VI. THE ELEUSINIAN MYSTERIES
The cult of the dead, thus pursued in unhampered freedom, preserved and encouraged certain ideas of the life of the soul after death; of the soul as a conscious and powerful being which though separated from the body has not been parted for ever from the scene of its earthly existence. To the Greeks such ideas had become strange and unfamiliar--strange, at least, to the Ionian Greeks of the Homeric age.
But from such a cult no dogmatic or distinctly outlined picture of the life of the departed soul could have been deduced, nor ever was deduced. Everything in this connexion dealt with the relation of the dead to the living. Families by means of sacrifice and religious acts sought to nourish the souls of their own dead. But the cult was in itself chiefly precautionary (apotropaic) in character, and as a consequence men preferred rather to avoid investigation into the nature and condition of the dead themselves, except in so far as they came into the life of the living.
This is the point at which the cult of the souls and belief in the existence of souls stopped short among many of the so-called "savage" peoples who have no history. Nor can there be much doubt that it had reached this stage of development in Greece, too, before the time of Homer; though temporarily overshadowed, it continued to exist for it was rooted firmly in the united life of the family and its traditional practices.
Such traditional beliefs, however, left the nature of the disembodied soul vague and undefined; they viewed it purely from the standpoint of the living and almost entirely in its relations with this world; and resting on such foundations it is not very surprising if they yielded unresistingly and sank into insignificance once the feeling of the influence exercised by the dead upon the living began to weaken, or if anything happened to cause the decline or discredit of the cult of the dead. When the living withdrew their support and reverence from the departed soul the latter ceased to present any clear picture to the minds of men--it became a mere evanescent shadow--unsubstantial--little more than nothing. This is what {218} happened in the period of Ionic culture, in which Homer lived.
The poetry of that period, however, had of its own accord given rise to aspirations after a fuller and more definite picture of the long, unbounded future in the life to come. These aspirations had been given shape in the pictures of the translation of individual mortals to Elysium and the Islands of the Blest.
Such things, however, were, and continued to be, matters of poetry, not of religious faith. Even the poetical fancy dealt with the marvellous past and with exceptional heroes chosen out long ago by the special favour of the gods; such favour was not extended to include the living generations of men. The desire, once it was awakened, for a more hopeful prospect of the life to come beyond the grave and for something more than the mere negative existence of the ancestors worshipped in family cults, must look to other sources for its satisfaction. Such desires began to be felt by many, but their originating source and the secret forces that set them going must remain for us hidden behind the obscurity that lies over the most important period of Greek development, the eighth and seventh centuries. Nor does it help us very much when historians try to stop the gaps of our knowledge with platitudes or the barren offspring of their own imagination. The existence of such desires and their growing strength is shown by the fact that they were able to create for themselves a means of satisfaction (a peculiarly limited satisfaction it is true) in a direction that immediately occurs to everyone as soon as the subject of future blessedness or belief in immortality among the Greeks is mentioned--the Eleusinian Mysteries.
§ 2
Wherever the cult of the gods of the earth and the lower world, and particularly of Demeter and her daughter, was at its height it was not difficult for hopes of a better fate in the kingdom of souls below the earth, where those deities ruled, to become attached to participation in their cult. The tendency to connect closely such hopes with the worship of these gods may have existed in many different localities. In Eleusis alone, however (and in the cults, mostly of later origin, affiliated to Eleusis), we see this connexion carried out as a fully organized institution. We can follow at least in general outline the gradual advance of the Eleusinian religious organization. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter tells us the origin {219} of the cult according to the national legends of Eleusis. In the country of the Eleusinians the divine daughter of Demeter, after being carried down to the lower world by Aïdoneus, came up once more to the light of day, and was restored to her mother. Before ascending to Olympos and the company of the other immortals, in accordance with the wish of Zeus, Demeter fulfilled her promise, and when the Eleusinians had erected a temple to her outside the city, over the spring Kallichoros, she founded the sacred worship whereby men should do honour to her in the future. She herself instructed the princes of the land "in the performance of the cult and taught them her sacred Orgia", which respect for the goddess does not allow them to communicate to others.[1\6] This primitive Eleusinian cult of Demeter, then, is the religious service of a close corporation. Knowledge of the holy ritual, carrying with it the priesthood of the two goddesses is confined to the descendants of the four Eleusinian princes to whom Demeter once gave her ordinances as an inheritance. The cult is therefore a "secret" one: not more so, indeed, than a great many cult-societies of Greece, participation in which was strictly forbidden to all unauthorized persons.[2\6] It differs from them, however, in the solemn promise which is made to the participants in its worship. "Blessed is the man who has beheld these holy acts; but he that is uninitiated and has no share in the holy ceremonies shall not enjoy a like fate after his death, in the gloomy darkness of Hades." To those who share in the Eleusinian worship a privileged fate is promised after death; but even in his lifetime, we read further on,[3\6] he is highly blessed whom the two goddesses love: they send him Ploutos, the giver of good things, to be a beloved partner of his hearth and home. On the other hand, whosoever honours not Korê, the queen of the lower world, with gifts and sacrifice, shall do penance everlastingly (368 ff.).
The narrow circle of those to whom such a tremendous promise was made began to be extended after the time when Eleusis was united with Athens (which may have taken place some time in the seventh century), and when the Eleusinian worship was raised to the position of an official cult of the Athenian state. Nor was it Attica alone, but the whole of Greece which became interested in the Eleusinian festival, when Athens became the chief centre of Greek life. A solemn "truce of God" was proclaimed which assured the peaceful and undisturbed performance of the sacred ritual, and distinguished the Eleusinia, like the great games and Fairs of Olympia, the Isthmus, etc., as a Pan-Hellenic festival. At {220} the height of Athenian power (about 440)[4\6] a decree of the people was passed which required the yearly offering of first fruits of the fields to the Eleusinian temple from Athenian citizens and allies, and invited similar offerings from all Greek states. The decree could appeal in so doing to ancient and ancestral custom, and to an utterance of the Delphic god who had authorized these things.[5\6] The inner history of the development of the Eleusinian festival is a matter of some obscurity. The holy rites continued to be performed at Eleusis; Eleusinian noble families still took part[6\6] in the worship of the goddesses, which was yet directed by the Athenian government. On the other hand, a good deal must have been altered in the course of time. The popular decree mentioned above acquaints us with the names of two triads, each composed of two divine personages and a Hero, who were worshipped at Eleusis at that time. Demeter and Korê occur together with Triptolemos, and also "the god, the goddess, and Eubouleus".[7\6] The Homeric hymn gives no hint of the very important position here (and in innumerable other accounts, as well as pictorial representations) attributed to Triptolemos, nor of the other addition to the Eleusinian group of divinities. It is evident that in the course of years many different local figures and modes of worship have been added to and fused with the old cult of the two goddesses; and that in these local figures we have always the one type of chthonic godhead expressing itself anew in ever varied and differentiated forms. Their number is not exhausted by the six already mentioned.[8\6] The most important addition to the Eleusinian circle of deities was Iakchos, the son of Zeus (Chthonios) and Persephone. This god was himself an underworld deity, quite distinct from that Dionysos, with whom other Athenian cults confused him, and with whom he was in fact commonly identified.[9\6] It is a very probable supposition that this god, who soon came to be regarded as the central figure of the group of deities worshipped at Eleusis,[10\6] was the contribution of Athens to that circle: his temple was situated in Athens not Eleusis;[11\6] in the Athenian suburb Agrai the "Little Mysteries" were celebrated in his honour in the spring as a sort of prelude to the greater festival. At the Eleusinia itself, the sacred procession, in which the picture of the youthful god was borne from Athens to Eleusis, formed the link between the part of the festival already performed at Athens and that still to take place at Eleusis. The introduction of Iakchos into the festival of Eleusis did not merely make an external addition to the group of divinities that already shared in it; it added {221} an act[12\6] to the sacred story, the representation of which was the goal and summit of the festival; and thereby in all probability enriched it internally in meaning and substance. It is, indeed, quite impossible for us even to hazard a guess as to the exact meaning and essence of the change which came over the festival thus enlarged in the course of time. We can, however, be sure of this much; there is no ground at all for entertaining the commonly held view that it was the private mysteries of Orphic conventicles which exercised such a transforming influence on the public mysteries of the Athenian state. Those who are not content with solemn and mysterious jargon about "Orphics" and the like, but keep clearly in mind the well-known and quite distinctive features of the Orphic doctrine about gods and the souls of men, will easily recognize that everything points to the unlikelihood of even a single one of these having entered the circle of ideas current at Eleusis.[13\6] They could only have shattered such ideas to pieces.
If the festival, then, grew of its own accord in inward meaning and outward circumstance, the circle of those who came to take part in it grew as well. Originally this festival, so rich in promised blessings, admitted only the citizens of Eleusis, perhaps only the members of certain noble Eleusinian families--and may have appeared to its members an even greater privilege through this very exclusiveness. In this respect it changed completely, admission to it was thrown open to all Greeks--not merely Athenians, but every Greek without distinction of race or country, whether man or woman, was welcomed at Eleusis (and even hetairai, who were still excluded, e.g. from the Demeter-festival of the Athenian women; to say nothing of children and slaves).[14\6] The generosity of Athens--such was the glorious boast--wished the unexampled salvation which this festival promised to its worshippers to be made accessible to all Greeks.[15\6] What contrast to the exclusive cult-unions into which a man had to be born in order, as citizen of a state, member of a phratria, clan, or family, to participate in the advantages they offered! The society of the Eleusinian mystery-festival, once just as exclusive as the rest, had thrown open its doors so widely that this almost unconditional freedom of access became its principle and distinguishing characteristic. The attraction of membership was even heightened by the fact that just by his own unhampered free will and choice the individual could enter the great society through the mediation of one of the two families to whom the highest priesthood of the festival {222} was committed.[16\5] The only condition made was ritual purity, and murderers, for whom this was an impossibility--as it was even for those who were only accused of the shedding of blood--were as such excluded from the mysteries: as, indeed, they were from all the religious ceremonies of the state.[17\6]
Religious purification of the worshippers preceded and accompanied the holding of the festival; to many of the believers it may have appeared that the whole festival itself was principally a great purification and religious dedication of unusual solemnity, by which the members ("the Pure"[18\6] as they called themselves) were made worthy of the favour of the goddesses.
§ 3
As to the actual details of what went on at the long-drawn-out festival itself our knowledge hardly extends beyond the most external circumstances, and is even so most incomplete. A few notices in late and often untrustworthy writers give us a very inadequate picture of what took place inside the great temple of initiation and of the essential Mystery. The secret which was committed[19\6] to the Mystai and Epoptai has been well kept. Considering the enormous number of worshippers indiscriminately admitted to the festival, this would, indeed, have been a real miracle, if the secret to be kept had taken the form of dogma expressed in concept and words and capable of being communicated verbally to others. Since the labours of Lobeck, however, drastically reducing to order the confusion of opinions on this subject, no reasonable person believes that this was the case. It was difficult to let out the "secret" for there was essentially no secret to let out. Profanation could only come through actions, through "the Mysteries being acted",[20\6] as they were in the year 415 in the house of Poulytion. The Mystery was a dramatic performance, or, more strictly, a religious Pantomime, accompanied by sacred songs[21\6] and formal speeches; a representation, as Christian authors let us see, of the Rape of Korê, the wanderings of Demeter, and the final reunion of the goddesses. This in itself would not have made the mysteries remarkable; a similar dramatic reproduction of the circumstances attending the life of a god, which had led to the foundation of the festival in question, was a very widespread cult-practice in Greece; it was part of the festivals of Zeus, Here, Apollo, Artemis, Dionysos, and, above all, of other festivals in honour of Demeter herself. But the Eleusinia was distinguished from all other such festivals, even from the equally secret festivals of Demeter known as the Thesmophoria and the Haloa, by reason {223} of the hopes which it inspired in the minds of the initiated. The Hymn to Demeter tells us that the pious worshipper of the Goddess at Eleusis might hope for riches upon earth and a better fate after death. Later authorities also speak of the success in this life which initiation at Eleusis gave good ground for expecting. But far more emphatic are the statements, made by innumerable witnesses from Pindar and Sophokles onwards, that only they who have been initiated into these mysteries may entertain a joyful expectation of the life to come. To them only is it granted to have real "life" in Hades; nothing but evil awaits others in that place.[22\6]
It was these promises of a blessed immortality that for centuries drew so many worshippers to the Eleusinian festival. Nowhere else could such promises be obtained with such distinctness and assurance. The injunction commanding secrecy must obviously have referred to quite other matters; it cannot have applied to this, the greatest boon anticipated from initiation at Eleusis. Everyone speaks out aloud and without restraint about it. At the same time, all our information is so completely at one on the point and so free from doubt or uncertainty that we must perforce believe that the performances that were to be preserved so secret were, in reality, for the believers the source of an assurance which was not held as the mere probable conjecture of individuals, but as fixed and certain truth beyond question or need of interpretation.
How this was brought about certainly remains obscure. Since the discrediting of "symbolism" in the sense made familiar by Creuzer or Schelling, many of our modern mythologists and historians of religion have been all the more eager to assert that the performances at the Eleusinian mysteries were in reality the true and mystic celebration of the Greek "Religion of Nature" as discovered by themselves. Demeter, in this view, would be the earth; Korê-Persephone, her daughter, the seed of corn; the Rape and Return of Korê would mean the sowing of the seed in the earth and the rise of the young grain from beneath the soil; or, in a more general sense, "the yearly decay and renewal of vegetation." In some way or other the Mystai must have had revealed to them the real meaning of the "nature-symbolism" hidden in the mystical performances. Witnessing these performances they are supposed to have learnt that the fate of the seed of corn, represented by Persephone, its disappearance beneath the earth and eventual rebirth, is an image of the fate of the human soul, which also disappears that it may {224} live again. This, then, must be the real content of the holy Mystery.
It remains, however, first and foremost, to be proved that the Greeks[23\6] themselves would have regarded such symbolistic mummery, in which the phenomena and processes of nature appear under the guise of anthropomorphic gods, as religious at all, or would have recognized their own religion in such things. Still further--admitting for the sake of argument the possibility of such an interpretation--the identification of Korê with the seed of corn and its fate leads at once, if we try to get beyond the vaguest generalities, to intolerable absurdity. It is difficult to see, however (and this would be the main point at issue), how such an analogy between the soul and the grain of seed could have led to a faith in immortality that was not to be had, it would seem, in a more direct fashion. What possible effect could have been produced by such a far-fetched and arbitrary parallel between the phenomena of two such wholely different provinces of existence? If a reasonably plausible deduction was to be made from the visible and unmistakable (the condition of the grain) to the invisible and unknown (the condition of the soul) surely the first and simplest requisite would be that a real causal connexion between the two should be plainly demonstrated. These may seem dull and pedantic considerations where the sublimest forebodings of the heart are concerned; but I should not have supposed that it would have been so easy to tempt the Greeks with vague surmises from the path of logic and lucidity, or that such surmises would have afforded them such extremity of "bliss".
Lastly, the analogy, even if it proved anything, is false. It would only hold if the soul, like the grain, after a temporary disappearance below the earth, were promised a new life upon the earth--if a palingenesia in fact were promised. That this, however, was not a belief supported by the officially conducted mysteries of Athens, is admitted on all hands.
Equally untenable is the view that the dramatic presentation at the mysteries of the Rape and Return of Korê (regarded this time as a divine personage, not as the personified grain of corn) was intended to inspire hopes of an analogous fate for the human soul, by virtue of a mystic unification of the life of man with the life of the godhead to whom he swears allegiance.[24\6] Even so the hope based upon the typical fate of Korê could only have led to a hope for the palingenesia of mankind in general, not (what was and always remained the real belief of Eleusis) to the hope of a specially {225} favoured after-life for the Mystai in the kingdom below the world. Indeed, we must not look to the Eleusinian mysteries for the ecstatic exaltation of the soul to the recognition of its own godhead--though such exaltation was the motive force and the essential core of Greek mysticism, as of all mysticism and mystic religion. From the mysteries of Eleusis, however, it remained far removed; the belief there fostered, with its absolute division and distinction between the divine and the human, never transgressed the bounds of popular Greek religion, over whose portals stood the universally prescriptive words: ~he\n andrô=n, he\n theô=n ge/nos~--"the race of men is one, and the race of gods is another." Nor was Eleusis any exception to this rule; the mysteries did not point the way to mysticism.
§ 4
Inquiry is on the wrong track when a deeper meaning is sought for in the mimic presentation of the sacred myth at Eleusis whereby the human soul was to obtain the blessed hope of immortality. The conviction that the human soul was immortal in its own right, by reason of its own nature, was not a conviction that was obtained at Eleusis. That is why we may dismiss such fanciful analogies as those between the human soul and the seed of corn or the goddess of the earth's life. Such analogies, if they proved anything, would prove at most the complete indestructibility, in spite of all vicissitude, of the life of the human soul--of every human soul. But this was not Eleusinian doctrine. The continued conscious existence of the soul after its separation from the body was not a doctrine but a presupposition of Eleusis; and it could be thus presupposed because it was the basic idea of the popular and widespread cult offered to the souls of the departed.[25\6] The advantage obtained by the initiated at Eleusis was that a livelier and fuller content was given to the bare existence of the disembodied soul, which was all that the current worship of the souls essentially contemplated. We are assured that only the initiated at Eleusis will have a real "life" after death; that evil will be the fate of "the others".[26\6] Not that the soul, relieved of the presence of the body, will live hereafter, but how it will live was what Eleusis taught men. With the calm assurance common to all close and confined religious associations, the Eleusinian society divided mankind into two classes: the "Pure", that is those who had been initiated at Eleusis, and the innumerable multitude of the uninitiated. Only for the members in {226} communion with the mystery of Eleusis was salvation assured. Salvation was theirs as a reversionary right, but salvation such as theirs was a privilege and could only be obtained by participation in the bounteous festival of the Athenian State and in its ceremonial. Centuries of large-minded tolerance in admitting to the mysteries extended this privilege to an immense number of Greeks (and of Romans, too, in later times). But the prospect of a blessed hereafter never became a matter of course; not as man, not even as a virtuous and pious man did such a privilege come to anyone. It was granted solely to the member of the Eleusinian religious society and the participator in the divine service of the goddesses.[27\6]
What were the means employed to impress this hope--this certain expectation rather--of a blessed hereafter in Hades upon the Mystai? We must frankly admit that we cannot, unfortunately, say anything definite in answer to this question. Only to the suggestion that these hopes were grounded upon symbolic representations of any kind may we give a decided denial. And yet this is the generally accepted opinion. "Symbols" there may have been, as an assistance to the dramatic or pantomimic representation of the Rape and Return of Korê;[28\6] but hardly in any other sense than that of typical condensations--the part being put for the whole, or the whole understood in the part--of scenes impossible to represent in their entirety. It is true that with the lapse of centuries, and in the absence of any official written interpretation of the inner meaning and intention of the ritual many of these symbols became unintelligible--a disadvantage which belonged to all other departments of Greek religion as well. As soon as independent reflexion on matters of religion began to arise, many sorts of allegorical or symbolical interpretations began to be applied to the details of the performances at the mysteries. Does it follow from this that the mysteries of the Earth divinities, as some are inclined to believe, bore a symbolical or allegorical character from the outset, and differed in this respect from all other Greek worship of the gods?[29\6] Similar interpretations were applied by philosophers or would-be philosophers to the fables of the gods in Homeric or popular mythology; the mysteries did not by any means hold a peculiar position in the minds of connoisseurs of myth-interpretation in antiquity. If a "deeper meaning" was attached by preference to the performances at Eleusis, that only shows that much in these performances was no longer understood, or in its real meaning no longer satisfied the spirit of the philosophic centuries. But it shows also that for this {227} festival of unexampled splendour, where night and the injunction of secrecy awakened awed expectancy,[30\6] performed according to an archaic ritual of ever-increasing perfection and attended by the whole of Greece, an unusual sympathy was felt. It offered something to the eye and the ear which was attractive to all men, and they exerted themselves to find a satisfactory meaning in its sights and sounds. Finally, it is likely enough that the "meaning" which they themselves had arbitrarily bestowed upon them was what made the mysteries specially attractive to many. To this extent it is legitimate to say that symbolism was a real and historical factor in the constitution of the mysteries.
Even supposing, however, that much in the presentation of this mystic festival was consciously ordered and disposed by the founders of it with a view to symbolic interpretation, and consequently to the possibility of an ever-increasing idealization of its significance, yet this cannot have extended to the hopes of a blessed immortality revealed to the Mystai. Symbolist or allegorizing modes of interpretation must always have been the private concern of individuals and therefore liable to much uncertainty and variety.[31\6] Our authorities, however, from the most diverse periods, speak with far too great distinctness and unanimity about the blessed hereafter vouchsafed to the initiated in the mysteries, for it to be credible that this can have been the outcome of any interpretation of complexities, or of any metaphorical application of the hopes derived from events in the life of the gods to a quite different province, the life of the human soul. What every witness speaks of in the plainest and simplest language without any special "mystery"--the hope of future blessedness--must have been offered to the participants in the mysteries in the most unequivocal fashion. It is natural, above all, to suppose that the exhibition of the "mystic drama" included particularly the final scene as it is sketched in the 2nd Homeric Hymn: the foundation of the Eleusinian festival by the goddess herself--what had once been revealed to the little city-community must have been proclaimed to the great company of those admitted to the common festival of Eleusis:[32\6] the highest reward of participation in this unparalleled act of worship is what the Homeric Hymn distinctly puts forth as such--the peculiar favour of the gods of the lower world and a future life of blessedness within their kingdom. The statues of the goddesses were seen radiantly illuminated;[33\6] at this festival of grace in remembrance of their trials, their happiness, and their beneficent acts, they {228} themselves--as it seemed to the faithful believer--were invisibly present. What further need of warrant was there for the promises of future blessedness?
§ 5
In spite of many extravagant statements from antiquity, we have no means of estimating how widely participation in the Eleusinian mysteries (whether of those celebrated at Eleusis itself or in the numerous associated festivals) was extended in Greece. Still, it is probable that large numbers, not from Athens alone but from the whole of Greece, sought eagerly to enter the state of grace vouchsafed to the worshippers at Eleusis. In this way the more lively conception of the state of the soul in the hereafter may have gradually become the common property of Greek imagination.
On the whole, we must be on our guard against attributing too great an importance to these mysteries. There can hardly have been any question of moral influence--the ancients themselves in their most exaggerated eulogies of the mysteries and their greatness, say almost nothing of this.[34\6] Nor is it easy to see what part of the mysteries could have served as a vehicle of moral influence.[35\6] Distinct dogma in the religious sense was never provided by the mysteries any more than by other worships of the gods in Greece. Nor was there anything exclusive about the cult of the mysteries; side by side with that cult and after it the Mystai took part in other worships of the gods, according to the usages prevailing in their own homes. The great festival when it was over left no sting behind in the hearts of the initiated. No requirement of a new manner of life, no new and peculiar condition of conscience was theirs on its account; no strange revaluation of values, contradicting the general opinions of the time, was learnt there. There was a total absence of that which (if we rightly understand the word) gives to the doctrines of sectarian religion their force and persuasiveness--paradox. Even the prospect of future bliss opened to the initiated did not divert them from the normal tenor of their existence. It was a genial prospect; not a compelling demand drawing all things to itself and turning men away from ordinary life. The light that fell from beyond was not so blinding that it made all things on this earth seem dark and mean. If in the decadence of Greek culture--and even among the people of Homer--ideas hostile to this life made their appearance and in many places acquired weight and influence; if some men began to think death superior {229} to life, and this life, of which alone we can be assured, as merely a preparation, a land of passage to a higher life in the world invisible--for all this the mysteries were not responsible. It was not they, nor the feelings and surmises awakened by their pictures and performances, that dulled the beauty of this earth for the enthusiasts "intoxicated with other-worldliness", or made them strangers to the instincts of life and sanity prevailing in older and unspoiled ages of Greek life.
NOTES TO CHAPTER VI
[1\6: H. Cer. 270 ff. (Demeter speaks) ~all' a/ge moi nêo/n te me/gan kai\ bômo\n hup' autô=| teucho/ntôn pa=s dê=mos hupai\ po/lin aipu/ te tei=chos, Kallicho/rou kathu/perthen, epi\ prou/chonti kolônô=|. o/rgia d' autê\ egô\n hupothê/somai, hôs a\n e/peita euage/ôs e/rdontes emo\n me/nos hila/skêsthe~. Building of the temple: 298 ff., and following that the instructions of the goddess as to the ~drêsmosu/nê hierô=n~ and the ~o/rgia~, 474 ff.]
[2\6: See Lobeck, Agl. 272 ff.]
[3\6: 487 ff. I will not stop to answer the attacks made on the concluding part of the hymn nor to defend the many lines which editors have rejected. None of the attacks seem to me justified.]
[4\6: Körte, Ath. Mitt. 1896, p. 320, dates the decree in the year 418.]
[5\6: ~kata\ ta\ pa/tria kai\ tê\n mantei/an tê\n ek Delphô=n~, SIG. 20, l. 5; 26 f.; 35 [IG. i, Supp., p. 59, 27_b_]. In Sicily the Eleusinia are already well known in the time of Epicharmos: Epich. ~en Odussei= automo/lô|~ ap. Ath. 374 D = 100 Kaib. EM. 255, 2; cf. K. O. Müller, Kl. Schr. ii, 259.]
[6\6: We can only state this definitely of the Eumolpidai who provided the male and female hierophants. Severely as the genealogy of this family has suffered on all sides through fictitious accretions and combinations there can be no doubt of its Eleusinian origin. On the other hand, it is a striking fact that none of the ~ge/nê~ who are known to have shared in the direction of the Eleus. mysteries derived their origin from the Eleusinian princes mentioned in h. Cer. 475-6 as receiving with Eumolpos the instructions of the goddess (Triptolemos, Diokles, Keleos). The Krokonidai and Koironidai did, it is true, claim Triptolemos as their ancestor, but their connexion with the sacred festival is obscure and dubious (see K. O. Müller, Kl. Schr. ii, 255 f.). The Kerykes (in whose family the posts of Dadouchos, Herald of the Mysteries, Priest ~epi\ bômô=|~, etc., were hereditary) were only connected with Eumolpos by a tradition which the family itself regarded as apocryphal (Paus. 1, 38, 3); they themselves traced their descent from Hermes and Herse the daughter of Kekrops (s. Dittenberger, Hermes, xx, 2), and therefore evidently regarded themselves as an Athenian family. We know too little of these relationships to venture to say that this claim was unjustified (as Müller, p. 250 f., is inclined to do). Nothing need prevent us from supposing that this is one of the many innovations introduced at and after the union of Eleusis and its festival with Athens--many of them are quite evident--and that in addition to the old Eleusinian priestly families the Athenian family of the Kerykes was given a regular part in the ~drêsmosu/nê hierô=n~. This would then be part of the compromise (~sunthê=kai~, Paus. 2, 14, 2) between Athens and Eleusis upon which the whole relationship between the two states and their religious cults rested.]
[7\6: See above, chap. v, n. 18.]
[8\6: It is doubtful what part the goddess Daeira played in the Eleusinia: that she played some part must be regarded as certain from the fact that among the official priesthoods of the festival a ~daeiri/tês~ is expressly mentioned (Poll. i, 35). She stands in a certain opposition to Demeter: but though she is nevertheless identified by Aesch. {231} and others with Persephone (K. O. Müller, Kl. Schr. ii, 288) the most we may deduce from this is that she also was a chthonic deity. (Acc. to the sacrificial calendar of the Attic Tetrapolis, Leg. Sacr. i, p. 48, B. 12. ~Dai/ra| hoi=s kuou=sa~ was offered. This does not point to the identity of this goddess with Persephone--as the editor, p. 52, points out. Pregnant animals were by preference offered to Demeter, though occasionally to Artemis and Athene too.) Daeira seems from all the indications to belong to the ~chtho/nioi~. (Meaning of the name uncertain: ? "the knowing one" or "the (torch) burning one": cf. Lobeck, Pathol. prol. 263.) In Eust. on ~Z~ 378, p. 648, 24, among the notices collected from the lexicographers there is one in which Pherekydes makes her the sister of Styx (it is not Pherekydes but the over-subtle scholar to whom Eust. owes his note, who thinks that Daeira signified the ~hugra\ phu/sis~ to the ancients; so also Ael. Dionys. quoting ~hoi peri\ teleta\s kai\ mustê/ria~ in his Lexicon, ap. Eust. 648, 41. This is a worthless allegorical interpretation).--For which reason some made her the daughter of Okeanos (Müller, pp. 244, 288 )--~tine\s de\ phu/laka Persepho/nês hupo\ Plou/tônos apodeichthê=nai/ phasi tê\n Da/eiran~ (648, 40). According to this she would be a Hades-daimon keeping guard over the wife of Aidoneus (cf. the guardian ~Kôkutou= peri/dromoi ku/nes~ in Ar., Ran. 472, quoting Eurip.). In this case we can see the origin of Demeter's hostility. Did this Daeira also play a part (as a character) in the Eleusinian ~dra=ma mustiko/n~? Ap. Rh. makes her the same as Hekate, who, however, in the h. Cer. (and on vase-paintings) is the helper rather than the enemy of Demeter.]
[9\6: So also in the recently discovered Paean (fourth century B.C.) of Philodamos of Skarpheia addressed to Dionysos (BCH. 1895, p. 403), where in the third section we are told how Dionysos, the son of Thyone, born in Thebes, went from Delphi to Eleusis where he was called Iakchos by the mortals to whom he had (in the mysteries) revealed ~po/nôn ho/rmon a/lupon~.--The attempt at historical synthesis, bringing together as many as possible of the different relations and ramifications of the Dionysos nature, is particularly evident in the whole composition of this hymn. The cult of Dionysos was established in Attica by the Delphic oracle--so much is certain; and that is enough for the poet who now makes Iakchos, too, come from Delphi to the people of Attica. Such a conception has no historical significance.]
[10\6: ~I/akchos~ (there clearly distinguished from ~Dio/nusos) tê=s Dê/mêtros dai/môn~ is described as ~ho archêge/tês tô=n mustêri/ôn~ in Str. 468 (cf. Ar., Ran. 398 f.).]
[11\6: The ~Iakchei=on~ (Plu., Arist. 27. Alciphr. iii, 59, 1).]
[12\6: Was the birth of Iakchos any part of the spectacle at the mysteries? It might be thought so from what we are told by Hippol., RH. 5, 8, p. 162 D.-S.: the hierophant ~nukto\s en Eleusi=ni hupo\ pollô=| puri\ telô=n ta\ mustê/ria boa=| kai\ ke/krage le/gôn; hiero\n e/teke po/tnia kou=ron Brimô\ brimo/n~. This statement, however, suffers from the disadvantage belonging to all information given by Christian writers on the subject of mysteries when not confirmed by earlier evidence; such information is admissible at most for the actual time of the writer. (Immediately combined with this in Hippol. comes the remarkable assertion that the hierophant was ~eunouchisme/nos dia\ kônei/ou~. Of this Epict. for example (3, 21, 16) knows nothing, but only speaks of the ~hagnei/a~--probably confined to the time of the festival and its preparation--of the hierophant. Still, Jerome, adv. Jovin. 1, 49, p. 320 C Vall., speaks of the cicutae sorbitionis castrari of the hierophant. Likewise Serv., A. vi, 661.)] {232}
[13\6: An opportunity of speaking in more detail of Orphic doctrine will occur later on. Here I will only point out in passing that the ancients themselves never suggested for a moment that Orpheus--the master of every kind of mysticism--had anything in particular to do with the Eleusinia; as Lob. Agl. 239 shows.]
[14\6: As to the admission of slaves to the Eleusinian initiation ceremonies K. O. Müller, Kl. Schr. ii, 56, opposes Lobeck (Agl. 19) and suggests a doubt. His main objection is that on the great inscr. dealing with the regulation of the Eleusinia (CIA. i, 1) side by side with ~mu/stai kai\ epo/ptai~ there is mention also of ~ako/louthoi~ (but not of ~dou=loi~, Ziehen, Leg. Sacr. [Diss.], p. 14 f.)--i.e. presumably slaves, not themselves Mystai, belonging to the ~mu/stai~. But if slaves were initiated that would not prevent there being other slaves, ~ako/louthoi~ of the ~mu/stai~, uninitiated and not reckoned among the ~mu/stai~. It is definitely stated on the official record of building expenses at Eleusis dating from the year 329/8, CIA. ii, 834, b, col. 2, 71, ~mu/êsis duoi=n tô=n dêmosi/ôn~ (the state slaves employed in the building operations) ~D D D~ (cf. l. 68). Initiation of the ~dêmo/sioi~ also in CIA. ii, 834 c, 24. On this view, when the comic poet Theophilos (ii, p. 473 K.) makes someone speak of his ~agapêto\s despo/tês~ by whom he ~emuê/thê theoi=s~, it will not be necessary to suppose that a freedman (as Meineke, Com. 3, 626) is speaking and not a slave.--The generosity implied was all the greater since in many of the most sacred feasts of the gods at Athens slaves were expressly excluded: cf. Philo, Q. omn. Prob. 20, ii, p. 467 M. Casaubon on Ath., vol. 12, p. 495 Schw.]
[15\6: Isoc. 4, 28, ~Dê/mêtros ga\r aphikome/nês eis tê\n chô/ran . . . kai\ dou/sês dôrea\s ditta/s, hai/per me/gistai tugcha/nousin ou=sai, tou/s te karpou\s kai\ tê\n teletê/n, . . . hou=tôs hê po/lis hêmô=n ou mo/non theophilô=s alla\ kai\ philanthrô/pôs e/schen, hô/ste kuri/a genome/nê tosou/tôn agathô=n ouk ephtho/nêse toi=s a/llois, all' hô=n e/laben ha/pasi~ (he means all Greeks: cf. 157) ~mete/dôken~.]
[16\6: ~muei=n d' ei=nai toi=s ou=si Kêru/kôn kai\ Eumolpidô=n~ as the law appoints, CIA. i, 1 (more exactly Supp. p. 3 f.), ll. 110-11. Thus the ~mu/êsis~ belonged exclusively to the members of the ~ge/nê~ of the Eumolpidai and Kerykes (but to all the members, not merely those serving as officers at the particular festival concerned). Cf. Dittenberger, Hermes, 20, 31 f. The Emperor Hadrian, in order to be able to hold the festival in a more sumptuous manner, had himself made ~a/rchôn~ of the ~Eumolpidô=n ge/nos~, having already been made a member of that ~ge/nos~: ins. from Eleusis, Ath. Mitt. 1894, p. 172.--There is no reference to the Eleusinia in what is said about the ~muei=n~ of a priestess belonging to the family of the Phyllidai in Phot. ~Phillei=dai~: see Töpffer, Att. Geneal. 92.--The exx. of ~mu/êsis~ collected by Lobeck (Agl. 28 ff.) do not contradict this law: in the case of Lysias who ~hupe/scheto muê/sein~ the hetaira Metaneira [D.] 59, 21, ~muei=n~ merely means defray the cost of initiation (quite correctly explained by Müller, review of Aglaoph., Kl. Schr. ii, 56). So, too, in the case of Theoph. (ii, p. 473 K.) ~emuê/thên theoi=s~, i.e. at the expense of my master.]
[17\6: The ~pro/rrêsis~ of the Basileus and the proclamations of the hierophant and dadouchos excluded all ~andropho/noi~ from those taking part in the mysteries: Lob., Agl. 15. They were also, it is true, excluded from all other sacred rites: Lob. 17. Even ~toi=s en aiti/a|~ the Archon gave warning ~ape/chesthai mustêri/ôn kai\ tô=n a/llôn nomi/môn~ (Poll. 8, 90): in fact, the person accused of murder was in any case, as "unclean", excluded from all ~no/mima~: Antipho, vi, 36 (in AB. 310, 8 read ~nomi/môn~).] {233}
[18\6: ~ho/sioi mu/stai~, Ar., Ran. 336. (So, too, the Mystai of the Orphic mysteries are called ~hoi ho/sioi~: Pl., Rp. 363 C; Orph., H. 84, 3.) ~ho/sios~ is probably here used in its primitive sense = "clean" (~ho/siai chei=res~, etc.). [Pl.] Axioch. 371 D refers to ~ta\s hosi/ous agchistei/as~ of the Eleus. Mystai. In the same way ~hosiou=n~ was used of ritual purification and expiation: ~phugai=sin hosiou=n~ the murder, E., Or. 515; ~hosiou=n~ the returned homicide, D. 23, 73; (of the Bacchic mysteries ~ba/kchos eklê/thên hosiôthei/s~, E. fr. 472, 15). Thus the ~ho/sioi~ are identical with the ~kekatharme/noi~ as the initiated are called: Pl. Phd. 69 C, and frequently. It would be hazardous to suppose that the Mystai called themselves ~ho/sioi~ as the only pious and righteous people (though that is what ~ho/sios a/nthrôpos~ and the like mean elsewhere). Their spiritual self-satisfaction hardly went as far as that, and indeed they did not ascribe so much personal merit to themselves at all.]
[19\6: In a solemn announcement of the Keryx as it seems: the latter acc. to Sopater ~diai/r. zêtêm.~ (Walz, Rhet. Gr. viii, 118, 24 f.) ~dêmosi/a| epita/ttei tê\n siôpê/n~ at the commencement of the sacred ritual.]
[20\6: ~ta\ mustê/ria poiei=n~, Andoc., Myst. 11-12.--The more clearly descriptive expression, ~exorchei=sthai ta\ mustê/ria~ does not seem to occur before Aristides, Lucian, and the latter's imitator Alciphron. [Lys.] 6, 51: ~hou=tos endu\s stolê/n, mimou/menos ta\ hiera\ **epedei/knue toi=s amuê/tois kai\ ei=pe tê=| phônê=| ta\ apo/rrêta~. The ~apor.~ thus divulged were the sacred formulæ uttered by the hierophant.]
[21\6: At least in later ages there was plenty to hear: ~eis epha/millon kate/stê tai=s akoai=s ta\ horô/mena~, Aristid., Eleus. I, 415 Di. [ii, 28 Ke.]. We frequently hear of the beautiful voices of the hierophants, of ~hu/mnoi~ ringing out, etc.]
[22\6: The well-known statements of Pindar, Sophokles, Isokrates, Krinagoras, Cicero, and others are collected by Lobeck, Agl. 69 ff. There is a reminiscence of Isocr. in Aristid. Eleus. I 421 Di. [ii, 30 Ke.] ~alla\ mê\n to/ ge ke/rdos tê=s panêgu/reôs ouch ho/son hê parou=sa euthumi/a . . . alla\ kai\ peri\ tê=s teleutê=s hêdi/ous e/chein ta\s elpi/das~. id. Panath. I, 302 Di. ~ta\s arrê/tous teleta\s hô=n toi=s metaschou=si kai\ meta\ tê=n tou= bi/ou teleutê\n belti/ô ta\ pra/gmata gi/gnesthai dokei=~. Cf. also Welcker's account, Gr. Götterl. ii, 519 ff., in which, however, there is a good deal mixed up which has nothing to do with the mysteries.]
[23\6: That is, in the time of still vital religion and in the circles which still retained an unspoilt feeling for it. Apart from these it is true that the allegorical interpretation of myths was already familiar in antiquity, and in learned circles the gods and the stories of the gods were transformed and disintegrated ~eis pneu/mata kai\ rheu/mata kai\ spo/rous kai\ aro/tous kai\ pa/thê gê=s kai\ metabola\s hôrô=n~ as Plutarch complains, Is. et O. 66, p. 377 D. These allegorical interpreters from Anaxagoras and Metrodoros onwards are the real ancestors of our modern "nature" mythologists. No one doubts, however, that from their interpretations nothing can be learnt except what the real sense of Greek belief in the gods certainly was not. It is worth noticing that Prodikos, because he said that ~hê/lion kai\ selê/nên kai\ potamou\s kai\ leimô=nas kai\ karpou\s kai\ pa=n to\ toioutô=des~ were the real essence of the Greek gods, was looked upon as one of the ~a/theoi~ (S.E., M. 9, 51-2 = B 5 Diels). Quam tandem religionem reliquit? asks the Greek whom Cicero is reproducing in ND. i, 118, with reference to this ancient prophet of Greek "nature-religion".--For the ancient allegorists Persephone, too, is nothing but ~to\ dia\ tô=n karpô=n phero/menon pneu=ma~ (so Kleanthes: Plu. as above). Acc. to Varro Persephone "means" fecunditatem seminum, {234} carried off by Orcus on the occasion of some crop-failure, etc. (Aug., CD. vii, 20). In Porph. ap. Eus., PE. 3, 11, 7-9. we actually have the very interpretation which has been recently restored to so much favour--that ~Ko/rê~ is nothing else but a (feminine) personification of ~ko/ros~ = young plant, shoot.]
[24\6: A hint of such an explanation occurs in Sallustius, de Dis iv, ~kata\ tê\n enanti/an isêmeri/an~ (i.e. the autumnal) ~hê tê=s Ko/rês harpagê\ **muthologei=tai gene/sthai; ho\ dê\ ka/thodo/s hesti tô=n psuchô=n~ (from the standpoint of this Neoplatonist at any rate the analogy might be carried through). So, too, Sopater ~diai/r. zêt.~ in Walz, Rh. Gr. viii, 115, 3, speaks of ~to\ tê=s psuchê=s pro\s to\ thei=on suggene/s~ as if it were confirmed in the (Eleusinian) mysteries.]
[25\6: It may be mentioned here by anticipation that a real doctrine of the indestructibility of the human soul was first traditionally attributed in antiquity to the Greek philosophers such as Thales or to the theosophoi such as Pherekydes (and Pythagoras too). In what sense this can be regarded as true we shall learn in the course of our inquiry. The mysteries of Eleusis, from which many modern critics would like to derive the belief in immortality among the Greeks, are mentioned by no ancient authority as among the sources of that belief or of such a doctrine. In which they were quite right.]
[26\6: Soph. fr. 753 N. [791 P.] ~hôs tri\s o/lbioi kei=noi brotô=n, hoi\ tau=ta derchthe/ntes te/lê mo/lôs' es Ha/idou; toi=sde ga\r mo/nois ekei= zê=n e/sti, toi=s d' a/lloisi pa/nt' ekei= kaka/~.]
[27\6: The privileged position of the initiated is exhibited with striking vigour in the well-known outburst of Diogenes: ~ti/ le/geis, e/phê, krei/ttona moi=ran he/xei Pataiki/ôn ho kle/ptês apothanô\n ê\ Epameinô/ndas, ho/ti memu/êtai?~ Plu., Aud. Poet. iv, p. 21 F; D.L. vi, 39; Jul., Or. vii, 238 A (p. 308 Hert.).--A homiletic application of Diogenes' saying is made by Philo, Vict. Off. 12, ii, p. 261 M. ~sumbai/nei polla/kis tô=n me\n agathô=n andrô=n mêde/na muei=sthai, lê|sta\s de\ e/stin ho/te kai\ katapontista\s kai\ gunaikô=n thia/sous bdeluktô=n kai\ akola/stôn, epa\n argu/rion para/schôsi toi=s teloi=si kai\ hierophantou=si~. Cf. Spec. Leg. 3, 7, i, p. 306 M.]
[28\6: Of this nature were the ~hiera/~ which the hierophant "showed" and the other things that were employed in the festival: pictures of gods, relics, and paraphernalia of all sorts (e.g. the ~ki/stê~ and the ~ka/lathos~: O. Jahn, Hermes, 3, 327 f.): see Lob., Agl. 51-62.]
[29\6: Preller, for example (stimulated by K. O. Müller), is fond of dwelling on the special character and meaning of the worship of the chthonic deities as something quite distinct from other Greek worships of the gods. An example may be found in Pauly-Wissowa^1, s.v. Eleusis, iii, p. 108: "The department of religion to which the Eleusinian cult belongs is that of the chthonic deities, which had been indigenous in Greece from the earliest times and was a widely popular cultus. In this cultus ideas of the generous fruitfulness of the earth's soil and of the fruitfulness of death--whose seat seems to be beneath the earth like the Old Testament Sheol--were interwoven in a mysteriously suggestive way: a way which essentially resisted all efforts at clear and distinct comprehension, and could not help leading to mystical or occult suggestions and obscure symbolistic expression." This and further amplifications in the same sense all rest upon the unprovable axiom that the activities of the ~chtho/nioi~ as gods of the soil and as gods of the kingdom of the souls were "interwoven": the suggestive haze of the rest follows naturally. But what in all this is Greek?]
[30\6: ~hê kru/psis hê mustikê\ tô=n hierô=n semnopoiei= to\ thei=on, mimoume/nê tê\n phu/sin autou= pheu/gousan hêmô=n tê\n ai/sthêsin~. Str. 467.] {235}
[31\6: In fact the ancient allegorical interpretations of the mysteries differed widely among themselves: Lob., Agl. 136-40.--Even Galen attributed an allegorical sense to the mysteries of Eleusis, but he thinks ~amudra\ ekei=na pro\s e/ndeixin hô=n speu/dei dida/skein~ (iv, p. 361 K.). This cannot have been true of the assurances given to the Mystai of a blessed future in Hades.]
[32\6: Such proclamations may have occurred in the ~hieropha/ntou rhê/seis~ (Sop. ~diai/r. zêt.~ Walz, viii, 123, 29; cf. Lob., Agl. 189).]
[33\6: Lob., Agl. 52, 58 f.]
[34\6: No one says anything of any kind of moral obligation undertaken by the Mystai or of any consequent moral influence of the festival: not even Andokides in whose warnings addressed to the college of judges composed of Mystai (Myst. 31) the words ~hi/na timôrê/sête me\n tou\s asebou=ntas ktl.~ are not to be taken with the previous ~memu/êsthe kai\ heôra/kate toi=n theoi=n ta\ hiera/~ but with ~hoi/tines ho/rkous mega/lous ktl., kai\ arasa/menoi ktl.~ He speaks, in fact, of the moral obligation of the jury who have taken the oath, as judges not as Mystai. In Ar., Ran., 455 ff., the words ~ho/soi memuê/metha~ stand loosely side by side with ~eusebê= diê/gomen tro/pon peri\ tou\s xe/nous kai\ tou\s idiô/tas~. (Of the Samothrakian mysteries Diodoros says, 5, 49, 6: ~gi/nesthai de/ phasi kai\ eusebeste/rous kai\ dikaiote/rous kai\ kata\ pa=n belti/onas heautô=n tou\s tô=n mustêri/ôn koinônê/santas~--as it seems without effort on their part by a pure act of grace.)]
[35\6: Formal or verbal instruction of a theological or moral kind was not supplied at Eleusis; so much may be stated without fear of contradiction since the work of Lobeck. Thus, the three commandments of Triptolemos, which acc. to Xenokrates ~diame/nousi Eleusi=ni~ (Porph., Abs. 4, 22) cannot be regarded as moral precepts proclaimed at the mysteries: indeed, there is nothing to lead one to conclude that they had anything to do with the mystery festival at Eleusis. In character these very simple precepts seem related to the laws of Bouzyges, with whom Triptolemos is sometimes confused (Haupt, Opusc. iii, 505) and were very likely, like them, recited at some agricultural festival. Supposing further that the third "law" of Triptolemos: ~zô=|a mê\ si/nesthai~ was really (as Xenokr. seems to have understood it) intended to recommend a complete ~apochê\ empsu/chôn~, then it certainly cannot have been proclaimed at the Eleusinia (though this is what Dieterich thinks happened, Nekyia, 165). It is surely unthinkable that the Mystai at Eleusis were, after the Orphic model, absolutely forbidden to eat flesh for the rest of their lives. It remains a possibility that the precept had quite a different meaning--it does not definitely speak of the killing of animals--and that it belongs to some simple farmer's festival (not to the great festival of Eleusis, but rather, e.g. the Haloa) at which the farmer was recommended to spare his live stock (just as the third of the three laws of Demonassa at Cyprus forbade the farmer ~mê\ apoktei=nai bou=n aro/trion~, D. Chr. 64, 3 [329 R., 148 Arn.]; Attic law ap. Ael. VH. 5, 14, etc.).--In any case to bring all this into connexion with the mystery festival of Eleusis is absolutely without justification.]
{{236}}
VII. IDEAS OF THE FUTURE LIFE
Certain allusions in Plutarch and Lucian[1\7] would lead us to suppose that the "mystery-drama" of Eleusis included also a visual exhibition of the underworld and its blest, or unblest, inhabitants. But these contemporaries of a final and luxuriant flowering of mystery-religions of every kind can serve as reliable witnesses only for their own period. In their day the Eleusinian festival, in competition it may be with other secret worships which were invading the Greco-Roman world in ever-increasing numbers, seems to have undergone a considerable alteration and extension of its primitive and traditional shape. We may doubt whether in earlier, classical times the Eleusinia can have attempted to bind the imagination with what were always petty details, or confine within formal limits what lay beyond all human experience. Still the solemn promise of future blessedness made in the mystic festival may, at any rate, have stimulated the imagination of its worshippers and given a more definite turn to their own natural efforts to picture the life to come. The ideas cultivated at Eleusis unmistakably contributed to the process by which the picture of Hades acquired colour and distinctness. Even without such stimulus, the natural instinct of the Greeks at all periods to give form even to what was essentially formless, worked in the same direction. The limits set by Homeric beliefs about the future world had made the Odyssean description of a descent to Hades seem a risky experiment only to be undertaken with the greatest caution. Now, however, since the re-establishment of the belief in a conscious after-life of the disembodied soul, such imaginative bodyings-forth of the invisible realm of shadows had become apparently the most natural and innocent employment of poetic fancy.
The story of Odysseus' journey to Hades and its expansion in conformity with the gradually increasing distinctness with which the life after death was conceived, was followed at an early period in the development of Epic poetry by further accounts of such journeys undertaken by other heroes. A Hesiodic poem described the descent of Theseus and Peirithoös to the underworld.[2\7] A Nekyia, the details of which are unknown, occurred in the poem of the Return of the heroes {237} from Troy. The epic which went by the name of the "Minyas" seems to have given considerable space to a descent to Hades.[3\7] The ancient fable of Herakles' descent to Hades and conflicts in the underworld received embellishment at more than one poet's hand.[4\7] As a result of such repeated and rival interpretations of the story the stock of characters and events associated with Hades was gradually and continually being enlarged. Accident has preserved to us the fact about the little-known Minyas that it, too, added to the details of the picture. To what extent popular imagination and mythology, on the one hand, and poetic inventiveness, on the other, may have been responsible for all this we can hardly say. It seems probable that here, as in the development of so many Greek myths, on the whole the balance of invention lay on the side of the poets. Purely poetic visions or pictures like that of the translation of individual heroes to Elysium may have gradually won their way to popular acceptance. "Dearest Harmodios," said the Athenian Skolion, "thou art not dead indeed, but livest yet, men say, in the Islands of the Blest." Not that there was anything fixed or dogmatic on the point. In a funeral oration Hyperides represents Leosthenes and his companions in battle as meeting in Hades, among the illustrious dead, the Tyrannicides, Harmodios and Aristogeiton.[5\7]
Much that may have been the invention of poets for the filling up or furnishing of the desert region so stamped itself upon the general mind that it almost seemed the natural growth of authentic popular belief. Everyone was familiar with the guardian of the gate of Plouton, the malignant hound of Hades who admits everyone but lets no one out again. He is the same creature, long known from the adventure of Herakles, which is already named Kerberos by Hesiod.[6\7] Like the gate and the gate-keeper, the waters that divide Erebos from the world of the living are already known to Homer. Now they have a Ferryman added to them, the churlish old man Charon, who, like a second Kerberos, safely transports everyone across the water, but lets no one return.[7\7] The Minyas is the first to mention him: that he became a real figure of popular belief (as he is still in Greece to this day, though with altered significance is shown by pictures on the Attic vases that were put into the graves with the dead. These represent the soul as it stands upon the sedgy bank and meets the ferryman who will carry it over to the other side whence no man returns.[8\7] The custom of burying the dead with a small coin fixed between the teeth was also explained as provision for the passage-money that would have to be paid to Charon.[9\7] {238}
§ 2
The soul, then, being safely arrived on the other bank and Kerberos passed by--what awaited it there? Those who had been initiated into the mysteries now counted upon enjoying the glad future that their hopes had formerly pictured. In reality this blessed future, vouchsafed by the grace of the deities who rule below, was not very hard to obtain. So many were initiated and recommended to divine favour that the picture of Hades, once so gloomy, began to assume a more genial aspect. Quite early we meet with the general name of "Blessedness" as applied to the future life; while the dead without much distinction are called the "Blessed".[10\7]
Of course, anyone who had been so foolish as to neglect or despise initiation has "not the same fate below", as the Hymn to Demeter discreetly puts it. Only the initiated have life, says Sophokles: the uninitiated, with whom it goes ill in the land below, can hardly have been thought of otherwise than as floating in the glimmering half-life of the shadows in the Homeric Erebos. Well-meaning modern efforts to read a moral meaning into things Greek have sought to prove that the Greeks, too, had a genuine popular belief in a future judgment and recompense for the past deeds and character of the dead. Homer makes hardly the most distant allusion to such a belief. The perjurer alone suffers in Homer the punishment at the hands of the gods of the underworld which he had invoked upon himself in his oath. Even the "Sinners" and their punishment which later imitation added to the story of Odysseus' Journey to Hades, considered without prejudice, do not support the opinion that Homeric poetry knew of a belief in retribution hereafter. Later poets were only following this model when they made other enemies of the gods endure eternal punishment in Hades--Thamyris, for example, or Amphion (as the Minyas related), and later Ixion in particular.[11\7] All this does not, even in the slightest degree, suggest a general belief in future rewards and punishment. Of course, there is the judgment that is given in Hades by "One" according to Pindar (Ol. ii, 65), but this occurs in connexion with a description of the "last things" which the poet has borrowed from the teachings of mystic separatists. Aeschylus[12\7] knows of a judgment pronounced by Hades himself; but his thoughts about divine retribution both on earth and hereafter are derived from his own religious temperament which was entirely opposed to the popular beliefs of his day and more inclined to accept the speculative doctrines of the theologians. The {239} first precise account of the three judges in Hades, Minos, Rhadamanthys, and Aiakos, who judge the deeds of men done in their lifetime upon earth occurs in Plato in a description of the other world which reproduces anything rather than the popular beliefs of the time.[13\7] Later on, the picture of the judges in Hades (to whom Triptolemos was also added),[14\7] like many other details of the Platonic eschatological myths, became a real part of popular fancy, as allusions in later literature and even, perhaps, pictures of the underworld on vase-paintings from Southern Italy, bear witness. But the idea that in the supreme period of Greek culture the belief in a judgment and judges in Hades, who passed sentence on the deeds of men done on earth, had really any root in popular belief, is quite unproved and can be shown to be erroneous from the argument ex silentio. And where there are no judges no judgment can take place.
We often see it asserted that the belief in a future state of compensation for the good and evil deeds of this world was obtained by the Greeks from the Eleusinian mysteries. In reality the opposite is true; if and in so far as the Greeks ever received or entertained such a belief in future rewards and punishments the mysteries of Eleusis had nothing whatever to do with the matter. We have only to remember the simple fact that the Eleusinian mysteries admitted to initiation, with the single exception of those stained by the crime of murder, Greeks of all sorts without any inquiry into their past life and actions, or even their character. The initiated were promised a blessed life hereafter; a gloomy fate awaited the uninitiated. The difference was not made by goodness or badness; "Pataikion the thief will have a better fate after his death because he has been initiated at Eleusis than Agesilaos or Epameinondas" sneered Diogenes the Cynic. Not political or moral worth but "spiritual" merit alone is decisive. Nor will anyone be very surprised at that. It is so in most religions. But in any case, the idea of a sentence passed on virtue or vice in Hades had been forestalled by the system of rewards and punishments in the lower world which the mysteries had already formulated from quite a different point of view. Where the mysteries were seriously and conscientiously taken they would rather have thrown their weight into the scales against any such idea, if it began to make itself felt, of compensation for good and evil deeds in Hades; they certainly contained nothing that fostered such a belief.
No doubt in the long run, among a spiritually alert people, {240} the morality inculcated by religion allied itself freely and without reluctance to the morality of the citizen in its independent development. Only in this way could the former maintain its ascendancy. Thus, in the minds of many of the Greeks the idea of religious justification (through the mysteries) may have lent its support to the idea of civic just dealing; and, at the same time, the company of the unblest who had neglected the sacred mysteries and their future salvation as well, was increased by the not unimportant body of those who receive the wages of sin in Hades and expiate their crimes against the gods, the family, and the civil society of men. Those who have taken a false oath, parricides, violators of the laws of hospitality are made by Aristophanes (in the Frogs) to "lie in the mud"--a form of penalty originally anticipated for the uninitiated in some Orphic private mysteries, but now transferred by him to those guilty of moral misdemeanours.[15\7] The inconsistency with the promises made in the mysteries themselves involved in such conceptions may have been the less observed just because the idea of a future system of compensation in accordance with the requirements of morality was never seriously or fully developed, but remained merely a matter of vague suggestion. In circumstances of real need that ideal never satisfied anyone in Greece. Men expected to see the retributive power of the gods visibly active upon earth; those in whom experience weakened this belief would not have derived much comfort from the idea of compensation hereafter. Everyone knows the typical case of Diagoras, the "Atheist".[16\7]
§ 3
The picturing of the future life, however seriously it might be carried on by adherents of certain mystical sects, remained for the poets and the public at Athens in the fifth century little more than an amusement of idle fancy in which a man might indulge his own whim with perfect freedom. The comic poets from Pherekrates onwards regarded a Descent into the Unknown country as a suitable framework for a burlesque play.[17\7] According to their fancy a Paradise, like that of the golden age on earth when Kronos still ruled, awaited the "Blessed" in the world below;[18\7] a "City of Delight"[19\7] such as men hoped to meet with at the ends of the world, or even somewhere upon the real world. It is from a comedy, the Frogs of Aristophanes, in connexion with the Descent to Hades of a typical commonplace Athenian citizen, who for the time being plays the part of Dionysos, that we get a clearer outline of the geography of the lower regions. Beyond {241} the Acherousian Sea with its cross-grained ferryman dwell snakes and monsters of all kinds. Having passed by the darkness and putrescence of the slough in which wallow perjurers and those who have committed crimes against father or stranger, the way leads to the palace of Plouton, near which lives the chorus of those who have been initiated into the mysteries. For them even in Hades the sun dispenses a brilliant light; they dance in myrtle groves and sing to the sound of the flute hymns of praise to the gods of the underworld.[20\7] A separation of the inhabitants of the lower regions into two classes as taught by the mysteries, is here also carried through: at least clear consciousness is implied in the case of the Mystai which in itself marks clearly the change which has taken place since the Nekyia of the Odyssey. Then there are other regions in Hades besides the places where the initiated and the impious dwell. There is a reference to the plain of Lethe,[21\7] and to the place where Oknos is plaiting the rope which his she-ass gnaws to pieces as fast as he plaits it. This is a parody, half humorous, half pathetic, of the Homeric figures of Sisyphos and Tantalos; a sort of bourgeois counterpart of that Homeric aristocracy of the enemies of heaven, whose punishment, as Goethe remarked, is a type of ever-unrewarded labour. But, we may ask, what had honest Oknos done to deserve this fate of eternally fruitless toil? He is only a man like other men, but he "typifies all human endeavour." That anyone could have introduced such quaint inventions of innocent humour into the realm of Hades shows how far all this was from theological seriousness.
§ 4
We ought to be able to observe the change which had come over the conception of the future life since the days of Homer from a consideration of the picture of the Underworld which Polygnotos of Thasos painted on one of the walls of the Hall of the Knidians at Delphi. The details of this picture are precisely known to us from the account given by Pausanias. The first impression that we get from it is the extraordinary vagueness and undeveloped state of the mythology of the underworld at this period, about the middle of the fifth century. On the wall was represented the questioning of Teiresias by Odysseus; the companies of heroes, the men and women of poetry, occupied the greater part of the space. The divine judgment of heaven was illustrated by the figures of the Homeric "Sinners", Tityos, Tantalos, and Sisyphos. Outside the ranks of the Heroic company is Oknos and his {212} she-ass. But where is the reward of virtue, the punishment of wickedness? In expiation of the worst excesses, those committed against gods and parents, a temple-robber receives a cup of poison from a sorceress,[22\7] and an undutiful son is being choked by his own father.[23\7] Apart from these evil-doers are the "uninitiated", those who have made light of the Eleusinian mysteries. Because they have missed the "completion" of the initiation they are now forced, men and women, to pour water from broken pitchers into a (perforated) jar in ever-unavailing endeavour.[24\7] There is no sign anywhere of a judge who should separate the souls into two classes; and of the monsters of the underworld there only appears the corpse-devouring daimon Eurynomos who must have been known to the artist from some local legend.[25\7] Of the reward of the "virtuous" there is not a trace, and even the hopes of the initiated in the mysteries are only vaguely alluded to in the casket which Kleoboia, as she crosses the river in Charon's boat with Tellis, is holding on her knee.[26\7] This is a symbol of the sacred mysteries of Demeter which Kleoboia once brought from Paros to Thasos, the home of Polygnotos.
With this series of pictures, hardly altered at all from Homer,[27\7] contrast for a moment the scenes of torment represented in Etruscan pictures of the Underworld, or the pedantic details of the trial of the dead on the day of judgment as the Egyptians elaborated them in picture and writing. From such gloomy severity, from the rigid and overpowering dogmatism that a people without imagination had constructed for itself out of religious speculations and visions won by much labour and thought, the Greeks were fortunately preserved by their own genius. Their fancy is a winged god whose nature it is to pass lightly over things--not to fall heavily to earth and there remain ponderously prostrate. Nor were they very susceptible during their best centuries to the infectious malady of a "sick conscience". What had they to do with pictures of an underworld of purgatory and torment in expiation of all imaginary types and degrees of sin, as in Dante's ghastly Hell? It is true that even such dark fancies of the Christian Hell are in part derived from Greek sources. But it was only the misguided fancy of particular isolated sects that could call forth such pictures as these, and recommend itself to a philosophic speculation which in its worst excesses violently contradicted all the most fundamental principles of Greek culture. The people and the religion of Greece, the mysteries which her cities organized and deemed holy, may be freely acquitted of all such aberrations.
NOTES TO CHAPTER VII
[1\7: Plu. (the MSS. wrongly give Themistios) de An. fr. 6 ap. Stob., Fl. iv, 52 b, 48 H. = p. 107, 27 ff. Mein.; Luc., Catapl. 23.]
[2\7: Paus. 9, 31, 5.]
[3\7: The remains in Kinkel, Frag. Epic. i, 215 ff. This ~Minua/s~ was identified by K. O. Müller, Orchom^2., p. 12, with the Orphic ~kata/basis eis Ha/idou~, and this suggestion has been followed, though with hesitation, even by Lobeck, Agl. 360, 373. It rests solely on the fact that the Orphic ~kata/basis~ was very doubtfully ascribed according to Clemens to Prodikos of Samos, according to Suidas to Herodikos of Perinthos (or to Kerkops, or to Orpheus of Kamarina); while the Minyas, according to Paus. 4, 33, 7, was very doubtfully ascribed to Prodikos of Phokaia. Müller first identified Prodikos of Samos with Herodikos of Perinthos, and then both of them with Prodikos of Phokaia. The justification of such a procedure is by no means "self-evident" and the identification--entirely depending upon this quite arbitrary view--of the Orphic ~kata/basis eis Ha/idou~ with the Minyas is in the last degree hazardous. Such an alternative title to an ancient narrative poem can only be defended by fictitious and quite untenable parallels. The name ~Minua/s~ has no parallel in Orphic literature, and suggests rather a poem dealing with heroic adventure in which the Nekyia would only be an episode. If we are to believe in the double title we require at least to be told how the name (Minyas) could possibly have been given to a poem whose contents as implied by the title ~kata/basis eis Ha/idou~ plainly consisted in a descent to Hades--made by Orpheus himself (as Lobeck also understands, p. 373). Besides, everything we learn about the Nekyia of the Minyas differs widely from the temper and doctrine of Orphism, which should have manifested themselves very distinctly in such a vision of the life to come. Nor is anything from the Minyas given elsewhere under the name of Orpheus, like so many of the details of underworld mythology. There is nothing to suggest that it was Orpheus who sought the atra atria Ditis: an unprejudiced interpretation of fr. 1 (ap. Paus. 10, 28, 2) would suggest that it was rather Theseus and Peirithoos whose descent to Hades supplied the framework for the Hades episode in the poem. There is then not the slightest justification for including the Minyas in the list of Orphic poems or for citing what is known of its contents as Orphic mythological doctrine (which last Lobeck himself did not do: he knew too well the real nature and meaning of Orphism). Cf. Dümmler, Delphika, p. 19 (Bas. 1894).]
[4\7: Allusions in the Iliad and Odyssey presuppose the existence of an old poem on the journey to Hades of Herakles: how he was commissioned by Eurystheus, conducted by Athene (and Hermes), went down below and wounded Hades himself and carried off the dog of Hades. Many hands must subsequently have taken part in filling in the details of the adventure: we cannot, however, definitely name the poet who gave its final form and character to the whole. As far as the individual features of the poem are known to us (esp. from the survey given in [Apollod.], 2, 12. Myth. Gr., 2, 122 ff. W., combining both early and late mythological characteristics), they are rather the features of a vigorous story of heroic adventure, full of movement and tending to the gruesome and the extravagant--not of a static or {244} tranquil narrative that would allow of the calm reception of pictures illustrating the quiet ordinary life and events of frequent occurrence in the mysterious world of darkness. In this respect the ~kata/basis~ of Herakles in its traditional form must have differed noticeably from the Nekyia in ~l~, as well as from the Minyas. In fact, not one of the fabulous details current in later times about Hades can be traced back to a description in the Herakles adventure (even "Kerberos" seems to have got his name elsewhere.]
[5\7: Hyperides, Epit. § 35-9 = p. 92 f. (Blass^3): Leosthenes will meet ~en Ha/idou~ the Heroes of the Trojan war, the Persian war, and also Harmodios and Aristogeiton. This is a stereotyped rhetorical idea: cf. Pl., Ap. 41 A-C. An epigram from Knossos on a Cretan who has distinguished himself in a cavalry battle (BCH. 1889, p. 60, ll. 1-2, after Simon., Ep. 99, 3-4 Bgk.), ll. 9-10: ~tou/neka/ se phthime/nôn kath' homê/gurin ho kluto\s Ha/dês i/se polissou/chô| su/nthronon Idomenei=~.]
[6\7: Kerberos is first named in Hes., Th. 311, and he is the same hound of Hades which Homer knows and leaves unnamed, as Hesiod does, Th. 769 ff. According to this account he admits everyone, fawning about them and wagging his tail: but anyone who tries to slip out of Hades again he devours. That Kerberos inspires terror in those who enter Hades is therefore a conception of later ages (when his name was sometimes derived from the fact that he ~ta\s kê=ras, ho\ dêloi= ta\s psucha/s, e/chei bora/n~: Porph. ap. Eus., PE. 3, 11, 11, p. 110 A, etc.): the superstitious are afraid ~tô=| Kerbe/rô| diada/knesthai~ (Plu., N.P. Suav. Ep. 1105 A; cf. Verg., A. vi, 401; Apul., Met. i, 15 fin.). The honey cakes given to those who enter Hades are intended to pacify him (Sch. Ar., Lys. 601; Verg., A. vi, 420; Ap., Met. vi, 19). It cannot be proved that this is an ancient conception (certainly not from the absurd invention of Philochoros, fr. 46, to which Dieterich, Nekyia, 49, appeals). Ar., Lys. 601, speaks of the ~melitou=tta~ for the dead without suggesting any such purpose; and in fact honeycakes would hardly be a satisfactory bait to a dog: they rather suggest offerings for underworld snakes (as in the cave of Trophonios, Ar, Nu. 507; for the Asklepios-snake, Herond. iv, 90-1) and for spirits appearing as snakes (and hence customary at offerings for the dead, and even e.g. according to the precepts of the ~rhizoto/moi~ when digging up medicinal plants, Thphr., HP. 9, 8, 7). In the lines of Sophokles, OC. 1574 ff., Löschcke, Aus der Unterwelt, p. 9 (Progr. Dorpat, 1888) finds an expression of the idea that there was need of pacifying Kerb. in his rage against souls entering Hades. In reality nothing of the kind is even suggested there. The traditional text is unintelligible, and is emended and interpreted with probable correctness by Nauck (~do/s~ instead of ~ho/n~). Adopting this correction the words express a prayer of the Chorus addressed to a child of Tartaros and Ge, who is called ~ho aie/nupnos~, which must mean "who sends to everlasting sleep" (not "who sleeps for ever")--(or to separate ~pai=s Ga=s kai\ Tarta/rou~ from ~aie/nupnos~ as the Schol. would do, is impossible. The ~aie/nupnos~, as the Schol. has already noticed, can hardly be anyone else than Thanatos (it would be an unintelligible epithet for Hesychos, of whom L. thinks). Thanatos, however, is nowhere else called son of Tartaros and Ge (nor is Hesychos, while Typhon and Echidna are, though the adj. would not suit them; who else besides Soph., OC. 40, calls the Erinyes daughters of Ge and Skotos?). The Chorus pray to him (acc. to Nauck's correction) to grant Oedipus a safe passage in his journey to Hades. Terrors of all kinds were to be met with on the way there, ~o/pheis kai\ thêri/a~ (Ar., Ra. 143 ff., 278 ff.; we may also remember Verg., {245} A. vi, 273 ff., 285 ff., etc.): that Kerberos is among these terrors is suggested by Soph. as little as it is by Aristoph. in the Frogs. In fact, Soph. had spoken of him a few lines before (1569 ff.) in words which suggest anything rather than danger to those who enter Hades. Sophokles, then, cannot be made to serve as witness for the view that the Greeks thought of Kerberos after the manner of the two piebald dogs of the Indian Yama that terrify and drive back the dead. Further, there is no good evidence for a Greek tradition of two hounds of Hell. Nor can it be proved by the case adduced by Löschcke: the picture on a sarcophagus from Klazomenai of a naked boy holding a cock in each hand and standing between two (female dogs that leap round him (in a manner suggesting play rather than anger). The picture can hardly have a mythical sense. This cannot give support to the view (as old as Wilford) that ~Ke/rberos~ is no other than one of the two piebald (çabala) dogs of Yama and a creation of primitive Indo-Germanic times. In any case, the evidence is weak enough. See Gruppe, Gr. Culte u. Mythen, i, 113-14; Oldenberg, Rel. d. Veda, 538 [= 459 Fr. T.].]
[7\7: Agatharch. p. 115, 14 ff. Müll., says that it is a popular belief ~tô=n ouke/ti o/ntôn tou\s tu/pous en porthmi/di diaplei=n, e/chontas Cha/rôna nau/klêron kai\ kubernê/tên, hi/na mê\ katastraphe/ntes ekphora=s epide/ôntai pa/lin~.]
[8\7: Cf. v. Duhn, Arch. Zeit. 1885, 19 ff.; Jahrb. arch. Inst. ii, 240 ff.]
[9\7: Charon's fare (2 obols instead of the otherwise usual one--the difference not satisfactorily explained) is first mentioned in Ar., Ran. 140, 270. That this is the purpose of the money that was inserted between the teeth of the dead is frequently asserted by later authors. The many different names which were given to this "Charon's penny" (~karka/dôn~, cf. Lobeck, Prol. Path. 351; ~katitê/rion, dana/kê~ and simply ~nau=lon~: see Hemsterh. Lucian, ii, 514 ff.) show that this idea and the symbolism underlying it was a favourite subject of speculation. In spite of this we may doubt whether the custom of supplying the dead with a small coin has really arisen out of the wish to give them the fare-penny for the underworld ferryman. It is extremely doubtful whether Charon and his boat can have been figures of such clear dogmatic fixity as to have given rise to such a remarkable custom expressing itself in such a literal fashion. The custom itself, now, it seems, attested in Greece only from graves of a late period (see Ross. Archäol. Aufs. i, 29, 32, 57 Anm.; Raoul Rochette, Mém. de l'Inst. de Fr., Ac. des Ins. xiii, p. 665 f.) must be ancient (though no older than the use of coined money in Greece), and has held its own with the most remarkable tenacity in many parts of the Roman Empire to a late age--even through the Middle Ages to our own time (cf. among others Maury, La magie et l'astrol. dans l'antiq. 158, 2). It is not very hard to understand that it might be ingeniously connected with the poetical story of the ferryman of the dead, and this plausible explanation of the strange custom might then become a part of popular belief. The custom itself ought rather to have been brought into connexion with the practice common in many lands of satisfying the requirements of the dead by the gift of some diminutive and all but symbolical object which is offered at burial and put in the grave (see something of the kind in Tylor, i, 193-4). Parva petunt Manes: pietas pro divite grata est munere; non avidos Styx habet ima deos. The obol may be the last symbolical vestige of the entire property of the dead which the ancient law of the dead required to be placed undiminished in their graves. ~tethnê/xê| . . . ek pollô=n obolo\n {246} mou=non enegka/menos~: the epigram of Antiphanes Maced. (AP. xi, 168) expresses more nearly perhaps, though in sentimental language, the original and primitive intention of the gift of an obol, than does the fable of Charon's penny (cf. AP. xi, 171, 7; 209, 3). According to German superstition "money should be laid in the mouth of the dead man so that if he has buried a treasure he may not return", Grimm, p. 1785, n. 207. Here the undoubtedly ancient conception is quite clearly betrayed: that by giving a coin the property of the dead was bought up. The evidence for this first and proper meaning of the custom has been preserved in the strangest fashion, together with the custom itself, even down to the eighteenth century, when J. Chr. Männlingen voices it, Albertäten 353 (summarized in A. Schultz, Alltagsleben e. d. Frau im 18 Jh., p. 232 f.): this custom, common both to heathendom and Christianity, of putting a penny in the coffin of the dead "means that men buy up the property of the dead, whereby they think they will have good luck in their life".]
[10\7: Ar., Tagenist. fr. 488, 9: ~dia\ tau=ta ga/r toi kai\ kalou=ntai (hoi ne/kroi\) maka/rioi; pa=s ga\r le/gei tis, ho makari/tês oi/chetai ktl., makari/tês~, then, was already, by that time, a common expression for the dead which had lost its full sense and value, just like the German "selig" (which is borrowed from Greek). Strictly speaking it means a condition approaching the existence of the ~ma/kares theoi\ aie\n eo/ntes~. The full meaning still appears in the appeal to the heroized Persian monarch: ~makari/tas isodai/môn basileu/s~, Aesch., Pers. 633 (~nu=n d' esti\ ma/kaira dai/môn~, E., Alc. 1003); cf. also Xen., Ages. xi, 8, ~nomi/zôn tou\s eukleô=s teteleutêko/tas makari/ous~. Such passages allow us to see that ~maka/rios, makari/tês~ were not used of the dead in any sense ~kat' anti/phrasin~, as ~chrêsto/s~ sometimes is (Plu., Q. Gr. v, p. 292 B; though on grave inscr. it is generally meant in its proper sense); cf. ~eukrinê/s~, Phot. Suid. ~makari/tês~ frequently occurs as applied to one lately dead in late writers: see Ruhnken, Tim., p. 59. Lehrs, Popul. Aufs^2., p. 344. Doric form ~zameri/tas~: Phot. ~makari/tas~. ~makari/a~ "Blessedness", the land of the Blessed, i.e. the dead, is only used in a humorous sense in such phrases as ~a/pag' es makari/an~ (Ar. Eq. 1151), ~ba/ll' es makari/an~. So, too, is ~es olbi/an. hôs eis makari/an; to\ eis ha/|dou~, Phot. (~makari/a~, the name of a sacrificial cake--Harp. ~neê/lata~--occurs in modern Greek usage as a cake used at funerals, Lob., Agl. 879).]
[11\7: The punishment of Ixion for his ingratitude to Zeus consisted according to the older form of the story in his being fastened to a winged wheel and then being whirled through the air. That Zeus ~etarta/rôsen~ him (Sch. Eur., Ph. 1185) must then be a later story or one which did not become current till later: not until A.R. iii, 61 f., is there any mention of Ixion in Hades, though after him frequently; cf. Klügmann, Annali d. Inst., 1873, pp. 93-5. (The analogy with the punishment of Tantalos and its displacement from the upper world to Hades is obvious; see Comparetti, Philol. 32, 237.)]
[12\7: Aesch., Eum. 273 f.; cf. Supp. 230 f. The fact that in this passage the poet says ~ekei= dika/zei ta\mplakê/math', hôs lo/gos, Zeu\s a/llos~ simply shows that he is not simply following his own ideas in this fancy of a judgment in the other world (~ouk emo\s ho mu=thos~). It does not in the least suggest (as Dieterich, Nek. 126, seems to think) that he is reproducing popular tradition or could be so doing. Only theological doctrines, at that time at least, knew anything of such a judgment in the future life upon the deeds of this: it is their ~lo/gos~ that Aesch. is following (in this one point). See below, p. 425.]
[13\7: Gorg. 523 A ff. (whence Axioch. 371 B ff., etc.). When Plato {247} keeps closer to popular belief, in Ap. 41 A, he speaks of the judges in Hades, Minos, Rhadamanthys, Aiakos ~kai\ Tripto/lemos kai\ a/lloi ho/soi tô=n hêmithe/ôn di/kaioi ege/nonto en tô=| heautô=n bi/ô|~. He says nothing of a judgment given on the deeds done in this life, and clearly does not imply any decision as to the good or evil deserts of those who have just left the upper world and come down to Hades. We should be much rather led to suppose that those ~alêthô=s dikastai/, hoi/per kai\ le/gontai ekei= dika/zein~ exercise their powers as judges among the dead, too, and decide between them in their disputes just as Minos does in the Nekyia of ~l~ 568-71, and as Rhadamanthys still does in Pi., O. ii, 83 ff., on the ~maka/rôn na=sos~. Only the number of those who have this wide authority below is extended (in Plato) almost indefinitely. The process seems to have been as follows: the allusions in the Odyssey were taken up and in the course of the elaboration of the picture of Hades the number was enlarged of those who like Minos are patterns of justice among the dead and give judgment among them. Then philosophico-poetical speculation (perhaps not without Egyptian influence) about a judgment in the next world handed over to this increased number of judges in Hades the office of judging the conduct during their lifetime of those who have just entered Hades.--The selection of judges is not hard to understand. Aiakos, Rhadamanthys, and Minos are regarded as patterns of justice: Dem. 18, 127. Minos as judge in Hades was taken from ~l~ 568 ff. Rhadamanthys is known to ~d~ 564 as dwelling among those who have been translated alive to Elysion. There he is--not judge: there is nothing there to judge, but--~pa/redros~ of Kronos, acc. to Pi., O. ii, 83. As soon as men began to transfer Elysion to Hades (of which more later) Rhad. also found his place there. His fame as the most just of judges (see Cratin., ~Chei/rônes~, 231 [i, p. 83 K.]; Pl., Lg. 948 B, etc.; cf. also Plu., Thes. 16 ad fin.) allowed him easily to find his place next to Minos as judge over the dead. Aiakos, too, as a model of ~euse/beia~ (Isoc. 9, 14, etc.), lawgiver to Aegina, arbitrator among the gods themselves (Pi., I. viii, 24 f.), seemed naturally called to be a judge among the dead. His position as judge, however, was never so secure as that of Minos and Rhadamanthys. Pindar, though he often speaks of Aiakos and the Aiakidai gives no hint of a special position held by Aiakos in the next world. Isoc. 9, 15, ~le/getai para\ Plou/tôni kai\ Ko/rê| megi/stas tima\s e/chôn paredreu/ein ekei/nois~ where nothing is implied as to his office of judge but merely to the honour done to Aiakos in being given a seat near the ruling pair (cf. Pi., O. ii, 83, of Rhad.; Ar., Ra. 765, there is a rule in Hades that the best artist ~lamba/nei thro/non tou= Plou/tônos hexê=s~. Proedria of the Mystai in Hades, etc.). Aiakos is ~kleidou=chos~ of Hades; [Apollod.] 3, 12, 6, 10; Epigr. Gr., 646, 4; P. Mag. Par. 1264 ff.; ~pulôro/s~ (cf. Hades himself as ~pula/rtês~, ~Th~ 368) in Luc., D. Mort. 13, 3; 20, 1, 6; 22, 3; De Luct. 4; Philops. 25 and Philostr., VA. 7, 31, p. 385 K. "Holder of the Key" is an office of high distinction (suggested in the case of Aiakos perhaps by the cult offered to him together with chthonic powers): keys belong to many of the gods--Plouton himself, Paus. 5, 20, 3, and others; see Tafel and Dissen on Pi., P. 8, 4; in P. Mag. Par. 1403 comes the trimeter, ~kleidou=che Perse/phassa Tarta/rou ko/rê~. It is difficult to believe that the attribution of this remarkable office of distinction to Aiakos was a later invention than the apparently commonplace office of judge. It seems, in fact, that Eurip. in the Peirithoos (fr. 591 N.) made Aiakos the first to meet Herakles as he entered Hades, i.e. probably at the gate itself. It can hardly be anything but a {248} reminiscence of Eurip. that suggested (not to Aristoph. himself--see Hiller, Hermes viii, 455--but to a well-read grammaticus) the name "Aiakos" as that of the person who meets Herakles at the very gate of Plouton in the Frogs (l. 464). Just because the story of Aiakos' position as holder of the key at the gate of Hades was an old one and mentioned by respected authorities, the belief in his position as judge never quite prevailed, in spite of Plato.]
[14\7: This is obviously Attic invention. Plato certainly mentions Triptolemos in addition to Minos and the other judges. But it seems that to the Athenians Minos was unacceptable as a type of justice (he was, especially on the stage, the object of bitter attacks as an enemy of the country; see Plu., Thes. 16). and they tried to substitute their own Triptolemos for him in the triad of judges. Thus we find Triptolemos not beside Minos but in his place in a picture of the underworld on a vase from Altamura (Tript. Aiak. Rhad.), and in an analogous picture on an amphora at Karlsruhe (Aiak. Tript., the left side is broken off but prob. represented Rhadamanthys not Minos). Cf. Winkler, Darst. d. Unterwelt auf unterital. Vasen, p. 37. For the rest, nothing suggests that the three judges on these vase-pictures pass judgment on the deeds of men done in their lifetime: in strictness nothing is implied about their giving judgments. What is certain is simply that they, as types of justice, ~epi\ tai=si tou= Plou/tônos oikou=sin thu/rais~ (like the Mystai in Ar., Ra. 163): they enjoy the rights of ~pa/redoi~ of the divine pair, and hence they are seated on ~thro/noi~ or ~di/phroi~.]
[15\7: Ar., Ra. 145 ff., 273 ff. "Darkness and mud," ~sko/tos kai\ bo/rboros~, as manner and place of punishment for ~amu/êtoi kai\ ate/lestoi~, are derived from Orphic teaching: Pl., Rp. 363 D; Olympiod. on Pl., Phd. 69 C. By an inaccurate extension of meaning this fate was said to threaten all ~ate/lestoi~ without distinction: Plu. ~p. psuchê=s~ ap. Stob. Fl. 120, 28 (4, 108, 2 Mein.); Aristid., Eleus., p. 421 D. = ii, 30 Keil; Plot., 1, 6, 6. Plotinos undoubtedly has the right interpretation of the reason for this strange form of punishment: the mud in which the uninitiated lie marks them out as ~mê\ kekatharme/nous~ who have not shared in the purifications such as were offered by the Orphic initiation ceremonies. Hence they remain fixed for ever in their original foulness (and in darkness because of their ignorance of the ~thei=a~). It is, in fact, an allegorical punishment which has no meaning outside the range of Orphic doctrines of katharsis and atonement. Aristoph. transfers it to those who have seriously transgressed the laws of city or religion, for whom it was unsuitable: this only shows that an appropriate penalty in Hades for crimes against civil society had not yet been invented. It had evidently been thought sufficient to say generally that the ~asebei=s~ (or at least the more heinous offenders) would be punished in Hades. This commonplace form of the opinion is probably to be regarded as a final echo of some definite theological doctrine which had become vulgarized and emptied of distinct meaning among the general public of the profane. The author of the first speech against Aristogeiton ([D.] 25) who speaks of the ~eis tou\s asebei=s ôsthê=nai~ in Hades (53), confesses himself an adherent of Orpheus (11).--The ~memuême/noi~ dwell in Hades next to the palace of Plouton himself: Ar., Ra. 162 f., where they have the privilege of ~proedri/a~, D.L., vi, 39. When a distinction between a ~chô=ros eusebô=n~ and a ~chô=ros asebô=n~ in Hades began to be made, the initiated, in order that they might not be deprived of their privileged position, were given ~proedri/a~ in the ~ch. eusebô=n~. In this way, e.g. the author of the Axioch. 371 D (who {249} can hardly have written before the third century) tries to reconcile the hopelessly contradictory pretensions of the ~eusebei=s~ and ~memuême/noi~ to reward in Hades.]
[16\7: Sex. Emp., M. ix, 53. Suid. ~Diago/ras~.]
[17\7: Descents to Hades occurred in the ~Krapa/taloi~ of Pherecr. (i, p. 167 K.); the ~Ba/trachoi~ and ~Gêruta/dês~ of Ar.; [Pherecr.] ~Metall.~ (i, p. 174 K.); and probably also in the ~Trophô/nios~ of Cratin., etc.--On a vase from Eretria, fifth century, there is a representation of a repulsive scene of torture; an old woman, naked and tied to a tree, is being tortured by three satyrs. This, according to J. Zingerle, Archäol. epigr. Mittheil. a. Oesterreich, 18, 162 ff., is a parody of some incident from a comedy of the time, the plot of which was laid in Hades. But nothing in the picture suggests that the lower regions are the scene of this gruesome affair; and what would the satyrs be doing there?]
[18\7: Utopian existence in Hades; see in partic. [Pherecr.] ~Metall.~ (i, p. 174 K.). A pretext for such parodies was perhaps given by the Orphic promise of an everlasting carouse for the initiated at the ~sumpo/sion tô=n hosi/ôn~ in Hades (Pl., Rp. ii, 263 C, ~maka/rô=n euôchi/a~, Ar., Ra. 85). Many details were borrowed from the descriptions of the reign of bliss upon earth in the golden age under Kronos' rule which had long been a familiar subject of comedy (cf. Pöschel, Das Märchen vom Schlaraffenland, 7 ff.). The golden age in the dim past and the land of Elysion in the future always had many features in common. (See above, chap. ii, n. 49.) From these traditional pictures of a spirit-world only to be met with in the long-vanished past or in the next world, the whole Greek literature of imaginary Utopias drew its sustenance (see my Griech. Roman, ii, § 2, 3). That literature was really an attempt to transpose those early fantasies of a land of spirits into real life and on to the inhabited world.]
[19\7: ~e/sti g' eudai/môn po/lis para\ tê\n eruthra\n tha/lattan~, Ar., Av. 144 f. (cf. Griech. Roman, 201 ff.).]
[20\7: ~li/mnê~ (the Acherousian lake: Eur., Alc. 443, and often afterwards). Charon: Ar., Ra. 137 ff., 182 ff., 185 ff.--~sko/tos kai\ bo/rboros~ 144 ff., 278 ff., 289 ff. Abode and life of the Mystai: 159, 163, 311 ff., 454 ff.]
[21\7: ~to\ Lê/thês pedi/on~, l. 186. This is the earliest reference to Lethe of which we can be quite sure; but it is made so casually that it is obvious that Aristoph. is merely alluding to a story well known to his audience. Plato makes use of the ~Lê/thês pedi/on~ together with the ~Ame/lês potamo/s~ (hence 621 C: ~Lê/thês potamo/s~) in the myth at the close of the Republic, x, 621 A, which is intended to illustrate and support the theory of palingenesia. Of course, this ingenious fancy was eminently suitable for use by adherents of the doctrine of metempsychosis; but there is nothing to show that it had been actually invented for the special benefit of this doctrine, i.e. by Orphics or Pythagoreans--as many have supposed. It is probable that it was nothing more originally but an attempt to explain symbolically the unconscious condition of the ~amenêna\ ka/rêna~. Does Theognis already (704, 705) refer to it?--~Persepho/nên . . . hê/te bro/tois pare/chei lê/thên, bla/ptousa no/oio~. Other references to the ~Lê/thês pu/lai, La/thas do/moi, Lê/thês hu/dôr~ are all later; the ~Lê/thês thro/nos~ in the account of Theseus' journey to Hades in [Apollod.] Epit. i, 24, is perhaps taken from older legendary material. (Bergk's assertion, Opusc. ii, 716: "The conception of Lethe's fountain and stream is certainly ancient and popular: the well of Lethe is nothing but the fountain of the gods: whoever drinks of it forgets all sorrows, etc.," {250} is entirely devoid of foundation in fact.) The river of Lethe was in later times localized on earth like Acheron and Styx; in the R. Limia of Gallaecia--far away on the western sea--men rediscovered the Oblivionis flumen (account of the year 137 B.C.: Liv., Epit. 55; Flor. 1, 33, 12; App., Hisp. 72: Plu., QR. 34, p. 272 D; cf. Mela, 3, § 10; Plin., NH. 4, § 115. Absurd aetiology in Strabo, p. 153).]
[22\7: This is presumably the meaning of the words which Pausanias (10, 28, 5) uses: his absurd mannerism makes him talk round the incident instead of simply describing it. (Much too artificial explanation of the circumstance in Dümmler, Delphika, p. 15 [1894].)]
[23\7: Paus. 10, 28, 4.]
[24\7: See Appendix iii.]
[25\7: Eurynomos: dark-blue body like a bluebottle, with prominent teeth, sitting on a vulture's skin, Paus. 10, 28, 7. There seems to be no mention of him in literature: whether the statement of Pausanias that he was a ~dai/môn tô=n en Ha/idou~ who eats the flesh of corpses off their bones, is anything more than a guess, we cannot tell. The vulture-skin indeed suggests that the nature of the Daimon who sits on it was related to the vulture. The fact that the vulture eats the flesh of corpses was often observed by the ancients **(see Plu., Rom. 9, etc.: Leemans on Horapollo, p. 177). Welcker (Kl. Schr. v, 117) sees in Eurynomos nothing but the "corruption" of the body, in which case he would be a purely allegorical figure. On the contrary he is much more likely to be one of those very concretely imagined spirits of Hell (only with a euphemistic name, like the lesser spirits Lamia, Mormo, Gorgyra, Empousa, etc. (a word about them will be found below, Append. vi). The artist must have known him from some local tradition. He devours the flesh of the corpse: thus a late epigram (Epigr. Gr. 647, 16) calls the dead ~luprê\n dai=ta Cha/rôni~. Even in Soph., El. 542, we have; ~Ha/idês hi/meron te/knôn tô=n ekei/nês e/sche dai/sasthai~ (Welcker, Syll., p. 94).]
[26\7: Paus. 10, 28, 3. Cf. O. Jahn, Hermes, iii, 326.]
[27\7: The third century vase-paintings from Southern Italy also as a rule keep within the limits of the epic Nekyia. In addition to the few special types of the sinners undergoing punishment in Hades (Sisyphos, Tantalos, the Danaids) we have allusions to the journeys to Hades of Theseus, Peirithoos, Herakles, and Orpheus. All attempts to read mystical or edifying intentions into these (as in Baumeister's Denkm. 1926-30) are now regarded as completely mistaken. (Orpheus appears there not as founder and prophet of his mysteries but simply as the mythical singer who goes down to the underworld to rescue Eurydike with his singing. This is rightly maintained by Milchhöfer, Philol. 53, 385 ff., 54, 750 f., against Kuhnert, Arch. Jahrb. viii, 104 ff.; Philol. 54, 193.) Nothing at all is suggested as to the fate of mankind in general. On a vase from Canosa a father and mother with a boy stand on the left of Orpheus: this, too, must belong to the region of mythology. (They cannot, however, be Dionysos and Ariadne as Winkler suggests, Darst. d. Unterw. auf unterit. Vasen, 49. But it is difficult to imagine that they can be a family of Mystai as Milchhöfer supposes.)]
Part II
{{253}}
VIII. ORIGINS OF THE BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY
THE THRACIAN WORSHIP OF DIONYSOS
The popular conception of the continued existence of the souls of the dead, resting upon the cult of the dead, grew up and coalesced with a view of the soul derived from Homeric teaching on the subject, which was in essential, though unrecognized, contradiction with the cult of souls. The popular conception, unchanged in all essentials, remained in force throughout the coming centuries of Greek life. It did not contain within itself the seeds of further development; it did not make any demand for better and deeper ideas of the character and condition of the soul in its independent life after its separation from the body. Still more, it had nothing in it that could have led beyond the belief in the independent future life of those souls to the conception of an everlasting, indestructible, immortal life. The continued life of the soul, such as was implied in and guaranteed by the cult of souls, was entirely bound up with the remembrance of the survivors upon earth, and upon the care, the cult, which they might offer to the soul of their departed ancestor. If that memory dies out, if the venerating thoughtfulness of the living ceases, the soul of the departed is at once deprived of the sole element in which it still maintained its shadow of an existence.
It was impossible, then, that the cult of the souls should produce out of itself the idea of a true immortality of the soul or of the independent life of the soul indestructible by its very nature. Greek religion as it existed among the people of Homer could not shape such a belief of its own accord, and even if it were offered from outside could not have accepted it. It would have meant giving up its own essential character.
If the soul is immortal, it must be in its essential nature like God; it must itself be a creature of the realm of Gods. When a Greek says "immortal" he says "God": they are interchangeable ideas. But the real first principle of the religion of the Greek people is this--that in the divine ordering of the world, humanity and divinity are absolutely divided in place and nature, and so they must ever remain. A deep {254} gulf is fixed between the worlds of mortality and divinity. The relations between man and God promoted by religion depend entirely upon this distinction. The ethical ideas of the Greek popular conscience were rooted in the frank admission of the limitations proper to human capacity which was conditioned by an existence and a fate so different from that enjoyed by the gods; in the renunciation of all human claims to happiness and independence. Poetic fancies about the "Translation" of individual mortals to an unending life enjoyed by the soul still united to the body might make their appeal to popular belief; but such things remained miracles in which divine omnipotence had broken down the barriers of the natural order on a special occasion. It was but a miracle, too, if the souls of certain mortals were raised to the rank of Heroes, and so promoted to everlasting life. The gulf between the human and the divine was not made any narrower on that account; it remained unbridged, abysmal. The bare idea that the gulf did not in reality exist, that actually in the order of nature the inner man, the "Soul" of man belonged to the realm of gods; that as a divine being it had everlasting life--such an idea would involve further consequences about which no one can be in much doubt: it would have contradicted every single idea of Greek popular religion. It never could have become widely held and believed in by the Greek populace.
Nevertheless, at a certain period in Greek history, and nowhere earlier or more unmistakably than in Greece, appeared the idea of the divinity, and the immortality implicit in the divinity, of the human soul. That idea belonged entirely to mysticism--a second order of religion which, though little remarked by the religion of the people and by orthodox believers, gained a footing in isolated sects and influenced certain philosophical schools. Thence it has affected all subsequent ages and has transmitted to East and West the elementary principles of all true mysticism: the essential unity of the divine and the human spirit; their unification as the aim of religion; the divine nature of the human soul and its immortality.
The theory and doctrine of mysticism grew up in the soil of an older cult-practice. Greece received from abroad a deeply emotional religious cult, accompanied by practices that stimulated mysterious and extraordinary imaginings. The sparks of momentary illumination struck out by this faith were fed and fanned by mysticism till they became a vivid and enduring flame. For the first time, clearly {255} discernible through its mystical wrappings, we meet with the belief in the indestructibility and eternal life of the soul: we meet it in the doctrines of a mystical sect which united in the worship of Dionysos. The worship of Dionysos must have sown the first seed of the belief in an immortal life of the soul. To explain how this may have happened; to make clear to the mind of the reader how the essence and inner reality of that worship was bound to stir up the belief in an immortal life--such is our next task.
§ 2
In the spiritual life of men and nations, it is not by any means the extravagant or, in one sense or another, the abnormal that is most difficult for our sympathetic understanding to grasp. By clinging to a traditional and too narrow formula for the Greek spirit we make difficulties for ourselves; but it is not really a matter of serious perplexity, if we reflect upon it, to understand how Greek religion at the height of its development regarded "madness" (~mani/a~) as a religious phenomenon of wide-reaching importance. Madness, in this sense, is a temporary destruction of physical balance, a condition in which the self-conscious spirit is overwhelmed, "possessed" by a foreign power, as our authorities explain it to us. This madness "which comes not from mortal weakness or disease, but from a divine banishment of the commonplace"[1\8] found effective application in the mantic and telestic arts. Its effects were so common and well recognized that the truth and importance of such religious madness (entirely distinguishable from bodily disease was treated as a fact of experience not merely by philosophers, but by the doctors themselves.[2\8] For us it only remains obscure how such "divine mania" was fitted into the regular working order of the religious life; the sensations and experiences themselves belonging to this condition are made intelligible enough by a whole host of analogies. In fact if the truth were told we should rather have to admit that it is easier for us to sympathize with such overflowing of sensation and all that goes with it than with the opposite pole of Greek religious life, the calm and measured composure with which man lifted up heart and eye to the gods, as the patterns of all life and the patrons of a serenity as brilliant and unmoved as that of the clear heavens themselves.
But how came it that in the character of a single people such extravagance of emotion was combined with a fast-bound and regulated equilibrium of temper and behaviour? The answer is that these opposing features sprang from two {256} different sources. They were not originally combined in Greece. The Homeric poems hardly give any hint of that overflowing of religious emotion which later Greek peoples knew and honoured as a heaven-sent madness. It spread among the Greeks themselves in the train of a religious agitation, we might almost say revolution, of which Homer records, at most, only the first faint essays. It had its origin in the religion of Dionysos, and in company with this religion enters as something new and strange into Greek life.
The Homeric poems do not recognize Dionysos as belonging to the gods of Olympos, but they are aware of his existence. It is true they nowhere plainly[3\8] refer to him as the wine-god honoured in joyful festivals, but we read (in the narrative of Glaukos' meeting with Diomedes) of the "frenzied" Dionysos and his "Nurses" who were attacked by the Thracian Lykourgos.[4\8] The Mainas, the frenzied woman of the Dionysos-cult, was such a well-known phenomenon, so familiar in men's minds, that the word could be used in a simile to explain the meaning of something else.[5\8] In this form the worship of the god first came to the notice of the Greeks; this was the origin of all the other festivals of Dionysos that later Greece developed in so many different directions.[6\8] They learnt to know Dionysos Bakcheios, "who makes men frenzied,"[7\8] as he was worshipped in his own country.
That the original home of Dionysos-worship was in Thrace, that his cult, popular among many of the Thracian peoples,[8\8] was particularly honoured among the southernmost of the Thracian stocks who were best known to the Greeks and lived on the coast between the mouths of the rivers Hebros and Axios and in the mountainous country behind--to all this the Greeks themselves bore frequent and manifold witness.[9\8] The god whose name the Greeks knew in its Greek form "Dionysos" had, it appears, among the numerous and divided Thracian peoples various appellations of which those most familiar to the Greeks were Sabos and Sabazios.[10\8] The Greeks must have known and remarked on the nature and worship of the god at an early period of their history. They may have met with him in Thrace itself. At all periods they had an extensive and varied intercourse with this country and must in the early days of their wanderings have passed through it on their way to their future home. They may have had further opportunities of knowing it from the Thracian races or tribes who, according to a few isolated legends, had dwelt in primitive times in certain localities of Central Greece. The ethnographical material of these {257} legends was regarded as founded on fact by the great historians of the fifth and fourth centuries.[11\8]
The cult of this Thracian divinity differed in every particular from anything that we know of from Homer as Greek worship of the gods. On the other hand, it was closely related to the cult paid by the Phrygians, a people almost identical with the Thracians, to their mountain-mother Kybele. It was thoroughly orgiastic in character. The festival was held on the mountain tops in the darkness of night amid the flickering and uncertain light of torches. The loud and troubled sound of music was heard; the clash of bronze cymbals; the dull thunderous roar of kettledrums; and through them all penetrated the "maddening unison" of the deep-toned flute,[12\8] whose soul Phrygian aulêtai had first waked to life. Excited by this wild music, the chorus of worshippers dance with shrill crying and jubilation.[13\8] We hear nothing about singing:[14\8] the violence of the dance left no breath for regular songs. These dances were something very different from the measured movement of the dance-step in which Homer's Greeks advanced and turned about in the Paian. It was in frantic, whirling, headlong eddies and dance-circles[15\8] that these inspired companies danced over the mountain slopes. They were mostly women who whirled round in these circular dances till the point of exhaustion was reached;[16\8] they were strangely dressed; they wore bassarai, long flowing garments, as it seems, stitched together out of fox-skins;[17\8] over these were doeskins,[18\8] and they even had horns fixed to their heads.[19\8] Their hair was allowed to float in the wind;[20\8] they carried snakes sacred to Sabazios[21\8] in their hands and brandished daggers or else thyrsos-wands, the spear-points of which were concealed in ivy-leaves.[22\8] In this fashion they raged wildly until every sense was wrought to the highest pitch of excitement, and in the "sacred frenzy" they fell upon the beast selected as their victim[23\8] and tore their captured prey limb from limb. Then with their teeth they seized the bleeding flesh and devoured it raw.
It is easy enough, by following poets' descriptions and plastic representations of such scenes, to elaborate still further the picture of this nocturnal festival of fanatic enthusiasm. But, we must ask, what was the meaning of it all? We shall get nearest to the truth if we will exclude as far as possible all theories imported from unrelated provinces of thought and fix our attention solely on what, for the participants, was the result of it all--the result anticipated and consciously proposed by them, and therefore the recognized object, or, at least, one {258} of the recognized objects of these strange proceedings. The participators in these dance-festivals induced intentionally in themselves a sort of mania, an extraordinary exaltation of their being. A strange rapture came over them in which they seemed to themselves and others "frenzied", "possessed".[24\8] This excessive stimulation of the senses, going even as far as hallucination,[25\8] was brought about, in those who were susceptible to their influence, by the delirious whirl of the dance, the music and the darkness, and all the other circumstances of this tumultuous worship.[26\8] This extreme pitch of excitement was the result intended. The violently induced exaltation of the senses had a religious purpose, in that such enlargement and extension of his being was man's only way, as it seemed, of entering into union and relationship with the god and his spiritual attendants. The god is invisibly present among his inspired worshippers. At any rate, he is close at hand, and the tumult of the festival is to bring him completely into their midst.[27\8] There are various legends about the disappearance of the god into another world and his return thence to mankind.[28\8] Every second year his return is celebrated, and it is just this Appearance, this "Epiphany" of the god, that gives the reason and the motive of the festival. The Bull-God, in the most ancient and primitive form of the belief, appeared in person among the dancers,[29\8] or else the imitated roaring of a bull produced by hidden "Mimes of Terror" served to suggest the invisible Presence.[30\8] The worshippers, too, in furious exaltation and divine inspiration, strive after the god; they seek communion with him. They burst the physical barriers of their soul. A magic power takes hold of them; they feel themselves raised high above the level of their everyday existence; they seem to become those spiritual beings who wildly dance in the train of the god.[31\8] Nay, more, they have a share in the life of the god himself; nothing less can be the meaning of the fact that the enraptured servants of the god call themselves by the name of the god. The worshipper who in his exaltation has become one with the god, is himself now called Sabos, Sabazios.[32\8] The superhuman and the infra-human are mingled in his person; like the frenzied god[33\8] he throws himself upon the sacrificial animal to devour it raw. To make this transformation of their nature outwardly manifest, the participants in the dance-festival wear strange dress: they resemble in their appearance the members of the wild thiasos of the god;[34\8] the horns they set on their heads recall the horned, bull-shaped god himself, etc.[35\8] The whole might be called a religious drama, since {259} everything is carefully arranged so as to suggest to the imagination the actual presence of the mysterious figures from the spirit world. At the same time, it is something more than mere drama, for it can hardly be doubted that the players themselves were possessed by the illusion of living the life of a strange person. The awe-inspiring darkness of night, the music, especially that of the Phrygian flute, to which the Greeks attributed the power of making its hearers "full of the god",[36\8] the vertiginous whirl of the dance--all these may very well, in suitably disposed natures,[37\8] have really led to a state of visionary exaltation in which the inspired person saw all external objects in accordance with his fancy and imagination. Intoxicating drinks, to which the Thracians were addicted, may have increased the excitement;[38\8] perhaps they even used the fumes derived from certain seeds, with which the Scythians and Massagetai knew how to intoxicate themselves.[39\8] We all know how even to day in the East the smoke of hashish may make men visionaries and excite religious raptures[40\8] in which the whole of nature is transformed for the enthralled dreamer. "Only when thus possessed did the Bakchai drink milk and honey out of the rivers; their power ceased when they came to themselves again," says Plato.[41\8] For them the earth flowed with milk and honey, and the air was filled with the sweet odours of Syria.[42\8] Hallucination was accompanied by a state of feeling in which pain itself was only an added stimulus to sensation or in which the visionary became completely insensible to pain, as is not unusual in such states of exaltation.[43\8]
Every detail confirms the picture of a condition of wild excitement in which the limitations of ordinary life seemed to be abolished. These extraordinary phenomena transcending all normal experience were explained by saying that the soul of a person thus "possessed"[44\8] was no longer "at home"[45\8] but "abroad", having left its body behind. This was the literal and primitive meaning understood by the Greek when he spoke of the "ekstasis" of the soul in such orgiastic conditions of excitement.[46\8] This ekstasis is "a brief madness", just as madness is a prolonged ekstasis.[47\8] But the ekstasis, the temporary alienatio mentis of the Dionysiac cult was not thought of as a vain purposeless wandering in a region of pure delusion, but as a hieromania,[48\8] a sacred madness in which the soul, leaving the body, winged its way to union with the god.[49\8] It is now with and in the god, in the condition of enthousiasmos; those who are possessed by this are ~e/ntheoi~; they live and have their being in the god.[50\8] While still retaining {260} the finite Ego, they feel and enjoy to the full the infinite powers of all life.
In ekstasis the soul is liberated from the cramping prison of the body; it communes with the god and develops powers of which, in the ordinary life of everyday, thwarted by the body, it knew nothing. Being now a spirit holding communion with spirits it is able to free itself from Time and see what only the spiritual eye beholds--things separated from it in time and space. The enthusiastic worship of the Thracian servants of Dionysos gave birth to the inspiration mantikê,[51\8] a form of prophecy which did not (like prophecy as it invariably appears in Homer) have to wait for accidental, ambiguous and external signs of the god's will, but on the contrary entered immediately into communion with the world of gods and spirits and in this heightened spiritual condition beheld and proclaimed the future. This power belonged to men only in ekstasis, in religious madness, when "the God enters into men". The Mainads are the official exponents of this mantikê of inspiration.[52\8] It is simple and intelligible enough that the Thracian cult of Dionysos, which was throughout a means of stimulating men to a condition of extreme exaltation that they might enter into direct communion with the spirit-world, also encouraged the prophesying of inspired seers, who in their rapt exaltation and frenzy became clairvoyant. Among the Thracian Satrai there was a tribe called the Bessoi who produced prophêtai, and these were in charge of an oracle of Dionysos situated on the top of a high mountain. The prophetess of this temple was a woman who gave prophecies like the Pythia at Delphi, that is to say, in a state of rapt ecstasy. This, at least, is what Herodotos says,[53\8] and we have many other accounts of Thracian mantikê and its close connexion with the orgiastic cult of Dionysos.[54\8]
§ 3
The Greek type of religion, perhaps from its very origin, certainly at the earliest period of its development in which it becomes accessible to our observation--the period to which the Homeric poems belong--had no leaning to anything resembling an excited emotional worship like that practised by the Thracians in their orgiastic cult of Dionysos. The whole movement wherever it came to their notice must have struck the Greeks of Homer as something strange and barbaric, attractive only through the interest ever attached to the unknown. And yet--the fact is certain--the thrilling tones {261} of this "enthusiastic" worship awoke an answering chord deep in the hearts of many Greeks; in spite of all that was strange they must have recognized a familiar accent in it--something that, however outlandishly expressed, could appeal to the common nature of mankind.
This enthusiastic Thracian cult was in fact only a special expression, conforming to their peculiar national characteristics, of a religious impulse that is to be found all over the earth, and which breaks out in every stage of civilization. It must, indeed, answer to an instinctive need of human nature, and be rooted in the physical and psychical constitution of man. In moments of supreme exaltation man felt the presence above him and around him of mighty powers that seemed to express themselves even in his own personal life. These he was no longer to confront in pious and fearful awe, passively confined within the limits of his own separate personality: he was to break down every barrier and clasp them to his heart, making them his own in unconditional surrender. Mankind needed not to wait for that strange product of poetry and thought, Pantheism, before it could experience this instinctive need to lose its own private existence, for a moment, in the divine. There are whole races of men, not otherwise among the most distinguished members of the human family, who have a special tendency and gift for such expansion of the human consciousness into the supra-personal. They have an urgent impulse to such rapt and visionary states, and they regard the enticing or horrifying visions that visit them in those states as actual experiences of another world into which their "souls" have for a brief while been transported. In every part of the world there are peoples who regard such ecstatic exaltation as the only true religious act, the only way of intercourse with the spirit-world available to man, and base their religious performances principally upon such ceremonial as experience has shown to be most capable of inducing the ecstasies and visions. The means most commonly adopted by such peoples to produce the desired intensity and stimulation of feeling is a violently excited dance prolonged to the point of exhaustion, in the darkness of night, to the accompaniment of tumultuous music. Sometimes whole companies of the people induce in themselves a state of religious excitement by wild and furious dancing.[55\8] More often selected individuals, specially susceptible to such impressions, suffer their "souls" to be drawn out by music and dancing and every other sort of stimulating influence, and made to visit the world of spirits and gods.[56\8] Such "magicians" and priests who can place {262} themselves in immediate contact of soul with the spirit world, are to be found all over the globe. The shamans of Asia, the "medicine men" of North America, the Angekoks of Greenland, the Butios of the Antilles, the Piajes of the Caribbees are merely special cases of a universal type, essentially the same in all its different manifestations. Africa, Australia, and the island world of the Pacific are equally familiar with them. Both their performances and the range of ideas that lie behind them belong to a type of religious experience that occurs with the regularity of a natural phenomenon, and must therefore not be regarded as abnormal. Even among Christian peoples of long standing, the smouldering fires of this primitive and emotional type of religion are ever ready to burst out again in renewed flames, and those who feel their warmth are kindled to a more than human sense of life and vigour.[57\8] Conventionality and traditionalism, even the substitution of a cold and spurious mimicry for real feeling, are of course quite compatible with a form of religion which consists so much in the display of emotion. But even so, the most cautious observers[58\8] have declared that by such violent stimulation of every sense the "magicians" are thrown into a state of quite unfeigned exaltation. In accordance with the character and content of their normal modes of thought, the hallucinations to which the magicians are subject differ in different cases; but as a general rule their frenzy opens to them a way of immediate intercourse, frequently of complete communion of being, with the gods. This is the only explanation which will account for the fact that, like the inspired Bakchantes of Thrace, the magicians and priests of so many peoples are called by the name of the divinity to whom their "enthusiastic" worship elevates them.[59\8] The impulse to union with God, the extinction of the individual in the divine--these are what form the fundamental points of contact between the mysticism of the most highly cultivated and talented people and the emotional religion of primitive "savages". Even the external machinery of excitement and stimulation are not always dispensed with by the mystics:[60\8] they are always the same as those with which we are already familiar in the orgiastic religion of primitive peoples--music, the giddy whirl of the dance, narcotic stimulants. Thus (to take the most striking example out of many that might be given) the dervishes of the Orient whirl round in their violent dances to the rattle of drums, and the sound of flutes till the last stages of excitement and exhaustion are reached. The purpose of it all is vividly expressed by the {263} most fearless of all the mystics, Jelaleddin Rumi, in the words: "He that knows the power of the dance dwells in God; for he has learnt that Love can slay.[61\8] Allah hu! . . ."
§ 4
Wherever a cultus of this kind, making its aim and object the evocation of ecstatic raptures, has taken root--whether in whole races of men or in religious communities--there we find in close alliance with it, whether as cause or effect or both, a peculiarly vital belief in the life and power of the soul of man after its separation from the body. Our comparative glance over the analogous phenomena of other lands has shown us that the exalted worship offered to "Dionysos" among the Thracians was only a single variety of a method, familiar to more than half the human race, of getting into touch with the divine by a religious "enthousiasmos". We therefore expect to find among the Thracians a specially strong and well-developed belief in the life of the "soul". And in fact we find Herodotos telling us of a Thracian tribe, the Getai, whose belief "made men immortal".[62\8] They had only one god, Zalmoxis by name.[63\8] To this god, who dwelt in a cavernous mountain, all the dead of their race, they believed, would one day be gathered and have immortal life.[64\8] The same belief was held by other Thracian tribes, too.[65\8] This creed seems to have had in view the "transplantation"[66\8] of the dead to a blessed life in the hereafter. But, it would seem, this transplantation was not perhaps for ever. We hear of the belief that the dead would "return"[67\8] from the other world; and that this idea existed among the Getai is implied (though the narrator does not clearly understand this) by the absurd pragmatizing fable which Herodotos got from the Greek settlers on the Hellespont and the Pontos.[68\8] In this story (as often in later accounts too Zalmoxis is actually a slave and pupil of Pythagoras of Samos. Whoever invented this fairy-tale was led to it by observing the close relationship between the Pythagorean doctrine of the soul and the Thracian belief. In the same way later observers of the same fact reversed the positions and made Pythagoras the pupil of the Thracian.[69\8] In any case the fact cannot to be doubted that in Thrace people thought they had found again the special doctrine of Pythagoras as to the transmigration of souls. The belief in the "return" of the soul must be interpreted as meaning that the souls of the dead return to life in new bodies and resume their life on earth, to this extent being {264} "immortal". Only so interpreted could it have been held for a moment without coming into conflict with obvious appearances. An allusion in Euripides seems to regard as Thracian such a belief in a recurrent incarnation of the soul.[70\8]
We should be justified in expecting to find an inner connexion between this Thracian belief in immortality, which seems to have made such an impression on our Greek informants, and the religion and "enthousiastic" worship of the same people. Nor are traces lacking of a close association of the Thracian worship of Dionysos and Thracian cult of the Souls.[71\8] But if we ask why the religion of the Thracian Dionysos was attended by a belief in the independent, indestructible life of the soul, a life not confined to the period of its sojourn in the body which at present envelopes it, the answer must be sought not in the nature of the god to whom the cult was offered (that nature being, in fact, insufficiently known to us) but in the nature of the cult itself. The object of that cult--we might almost say its special task--was to exalt its worshippers to a state of "ekstasis" in which their "souls" should be forcibly delivered from the normal circle of their human and circumscribed being, and raised as pure spirits to communion with the god and his company of spirits. The true "Bakchai"[72\8]--those who were really cast into a state of religious madness--found in the rapture of these orgies a new province of experience open before them: they experience things of which they could give no account in the fully conscious light of ordinary day. There can be no doubt that the experiences and visions that their "ekstasis" gave them were regarded by them as the plainest and most literally real of facts.[73\8] The belief in the existence and life of a second self distinct from the body and separable from it was already encouraged by the "experiences" of the separate existence and independent behaviour of that self in dreams and fainting fits.[74\8] How much more strongly and vividly must this belief have been confirmed for those who in the intoxication of those delirious dances had "experienced" for themselves how the soul, freed from the body, could participate in the joys and terrors of the divine existence; not indeed the whole man, body and soul together, but the soul by itself and in separation from the body--the spiritual being invisibly living within the man. The sense of its own divinity, its eternity, which had been blindingly revealed to it in "ekstasis", might be developed by the soul into a lasting persuasion that it was indeed of a divine nature, and called to a divine life which it would enjoy for ever as soon as it was freed from the body, {265} just as it had then enjoyed it for a moment. No mere intellectual arguments could give such powerful support to a spiritualism of this kind as the personal experience itself which, even in this life supplied a foretaste of what the individual was one day to enjoy as his own for ever.
In some such way as this, the persuasion of an independent, continued existence of the soul after the death of its body was developed into a belief in the divinity and immortality of the soul. In all such cases it was almost inevitable that the naive distinction between "body" and "soul", natural to simple-minded peoples and individuals, should harden into an opposition between the two. The descent from the heights where the ecstatic and emancipated soul enjoyed its thrilling delights was too sudden; the body could not but seem a burden and a hindrance, almost an enemy of the heaven-born soul. Disparagement of the ordinary existence of every day, a turning aside from this life--these are the natural results of such an advanced spiritualism, even though it may have no speculative basis, when it influences so profoundly the religious temperament of a people as yet untroubled by the subtleties of a scientific culture. A trace of such a depreciation of the earthly life of mankind in comparison with the joys of a free spirit-existence is to be found in what Herodotos and other narrators tell of certain Thracian tribes[75\8] who receive the new-born among their kinsfolk with mourning, and bury their dead with joyful acclamation, for the latter are now beyond the reach of all pain, and are living "in perfect happiness".[76\8] The cheerfulness with which the Thracians faced death in battle[77\8] was explained by the persuasion which they held that death was only an entrance into a higher life for the soul. They were even credited with a real desire for death, for to them "dying seemed so fair".[78\8]
§ 5
Further than this the Thracians--who never quite outgrew a sort of semi-animated torpor of the intellect--could not go on the way marked out for them. The seed of a mystical form of religion that existed in the ecstatic dance-orgies of Dionysos-worship never came to fruition. We never feel with them that we are being taken beyond the region of vague unconscious emotion; it is but a passing illumination that for a moment of wild excitement reveals the near presence of overwhelming spirit-forces.
Not until the flames of such ecstatic worship were fed and nourished by a people of more independent and developed spiritual life, could fitful suggestions be welded into deep and {266} enduring thought. Reflexion upon the nature of the world and of God, the changing and deceptive flow of appearance with the indestructible One Reality behind it; the conception of a divinity that is One, a single light that, divided into a thousand rays and reflected from everything that is, achieves its unity again in the soul of man; such thoughts as these, allied to the dim half-conscious impulse of an enthusiastic dance-worship, might allow the pure waters of the stream of mysticism to run clear at last, freed from the turbid and unsatisfying enthusiasm of popular religious practices.
Thus, for example, among the stern and rigid-minded peoples of Islam, with their stiff, uncompromising Monotheism, there arose, no one knows whence, the inspired dance-orgies of the Dervishes, which then spread far and wide carrying with them the mystical doctrine of the Sûfis, that child of the profound mind of India. Man is God; God is All: such was the pronouncement of the inspired poetry--the special contribution in particular of Persia to this religion of mystic **ecstasy--now in the most transparent simplicity, now in the most gorgeous magnificence of imagery. In the ecstatic dance, which in this case remained in organic connexion with the mystical doctrine (as the soil of the maternal earth with the flowers which she puts forth) new strength was ever being added to the spiritual superstructure. Mystical theory was invigorated by the practical experience, in heightened consciousness, of an internal and unquenchable source of undying power and might. The veil of the world was torn aside for the inspired worshipper; the All-One became sensible and intelligible for him; it poured into his own being; the "deification" of the Mystai was realized in him. "Who knows the power of the Dance dwells in God". . .
Many years before all this, a process of development was completed on Greek soil which has no closer parallel than the special phase of Oriental religion just referred to. Greek religion never indeed (so long at least as the independence of Greek life lasted) went to the extravagant lengths of Oriental mysticism. Even the sense of the infinite had to be expressed by the Greek imagination in plastic form. But for all that, on Greek soil, in the ecstatic Cult of Dionysos, under the influence of Greek reflexion upon God, the world and mankind, the seeds which previously lay undeveloped in the womb of that cult were unfolded in a mystical doctrine, whose guiding principle was the divinity of the human soul and the infiniteness of its life in God. It was from this source that Greek philosophy found the courage to advance a doctrine of the immortality of the soul.
NOTES TO CHAPTER VIII
[1\8: Pl., Phdr. 265 A.]
[2\8: e.g. Cael. Aurel. (i.e. Soranos), Morb. Chr. i, § 144 ff.; Aret. Chron. Pass. i, 6, p. 84 Kühn [vol. 24].]
[3\8: Even the late interpolated passages ~X~ 325, ~ô~ 74, are not quite conclusive. Apart from these the statement of Sch. ~i~ 198 applies strictly throughout both poems: ~to\ mê\ paradido/nai Ho/mêron Dio/nuson oi/nou heuretê/n~, Lehrs, Arist.^3, p. 181.]
[4\8: ~Z~ 132 ff. The scene is evidently meant to be a Bacchic festival. This is shown by the ~thu/sthla~, which the ~Diônu/soio tithê=nai~ let fall out of their hands. All the rest is obscure. Even in antiquity no one knew who the ~tithê=nai~ of Dionysos really were, and hence alternative suggestions were all the more numerous: cf. Nauck, Fr. Trag.^2, p. 17. Voigt, in Roscher's Mythol. Lex. i, 1049. It can hardly be necessary (with Sch. A on Z 129) to deduce from the reference to ~tithê=nai~ that Dionysos himself was regarded as ~nê/pios e/ti kai\ pai=s~. His former ~tithê=nai~ follow him in the Bacchic festival even after he has grown up, exactly as in h. Hom. xxvi, 3, 7-10. ~hai Dionu/sou trophoi/~ as the frenzied mob worshipping the god, ~tô=| theô=| orgia/zousai~ (in Thessaly), come in D.S. 5, 50, 4, in a parallel narrative to the story of Lykourgos and the Mainads. With the conception of the god as ~likni/tês~ neither his leap into the sea (~Z~ 135 ff.), nor esp. the adj. ~mainome/noio~ (132) are in harmony. This last word does certainly give us pause. The accounts provided by later ages of the madness of Dionysos are obviously made up from the lines of Homer and are therefore of no use to us (already ap. Eumelos in the ~Eurôpi/a~, Schol. AD. ~Z~ 131; then Pherekydes, Achaios ~en I/ridi~: Phld., Piet., p. 36 [Nauck, Fr. Trag.^2, p. 751]; E., Cyc. 3. [Apollod.] iii, 5, 1, is prob. derived from Pherec. as are also Philistos fr. 57, FHG. i; Pl., Lg. 672 B; Nic. ~Ophiak.~ fr. 30 Schn., etc.). Scholastic interpreters even thought of a hypallage: ~mainome/noio = maniopoiou=, bakchei/as paraskeuastikou=~, Schol. A, ~Z~ 132; cf. Sch. B, p. 182a, 43 f. Bk. And, indeed, there is certainly in this case a sort of mythological or sacramental hypallage: the state of mind brought about by the god in those who surround him is reflected back on to the god himself (~maino/menoi Sa/turoi~, E., Ba. 130; cf. the mad nurses of Dionysos, Nonn., D. ix, 38 ff.). It would not be hard to parallel this (e.g. Dionys. who makes men drunk is represented as himself drunk, Ath. 428 E, etc.).]
[5\8: ~X~ 460, ~mega/roio die/ssuto maina/di i/sê, pallome/nê kradi/ên~. The evidence of this passage for the familiarity of Homer's audience with the nature of the Mainads cannot be set aside as Lob., Agl. 285, tries to do. The word could only be used as an ~eikô/n~ if the thing were often before men's eyes. ~maina/s~, indeed, is even something different from, and more specialized than ~mainome/nê~ (~Z~ 389).]
[6\8: The view that ~mai/nesthai~ was primitive in the cult of D., the wine, etc., being added later, was definitely put forward in 1825 by O. Müller (Kl. Schr. ii, 26 ff.) arguing against J. H. Voss. But it is only in quite recent times that in tracing the origin of the religion of Dionysos occasional inquirers have taken this view as their starting point: cf. esp. Voigt in his noteworthy treatment of Dionysos in Roscher's Myth. Lex. i, 1029 ff.]
[7\8: ~ho\s mai/nesthai ena/gei anthrô/pous~, Hdt. iv, 79.] {268}
[8\8: E.g. the Odrysai, who, however, lived further north in the Hebros valley; Mela, ii, 17, mentions distinctly the mountain chains of Haimos, Rhodope, and Orbelos as sacris Liberi patris et coetu Maenadum celebratos.]
[9\8: Lob., Agl. 289 ff.]
[10\8: Sabazios: ~Saba/zion to\n Dio/nuson hoi Thra=|kes kalou=sin~ Sch. Ar., Ves. 9; cf. Sch. Ar., Lys. 388; D.S. 4, 4, 1; Harp. ~Saboi/~; Alex. Polyh. ap. Macr. i, 18, 11 (Sebadius: cf. Apul., M. viii, 25, p. 150, 11 Ey. The original form of this name seems to have been Savos, Savadios, Kretschmer, Einleitung in. d. **Gesch. d. griech. Spr. 195 f.; Usener, Götternamen 44). Sabos, Phot. p. 495, 11-12 Pors. Hesych. s.v.; Orph., H. 49, 2, etc. The fact that others could call Sabazios a Phrygian god (Amphitheos ~p. Hêraklei/os b'~ ap. Sch. Ar., Av. 874; Str. 470; Hsch. s.v.), only serves to bring out more clearly the opinion, unanimously held even in antiquity, that the Thracians and the Phrygians were closely related. Sabazios (besides being identified with Helios: Alex. Polyh. l.c.; cf. Soph. fr. 523 N.), as the supreme and almighty god of the Thracians, was even called ~Zeu\s Saba/zios~ (Val. Max. i, 3, 2), esp. on inss. (a few are given in Rapp, Dionysoscult [Progr.] p. 21; cf. also ins. from Peiraeus ~Eph. Arch.~ 1883, p. 245; Ins. Pergam. i, 248, 33, 49: from Pisidia, Papers of the Amer. School at Athens, ii, p. 54, 56. Jovi Sabazio, Orelli, Ins. 1259). We even find ~Zeu\s Ba/kchos, Zeu\s Hê/lios~ (BCH. vi, 189).--The name ~Saba/zios~ was derived from ~saba/zein = eua/zein, dia\ to\n geno/menon peri\ auto\n euasmo/n (theiasmo/n)~: Sch. Ar., Av. 874; Lys. 388. So, too, ~Ba/kchos~ was on this view only another way of expressing the same meaning; since this name also was derived by the ancients from ~ba/zein = eua/zein~ (it is really from the root ~wach (ache/ô) Ba/kchos~, with "affrication"; a reduplicated form of it is ~wiwachos, I/akchos, iache/ô, iakche/ô~; cf. Curtius, Griech. Etym.^5, p. 460, 576). Other names of the Thracian Dionysos are the following: ~Bassareu/s (Ba/ssaros~, Orph., H. 45, 2), derived from ~bassa/ra~ the long dress (made of skin?) worn by the ~Bassari/des = Thra/|kiai ba/kchai~, AB. 222, 26 f.; Hsch. s.v. ~Bassa/rai~ and EM. s.v. (the last compiled from Orion and Sch. Lyc. 771). Other accounts (not contradicting in this point the statement of Hsch.) made it the dress worn by the god himself: Sch. Pers. i, 101. (The ~Bassareu/s~ was generally described as bearded and even senili specie, like the representation of Dionysos himself in the oldest Greek art: Macr. i, 18, 9.) If ~Bassareu/s~ means "the wearer of the long fox-skin" we should be strongly reminded of the--also Thracian--god ~Za/lmolxis (Za/lmoxis)~, whose name was derived from ~zalmo/s = dora\ a/rktou~ (Porph., VP. 14, though this comes only from Antonius Diogenes 6), and probably means "he who is cloaked in the bearskin" (see Fick, Spracheinh. d. Indog. Europ., p. 418; Hehn, Culturpflanz. 428 E.T.).--~Gi/gôn~ a name of Dionysos, EM. 231, 28: perhaps a name given to the god in the city Gigonos mentioned in the same passage, and the ~a/kra Gi/gônis~ at the western end of the Thracian Chalkidike.--EM. 186, 32, is too short to be intelligible: ~balia/; diapoi/kilos. kai\ to\n Dio/nuson Thra=|kes.--Du/alos Dio/nusos para\ Pai/osin~, Hesych.]
[11\8: At any rate the people whom Thuc., Ephoros, and others call Thracians and regarded as having been once settled in Phokis, Boeotia, etc., are undoubtedly to be considered Thracians--and not the impossibly honest and exemplary people, a creation of the fancy, the "Thracians of the Muses", alleged to be quite distinct from the real Thracian peoples, of whom we have heard so much since K. O. {269} Müller (Orchom. 379 ff.) introduced the idea. Antiquity only knew of one kind of Thracian. In the Homeric poems they are not so different from the Greeks in civilization as they were in later times, when we know them from the accounts of Herod. and Xen. For all that they are the same people. They seem in the course of time to have degenerated, or rather they have not shared in the progress made by others and so have remained backward (even behind their Phrygian relatives who wandered to Asia Minor and achieved a higher culture under Semitic influence). In fact, like the Keltoi, they were never able to get beyond a condition of semi-civilization.]
[12\8: ~mani/as epagôgo\n homokla/n~. Aesch. in the ~Êdônoi/~ ap. Str. 470-1 (fr. 57), is the locus classicus for the music in the Thracian festival of Dionysos. Apart from this it is impossible to distinguish in the accounts given by our ancient authorities, between the strictly Thracian festival and the ideal generalized festival of Dionysos (not the mitigated ceremonial actually used in the festival in Greece. They merge completely into each other.]
[13\8: ~saba/zein = eua/zein~, Schol. Ar., Av. 874; Lys. 388.]
[14\8: ~hai Ba/kchai sigô=sin~. Diogen., Prov. iii, 43.]
[15\8: Complete revolution round one's own axis, as in the dance of a dervish, is known at least only in the more fanatic dance-festivals of antiquity: ~strophê\n holosô/maton hô/sper hoi ka/tochoi dineu/ontes~, Heliod. 4, 17, p. 116, 1 Bk. ~di/nêsis tô=n theophorê/tôn~ in Phrygia: Horus ap. EM. 276, 32. Crusius, Philol. 55, 565, compares besides Verg., A. vii, 377 ff.; Alex. Aphr., Prob., p. 6 Us. In the Spartan dance ~diamale/as~ (?) Seilenoi and Satyrs appeared ~orchou/menoi hupo/trocha [peri/trocha~ acc. to Meineke: perhaps better]. Poll. 4, 104.]
[16\8: E., Ba. 116 ff., 664 ff. Thracian: assiduis Edonis fessa choreis qualis in herboso concidit Apidano, Prop. 1, 3, 5 f.]
[17\8: Bassaris: Thracian acc. to Sch. Pers. i, 101; worn by ~ba/kchai~ Hsch. ~bassa/rai~. Lydian, too: ~ho/stis chitô=nas bassa/ras te Ludi/as echei podê/reis~, A. ~en Êdônois~, fr. 59; cf. Poll. 7, 59. "Perhaps a Phrygian word that has penetrated into Lydia," Kretschmer, Einleitung, 390. The worship of Dionysos which had also presumably come from Phrygia, was esp. popular in Lydia.]
[18\8: Familiar in the Bacchic ceremonial of Greece; but occurring already in Thrace: Aesch. ~en Êdônoi/~ (dealing entirely with Thracian customs) mentions the ~nebri/des~, and in the same place has ~aigi/das~ as well (fr. 64).]
[19\8: The ~Ba/kchai~ of Macedonia and the ~Mimallo/nes~, in all respects resembling the Thracian Bacchants, ~keratophorou=si kata\ mi/mêsin Dionu/sou~: Sch. Lyc. 1237 (~Laphusti/as keraspho/rous gunai=kas~).]
[20\8: Mentis inops rapitur, quales audire solemus Threicias passis Maenadas ire comis, Ov., F. iv, 457 f.]
[21\8: Thphr. Ch. 16 (28, p. 141 Jebb); Artemid. 2, 13, p. 106, 9 H.]
[22\8: Snakes and daggers are found in the hands of the ~mimallo/nes kai\ bassa/rai kai\ ludai/~ in the train of Ptol. Philad.: Kallixenos ap. Ath. 198 E. Snakes and ~thu/rsoi~ belong to the paraphernalia of the ~e/nochoi toi=s Orphikoi=s kai\ toi=s peri\ to\n Dio/nuson orgiasmoi=s gunai=kes~ in Macedonia, and of the ~Klô/dônes kai\ Mimallo/nes~ who ~polla\ toi=s Êdôni/si kai\ tai=s peri\ to\n Hai=mon Thrê/|ssais ho/moia drô=sin~, Plu., Alex. 2 (in connexion with the snake of Olympias. She was especially given to the Thrako-Dionysian mysteries: cf. the letter of Olympias to Alexander, Ath. 659 F).--~thu/rsoi~ of the Macedonian ~Mimallo/nes~: Polyaen. 4, 1; Sch. Pers. 1, 99.--"Even now" the thyrsos wands are decked with ivy in the Thraciae populis sollemnibus sacris, Plin., {270} NH. xvi, 144.--The ~na/rthêx~ of the thyrsos is really a shepherd's staff: Clem. Al., Protr. ii, p. 14 P.]
[23\8: Eur., Ba. 735 ff. and frequently.]
[24\8: ~katochai\ kai\ enthousiasmoi/~ in the Thrako-Macedonian worship of Dionysos: Plu., Alex. 2. (The Mimallones imitantur furorem Liberi, Sch., Pers. i, 99.) ~hoi tô=| Sabazi/ô| ka/tochoi~: Porph. ap. Iamb. de Myst. 3, 9, p. 117, 16. ~ba/kchos; ho maniô/dês~, Eust. ~d~ 249; ~b~ 16. ~Klô/dônes~ is the name given to the ~maina/des kai\ ba/kchai apo\ tou= kato/chous ginome/nas klô/zein~, EM. 521, 50. ~hoi ka/tochoi toi=s peri\ to\n Dio/nuson orgiasmoi=s~, Plu., Is. et Os. 35, p. 364 F.]
[25\8: ~hoi bakcheuo/menoi kai\ korubantiô=ntes enthousia/zousi me/chris a\n to\ pothou/menon i/dôsin~, Philo, Vit. Cont. 2, ii, p. 473 M.]
[26\8: So too the wild shaking and whirling-round of the head, which acc. to innumerable literary and pictorial descriptions was a regular feature of the Bacchic dance and cult, must have contributed--and was so intended--to bring about the condition of ecstasy and frenzy (~rhipsau/cheni su\n klo/nô|~, Pi., fr. 208; ~kra=ta sei=sai~, E., Ba. 185, etc.).--How such fanatic shaking of the head, if kept up for along time, is by itself sufficient, in persons naturally predisposed to it, to bring on complete religious ~e/kstasis~, may be learnt from a remarkable account in Moreau du hachisch, p. 290 ff., derived from personal observation in the East.]
[27\8: The object of the trieteric festival of Dionysos (repeated every second year) held in so many places in Greece (cf. Weniger, Dionysosdienst in Elis, Progr. 1883, p. 8) was to celebrate the presence of the god. This is clearly shown by D.S. 4, 3, 2, who also attributes the trieteric festival to the Thracians: ~tou\s Boiôtou\s kai\ tou\s a/llous He/llênas kai\ Thra=|kas . . . katadei=xai ta\s trietêri/das thusi/as Dionu/sô| kai\ to\n theo\n nomi/zein kata\ to\n chro/non tou=ton poiei=sthai ta\s para\ toi=s anthrô/pois epiphanei/as~. At this time women and maidens celebrated ~tê\n parousi/an tou= Dionu/sou~. (In the archaic song of the Elean women the Bull-god is thus called upon: Plu., QG. 36, 299 A; Is. et Os. 35, p. 364 F; whereupon the Eleans believed that ~to\n theo/n sphisin epiphoita=n es tô=n Thui/ôn tê\n heortê/n~: Paus. 6, 26, 1.)--For Bakchos amongst the dancers see E., Ba. 185 ff., 306 f., and often. At the trieteric festival at Delphi ~Dio/nusos . . . Parnaso\n kata\ **pêda=| choreu/ei parthe/nois su\n Delphi/sin~, E., Hypsip. fr. 752. And so often in poetry: see Nauck on S., OT. 213; Ant. 1126 ff.--Thracian trieteric festival: tuo motae proles Semeleia thyrso Ismariae celebrant repetita triennia bacchae, Ov., M. ix, 641 f.; tempus erat, quo sacra solent trieterica Baccho Sithoniae celebrare nurus; nox conscia sacris, etc., vi, 587.]
[28\8: ~aphanismo/s~ followed by ~epipha/neia~ of Dionysos represent, as we frequently learn, the varying relationship of the god with mankind. These are alternating and periodically repeated, and they are reflected in the trieteric period of the festivals. It is customary to explain this disappearance and return of the god as an allegorical typification of the destruction and restoration of vegetation. There is no reason at all to believe this, except for those who regard the doctrines of the Greek "Religion of Nature" as infallible axioms. The god is simply, and in the literal sense of the words, regarded as removed for a time from the world of men, during which period he is in the world of spirits. In the same way Apollo, according to the Delphic legend, is carried away from the human world for certain periods: he lives during that time among the Hyperboreans, whose land is inaccessible to mortal foot or ship. We ought not to be afraid to make use of the light thrown on these matters by parallel legends of the temporary disappearance {271} of gods among uncivilized peoples (the god may be sometimes asleep or under constraint; cf. Plu., Is. et Os., 69 fin. 378 F); cf. what we are told in Dobrizhoffer's Gesch. d. Abip. ii, p. 63 (E.T.), about the beliefs held by the Abipones of Paraguay; or, again, what is said of the negro races of West Africa, according to whom the god normally lives in the depths of the earth, but at regularly recurring intervals comes up to visit men; whereupon the members of a mystical society build him a house, receive his oracles, etc.; Réville, Rel. des peuples non-civil. i, 110-11. Thus Dionysos, too, is for a time in the underworld, in the world of spirits and the souls. This is clearly presupposed by the festival at Lerna, in which Dionysos is called up out of the bottomless spring Alkyonia by which there was an entrance to Hades (just as the inhabitants of Kos every year ~anakalou=ntai~ Hylas out of his spring, i.e. from the underworld: H. Türk, De Hyla, p. 3 f.; Welcker, Kl. Schr. i, 12; and see Maass, Litt. Ztg. 1896, 7-8). Hence also in Lerna a lamb was offered as a victim ~tô=| pulao/chô|~, i.e. to Hades himself, and was thrown into the spring (Plu., Is. et Os. 35, p. 368 F, quoting Sokrates ~peri\ tô=n Hosi/ôn~; Smp. 4, 6, 2, p. 671 E; Paus. 2, 36, 7; 37, 5-6). Because he is in the realm of the dead a pragmatical myth represented him as slain by Perseus and thrown into the spring of Lerna: Lob., Agl. 574. In Delphi, too, something was known of the death and reawakening of Dionysos, but we have in Orph., H. 53, a quite unambiguous expression of the real conception, acc. to which D. "rested in the house of Persephone", and appears again in the upper world at the time of the trieteric festival when he ~egei/rei~ his ~kô=mon, eua/zôn kinô=n te chorou/s~. We may be all the more certain that the same idea is to be attributed to the trieteric festival in Thrace, since the same belief exactly occurs again in the legend of the Thracian (Getic) god Zalmoxis (see below)--he was believed to have disappeared into his infernal kingdom among the spirits and souls and to have made periodical returns to the world of the living. The reason why Dionysos, as worshipped both in Thracian and Greek trieteric festivals, stops for a time in the underworld of the souls, is clear enough: that too was his realm. We can now understand why it is that Dionysos is also ruler over the souls and can be called ~Zagreu\s, Nukte/lios, Isodai/tês~: i.e. he is simply given names of Hades himself (Plu., E ap. D. ix, p. 389 A). His real character of master of the souls and spirits (~a/nax, hê/rôs~), as it had been originally in the Thracian cult, was thus **preserved, in spite of much alteration in its Greek form, partly in Greek local cults, partly in the Orphic cult of Dionysos.--There is a legend which is based on a reminiscence of this periodic disappearance of Dionysos to the underworld, viz. the thoroughly Greek story of his descent on a single occasion into Hades in order to bring back Semele. Elsewhere his disappearance into the realm of the spirits gave rise to the legend of his escape and flight to the Muses; this was spoken of in the Agrionia at Chaironeia (Plu., Smp. 8 Praef.).]
[29\8: Cf. Eur., Ba. 920 ff., 1020 f.]
[30\8: ~tauro/phthoggoi d' hupomukô=ntai/ pothen ex aphanou=s phoberoi\ mi=moi~: A. ~Êdônoi/~ describing the Thracian worship of D. (fr. 57). This was "certainly intended to increase for the participants in the festival the feeling of the god's presence and thus to add to the wildness of their orgies", as Rapp, Dionysosc., 19, very rightly observes. The invisible bellowing bull is the god himself. (Dionysos appears as a bull to the insane Pentheus: E., Ba. 920 ff.).--"The Batloka, a tribe in the Northern Transvaal, hold a yearly festival of the dead in which {272} hidden magicians make weird sounds with flutes which the people take for the voice of spirits; they say 'Modimo is there'." Schneider, Relig. d. Afrikan. Naturv. 143.]
[31\8: The women taking part in the trieteric festival of the god play the part of the ~maina/des~ in his train; D.S. 4, 3, 3. Imitation of the ~Nu/mphai te kai\ Pa=nes kai\ Seilênoi\ kai\ Sa/turoi~ in the ~bakchei/a~: Pl., Lg. 815 C. What was afterwards merely a piece of traditional ritual was originally without doubt a real hallucination of the ~ka/tochoi~.--The idea that a throng, ~thi/asos~, of wood-spirits Satyrs and Seilenoi danced about the God must also have been common in the Thracian cult (~sugchoreuetai\ Dionu/sou~, Ael., VH. iii, 40; ~ho tô=| Dionu/sô| parepo/menos o/chlos~, Ath. 362 E. ~saua/dai~ (obviously related to ~Saba/zios~; cf. Usener, Götternamen, 44 f.) was the name given to ~hoi seilênoi/~ by the Macedonians, who in the practice of Dionysos-worship were entirely dependent upon the Thracians. Hsch. s.v., cf. Hdt. viii, 138 fin.]
[32\8: The ~bakcheu/ontes tô=| theô=|~ (i.e. Sabazios, Sabos) are called ~sa/boi kai\ sa/bai kai\ saba/zioi~: Phot. ~sabou/s~; cf. Eust., ~b~ 16, p. 1431, 46. Harp. (Phot.) s. ~sa/boi~; Phot. ~parasaba/zein~ (p. 383, 16 Pors.); Sch. Ar., Av. 874. This identification of the god with his ecstatic worshippers belongs to the Phrygian cult of Kybele as well. Just as the goddess is called ~Kubê/bê~ so ~ho katecho/menos tê=| mêtri\ tô=n theô=n~ is called ~Ku/bêbos~: Phot. ~Ku/bêbos, ku/bêbon~, Eust. ~b~ 16. Thus the Greeks in calling the ecstatic worshippers of Bakchos by the name of the god were only adopting the conceptions and vocabulary of the Thracian religion of inspiration into their Dionysos-worship which was modelled on the Thracian cult. ~Ba/kchos~ is their name for the ~orgiastê\s tou= theou=~ (etymologically connected is ~baba/ktês [krau/gasos, ho/then kai\ Ba/kchos~ Hsch.] a Phrygian word for the frenzied priest of Kybele: and therefore = ~Ku/bêbos~; cf. Ribbeck, Alazon, p. 86). It appears that the ~ba/kchoi~ of Dionysos were often called by the old Thracian name ~sa/boi~: ~sa/bous kai\ nu=n e/ti polloi\ tou\s ba/kchous kalou=sin~, Plu., Smp. 4, 6, 2, p. 671 F (~Laphu/stioi~ is also a name given, after ~Dio/nusos Laphu/stios~, to the ~Ba/kchoi~ who worship him: Lyc. 1237 with Sch.).]
[33\8: ~Dio/nusos ôma/dios~ (Porph., Abs. ii, 55), ~ômêstê/s~ (Plu., Them. 13), ~laphu/stios, tauropha/gos~ (Soph. fr. 607 N.).--At other times we catch a glimpse of the idea that the god himself is the torn and devoured bull (just as in many ancient worships the proper victim of the god is the animal most homogeneous with him): this is evidently the most primitive form of ~en-thousiasmo/s~, the primeval symbolism of a mystic worship that, like all mysticism, desires to take personal possession of the God.]
[34\8: Dionysos himself also carries the thyrsos (as often in sculpture): E., Hyps. fr. 752, etc.]
[35\8: See above, n. 19 (~ho bou/kerôs I/akchos~, Soph., fr. 874, ~tauro/kerôs theo/s~, E., Ba. 100). The Greek Dionysos is often described as bull-shaped and horned: this, too, in imitation of Thracian belief. It is Sabazios whom they ~kerasti/an pareisa/gousi~, D.S. 4, 4, 2; cf. 3, 64, 2. ~Hu/ê| tauroke/rôti~, Euphor. fr. 14.--An allusion in D.S. 4, 4, 2, seems to suggest that the god, the ~murio/morphos~, was also (like Attis) regarded as a herdsman. Something of the sort may be referred to in the unintelligible lines quoted by Cl. Al., Prot. ii, p. 14 P., apparently in connexion with the Sabazios mysteries. So Dionysos, too, is sometimes thought of as a ~bouko/los~: ~poime/ni d' agrau/lôn tau/rôn, Dio\s aigio/choio huie/i kissochi/tôni~ are words used of him in [Orph.] Lith. 260. Again, in imitation of the god himself his ~mu/stai~ are ~bouko/loi~ on the inscriptions from Asia Minor (Ins. Perg. ii, 485-8) and Thrace, of {273} which R. Schöll speaks, de commun. et coll. Graecis (Satura philol. Saupp.), p. 178 ff. ~boukoliko/s~ occurs among the cult officials in the Iobakcheia at Athens: Ath. Mitth., 1894, p. 260, l. 122; archibucolos dei Liberi on inscriptions of the city of Rome. ~bouko/los~ and ~boukolei=n~ occur in connexion with Bacchic worship as early as Kratinos, Aristoph., and Eurip.: ~nuktipo/lou Zagre/ôs bou/tas~, E., Cret. fr. 472, 11 (acc. to Diels). See Crusius, Rh. M. 45, 266 f.; Dieterich de hymnis Orph. (Marb. 1891), p. 3 ff.]
[36\8: The special flute-melodies going under the name of Olympos were called ~thei=a~ ([Pl.] Min. 318 B); ~kate/chesthai poiei=~ (Pl., Smp. 215 C); ~homologoume/nôs poiei= ta\s psucha\s enthousiastika/s~ (Arist., Pol. 1340a 10). Cic., Div. i, 114: ergo et ei quorum animi, spretis corporibus, evolant atque excurrunt foras, ardore aliquo incitati atque inflammati, cernunt illa profecto quae vaticinantes praenuntiant: multisque rebus inflammantur tales animi qui corporibus non inhaerent: ut ei qui sono quodam vocum et Phrygiis cantibus incitantur. An unmistakable description of what was meant by ~e/kstasis~ and Korybantic frenzy (see below).]
[37\8: i.e. those who are ~enthousiasmou= katakô/chimoi~, as Aristotle knew them; certain ~manikai\ diathe/seis~ are known to Plato. Somewhat similar is the ~phu/sis theia/zousa~ which according to Demokritos [D. Chr. 36, 1] fr. 21 Diels, belongs to the inspired poet.]
[38\8: The drunkenness of the Thracians and their ancient cultivation of the vine are well known. They even brewed beer from barley: Ath. 547 BC (cf. Hehn, Culturpflanzen, p. 121 E.T.). The prophetai (prophesying in "enthusiasm") of a Thracian oracle prophesied plurimo mero sumpto, Aristot. ap. Macr. 1, 18, 1.--Even the women drank unmixed wine in Thrace: Pl., Lg. 637 E.]
[39\8: Mela, 2, 21 (and from him Solin. 10, 5, p. 75, 16 Mom.) says of the Thracians epulantibus ubi super ignes quos circumsident quaedam semina ingesta sunt, similis ebrietati hilaritas ex nidore contingit (cf. [Plu.] de Flu. 3, 3). There can be no doubt that it was hemp-seed (~ka/nnabis~) which had this effect. Hdt. iv, 74, says expressly that the Thracians knew hemp. It was thus with a sort of hashish that they intoxicated themselves (hashish is an extract of cannabis indica). The Scythians did something similar: Hdt. tells of their vapour-baths in tightly closed huts (iv, 75): they produced a smoke by laying hempseeds on red-hot stones and--though Hdt. does not say so--must necessarily have got into a state of wild intoxication. This may have been a religious performance. Drunkenness is generally regarded by savage tribes as a religiously inspired condition. Further, the Scythian practice has the most striking parallel in the use of "vapour-huts" among the North American Indians, in which case the religious intention is certain (see the account in Klemm, Culturg. ii, 175-8; J. G. Müller, Amerik. Urrelig. 92). Hdt. i, 202, also mentions intoxication from the fumes of certain "fruits" among the Massagetai; these last, after they had completely bemused themselves, stood up to dance and sing. The Thracians, too, may very well have used intoxication through hashish-fumes as a means of exciting themselves to their ecstatic religious dances.--The ancients were quite familiar with the practice of inhaling aromatic smoke to produce religious hallucinations: [Galen] ~ho/r. iatr.~ 187 (xix, p. 462 K) ~enthousiasmo/s esti katha/per exi/stantai/ tines epi\ (hupo\?) tô=n hupothumiôme/nôn en toi=s hieroi=s, <pha/smata~ (om. edd.)> ~horô=ntes ê\ tumpa/nôn ê\ aulô=n ê\ sumbo/lôn~ (scr. ~kumba/lôn~) akou/ontes~; cf. odorum delenimento potest animus humanus externari, Apul., Ap. 43.--For the use of smoke in the {274} Korybantic ceremonies see below.--The ~gaga/tês li/thos hupothumiathei/s~ is useful as an ~epilêptikô=n e/legchos~ (Dioscor. v, 145); it brings on the convulsions of the victim of ~hiera\ no/sos~ (epilepsy) [Orph.] L. 478 ff. (cf. further Damigeron, de Lap. 20, p. 179 Ab.; Plin., NH. 36, 141; and also Gal. xii, p. 203 K.).]
[40\8: Polak, Persien, ii, 245 ff.--We have only to read the accounts derived from personal experience of the sensations and hallucinatory states accompanying hashish-smoking--such as those given, for instance, by Moreau (de Tours) Du hachisch et de l'aliénation mentale (Paris, 1845), esp. pp. 23 ff., 51 ff., 59 ff., 90, 147 ff., 151 ff., 369 ff.--to have a complete parallel to the condition which underlay Bacchic excitement. There, too, is the complete ~e/kstasis~ of the spirit, a waking dream-state, an ~oligochro/nios mani/a~. It only requires the special tone and character given to the hallucinations and illusions by deep-rooted religious or fanciful conceptions--and the external machinery for cultivating such illusions--to make them an exact equivalent of the delirious condition of the real ~ba/kchoi~ at the nightly festival of Dionysos. (The helpless state of impressionability to outward--e.g. musical--and inward influences is a marked feature of the intoxication and fantasia of hashish.) Other narcotics also have similar effects (Moreau, p. 184 ff.).]
[41\8: Pl., Ion, 534 A (perhaps an allusion to the words of Aischines Socr. in the ~Alkibia/dês~ [Aristid. Rh. ii, 23 f. Dind.]).]
[42\8: E., Ba. 142 f., 706 ff. (144 ~Suri/as d' hôs liba/nou kapno/s~).]
[43\8: Anaesthesia of the Bakchai: ~epi\ de\ bostru/chois pu=r e/pheron oud' e/kaien~, Ba. 757 f.--suum Bacche non sentit saucia volnus, dum stupet Edonis exululata iugis, Ov., Tr. 4, 1, 41 f. qualis deo percussa maenas . . . atque expers sui volnus dedit nec sensit, Sen., Troad. 682 ff. Similar insensibility to pain (certainly not always feigned) was shown in their ekstasis by the self-wounding galli of Kybele, the priests and priestesses of Mâ (Tibull. 1, 6, 45 ff.)--something of the sort is reported of the prophets of Baal (1 Kings xviii, 28). See in general on the subject of anaesthesia and the ~orthô=s katecho/menoi hupo\ tô=n theô=n~, Iamb., Myst. 3, 4, p. 110 Par. In the case of the shamans, the Indian Yogis, the dervishes, and the natives of North America the existence of such states of insensibility in religious excitement has been actually observed.]
[44\8: ~katecho/menos ek tou= theou=~ (Pl., Men. 99 D; X., Sym. i, 10. ~katecho/menoi hô/sper hai ba/kchai~, Pl., Ion, 534 A; Sym. 215 C. ~mane/nti te kai\ kataschome/nô|~, Phdr. 244 E. ~hê d' aphro\n exiei=sa kai\ diastro/phous ko/ras heli/ssous', ou phronou=s' ha\ chrê=n phronei=n, ek Bakchi/ou katei/cheto~, E., Ba. 1122 ff. ~ka/tochoi~ above, n. 24.]
[45\8: ~e/ntheo/s te gi/gnetai kai\ e/kphrôn kai\ ho nou=s ouke/ti en autô=| e/nestin~, Pl., Ion, 534 B (where it is applied to the inspired poet but properly belongs to the Bakchai).]
[46\8: ~e/kstasis, exi/stasthai~ is often used of the inspired state. ~mai/nesthai, enthousia=n, e/ntheon gi/nesthai, ekstê=nai~ are all used in the same sense and apply to the "inspired" prophets (~Ba/kides, Si/bullai~) and the poets: Arist., Prob. 30, 1, p. 954a, 34-9. ~exi/statai kai\ mai/netai~, Arist. HA. 6, 22, p. 577a, 12. The religious ~orgiasmoi/, eksta/sias psucha=s epa/gonti~: Phintys ap. Stob., Fl. iv, 23, 61a, p. 593 H. ~e/kstasis~ is a state in which the soul seems estranged from itself; when the ~oikei=ai kinê/seis ouk enochlou=ntai all' aporrapi/zontai~ (Arist., Pa. Nat. 464a, 25). The word became weak and commonplace enough in later usage, but it was evidently meant, originally, to express the "exit" of the "soul" from its body. In the same way the phrase used of one who {275} goes off into a faint: ~to\n d' e/lipen psuchê/~ originally meant the same thing and was so understood, see above (chap. i, n. 8). The same idea occurs again in P. Mag. Par., l. 725, p. 63 Wessely: ~ hupe/klutos d' e/sei tê=| psuchê=| kai\ ouk en seautô=| e/sei ho/tan soi apokri/nêtai~ [the god conjured up].]
[47\8: ~e/kstasis estin oligochro/nios mani/a~ [Galen] ~ho/r. iatr.~ 485 (xix, p. 462). ~mani/ê e/kstasi/s esti chro/nios~ Aretaeus, Chr. Pass. 1, 6, p. 78 K.]
[48\8: ~Dio/nuson maino/lên orgia/zousi ba/kchoi, ômophagi/a| tê\n hieromani/an a/gontes, kai\ teli/skousi ta\s kreônomi/as tô=n pho/nôn anestemme/noi toi=s o/phesin epololu/zontes eua/n~, Clem. Al., Protr. ii, p. 11 P.]
[49\8: The ~enthousiô=ntes ek theou= tinos~ become like the god, ~lamba/nousi ta\ e/thê kai\ ta\ epitêdeu/mata (tou= theou=), katho/son dunato\n theou= anthrô/pô| metaschei=n~, Pl., Phdr. 253 A. More boldly ~heautô=n eksta/ntas ho/lous enidru=sthai toi=s theoi=s kai\ enthea/zein~, Procl. _in _Rp.__ ii, 108, 23 Kr.--~ouk e/kstasis ha/plôs hou/tôs esti/n, alla\~ (in its positive sense) ~epi\ to\ krei=tton anagôgê\ kai\ meta/stasis~, Iamb. Myst. 3, 7, p. 114, 9 Parth.]
[50\8: ~e/ntheoi gunai=kes~ of the Bakchai, S. Ant. 963. ~hai Ba/kchai ho/tan e/ntheoi ge/nôntai~--Aesch. Socr. ap. Aristid., Rh. (ii, 23 Dind.). ~e/ntheos ê/de hê mani/ê~ (the religious sort) Aret., p. 84 K. The essential meaning of ~e/ntheon ei=nai~ (plenum esse deo) is clearly defined in Sch., E., Hip. 141: ~e/ntheoi le/gontai hoi hupo\ pha/smato/s tinos aphairethe/ntes to\n nou=n, kai\ hup' ekei/nou tou= theou= tou= phasmatopoiou= katecho/menoi kai\ ta\ dokou=nta kei/nô| poiou=ntes~. The ~e/ntheos~ is completely in the power of the god; the god speaks and acts through him. The ~e/ntheos~ has lost his consciousness of himself; like the ~thei=oi a/ndres~ (which phrase in Plato has the same meaning as ~e/ntheoi a/ndres~) esp. the ~theoma/nteis, le/gousi me\n alêthê= kai\ polla/, i/sasi d' oude\n hô=n le/gousi~, Pl., Men. 99 C. (Philo, Spec. Leg. ii, p. 343 M., says of the inspired prophet: ~enthousia=| gegonô\s en agnoi/a|, metanistame/nou me\n tou= logismou= . . . epipephoitêko/tos de\ kai\ enô|kêko/tos tou= thei/ou pneu/matos kai\ pa=san tê=s phô/nês organopoiï/an krou/ontos ktl.~; cf. Iamb., Myst. 3, 4, p. 109.)]
[51\8: ~e/ntheoi ma/nteis~ (Bakides, Sibyllai Arist., Prb. 30, 2, 954a, 37. ~theoma/nteis~ Pl., Men. ad fin. ~mantikê\ kata\ to\ e/ntheon, ho/per esti\n entheastiko/n~ [Plu.] Plac. Phil. 5, 1, 1 [Dox., p. 415].]
[52\8: ~ma/ntis d' ho dai/môn ho/de~ (Dionysos)~; to\ ga\r bakcheu/simon kai\ to\ maniô=des mantikê\n pollê\n e/chei; ho/tan ga\r ho theo\s eis to\ sô=m' e/lthê| polu/s, le/gein to\ me/llon tou\s memêno/tas poiei=~, E., Ba. 298 ff. Here the inner relationship of the inspiration mantikê and the "possession" which took place in ecstatic frenzy is expressed with all possible clearness (drunkenness is surely not referred to!). This is how Plu., Smp. 7, 10, p. 716 B, also understood Eur. Prophesying Mainads: ~maina/das thuosko/ous~ E., Ba. 224--~oudei\s e/nnous epha/ptetai mantikê=s enthe/ou kai\ alêthou=s, all' ê\ kath' hu/pnon tê\n tê=s phronê/seôs pedêthei\s du/namin ê\ dia\ no/son ê\ dia/ tina enthousiasmo\n paralla/xas~, Pl., Ti. 71 E. ~nosê/mata mantika\ ê\ enthousiastika/~ make inspired ~ma/nteis~ what they are: Arist. Prob. 954a, 35. Such mantikê takes place in the state of furor, cum a corpore animus abstractus divino instinctu concitatur, Cic., Div. i, 66. A famous case is that of Kassandra from whom the deus inclusus corpore humano, non iam Cassandra loquitur, § 67; cf. the Sibyl who prophesies ~mainome/nô| sto/mati~ (Heraclit. fr. 12 By. = 92 D.) and the Pythia at Delphi prophesying in a state of ~mani/a~. For the prophecy of Korybantic Phrygians possessed and "frenzied", see Arrian ap. Eust., on D.P. 809.]
[53\8: Hdt. vii, 111 (for Hdt. the ~Bêssoi/~ seem to be a division, perhaps a clan, of the Satrai. Polyb., Strabo, Pliny, Dio C., and others know them as an independent Thracian tribe: ~pro/mantis gunê\ chre/ousa kata/per en Delphoi=si~--which means that she prophesied in ecstasy, for that is what the Pythia at Delphi did. (See Sch. Ar., Plut. 39; {276} Plu., Def. Or. 51, p. 438 B. Lucan vi, 166 ff., clearly describes the phenomena supposed to attend their religious ekstasis: artus Phoebados irrupit Paean, mentemque priorem expulit, atque hominem toto sibi cedere iussit pectore. bacchatur demens aliena, etc.)]
[54\8: ~ho Thrê|xi\ ma/ntis Dio/nusos~, E., Hec. 1267. Rhesos dwelling in Mt. Pangaios is ~Ba/kchou prophê/tês~, Rh. 972. ~aphike/sthai toi=s Leibêthri/ois para\ tou= Dionu/sou ma/nteuma ek Thra/|kês~, Paus. 9, 30, 9. Aristoteles qui Theologumena scripsit, apud Ligyreos (?) ait in Thracia esse adytum Libero consecratum, ex quo redduntur oracula. Macr. 1, 18, 1. The wife of Spartacus, herself a Thracian, was ~mantikê/ te kai\ ka/tochos toi=s peri\ tô=n Dio/nuson orgiasmoi=s~, Plu., Crass. 8. Octavian in Thrace consulted in Liberi patris luco barbara caerimonia, i.e. an oracle: Suet., Oct. 94. Even in 11 B.C. the Bessoi still had a ~hiereu\s tou= Dionu/sou~, Vologeses, who by means of prophesyings (~polla\ thei/asas~) and ~tê=| para\ tou= theou= do/xê|~ stirred up his people to rebel against the Odrysai: D.C. 54, 34, 5. In 29 B.C. M. Crassus had handed over to the Odrysai the piece of land occupied by the Bessoi ~en hê=| kai\ to\n theo\n aga/llousi~, D.C. 51, 25, 5.--The spirit of the old Thracian ecstatic cult reappeared in the character of the Bacchic worship introduced from Greece into Italy whose excesses (in 186 B.C.) are narrated by Livy: 39, 8 ff.: among these being viros velut mente capta cum iactatione fanatica corporis vaticinari: 39, 13, 12.]
[55\8: Compare, for example, what we are told of the religious dances of the Ostiaks (Erman, Travels in Siberia, ii, 45 f., E. T., Cooley), the Haokah dance of the Dakota, the "medicine-dance" of the Winnebago in North America (Schoolcraft, Indian Tribes, iii, 487 ff., 286 ff.), the dance of voodoo negroes in Haiti (Nouv. annales des voyages, 1858, iii, p. 90 ff.). For the violent religious dances of the people in ancient Peru see Müller, Amerik. Urrelig. 385; in Australia, R. Brough-Smith, Aborigines of Victoria, i, 166 ff. (1878). Among the Veddas of Ceylon there was a dance of the "devil's priests" (called Kattadias) dressed up as demons: see Tennent, Ceylon, i, 540 f.; ii, 442.--In antiquity the following have the closest relationship to the ecstatic cult of the Thracians: the dance festivals in honour of the "Syrian Goddess", of the Kappadocian Mâ, of the Phrygian Mountain Mother, and of Attis (the last having much the same origin as the Thracian festival, but being more strongly affected by Semitic influences, and perhaps by the religious practices of the prehistoric inhabitants of Asia Minor). Besides these we may remember the account given by Poseidonios ap. Strabo, 198, D.P. 570 ff., of the excited nocturnal festival celebrated in honour of "Dionysos" in an island at the mouth of the Loire by the women of the Namnites (Samnites, Amnites) ~Dionu/sô| katecho/menai~ in the wildest delirium (~lu/tta~).]
[56\8: This is regularly the meaning of such excesses practised by "magicians". The shaman (with his "soul") voyages out into the spirit-world; see the remarkably vivid account of Radloff, Siberien, ii, 1-67; and also Erman, Zschr. f. Ethnologie, ii, 324 ff.; A. Krause, Tlinkitindianer, p. 294 ff., 1885. So does the Lapp magician (Knud Leem, Lappen in Finmarken [E.T. in Pinkerton's Voyages]). The Angekok enters into communion with his Torngak (Cranz, Hist. of Greenland, i, p. 194, E.T., 1820); the Butio with the Zemen (Müller, Amerik. Urrelig., 191 f.); the Piajes with the spirits (Müller, 217). Thus, too, communication with the divine "grandfather" of the people is established by means of dances, etc., among the Abipones (Dobrizhoffer, Abipones, ii, 64, E.T.). The expulsion of the soul to visit the spirit-world is also practised (in their convulsions) by the {277} magicians of the North American Indians, the people of the Pacific Islands (Tylor, ii, 133), etc. Such practices start out from a commonly held conception of the nature of body and soul and of their relations with the unseen. The magicians believe "that in their ecstatic condition they can break through the barrier between this world and the next", Müller 397. To facilitate this process they employ the various means alluded to of stimulating their senses.]
[57\8: The most remarkable case of this is provided by the history of a religious sect of our own day widely spread in Russia, who call themselves "the Christs", i.e. sons of God. The sect was founded by a holy man named Philippov in whose body God one day took up his abode; after which the man spoke as the living God himself and gave commandments. The sect particularly stood for the idea that the divine dwells in mankind, Christ in men and Mary in women, and that the sense of their presence can be awakened in men by the action of the Holy Ghost, through the force of strong belief, by saintliness and by religious ecstasy. To produce the ecstasy dances are held in common. About midnight, after long prayers, hymns, and religious addresses, the participators in the secret festival, both men and women, dressed in strange costumes begin to dance. Soon the ranks and circles of the dancers and singers break up; individuals begin to turn round and round, revolving on their own axis with incredible speed, balancing meanwhile on their heels. The excitement of the dancing and leaping crowd grows continually greater. Finally one of them calls out "He comes; He is near--the Holy Ghost". The wildest ecstasy takes hold of every one. Details may be found in N. Tsakni's La Russie sectaire, p. 63 ff. (cf. what is said in the same work, p. 80 ff., of the religious dances of the Skopzes, and p. 119 f. of the sect of the "Leapers").--All this is true Bacchanalia christiana and therefore mentioned here.]
[58\8: e.g. Mariner, Tonga Islanders, i, 108 (1817); Wrangel, Reise in Siberien, i, 286 (i, 267 f., French trans.); Radloff, Siberien, ii, 58. Even the respectable Cranz, whose own point of view made it impossible for him to appreciate properly the Angekok practices so clearly observed by him, admits that many of them really saw visions that suggested "something supernatural" to them: Hist. of Greenland, p. 197 E.T. Something similar is said about ecstatically dancing dervishes by Lane, Modern Egyptians, ii, 197.]
[59\8: Magicians called by the name of the god (Keebet) among the Abipones: Dobrizhoffer, ii, 248. Similar cases elsewhere: Müller, 77. In Tahiti the person inspired by the god so long as the "inspiration" lasted (several days sometimes) was himself called "god" or given the name of some particular god: Waitz, Anthropol. vi, 383. In the case of an African tribe dwelling on the banks of Lake Nyanza the chief spirit sometimes takes temporary possession of one of the magicians (man or woman) who then bears the name of the spirit: Schneider, Relig. d. Afrik. Naturv. 151. Sometimes the identity of the magician with the god is expressed by the wearing of the god's distinguishing dress and imitation of his outward appearance (in the manner of the Thracian ~Ba/kchoi~); cf. the devil-dancers in Ceylon, etc.]
[60\8: When it acquires a more philosophical temper mysticism seeks its unification with the highest (the ~e/llampsis tê=s phu/seôs tê=s prô/tês~) more by means of the completest passivity of mind and body. It employs the ~eis hautê\n xulle/gesthai kai\ athroi/zesthai~ of the soul (Plato), or its withdrawal from all that is finite and particular (the recojimiento of the Spanish mystics). The profoundest quietude of spirit brings {278} about the unification with the One behind all multiplicity; cf. the Neoplatonic mystics, the Buddhists, etc. Sometimes both are found together; absorption and passivity of the spirit side by side with wild excitement. Both methods were practised by the Persian Sufis. Chardin, Voyage en Perse, iv, 458 (cd. Langlés) says of them, cependant ils se servent plus communément du chant de la danse et de la musique, disant qu'ils produisent plus sûrement leur extase. It may be that the cult of religious exaltation is always the real origin of these ecstatic states. Though the cult sometimes falls into decay itself, its offspring the ~e/kstasis~ survives.]
[61\8: In the language of these mystics the words mean: he knows that the passionate longing for reunion with God, the Soul of the universe, breaks down the individual personality and its limitations--"for where Love awakes to life the Self dies, that gloomy tyrant."]
[62\8: ~Ge/tai hoi athanati/zontes~, Hdt. Iv, 93-4 (~apathanati/zontes~, Plato and others, see Wesseling on D.S. i, p. 105, 32).]
[63\8: . . . ~oude/na a/llon theo\n nomi/zontes ei mê\ to\n sphe/teron~ (the Zalmoxis just mentioned) Hdt. iv, 94 fin. There we are told that the Getai ~pro\s brontê/n te kai\ astrapê\n toxeu/ontes a/nô apeileu=si tô=| theô=|, oude/na ktl.~ If it were true (as most people seem to think) that the god (~ho theo/s~) threatened by the Getai during thunder was their own god Zalmoxis, then it certainly is difficult, or, indeed, impossible, to understand the point of explaining the threatening of this god by the statement that they hold him for the only true god. The truth is that the ~tô=| theô=|~ refers simply to the "sky" during a thunderstorm. The usage is common in Greek and is only transferred to the Getai by a rather awkward extension. This thundering ~theo/s~ is not Zalmoxis at all (hence Z. is not as some have thought a "sky-god"). The Getai regarded Zalmoxis as the only god: the Thunderer is no real god to them (at the most a bad demon or a magician or something of the kind). To show that they are not afraid of him they shoot arrows against him, probably in the hope of breaking the thundercloud. (Parallels in other countries: Grimm, p. 1088; Dobrizhoffer, ii, 78. In India, Oldenberg, 491-4. Excitement during an eclipse of the moon: Weissenborn on Livy, 26, 5, 9. Reminiscence of such customs in the myth of Herakles: [Apollod.] 2, 5, 10, 5. From Hdt. by indirect channels comes Isig., Mir. 42 [p. 162 West.]; cf. also the account of D.C. 59, 28, 6 about Caligula.--Pallad., RR. i, 35 [contra grandinem].)]
[64\8: ~athanati/zousi de\ to/nde to\n tro/pon . . . ou/te apothnê/skein heôutou\s nomi/zousi, ie/nai te to\n apollu/menon para\ Za/lmoxin dai/mona (hoi de\ autô=n to\n auto\n tou=ton ounoma/zousi Gebele/ïzin)~, Hdt. iv, 94. Here, as regularly in Greek use of the words, we must not understand by ~atha/naton ei=nai~ a mere shadowy (if timeless) survival of the soul after death as in the Homeric Hades. Such a belief if it had been held by the Getai would not have struck Hdt. or his readers as remarkable in the slightest degree. It must therefore imply an unending and fully conscious existence, in this last respect resembling the life on earth.]
[65\8: ~athanati/zousi de\ kai\ Te/rizoi (teretizoi~ Phot.) ~kai\ Kro/buzoi kai\ tou\s apothano/ntas hôs Za/lmoxi/n phasin oi/chesthai~, Phot. Suid., EM. ~Za/molxis~. The Krobyzoi are a well-known Thracian stock. The Terizoi are not elsewhere mentioned; perhaps they may be placed in the neighbourhood of ~Ti/ristis, Ti/rixis a/kra~ = C. Kaliakra (cf. C. Müller on Arrian, P. Eux. 35); there we also hear of a ~Ti/ristis po/lis~, Ptolem. With this Tomaschek also agrees (D. alten Thraker, Ber. Wien. Ak. 128, iv, p. 97). In this case they would be neighbours of the Krobyzoi.] {279}
[66\8: ~ouk apothnê/|skein alla\ metoiki/zesthai nomi/zontes~ is what we hear of the Getai in Julian, Caes. 327 D. animas (putant) non extingui sed ad beatiora transire, Mela, ii, 18.]
[67\8: ~. . . tou\s apothano/ntas hôs Za/lmoxi/n phasin oi/chesthai, hê/xein de\ au=this. kai\ tau=ta aei\ nomi/zousin alêtheu/ein. thu/ousi de\ kai\ euôchou=ntai hôs au/this hê/xontos tou= apothano/ntos~, Phot. Suid., EM. ~Za/molxis~. Mela, ii, 18: alii (among the Thracians) redituras putant animas obeuntium.]
[68\8: Hdt. iv, 95, Zalmoxis, a slave of Pythagoras in Samos, is set free and comes back a rich man to his **poverty-stricken country. He collects together the leading men of the race in a room, where he entertains them and seeks to persuade them of the belief that neither he nor they nor their descendants will die but that they will all come after death to a place where they will enjoy all good things in abundance. Thereupon he withdraws into a secret underground chamber and lives there for three years. In the fourth year he comes to light again and "the Thracians are persuaded of the truth of what Zalmoxis had told them." This implies--though Hdt. omits to say so, and so does [Hellan.] ~p. nom. barb.~ (following Hdt.) ap. Phot., etc., s. ~Za/molxis~--that he had also promised that he and his adherents should return to earth alive after the expiry of a definite period (three years). That such a belief in the "return" of the dead was actually held by the Thracians is clear enough from the quotations given in the last note. The story of Zalmoxis' trick (which was perhaps intended humorously by its inventors) seemed suspicious even to Hdt., but it is not pure invention (any more than the analogous stories about Pythagoras, Trophonios, and later Empedotimos): it is rather a euhemerist version of a miraculous legend. The disappearance of Zalmoxis into a subterranean chamber is a distortion of the belief in his permanent abode in a hollow mountain-side, an ~antrô=de/s ti chô/rion~ in Mt. Kogaionon of which Str. 298 speaks plainly enough. In that mountain the god dwells; just as Rhesos ~krupto\s en a/ntrois tê=s hupargu/rou chthono/s~ of Mt. Pangaios, dwells there as an ~anthrôpodai/môn~ [E.], Rh. 970; cf. chap. iv, n. 36. He lives there undying like the ~Ba/kchou prophê/tês~, who has become a god, to whom the tragedy obscurely alludes in ll. 972 f. as living on Mt. Pangaios (this may perhaps refer to Lykourgos--see G. Hermann, Op. v, 23 f.--surely not to Orpheus as Maass, Orpheus, p. 68 [1895], suggests). The obvious parallel is Amphiaraos and Trophonios in their caves, and Orig., Cels. iii, 34 (see above, chap. iii, n. 13), puts them and Zalmoxis together. We may safely complete Hdt.'s account of how the ~apollu/menoi~ of the Getai go away and have everlasting life ~para\ Za/lmoxin dai/mona~ (iv, 94), by saying that they reach this same hollow mountain, a subterranean place of delight where they dwell with the god. Mnaseas compares Zalmoxis with Kronos (FHG.; Phot. Suid. EM., as before) and the similarity doubtless resides in the fact that both rule over the spirits of the blest in another world. But besides this the Thracian belief must also have included the idea of a periodical appearance of the god in the upper world. Hdt.'s story of the trick practised by Zalmoxis shows this (the return of the souls to which the story also points, is a sort of counterpart of this). Are we to suppose that the ~epipha/neia~ of the god was expected after the expiry of three years (just as it was after two years in the Dionysos festival; see above, n. 27)? We do not know whether these Thracian tribes celebrated the ~epipha/neia~ of the god with "enthusiastic" worship. Such an element in the cult of Zalmoxis seems to be suggested by the fact that we hear of "physicians of Zalmoxis" (Pl., Charm. 156 D) and of mantikê--which is generally closely bound up with ~iatrikê/~--{280} in the cult of this god. This must be the meaning of calling Zalm. himself ~ma/ntis~: Str. 762, 297; cf. also the otherwise valueless account of Ant. Diog. ap. Porph. VP. 14-15. Finally, the enthusiastic character of the cult seems to be implied in the identifying of the priest with the god by the Getai (as in the similar cases mentioned above, notes 32 and 59). Thus, the high priest is himself called "god": Str. 298 (he has authority over both king and state: cf. the ~hiereu\s tou= Dionu/sou~ among the Bessoi, above, n. 53; cf. Jordanes, Get. 71). This made it easy for the "god" Zalmoxis, whom even Hdt. quite rightly regarded as ~dai/môn tis Ge/tê|si epichô/rios~ (iv, 96) to be metamorphosed into a man of the historical past (he is this in D.S. 1, 94, 2; Str. vii, 297; cf. Jordanes, Get. 39). If the contemporary priest was called "god" it might naturally be concluded that the "god" Zalmoxis was once only a priest too.]
[69\8: Hermip. ap. Jos., Ap. i, 22.]
[70\8: In E., Hec. (1265 ff.) the Thracian Polymestor prophecies to Hekabe that she shall become a dog after her death, ~pu/rs' e/chousa de/rgmata~. Hekabe asks ~pô=s d' oi=stha morphê=s tê=s emê=s meta/stasin;~ Pol.: ~ho Thrê|xi\ ma/ntis ei=pe Dio/nusos **ta/de~. It looks as if Eur. in this allusion to a belief in metempsychosis was intending to give a realistic touch of Thracian national character. He was well informed in such matters.]
[71\8: The connexion between Thracian Dionysos-worship and the belief in immortality and cult of the dead is vouched for, acc. to Rapp, Dionysosc. 15 ff., by the insc. found by Heuzey in Thracian districts. An epitaph found at Doxato (near Philippi) says of one who has died young (ll. 12 ff.): reparatus vivis in Elysiis. Sic placitum est divis aeterna vivere forma qui bene de supero lumine sit meritus.--nunc seu te Bromio signatae (see Anrich, Antike Mysterienwesen, 123 f.) mystides ad se florigero in prato congregem uti Satyrum, sive canistriferae poscunt sibi Naïdes aeque, qui ducibus taedis agmina festa trahas . . . (CIL. iii, 686). It is true that this remarkable fantasy contains nothing directly alluding to specifically Thracian worship. On the other hand this is certainly suggested and both the Thracian god and his connexion with a cult of the dead is implied in the use of the local cult-title of Dionysos in an offering made by Bythos and Rufus to the thiasi Liberi patris Tasibasteni of 300 denarii ex quorum reditu annuo rosalibus (and so at the yearly festival of the dead) ad monimentum eorum vescentur. CIL. iii, 703; cf. 704. Even the conjunction by E., Hec. 1265 ff., of the belief in palingenesia with the oracle of the Thracian Dionysos seems to imply a connexion between that belief and the cult of Dionysos.]
[72\8: ~polloi\ me\n narthêkopho/roi, pau=roi de/ te Ba/kchoi~ ap. Pl., Phd. 69 C. The strict meaning of this Orphic verse (Lob., Agl. 813 ff.) is that out of the multitudes who take part in the Bacchic festival only a few have any real right to call themselves by the name of the god--as having become one with him through their ecstasy and exaltation. A special morbid state was necessary for that: the same state which in other circumstances made the real shamans, Piajes, etc.]
[73\8: Even when their ~e/kstasis~ had ceased the ecstatic worshippers still regarded as real the visions which they had enjoyed in that condition: ~hoi=on sune/bê Antiphe/ronti tô=| Ôrei/tê| kai\ a/llois existame/nois. ta\ ga\r phanta/smata e/legon hôs geno/mena kai\ hôs mnêmoneu/ontes~, Arist. ~p. mnê/mês~, 1, p. 451a, 8. "Magicians who had subsequently been converted to Christianity were still convinced of the reality of their earlier visions: they thought they had seen something perfectly real." {281} Müller, Amerik. Urrelig. 80. Add: Tylor, ii, 131; Cranz, Greenland, p. 197.]
[74\8: See above, chap. i, p. 7 ff.]
[75\8: Hdt. v, 4 (speaking of the ~Trausoi/~. Hsch. has the same, s.v. ~Trauso/s~). The story was then added to the regular list of ~no/mima barbarika/~ used for illustrating the variability of ~no/mos~. It was soon after told of the ~Kro/buzoi~: Isig., Mir. 27 (they were also regarded as strong adherents of a belief in immortality; see above, n. 65); then of the ~Kausianoi/~: Nic. Dam., Mir. 18 West. Zenob., Prov. v, 25, p. 128, 5 L.-Schn. (~Kau/sioi, Kausianoi/~). It occurs again in a fragment of some collection of ~no/mima barbarika/~ written before the third century (there is no reason to ascribe it to Aristotle) given by Mahaffy, On the Flinders Petrie Papyri, Transcript., p. 29: ~Kausianoi=s de\ no/mimon tou\s me\n gignome/nous thrênei=n tou\s de\ teleutô=ntas eudaimoni/zein hôs pollô=n kakô=n anapepaume/nous (kakô=n~ as above or ~po/nô=n~ must be supplied to fill the gap; cf. the well-known fragment of Eur. Cresph.: ~echrê=n ga\r hêma=s . . .~ fr. 449, which perhaps alludes to Hdt.'s account). It is told of Thracians in general, or of some tribe not particularly named, by S. E., P. iii, 232; Val. Max. 2, 6, 12 (both clearly drawing on collections of ~no/mima barbarika/~); Mela, ii, 18; AP. ix, 111 (Archias). There were thus three sources of the story: Besides Hdt.'s, two in which either the Krobyzoi or the Kausianoi were named as the Thracian tribe instead of Hdt.'s Trausoi.]
[76\8: ~ho/sôn kakô=n exapallachthei\s e/sti en pa/sê| **eudaimoni/ê|~, Hdt. v, 4.]
[77\8: See Jul., Caes. 327 D, Mela, ii, 18. Likewise of the ~Kausianoi/~ in Anon. ap. Mahaffy (see n. 75), p. 29, 10-12. Iamb., VP. 173: as a result of the (Pythagorean) doctrine of immortality taught by Zalmoxis ~e/ti kai\ nu=n hoi Gala/tai~ (because they had been instructed by Zalm.; from a similar fabulous source comes Hippol., RH. i, 2, p. 14, 93 D.-S.) ~kai\ hoi Tra/leis kai\ polloi\ tô=n barba/rôn tou\s hautô=n huiou\s pei/thousin hôs ouk e/sti phtharê=nai **tê\n psuchê/n . . . kai\ ho/ti to\n tha/naton ou phobête/on, alla\ pro\s tou\s kindu/nous eurô/stôs hekte/on~.--~Tra/lleis~ Scaliger for the MS. ~tralis~, rightly as far as sense goes. But we find the name ~TRALEIS~ given to the Pergamene mercenaries called after the Thracian tribes: Ins. Perg. i, n. 13, 23, 59. These had already served as infantry in 331 in the army of Alexander the Great: D.S. 17, 65, 1; cf. Hsch. ~Trallei=s~. They were a south Thracian tribe: Plu., Ages. 16; Ap. Lac. 42; Str. 649 (where read ~Tralle/ôn~); Tralli Thraeces, Liv. 38, 21, 2, who elsewhere calls them Illyriorum genus, 27, 32, 4; 31, 35, 1. It appears that a branch of the Thracian tribe of the Tralles reached Illyria in their wanderings; there Theopompos, too, knew them: Steph. Byz. ~Tralli/a~; cf. also s. vv. ~Bê=gis, Bo/louros~ (cf. Tomaschek, Sitzb. Wien. Ak., 128, iv, p. 56 f.).]
[78\8: Appetitus maximus mortis, Mart. Cap. 6, 656. The Thracians esp. are meant by Galen when he speaks of ~barba/rôn eni/ois~ who entertained the belief ~ho/ti to\ apothnê/skein esti\ kalo/n~ (xix, p. 704 K).]
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