic chivalry, including Achilles himself, have been doomed to that dim shadow-world in which we see them wandering in the Nekyia of the Odyssey, if a way out into a life exempt from death had already revealed itself to imagination at the time when the Epic gave the stamp of its approval to the stories which dealt with the fate of the greater number of the heroes? Because the poem of the Trojan War and the adventures of the Return from Troy had not yet decided upon the fate of Menelaos, a later poet could speak of his "translation" to the--since "discovered"--Land of Destiny. It is highly probable that even at the time of the composition of the Journey to Hades of Odysseus this conception--afterwards so important for the development of the Greek belief in immortality--of a secluded resting-place of living and translated heroes had not yet been completely {60} formulated. It fits easily into the framework of belief prevailing in the Homeric poems, but it is not necessarily required by that framework. It is natural on this account to suppose that it entered the Epic from without. And, remembering the Babylonian story of Hasisatra and the Hebrew one of Enoch,[18\2] both of whom without suffering death were translated into the realm of immortal life--either to "Heaven" or to the "End of the Rivers" to the gods--we might be inclined to follow the fashion that prevails in some quarters nowadays, and believe that these earliest Greek translation legends were borrowed from Semitic tradition. Little, however, would be gained by such a mechanical derivation. Here and in all such cases the main question remains still unanswered: what were the reasons which led the Greek mind to wish to borrow this particular idea at this particular time from abroad? In the present instance at least, nothing argues specially for the handing on of the belief in translation from one nation to another rather than for its independent origin in the different countries out of similar needs.

This new idea did not contradict the normal Homeric beliefs about the soul but on the contrary presupposed them and supplemented them without incongruity. It was also, as we have seen, based upon conceptions that were familiar and natural to Greek thought. There was, indeed, no need for any stimulus from without to produce from these materials the undoubtedly new and peculiarly attractive idea of which we receive the earliest intimation in the prophecy of Proteus.

§ 3

The importance of this new creation for the later development of Greek belief makes it all the more necessary to be quite clear as to what exactly this novelty really was. Was it a Paradise for the pious and the just? A sort of Greek Valhalla for the bravest heroes?--or was it that a reconciliation and adjustment between virtue and happiness such as this life never knows had revealed itself to the eyes of hope in a Land of Promise? Nothing of the kind is warranted by these lines. Menelaos was never particularly remarkable for those virtues which the Homeric age rated highest.[19\2] He is only to be transported to Elysium because he has Helen to wife and is therefore the son-in-law of Zeus; such is Proteus' prophecy to him. We are not told why Rhadamanthys has reached the place of happiness; nor do we learn it through the title by which he was referred to almost invariably by {61} later poets, the "Just". We may, however, remind ourselves that as brother of Minos he was also a son of Zeus.[20\2] It was not virtue or merit that gave him a claim to blessedness after this life; indeed, of any such claim we never find the least trace. Just as the retention of the psyche in the body and the consequent avoidance of death can occur only as a miracle or by magic--that is, as an exceptional case--so does translation into the "Land of Destiny" remain a privilege of a few special favourites of the gods. No one could deduce from such cases any article of faith of universal application. The nearest parallel to this miraculous preservation of life for a few individuals in a land of blessed repose is to be found in the equally miraculous preservation of consciousness in those three enemies of the gods in Hades whom we hear of in the Nekyia of the Odyssey. The Penitents in Erebos and the blessed in Elysium correspond: both represent exceptions which do not destroy the rule and do not affect the main outline of Homeric belief. In the first case, as in the second, the omnipotence of Heaven has broken through the rule. Those, however, who owe to the special favour of the gods their escape from death and their translation to Elysium are near relatives of the gods. This seems to be the only reason for the favour shown to them.[21\2] If therefore any more general reason beyond the capricious good-will of some god is to account for the translation of these individuals it might perhaps be found in the belief that near relationship with the gods, that is, the very highest nobility of lineage, could preserve a man from the descent into the common realm of hopeless nothingness after the separation of the psyche from the body. In the same way the beliefs of many primitive peoples represent the ordinary man as departing to a joyless country of the dead (if he is not annihilated altogether) while the descendants of gods and kings, or the aristocracy, go to a land of unending happiness.[22\2] Such a fancy, however, is only dimly apparent in the promise made to Menelaos; nowhere is anything said of a general rule from which the individual case might be deduced.--

§ 4

But the individuals who are admitted to an everlasting life in the Elysian land at the end of the world are much too distantly removed from the habitations of the living for them to be credited with the power of influencing the world of men.[23\2] They resemble the gods only in the enjoyment accorded to them of an unendingly conscious life. Of the omnipotence of {62} the gods they have not the smallest share[24\2] any more than the dwellers in Erebos, from whose fate their own is otherwise so different. We must not suppose, therefore, that the origin of the stories of the promotion of individual heroes above their companions and their translation into a distant dwelling-place, is to be sought in any cultus offered to those individuals in their previous earthly dwelling-place. Every religious cult is the worship of something real and powerful; no popular religion and no poet's fancy would have given the national heroes, if they were to be regarded as powerful and worshipped accordingly, such a distant and inaccessible home.

It was the free activity of the poetic fancy which created and embellished this last refuge of human aspiration upon the Elysian plain. The needs which this new creation was chiefly intended to satisfy were poetical and not religious.

The atmosphere of the younger of the two Homeric epics already differs widely from that of its older companion, the Iliad, with its heroic delight in the untiring manifestation of vital energy. It is likely that the feelings of the **conquerors of a new home upon the Asiatic coast may have differed considerably from those of the same people confirmed in undisturbed possession and enjoyment of their conquests. It seems as if the Odyssey reflected the temper and aspiration of these Ionian city-dwellers of a later time. A spirit of contentment and leisure seems to flow like an undercurrent through the whole poem, and has made for itself a haven of rest in the midst of the busy action of the story. When the poet's own feelings find their true expression they show us idyllic scenes of quiet enjoyment of daily life; magnificent in the country of the Phæacians, gay and more homely at the farm of Eumaios; pictures of quiet repose after the fights of the heroic past, that have now faded into a mere pleasant memory, such as we get in the house of Nestor, or in the Palace of Menelaos and the regained Helen. Or, again, we have a description of nature in a mood of liberality and gentleness, as upon the island of Syriê, the home of Eumaios' childhood, upon which in ample possession of cattle, wine and corn, a people live free from necessity and pain, till they arrive at a good old age when Apollo and Artemis with their gentlest shafts bring swift death to them (Od. xv, 403 ff.). If you ask the poet where this fortunate island lies he will tell you that it lies over there beyond Ortygiê where the sun turns back. But where is Ortygiê,[25\2] and who can point out the place where the sun begins his return journey far in the West? The country of idyllic happiness lies indeed almost beyond {63} the limit of this world. Phoenician merchant-men who go everywhere may perhaps reach that land as well (415 ff.), and Ionian seamen in this earliest period of Greek colonization into which the composition of the Odyssey reaches may well have hoped to find far out over the sea such propitious habitations of a new life.

In the same way the country and the life of the Phæacians seem like an ideal picture of an Ionian state newly founded in a distant land far from the turmoil, the restless competition, and all the limitations of their familiar Greek homes. But this unclouded dream-picture, bathed in purest light, lies far away in a distant land all but inaccessible to man. Only by chance is a strange ship cast away on to that coast, and at once the magic ships of the Phæacians carry back the stranger through night and cloud to his own home again. True, there is no reason to see in the Phæacians a sort of ferry-people of the dead, neighbours of the Elysian fields. Still, the poetic fancy which invented the country of the Phæacians is not unrelated to that which gave rise to the idea of an Elysian plain beyond the bounds of the inhabited world. Given the idea that a life of untroubled bliss can only be had in the remotest confines of the earth, jealously guarded from all intrusion, only one more step remains to be taken before men come to believe that such bliss is really only to be found where neither accident nor purpose can ever bring men, more remote even than the Phæacians, than the country of the Æthiopians, the beloved of the gods, or than the Abioi of the North, already known to the Iliad. It must lie beyond the bounds of real life. Such idyllic longings have given rise to the picture of Elysium. The happiness of those who there enjoy everlasting life seemed to be fully safeguarded only if their place of abode were removed for ever beyond the range of all exploration, out of reach of all future discovery. This happiness is imagined as a condition of perfect bliss under the most benignant sky; easy and untroubled says the poet, is the life of men there, in this resembling the life of the gods, but at the same time without aspiration and without activity. It is doubtful whether the poet of the Iliad would have considered such a future worthy of his heroes, or given the name of happiness to such felicity as this.

§ 5

We were obliged to assume that the poet who inserted these inimitably smooth, melodious verses in the Odyssey was not the first inventor or discoverer of the Elysian paradise beyond {64} the realm of mortality. But though he followed in the footsteps of others, when he introduced into the Homeric poem a reference to this new belief, he was giving this idea for the first time an enduring place in Greek imagination. Other poems might disappear, but anything that appeared in the Iliad or the Odyssey was assured of perpetual remembrance.

The imagination of Greek poets or Greek people never gave up the alluring fancy of a distant land of blessedness into which individual mortals might by the favour of the gods be translated. Even the scanty notices which have come down to us of the contents of the heroic poems that led up to, continued, or connected the two Homeric Epics and linked them up with the whole cycle of Theban and Trojan legend enable us to see how this post-Homeric poetry took pleasure in the recital of still further examples of translation.

The Kypria first described how the army of the Achæans for the second time encamped in Aulis, was detained by adverse winds sent by Artemis; and how Agamemnon on the advice of Kalchas would have sacrificed his own daughter Iphigeneia to the goddess. Artemis, however, snatched away the maiden and transported her to the land of the Taurians, and there made her immortal.[26\2]

The Aithiopis, a continuation of the Iliad, tells of the help brought to the Trojans by Penthesileia and her Amazons, and after her death by Memnon the Æthiopian prince, an imaginary representative of the eastern monarchies of inner Asia. Antilochos, the new favourite of Achilles, falls in the war, but Achilles slays Memnon himself. Thereupon Eos the mother of Memnon (and known as such already to the Odyssey) obtains the permission of Zeus to give immortality to her son.[27\2] It may be supposed that the poet described what we see so often represented upon Greek vases: the mother bearing through the air the dead body of her son. According to the story told in the Iliad, Apollo, with the help of Sleep and Death, the twin brothers, bore off the body of Sarpedon, the son of Zeus, to his Lycian home after he had been slain by Achilles, merely in order that he might be buried in his own country. But the poet of the Aithiopis has tried to outdo the story in the Iliad in impressiveness (for it was evidently his model),[28\2] and has made Eos, with the permission of Zeus, not merely carry off the dead to his far-off home in the East, but there awaken him to immortal life.

Soon after the death of Memnon fate overtakes Achilles himself. When his body, rescued by his friends after much hard fighting, is laid upon its bier, Thetis, his mother, with {65} the Muses and the other sea-goddesses come and sing the funeral dirge. Of this we are told in the last book of the Odyssey (xxiv, 47 ff.) which relates further how his body was burnt, his bones gathered together and entombed under a mound, and the psyche of Achilles departed to the House of Hades; the whole story being told to him in the underworld by the psyche of Agamemnon. But the author of the Aithiopis--always remarkable for his bold innovations in the traditional material--here ventures upon an important new touch. From the funeral pyre, he tells us, Thetis carried off the body of her son and brought him to Leuke.[29\2] That she restored him to life again there and made him immortal the one meagre extract which accident has preserved to us does not say. But there can be no question that that is what the poet narrated--all later accounts conclude the story in this way.

The parallel is clear: the two opponents, Achilles and Memnon, are both set free from the fate of mortals by their goddess-mothers. In bodies once more restored to life they continue to live, not among men, nor yet among the gods, but in a distant wonderland--Memnon in the east, Achilles in the "White Island". The poet himself can hardly have imagined Achilles' Island to have been in the Euxine Sea, where, however, later Greek sailors located this purely mythical spot.

The translation of Menelaos is still more closely paralleled by the story told in the Telegoneia, which was the final and the latest-written of the Cyclic poems, of the fate which attended the family of Odysseus. Telegonos, the son of Odysseus and Kirke, slays his father unwittingly; when he discovers his mistake he brings the body of Odysseus with Penelope and **Telemachos to his mother, Kirke, who makes them immortal; and there they dwell now (in the Isle Aiaia, far away over the sea, we must suppose--Penelope as the wife of Telegonos, and Kirke with Telemachos.[30\2]

§ 6

It is natural to feel surprise that in none of these stories is there any mention of translation to a common meeting-place of the Elect, such as the Elysian plain seemed to be. We must on that account be content to leave unanswered the question to what precise extent these lines of the Odyssey which describe the translation of Menelaos to Elysium may have influenced the development of translation stories in the post-Homeric Epics. The influence must clearly have been {66} considerable.[31\2] The stories of the translation of individual heroes to a solitary after-life in secluded abodes of immortality show, at any rate, the same direction of fancy as that which produced the fields of Elysium. No longer does Eos, after she has snatched him from Hades, raise her son to be among the gods as once she had raised Kleitos and others of her favourites. Memnon enters upon a peculiar state of being that differentiates him from the rest of mankind as much as from the gods. The same applies to Achilles and the other translated heroes. Thus did poetry increase the number of those who belonged to this middle realm; who, born in **mortality have, outside the realms of Olympos, achieved immortality. It is still only favoured individuals who enter this kingdom; it is still poetical aspiration, giving free rein to its creative instinct, that continues to transport an ever-increasing number of the bright figures of Legend into the illumination of everlasting life. Religious worship can have had no more influence in the development of these stories than it had in the narrative of the translation of Menelaos. Achilles, for example, may in later times have had a cult paid to him on an island at the mouth of the Danube, supposed to be Leuke. But the cult was the result and not the motive or the cause of the story. Iphigeneia was certainly the epithet of a Moon-goddess; but the poet who told of the translation of her namesake, the daughter of Agamemnon, had no suspicion of the latter's identity with a goddess--otherwise he would never have regarded her as Agamemnon's daughter. Nor, we may be fairly certain, can it have been an accidental meeting with the cult of the goddess Iphigeneia, which induced him to invent an immortality iure postlimini for his mortal Iphigeneia, by the machinery of translation. Both for the poet and his contemporaries the importance and the essence of his narrative--whether free invention or a reconstruction out of older material--lay in the fact that it told of the raising of a mortal maiden, the daughter of mortal parents, to immortal life, and not to religious veneration which could not have made itself very apparent to the maiden relegated to the distant Tauric country.

The busy expansion of the legendary material went on in epics that finally lost themselves in genealogical poems. To what extent it may have made use of the motif of translation or transfiguration we can no longer accurately judge. The materials at our disposal are quite insufficient to warrant any conclusion. When such a misty figure as Telegonos is deemed worthy of immortality, it may be supposed that in the mind {67} of the poet all the heroes of Epic tradition had come to be possessed of a virtual claim to a share in this mode of continued existence in a life after death. Certainly the more important among them could not be left out--those at least of whose end the Homeric poems themselves had not already given a different version. The poem of the Return of the Heroes from Troy may especially have given scope for many translation stories.[32\2] We may, for example, ask whether Diomedes, at least, whose immortality is often vouched for by later mythology, was not already added to the number of the immortals in the epics of the Heroic cycle. An Attic folk-song of the fifth century can speak with assurance of Diomedes as not having died but as living in the "Islands of the Blest". Thus a far greater company of the Heroes of the Trojan War was thought of by the poetry of Homeric tradition as gathered together in "Isles of the Blest", far out to sea, than we should guess from the summaries of the post-Homeric Epics which accident has preserved to us. This conclusion must be drawn from the lines of a Hesiodic poem which give us some remarkable information about the oldest Greek forms of the Cult of the Souls and belief in immortality, and the lines, therefore, must be subjected to a closer examination.

II

The Hesiodic poem known as the "Works and Days" consists of a number of independent pieces of didactic or narrative interest loosely strung together. In it, not far from the beginning, comes the story of the Five Ages of Men. As regards its subject-matter, the train of thought which unites this section to the passages which precede and follow it is hardly discoverable; in form it is quite disconnected.

In the beginning we are there told the gods of Olympos created a Golden race whose members lived like the gods, without care, sickness or decrepitude, and in enjoyment of rich possessions. After their death, which came upon them like sleep to tired men, they became, by the will of Zeus, Daimones and Guardians of mankind. They were followed by a Silver race, far inferior to the first, and unlike them in body as in mind. The men of this race had a long childhood, lasting a hundred years, followed by a short youth, during which their wantonness and pride in their dealings with each other and with the gods brought them much sorrow. Because they refused the honours due to the gods Zeus destroyed them and they are now Daimones of the Underworld, honoured {68} but inferior to the Daimones of the Golden Age. Zeus then created a third race, this time of Bronze--hard-hearted and of great strength; war was their delight, and being destroyed by their own hands they went down unhonoured to the House of Hades. Thereupon Zeus made a fourth race that was juster and better, the race of Heroes, who were called "Demigods". They fought before Thebes and Troy and some of them died, while others Zeus sent to dwell at the ends of the world on the Islands of the Blest by the river Okeanos, where the Earth brings them her fruits three times in the year. "Would that I did not belong to the fifth Age; would that I had died earlier or been born hereafter," says the poet, "since now is the Iron Age," when toil and grief never leave men, when there is enmity of all against all and force conquers right, and Envy, evil-tongued, delighting in wickedness, fierce-eyed, is over everything. Now, Shame and the goddess of retribution, Nemesis, depart from men and go to the gods; every misfortune is left behind for man, and there is no defence against evil.

The author here lays before us the results of gloomy reflection upon the origin and growth of evil in the world of men. He sees the steps of mankind's degeneration from the height of godlike happiness to the extremes of misery and wickedness. He is following popular conceptions. It is natural to every race of men to lay the scene of earthly perfection in the past, so long, at least, as man gets his information about that past not from distinct historical memory, but from the picturesque stories and beautiful dreams of the poets which encourage the natural tendency of fancy to retain only the more attractive features of the past in the memory. The folk-lore of many lands can tell of a Golden Age and how mankind gradually fell from that high estate; and it is not at all surprising if fanciful speculation starting from the same point and travelling along the same road has reached the same conclusion in the case of more than one people without the aid of any historical connexion. We have a number of expressions of the idea of man's gradual degeneration through several Ages which present the most striking similarities among themselves and with the Hesiodic picture of the five Ages of Men. Even Homer is sometimes overcome by the mood; it lies, for instance, at the root of such idealizations of the past as are implied when in his description of the heroic life he thinks of "men as they now are" and "how few sons are equal to their fathers in virtue; worse, most of them; few, indeed, are the men who are better than their fathers" {69} (Od. ii, 276 f.). But the epic poet keeps himself and his fancy on the heights of the heroic Past; only occasionally, and in passing, his glance falls upon the commonplace level of real life. But the poet of the "Works and Days" has all his thoughts fixed upon the level plain of real and contemporary life; the glance which he occasionally casts upon the heights of the storied past is all the more bitter on that account.

What he has to say of the first condition of mankind and the gradual process of deterioration is given, not as an abstract exposition of what in the necessary course of things must have occurred, but rather as a traditional account of what had actually happened--in fact, as history.

In this light he himself must certainly have regarded it, though, apart from a few vague memories, no historical tradition is contained in what he says of the nature and deeds of the earlier generations of mankind. His story remains an imaginary picture. And for this reason the development, as he presents it, takes a logically defined and regulated course, based on the idea of a gradual deterioration. The uneventful happiness of the first race of men who know neither virtue nor vice is followed by a second race, which after a prolonged minority displays pride and contempt of the gods. In the third, or brazen age, active wickedness breaks out, with war and murder. The last age, at the beginning of which the poet himself seems to stand, marks the breakdown of all moral restraint. The fourth race of men, to which the heroes of the Theban and Trojan wars belong, is alone among all the others in not being named and ranked after a metal. It is an alien in the evolutionary process. The downward course is checked during the fourth age, and yet in the fifth it goes on again as if it had never been interrupted. It is not apparent why that course should have been interrupted. Most of the commentators have recognized in the story of the fourth age a fragment of different material, originally foreign to the poem of the Ages of Men and added deliberately by Hesiod to this poem, which he may have taken over in its essential features from older poets. But if we adopt this view we have to ask what can have tempted the poet to such serious disturbance and dislocation of the orderly succession of the original speculative poem. It will not be enough to say that the poet, brought up in the Homeric tradition, found it impossible to pass over, in a description of the earlier ages of men, the figures of the heroic poetry which, thanks to the power of song, had acquired in the imagination of the Greeks more reality than the plainest manifestations of actual life. Nor {70} is it likely that, having in his grim description of the Bronze race introduced a darker picture of the Heroic age, drawn from a point of view different from that of the courtly Epos, he wished to set by its side this bright vision of the same age as he saw it in his own mind. If the picture of the Bronze race does really refer to the Heroic age,[33\2] giving its reverse side, so to speak, Hesiod never seems to have noticed the fact. He must have had stronger grounds than these for the introduction of his narrative. He cannot have failed to perceive that he was breaking the continuity of moral deterioration by his introduction of the Heroic race. It follows that he must have had some aim, other than that of the description of the moral deterioration of men, which he imagined himself to be serving by the introduction of this new section. This other purpose will become plain if we inquire what it is that really interests the poet in the Heroic race. It is not their higher morality--that only interrupted the series of continually worsening generations. Nor would he in that case have dismissed the subject with a few words which barely suffice to connect this section with the theme of moral development. Further, it is not the fights and great deeds done at Thebes or Troy that interest him for he says nothing of their greatness, and at once declares that the cruel war and the dread fury of battle destroyed the Heroes. This, again, does not discriminate between the Heroes and the men of the Bronze age who also, being destroyed by their own deeds, had to go down to Hades. What distinguishes the Heroic age from the others is the way in which some of the Heroes depart from this life without dying. This is the point that interests the poet, and this it must have been that chiefly induced him to bring in here his account of the fourth race of men. He combines clearly enough with his main purpose of describing the advancing moral decline of man, a secondary aim--that of telling what happened after death to the representatives of each successive race. In introducing the Heroic race of men this secondary aim becomes the chief one, and justifies what would otherwise have been merely an intrusive episode. It is this aim, too, which gives the Hesiodic narrative its importance for our present inquiry.

§ 2

The men of the Golden Age, after sleep has overcome them and they have died and been laid in the earth, become by the will of Zeus "Daimones"--Daimones upon earth, watchers of men, wandering over all the earth, veiled in clouds, {71} observing justice and injustice,[34\2] dispensing riches like kings. These men of the earliest times have then become effective realities. They are not spirits confined to an inaccessible region beyond this world, but powers acting and working amongst men. In this exalted state Hesiod calls them Daimones, and thus describes them by a name which is otherwise applied by him as well as by Homer only to the immortal gods. The name so employed is not to be understood as implying a separate class of immortals, an intermediate class of beings between gods and men, as later speculation used the word.[35\2] These later beings of an intermediate class were thought of as possessing an originally immortal nature like the gods, and as dwelling in an intermediate region of their own. Hesiod's Daimones, on the contrary, have once been men and have only after their death become immortals invisibly[36\2] roaming the earth. When they are given the name Daimones nothing more is implied than that they now share the invisible might and unending life of the gods, and to that extent may be called gods--with as much right as Ino Leukothea, for instance, who, according to Homer, became a goddess after being a mortal; or as Phaëthon, who, according to the Hesiodic Theogony, was raised by Aphrodite from the world of mortality and is now called a "godlike Daimon" (Th., 991). On the other hand, these immortals who were once men are clearly distinguished from the everlasting gods, "who have their Olympian dwellings," by being called Daimones "who rule upon earth".[37\2] And though they are given the name, familiar to everybody from Homer, of Daimones, i.e. gods, they, nevertheless, form a class of beings which is entirely unknown to Homer. Homer knows of certain individual men who are raised or translated, body and soul together, to undying life. The later Epos can tell of certain also who, like Memnon or Achilles, receive a new life after their death and now live on in undivided unity of body and soul. But that the soul outside Erebos could carry on a conscious life of its own and influence living men--of this there is no mention in Homer. Yet this is exactly what has happened according to the Hesiodic poem. The men of the Golden Age have died and now live on divided from their bodies, invisible and godlike, and therefore called gods. Just as in Homer, the gods themselves assume manifold shapes and visit the cities of men, observing the good and evil deeds of men,[38\2] so also do the souls of the dead in Hesiod. For the beings who here, after their separation from the body, have become Daimones, are Souls--that is to say, beings who after their {72} death have entered in any case upon a higher existence than was theirs while they were united to the body. This, however, is an idea that we never meet with in the Homeric poems.

And yet it is quite unthinkable that this remarkable conception is the independent and passing invention of the Boeotian poet. He comes back to it again later on in the course of his poem. "Thirty thousand," that is, innumerable immortal Watchers over mortal men wander invisibly in the service of Zeus over the earth, taking note of right and wrong (Op., 252 ff.). The conception is important to him for ethical reasons; if he is to make use of it in his argument he must not have invented it himself. And, in fact, nothing that belongs to the sphere of religious belief and cultus, or even the lower levels of superstition, has been invented by this earnest-minded poet. The Boeotian school of poetry to which he belonged was far removed from, and indeed, hostile to the free inventiveness and roaming fancy with which the Homeric school ". . . know how to put forward many lies and make them seem like truth" (Th., 27). In pursuance of their purpose not simply to please but always in some sense to teach, the Boeotian poets never innovate in the region of the purely mythical, but simply order or piece together, or merely register what they find in the tradition. In religion especially invention lies farthest from their minds, though they do not by any means deny themselves the right of independent speculation about the traditional. Thus, what Hesiod tells us about the men of a previous age, whose souls after death become Daimones, came to him from tradition. It might still be objected that this tradition while being older than Hesiod may, nevertheless, be more recent than Homer, and be the result of post-Homeric speculation. It is unnecessary to develop the reasons which make such a view untenable; the course of our inquiry up to the present has made it possible for us to maintain decidedly that in what Hesiod here says we have a fragment of primitive belief reaching back far beyond Homer and surviving in the secluded Boeotian countryside. We have found even in the poems of Homer vestiges of a cult of the dead sufficient to make us believe that once in a distant past the Greeks resembled the majority of other nations and believed in the continued, conscious existence of the psyche after its separation from the body and in its powerful influence upon the world of men. We found, too, that in accordance with this belief, religious honours of various sorts were paid to the disembodied souls. In Hesiod's narrative we simply have documentary confirmation of {73} what could only be with difficulty extracted from the study of Homer. Here we encounter the still living belief in the elevation of the soul after death to a higher life. They are the souls, it must be noted, of a race of men long since disappeared, about whom this belief is held. The belief in their godlike after-life must therefore be long-standing, and the worship of these souls as powerful beings still continues. For when it is said of the souls of the second race "these also receive worship"[39\2] (Op., 142), it is distinctly implied that the Daimones of the first or Golden generation a fortiori received worship.

The men of the Silver generation, on account of their refusal to pay due honour to the Olympians, are "hidden" by Zeus under the earth, and are now called "mortal Blessed Ones that live below the earth, second in rank, yet worship is paid to them also" (141-2). Thus, the poet knows of the souls of men who likewise belonged to the distant past, whose home is in the bowels of the earth, who receive religious honour and who must therefore have been conceived as powerful. The poet has not specified the nature of their influence upon the upper world. It is true that he does not distinctly call the spirits of this second generation "good", as he had done the first (122), and he makes them spring from the less perfect Silver age and seems to have given them inferior rank. But it does not follow that he here anticipated later speculation and thought of the second generation as a class of wicked demons whose nature it is to work evil.[40\2] Only to the Olympians do they seem to stand in a rather more distant relationship--almost one of hostility. They had before paid the gods none of their pious dues, and so now they are not called, like the souls of the first race, "Daimones appointed by Zeus to be Watchers of men." The poet refers to them with a remarkable expression, "mortal Blessed Ones," that is, mortal gods. This very singular denomination, the two parts of which really cancel one another, points to a certain embarrassment felt by the poet in making use of an expression taken from the Homeric vocabulary (to which the poet felt himself confined) to designate clearly and effectively a class of beings that was unknown to Homer.[41\2] The disembodied souls of the first race he had simply called Daimones. But this name, common as it was both to the race of those who from mortality had achieved immortality and to the immortal gods, left the essential difference between the two classes of immortal beings unexpressed. For that very reason the name was never employed in Hesiod's fashion by later ages,[42\2] who always {74} called such as, not having been born immortal, had achieved immortality, by the name of "Heroes". Hesiod, who could not use the word in this sense, described them by the bold oxymoron: mortal Blessed Ones, human gods. As immortal spirits they resembled the gods in their new state of being. But their nature was still mortal, and hence their bodies had to die, and this constituted their difference from the everlasting gods.[43\2]

The name Daimones then does not appear to involve any essential distinction between the spirits of the men of the Silver generation and the Daimones of the Golden Age. Only the place where the two classes of spirits have their dwelling is different--the Daimones of the Silver race live in the depths of the earth. The expression "of the underworld", used of them, is a vague one, and only suffices to differentiate them from the spirits of the "upper world" who were derived from the first race. Still, the abode of the souls of the Silver Age is in any case not thought of as being the distant meeting-place of the unconscious, vegetating shadow-souls--the House of Hades; the "phantoms" that hover about that place could not have been called Daimones or "mortal gods", nor do they receive any kind of worship after their death.

§ 3

The Silver Age, then, belongs to a long-since vanished past.[44\2] The stalwarts of the Bronze Age, we are told, destroyed by their deeds, went down into the gloomy home of the dreadful Hades, nameless. Black Death seized them, for all their violence, and they left the light of the sun.

Except for the addition of the adjective "nameless" one might, indeed, suppose that this was a description of the fate of the souls of the Homeric heroes. Perhaps, however, the word[45\2] only means that no honourable and distinctive title, such as belonged to the souls of the first and second as well as to the fourth race, was attached to those who had gone down into the shadow-world of annihilation and become as nothing.

There follows "the divine race of Heroes who were called the Demigods". The wars at Thebes and Troy destroyed these. Part were "enfolded in the destiny of Death"; others received life and a home far from men at the hand of Zeus Kronides, who gave them a dwelling-place at the ends of the world. There they live, free from care, in the Islands of the Blest, by the deep-flowing Okeanos; favoured Heroes, for whom the Earth, of her own accord, brings forth her sweet fruits three times a year. {75}

Here, at last, for the first time we have reached a clearly definable period of legendary history. The poet means to speak of the Heroes whose adventures were narrated in the Thebais, the Iliad and kindred poems. What we notice here specially is how little the Greeks yet knew of their history. Immediately after the disappearance of the Heroes the poet begins the age in which he himself must live. Where the realm of poetry ends, there is an end of all further tradition; there follows a blank, and to all appearances the present age immediately begins. That explains why the Heroic Age is the last before the fifth, to which the poet himself belongs, and why it does not, for example, precede the (undated) Bronze Age. It connects itself conveniently with the Bronze Age also in what is related of the fate suffered by a part of its representatives, for the subject which here particularly interests the poet is the fate of the departed. Some of the fallen Heroes simply die--that is to say (there can be no doubt of it) they enter the realm of Hades like the members of the Bronze race or the Heroes of the Iliad. But when others are distinguished from those whom "Death took" in that they reach the Islands of the Blest, it is impossible not to suppose that these last have not suffered death, that is, the separation of the Psyche from the visible Self, but have been carried away alive in the flesh. The poet is thinking of such cases as those we have met with in the Odyssean narrative of Menelaos, or, in the Telegoneia, of Penelope, Telemachos and Telegonos. These few exceptional instances could hardly have made such a deep impression on him that he felt himself bound on their behalf to erect a special class of the Translated to be set over against those who simply died. There can be no doubt that he had many more examples before him of this same mysterious mode of separation from the world of men that did not involve death. We have already seen how the lines in the Odyssey in which the translation of Menelaos is foreshadowed, point back to other and earlier poems of the same kind. Further, the references to the subject which we found in the remains of the Cyclic Epics make it easy to suppose that later Heroic poetry had been continually widening the circle of those who enjoyed translation and illumination.

Only from such a poetical source can Hesiod have derived his conception of a common meeting-place where the Translated enjoy for ever their untroubled existence. He calls that place the "Islands of the Blest"; and these lie far removed from the world of men, in the Ocean, on the confines of the earth, just where the Odyssey puts the Elysian {76} plain, another meeting-place of the still-living Translated, or rather the same under a different name. Its name does not oblige us to regard the "Elysian plain" as an island, but neither does it exclude that assumption. Homer never expressly calls the land of the Phæacians an island,[46\2] but the imagination of most readers will picture Scheriê as such, and so did the Greeks perhaps already at the time of the Hesiodic school of poets. In the same way a poet may have thought of the "Land of Destiny" that receives passing mention in Homer as an island, or group of islands; only an island surrounded and cut off by the sea can give the full impression of a distant asylum far from the world, inaccessible to all save those specially called thither. And accordingly the mythology of many peoples, especially those who live by the sea, has made a distant island the dwelling-place of the souls of the departed.

Complete isolation is the essential feature of the whole idea of translation, as Hesiod clearly shows. A later poet has added a line--which does not quite fit into its place--to make this isolation even more marked.[47\2] According to it, these Blessed Ones live not only "far from men" (167), but also (169) far from the immortals, and are ruled over by Kronos. The writer of this line follows a beautiful legend, later, however, than Hesiod, in which Zeus released the aged Kronos, together with the other Titans,[48\2] from Tartaros, so that the old king of the gods, under whose rule the Golden Age had once prevailed with peace and happiness upon earth, now wields the sceptre of another Golden Age over the Blessed in Elysium, himself a figure of peaceful contemplation dwelling far away from the stormy world, from the throne of which he has been ousted by Zeus. Hesiod himself has provoked this transference of Kronos from the Golden Age to the land of the Translated; for in the few lines that he devotes to the description of the life of the Blessed a reminiscence of the picture of the Golden Age's untroubled existence is clearly discernible. Both pictures, the one of a childhood's paradise in the past, the other of unclouded happiness reserved in the future for the elect, are closely related; it is difficult to say which of them has influenced the other[49\2] since the colours must have been the same in any case--the purely idyllic having an inevitable uniformity of its own.

§ 4

Hesiod says nothing of any influence upon this world exerted by the souls of the Translated in the Islands of the Blest, such as is attributed to the Daimones of the Golden {77} race, nor of any religious worship, which would be implied by such influence if it existed, such as the underworld spirits of the Silver Age receive. All relations with this world are broken off, for any influence from this side would completely contradict the whole conception of these blessed departed. Hesiod faithfully sets down the conception of the Translated exactly as poetic fancy, without any interference from religious cultus, or the folk-belief founded on it, had instinctively shaped it.

Supposing, then, that he follows Homeric and post-Homeric poetic tradition in this particular, whence did he derive his ideas about the Daimones and spirits of the Golden and Silver Ages? He did not and could not have got these from Homeric or semi-Homeric sources, for they (unlike the idea of Translation) do not simply expand, but actually contradict Homeric beliefs about the soul. To this question we may answer with certainty; he derived them from cultus. There survived, in spite of Homer, at least in central Greece where the Hesiodic poetry had its home, a religious worship paid to the souls of certain departed classes of men; and this cultus preserved alive, at least as a vague tradition, a belief which Homer had obscured and dispossessed. It only reached the Boeotian poet, whose own conceptions spring entirely from the soil of Homeric belief, as from a far distance. Already in the days of the Bronze race, he tells us, the souls of the dead were swallowed up in the dread House of Hades, and this (with a few miraculous exceptions) applies to the Heroic race as well. And for the poet, standing as he does, at the opening of the Iron Age, to which he himself belongs, nothing remains but dissolution in the nothingness of Erebos. That such is his view is proved by his silence about the fate after death of his generation--a silence that is all the more oppressive because the grim picture that he gives of the misery and ever-increasing depravity of real and contemporary life might seem to require a brighter and more hopeful picture of future compensation, if only to balance it and make it endurable. But he is silent about all such future compensation; he has no such hope to offer. Though in another part of the same poem Hope alone of all the blessings of an earlier and better age still remains among men, such Hope no longer illuminates the next world, at any rate, with its beams. The poet, more deeply distressed by the common realities of life, can by no means dispense so easily as the singers of the epic tradition enclosed in the magic circle of their poetry, with such hopes of the future. He can draw comfort only from what poetry {78} or religious myth tell him of the far distant past. It never enters his head to believe that the miracle of the translation of living men could transcend the limits of the Heroic Age and repeat itself in the common and prosaic present day. And the time when, according to a law of nature no longer (so it seems) in operation, the souls of the dead became Daimones and lived a higher life upon and beneath the earth, is situated far back in the distant past. Another law rules now; the men of to-day may still worship the immortal spirits of the Golden and the Silver Age, but they themselves will never be added to the number of those illuminated and exalted souls.

§ 5

Hesiod's description, then, of the five Ages of Men gives us the most important information about the development of Greek belief in the soul. What he tells us of the spirits of the Silver and Golden race shows that from the earliest dawn of history down to the actual lifetime of the poet, a form of ancestor-worship had prevailed, based upon the once living belief in the elevation of disembodied and immaterial souls to the rank of powerful, consciously active spirits. But the company of these spirits receives no additions from the life of the present day. For centuries now the souls of the dead have been claimed by Hades and his vain shadow world. The worship of the soul is stationary; it affects only the souls of the long-since departed; it no longer increases the number of the objects of its worship. In other words, the belief has changed; the Homeric poems have triumphed and the view they held, and to which they gave authority, and, as it were, official sanction, now prevails. They teach men that the psyche once separated from the body loses all its powers and consciousness; the strengthless shadows are received into a distant Underworld. For them, no action, no influence upon the world of men is possible, and therefore no cult can be paid to them. Only on the farthest horizon faintly appear the Islands of the Blest, but the circle of the fortunate, who, according to the visionary fancy of the poets, are translated alive there, is now closed, just as the circle of epic story is complete also. Such miracles no longer happen.

Nothing in this evolutionary process so clearly depicted in the poem of Hesiod contradicts what we have learned from Homer. One thing only is new and immensely important; in spite of everything the memory survives that once the souls of departed generations of men had achieved a higher, {79} undying life. Hesiod speaks in the present tense of their being and working and of the worship paid to them after their death; if they are believed to be immortal, men will naturally continue to worship them. And the opposite also is true; if the worship of such spirits had not survived into the present, no one would have held them to be deathless and eternally potent.

In a word, we are in the old Greek mainland, the land of Boeotian peasants and urban farmers, among a stay-at-home race which neither knows nor desires to know of the seafaring life that tempts men to foreign lands whence they bring back so much that is new and strange. Here in the central uplands vestiges of ancient custom and belief remained that had been forgotten in the maritime cities of new Greece on the Asiatic coast. Even here, however, the new learning had penetrated to this extent: the structure of ancient belief, transported into the distant past, interwoven with fanciful tales of the earliest state of mankind, like the expiring echo of half-forgotten song lives on only in memory. But the cult of Souls, is not yet quite dead; the possibility remains that it may yet renew its strength and expand into fresh life when once the magic influence of the Homeric view of the world shall have been broken.

NOTES TO CHAPTER II

[1\2: It is not for nothing that what is here said of the "climate", if one may so call it, of the Elysian plain, ~d~ 566-8, reminds us so strikingly of the description of the abode of the Gods on Olympos, ~z~ 43-5.]

[2\2: The announcement of the fate of Menelaos is quite superfluous; it is not necessitated (and not even justified) by his first request (468 ff.), or by his further questions (486 ff.; 551 ff.). Nitzsch already regarded the lines 561-8 as a later addition: Anm. z. Od. iii, p. 352--though indeed on grounds that I cannot regard as conclusive. Others have done the same since.]

[3\2: The following are made invisible (by envelopment in a cloud) and carried away--this, though not always stated, is most probably to be understood in most cases: Paris, by Aphrodite, ~G~ 380 ff.; Aeneas, by Apollo, ~E~ 344 f.; Idaios, son of Dares, the priest of Hephaistos, by Heph., ~E~ 23; Hektor, by Apollo, ~U~ 443 f.; Aeneas, by Poseidon, ~U~ 325 ff.; Agenor, by Apollo, ~Ph~ 596 ff.--this last appears to be the original copied twice over in the story of this one day of fighting by later poets (in the above-mentioned cases of the use of the motif, ~U~ 325 ff.; 443 f.). It is remarkable (for no special reason for it suggests itself) that all these cases of translation are found on the Trojan side. Otherwise we only have one instance (and that only in the narrative of a long past adventure, the translation of the Anaktoriones by their father Poseidon, ~L~ 750 ff. Lastly, a case that hardly goes beyond those already mentioned: Zeus could have translated alive his son Sarpedon out of the fray and placed him in his Lykian home (~P~ 436), but refrains owing to the warning of Hera (440 ff.).]

[4\2: The wish to die quickly is expressly contrasted with the wish to be carried off by the Harpies, 63 ~ê\ e/peita~--"or if not," i.e. if quick death is denied to me. (v. Rh. Mus. 50, 2, 2.) Again 79-80: ~hôs e/m' aïstô/seian Olu/mpia dô/mat' e/chontes êe/ m' eüplo/kamos ba/loi A/rtemis~. Thus the Harpies (= ~thu/ella~ 63) in this case do not bring death but carry away men alive (~anarpa/xasa oi/choito~ 63 f., ~ha/rpuiai anêrei/psanto~ 77 = ~ane/lonto thu/ellai~ 66, and they carry them off ~kat' êero/enta ke/leutha~ 64 to the ~prochoai\ apsorro/ou Ôkeanoi=o~ 65 ~e/dosan stugerê=|sin Erinu/sin amphipoleu/ein~ 78). At the "mouths of Okeanos" (where it goes into the sea is the entrance to the world of the dead; ~k~ 508 ff., ~l~ 13 ff. To be carried off by the storm-spirits used proverbially as a wish: ~Z~ 345 ff. ~hô=s m' o/phel' ê/mati tô=| ho/te me prô=ton te/ke mê/têr oi/chesthai prophe/rousa kakê\ ane/moio thu/ella eis o/ros ê\ eis ku=ma poluphloi/sboio thala/ssês~ (i.e. to some solitary place, Orph., H. 19, 19; 36, 16; 71, 11). Such transportation through the air is elsewhere contrasted with death and dwelling in Hades, as in Penelope's prayer. (Roscher, Kynanthropie [Abh. d. sächs. Ges. d. Wiss. xvii], p. 67, gives a strange but hardly the correct explanation of this.) Cf. Soph., Tr., 953 ff.; Ai., 1193 ff.; (Phil., 1092 ff.?); cf. also Eur., Hipp., 1279 ff.; Ion, 805 f.; Supp., 833-6. A deeply rooted popular mode of thought, and one of primeval antiquity, lies at the root of all {81} these instances.--~hupo\ pneuma/tôn sunarpage/nta a/phanton gene/sthai~ is a reason for ~timai\ atha/natoi~, in the only half-rationalized story of Hesperos in D.S. 3, 60, 3.]

[5\2: One would like to know more of this strange story, but what we learn elsewhere of Pandareos and his daughters (Sch. ~u~ 66-7; ~t~ 518; Ant. Lib. 36) contributes nothing to the understanding of the Homeric narrative and probably belongs in part to another connexion. Pandareos, father of Aëdon (~t~ 518 ff.), seems to be another person. Even the strange representation of the two daughters of Pandareos in Polygnotos' picture of the underworld (Paus. 10, 30, 2) casts no light on the Homeric fable. (Cf. Roscher, Kynan., 4 ff., 65 f.)]

[6\2: The Erinyes live normally in Erebos, as is shown esp. by ~I~ 571 f.; ~T~ 259. But when they punish during the lifetime of the criminal acts done in contravention of the laws of family life, it must be supposed that they were sometimes thought of as going about the earth, e.g. ~I~ 454: ~l~ 278--for "working at a distance" seems impossible--as in Hes., Op., 803 f.--~Erinu/sin amphipoleu/ein~ (78) cannot be anything but "serve the Erinyes", "become their ~amphi/poloi~". To understand it as Roscher does (Kynan., 65, n. 183) following Eustathius, in the sense "fly about in the train of the E." is forbidden by the use of the simple dative ~Erinu/si~ joined closely with ~amph.~ (~theai=s amphipolô=n~ Soph., O.C., 680, is different.)]

[7\2: "When the Bride of the Wind comes by you must throw yourself on the ground as though it were the Muodisheere (on which see Grimm (E.T.), p. 931) otherwise they will carry you off." Birlinger, Volksthüml. a. Schwaben, i, 192, "She is the Devil's Bride," ib. (On the "Bride of the Wind", etc., see Grimm, pp. 632, 1009.) Such wind-spirits are in unholy alliance with the "Furious Host", i.e. the unquiet "souls" of the dead that travel through the air by night.]

[8\2: On the Harpies, see Rh. Mus., 50, 1-5.]

[9\2: See Nägelsb., H.T., pp. 42-3, and Roscher, _Nektar u. Ambrosia_, p. 51 ff., answering Bergk's objections, Opusc. ii, 669. (Arist. Meta., 1000a, 9-14, is very definite.)]

[10\2: It is not improbable that this Ino Leukothea was originally a goddess who was later turned into a "Heroine" (identified with the daughter of Kadmos for reasons no longer recoverable and only afterwards turned back again into a goddess. But for the Homeric age she was essentially a mortal who had become a goddess: for this reason, just because she was an example of such deification of mortals, she remained an interesting character to later writers; cf. in addition to the well-known passages in Pindar, etc., Cic., T.D. i, 28. Only what the actual conception of the people and their poets was--not what may possibly be suggested as the doubtful background of such conceptions--concerns me in this as in many other cases.]

[11\2: Only temporary translation (~anê/rpase~) of Marpessa by Apollo ~I~ 564.]

[12\2: Ganymedes, ~anê/rpase the/spis a/ella~, h. Ven., 208, as the ~thu/ella~ (= ~Ha/rpuia~) did the daughters of Pandareos. The eagle is the addition of later poetry.]

[13\2: ~L~ 1; ~e~ 1.]

[14\2: ~Êô\s . . . ap' Ôkeanoi=o rhoa/ôn ô/rnuth', hi/n' athana/toisi pho/ôs phe/roi êde\ brotoi=sin~, ~T~ 1 f.: cf. ~ps~ 244 (h. Merc., 184 f.). So also h. Ven., 224 ff., says of Tithonos: ~Êoi= terpo/menos chrusothro/nô| êrigenei/ê| nai=e par' Ôkeanoi=o rhoê=|s epi\ pei/rasi gai/ês~, in good Homeric style. It seems that the magic island Aiaia was considered the home of Eos (and of Tithonos): ~m~ 3: ~nê=so/n t' Aiai/ên, ho/thi t' Êou=s êrigenei/ês {82} oiki/a kai\ choroi/ eisi antolai\ êeli/oio~. I need not here go into the attempts made even in antiquity to explain the much-discussed difficulty introduced by this verse and to bring it into conformity with the westerly situation of Aiaia implied in the rest of the Odyssey. One thing is certain: the first composer of this verse thought of Aiaia as lying towards the east. Only the last resources of the commentator's art could situate the place of the "sun's uprising" and the "dwelling of the Dawn" in the west.]

[15\2: Among innumerable unsuccessful attempts made by the ancients at finding an etymological derivation for the word ~Êlu/sion~ (Sch., ~d~ 563, Eust., p. 1509, Hesych., s.v., etc., also Cels. ap. Orig., Cels. vii, 28, p. 53 L.) occurs also the right one, E.M., 428, 36: ~para\ tê\n e/leusin, e/ntha hoi eusebei=s paragi/nontai~. The grammarians seem to have disputed over the question, did Menelaos live for ever in Elysion? It was agreed on all hands that he reached that abode alive, without separation of psyche from body; but the over-subtle thought that the prophecy meant that he too should die there though not in Argos--not that he should never die at all: so esp. E. Gud., 242, 2 ff. This was the opinion also of those who derived ~Êlu/sion~ from the fact that there the ~psuchai\ lelume/nai tô=n sôma/tôn dia/gousi~: Eust., 1509, 29, E.M., etc. The etymology is as bad as the interpretation of the line. The line remained, however, throughout antiquity as a curiosity; intelligent readers understood the prophecy quite rightly as referring to the translation of Menelaos to everlasting life without separation of ~psuchê/~ from body; e.g. Porph. ap. Stob., Ecl. i, p. 422, 8 ff., W. So, too, those who gave the right interpretation of fact, but rested it upon the more dubious etymology: ~Êlu/sion oulu/sion, ho/ti ou dialu/ontai apo\ tô=n sôma/tôn hai psuchai/~. Hesych. (cf. E.M., 428, 34-5; Sch., ~d~ 563; Procl. on Hes., Op., 169).]

[16\2: ~ou mê\n phai/netai/ ge (ho poiêtê/s) proagagô\n to\n lo/gon es ple/on hôs heu/rêma a/n tis oikei=on, prosapsa/menos de\ autou= mo/non ha/te es ha/pan ê/dê diabeboême/nou to\ Hellêniko/n~--to adopt the words that Pausanias (10, 31, 4) uses of a similar case.]

[17\2: The reasons for the special favour shown to Rhadamanthys are as unknown to us as they evidently were to the Greeks of later times. What is generally said of the "justice" of Rhad. rests upon private opinion only and does not supply the place of the precise legend that should have justified his translation. That he once had a complete legend of his own may be guessed from the allusion to him in ~ê~ 323, though that passage still leaves us quite in the dark. At any rate, it certainly does not follow from that reference that while dwelling in Elysion he was a neighbour of the Phaeacians as Welcker thinks: nor further that he had always been a dweller in Elysion, as Preller supposes, instead of being transported there. Nothing in the former passage justifies us in regarding him as then dwelling in Elysion; while the other reference to him must be supposed to mean that Rhad. just as much as Menelaos, was translated to Elys. (and so e.g. Paus. understood the poet 8, 53, 5: ~pro/teron de\ e/ti Rhada/manthun entau=tha hê/kein~; doubtful: Aesch. fr. 99, 12-13). In fact, we have lost the legends which gave the details of his translation: his figure had become isolated and had not entered into the greater circle of epic figures--and as a consequence his mythical context soon disappeared too.]

[18\2: Hasisatra's Translation: see the translation of the Babylonian account in Paul Haupt's Der Keilins. Sintfluthber. (Leip. 1881), p. 17, 18. The expressions used by the Greek-writing reporters are exactly like those common in Greek accounts of translation: ~gene/sthai aphanê= {83} (to\n Xi/southron) meta\ tô=n theô=n oikê/sonta~, Beros. ap. Sync., p. 55, 6, 11 Di.; ~theoi/ min ex anthrô/pôn aphani/zousi~, Abydenus ap. Syncell., p. 70, 13. Of Enoch we read, Gen. 5^24: ~ouch heuri/sketo ho/ti mete/thêken auto\n ho theo/s (metete/thê~, Ecclus., 44^16; Hebr. 11^5); ~anelê/phthê apo\ tê=s gê=s~, Ecclus. 49^14; ~anechô/rêse pro\s to\ thei=on~, Jos., AJ. i, 3, 4 (of Moses: ~aphani/zetai~, Jos., AJ. iv, 8, 48). On the translation of Enoch and Elijah, see also Schwally, D. Leben. nach d. Tode n. d. Vorst. d. a. Israel (1892), p. 140. Translation of the living into Sheol often in the O.T., see Schwally, p. 62. Even Enoch has not escaped the fate of being regarded by comparative mythologists as the sun. Enoch may be given up to them, if the Orientalists have no objection; but it seems a pity that the theory, in accordance with the favourite argument from analogy, should be applied to Greek Translation-myths too, so that we should see the whole series of such figures, from Menelaos to Apollonios of Tyana, transformed by magic into mythological suns (or dawns, water-meadows, thunder-clouds, etc.).]

[19\2: ~malthako\s aichmêtê/s~, ~R~ 588.]

[20\2: ~X~ 321-2.]

[21\2: One might even suspect that Menelaos is translated to everlasting life not merely because he has Helen, Zeus' daughter, to wife: ~hou/nek' e/cheis Hele/nên~ as Proteus tells him, but in imitation of a much earlier mythical tradition, according to which Helen herself was translated and made immortal. No ancient tradition reports the death of Helen--with the exception of the absurd invention of Ptolemaios Chennos (Phot. Bibl., p. 149_a_, 37 Bk.; 42; 149_b_, 1 ff.) and the not very superior aetiological myth in Paus. 3, 19, 10. On the other hand, we often hear of her deification, living on the island Leuke or else in the Islands of the Blest. It was not unnatural that mythological tradition should have at an early period set free the most "daemonic" of women from the usual fate of mankind and that Menelaos should rather have followed her example than she his (as Isoc. 10, 62, definitely says).]

[22\2: Cf. Tylor, ii, 85: J. G. Müller, Ges. d. Americ. Urrelig., 660 f.; Waitz, Anthrop. v, 2, 114; vi, 302, 307.]

[23\2: We are told that Rhadamanthys was once conveyed by the Phaeacians to Euboea ~epopso/menos Tituo\n Gaiê/ïon huio/n~ (~ê~ 321 ff.). We have no grounds and no right to complete this story by supposing that this was when Rh. already lived in Elysion. To regard the Phaeacians as a sort of "ferry-folk of the dead" connected in some way with Elysion is pure unsupported fancy.]

[24\2: The possessor of ~athanasi/a~ did not necessarily possess also ~du/namin iso/theon~ (Isoc. 10, 61).]

[25\2: To identify ~Ortugi/ê~, ~o~ 404, with Delos, and ~Suri/ê~ with the island Syros as the older commentators and K. O. Müller, Dorier, i, 381 [? not in E.T.], did, is impossible on account of the addition of the words ~ho/thi tropai\ êeli/oio~ alone. These show that Syrie was far away in the fabulous west, the only possible place for such a wonderland. It is evident that Ortygia is originally a purely mythical spot, sacred to Artemis and no more certainly fixed in one place than the Dionysian Nysa, and for that reason always to be found wherever the cult of Artemis was especially popular, in Aetolia, Syracuse, Ephesos, or Delos. Delos is clearly distinguished from O. in h. Ap. 16, and only later identified with O. (Delos being considered the older name, O. Schneider, Nicandr., p. 22, n.), when Artemis had been brought into closer connexion with Apollo, and even then not invariably. Thus in Homer Ortygia never clearly = Delos.] {84}

[26\2: ~A/rtemis de\ autê\n hexarpa/xasa eis Tau/rous metakomi/zei~ (cf. the ~mete/thêken auto\n ho theo/s~ of Enoch, Gen. 5^24) ~kai\ atha/naton poiei=, e/laphon de\ anti\ tê=s ko/rês pari/stêsi tô=| bômô=|~, Procl., Chrest. ap. Kinkel Epic. Fr., p. 19: [Apollod.] Epit. iii, 22. Wagn.]

[27\2: ~tou/tô| (tô=| Me/mnoni Êô\s para\ Dio\s aitêsame/nê athanasi/an di/dôsi~ says Proclus with regrettable brevity (p. 33, Kinkel).]

[28\2: It cannot be doubted (in spite of Meier, Annali dell' Inst. Arch., 1883, p. 217 ff.) that the story given in ~P~ of Sarpedon's death and the carrying away of his body, even if it does not belong to the oldest part of the poem (which I cannot regard as certain), is nevertheless earlier than the Aithiopis and was the model for its account of Memnon's death (cf. also Christ, Chron. altgr. Epos., p. 25). But why do Thanatos and Hypnos carry away the body of Sarpedon (instead of the usual ~thu/ella, a/ella, Ha/rpuia~, or the winds, Q.S. ii, 550, in the case of Memnon)? Where these two are found on Attic lekythoi as bearers of the corpse (Robert, Thanatos, 19) they were perhaps intended in some consolatory sense as in the grave inscriptions ~hu/pnos e/chei se, ma/kar . . . kai\ ne/kus ouk ege/nou~. The Homeric poet, however, can hardly have meant anything of the sort, but merely invents the indispensable second bearer to assist Thanatos--an effective touch but not one that rested on any religious grounds. Hypnos as brother of Thanatos is also found in the ~Dio\s apa/tê~, ~X~ 231.]

[29\2: ~ek tê=s pura=s hê The/tis anarpa/sasa to\n pai=da eis tê\n Leukê\n nê=son diakomi/zei~, Procl., Chrest., p. 34, Kink. Then he continues, ~hoi de\ Achaioi\ to\n ta/phon chô/santes agô=na tithe/asin~. Thus a grave-mound is set up though the body of Achilles has been translated: evidently a concession to the older narrative (~ô~ 80-4), which knew nothing of the translation of the body but gives prominence to the grave-mound. Besides which, the tumulus of Achilles--a landmark on the seashore of the Troad--required explanation, and the poet accordingly speaks of the erection of a cenotaph. It was not considered a contradiction to erect cenotaphs, not only to those whose bodies were irrecoverable (see above, Ch. I, n. 88), but also to Heroes whose bodies had been translated. Thus Herakles, after he has been struck by lightning and snatched up into the sky, has a ~chô=ma~ made for him, though no bones were found upon the ~pura/~, D.S. 4, 38, 5; 39, 1. (The tumuli found in the Troad were not, indeed, originally empty as Schliemann, Troy, etc., pp. 252, 263, supposed; they were not cenotaphs but merely grave-mounds that had once been filled and belong to a type frequently met with in Phrygia; see Schuchhardt, Schliemann's Excav. [E.T.], p. 84 ff. Kretschmer, Einl. Ges. gr. Spr., 1896, p. 176.)]

[30\2: What became of Odysseus? Proclus is silent on the point, and we have no means of guessing. According to Hyginus 127 he was buried in Aiaia; but if nothing more was going to be done with his body why bring him to Aiaia? Acc. to Sch. Lyc., 805, he was raised to life again by Kirke, but what happened to him then? (Acc. to [Apollod.] Epit. vii, 37 W., the dead Odysseus seems to remain in Ithaka.--We have no grounds for altering the words to suit the Telegoneia as Wagner does, esp. as a complete correspondence with that poem cannot be obtained.) The death and burial of Od. among the Tyrrhenians (Müller, Etruscans iii, 281 tr. Gray) belong to quite another connexion.]

[31\2: The Aithiopis is later than the Hades scenes in ~ô~, and consequently later still than the Nekyia of ~l~. The prophecy of the Translation of Menelaos in ~d~ is likewise later than the Nekyia but to all appearance older than the Aithiopis.] {85}

[32\2: The extract from the Nostoi in Proclus, Chrest., is particularly inadequate and evidently gives no full idea of the very wide and various subject matter of that poem. Thus, too, the notices of it preserved from other sources give details of its subject matter (esp. of the Nekyia which was included in it) that cannot be fitted into the limits of Proclus' outline.]

[33\2: The idea that the Bronze age is really identical with the age of Heroes is at first sight attractive (see e.g. Steitz, Die W. u. T. des Hesiod, p. 61); one soon finds, however, that it breaks down on closer examination.]

[34\2: It does not seem to me absolutely necessary to strike out lines 124 f. (~hoi/ rha phula/ssousi/n te di/kas kai\ sche/tlia e/rga, êe/ra hessa/menoi pa/ntê phoitô=ntes ep' ai=an~). They are repeated in lines 254 f., but that is a natural place to repeat them. Proclus does not comment on them; but it does not follow that he did not have them before him; and Plutarch, D.O. 37, p. 431 B, seems to allude to l. 125 in its present context.]

[35\2: Plu., D.O., 10, p. 415 B, in obvious error, takes Hesiod's ~dai/mones~ for such an intermediate class of beings; he supposes that Hesiod distinguishes four classes ~tô=n logikô=n, theoi/, dai/mones, hê/rôes, a/nthrôpoi~. In this Platonist division the ~hê/rôes~ would correspond rather with Hesiod's ~dai/mones~ of the first age. (What Proclus has to say on Hesiod, Op. 121, p. 101, Gaisf., is taken evidently word for word from Plutarch's commentary on Hesiod and resembles closely the remarks in the passage cited from the Def. Orac.) Modern critics have often failed to notice the difference between the Hesiodic ~dai/mones~ and the Platonic. Plato himself is very decided about the difference (Crat. 397 E-398 C).]

[36\2: ~êe/ra hessa/menoi~ 125 (cf. 223; ~X~ 282) is a naive equivalent for "invisible" as Tzet. correctly explains. This is how it is to be understood regularly in Homer whenever there is mention of envelopment in a cloud and the like.]

[37\2: These daimones are called ~epichtho/nioi~ in contrast (not to the ~hupochtho/nioi~ of l. 141, but) to the ~theoi\ epoura/nioi~, as Proclus on l. 122 rightly remarks. Thus in Homer we have ~epichtho/nioi~ regularly used as an adjective, or, standing alone, as an equivalent of men as distinguished from gods. Then the ~hupochtho/nioi~ of 141 are brought in to form another and secondary contrast with the ~epichtho/nioi~.]

[38\2: ~r~ 485 ff. It follows that the descriptions of the visits paid by gods to the homes of men are of great antiquity; cf. my Griech. Roman, p. 506 ff. Zeus Philios in particular is fond of visiting men: Diod. Com. ~Epi/klêr.~, Mein. Com. iii, p. 543 f. (ii, p. 420 K.).]

[39\2: ~timê\ kai\ toi=sin opêdei=~ 142. ~timê/~ in the sense not of simple honour but of practical worship, as frequently in Homer, e.g. in such phrases as: ~timê\ kai\ ku=dos opêdei=~, ~R~ 251; ~timê=s aponê/menos~, ~ô~ 30: ~timê\n de\ lelo/gchasin i=sa theoi=sin~, ~l~ 304; ~e/chei timê/n~, ~l~ 495, etc. In the same way here, l. 138: ~hou/neka tima\s ouk edi/doun maka/ressi theoi=s~.]

[40\2: Light and dark, i.e. good and bad, ~dai/mones~ are acc. to Roth, Myth. v. d. Weltaltern (1860), pp. 16-17, distinguished in Hesiod's daimones of the golden and silver age. Such a distinction, however, never appears in Hesiod; and it is hardly credible that the gods and spirits of ancient Greek popular belief (which never really admitted the categories good and bad) should in this primitive period have been actually classified in accordance with such categories. At any rate, Greek readers never found anything of the kind expressed in Hesiod: {86} the conception of bad daimones is regularly supported by reference to the philosophers alone (e.g. Plut., D.O., 17, p. 419 A, and the conception is certainly no older than the earliest philosophic speculation.]

[41\2: l. 141: ~toi\ me\n hupochtho/nioi (epichtho/nioi~ all MSS. except one, see Köchly's Apparatus; also Tz.) ~ma/kares thnêtoi\ kale/ontai.--phu/lakes thnêtoi\~ was read and explained by Proclus. This is clearly wrong, and is corrected to ~phu/lakes thnêtô=n~ (as in l. 123) by Hagen and Welcker. But this transfers from the first to the second race an expression that we cannot be sure Hesiod meant to be transferred. Not merely the words but the sense, too, is thus corrected, without due ground. ~ma/kares~ does not look like a corruption; it is more likely that ~phu/lakes~ is an accidental alteration. ~hup. ma/kares thnêtoi=s kale/ontai~ is the reading of the latest editor: but here to say the least of it the addition of ~thnêtoi=s~ is superfluous. We should rather try to understand and explain the traditional text and show how the poet came by the remarkable expression.]

[42\2: When philosophers and philosophizing poets of a later age occasionally refer to the soul when freed from the body as a ~dai/môn~, the expression has a totally different sense.]

[43\2: Similarly, though the oxymoron is much less daring in his case, Isocrates, 9, 72, has ~dai/môn thnêto/s~. In order to describe a daimon who has originally been a mortal later ages boldly invented the compound ~anthrôpodai/môn~ which corresponds fairly well with the Hesiodic ~ma/kar thnêto/s~: [Eur.] Rhes., 971; Procop., An. 12, p. 79, 17 D. (~nekudai/môn~ on a defixio from Carthage, BCH. xii, 299). Later still a king destined to become a god is called, even at his birth, by Manetho (i, 280) ~theo\n broto\n anthrô/poisin~.]

[44\2: The silver race was created by the gods of Olympos, like the golden before them (l. 110; 128); only the third race (l. 143) and then the fourth (158) by Zeus alone. It might be supposed from this that the silver age as well as the golden age occurred in the period before Zeus' rule, ~epi\ Kro/nou ho/t' ouranô=| embasi/leuen~ (l. 111); and in this sense "Orpheus" understood the words of Hesiod when he ~tou= argurou= ge/nous basileu/ein phêsi\ to\n Kro/non~ (Proclus on l. 126). But it would be very difficult to reconcile l. 138 ~Zeu\s Kroni/dês ktl.~ with this view. Hesiod may then have placed the silver age in the time when sub Iove mundus erat (as Ovid explicitly states, M. i, 113 f.); but all the same it lay for him in the far distant past before all history.]

[45\2: ~nô/numnoi~ 154 may quite as well mean "nameless", i.e. without name or special title, as "fameless" (as it does for the most part though not invariably in Homer).]

[46\2: See Welcker, Kl. Schr. ii, 6, who, however, in the desire to rule out all possibility of identifying Scherie with Korkyra asserts too positively that it was a part of the mainland. ~z~ 204 (compared with ~d~ 354) at least comes very close to regarding it as an island. But it is clear that nowhere is it explicitly called an island.--It is possible that ~Scheri/ê~, connected with ~schero/s~, may really mean "mainland" (Welcker, loc. cit.; Kretschmer, Einl. Gesch. gr. Spr., 281): but the question still remains whether the Homeric poet, who did not invent the name, understood or respected its original significance. At any rate, it was no longer understood by those who in very early times identified Scherie with the island Korkyra.]

[47\2: The objections to l. 169 as regards its form are brought out by Steitz, Hesiods W. u. T., p. 69. The line is missing in most of the MSS.; it was rejected (together with the line following, which, however, {87} is quite sound) by ancient critics (Proclus on l. 158). Later editors are united in condemning it. But the interpolation is at any rate old: probably even Pindar already knew the line in this place (O. ii, 70).]

[48\2: ~lu=se de\ Zeu\s a/phthitos Tita=nas~ Pi. (P. iv, 291), in whose time, however, this was a well-known myth to which he is only making a passing allusion for the sake of an example. The Hesiodic Theogony still knows nothing of it.]

[49\2: Before Hesiod we have no mention of the myth of a Golden, Saturnian Age, nor any complete description of the imaginary life upon Blessed Islands. But epic poetry had already, as we have seen, provided him with occasional examples of translation to a place of blessedness, and he only collects these into a combined picture of such a place. To that extent the belief in a blessed life beyond the grave meets us earlier than the myth of a Golden Age. But we have not the slightest ground for saying that the former "must have existed from the beginning among the Greeks" (as Milchhöfer at least thinks, Anf. Kunst, p. 230). On the other hand, it may be mere accident that the myth of the Golden Age has no older authority than Hesiod--the story itself may be much earlier. After Hesiod it was frequently taken up and improved upon; not, however, first by Empedocles as Graf supposes, ad aureæ aet. fab. sym. (Leip. Stud. viii, p. 15), but already in the epic ~Alkmeôni/s~, see Philod. Piet., p. 51 Gp. (See also some remarks by Alfred Nutt, The Voyage of Bran, p. 269 f., 1895, with which I cannot agree.)]

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III. CAVE DEITIES: SUBTERRANEAN TRANSLATION

The history of Greek culture and religion shows no sudden break or revolution in its course. The Greeks neither at any time experienced a movement from within that caused a violent recoil from the path which they had chosen, nor were they ever diverted by the overwhelming might of an invading force from the natural course of their evolution. Out of their own natural feelings and reflexion this most intellectually gifted nation evolved the great ideas that nourished succeeding centuries. They anticipated all later ages. The profoundest and the boldest, the most devout as well as the most irreverent speculations as to the nature of God, the world and men have their origin among the Greeks. But this excessive many-sidedness led to a general condition of equipoise in which individual factors restrained or balanced each other. Whereas the most violent impacts and sudden revolutions in the history of civilization are given by just those nations who are only able to embrace one idea at a time and who, confined in the narrow limits of their fanaticism, throw everything else overboard.

It is true, indeed, that the Greeks were ever open to influences--whether civilized or the reverse--from abroad. In wave after wave of peaceful invasion foreign ideas and ways of life, especially from the East, flowed over Greece. In one case, at least (that of the ecstatic religion of the Thracian Dionysos-worshippers), a spring flood burst out that broke down all the dykes. In many cases the invading elements might be easily eliminated again from Greek culture; in many others they obtained a permanent footing and influenced it deeply. But never did an influence from abroad obtain in Greece an authority at all comparable to the subversive and transforming power exercised by Buddhism, Christianity, or Islam over the peoples on whom they laid their grip. The Greek genius, as supple as it was tenacious, maintained control over all such foreign influences, in full possession of its original nature, its genial **naivety. New ideas, whether introduced from abroad or engendered at home, were taken up and assimilated, but the old were not done away with; they gradually amalgamated with the new so that much was learnt while nothing was quite forgotten. The stream flowed on in its peaceful course, but it still remained the same stream. Nec manet ut fuerat nec formas servat easdem: sed tamen ipse idem est. {89}

The history of Greek culture, then, has no sharply contrasted epochs, no periods of abrupt change, when the old is completely given up and a new era definitely begins. Indeed, the most serious revulsions of Greek history, culture, and religion took place beyond doubt before the time of the Homeric Epos, and in that dim past it is possible that more violent and startling upheavals may have occurred to make the Greeks what we afterwards know them to be. Greek life becomes first clearly known to us in Homer. It is true that the broad uniformity that it has in the picture reflected for us in the poems of Homer vanishes in the course of the years that follow. New forces emerge; much that was forgotten comes to light again now that the Homeric system of ideas, once all powerful, is falling to pieces; out of the very old and the quite new things of which Homer never gives the least hint are being put together. But nowhere during the violent movements of the next troubled centuries after Homer did any absolute break with the Epic or its system take place. Only in the sixth century did the defiant speculation of a few bold spirits begin to seek a way of escape from the thraldom of the Homeric poems which still lay over the whole of Greece. The history of the Greek common people knows nothing of a reaction against Homer and his world. Homeric religion and moral ideas gradually ceased to reign supreme in men's minds, but they were never violently or completely discarded.

So we, too, though we leave behind us Homer and the Epos and enter upon the tortuous paths of the later history of Greek soul worship and belief in immortality, may still for a time be guided by the Ariadne thread of the epic. In our subject, too, there are links which connect the Homeric with following ages. Soon enough the thread will break, and we shall have to enter the new field of inquiry depending on our own resources. . . .

§ 1

Prominent among the chieftains, who, under the leadership of Adrastos, came to the help of Polyneikes and laid siege to Thebes, was Amphiaraos the Argive hero and seer descended from the mysterious priest and prophet Melampous. He was drawn into the war against his will, for he foresaw its unhappy end. After the decisive struggle in which the opposing brothers fell slain by each other's hand, the Argive host turned to flight, and with them fled Amphiaraos. But before Periklymenos, who was pursuing him, could drive his spear into the fugitive's back, Zeus made the earth open before him in a flash of {90} lightning and Amphiaraos with his horses, his chariot, and his charioteer, was swallowed up in the depths where Zeus made him immortal. So runs the legend of the fate of Amphiaraos as we learn it from innumerable sources from Pindar onwards,[1\3] and we may be sure that thus it was told in the Thebaïs, the old epic poem of the war of the Seven against Thebes, which was taken up into the Epic Cycle.[2\3]

At Thebes, then, Amphiaraos lived on for ever under the earth. Northwards in the Boeotian countryside, near Lebadeia, men told of a similar marvel. In a cave of the mountainous ravine, before which Lebadeia lies, lived Trophonios for ever immortal. The legends that professed to explain his miraculous cave-existence do not quite agree among themselves, as, indeed, is generally the case with those figures who were not early taken up by the poets and given a fixed place in the narratives of heroic adventure. But all accounts (the oldest of which perhaps go back to the "Telegoneia") agree in the assumption that Trophonios, like Amphiaraos, was first a man, a famous master-builder, who while flying from his foes, had dived underground at Lebadeia and now lives for ever in the depths of the earth whence he foretells the future to those who come and question him there.

These stories, then, claim to speak of men who during their lifetime were swallowed up by the earth, and who now live on for ever at the places where they were taken down into the depths--places situated in quite definite localities of the Greek countryside.

We are not entirely without other legends of a similar character. One of the wild spirits of the Lapith people from Thessalia, Kaineus by name, having been made invulnerable by Poseidon (who had before this transformed him from a woman into a man), was cudgelled with tree-trunks in a battle with the Centaurs; but they could do nothing to him, and with "upright foot" (i.e. standing upright, alive, not lying at full length like a dead man or one mortally wounded) he clove the earth under him and went down alive into the depths.[3\3] In Rhodes Althaimenes was honoured as the "founder" of the Greek cities on that island; he had not died but had vanished into a chasm in the ground.[4\3] Like Amphiaraos, his son Amphilochos, the heir of his prophetic power, appears to have had a legend according to which he still dwelt alive under the earth either in Akarnania or Cilicia.[5\3] A few more examples of the same type might be produced,[6\3] but the number of such stories remains small, and they only make their appearance here and there, as if by {91} accident, in the tradition. Epic poetry without whose co-operation such local legends rarely achieved widespread or lasting popularity, with few exceptions left such narratives out of account. In fact, they conflicted with the normal Homeric outlook. The belief, however, that immortality when it was miraculously bestowed by the favour of heaven upon certain individual men, was absolutely conditioned by the non-occurrence of death, i.e. the separation of the psyche from the visible man--this belief has helped to shape these stories too. They never speak of an undying existence of the soul by itself in separation from the body. Thus far they are firmly rooted in orthodox Homeric belief.

But the heroes of these stories have their everlasting existence in special abodes under the surface of the earth, in subterranean chambers[7\3]--not in the common meeting place of the departed; they each have their own peculiar domain far from the House of Aïdoneus. Such isolation of individuals below the earth does not agree with Homeric ideas; though it almost seems as if a dim echo of these stories of seers like Amphiaraos and Amphilochos, translated alive and with consciousness undestroyed, could be discerned in what the Homeric Nekyia says of Teiresias the Theban seer, in whom alone of all the shadows Persephone had allowed consciousness and intelligence (the essential vital powers) to remain undiminished.[8\3] But even he is fast bound in Erebos, the general home of the dead, and cut off from all connexion with the upper world, as is demanded by the Homeric view of the world. Amphiaraos and Trophonios, on the other hand, are released from Hades; not having suffered death they have not entered the world of the strengthless dead. They are also translated out of this life (besides out of Hades). But this "subterranean translation" is in its nature and in the origin of the belief in it quite distinct from that "translation to Islands of the Blest" of which we spoke in the last chapter. Those Heroes dwelling alone or in company on holy islands far out over the sea are far removed from human life and beyond the reach of prayers and desires. No influence upon the things of this world is attributed to them, and consequently no cult is offered to them: there never existed a cult of the dwellers in Elysium as such. They glimmer in the distance like visions of the poet's fancy from which no one anticipates active interference with the world of reality. It is quite different with these dwellers in the caves. They are actually alive under the surface of the earth; not far away in the inaccessible, spectral world of Hades, but here in the midst of Greece. Questions and prayers {92} can reach down to them, and they can send up aid to those who call to them. To them, accordingly, as powerful and effectual Spirits a cult is paid.

We have detailed information of the manner in which Amphiaraos was worshipped, more especially in later times, when, in addition to the neighbourhood of Thebes, where the original legend of his descent beneath the earth was localized, Oropos also, the boundary town between Boeotia and Attica, was with overwhelming success identified as the place of his disappearance and made a centre of his influence.[9\3] We have also a certain amount of information, again from later ages, about the cult of Trophonios. With the passage of time, the details of the worship grew and multiplied, but among them all certain features stand out as especially characteristic and allow us to understand the religious ideas lying behind them. To Amphiaraos and Trophonios were offered just those sacrifices which were also paid to the Chthonic deities, i.e. those deities who dwelt in the depths of the earth.[10\3] Aid was not expected from them in the details of the daily life of individuals or states. Only in the actual locality of their descent were they effectual, and only there because they revealed the future. Kroisos had already, and Mardonios after him, sent inquiries to the most famous oracles of the day,[11\3] and among them to Amphiaraos at his ancient oracular seat near Thebes and to Trophonios at Lebadeia. Of Amphiaraos it was believed that he revealed the future by visions sent in dreams to those who after making offering laid themselves down to sleep in his temple. To question Trophonios, it was necessary to pass through a narrow passage into his cave. Inside, the inquirer expected to see Trophonios in person or, at least, to hear his instructions.[12\3] He dwelt, like a spirit confined to the scene of his magical existence, in bodily person at the bottom of his cave. In fact, the method of Incubation, or temple-sleep, by which Amphiaraos (like many other daimones and Heroes) was questioned, was based on the assumption that the daimon, who was only visible indeed to mortal eyes in the higher state achieved by the soul in dreams, had his permanent dwelling at the seat of his oracle.[13\3] That is why his appearance can only be expected at this particular place and nowhere else. Originally, too, it was only the dwellers in the depths of the earth who were thus visible in dreams to those who lay down to sleep in the temple over the place where they had their subterranean abode. Homer knows nothing of either gods or daimones who live permanently under the ground in definite places in the inhabited world, near mankind; and for that {93} reason he betrays no knowledge of Incubation-oracles.[14\3] There is some ground for the belief that this method, inherent in the divinatory power, of getting into touch with the spirit world, was one of the oldest types of Greek oracular art--certainly not later than the Apolline mantikê of inspiration. And it is precisely in the legend of Amphiaraos, as we may believe it to have been related as early as the cyclic poem of the Thebaïs, that we have a proof that already in the days when the quasi-Homeric poetry was still popular, people believed in deathless dwellers below the earth and in their active potency in the mantic art.

It is clear, then, that the worship of Amphiaraos and the belief in his subterranean existence was not due to the influence of the Epic. Rather the reverse was the case; the cult already existed and provided the idea of the daimon and this gave rise to the Epic narrative. The Epic found an existing cult of an oracular daimon who dwelt beneath the earth near Thebes ready to its hand. It reduced this fact to a form which it could understand in a manner typical of the relation which frequently existed between the facts of religious life and Epic poetry. The cult was connected with an event in legendary history, and so brought into harmony with the Epic outlook. The Epic knew nothing of gods attached in this way to a **particular earthly spot, and so the spirit worshipped in the cult became in the epic imagination a chieftain and Seer who had not always lived beneath the earth in that place, but had only been transported there subsequently by a miraculous fiat of the supreme god, who had also accorded an eternal life in the depths to the translated hero.[15\3]

We may perhaps find a parallel in more recent Saga story that will throw light on the question. German mythology is perfectly familiar with such figures for ever, or until the day of judgment, alive in caverns of the mountains or subterranean chambers. Thus, Charlemagne, or it may be Charles the Fifth, still has his abode in Odenberg or in Unterberg, near Salzburg, Frederick II (or, in more recent versions of the legend, Frederick I Barbarossa in Kyffhäuser, Henry the Fowler in Sudemerberg, near Goslar. Thus, too, King Arthur, Holger Danske, and many other favourite characters of popular tradition dwell in subterranean caverns.[16\3] Occasionally, we can still plainly see how these were originally ancient gods who according to pagan belief dwelt in hollow mountains and whose place has been taken by these heroes and holy men "translated" beneath the earth.[17\3] So, too, Greek tradition allows us to see even now that those ancient {94} translated mortals, Amphiaraos and Trophonios, are only Epic substitutes for ancient deities who did not owe their everlasting life and subterranean abode to the favour of heaven, but had possessed these from the beginning. At least, at the site of his worship men knew that the prophetic dweller in the cave was a god; one of them is called Zeus Trophonios or Trephonios, not only by learned authorities, but in inscriptions from Lebadeia;[18\3] Amphiaraos, too, is once called Zeus Amphiaraos and more often a god.[19\3] In the Translation legends of Christianized people the kings have usurped the place of the ancient gods because the gods themselves, fallen into neglect, have been dethroned. For reasons not so very different from these the ancient gods on Greek soil were turned into heroes.

Surrounded by the unending multiplicity of contemporary notions of divinity the imagination of the Epic poet had fashioned for itself a generalized picture of a divine kingdom. This was at that time a solitary attempt to erect a Panhellenic theological system, but it had the greatest influence upon the mental conceptions of Greeks of every race, for the Epic poet addressed them all. He stood as though on a height looking down on all the narrow valleys and mountainous countrysides cut off from the rest of the world, and a wide prospect opened out before his eyes. He **soars above all the innumerable contradictory and conflicting details of local cult and belief, and finds something universal beyond. The name and conception of Zeus, Apollo, Hermes, Athena, and all the gods represented innumerable diversities in the myths and ritual of the different cities and races; their outward shapes and personalities differed widely according to their localization and the manner of their influence. Instead of all these the Epic poet sees only one Zeus, Apollo, etc., reduced in each case to a single unified personality. And just as he had looked beyond the multiplicity of local deities so he did not confine his gods to particular local habitations and centres of influence in the Greek countries; they did not belong to one locality more than another. True they worked and ruled in the world, but they were for all that free to move where they would. They dwell and meet together on the heights of Olympos, the Pierian Holy Mountain, which, however, became in the imagination of Homer, unfettered by attachment to any particular place, more and more an ideal mountain of fancy. So the broad sea is the dwelling-place of Poseidon; he is not confined to any one place. Even the rulers of the spirit world. Aïdes and Persephoneia, have their abode, not, indeed, on {95} Olympos, and certainly not here or there beneath the surface of the Greek countryside, but far away in a land of fancy; they, too, are not bound to any particular locality of the actual world. At the end of this enormous work of unification and idealization, that, out of all the infinite special manifestations of the name Zeus, each worshipped only in its narrow little circle in Greece, had evolved the single almighty figure of Zeus Father of Gods and Men--how could one who had imagined all this be able to understand, if he met with such a creature, a special Zeus, calling himself Zeus Trophonios, who passed his undying existence in a cave near Lebadeia and was only powerful in that one spot?

Of course, the inhabitant of such a holy spot would not allow himself to be deprived of the belief in the existence and presence of the god on his native soil. Though he might be ready enough in general and in respect of other men's local deities to regulate conceptions of the nature of the gods in accordance with the Homeric picture, yet he refused absolutely to be shaken in his belief in his own local deity, however unknown to the Olympian family of gods in Homer that deity might be. The local worship in its unaltered, undisturbed persistence, witnessed to the objective truth of his belief. Thus there were preserved in the pious faith of their worshippers large numbers of local deities whose circle of influence was, however, very limited. They had not been raised with the other gods to the heights of Olympos, but had remained faithful to the soil in which they had their home,[20\3] witnesses to a far distant past in which the members of every remote little community had their separate god bound to the soil beyond which their thoughts did not stray. We shall see how in post-Homeric times many such ancient earth-gods, i.e. gods thought of as living below the surface of the ground, were given new and in some cases a more wide-reaching lease of life. The Epic in its prime knew nothing of these earth-dwelling deities. When it could not close its eyes to their existence it changed them into translated heroes, and beyond the immediate locality of the cult this version of them became the commonly accepted one throughout the rest of Greece.

§ 2

But the Epic was by no means uniform in intention, or carried through as a systematic unity; it was far from being the offspring of a learned reflection that could tolerate no discrepancy. Even here we find at least some few dim {96} recollections of the ancient belief in gods that can have their permanent abode in mountain hollows.

The Odyssey (xix, 178 f.) calls Minos, the son of Zeus (cf. Il. xiii, 450; xiv, 322; Od. xi, 568) who ruled in Knossos the Cretan city, "the familiar gossip of great Zeus."[21\3] Very probably the poet meant by these words much the same as was understood by them in later times: that Minos was personally acquainted with Zeus, on earth, of course, and, in fact, in the cave--not far from Knossos on the side of Mount Ida--which was revered as the "Cave of Zeus".[22\3] The island of Crete, overrun by the Greeks at an early period, still preserved in its remote seclusion much that was primeval in belief and legend. There, sometimes on Mount Ida, sometimes on Mount Dicte (in the east of the island) the holy cave was pointed out where (already in Hesiod) Zeus was said to have been born.[23\3] According to a local legend, which probably was present to the fancy of the writer of these lines of the Odyssey, the god now fully grown up still dwelt in his subterranean chamber, and was visited by individual mortals. As Minos before him, so, too, Epimenides had been allowed to hear the prophecies of the god.[24\3] The Zeus that dwelt in Ida was worshipped in a mystical cult;[25\3] every year a "throne" was "spread" for him, i.e. probably a "divine banquet" (Theoxenion) was prepared for his consumption, as for other especially Chthonic deities. The initiated then entered the cave dressed in black woollen garments, and remained within for thrice nine days.[26\3] Everything points to the existence of conceptions similar to those that we found expressed in the cult of Zeus Trophonios at Lebadeia. Zeus dwelling in bodily form in the depths of his cave can appear in person to those who enter his cave duly sanctified.

Then there appears, from the fourth century onwards, the strange statement, perhaps started by Euhemeros and eagerly taken up in later ages by scoffers like Lucian or Christian opponents of the old religion, that Zeus lay buried on Ida.[27\3] What is here called the grave of the god is nothing in reality but the cave which was generally regarded as his permanent abode.[28\3] The idea--always strange to the Greeks[29\3]--that a god could lie buried anywhere on the earth, deprived of life for ever or even for a limited period of time, is often met with in the tradition of Semitic and other non-Greek peoples.[30\3] We need not inquire what deeper or perhaps allegorical sense such legends may have had in the beliefs of those nations; there is no reason to suppose that such foreign legends had any influence in the formation of Greek myth. Nor does the {97} tradition in Greek lands give the slightest support to the view current among modern mythologists that the death and burial of gods is intended to symbolize the "death of Nature". It is, in fact, plain that in the legend of the Cretan Zeus' grave, the "grave" has simply taken the place of the cave as the everlasting abode of the undying god, and that it is a paradoxical expression intended to signify his perpetual confinement to that place. We are immediately reminded of a no less paradoxical notice of a god's grave at Delphi. Under the navel stone (Omphalos) of the Earth-goddess (which was a vaulted piece of masonry in the Temple of Apollo recalling in its shape the ancient vaulted tombs),[31\3] there lay buried a divine being. Our learned authorities call this being Python, the enemy of Apollo; one and only one quite untrustworthy witness says it was Dionysos.[32\3] Here we have a case of one god setting up his temple and abode over the grave of another god. Apollo, the god of prophecy, thrones it over the Earth-spirit Python, the son of the Earth-goddess Gaia. Now, we have ancient and in the highest degree trustworthy traditions to the effect that there was originally at Delphi an ancient Earth-Oracle into whose place Apollo and his mantic art came later as an intruder. We are therefore justified in believing that this circumstance in the history of religion has found expression in the legend that Apollo's temple and oracular seat stood over the place where an ancient and superseded oracle-daimon lay "buried".[33\3] In the days when the primeval Earth-Oracle was still powerful its guardian would not lie dead and buried under the Omphalos of the Earth-goddess, but would have dwelt there alive underground, like Amphiaraos or Trophonios or Zeus on Ida.

§ 3

The "grave" under the Omphalos means in the case of Python the overthrow of an earth-dwelling Chthonic Daimon by the cult of Apollo. The "grave" of Zeus, which had thrust itself into the place of an older legend of the dwelling of Zeus in the cave of the mountain, expresses the same idea as this legend, but expresses it in a form current in later ages which knew of many "Heroes" who after their death and from their graves gave proof of a higher existence and a powerful influence. The Zeus that died and is buried is only a god reduced to a Hero;[34\3] remarkable and paradoxical is only the fact that unlike Zeus Amphiaraos, Zeus Trophonios (and Zeus Asklepios), he has not, in the usual fashion, dropped his title of god, which directly contradicted his "Hero" {98} nature. It is possible that in the case of this cave-Zeus, half-god half-Hero, a conception has been transferred merely on analogy from other cases where it was applied more properly, after they had become fully "Heroized", to gods who according to the no longer intelligible theory had once been dwellers in the depths of the earth.

We have several accounts of Heroes who were buried in temples of gods and were sometimes associated with the cult of the higher god to whom the temple was dedicated. The way in which such legends could arise may be seen unusually clearly from the case of Erechtheus.

The Ship-Catalogue in the Iliad (ii, 546 ff.) tells us that Erechtheus was the son of the Earth, but that Athene brought him up and "settled him in her rich temple",[35\3] where the Athenians every year honour him with sacrifice of sheep and bulls.[36\3] It is plain that Erechtheus is here thought of as still living; to honour a dead man with such offerings, repeated every year and attended by the whole community, would be a custom quite unknown to Homer. Erechtheus is, therefore, thought of as dwelling alive in the temple in which Athene has set him down, i.e. the ancient temple on the Acropolis which was enclosed in the "strong house of Erechtheus", to which, according to the Odyssey, Athene betakes herself as her own home. On the old citadel of the Kings, royal residence and sanctuary of the goddess were combined; its foundation walls have recently been discovered on the spot where later joint worship was paid to Athene and Erechtheus in the "Erechtheion".[37\3] Erechtheus dwells below the ground in a crypt of this temple,[38\3] like other earth-deities, in the form of a snake, immortally. He is not dead, for as Euripides still says, in a story which otherwise follows different lines, "the earth gaped and covered him over,"[39\3] i.e. he was translated and lived on under the earth. On the analogy of the examples already discussed it is clear that this is also a case of a primitive local deity,[40\3] once supposed to have been living always in a cave on the mountain-side, transformed to a Hero who has been brought there and raised to immortal life. The later belief in Heroes required a grave at which the continued existence and potency of the "Hero" was localized; by a natural process of development the Hero Erechtheus translated alive and made immortal is thought of as buried in a grave. Erichthonios, who was expressly identified with the Homeric Erechtheus, was by later ages supposed to be buried in the Temple of Polias, i.e. the oldest temple of Athene, on the Acropolis.[41\3] We have clearly before us the steps by which the {99} aboriginal deity, dwelling beneath the ground, the son of Earth, is made into a mortal Hero, translated to immortality and placed under the protection of the Olympian goddess who has now become more powerful than he; and finally transferred, cave and all, to the precincts of her temple, and finally reduced to the condition of a Hero like another, who had died and lies peacefully buried in the temple of the goddess on the citadel.

With this example before us we may explain several other analogous cases, in which we have only the last stage of the process, the grave of a Hero in a god's temple, without any of the intermediate steps. A single example may be given.

At Amyklai, not far from Sparta, in the holiest temple of Laconia, stood the ancient bronze statue of Apollo upon an altar-shaped base, within which, according to legend, Hyakinthos lay buried. Through a bronze door in the side of the altar offerings for the dead were sent down to "Hyakinthos" buried below every year at the festival of the Hyakinthia.[42\3] The recipient of these offerings has little resemblance to the gentle youth of popular legend. The Hellenistic poets tell how he was beloved by Apollo and died by a cast of Apollo's discus and was changed into a flower. The fable, almost destitute of local reference, has been put together from many popular themes.[43\3] The sculpture on the above-mentioned altar, on the other hand, represents among many gods and heroes Hyakinthos and his sister Polyboia as they are being carried up to heaven--which will not square with the metamorphosis story. Further, he is represented as bearded, and so not as the boy whom Apollo loved,[44\3] but as a grown man (of whose daughters indeed other legends make mention).[45\3] The true story of this Hyakinthos has disappeared almost without leaving a trace. But in what the monument reveals and in what we know of the yearly festival held in honour of Hyakinthos significant features emerge which perhaps can tell us the real character of the Daimon that was honoured at Amyklai together with, and as our information clearly shows, before Apollo himself.[46\3] Hyakinthos was given offerings that were otherwise peculiar to the gods that ruled the lower world.[47\3] These offerings were let down directly into the underground place where, in fact, Hyakinthos himself was supposed to dwell. In the great festival of the Hyakinthia the alternate worship of Apollo and Hyakinthos (after whom as the chief personage the festival is named) points to the incomplete amalgamation of two originally distinct cults; and the plain and unadorned, almost dismal, ceremonies of {100} the days devoted to Hyakinthos--contrasted with the more cheerful worship paid to Apollo on the middle day of the feast[48\3]--allow us to see clearly the real nature of Hyakinthos as a Daimon related to the gods of the underworld. On the altar-relief Polyboia was represented as his sister: she was a goddess of the underworld like Persephone.[49\3] Hyakinthos was, then, an old local deity of the Amyklaian countryside, dwelling below the earth, and his worship at Amyklai was older than that of Apollo. But he is a dim figure. The Olympian god (probably not before the Doric conquest of the Achæan land) has set himself down beside, and indeed over, the ancient earth-spirit, and now outshines him without quite being able to banish his worship. The divine existence of the latter under the ground could not be imagined by later ages, except as the after-existence of the psyche of a dead and buried Hero whose body lay in the "grave" under the statue of the god. Next, in order to explain their association in cult, poetic legend made the god a lover, just as in another case, and for similar reasons, it had made him the lover of Daphne.[50\3]

§ 4

Thus it may be that under many a Hero whose grave was shown in the Temple of a god an ancient local-god was hidden, whose abode beneath the earth had been converted into a "grave" now that he himself had sunk from a deity of higher rank to a human chieftain. It depended upon the circumstances of the case whether his humanization was complete or whether the memory of his former god-head (preserved in cult) secured for him a second elevation to the heavenly regions[51\3] among the Olympian gods whose nature was originally quite foreign to that of the old earth-daimon. Such conceptions, differing widely according to the circumstances of place and time, are shown most clearly in the different views taken of Asklepios. For Homer and the poets he is generally a great chieftain, a mortal who had learnt the art of healing from Cheiron. In religious cult he was generally set on a level with the upper gods. In reality he, too, is a local earth-dwelling deity from Thessaly, who from beneath the earth dispenses, like so many earth-spirits, healing from the ills of the flesh and knowledge of the future[52\3]--the two being closely connected in antiquity. He, too, easily bore the change from god to Hero. Asklepios was struck by Zeus' lightning which in this, as in many cases, did not destroy life, but translated the person affected to a higher existence outside the visible world.[53\3] {101} We can now easily understand what it means when even this ancient earth-deity is said to be "buried"--his grave being shown at different places.[54\3] Many peculiarities of the worship paid to him show clearly the original character of Asklepios as an ancient god living below the earth.[55\3] One essential characteristic indeed of such earth-spirits he lacks--he is not bound to any one particular place. An enterprising priesthood, wandering in company with the rest of their tribe, had taken with them this old established worship of theirs, and spread it far and wide, so that Asklepios himself became at home in many different places.

Now, in closest relationship, though they remained more faithful to their original character, with this Zeus Asklepios stood those Boeotian earth-spirits with whom this discussion began. Trophonios, and Amphiaraos, too, might have been described as an Asklepios, who had stayed at home in his old cavern dwelling.[56\3] They, too, Amphiaraos and Trophonios, had become mortal men of a past age in the imagination of a time which could no longer properly understand such cave-spirits. But we never hear of their "graves"; for the generation which made them Heroes knew nothing of mortal chieftains who after dying and being buried yet lived on with undiminished powers. But it was the belief in their uninterrupted potency that gave those strange cavern deities a secure place in men's memory. In the epic and in legends inspired by the epic they are recognized as human beings that had not died but had been translated, without any division of soul from body, to everlasting life in the depths of the earth. Ever afterwards--even when they are not only called immortal, but actually "gods"--they are reckoned as men who have become immortal or godlike.[57\3] And they have become the patterns of what other mortals too may rise to. In the Electra of Sophokles (836 ff.) the chorus wishing to justify the hope of a continued life for the departed, expressly appeal to the example of Amphiaraos, who still rules below the earth with all his spiritual powers intact. For the same reason these and other examples offered by ancient legend and poetry of the "translation" of individual great men to a life below the earth are important for our inquiry too. In them, as it did (in another sense) in the case of those translated to the Islands of the Blest, the Epic points beyond its own resigned and gloomy conception of the state after death towards a higher life after the visible world has been left behind. It took isolated cases of the once numerous class of cavern deities worshipped in Greek countries, and deprived {102} them of their god-head, though not of the superhumanly continued existence and (especially mantic) powers claimed for them by the belief and cult of their countrymen. Thus reduced to mortal rank, it interwove them in the fabric of the heroic mythology, and in so doing instituted a class of outstanding human individuals who had been raised to a godlike existence, far, indeed, from the upper world, but, at least, not condemned to the common realm of the souls. Instead they were given a home beneath the earth, each in a definite place in Greek territory, near living men, and able to help them. The descent from god to mortal Hero resulted, since the essential point of continued existence was not denied, in a corresponding exaltation of the mortal and the heroic to the divine. Thus the epic leads us in this instance towards a range of conceptions which the poems themselves treated as though it never existed, and which now suddenly comes into view.

NOTES TO CHAPTER III

[1\3: Pi., N. ix, 24 ff., x, 8 f., [Apollod.] iii, 6, 8, 4 (~su\n tô=| ha/rmati kai\ tô=| hênio/chô| Ba/tôni . . . ekru/phthê kai\ Zeu\s atha/naton auto\n epoi/êsen~) etc. The expressions used to describe the translation and continued conscious existence of A. are noteworthy: ~kata\ gai=' auto/n te/ nin kai\ phaidi/mous hi/ppous e/marpsen~, Pi., O. vi, 14. ~Zeu\s kru/psen ha/m' hi/ppois~, N. ix, 25. ~gai=a hupe/dekto ma/ntin Oiklei/dan~, x, 8. ~ma/ntis kekeuthô\s polemi/as hupo chthono/s~, A., Th., 588. ~ede/xato rhagei=sa Thêbai/a ko/nis~, S. fr., 873 (= 958 P.). ~theoi\ zô=nt' anarpa/santes es mu/chous chthono\s autoi=s tethri/ppois eulogou=sin emphanô=s~, E. Supp., 928 f. ~hê/rpasen cha/rubdis oiônosko/pon, te/thrippon ha/rma peribalou=sa cha/smati~, 501 f. (Eriphyle ~Amphia/raon e/krups' hupo\ gê=n autoi=si su\n hi/ppois~, Oracle in Ephorus ap. Ath., 232 F. ~Amphiara/ou zô=ntos to\ sô=ma katade/xasthai tê\n gê=n~, Agatharch., p. 115, 21 Mü. ~epespa/sato hê gê= zô=nta~, Philostr., V. Ap., 2, 37, p. 79, 18 Kays. ~aphanismo/s~ of A., St. Byz. s. ~Ha/rpuia.--pa/mpsuchos ana/ssei~, S., El., 841; ~aei\ zô=n tima=tai~, Xen., Cyn. i, 8.]

[2\3: That the translation of Amphiaraos in the form so frequently repeated by later authors (clearly following an important and influential original) appeared already in the Thebaïs of the epic cycle is taken by Welcker for granted, Ep. Cykl. ii, 362, 66. The view is intrinsically probable: but it can claim more definite grounds. Pi., O. vi, 12-17, tells us that after Amphiaraos and his team had been swallowed up by the earth, Adrastos, over the seven funeral-pyres (which consumed the bodies of the Argives who had fallen in battle, said ~pothe/ô stratia=s ophthalmo\n ema=s, ampho/teron, ma/ntin t' agatho\n kai\ douri\ ma/rnasthai~. That this famous lament was taken ~ek tê=s kuklikê=s Thêbaï/dos~, fr. 5 Kinkel, p. 12, is proved by the testimony of the ancient scholia on ~pothe/ô ktl.~, quoting Asklepiades. This means that in the Thebaïs too, after the battle was over Amphiaraos was not to be found either among the fallen or the survivors--was in fact translated. Pindar must have taken not merely the words of the lament of Adrastos but the whole situation that led up to these words, as he described it, from the Thebaïs. (Bethe, Theb. Held. [1891], p. 58 f., 94 ff., claims to prove that Pindar took nothing but the words ~ampho/teron ktl.~ from the Thebaïs which said nothing of the burial of these who had fallen before Thebes, and that Pindar added this last on his own account, O. vi, as well as N. ix, 25. But the "proofs" of this view, in itself highly improbable, on closer examination come to nothing.)--In the Odyssey it is said of Amph. ~o/let' en Thê/bê|si~ ~o~ 247; ~tha/nen Amphia/raos~ 253. The expression "is naturally to be understood as merely implying disappearance from the earth" says Welcker, Ep. C. ii, 366. All we can claim is that the expression does not indeed prevent us from assuming that the story of the "disappearance" of Amph. was known also to the poet of these lines. Thus in the OC. of Soph. Antigone says twice over (ll. 1706, 1714) that Oedipus ~e/thane~, whereas he really was like Amphiaraos translated alive (~a/skopoi pla/kes e/marpsan~ 1681).]

[3\3: Pi., fr. 167, A.R. i, 57-64 (~zôo/s per e/ti . . . edu/seto neio/thi gai/ês~). Orph., Arg., 171-5 (~phasi\n . . . zôo/n t' en phthime/noisi molei=n hupo\ keu/thesi gai/ês~). Agatharch., p. 114, 39-43 Mü. (~eis tê\n gê=n katadu=nai ortho/n te kai\ zô=nta~). Schol. and Eust. on ~A~ 264, p. 1001.--In Ovid, M. xii, 514 ff., the translation becomes a metamorphosis (into a bird); and {104} often an ancient translation myth has thus been replaced by a metamorphosis in later mythology. The connected story of Kaineus has been lost, and only a few fragments survive in Sch., A.R. i, 57; Sch., ~A~ 264 (the best known being the change of sex [cf. also Meineke, h. crit. com., 345], the meaning of which is very dubious. Similar stories are told of Teiresias, Sithon (Ov., M. iv, 280), Iphis, and Ianthe, this last reminding us strikingly of a narrative in the Mahâbhârata. Then frequently in many miracle tales, both heathen and Christian, to which far too much respect is paid by those who seek to find in them dark reminiscences of bisexual gods). No traces of a cult of Kaineus can be found.]

[4\3: Althaimenes, son of Katreus (cf. Rh. Mus. 36, 432 f.), ~euxa/menos hupo\ cha/smatos ekru/bê~ [Apollod.], iii, 2, 2, 3. Rationalistic version of Zeno of Rhodos ap. D.S., 5, 59, 4, who says, however, ~hu/steron kata\ chrêsmo/n tina tima\s e/sche para\ Rhodi/ois hêrôïka/s~, and, in fact, we learn from an insc. in Newton, Gr. Insc. in B.M. ii, 352, that a political division (Ktoina?) of the people of Rhodos was called ~Althaimeni/s~, whose ~hê/rôs epô/numos~ must have been Althaimenes.]

[5\3: Amphilochos appeared in person to sleepers at his dream-oracle at Mallos in Cilicia (Luc., Philops., 38)--so also did his rival Mopsos, Plut., DO. 45, 434 D--as well as at his oracle in Akarnania, Aristid. i, p. 78 D. [38, 21 Keil]. Mopsos in Cilicia and Amphilochos in Akarnania are alike in being among those ~daimo/nia~ which ~hidrume/na e/n tini to/pô| tou=ton oikou=sin~, Orig., c. Cels. iii, 34, pp. 293-4 L. The same author says of Amph. Mopsos and others, ~anthrôpoeidei=s theôrei=sthai theou/s~, vii, 35, p. 53.]

[6\3: Laodike, daughter of Priam [Apollod.], Epit. v, 25; Nicol. Prog. ii, 1.--Aristaios, who ~a/phantos gi/gnetai~ in M. Haemus and is now honoured ~athana/tois timai=s~, D.S. iv, 82, 6. (Cf. Hiller v. Gärtr., Pauly-Wiss. ii, 855, 23 ff.)]

[7\3: The regular expression for these subterranean dwelling-places is ~me/gara~. Lex. rhet. ap. Eust., Od., 1387, 17 f. Hence also the sacrificial pits into which men lowered the offerings made to the deities of the lower world are called ~me/gara~ (Lob., Agl., 830; ~me/gara = cha/smata~, Schol. Luc., D. Mer. 2, pp. 275 ff. Rabe. It was thought that by sinking the gifts in the ground they would immediately reach the dwelling-place of the spirit who lived there. The sacrificial chasm is itself the "chamber", ~me/garon~, in which the spirit lives (in the form of a snake) and dwells.]

[8\3: ~k~ 492 ff., ~psuchê=| chrêsome/nous Thêbai/ou Teiresi/ao, ma/ntêos alaou= tou= te phre/nes e/mpedoi/ eisin; tô=| kai\ tethnêô=ti no/on po/re Persepho/neia, oi/ô| pepnu=sthai; toi\ de\ skiai\ aï/sousin~. His ~phre/nes~ being undestroyed the most important and distinguishing feature of death is absent. His body, indeed, is destroyed and hence he is called ~tethnêô/s~ like all the other dwellers in Hades, though it is still difficult to see how the ~phre/nes~ could remain without a body. It is highly probable that the idea of the continued existence of the consciousness of the famous seer renowned in Theban legend was derived by the poet from a popular tradition according to which Teiresias still gave proof of the clearness of his wits by the oracles which he sent up from below the earth. In Orchomenos there was a ~chrêstê/rion Teiresi/ou~, Plu., DO. 44, p. 434 C (as Nitzsch, Anm. Od. iii, p. 151. also reminds us). If we may argue from the context in which Plutarch speaks of him, this must have been an earth-oracle, i.e. an incubation-oracle. There stories like those told at Thebes of Amphiaraos may have been related of Teiresias and his survival after death. Some such information the poet of {105} the Nekyia may then have transformed and made use of for his own purposes. Str. 762 not without good ground connects these verses about Teiresias with the stories of Amphiaraos and Trophonios.]

[9\3: The ancient site of the Oracle of Amphiaraos was near Thebes at the place (Knopia where according to the epic story he sank into the earth. Paus. 9, 8, 3, Str. 404. Even at the time of the Persian war the envoy of Mardonios inquired of him there, near Thebes, as Hdt. viii, 134, unmistakably says. (That the oracle lay in Theban territory is shown also by the addition of the words, otherwise pointless, ~Thêbai/ôn oudeni\ e/xesti manteu/esthai autothi/~. A similar rule is found at the temple of Herakles in Erythrai which may be approached by Thracian women but not by Erythræan women [Paus. 7, 5, 7-8]; and in the same way the Lampsakenoi were excluded from the funeral games of Miltiades on the Chersonnese: Hdt. vi, 38.) Oropos also claimed to harbour Amphiaraos under its soil; Sch. Pi., O. vi, 18, 21-3; differently in Paus. 1, 34, 2-4. But the oracle must have been moved there afterwards--hardly before the end of the fifth century (~methidru/thê~, Str. 404); to suppose that it had always been confined to Oropos is contrary to all the traditional evidence.]

[10\3: Those who wished to inquire of his oracle offered by night to Trophonios, before going down into the cave, a ram, sacrificing it in a pit (~bo/thros~): Paus. 9, 39, 6; to Amphiaraos, after a considerable fast (Philos., VA., 2, 37, pp. 79, 19 ff. K.) and the provision of a ~katha/rsion~, the inquirer offered a ram upon the fleece of which he lay down to sleep (Paus. 1, 34, 5).--Cleanthem cum pede terram percussisset versum ex Epigonis (prob. of Soph.) ferunt dixisse: audisne haec, Amphiaraë, sub terram abdite? Cic., TD. ii, 60. The gesture also must have been borrowed from the same scene in the ~Epi/gonoi~. It was thus customary to knock on the ground in calling upon A., as in the case of other ~katachtho/nioi (Amphia/rae chtho/nie~ occurs as late as P. Mag. Par. 1446 f. W .): ~I~ 568; cf. Paus. 8, 15, 3. Cf. also Nägelsb., Nachh. Theol., 102, 214. Skedasos in Sparta ~gê=n tu/ptôn anekalei=to ta\s Erinu/as~, Plu., AN. 3, p. 774 B. In his grief for the loss of his daughter Herodes Atticus threw himself on the ground ~tê\n gê=n pai/ôn kai\ boô=n; ti/ soi, thu/gater, kathagi/sô? ti/ soi xuntha/psô?~ Philostr., VS. 2, 1, 10. Pythagoras ~ho/tan brontê/sê| tê=s gê=s ha/psasthai parê/ggeilen~, Iamb., VP. 156.]

[11\3: That the dream-oracle of Trophonios had a much older influence is implied by the story of the inquiry made of it by the ~Boiôtoi\ halo/ntes hupo\ Thra|kô=n~ in Phot. (Suid.) ~lu/sioi teletai/~.]

[12\3: Trophonios himself was supposed to appear in the cave at Lebadeia. The inquirer goes down to it ~deo/menos suggene/sthai tô=| daimoni/ô|~ (Max. Tyr. 14, 2, p. 249 R.); indications were sought from sacrifice ~ei dê\ to\n katio/nta eumenê\s kai\ hi/leôs de/xetai~ (Trophonios), Paus. 9, 36, 6. Saon, the discoverer of the oracle and founder of the cult, had after entering the ~mantei=on~ met Trophonios himself in person, ~tê\n hierourgi/an . . . didachthê=nai para\ tou= Trophôni/ou phasi/~ (Paus. 9, 40, 2). He dwells and is visible in the oracular cavern: Orig., Cels. iii, 34, pp. 293-4 L.; vii, 35, p. 53; Aristid. i, p. 78 D. [38, 21 Keil]. Even the stupidly rationalising account of Troph. in Schol. Ar., Nub. 508, p. 190 Ruth., Sch. Luc., DM. iii, Cosm. ad Greg. Naz. p. 184 [Clarke, p. 52] (Eudoc., Viol., p. 682, 8)--implies the bodily presence of an ~egkatoikê=san daimo/nion~ in the cave of Trophonios. Lucian, too, shows that this was the popular impression (DM. iii, 2) by his curious satiric fiction that whereas Troph. himself was in Hades (to which acc. to Necyom. 22 the cave of Trophonios was only an {106} entrance ~to\ thei=on hêmi/tomon~ of Trophonios ~chra=| en Boiôti/a|~. Thus the visitor expected to meet Trophonios there in his divine shape, as Ampelius puts it in a similar case with great simplicity and directness, 8, 3: ibi (Argis in Epiro Iovis templum hyphonis (irretrievably corrupt: Trophonii absurdly Duker; Typhonis, Tychonis others not much better) unde est ad inferos descensus ad tollendas sortes: in quo loco dicuntur ii qui descenderunt Iovem ipsum videre. Otherwise, Tr. was said to inhabit the cave in the shape of a snake as is so frequently the case with earth-deities. Not only are snakes sacred to him as to Asklepios (Paus. 9, 39, 3) and live in his cave (to propitiate them people take honey-cakes down with them) but he himself is present in the form of a snake: ~o/phis ê=n ho manteuo/menos~, Schol. Ar., Nub. 508: cf. Suidas ~Trophô/nios~. It was this personal contact between the god and the inquirer which specially distinguished the oracle of Tr. ~mo/non ekei=no (to\ mantei=on) di' autou= chra=| tou= chrôme/nou~. Philostr., VA. 8, 19, p. 335, 30 K. Of course, many only heard without seeing: ~tis kai\ ei=den kai\ a/llos ê/kousen~, Paus. 9, 39, 11. But it was the god they heard.]

[13\3: Speaking of Zalmoxis among the Getae (cf. Str. 297 f.; 762; Hdt. iv, 95-6. EM. ~Za/lm.~), Mopsos in Cilicia, Amphilochos in Akarnania, Amphiaraos and Trophonios--in fact, all of them daimones who had oracles of Incubation--Or. (Cels. iii, 34, p. 293-4 L.) says: they have temples and ~aga/lmata~ as ~daimoni/ois ouk oi=d' ho/pôs hidrume/nois e/n tini to/pô|, ho\n . . . oikou=sin~. They dwell within this ~he/na keklêrôme/non to/pon~, vii, 35 (pp. 53-4 L.), cf. iii, 35 fin. In that place and only there are such daimones visible. Cels. vii, 35 (p. 53 L.), of the temples of Amph., Troph., Mops.: ~e/ntha phêsi\n anthrôpoeidei=s theôrei=sthai theou\s kai\ ou pseudome/nous alla\ kai\ enargei=s. . . . o/psetai/ tis autou\s ouch ha/pax pararrue/ntas . . . all' a/ei toi=s boulome/nois homilou=ntas~ (and so ever present there. Aristid. i, p. 78 Di. [38, 21 K.], ~Amphia/raos kai\ Trophô/nios en Boiôti/a| kai\ Amphi/lochos en Aitôli/a| chrêsmô|dou=si kai\ phai/nontai~. On the extension beyond its original home of the cult of such an Incubation-deity localization in a single spot was of course relaxed. It was either disputed where his permanent habitation really was (as in the case of Amph.), or else the god gradually ceased to be bound to any one place, though still bound to certain places in the sense that he could appear only there, and not anywhere he chose. Such is the case with Asklepios and with various other daimones equally bound originally to a single spot, who then ~epiphai/nontai, epiphoitô=sin~, in certain other temples as well (cf. for example, the account of the ~epipha/neiai~ of Machaon and Podaleirios in Adrotta given by Marin., V. Procli, 32; cf. Suid. ~Euste/phios~, from Damascius, V. Isid.). But when inquiries are made of a god by Incubation the god must always appear in person; if he is absent no oracle can be given. See the story of Amphiaraos in Plu., DO. 5, p. 412 A. In the records of miracles of healing found in Epidauros the god himself regularly comes to the sleeper in the ~a/duton~ (or else in the form of a snake ~Eph. Arch.~ '83, p. 215 f., ll. 113-19), sometimes accompanied by his ~hupê/retai~ (the Asklepiadai), cf. ~Eph. Arch.~ '85, p. 17 ff. ll. 38 ff., 111 f. In the old miracle of Aristagora of Troezen (~Eph. Arch.~ '85, p. 15, l. 10 ff.) reported already by Hippys of Rhegion (which there is no reason to doubt) at first only "the sons of the god" appeared to the sick woman ~ouk epidamou=ntos autou= all' en Epidau/rô| eo/ntos~. Only in the following night did Asklepios himself appear to her ~hikô\n ex Epidau/rou~. Everywhere it is implied that dream-healing can only take place through personal action of the god (cf. Ar., Plut.); {107} later by the advice, at least, of the god, personally appearing to the patient (see Zacher, Hermes, xxi, 472 f.); and this presumption is explained by the fact that originally Incubation could only take place at the actual spot where the god (or Hero) had his permanent abode.]

[14\3: The ~hupophê=tai~ of the Dodonian Zeus the ~Selloi/, anipto/podes chamaieu=nai~, ~P~ 234 f., were explained by some already in antiquity as priests of an Incubation oracle (Eust., Il., p. 1057, 64 ff.), Welcker agreeing with them, Kl. Schr. iii, 90 f. This view is founded solely on the adj. ~chamaieu=nai~, which is not, however, to be separated from ~anipto/podes~. But since ~anipto/podes~ can have no connexion with Incubation neither then can ~chamaieu=nai~. Both epithets refer obviously to the special severity and simplicity of the life of the ~Selloi/~, the (ritual) reason for which it is true we do not know and have no means of guessing.]

[15\3: It remains indeed impossible to determine what moved the epic to recognize in the Boeotian cave-daimon the Argive seer Amphiaraos (even during his life-time an adept in the incubation-mantic art acc. to Paus. 2, 13, 7; cf. Did. in Gp. 2, 35, 8, p. 73, 14 ff. Beckh), or why the heroized god Amphiaraos was turned into an Argive and made a member of the prophetic family of Melampous otherwise the foes of the Boeotian seers; or, finally, why he was brought to Boeotia as an enemy and then made to dwell for ever in that hostile and alien land.]

[16\3: Henry the Fowler in Sudemerberg: Kuhn and Schwartz, Nordd. Sag., p. 185. The other examples in Grimm, ch. xxxii.--G. Voigt in Sybel's hist. Zeits. xxvi (1871), pp. 131-87, shows in his most lucid account that it was not originally Frederick Barbarossa but Frederick II whom the legend represented as not dead but "lost" and to whom the expectation referred that he would come again some day. From the fifteenth century the story begins to appear that he was dwelling in Kyffhäuser (or in a cave in the rocks near Kaiserslautern); the name of Barbarossa does not appear till the sixteenth century, and then gradually predominates. But how it came about that from a definite moment onwards the translated emperor was thought of as living on in a hollow mountain is by no means clear from the written documents alone or from the critical study of the evolution of the legend. Suddenly and without intermediate steps the story assumes this shape, and it can hardly be accounted for except on the view that it arose from the combination of the Frederick legend with already existing Saga-stories of translated Heroes or gods (as Voigt also suggests, p. 160).]

[17\3: Grimm, pp. 959-61. Simrock, D. Myth.^3, p. 144.--How easily similar legends can appear spontaneously among different peoples without interconnexion appears from the fact that translation legends are also found not only in Greece but in distant Mexico; see Müller, Gesch. am. Urrel. 582. Holy men who have "vanished" and are not dead but live on in the depths of mountain caves, and are expected one day to reappear on earth, occur in the legends of Mohammedan peoples of the East: A. v. Kremer, Culturg. Streifz. Geb. Islam, 50; Gesch. Ideen Islam, 375 f., 378.]

[18\3: ~Dii\ Trephôni/oi~ Insc. from Lebadeia, Meister, Böot. Insc. 423 (GDI. i, p. 163); otherwise only ~Trephôni/oi~ (n. 407, 414, ~kataba\s en Trephô/nion~ BCH. 1890, p. 21), ~Trophôni/ô|~ (n. 413); and side by side occur ~tu= Di\ tu= Basilei=i kê\ tu= Trephôni/u~, etc. (n. 425, 429, 430). ~Dionu/sô eustaphu/lô kata\ chrêsmo\n Dio\s Trophôni/ou~ Insc. from Labadeia in Stephani Reise d. Geg. nörd. Griechen, No. 47. Ins. from Leb. IGSept. i, 3077 (1st-2nd cent. A.D.)--Str. 414: ~Leba/deia ho/pou Dio\s Trophôni/ou mantei=on hi/drutai~. {108} Liv. 45, 27, 8, Labadiae templum Iovis Trophonii adiit. Obs. 50 (= 110) Lebadiae Eutychides in templum Iovis Trophonii degressus--. ~Dio\s mantei=on~ is the name given to the oracle of Tr. in Phot. also and Hesych. ~Leba/deia~.]

[19\3: ~Dio\s Amphiara/ou hiero/n~ (at Oropos): [Dicaearch.] Descr. Gr. i, § 6 (i, 100 Mü.). Even Hyperides in the speech for Euxenippos refers throughout to Amph. at Oropos as a god. Amph. in Or. ~ho theo/s~ (1st-2nd cent. B.C.): IGS. i, 3498; 412; CIG. 1570a, 25, 30, 52. Liv. 45, 27, 10 (in Oropos) pro deo vates antiquus colitur. Cic. Div. i, 88: Amphiaraum sic honoravit fama Græciæ, deus ut haberetur. Plutarch also, speaking of the embassy sent by Mardonios to the ancient Theban oracle, calls Amph. ~theo/s~: DO. 5, p. 412 A. Acc. to Paus. 1, 34, 2, however, Amph. was first honoured as a god in Oropos.]

[20\3: Origen is expressing it in his own way, but he is quite right in principle when he distinguishes the local gods remaining in the countryside from the gods of Olympos, Cels. iii, 35 fin.: ~mochthêrô=n daimo/nôn kai\ to/pous epi\ gê=s prokateilêpho/tôn, epei\ tê=s katharôte/ras ou du/nantai epha/psasthai chô/ras kai\ theiote/ras~. He says of Asklepios, 5, 2 (p. 169 L.), ~theo\s me\n a\n ei/ê aei\ de\ lachô\n oikei=n tê\n gê=n kai\ hôsperei\ phuga\s tou= to/pou tô=n theô=n~.]

[21\3: ~Dio\s mega/lou oaristê/s~. The word implies quite as much familiar conversation as well as general intimacy with Zeus. The obscure ~enne/ôros~ need not be considered here. In any case it is to be taken closely with ~basi/leue~, next to which it stands, and not with ~Dio\s m. oaristê/s~ (as many even ancient writers have done.]

[22\3: Intercourse of Minos with Zeus in the cave: [Pl.] Min. 319 E. (whence Str. 762), Ephorus ap. Str. 476; (from Eph. also Nic. Dam. ap. Stob. Fl. iv, 2, 25, p. 161 H.). V.M. i, 2, ext. 1. Here the position of the cave is as a rule not precisely stated. But the Idaian cave is generally meant and Max. Tyr. definitely refers to this one as the place where Minos met Zeus, 38, 2 (p. 221 R.).]

[23\3: Birth of Zeus in the cave: ~Aigai/ô| en o/rei~ Hes., Th. 481 ff. Thence his mother bore him ~es Lu/kton~ 482 (cf. 477), which would be near Ida:--~es Di/ktên~ Schömann. And, at any rate, the cave on Mt. Dicte was the generally reputed place of Zeus' birth: [Apoll.] 1, 1, 6. D.S. 5, 70, 6; Mela 2, 113; D.H. 2, 61 (who also makes Minos visit Zeus there). At Praisos ~to\ tou= Diktai/ou Dio\s hiero/n~: Str. 475-8. Others, indeed, mention Ida as the place of the birth of Zeus: D.S. 5, 70, 2, 4; A.R. iii, 134. Both the holy caves are thus continually rivals; but it appears that the legend of the birth of Zeus was principally localized at the Diktaian cave, that of his intercourse with Minos chiefly at the Idaian; cf. now also M. Mayer, Myth. Lex. s. Kronos, ii, 1533 ff.]

[24\3: Max. Tyr. 16, 1 (cf. 38, 3; prob. from Max. only, Theod. Met. Misc. c. 90, p. 580 Mü.). Cf. Rh. Mus. 35, 161 f. Max. speaks of the cave of Diktaian Zeus, perhaps only inexactly and by oversight. It would be to Ida rather and its cave which rose above Knossos, the home of Epimenides, that the legend would make him go on pilgrimage. So, too, D.L. viii, 1, 3, of Pythagoras, ~en Krê/tê| su\n Epimeni/dê| katê=lthen eis to\ Idai=on a/ntron~. Pyth. in the Idaian cave, Porph., VP. 17.]

[25\3: Schol. Plat., Leg. i, introd. (p. 372 Herm.) and Leg. 625 B, see Lob., Agl. 1121. (~Dio\s Idai/ou mu/stês~, Eur., Cret. fr. 472, 10 N.) Recently the Idaian cave of Zeus has been rediscovered high up in the mountains, a day's journey from Knossos (Fabricius, Ath. Mitth., vol. x, 59 ff.). Remains of votive offerings of antiquity have been {109} found, but only before the entrance to the cave ~en tô=| stomi/ô| tou= a/ntrou~ (where Thphr. had already remarked the like, HP. 3, 3, 4); inside the cave, which, like a vaulted tomb, consisted of two chambers, only traces of the cult from Roman times were found. It seems from this that the sacrificial ritual of the previous period did not reach further than the entrance of the cave (as was the case also at the temple of Troph. at Lebadeia; while the interior of the cave as the seat of the god himself was only entered by Mystai and priests (the birth-chamber was not to be approached at all: Boios, ap. Ant. Lib. 19).]

[26\3: Porph., VP. 17, p. 25 N.: ~eis de\ to\ Idai=on kalou/menon a/ntron kataba\s e/ria e/chôn me/lana ta\s nomizome/nas tri\s enne/a~ (cf. Nauck on S., OC. 483) ~hême/ras ekei= die/tripsen kai\ kathê/gisen tô=| Dii/, to/n te stornu/menon autô=| kat' e/tos thro/non ethea/sato~. The historical truth of the story of Pyth.'s visit to the cave need not be discussed here, but we may assume the credibility of the details given of the cult of Zeus in the cave and the customary ceremonial of pilgrimage to it. (The story comes from relatively good sources, Gr. Roman, p. 254.)--The long time spent in the cave (i.e. in the wide and lofty outer chamber) has its companion picture in what Str. 649 says of ~Charô/nion~ at Acharaka, Plu., Gen. Soc. 21, 590 B., of the cave of Trophonios. It was necessary also to spend several days in the ~oi/kêma Dai/monos agathou= kai\ Tu/chês~ in preparation for the descent into the cave: Paus. 9, 39, 5. The (to Zeus) ~stornu/menos kat' e/tos thro/nos~ has nothing to do with the Korybantic ~thronismo/s~ (see Hiller, Hermes, 21, 365). What is meant is in any case a lectisternium: thus in Athens it was usual to ~kli/nên strô=sai tô=| Plou/tôni~, CIA. ii, 948-50; to Asklepios (CIA. ii, 453b 11): to Attis, CIA. ii, 622; (in Cos at the ~xenismo/s~ of Herakles, Ins. Cos 36b, 22), etc. The ~thro/nos (strônu/ein thro/nous du/o~ for a goddess CIA. ii, 624, 9, 10) appearing instead of a ~kli/nê~ is possibly in accordance with ancient ritual. Thus in the so-called feasts of the dead in ancient times the Hero is represented on a throne while later he reclines on the ~kli/nê~. Thus in Rome besides lectisternia we sometimes have sellisternia especially for female deities: Comm. Lud. Saec., l. 71; 101; 138 [Dessau, ii, 1, p. 282; CIL. vi, 32] and elsewhere.]

[27\3: Acc. to Ennius, Euh. 73 Vahl. (ap. Lactant. i, 11, and ap. Min. Fel. xxi, 1) Euhemeros spoke of the grave of Zeus. Call., h. Jov. 8-9, clearly attacks the fable of Zeus' grave in Crete. It seems to me very probable that Euh. had taken up the story as one that evidently suited his cheap pragmatical interpretation of myths and had introduced it into literature. It would be Euh. then whom Call., loc. cit., was attacking as he did elsewhere the ~ge/rôn alazô/n~ and his ~a/dika bibli/a~ (fr. 86).]

[28\3: The grave of Zeus in Crete is spoken of without exact specification of the place by Call., loc. cit., Cic., ND. iii, 53; D.S. 3, 61, 2; Mela ii, 112; Luc., Tim. 6, J. Tr. 45, Sacr. 10, D. Conc. 6; Min. xxi, 8; Firm., Err. Prof. Rel. vii, 6. Euhemeros ap. Min. xxi, 1, speaks of the Dictæi Iovis sepulcrum obviously inexactly, for acc. to Lact. i, 11, he made the grave in oppido Cnosso far from Mt. Dicte. Even there he means not "in" but "near" Knossos, i.e. on Mt. Ida. For the fact that it was on Mt. Ida we have the testimony of Varro de litoralibus ap. Solin. 11, p. 81, 12-15 Momms. Finally, the situation of the grave within the Idaian cave is clear from Porph., VP. 17, p. 25 N.]

[29\3: Hence the story of the grave of Zeus (when not denied outright as by Call.) was allegorized; Celsus hinted at ~tropika\s huponoi/as~: Or., Cels. iii, 43, p. 307 L.; cf. Philostr., VS. p. 76, 15 ff. K.] {110}

[30\3: Examples are frequent in the mythology of Oriental, and generally but not exclusively Semitic peoples. It is generally "Kronos" who is buried (cf. Mayer, Myth. Lex. ii, 1487 ff.); at other times Astarte, Adonis, the Phrygian Attis, "Herakles," and others. Cf. also the stories of the Heroes sleeping eternally in Sardinia (Rh. Mus. 35, 157 ff.; 37, 465 ff.); and of Kragos and the other ~a/grioi theoi/~ (or ~theoi\ agrei=s~? JHS. 10, 57, 55) who "were made immortal" on Mt. Kragos in Lykia (St. Byz. ~Kra/gos~): they, too, were thought of as sleeping, and not "dead", as Eust. on D.P. 847 expresses it.]

[31\3: Varro, LL. vii, 17, p. 124 Sp.^2, compares the shape of the Omphalos with a thesaurus, i.e. with one of the vaulted buildings which used to be called treasuries, but which have now been undoubtedly proved to be really vaulted graves. On a smaller scale (as vase paintings show) the ~omphalo/s~ had the shape generally given to the dwelling-places made for the spirits of the departed who dwelt below the earth, as well as that of the abodes of other earth-spirits; even the ~cha/sma gê=s~ over the cavern of Trophonios was of this shape, Paus. 9, 39, 10. Was this dome-shape especially connected with earth-spirits who had mantic powers? The Delphic "omphalos" was even used as a technical expression to describe this "tholos" shape; thus the ~omphaloi/~ (of ~phia/lai~) ~kai\ tô=n balanei/ôn hoi tho/loi paro/moioi~, Ath. 501 D. E. (cf. Hesych. ~Balaneiompha/lous~, AB. 225, 6). It was called ~omphalo/s Gê=s~ because sacred to the earth-goddess. It was later interpreted "navel", i.e. middle point of the earth, by mistake, and then fabulous accounts made up to explain this.]

[32\3: Modern writers have adopted the view that Dionysos was buried under the Omphalos: e.g. Enmann, Kypros u. Ursp. Aphrod., S. Petersb., 1886, p. 47 ff. But closer examination shows that all that we have good authority for is that the ~omphalo/s~ was Pythonis tumulus (Varro, LL. vii, 17, p. 124 Sp.), ~ta/phos tou= Pu/thônos~ (Hesych. s. ~Toxi/ou bouno/s~). Dionysos, on the other hand, was buried at Delphi, ~para\ to\n Apo/llôna to\n chrusou=n~ (Philochoros ap. Sync. 307, 4 ff. Di.; Eus. Arm. = Hier. Chr., pp. 44-5 Sch.; Malal., p. 45, 7 Di., from Africanus acc. to Gelzer, Afric. i, 132 f.), i.e. he was buried in the ~a/duton~ (cf. Paus. 10, 24, 5), or, what comes to the same thing, ~para\ to\ chrêstê/rion~ (Plu., Is. et O. 35, 365 A.), ~para\ to\n tri/poda~ (Call. ap. Tz. Lyc. 208; cf. E.M. ~Delphoi/~). The tripod stood in the Adyton (D.S. 16, 26; Str. 419; cf. Hdt. vii, 140). Whether the ~omphalo/s~ also stood in the Adyton (or whether as some think, in the Cella of the Temple) cannot be made out for certain though it seems probable. No one, however, made the grave of Dionysos under the Omphalos except Tat., Gr. viii, p. 40 Ott. [p. 9, 16 ff. Schw.]: ~ho omphalo\s ta/phos esti\ Dionu/sou~, and the statement of this very careless pamphleteer cannot stand against the witness of Varro, etc. It is plain that Tatian confused the two "graves", as Hyg. 140 and Serv. (A. iii, 92; iii, 360; vi, 347) did, reversing the process and making the tripod into the grave of the Python. The real tradition knew, besides the grave of Dionysos near the tripod, the grave of Python in the Omphalos of his mother Gaia. This was never seriously denied; doubt might rather have been believed to linger over the question, who then was preserved in the tripod? Porph., VP. 18, p. 25, 6 ff. N., says that it was Apollo himself, or possibly an Apollo the son of Silenos. This absurdity seems to go back to Euhemeros (cf. Minuc. xxi, 1; worthless is Fulgentius Expos., 2, p. 769 Stav. = p. 112, 3 ff. Helm), and may be merely a frivolous jest. (Too much respect is paid to this tradition by K. O. Müller, Introd. to Scient. Myth., p. 246.)] {111}

[33\3: That the snake killed by Apollo was the guardian of the old ~mantei=on chtho/nion~ we have on unimpeachable authority (testim. collected by Th. Schreiber, Apollo Pythoktonos, p. 3): esp. Eur., IT. 1245 ff. Call., fr. 364; ~poiêtai/~ acc. to Paus. 10, 6, 6, who say that ~(to\n Pu/thôna) epi\ tô=| mantei/ô| phu/laka hupo\ Gê=s teta/chthai ktl.~ That the struggle was for the oracle is shown briefly and plainly by [Apollod.] 1, 4, 1, 3: ~hôs de\ ho phrourô=n to\ mantei=on Pu/thôn o/phis ekô/luen auto\n (Apo/llôna) parelthei=n epi\ to\ cha/sma~ (the oracular cleft), ~tou=ton anelô/n to\ mantei=on paralamba/nei~. The snake form is proper to earth-spirits, and, as earth-spirits always have mantic power, to oracle-spirits. Trophonios appeared as a snake and so did Asklepios. There can be no doubt that the Delphian ~dra/kôn~ is the embodiment of the pre-Apolline oracle-daimon. Thus Hesych. says exactly ~Pu/thôn daimo/nion mantiko/n~ (elaborated in Hyg. 140). Cf. Act. 16^16.--Supporters of the doctrine of the Greek "religion of Nature" find even in the legend of Apollo's fight with the snake an allegorical version of a physical fact tending to become an ethical one. I cannot regard such an allegory as primitive.]

[34\3: An instructive parallel may be added. In [Clem.] Hom. 5, 22, p. 70, 32 Lag., there is mention of a grave of Plouton ~en tê=| Acherousi/a| li/mnê|~. This may be explained as follows. At Hermione Hades under the name of Klymenos was honoured together with Demeter ~Chthoni/a~ and Kore. Pausanias knew well that Klymenos was a titular name (~epi/klêsis~) of Hades (2, 35, 9), but his rejection of the opinion that Klymenos was a man from Argos who had come to Hermione (as founder of the Chthonic cult) shows that this was the general view. Behind the temple of Chthonia lay ~chôri/a ha\ kalou=sin Hermionei=s to\ me\n Klume/nou, to\ de\ Plou/tônos, to\ tri/ton de\ autôn li/mnên Acherousi/an~. At this ~li/mnê Acherousi/a~ it is possible that a grave of Hades, transformed into the Hero Klymenos, may have been shown. This Clemens referred to, but instead of Klymenos or Hades used inaccurately the name more familiar to later times, Plouton.]

[35\3: ~ka\d d' en Athê/nê|s' ei=sen, heô=| eni\ pi/oni nêô=|~. These words may be kept in mind in order to explain the mysterious narrative in Hesiod Th. 987 ff. of Phaethon whom Aphrodite ~ô=rt' anereipsame/nê kai/ min zathe/ois eni\ nê/ois nêopo/lon mu/chion poiê/sato, dai/mona di=on~. Aphr., in fact. "translated" Phaethon alive and made him immortal--within her own temple just as Athene had Erechtheus. Perhaps Phaethon was translated beneath the ground under the temple--the adj. ~mu/chion~ may mean this. ~theoi\ mu/chioi~ are those that rule over the ~mucho/s~ of a house, e.g. over the ~tha/lamos~ as the inmost chamber: thus ~Aphrodi/tê muchi/a~ (Ael., HA. x, 34). ~Lêtô\ muchi/a~ (Plu. ap. Eus., PE. iii, 1, 3, p. 84 c.). A goddess called simply ~Muchi/a~, ins. fr. Mytilene, GDI. 255. But ~mu/chioi~ could also mean dwellers in the depths of the earth (~muchô=| chthono\s euruodei/ês~, Hes., Th. 119; more commonly in the plural ~muchoi\ chthono/s~, see Markland on Eur., Sup. 545; cf. ~A/ïdos mucho/s~, AP. vii, 213, 6 (Archias); also ~mucho\s eusebe/ôn, athana/tôn~ under the earth, Epigr. Gr. 241 a, 18; 658 a; Rh. Mus. 34, 192). Thus (of the Erinyes) Orph. H. 69, 3, ~mu/chiai, hupo\ keu/thesin oiki/' e/chousai a/ntrô| en êero/enti~. Phot. 274, 18, ~mucho/pedon; gê=s ba/thos, Ha/idês.~]

[36\3: That the ~mi/n~ of line 550 refers to Erechtheus and not Athene is shown by the context: Schol. BL. states it expressly. Athene cannot have been intended to accept the offering of bulls and rams, for ~thê/lea tê=| Athêna=| thu/ousin~. And, in fact, cows, not bulls, were offered to Athene; cf. P. Stengel, quaest. sacr., p. 4-5, Berl. 1879.]

[37\3: See Wachsmuth, Ber. sächs. Ges. Wiss., p. 399 ff., 1887.] {112}

[38\3: Thus there was, at the temple of Palaimon on the Isthmus, an ~a/duton kalou/menon, ka/thodos de\ es auto\ hupo/geôs, e/ntha dê\ to\n Palai/mona kekru/phthai~ (i.e. not dead and buried) ~phasi/n~. Paus. 2, 2, 1.]

[39\3: ~cha/sma kru/ptei chthono/s~, Eur. Ion, 292.--Erechtheus ab Iove Neptuni rogatu fulmine est ictus, Hyg. 46. That is only another kind of translation.]

[40\3: We need not here speak of the relationship between Erechtheus and Poseidon, with whom he was eventually merged.]

[41\3: Clem. Al. Protr. iii, p. 39 P. (with Arnob. and the others who copy him); [Apollod.] 3, 14, 7, 1. Clemens (quoting Antiochos of Syracuse mentions a grave of Kekrops on the citadel. It is uncertain what is the relation between this and the ~Kekro/pion~ known from insc. CIA. i, 322, and ~to\ tou= Ke/kropos hiero/n~ on the citadel (Decree honouring the Epheboi of the tribe Kekropis in the year 333: BCH. '89, p. 257. l. 10).]

[42\3: ~Huakinthi/ois pro\ tê=s tou= Apo/llônos thusi/as es tou=ton Huaki/nthô| to\n bômo\n dia\ thu/ras chalkê=s enagi/zousin; en aristera=| de/ estin hê thu/ra tou= bômou=~. Paus. 3, 19, 3. We shall meet with similar examples in treating of the sacrifices made to Heroes. This naive sacrificial rite regularly presumes the physical presence of the god or "spirit" in the place underground into which the offerings are poured or thrown (as in the ~me/gara~ of Demeter and Kore, etc.).]

[43\3: The story of Hyakinthos is found in its familiar form in the poets of the Hellenistic period and their imitators, Nikander, Bion, Ovid, etc.: already Simmias and Euphorion had told it (see Welcker, Kl. Sch. i, 24 ff.; and G. Knaack, Anal. Alexandrino-romana, p. 60 ff.). It may even reach back to earlier times; the death of H. caused by Apollo's discus-throw is mentioned by Eur., Hel. 1472 ff., though he does not speak of the love of Apollo for H. As the story was generally given, and, indeed, as it had already been implicitly told by Nikias, it had no local colouring and no importance as local legend. It was not ever even an aetiological myth for it could only account in the most general way for the melancholy character of the Hyakinthos festival and not at all for the peculiar features of its ritual. It is an erotic myth leading up to a metamorphosis, like so many others of its kind, in substance, it is true, closely related the Linos myth, etc., with which it is generally compared--and in accordance with the fashionable theory interpreted as an allegory of the spring blossom fading beneath the heat of the sun. It is, in fact, a regular mythological theme (the death through the cast of the discus occurring for example in the stories of Akrisios, Kanobos, Krokos [see Haupt, Opusc. iii, 574 f. In Philo ap. Galen, xiii, 268, read v. 13 ~êïthe/oio~, v. 15 perhaps ~kei/nou dê\ stathmo/n~]). We cannot tell how far the flower Hyakinthos had anything to do with the Amyklaian Hyakinthos (cf. Hemsterhuis, Lucian ii, p. 291 Bip.); perhaps nothing at all--there were no hyacinths used in the Hyakinthia. The similarity of the name may have suggested this addition to the metamorphosis story to the Hellenistic poets.]

[44\3: Certainly not as Apollo's ~erô/menos~ (as which Hauser, Philol. 52, 218, in spite of the beard, regards the Hyakinthos of the Amyklaian altar). Bearded ~paidika/~ are unthinkable as every reader of the Anth. Pal. knows. The most ancient form of the story, as implied in the sculpture at Amyklai, neither knows anything of the love of Apollo and Hyakinthos nor consequently of the latter's early death, etc.]

[45\3: The ~Huakinthi/des~ at Athens were regarded as the daughters (strangely migrated to Athens) of the "Lacedaemonian" Hyakinthos. i.e. the one buried in Amyklai. See St. Byz. ~Lousi/a~; Harp. {113} ~Huakinthi/des~; [Apollod.] 3, 15, 8, 5-6; Hyg. 238 (Phanodemos ap. Suid. ~Parthe/noi~ arbitrarily identifies the ~Huakinthi/des~ with the ~Hua/des~ or daughters of Erechtheus. So also [Dem.] 60, 27). This idea implies a form of the story in which Hyak. did not die while still a boy or a half-grown youth as in the metamorphosis version.--That the figure of Hyakinthos on the sculpture at Amyklai had a beard is expressly mentioned by Paus. 3, 19, 4, as conflicting with the fresh youthfulness of Hyakinthos as Nikias (second half fourth century) with reference to the love-story had represented him in his famous picture (~prôthê/bên Hua/kinthon~, Nic., Th. 905). Paus. § 5, expressly raises a doubt as to the truth of the traditional fable about H.'s death.]

[46\3: ~pro\ tê=s tou= Apo/llônos thusi/as~ Paus. 3, 19, 3. More than once it is stated that at a particular festival sacrifice to the Hero preceded that to the god (cf. Wassner, de heroum ap. Gr. cultu, p. 48 ff.). Probably the reason in all such cases is that the cult of the "Hero" (or god turned Hero is older in that particular spot than the worship of the god whose cult had only been adopted there at a later time. Thus in Plataea at the Daidalia sacrifice was made to Leto before Hera (~prothu/esthai~): Plu. ap. Eus., PE. iii, 84 C: there it is quite evident that the cult of Hera was adopted later. Perhaps even the form of the word ~Hua/kinthos~ implies that it was the name of an ancient deity worshipped already by the pre-Greek inhabitants of the Peloponnese. See Kretschmer, Einl. in Gesch. gr. Spr. 402-5.]

[47\3: ~Huaki/nthô| enagi/zousin~, Paus. 3, 19, 3.]

[48\3: The second day of the festival was sacred to Apollo and not to Hyakinthos: ~to\n theo\n a/|dousin~ Ath. 139 E. (It has been rightly said that this was when the ~paia/n~ mentioned by Xen., HG. 4, 5, 11, must have been sung.) It is impossible to deny, with Unger, Philol. 37, 30, the cheerful character of this second day of the festival as described by Polykrates ap. Ath. 139 E, F. It is true that Didymus (whose words Athenaeus is quoting) begins in a way (139 D) that might lead one to suppose that all three days of the ~tô=n Huakinthi/ôn thusi/a dia\ to\ pe/nthos to\ geno/menon (gino/menon?) peri\ to\n Hua/kinthon~ were passed in gloom without festivity, crowns, feasting, or Paean, etc. But he refutes himself afterwards in his description of the second day of the festival, at which not merely at the performances but at the sacrifice and the banquetings festivity reigns supreme. We can only suppose that his language at the beginning is inaccurate, and that he means what he says of the solemnity of the occasion "because of the mourning for Hyakinthos" to be taken as limited like the mourning itself to the first day of the feast.]

[49\3: Hesych. ~Polu/boia; theo/s tis hup' eni/ôn A/rtemis, hupo\ de\ a/llôn Ko/rê~. Cf. K. O. Müller, Dorians, i, 361 (~A/rtemis~ there probably as Hekate).]

[50\3: Another view of the combined worship of Apollo and Hyakinthos at Amyklai is taken by Enmann, Kypros, etc., 35. In this as elsewhere he relies on certain opinions adopted from H. D. Müller's mythological writings, which must be approved of in general before they can be found enlightening as applied to any particular case.]

[51\3: As happened in the case of Hyakinthos, too, in the scene represented on the Amyklaian altar, Paus. 3, 19, though nothing can be deduced from this as to his original nature.]

[52\3: The oracular activity of Asklepios plays a subordinate part in the usual accounts of him in comparison with his powers of healing. But originally they were closely united (as was usually the case with earth spirits). Apollodorus ~p. theô=n~ ap. Macrob. 1, 20, 4, puts it {114} distinctly: scribit quod Aesculapius divinationibus et auguriis praesit. Celsus calls Asklepios ~euergetou=nta kai\ ta\ me/llonta prole/gonta ho/lais po/lesin anakeime/nais heautô=|~, Or., Cels. iii, 3, pp. 255-6 L.]

[53\3: See Appendix I.]

[54\3: Cicero quoting the pragmatical "theologi" says, ND. iii, 57, Aesculapius (the second one fulmine percussus dicitur humatus esse Cynosuris (the district of Sparta? From a similar source come Clem. Al., Protr. ii, p. 26 P.; Lyd., Mens. iv, 90, p. 164 Wünsch); of the third Askl., Cic. § 57 says: cuius in Arcadia non longe a Lusio flumine sepulcrum et lucus ostenditur. Even the temple of Asklepios in Epidauros was regarded by many as the place of his grave if we are to believe the Clementine Hom. v, 21, Rec. x, 24 (sepulcrum demonstrator in Epidauro Aesculapii).]

[55\3: The chthonic character of Asklepios is shown specially by the fact that not only are snakes sacred and dedicated to him but that he himself was actually thought of as a snake (cf. Welcker, Götterl. ii, 734). ~o/phis, Gê=s pai=s~ (Hdt. i, 78); deities who dwell in the earth, and afterwards "Heroes" (in the later sense), appear in the form of snakes as ~chtho/nioi~. Since such earth-spirits generally have oracular powers the snake is an oracular animal; but that is a secondary development. The offer of a cock, too (as by Sokrates before his departure to the underworld), points to the chthonic character of Ask., for it was a sacrifice also made to Heroes. Thus the ~hêrô=|a~ at Athens were frequented by the priests of Asklepios (CIA. ii, 453 b); cf. Köhler, Ath. Mitth. vol. ii, 245 f. (Sacrificial pit, ~bo/thros~, for this chthonic worship in the Asklepieion at Athens? see Köhler, ib. 254.)]

[56\3: The connexion between Amphiaraos and Asklepios is shown also by the fact that Iaso, one of the allegorical figures attached to Asklepios, though generally the daughter of Askl. (e.g. EM. 434, 17 ~Iasô/~ with Sylb.; cf. Herond. iv, 6), was probably also regarded as the daughter of Amph.: Sch. Ar., Plut. 701. Hesych. s.v. (her portrait in the temple at Oropos, Paus. 1, 34, 3). So, too, ~A/lkandros~ the son of Trophonios (Charax. ap. Schol. Ar., Nub., 508, p. 500 Bk.) seems to be the same as ~A/lkôn~, the Asklepiad daimon whose priest Sophokles was. The portraits of Trophonios followed the type of the Asklepios statues: Paus. 9, 39, 3-4. Troph. son of Valens (= Ischys) and Koronis, and brother of Asklepios: Cic., ND. iii, 56, acc. to the theologi. With good reason, considering their intrinsic affinity, Trophonios, Amphiaraos, Amphilochos, and the Asklepiadai are mentioned side by side by Aristid. i, p. 78 D.]

[57\3: Sulla counted Amphiaraos a "god" and hence the territory belonging to his temple at Oropos was excepted from the lease for the collection of taxes granted to the Roman publicani. The Roman Senate allowed this to stand, ins. from Oropos ~Eph. Arch.~, 1884, p. 101 ff.; Hermes, 20, 268 ff.; the publicani had denied immortalis esse ullos qui aliquando homines fuissent, Cic., ND. iii, 49. Thus only the fact that he was now a god was claimed by the other side--it was not denied that he had once been a mortal. Paus. again 8, 2, 4, mentions Amph. among the ~theoi/~ who ~egi/nonto ex anthrô/pôn~; so too Varro ap. Serv. A. viii, 275; cf. Apul., D. Soc. 15 fin.; also Philo, Leg. ad Gaium, § 78, ii, p. 557 M.]

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