CHAP. above human passions, they were too great, and too remote from earthly affairs, to be tried by the same B.C. 1184. rules which bind an inferior race. But the interests of morality were chiefly connected with religion by the functions of the Powers whose peculiar province it was to exact the penalty due to divine justice for atrocious crimes. Homer simply designates the office of the Furies, without either fixing their number, or describing their form, which the imagination of later poets painted with terrific exactness; but the mysterious obscurity in which he wraps their outlines, was perhaps no less awful. Their dwelling-place, in the gloomy depths of the invisible world, was an object of horror to the blessed gods, who abode in the perpetual sunshine of Olympus. They shrouded themselves in darkness, when they went forth to execute their work of retribution 1, and, unlike the celestial powers, they could not be propitiated: at least in the Homeric age no rites seem to have been invented to disarm their wrath, and to quiet the alarms of a guilty conscience. They were especially vigilant in enforcing the respect due to age, to parental authority, and kindred blood 2; but perjury, and probably all other offences proscribed as peculiarly heinous by public opinion, were equally subject to their inquisition.3 The awe inspired by these inexorable ministers of vengeance was a wholesome check, if not an adequate counterpoise, to the heedless levity which the easy and capricious government of the Olympian gods tended to encourage. Homeric view of a future state. The idea of retribution however was not generally associated with that of a future state. Homer views death as the separation of two distinct, though not 1 Il. ix. 572. 2 Il. ix. 454. xxi. 412. xv. 204. * Il. xix. 260. Od. xvii. 475. Geppert (1. c. i. p. 372.) collects apparently by a very arbitrary process—from a few of the Homeric examples, that their province was originally confined to the assertion of parental authority and the rights of primogeniture, and considers it as evidence of interpolation when other functions are attributed to them. wholly dissimilar, substances, the soul and the body. The latter has no life without the former; the former no strength without the latter. CHAP. VI. The souls of the B.C. 1184. heroes are sent down to the realm of Hades (the Invisible), while they themselves remain a prey to dogs and birds. And when it is said of Hercules, that his shade is among the dead, while he himself shares the banquets of the immortal gods, it must be supposed that his virtue has been rewarded with a new undecaying body, and a divine soul. When a man is dead, says the shade of Anticlea, the flesh and the bones are left to be consumed by the flames, but the soul flies away like a dream. Funeral rites seem not to have been accounted a necessary condition of its entrance into Hades, but it could enjoy no rest there till they had been performed.1 Hence arose the importance attached to them by surviving friends, the obstinate contests that take place over the slain, Priam's desperate effort to recover the corpse of Hector. Several of the most interesting scenes in Greek poetry and history depend entirely on this feeling. When Condition the soul has made its escape through the lips or the wound, it is not dispersed in the air, but preserves the form of the living person. But the face of the earth, lighted by the sun, is no fit place for the feeble, joyless phantom. It protracts its unprofitable being in the cheerless twilight of the nether world, a shadow of its former self, and pursuing the empty image of its past occupations and enjoyments. Orion, like the spectre of the North American hunter, is engaged in chasing the disembodied beasts, which he had killed on the mountains, over the asphodel meadow. Minos is busied in holding mock trials, and dispensing his rigid justice to a race that has lost all power of inflicting wrong. Achilles retains his ancient pre-eminence among his dead companions, but he would. 1 Od. xi. 65. 11. xxiii. 71. after death. VI. CHAP. gladly exchange the unsubstantial honour, even if it were to be extended to the whole kingdom of spirits, B.C. 1184. for the bodily life of the meanest hireling. Nothing was more remote from Homer's philosophy than the notion that the soul, when lightened of its fleshly incumbrances, exerted its intellectual faculties with the greater vigour. On the contrary, he represents it as reduced by death to a state of senseless imbecility. Alas, exclaimed Achilles, when the spirit of Patroclus had vanished, even in Hades there remains a ghost, and an image of the dead, but the mind is altogether gone. Tiresias alone among the shades enjoys a certain degree of mental vigour, by the especial favour of Proserpine. It is only after their strength has been repaired by the blood of a slaughtered victim that they recover reason and memory for a time, can recognise their living friends, and feel anxiety for those whom they have left on earth. While the greater part of the vast multitude that peoples the house of Hades merely prolongs a dreaming, vacant existence, a few great offenders are doomed to a kind of suffering most in accordance with the character of the infernal realms, -to the torment of unavailing toil, and never-satisfied longings. A more tremendous prison, removed as far below Hades as earth is from heaven, was reserved for the audacious enemies of Jupiter: the abyss of Tartarus, fast secured with iron gates, and a brazen floor. On the other hand, a few favoured heroes, instead of descending into Hades, were transported to a delicious plain, an island of Ocean, cooled by perpetual breezes from the West, and exempt from every inclement change of the sea Worship and Sacrifices. sons. The favour of the gods was believed to be obtained by means similar to those which are most efficacious with powerful mortals, — homage and tribute, or, in the language of religion, worship and sacrifice. Con CHAP. VI. sidered from one point of view, the sacrifices of the Greeks appear in a highly pleasing light, as an expression of pure, though misdirected piety; viewed from B.C.1184. another side, they present only the blind impulses of a rude superstition. A simple feeling of dependence on the divine bounty naturally vents itself in the form of an offering, which, however trifling in itself, may be an adequate symbol of the religious sentiment. In many of the Greek rites, as in those of domestic worship, in the libations that accompanied the social meal, in the eiresioné and other harvest offerings1, in the votive locks which youths and virgins frequently dedicated to a guardian deity2, this merely symbolical character is predominant; and these may have been among the earliest forms of devotion. But the same unworthy conceptions of the divine nature which led the Greeks to treat the material offering as the essential part of every sacred service, gave birth to more luxurious and less innocent rites. The image of earthly kings applied to the heavenly powers, suggested the persuasion, that the efficacy of a sacrifice depended on its value, and that the feeling which prompted the offering was not merely to be expressed, but to be measured by it. This persuasion was cherished by two popular prejudices; by the notion that the gods were capable of envy and jealousy, which men might allay by costly profusion in their gifts, and by the view taken of a sacrifice, as a banquet for the gods, the more agreeable in proportion as it was rich and splendid.3 sacrifices. When the sacrifice was designed to soften the anger Human of an offended deity, it would of course be unusually sumptuous; for it was then at once a propitiatory offering, and a self-imposed penalty. This mode of thinking might easily lead to the notion, that on some 'Compare Mueller, Dorians, ii. 8. 1. Heffter, Die Götterd. auf Rh. p. 81. * Il. xxiii. 142., and the passages collected by Meursius, Græcia Feriata, p. 239. Od. vii. 203. CHAP. extraordinary occasions the divine wrath was to be appeased by no oblation less precious than the life of B. C. 1184. man. And it seems certain, that before the times described by Homer the Greeks had been brought, either by their own train of thinking, or by the influence of foreign example, to this dreadful conclusion. This high antiquity of human sacrifices among the Greeks has been disputed, on the ground that such rites are not mentioned or alluded to by Homer. We conceive however that Homer's silence would not in the slightest degree shake the authority of the numerous legends which speak of human victims, as occasionally, and even periodically, offered in certain temples1; more especially as in the latter case they record the early substitution of other victims, or of milder rites. Though the practice of dedicating living persons to a deity, which was unquestionably very ancient, may not have been originally connected with any effusion of blood, still it indicates the prevailing sentiment; and there is nothing in the manners of the heroic age to prevent us from believing, that the same sentiment sometimes manifested itself in the sacrifice of human life, even if the practice had not been transmitted from earlier times. But in fact Homer himself appears strongly to confirm the testimony borne by later writers to the antiquity of the usage, when he informs us that Achilles immolated twelve Trojan prisoners at the funeral pile of Patroclus, not to indulge his own vengeance, but to soothe his departed friend. The poet indeed considers this as a terrible display of friendship; but it seems clear that he would have found nothing inconsistent with piety or humanity in a similar sacrifice offered to the gods. Temples and holy grounds. Offerings of a different kind, designed for the perpetual ornament of holy places, are important rather 1 Porphyr. de Abst. ii. 54, 55. Theodoret. Græc. Aff. Cur. vii. p. 895. |