Part 1 — CHAPTER V THE CULT OF SOULS

Greek civilization as we see it reflected in the Homeric poems strikes us as so variously developed, and yet so complete in itself, that if we had no further sources of information, we should naturally suppose that the characteristic culture of the Greeks there reached the highest point attainable under the conditions set by national character and external circumstance. In reality the Homeric poems stand on the border line between an older development that has come to complete maturity and a new, and in many ways differently constituted, order of things. The poems themselves offer an idealized picture of a past that was on the point of disappearing entirely. The profound upheavals of the following centuries can be measured by their final results; we can guess the underlying forces from a study of the individual symptoms. But the fact remains that in the very imperfect state of our information about this period of transformation, we can do little more than recognize the existence of all the conditions necessary for a complete reorganization of Greek life. We can see how the once less-important races in Greece now come into the foreground of history; how they set up new kingdoms by the right of conquest on the ruins of the old, and bring into prominence their own special ways of thinking. Colonization over a wide area meant the expansion of Greek life; while the colonies themselves, as is so often the case, traversed all the stages of development at a much faster rate. Commerce and industry developed, calling forth and satisfying new demands. New elements of the population came to the fore, governments began to fall and the old rule of the kings gave way to Aristocracy, Tyranny, Democracy. In friendly and (in the West especially) hostile relationship the Greeks came into contact more than formerly with foreign peoples in every stage of civilization who influenced them in many directions.

All these great movements must have produced many fresh currents in intellectual life too. And in fact the attempt to get free from tradition, from the long-standing culture that seemed, when reflected in the Homeric poems, so permanent and complete in itself, is seen most clearly in the sphere of poetry. The poets threw off the tyranny of the epic convention. They ceased to obey its formal verse-rhythm. And with the freedom thus gained from its vocabulary of stock words, phrases, and images, it was inevitable that the point of view also should change and gain in width. The poet no longer turns his gaze away from his own time and his own person. He himself becomes the central figure of his poetry, and to express the ferment of his own emotions he invents for himself the most natural rhythm, in close alliance with music which now becomes an important and independent element in Greek life. It is as though the Greeks had just discovered the full extent of their own capacities and dared to make free use of them. In every branch of the plastic arts the hand of the artist wins in the course of the centuries an ever greater capacity to give visible shape to the imagined world of beauty. Even the ruins of that world reveal to us more plainly and impressively (because less mixed with conscious reflexion) than any literary achievement, the thing that is of permanent value in Greek art.

It was impossible that religion, alone unaffected by the general atmosphere of change, should remain unaltered in the old paths. But here, even more than in other directions, we must admit that the inward reality of the change remains hidden from us. We can see indeed many external alterations, but of the directing spirit which called them forth we hardly catch more than a glimpse. It is easy, by comparing the later condition of religion with the Homeric, to see how enormously the objects of religious worship have multiplied. We can see how much more sumptuous and elaborate ceremonial has become and observe the development in beauty and variety, in conjunction with the fine arts, of the great religious festivals of the different cities and peoples of Greece. Temples and sculpture bear unmistakable witness to the increased power and importance of religion. That an inward and far-reaching change had come over religious thought and belief might have been already guessed from the fame and importance which belonged to the oracle at Delphi, now coming into real power; and from the many new developments in Greek religious life taking their origin from this spiritual centre. At this time there grew up, under the influence of a deepening moral sense, that new interpretation of religion that we meet with in its completed form in Aeschylus and Pindar. The age was decidedly more “religious-minded” than that in which Homer lived. It is as though the Greeks then went through a period such as most civilized nations go through at some time or other, and such as the Greeks themselves were to repeat more than once in after centuries—a period in which the mind after it has at least half succeeded in winning its freedom from disquieting and oppressive beliefs in invisible powers shrinks back once more. Under the influence of adversity it feels the need of some comforting illusions behind which it may take shelter and be relieved in part of the burden of responsibility.

The obscurity of this period of growth hides also from our sight the origin and development of beliefs about the soul very different from the Homeric. The results of the process are however visible enough and we can still discern how a regular cult of the disembodied soul and eventually a belief in immortality fully worthy of the name were being built up at this time. These things are the result of phenomena which partly represent the re-emergence of elements in religious life which had been submerged in the previous period, and partly the entry of fresh forces which in conjunction with the resuscitated old give rise between them to a third and new creation.

I CULT OF THE CHTHONIC DEITIES

The chief new feature revealing itself to comparative study in the development of religion in the post-Homeric period is the worship of chthonic deities, that is, of deities dwelling in the interior of the earth. And yet it is an undoubted fact that these divinities are among the oldest possessions of Greek religious faith. Indeed, bound as they are to the soil of the country, they are the true local deities, the real gods of home and country. They are also not unknown to Homer; but epic poetry had transferred them, divested of all local limitation, to a distant subterranean region, inaccessible to living men, beyond the limits of Okeanos. There Aïdes and the terrible Persephoneia rule as guardians of the dead. From that distant and unapproachable place they can have no influence upon the life and doings of men on earth. Religious cult, too, only knows these deities in connexion with particular localities and particular groups of worshippers. Each of these worships the deities of the underworld as denizens of their soil and their countryside alone. They are untroubled by any considerations of a general and uniform kingdom of the gods such as the epic had set up; nor are they disturbed by similar and conflicting claims made by neighbouring communities. And only in these local cults are the gods of the lower world seen in their true nature as they were conceived by the faith of their worshippers. They are the gods of a settled, agricultural, inland population. Dwelling beneath the soil they guarantee two things to their worshippers: they bless the cultivation of the ground and ensure the increase of the fruits of the soil to the living; they receive the souls of the dead into their underworld.1 In certain places they also send up from the spirit-world revelations of future events.

The most exalted name we met with among these dwellers below the earth is that of Zeus Chthonios. This is at once the most general and the most exclusive designation of the god of the lower world; for the name “Zeus” had in many local cults thus preserved the generalized meaning of “god” in combination with a particularizing adjective. The Iliad also once speaks of “Zeus of the lower world”; though by this is meant none other than the ruler of the distant realm of the dead, Hades. Hades too, in the Hesiodic Theogony is once called “Zeus the Chthonian”.2 But the agricultural poem of Hesiod bids the Boeotian countryman, when preparing his fields for sowing, pray for a blessing to the Chthonic Zeus. Zeus Chthonios was also sacrificed to in Mykonos for the “fruits of the earth”.3

But, more frequently than under this most general and exalted title,4 we meet with the god of the living and the dead under various disguises. The gods of the underworld were generally referred to by affectionate or cajoling nicknames that laid stress on the lofty or beneficent character of their rule and threw a veil over the darkest side of their nature with conciliatory euphemism.5 Thus Hades had many flattering titles and special names.6 So, too, in many places Zeus of the underworld was worshipped as Zeus Eubouleus or Bouleus,7 at other places, especially Hermione, as Klymenos.8 Zeus Amphiaraos, Zeus Trophonios we have dealt with already in their capacity of Heroes, but they are really nothing else but such earth deities with honourable titles, who have been deprived to some extent of their full status as gods9 and have on that account developed all the more strongly the oracular side of their powers. Hades, the ruler of that distant kingdom of darkness, is one of this class of manifestations of Zeus Chthonios that vary in name according to the different localities of their worship. The king of the shadows in Erebos as he appears in Homer has no altars or sacrifices made to him10; but these things belong to him as the local god of particular places. In the Peloponnese there were local centres of his worship in Elis and Triphylia,11 sites of a very ancient civilization; and it is probable enough that tribes and clans having their origin there contributed by their wanderings to the spread of their native cult of the chthonic deity in other Greek countries as well.12 Hades, too, was for his Peloponnesian worshippers a god of the fertility of the earth just as much as a god of the dead.13 And in the same way he was the lord of the Souls as well, in those places where “in fear of the name of Hades”14 he was called, in honour of his beneficent powers, Plouton, Plouteus, or Zeus Plouteus.

The welfare of the living and the dead was also the concern of the female deity of the underworld called by the name of the earth itself Ge or Gaia. At the places where she was worshipped she was regarded as one who brought fruitfulness to the fields, but she held sway over the souls of the dead as well, in conjunction with whom prayers and sacrifice were offered to her.15 Her temples remained in honour, especially at Athens and at the primeval centre of ancient worship of the gods, Olympia.16 But her personality had never been quite reduced to definite and intelligible outline from the enormous vagueness natural to primitive deities. Earth-goddesses of more recent and intelligible form had supplanted her. She retained longest her mantic powers which she exercised from beneath the earth, the abode of spirits and souls, at ancient oracular sites—though even here she often had to give way to oracular gods of another description, such as Zeus and Apollo. A poet indeed mentions her once side by side with the great ruler of the lower world,17 but in actual worship she was seldom found among the groups of male and female deities of chthonic nature such as were worshipped together at many places. Above all, at Hermione there flourished from primitive times a solemn cult of the lower-world Demeter in conjunction with the lower-world Zeus, under the name of Klymenos, and with Kore.18 At other places Plouton and these two goddesses were worshipped together, or Zeus Eubouleus and the same two, etc.19 The names of the underworld god vary indefinitely, but the names of Demeter and her divine daughter appear every time unchanged. Either alone or together, and worshipped in connexion with other related deities, these two goddesses have by far the most important place in the cult of the underworld. The fame and widespread popularity of their cult in all Greek cities of the mother-country and in the colonies proves more than anything else that since Homeric times a change must have taken place in the sphere of religious emotion and service of the gods.

Homer gives no hint of the character or importance of the later cult of Demeter and Persephone. For him Persephone is simply the grim unapproachable Queen of the dead, Demeter invariably (and solely) a goddess of the fertility of crops20; she stands apart indeed from the rest of the Olympians, but no reference to a close association with her daughter is ever made.21 Now, however, both goddesses appear in various and changing activity, but always closely associated, and it seems as if they had come to share some of their previously distinct characteristics. Both are now chthonic deities who together have in their protection the growth of the crops and the care of the souls of the dead. How in detail the change came about we can no longer discover. It may be that, in the times of the great migrations, from various centres of the worship of the two goddesses, such as had existed from great antiquity in the Peloponnese especially,22 there issued forth this faith that differed so essentially from the Homeric-Ionic view of things. It must have spread just as in later times the special variety of the cult of the closely associated goddesses that was practised in Eleusis was widely propagated by regular missions. It also seems that Demeter, in whose name there was early a tendency to recognize a second “Mother Earth,” in many places took the place of Gaia in religious cult, and thereby entered into closer connexion with the realm of the souls below the earth.

§ 2

As the numbers of the underworld beings increased, and their cult grew and expanded, these divinities began to have a very different meaning for the living from what they once had for the Greeks of the Homeric age. The upper and the lower worlds are drawn closer to each other; the world of the living borders upon that world after death over which the chthonic gods hold sway. The ancient belief that the earth-caverns of their own land, on which men dwelt and worked, were the near and accessible abode of divinity, now reappeared here and there, and was no longer completely awed into silence by the poetic lustre of the all-embracing divine world of Olympos. We have spoken in a previous chapter of Amphiaraos at Thebes, Trophonios in the Lebadean cave, and Zeus in the cave on Mt. Ida; and again of that Zeus who was seen enthroned by those who descended into a cave in Epirus. These are all vestiges of the same belief which originally underlay all local cults of underworld deities. The realm of chthonic gods, of spirits and departed souls, seemed to be close at hand. Ploutonia, i.e. direct inlets to the underworld, existed at many places,23 as also did Psychopompeia, clefts in the rock through which the souls can pass out into the upper world. In the middle of the city of Athens, in a natural chasm on the Areiopagos, underworld beings were reputed to have their home.24 The most striking denial of the separation between the living and the underworld, such as was demanded by Homeric theology, was at Hermione. Here, behind the temple of Chthonia lay a sacred precinct of Plouton or Klymenos with a chasm in the ground through which Herakles had once brought up Kerberos to the earth—and an “Acherusian Lake”.25 So near did the spirit world seem here, that the people of Hermione did not give their dead the usual coin to pay the fare of Charon, the ferryman of the dead:26 for them, in whose own country lay the river Acheron, no tract of water lay between the land of the living and the dead.

More important than these cases of contact between the dark underworld and the world of the living—for the localization of the underworld still remained for the most part matter of fancy—is the fact that the creatures of that world are again drawing closer to the senses of men. The thoughts of men turn more frequently to the other world at so many festivals and anniversaries; the gods who rule below desire and repay the veneration of mankind, both of the individual and the city. And in the train of the chthonic gods the souls of the dead, always closely bound to them, receive a cult which in many particulars goes beyond anything customary in the Homeric Age.

II FUNERAL CEREMONIES AND WORSHIP OF THE DEAD

The first duty that the survivors owe to their dead is to bury the body in the customary manner. This age takes the matter more seriously than the Homeric people had done. Whereas in Homer denial of burial to enemies fallen in war is often mentioned, it is now regarded as a religious duty that is seldom neglected to give back the bodies of the fallen foe for burial. To deny the honour of burial to members of one’s own city is an outrage of the most extreme kind; everyone knows what terrible vengeance for such a neglect of duty was taken, by the excited populace at Athens, on the generals after Arginousai. Nothing can release a son from the duty of burying his father and offering him the regular gifts at his grave.27 And if the relations, in spite of everything, neglect their task the law at Athens requires the Demarch to see to the burial of his fellow demesman.28 Religious requirements, however, go beyond the law. At the solemn agricultural festival of Demeter the Bouzyges at Athens invoked a curse on all who should leave a corpse unburied.29 This matter, which the chthonic deities take under their protection, is no mere sanitary police regulation. It is not any such consideration, but solely the “unwritten laws” of religion which are obeyed by Antigone when she covers the dead body of her brother with a little dust: even such symbolical burial is enough to avert the “abomination” (ἄγος). Motives of pure piety may have played their part, but the really fundamental idea underlying all such practices was the one already met with in the Iliad:30 that the soul of the unburied person can find no rest in the hereafter. The ghost haunts the neighbourhood, its rage afflicts the land in which it is detained against its will; and the withholding of burial “is worse for the withholder than for him to whom burial is refused”.31 Condemned criminals, indeed, are thrown by the state, unburied, into a pit;32 the sacrilegious and traitors to their country are denied burial in the ground of that country.33 This is a formidable punishment, for even though the outlaw is buried in a foreign country,34 his soul cannot be permanently tended there. Only the family of the dead in their own home can give their departed kinsman the honour due to him in the cult of the souls, and only they at the spot where his remains lie buried.35

What we know of the details of the funeral ceremonies, differs very little in essence from what had survived into the Homeric age as customs no longer fully explained by contemporary belief. The new features that we meet with may also, for the most part, be very primitive usage restored to currency. Some of the particular details make the solemnity of the act more apparent.

After the eyes and mouth have been closed by the next of kin the body is washed and anointed by women of the family, and clothed in clean garments. It is then laid out upon a bier in the interior of the house for the ceremonial lying-in-state. In Athens marjoram was strewn under the body, for superstitious reasons,36 and also four broken-off vine branches; in the grave, also, the corpse lay on vine branches.37 Underneath the bier were placed ointment vessels of the peculiar slim shape that the graves have restored to us again in such numbers. At the door of the room, for the benefit of those leaving the house who had incurred religious defilement by coming in contact with the corpse, was placed a bowl full of pure water brought in from another house.38 Cypress branches fixed upon the house door outside warned the scrupulous that a corpse was in the house.39 The head of the dead person was generally decked with garlands and fillets, in a manner unknown to the Homeric age, as a sign, it appears, of respect for the higher sanctity of the departed.40

The lying-in-state of the dead, lasting the whole of one day, was certainly not intended originally to serve the purpose of a public “notification of death”, such as later writers attribute to it.41 The funeral dirge was sung at the bier of the dead man, and to give opportunity for this ceremony was its real purpose. The habit of the old Attic government of the Eupatridai had increased the pomp of funeral ceremonies in every direction, and had encouraged an extravagant cult of the souls of the departed. Solon’s legislation had to restrain and limit such exaggeration in many ways, and in particular, the tendency to increase unduly the lamentation sung over the dead body required to be kept within bounds. Only the women of the immediate family of the dead might take part in it, for to them alone the cult of the departed belonged as a duty.42 The violent expression of grief, the tearing of the cheeks, beating the breast and head, was forbidden,43 as also was the singing of “poems”,44 i.e. in all probability regular funeral dirges specially written for the purpose such as Homer made the women sing round Hektor’s bier. To extend the subject of the funeral dirge to apply to others beside the person then being buried had to be made absolutely illegal.45 This prohibition must also have been applied already to the gathering at the graveside. But to sacrifice animals before the procession to the grave was a very ancient custom, and it seems as if Solon forbade this too.46 In other states, also, legislation was necessary to put a curb on the tendency to overdo the violence of the expressions of grief for the dead47 which were common in the antiquity of the Greeks as among many of the “uncivilized” tribes who carry them to the point of exhaustion. It was not simple piety or natural human grief (never particularly given to violent or excessive demonstration) that caused these things. It was rather the ancient belief that the soul of the dead was still invisibly present, and would be pleased at the most violent expressions of grief for its loss.48 The dirge, carried to this extreme, belongs in fact to the cult of the departed spirit. The restraints placed upon the traditional lamentation may in their turn—in so far as they were effective—have been derived not from considerations of good sense (which rarely have much influence in such matters) but from religious or superstitious reasons.49

The lying-in-state of the body seems invariably to have lasted for one day only.50 In the early morning of the third day51 after death the corpse, together with the bier on which it lay, was borne out of the house. Legislation was in some places necessary to check excessive ostentation at the funeral procession.52 What pomp and ceremony was customary in the time of the old aristocratic rule at this part of the cult of the dead, we may gather (if it corresponded at all to reality) from the picture of a funeral procession represented on a very archaic “Dipylon vase”.53 There the body is carried on high on a wagon drawn by two horses: men carrying swords surround it, and a whole company of women, making lamentation and beating their heads, follow the procession. At Athens the attendance in the procession was confined, in the case of women at least, to those of the immediate kinsfolk (for three generations). The men, who had their place in front of the women seem to have been admitted without such restriction.54 The admission of hired companies of Karian women and men, singing the national dirges, seems at Athens not to have been forbidden.55 At Keos and elsewhere, the laws ordered processions to the grave to be conducted in silence.56 On the whole, the discipline of respectable city life reduced the “excessive and barbaric”,57 which must once have been the rule in the display of mourning, to a discreet symbolism.

On the details of the burial procedure our information is incomplete. Occasional expressions used by Greek authors allow us to conclude—and this is confirmed by the excavation of graves in Greek countries—that besides the custom, exclusively prevailing in Homeric times, of cremation, the more ancient practice of burying the body unburnt was still kept up.58 The body was not intended to be completely destroyed. Out of the ashes of the funeral pyre the son carefully gathers the remains of his father’s bones59 in order to bury them, enclosed in an urn or a box. If on the other hand the body remains unburnt, it is either enclosed in a coffin made of baked clay, or wood60—a custom clearly betraying its foreign origin, or else—and this must have been certainly the older and more purely native Greek usage—it is let down into the earth without a coffin, and laid upon a bed of leaves;61 at other times, if the nature of the ground allows, it may rest unburied in a rock-chamber, upon a bed of stonework.62

The soul, though now set free, keeps up some connexion with the body it once inhabited. It is for its use and pleasure that an ample provision of household implements and vessels is laid beside the corpse (though no longer the whole of the dead man’s possessions as once was usual); and graves since opened have restored such things in large numbers to our gaze.63 But the Greeks never seriously believed that such a phantasmal existence could be prolonged to eternity. Elaborate expedients for the perpetual preservation of the corpse (by embalmment and other means, such as were employed in the case of bodies buried in the Mycenæan shaft-graves)64 were unknown in these later times—except as a peculiar archaism in the burial of Spartan kings.

§ 2

Once the body is buried, the soul of the dead enters the invisible company of the “Better and Superior”.65 This belief, which Aristotle regarded as of primeval antiquity in Greece, emerges very clearly in the cult-observance of these post-Homeric centuries from the obscurity which the Homeric age had imposed upon it. The soul of the dead has its special cult-group composed naturally enough of the descendants and family of the dead, and of them only. There even survived a dim memory of the time when the body of the dead was buried inside the house, which thus became the immediate centre of his cult.66 That must quite certainly have been during an age which knew little or nothing of the almost painful sensitiveness to the idea of ritual “purification” such as prevailed in later times. At least, we have no reason for supposing that the Greeks (like many so-called “savage” peoples among whom the custom prevails of burying the corpse within the dead man’s own hut) deserted the house that had now become haunted, and left it to the undisturbed possession of the ghost of the dead man buried there.67 To bury the dead within the walls of the city, at least, was considered unobjectionable in later times by certain Dorian states.68 Even where religious scruples and the practical convenience of city life combined to fix the place for burials outside the city walls, families kept their graves together often in a single extensive plot with a wall built round it.69 Where a country estate belonged to a family, this generally also included the graves of its ancestors.70

Wherever it was situated, the grave was holy, as being the place where later generations tended and worshipped the souls of departed members of their family. Grave columns indicated the holiness of the spot;71 trees and sometimes a complete grove surrounded the grave, as they did so often the altars and temples of the gods.72 These were intended to serve as pleasant retreats for the souls of the beloved dead.73

Sacrificial offerings began for the most part at the actual time of the funeral. The custom of pouring libations of wine, oil, and honey at the grave was probably in general use.74 Even the sacrifice of animals, such as was made at the funeral pyre of Patroklos and even of Achilles, cannot have been unusual at an earlier period. Solon expressly forbade the sacrifice of an ox at the grave.75 At Keos, permission is just as expressly given for a “preliminary sacrifice to be offered at the funeral in accordance with ancestral custom”.76 When the funeral ceremony is over, the members of the family, after a solemn rite of religious purification,77 put on garlands (they had previously avoided this78) and begin the funeral feast.79 This also was a part of the cult of the dead. The soul of the dead man was regarded as being present—even as playing the part of host.80 It was awe felt for the invisible presence that originally inspired the custom of speaking only praise of the dead at the funeral feast.81 This feast was an entertainment given in the house of the dead man to the surviving members of his family. The dead man had a meal to himself alone, which was offered at the grave82 on the third and on the ninth day after the funeral.83 On the ninth day it appears that ancient usage brought the period of mourning to an end.84 Where it was extended to a longer period the earlier series of offerings to the dead was prolonged proportionally. Sparta had a period of mourning lasting eleven days.85 At Athens, in addition to the sacrifice on the third and ninth days, another funeral feast which might be repeated several times,86 was held on the thirteenth day.87

Even after the ceremonies attached to the funeral itself were at last over, the relations of the dead were by no means released from the duty of tending not merely the grave, but the soul of the deceased member of their family. In particular the son and heir had no more sacred duty to perform than the offering of “the customary things” (τὰ νόμιμα) to the soul of his father. These consisted above all of libations to be made to the dead on certain fixed and recurrent festivals. On the 30th of the month there was a traditional feast of the dead.88 Besides this, every year at the “Genesia”, when the birthday of the dead came round, the occasion was regularly celebrated with sacrifice.89 The day on which he first entered this life is still of importance to the psyche of the dead man. It is plain that no impassable gulf was fixed between life and death: it almost seems as though life went on quite uninterrupted by death.

Besides these variable feasts of the Genesia, celebrated as they occurred by the individual families, there was at Athens a festival, also called the Genesia, at which the whole citizen body did honour to the souls of their dead relatives on the 5th Boëdromion.90 We hear also of the Nemesia as a feast of the dead in Athens91 (probably intended for the averting of the anger of the dead—always a subject of apprehension), and of various festivals of the dead in other Greek States.92 At Athens the chief festival of all the dead occurred at the close of the Dionysiac feast of the Anthesteria, in the spring, of which it formed the concluding day. This was the time when the dead swarmed up into the world of the living, as they did in Rome on the days when the “mundus patet”, and so still in the belief of our own (German) country people at “Twelfth-tide”. The days belonged to the souls (and their master Dionysos): they were days of “uncleanness”93 unsuited to the business of city life. The temples of the gods were closed during that period.94 As protection against the ghosts invisibly present, the citizens employed various old and tried precautionary measures; they chewed hawthorn leaves on their morning walk, and smeared their doorposts with pitch. In this way the ghosts were kept at arms length.95 Each family made offering to its own dead, and the offerings they made have remained for the most part the appropriate gifts of the dead on their feast-days in many lands down to modern times. A special offering was made to the dead96 on the last day of the feast, the Chytrai, which was sacred to none of the Olympians, but to Hermes the leader of the dead. To this god—but “for the dead”—were offered cooked vegetables and seeds in pots (which gave their name to this day of the festival).97 It seems probable that as a sacrifice to the dead honey-cakes were thrown into a cleft of the earth in the Temne of Ge Olympia.98 Indoors, too, the swarming ghosts entered and were entertained. They were not, however, permanently welcome guests, and finally they were driven out of the house in a manner parallelled at the close of festivals of the dead among many nations of old and modern times.99 “Begone ye Keres, Anthesteria is over” were the words used in sending away the souls, and it is remarkable that in this formula they were given their primeval name—a name whose original sense had been forgotten by Homer, but not by the language of the common people of Attica.100

Individuals may have found still further opportunities of bringing gifts to their own dead and showing their reverence for them. The cult paid by the family to the spirits of their ancestors is hardly distinguished, except by the greater limitation of the circle of worshippers, from the worship of underworld deities and Heroes. In the case of the souls, however, nature itself united the sacrificers and worshippers (and no one else) with the object of their devotion. If we wish to form some idea of the way in which (under the influence of a civilization that tended to reduce all primitive grandeur to mere idyll) the worship of the dead altered its character in the direction of piety and intimacy—we need only look at the pictures representing such worship (though rarely before the fourth century) on the oilflasks which were used at funerals in Attica and then laid by the side of the dead in the grave. These slight sketches breathe a spirit of simple kindliness; we see the mourners decking the grave monument with wreaths and ribbons; worshippers approaching with gestures of adoration, bringing with them many objects of daily use—mirrors, fans, swords, etc., for the entertainment of the dead.101 Sometimes the living seek to give pleasure to the spirit of the dead by the performance of music.102 Gifts, too, of cakes, fruit, and wine are being made—but the blood of the sacrificial animals is never spilt.103 There was a time when more solemn—and less comfortable—thoughts prevailed;104 and of these we learn something from the much older sculptured reliefs, found on sepulchral monuments in Sparta, which give the dead a more awe-inspiring attitude. The ancestral pair sit in state and are approached by members of the family (represented as much smaller figures) offering their worship. These bring with them flowers, pomegranates, and sometimes even animals for sacrifice, a cock, a pig, or a ram. Other and later types of such “banquets of the dead” show the dead person standing up (not infrequently by the side of a horse) or lying upon a couch and accepting the drink-offering made to him by the survivors.105 These reliefs allow us to see at what a distance the departed spirits are supposed to stand from the living: the dead do, indeed, seem now to be “better and stronger” beings; they are well on the road to becoming “Heroes”. Drink offerings such as those we see offered on these reliefs—a mixture of honey-water, milk, and wine, and other liquids, offered in accordance with precise ritual—always formed a regular part of sacrifices made to the dead.106 Besides these, animals, too, were slain, especially sheep (less often oxen) of black colour. These must be completely burnt, as being intended for the sole enjoyment of the dead—a custom observed at all sacrifices made to the spirits of the underworld.107

The whole of this very material cult depended upon the assumption—which was sometimes distinctly expressed—that the soul of the dead is capable of receiving, and is in need of, a physical satisfaction from the gifts made to it.108 It is consequently, not thought of as deprived of the power of sense-perception. Even in the grave it can feel what is going on in its neighbourhood.109 It is not a good thing to attract its attention; it is best to pass by the graves of the dead in silence.110 The common people thought of the dead, according to a famous phrase of Plato’s, as “hovering” suspended over their graves, the site of their cult.111 The pictures on the Attic oilflasks illustrate this belief, for they represent the souls of the dead flying above the grave-monument, and the diminutive size of these winged figures is evidently intended to represent their somewhat contradictory immaterial materiality, and to express their invisibility for mortal eyes.112 Sometimes, indeed, the souls become visible, and then, like the underworld gods and the Heroes, they prefer the shape of a snake.113 Nor are they absolutely bound to the immediate neighbourhood of the grave; they sometimes revisit their old habitations among the living, and not only on those days of the dead in the month Anthesterion. The Greeks, like other people, were acquainted with the custom of allowing what fell to the ground to lie there undisturbed for the spirits that hovered about the house to carry away if they liked.114 The dead man’s spirit, being thus invisibly present, can overhear if anyone speaks ill of it: either with the idea of defending the helpless, or, on the contrary, to avoid incurring the wrath of invisible but potent spirits, a Solonian law forbade abusive language to be addressed to a dead man. That is the real meaning of the old warning de mortuis nil nisi bene, as popular belief understood it. The descendants of a dead man were bound to prosecute anyone who slandered their ancestor:115 this also is among the religious duties owed by the living to the soul of the dead.

§ 3

Like all other cults, the cult of the dead had more to do with the relations of the daimon to the living than with his nature and essence considered abstractly, and in itself: a dogmatic account of this nature was neither offered nor required by his worship. Still, the cult was founded upon a general conception, merely evading more exact definition, of the nature of the departed spirit. Men sacrificed to the souls of the dead, as to the gods116 and Heroes, because they regarded them as invisible Powers,117 a special class of “Blessed Ones”, as the dead were beginning to be called even in the fifth century. They attempted to propitiate them,118 or at least to avert their easily awakened displeasure.119 Their help was also sought in all times of need; but most especially, like the chthonic gods into whose realm they have entered, they can prosper the fruits of the earth120 and lend assistance at the entry of a new soul into life. For this reason libation is made to the souls of ancestors at a marriage.121 The Tritopatores also, who were invoked at wedding celebrations in Attica that the marriage might prove fruitful,122 were nothing else than the souls of the ancestors.123 We know them also to have been referred to as wind-spirits,124 and in this there appears, plainly or obscurely, an isolated fragment of the most ancient belief of the people: the departed spirits of the dead become spirits of the air; the ghosts that travel on the winds are the liberated souls of the dead.

§ 4

Though it is good and profitable in one’s own interest to enlist the sympathy and retain the goodwill of these invisible spirit powers by sacrifice, yet their worship is to a much greater degree conditioned by a sentiment of piety which no longer seeks its own advantage, but the greater honour and welfare of the dead. Such piety certainly takes on a curious form, but it is this which gives its special character to the cult of the souls, and the ideas which lie behind that cult. The souls of the dead are dependent upon the cult paid to them by the members of their family who still live on in this world; their fate is determined by the nature of this cult.125 The beliefs which nourished the cult of the dead are totally distinct from the mode of thought prevailing in the Homeric poems according to which the souls are banished into the distant realm of Hades and cut off eternally from all attention or care that the living might pay them. It differs again from the beliefs which the mysteries implanted in the minds of their worshippers; for in this case it was not their merit—whether religious or moral—which secured to the disembodied souls their position in the future life. These two streams of religious belief flowed side by side, but never met. The nearest analogue to the cult of the souls and its appropriate beliefs was undoubtedly the cult of Heroes, but even here the difference is profound. It is no longer a special privilege miraculously bestowed upon a few favoured individuals; every soul has a right to the attentive care of its own family, and in each case its fate is settled, not by the character displayed or deeds done during its lifetime, but by the relation to itself of those who survive. As a consequence everybody on the approach of death thinks of the “future state” of his soul, and that means the cult which he would like to make sure will be offered to his departed spirit. Sometimes for this purpose he makes a special foundation, or bequest, which is provided for in his will.126 Of course, if he leaves a son behind him, the care of his spirit will be amply provided for; until that son comes of age, a guardian will offer the appropriate gifts.127 Even slaves to whom he has given their freedom will be sure to take part in the permanent and regular cult of their former master.128 One who has no son to leave behind him will make haste to take a son from another family into his own house, who, together with his property will inherit also the duty of offering a regular and enduring cult to his adopted father, and his new ancestors, and of caring for the needs of their souls. This is the real and original meaning of all adoption; and how seriously such provision for the proper care of the souls of the departed was taken, can best and most clearly be seen from the testamentary speeches of Isaeus, in which with a completeness of art that almost conceals itself expression is given to the genuine and simple feelings of the homely Athenian bourgeoisie whom no enlightenment had ever disturbed in the beliefs of their fathers.129

All cult, all prospect of a full life and future well-being—for so we may express the naive conception—of the soul on its separation from the body, depends upon the holding together of the family. To the family itself the souls of its former ancestors are, in a limited sense, of course, gods—its gods.130 It can hardly be doubted that here we have the root of all belief in the future life of the soul, and we shall be tempted to subscribe to the belief—as a guess tending in the right direction—of those who see in such family worship of the dead one of the most primitive roots of all religious belief—older than the worship of the higher gods of the state and the community as a whole; older even than the worship of Heroes, and of the ancestors of large national groups. The family is older than the state,131 and among all peoples that have not passed beyond family-organization and formed states, we find this type of belief about the soul invariably present. Among the Greeks, who in the course of their history learnt so much that was new without ever quite discarding the old, this belief lived on in the shadow of the great gods and their cults, even in the midst of the tremendous increase in the power and organized influence of the state. But these larger and wider organizations cramped and hindered its development. Left to itself, and given more freedom to grow, such belief might possibly have elevated the souls of the family ancestors to the position of all-powerful spirits of the house under whose hearth they had once been laid to rest. The Greeks, however, never had anything to correspond exactly with the Italian Lar familiaris.132 The nearest equivalent to it would be the Good Daimon which the Greek household honoured. Careful examination shows this Daimon to have been originally the soul of an ancestor who has become the good spirit of his house—but the Greeks themselves had forgotten this.133

§ 5

We cannot at this late date trace the reawakening of the cult of souls in post-Homeric times or the varying stages it may have gone through in its development. Still, some of the facts are plain. Indications have already been noticed that point to the view that the cult of the dead was carried on in the days when the aristocratic regime still held sway in Greece with greater pomp and seriousness than in the centuries—the fifth and sixth—beyond which our knowledge hardly extends. In these earlier times, we are forced to conclude, there must also have been a livelier belief in the power and importance of the souls corresponding with the greater vigour of religious cult. It seems as if at this time ancient usage and belief broke violently through the suppression and neglect under which they lay in the times that speak to us in the Homeric poems. There is no reason to suppose that any one member of the Greek peoples was specially responsible for the change. At the same time, different districts in accordance with their varying natural proclivities and civilization differed in the cult they paid their dead. In Attica, with the spread of democracy, the ideas at the bottom of such practice tended more and more in the direction of mere affectionate piety. In Laconia and Boeotia134 and in other places where primitive life and customs maintained themselves for a long time, more serious notions of the nature and reality of the disembodied spirits remained in force and a more serious cult was paid to them. Elsewhere, as in Locris and on the island of Keos,135 the cult of the dead seems to have maintained itself only in a very much weakened form. When advancing culture made individuals less dependent on the traditional beliefs of their own country many temperamental variations and gradations in belief and conception made their appearance. Homeric ideas on the subject, universally familiar from poetry, may have entered into the question and added to the confusion; even where the cult of the dead was practised with the greatest fervour, ideas radically incompatible with that cult—as that the souls of the worshipped dead are “in Hades”136—are sometimes revealed unintentionally. At quite an early period we find expressions of the view, which goes beyond anything said in Homer, that nothing at all survives after death. Attic orators, for example, are allowed to speak to their audience in a tone of hesitation and doubt about hopes commonly cherished of continued consciousness and sensation after death. Such doubts, however, only affect the theoretic consideration of the soul’s future life; the cult of the souls was still carried on inside the family. Even an unbeliever, if he were in other respects a true son of his city and deeply rooted in its ancient customs, might in his last will and testament provide seriously for the perpetual cult of his own soul and those of his near relatives—as Epicurus did in his will, to the astonishment of after ages.137 Thus, even unbelief still clung to cult as to other old established customs, and in many an individual the cult still tended to awaken the beliefs which alone could justify it.

III TRACES OF THE CULT OF SOULS IN THE BLOOD-FEUD AND SATISFACTION FOR MURDER

§ 1

In the renewal and development of the cult offered to the dead, an important part was again played by that priestly association which exercised such a decisive influence on the public worship of invisible powers in the Greek states—the priesthood of the Delphic oracle. On the occurrence of disturbing portents in the sky recourse was had to the god, who gave orders that in addition to the gods and Heroes “sacrifice should be made to the dead also on the appointed days, in accordance with custom and tradition, by their relatives.”138 Individuals in doubt as to what the sacred law required in the observance due to a departed soul applied at Athens to one of the “Exegetai”—probably one of that college of Exegetai that had been founded under the influence of Delphi.139 The god protected the rights of the dead, too; the fact that his decisions confirmed the sanctity of the cult of the dead must have contributed a good deal to the consideration and awe in which that cult was held by the living.140

The decrees of Delphi were even more influential where they concerned a cult to be offered not to one who had died in peace, but to a person who had been robbed of his life through an act of violence. The treatment of such cases shows with striking distinctness the change which had come over the beliefs about the dead since the Homeric period.

In Homer, when a free man has been killed, the State takes no share whatever in the pursuit and punishment of the murderer. It is the duty of the nearest relatives or the friends of the murdered man141 to carry on the blood-feud against the assailant. As a rule the latter puts himself out of reach of reprisals by flight. He withdraws to a foreign country which is unconcerned in his action. We hear nothing of any distinction between premeditated murder and unintentional or even justifiable homicide;142 and it seems probable that at that time, when no regular inquiry was made into the nature of the individual case, the relatives of the murdered man took no account of the different varieties of killing. If the guilty man can escape by flight from those whose duty it is to avenge his deed, they on their part may forgo the full toll of vengeance, which would have required the death of the murderer, and may be satisfied with the payment of compensation, after which the doer of the deed is allowed to remain in his own country undisturbed.143 The requirements of vengeance are thus in essence fulfilled, but the retaliatory murder of the murderer can be bought off. This decided relaxing of the ancient notion of vengeance can only be accounted for by an equally decided weakening of the belief in the continued consciousness, power, and rights of the murdered man, upon which the requirement of vengeance was founded. The soul of the dead is powerless; its claims can be easily satisfied by the payment of “weregild” to the living. In such a satisfaction as this, the departed soul is in reality not concerned at all; it remains a simple business transaction between living people.144 In the midst of the general declension of the beliefs about the dead—amounting almost to complete extinction—which is found throughout the Homeric poems, this weakening of belief in one particular point is not very surprising. But in this case, as in the general study of Homeric beliefs about the dead, it is clear that the conception of the soul as powerless, shadowlike, and feeble is not the primitive or original one; it has foisted itself gradually in the course of years upon a more ancient mode of conception in which the dead had undiminished sensibility and could influence the condition of the living. Of this older conception we have emphatic witness in the duty—not forgotten even in Homeric Greece—of prosecuting the blood-feud.

In later times the pursuit and punishment of homicide was organized in accordance with quite different principles. The State recognized its interest in the reprisals made for such a breach of the peace: we may take it as certain that in Greek cities generally the state took a share in the regular investigation and punishment of murder in its courts of justice,145 though here, too, it is only in the case of Athenian law that we have precise information. At Athens, in accordance with the ancient code dealing with the legal prosecution of murder (which never fell into disuse after Drakon had established it by his penal legislation), the exclusive right—and the unavoidable duty—of prosecuting the murderer belonged to the next of kin of the murdered man. (In special cases only it was extended to include the more distant relatives, and even the members of the phratria to which he had belonged.) It is clear that this duty of making an accusation which fell upon the next of kin, preserves a relic of the ancient duty of the blood-feud which has been transformed by the requirements of the public welfare. It is the same narrow circle of relationship, extending to the third generation, united by a strict religious bond, to which alone belonged the right to inherit property and the duty of performing the cult of the dead. This circle of relatives is here again called upon to “succour” the unfortunate who has been violently done to death.146 The reason for this duty—a duty evidently derived from the ancient blood-feud—is easy to understand: it, too, is a department of the cult of the dead which was binding as a duty upon exactly that circle of relatives. It was no mere abstract “right”, but a quite definite personal claim, made by the dead man himself, that the surviving relatives were required to satisfy. At Athens even in the fourth and fifth centuries the belief still survived in undiminished vigour that the soul of one violently done to death, until the wrong done to him was avenged upon the doer of it, would wander about finding no rest,147 full of rage at the violent act, and wrathful, too, against the relatives who should have avenged him, if they did not fulfil their duty. He himself would become an “avenging spirit”; and the force of his anger might be felt throughout whole generations.148 Implacable revenge is the sacred duty of those—his representatives and executors—who are specially called upon to fulfil the needs of the dead soul. The state forbids them to take the law into their own hands; but it commands them to seek redress at the tribunals of justice. It will take over the duties of judge and executioner itself; but a decided consideration will be shown to the relatives of the murdered man at the hearing of the case. In duly conducted criminal procedure the courts specially appointed for this purpose will decide whether the deed is to be considered one of wilful murder, unintentional manslaughter, or justifiable homicide. In making these distinctions the state has struck a blow at that older code of the blood-feud in which the right of vengeance belonged entirely to the family of the murdered man. According to that code, as we cannot but conclude from Homer, nothing but the fact of the violent death of a relative was considered, not the character or motive of the deed itself. Now, however, the murderer is liable to a death penalty which he can avoid before the verdict is given by going into voluntary and perpetual exile. He disappears and leaves the country—at the boundaries of the country the state’s authority ceases, and so does the power of the indignant spirit of the dead, which is bound to its native soil—like that of all local deities, whose influence is confined to the place where they are worshipped. If, by such flight over the frontier, “the doer of the deed withdraws himself from the person injured by him—i.e. the angry soul of the dead man”149—his life is thereby saved, even if he himself is not justified. This alone is meant by the permission of such voluntary exile. Involuntary homicide150 is punished by banishment for a limited period, after the expiration of which the relations of the dead man are to grant a pardon to the murderer on his return to his native land.151 If they voted for it unanimously152 they could even do this before he went into banishment, in which case this would not take place at all. There can be no doubt that this pardon had to be granted by them in the name of the dead man as well, of whose rights they were the representatives; indeed, the man himself lying mortally wounded could before his death, even in the case of wilful murder, pardon his assailant and thereby excuse his relatives the duty of prosecution;153 to such an extent was the injured soul’s wish for vengeance the only point at issue, even in the legal procedure of a constitutionally governed state, and not in the least the lawless act of the murderer as such. When there is no desire for vengeance on the part of the victim requiring to be satisfied, the murderer goes unpunished. When he suffers punishment, he suffers it for the satisfaction of the soul of the murdered man. He is no longer slain as a sacrifice to his victim; but when the relations of the dead exact vengeance from him by legally constituted processes, that, too, is a part of the cult offered to the soul of the dead.

§ 2

It is true that the state directs the blood-feud required of the relatives of the dead man along constitutional channels that shall not contravene the laws of the community; but it does not in the least intend to abolish the fundamental idea of the ancient family vendetta. It reasserts the original claim to vengeance of the victim violently done to death—a claim closely bound up with the cult of the dead—by forbidding the old custom, common in Homeric times, of buying off the blood-guiltiness of the murderer by a compensatory payment made to the relatives of the dead man.154 It does not destroy the religious character of the whole transaction; it uses its own processes to secure the fulfilment of the requirements of religion. That is why the head of all criminal jurisdiction is the King Archon, the constitutional Administrator of all the religious functions of the ancient royal government. The religious basis of the oldest Athenian criminal jurisdiction is particularly evident. It has its seat on the Areiopagos, the hill of the Curse-Goddesses, over the sacred chasm in which they themselves, the “Venerable Ones”, have their dwelling. The judicial office is closely bound up with the service of the goddesses.155 At the commencement of the proceedings both parties take an oath in the name of the Erinyes.156 Each of the three days at the end of the month, upon which legal proceedings in these courts took place,157 was sacred to one of the three goddesses.158 To them sacrifice was made by those who were acquitted in those courts;159 for it is the goddesses who have given them absolution just as it is the goddesses who demand the punishment of the guilty. They still do it, as once they had done in the typical case of Orestes, in which they themselves had been the accusers.160 In this Athenian worship the Erinyes had not vet entirely lost their true and original character. They had not become the mere guardians of law in general, as which they were sometimes represented by poets and philosophers who thus extended and weakened immeasurably their once much narrower significance. They are formidable daimones, dwelling in the depths of the earth from which they are conjured up by the curses and maledictions of those who have no earthly avenger left. Hence they are more particularly the avengers of murder committed within the family itself; they punish the man who has slain the very person whom he would have been called upon to avenge, if that person had fallen at the hand of another murderer than himself. When the son has slain his father or mother, who shall then carry out the blood-feud incumbent upon the nearest relation of the dead? This nearest relation is the murderer himself. It is the Erinys of the father or the mother who sees to it that the dead shall still receive due satisfaction. She breaks out from the kingdom of the dead to seize the murderer. She is ever at his heels in pursuit, leaving him no rest night or day. Vampire-like she sucks his blood:161 he is her destined victim.162 Even in the judicial procedure of the fully organized state it is the Erinyes who demand revenge for murder at the courts of law. Their absolute power extends in widening circle to all murder, even when it is committed outside the limits of the family; though it was only the imagination of the poetically or philosophically minded that ever transformed them completely to champions of justice of all kinds, in heaven and upon earth. In the cult and beliefs proper to individual cities they remained the auxiliaries attached to the souls of murdered men. These gruesome daimones had their origin in the worship of the dead, and they lived on in connexion with the undying worship of which they were a part. Indeed, if we examine closely the sources of information at our disposal, we can see even through their inadequacy and obscurity that the Erinys was nothing else but the soul itself of the murdered man, indignant at its fate and seizing its revenge for itself—till later ages substituted for this the conception of the ghost from hell taking over to itself the rage of the dead man’s soul.163

§ 3

Thus, the whole procedure at murder trials was directed rather to the satisfaction of invisible powers—the injured souls of the dead and the daimones that represent them—than of the state and its living members. In essence it was a religious act. As a result all was not at an end when the human verdict on the case had been given. On his return from exile the man guilty of involuntary homicide, besides receiving the pardon of the relatives of the dead man, had still a double duty to perform; he had to be purified and to offer propitiatory sacrifice.164 Purification from the blood of the slain was necessary even in the case of the unpunished agent of what the state regarded as justifiable homicide;165 it restored the man, hitherto regarded as “unclean”, to participation in the religious gatherings of state and family which could not have been approached by an unpurified person without suffering defilement. The Homeric poems know nothing of any such religious purification of those who have incurred the stain of blood.166 Analogous occurrences in the religious usage of allied peoples make it, however, almost impossible to doubt that the notion of religious uncleanness belonging to a man who has had any dealings with uncanny powers was of primeval antiquity among the Greeks, too. It can only have been suppressed in the Homeric view of the matter; just as that view also suppressed the usages of expiation. These were intended to propitiate the indignant soul of the dead and the gods who protected it, by means of solemn sacrifice; but in the Homeric picture of the world they never appear, for the ideas on which they were based had themselves been swept away.

The details of purification and expiation—the former serving the interests of the state and its religious needs, the latter intended as a final appeasement of the injured powers of the unseen world—were closely united in practice and are often confused in the accounts which have come down to us. A hard and fast distinction between them cannot be drawn. So much at all events is clear; the expiatory rites indispensable when murder had been committed had the closest possible similarity with the ritual of sacrifice to the gods of the underworld.167 And, in fact, the deities invoked at such rites of expiation—Zeus Meilichios, Zeus Apotropaios, and the rest—belong to the underworld circle of gods.168 To them, instead of the murderer himself, a victim was offered to appease the anger felt by them as the patrons of the departed soul. The Erinyes, too, have sacrifice made to them at expiations169—everything in these matters is connected with the kingdom of the dead and its inhabitants.

But it was the Delphic Oracle that saw to the details of purification and expiation after murder. The necessity of such rights was impressed on men by the example set in the story of Apollo’s own flight and purification after the slaying of the earth-spirit at Pytho. These events were symbolically enacted over again regularly every eight years.170 At Delphi, too, according to Aeschylus, Apollo himself purified Orestes the matricide from the pollution of his crime.171 At Athens one of the oldest propitiatory sites was called after one of Apollo’s titles, the Delphinion.172 The Oracle must often have directed its inquirers to placate not merely the Heroes, but also the angry souls of murdered (and not heroized) men by means of expiatory sacrifices: as it bade the murderers of Archilochos and the Spartan king Pausanias.173 Propitiatory sacrifice in this sense does not belong to the Apolline cult as an exclusive possession; it belongs, also, to other, mostly lower-world, deities; but it was the Oracle of Apollo that set the seal on its sanctity. At Athens the Exegetai founded under the influence of the Delphic Oracle were the official administrators of this expiatory ritual.174 Plato was certainly following the customs of Greek cities when in the “Laws” he declares that his state shall take its regulations for purification and propitiation from Delphi.175

§ 4

The Oracle, then, of the omniscient God sanctified and recommended these rites of expiation; the state regulated its judicial procedure in murder cases on the lines of the old family blood-feud. It was natural, then, that the ideas on which these religious and political institutions were based—the conviction of a continued existence enjoyed by the murdered man’s soul and of his consciousness and knowledge of what occurred among the living who survived, his anger and his powers—that these ideas should attain to something like the position of an article of faith. The confidence with which these beliefs were held still manifests itself to us in the speeches at murder trials in which Antiphon, suiting his language to his real or imagined public, tries to arouse terror and awe, as at the presence of indubitable realities, by calling upon the angry soul of the dead man and the spirits that avenge the dead.176 About the souls of murdered men indeed, regarded as more than other spirits unable to find rest, a strange and ghostly mythology grew up, of which we shall have some specimens later on. How primitive such beliefs could be we may gather with startling clearness from occasional records of purely savage customs177 which are derived from them—customs which cannot possibly have been freshly invented in the Greece of this enlightened period, and must be either primitive Greek savagery come to light again, or else barbarisms only too easily welcomed from less civilized neighbours. In any case they imply the most materialistic view of the survival of the murdered man, and of the revenge that might be taken by his soul.

It is evident that what men believed about the souls of murdered men must have had an important influence upon the general belief in a future life as it took shape in the mind of the people. But the extent of such an influence can be more exactly measured in the story which Xenophon tells about the dying Kyros; as the strongest grounds for the hope that an after-life will be the portion of all souls after their separation from the body, the dying king points to the unquestioned facts which, as all admit, prove a special after-life for the souls “of those who have suffered injustice”. In addition to this he lays stress on the argument that the worship of the dead would not have been preserved intact to his own time if their souls had been entirely deprived of all active power.178 Thus we see how the cult of the souls of the dead was the chief source of the belief in a continued life after death.