In Argos’ horse-abounding plainTo die is not thy fate,O Menelaus, there for theeNo mortal chances wait.Thee shall the immortals far awayTo earth’s remotest end,Where fair-haired Rhadamanthys dwellsIn Plains Elysian, send.There life flows on in easy course,There never snow nor rainNor winter tempests vex the land;But Ocean sends amainFresh Zephyr breezes breathing shrillTo cool the untroubled life.There dwell, since thou art kin to Zeus,And Helen is thy wife.
In Argos’ horse-abounding plainTo die is not thy fate,O Menelaus, there for theeNo mortal chances wait.Thee shall the immortals far awayTo earth’s remotest end,Where fair-haired Rhadamanthys dwellsIn Plains Elysian, send.There life flows on in easy course,There never snow nor rainNor winter tempests vex the land;But Ocean sends amainFresh Zephyr breezes breathing shrillTo cool the untroubled life.There dwell, since thou art kin to Zeus,And Helen is thy wife.
In Argos’ horse-abounding plainTo die is not thy fate,O Menelaus, there for theeNo mortal chances wait.Thee shall the immortals far awayTo earth’s remotest end,Where fair-haired Rhadamanthys dwellsIn Plains Elysian, send.There life flows on in easy course,There never snow nor rainNor winter tempests vex the land;But Ocean sends amainFresh Zephyr breezes breathing shrillTo cool the untroubled life.There dwell, since thou art kin to Zeus,And Helen is thy wife.
In dealing with the Homeric poems we can never escape the difficulties as to chronology and genuineness which at present envelop the whole Homeric question, on its literary side, like a thick mist. Dr. Rohde thinks that this passage is of later date than that which describes the voyage to Hades of Odysseus. The last line has a curious ring. Menelaus is to be rescued from the common fate, not for any virtue or merit of his own, but because he is the son-in-law of Zeus.We are reminded of the still more aristocratic belief of certain existing races of barbarians, who think that a happy state in the future life is reserved for the chiefs and those of high lineage.
According to the Cyclic Poets, the Islands of the Blessed were destined not for Menelaus only, but for others of the heroes who fought at Troy. In theAethiopis, Eos (the Dawn) is allowed not merely to bear away her dead son Memnon, as Sarpedon had been borne away by Sleep and Death, but to awake him again to an immortal life. In the same poem, Thetis is represented as carrying off the body of Achilles from the funeral pyre, and transporting it over the sea to a new life in the island of Leuce, the white island, which popular fancy placed in the Euxine sea. In theWorks and Daysof Hesiod all the godlike heroes who fought at Troy are said to dwell still in the Islands of the Blessed. Odysseus after his death was said to have been translated to the island of Aeaea. And an Athenian drinking-song of aboutB.C.500 tells how Harmodius and Aristogeiton, who slew the Tyrant and restored liberty to the Athenians, are not dead but dwell in the Happy Isles with Diomedes and swift-footed Achilles.
It may be doubted how far the Islands of the Blessed, the Elysian Fields, and the Realm of Hades are really distinct in Homeric geography. All seem to be reached by a voyage across the sea in the direction of the setting sun. Subsequent poets, however, gradually determine and map out the land of the dead. It is a conjecture, the truth of which is more than probable, that the great teacher of the lore of the future world was Orphism.
Orphism is one of the most important, but at the same time one of the most obscure phases of ancient religion. The original documents of the sect have perished, and forgeries have taken their place. It is only by putting together a number of occurrences, and collecting phenomena from all quarters,that we are able even to conjecture the tenets and observances of the Orphists; yet it seems certain that they exercised a deep and long-continued influence on the development of religion in Greece. We first clearly trace their activity in the sixth centuryB.C., when Onomacritus, a contemporary of Peisistratus at Athens, committed to writing much of their lore, and when Pythagoras attempted to found among the Greek cities of Southern Italy something like an Orphic church. Yet from what we learn as to Orphism, we see that it must contain elements handed down from a barbaric and primitive state of religion. It was essentially mystic and ecstatic in character. Zagreus, who was a form of Dionysus, was the principal object of Orphic worship,—the young god who was torn to pieces by the wicked hands of Titans, but restored to life by the favour of Zeus and Athena. By mystic communion with Zagreus, who was regarded as the ruler of the dead, the votary escaped from the trammels of the flesh, became pure and chaste, and fit for a nobler existence hereafter. Of course, in this religion, as in all, mere ritual tended to encroach on the religion of conduct; it was supposed by many that a mere partaking in mysterious rites would secure for them a favourable reception in the world of shades, and a verdict of acquittal from the stern judges of the dead.
It is certain, as I have already observed, that this ecstatic form of religion contains primitive elements. Anthropology has informed us that the wizard or medicine-man among savage tribes commonly acquires and retains his influence by means of trances or ecstasies, in which he professes to be inspired by the spirits of the dead. This is the original germ whence all ecstatic religion takes its rise; though, of course, it may reach a high moral level under some circumstances, and tend greatly to the help and elevation of mankind. What was the precise ethical level of the Orphic religion it is very hard to say.
However, we are at present concerned only with one aspect of Orphism—its lore as to the world of spirits. It is believed that this lore gradually works its way into current literature and art. After we leave the Homeric age, the next important landmark in the history of Hades is to be found in the great painting of Polygnotus in the Leschè or arcade of Delphi. Of this picture we possess so careful and detailed a description from the pen of Pausanias[33]that a skilled archaeologist, Professor Robert, has succeeded, with the help of certain vase-paintings of Polygnotan style, in restoring, figure for figure, the whole composition, with a sureness of hand which may well surprise those who do not realize the degree in which the scientific methods of archaeology have been developed in recent years.
In the upper part of the picture is a group which is almost a transcript from theOdyssey: Odysseus sword in hand over his trench, the unburied Elpenor behind him in sailor’s dress, and Teiresias and Anticleia approaching to hold converse with him. But this group seems somewhat apart from the rest of the scene, which is composed of elements mostly foreign to the Homeric circle of ideas. On the left is the river Acheron, full of reeds and peopled with shadowy fish; on which floats the bark of the ferryman Charon, who is taking to their last home the spirits of a man and a girl. Pausanias observes that Polygnotus has borrowed Charon from the epic poem called theMinyas, in which the voyage to Hades of Theseus and Peirithous was narrated. Whencesoever Charon may have originally come, he certainly held a great place in the beliefs of the later Greeks. The obol, his fee, was sometimes placed in the mouth of the dead. In later writers, such as Virgil and Lucian, he is very prominent. Some of the sepulchral lekythi, of which I have spoken already, furnish us with a representation of the River of Death and the boat of Charon. One here
FIG. 12. THE BOAT OF CHARON.
FIG. 12. THE BOAT OF CHARON.
FIG. 12. THE BOAT OF CHARON.
copied (Fig. 12) from a vase at Athens[34], presents a most curious scene. Charon, a being of traditional ugliness, clad in sailor’s cap and short chiton, drives his boat to the bank by means of a pole. He is awaited by a girl who bears in her hands her favourite bird, a goose, while a box for the toilet rests on a rock, and near it sits a young child. This flitting to the world of shades has quite a domestic aspect: it seems that Charon was expected to convey not only passengers, but also as baggage the offerings brought to them at the tomb. Sometimes the boat of Charon appears in these vase-paintings in close proximity to the stele of the grave; and the dead wait for him on thesteps of the stele[35]. On another vase, Hermes, with herald’s staff, leads the soul down to the edge of the river[36].
It is a well-known fact, though one not easy to explain, that Charon, under the form Charuns, figures as the messenger of death in several of the mural paintings of Etruscan tombs. He is there depicted as a hideous monster, with hooked nose, sometimes winged, wielding an axe, and entwined with serpents. That the mild and quiet Charon of the Greeks should have his counterpart in a fierce and deformed daemon in the more monstrous pantheon of Etruria is quite natural; but it is less clear whence the Greeks and Etruscans originally borrowed their respective divinities.
We must, however, resume our description of the picture of Polygnotus. About the entrance of Hades cluster the transgressors whose punishment is eternal. They are very few in number: the parricide, the temple-robber, and such noted personages of legend as Tityus, who is devoured by a vulture after the fashion of Prometheus. Next we reach a group of fair women, who must indeed have been delightful creations under the hands of the most dignified and majestic of all painters—Ariadne and Tyro, Procris and Chloris. For some who had to be punished a most gentle meed of punishment is provided. Phaedra in her lifetime, as is well known, was inspired with a disastrous passion for her stepson Hippolytus, and after his death she went and hanged herself. In the painting of Polygnotus, as Pausanias observes, ‘Phaedra is borne through the air on a swing, and holds the ropes on each side in her hands: this attitude, in spite of the extreme gentleness of the allusion, refers to the manner of her death.’ Near the group of women Theseus and Peirithous are seated. They had dared, with overweening impiety, to make their way into Hades, in order to carry off Persephone, Queen of theShades. But they were made prisoners by the nether powers and kept in chains. Such a fate for heroes of the race of the gods naturally seemed to Polygnotus too harsh. In his picture they merely keep their seats. So Virgil writes, ‘Sedet aeternumque sedebit infelix Theseus.’ Pausanias quotes Panyasis, a late Epic poet, to the effect that Theseus and Peirithous on their seats did not appear to be prisoners, but really the rock grew to their flesh in the place of bonds. But Polygnotus was content with a mere hint: in his painting nothing indicated either bondage or torture. Near by are Cameiro and Clytie, daughters of Pandareus. In theOdysseyPenelope tells how they were carried away by the fierce storm-winds and given to the hateful Erinnyes. But Polygnotus will know nothing of the Erinnyes. He merely represents the girls as crowned with flowers and playing with astragali or knuckle-bones. The storm-winds seem to have done them little harm.
Presently we come to the central part of the picture. It is occupied by the grove of Persephone, represented in the sparing fashion of Greek painting by a single tree, under which sits Orpheus, his lyre in his hands. No doubt we have here the key to the picture. Orpheus is the central figure of the whole. To Polygnotus he is not merely a departed hero, but priest and hierophant. The song which he sings is the mystic song of immortality. About him there cluster the heroes who fought at Troy: on the one side Agamemnon, Protesilaus, Achilles, Patroclus; on the other, Hector, Paris, Memnon, Sarpedon, and Penthesileia, queen of the Amazons. Paris makes love to Penthesileia, who looks back at him with contempt. The Greek and Trojan heroes may fight again their battles in memory; but peace has fallen on them, and they no longer wish to wield the lance. We need not dwell on other groups: Palamedes and Thersites busy with the dice; Thamyris, who had once challenged the Muses, seated in dejection over his broken lyre; the strange apparition of Marsyas,who teaches the boy Olympus to play the flute; and many others.
Towards the right end of the painting we again find punishments of a kind going forward. Sisyphus heaves his rock up the hill. Tantalus stands up to the chest in water which he may not drink, and clutches at fruit which eludes his grasp. These punishments had already been mentioned in theOdyssey; Polygnotus adds a rock, which hangs over the head of the sufferer, ever threatening to fall, but never falling. There appears also a great cask set in the earth, which it is the fate of an approaching train ever to try to fill with water from broken water-vessels. This was, according to tradition, the allotted task of the fifty daughters of Danaus, who had all save one in one night slain their husbands. But Polygnotus followed a different account: he calls the approaching men and women merely ἀμ�ητοι, uninitiated. Pausanias observes that they must be those who held in contempt the sacred mysteries of Eleusis; but this does not seem to be the meaning. They are ordinary persons, men and women who did not necessarily sin overtly against the Mysteries, but merely neglected to avail themselves of the ‘means of grace’ offered them by the hierophants of Eleusis, and suffer in the next world for their carelessness or obstinacy.
The general tone of the painting of Polygnotus bears a close resemblance to that of the sepulchral reliefs which we shall describe in this book. This is the less curious, when we consider that the sculptors of the reliefs were of that Attic school of sculpture which took so much of its character from Polygnotus. In spirit also the painting is like the Homeric poems, when they deal with the future life. The cultivated Greek mind looked for little bliss in the world to come, except such as could come from the reunion of friends and families, and the memory of past deeds. Still less did it look for future punishments. These were ordinarily reserved for thenoted criminals of legend. The only classes which Polygnotus seems to have thought in any peril were the parricides, the temple-robbers, and the uninitiated. He seems to have thought that spirits were of the stuff of which dreams are made, and passed an existence of quiet and gentle melancholy, of which the worst feature was its exposure to tedium.
There do not appear in the picture of Polygnotus, as in some paintings which we must presently consider, any malignant beings to act as the police of the under-world. Not even Cerberus appears. The only spirit of inauspicious type who is seen is Eurynomus. Pausanias says[37]: ‘The interpreters at Delphi say that Eurynomus is one of the spirits that dwell in Hades, and that his office is to devour the bodies of the dead, leaving only their bones.’ Eurynomus does not appear, adds Pausanias, in Homer nor in the Cyclic poets. The daemon shows his teeth, and is seated on the skin of a vulture. Probably it was from the facts just mentioned that the interpreters at Delphi deduced the function of Eurynomus. But their opinion goes for little, and the name Eurynomus has nothing to do with the decay of the flesh. In the time of Polygnotus it was usually fire rather than decay which made away with the bodies of the dead. This daemon, who was possibly an archaic form of Hades himself, remains then unexplained. At any rate, we have no right to regard him as a punisher of souls. The punishments of Hades, according to Polygnotus, seem to go on by some law, without present enforcement.
With the Hades of Polygnotus we must compare that which is depicted on a class of large amphorae which come to us from Apulia in Italy. I have engraved (Fig. 13) a fair specimen of these vase-paintings, which are all closely alike, from a vase of Canusium[38].
Here in the centre we have, in place of the sacred grove of Persephone, the palace of Hades and his Queen. He is seated, and holds a long sceptre; she carries a torch. The palace has not unnaturally taken the form of a chapel of the deities; the wheels hung up in the background seem to be votive offerings. The motive of the whole picture is curiously twofold. Two visits to Hades, which really took place at quite different times, are depicted as going on together, the quest of Orpheus for his lost Eurydice, and the attempt of Herakles to carry off the dog Cerberus and to rescue his friend Theseus.
FIG. 13. THE GREEK UNDER-WORLD.
FIG. 13. THE GREEK UNDER-WORLD.
FIG. 13. THE GREEK UNDER-WORLD.
Orpheus stands, lyre in hand, before the chapel of the nether deities. He is clad in the variegated embroidered robes of the Orientals, with sleeves down to the wrists anda Phrygian tiara. In the painting of Polygnotus Orpheus was, as Pausanias expressly states, clad in the ordinary Greek dress. Later art rejoiced in the picturesque costume of the Persians and Phrygians: and the Thracian home of Orpheus allowed artists to consider him as belonging to a semi-Greek, Anatolian race. Orpheus is evidently using his art to persuade Hades to restore Eurydice, and that dread deity seems, from the position of his uplifted right hand, to be addressing him; but Eurydice, in this as in most of the vase-paintings, is wanting; a curious fact, which may indicate that the motive of the quest of Orpheus was originally something different. It seems indeed, as will appear clearly later, that the vase-painter combines without much skill or purpose groups taken from the works of older and more thoughtful artists.
In the lowest line Herakles struggles with Cerberus, around whose three necks he has fastened a chain. Hermes, who carries a herald’s staff, points out to his brother the road to the upper air, and urges departure. A more terrifying figure behind Herakles also gives cause for haste. One of the Poenae or Furies, a female servant of Hades, wearing hunting-boots and holding over her arm a leopard’s skin, advances with a torch to defend the realm of the dead against rash invaders. In the upper line, on the right, a similar figure, with drawn sword, guards the captives whom Herakles has come to release. Peirithous sits and cannot rise, but Theseus is standing; so far as he is concerned, the attempt of the invincible Herakles is successful, and he is allowed to return to earth.
The other groups which make up the picture have no special connexion either with Orpheus or with Herakles, and are introduced merely to complete the picture of Hades. On some of these under-world vases the names are written over the various persons, so that we can identify them withease and certainty. In the upper line to the left is Megara, the wife of Herakles, and the two children of hers whom their father slew in a fit of madness. They stand near a spring-house, where water flows from a lion’s-head fountain. Drops of blood still stand on their breasts. Why they alone should thus bear in Hades the marks of mortal calamity we cannot say; nor indeed why they should appear at all as prominent inhabitants of the land of shades. One is inclined to fancy that some tale or legend may have connected them with the voyage of their father to Hades.
Beneath them is a curious domestic group: a young husband who is in the act of crowning himself with a wreath, a wife, and their little son, who drags behind him a plaything. It is a veritable scene of the reconstitution, in the land of shades, of a family endued with perpetual youth and leisure. Who these people may be is quite uncertain; but it is reasonable to think that they are such as have undergone initiation, and whose future life is thus assured. Opposite are the three judges of the dead, Minos, Aeacus, and Rhadamanthys, or, as some give the name, Triptolemus. Bearded and venerable figures, they carry long sceptres, but do not look so stern as one would expect from their terrible function.
The other scenes, in the two corners below, are of not much more than geographical import. They show the place to be Hades by introducing some of the well-known inhabitants of that region. On the left is Sisyphus uprearing his rock; and lest he should loiter at the task, one of the Poenae with snakes in her hair urges him with a double-thonged whip; in her other hand she carries a javelin and leopard’s skin. On the right is Tantalus, in the dress of an Oriental prince, and still carrying his sceptre. The Homeric pains have ceased to trouble him; he no longer stands in water, nor reaches after fruit. But he is still threatened by the hanging rock.
On other vases of the class, while the general arrangement is the same, the groups are varied. Peleus and Myrtilus, the faithless charioteer who arranged his victory at Olympia, sometimes take the place of Theseus and Peirithous. In the place of Tantalus we have a group of women ever drawing water, whether they be the Danaides or women who died uninitiated.
It is likely that all these Apulian vase-paintings go back to some original of a great painter which was known throughout the Greek world. An original by Polygnotus it cannot be; the composition is quite unlike his, and the Oriental garments worn by some of the personages indicate a different and a later school than his. We know that Nicias, a contemporary of Praxiteles, made a great picture of the under-world; but as we know nothing of its details, the inquiry whether this was the original copied in Italy has no certain basis.
Singularly instructive and suggestive is the comparison of these Hellenic pictures of the under-world with those which our ancestors of the Middle Ages painted on the walls and in the windows of their churches. There we see the ecstatic bliss of the saved, conducted by angels to the abode of God and the saints, and the fearful tortures inflicted upon the damned by hosts of hideous and malignant demons, who bind, burn, tear, and outrage them with fiendish ingenuity. In the Christian paintings there is no mean, everything is extreme. The destiny to eternal life or eternal torment seems to hang upon a decision by no means easy: angels and devils dispute the possession of souls, and the latter are at least as successful as the former in their raids. Our ancestors can scarcely have taken these representations as seriously as we are disposed to take them, or life shadowed by such a terrific future would have been unendurable. But still they embodied the teaching of the Church, which few dared dispute, at all events openly. They give us a glimpse atthe terrible moral pressure necessary in order that the realities of the moral and spiritual life should be burned into the heart of the European peoples.
In the Greek pictures, on the other hand, nothing is extreme, but everything is in moderation. Setting aside the torments of a few legendary heroes, like Tityus and Tantalus, which had little relation to actual life, there was no torture, as there was certainly no bliss, in Hades. Between the punishment of the uninitiated and the reward of the initiated there is not very much difference. Whether Megara and her children belong to the class of the happy or the wretched we do not know. They bear the marks of suffering, but as one of the boys carries the oil-flask and strigil of the athlete, he would seem to pass his time in Hades as suitably as the little boy of the initiated pair who trundles his toy. The only unpleasant feeling which is roused by our vase-painting or the more exquisite Hades of Polygnotus is that its tenants must suffer from infinite ennui, and the same reproach has been brought sometimes against the heaven of the Middle Ages. But probably only highly civilized people learn to realize that ennui may become a torment.
In particular, we may compare the swarms of black and hideous devils, with horn and hoof of the mediaeval pictures, with the Greek Poenae. We can trace the genealogy of these latter from early times. The Oriental imagination had from very early times delighted in depicting evil spirits in the form of monsters and winged beasts, who are overcome and slain by the gods in human form. For winged monsters the Greek artists of the sixth century had tended to substitute winged human beings of hideous aspect, Gorgons and Harpies, Eris and Phobos, and the like. It was Aeschylus who, wishing to bring on the stage in bodily form in hisEumenidesthe powers that avenge kindred blood, transformed the Erinnyes, who had hitherto been worshipped at Athens as the Eumenidesor gentle goddesses, in beautiful and dignified form[39]. He took as his models the Gorgons and Harpies of earlier art. So he himself tells us in theEumenides[40], where his priestess thus describes the sleeping visitors: ‘I call them not women, but Gorgons; yet cannot I quite liken them to the forms of Gorgons. In a picture once I saw Harpies painted bearing off the food of Phineus: these, however, are unwinged in aspect, but black and utterly abominable.’
Pausanias too says, when speaking of the shrine of the Eumenides at Athens[41]: ‘It was Aeschylus who first wreathed snakes in their hair; but in their statues there is nothing terrible, nor in the other statues set up in honour of the nether gods.’ In a series of vase-paintings which represent the flight to Delphi and the purification of Orestes, the Erinnyes appear sometimes in Aeschylean guise as women, unwinged, but with snakes in their hair and of terrible aspect. With these the Poenae of our vase-painting are almost identical in dress, though the ugliness is softened down. And as Polygnotus knows not the Poenae, it seems likely that it was in part the influence of Aeschylus which introduced them as ministrants of evil in the realm of Hades. But the Poenae certainly fill very inefficiently the place of the Christian demons. Greek art loved to soften, to generalize, while mediaeval art rejoiced, like Dante, in exact detail. Greek art was always ready to sacrifice precise meaning to beauty and grace, while mediaeval art had little sense of beauty, but tried to work on the emotions of fear and horror.
Side by side with the evidence derived from the works of ancient painters we must place that derived from ancient poets and other writers. The philosophers are outside our scope, except so far as they testify to the opinions of ordinarymen: to regard the views of Plato and Epicurus as ordinary Greek opinions would of course be as absurd as to regard John Stuart Mill or Herbert Spencer as representatives of the ordinary Englishman.
In ordinary Greek belief, then, we find abundant traces of the eternal conflict between the priest and the prophet, between ritual and ethics. There was a general feeling that those who died nobly or after a well-spent life were sure of a friendly reception in Hades. Xenophon says of Agesilaus[42], ‘He ever feared the gods, being of opinion that those who lived nobly were not yet happy, but that those who had died with good name were at once among the blessed.’ The chorus in theAlcestisspeak of their mistress immediately after her death as a blessed spirit. And a multitude of epitaphs[43]express the conviction that those who had lived nobly were sure of a favourable reception from Persephone. Beside this ethical view we find the opinion of the sacerdotal party that initiation in the Mysteries or attachment to the cultus of some deity was necessary for the attainment of future bliss. This was especially the view of the Orphists, and as such it is ridiculed by Plato in theRepublic[44]: ‘They persuade not individuals merely, but whole cities also, that men may be absolved and purified from crimes, both while they are still alive and even after their decease, by means of certain sacrifices and pleasureable amusements which they call Mysteries: which deliver us from the torments of the other world, while the neglect of them is punished by an awful doom.’ We have seen that Polygnotus gives some countenance to those who regarded the Mysteries as the gate of future happiness. And there was certainly in Greece a generally spread conviction, which may be well traced in theFrogsof Aristophanes, that initiation was, if not a passport to future happiness, at least a safeguardamid the dangers which surround the soul from the moment of its departure from the body until its final doom is fixed.
In the mentions of Hades to be found in the Tragedians, it appears more especially as the place of the reassembling of families. Sophocles’ Antigone expresses a hope of being well received in Hades by the relations to whom at her peril she has performed the rites of burial. The Oedipus of Sophocles wants to blind himself in order that in Hades he may not see the father and mother whom he has so deeply though ignorantly injured. In theAgamemnonof Aeschylus, Clytemnestra anticipates the meeting of Agamemnon in Hades with his daughter Iphigeneia. Hyperides, in his Funeral Oration, takes a somewhat wider view. He imagines the fallen heroes of the Lamian War as received in friendly fashion in Hades not merely by their kinsfolk, but by the worthies of Troy and of Marathon, and by the tyrannicides Harmodius and Aristogeiton.
As regards the imagery and geography of Hades the ordinary Greeks do not seem to have greatly troubled themselves. There were the views of poets and painters, and there were the more definite and dogmatic views of the professors of Orphic lore. These the people received or neglected as suited the bent of the mind of each. Hades was a realm of the imagination, as to the nature of which each man might innocently indulge his own hopes and aspirations.
In the epitaphs of later times we find, as will be shown in a future chapter[45], numerous allusions to the realm of Hades and Persephone. But they do not strike the reader as embodying strong belief; often they are of an epideictic or rhetorical character, like the statements which also occur that the soul of the dead has made its way to the Islands of the Blest or to the abodes of the gods. The beliefs which confined the spirits of the dead to the tomb and its neighbourhood belong to a lower and worse-educated stratum of the population, but have more vitality.
Greek religion and tradition knew of many mortals who had gone down alive into the earth, and there abode, giving for the most part oracles from their hiding-places. Such was Amphiaraus, the Argive hero, who after the bootless siege of Thebes went down with chariot and horses into the ground, and whose shrine was in later times a great oracular seat. Such was Trophonius of Lebadeia, whose cave is described for us by Pausanias. Caeneus, when overwhelmed with rocks by the Centaurs, vanished alive into the earth, and there lived on. It is, in fact, a marked feature of the cultus of heroes that their power is exercised only at the place where they disappeared or where their bodies were laid. They are intensely local, earth-daemons who possess a piece of land, and whose favour must be conciliated by any one who expects that land to yield him increase. Pelopidas, in the course of a campaign against the Spartans[46], unwittingly slept near the graves of some virgins of Leuctra, who had in old time been violated and slain by the Spartans. They appeared at night to the Theban general, and promised him victory if he made them the sacrifice of a foal. This is but one among a hundred instances of the fact that a hero had power only at his spot of burial: elsewhere he was helpless.
It is remarkable that this tendency to localization has been in all ages a mark of the ghost, and still marks him in the cases investigated by the Psychical Society. Yet the local character of ghosts has not become an impediment in the way of the acceptance of the Christian doctrines of Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory. Among our ancestors, just as among the Greeks, beliefs could lie in strata, and inconsistencies between a belief of one stratum and a belief of another stratumhad little disturbing power. When Campbell writes in his noble address to the Mariners of England, ‘The spirits of your fathers shall start from every wave,’ he can scarcely be supposed to deny that the souls of British naval heroes had found a heavenly resting-place.
Sometimes, however, the Greek mind was disturbed by inconsistencies of this kind, and evolved a theory for their explanation. Thus a later interpolator of theOdyssey, being scandalized by the assertion of Odysseus that he saw in Hades the mighty Herakles, adds[47], ‘his ghost (εἴδωλον) only; since he himself joys amid the delights of the immortal gods.’ Others supposed that it was only the spirits of the unburied which hovered around their bodies: and it is an ingenious modern theory that the custom of burning the bodies of the dead arose out of the desire to prevent them from disturbing the living. But in spite of everything, the Greek dead retained to the last their right to levy tribute on their descendants and friends.
Whenwe turn from the facts of Greek cult and belief as to a future life to the monuments of the dead, and set them in chronological order, the first group which commands our attention is that which belongs to the pre-historic city of Mycenae. We cannot here speak of the wealth of gold and silver, of bronze and ivory, which the fortunate spade of Dr. Schliemann brought to light within the sacred circle in the Acropolis of the city[48]. We must pass by the contents of the graves of the wealthy pre-historic monarchs of Mycenae, and confine our survey to the outward and sculptural adornments of their tombs. These fall into two well-marked and clearly distinguished classes. First, we have the conical so-called treasuries, of which several exist in the neighbourhood of Mycenae, as well as at Orchomenus, Menidi and other spots of Greece; secondly, we have the carved tombstones which were set up over the graves in the Mycenaean Acropolis.
The larger and more elaborate of the so-called treasuries of pre-historic Greece, such as the Treasury of Atreus at Mycenae, and the Treasury of Minyas at Orchomenus, consist of two chambers, a larger outer chamber, which is circular in plan and of conical form, resembling in fact the beehiveto which it has often been compared, and a cubical inner chamber, of much smaller dimensions. The accompanying engraving will make this clear (Fig. 14). The architect of the Mycenaean tomb had no small skill. The colossal size of the stones, especially of that over the door and of some in the dromos or approach, arouses the astonishment of the modern visitor, who wonders by what machinery and appliances blocks so colossal were transported from the quarries and placed in position. The gradual inward slope of the walls, each course of which somewhat overlaps the course below, is managed with great skill and accuracy. Rows of nails, some remains of which are still to be seen in the inner walls, supported, not indeed as some have supposed, a complete bronze lining to the conical chamber, but rows of stars or other ornaments, on which would glitter the light of the torches (Fig. 15). Perhaps the most expressive characteristic of all is the lavish expenditure of labour on a building which was entirely buried with earth, and on the magnificent approach built of hewn stones, when something far simpler and more effective might have been arranged. Evidently the builders of these monuments thought no trouble and no expense wasted, if only the dead were honoured and gratified.
FIG. 14. SECTIONAL PLAN OF THE SO-CALLED TREASURY OF ATREUS[49].
FIG. 14. SECTIONAL PLAN OF THE SO-CALLED TREASURY OF ATREUS[49].
FIG. 14. SECTIONAL PLAN OF THE SO-CALLED TREASURY OF ATREUS[49].
A simpler form of tomb of the same age and style dispensed with the square side-chamber, and consisted ofa beehive building only. The engraving (Fig. 16) gives the plan of such a tomb near the Lion Gate of Mycenae.
FIG. 15. RESTORATION OF INTERIOR OF TREASURY, BY C. CHIPIEZ[50].>
FIG. 15. RESTORATION OF INTERIOR OF TREASURY, BY C. CHIPIEZ[50].>
FIG. 15. RESTORATION OF INTERIOR OF TREASURY, BY C. CHIPIEZ[50].>
The excavations of recent years have given us abundant information on three important points, first as to the architectural decoration of these splendid memorials of the dead, second as to their purpose, and third as to their date. On each of these subjects I must briefly touch.
There have been for a long time in the British Museum interesting fragments from the doorway of the Treasury of
FIG. 16. PLAN AND FAÇADE OF TREASURY[51].
FIG. 16. PLAN AND FAÇADE OF TREASURY[51].
FIG. 16. PLAN AND FAÇADE OF TREASURY[51].
Atreus, and attempts have been made, on the ground of these fragments and others once known which have disappeared, to reconstruct the entrance of the building. Such attempt has best succeeded in the hand of M. Chipiez[52], who has produceda design at once faithful to the data, and of noble architectural effect. A more recent discovery is that of the decoration, in relief, of the ceiling of the side-chamber of the tomb of Orchomenus, which was excavated by Dr. Schliemann in 1880[53](Fig. 17). The pattern of this ceiling bears a close resemblance to some of the Egyptian patterns in use for painted ceilings, thus giving us a valuable suggestion as to the origin of the art of the Mycenaean age.
FIG. 17. CEILING OF TREASURY, ORCHOMENUS.
FIG. 17. CEILING OF TREASURY, ORCHOMENUS.
FIG. 17. CEILING OF TREASURY, ORCHOMENUS.
That the conical underground buildings of early Greece were really erected as burial-places of the kings and nobles is now certain. Pausanias, in whose times less was known as to primitive Greece than is now known, calls the beehivetomb at Orchomenus the treasury of Minyas, and those at Mycenae the treasuries of Atreus and his sons. And doubtless they were in a sense treasuries, since in them were stored all the rich spoils which at that time were so freely bestowed on the great dead. But primarily they were burial-places, and the use as treasure-houses was only a derivative one. A few years ago this was a matter of dispute among the learned, K. O. Müller taking one side and Welcker the other. But in this case, as in so many others, the spade has cut the Gordian knot which the wit of man could not untie. Excavation has brought to light within the beehive grave of Menidi, in Attica, six skeletons; and at Vaphio, though the bodies which had been buried in the conical chamber had passed into dust, yet the disposition of the rich booty which was found buried beneath the floor showed that it was certainly a sepulchral deposit.
In the case of the more elaborate tombs with two chambers, there can be little doubt that the smaller side-chamber was that wherein the corpses were laid, while the outer chamber served for the purposes of the cultus with which the dead were honoured: thither was brought the tribute of sacrifice and offering which the dead demanded from the living. But in those cases where there is a single chamber, the dead rested beneath the floor of that chamber in the midst of their wealth, their arms and ornaments and vessels of silver and gold.
A number of recent discoveries, a full account of which would take us too far from our immediate subject, have helped us to determine the date of the beehive tombs of early Greece. The earliest date indicated for them seems to be about the fifteenth, and the latest the tenth, century before our aera. They belong to the age of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth dynasties of Egypt, when the land of the Pharaohs was more than once exposed to invasion by the powerful chiefs of the islands of the north. As the mists of the past are lifting,we gain a clearer and clearer view of a somewhat highly developed civilization in Hellenic lands at a time long before the Greece which is known to us came into being, of kings before Agamemnon, and palaces older and more splendid than those described in the Homeric poems. We may venture, though perhaps not without some trepidation, to ascribe the tombs of which we have spoken to the Achaean heroes whose fame still echoes in the earliest poetry of Greece; though it is certain that after their erection great changes had taken place in the country before the Homeric poems acquired anything like their present form. Our trepidation arises from the fact that the last word is certainly not said, nor the last theory put forth in this matter. The claims of the Carians and the Pelasgi to the remains of the Mycenaean age find adherents. Mr. Helbig, in an able recent work[54], has tried to prove that the contents of the Mycenaean tombs are almost entirely Phoenician. But the verdict of the majority of archaeologists goes in favour of the Achaeans, and the sober judgement of M. Perrot has accepted their claims in his great work onLa Grèce primitive.
It is supposed by many archaeologists that the graves which were dug in the rock just within the Lion-gate of Mycenae, those tombs the rich spoil of which dazzled Europe a few years ago, are of older period than the beehive tombs. It is not unusual to recognize in the graves of prehistoric Greece two periods, an older period of rock-cut graves, and a later of beehive graves. But this distinction rests on no solid proof. There is no reason for deciding that the contents of the beehive tomb at Vaphio belonged to a later age than the contents of the Mycenaean rock-tombs. In the opinion of Professor Petrie, an opinion eminently worthy of consideration, they belong to an earlier time. Mr. Evans, another excellent authority, has accepteda view, first put forward by myself, that the bodies and the treasures found in the rock-graves at Mycenae had been moved thither, on some alarm of invasion, from an earlier resting-place in the beehive tombs which lie outside the acropolis walls of that city. In any case we are justified, in the present state of knowledge, in declining to recognize the line of division of which we have spoken. And so we may persist in regarding the sculptural decorations of the rock-tombs as not earlier than the architectural decorations of the beehive tombs. Very probably they may be later, but in any case they belong to the same race and the same age.
Over several of the rock-cut fosses in which the wealth of the early kings of Mycenae lay mingled with their bones, there was erected, either at the time of burial or later, an upright slab to mark the spot. Some of these slabs were plain, but others were carved with reliefs, of which some account must here be given, as it is desirable to compare them with the sepulchral reliefs of later Greece.
These slabs were made of the calcareous stone of the district: with time their surface has naturally suffered, but we can still trace on them the scenes sculptured by hands evidently quite unaccustomed to dealing with such materials. The designs are in many cases mere patterns, such as appear with far greater appropriateness on the gold plates used for the adornment of the dead. But in a few cases we have transcripts from the life of the period.Fig. 18[55]represents part of one tombstone. We here see a warrior charging the foe in a chariot, the horse of which gallops with an almost preternatural energy. The driver holds with his right hand the reins, while the left hand grasps the hilt of a sword slung to his side by a sword-belt. In front of him flies an enemy who brandishes a leaf-shaped sword. The whole field is occupied by spiral designs.Fig. 19[56]presents