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From Greek and Roman Mythology by William Sherman Fox, 1916.
The Greek View of the Soul and of Death.
To comprehend, even in part, the Greek stories of the afterworld one must keep before him the fact that they are all based on the conception that the soul has a life apart from the body. This the Greeks held to be as certain as anything could be in the realm of the inscrutable, and all the phenomena of life seemed to point to its truth.
When, however, they came to state their belief as to what the soul really was, they frankly argued from probability. The soul could not well be very unlike the living man; therefore, it was his shade, or airy double. This shade either comprised or was identical with all that was characteristic of the man—his personality, we say—for this is what vanished at death, while the inert body remained.
Moreover, like the man himself, the shade was able to think, feel the drive of desire, and move about from place to place. On the other hand, the soul could not be very like the man, for the conditions of concrete existence could not surround it, and, moreover, it must be of a very tenuous substance, for it seemed to leave the body through a wound or with the passing of the invisible breath, and untrammelled by the body it was free to go about, as on wings, whithersoever it would, like the birds of heaven. Yet all its thoughts and desires were faint and futile, for it utterly lacked the material means of gratifying them, so that the existence of the disembodied soul was joyless and the end of all that men esteem worth while.
The words of Hekabe to Andromache well sum up the attitude of the Greek toward death:
“Death cannot be what life is, Child, the cup
Of Death is empty, and Life hath always hope."
But the Greeks strangely contradicted themselves. Though affirming the immateriality of souls, they were unable to conceive of their conscious existence without at least some of the accessories of the material. After death a man's shade pursued the same occupations which it had followed in life and cherished the same characteristic passions. Orion still hunted the wild beasts of the woodland; Aias still harboured his anger against Achilles; Aiakos and Rhadamanthys still sat on the tribunals of judgement; Teiresias still dispensed his prophecies.
This bondage to the material extended even to the punishments of the arch-criminals: Izion was bound to a real wheel, and Sisyphos struggled with a real stone.
When the Greeks came to localize the abode of the assembled shades, they not unnaturally, like many other peoples, believed it to be under the earth, an idea which probably sprang from
the primitive custom of burial; and after the belief had once been established, it was easy to think of those souls that had been banished from their bodies by cremation as going to the same place. In this underworld were gathered the souls of all except a special few, souls that were thenceforth like to
“. . . pale flocks fallen as leaves,
Folds of dead people, and alien from the sun."
It was a spacious democratic realm in which they abode, a realm in which there was no fear of overcrowding. Its boundaries were impassable, and rarely did a soul return from it to the upper light, even for a brief season. It was a kingdom organized like a kingdom of earth; Hades and Persephone sat on its two thrones as king and queen; and it had its several benches of judges.
Hermes mustered the immigrants bound for its shores, and Charon, the grim, grey ferryman, transported them at the established tariff of an obol a head,' while Kerberos, the three-headed hound, stood guard at its main entrance. Its area was delimited into various precincts determined by natural boundaries, and its population was divided into classes, the ordinary rank and file of the departed on the one hand, and the sinners extraordinary on the other. The lower realm was indeed a world in itself.
Entrances to, and Rivers of the Underworld.
Although some were sceptical enough to say that "no roads lead underground," yet the average Greek entertained no other opinion than that such paths did exist.
In a number of places the inhabitants pointed to local caves whence the ways ran downward; for instance, at Tainaron in Lakonia, at Troizen in Argolis, at Ephyra in Thesprotia, and at Herakleia in Pontos, while Hermione in Argolis offered so short a route that those who travelled along it were exempted from the payment of the usual obol.
Often white rocks by the banks of streams were held to mark the proximity of the lower world, or, again, the channels through which springs or streams disappeared beneath the ground passed as entrances to Hades.
Indeed, it seems probable that the Styx and the Acheron, the oldest of the rivers of Hades, were originally just such streams. In time the imagination of the Greeks gave them almost wholly an infernal existence and developed from them three others—Kokytos, Pyriphlegethon, and Lethe. The relations of all these to one another, that is, whether they were main streams or tributaries, were by no means uniform; nevertheless, each had its own distinct significance in literature: the Styx was the river of hate; Acheron, with its chill, stagnant water, the river of mourning; Kokytos, the river of lamentation; Lethe, the river of forgetfulness; and Pyriphlegethon, the river of flame.
The Judges.
The better and earlier tradition recognizes three judges in Hades—Aiakos, king of Aigina, and Rhadamanthys and Minos, the sons of Zeus and Europe; the later and Attic tradition adds Triptolemos as a fourth.
The first three were endowed with distinct individualities. Aiakos, by virtue of his being the "wisest in deed and in counsel" among mortals, was given the principal place among the judges, and to his care, moreover, were entrusted the keys of Hades' house. To him the souls from Europe came to be judged, while his brother Rhadamanthys, seated at the crossways where one road led to the Happy Isles and the other to Tartaros, judged the souls from Asia. Souls whose origin was in doubt appeared before Minos, who, wielding a golden sceptre, exercised both civil and judicial power, as he had done on earth.
The Punishments of Hades.
Only that class of the inhabitants of Hades whom we have called the sinners extraordinary suffered special punishments. Their sins had been against the gods. For disclosing to men the counsel of Zeus and for his horrible banquet Tantalos was condemned to stand in a pool that ever receded from his thirsty lips, while near him hung branches laden with fruit that always sprang away from his hungry grasp, and over his head was poised a stone that continually threatened to fall but never did.
Tityos had in his lifetime attempted violence on Leto, and for this, his huge body was stretched out supine on the soil of Hades and two vultures never ceased gnawing at his vitals. Ixion forgot his debt of gratitude to Zeus and made a foul attack on Hera, so that in Hades he was lashed to a wheel and whirled around forever, his fate being a perpetual warning to ingrates. For their sacrilegious attempt to scale heaven by piling up mountains into a grand staircase Otos and Ephialtes were bound by serpents to two great columns. Of the punishments of Sisyphos and of the daughters of Dahaos enough has already been said.
Visits of the Living to Hades.
Consistent with the belief in roads leading to the lower world is the tradition that certain human beings of almost divinely rare endowments, or through some interposition of the gods, had been able to follow these paths to their end and again to see the light of day.
Protesilaos returned to life for a few short hours only, but Alkestis and Glaukos, the son of Minos, for many years.
Herakles descended by Tainaron and came back by Troizen, bringing Kerberos with him, and Theseus accompanied Peirithoos below in his foolhardy mission to rob Hades of Persephone, although his safe return was due only to the superior strength of Herakles. The most famous descents were those of Odysseus and Orpheus, that of the former furnishing inspiration to Vergil and Dante in their treatment of similar themes, and to those modem poets who have depicted Christ in Hades.
At the word of Kirke Odysseus approached the underworld by way of the land of the Kimmerians, a people who dwelt amid clouds and gloom and never looked upon the face of the sun. Here he dug a trench and poured into it the blood of black victims, and soon the gibbering ghosts began to gather about the trench, clamouring for the blood, which, for a time, Odysseus would not permit them to touch.
First there appeared to him the restless shade of his former shipmate Elpenor, begging him to accomplish the due rites over his unburied body, and at length there came the ghost of Teiresias, the blind seer of Thebes. When Odysseus allowed him and the other shades to taste of the blood, memories of the upper world and the power of speech returned to them, and from Teiresias he learned the vicissitudes that were to mark the remainder of his life down to the day of his death.
Then he saw his mother Antikleia, who, though now merely a phantom, had not lost the tenderness of a mother for him, recounting to him what had happened in Ithake during his long absence, just those things that only a mother thinks of telling, the little happenings about the home that make or mar the life within it.
After her he saw a host of the famous wives and mothers of the gods and heroes, both the chaste and the unchaste, and when the shades of the women folk were scattered by Persephone, the ghosts of the men crowded about, and drinking of the blood told Odysseus, one by one, the sorry tales of their last days, and with grief or delight listened to the tidings which he had brought them of the kinsfolk whom they had left behind.
First came Agamemnon, surrounded by the shades of those who had died with him at Aigisthos's fatal banquet; and then Achilles, proud to learn of the glory of Neoptolemos among the living; Aias, still brooding over his imagined dishonour; Minos, wielding his golden sceptre and dealing out dooms to the dead; and Orion, hunting across the asphodel meadows the ghosts of the animals which he had slain in life.
Last of all Odysseus beheld the great sufferers of Hades,—Tantalos, Tityos, Sisyphos, Ixion, and the rest, and would have seen more of the renowned heroes had not the increasing throng and clamour of the shades filled his breast with fear and caused him to fly to his ship and sail away down the stream of Okeanos. From the account of this visit of Odysseus to Hades, as it stands in the Odyssey itself, more can be learned of the prevailing Greek conception of the state of the dead than from any other single source.
The story of the descent of Orpheus is of a very different character. Eurydike, the young wife of Orpheus, the sweet singer of Thrace, was bitten by a serpent, and, dying, her soul passed within the pale of Hades' realm.
Orpheus resolved to win her back, and as he entered the abode of the shades with a song on his lips, “the pallid souls burst into weeping, Tantalos ceased to pursue the retreating water, Izion and his wheel stood still, the vultures abandoned their torment of Tityos; the daughters of Danaos deserted their jars, and Sisyphos sat down upon the rock. Down the cheeks of the Erinyes flowed moist tears, and the king and queen of Tartaros yielded to his plea " that they set his dear wife free.
One condition, however, was imposed, that as Eurydike followed her husband on the way out, he was on no account to turn around and look upon her; but, in the ecstasy of his joy at his recovery of her, he violated the condition, and Eurydike was recalled to Hades, never more to return to earth.
Elysion, The Islands of the Blest.
The domain of Hades was not, however, the only abode of those who had come to the end of this life, for there was, besides this, a land of eternal happiness with broad flowery fields known now as Elysion, and now as the Islands of the Blest.
The Greeks naturally thought of this land as lying in the distant west, some even identifying it with the island of the Phaiakians, or again with Leuke ("White Isle")at the western end of the Euxine.
According to Pindar, only those mortals were translated thither who had come through a triple test in life and had remained good and brave and true, although from other literary sources one gathers that the common belief was that the land was reserved for those in whose veins flowed the blood of the gods.
It was indeed for this reason alone, and not for any special piety, that Menelaos and Helen were admitted into its bliss, though Peleus, Achilles, Kadmos, and many others of the heroes were there who by virtue of passing either test could have entered this land, whose charm can be best conveyed by the words of Proteus to Menelaos: "But thou, Menelaus, son of Zeus, art not ordained to die and meet thy fate in Argos, the pastureland of horses, but the deathless gods will convey thee to the Elysian plain and the world's end, where is Rhadamanthys of the fair hair, where life is easiest for men. No snow is there, nor yet great storm, nor any rain; but always Ocean sendeth forth the breeze of the shrill west to blow cool on men: yea, for thou hast Helen to wife, and thereby they deem thee to be the son of Zeus."
Fox, William Sherwood. Greek and Roman Mythology. Marshall Jones Co., 1916.
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