Note 18 — Chapter VII · IDEAS OF THE FUTURE LIFE

Utopian existence in Hades; see in partic. [Pherecr.] Μεταλλ. (i, p. 174 K.). A pretext for such parodies was perhaps given by the Orphic promise of an everlasting carouse for the initiated at the συμπόσιον τῶν ὁσίων in Hades (Pl., Rp. ii, 263 C, μακάρῶν εὐωχία, Ar., Ra. 85). Many details were borrowed from the descriptions of the reign of bliss upon earth in the golden age under Kronos’ rule which had long been a familiar subject of comedy (cf. Pöschel, Das Märchen vom Schlaraffenland, 7 ff.). The golden age in the dim past and the land of Elysion in the future always had many features in common. (See above, chap. ii, n. 49.) From these traditional pictures of a spirit-world only to be met with in the long-vanished past or in the next world, the whole Greek literature of imaginary Utopias drew its sustenance (see my Griech. Roman, ii, § 2, 3). That literature was really an attempt to transpose those early fantasies of a land of spirits into real life and on to the inhabited world.