CHAPTER III

CAVE DEITIES: SUBTERRANEAN TRANSLATION

The history of Greek culture and religion shows no sudden break or revolution in its course. The Greeks neither at any time experienced a movement from within that caused a violent recoil from the path which they had chosen, nor were they ever diverted by the overwhelming might of an invading force from the natural course of their evolution. Out of their own natural feelings and reflexion this most intellectually gifted nation evolved the great ideas that nourished succeeding centuries. They anticipated all later ages. The profoundest and the boldest, the most devout as well as the most irreverent speculations as to the nature of God, the world and men have their origin among the Greeks. But this excessive many-sidedness led to a general condition of equipoise in which individual factors restrained or balanced each other. Whereas the most violent impacts and sudden revolutions in the history of civilization are given by just those nations who are only able to embrace one idea at a time and who, confined in the narrow limits of their fanaticism, throw everything else overboard.

It is true, indeed, that the Greeks were ever open to influences--whether civilized or the reverse--from abroad. In wave after wave of peaceful invasion foreign ideas and ways of life, especially from the East, flowed over Greece. In one case, at least (that of the ecstatic religion of the Thracian Dionysos-worshippers), a spring flood burst out that broke down all the dykes. In many cases the invading elements might be easily eliminated again from Greek culture; in many others they obtained a permanent footing and influenced it deeply. But never did an influence from abroad obtain in Greece an authority at all comparable to the subversive and transforming power exercised by Buddhism, Christianity, or Islam over the peoples on whom they laid their grip. The Greek genius, as supple as it was tenacious, maintained control over all such foreign influences, in full possession of its original nature, its genial **naivety. New ideas, whether introduced from abroad or engendered at home, were taken up and assimilated, but the old were not done away with; they gradually amalgamated with the new so that much was learnt while nothing was quite forgotten. The stream flowed on in its peaceful course, but it still remained the same stream. _Nec manet ut fuerat nec formas servat easdem: sed tamen ipse idem est_. {89}

The history of Greek culture, then, has no sharply contrasted epochs, no periods of abrupt change, when the old is completely given up and a new era definitely begins. Indeed, the most serious revulsions of Greek history, culture, and religion took place beyond doubt _before_ the time of the Homeric Epos, and in that dim past it is possible that more violent and startling upheavals may have occurred to make the Greeks what we afterwards know them to be. Greek life becomes first clearly known to us in Homer. It is true that the broad uniformity that it has in the picture reflected for us in the poems of Homer vanishes in the course of the years that follow. New forces emerge; much that was forgotten comes to light again now that the Homeric system of ideas, once all powerful, is falling to pieces; out of the very old and the quite new things of which Homer never gives the least hint are being put together. But nowhere during the violent movements of the next troubled centuries after Homer did any absolute break with the Epic or its system take place. Only in the sixth century did the defiant speculation of a few bold spirits begin to seek a way of escape from the thraldom of the Homeric poems which still lay over the whole of Greece. The history of the Greek common people knows nothing of a reaction against Homer and his world. Homeric religion and moral ideas gradually ceased to reign supreme in men's minds, but they were never violently or completely discarded.

So we, too, though we leave behind us Homer and the Epos and enter upon the tortuous paths of the later history of Greek soul worship and belief in immortality, may still for a time be guided by the Ariadne thread of the epic. In our subject, too, there are links which connect the Homeric with following ages. Soon enough the thread will break, and we shall have to enter the new field of inquiry depending on our own resources. . . .

§ 1

Prominent among the chieftains, who, under the leadership of Adrastos, came to the help of Polyneikes and laid siege to Thebes, was Amphiaraos the Argive hero and seer descended from the mysterious priest and prophet Melampous. He was drawn into the war against his will, for he foresaw its unhappy end. After the decisive struggle in which the opposing brothers fell slain by each other's hand, the Argive host turned to flight, and with them fled Amphiaraos. But before Periklymenos, who was pursuing him, could drive his spear into the fugitive's back, Zeus made the earth open before him in a flash of {90} lightning and Amphiaraos with his horses, his chariot, and his charioteer, was swallowed up in the depths where Zeus made him _immortal_. So runs the legend of the fate of Amphiaraos as we learn it from innumerable sources from Pindar onwards,[1\3] and we may be sure that thus it was told in the Thebaïs, the old epic poem of the war of the Seven against Thebes, which was taken up into the Epic Cycle.[2\3]

At Thebes, then, Amphiaraos lived on for ever under the earth. Northwards in the Boeotian countryside, near Lebadeia, men told of a similar marvel. In a cave of the mountainous ravine, before which Lebadeia lies, lived Trophonios for ever immortal. The legends that professed to explain his miraculous cave-existence do not quite agree among themselves, as, indeed, is generally the case with those figures who were not early taken up by the poets and given a fixed place in the narratives of heroic adventure. But all accounts (the oldest of which perhaps go back to the "Telegoneia") agree in the assumption that Trophonios, like Amphiaraos, was first a _man_, a famous master-builder, who while flying from his foes, had dived underground at Lebadeia and now lives for ever in the depths of the earth whence he foretells the future to those who come and question him there.

These stories, then, claim to speak of men who during their lifetime were swallowed up by the earth, and who now live on for ever at the places where they were taken down into the depths--places situated in quite definite localities of the Greek countryside.

We are not entirely without other legends of a similar character. One of the wild spirits of the Lapith people from Thessalia, Kaineus by name, having been made invulnerable by Poseidon (who had before this transformed him from a woman into a man), was cudgelled with tree-trunks in a battle with the Centaurs; but they could do nothing to him, and with "upright foot" (i.e. standing upright, alive, not lying at full length like a dead man or one mortally wounded) he clove the earth under him and went down alive into the depths.[3\3] In Rhodes Althaimenes was honoured as the "founder" of the Greek cities on that island; he had not died but had vanished into a chasm in the ground.[4\3] Like Amphiaraos, his son Amphilochos, the heir of his prophetic power, appears to have had a legend according to which he still dwelt alive under the earth either in Akarnania or Cilicia.[5\3] A few more examples of the same type might be produced,[6\3] but the number of such stories remains small, and they only make their appearance here and there, as if by {91} accident, in the tradition. Epic poetry without whose co-operation such local legends rarely achieved widespread or lasting popularity, with few exceptions left such narratives out of account. In fact, they conflicted with the normal Homeric outlook. The belief, however, that immortality when it was miraculously bestowed by the favour of heaven upon certain individual men, was absolutely conditioned by the non-occurrence of death, i.e. the separation of the psyche from the visible man--this belief has helped to shape these stories too. They never speak of an undying existence of the soul by itself in separation from the body. Thus far they are firmly rooted in orthodox Homeric belief.

But the heroes of these stories have their everlasting existence in special abodes under the surface of the earth, in subterranean chambers[7\3]--not in the common meeting place of the departed; they each have their own peculiar domain far from the House of Aïdoneus. Such isolation of individuals below the earth does not agree with Homeric ideas; though it almost seems as if a dim echo of these stories of seers like Amphiaraos and Amphilochos, translated alive and with consciousness undestroyed, could be discerned in what the Homeric Nekyia says of Teiresias the Theban seer, in whom alone of all the shadows Persephone had allowed consciousness and intelligence (the essential vital powers) to remain undiminished.[8\3] But even he is fast bound in Erebos, the general home of the dead, and cut off from all connexion with the upper world, as is demanded by the Homeric view of the world. Amphiaraos and Trophonios, on the other hand, are released from Hades; not having suffered death they have not entered the world of the strengthless dead. They are also translated out of this life (besides out of Hades). But this "subterranean translation" is in its nature and in the origin of the belief in it quite distinct from that "translation to Islands of the Blest" of which we spoke in the last chapter. Those Heroes dwelling alone or in company on holy islands far out over the sea are far removed from human life and beyond the reach of prayers and desires. No influence upon the things of this world is attributed to them, and consequently no cult is offered to them: there never existed a cult of the dwellers in Elysium _as such_. They glimmer in the distance like visions of the poet's fancy from which no one anticipates active interference with the world of reality. It is quite different with these dwellers in the caves. They are actually alive under the surface of the earth; not far away in the inaccessible, spectral world of Hades, but here in the midst of Greece. Questions and prayers {92} can reach down to them, and they can send up aid to those who call to them. To them, accordingly, as powerful and effectual Spirits a _cult_ is paid.

We have detailed information of the manner in which Amphiaraos was worshipped, more especially in later times, when, in addition to the neighbourhood of Thebes, where the original legend of his descent beneath the earth was localized, Oropos also, the boundary town between Boeotia and Attica, was with overwhelming success identified as the place of his disappearance and made a centre of his influence.[9\3] We have also a certain amount of information, again from later ages, about the cult of Trophonios. With the passage of time, the details of the worship grew and multiplied, but among them all certain features stand out as especially characteristic and allow us to understand the religious ideas lying behind them. To Amphiaraos and Trophonios were offered just those sacrifices which were also paid to the Chthonic deities, i.e. those deities who dwelt in the depths of the earth.[10\3] Aid was not expected from them in the details of the daily life of individuals or states. Only in the actual locality of their descent were they effectual, and only there because they revealed the future. Kroisos had already, and Mardonios after him, sent inquiries to the most famous oracles of the day,[11\3] and among them to Amphiaraos at his ancient oracular seat near Thebes and to Trophonios at Lebadeia. Of Amphiaraos it was believed that he revealed the future by visions sent in dreams to those who after making offering laid themselves down to sleep in his temple. To question Trophonios, it was necessary to pass through a narrow passage into his cave. Inside, the inquirer expected to see Trophonios in person or, at least, to hear his instructions.[12\3] He dwelt, like a spirit confined to the scene of his magical existence, in bodily person at the bottom of his cave. In fact, the method of _Incubation_, or temple-sleep, by which Amphiaraos (like many other daimones and Heroes) was questioned, was based on the assumption that the daimon, who was only visible indeed to mortal eyes in the higher state achieved by the soul in dreams, had his permanent dwelling at the seat of his oracle.[13\3] That is why his appearance can only be expected at this particular place and nowhere else. Originally, too, it was only the dwellers in the depths of the earth who were thus visible in dreams to those who lay down to sleep in the temple over the place where they had their subterranean abode. Homer knows nothing of either gods or daimones who live permanently under the ground in definite places in the inhabited world, near mankind; and for that {93} reason he betrays no knowledge of _Incubation-oracles_.[14\3] There is some ground for the belief that this method, inherent in the divinatory power, of getting into touch with the spirit world, was one of the oldest types of Greek oracular art--certainly not later than the Apolline _mantikê_ of inspiration. And it is precisely in the legend of Amphiaraos, as we may believe it to have been related as early as the cyclic poem of the Thebaïs, that we have a proof that already in the days when the quasi-Homeric poetry was still popular, people believed in deathless dwellers below the earth and in their active potency in the mantic art.

It is clear, then, that the worship of Amphiaraos and the belief in his subterranean existence was not due to the influence of the Epic. Rather the reverse was the case; the cult already existed and provided the idea of the daimon and this gave rise to the Epic narrative. The Epic found an existing cult of an oracular daimon who dwelt beneath the earth near Thebes ready to its hand. It reduced this fact to a form which it could understand in a manner typical of the relation which frequently existed between the facts of religious life and Epic poetry. The cult was connected with an event in legendary history, and so brought into harmony with the Epic outlook. The Epic knew nothing of gods attached in this way to a **particular earthly spot, and so the spirit worshipped in the cult became in the epic imagination a chieftain and Seer who had not always lived beneath the earth in that place, but had only been transported there subsequently by a miraculous fiat of the supreme god, who had also accorded an eternal life in the depths to the translated hero.[15\3]

We may perhaps find a parallel in more recent Saga story that will throw light on the question. German mythology is perfectly familiar with such figures for ever, or until the day of judgment, alive in caverns of the mountains or subterranean chambers. Thus, Charlemagne, or it may be Charles the Fifth, still has his abode in Odenberg or in Unterberg, near Salzburg, Frederick II (or, in more recent versions of the legend, Frederick I Barbarossa in Kyffhäuser, Henry the Fowler in Sudemerberg, near Goslar. Thus, too, King Arthur, Holger Danske, and many other favourite characters of popular tradition dwell in subterranean caverns.[16\3] Occasionally, we can still plainly see how these were originally ancient _gods_ who according to pagan belief dwelt in hollow mountains and whose place has been taken by these heroes and holy men "translated" beneath the earth.[17\3] So, too, Greek tradition allows us to see even now that those ancient {94} translated mortals, Amphiaraos and Trophonios, are only Epic substitutes for ancient deities who did not owe their everlasting life and subterranean abode to the favour of heaven, but had possessed these from the beginning. At least, at the site of his worship men knew that the prophetic dweller in the cave was a _god_; one of them is called Zeus Trophonios or Trephonios, not only by learned authorities, but in inscriptions from Lebadeia;[18\3] Amphiaraos, too, is once called Zeus Amphiaraos and more often a god.[19\3] In the Translation legends of Christianized people the kings have usurped the place of the ancient gods because the gods themselves, fallen into neglect, have been dethroned. For reasons not so very different from these the ancient gods on Greek soil were turned into heroes.

Surrounded by the unending multiplicity of contemporary notions of divinity the imagination of the Epic poet had fashioned for itself a generalized picture of a divine kingdom. This was at that time a solitary attempt to erect a Panhellenic theological system, but it had the greatest influence upon the mental conceptions of Greeks of every race, for the Epic poet addressed them all. He stood as though on a height looking down on all the narrow valleys and mountainous countrysides cut off from the rest of the world, and a wide prospect opened out before his eyes. He **soars above all the innumerable contradictory and conflicting details of local cult and belief, and finds something universal beyond. The name and conception of Zeus, Apollo, Hermes, Athena, and all the gods represented innumerable diversities in the myths and ritual of the different cities and races; their outward shapes and personalities differed widely according to their localization and the manner of their influence. Instead of all these the Epic poet sees only one Zeus, Apollo, etc., reduced in each case to a single unified personality. And just as he had looked beyond the multiplicity of local deities so he did not confine his gods to particular local habitations and centres of influence in the Greek countries; they did not belong to one locality more than another. True they worked and ruled in the world, but they were for all that free to move where they would. They dwell and meet together on the heights of Olympos, the Pierian Holy Mountain, which, however, became in the imagination of Homer, unfettered by attachment to any particular place, more and more an ideal mountain of fancy. So the broad sea is the dwelling-place of Poseidon; he is not confined to any one place. Even the rulers of the spirit world. Aïdes and Persephoneia, have their abode, not, indeed, on {95} Olympos, and certainly not here or there beneath the surface of the Greek countryside, but far away in a land of fancy; they, too, are not bound to any particular locality of the actual world. At the end of this enormous work of unification and idealization, that, out of all the infinite special manifestations of the name Zeus, each worshipped only in its narrow little circle in Greece, had evolved the single almighty figure of Zeus Father of Gods and Men--how could one who had imagined all this be able to understand, if he met with such a creature, a special Zeus, calling himself Zeus Trophonios, who passed his undying existence in a cave near Lebadeia and was only powerful in that one spot?

Of course, the inhabitant of such a holy spot would not allow himself to be deprived of the belief in the existence and presence of the god on his native soil. Though he might be ready enough in general and in respect of other men's local deities to regulate conceptions of the nature of the gods in accordance with the Homeric picture, yet he refused absolutely to be shaken in his belief in his own local deity, however unknown to the Olympian family of gods in Homer that deity might be. The local worship in its unaltered, undisturbed persistence, witnessed to the objective truth of his belief. Thus there were preserved in the pious faith of their worshippers large numbers of local deities whose circle of influence was, however, very limited. They had not been raised with the other gods to the heights of Olympos, but had remained faithful to the soil in which they had their home,[20\3] witnesses to a far distant past in which the members of every remote little community had their separate god bound to the soil beyond which their thoughts did not stray. We shall see how in post-Homeric times many such ancient earth-gods, i.e. gods thought of as living below the surface of the ground, were given new and in some cases a more wide-reaching lease of life. The Epic in its prime knew nothing of these earth-dwelling deities. When it could not close its eyes to their existence it changed them into translated heroes, and beyond the immediate locality of the cult this version of them became the commonly accepted one throughout the rest of Greece.

§ 2

But the Epic was by no means uniform in intention, or carried through as a systematic unity; it was far from being the offspring of a learned reflection that could tolerate no discrepancy. Even here we find at least some few dim {96} recollections of the ancient belief in gods that can have their permanent abode in mountain hollows.

The Odyssey (xix, 178 f.) calls Minos, the son of Zeus (cf. _Il._ xiii, 450; xiv, 322; _Od._ xi, 568) who ruled in Knossos the Cretan city, "the familiar gossip of great Zeus."[21\3] Very probably the poet meant by these words much the same as was understood by them in later times: that Minos was personally acquainted with Zeus, on earth, of course, and, in fact, in the cave--not far from Knossos on the side of Mount Ida--which was revered as the "Cave of Zeus".[22\3] The island of Crete, overrun by the Greeks at an early period, still preserved in its remote seclusion much that was primeval in belief and legend. There, sometimes on Mount Ida, sometimes on Mount Dicte (in the east of the island) the holy cave was pointed out where (already in Hesiod) Zeus was said to have been born.[23\3] According to a local legend, which probably was present to the fancy of the writer of these lines of the Odyssey, the god now fully grown up still dwelt in his subterranean chamber, and was visited by individual mortals. As Minos before him, so, too, Epimenides had been allowed to hear the prophecies of the god.[24\3] The Zeus that dwelt in Ida was worshipped in a mystical cult;[25\3] every year a "throne" was "spread" for him, i.e. probably a "divine banquet" (Theoxenion) was prepared for his consumption, as for other especially Chthonic deities. The initiated then entered the cave dressed in black woollen garments, and remained within for thrice nine days.[26\3] Everything points to the existence of conceptions similar to those that we found expressed in the cult of Zeus Trophonios at Lebadeia. Zeus dwelling in bodily form in the depths of his cave can appear in person to those who enter his cave duly sanctified.

Then there appears, from the fourth century onwards, the strange statement, perhaps started by Euhemeros and eagerly taken up in later ages by scoffers like Lucian or Christian opponents of the old religion, that Zeus lay _buried_ on Ida.[27\3] What is here called the _grave_ of the god is nothing in reality but the _cave_ which was generally regarded as his permanent abode.[28\3] The idea--always strange to the Greeks[29\3]--that a god could lie buried anywhere on the earth, deprived of life for ever or even for a limited period of time, is often met with in the tradition of Semitic and other non-Greek peoples.[30\3] We need not inquire what deeper or perhaps allegorical sense such legends may have had in the beliefs of those nations; there is no reason to suppose that such foreign legends had any influence in the formation of Greek myth. Nor does the {97} tradition in Greek lands give the slightest support to the view current among modern mythologists that the death and burial of gods is intended to symbolize the "death of Nature". It is, in fact, plain that in the legend of the Cretan Zeus' grave, the "grave" has simply taken the place of the cave as the everlasting abode of the undying god, and that it is a paradoxical expression intended to signify his perpetual confinement to that place. We are immediately reminded of a no less paradoxical notice of a god's grave at Delphi. Under the navel stone (Omphalos) of the Earth-goddess (which was a vaulted piece of masonry in the Temple of Apollo recalling in its shape the ancient vaulted tombs),[31\3] there lay buried a divine being. Our learned authorities call this being Python, the enemy of Apollo; one and only one quite untrustworthy witness says it was Dionysos.[32\3] Here we have a case of one god setting up his temple and abode over the grave of another god. Apollo, the god of prophecy, thrones it over the Earth-spirit Python, the son of the Earth-goddess Gaia. Now, we have ancient and in the highest degree trustworthy traditions to the effect that there was originally at Delphi an ancient Earth-Oracle into whose place Apollo and his mantic art came later as an intruder. We are therefore justified in believing that this circumstance in the history of religion has found expression in the legend that Apollo's temple and oracular seat stood over the place where an ancient and superseded oracle-daimon lay "buried".[33\3] In the days when the primeval Earth-Oracle was still powerful its guardian would not lie dead and buried under the Omphalos of the Earth-goddess, but would have dwelt there alive underground, like Amphiaraos or Trophonios or Zeus on Ida.

§ 3

The "grave" under the Omphalos means in the case of Python the overthrow of an earth-dwelling Chthonic Daimon by the cult of Apollo. The "grave" of Zeus, which had thrust itself into the place of an older legend of the dwelling of Zeus in the cave of the mountain, expresses the same idea as this legend, but expresses it in a form current in later ages which knew of many "Heroes" who after their death and from their graves gave proof of a higher existence and a powerful influence. The Zeus that died and is buried is only a god reduced to a Hero;[34\3] remarkable and paradoxical is only the fact that unlike Zeus Amphiaraos, Zeus Trophonios (and Zeus Asklepios), he has not, in the usual fashion, dropped his title of god, which directly contradicted his "Hero" {98} nature. It is possible that in the case of this cave-Zeus, half-god half-Hero, a conception has been transferred merely on analogy from other cases where it was applied more properly, after they had become fully "Heroized", to gods who according to the no longer intelligible theory had once been dwellers in the depths of the earth.

We have several accounts of Heroes who were buried in temples of gods and were sometimes associated with the cult of the higher god to whom the temple was dedicated. The way in which such legends could arise may be seen unusually clearly from the case of _Erechtheus_.

The Ship-Catalogue in the Iliad (ii, 546 ff.) tells us that Erechtheus was the son of the Earth, but that Athene brought him up and "settled him in her rich temple",[35\3] where the Athenians every year honour him with sacrifice of sheep and bulls.[36\3] It is plain that Erechtheus is here thought of as still living; to honour a dead man with such offerings, repeated every year and attended by the whole community, would be a custom quite unknown to Homer. Erechtheus is, therefore, thought of as dwelling alive in the temple in which Athene has set him down, i.e. the ancient temple on the Acropolis which was enclosed in the "strong house of Erechtheus", to which, according to the Odyssey, Athene betakes herself as her _own_ home. On the old citadel of the Kings, royal residence and sanctuary of the goddess were combined; its foundation walls have recently been discovered on the spot where later joint worship was paid to Athene and Erechtheus in the "Erechtheion".[37\3] Erechtheus dwells below the ground in a crypt of this temple,[38\3] like other earth-deities, in the form of a snake, immortally. He is not dead, for as Euripides still says, in a story which otherwise follows different lines, "the earth gaped and covered him over,"[39\3] i.e. he was _translated_ and lived on under the earth. On the analogy of the examples already discussed it is clear that this is also a case of a primitive local deity,[40\3] once supposed to have been living always in a cave on the mountain-side, transformed to a Hero who has been brought there and raised to immortal life. The later belief in Heroes required a _grave_ at which the continued existence and potency of the "Hero" was localized; by a natural process of development the Hero Erechtheus translated alive and made immortal is thought of as _buried_ in a grave. Erichthonios, who was expressly identified with the Homeric Erechtheus, was by later ages supposed to be buried in the Temple of Polias, i.e. the oldest temple of Athene, on the Acropolis.[41\3] We have clearly before us the steps by which the {99} aboriginal deity, dwelling beneath the ground, the son of Earth, is made into a mortal Hero, translated to immortality and placed under the protection of the Olympian goddess who has now become more powerful than he; and finally transferred, cave and all, to the precincts of her temple, and finally reduced to the condition of a Hero like another, who had died and lies peacefully buried in the temple of the goddess on the citadel.

With this example before us we may explain several other analogous cases, in which we have only the last stage of the process, the grave of a Hero in a god's temple, without any of the intermediate steps. A single example may be given.

At Amyklai, not far from Sparta, in the holiest temple of Laconia, stood the ancient bronze statue of Apollo upon an altar-shaped base, within which, according to legend, _Hyakinthos_ lay buried. Through a bronze door in the side of the altar offerings for the dead were sent down to "Hyakinthos" buried below every year at the festival of the Hyakinthia.[42\3] The recipient of these offerings has little resemblance to the gentle youth of popular legend. The Hellenistic poets tell how he was beloved by Apollo and died by a cast of Apollo's discus and was changed into a flower. The fable, almost destitute of local reference, has been put together from many popular themes.[43\3] The sculpture on the above-mentioned altar, on the other hand, represents among many gods and heroes Hyakinthos and his sister Polyboia as they are being carried up to heaven--which will not square with the metamorphosis story. Further, he is represented as bearded, and so not as the boy whom Apollo loved,[44\3] but as a grown man (of whose daughters indeed other legends make mention).[45\3] The true story of _this_ Hyakinthos has disappeared almost without leaving a trace. But in what the monument reveals and in what we know of the yearly festival held in honour of Hyakinthos significant features emerge which perhaps can tell us the real character of the Daimon that was honoured at Amyklai together with, and as our information clearly shows, before Apollo himself.[46\3] Hyakinthos was given offerings that were otherwise peculiar to the gods that ruled the lower world.[47\3] These offerings were let down directly into the underground place where, in fact, Hyakinthos himself was supposed to dwell. In the great festival of the Hyakinthia the alternate worship of Apollo and Hyakinthos (after whom as the chief personage the festival is named) points to the incomplete amalgamation of two originally distinct cults; and the plain and unadorned, almost dismal, ceremonies of {100} the days devoted to Hyakinthos--contrasted with the more cheerful worship paid to Apollo on the middle day of the feast[48\3]--allow us to see clearly the real nature of Hyakinthos as a Daimon related to the gods of the underworld. On the altar-relief Polyboia was represented as his sister: she was a goddess of the underworld like Persephone.[49\3] Hyakinthos was, then, an old local deity of the Amyklaian countryside, dwelling below the earth, and his worship at Amyklai was older than that of Apollo. But he is a dim figure. The Olympian god (probably not before the Doric conquest of the Achæan land) has set himself down beside, and indeed over, the ancient earth-spirit, and now outshines him without quite being able to banish his worship. The divine existence of the latter under the ground could not be imagined by later ages, except as the after-existence of the psyche of a dead and buried Hero whose body lay in the "grave" under the statue of the god. Next, in order to explain their association in cult, poetic legend made the god a lover, just as in another case, and for similar reasons, it had made him the lover of Daphne.[50\3]

§ 4

Thus it may be that under many a Hero whose grave was shown in the Temple of a god an ancient local-god was hidden, whose abode beneath the earth had been converted into a "grave" now that he himself had sunk from a deity of higher rank to a human chieftain. It depended upon the circumstances of the case whether his humanization was complete or whether the memory of his former god-head (preserved in cult) secured for him a second elevation to the heavenly regions[51\3] among the Olympian gods whose nature was originally quite foreign to that of the old earth-daimon. Such conceptions, differing widely according to the circumstances of place and time, are shown most clearly in the different views taken of _Asklepios_. For Homer and the poets he is generally a great chieftain, a mortal who had learnt the art of healing from Cheiron. In religious cult he was generally set on a level with the upper gods. In reality he, too, is a local earth-dwelling deity from Thessaly, who from beneath the earth dispenses, like so many earth-spirits, healing from the ills of the flesh and knowledge of the future[52\3]--the two being closely connected in antiquity. He, too, easily bore the change from god to Hero. Asklepios was struck by Zeus' lightning which in this, as in many cases, did not destroy life, but translated the person affected to a higher existence outside the visible world.[53\3] {101} We can now easily understand what it means when even this ancient earth-deity is said to be "buried"--his grave being shown at different places.[54\3] Many peculiarities of the worship paid to him show clearly the original character of Asklepios as an ancient god living below the earth.[55\3] One essential characteristic indeed of such earth-spirits he lacks--he is not bound to any one

## particular place. An enterprising priesthood, wandering in company

with the rest of their tribe, had taken with them this old established worship of theirs, and spread it far and wide, so that Asklepios himself became at home in many different places.

Now, in closest relationship, though they remained more faithful to their original character, with this Zeus Asklepios stood those Boeotian earth-spirits with whom this discussion began. Trophonios, and Amphiaraos, too, might have been described as an Asklepios, who had stayed at home in his old cavern dwelling.[56\3] They, too, Amphiaraos and Trophonios, had become mortal men of a past age in the imagination of a time which could no longer properly understand such cave-spirits. But we never hear of their "graves"; for the generation which made _them_ Heroes knew nothing of mortal chieftains who after dying and being buried yet lived on with undiminished powers. But it was the belief in their uninterrupted potency that gave those strange cavern deities a secure place in men's memory. In the epic and in legends inspired by the epic they are recognized as human beings that had not died but had been translated, without any division of soul from body, to everlasting life in the depths of the earth. Ever afterwards--even when they are not only called immortal, but actually "gods"--they are reckoned as men who have _become_ immortal or godlike.[57\3] And they have become the patterns of what other mortals too may rise to. In the _Electra_ of Sophokles (836 ff.) the chorus wishing to justify the hope of a continued life for the departed, expressly appeal to the example of Amphiaraos, who still rules below the earth with all his spiritual powers intact. For the same reason these and other examples offered by ancient legend and poetry of the "translation" of individual great men to a life below the earth are important for our inquiry too. In them, as it did (in another sense) in the case of those translated to the Islands of the Blest, the Epic points beyond its own resigned and gloomy conception of the state after death towards a higher life after the visible world has been left behind. It took isolated cases of the once numerous class of cavern deities worshipped in Greek countries, and deprived {102} them of their god-head, though not of the superhumanly continued existence and (especially mantic) powers claimed for them by the belief and cult of their countrymen. Thus reduced to mortal rank, it interwove them in the fabric of the heroic mythology, and in so doing instituted a class of outstanding human individuals who had been raised to a godlike existence, far, indeed, from the upper world, but, at least, not condemned to the common realm of the souls. Instead they were given a home beneath the earth, each in a definite place in Greek territory, near living men, and able to help them. The descent from god to mortal Hero resulted, since the essential point of continued existence was not denied, in a corresponding exaltation of the mortal and the heroic to the divine. Thus the epic leads us in this instance towards a range of conceptions which the poems themselves treated as though it never existed, and which now suddenly comes into view.

NOTES TO