XII. THE LAY AUTHORS

XII. THE LAY AUTHORS

Theology and Philosophy, each in its own way attempting to go beyond inadequate popular belief, could only very gradually transcend the limits of those narrow communities within which their influence was first felt and reach the circles in which that popular belief held sway. During the earliest successes of the theological and philosophical spirit hardly a voice was raised that might have suggested that the belief in the imperishability and divine nature of the human Soul, of the inherence of all things spiritual in one imperishable, fundamental substance, might become something more than a mystery known to the wise and illuminated, and enter into the convictions of the people and the unlearned. "After the death of the body, the Image of Life remains alive; for that alone is descended from the gods"--such is the announcement of Pindar. But for all the confidence with which, as though anticipating no contradiction, he here proclaims the view of the soul's immortality and bases it upon its divine nature, such an opinion can at that time have been no more than the persuasion of isolated communities formed and instructed in that particular doctrine. It cannot be merely accidental,[1\12] that in the fragments which have come down to us of the lyric and semi-lyric (elegiac and iambic) poetry--poetry intended for a wide and unspecialized public and expressing feelings and ideas in language that all could understand--hardly a trace appears of that enhanced conception of the worth and nature of the Soul. Reflexion does not linger over such dark subjects; whenever they are illuminated for a passing moment, we discern the outlines of those figures from the spirit world just as the Homeric imagination had given them shape.

Life and light are only to be found in this world;[2\12] Death, to which we are all "owing",[3\12] leads the soul into a realm of nothingness.[4\12] Inarticulate, voiceless, the dead man lies in the grave like a statue.[5\12] Upon earth, and not in any shadowy hereafter, is completed that judgment[6\12] which divine Justice passes upon the criminal himself, or upon his descendants in whom something of him still lives on. It is the lack of such descendants that forms the bitterest pang, as he goes down to Hades, of the man who passes childless out of this life.[7\12] {412}

More distinctly and bitterly, in this age of advancing civilization and growing sensibility, sounds the wail over the pain and affliction of life, the obscurity of its ways, and the uncertainty of its outcome.[8\12] Silenos, the prophetic wood-spirit, so went the ancient legend, when captured by King Midas in his rose-gardens at Bermios earned his release with the judgment of melancholy wisdom that the Greek was never tired of repeating in ever-varying forms--not to be born is the best thing for men, but having been born, let him pray that he may return as soon as possible to the kingdom of Night,[9\12] and of Hades.[10\12] The cheerful enjoyment of life is no longer so sure of itself as once it had been in the days of its naïve confidence: and yet there is no substitute attempted, no compensatory hereafter in a next world of justice and untroubled happiness. We rather hear the opinion expressed that rest is the greatest of all earthly blessings; and rest is brought by Death. Nevertheless there is little demand for consolation; a robust and virile sense of life that can put up with whatever may befall of evil or hardship in healthy indifference, is in the air, and speaks to us from many a page of this poetic legacy with unpretending veracity. No attempt is made to smooth over the hardship and cruelty of life. Man's power is small, his efforts go unrewarded, one necessity after another besets his short life: over all alike hangs the shadow of inevitable death. All things come at last to the awful chasm--the bravest virtue and the highest authority in the world.[11\12] Yet life is good and death an evil; else, why do the blessed gods not die? asks Sappho[12\12] with feminine naiveté; though indeed, her life's path had lain through the deepest valley of the shadow. Even the dead man, if he wishes to be preserved from utter nothingness, must depend upon the world of the living as the only place of reality; the fame of his virtues and his deeds is all that outlasts his death.[13\12] Perhaps some dim perception of that fame reaches even to the dead.[14\12] They themselves are for the living as though they had passed into nothingness; we should not, thinks a poet, give them another thought after we have buried them.[15\12]

Here even the time-honoured conventions associated with the cult of souls seem to be perversely cast aside. In general, the poet with his wide-ranging observation of mankind had small occasion to be reminded of the cult of the soul that the narrow circles of family or city offered to their dead, or of the conceptions thereby encouraged of the continued life enjoyed by the departed. The omission is supplied by the Orators of the fifth and fourth centuries and by what they say--and do {413} not say--of the state of things hereafter. The greatest period of lyric poetry was by that time already fading into the past, and yet whoever wished in speaking before a citizen assembly to meet with general agreement and understanding was still obliged to refrain from speaking of the blessed immortality, the eternity and divinity of the soul. The Orators[16\12] never pass beyond the conceptions of the survival, power, and rights of the souls of the departed which were called forth and maintained in existence by the cult of the soul. The continued existence of the souls in the next world is not called in question; but the opinion that the souls still preserve their consciousness and have any knowledge of what happens on this earth is only expressed with the most cautious avoidance of definiteness.[17\12] What--apart from the sacrificial offerings of their relatives--still binds the dead to the life upon earth, is little more than the fame accorded to them among the living.[18\12] Even in the elevated language of solemn funeral orations the consolations offered to the survivors omit all mention of any enhanced state of being, any thought of immortal life in fully-conscious blessedness, that might belong now to the glorious departed.[19\12] Such high visions and hopes for the future were still, it appears, as little necessary or demanded for the comfort of the people as they had been in the times of the great wars of liberty.[20\12] The beloved dead who had given their lives for their country in those wars, as well as many others of the time whom death had overtaken, were the recipients of the epitaphs composed by Simonides the master of brilliant and condensed inscriptions. Nevertheless, not once does he vouchsafe a word that might point forward to a land of blessed immortality for the departed. There is a vestige of life still remaining for the dead--but it is in this world; the memory of the living and their own great name honoured by after generations is all that can prolong their existence.

It seems like an echo from another world when (about the middle of the fifth century) Melanippides the dithyrambic poet addresses a god in the words: "Hear me Father, marvel of all mortal men, Thou that rulest over the everliving Souls." The words must be addressed to Dionysos;[21\12] for such as entered into the magic circle of his nightly festival those visions of the imperishability of the human soul and its divine power acquired reality. Such wisdom received but partial assent from those who lived unaffected by the conceptions of isolated sects of the theologically or philosophically minded. {414}

§ 2

A peculiar position is taken up by Pindar. Two contrasted views of the nature, origin, and destiny of the soul seem to be combined in his mind with equal claim to authority.

In the Victory Odes allusions predominate which imply an agreement with the popular view expressed in the sayings of poets and the presuppositions of the cult of souls and the worship of Heroes. After its separation from the body, the soul disappears into the underworld.[22\12] The piety and affectionate memory of relatives and descendants remains as a link between the dead and the living;[23\12] whether the soul itself is still conscious of any connexion with the world of the living seems uncertain.[24\12] Its power is over and done with--it is certainly no condition of blessed happiness into which it has entered. Only the glorious name, the fame that is honoured in song, rewards the great deeds of the virtuous after death.[25\12]

An exalted state of being, after their departure from this earth, is attributed to the Heroes alone. The belief in the existence, importance, and power of these illuminated spirits holds complete sway;[26\12] it emerges in lively reality from the words and narrations of the poet throughout all his work. Moreover, the ancient conception--in reality rendered untenable by the belief in Heroes--that only with the undivided union of body and soul is complete life imaginable, is discernible in many allusions and stories of Translation that imply that conception. Amphiaraos, the most illustrious of those who have been translated to everlasting life, is specially dear to the heart of the Theban poet, and is glorified more than once in the language of unaffected faith in such miracles.[27\12] But, further, even when death has occurred in the meantime, elevation to a higher life remains possible--even beyond the heights of the "Hero". Semele lives for ever, though she died under the crash of the thunder-bolt.[28\12] The barrier between men and gods is not insuperable; we can distantly approach the immortals not only in greatness of mind, but in bodily vigour.[29\12] One mother gave birth to both races, though the gulf between them is indeed a deep one; man is nought--a shadow's dream-image; for the gods the brazen heavens remain for ever as an unconquerable stronghold.[30\12] Only a miracle of divine interference with the lawful and normal course of nature, can raise the individual soul to the everlasting life of the gods and Heroes.

Such visions as these could be indulged in by one who still {415} kept his feet firmly fixed upon the ground of popular belief. And yet side by side with them in Pindar's works are to be found descriptions of quite another order in which is expressed, with elaborate fullness and dogmatic exactitude, a complete doctrine of the nature, destiny, and fate of the soul; passages in which, in spite of some little poetic licence in detail, a well ordered and, in the main, consistent whole is pictured.

The Soul, the "Image of Life", the other Self of the living and visible man, sleeps while the limbs of man are active; when the individual is asleep it shows him dream-visions of the future.[31\12] This psyche[32\12] which during the waking and conscious hours of the man is itself lying in the darkness of unconsciousness, is far from being the totality of mental powers gathered together in a single creature, or at any rate, in a single concept, such as the philosophers as well as the everyday use of the word at that period understood by the name "psyche". Here, again, the name once more denotes the double of mankind dwelling within the living man such as it was known to primeval popular belief and to the Homeric poems. A theological meaning has, however, been added to it. This "Image" of man, we are told, "is alone descended from the gods," and with this the reason also is discovered why the soul-image alone after the destruction of the body by death remains alive.[33\12]

Derived from the gods and therefore eternally exempt from destruction, everlasting and immortal, the soul is none the less condemned to finiteness; it dwells within the mortal body of man. This is the result of the "ancient guilt" of which, quite in the manner of theological poetry, Pindar also speaks.[34\12] After the death of the body it is to await in Hades the stern sentence that "One" shall pronounce over its earthly deeds.[35\12] For the condemned there is in store "affliction past beholding"[36\12] in deep Tartaros, "where the slow rivers of murky night spit out endless darkness," and forgetfulness encloses the victims.[37\12] The just enter into the subterranean places of bliss where the sun gives them light when he has set upon earth.[38\12] In flowery meadows they enjoy an existence of resplendent idleness, such as only the Greek imagination, nourished amid the artistic surroundings of Greek life, could describe without falling into emptiness and futility.

But the soul has not even so found its last resting place. It must again give life to a body and not until it has completed upon earth a third faultless life can it hope for an end of its earthly course of being.[39\12] The conditions of each new life {416} upon earth depend upon the degree of purity that the soul has achieved in its previous lifetimes. When at last the Queen of the Underworld considers that its "ancient guilt" has been atoned for, she sends forth the souls after the ninth year[40\12] of their last sojourn in Hades once more to live in the upper world, this time in happiness. Here they pass through one more lifetime as kings, mighty men of valour, and Wise Men.[41\12] Then at last they escape from the necessity of earthly rebirth. As "Heroes" they are honoured among men;[42\12] and they have therefore entered into a state of higher being which the popular belief of Pindar's time ascribed not only to the souls of the great ancestral figures of the past, but also to many who had departed hence in more recent times after a life of valour and service.[43\12] Now they are beyond the reach of Hades as much as of the world of men. Faith seeks them in "Islands of the Blest" far out in Okeanos; thither, to the "Citadel of Kronos" they travel on the "Way of Zeus"[44\12] and enjoy, in company with the great ones of the past, under the protection of Kronos[45\12] and his assessor Rhadamanthys, a life of bliss for ever undisturbed.

Such conceptions of the origin, fortunes, and ultimate destiny of the soul, the more they diverge from commonly held opinions, the more certainly must they be regarded as being part of the private and real persuasion of the poet himself. The poet, who on other occasions when he makes passing and casual reference to the things of the next world accommodates himself to the traditional view, gives himself up willingly to such hopes and aspirations where the circumstances of his song provided an opportunity of dealing at length with such matters--especially in hymns of mourning for the dead. He may have paid attention in such poems to the special opinions of those who were to be the first hearers of his song. Theron, the ruler of Akragas, to whom was dedicated the second Olympian Ode of Victory that deals so fully with the hope of bliss to come, was an old man whose thoughts might well be occupied with the life after death.[46\12] In this case, therefore, we may presume perhaps the special interest of the person whose praises are sung in these reflections that lead so far away from the commonly accepted view of the Soul.[47\12] But that Pindar, proud and self-willed, conscious of specific knowledge and proud of that consciousness, should have given expression to strange doctrine so foreign to popular ideas simply out of complaisance to another's will, and in **subservience to another man's belief--that is quite unthinkable. It is rather the substance of what he believes himself {417} and has achieved by his own struggles that in a solemn hour he reveals for a moment to like-minded friends.

The different elements out of which Pindar has composed his special view are not hard to distinguish. He is following theological doctrine in what he tells of the divine origin of the soul, its wanderings through several bodies, the judgment in Hades, the special place assigned to the just, and that of the wicked. But it is layman's theology that he is propounding; it does not bind itself to a single unalterable formula, and betrays throughout that its exponent is a poet. Pindar, throughout the whole of his poetic activity, combines the office of singer with that of professional teacher, more especially where he has to speak of the things of an invisible divine world. But for all his didactic professionalism he remains the poet, for whom as depository and trustee of the Myth it is out of the question to abandon the traditional, whether in legend or belief. His task is to keep pure what has been handed down to him, to make it more profound, perhaps to supplement and complete it, but with all this to justify it. Thus, poetic legend and popular belief enter even into his theologian's doctrine of the Soul; the Islands of the Blest, the elevation of man to Hero--these were things he could not give up.

From what particular direction Pindar's theological interests may have come to him we cannot say with precision or certainty. Orphic as well as Pythagorean doctrines may have come to his notice in Sicily whither he made repeated visits after 477 B.C.[48\12] For both sects this country was the original nursery and breeding ground.

There, too, the poet may perhaps have (even at that date) met with certain varieties of the Orphic mystical doctrine which, like his own views, were intermingled with elements taken from conventional mythology. Examples of this type of Orphic mysticism allied with foreign elements are the verses which, inscribed upon gold tablets, were found not long ago in graves near the ancient Sybaris.[49\12] Three of these poems begin with phrases that are common to them all, and imply the same underlying conceptions; after that they part company and represent two different views. The soul of the dead person[50\12] thus addresses itself to the Queen of the lower world, and the other gods of the depths below: "I draw near to you purified and born of pure parents."[51\12] It belongs then to a mortal who, like his parents before him, has been "purified" in the sacred mysteries of a religious association.[52\12] It claims also to be descended from the blessed race of the deities of the lower {418} world.[53\12] "Lightning robbed me of life," so one of the versions goes on,[54\12] "and so I escaped from the Circle, the burdensome, the grievous". In these words purely Orphic belief is expressed: the Soul has now at last escaped entirely from the "Circle of Births",[55\12] and it enters as it tells us "with speedy feet into the wished-for precinct",[56\12] and buries itself in the bosom of the Queen of the Underworld.[57\12] It is the latter, probably, who at the end greets the liberated soul with the words: "Fortunate and to be called Blessed art thou; now shalt thou be, instead of a mortal--a god."

Much less exalted are the hopes expressed in the other two versions of the mystic document--two versions that resemble each other in most essentials. Here the soul asserts that it has done penance for unrighteous deeds; now it appears before the revered Persephoneia to implore her graciously to send it to the dwelling places of the pure and the holy.[58\12]

How are we to explain the discrepancy? It would indeed be possible to explain the more restrained version as that of a sect whose members were less confident of their own divine origin and of the necessary return of the soul at last to its enfranchised divine state. It is much more probable, however--since in fact the presupposition of the divine nature of the soul and its kinship with the divine is really made in both cases and with the same words--that we here have to do with the beliefs of one and the same sect, and that the varying heights of felicity aspired to correspond to different stages of the process of redemption. He who through participation in the sacred mysteries has atoned for the ancient guilt, can be admitted by the goddess into the paradise of the blest in the midst of Hades. But he must still, in subsequent rebirths upon earth first complete the cycle before he can be fully released from rebirth and become once more what he was at the beginning, entirely a god. The dead man of the first tablet has reached the final goal of his pilgrimage; the other two have only reached an intermediate resting place.[59\12] Another inscription, found in a grave of the same neighbourhood,[60\12] by its use of a mystic formula[61\12] appended also to the first version of the above-mentioned poems, reveals itself as an expression of faith deriving from the same sect. Among a variety of disconnected instructions and appeals to the dead,[62\12] strung together with no particular arrangement, it contains the following statement: "a god hast thou become instead of a mortal", This then always remained the crowning point of the salvation promised by the sect. {419}

In the cult and beliefs of this sect which thus with divided voice speaks to us in these verses, the worship of the ancient Greek divinities of the Underworld (among whom Dionysos is not this time included) was fused with the boldest conception belonging to the Dionysiac mysteries: the confident assurance that the divine nature of the soul must in the end break through, purified and triumphant over the earthliness that obscured it. Pindar in another, but not very different, way has brought the same elements into conjunction. One would indeed like to be able to estimate the influence which his doctrine, which lay so close to his own heart, may have exercised on the hearers and readers of his poems. He was at once something more and something less than a theological teacher. Never again among the Greeks did the blessed life of the sanctified soul receive such majestic expression, clothed in such ample and resplendent diction, as that which poured so freely from the heart of this richly gifted poet. But though the poet may have touched the heart of his hearer and tempted his imagination to stray along the path laid out for him, yet it cannot have been easy (and perhaps the greatness of the poet's triumph almost made it harder) permanently to mistake the magic gleam of poetry for the sunlight of reality. One may doubt whether the poems in which Pindar recounted his dreams of future blessedness can have found many hearers in whom they awakened not merely æsthetic satisfaction, but belief in the literal truth of the teaching, in the reality of those beautiful, dim, haloed figures.

§ 3

But perhaps by the expression of such doubts we do less than justice to the influence which a Greek poet might exercise upon the minds and dispositions of his hearers. Greek popular opinion was very much inclined to place the poet on a pedestal to which his modern representative would hardly care to aspire, and to which at any rate he could never attain. The purely artistic value and importance of a poem did not seem to be impaired by the demand that it should at the same time instruct and edify. The poet was to be the teacher of his people in an age when, in the conditions of Greek life, the people had no other instructor. He was to be a teacher in the highest sense of all when, speaking in the language of the most exalted poetry, he dealt with the doubts and certainties of religion and the relationship between religion and morality. In these matters he could supplement out of the wealth of {420} his own far-reaching reflection what was lacking in the public morality of the time through the absence of an official, authoritative religious Book. By giving them intelligible and memorable expression, together with greater cohesion and unity, he could strengthen the foundations of the common stock of moral ideas that had been evolved in the course of social and city life. He might also expand and give greater depth to the ideas of popular morality, tempering them in the fire of his own more rigorous thought and interpreting and refining them from the heights of a more elevated understanding of the divine. What he thus gave back to the people stamped with the impress of his own very personal temperament and outlook, no longer remained the casual opinion of a single individual, but took root in suitably constituted minds and became for many a valued possession, an enduring addition to their consciousness.

It was not until the rise in later times of a fully developed philosophy extending its range of interpretation to the whole of life that poetry was deprived of its special office of instructress to the aspiring minds among the people.[63\12] Poetry had always been willing to exercise this function, but never so decidedly or with such fully conscious purpose as in the times of transition at the beginning of which Pindar lived--the transition from an unsophisticated faith in the traditional view of all things visible and invisible to a fresh stabilization of belief secured by, and resting upon, philosophic conviction. The need felt for the readjustment or verification of the ancestral or traditional forms of belief was vividly awakened, and it was still only poetry that could extend the light of its teaching to illuminate the minds of whole classes of the population. The influence of the poets must have increased in proportion as the numbers increased of those who were ready to receive the special bounty which they were able to offer. But if the influence wielded by Pindar, the Pan-Hellenic poet of the great Festivals, as the teacher of his people was, as we have seen, considerable, a very wide field indeed for the propagation of fruitful ideas lay open to the Attic tragedians in the huge concourse of the people which flocked together to hear their creations--a multitude which seemed all the greater for being confined within a narrower space. The poets themselves frequently allow it to be seen how seriously they regarded themselves as the teachers of their public, and the people admitted their claims. All men expected and demanded instruction from the word of the poet--the highest instruction from the highest poetry.[64\12] We shall not be much mistaken {421} if we believe that the opinions and reflections to which Aeschylus, Sophokles, and not least Euripides, gave utterance in their tragic drama did not remain the sole property of those in whose minds they had first arisen.

§ 4

The Attic Tragedy of the fifth century must of its own accord, even if the conscious purpose of the dramatists had not tended in the same direction, have developed into an artistic product based on psychological interest. The real theatre of that drama must inevitably have become the interior of its hero's mind.

The tragic poet attempted something hitherto unknown. The characters and events of ancient legend or history which had passed shadowlike before the minds of the hearers or readers of all earlier poetry, at the mercy of those hearers' own private and variously limited imagination--these same events and characters were now to take form and body and appear visibly before the eyes of all beholders alike in equal clearness. What had hitherto seemed a dream-vision of the imagination now visibly presented itself to the eyes of the beholder, unchanging, precise, independent of the limitations of intellect among the audience, a concrete and self-moving object of waking perception. Thus reawakened to a palpable and fully realized life, the myth was seen in a new light. What in it was mere incident became subordinated to the personality of the man who plays his part in these events before our eyes, and whose importance and content is not exhausted in the single particular action. The old legend in becoming drama has undergone an extension both spatial and temporal, and even in externals the plot that unfolds itself in a series of momentary acts plays the least part in the story. The speeches and counter-speeches of the hero and the other actors who take part in the story were bound to take up the greater part of the time. Motives of action, expressed, debated and fought out in words, become more important than their eventual outcome in passionate deed or mortal woe. With the advance of artistic skill the intellect seeks to grasp the permanent outlines of the character that in the given circumstances can be moved by particular motives to particular acts. Thus, the complete materialization of the myth leads to its complete spiritualization. The eyes and mind of the beholder are directed less to the external events--these, being familiar from the ancient legend, could {422} awaken little curiosity--and more to the inward meaning and import of what the hero does and suffers.

And it was here that the dramatic poet was faced with his special and peculiar problem. What was to happen in his drama was settled out of hand by the course of the ancient legend (in a few cases by the course of historical events) and the lines along which his invention must move were planned out for him in advance. To give life to the personages of the drama, motivation and justification to the events of the drama--that was his particular business. But in this he was thrown entirely upon his own resources. Even if he could he was not permitted to derive the inner motive forces of the action from the real modes of feeling and thinking that had belonged to the distant past in which the myth had first been conceived. Such motives would have remained unintelligible to the audience, and his play would have been stillborn. But on the other hand, how was he to make plausible and intelligible to the vastly different mentality and changed feelings of the age in which he lived actions which really sprang from the habits and moral ideas of a long since vanished age? It is open to him (if he is not content to be a mere annalist simply stringing together bare events) to take the actual incident given him by the mythical legend and set over against it the actor in the story whose emotions are those of a modern man, and upon whose shoulders the burden of the event is laid; he may represent this opposition as beyond reconciliation, and so lead to the most simple and overwhelming of tragic conflicts. This simple opposition of character and destiny which places both the poet and his hero--another Hamlet--in a position of direct hostility to the mythological background can, however, never become the rule. It is the business of the poet as far as possible to assimilate and make his own the spirit that actually called forth the dark and cruel legend of the past, while yet remaining true to the mode of perception proper to his own time. He must manage to leave undisturbed the full primitive sense of the mythical story and bring it about that by its marriage with the spirit of a later age its meaning is not destroyed but deepened. He is committed to the search for an adjustment between the mental attitudes of an older and a newer age.

Such an adjustment came most easily to Aeschylus and satisfied the needs of his temperament. As one who had grown to manhood in the Athens of the period before the Persian wars his own character had its roots in ancient and traditional modes of thought. These he built up under the guiding {423} influence of his own special ways of thinking and feeling into a new and loftier whole: to corroborate this whole, which appeared to him as a law of the moral world, by reference to typical examples taken from mythology--examples chosen by him with deliberate care to serve as subjects of his dramatic poetry--this was one of the chief aims of his art. To the plot in its moral--nay, its religious--sense, all his thoughts are directed; the characters of the actors themselves are only illuminated from the standpoint of this special interest; their wider, independent existence outside the life of the drama which completely **envelops them is not meant to draw attention to itself. He himself gives us the right, in studying his plays, to leave out of sight for a moment the representational aspect of the particular and the personal--all that in fact makes them essentially works of art--in order to observe more closely the under-current of generalized belief which we may reasonably call the ethic and theology of the poet.

Behind the living tissue of his artistic creation Aeschylus allows us to perceive pretty clearly the firm outlines of his own ethical and religious convictions. He fuses together elements prescribed to him from without with that which was dictated by his own spirit. What is prescribed to him by legend--which he allows to run its full course, in strictly dramatic form and by preference as a trilogy, a form in this case uniquely adapted to the subject--is a history that deals with the continued operation of the forces of evil and suffering upon several generations of a family, persisting from father to son and from son to son's son. The belief also in such interconnexion of human destinies is prescribed to him from without. That the sins of the ancestors were visited upon their descendants here upon earth was an ancient article of faith especially strong in Attica.[65\12] What Aeschylus contributes on his part is the unswerving conviction that the son and grandson of the sinner are punished for their own sin too. Suffering is punishment,[66\12] and suffering would not have overtaken Oedipus, nor the sons of Oedipus, if Laïos had been the only guilty one--if their own sin had not deserved punishment.

And yet it does not lie within their power to choose whether the guilt shall be theirs or not: they cannot escape the deed of sin. How, we may ask, can a guilty deed be necessitated, imposed upon the guilty one by the decree of a higher power, and yet at the same time the fault of the doer of the deed, as though he had acted of his own free will? {424} The question is a perplexing and a formidable one, and it was by no means unnoticed by the poet. Behind the external apparatus of myth he finds himself faced by the problem of the freedom or determination of man's will, which, as civilization and culture advance, feels itself morally responsible for every decision. He finds a way out of the difficulty in the view that it is not merely the deed of wickedness itself, but the conscious decision that leads up to the deed that arises out of the family inheritance of crime. The conscious choice and decision, though regarded as necessary, seemed to demonstrate fully the personal guilt and responsibility of the doer.[67\12] The cloud of evil that proceeds from the deed of the ancestor casts a dark shadow also over the minds of his son and his son's son. Not from his own mind or character does the will to do wrong take its origin. The noble, pure and resolute Eteokles, the model of intelligent manhood, the shield and protection of his people, falls in a moment, a victim to ominous destiny; his clear-sighted spirit is darkened, he gives himself up--his better self--for lost,[68\12] and rushes upon his doom with awful resolve. The "sins derived from his ancestors"[69\12] drive him on. Then, and not till then, is the full measure of penance at last paid for the crime done by the ancestor;[70\12] his descendants are his representatives, and become guilty on his behalf and then, for their own guilt as well as his, they suffer retribution. Divinity, or a spirit of vengeance sent with a divine mission, drives the victims burdened with the inheritance of crime to the criminal deed. The divine guidance is actuated no longer, as in ancient and undying popular belief, by personal desire of vengeance, anger or malice,[71\12] but by divine justice, acting with "just deceit",[72\12] that the measure of guilt may be fulfilled, and that the divine will to justice may have a means to complete satisfaction. The evil Spirit of the House assists Klytaimnestra to conceive the thought of murdering her husband;[73\12] God himself guides and urges forward Orestes to the act of matricide which he plans and carries out with fully conscious purpose--a crime that is also a duty. To the poet the old ideas of the duty of avenging murder are a very living reality. The right to worship and cult possessed by the souls, their claim to vengeance when they have been violently done to death, their ghostly influence exerted upon the life and destinies of their immediate kinsfolk upon whom the duty of taking vengeance rests--all these things are for him not the obsolete fancies of an older generation but true and awful realities.[74\12] Whole dramas, the **Choephoroi and the Eumenides, for {425} instance, would appear as a meaningless beating of the air if they were not animated and made significant by unaltered faith in the right and the might of the souls, the reality and potency of the daimonic counsel, the Erinyes,[75\12] who appear on behalf of the murdered mother. And now at last light breaks through the dark and clouded sky of awful imagination: where Duty and Crime have become inextricably confused, divine grace, though yielding nothing of its rights, finds at last a solution.

All these things, however--conflict and solution, crime and its expiation in ever-renewed crime and the suffering that arises thence--fulfil themselves in this world. Guilt is avenged always upon earth. The "other" world is by no means an indispensable link in this chain of conceptions and fancies; the poet's view is rarely turned in that direction. Speculation upon the state of the soul after death, upon a blessed life in the kingdom of the spirits,[76\12] does not interest him. Only such portions of the eschatological imaginings of the theologians as might serve the purposes of moral inspiration or support, found favour with the poet. There are occasional allusions to the judgment that, in Hades, "another Zeus" holds over the deeds of earthly life,[77\12] but they remain dark and vague. It is not explained in what relation this judgment in Hades stands to the complete equivalence of guilt and destiny that, here upon earth, Zeus and Moira bring to completion in the person of the criminal himself and, after his death, of his descendants. Side by side with the allusions to the judgment in the underworld implying the complete consciousness of the dead, stand expressions that call up a picture of the senseless, twilight existence of the souls in Hades like that described in Homer.[78\12] The poet, to whom every feature of the beliefs derived from the cult of the souls about the relations of the departed to the life of the dwellers on earth was intensely and vividly real, never cared to fix his attention for long upon the nature and condition of the dead in their separate other-world existence. In fact his chosen work of giving a moral significance and deeper meaning to popular and ancient faith was wholly derived from this faith itself; and so also was the lofty and consistent idea of divinity which fills the background of his picture of life. The generation which had fought at Marathon, in spite of a profounder and even more sombre meditation upon life and destiny, could still dispense almost entirely with the assistance of the theological doctrines of the sects who sought refuge from the dark and austere {426} realities of this unsatisfying world in thoughts of an imagined hereafter.

§ 5

Towards the great problems of dramatic philosophy--the problems of the freedom or compulsion of the will, the guilt and destiny of man--Sophokles took up a position that differed essentially from that of his great predecessor. A maturer and calmer self-abandonment to the observation of life and its difficulties made him less able to rest content with simple or sweeping solutions of the complexities; made him seek out other and more various modes of understanding. The individual man, stamped with the unique impression of his peculiar being, with him becomes more fully detached from the background of omnipotent might and universal law. The individual finds within himself the rules of his behaviour, the causes of his success, or his tragic failure. No petty, egotistical motive inspires the action of Antigone or Elektra: they are obedient to the old, unwritten laws of the gods. But the force that leads them to obey is derived solely from the special fashion and impulse of their own hearts. No one else could do what they do, suffer what they suffer. We realize the necessity and justification of what they do and suffer solely from the contemplation of the strength and weakness of their own characters as displayed for us in the action that takes place upon the stage. Indeed, the length to which Sophokles, in the "Elektra", goes in the suppression of such universally recognized and binding motives as those derived from the duty of vengeance and the rights of injured souls, may well cause surprise. The special and individual case must for him carry its own justification within itself, and in fact it receives such justification so completely from the character and behaviour of the actors in the drama that, unlike the hero of Aeschylus' tragedy, Orestes needs to have no qualm of doubt in the performance of his deed, and suffers no remorse after the murder of the wicked murderess. Once again as in the Homeric story, with Orestes' "righteous deed of blood",[79\12] the circle of calamity is complete: no Erinys rises from the earth to demand his overthrow.[80\12]

So, too, when the suffering and calamity that befalls the mortal hero comes not from his own conscious decision and exercise of will, but from obscure decrees of fate it is still the special character of the hero which not only demands the greater part of our attention, but entirely conditions and sufficiently explains the course of events. The same {427} misfortune might overtake another man, but neither its inward nor its outward effects would be the same as they are for Oedipus or Aias. Only tragically extreme characters can have a tragic fate.

And yet, in these as in other tragedies, what gives the first impulse and direction to the course of the story does not arise from the will or character of their heroes. The mind of Aias is not free but subject when he performs the deed that sends him to his death. Oedipus, Deianeira take vengeance upon themselves for the deeds of horror that they have brought about without knowing what they did. Notwithstanding the fact that the interest of the "Philoktetes" centres so completely round the vividly contrasted characters of Philoktetes, Neoptolemos, and Odysseus, yet the situation which brings them into opposition is one which it was beyond the power or the purpose of man to bring about or to hinder. An obscure destiny plunges man into suffering, drives him to actions in the face of which easy and ready-made judgments about "guilt" and the relation between suffering and desert are silenced. It is not inherited family crime that here forces the son and the grandson to deeds that can hardly be called their own. The poet, it is true, knows of these conceptions[81\12] that play so large a part in the poetry of Aeschylus, but they are mere historical tradition to him, not vital motives of his drama. Nor is it mere irrational chance, or impersonal fate working by necessity and without passion that directs the mind and guides the hand of the actor in his bondage. Clearly or obscurely moving about in the background of events the will of a divine power can be discerned that, inevitable as fate,[82\12] guides the deeds and the fate of men in accordance with its own purpose.

The divine purpose brings to maturity a plan in which the individual man and his destiny are mere instruments. To make plain the premeditated character of this purposeful direction of human affairs is the object of the prophetic anticipations of the future, the divine oracles and prophecies of seers of which we hear so much in the plays. If this divine purpose should involve the fatal act, the undeserved suffering of the individual, then that purpose will be fulfilled though human happiness may be destroyed in the process, and though pain, crime, agony, and violent death may overwhelm the mortal individual. The well-being of the individual does not enter into the question where the intentions of a divinity that sees far beyond this puny existence are concerned. An honest, simple-minded, good-hearted man, without {428} deceit or fault, like Philoktetes, is abandoned for many long years to every kind of suffering in order that he may not interfere prematurely in the development of the war against Troy with the magic weapons that are in his possession.[83\12] He is an involuntary martyr for the good of the whole community. In order that Herakles may be released from this life at the precise moment of time that has been fixed by divine foreknowledge,[84\12] Deianeira, the most devoted and womanly character in the whole of the Attic drama, must out of the goodness of her heart and the love she bears to her husband send him to the most awful of deaths and then perish herself. Simply because such is the will of heaven[85\12] must Oedipus, unknowing and blameless, slay his father, marry his mother, and plunge himself into the deepest depth of misery.

Thus, out of the darkness, the hand of divine superiority guides the destinies of humanity, the will and behaviour of men, according to its own purposes. The problematical in human life, the disparity between personal guilt and personal suffering, which daily experience brings before our eyes, seemed to the poet to be rendered more intelligible by this conception. He preaches dutiful submission to these dispensations of a higher power. He himself is one of the pious, in the specific sense of the word,[86\12] for whom to perceive the will of the gods is sufficient to call forth adoration of the gods; who feel no need that this mighty will should justify itself to human ideas of morality and goodness.[87\12] It may be right to call this will a holy will; but there is no need for it to prove itself such at the bar of human judgment. Nor does such piety find itself disturbed in its worship when, in order to assert the divine prerogative over humanity (whose first duty it is to recognize the limits of what is allowed and possible for it), divine inhumanity and cold lust of vengeance manifest themselves so clearly as in the Athene of the "Ajax".[88\12] It gives the measure of the peculiar and unique character of Sophoklean art and the Sophoklean attitude to life--a quite personal character not to be explained on abstract grounds--that this attitude of awed submissiveness in matters of religion could exist side by side with the strong appreciation and justification of the unfettered action of free individuality. Rarely--only once or twice in the plays--is a cry of pain wrested from the lips of one of these uncomplaining victims of a purpose not their own.[89\12] As a rule, the eye shuns to behold, the judgment to criticize, the ultimate reasons of divine action. It is partly artistic restraint no doubt, but religious discretion, too, makes the poet leave {429} such things in semi-obscurity.[90\12] The majesty of divine power remains for the most part in the background and does not mingle familiarly with men or too notoriously interfere with human destiny.[91\12]

But the individual who with his sufferings must serve a purpose that is not his own, Humanity that lives under such bitter laws--what elevating and consoling thoughts are awakened by the contemplation of their fate. The poet employs all the resources of his overwhelming art to secure the profoundest sympathies of his hearers for the undeserved sufferings of the victim, for the delusions of well-intentioned but limited vision that must always stray from the goal at which it aims. The moral of the play is not lost even on the sufferer's foe as he beholds the error and guilt of the noble but misguided heart.[92\12] What thus overwhelms the strong and the wise, the good and the well-meaning, through no fault of their own, may descend upon any member of the human family. Thus the destinies of men are allotted. The lament over the vanity and the sorrow of life, its brief happiness, and the uncertainty of its joy, is poured forth in memorable lines.[93\12] They end on a note of resignation which gives the keynote of the poet's own character; but there is a bitterness which remains behind.

It might have been supposed that one who thus abandoned all attempt to reconcile the worth and actions of men with their fate upon earth, would feel all the more need, for his own satisfaction and that of others, to prove the existence of a divine justice that should restore the balance in a future state of being. But the poet shows little sign of any such need. Thoughts of what may happen after death are never of very great moment to him. They never distinctly affect the behaviour of those whose deeds or suffering fill his plays.[94\12]

When, however, light is thrown for a passing moment on the unknown land beyond the grave the scene that imagination reveals hardly differs at all from the picture that had once been present to the minds of the Homeric singers. The place that is in store for the departed is Hades,[95\12] the unlovely country of the dead,[96\12] whither the Soul flits powerless, shadowlike, little more than a nothing,[97\12] feeling no joy but no pain either;[98\12] where it enters upon a state of insensibility that the grief-stricken sufferer on earth often longs for as a much-desired haven of rest.[99\12] Plouton, Persephone, all the deities of the earth below,[100\12] there rule over the departed. But it is not grace nor kindliness that prevails there--only Justice: Hades demands equal justice for all.[101\12] {430} Pious veneration of the gods continues also in the other world,[102\12] and for the rest we hear nothing of either reward or punishment or of a final supplementing in the land of the Souls of the inadequacy of the justice that fulfils itself on earth.

But though departed into Hades the dead have still a claim upon the upper world and on those who still are living there. Together with the Homeric picture of the lower world is united the cult of the souls and the ideas, connected with that cult, of the continued life of the dead. The next of kin owe to the departed the ceremonious burial that is the first expression of their pious solicitude for his soul's welfare.[103\12] In two plays the "Ajax" and the "Antigone", the love and loyalty of the survivors is obliged to fight for this right of the dead in desperate encounter with earthly authority and even with the sacrifice of their own devoted lives. Such instances serve to bring out clearly the fact that it is no empty convention or tradition that is thus defended and carried through to the end. Nor does the completion of the burial mark the end of the dead man's relations with the upper world: even after that he may be benefited by offerings made at his grave.[104\12] Information of what happens on earth may penetrate to the dead;[105\12] and he himself, under the protection of the underworld spirits and of their assessor Dikê, who take cognizance of his claims,[106\12] may interfere in the affairs of the living as a "Curse-spirit" upon those who disregard his wishes,[107\12] by sending threatening dream-visions upon his foes,[108\12] and as a very present help and unseen ally to his friends in their hour of need.[109\12]

As to an eternity of bliss awaiting the soul, the god in man, after its final release from the shackles of the body, the poet knows as little of such as he does of an eternity of damnation for the wicked. Only the quite special state of grace which is enjoyed by those who have been purified in the mysteries of the goddesses at Eleusis receives mention by him[110\12]: he is frequently disposed to think of this supreme expression of Attic worship with patriotic pride.[111\12] But it is only a minority of the good who thus achieve by the grace of the goddesses a privileged "life" in the kingdom of shadows. One and only one is lifted by the divine grace clear of the human fate of annihilation, and in the Grove of the Erinyes the sorely-tried Oedipus is translated without seeing death out of this earthly life.[112\12] So living a reality to this poet of ancient piety is the conviction that the divine miracle of translation[113\12] is a literal truth, that he is even ready {431} to make this strange circumstance serve as the sole aim and purpose of a whole drama: a miracle which all the other scenes serve not so much to prepare as simply to postpone, and thus heighten the expectancy with which the event is awaited. It is not supreme virtue that secures an immortality for Oedipus which others also who showed an equal degree of goodness might possibly attain. He reveals himself to us as an innocent sufferer indeed,[114\12] but also as obdurate in his rash and violent nature, vindictive, stubborn, and self-willed, not ennobled but rather brutalized by his sufferings.[115\12] Nevertheless, divine power elevates him to the state of immortal Hero less almost for the sake of the satisfaction and bliss to himself as in order that he may be the saviour of the Attic land, the country of humanity and kindness that has taken into its protection[116\12] the unfortunate one, and desires to preserve for ever his power of blessing.[117\12] Just as once it had pleased divine power to overwhelm the innocent victim in a sea of crime and suffering, so now it pleases the same divine power to raise the sufferer, without any new or special merit on his side, to a fate of superhuman bliss.[118\12] In his case a divine miracle occurs, into the ultimate reasons for which it is not profitable to inquire.

In his views, so far as he allows us to see them, of the things of the next world, Sophokles differs not at all from those who still saw life and worshipped the gods as their fathers had done before them. The great poet of human, tragic destiny, the profound student of the divine government of this mournful world, was unwilling to set by the side of it a brighter and more comforting picture of a spirit world of the imagination. In this, too, he is modest and will not say much--he knows no more of these matters, and in no other fashion, than "any other honest citizen of Athens".[119\12]

§ 6

In the course of a long life Sophokles was able to make himself complete master of his art and grow up into strong and generous manhood without the guidance or support of either theological or philosophical learning. Theology he did not care to seek out in its hiding place, the obscurity of isolated sects. Philosophy, in the period of his impressionable youth, had not yet reached Athens, and when he had attained riper years his noble simplicity of temper had little to gain or to fear from the meditated wisdom or folly of the younger generation. In serene detachment he passed on his way through all the press and clamour of the market place. {432}

The moving impulse which since the end of the sixth century had collected together at Athens all the intellectual forces of Greece for a final expansion of their capacity now began, in the middle of the fifth century, to take hold of philosophy as it had long since done literature and the fine arts. Athens saw the last representatives of Ionian physiology gathered together within her walls. Some, like Anaxagoras, took up their residence there for a long period, and left the impress of their teaching upon the foremost minds of the city. The others who paid briefer visits were those who in conscious opposition to the recent trend of thinking, stoutly upheld the older principles of philosophic Monism or Hylozoism, such as Diogenes of Apollonia or Hippon of Samos; or who sought like Archelaos to reconcile the old and the new Ionic doctrine. Besides these, Athens was a headquarters of the wandering exponents of the newest wisdom, the Sophists. Nowhere did unfettered discussion find such cultivated appreciation of its daring; nowhere was such an eager welcome given to the dialectical word-play that, seeming to be an end in itself, was destined to become the most fruitful nursery of native Athenian philosophy. All traditional beliefs and customs that had not their origin or their justification in reflexion were already doomed as soon as they, together with every conventional view of life and the world, were deprived of their natural protection of unchallenged self-evidence by the cold scrutiny of the sovereign tyrant Dialectic. The Sophists, those skirmishers of a new and as yet unrecognizable philosophy, scattered and put to flight the old guard of positive and doctrinal wisdom, but to the individual, who was bidden to depend upon his own resources, they offered stimulus to reflection in abundance but no permanent foothold in the shifting sands of opinion. It would be but a final assertion of the principle that there are no principles if by any chance the Sophists themselves should for a moment speak in the language of edification and, for example, lend the support of their eloquence to certain articles of doctrine that provided a positive teaching as to the nature and life of the soul.[120\12]

If Sophokles remained quite unaffected by this whole movement which reached its flood tide in Athens, Euripides was drawn completely into its current. He sought out philosophers and sophists personally and in their writings. His was a spirit that urgently desired to know the truth and he followed every available guide to knowledge and wisdom for a stage upon their journey. But he was never able to continue permanently in any one direction; in the restlessness {433} and bewilderment of search and experiment he is the true son of his age.

His philosophical and sophistical leanings were sufficiently marked to make it impossible for him to accept any part of the belief or tradition of his countrymen without trial. So far as it is possible within the limits of dramatic art, he instituted an unsparing and unhesitating criticism of all accepted things, and in the process felt himself immeasurably superior to the wit and wisdom of the past. And yet he never satisfied himself. He could never rest content with a merely negative position, for all onesidedness was foreign to his nature. The tremendous honesty of his nature made it impossible for him to admit that element of frivolity which made the sophistic movement and the dialectical negation of all certainty so simple and attractive, and at the same time took away half its sting. But he could take nothing easily; and so with all his sophistic enlightenment he was never happy. The pupil of the Sophists would hear every other side as well; there were even moments when he longed to take refuge in the restful narrowness of old and traditional piety. But it was not given to him to settle down in any fixed set of opinions; all his convictions were provisional, mere hypotheses adopted for the purposes of experiment. Afloat on a changeful sea, he let himself be driven hither and thither by every wind of intellectual excitement or artistic necessity.

When all convictions were involved together in a state of perpetual change and instability, the conception of the nature and being of the soul and its relation to the powers of life and death could not alone remain in fixed and dogmatic certainty.

Where the content and character of the fable chosen as the subject of his drama demand it, the poet frankly adopts the popular view of the nature and destiny of the departed soul, its power and claim upon the worship of the survivors upon earth. In the fairy-tale play of the "Alcestis" the whole apparatus of popular belief plays its part; the God of Death and his awful office, the dwelling of the dead in the underworld, are spoken of as facts and creatures of experience and reality.[121\12] The elaborate funeral ceremonies owed to the dead are treated with the utmost seriousness and precision.[122\12] A whole drama, the "Suppliant Women", has as its real subject, or at least as its ostensible motive, the religious importance of a ritual burial,[123\12] nor is there any lack of isolated passages in which the importance of burial and the honour paid to graves is stressed.[124\12] The survivors on earth give pleasure to the dead by offerings at their graves,[125\12] {434} and in this way obtain their goodwill and can count upon their support.[126\12] Power and honour belong not only to the great ones of antiquity translated to a higher state of being;[127\12] not only "Heroes" can extend their influence beyond their graves and affect the course of earthly events:[128\12] from the soul of his murdered father, the son expects assistance and succour in his time of need. The dread creatures of antique faith, the Erinyes, exact vengeance for the murdered mother.[129\12]

But at this point it becomes apparent that the poet only associates himself for his own purposes with this circle of ancient and sanctified popular fancy--so long in fact as it suits the tone that he wishes to give to the drama and its characters. The Erinyes are excellent material for the play--that in reality their horrid figures only exist in the imagination of the mentally diseased is clearly asserted in the "Orestes".[130\12] The whole series of beliefs and demands--murder ever calling forth fresh murder in accordance with the sacred duty of vengeance, the Erinyes, the bloodthirsty patrons of the murdered victim who leaves no proper avenger behind him--all these have ceased to have any validity for him. The "animal and bloodthirsty" part of these figures of ancient belief call forth the loathing of the poet living in the days of organized justice and humaner manners.[131\12] He does not believe in the souls' right to blood; the ancient legends which depend on this right are an abomination to him. In fact, he only seems to have written his plays about them in order, by the manner of his presentation, to have his revenge upon this material that was almost unavoidably thrust upon him by the tradition of the tragic stage. The duty of the living to offer a cult to the departed souls becomes doubtful in its turn. The seriousness with which that cult is sometimes handled in the plays is compromised by such reflections as these: it is certain that it matters little to the dead whether rich offering are placed in their graves or not; such things only satisfy the idle vanity of the living;[132\12] honour and dishonour are of no further consequence to the dead.[133\12] How should they be, if the departed no longer feel either pleasure or pain, are nothing at all, as is repeatedly declared even in the middle of the "Alcestis"?[134\12]

It is evident that only from an arbitrarily adopted point of view do the picturesque creations of popular belief in the soul and of the cult of souls seem real to the poet; apart from this they disappear from his mind like the creatures of a dream.[135\12] The teachings of the theologians supplied him with no real substitute for popular faith; at the most they were a {435} momentary and passing stimulus. No doubt he did not shut his eyes completely to these manifestations of the spiritual life of his time. His plays contain allusions to Orphic poetry and he joins the asceticism of the Orphics to the cold virtue of his Hippolytos.[136\12] The thought that the soul has fallen from a higher state of being and is enclosed within the body like the dead man in his coffin takes captive his imagination for a moment. "Who knows then whether life is not a kind of death," so that in death the soul awakes to its real life?[137\12] The gloomy view of human destiny upon this earth to which the poet so often gives expression, might seem to hint at a consolation to come in a more satisfactory hereafter; but the poet has no longing for the consolation offered by the theologians. Among the many and various reflections of the poet upon the reality that may reveal itself when the curtain is drawn aside by death, we never meet with the conception that lies at the bottom of the assurances made by the theologians--the conception that the spiritual individual is certain of its immortality because in its individuality it is of divine nature and is itself a god.[138\12] True, he is the author of the bold saying so often quoted and varied in later times, that God is nothing else but the mind that dwells in men.[139\12] But this makes no allusion to the theological doctrine of the multiplicity of individual gods or daimones banished into the life of men; it rather implies a semi-philosophic doctrine of the soul in which one may perceive for the first time the expression of a permanent conviction on the part of the poet.

In quite inapposite contexts Euripides sometimes introduces passing allusions to a philosophical view of the world and humanity, that is the more certainly to be regarded as the private conviction of the poet himself as the utterances fail to correspond fully with the character of the person in the play who makes them, and do not arise necessarily from the dramatic situation. Everything in the world has had its origin from Earth and "the Aether of Zeus"; the Earth is the maternal womb from which the Aether brings everything to birth.[140\12] Both constituents combine to produce the multiplicity of appearance; they are not fused together nor are they to be derived from a single common original element;[141\12] they remain in dualistic contrast side by side.[142\12] It was probably the dualism of this cosmological fancy that reminded the ancients of Anaxagoras; but these statements cannot be regarded as simply a poetical version of the doctrine of Anaxagoras;[143\12] for they derive the multiplicity of matter and things from the simple element of "Earth" from which {436} they arise only by a process of change and transformation, while in the "seedmixture" of Anaxagoras, the unchangeable seeds of all things only separate themselves out from the whole and give rise by mechanical reassemblings to all the perceived appearances of the world. The "Aether" of Euripides in its relations with the "Earth" is besides being the active partner also the intellectual and animated element. The isolation of such an element from the rest of matter does indeed remind us of the procedure of Anaxagoras. But the poet's Aether is still an element though it may be penetrated by mind and animated by spirit; it is not a mental being standing over against all the other elements in essential distinctness like the Nous of Anaxagoras. The fact that it is the element of the Aether, i.e. the dry and hot air, in which intellectual capacity is said to inhere, may be regarded as having been borrowed from Diogenes of Apollonia, a philosopher who was held in considerable estimation at Athens at that time, and who was well known to Euripides.[144\12] In his doctrine, the air (which indeed, in contrast to the view of Euripides, produces all other things simply out of itself) is expressly identified with the "Soul" and is itself described as "having understanding".[145\12]

This view of the elementary forces and constitution of the universe, made up as it is from philosophical suggestions of a scarcely reconcilable character, in which the dualistic tendency is in fact finally predominant, suggests itself to the poet whenever in an exalted mood he speaks of the final destiny of the human soul. The soul on its separation from the body will depart to join the "Aether". But in such conceptions it is not always the imagination of the philosopher-poet that finds expression. On this subject it is accompanied or replaced by a more popular view that only distantly resembles it, but which led to the same result. When we hear now and again of the Aether, the luminous atmosphere above the clouds, as being the dwelling place of the departed souls,[146\12] the view--more theological than philosophic in its character--seems to be implied that after death the liberated soul will float upwards to the seat of the gods[147\12] which has long ceased to be situated upon Olympos, but is in "heaven" or in this same Aether. This, too, was the meaning of a saying traditionally ascribed to Epicharmos the comic-poet of Sicily who was himself versed in philosophy. In this saying the pious man is assured that for him death will bring no evil for his "mind" will dwell permanently in "heaven".[148\12] This conception, which appears so frequently in later epitaphs, {437} must have been familiar to popular imagination at Athens at an early period; at least in the grave-epigram officially dedicated by the state to the memory of the Athenians who fell in the year 432 before Poteidaia, we find the belief expressed (as a commonly received opinion) that the souls of these brave men have been received by the "Aether" just as the earth has received their bodies.[149\12] Such official use implies a commonly accepted opinion and the fundamental ideas of the popular cult of the souls might have led to similar results. From the beginning popular belief had regarded the psyche, which got its name from the air or breath, as closely akin to the winds, the mobile air and its spirits. It would not be difficult for the idea to arise that the soul, as soon as it was free to decide for itself what should become of it, should go to join the elemental spirits that are its kinsfolk. Perhaps this, too, is what Epicharmos means when on another occasion he says that in death when the united are parted asunder each returns whence it came, the body to earth, but the soul up to the heights--its name, in which allusion is made to its perpetual mobility, being now after the example of Xenophanes derived from the breath of the wind, the moving air (~pneu=ma~), a usage which became very common in later times.[150\12]

But perhaps the use of such a name is an indication that this poet also regards the soul as standing in a close relation and kinship with the Aether that is destined to receive it after its release from the body; so that from this side, too[151\12]--in addition to the more popular conception just mentioned--Euripides may have received a hint for his peculiar version of the physiological theory of Diogenes. In his view the soul participates in the nature of the Aether. But it is more important to notice that the Aether participates in the nature and true reality of the soul; it possesses life, consciousness and power of thought. They both belong to one family. The Aether according to the poet--and here the speculations of Anaximenes as revived by Diogenes are unmistakable[152\12]--is a true vital atmosphere, an all-embracing psychic element, so that it becomes, not a mere vehicle of mind, but the All-Mind itself. The concept is even condensed and half-personified, it is called by the name of the highest divine power, Zeus,[153\12] and the poet as though speaking of a personal god, calls it "immortal".[154\12] The human mind, too, as akin to the universal god and the All-Mind, appears, as it had been in the teaching of Diogenes,[155\12] as a part of this God, this universal Mind. God is the mind, and the mind and understanding in us is God--so the poet clearly asserts.[156\12] In death, when {438} the separation of the mind from its earthly elements takes place, the Pneuma of man will "not indeed live", as it had done in the separate existence of the individual man, but it will "preserve an immortal consciousness", entering into the immortal Aether and fusing itself with the All-living and the All-thinking.[157\12] None of the physiologists who conceived the same idea of an immortality excluding the personal immortality of the individual, of the universal spirit of life in mankind, has expressed his meaning with such distinctness as this philosophic layman.

The poet may have wished to remain permanently upon the sublime heights of this Pantheistic vision; but he must, in his peculiar all-embracing spirit that never held fast to any one view with enduring persistence, have experienced too often the truth of the saying of Protagoras that every statement calls forth its equally legitimate opposite,[158\12] to have become an unswerving adherent of any single opinion. Death, and whatever may reveal itself after death, is beyond the experience of any man.[159\12] It may be that complete disappearance into nothingness follows death; that the dead man becomes simply nothing.[160\12] It may be that in the permanence of the human race the great name and the renown of glorious deeds lives on undying.[161\12] Whether there may remain besides a vestige of life in a spirit world, who can tell? Perhaps such a thing is hardly even to be wished.[162\12] It is just what makes death such a comforting thing, that it puts an end to all feeling and therefore to all pain and every care. We should not lament over our fate if, like the harvests that follow each other in the course of the years, one generation of men after another flowers, fades, and is carried off. So it is ordered in the course of Nature, and we ought not to be dismayed by anything that is rendered inevitable by her laws.[163\12]

NOTES TO CHAPTER XII

[1\12: The learned and more particularly the philosophers of later ages paid special attention to utterances of the older poetry that gave expression to belief of a spiritualist tendency. Just as they selected and preserved passages from Pindar (and from Melanippides in the case soon to be mentioned), which bore witness to an advanced view of the soul, so they must also have given us similar passages from other melic or from iambic and elegiac poets--if such passages had existed. They must, for example, have been absent from the ~thrê=noi~ of Simonides which were famous as the models of this kind of poetry. And so with all the rest.]

[2\12: Hades puts an end to all pleasure for every man; hence the warning that man should enjoy his youth upon earth: Thgn. 973 ff.; cf. 877 f., 1191 ff., 1009 f.; Sol. 24; Thgn. 719 ff.]

[3\12: ~thana/tô| pa/ntes opheilo/metha~--an ancient saying often repeated; cf. Bergk on Simon. 122, 2; Nauck on Soph., El. 1173 [Blaydes ad loc.].]

[4\12: Hades himself plays the part of Thanatos and carries off the souls to the lower world. Thus as early as Semon. i, 13 f., ~tou\s d' A/rei dedême/nous pe/mpei melai/nês Aï/dês hupo\ chthono/s~. In metaphorical language ~Ha/idês~ for ~tha/natos~ is quite regular from the time of Pindar onwards. This, in turn, lent support to the use of the name of ~Ha/idês~ instead of the personified ~Tha/natos~. So esp. in Pi., O. ix, 33-5; cf. besides, Epigr. Gr. 89, 3-4. ~to/nde . . . ma/rpsas Ha/idês hoi skoti/as amphe/balen pte/rugas~; cf. 201, 2; 252, 1-2. (And therefore in Eur., Alc. 261, we should not alter the ~pterôto\s Ha/idas~ who is named instead of Thanatos--not even in favour of the otherwise ingenious ~ble/pôn . . . ha/|dan~.)]

[5\12: ~dêro\n e/nerthen gê=s ole/sas psuchê\n kei/somai hô/ste li/thos a/phthoggos~ Thgn. 567 f.--the condition of things in Hades is regarded exactly as in the Homeric pictures: Thgn. 704-10.]

[6\12: See esp. Sol. 13, 29 ff.: Thgn. 731-42; 205 ff.]

[7\12: Mimn. ii, 13: ~a/llos d' hau= pai/dôn epideu/etai, hô=nte ma/lista himei/rôn kata\ gê=s e/rchetai eis Aï/dên~. Without children there can be no assurance that the cult of the soul will be carried on. But we may well believe that the attaching of so much importance to offspring was assisted by the natural human belief that the man who left children behind him on earth did not completely perish in death (hence ~aeigene/s esti kai\ atha/naton hôs thnêtô=| hê ge/nnêsis~ as in Plato, Smp. 206 E). This alone gives a meaning and a reason for the widespread belief among the Greeks that the wicked man who is punished after his death in his children and children's children himself feels that punishment.]

[8\12: Semon. 1; 3. Mimn. 2. Sol. 13, 63 ff.; 14. Thgn. 167 f.; 425 ff. We may also add here the expressions of resignation, Hdt. vii, 46; i, 31.]

[9\12: ~Nukto\s tha/lamos~ [Ion] fr. 8, 2.]

[10\12: On the story of Midas and Silenos see Griech. Roman, p. 204 f. As to the ancient and often repeated maxim ~archê\n~ (or ~pa/ntôn) me\n mê\ phu=nai epichthoni/oisin a/riston ktl.~, see Bgk., Opusc. ii, 214; _PLG^4. ii, p. 155 f. Nietzsche, Rh. Mus. xxviii, 212 ff. (whose view that the {440} beginning ~archê\n . . .~ is old and original--but not his involved explanation of this--has been fully confirmed by the finding of the primitive form of the ~agô/n~: Mahaffy, On the Flinders Petrie Papyri, i, p. 70).]

[11\12: Simon, fr. 39; 38.]

[12\12: fr. 137.--Usener, Götternamen, 229, 13, says of Sappho that "she was possessed by the belief that as a poetess she would live again after her death among the gods, and would therefore become a heroine; see frr. 68 and 136". But from these fragments of Sappho no such belief can be extracted without first reading into them a good deal that they do not say.]

[13\12: Of the man who has fallen in glory on the battlefield Tyrtaios says, 12, 31 f.: ~oude/ pote kle/os esthlo\n apo/llutai oud' o/nom' au/tou=, all' hupo\ gê=s per eô\n gi/gnetai atha/natos~ (i.e. in renown upon earth). Thgn. says to his Kyrnos, 243 ff., in your lifetime my songs will make you famous ~kai\ ho/tan dnopherê=s hupo\ keu/thesi gai/ês bê=|s polukôku/tous eis Ai/dao do/mous, oude/pot' oude\ thanô\n apolei=s kle/os alla\ melê/seis a/phthiton anthrô/pois aie\n e/chôn o/noma . . .~ cf. Aesch., Epigr. iii, 3 (241 Bgk. = 449 Di.), ~zôo\n de\ phthime/nôn pe/letai kle/os~.]

[14\12: Even in Hades the dead perceive ~chthoni/a| phreni/~ if they themselves or the ~aretai/~ of their descendants upon earth are praised: Pi., P. v, 98: cf. O. viii, 81 ff.; xiv, 20 ff.; [Ion] Anth. Pal. vii, 43, 3 (to Eurip.), ~i/sthi d' hupo\ chthono\s ô/n, ho/ti soi kle/os a/phthiton e/stai ktl.~--In the expressions collected by Meuss, Jahrb. f. Philol. 1889, p. 812 f., from the fourth century orators there only remains a very faint recollection of such a belief.]

[15\12: Semon. 2, ~tou= me\n thano/ntos ouk a\n enthumoi/metha, ei/ ti phronoi=men, plei=on hême/rês miê=s~.--Stes. 51, ~atele/stata ga\r kai\ ama/chana tou\s thano/ntas klai/ein~. 52, ~thano/ntos andro\s pa=s' apo/llutai pot' anthrô/pôn cha/ris~.]

[16\12: This emerges at once if we review the material collected by H. Meuss upon "the conceptions appearing in the Attic orators of existence after death": Jahrb. f. Philol. 1889, pp. 801-15. For the cult of the soul and all that attaches to it the orators are our most authoritative witnesses and as such are frequently examined in the sections of this book that deal with the subject.]

[17\12: ~ei/ tines tô=n teteleutêko/tôn la/boien tro/pô| tini\ tou= nu=n gignome/nou pra/gmatos ai/sthêsin~ and frequently in this style: cf. the passages quoted by Westermann on D., Lept. (20), 87; cf. also Lehrs, Pop. Aufs. 329 ff. The question is always whether the dead are capable in any way of apprehending what goes on in this world. The continued life of the dead is never doubtful but rather implied throughout, for without such implication no possibility whatever would be left for that ~ei~--.]

[18\12: See Nägelsbach, Nachhom. Theol. 420. Meuss, p. 812.]

[19\12: This is well brought out by Lehrs, Pop. Aufs. 331. But the statement holds good in an even more precise and exclusive sense than he there gives it. The words of Hyper., Epit. xiii, § 39, deal simply with the existence in Hades of those who have died for their country (with some traditional embellishments; see above, chap. vii, n. 5)--this much can hardly ever have been expressly doubted or denied by any orator. But it is wrong to say (as Lehrs does: p. 331) that Hyp. expresses, though in other words, what was afterwards laid down by [D.H.] Rhet. vi, 5, as proper "for such funeral speeches" (no, only for private funerals--which is quite another matter). It is true that the advice there given is to say that the soul is ~atha/natos~ and now dwells {441} "with the gods". But it never enters into the head of Hyp. to say any such thing (nor in the frag. of the speech preserved by Stob., Fl. 124, 36). In fact, the precept of this sophistic writer (still more the advice given by Men. Rhet., de Encom. 414, 16 ff.; 421, 16 ff. Sp.) rather reveals the enormous contrast between the style of the sophistic funeral oratory of a later period and the real characteristics of the old Attic funeral orations: a difference founded upon the difference of sentiment manifested by the public that listened to such speeches in two different ages. Even the statements of [Dem.] Epit. (60) 34 (~pa/redroi toi=s ka/tô theoi=s~ together with the ~agathoi\ a/ndres~ of earlier times ~en maka/rôn nê/sois~) betray sophistic colouring though falling far short of the excesses of Ps.-D.H. and Men. Rhet.]

[20\12: The only thing ~ agê/rantos~ about those who have fallen in the wars of freedom is their ~eulogi/ê~ Simon. 100, 4; cf. 106, 4 (with Bgk.'s note). 99, 3-4 ~oude\ tethna=si thano/ntes epei/ sph' aretê\ kathu/perthen kudai/nous' ana/gei dô/matos ex Aï/deô~ (which is imitated in the epitaph of Thrasymachos the Kretan ~oude\ thanô\n areta=s o/num' ôle/sas, alla\ se Pha/ma kudai/nous' ana/gei dô/matos ex Aï/da~, BCH. 1889, p. 60).]

[21\12: ~klu=thi/ moi ô= pa/ter, thau=ma brotô=n, ta=s aeizô/ou mede/ôn psucha=s~, Melanipp. 6. The words ~thau=ma brotô=n~ (modelled on the ~thau=ma brotoi=si~ of Homer) can refer only to Dionysos (of the gods who enter into the question here): ~Diô/nusos, cha/rma brotoi=sin~, ~X~ 325. Further, it is natural to think of Dionysos in the work of a dithyrambic poet.]

[22\12: The dead man ~amph' Ache/ronti naieta/ôn~, Pi., N. iv, 85. This is the general assumption: e.g. P. xi, 19-22; O. ix, 33-5; I. viii, 59 f.; fr. 207 Bgk.]

[23\12: ~e/sti de\ kai/ ti thano/ntessin me/ros ka\n no/mon erdo/menon; katakru/ptei d' ou ko/nis suggo/nôn kedna\n cha/rin~, O. viii, 77 ff.]

[24\12: Something of the kind is adopted for the moment, e.g. in O. xiv, 20 ff.; viii, 81 ff. A real belief in such a possibility appears perhaps most clearly in P. v, 98 ff.]

[25\12: For him who dies fighting for his country there is in store--not blessedness but only Fame, I. vii, 26 ff. He who comes ~kala\ e/rxais aoida=s a/ter eis Aï/da stathmo/n~ has little reward for his pains (his reward would, in fact, have been just the praise given in the ~aoida/~), O. x, 91 ff., cf. N. vii, 30-2.]

[26\12: A strange expression is the ~dai/môn gene/thlios~ of O. xiii, 105 (in the same poem we also have ~Xenophô=ntos dai/môn~ 28, which in this case at least is something more than "destiny", otherwise the normal meaning of ~dai/môn~ in Pindar, cf. P. v, 123, I. vii, 43). It almost seems as if it were intended to describe the ancestor spirit that brings good luck to the house like the genius generis or ~hê/rôs suggenei/as~ (see above, chap. v, n. 132).]

[27\12: Amphiaraos, O. vi, 14; N. ix, 24 ff.; x, 8 f. (Amph. from his underground cavern sees the fighting in the war of the Epigonoi, P. viii, 39-56. There is no suggestion that the ~Epi/gonoi~ inquire at his oracle--as Dissen supposes; with this the ~hô=d' eipe marname/nôn~ 43 is inconsistent.)--Ganymedes translated to eternal life, O. i, 44; x, 104 f. Apart from this there are temporary translations to the gods or from one place on earth to another, O. i, 36 ff.; ix, 59; P. ix, 5ff.; I. viii, 20 f.]

[28\12: O. ii, 27 ff.]

[29\12: ~alla/ ti prosphe/romen e/mpan ê\ me/gan no/on ê/toi phu/sin athana/tois~, N. vi, 4 f.]

[30\12: ~skia=s o/nar a/nthrôpos~, P. viii, 95. ~he\n andrô=n he\n theô=n ge/nos, ek mia=s de\ pne/omen matro\s ampho/teroi; diei/rgei de\ pa=sa kekrime/na du/namis, {442} hôs to\ me\n oude/n, ho de\ chalkeos asphale\s aie\n he/dos me/nei ourano/s~, N. vi, 1 ff.]

[31\12: fr. 131 Bgk.]

[32\12: Pindar in these lines speaks only of the ~aiô=nos ei/dôlon~; but that by this he means the ~psuchê/~ is obvious in itself and is stated by Plutarch, who preserves the lines, Cons. ad Apoll. 35, p. 120 D (~peri\ psuchê=s le/gôn~; cf. Rom. 28).--~psuchê/~ in Pindar sometimes stands for what is otherwise called ~kardi/a~ or ~phrê/n~, "heart" or "disposition" e.g. P. i, 48; iv, 122; N. ix, 39; I. iv, 53b, and O. ii, 77, and prob. also P. iii, 41; "disposition," N. ix, 32. The word is sometimes (as in Homer) equivalent to ~zôê/~, P. iii, 101, ~psucha\n lipô/n~. It simultaneously = "life" and the alter ego dwelling within the living man, O. viii, ~psucha\s ba/lon~; cf. N. i, 47. But the poet knows also the full meaning of ~psucha/~ in the older idiom and belief. Entirely in the manner of Homeric usage ~psucha/~ denotes the spiritual double of mankind, which survives the man himself, in those instances where the ~psuchê/~ of the dead is said to be still in existence: ~psucha\n komi/xai~, P. iv, 159; N. viii, 44 f.; ~su\n Agamemnoni/a| psucha=|~ (is Kassandra sent into Hades), P. xi, 20 f. Persephone ~anadidoi= psucha\s pa/lin~ (out of Hades), fr. 133, 3 (Bgk.); I. i, 68, ~psucha\n Aï/da| tele/ôn~ (in death).--~psuchai/~ is also used in the old idiomatic sense in fr. 132, 1: which is, however, spurious.--~psucha/~ in Pindar never denotes the psychical powers of the living man inclusive of the intellect, much less the intellect, ~nou=s~, alone.]

[33\12: ~kai\ sô=ma me\n pa/ntôn he/petai thana/tô| peristhenei=, zô=on d' e/ti lei/petai aiô=nos ei/dôlon; to\ ga\r esti mo/non ek theô=n~, fr. 131 (96 Boeckh).]

[34\12: ~oi=si de\ Phersepho/na poina\n palaiou= pe/ntheos de/xetai~--fr. 133. What is meant is undoubtedly the ancient "guilt" of the soul for which Perseph. receives satisfaction. This guilt can only be called a ~pe/nthos~ if she who accepts the satisfaction is regarded as herself grief-stricken by the guilty dead; if, in fact, the deed has been the occasion of mourning for Persephone. That this can apply to the goddess of the underworld is startling, but it cannot be got rid of by artificial interpretation (as Dissen would like to get rid of it). Pindar follows throughout the analogy of the ancient procedure of expiation in the case of blood-guiltiness. But this procedure seems to be familiar with the idea that, apart from the ~agchistei/a~ of the murdered man, the underworld gods themselves (as guardians of the Souls) are immediately injured by the deed and stricken by grief and must receive satisfaction on their own account. Hence in certain legends (typificatory of ritual) the murderer not only has to fly from the land but to undergo servitude to the ~chtho/nioi~: Apollo, especially after the slaying of Python, has to serve ~A/dmêtos~, i.e. Hades for an ennaëteris (more on this subject below, n. 40). Thus, the guilty soul banished from its proper home serves a "great year" under Persephone, and this is the ~poina/~ that it pays.]

[35\12: O. ii, 63-5. Everything here refers to judgment and compensation in Hades. In the words ~thano/ntôn me\n entha/d' auti/k' apa/lamnoi phre/nes poina\s e/tisan~ the ~entha/de~ cannot possibly belong to the ~poina\s e/tisan~, as Aristarchos supposed, so that the words should refer to the punishment in the course of a new birth upon earth of crimes committed in Hades (in itself a remarkable conception). ~thano/ntes~ alone would not be put for ~thano/ntes kai\ anabebiôko/tes~, and we can only understand by the word those who after a life-time upon earth have died and are now spending their time below in the underworld. Moreover, it is hardly likely (as Ty. Mommsen reminds us adnot. crit. ad Olymp. 24) that the exposition of the "knowledge of the future" (62) on the part of {443} a man still living upon earth would begin with what may happen to man, not after his death, but in a second appearance upon earth that is to fall to his lot later on. We must first of all be told what happens after the conclusion of the present condition of life, viz. that upon earth. Finally, the use of ~auti/ka~ is quite satisfactory if it refers to the judgment in Hades that follows immediately after death; while it is meaningless in Aristarchos' interpretation (hence Rauchenstein writes ~au=tis~--a mere conjecture and a superfluous one). The view that the ~me\n--de/~ of 63-4 necessitates Aristarchos' explanation is not convincing (as Lübbert thinks, Ind. Schol. Bonn. hib. 1887, p. xviii--incidentally he quite unjustifiably introduces specifically Platonic fancies into Pindar, p. xix). The ~thano/ntôn me/n~ of 63 is not answered till ~ho/soi d' eto/lmasan . . .~ 75, just as the ~auti/ka~ of 63 does not receive its contrast till we come to what happens much later--after the life on earth has been thrice repeated--described in 75 ff. The ~de/~ of 64 and 67 are subordinate (not adversative) to what is introduced by the ~me/n~ of 63 and they continue the thought. The ~entha/de~ of 63 might indeed, in accordance with an otherwise correct usage, be connected with ~apa/lamnoi phre/nes~, as it is by one of the Scholiasts: "the ~phre/nes~ which have committed crimes here upon earth." But ~apa/lamnos~ does not mean sceleratus, impius (nor does it in the passages adduced for this meaning by Zacher, Diss. Halens. iii, 237: Thgn. 281; Sim. v, 3). The ~apa/lamnoi phre/nes~ are simply equivalent to the ~amenêna\ ka/rêna~ of Homer, and are a very suitable expression for the ~psuchai/~ of the dead (though not indeed for the ~psuchai/~ of the reborn as Aristarchos would have it). No alternative remains save to connect ~thano/ntôn~ and ~entha/de~: simulac mortui sunt hic, s. decedunt hinc (Dissen). The sentence ~ta\ d' en ta=|de . . .~ must then either be a more exact description of what has been stated generally just before in ~poina\s e/tisan~ (and this is Mommsen's view supported by one Schol.), or else be subordinated--together with its contrasted ~i/sais de\ . . .~ 67 ff.--to ~poina\s e/tisan~. ~poina/~ in Pindar means regularly compensation, whether expiation for evil deeds or reward for good (cf. P. i, 59; N. i, 70b). If we might suppose that by a brachylogy not beyond possibility in Pindar ~poina\s e/tisan~ is put for ~poina\s e/tisan kai\ ede/xanto~, then the sense might be: after death the souls receive at once recompense for their actions--and then follows the division of the bad 64 ff., and the good 67 ff. But we may perhaps rest content with Mommsen's explanation.]

[36\12: O. ii, 74.]

[37\12: Plu., de Lat. Viv. 7, p. 1130 C after citing the lines of Pindar fr. 130 (95) adds: (the rivers of Erebos) ~decho/menoi kai\ apokru/ptontes agnoi/a| kai\ lê/thê| tou\s koazome/nous~. This might possibly be an addition made by Plu. on his own account--he had frequently spoken of ~eis a/gnoian auto\n embalei=n~, etc., in his war against the Epicurean ~la/the biô/sas~ and here the same thing appears again from Erebos. But the words are more probably a paraphrase from Pindar. At any rate, what is said in Plu. about the ~mnê=mai kai\ lo/goi~ of the ~eusebei=s~ in clear contrast with the ~lê/thê~ of the ~asebei=s~, comes from Pindar: this is shown by the allusions of Aristid. i, p. 146, 1 Dind. From this parallel it is also clearly proved that the ~lê/thê~ does not refer (as Lehrs, Pop. Aufs. 313 thinks) to the forgetfulness of the ~kolazo/menoi~ in the minds of the living, but forgetfulness of their previous life by the ~kolazo/menoi~ themselves. Accordingly we are to suppose that Pindar assigns retention of memory and complete consciousness only to the good in Hades, as their special privilege (cf. the position of Teiresias in ~k~ 494), while the punishment {444} of the wicked is enhanced by ~lê/thê~ (cf. above, chap. vii, n. 21 ). Not to have fallen a victim to ~lê/thê~ in Hades--not to have drunk the waters of Lethe--is occasionally alluded to in poetico-religious utterances of later times as a special privilege of the good, e.g. Epigr. Gr. 204, 11 (first century B.C.); 414, 10. ~Lê/thês~ and ~Mnêmosu/nês pê/gê~ in Hades (as in the sanctuary of Trophonios at Lebadea, Paus. 9, 39, 8); Epigr. 1037 (cf. above, chap. vii, n. 21; chap. xi, n. 96; and see also below).]

[38\12: ~toi=si la/mpei me/n me/nos aeli/ou ta\n entha/de nu/kta ka/tô~ fr. 129. In this naive conception, what Helios only threatens to do in Homer, ~du/somai eis Aï/dao kai\ en neku/essi phaei/nô~, he does in reality and regularly during the earthly night. The same idea must be referred to in O. ii, 61 ff., ~i/son de\ nu/ktessin aiei\ i/son en hame/rais ha/lion e/chontes~ (so Boeckh)--the ~esthloi/~ live in the ~chô=ros eusebô=n~ in Hades: they have by night and day the same sun (as we: the ~apone/steron~ of 62 also implies this), that is to say, just as much of the sun as we have on earth only in reverse order of time. The sun only shines upon the ~eusebei=s~ below; ~mo/nois ga\r hêmi=n hê/lios kai\ phe/ggos hilaro/n esti~ sing the initiated in Hades in Ar., Ran. 454 f. (but it is the same sun which shines upon them as shines on us, ~phô=s ka/lliston hô/sper entha/de~ 155. solemque suum sua sidera norunt is a subtlety of later excogitation). Helios shining by night in Hades occurs again in the late Greek Hymn ~eis Hê/lion~ (Orph., p. 291 Ab.), v, 11, ~ê\n gai/ês keuthmô=na mo/lê|s neku/ôn t' epi\ chô=ron~. Epigr. Gr. 228b, 7-8, ~Lêtogene/s, su\ de\ pai=das en hêrô/essi phula/ssois, eusebe/ôn aei\ chô=ron epercho/menos~.]

[39\12: O. ii, 75 ff.]

[40\12: fr. 133 ~ena/tô| e/teï~. What is meant is beyond all question "after the expiration of an ennaëteris" (period of 99 months, i.e. 8 years and 3 intercalary months), a period which besides being familiar as a cycle of religious festivals (Apolline specially but not exclusively) also occurs in the ancient procedure of atonement for murder as the period of self-banishment and servitude in a foreign land undergone by the murderer. Apollo after slaying Python serves ~me/gan eis eniauto/n~ (i.e. an ennaëteris) in the house of Admetos (i.e. the god of the lower world) and then returns purified (Müller, Dorians, i, 338); in the same way Herakles serves Eurystheus (at least a trace of this is found in [Apollod.] 2, 5, 11, 1; see Müller, Dorians, i, 445).--After the murder of Iphitos Herakles has to serve as bondsman to Omphale (peculiar in this case is the combination of this species of atonement for murder with the buying-off of the relatives of the murdered man [Apollod.] 2, 6, 2, 5; D.S. 4, 31, 5). At the end of this period of service he is once more "pure" (~hagno\s ê=n~ S., Trach. 258).--Kadmos after slaying the dragon and the ~Spartoi/~ serves Ares (the chthonic?) for an ~eniauto/s~ of eight years [Apollod.] 3, 4, 2, 1; Müller, Orchomen. 213.--Hippotes after the murder of Mantis has to fly the country ~de/ka e/tê~ [Apollod.] 2, 8, 3, 3.--On the analogy of this custom the gods, too, who have broken an oath sworn by the Styx are banished nine years from the rest of the Olympians (and confined to Hades, since menial service of the ~chtho/nioi~ is the essential idea of all such ~apeniautismo/s~), Hes., Th. 793 ff.: Orph. fr. 157. With a reminiscence of this expiatory banishment Pindar makes the souls at the conclusion of their earthly pilgrimage (which is itself a banishment) undergo a final period of penance in Hades for an ennaëteris, at the end of which the ~poinê/~ for the ancient crime is regarded as completely paid off.--The life on earth and the period in Hades which follows is regarded as an exile of the souls (on account of serious crime).--Such an idea was most natural if the real home of the soul was thought of as being {445} a divine (not earthly) country; the idea occurs quite clearly in Empedokles (certainly uninfluenced by the brief allusions of Pindar); see above, chap. xi, n. 75.]

[41\12: fr. 133. The similarity to the promises made by Emped. fr. 146 (457 f.) is immediately apparent, but is not to be explained by imitation of Pindar by Emped., but simply by the similarity of imaginative outlook which led to similar results in the two cases.--Elevation to the rank of Hero is the reward which next awaits the man who is born a king, according to this view. Very remarkable is the manner in which Pindar, O. ii, 58-62, effects the transition to his eschatological statement: the man who possesses ~plou=tos aretai=s dedaidalme/nos~ knows the future, viz, what we are then told about the fate of the soul hereafter. This assertion, which seems to attribute to the virtuous Great Man at once a higher and a profounder knowledge, is perhaps best explained by the allusions of fr. 133. He who has reached this highest stage of earthly happiness must deduce from that very circumstance that for him now it is fated after another death to become a Hero. He therefore knows that everything, indeed, happens that is related in ll. 63-74, but that before him in particular lies that which follows in ll. 75 ff.; and this is to be regarded as the real import of what the man in question "knows", 62, while the rest, 63-74, is only added for the sake of completeness. Theron, therefore--for it is he who is alluded to throughout--may be assured beforehand that after death he will be gathered to the Heroes. This is what Pindar means to say here, or at least to give the ~sunetoi/~ to understand 91 ff. As a matter of historical fact Theron was worshipped with ~hêrôïkai\ timai/~ after his death, D.S. xi, 53, 2.]

[42\12: fr. 133. There is according to Dissen a contradiction between fr. 133 and O. ii, 75 ff.: in the latter three periods of life on earth are necessary before the final departure, in fr. 133 only two. This variation would be got rid of if we could adopt the interpretation given by Ty. Mommsen, adnot. crit. Olymp. 30, and assert that in O. ii also Pindar only speaks of two earthly lives with a single residence in Hades intervening. But the words ~es tri\s hekate/rôthi mei/nantes~, 75-6, can hardly bear any other interpretation than "three times on each of the two sides" (not: "on both sides--once on that side, twice on this side: total three times"). At the same time there is nothing in fr. 133 to prevent us taking the same number of lives (three as a minimum) to be implied there too. We are not there told that the birth as kings, etc., must always be the one to follow the first birth: in this case also two earlier lives may have gone before.]

[43\12: See above, chap. iv, § 8.]

[44\12: ~e/teilan Dio\s hodo\n para\ Kro/nou tu/rsin~, O. ii, 77. What exactly is to be understood by the "way of Zeus" was presumably clearer to the ~sunetoi/~ versed in the mythology of mysticism for whom Pindar is here writing, than it is to us. It must mean (as Boeckh supposes) the way which Zeus treads in order to reach that Island, far to the West in Okeanos, inaccessible as the Land of the Hyperboreans to ship or traveller on foot; it is a special ~athana/tôn hodo/s~ like that which leads to Homer's grotto of the Nymphs, ~n~ 112. Acc. to Bergk, Opusc. ii, 708, it is "certain" that Pindar means the Milky Way. Along this the gods travel to the house of Zeus, Ovid, M. i, 168; and Orpheus in the same way fr. 123, 17 Ab., speaks of the ~theô=n hodoi\ ouraniô/nôn~ in the heavens. But the souls could only be made to travel along the Milky Way if their habitation was placed in the sky as it often was later. So, as Bergk points out, following Lob., Agl. 935, {446} the Empedotimos of Herakld. Pont. calls the Milky Way ~hodo\s psuchô=n tô=n ha=|dên to\n en oura/nô| diaporeuome/nôn~ ap. Philop. in Arist., Mete., p. 117, 10 Hayd.; see above, chap. ix, n. 111. But Pindar situates his ~maka/rôn nê=sos~ in the Ocean (78): it is difficult to see how the souls could arrive there on the Milky Way from the place where they find themselves after death. (We may surely acquit Pindar of the later fancies about an Okeanos in the heavens.) Q.S. iii, 761 ff. (cited by Tafel) knows of a special way belonging to the gods which leads from heaven down to the ~Êlu/sion pedi/on~. But the way by which the souls reach the ~maka/rôn nê=sos~ does not, like that way, begin in heaven. We should rather think of some way only passable for gods and spirits leading from the inhabited world over the pathless Ocean to the latter's "sources" far in the West.]

[45\12: In O. ii, 84-5, it is certainly Kronos who is meant (as Didymos took it, though he gave an absurd interpretation of the passage) and not Zeus as Aristarchos imagined. The exceedingly corrupt and (owing to the intrusion of glosses) unmetrical lines are beyond certain restoration: the emendations of the Byzantine scholars give the required sense.--What happened to the incorrigibly wicked? In accordance with the theory of the soul's Transmigration two alternative views as to their fate were possible: they might be regarded as passing from body to body unceasingly (Empedokl.) or as doing penance by suffering eternal punishment in Hell (as with Plato and others). The circumstances in which he alludes to these matters do not give Pindar any special occasion to declare himself for either view. He has only to speak of the final condition of the just; the fate of the ~asebei=s~ is left in semi-obscurity. Something about the matter is, however, said in fr. 132; ~psuchai\ asebe/ôn~ hover under the vault of heaven that covers the earth (~gai/a|~ either corrupt or grammatically bad Greek), while the pious above the vault of heaven (~epoura/nioi~) sing to the "Great Blessed One". Everything in this is un-Pindaric, the inadequacy and even incorrectness of the language (~molpai=s en hu/mnois~), the unconcealed monotheism of the phrase ~ma/kara me/gan~, the conception of the souls as having nothing else to do than sing to the One God, the whole idea that these blessed ones dwell "in heaven". This last is an idea familiar to Greeks of a later period, nor is the division of souls into ~hupoura/nioi~ and ~epoura/nioi~ unknown to them; cf. Epigr. Gr. 650, 9 ff. But Pindar cannot have written anything of the kind. It is even doubtful whether Clem. Al. who, Str. iv, 640 P., names as the author of the lines ~to\n melopoio/n~, meant Pindar by the words: Theodoret. (Gr. Aff. C. viii, 599 C), who attributes the second half of the frag. to Pindar, had no other source but the same Clem. Al. But it may be doubted whether the whole is to be attributed to any Greek of the older faith. It has quite the appearance, as Zeller, Socr. and Socratics, p. 24, n. 3, strikingly suggests, of one of those Jewish forgeries in which Jewish monotheism and the ideas connected with it were to be fathered upon Greek antiquity. Welcker, Kl. Schr. v, 252 ff.; Götterl._ i, 741 f., defends the fr. (and most unconvincingly connects the ~psuchai\ hupoura/nioi~ and ~epoura/nioi~ of the fr. with the quite different ~dai/mones epichtho/nioi~ and ~hupochtho/nioi~ of Hes., Op. 123 and 141). He thinks he can defend the genuineness of the lines (which had already been declared spurious by Dissen) by pointing to the words of Horace about Pindar's ~thrê=noi~ (O. iv, 2, 21): flebili sponsae iuvenem raptum plorat, et vires animumque moresque aureos educit in astra nigroque invidet Orco. Even supposing that this referred to the transport of the souls to the stars the witness of Horace thus given would only {447} remove a single difficulty from a passage that has other overwhelming difficulties in profusion. But Horace says nothing of the transport of the "Soul" to the heavenly regions, vires, animus, mores, all these together refer not at all to the ~psuchê/~ but to the ~ê=thos~ and the ~aretai/~ of the dead. Pindar, Horace means, rescues the memory of the nature and merits of the youth from decay: only the fame which the poet secures for him is under discussion. educit in astra and invidet Orco mean nothing more than: he rescues the memory of the dead from oblivion, exactly as in the epitaph quoted above, n. 20: ~houde\ thanô\n areta=s o/num' ô/lesas alla/ se Pha/ma kudai/nous' ana/gei dô/matos ex Aï/da~. Thus, it is least of all to be concluded from Horace's words that Pindar transported the souls of the ~eusebei=s~ into the heavens (rather that in the ~thrê=noi~--as much as anywhere else: see above, n. 25--Pindar sometimes only recognizes the immortality of fame: of that alone does Horace speak).]

[46\12: O. ii celebrates the victory which Theron had won at Olympia in Ol. 76, but was probably written some time after that victory. Theron died Ol. 77, 1, or 76, 4.]

[47\12: Sicily was rich in cults of ~chtho/nioi~, in which Gelon, Hieron and their ancestors were hierophants, Hdt. vii, 153; Pi., O. vi, 95. So, too, Akragas the city of Theron (and the home of Empedoldes which also is not without its importance) was ~Phersepho/nas he/dos~, Pi., P. xii, 2, having been given by Zeus to Persephone on her marriage, Sch. Pi., O. ii, 16 (as also had, in addition to other cities, Pindar's native city Thebes, Euphorion, fr. 48; cf. Eur., Phoen. 684 ff. Theron's family traced its descent from Eteokles the son of Oedipus). It is very possible that the hopes of a blessed immortality of the soul such as were fostered in many ways in the cult of the ~chtho/nioi~ and particularly in that of Persephone, should have been familiar to Theron from such a cult and attractive to him.]

[48\12: The theological character of much of Pindar's work makes knowledge of mystic doctrine not surprising in him. In fr. 137 he speaks of the Eleusinia (to which he otherwise owes nothing). In fr. 131, though the words are unfortunately most corrupt and probably contain lacunae as they have been transmitted, he speaks of the "releasing Initiations", ~olbi/a d' ha/pantes ai=sa lusi/ponon teleta/n~--this is the form of the words required by the metre (dactylo-epitritic), and thus (not ~teleuta/n~) they appear in Plu., Cons. Apoll. 35, p. 120 D, and also in cod. Vatic. 139 (which I have collated).]

[49\12: IG. xiv = IG. Sic. et It., 641, 1-2-3. [Harrison-Murray, Prolegom. 661 ff.; Vors. 66 B, 18, 19.]--The inscription of the oldest of these poems belongs to the fourth century B.C. The verses can, however, be cited here because the original or rather the two originals upon which the poems are modelled were older than the oldest of the three surviving inscr. (which itself shows serious corruption of the primitive text); and nothing prevents us from supposing that the original forms of these verses go to the fifth century.--The common ancestor of versions 2 and 3 is not derived from version 1, even in the parts in which it agrees with that version, but from a still older original.--Acc. to Dieterich, Nekyia 128 f., 135 f., the lines are taken from a poem of Orpheus' descent to Hades; but of this they themselves offer not the slightest suggestion.]

[50\12: The feminine ~e/rchomai ek katharô=n kathara/~--and also ~nu=n d' hike/tis hêkô~ (though this indeed is metrically impossible) IG. xiv, 641, 2, l. 6--refers probably to the ~psuchê/~ and not to the sex of the dead person as though a woman were speaking in all three cases. Moreover, in {448} No. 1, 9, Persephone speaks as though to a man ~o/lbie kai\ makariste/, theo\s d' e/sê| anti\ brotoi=o~.]

[51\12: l. 1, ~e/rchomai ek katharô=n kathara/, chthoni/ôn basi/leia~. This is certainly the right punctuation (and is given by the editors), and not Hofmann's ~ek katharô=n, kathara\ chth. b.~ "Pure and born of the pure" (referring to the immediate parents of the dead: more distant ancestry would be expressed by ~apo/~); cf. ~ka/kistos kak kakô=n~, etc. (Nauck on Soph., OT. 1397; Ph. 874); ~agathoi\ ex agathô=n o/ntes~, Andoc., M. 109.]

[52\12: The parents are ~katharoi/~, the soul of the dead ~kathara/~, simply as being "purified", "sanctified", in ~teletai/~ of the ~chtho/nioi~. In the same way, elsewhere, the Mystai are ~ho/sioi~ "the pure": see above, chap. vi, n. 18.]

[53\12: ~kai\ ga\r egô\n humô=n ge/nos o/lbion eu/chomai ei=men~--so in all three versions.]

[54\12: ~alla/ me moi=r' eda/masse kai\ asteropê=ta keraunô=n~ (particip.): so in the original to which the readings of three versions point, as restored by O. Hofmann in GDI. 1654. ~asteroblê=ta~ is in No. 1--this might simply = ~asteropoblê=ta~, but it may only have been substituted by mistake for ~asteropê=ta ( = asteropêtê/s~ of Homer). The line in this form occurs in No. 1, 4. Versions 2 and 3 have ~ei/te me moi=r' eda/mass' ei/t' astropê=ta keraunô=n~. But the dead had no choice between natural death (for this is what ~moi=ra~ must mean as contrasted with death by the thunderbolt) and death by being struck by lightning; one or other of the two (or more) forms of death must in actual fact have occurred. In this embarrassment--for death by lightning is not a very frequent occurrence--the ancient verse was altered in such a way that it might refer also to one who had died a natural death. The attempt was indeed not a great success. Originally death by lightning can alone have been mentioned (as in No. 1) and the original form of the lines must have referred to someone who had actually perished in this way. The dead person was then immediately regarded as sanctified simply on account of the method of his death; he became a ~hiero\s nekro/s~ translated to a higher and continued life: see above, chap. ix, n. 127, and Appendix i. This is the only interpretation of the lines which gives any point to the introduction here of this peculiar manner of death--one who has been thus translated out of life will certainly now be ~theo\s anti\ brotoi=o~.]

[55\12: ~ku/klos tê=s gene/seôs~, rota fati, etc. Lob., Agl. 798 ff.]

[56\12: ~himertou= d' epe/ban stepha/nou posi\ karpali/moisi, Despoi/nas d' hupo\ ko/lpon e/dun chthoni/as basilei/as~, No. 1, 6-7. The ~ste/phanos~ will probably be the sacred precinct, the enclosure that surrounds the realm of Persephone, as Dieterich, De hymn. Orph. 35, very plausibly suggests.]

[57\12: See Appendix xi.]

[58\12: ~hô/s me pro/phrôn pe/mpsê| he/dras es euage/ôn~. The ~he/drai euage/ôn~ correspond to the ~chô=ros eusebô=n~ of other poets and mythologists. But the strange phrase does also contain an allusion to the fact that this paradise of the "pure" is specially reserved for the initiates of the mysteries. The ~euagê/s~, the man untouched by any ~a/gos~, is ~ho/sios (ho/sios e/stô kai\ euagê/s~ law ap. And., M. 96): ~euagei=n = hosiou=n~ in an ins. from Ialysos in Rhodes, IGM. Aeg. i, 677. Ordinary non-religious language also preserves the original meaning of the word: it frequently means (in contrast to ~skotô/dês~ and the like) "bright, pure, clean" (and in places, too, where it is customary to insert without good reason ~euaugê/s~, following the ex. of Hemsterh. on Eur., Suppl. 662).]

[59\12: The similarity with the stages of the reward given to the good in Pindar is obvious: ~chô=ros eusebô=n~ in Hades; then and not till then {449} escape from the underworld and from human life as well. The only difference is that in Pi. the soul's final end is to become a ~hê/rôs~ while here it becomes ~theo/s~.]

[60\12: IG. xiv, 642.]

[61\12: id. 641, 1, v, 10, ~e/riphos es ga/l' e/peton~. 642, 4, ~theo\s ege/nou ex anthrô/pou. e/riphos es ga/la e/petes~. The conjunction of the two phrases in 642 shows that "As a kid I fell into the milk" is a condition of "I became a God". We may certainly recognize in the phrase a ~su/nthêma~ or ~su/mbolon~ of the Mystai like those usual in other secret initiatory rites--~ek tumpa/nou ephagon ktl.~, Lob. 23 ff.--which refer to performance of symbolical actions in the initiation ceremonies. The precise sense of this ~su/nthêma~ cannot be made out (Dieterich's efforts, H. Orph., p. 35, have not succeeded in clearing up the matter).]

[62\12: Worth remarking is the instruction ~all' hopo/tam' psuchê\ proli/pê| pha/os aeli/oio, dexio\n eisie/nai pephulagme/nos eu= ma/la pa/nta~ (this or something like it may have been the original form of the lines which have been thrown into confusion by the intrusion of the explanatory words ~dei= tina~). Then at the conclusion ~(ô=) chai=re chai=re, dexia\n hodoiporô=n leimô=na/s te hierou\s kai\ a/lsea Phersephonei/as.~ (~kai/~: this and nothing else is probably concealed by the KAT of the inscription--~kai/~ long before a vowel in 3rd thesis is even in Homer not unheard of.) Here at a comparatively early date we meet with the legend of the Two Ways at the entrance to the underworld, of which that to the right leads to the ~chô=ros eusebô=n~, the left to the place of punishment of the ~a/dikoi~. It may derive from the fancies of South Italian mystic sects. ~dexio/n~ and ~aristero/n~ in the Pythagorean table of Opposites--and in oionistike for a long time before that--mean the same as ~agatho/n~ and ~kako/n~ (Arist., Metaph. 1, 5, p. 986a, 24; cf. Iamb., VP. 156).--The ~U~ Pythagoreum denoted the parting of the ways of life to the right (to virtue) and to the left (vice): Serv., A. vi, 136; cf. O. Jahn, Pers., p. 155 f. Plato transferred the Two Ways to the underworld probably following Pythagorean example, Rp. 614 C; cf. ~tô\ hodô/~, Gorg. 524 A; divorso itinere, Cato ap. Sall., C. 52, 13, in a Platonist passage. To the right the fountain of Mnemosyne, to the left that of Lethe--grave-tablet from Petelia: Epigr. Gr. 1037 = IG. xiv. 638. The Two Ways in the underworld (of which that to the right hand regularly leads to salvation) are also spoken of by the ~poêtê/s~ whose lines are quoted by Hippol., RH. 5, 8, p. 164, 80 D.-S. (perhaps "Orpheus" as Dieterich, Nek. 193 thinks); cf. also Verg., A. vi, 540 ff., Hegesipp., AP. vii, 545, and the Jewish forgery under the name of Philem., Mein. 4, 67, 6 f. (ii, p. 539 K.).--Three Ways in the world of the spirits, which he takes as being in the sky, are seen by the Empedotimos of Herakld. Pont. (see above, chap. ix, n. 111): Serv., G. i, 34. Plutarch also alludes to three Ways in the underworld, Lat. Viv. vii, p. 1130, for in giving his quotation from Pindar's ~thrê=nos~ fr. 129-30 he suddenly, without having previously said anything about the other two Ways, speaks of the ~tri/tê tô=n anosi/ôs bebiôko/tôn kai\ para/nomôn hodo/s~ which leads into Erebos. We should suppose that he found these three Ways in Pindar whom he is making use of throughout the passage. Three Ways would seem natural to one who knew of three classes of souls; the ~eusebei=s~ and the ~asebei=s~ having in between them those who have not strayed seriously from either side of the middle way of ordinary morality and deserve neither reward nor severe punishment. To these then was probably allotted, instead of the bliss or sorrow of the two other classes, the indifferent state of the Homeric ~ei/dôla kamo/ntôn~. So at least it appears from Lucian, Luct. 7-9. A similar triple {450} division occurs in a popular form ap. D.H. viii, 52 ad fin.: (1) a place of punishment, a kind of Tartaros: (2) ~to\ lê/thês pedi/on~ (which is here the indifferent state); (3) the ~aithê/r~ which is the dwelling-place of the Blessed. Verg., too, has three classes, but he places the middling characters in the limbus infantium, beyond which the road first divides towards Elysium and Tartarus. Did Pindar then anticipate these and incidentally--he need not have been logically consistent about it--introduce such a triple division of the souls?]

[63\12: Plato's violent attacks on poets and poetry--in which nevertheless acc. to his own account ~oude\n spoudê=s chari/n, alla\ paidia=s he/neka pa/nta dra=tai~--show once more clearly enough that in his time the old Greek view of the poets as the true teachers of their age was by no means a thing of the past. It was precisely as teachers, whether rightly or wrongly so regarded, that they seemed to him dangerous and worth opposing.]

[64\12: Aristophanes is only formulating popular opinion--and in unusually naive language--when he says Ran. 1030 ~tau=ta ga\r a/ndras chrê\ poiêta\s askei=n; ske/psai ga\r ap' archê=s hôs ôphe/limoi tô=n poiêtô=n hoi gennai=oi gege/nêntai ktl.~ And again 1053 ff. where he is referring particularly to tragic dramatists, ~apokru/ptein chrê\ to\ ponêro\n to/n ge poiêtê/n, kai\ mê\ para/gein mêde\ dida/skein. toi=s me\n ga\r paidari/oisin e/sti dida/skalos ho/stis phra/zei, toi=s hêbô=sin de\ poiêtai/~.]

[65\12: This idea is alluded to as early as ~D~ 160 ff. Then Hes., Op. 282 ff. It is established for Hdt.; cf. i, 91, vi, 86. Further examples collected by Nägelsbach, Nachhom. Theol. 34 f. Thgn. 205 ff., 731 ff., is particularly definite. Among Attic authors; cf. Sol., fr. 13, 29 (~anai/tioi e/rga ti/nousin~); E., Hipp. 831 ff., 1378 ff. (where note ~to\n oude\n o/nt' epai/tion~), fr. 980; [Lys.] 6, 20; Lycurg. 79. It is briefly alluded to as a commonly held opinion by Isoc. 11, 25; cf. Lys., fr. 53 Th. The case of Diagoras of Melos the ~a/theos~ may also be remembered; cf. above, chap. vii, n. 16.--This idea of the punishment of the son for the deeds of the father receives its justification acc. to Plu., Ser. Nu. Vi. 16, 559 D (quite in accordance with primitive ideas) in the unity that belongs to all the members of the same ~ge/nos~--so that in the person of the son it is the father himself, though he may be dead, who is also punished. The idea arises from the deeply ingrained feeling of the unity, solidarity, and continuity of the ancient family cult-circle pre-supposed by the cult of souls. (This is primitive and meets us, e.g. in India as well: "release us from the wrongs that our fathers have done; take away the sins of that we ourselves have committed" is the prayer to Varuna in the Rigveda, 7, 86, 5. ~ta\ ek prote/rôn aplakê/mata~ are transferred also to the next generation "like a pestilence-breeding substance", Oldenberg, Rel. d. V. 289. Elsewhere the conception emerges that the guilty ancestor lives again in the descendant and is punished in his person: Robinsohn, Psychol. d. Naturv. 47.)]

[66\12: It is precisely on this point, namely, that evil does not befall men without their own fault, that the Chorus, i.e. the poet, of the Agamemnon (757), acknowledges ~di/cha d' a/llôn mono/phrôn eimi/~.]

[67\12: In this way, too, the Stoics saved the responsibility of men for their own deeds in spite of the unavoidable ~eimarme/nê~. The deeds would not have come to fruition if the personal ~sugkata/thesis~ of the man had not been added to the original necessary cause conditioning the acts. The ~sugk.~, though not itself "free", yet always remains ~eph' hêmi=n~ and makes us responsible: Cic., Fat. 18; Nemes. Nat. Hom., p. 291 Matth.] {451}

[68\12: Clearly so from l. 689 onwards.]

[69\12: ~ta\ ga\r ek prote/rôn aplakê/mata/ nin pro\s ta/sd' (ta\s Erinu/as) apa/gei~, Eum. 934.]

[70\12: Only when Eteokles and Polyneikes have fallen in single combat ~e/lêxe dai/môn~, Sept. 956.]

[71\12: This idea is quite common in Homer (Nägelsbach, Hom. Theol. 70 f., 320 f.), and in later times reappears frequently in the case of such authors as always, or on occasion, express popular ideas: Thgn. Hdt. esp. Eur. (cf. Fr. Trag. Adesp. 4, 55 N.), and the orators: see Nägelsbach, Nachhom. Th. 54 ff., 332 f., 378.]

[72\12: ~apa/tês dikai/as ouk apostatei= theo/s~, fr. 301 S. This, too, must be the meaning of other expressions in which the poet refers less plainly to the righteous purpose of divine deception: Pers. 93 ff., 742; frr. 156, 302 (cf. also Suppl. 403 f.).--Aristoph. makes his Clouds speak quite in accordance with the Aeschylean ideas, Nub. 1458 ff. This grim idea must, in fact, have had considerable success and spread beyond the stage. Falsehood and deception for a good end presented no difficulty to the mind of the Greeks (even as applied to their gods). Hence Sokrates (in Xen.), Plato, and certain Stoics could quite openly approve of and recommend such falsehoods (and the author of the ~Diale/xeis~, c. 3 in defending the same theory also appeals to the lines of Aesch.).]

[73\12: Ag. 1497-1508. Here there is a clear opposition between the popular view which attributed all guilt to an ~ala/stôr~ tempting to crime (a reminiscence of which appears in Soph., El. 197 ff.), and the more elevated conception of the poet who holds fast to the view that though the ~ala/stôr~ may contribute to the result the agent of the evil deed is not ~anai/tios~.]

[74\12: The dead man stands in need of the cult paid by his surviving kinsfolk, Cho. 484 (his grave a ~bômo/s~, Cho. 106; ~choai\ gamê/lioi~ for him, 486 f.). As an appeasement of his easily aroused wrath ~choai\ nerte/rôn meili/gmata~, Cho. 15. The dead man is still conscious of events both past and present upon earth: ~phro/nêma tou= thano/ntos ou dama/zei puro\s malera\ gna/thos~, Cho. 324 f. In the song of awakening addressed to the departed and the invocations sung by Electra and the Chorus in Cho. the soul of Agamem. is similarly regarded as fully alive and accessible to the callers (though, indeed, ~ex amaura=s phreno/s~ 157) and addressed accordingly (cf. 139, 147 f., 156 f., 479 ff.; Pers. 636). It is even expected that his soul, invisibly present in the upper world, will take an active share in the work of vengeance: ~a/kouson es pha/os molô/n, xu\n de\ genou= pro\s echthrou/s~, Cho. 459; cf. 489. So, too, Orestes, Eum. 598, hopes in his extremity of need that ~arôga\s ek ta/phou pe/mpsei patê/r~. More especially the murdered man has a right to be avenged by his ~agchistei=s (oud' ap' a/llôn~, Cho. 472) and Apollo himself has commanded Orestes to take such vengeance, Cho. 269 ff., etc. Dread results of neglecting this duty, Cho. 278-96 (possibly an interpolated passage, but still an extension of the words of A. himself 271 ff. in a sense thoroughly in consonance with popular belief).]

[75\12: The Erinyes only avenge the murder of a blood-relation and not therefore when one of a married pair is murdered by the other, Eum. 210-12, 604 ff. But the opinion emerges that they are particularly charged with the vengeance of a mother who has been murdered by her son (rather than a father who has suffered the same fate), 658 ff., 736 ff. (Reminiscences of such a view in S., El. 341 ff., 352 ff.; E., Orest. 552 ff., fr. 1064.) This may possibly be an old popular belief (not fully understood by A. himself) which need not, however (as is often {452} supposed), depend upon an ancient system of "matriarchy" for which there is no other evidence in Greece. It is simply explained by the fact that the father has plenty of men still living among his kinsfolk who will avenge him (even against his own son), whereas the mother who is separated from her own family can expect no avenger from that side, while in the family of her husband there will be nobody yet old enough to take vengeance on her own son. For this reason it is for her most particularly and necessarily that the daimonic avengers of murder must intervene, and they are the Erinyes, who are always thought of as only active where no earthly avenger is available.--Of course, it could never be denied that there exists also ~patro\s euktai/an Erinu/n~, Sep. 783.]

[76\12: ~dai/môn, theo/s, di=os ana/ktôr, isodai/môn basileu/s~ are titles given only to the dead Persian king, Pers. 620, 633, 644, 651. They are, however, probably intended to characterize Persian and not Greek beliefs (the Greek king, too, is still a king in Hades, but not a ~dai/môn~, Cho. 355-62).]

[77\12: ~kakei= dika/zei tamplakê/math', hôs lo/gos, Zeu\s a/llos~ (cf. ~Zê=na tô=n kekmêko/tôn~ 158) ~en kamou=sin husta/tas di/kas~, Suppl. 230 f.; cf. 414 ff.--~me/gas ga\r Ha/idês esti\n eu/thunos brotô=n e/nerthe chtho/nos, deltogra/phô| de\ pa/nt' epôpa=| phreni/~, Eum. 273 ff. Not even in Hades do the Erinyes let the murderer go, Eum. 340. The punishment in Hades seems to be regarded as merely supplementary to the (perhaps delayed) punishment of crime on earth ~rhopê\ d' episkopei= di/kas tachei=a tou\s me\n en pha/ei, ta\ d' en metaichmi/ô| sko/tou me/nei chroni/zontas a/chê, tou\s d' a/kratos e/chei nu/x~, Cho. 61 ff.]

[78\12: ~tou\s thano/ntas ei the/leis euergetei=n ei/t' ou=n kakourgei=n, amphidexi/ôs e/chei tô=| mê/te chai/rein mê/te lupei=sthai nekrou/s~, fr 266. This does, not, however, agree with Cho. 324 f., or with the frequently occurring expressions which presuppose consciousness and feeling (and so also ~chai/rein~ and ~lupei=sthai~) in the dead. Consistency in such matters must not, in fact, be looked for in a non-theological poet. The ~psuchê/~ of the dead man a shadow without the sap of life, fr. 229. Death a refuge from earthly suffering, fr. 255. The speedy death which the Chorus wish for themselves, Ag. 1449 ff., brings with it ~to\n aei\ ate/leuton hu/pnon~ and therefore a condition of unconsciousness if not of complete nothingness.--The shadow of Dareios takes his leave of the Persian nobles in the foll. words: ~humei=s de/, pre/sbeis, chai/ret', en kakoi=s ho/môs psuchê\n dido/ntes hêdonê=| kath' hême/ran, hôs toi=s thanou=si plou=tos oude\n ôphelei=~, Pers. 840 ff. This view of life is perhaps intended to have an Oriental colouring (like the epitaph of Sardanapalus which is rightly quoted in illustration of this passage); the reason given ~hôs toi=s thanou=si ktl.~ is perhaps to be similarly explained.]

[79\12: ~e/ndikoi sphagai/~, 37. Orestes is to his father's house ~di/kê| kathartê\s pro\s theô=n hôrmême/nos~ 70.]

[80\12: One reason why no Erinys pursues Orestes after he has murdered his mother is, indeed, the fact that Sophokles is treating the "Elektra" in isolation as an independent drama and could not therefore introduce a fresh thread of interest at the end, if he was to bring it to a satisfactory conclusion. But the mere fact that he could so arrange matters shows that for him, in contrast with Aeschylus, the belief in the veritable reality of the Erinys and the necessary perpetuation of the idea of vengeance in the family was already obscured and almost obsolete. The ancient family blood-feud is less important to him than the rights of the separate and independent individual.]

[81\12: Casual allusions, El. 504 ff.; OC. 965; Ant. 856; and cf. 584 ff., 594 ff.] {453}

[82\12: ~ou ga\r i/dois a\n athrô=n broto\n ho/stis a\n, ei theo\s a/goi, ekphugei=n du/naito~, O.C. 252. ~ho/tan de/ tis theô=n bla/ptê|, du/nait' a\n oud' a\n ho sthe/nôn phugei=n~, El. 696 f. ~ai/schê me/n, ô= gunai=kes, oud' a\n hei=s phu/goi brotô=n poth' hô=| kai\ Zeu\s~ (as the one who rules and ordains everything, cf. El. 175; O.C. 1085) ~ephormê/sê| kaka/; no/sous d' ana/gkê ta\s theêla/tous phe/rein~, fr. 619 N.]

[83\12: Phil. 191-200.]

[84\12: It is fixed long before by an oracle: 821 ff.; 1159 ff. It is not exactly overpowering violence or heaven-sent madness that drives Deianeira to carry out the prophecy; it is rather an obscure force that transforms her purest intentions to an evil result. She herself is completely innocent: ~hê/marte chrêsta\ môme/nê~.]

[85\12: The reason for this will of the gods is not revealed to us, either in OT. or in the subsequent treatment given in OC. The only thing that is made quite clear there is the complete innocence of Oedipus; as to the meaning of the divine purpose that has plunged him into such deeds of horror the sufferer can only say ~theoi=s ga\r ê=n hou/tô phi/lon, ta/ch' a/n ti mêni/ousin eis ge/nos pa/lai~ (964 f.). This is a passage in which modern interpretation of the ancients finds the "upholding of the moral order in the world" clearly expressed as a motive of divine will.]

[86\12: ~kai\ ga\r ê=n tô=n theosebesta/tôn~, Sch., El. 831.]

[87\12: fr. 226 N., ~sopho\s ga\r oudei\s plê\n ho\n a\n tima=| theo/s. all' eis theo/n s' horô=ta, ka\n e/xô di/kês chôrei=n keleu/ê|, kei=s' hodoiporei=n chreô/n. aischro\n ga\r oude\n hô=n huphêgou=ntai theoi/~.]

[88\12: Aias has angered the goddess because he has boasted that he could do without her help. Thus he has drawn upon himself ~astergê= thea=s orgê/n~, 776. The goddess makes him insane that he may recognize ~tê\n theô=n ischu\n **ho/sê~, 118. Thus, her superior power is shown and the folly of men who despise that power. But as for showing that the revengeful act of the goddess has any sort of moral purpose or meaning behind it, the pious poet makes no such attempt.--The interpolation of ideas more familiar in modern times does not make it any easier to understand the peculiar character of such antique ~euse/beia~ and ~deisidaimoni/a~. The same kind of fearful awe of the gods which we find here, runs through the whole of Herodotos' historical writing (Hdt. was not without reason a friend of Sophokles) and meets us again in the character of Nikias and to a large extent in Xenophon, too. Thuc. and, on the whole, Eurip. (for he varies) calmly ignore it or else violently reject it. Its nature is shown (better than in the more usual ~euse/beia~) by the phrase ~hê pro\s tou\s theou\s eula/beia~ which also occurs: [D.] 59 (Neaer.) 74.]

[89\12: Trach. 1266 f.; 1272 (where, however, there remains a suspicion that the traditional text may be unsound); fr. 103 N. Parallels occur also in Phil.]

[90\12: There exists a region of divine mystery that is not to be fathomed: ~ou ga\r a\n ta\ thei=a krupto/ntôn theô=n ma/thois a/n, oud' ei pa/nt' epexe/lthois skopô=n~, fr. 833; cf. OT. 280 f. and ~polla\ kai\ lathei=n kalo/n~, fr. 80 N.]

[91\12: The behaviour of Athene in the prologue of the Aias is an exception.]

[92\12: Odysseus beholding the insane Aias: ~epoikti/rô de/ nin du/stênon o/nta kai/per o/nta dusmenê=, hothou/nek' a/tê| sugkate/zeuktai kakê=|, oude\n to\ tou/tou ma=llon ê\ toumo\n skopô=n; horô= ga\r hêma=s oude\n o/ntas a/llo plê\n ei/dôl' ho/soiper zô=men, ê\ kou/phên skia/n~, Ai. 121 ff.]

[93\12: ~iô\ geneai\ brotô=n ktl.~ OT. 1186 ff.; ~ho/stis tou= ple/onos me/rous chrê/|zei . . .~ OC. 1211-38; cf. frr. 12, 535, 536, 588, 859, 860.]

[94\12: Nor is Antigone affected by such motives as might appear from a casual or isolated study of such lines as Ant. 73 ff. The whole play {454} shows that Antig. throughout follows the ~a/grapta kasphalê= theô=n no/mima~ and the instincts of her own nature, without paying any attention to what may happen to her on earth and without a side glance at what may be the result in the world below of her "pious crime".]

[95\12: We often have ~en Ha/idou kekeutho/tôn~ (Ant. 911) ~muchou\s kichei=n tou= ka/tô theou=~ (Ai. 571) and other phrases = "be dead" (cf. to be an ~oikê/tôr~ of Erebos, Ai. 395 ff. Hades seems to be called ~pando/kos xeno/stasis~ fr. 252). The confusion of the idea of a kingdom of Hades with that of the grave is shown in the not infrequent expression ~en Ha/idou, par' Ha/idê| kei=sthai~, El. 463; OT. 972; Ph. 861; ~phi/lê met' autou= kei/somai phi/lou me/ta~, Ant. 73; cf. fr. 518.]

[96\12: ~to\n apo/tropon Ha/idan~, Ai. 608; fr. 518.]

[97\12: The dead man is a ~skia/~, Ai. 1231. ~spodo\s kai\ skia\ anôphelê/s~, El. 1159a. ~mêde/n~, El. 1166; Ai. 1231.--In spite of this, in the Homeric manner, a definite shape and a measure of semi-conscious existence is presumed in the shades in Hades: OT. 1371 ff.--Doubt: ~ei/ tis e/st' ekei= cha/ris~, El. 356.]

[98\12: ~thano/ntôn oude\n a/lgos a/ptetai~, OC. 955. ~toi=s ga\r thanou=si mo/chthos ou prosgi/gnetai~, Tr. 1173. ~tou\s ga\r thano/ntas ouch horô= lupoume/nous~, El. 1170. (All three lines are denied to Soph. by the latest criticism.)]

[99\12: Ph. 797 f.; Ai. 854; OC. 1220 ff.; fr. 631 (cf. A., fr. 255; Fr. Tr. Adesp. 360. ~limê\n kakô=n ho tha/natos~, a commonplace of later moralists: see Wyttenb. Plu., Mor. vi, p. 720, was taken over from tragedy).--The converse fr. 64, 275.]

[100\12: Collectively ~hoi ne/rteroi, hoi ne/rteroi theoi/~, OC. 1661; Ant. 602. Hades in particular is often mentioned, and also ~Plou/tôn~: ~Ha/idês stenagmoi=s kai\ go/ois plouti/zetai~, OT. 30; fr. 251. ~ho para\ to\n Ache/ronta (ta\n Ache/rontos akta/n~, Ant. 812. ~akta\n hespe/rou theou=~, OT. 177) ~theo\s ana/ssôn~, El. 184. Persephone and Aidoneus, OC. 1556 ff. Erinyes, Thanatos, Kerberos: OC. 1568 ff. ~pompai=os Hermê=s chtho/nios~, Ai. 832; and see El. 110 B., etc.--~Ha/idês~ (here as often = ~Tha/natos~) desires to devour men: ~dai/sasthai~, El. 542, f.--a popular conception or at least popular language: see above, chap. vii, n. 25.]

[101\12: Hades ~ho\s ou/te tou\pieike\s ou/te tê\n cha/rin oi=den, monê\n d' e/sterxe tê\n haplôs di/kên~, fr. 703, i.e. the justice of absolute equality (for all earthly distinctions have passed away): ~ho/ g' Ha/idês tou\s no/mous i/sous pothei=~, Ant. 519.]

[102\12: ~hê ga\r euse/beia sunthnê/|skei brotoi=s~ (it dies when the man dies to whom it belonged: i.e. it follows him, or his ~psuchê/~, into the lower-world. No textual corruption need be assumed here, ~ka\n zô=si ka\n tha/nôsin ouk apo/llutai~, Ph. 1443 f.]

[103\12: Without ritual burial the dead man is ~tô=n ka/tôthe theô=n a/moiros akte/ristos ano/sios ne/kus~, Ant. 1070 f.]

[104\12: ~enta/phia hoi=a toi=s ka/tô nomi/zetai~, El. 326. ~kteri/smata~, 434, 931. ~loutra/~, 84, 434 (cf. above, chap. v, nn. 106, 107), ~e/mpura~, 405. ~choai/~, 440.--El. 452, prayer is made to the dead that he "shall help us and Orestes" ~ho/pôs to\ loipo\n auto\n aphneôte/rais chersi\n ste/phômen ê\ ta\ nu=n dôrou/metha~ (at present only a lock of hair and a girdle, 448 ff.).--Offerings to the dead made by foes and even the approach of such persons to the neighbourhood of the grave is displeasing and hateful to the departed who lies therein: El. 431 ff., 442 ff.; Ai. 1394 f. (cf. above, chap. v, n. 109). In this case as in the cult of the soul generally the presence of the dead man in the grave, or else in its immediate neighbourhood, is presupposed--not his departure into an inaccessible land of the dead. The latter view, retained from Homeric {455} poetry, is generally allowed to remain incongruously side by side with the former.]

[105\12: El. 1066 ff.]

[106\12: The god of the underworld is ~ouk aperi/tropos~ of the murdered man: El. 182 f. Hence all the gods and spirits of the lower world are summoned to take vengeance for the murder of Agamemnon: El. 110-16. We hear of ~Di/kê hê xu/noikos tô=n ka/tô theô=n~ as the patron of the dead in their claim to justice: Ant. 451.]

[107\12: Herakles in giving his last commands to Hyllos finally threatens the latter: ~ei de\ mê/, menô= s' egô\ kai\ ne/rthen ô/n, arai=os eis aei\ baru/s~, Tr. 1201 f.; cf. fr. 367; see above, chap. v, n. 148.]

[108\12: Elektra thinks that Agamemnon himself may have sent the ~duspro/sopt' onei/rata~ to Klytaimnestra: El. 459 f. (There is no reason for altering the traditional text here--with Nauck--to make the gods the senders of the dreams instead of the dead man. ~hê/rôes~, too, can send nocturnal visions of terror: see above, chap. ix, n. 102.) Here Elektra supposes that by sending such harbingers of his wrath the unavenged victim of murder has signified his readiness to assist in the taking of vengeance. This makes perfectly good sense and is the only interpretation that suits the context of Elektra's admonitions to her sister.]

[109\12: ~arôgo/s~, El. 454. ~zô=sin hoi ga=s ka/tô kei/menoi. pali/rruton ga\r hai=ma hupexairou=si tô=n ktano/ntôn hoi pa/lai thano/ntes~, El. 1419 f. "The dead man brings death to the living," Nauck on Tr. 1163.]

[110\12: frr. 753, 805.]

[111\12: OC. 1049 ff., 680; fr. 736.]

[112\12: Oedipus does not die but vanishes (is seen no more, 1649); the depths of the earth open and receive him: 1661 f., 1681. What is meant is translation without death as in the case of Amphiaraos, etc. The poet only hints at the miracle in intentionally vague words--but they cannot refer to anything but translation. ~ô/leto~ 1656, and ~e/thane~ are therefore only inaccurate expressions to describe his departure (see also above, chap. iii, n. 2). The Messenger of 1583 f. refuses, however, to give a distinct answer to the question of the Chorus ~o/lôle ga\r du/stênos~; he will only hint that Oedipus has indeed ~o/lôle~ (1580), but has not simply died--he has instead been translated out of earthly life. The corrupt ~hôs leloipo/ta kei=non to\n aei\~ (this was already what the Alexandrians read) ~bi/oton exepi/staso~ may not therefore be altered simply into ~to\n aino/n, to\n a/bion bi/oton~. It may perhaps have originally been something like ~to\n e/ntha, to\n en gê=|, to\n andrô=n bi/oton~ (cf. Medea to her children ~es a/llo schê=m' aposta/ntes bi/ou~, E., Med. 1039. A dead woman ~hupokechô/rêke aiphni/dion tou= kath' hêma=s bi/ou~. Ins. from Amorgos, BCH. 1891, p. 576, ll. 9-10).]

[113\12: A distinct act of precaution against disbelief in such a miracle: OC. 1665 f. (cf. ~e/rrei de\ ta\ thei=a~, OT. 906 ff.; which refers esp. to the belief in the Oracle of Loxias, a matter of great importance to Soph.).]

[114\12: The innocence of Oedipus and the fact that the awful crimes committed by him have been done in ignorance and against his will ~theô=n ago/ntôn~, is stressed in order that his elevation to the position of Heros may not seem to be an honour done to a guilt-stained criminal. But the poet does not attribute positive virtues to him even in OC.--far less in fact than in OT.]

[115\12: One has only to read the play without preconceived ideas to see that this passionate and savage old man, pitilessly heaping dreadful curses on his sons, gloating vindictively over the coming misfortunes {456} of his own country, is quite ignorant of the "deep peace from the gods" or the "illumination of the pious sufferer" which conventional literary interpretation has been anxious to ascribe to him. The poet is not one to gloss over the harsh realities of life with trite phrases of vapid consolation, and he has clearly perceived that the usual effect of unhappiness and misery upon men is not to "illuminate" but to enfeeble and vulgarize them. His Oedipus is pious (he was that from the beginning in OT. as well), but he is made savage, ~êgri/ôtai~, exactly like Philoktetes in his misery (Ph. 1321).]

[116\12: Humanitarianism of Athens and her king: 562 ff., 1125 ff.]

[117\12: It is emphasized over and over again that the settlement of Oedipus on Attic soil is meant to bring about the salvation of the Athenians and the discomfiture of the Thebans (Apollo's oracle has thus decreed it): 92 f., 287 f., 402, 409 ff., 576 ff., 621 ff. The whereabouts of the valuable possession must therefore be kept secret (as frequently with the graves of Heroes: see above, chap. iv, n. 38); 1520 ff. This elevation of Oedipus to be the ~sôtê/r~ of Attica (459 f.) is evidently what makes the interest and importance for the poet of the whole mystery which he relates.]

[118\12: ~nu=n ga\r theoi/ s' orthou=si, pro/sthe d' ô/llusan~, 394. The gods now feel ~ô/ran tina/~ for Oedipus, 386. After many ~pê/mata pa/lin sphe dai/môn di/kaios au/xoi (a/n)~, 1565 f. It is, in fact, an act of kindness after a long period of ill-usage; there is a reversal of fortune, but there is no reward or indemnification given in recognition of a just claim. It is all grace.]

[119\12: In this, too, ~hôs a/n tis hei=s tô=n chrêstô=n Athênai/ôn~ (Ion ap. Ath. 13, 604 D).]

[120\12: Prodikos is, acc. to Welcker, Kl. Schr. ii, 497 ff., responsible for most of the theories propounded in the Ps.-Platonic Axiochus on the subject of the ~athanasi/a tê=s psuchê=s~, Ax. 370 B ff., the tendency of the soul to the heavenly ~aithê/r~ (366 A, and even of the Platonizing fantasy at the end about the fate of the departed (371-2). Prodikos, if we adopted this attribution, would become less the "forerunner of Sokrates" (as Welcker calls him) than the forerunner of Plato. There is, however, no real reason to attribute to him any more share in that document than is asserted distinctly in it. The brief and carelessly composed pamphlet consists of a medley of the conventional ingredients of the usual ~lo/goi paramuthêtikoi/~ loosely strung together. To Prod. is assigned: the disquisition on the troubles of life in all its stages 336 D-367 E; and the saying ~ho/ti ho tha/natos ou/te peri\ tou\s zô=nta/s estin ou/te peri\ tou\s metêllacho/tas ktl.~, 369 B (cf. Buresch, Leip. Stud. ix, 8-9). These two passages put together would establish as the opinion of Prodikos just the opposite of what Welcker wishes to ascribe to him. He would show himself as a true ~peisitha/natos (--ex ekei/nou thanata=| mou hê psuchê/~, 366 C), who would make death a mere exit into a state of unconsciousness after the troubles of life, and thus seem an absolute nonentity. But the piece is in reality quite without authority: it apparently puts forward the name of Prodikos, who is so often stated in Plato to have been the "teacher" of Sokrates, merely in order to have a definite authority (like the fabulous Gobryes later on) for what the author does not wish to represent Sokrates as saying on his own account. One of the sayings attributed to the imaginary Prodikos, ~ho/ti ho tha/natos . . .~ is, however, only too clearly a simple appropriation of Epicurus' aphorism, ~ho tha/natos oude\n pro\s hêma=s ktl.~ (p. 61, 6 Usen.; cf. p. 227, 30; 391. Heinze also points this out, Ber. sächs. Ges. d. Wiss. 1884, p. 332). The other passage (366 D ff.) agrees suspiciously {457} with what Teles (p. 38 Hens.) has to say on the same subject apparently in entire dependence on Krates the Cynic. It seems extremely probable that the author of the Axiochus also had Krates before him or even Teles (as Wyttenbach already suggested, Plu., Mor. vi, p. 41); and that he attributes what he has thus borrowed from extraneous sources to "Prodikos" by a fiction that never came amiss to the composers of such dialogues.--It follows then that what Prodikos really said about the soul and its destiny is unknown to us; cf. on this recently much-discussed subject: Brinkmann, Rh. Mus. 51, 444 ff.]

[121\12: In the Prologue Thanatos at once describes his claims and his office. He has to receive the departed and cut off the lock of hair from the forehead (75 f. probably as a sign that the dead enter into the possession of the underworld deities: in Verg., A. iv, 698 f. Proserpina in the same way dedicates the dead to Orcus). He then leads them to Hades, 871. He comes in person to the grave and enjoys the offerings laid there, 844 ff., 851 f. (like the dead man himself on other occasions, see above, chap. v, n. 108). Properly speaking he is only the servant of Hades; but just as the word ~ha/|dês~ was already common as = ~tha/natos~, so Thanatos himself is also actually called ~Ha/idês~ (268, see above, n. 4); only as identical with Hades can he be called ~a/nax nekrô=n~, 843; cf. ~daimo/nôn koi/ranos~, 1140.--In the underworld are Charon ~ho psuchopompo/s~, 361, 254 ff., 458 f., and Kerberos, 360. Hades and Hermes ~chtho/nios~ receive the dead. ~ei de/ ti kakei= ple/on e/st' agathoi=s~ Alkestis will have the seat of honour next to Persephone: 744 ff. By the living who survive she is regarded on account of her incomparable virtue as ~ma/kaira dai/môn~ and her grave is not the abode of a dead woman but a place of worship, 995-1005. Such facile elevation to the rank of "Heroine" was supposed to be characteristic of Thessaly and Eurip. may in this also have intended to give his poem a touch of Thessalian local colour. (~dai/môn~ as an intermediate stage between ~theoi/~ and ~a/nthrôpoi~; so frequently in Eur., e.g. Tro. 55-6; Med. 1391; is this the meaning of the ~me/son~ in Hel. 1137?)--Thoroughly in keeping with popular belief is ~chai=re kan Ha/idou do/mois eu= soi ge/noito~, 626 f. (such a ~chai=re~ is the last word with which ~hôs nomi/zetai~ one addresses the dead ~exiou=san husta/tên ho/don~, 609 f.). Similar also (but really implying the conception of the dead as resting in the grave and not in Hades) is: ~kou=pha/ soi chthô\n epa/nôthe pe/soi~, 463.]

[122\12: The funeral dirge, 86 ff.; ~ko/smos~ buried with the dead, 618 ff.; mourning ceremonies: the manes of the horses are cut short; no sound of flute or lyre is to be heard in the town for twelve months, 428 ff. (~pe/nthos etê/sion~ is usual, 336). These extreme observances are probably taken from the mourning customs of the Thessalian dynastic families.]

[123\12: Burial of the dead in accordance with ~no/mos palaio\s daimo/nôn~, Suppl. 563; ~no/mima theô=n~, 19; a general Hellenic custom, 526 f.--Burial of Polyneikes in spite of Kreon's prohibition: Phoen. and probably ~Antigo/nê~.]

[124\12: ~toi=s ga\r thanou=si chrê\ to\n ou tethnêko/ta tima\s dido/nta chtho/nion eusebei=n theo/n~, Ph. 1320 f. ~en eusebei= gou=n no/mima mê\ kle/ptein nekrô=n~, Hel. 1277. The honour of the grave more important even than good fortune upon earth, Hec. 317 f. Lament over the dishonouring of the grave of Agamem., El. 323 ff. Request for the burial of Astyanax, Tro. 1133 ff., of Orestes, IT. 702 ff., of Makaria, Hcld. 588 ff. The shade of the murdered Polydoros prays especially for burial, Hec. 47 ff. (31 f., 796 f.). He is an example of the wandering of the ~a/taphoi~ upon the upper earth; he ~a/thaptos alai/nei~, Tro. 1084 (see above, p. 163, and Append. vii).--Funeral ceremony for those who have {458} been drowned at sea, Hel. 1057 ff., 1253 ff.; though there the idea is only used as an excuse for the intrigue.]

[125\12: ~choai/~ for the dead, e.g. Or. 112 ff., El. 511 ff.; IT. 159 ff.]

[126\12: ~choai/~ make the dead ~eumenê=~ towards the givers of the offering, Or. 119. The children call upon the soul of the murdered father to help them, El. 676 ff., in the belief that ~pa/nt' akou/ei ta/de patê/r~, 684. The soul of the dead man hovers above the living observing everything, Or. 674 ff. Invocation of the dead (striking both hands on the ground: see above, chap. iii, n. 10), Tro. 1305 f. Expectation that the dead thus called on will ~sô=sai~ his friends, Or. 797, or help them, El. 679. Calling upon the departed in Hades ~a/rêxon, elthe\ kai\ skia\ pha/nêthi/ moi~, HF. 494 (though with the qualification ~ei/ tis phtho/ggos eisakou/setai thnêtô=n par' Ha/idê|~, 490).]

[127\12: Translation miracles are touched upon by the poet with obvious pleasure; cf. transl. of Kadmos and Harmonia, Bac. 1330 ff., 1338 ff.: of Peleus, Andr. 1257 ff.; of Helen, Or. 1629 ff.: of Herakles, Hcld. 910; of Menelaos (in unmistakable sarcasm), Hel. 1676 ff. So, too, in the spurious conclusion to the IA. there is a translation of Iphigeneia, 1583 ff. (~pro\s theou\s aphi/ptato~, 1608).]

[128\12: Eurystheus buried in the temple of Athene Pallenis will bring safety to Athens and evil to her enemies: Hcld. 1026 ff. Eurysth. says ~soi\ me\n eu/nous kai\ po/lei sôtê/rios me/toikos aei\ kei/somai kata\ chthono/s~, 1032 f.; i.e. he will become a ~hê/rôs sôtê/r~ of the land (just as Oedip. was to become ~sôtê/r~ for Attica. S., OC. 460, and Brasidas Heros ~sôtê/r~ of the Amphipolitans, Thuc. 5, 11, 1). Heroic cult of Hippolytos, Hip. 1423 ff., fr. 446.]

[129\12: The Erinyes are spoken of (apparently with real belief) in IT. 79 ff. and elsewhere.]

[130\12: Or. 258 f., not very different, IT. 288-94.]

[131\12: ~to\ thêriô=des tou=to kai\ miaipho/non~, Or. 524. Orestes instead of committing murder himself should have brought his father to justice, Or. 500 f. Agamemnon himself if he could have been asked would not have desired this bloody vengeance, Or. 288 ff. It is only Apollo's unwise counsel that has led Orestes to the murder of his mother, El. 971 ff., 1296 f.; Or. 276 ff., 416, 591. After the deed Orestes does indeed feel remorse but no religious terrors, El. 1177 (in spite of which there is much about the pursuing Erinyes of his mother). How completely this whole series of ideas, the duty of vengeance, etc., has lost its meaning for the poet, is to be felt more especially in the sophistical frigidity with which the subject is treated in an ~agô/n~ between Tyndareos and Orestes, Or. 491-604, and in the hair-splitting of the speech of Orestes himself, 932 ff.]

[132\12: ~dokô= de\ toi=s thanou=si diaphe/rein brachu/, ei plousi/ôn tis teu/xetai kterisma/tôn; keno\n de\ gau/rôm' esti\ tô=n zô/ntôn to/de~, Tro. 1248 ff.]

[133\12: fr. 176.]

[134\12: ~oude\n e/sth' ho katthanô/n~, Alc. 381. The dead are ~hoi ouke/t' o/ntes~ 322. ~toi=s~ (the dead) ~me\n ga\r oude\n a/lgos a/psetai/ pote, pollô=n de\ mo/chthôn eukleê\s epau/sato~, 937 f. But even fame is nothing to the dead. Admetos says to his father in the scurrilous dialogue ~thanei= ge me/ntoi duskleê/s, ho/tan tha/nê|s~. To which the old man unconcernedly replies ~kakô=s akou/ein ou me/lei thano/nti moi~ (725 f.).]

[135\12: It might seem simpler to regard all the utterances of persons in the plays which correspond to conventional beliefs as being merely dramatic expressions of the character's own (orthodox) view, and in no sense put forward by the poet as his own opinion. And certainly the separate and independently acting persons of the drama can only {459} speak and act in accordance with their own proper conceptions and springs of action--not in accordance with the poet's. But in the antique drama this complete detachment of the creatures of the dramatic imagination from their creator, the poet of the drama, only holds good in a limited sense. The ancient dramatists exercised their office of judge much more vigorously than the greatest of the moderns. The course of his play showed clearly what acts and characters the poet disapproved of, but also which opinions he sanctioned and which he did not. We have only to remember the attacks of Oedipus and Iokaste upon the judgments of the gods in OT. (or the story of Sen., Ep. 115, 14: Eur. fr. 324). Accordingly we may take it that such utterances of dramatic characters as are not supplied with practical or spoken corrective are among those of which the poet did not disapprove. Euripides so very frequently puts words into the mouth of his characters which can only express his own moods or opinions that we may also assume that when their language harmonizes with traditional belief then, too, the most subjective of the tragedians is for the moment expressing his own view. Thus, for example, we cannot doubt that the strain of piety running through the whole of the Hiketides (subjection of ~phro/nêsis~ to God's wisdom, 216 ff., submission to the guidance of the gods, 592 ff., and to Zeus' government of the world, 734 ff.), and especially the whole-hearted elaboration of the picture of Theseus as a model of ~euse/beia~ represent the actual opinion of the poet at that particular period (he clearly speaks of himself, 180-3). At other times, too (apart from the Bacchae), though generally for a short time only, he shows vague aspirations towards orthodoxy.]

[136\12: Alc. 968 ff.; Hipp. 952 ff.--Asceticism of the mystai of Zeus and Zagreus of the Mountain Mother and the Kouretes: ~Krê=tes~, fr. 472.]

[137\12: Polyid. fr. 638; Phrixos, fr. 833. It is usual (cf. Bergk, Gr. Litt. 3, 475, 33) to see here a reminiscence of Herakleitos. But the latter's ~atha/natoi thnêtoi/, thnêtoi\ atha/natoi, zô=ntes to\n ekei/nôn tha/naton, to\n de\ ekei/nôn bi/on tethneô=tes~ (fr. 67 Byw. 62 D.) is clearly intended to express the view that "death" and "life" are purely relative concepts; that death (of the one, i.e. Fire) and life (of the other, i.e, Water or Earth) are simultaneously present in the same object (see also frr. 68, 78 = 36, 88). According to this view it would be strictly true that life on earth is not more life than it is death; but that is certainly not what Eurip. means to say. Philo and Sext. Emp. are mistaken in attributing to Herakl. the Orphic doctrine of the "death" of the soul which takes place when it is enclosed in the ~sô=ma~, as its ~sê=ma~ (see above, chap. xi, n. 19). But it is precisely this Orphic doctrine that is present to the mind of Eurip. (and Plato, Gorg. 492 E, 493 A, brings it into immediate connexion with the verses of E.). He is speaking of the true "death" of the soul in the life of the body and of its release to a real (and not a merely relative) life after death; and thinks that "life" has no claim to the distinguishing name (cf. ~ho\ dê\ bi/oton kale/ousi~ Emped. 117 Mull. = fr. 15 D.).]

[138\12: Palingenesia is alluded to once only and in jest as a desirable reward for the virtuous, HF. 655-68; cf. M. Ant. xii, 5.]

[139\12: ~ho nou=s ga\r hêmô=n estin en heka/stô| theo/s~, fr. 1018.]

[140\12: fr. 839 (Chrysipp.) fully physical in fr. 898, 7 ff.--fr. 1023 ~Aithe/ra kai\ Gai=an pa/ntôn gene/teiran aei/dô~. Cf. fr. 1004.]

[141\12: fr. 484 ~(Melan. hê sophê/)--hôs ourano/s te gai=a/ t' ê=n morphê\ mi/a ktl.~ Here, too, the poet is speaking of a mere initial association of the elements afterwards to be parted, but thought of as always from the {460} beginning independent--there is no derivation of both from a single common original element, or of one out of the other. Eurip. may really have been thinking here of the ~ho/mou pa/nta chrê/mata ê=n~ of Anaxagoras (as the ancient authorities supposed), esp. as, with Anax. also, out of the general conglomeration two masses, ~aê/r~ and ~aithê/r~, first emerge (though in this case ~nou=s~ is not included in the ~aithê/r~ as it is with Eurip.). Here, too, then the usual dualism of the Euripidean cosmogony is preserved. For the rest this fr. 484 allows us to perceive that in spite of all his physiological tendencies Eurip. can never quite get rid of the mythical element in his cosmogonical events. The reason why Ouranos and Gaia in particular recommend themselves to him as elemental forces (and ~koinoi\ hapa/ntôn gonei=s~, fr. 1004) was that these figures had long been set at the beginning of the world and of the gods by cosmogonical poetry (~aithê/r~ is simply the more physiological term for what is half-personified as ~Ourano/s~). This probably explains why matter (or at least the more solid forms of matter as distinguished from the ~aithê/r~ the ~lepto/taton pa/ntôn chrêma/tôn~) is for him included in the description "earth". In this he is not following the old physiologists, none of whom had called "earth" the original matter--at least not earth alone (see Ilberg, Quaest. Pseudohippocrat., p. 16 ff., 1883). "Earth" as describing the merely material, matter deserted by spirit, may have come to him from popular usage. As early as ~Ô~ 54 the body deserted by soul and life is called ~kôphê\ gai=a~ (cf. Eur. frr. 532; 757, 5). Thus for the poet the contrast between ~gê=~ and ~aithê/r~ almost amounts to that between "matter" and "mind", except that he either could not or would not think of a "mind" without any material substratum and that for this reason his ~aithê/r~ still preserves a remnant of matter.]

[142\12: This is esp. clear in fr. 839, 8 ff. In the disruption of the elements out of which ~pa/nta~ are composed each of the two, ~gê=~ and ~aithê/r~, preserves itself undiminished and unmixed. ~thnê/|skei d' oude\n tô=n gignome/nôn diakrino/menon d' a/llo pro\s a/llou morphê\n idi/an ape/deixen~ (restores itself in its independent being). Whereupon we feel ourselves irresistibly reminded of the saying of Anaxagoras--~oude\n ga\r chrê=ma gi/netai oude\ apo/llutai, all' ap' eo/ntôn chrêma/tôn summi/sgetai/ te kai\ diakri/netai, kai\ hou/tôs a\n orthô=s kaloi=en to/ te gi/nesthai summi/sgesthai kai\ to\ apo/llusthai diakri/nesthai~, fr. 17 Mull. [and D.].]

[143\12: That it was not Anaxagoras, or at least not he alone, who gave the decided direction to the philosophic ideas of Eurip. has rightly come to be held of late. We do not find a trace in Eurip. of the separation of ~nou=s~ from matter, at least not in the form in which Anaxagoras understood it. For E. the mind is bound to one of the two primal elements and quite foreign to the other, the earth. Thus he arrives at a dualism indeed, but in quite a different sense from that of Anaxag. Dümmler, Proleg. zu Platons Staat (Progr. Basel, 1891), p. 48, points out reminiscences in Eurip. of Diogenes of Apollonia--but it is not true to say that the poet's views show the "closest kinship" with the monistic system of Diog., or with any Monism.]

[144\12: Tro. 884 ff. The air, called by the name of Zeus, and identical with the ~nou=s brotô=n~, can only be taken from the doctrine of Diog.: Diels, Rh. Mus. 42, 12.]

[145\12: Diog. Apoll., frr. 3, 4, 5 Mull. (= 8, 3, 4 D.). The soul is ~aê\r thermo/teros tou= e/xô, en hô=| esmen~, though it is colder than the air which is ~para\ tô=| hêli/ô|~, fr. 6 [5]. The soul is therefore more akin to the ~aithê/r~ than to the ~aê/r~ (~aithê/r~ and ~aê/r~ were at that time often confused: e.g. in E., fr. 944, ~aithê/r~ instead of ~aê/r~).] {461}

[146\12: Suppl. 1140 ~aithê\r e/chei nin ê/dê ktl.~ Elektra expects to find her dead father in the Aither, El. 59. Of a dying man, ~pneu=m' aphei\s eis aithe/ra~, fr 971 (differently, Or. 1086 f.); cf. also Suppl. 531-6 (imitated from Epicharm.), where again the ~aithê/r~ is only spoken of as the abode, and not as the original and consubstantial element of the soul.]

[147\12: ~aithê\r oi/kêsis Dio/s~, Eur., fr. 487 (Melanip.).]

[148\12: Epich., fr. 7, p. 257 Lor. [= fr. 265 Kaibel].]

[149\12: CIA. i, 442, ~aithê\r me\n psucha\s hupede/xato, sô/[mata de\ chthô\n~ tô=nde. . . .~]

[150\12: ~sunekri/thê kai\ diekri/thê, kapê=lthen ho/then ê=lthen pa/lin, ga= me\n es ga=n, pneu=m' a/nô; ti/ tô=nde cha/lepo/n? ou\de\ he/n~, Epich. ap. Plu., Cons. ad Apoll. 15, 110 A; Epich., fr. 8 [245 Kaib.]. ~pneu=ma~ as a general name for the ~psuchê/~ occurs also in Epich., fr. 7 [265]. No earlier authority is to be found for this usage that became so common later (under Stoic influence) than Xenophanes who ~prô=tos apephê/nato ho/ti hê psuchê\ pneu=ma~ (D.L. ix, 19). Epicharm. may have been actually following Xenophanes (whose writings he knew: Arist., Meta. iii, 5, 1010a, 6) in this use of the word. Eurip. then did the same, Suppl. 533. ~pneu=ma~ is the name given to the ~aê/r~ in so far as it is in motion. ~(hupolêpte/on, ei=nai sô=ma to\n ae/ra) gi/netai de\ pneu=ma kinêthei/s. outhe\n ga\r he/tero/n esti pneu=ma ê\ kinou/menos aê/r~: Hero, ~mêchan. su/st.~, p. 121 (ed. Diels = i, p. 6. ed. Schmidt) after Straton. The soul is called a ~pneu=ma~ just because the soul is that which has continual movement from its very nature (and is the principle of movement); as such it had already been regarded by Alkmaion (and later by Plato), and even before that by Pythagoras (see above, chap. xi, n. 40); in a different way by Herakleitos and Demokritos also. The universal ~aê/r~ and the Soul-~pneu=ma~, if we give the terms their proper meaning, are to be thought of as being of the same nature, so that the ~aê/r~, too (still more the ~aithê/r~ as a higher ~aê/r~), is psychical and animated by soul. That at least was how Diogenes of Apollonia regarded it. (~aê/r~ = the outer air, ~pneu=ma~ the air which is inside men's bodies: [Hp.] de Flatib. 3 [vi, 94 L.], a section taken from Diog. Ap.)]

[151\12: Numerous references in Eurip. to verses of Epicharm. are pointed out by Wilamowitz, Eurip. Herakles, i, 29. The fact that Eurip. knew the poems of Epich. and valued them for their philosophic contents is clearly made out by Wilamowitz' study. But he goes on to assert that all the allusions of Eurip. refer only to the (or one of the) forgeries in the name of Epicharm., of which many were known in antiquity. The reason alleged for this statement--"Euripides never quotes comedies"--is merely a petitio principii. It may be that Eurip. does not "quote" contemporary Attic comedy, but whether he maintained the same attitude to the brilliantly original comic poet of Sicily, whom Aristotle and even Plato (Gorg. 505 E and esp. Tht. 152 E) were not ashamed to notice, is the very point at issue; nothing is gained by unproved denial of this main premiss.--Moreover, it would be a most unusual species of forger that preferred to publish gems like ~na=phe kai\ . . .~ (imitated by Eurip.) or ~no/os horê=|~--under another man's name. The fragments of the ~Politei/a~, which is really a forgery fathered on Epicharmos (ap. Clem. Al., Str. v, p. 719 P. = Lor., p. 297), are of a very different character.]

[152\12: Archelaos makes a less satisfactory model for Eurip. here. Arch. in his reconciliation of the doctrines of Anaxagoras and Diogenes did not separate ~nou=s~ from the mixture of the material elements (or from the ~aê/r~), but he distinguished between them, while for the poet ~aithê/r~ and mind are the same.] {462}

[153\12: ~aithê/r~ = Zeus, fr. 941. ~aithê/r. . . . Zeu\s ho\s anthrô/pois onoma/zetai~, fr. 877. Hence the ~aithê/r~ is ~koruphê\ theô=n~, fr. 919.--In the same way for Diog. Ap. the air is god (Cic., ND. i, 29) and Zeus (Philod., Piet. c. 6b, p. 70 Gomp.; Dox. 536).--In E., fr. 941: ~to\n hupsou= to/nd' a/peiron aithe/ra kai\ gê=n pe/rix e/chonth' hugrai=s en agka/lais~ the ~aithê/r~ is not put instead of ~aê/r~ (for ~to\n hupsou=~ only suits ~aithê/r~ in its proper sense), but the two are combined under the one word (~hugrai=s en agka/lais~ could not be said of the ~aithê/r~ in the strict sense), just as the ~aê/r~ of Diogenes includes the ~aithê/r~ (for the hot ~aê\r para\ tô=| hêli/ô|~, fr. 6 [5 Diels] is, in fact, the ~aithê/r~, and so, too, essentially, is the warm ~aê/r~ in our bodies).]

[154\12: ~--eis atha/naton aithe/r' empesô/n~, Hel. 1016.]

[155\12: ~ho ento\s aê\r~ (which alone ~aistha/netai~--not the senses) ~mikro\n mo/rion ô\n tou= theou=~, Diog. ap. Thphr., Sens. 42.]

[156\12: The living air, or Zeus, is ~nou=s brotô=n~, Tro. 886. And vice versa, the ~nou=s~ in each one of us is no other than God, fr. 1018.]

[157\12: ~ho nou=s tô=n katthano/ntôn zê=| me\n ou/, gnô/mên d' e/chei atha/naton, eis atha/naton aithe/r' empesô/n~, Hel. 1013 ff.--Ambiguity attaches to the passages in which a dying person is said to depart ~eis a/llo schê=ma bi/ou~ (Med. 1039), ~es a/llas bio/tou morpha/s~ (Ion, 1068), to ~he/teron aiô=na kai\ moi=ran~ (IA. 1508). It is possible that in each case a personal existence continued in a land of the dead is understood--but if they mean no more than that they are remarkably pregnant in form. In reading them (esp. Med. 1039) one is reminded of the remarkable lines of Philiskos (pupil of Isocr.) ap. [Plu.] Vit. X Or., p. 243, 60 West. ~tô=| ga\r es a/llo schê=ma metharmosthe/nti kai\ a/llois en ko/smoisi bi/ou sô=ma labo/nth' he/teron~--said of the dead Lysias. But here the idea of metempsychosis seems really to be involved, which it can hardly be in the case of Eurip.]

[158\12: Eur. adopts it for himself, fr. 189 (Antiope), and confirms it by so many ~lo/gôn ha/millai~ in which he allows the most contradictory opinions about a single subject to be given equally plausible expression.]

[159\12: ~apeirosu/nê a/llou bio/tou~, etc. Hip. 191-7. ~to\ zê=n ga\r i/smen, tou= thanei=n d' apeiri/a| pa=s tis phobei=tai phô=s lipei=n to/d' hêli/ou~, fr. 816, 10 f. (Phoinix).]

[160\12: The dead man is ~gê= kai\ skia/--to\ mêde\n eis oude\n rhe/pei~, fr. 532; cf. 533, 534. ~to\ mê\ gene/sthai tô=| thanei=n i/son; hô/sper ouk idou=sa phô=s~ the dead woman knows nothing of herself or her sufferings, Tro. 636-44 (a locus often initiated in "consolations": Axioch. 365 D, Plu., Cons. ad Apoll. 15, p. 110 A).]

[161\12: ~phê/mê to\n esthlo\n kan muchoi=s dei/knusi gê=s~, fr. 865. ~aretê\ de\ ka\n tha/nê| tis ouk apo/llutai, zê=| d' ouket' o/ntos sô/matos~, fr. 734; cf. Andr. 772. At the sacrifice of Makaria the chorus in Hcld. 621 ff. can only offer as consolation the fame which awaits her--~oud' akleê/s nin do/xa pro\s anthrô/pôn hupode/xetai~.]

[162\12: Makaria voluntarily going to meet her death--~ei/ ti dê\ kata\ chthono/s; ei/ê ge me/ntoi mêde/n. ei ga\r he/xomen kakei= meri/mnas hoi thanou/menoi brotô=n ouk oi=d' ho/poi tis tre/psetai; to\ ga\r thanei=n me/giston pha/rmakon nomi/zetai~, Hcld. 592 ff.; cf. fr. 916.]

[163\12: fr, 757 (the metaphor of ll. 5 ff. is employed for homiletic purposes by Epictet. ii, 6, 11-14); Andr. 1270 ff.]

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