Chapter XI: Orphic Eschatology (2)

This is made the more probable from the fact that we certainly know that the sect of the Pythagoreans had special burial rites, strictly confined to the Initiated. Of this Plutarch[1483] incidentally gives clear evidence in his discourse of ‘The Daemon of Socrates.’ A young Pythagorean, Lysis, came to Thebes and died there and was buried by his Theban friends. His ghost appeared in a dream to the Pythagorean friends he had left in Italy. The Pythagoreans, more skilled in these matters than modern psychical experts, had a certain sign by which they knew the apparition of a dead man from the phantasm of the living. They got anxious as to how Lysis had been buried, for ‘there is something special and sacrosanct (ὅσιον) that takes place at the burial of the Pythagoreans and is peculiar to them, and if they do not attain this rite they think that they will fail in reaching the very happy end that is proper to them.’ So concerned were some of the Pythagoreans that they wished to have the body of Lysis disinterred and brought to Italy to be reburied. Accordingly one of them, Theanor, started for Thebes to make enquiries as to what had been done. He was directed by the people of the place to the tomb and went in the evening to offer libations, and he invoked the soul of Lysis to give inspired direction as to what was to be done. ‘As the night went on,’ Theanor recounts, ‘I saw nothing, but I thought I heard a voice say “Move not that which should not be moved,” for the body of Lysis was buried by his friends with sacrosanct ceremonies (ὁσίως), and his spirit is already separated from it and set free into another birth, having obtained a share in another spirit.’ On enquiry next morning Theanor found that Lysis had imparted to a friend all the secret of the mysteries so that the funeral rites had been performed after Pythagorean fashion.

What precisely the ὅσια, the sacrosanct rites, were we cannot in detail say, but we may be tolerably sure that something special was done for the man who had been finally initiated, who was like the Cretan mystic ὁσιωθείς, ‘consecrated.’ This something may have included the burial with his body of tablets inscribed with sentences from his ‘Book of the Dead.’ This I think is implied in a familiar passage of Plato. Socrates in the _Phaedo_[1484] says that ‘the journey to Hades does not seem to him a simple road like that described by Aeschylus in the _Telephos_. On the contrary it is neither simple nor one. If it were there would be no need of guides. But it appears in point of fact to have many partings of the ways and circuits. And this,’ he adds, ‘I say conjecturing it from the customary and sacrosanct (ὁσίων) rites which we observe in this world.’ The customary rites (νόμιμα) were for each and all; the sacrosanct rites (ὅσια) were for the initiated only, for they only were sacrosanct (ὅσιοι).

The Pythagoreans we know revived the custom of burial in the earth, which had been at least in part superseded by the Northern practice of cremation. It was part of their general return to things primitive. Earth was the kingdom of ‘Despoina, Queen of the underworld,’ who was more to them than Zeus of the upper air. To their minds bent on symbolism burial itself would be a consecration, they would remember that to the Athenians the dead were Δημητρεῖοι[1485], Demeter’s people, that burial was refused to the traitor because he was unworthy ‘to be consecrated by earth[1486],’ and burial in itself may well have been to them as to Antigone a mystic marriage:

‘I have sunk beneath the bosom of Despoina, Queen of the Underworld.’

_b._ ORPHIC VASES OF LOWER ITALY.

Orphic religion, as seen on the tablets just discussed, is singularly free from ‘other-worldliness.’ It is a religion promising, indeed, immortality, but instinct not so much with the hope of future rewards as with the ardent longing after perfect purity; it is concerned with the state of a soul rather than with its circumstances. We have the certainty of beatitude for the initiated, the ‘seats of the blessed,’ the ‘groves of Phersephoneia,’ but the longing uttered is ecstatic, mystic not sensuous; it is summed up in the line:

‘Happy and Blessed One, thou shalt be God instead of mortal.’

None knew better than the Orphic himself that this was only for the few: ‘Many are they that carry the narthex, few are they that are made one with Bacchus.’ For the many there remained other and lower beatitudes, there remained also—a thing wholly absent from the esoteric Orphic doctrine—the fear of punishment, punishment conceived not as a welcome purification, but as a fruitless, endless vengeance. Of the existence of this lower faith or rather _un_faith in the popular forms of Orphism we have definite and curious evidence from a class of vases, found in Lower Italy, representing scenes in the underworld and obviously designed under Orphic influence.

* * * * *

Two specimens[1487] of these ‘Apulian’ vases are given in figs. 163 and 164. It will be obvious at the first glance that the composition of both designs is substantially the same. This need not oblige us to conjecture any one great work of art of which these two and the other designs not figured here are copies; it only shows that some vase-painter of note in the 4th century B.C. conceived the scheme and it became popular in his factory.

The main lines of both compositions are as follows: in the centre the palace of Hades with Plouton and Persephone. Immediately below, and also occupying a central position, is Herakles, carrying off Cerberus. Immediately to the left of the temple and therefore also fairly central, is the figure of Orpheus. About these central figures various groups of criminals and other denizens of Hades are diversely arrayed.

With this scheme in our minds we may examine the first specimen, the most important of the series, because inscribed. The vase itself, now in the Naples Museum and usually known from the place where it was found as the ‘Altamura’ vase[1488], is in a disastrous condition. It was put together out of hundreds of fragments, painted over and freely restored after the fashion of the day, and it has never yet been subjected to a proper chemical cleaning. Much therefore in the drawing remains uncertain, and only such parts and inscriptions will be dealt with as are above suspicion.

The palace of Hades, save for the suspended wheels (p. 591), presents no features of interest. In the ‘Altamura’ vase many of its architectural features are from the hand of the restorer, but from the other vases the main outlines are sure. In the Altamura vase both Hades and Persephone are seated—in the others sometimes Persephone, sometimes Plouton occupies the throne. Had the designs been exclusively inspired by Orphic tradition, more uniform stress would probably have been laid on Persephone.

The figure of Orpheus, common to both vases, is interesting from its dress, which reminds us of Vergil’s[1489] description,

‘There too the Thracian priest in trailing robe.’

The vase-painter of the late 4th cent. B.C. was more archaeologist than patriot. In the Lesche picture of Polygnotus, Pausanias[1490] expressly notes that Orpheus was ‘Greek in appearance,’ and that neither his dress nor the covering he had on his head was Thracian. The Orpheus of Polygnotus must have been near akin to the beautiful Orpheus of the vase-painter in fig. 142. Polygnotus, too, made him ‘seated as it were on a sort of hill, and grasping his cithara with his left hand; with the other he was touching some sprays of willow, and he leant against a tree.’ Very different this from the frigid ritual priest.

* * * * *

About this figure of Orpheus an amazing amount of nonsense has been written. The modern commentator thinks of Orpheus as two things—as magical musician, which he _was_, as passionate lover, which in early days he was _not_. The commentator’s mind is obsessed by ‘Che farò senza te, Eurydice?’ He asks himself the question, ‘Why has Orpheus descended into Hades?’ and the answer rises automatically, ‘To fetch Eurydice.’ As regards these Lower Italy vases there is one trifling objection to this interpretation, and that is that _there is no Eurydice_. Tantalos, Sisyphos, Danaides, Herakles, but no Eurydice. This does not deter the commentator. The figure of Eurydice is ‘inferred rather than expressed.’ Happily this line of interpretation, which might lead us far, has been put an end to by the discovery of a vase in which Eurydice _does_ appear; Orpheus leads her by the wrist and a love-god floats above. It is evident that when the vase-painter wishes to ‘express’ Eurydice he does not leave her to be ‘inferred.’

It may be taken as an axiom in Greek mythology that passionate lovers are always late. The myth of Eurydice is of considerable interest, but not as a love-story. It is a piece of theology taken over from Dionysos, and, primarily, has nothing to do with Orpheus. Anyone who realizes Orpheus at all would feel that the intrusion of desperate emotion puts him out of key. Semele, the green earth, comes up from below, year by year; with her comes her son Dionysos, and by a certain instinct of chivalry men said he had gone to fetch her. The mantle of Dionysos descends on Orpheus.

Eurydice is one of those general, adjectival names that are appropriate to any and every goddess: she is the ‘Wide-Ruler.’ At Trozen, Pausanias[1491] saw ‘a Temple of Artemis the Saviour, and in it were altars of those gods who are said to rule below the earth, and they say that in this place Semele was brought up from Hades by Dionysos, and that here Herakles dragged up the hound of Hades.’ Pausanias is sceptical: ‘But I do not the least believe that Semele died, she who was the wife of Zeus, and as to the beast called the hound of Hades, I shall state what I am sure is the truth about him in another place.’ The cult of Artemis is clearly superposed over an ancient, perhaps nameless, anyhow forgotten cult of underworld gods. There was probably a cleft at hand and a legend of a rising Earth-goddess, as at the rock of Recall, _Anaklethra_ (p. 283), and the Smileless Rock at Eleusis (p. 127); and of course, given somebody’s _Anodos_, a Kathodos is soon supplied, and then a formal descent into Hades. At the Alcyonian lake, near Argos, which Nero tried in vain to sound, the Argives told Pausanias[1492] that Dionysos went down to Hades to fetch Semele, and Polymnos, a local hero, showed him the way down, and ‘there were certain rites performed there yearly.’ Unfortunately, as is mostly the case when he comes to the real point, Pausanias found it would ‘not be pious’ to reveal these rites to the general public. At Delphi, too, it will be remembered (p. 403), the Thyiades knew the mystic meaning of the festival of Heroïs, and ‘even an outsider could conjecture,’ Plutarch says, ‘from what was done, that it was an upbringing of Semele.’

Orpheus, priest of Dionysos, took on his resurrection as well as his death; that is the germ from which sprang the beautiful love-story. A taboo-element, common to many primitive stories, is easily added. You may not look back when spirits are about from the underworld. If you do you may have to join them. Underworld rites are often performed ‘without looking back’ (ἀμεταστρεπτί, see p. 24 note 2).

* * * * *

There is another current fallacy about these underworld vases. Commentators are not only prone to the romantic tendency to see a love-story where none is, but, having once got the magical musician into their minds, they see him everywhere. In these vases, they say, we have ‘the power of music to stay the torments of hell.’ They remember, and small wonder, the amazing scene in Gluck’s opera, where Orpheus comes down into the shades playing on his lyre, and the clamour of hell is spell-bound; or they bethink them of Vergil:

‘The very house itself, the inmost depths
Of Death stood still to hearken.’

But the vase-painter of the 4th cent. B.C. is necessarily guiltless of Vergil as of Gluck. Moreover his work is untinged by any emotion, whether of poetry or religion; his composition is simply an _omnium gatherum_ of conventional orthodox dwellers in Hades. Orpheus is there because, by that time, convention demanded his presence. The vase-painter’s wealthy clients—these Apulian vases were as expensive as they are ugly—would have been ill-pleased had the founder of popular mysteries not had his fitting place. But if interest focusses anywhere in a design so scattered and devitalized, it is on the obvious ‘record’ of Herakles, who, tradition said, had been initiated, not on the secret magic of Orpheus. It is true that the ‘Danaides,’ when they appear, are doing nothing but dangling their pitchers in attitudes meant to be decorative, but Tantalos still extends a hand to keep off his rock, and Sisyphos still uprolls the ‘pitiless’ stone; there is no pause in their torments.

It remains to note the figures in the side groups. In the top row to the left are Megara and her sons, placed there by a pardonable anachronism, out of compliment to Herakles and Athens. We should never have guessed their names, but the inscriptions are certain. Opposite them to the right a group which on the Altamura vase is almost certainly due to restoration. The figures are Myrtilos, Pelops, and Hippodameia. To the left of Orpheus are two _Poinae_, developments, as has been seen (p. 231), of the tragic Erinyes. Above Sisyphos is another figure, a favourite of the Orphics, Ananke, Necessity. Only three letters (ναν) of the name remain, but the restoration is practically certain. Opposite Orpheus are the three ‘Judges’ of Hades, Triptolemos, Aiakos, Rhadamanthys. Below the Judges are women bearing water-vessels, to whom provisionally we may give the canonical name of ‘Danaides.’ The sea horse is probably due to the restorer.

* * * * *

Turning to the Canosa vase, now in the Old Pinakothek at Munich[1493], we find that, though none of the figures are inscribed, most can easily be traced. Some modifications of the previous scheme must be noted. Tantalos the Phrygian takes the place of the Danaides. Near Orpheus, in place of the _Poinae_, is a group, man, wife and child, who are hard to interpret. No mythological figures quite suit them, and some authorities incline to see in the group just a human family initiated by Orpheus in his rites. In face of the fact that all the other figures present are mythological, this is, I think, difficult to accept. The figures are best left unnamed till further evidence comes to light. On the right hand, in the top row, is a group of great interest, Theseus, Peirithoös and Dike, armed with a sword.

To resume, we have as certain elements in these vases Orpheus, the three Judges of Hades, two heroes, Herakles and Theseus, who go down into Hades and return thence, two standard Homeric criminals, Sisyphos and Tantalos, and, in the case of the Altamura vase, the Danaides. The question naturally rises, is there in all these figures any common factor which determines their selection, or is it a mere haphazard aggregate?

The answer is as simple as instructive, and may be stated at the outset: _All the canonical denizens of the underworld are hero and heroine figures of the older stratum of the population_. Hades has become a sort of decent Dower-house to which are relegated the divinities of extinct or dying cults.

* * * * *

In discussing hero-worship, we have already seen (p. 336) that Tityos and Salmoneus are beings of this order. Once locally the rivals of Zeus, they paled before him, and as vanquished rivals became typical aggressors, punished for ever as a warning to the faithful. Tityos does not appear on Lower Italy vases, but Pausanias[1494] saw him on the fresco of Polygnotus at Delphi, a ‘dim and mangled spectre,’ and Aeneas[1495] in the underworld says:

‘I saw Salmoneus cruel payment make,
For that he mocked the lightning and the thunder
Of Jove on high.’

It was an ingenious theological device, or rather perhaps unconscious instinct, that took these ancient hero figures, really regnant in the world below, and made the place of their rule the symbol of their punishment. According to the old faith all men, good and bad, went below the earth, great local heroes reigned below as they had reigned above; but the new faith sent its saints to a remote Elysium or to the upper air and made this underworld kingdom a place of punishment; and in that place significantly we find that the tortured criminals _are all offenders against Olympian Zeus_.

We must confine our examination to the two typical instances selected by the vase-painter, Sisyphos and Tantalos.

We are apt to think of Sisyphos and Tantalos as punished for overweening pride and insolence, and to regard their downfall as a warning of the ephemeral nature of earthly prosperity.

‘Oh what are wealth and power! Tantalus
And Sisyphus were kings long years ago,
And now they lie in the lake dolorous;
The hills of hell are noisy with their woe,
Aye swift the tides of empire ebb and flow.’

Kings they were, but kings of the old discredited order. Homer says nothing of their crime, he takes it as known; but in dim local legends we can in both cases track out the real gist of their ill-doing: they were rebels against Zeus.

This is fairly clear in the case of Tantalos. According to one legend[1496] he suffered because he either stole or concealed for Pandareos the golden hound of Zeus. According to the epic author[1497] of the ‘Return of the Atreidae,’ he had been admitted to feast with the gods, and Zeus promised to grant him whatever boon he desired. ‘He,’ Athenaeus says, ‘being a man insatiable in his desire for enjoyment, asked that he might have eternal remembrance of his joys and live after the same fashion as the gods.’ Zeus was angry; he kept his promise, but added the torment of the imminent stone. It is clear that in some fashion Tantalos, the old hero-king, tried to make himself the equal of the new Olympians. The insatiable lust is added as a later justification of the vengeance. Tantalos is a real king, with a real grave. Pausanias[1498] says, ‘In my country there are still signs left that Pelops and Tantalos once dwelt there. There is a famous grave of Tantalos, and there is a lake called by his name.’ The grave, he says elsewhere[1499], he had himself seen in Mount Sipylos, and ‘well worth seeing it was.’ He mentions no cult, but a grave so noteworthy would not be left untended.

* * * * *

The legend of Sisyphos, if more obscure than that of Tantalos, is not less instructive. The _Iliad_ knows of Sisyphos as an ancient king. When Glaukos would tell his lineage to Diomede he says[1500]:

‘A city Ephyre there was in Argos’ midmost glen
Horse-rearing, there dwelt Sisyphos the craftiest of all men,
Sisyphos son of Aiolos, and Glaukos was his son,
And Glaukos had for offspring blameless Bellerophon.’

Ephyre is the ancient name of Corinth, and on Corinth Pausanias[1501] in his discussion of the district has a highly significant note. He says, ‘I do not know that anyone save the majority of the Corinthians themselves has ever seriously asserted that Corinthos was the son of Zeus.’ He goes on to say that according to Eumelus (circ. B.C. 750), the ‘first inhabitant of the land was Ephyra, daughter of Okeanos.’ The meaning is transparent. An ancient pre-Achaean city, with an eponymous hero, a later attempt—discredited of all but the interested inhabitants—to affiliate the indigenous stock to the immigrant conquerors by a new eponymous hero, a son of Zeus.

The epithet ‘craftiest,’ κέρδιστος, is, as Eustathius[1502] observes, a ‘mid-way expression,’ i.e. for better for worse. ‘Glaukos,’ he says in his observant way, ‘does not wish to speak evil of his ancestor.’ The word he uses means very clever (συνετώτατος), very ready and versatile (εὐτρεχέστατος). It is in fact no more an epithet of blame than πολύμητις, ‘of many wiles,’ the stock epithet of Odysseus. Eustathius goes on to explain the meaning of the name Sisyphos. Sisyphos, he says, was among the ancients a word of the same significance as θεόσοφος, divinely wise, σιός being among the Peloponnesians a form of θεός. He cites the oath used by comic poets, ναὶ τὼ σιώ for νὴ τοὺς θεούς, ‘by the gods.’ Whether Eustathius is right, and Sisyphos means ‘divinely wise,’ or whether we adopt the current etymology[1503] and make Sisyphos a reduplicated form of σοφός, i.e. the ‘Very Very Wise One,’ thus much is clear. The title was traditionally understood as of praise rather than blame, and it is not rash to see in it one of the cultus epithets of the old religion like ‘The Blameless One.’

It is as a benefactor that Sisyphos appears in local legend. It was Sisyphos, Pausanias[1504] says, who found the child Melicertes, buried him, and instituted in his honour the Isthmian games. It was to Sisyphos that Asopos[1505] gave the fountain behind the temple of Aphrodite, and for a reason most significant. ‘Sisyphos,’ the story says, ‘knew that it was Zeus who had carried off Aegina, the daughter of Asopos, but he would not tell till the spring on Acrocorinthus was given him. Asopos gave it him, and then he gave information, and for that information he, if you like to believe it, paid the penalty in Hades.’ Pausanias is manifestly sceptical, but his story touches the real truth. Sisyphos is the ally of the indigenous river Asopos. Zeus carries off the daughter of the neighbouring land; Sisyphos, hostile to the conqueror, gave information, and for that hostility he suffers in Hades. But though he points a moral in Olympian eschatology, he remains a great local power. The stronghold of the lower city bore his name, the Sisypheion. Diodorus[1506] relates how it was besieged by Demetrius, and when it was taken the garrison surrendered. It must have been a place of the old type, half fortress half sanctuary. Strabo[1507] notes that in his day extensive ruins of white marble remained, and he is in doubt whether to call it temple or palace.

As to the particular punishment selected for Sisyphos, a word remains to be said. It bears no relation to his supposed offence, whether that offence be the cheating of Death or the betrayal of Zeus. His doom is ceaselessly to upheave a stone. Reluctant though I am to resort to sun-myths, it seems that here the sun counts for something. The sun was regarded by the sceptical as a large red-hot stone: its rising and setting might very fitly be represented as the heaving of such a stone up the steep of heaven, whence it eternally rolls back. The worship of Helios was established at Corinth[1508]; whether it was due to Oriental immigration or to some pre-Hellenic stratum of population cannot here be determined. Sisyphos was a real king, the place of his sepulture on the Isthmus was known only to a few. It may have been kept secret like that of Neleus[1509] for prophylactic purposes. But a real king may and often does take on some of the features and functions of a nature god[1510].

* * * * *

On the ‘Canosa’ vase, immediately above Tantalos, is a group of three Judges, carrying sceptres. On the Altamura vase are also three Judges, occupying the same place in the composition, and happily they are inscribed—Triptolemos, Aiakos, and Rhadamanthys. Two of the three, Triptolemos and Aiakos, certainly belong to the earlier stratum.

Triptolemos had never even the shadowiest connection with any Olympian system; there is no attempt to affiliate him; he ends as he began, the foster-child of Demeter and Kore, and by virtue of his connection with the ‘Two Goddesses’ of the underworld he reigns below. Demeter and Kore, the ancient Mother and Maid, were strong enough to withstand, nay to out-top, any number of Olympian divinities. To tamper with the genealogy of their local hero was felt to be useless and never attempted.

In striking contrast to Triptolemos, Aiakos seems at first sight entirely of the later stratum. He is father of the great Homeric heroes, Telamon and Peleus, and when a drought afflicts Greece it is he who by sacrifice and prayer to Pan-Hellenian Zeus procures the needful rain. Recent investigation[1511] has, however, clearly shown that Aiakos is but one of the countless heroes taken over, affiliated by the new religion, and his cult, though overshadowed, was never quite extinguished. One fact alone suffices to prove this. Pausanias[1512] saw and described a sanctuary in Aegina known as the Aiakeion. ‘It stood in the most conspicuous part of the city, and consisted of a quadrangular precinct of white marble. Within the precinct grew ancient olives, and there was there also an altar rising only a little way from the ground, and it was said, as a secret not to be divulged, that this altar was the tomb of Aiakos.’ The altar-tomb was probably of the form already discussed (p. 63) and seen in fig. 9. Such a tomb, as altar, presupposes the cult of a hero.

Minos does not appear on these Lower Italy vases. In his place is Rhadamanthys, his brother and like him a Cretan. The reason of the substitution is perhaps not far to seek. Eustathius[1513] notes that some authorities held that Minos was a pirate and others that he was just and a lawgiver. It is not hard to see to which school of thinkers the Athenians would be apt to belong, and the Lower Italy vases are manifestly under Attic influence. If the old Cretan tradition had to be embodied, Rhadamanthys was a safe non-committal figure. He is most at home in the Elysian fields, a conception that was foreign to the old order. As brother of Minos, Rhadamanthys must have belonged to the old Pelasgian dark-haired stock, but we find with some surprise that he is in the _Odyssey_ ‘golden-haired’ (ξανθός), like any other Achaean. Eustathius hits the mark when he says[1514], ‘Rhadamanthys is golden-haired, out of compliment to Menelaos, for Menelaos had golden hair.’

Herakles and Theseus remain, and need not long detain us. Herakles is obviously no permanent denizen of Hades; he is triumphant, not tortured; he hales Cerberus to the upper air, and that there may be no mistake Hermes points the way. It has already been seen (p. 55) that Herakles was a hero, _the_ hero well worth Olympianizing though he never became quite Olympianized. In the _Nekuia_, when the poet is describing Herakles, he is caught on the horns of a dilemma between the old and the new faith, and instinctively he betrays his predicament. Odysseus[1515] says:

‘Next Herakles’ great strength I looked upon,
His shadow, for the man himself is gone
To join him with the gods immortal; there
He feasts and hath for bride Hebe the fair.’

The case of Theseus is different. In the Hades of Vergil[1516] he is a criminal condemned for ever:

‘There sits, and to eternity shall sit,
Unhappy Theseus.’

But on these Lower Italy vases we have again to reckon with Athenian influence. Theseus is of the old order, son of Poseidon, but Athens was never fully Olympianized, and she will not have her hero in disgrace. Had he not a sanctuary at Athens, an ancient asylum[1517]? Were not his bones brought in solemn pomp from Skyros[1518]? So the matter is adjusted with considerable tact. Theseus, never accounted as guilty as Peirithoös, is suffered to return to the upper air, Peirithoös has to remain below; and this satisfies Justice, Dike, the woman seated by his side. That the woman holding the sword is none other than Dike herself is happily certain, for she appears inscribed on the fragment of another and similar amphora in the Museum at Carlsruhe[1519]. Near her on this fragment is Peirithoös, also inscribed.

So far in our consideration of the criminals of Hades it might seem as though they owed their existence purely to theological _animus_. They are, we have seen, figures of the old religion degraded by the new. But to suppose that this was the sole clue to their presence would be a grave mistake. The notion of punishment, and especially eternal punishment, cannot be fairly charged to the account of Homer and the Olympian religion he represents. This religion was too easy-going, too essentially aristocratic to provide an eternity even of torture for the religious figures it degraded and despised. Enough for it if they were carelessly banished to their own proper kingdom, the underworld. It is, alas, to the Orphics, not to the Achaeans, that religion owes the dark disgrace of a doctrine of eternal punishment. The Orphics were concerned, as has fully been seen, with two things, immortality and purification; the two notions to them were inseparable, but by an easy descent the pains that were for purification became for vengeance. The germ of such a doctrine is already in the line:

‘I have paid the penalty for deeds unrighteous.’

The lower kind of Orphic could not rid of vengeance the Hades he made in his own vindictive image. We have seen (p. 507) the heights to which Dike could rise as Heavenly Justice, as Purity; here in Hades she descends to another and more human level.

The figure of Dike in art was not invented by the artist of the Lower Italy vases. She is quaintly figured in the design in fig. 165, from an amphora in the Museum at Vienna[1520]. Dike, with uplifted mallet, is about to pound the head of an ugly speckled woman, Adikia, Injustice. The vase, though not signed by Nikosthenes, is manifestly of his school, and therefore dates about the turn of the 6th and 5th centuries B.C. The figure of Dike smiting with the mallet or club was familiar to literature. Theseus, when he learns the death of Hippolytos, asks:

‘How then did Justice smite him with her club,
My son who shamed me?’

The Hades, then, of the Lower Italy vases is a popular blend of Orphism and of Olympian theology, or rather of ancient Pelasgian figures viewed through the medium of Olympianism. The old stratum provides the material, the new stratum degrades it, and Orphism moralises it.

THE DANAIDES.

We have left to the end the figures of the ‘Danaides,’ the maiden-figures carrying water-jars, who on the Altamura vase[1521] stand in the lowest row on the right hand. The ‘Danaides’ have been reserved advisedly, because in their case we have positive evidence of the blend between new and old.

When mention is made of the water-carriers in Hades, maidens who carry water in a leaky vessel, to the modern mind the name ‘Danaides’ instantly occurs:

‘O Danaides, O sieve.’

The association is real and valid, but its cause and origin have been misunderstood, and thereby much confusion has arisen.

The water-carriers of Hades are familiar to us mainly through the famous attack made by Plato[1522] in the _Republic_ on Orphic eschatology. Seizing, according to his fashion, on the lower side of Orphism, Plato complains that it is riddled through and through with other-worldliness. Homer and Hesiod promise to the just man good in this life, ‘bees’ and ‘woolly sheep,’ and ‘trees laden with fruit,’ and ‘wealthy marriages’ and ‘high offices.’ That in Plato’s eyes is bad enough, but religious poets, among them Orpheus, do worse. ‘Still more lusty are the blessings that Musaeus and his son give on behalf of the gods to the just, for on their showing they take them down into Hades and set them on couches and prepare a Banquet of the Blest; they crown them with garlands and make them spend their whole time being drunk, accounting eternal drunkenness to be the fairest reward of virtue; and others lengthen out still longer the recompense given by the gods, saying that there shall be children’s children and a posterity of the blessed and those who keep faith. In such and the like fashion do they sing the praise of justice. But the impious and unjust they bury in a kind of mud in Hades, and compel them to carry water in a sieve.’

The ‘immortal drunkenness’ promised as guerdon to the blessed was of course conceived of by the higher sort of Orphic as a spiritual ecstasy, by the lower Orphic as merely eternal banqueting. The notion was easily popularized, for the germ of it existed in the ‘Hero-feast’ already discussed (p. 350), and these ‘Hero-feasts,’ we have seen, were taken over by Dionysos.

* * * * *

The mud and the sieve to which the impious were condemned remain to be considered. They can only be understood in relation to Orphic ritual, and in this relation are instantly clear. Daubing with mud was, we have seen (p. 492), an integral rite in certain Orphic mysteries. The rite neglected on earth by the impious must be performed for ever in Hades. The like notion lies at the bottom of the water-carrying. He who did not purify himself on earth by initiation must for ever purify himself in Hades. But the vindictive instinct, always alive in man, adds, it is too late, he carries water in a pierced vessel, a sieve, and carries it for ever.

It is often said by modern commentators who have made no trial of eternal burning that fruitless labour is the greatest of all punishments. Goethe was the first offender. ‘The ancients,’ he says, ‘rightly considered fruitless labour as the greatest of all torments, and the punishments which Tantalos, Sisyphos, the Danaides and the Uninitiated undergo in Hades bear witness to this.’ But it is not in this reflective fashion that primitive mythology and eschatology are made.

The word used by Plato for those who carry the water in the sieve is noteworthy, it is ἀνόσιοι, which perhaps is best translated ‘unconsecrated ones.’ The word ὅσιοι we have already seen denoted complete initiation, the full and final stage; ἀνόσιοι is almost, though not quite, ‘uninitiated.’ In the _Phaedo_, Plato does not mention the water-carriers, but he says explicitly what he here implies, that those who lie in mud are those uninitiated in the mysteries. ‘I think,’ says Socrates, ‘that those who founded our mysteries were not altogether foolish, but from old had a hidden meaning when they said that whoso goes to Hades uninitiated (ἀμύητος), and not having finally accomplished the rites (ἀτέλεστος), will lie in mud.’

Again, when in the _Gorgias_ Plato[1523] notes the moralization of the notion of the water-carrying, he quite clearly states that the water-carriers are the uninitiated. Socrates is refuting the notion propounded by Callicles that the full satisfaction of the passions is virtue. ‘You make of life a fearful thing,’ he says, and I think perhaps Euripides was right when he said:

‘Life may be death, death life—who knows?’

‘A certain philosopher,’ he goes on, ‘has said we are dead, and that the body (σῶμα) is a tomb (σῆμα).’ This doctrine, it will be remembered, was fathered in the _Cratylus_ on the Orphics. Then with the notion of the tomb-body (σῶμα σῆμα) still in his mind, Socrates continues: ‘A certain ingenious man, probably an Italian or a Sicilian, playing on the word, invented a myth in which he called that part of the soul which is the seat of the desires a _pithos_, because it was _bid_able (πιθανὸν) and persuadable, and he called the ignorant “unshutting” (ἀμυήτους) ... and he declared that of the souls in Hades the uninitiated were most miserable, for they carry water into a _pithos_ which is pierced, with a sieve that is pierced in like manner.’ Whether the ‘ingenious man’ was Empedocles or Pythagoras is not for our purpose important; both held Orphic doctrines, and one of these doctrines was that the uninitiated carried water in Hades. It has not, I think, been noticed that the tomb (σῆμα) as a symbol of the body evidently suggests the _pithos_ or jar as symbol of the seat of the desires. We have seen in discussing the Anthesteria (p. 43) that the souls rise from a grave-_pithos_.

So far it must be distinctly noted that Plato nowhere calls the water-carriers in Hades _Danaides_. The first literary source for the Danaides _as water-carriers in Hades_ is the pseudo-Platonic dialogue the _Axiochus_[1524]. In Hades, we are there told, is the region of the unholy (χῶρος ἀσεβῶν) and the ‘unaccomplished water-carryings of the Danaides’ (Δαναΐδων ὑδρεῖαι ἀτελεῖς). The word ἀτελεῖς, ‘unaccomplished,’ means also uninitiated, and we are left in doubt—a doubt probably intentional, as to which meaning is here proposed. The whole purport of the _Axiochus_ is to prepare a coward to face death decently, and the dialogue is full of mysticism. We have as the meed of the blessed ‘flowery meadows,’ streams of ‘pure water,’ ‘drinking feasts with songs,’ and the like. Moreover and most significant of all, the uninitiated have ‘some sort of _proedria_’ or right of the first place, and even in Hades they ‘_go on performing their pure and sanctified rites_.’ It is the very mirror of the heaven where

‘Congregations ne’er break up and Sabbaths have no end.’

To Plato, then, the water-carriers of Hades are ‘uninitiated’; by the time of the _Axiochus_ they are Danaides: what is the connecting link? The answer must wait till the evidence of art has been examined.

The evidence of vase-painting is of high importance, because we possess two black-figured vases which antedate Plato by more than a century. The design in fig. 166 is from an amphora in the old Pinakothek[1525] in Munich. The scene is laid in the underworld; of that we are sure from the figure of Sisyphos. On the reverse of the vase (not figured here) Herakles is represented with Cerberus. On the obverse (fig. 166), four little winged _eidola_ (ghosts) are climbing carefully up a huge _pithos_, and into it they pour water from their water-jars. The _pithos_, it should be noted, is sunk deep into the earth; it is in intent the mouth of a well. Such _pithoi_ are still to be found sunk in the earth at Athens, and served the Turks for cisterns. The upper part of the _pithos_ is intact, so are the water-jars, but it is possible and indeed almost certain that the _pithos_ is thought of as pierced at the bottom so that the water poured in flows away into the ground:

‘inane lymphae
dolium fundo pereuntis _imo_.’

The vase in fig. 166 is usually figured as an illustration of the ‘Danaid’ myth, but there is not the faintest adducible evidence that the winged _eidola_ are Danaides.

The design in fig. 167, from a black-figured lekythos in the museum at Palermo[1526], allows us to go a step further. The water-carriers are emphatically _not_ Danaides. Of the six figures who rush in grotesque hurry to fill the _pithos_, three are men, three women. If we give them a name, it must be not Danaides but ‘Uninitiated.’ They are burlesqued, in the spirit of Aristophanes; the uninitiated soul pauses to refresh his mind by pulling the donkey’s tail. The donkey, it may be noted, is further evidence that the vase-painter has the mysteries in his mind. He has fallen on his knees, and his burden has dropped from his back. The seated old man gazes at it helplessly. There seems a reminiscence of the ‘ass who carried the mysteries,’ and in this topsy-turvy Hades, as in Aristophanes, he turns and will carry them no more. The ass and the old man, sometimes called Oknos, are stock figures in the comic Hades, and they are variously moralized. The closest literary analogy to our picture is offered centuries later by Apuleius[1527]. Psyche, when about to descend into the lower world, is warned that when she has gone some distance on the ‘deadly way’ she will come upon a lame ass and a lame ass-driver. The driver will ask her to pick up for him some of the bundles that have fallen from the ass’s pack. She is to remain silent and pass on.

It is of course matter for regret that neither of the black-figured vases that we possess is inscribed. It would have been most instructive to learn what that echo of popular tradition, the vase-painter, actually _called_ the water-carriers. Happily we have, not indeed a work of art itself, but the literary record of such a work in which an inscription _did_ occur—the painting by Polygnotus of the descent of Odysseus into Hades, frescoed on the wall of the Lesche of Delphi, and minutely described by Pausanias.

‘Above the figure of Penthesilea,’ Pausanias[1528] says, ‘are women carrying water in broken earthen sherds.’ The vessels are here described as broken, not pierced, and Pausanias says nothing about whether the vessel into which they pour is pierced or not. ‘One of the women is represented as in the flower of her youth, the other of advanced years.’ There were certainly no _old_ Danaides. There is no separate inscription over each woman, but there is an inscription common to both which says they are ‘of those who have not been initiated.’ Pausanias then goes on to describe some other mythological figures unconnected with these women, among them Sisyphos, who is ‘struggling to push a rock up a precipice.’ He then adds, ‘There is also in the picture a _pithos_ and an elderly man, a boy and two women, one just below the rock, who is young, and near to the old man a woman of similar age. The others are going on carrying water, but the old woman seems to have broken her hydria, but what is left in the potsherd she is pouring into the _pithos_.’ As in the black-figured vase-paintings it is a hydrophoria into a _pithos_, but the hydriae are in some cases at least broken. How many figures in all Pausanias saw is not clear, owing to his disjointed account, nor does it matter, the essential thing is that they are of both sexes and any age—they are nowise Danaides. Nor did Pausanias, charged though he was with later mythological associations, suppose them to be so—that the inscription forbade. He concludes his account thus: ‘We inferred that these also (i.e. the last group mentioned by him) were persons who held the rites at Eleusis to be of no account. For the Greeks of early days held initiation at Eleusis to be of as much more account than any other matter as the gods are compared to the heroes.’

Polygnotus and Plato certainly, the black-figured vase-painter probably, regarded the water-carriers of Hades not as mythical Danaides, but as real human persons uninitiated. By the date of the _Axiochus_ the fruitless water-carriers are Danaides. The question still remains to be answered, Why are the Danaides selected as typically Uninitiate? It was, it must be noted, perfectly natural that popular theology, when it made of the Uninitiate water-carriers in Hades, should seek a mythical prototype, but why were the Danaides selected? The reason is primarily simple and obvious, though later it became curiously complex.

The Danaides of mythology were _well-nymphs_. One of the sisterhood was called Amymone: she gave her name to the spring near Lerna, still called in Strabo’s time Amymone. Strabo[1529] preserves for us a line from an epic poet,

‘Argos, waterless once, the Danai made well-watered.’

Long before the tragedy about their husbands, the Danaides were at work watering, fertilizing thirsty Argos. The Danaides, _as merely Danaides_, might fitly be represented as filling a great well-_pithos_.

But, it must next be observed, the Danaides belong to the old stratum of the population, the same stratum as Tantalos, as Sisyphos, as Tityos: they are of the old matriarchal order, their prayer persistently iterated is:

‘We, the great seed of a Holy Mother, ah me!
Grant us that we
Unwed, unsubdued, from marriage of men may flee[1530].’

In the _Suppliants_ of Aeschylus it is from a marriage they deem lawless that the Danaides flee, and their act is justified. Behind the legend we seem to discern, though dimly, the reflection of some shift of old to new, some transition from matriarchal freedom to patriarchal marriage enactments. In any case, in the late orthodox form of the myth, we meet the Danaides as criminals, and their crime is clearly not only that of murder, but of rejection of marriage. What was justified by the old order was criminal in the new. Here was an opportunity for the moralist. Of old the Danaides carried water because they were well-nymphs; the new order has made them criminals, and it makes of their fruitful water-carrying a fruitless punishment—an atonement for murder[1531].

It will readily be seen that the well-nymphs, regarded by the new order as guilty maidens seeking purification, offered just the mythological prototype needed for the uninitiated water-carriers. Once the analogy was seized, many further traits of resemblance would eagerly be added. At the lake of Lerna, near which was the spring known as Amymone, expiatory purifications were, Strabo[1532] tells us, actually performed. Hence, he says, arose the expression ‘a Lerna of ills.’ It was the custom no doubt at Lerna as in many another swamp and lake to bury ‘purifications’ (καθάρματα). Such rites of the old order were the ‘mysteries’ of primitive religion. Herodotus[1533] expressly tells us that it was the Danaides who taught to the Pelasgian women the sacred rites of Demeter, which the Greeks called Thesmophoria, and of which Herodotus dares not disclose the full details. The Danaides, who later became types of the Uninitiated, were, it would seem, the prime Initiators. So does theology shift.

* * * * *

Another ritual fact helped out the fusion and confusion. To the Roman Church marriage is a sacrament, to the Anglican still ‘an excellent mystery.’ In like fashion to the Greeks marriage was conceived of as a rite of initiation, and through initiation of consummation; the word τέλη in its plural form was used of all mysteries, the singular form was expressly applied to marriage. Pollux[1534], in discussing wedding ceremonies, says, ‘and marriage is called τέλος, i.e. a rite that completes, and those who have been married are called complete, and on this account the Hera of marriage is called Teleia, the Complete One.’ It has already been seen (p. 533) that one special rite of purification, the _Liknophoria_, was common to marriage and the mysteries. The same is true of the _Loutrophoria_, carrying of the bath. Is it surprising that in the figures of the well-nymphs some ingenious person saw the Danaides as ἀτελεῖς γάμου, ‘uninitiated in marriage,’ and therefore condemned to carry for ever in vain the water for their bridal bath in Hades? The more so as, if we may trust Eustathius[1535], it was the custom to place ‘on the grave of those who died unmarried a water jar called _Loutrophoros_[1536] in token that the dead had died unbathed and without offspring.’ Probably these vases, as Dr Frazer[1537] suggests, were at first placed on the graves of the unmarried with the kindly intent of helping the desolate unmarried ghost to accomplish his wedding in the world below. But once the custom fixed, it might easily be interpreted as the symbol of an underworld punishment.

Some versions of the story say that the water was carried in a sieve (κοσκίνῳ). This notion may have arisen from another ritual practice. It is noticeable that the sieves of the stone age seem to have been simply pierced jars. Sieve and _pithos_ were one and the same. Carrying water in a sieve was an ancient test of virginity. Pliny[1538] tells us that the test of the sieve was applied to the Vestal Tuccia. If the water-carrying of the Danaides was conceived as a virginity test, the forty-nine sisters married before the murder would fail at the test, and Hypermnestra alone would carry the water in the leaky sieve:

‘Splendide mendax et in omne _virgo_
Nobilis aevum[1539].’

Finally, it will be remembered (p. 575) that the Orphics had their Well of Memory, which was in effect a Well of Life. It would not escape a mystic who saw the figures of the water-carriers that these were drawing water for ever but in vain from the Well of Life. So the scholiast[1540] to Aristides in quaint fashion interprets the myth: ‘the pierced _pithos_ of the Danaides,’ he says, ‘signifies that the Danaides after the murder of their dearest can never obtain from another man the grace of the living water of marriage.’ The notion of a ‘Water of Life’ haunts him, but he knows the real gist of the symbolism, for he adds: they have ‘become suspected on account of their pollution.’ Of the making of such mysticism there is clearly no end.

* * * * *

The symbolism of marriage, of virginity tests, of living water might, doubtless did, gather about the figures of the Danaides, but the primary notion that fitted them to be mythical prototypes of the ‘Uninitiated’ was that they were polluted, uncleansed. They are Choephoroi, but in vain; the libations that they pour into the grave-_pithoi_ of their husbands are a χάρις ἄχαρις, an attempted offscouring, ἀπόνιμμα, but no real purification. Of such a vain Choephoria performed by Clytaemnestra Electra[1541] says:

‘It is not right or meet
By law of gods or men that from a hateful wife
Grave-dues and washings should be brought my father.
Give them the winds, or in the deep dug earth
Go hide them.’

The water-carriers in Hades have been discussed at some length[1542], because they afford an instance typical of the methods of Orphic procedure. In discussing the mysteries it has been repeatedly seen that Orphism did not invent new rites, but mysticized and moralized old ones. In like fashion when Orphism developes eschatology, it takes for its material the mythology of the older stratum[1543], invents no new figures but gives to the old ones an intensified and moralized significance.

The Orphic tablets showed us the heights to which Orphism could rise. If we are inclined to estimate over highly the general level of the Orphic faith, the Lower Italy vases may correct the error. They mirror Orphism as it seemed to the many. In the matter of doctrine, instead of or at best in addition to purification, we have vindictive punishment; in the matter of theology, in place of what was practically monotheism on the tablets, the vases restore the old popular polytheism.

* * * * *

It is natural to ask, Is this the end? Did Orphism create no new figure, make no new god in its own purified image? The answer to this question will be found in our concluding enquiry as to the nature of Orphic Cosmogony.