Part 22 (2/2)
2 Odyssey, lib. xi. II. 538, 539.
3 Antigone, II. 872-874.
retribution which we find carried forward into the invisible world is the punishment of the t.i.tans, those monsters who tried by piling up mountains to storm the heavenly abodes, and to wrest the Thunderer's bolts from his hand. This germ is slowly expanded; and next we read of a few specified criminals, who had been excessively impious, personally offending Zeus, condemned by his direct indignation to a severe expiation in Tartarus. The insulted deity wreaks his vengeance on the tired Sisyphus, the mocked Tantalus, the gnawed t.i.tyus, and others. Afterwards we meet the statement that condign retribution is always inflicted for the two flagrant sins of perjury and blasphemy. Finally, we discern a general prevalence of the belief that punishment is decreed, not by vindictive caprice, but on the grounds of universal morality, all souls being obliged in Hades to pa.s.s before Rhadamanthus, Minos, or Aacus, three upright judges, to be dealt with, according to their merits, with impartial accuracy. The distribution of poetic justice in Hades at last became, in many authors, so melodramatic as to furnish a fair subject for burlesque. Some ludicrous examples of this may be seen in Lucian's Dialogues of the Dead. A fine instance of it is also furnished in the Emperor Julian's Symposium. The G.o.ds prepare for the Roman emperors a banquet, in the air, below the moon. The good emperors are admitted to the table with honors; but the bad ones are hurled headlong down into Tartarus, amidst the derisive shouts of the spectators.
As the notion that the wrath of the G.o.ds would pursue their enemies in the future state gave rise to a belief in the punishments of Tartarus, so the notion that the distinguis.h.i.+ng kindness of the G.o.ds would follow their favorites gave rise to the myth of Elysium. The Elysian Fields were earliest portrayed lying on the western margin of the earth, stretching from the verge of Ocea.n.u.s, where the sun set at eve. They were fringed with perpetual green, perfumed with the fragrance of flowers, and eternally fanned by refres.h.i.+ng breezes. They were represented merely as the select abode of a small number of living men, who were either the mortal relatives or the special favorites of the G.o.ds, and who were transported thither without tasting death, there to pa.s.s an immortality which was described, with great inconsistency, sometimes as purely happy, sometimes as joyless and wearisome. To all except a few chosen ones this region was utterly inaccessible. Homer says, ”But for you, O Menelaus, it is not decreed by the G.o.ds to die; but the immortals will send you to the Elysian plain, because you are the son in law of Zeus.”4 Had the inheritance of this clime been proclaimed as the reward of heroic merit, had it been really believed attainable by virtue, it would have been held up as a prize to be striven for. The whole account, as it was at first, bears the impress of imaginative fiction as legibly upon its front as the story of the dragon watched garden of Hesperus's daughters, whose trees bore golden apples, or the story of the enchanted isle in the Arabian tales.
The early location of Elysium, and the conditions of admission to it, were gradually changed; and at length it reappeared, in the under world, as the abode of the just. On one side of the primitive Hades Tartarus had now been drawn up to admit the condemned into its penal tortures, and on the other side Elysium was lowered down to reward the justified by receiving them into its peaceful and perennial happiness; while, between the two, Erebus
4 Odyssey, lib. iv. II. 555-570.
remained as an intermediate state of negation and gloom for unsentenced shades. The highly colored descriptions of this subterranean heaven, frequently found thenceforth, it is to be supposed were rarely accepted as solid verities. They were scarcely ever used, to our knowledge, as motives in life, incitement in difficulties, consolation in sorrow. They were mostly set forth in poems, works even professedly fict.i.tious. They were often denied and ridiculed in speeches and writings received with public applause. Still, they unquestionably exerted some influence on the common modes of thought and feeling, had a shadowy seat in the popular imagination and heart, helped men to conceive of a blessed life hereafter and to long for it, and took away something of the artificial horror with which, under the power of rooted superst.i.tion, their departing ghosts hailed the dusky limits of futurity:
”Umbra Non tacitas Erebi sedes, Ditisque profundi Pallida regna petunt.”
First, then, from a study of the Greek mythology we find all the dead a dull populace of ghosts fluttering through the neutral melancholy of Hades without discrimination. And finally we discern in the world of the dead a sad middle region, with a Paradise on the right and a h.e.l.l on the left, the whole presided over by three incorruptible judges, who appoint the new corners their places in accordance with their deserts.
The question now arises, What did the Greeks think in relation to the ascent of human souls into heaven among the G.o.ds? Did they except none from the remediless doom of Hades? Was there no path for the wisest and best souls to climb starry Olympus? To dispose of this inquiry fairly, four distinct considerations must be examined. First, Ulysses sees in the infernal regions the image of Herakles shooting the shadows of the Stymphalian birds, while his soul is said to be rejoicing with fair legged Hebe at the banquets of the immortal G.o.ds in the skies. To explain this, we must remember that Herakles was the son of Alcmene, a mortal woman, and of Zeus, the king of the G.o.ds. Accordingly, in the flames on Mount Oeta, the surviving ghost which he derived from his mother descends to Hades, but the purified soul inherited from his father has the proper nature and rank of a deity, and is received into the Olympian synod.5 Of course no blessed life in heaven for the generality of men is here implied. Herakles, being a son and favorite of Zeus, has a corresponding destiny exceptional from that of other men.
Secondly, another double representation, somewhat similar, but having an entirely different interpretation, occurs in the case of Orion, the handsome Hyrian hunter whom Artemis loved. At one time he is described, like the spectre of the North American Indian, chasing over the Stygian plain the disembodied animals he had in his lifetime killed on the mountains:
”Swift through the gloom a giant hunter flies: A ponderous brazen mace, with direful sway, Aloft he whirls to crush the savage prey;
5 Ovid, Met. lib. ix. II. 245-272.
Grim beasts in trains, that by his truncheon fell, Now, phantom forms, shoot o'er the lawn of h.e.l.l.”
In the common belief this, without doubt, was received as actual fact. But at another time Orion is deified and shown as one of the grandest constellations of the sky,
”A belted giant, who, with arm uplift, Threatening the throne of Zeus, forever stands, Sublimely impious.”
This, obviously, is merely a poetic symbol, a beautiful artifice employed by the poets to perpetuate a legend by a.s.sociating it with the imperishable hieroglyphs of the galaxy. It is not credible that men imagined that group of stars only outlined in such shape by the help of arbitrary fancy to be literally the translated hunter himself. The meaning simply was that he was immortalized through the eternal linking of his name and form with a stellar cl.u.s.ter which would always s.h.i.+ne upon men. ”The reverence and grat.i.tude of a weak world for the heroes and benefactors they could not comprehend, named them divinities, whom they did star together to an idolatrous immortality which nationalized the heavens” with the s.h.i.+ning shapes of the great and brave. These types of poetry, symbols lent to infant science, were never meant to indicate a literal translation and metamorphosis of human souls, but were honors paid to the memories of ill.u.s.trious men, emblems and pledged securities of their unfading fame. With what glorious characters, with what forms of deathless beauty, defiant of decay, the sky was written over! Go out this evening beneath the old rolling dome, when the starry scroll is outspread, and you may still read the reveries of the marvelling minds of the antique world, as fresh in their magic loveliness as when the bards and seers of Olympus and the Agean first stamped them in heaven. There ”the great snake binds in his bright coil half the mighty host.” There is Arion with his harp and the charmed dolphin. The fair Andromeda, still chained to her eternal rock, looks mournfully towards the delivering hero whose conquering hand bears aloft the petrific visage of Medusa. Far off in the north the gigantic Bootes is seen driving towards the Centaur and the Scorpion. And yonder, smiling benignantly upon the crews of many a home bound s.h.i.+p, are revealed the twin brothers, joined in the embrace of an undying friends.h.i.+p.
Thirdly, it is a.s.serted by several Latin authors, in general terms, that the ghost goes to Hades but the soul ascends to heaven; and it has been inferred most erroneously that this statement contains the doctrine of an abode for men after death on high with the G.o.ds. Ovid expresses the real thought in full, thus:
”Terra tegit carnem; tumulum circ.u.mvolat umbra; Orcus habet manes; spiritus astra pet.i.t.”
”The earth conceals the flesh; the shade flits round the tomb; the under world receives the image; the spirit seeks the stars.” Those conversant with the opinions then prevalent will scarcely doubt that these words were meant to express the return of the composite man to the primordial elements of which he was made. The particulars of the dissolving individual are absorbed in the general elements of the universe. Earth goes back to earth, ghost to the realm of ghosts, breath to the air, fiery essence of soul to the lofty ether in whose pure radiance the stars burn.
Euripides expressly says that when man dies each part goes whence it came, ”the body to the ground, the spirit to the ether.”6 Therefore the often misunderstood phrase of the Roman writers, ”the soul seeks the stars,” merely denotes the impersonal mingling after death of the divine portion of man's being with the parent Divinity, who was supposed indeed to pervade all things, but more especially to reside beyond the empyrean.
Fourthly: what shall be said of the apotheosis of their celebrated heroes and emperors by the Greeks and Romans, whereby these were elevated to the dignity of deities, and seats were a.s.signed them in heaven? What was the meaning of this ceremony? It does not signify that a celestial immortality awaits all good men; because it appears as a thing attainable by very few, is only allotted by vote of the Senate. Neither was it supposed actually to confer on its recipients equality of attributes with the great G.o.ds, making them peers of Zeus and Apollo. The homage received as G.o.ds by Alexander and others during their lives, the deification of Julius Casar during the most learned and skeptical age of Rome, with other obvious considerations, render such a supposition inadmissible. In view of all the direct evidence and collateral probabilities, we conclude that the genuine import of an ancient apotheosis was this: that the soul of the deceased person so honored was admitted, in deference to his transcendent merits, or as a special favor on the part of the G.o.ds, into heaven, into the divine society. He was really a human soul still, but was called a G.o.d because, instead of descending, like the mult.i.tude of human souls, to Hades, he was taken into the abode and company of the G.o.ds above the sky. This interpretation derives support from the remarkable declaration of Aristotle, that ”of two friends one must be unwilling that the other should attain apotheosis, because in such case they must be forever separated.”7 One would be in Olympus, the other in Hades. The belief that any, even a favored few, could ever obtain this blessing, was of quite limited development, and probably sprang from the esoteric recesses of the Mysteries. To call a human soul a G.o.d is not so bold a speech as it may seem. Plotinus says. ”Whoever has wisdom and true virtue in soul itself differs but little from superior beings, in this alone being inferior to them, that he is in body. Such an one, dying, may therefore properly say, with Empedocles, 'Farewell! a G.o.d immortal now am I.'”
The expiring Vespasian exclaimed, ”I shall soon be a G.o.d.”8 Mure says that the doctrine of apotheosis belonged to the Graco Pelasgic race through all their history.9 Seneca severely satirizes the ceremony, and the popular belief which upheld it, in an elaborate lampoon called Apocolocyntosis, or the reception of Claudius among the pumpkins. The broad travesty of
6 The Suppliants, l. 533.
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