Note 44 — Chapter XII · THE LAY AUTHORS

ἔτειλαν Διὸς ὁδὸν παρὰ Κρόνου τύρσιν, O. ii, 77. What exactly is to be understood by the “way of Zeus” was presumably clearer to the συνετοί versed in the mythology of mysticism for whom Pindar is here writing, than it is to us. It must mean (as Boeckh supposes) the way which Zeus treads in order to reach that Island, far to the West in Okeanos, inaccessible as the Land of the Hyperboreans to ship or traveller on foot; it is a special ἀθανάτων ὁδός like that which leads to Homer’s grotto of the Nymphs, ν 112. Acc. to Bergk, Opusc. ii, 708, it is “certain” that Pindar means the Milky Way. Along this the gods travel to the house of Zeus, Ovid, M. i, 168; and Orpheus in the same way fr. 123, 17 Ab., speaks of the θεῶν ὁδοὶ οὐρανιώνων in the heavens. But the souls could only be made to travel along the Milky Way if their habitation was placed in the sky as it often was later. So, as Bergk points out, following Lob., Agl. 935, the Empedotimos of Herakld. Pont. calls the Milky Way ὁδὸς ψυχῶν τῶν ᾇδην τὸν ἐν οὐράνῳ διαπορευομένων ap. Philop. in Arist., Mete., p. 117, 10 Hayd.; see above, chap. ix, n. 111. But Pindar situates his μακάρων νῆσος in the Ocean (78): it is difficult to see how the souls could arrive there on the Milky Way from the place where they find themselves after death. (We may surely acquit Pindar of the later fancies about an Okeanos in the heavens.) Q.S. iii, 761 ff. (cited by Tafel) knows of a special way belonging to the gods which leads from heaven down to the Ἠλύσιον πεδίον. But the way by which the souls reach the μακάρων νῆσος does not, like that way, begin in heaven. We should rather think of some way only passable for gods and spirits leading from the inhabited world over the pathless Ocean to the latter’s “sources” far in the West.