Psyche: The Cult of Souls and Belief in Immortality among the Greeks

They had their roots—these beliefs—not in any form of speculative thought but in the practice of the Cult of Souls: and that Cult, as it has been described1 for an earlier stage of Greek life, still went on unaltered and with undiminished vigour. This may be asserted with confidence, though we can produce no very important evidence from the literature of this later period. The character and content of that literature is such that we should hardly expect to find such evidence in it. But for the most part the literary evidence from which we were able to illustrate the Cult of Souls in an earlier period may be taken to apply equally to the age with which we are now dealing. Even in its final years Lucian’s pamphlet On Mourning bears express witness to the survival of the ancient and sanctified usages in their fullest compass. We hear again of the washing, anointing, 525 and crowning of the dead, the ceremonious lying-in-state upon the bier, the violent and extravagant lament over the dead body, and all the traditional customs that are still in full force. Last comes the solemn interment of the body—the articles of luxury burnt together with the corpse of the dead man or buried with him in the grave—articles that had once belonged to him and which he is supposed to enjoy even in death—the feeding of the helpless soul of the dead with libations of wine and burnt-offerings—the ritual fasting of the relatives only broken, after three days, in the Banquet of the Dead.2

The dead man must not be deprived of a single one of “the customary things”—only so can his well-being be fully secured.3 The most important of these is the solemn interment of the body. This is carried out not only by the family of the dead man, but in many cases also by the society to which he may have belonged.4 In these times when the cities sought to make up for the loss of more serious interests in their life by an often touching care for the immediate and the insignificant, deserving citizens were frequently honoured with elaborate funeral processions in which the municipality took part;5 the city fathers would then probably decree that representatives should be sent to the survivors and commissioned to express the sympathy of the city in their loss and distract their minds from their grief by a speech.6

The ritual act of burial, the object of so much pious zeal, was the very reverse of the indifferent matter that philosophy loved to represent it.7 The sanctity of the place where rests the dead is also a matter of great importance, not only for the dead man himself but for the rest of the family which desires to be still united in the life of the spirit world, and so inhabits a common burial-ground (generally outside the city, very rarely within,8 but sometimes, even yet, actually inside the house).9 The founder of a family-grave desires the members of it to be joined together in the same grave for at least three generations.10 Those who have a right to be buried there take steps—religious and legal or municipal—against the profanation of this family tomb and sanctuary by the burying in it of strangers or the pillaging of the vault—a practice that became increasingly common in the final period of the antique world.11 There are innumerable grave-notices threatening money penalties in accordance with the ancient law of the city, to be paid into the public treasury by those who violate the peace of the grave.12 No less common are the inscriptions which place the grave and its sanctity 526 under the protection of the underworld deities, invoking at the same time the most shocking curses—torments and calamities both temporal and eternal—against profaners of the holiness of the tomb.13 Especially the inhabitants of certain districts of Asia Minor, only very superficially Hellenized, give themselves free rein in the accumulation of such violent execrations. In their case the dark superstitions of ancestral and native worship of gods or spirits may have infected the Hellenes also—it is often the Greeks who become barbarian rather than the barbarians who are Hellenized in the history of Greek relations with these stubborn and barbarous native populations.14 But even in lands where the Greek population has maintained itself without admixture such execrations are occasionally to be found in graves.

As time went on and the sanctity and peace of the grave began to be more and more seriously threatened, measures of all kinds were taken for its protection. The grave is no mere chamber of corruption; the souls of the dead dwell there,15 and therefore is it holy; as a sanctuary it becomes completely sanctified when it has received the last member of the family, and is enclosed for ever.16 The family so long as it lasts continues to pay the regular Soul-Cult to its ancestors;17 sometimes special foundations ensure the payment for ever18 of the Soul-Cult of which the dead have need.19 Even those whose burial place lies far away from the graves of their own family20 are not entirely deprived of benevolent care and cult.

The pre-supposition of all Cult of Souls—that the dead survive to enjoy at least a gloomy sepulchral existence in their last resting-place—is everywhere vividly implied. It speaks to us with archaic simplicity from those grave-stones upon which the dead, as though still accessible to the sounds of the human voice and able to understand the words of the living, are addressed with the customary words of greeting.21 Sometimes the dead man himself is provided with a similar greeting which he is supposed to address to the passers-by22—between him, confined to his grave, and the others who still walk about in the daylight a dialogue takes place.23 The dead man is not entirely cut off from the affairs of the upper world. He feels an access of fresh life when he is called by the name that he had once borne in his life-time, and the memory of which is now preserved only by his gravestone. His fellow-citizens call upon him three times by name at his burial;24 but even in the grave 527 he is capable of hearing the precious sound. On a gravestone at Athens25 the dead man enjoins upon the members of the actors’ guild to which he had belonged to call upon his name in chorus whenever they pass by his grave, and to gladden him with the sound of hand-clapping, to which he had been accustomed in life. At other times the passer-by “kisses his hand”26 to the dead man; a gesture which denotes the honour paid to a Hero.27 The soul is not merely alive; it belongs now, as primitive and age-long belief expressed it, to the Higher and Mightier Ones.28 Perhaps this exaltation of the wrath and power of the dead is the meaning of the custom by which the dead are called the Good, the Honest (χρηστοί). This usage must have become established at an early period,29 but it is not until these later days that it is first employed as an addition to the simple words of greeting addressed to the dead on gravestones. In this use it is not uniformly current; it is rare in Attica (at least, on graves of natives of that country); whereas in Boeotia, Thessaly, and the countries of Asia Minor it is frequent and almost universal.30 In fact it is natural to suppose31 that this mode of address, originally a euphemistic title addressed to the ghosts of the dead who were conceived as quite capable of acting in a manner the very reverse of that attributed to them by the word, was intended to suggest the power belonging to the personality so addressed as one who has risen to a higher form of existence—and to venerate him with becoming awe.32

§ 2

The conception of the departed spirit as one who has been raised to a higher state of dignity and power receives clearer and more conscious expression where the departed one is called a Hero.

This class of intermediate beings standing on the border line between mankind and godhead—the world of the Heroes—was in no danger of extinction at this period of Greek religious belief. The attitude of mind that could think of certain special souls as withdrawn from the limitations of visible existence and raised to a higher spiritual state remained still vigorous and was even able to give birth to new conceptions.

In its original and proper sense the name Heros never indicated an independent and self-sufficient spirit. Archegetes, “leader” or “originator”, is his real and distinctive title. The Heros stands at the beginning of a series, taking its origin 528 from him, of mortal men for whom he is the leader and “ancestor”. The genuine Heroes are the ancestors, whether real or imaginary, of a family or a house; in the “Heroes”, after whom they wish to be called, the members of a society, a clan, or even a whole race honour the archegetai of those groups. They are always men of power and influence, prominent and distinguished from other men, who are regarded as having thus entered into the life of Heroes after their death. And even in later times the Heroes of a more recent elevation, though they may no longer be the leaders of a train of descendants taking their origin from them, are yet regarded as distinguished from the people who worship them by their peculiar virtue and dignity. To become a Heros after death was a privilege reserved for a few great and uncommon personalities who even in their lifetime were not as other men were.

The companies of these old and specially chosen Heroes did not suffer the fate of forgetfulness which would have been their second and real death. The love of country and city, undying among the Greeks, attached itself in reverent memory to the illuminated spirits of the past who had once protected and defended their native land. When Messene was refounded in the fourth century the Heroes of the country were solemnly called upon to become inhabitants of the city as they had been before—more particularly Aristomenes, the never-forgotten champion of Messenian freedom.33 Even at Leuctra he had appeared in the melée of the fight, doing battle for the Thebans.34 Before the battle, Epameinondas had secured the favour of the Heroines of the place, the daughters of Skedasos, by means of prayer and sacrifice.35 These were events of the last heroic age of Greek history, but the cult and memory of the local Heroes of the Greek countries survived into a much later age. Leonidas was worshipped by the people of Sparta for many centuries,36 and the champions of the Persian Wars, the saviours of Hellas, were worshipped by their remote descendants.37 Even in imperial times the inhabitants of the island of Kos still worshipped those who had fallen to secure their freedom centuries before.38 Such individual cases allow us to see what was the general rule: the memory and cult of a Hero lived on as long as the community remained in existence whose duty it was to maintain his worship. Even those Heroes—a class by themselves—who have secured their immortality through their fame in ancient poetry39 still retained their cult undiminished. The heroic 529 figure of Hektor still preserved life and reality for his worshippers in the Troad or at Thebes.40 Even in the third century of our era the district of Troy and the neighbouring coasts of Europe still kept fresh the memory and the cult of the Heroes of Epic renown.41 Of Achilles, who had a special fate, we must speak in another connexion.42

Nor did less splendid figures vanish from the memory of their narrower associations of worshippers. Autolykos the founder of Sinope retained his cult even in the time of Lucullus.43 At a quite late period the relics of the specially popular Heroes of the Pan-Hellenic games were still the subject of many superstitions44 that bear witness to their continued influence. Heroes to whom healing powers were ascribed continued to do works of healing and to be worshipped, and their number was even extended.45 Mere local spirits, whose very names had been forgotten, nevertheless lost none of the honour that came to them from their beneficent miracles; such were, for instance, that Philopregmon of Poteideia who was celebrated by a late poet,46 or the Hero Euodos of Apollinopolis in Egypt who dispensed “good journey” to those who honoured him in passing by his monument.47

But all Heroes were not yet reduced to such casual salutations from occasional passers-by. In many places48 the regular festivals and sacrifices to Heroes still survived—even human sacrifice was still sometimes made to spirits who were held capable of special exhibitions of power.49 In a few cases the festivals of Heroes are the chief feasts in the annual calendar of a city.50 The names of Heroes quite as much as of Gods were used in oath-taking51 at treaties made by Greek cities so long as they retained their independence. Foundations were dedicated to the honour of Gods and Heroes together.52 Cult associations called themselves after the Heroes they met to worship.53 Special priests of certain Heroes were regularly appointed.54 Even in the second century, in his book of travels, Pausanias is able to inform us of not a few Heroes whose cult, as he distinctly says, had gone on unbroken in their cities down to his own day.55 The annual festival of the Heroes who had fallen at Plataea was still celebrated with the greatest pomp in the time of Plutarch, who describes every detail of its archaic ceremonial.56 And at Sikyon, at the same time, the Heroic festival of Aratos, the founder of the Achæan League, was still celebrated, though here the centuries had robbed the occasion of many of its former glories.57 530

In all such ceremonies it was to a single and definite spirit-personality that the devotion of men was offered. Each of them received the cult that was due to him by the terms of some old-established and sanctified foundation. Nothing was further from men’s minds than the loose and vague conception, expressed sometimes by ancient writers, that all brave men of the past or all outstanding individuals of whatever time are to be regarded forthwith as Heroes.58 It was still clearly and consciously felt that elevation to the rank of Hero was not a privilege that belonged as a matter of course to any particular class of mankind, but, wherever it occurred, was essentially a ratification of quite exceptional worth and influence displayed already in the lifetime of the Hero. Following this conception even the Hellenistic age added to the number of the Heroes by drawing upon the great men of the present. A little earlier Pelopidas and Timoleon had been honoured in this way, and now the figures of Leosthenes, Kleomenes, and Philopoimen were raised to heroic glory.59 Even Aratos, the very incarnation of the sobriety of a too matter-of-fact age, at the end of a life devoted with ardour but without enduring success to the service of his country, was supposed by his countrymen to have passed over in a mysterious manner into the realm of heroic semi-divinity.60

As in these cases whole populations honoured individuals so also did narrower and much humbler associations, even in this rationalist age, elevate their helpers and protectors to the rank of Hero and honour them as such. The slaves of Kos thus honoured their former comrade and leader Drimakos;61 at another place there was a Hero who protected all refugees who took shelter with him;62 at Ephesos there was a Hero who had been a simple shepherd.63 At the time of Augustus, a benefactor of his city, Athenodoros, the philosopher, had been made a Hero by grateful Tarsians after his death.64 It sometimes happens that a Hero of the distant past may find himself confused with a descendant of the same name whom his contemporaries put in the place of his own ancestor and worship in his stead.65

So little were men grown out of the ideas centred round the cult of Heroes that, accustomed to the ever-increasing adoration of the “Mightier and Better”, every age was eager to add to their number from the men of the present. They did not always wait for the death of the individual so honoured before beginning to address him as Heros; even in his lifetime he must enjoy a foretaste of the honour that was destined 531 to be his after his departure from this life. Thus, Lysander was saluted as a Hero after his victory by the Greeks whom he had liberated from the despotism of Athens; and in the Hellenistic age many a fortunate army commander or mighty king received the same honour. Of the Romans Flamininus the friend of the Greeks was the first to receive it.66 This misapplication of the cult of Heroes to the living then became still further extended.67 It may be that sometimes it was a real feeling of unusual merit that fired the impulsive temperament of the Greeks; but in the end the custom became almost a meaningless convention; even private individuals were thus called Hero in their lifetime68 and heroic honours—even the foundation of annual athletic games—were granted to living persons almost indiscriminately.69 And at last when it was necessary to honour an individual whom the love and passionate regret of a monarch elevated to the rank of Hero after his death then, indeed, the age could hardly do enough in the hyperbole of pomp and ceremony. The funeral honours paid to the dead Hephaistion are an extravagant example of this.70

If in such cases the limits between the worship of a Hero and the adoration of a god seemed almost to have disappeared, we still have evidence of individual cases in which the survivors, without actually naming them Heroes, offer to their much-loved dead a memorial cult that hardly falls short of full heroic honours.71 Nor is it only in such cases as these that we perceive the signs of a tendency to exalt the Cult of Souls everywhere and to approximate it to the worship of ancestors in the ancient Cult of Heroes. It emerges clearly enough, for all the brevity of their language, from the multitude of epitaphic inscriptions in which members of simple citizen families are addressed with the title of Heros. At any rate, it betokens an increase in the importance and dignity of the dead when a tombstone expressly announces that an individual citizen has been “heroized” by the city after his death. And this is what not infrequently happened—early in Thera and later on in many other places as well.72 The same conclusion must be drawn when we hear of associations declaring a dead member to be a Heros;73 or when a society recognizes a dead man as Heros on the formal motion of an individual.74 Families, too, become accustomed to giving the name to those of their number that have died before the rest; and a son will thus speak of his father, parents of a son, and a wife of her husband—either informally or by a formal declaration naming 532 the dead one as Heros.75 A higher and mightier form of existence after death must be imagined for the departed when he is thus distinguished so explicitly from the ordinary multitude of the dead—still more so in those cases when the dead man, elevated to a mystic communion with higher forms of life, loses his own name and receives in exchange that of a Hero of long-standing honour, or even that of a God.76

In every case that is known to us, the “heroizing” of a dead person by the city or a society or the family is carried out entirely on the independent authority of those bodies. The Delphic Oracle, without whose deciding voice it was hardly possible in early times for the company of the elect to receive any addition,77 was, in these days when the prestige of the oracle had sunk almost to nothing, no longer applied to for its sanction. The consequence was hardly avoidable that the licence thus accorded to corporations and families should widen still further the bounds of the Heroes’ kingdom. In the end, these boundaries broke down entirely. There were cities and countries where it became the custom to apply the title of “Hero” as an epithet of honour belonging to all the dead without distinction. It seems that this extension of “heroizing” to all the dead first became common in Boeotia,78 though here it was not quite universal—Thespiai was an exception.79 Thessalian grave-inscriptions give the fullest evidence for the heroizing of the dead of every age and description. But the custom spread to every country populated by Greeks;80 only Athens is less unrestrained81 in the bestowal of the title of Hero upon the dead—a title which retained no more of the old and essential meaning of the word (which perhaps survived longest in Athens) than to say that the dead were really now dead.82

In spite of such indiscriminate application the name “Hero” still continued to be something of a title of honour. An honour, indeed, that was thus accorded to everyone without distinction was in danger of becoming the reverse of an honour. But isolated phrases of a naive and popular character make it clear that a difference was still felt to exist between the “Hero” and those who were not honoured with this distinguishing epithet.83 When the name of Hero was thus applied to all the dead, not in exceptional cases but as a rule, the glory and distinction of which the idea of the “Hero” was thus deprived must have fallen in some measure upon the individual dead, if they 533 and the Heroes could meet on common ground. Thus, even the dissipation of the heroic honour and its indiscriminate application to all the dead is in reality but another indication of the fact that even in the decline of the ancient world the power and dignity of the departed soul had not declined too, but had, on the contrary, grown greater.

§ 3

The souls of the departed show their power and the fact that they are still alive more particularly in the effect that they have on this life and on the living. For the purposes of the Cult of Souls they are regarded as confined to the region of the inhabited earth; they continue in the grave or near it, for a time or permanently, and can therefore be reached by the offerings or the prayers of their living relatives. There can be no doubt that at this time men still believed, as they had done since the earliest times, in a kindly relationship between the family and its departed members, an exchange in which offerings were made at the grave by the living and blessings vouchsafed by the Unseen. It is true, however, that we only have imperfect records of such calm and comfortable family belief in the survival of the departed and of the part they continue to play in the daily life of their descendants.

But there is a more sinister variety of intercourse with the souls or spirits of the dead. They sometimes appear unsought to the living; they can be compelled by the force of magic to use their powers in the service of the living. Both these possibilities apply more particularly to those unquiet souls whom fate or their own hands have deprived of life violently and before their time; to those who have not been consigned to the peace of the grave by ceremonious burial.84 The enlightened of the time do indeed refuse to believe in ghosts and haunting spirits of the dead that wander without rest about the place of their tragic fate, and make their presence disagreeably felt by the living.85 But the populace, even in such enlightened days, gave the fullest credence to stories in which the existence of a spirit-world seemed to reveal its sinister reality, trespassing at times upon the world of the living. Regular folk-tales of spectral apparitions, vagrant ghosts of unfortunate souls, vampire-like spirits of the grave,86 are preserved to us in some numbers—chiefly such as appealed to a perverted philosophy, the insaniens sapientia of an outworn age, as seeming to confirm its fancies of an invisible world between heaven and earth. In Lucian’s Lover of Lies the grey-beard 534 philosophers entertain each other in portentous seriousness with such communications from the spirit world.87 Plutarch himself is quite seriously convinced of the reality of some ghostly appearances.88 Philosophy, which at this time was going back to Plato, found in its system of demonology a means of making such old wives’ tales intelligible and credible to itself.

Finally, the time arrives when the violent and arbitrary interference with the unseen world—sorcery and spirit-raising—becomes a part of orthodox philosophy. The popular imagination of the Greeks did not have to wait for instruction from their barbarian neighbours, who had reduced the irrational to a system, before they could believe in the summoning of spirits from the deep. Magic in this sense was of extreme antiquity in Greece.89 But in the fusion and intermixture of Greeks with barbarians which marked the Hellenistic age similar and cognate superstitions from all the corners of the earth met together and acquired strength from their union. It was foreign sources rather than Greek which chiefly contributed to swell the turbid and noxious stream of sorceries and spirit-raisings, the practical application of an irrational theory of the nature and being of the soul in separation from the body. The lofty heaven of the old Greek gods was beginning to grow dim before the troubled vision of this later age; more and more their place was taken by a mob of idols and an obscure rabble of lesser devils. In this chaotic medley of Greek and barbarian demonology the companies of unquiet souls and ghosts of the dead easily found a place. The ghost was no longer an alien when the Gods themselves had become ghostly. When both Gods and spirits have to answer to the spells of the sorcerer the souls of the dead are seldom left in peace.90 We possess some relics of the art of spirit-raising in the Græco-Egyptian magic books; and we can now see with our eyes specimens which illustrate the practical outcome of this delusion in the magic charms and exorcisms that were scratched on tablets of lead or gold and placed in the graves—as the natural abode of the spirits which were to be compelled—where they have been found in considerable quantities in modern times. Among the sinister influences that are thus conjured to do the work of vengeance, punishment, or destruction upon the conjurer’s enemy, the unquiet souls of the dead are also regularly mentioned. To them is attributed the power and the will to intervene with malevolence and obstruction in the life of men, no less than to the other spiritual 535 powers of heaven and hell in company with whom they are summoned.91

§ 4

The Cult of Souls for all its expansion gave no assistance to the picturing of what might be the condition of the departed souls independently of their connexion with the living. Those who troubled themselves about such matters and sought further information were obliged to have recourse, if not to the systems of theologians and philosophers, then to the imaginative accounts and pictures of ancient poetry and legend.

The idea of a distant realm of the souls into which the strengthless shadows of those who had departed this life disappeared had not lost its hold on the popular imagination even of these later ages—difficult as it might be to reconcile92 such an idea with the pre-suppositions of cultus with its customary worship and sustenance of the souls confined within the grave. The belief in a distant kingdom of the dead could not but continue to be current among men for whom the Homeric poems remained the earliest manual and school-book in the hands of youth and the source of instruction and entertainment to every age. The passionate indignation with which philosophers of the Stoic as well as the Epicurean faith attacked the beliefs resting on the teaching of Homer cannot be explained except by supposing that Homer and his picture had remained a guiding force with the masses who were uninstructed in philosophy. And, in fact, ancient writers use language which shows that the ancient conception of Hades was by no means discarded but on the contrary was still vigorously alive among the populace.93

As to what might go on down below and the general appearance of the underworld—these were questions that the invention of theological and semi-philosophic fancy, each according to its special lights and preconceptions, strove to answer in eager competition.94 But such attempts to picture the condition of things in the kingdom of the souls—attempts which reached their highest point in the elaborate chiaroscuro of Vergil’s Hades—remained the exercises of ingenious fancy and rarely pretended to be anything else. A distinct and authoritative popular system of belief on these points was scarcely possible when the orthodox religion of the state formally and dogmatically rejected everything of the kind.

It would, indeed, have been more natural if in connexion with the idea of the congregation of souls enclosed in the 536 kingdom of the underworld deities a belief in a compensatory justice to be found in this after-life of the dead, had grown up and obtained popular currency. The oppressed and needy who feel themselves deprived of their share in this world’s goods think only too easily that somewhere there must be a place where they too will some day enjoy the fruits that others alone are allowed to pluck upon earth—and place that “somewhere” beyond the boundaries of this world and of reality. Pious belief in the gods expects to obtain the prize, so often denied upon earth, in a realm of the spirit. If indeed such a conviction of a compensatory justice to come95—reward of the virtuous and punishment of the wicked in a hereafter—was really more widely and seriously held in this age than it had been before,96 then the cult of the underworld deities as it was practised in the mysteries of the states and the various religious societies must have contributed in a large degree to bring this about. And contrariwise, the belief that the punishing and rewarding omnipotence of the gods would be felt in a hereafter must have brought an unbroken stream of adherents to those mysteries which in fact offered their help and mediation in the life to come. Those only could imagine that they had detailed knowledge of the enigmas that lie beyond the reach of all experience, who could surrender themselves entirely to the dogmatic teaching of a closed sect. We may in fact take leave to doubt whether the gruesome pictures of a place of torment in Hades, with its undying punishment in devouring flames, and the similar fancies that later authors sometimes express, were in reality anything more than the private imaginations with which exclusive and superstitious conventicles sought to terrorize their members.97 The charming pictures of a “Land of Arrival” to which death sends the much-tried children of men, may have been more widely accepted. Homer, the universal instructor, had stamped them upon men’s memories. For the poet the Elysian plain had been a place situated upon the surface of the earth to which the occasional favour of the gods was able to translate a few of their dearest favourites, that they might there enjoy, without seeing death, unending bliss.98 In imitation of the Homeric fancy, the poetry of the following ages had imagined the translation of many other Heroes and heroic women of the legendary past to a secret life of bliss in Elysium or in the Islands of the Blest.99 Later fancy, which saw in Elysium the Land of Promise to which all men who had lived in a manner pleasing to the gods 537 would be taken after their death,100 now placed its Elysium or Islands of the Blest in the interior of the earth beyond the reach of all save disembodied souls. In later times this became the currently accepted view, but the subject remained undefined and subject to variation. Men must still, in fact, have imagined The Isles of the Blest, the abode of privileged spirits, to be situated upon the surface of the earth (though, indeed, far away beyond the limits of the discovered countries of the globe), when attempts could be made to find the way there and to bring back news to the living. The attempt attributed to Sertorius was only the most famous of such voyages of discovery.101 Why, indeed, should these magic Isles remain for ever undiscovered upon the borders of the inhabited world that yet offered so wide a field for discovery, when everybody knew of the island in the Black Sea, often visited by living men, where Achilles, the supreme example of miraculous translation, lived for ever in perpetual enjoyment of his youth? For centuries the island of Leukê, the separate Elysium of Achilles and a few select among the Heroes, was visited and reverenced with religious awe.102 Here men thought they could discern in immediate perception, and in actual physical contact, something of the mysterious existence of blessed spirits. The belief in the possibility of miraculous translation to an eternity of unbroken union of body and soul, thus palpably and visibly substantiated, could not completely die even in this prosaic age. The educated did indeed find this conception so strange and unintelligible that when they come to speak of translation legends of the past they profess themselves unable to say what exactly the ancients had supposed to occur when such miracles took place.103 But the populace, which finds nothing easier to believe in than the impossible, once more naively accepted the miracle. Did not the examples of Amphiaraos and Trophonios plainly establish the fact of translation to underground retreats? And to them as being still alive in their caves beneath the earth a cult was offered until an advanced period.104 The translation of beautiful youths to everlasting life in the kingdom of the nymphs and spirits was the subject of many folk-tales.105 Even in contemporary life the miracle of translation seemed not altogether impossible.106 When the kings and queens of the Macedonian empire of the East began to receive divine honours in imitation of the great Alexander himself, it was not long before men ventured to affirm that at the end of his earthly existence the Divine Ruler everywhere 538 does not die but is merely “carried away” by the gods and still lives on.107 It is the peculiar property of divinity, as Plato clearly expresses it,108 to live for ever in the indivisible unity of body and soul. A court-bred theology could the more easily make such demands upon the belief of subject peoples in the Semitic East, and possibly in Egypt too, because native109 legends had already told of the translation to immortal life of individual men dear to the gods and akin to the gods in nature; just as similar stories became common in Italian legends too,110 though possibly only under the influence of Greek models. Indeed, quite apart from obsequious courtliness, Greeks and half-Greeks were quite capable of entertaining the idea111 that the darlings of their fancy, such as Alexander the Great, had not suffered death but had been translated alive to the realm of imperishable physical existence. This is shown clearly enough by the success which attended the appearance, in Moesia at the beginning of the third century A.D., of another Alexander. This imposter travelled from land to land with a great train of Bacchants, and everywhere men believed in his identity with the great monarch.112 A little earlier they had believed with equal credulity in the reappearance upon earth of the Emperor Nero,113 who, it was thought, had not died but had merely disappeared. When Antinous, the beautiful youth beloved by the Emperor Hadrian, sank and disappeared in his watery grave he was at once regarded as a god who had, in fact, not died but had been translated.114 The miraculous translation of Apollonios of Tyana is reported with the utmost seriousness;115 like the other marvels and mysteries in the strange and enigmatic existence of this prophetic figure, it found believers enough.116

But such unbroken continuance of the united life of body and soul, begun upon earth and carried on in a mysterious abode of bliss (the oldest form taken by the idea of human immortality in the Greek mind), was never attributed to more than a few specially favoured and specially gifted individuals. An immortality of the human soul as such, by virtue of its nature and composition—as the imperishable force of divinity in the mortal body—never became a real part of the belief of the Greek populace. When approximations to such a belief do occasionally find expression in popular modes of thought, it is because a fragment of theology or of the universally popular philosophy has penetrated to the lower strata of the uninstructed populace. Theology and philosophy remained the sole true repositories of the belief in the 539 immortality of the soul. In the meeting together and conjunction of Greek and foreign ideas in the Hellenized Orient it was not Greek popular tradition but solely the influence of Greek philosophy, that, finding favour even outside the limits of Greek nationality, communicated to foreign nations the arresting concept of the divine, imperishable vitality of the human soul—upon the impressionable Jewish people, at least, it had the profoundest and most deeply penetrating influence.117

§ 5

All the various modes of conceiving the life enjoyed by the soul after the death of the body, as they had been explored, modified, and developed in the course of centuries, were admitted on an equal footing to the consciousness of the Greeks in this late period of their maturity. No formulated body of religious doctrine had by a process of exclusion and definition given the victory to any one conception at the expense of the others. But where so much was permitted and so little proscribed it is still possible to ask how these various formulations of belief, expectation, and hope stood in relation to each other. Were any more popular and more readily received than others? To answer this question it is natural to suppose that we have only to turn to the numerous inscriptions from the gravestones of the people. Here, especially in these later times, individuals give unhampered expression to their own feelings and thus reveal the extent and character of popular belief. But information derived from this source must be carefully scrutinized if it is not to lead to misconception.

If we pass in imagination through the long rows of streets in which the Greeks placed the memorials of their dead, and read the inscriptions on the tombstones—they now form part of the accumulated treasures of Greek Epigraphy—the first thing that must arrest our attention is the complete silence maintained by the enormous majority of these inscriptions with regard to any hope—however formulated—or any expectation of a life of the soul after death. They content themselves with recording the name of the dead, adding only the name of the father and (in the case of a foreigner) the country of the deceased. At the most, the custom of some localities may add a “Farewell”. Such stubborn silence cannot be satisfactorily explained simply on the grounds of an economy practised by the surviving relatives 540 of the deceased (though in some cases a municipal regulation against wordy inscriptions may have given countenance to such economies).118 The very silence of this people that was never at a loss for words to express its meaning whether in verse or in prose, is in itself expressive. Where so little need was felt to give utterance to hopes of comfort, such hopes cannot have been of very vital consequence or matters of much assurance. Men rescued from forgetfulness only what had been the exclusive property of the individual—his name; the appellation which had distinguished him from all others in his lifetime and has now become the barest and emptiest envelope of the once living personality. Inscriptions in which precise hopes of a future life are expressed form a very small proportion of the great mass of epitaphic records. And of these very few again are in prose. Not as simple records of plain and authentic fact do such provisions and announcements of a blessed and hoped-for futurity present themselves. They need the artistic pomp and circumstance with which poetic fancy and extravagant affection clothe their inspired voyagings beyond the region of cold and matter of fact reality. This is certainly significant. Even among the poetic epitaphs the majority allude only to the life which the deceased has now done with, looking back upon the circumstances of his life—his fortunes and activities and character; giving expression, often with the most convincing sincerity, to the regret and dependence of the survivors; fixing attention exclusively upon things of this world. Wherever, at last, allusion is made to a future life, the tendency is rather to let fancy roam far beyond the limits of experience and sober reflexion to a vague and visionary land of promise. Such lofty aspirations needed more than any others the elevated language of verse. But we should run the risk of falling into grave error if we concluded from the preponderance of such aspirations among the metrical epitaphs that these were the normal views of the city folk who were their contemporaries.

The simple and archaic conception which perpetuates the old Homeric attitude and views without a complaint or a regret the disappearance of the soul of the departed into Erebos, is of the rarest occurrence among these sepulchral verses.119 More commonly we have the prayer that the departed may “rest in peace”, expressed in the traditional formula120—a formula that really refers to the dead man lying in his grave but also contains a further allusion to the “soul” that has departed to Hades.121 The idea is not yet dead 541 that there is a realm of the souls which receives the departed—Hades, the world ruled over by the Underworld deities, the “Chamber” of Persephone, the seat of primeval Night.122 Here a state of semi-conscious existence is conceived to prevail, under the empire of “Forgetfulness”, drinking of which123 the consciousness of the soul is darkened. Here “the majority”124 are assembled, and the dead man is visited by the reassuring thought that he may greet once more the souls of those who have gone before him.125

But sterner conceptions also occur. There is occasional reference to a judgment126 that separates the souls in the world below, dividing them into two and sometimes three127 classes in accordance with the deserts which they have earned on earth. There is no lingering over the pains of the damned,128 in the description of which the theological imagination had indulged so frequently. A more simple-minded fancy did not need such pharisaical satisfaction in the misfortunes of sinners in order to heighten its own assurance of superiority. There is no trace of a sentiment of penitence and terror indulged in for its own sake. The soul hopes to come by its rights;129 to reach the “Blessed”, to arrive at the Isles or the Island of the Blest—to Elysium, the abode of Heroes and demi-gods.130 Such hopes are very commonly expressed, but as a rule only in a brief phrase of confidence and hope. We rarely meet with any elaborate or alluring picture of the abode of the blessed.131 That abode is generally placed within the limits of the underworld kingdom of the souls,132 and such anticipations, when particularized, refer commonly to a “Place of the Good”, which in various forms is represented as the hoped-for dwelling-place of future life.133

But we also meet with the view that the company of the good is entirely removed from the region of underworld darkness.134 For many individuals the hope is expressed or the certainty announced that after death they will have their dwelling in the sky—in the shining Aether, among the stars. This belief in the elevation of the disembodied soul to the regions above the earth is so frequently repeated in various forms in this late period that we must suppose that among those who entertained precise conceptions of the things of the next world this was the most popular and widely held conviction.135 This belief that the soul rises to the neighbourhood and even the community of the heavenly deities136 has its origin both in religious aspiration and in philosophy. Its roots, indeed, stretch back to a much 542 earlier period137 and we may suppose that even in these later days it was derived from and very largely supported by the popular conception, disseminated by Stoic writers, of a living “breath”, which composes the human soul, and its effort upwards to the heavenly regions.138

But such language is in many cases plainly nothing more than a conventional formula which has already lost all vital significance; it rarely goes further than the expression of a hope that the soul will mount upwards to the heavenly heights. Very occasionally, in the adjective “immortal”139 applied to the soul (which only sleeps in death),140 we may detect the influence of mixed philosophical and theological ideas. We soon come to an end of the inscriptions which give expression to the doctrines of theology and of theologically minded philosophy as to the divine nature of the soul, its brief pilgrimage through earthly life and destined return to its true home in a divine incorporeal existence.141 There is no certain mention of a belief in the transmigration of souls.142 Of the specifically Platonic doctrine or its influence there is scarcely a trace.143

Another type of belief derives its strength not from the teachings of philosophers but from the usage and popular practice of religion. This is the belief of those who hope to be conducted after death to a blessed life by the special care of a god, presumably the god to which in their life-time they have offered particular devotion. Such a god will lead them by the hand, they hope, and conduct them into the land of bliss and purity. One who has thus “obtained a god as his leader”144 may face the future with equanimity. Together with Hermes the “messenger of Persephoneia”,145 Persephone herself is most frequently mentioned among these conducting deities.146 Perhaps in this we may see a reminiscence of the hopes awakened and cherished in the Eleusinian and other related mysteries147—hopes otherwise expressed on these tombstones with striking rarity. On the epitaph—certainly a late composition—of a Hierophant of Eleusis who “goes to the Immortals”, the dead man is made to commend, as a mystery revealed by the gods, the ancient opinion illustrated by stories like that of Kleobis and Biton148 “that death not only brings no evil to mortals, but is rather a blessing”.149 A gloomy philosophy has in these latter days of the old religion and worship of the gods taken hold of the mysteries themselves and given them an attitude of hostility to human life that was not originally theirs.150 We are reminded of the mysteries again when we find prayers 543 or promises that the dead shall not drink of the water of forgetfulness in the realm of the souls, but shall be given the “cold water” to drink by the God of the lower world; that he shall be refreshed at the spring of Mnemosyne, the bath of immortality, and so preserve intact his memory and consciousness, the necessary conditions of full and blessed life.151 Here there appears to be a reference to the promises made by particular secret cults in which the departed has specially recommended himself to the powers of life and death. This must plainly be the case when, instead of the Greek Aidoneus, there is mention of Osiris, the Egyptian Lord of Souls. “May Osiris give you the cold water” is a common prayer expressed in a formula that is of frequent and significant occurrence in late epitaphs.152 Of the numerous secret cults of these later times that promised a blessed immortality to their adherents, there is but infrequent mention in the grave-inscriptions: occasionally at the most there is an allusion to the special favour, reaching even beyond the grave, which belongs to the initiated in the mysteries of Mithras.153

No doubtful promises, but real and practical experience forms the basis of the belief of those to whom the dead has appeared visibly in a dream to assure them that his “soul” has not been annihilated by death.154 The oldest proof of the continued existence of the soul remains in force the longest. The pupil hopes for something higher from the master whom death has taken away from his sight: he prays to him that, as he had once in life, so he will now continue to stand by his side, assisting him in the pursuance of his profession as a physician—“Thou canst, for now thou hast a more divine part in life.”155

Expectations of an energetic after-life of the departed soul, expressing themselves in many forms, are widely current; but such expectations never achieve a unified, dogmatic form. Nor was anyone forbidden to cherish for himself and inscribe upon his grave-stone, unorthodox opinions of every kind—even though they should point to the very opposite of such expectations.156

A dubious “If” precedes on many epitaphs the anticipation of a conscious life of the dead in full possession of the senses, or a reward of the dead in accordance with their deserts: “if anything yet remains below”. Such phrases are of very frequent occurrence.157 Indeed the doubt itself is set aside when it is distinctly asserted that after death nothing of the man remains alive. All that men say of Hades and its terrors or its consolations is the fabled invention of poets; darkness 544 and nothingness is all that awaits us below.158 The dead turns to ashes or to earth;159 the elements out of which he was created take back what is their own.160 Life is only lent to man and in death he restores the loan again.161 In death he pays tribute to nature.162 The bitter outcry of the survivors against death, the savage beast of prey, loveless and pitiless, that has snatched away their dearest from their side, shows small hope of the preservation of the vanished life.163 Grief and complaint, say others, are vain both for the dead and for the living; no man returns; the parting effected by death is for ever.164 Only submission is left.165 “Take comfort, child, no man is immortal”—so runs the conventional phrase current among the populace and inscribed by many upon the graves of their vanished dead.166 “Once I was not, then I was, and now I am no more: what more is there to be said?”—so speaks the dead from more than one gravestone, addressing the living who is soon to suffer the same fate.167 “Live,” he cries to the living, “for there is nothing sweeter granted to us mortals than this life in the daylight.”168 A last thought reverts once more to the life that has been left behind on earth. The body dies, personality vanishes, nothing is left alive on earth but the memory of the deeds and virtue of the departed.169 But there is a continuance in the life of others, more vital than in the empty sound of fame, achieved by him who leaves behind him on earth children and children’s children. There are many who, in these later ages too, are content, in the true spirit of antiquity, with this blessing and desire no other consolation for their own annihilation.170

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