The House of Hades: Studies in Ancient Greek Eschatology

246 Pages·2000·19.23 MB·English

by  Lars Albinus

LARS A L B I N U S
THE HOUSE
OF HADES
Studies in Ancient Greek Eschatology
Studies in Religion · 2
Edited by:
Per Bilde, Armin W. Geertz,
Lars Kruse-Blinkenberg, Ole Riis and
Erik Reenberg Sand
For Bebi
The House of Hades
Studies in Ancient Greek Eschatology
Lars Albinus
AARHUS UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright: Aarhus University Press 2000
Cover: The Tomb of Agamemnon (Treasury of Atreus), at Mycenae, Greece
Cover photograph: Tonnes Bekker-Nieisen
Colour separation: Ploug Repro, Aarhus
Printed in the UK by the Alden Press, Oxford
ISBN 87 7288 833 4
Published with financial support from the Danish Research
Council for the Humanities and Aarhus University Research
Foundation
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Preface
What happens, when we die?
If we are looking for answers in the field of religion, we may find that death
is rarely, if ever, represented as the complete end of individual existence. But
what does individual existence really mean? By investigating interrelated
meanings of life and death in different contexts in ancient Greece, we shall try
to characterize one historical and religiously significant answer to this question,
the trans-historical dimension of which is not, therefore, to articulate what death
could be when we are dead, but rather what death can be taken to mean when
we are alive.
When we pose a question to the unknown, our gaze confronts a mirror. Even
the total otherness presupposes something familiar; the different somehow always
implies the same. In the mirror that death raises to our gaze, the life of the
individual is provided with a reference to something else, and still it seems to be
nothing but this life in its own living totality that is stamped on the image of
death. In the following, we are not going to spot the mirror of death as a clue to
what death means as an independent phenomenon. The meanings that we are
looking for are those of the ancient Greeks. What does Greek death say about
Greek life? That is what we will be looking for in the mirror, which is also the
mirror of history of ourselves as a result of former deaths. Futhermore, we shall
strive to make visible what is indeed invisible in itself, namely, the mirror as
such, the process of reflection.
The following text is itself a reflection of the combined process of learning,
making a theoretical choice, and communicating the results. I am therefore
thankful to the editorial board of the series Studies in Religion for suggesting that
I turn this work, which was originally presented as a university dissertation, into
a book.
In the course of completing this project I have enjoyed a great deal of help
from many people and institutions. In this regard I wish to thank the Aarhus
University Research Foundation and the Danish Research Council for the
Humanities for their financial support; Neil Stanford for language revision; Inge
Albinus, Per Bilde, Armin Geertz and Giuseppe Torresin for reading the manu­
script at various stages and for providing helpful advice; Mary Lund and
Liselotte Bülow of Aarhus University Press, for kind assistance in the editiorial
work.
Lars Albinus
Aarhus, June 2000

Contents
Introduction 9
Part One: Homeric discourse
1. The Homeric tradition 21
II. The funeral rites of Patroclus 27
III. The concept of ψυχή 43
IV. The state of being a hero 57
V. The underworld
a. Nekuia 67
b. Deutero-nekuia 82
c. ßusion 86
VI. Sleep and death 90
Part Two: Orphic discourse
VII. The Orphic tradition
a. Orphica 101
b. The author as a mythical figure 104
VIII. Continuity of being
a. Death and resurrection 112
b. Metempsychosis and immortality 117
IX. The lake and the meadow 131
X. Imitatio Mortis
a. The context of the gold plates 141
b. Memory 148
Part Three: The mystery
XI. Representing tradition 155
XII. The Eleusinian myth
a. Correlations between myth and ritual 165
b. The Homeric myth 168
XIII. The Eleusinian cult 173
XIV. Between discourses
a. The relational structure of a secret 192
b. The Eleusinian eschatologies of Homer and Orpheus 196
200
Conclusion
Technicalities 204
Text editions 205
Bibliography 207
Index Locorum 219
Plates 235-247
Plate 1. Dipylon krater. National Archaeological Museum, Athens
Plate 2: Attic white-ground lekythos. Friedrich-Schiller Universität, Jena
Plate 3a: Roscher - Lexicon der Griechischen und Römischen Mythologie, Hilesheim,
1965.
Plate 3b: Attic white-ground lekythos. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
Plate 4: Attic black-figured amphora. Antikensammlungen, Munich
Plate 5: Attic red-figured calyx krater, ca. 515 BC. The Metropolitan Museum of
Art, Purchase, Bequest of Joseph H. Durkee, Gift of Darius Ogden Mills and
Gift of C. Ruxton Love, by exchange, 1972. (1972.11.10)
Plate 6: Reconstruction by Hermann Schenck of the 5th Century painting by
Polygnotus.
Plate 7: Terracotta figurine of Persephone. Excavated from the ruins of Kamarina
by P. Or si. Monumenti antichi: Accademia nazionale dei Lincei, Rome.
Plate 8: The Lovatelli Um. Museo Nazionale Romano, Rome.
Plate 9: Sarchophagus from the Palazzo Spagna in Rome. Deutschen Archaeo-
logischen Institut, Rome.
Plate 10: Terracotta relief. Musée du Louvre, Paris.
Plate 11 : Drawing of terracotta figurine from Priene.
Plate 12: Votive relief found at Eleusis. National Archaeological Museum of
Athens.
Introduction
This book presents studies of ancient Greek eschatology in a pre-Christian
context. It should be noted at the outset that eschatology is used as an observer's
category from the perspective of phenomenology of religion. The eponymous
Greek word έσχατος carried no specifically religious connotations until the
Christian notion of έσχατολογία was used to designate 'the last times', 'the end
of the world'. Yet, before the introduction of Christianity, the Greeks seemed
more or less unconcerned with the general fate of mankind.1 What mattered was
the fate of the individual mortal being. In this respect, however, it is worth
noticing that έσχατος was implicitly associated with the invisible realm of
immortality and afterlife by denoting extremes of space and time (meaning, e.g.,
"furthest", "uttermost" or "last"). Thus, the phrase τα έσχατα παύείν, which
means "to suffer the fate of death", can be translated literally as "to experience the
last things". Specifically, then, I shall use the word eschatology in this study as
referring to human afterlife within a perspective ofzvhat is generally beyond space and
time in the world of mortals.1 2 The purpose of this definition is to single out a field
of statements and ritual practice that concern death as a religious phenomenon.
It is not my objective to relate this complex of 'attitudes' or 'ideas' to any trans-
historical question of truth, but simply to discover some basic, traditional
responses to the condition of mortality within the complex of ancient Greek
religion. In order to do so, I shall attempt to render visible the dominant traits of
semantic organization, while pointing to contesting frameworks of
representation and interpretation that seem constitutive in this respect. The
notion of discourse is provided to guide this line of investigation3 and is
understood to mean an order of rules that organizes certain conditions of
communicating experience and belief. Hence, it will be the phenomena of religious
communication, rather than religious experience as such, that specify the object
of investigation. The point here is rather banal, i.e., it is not the thing thought, but
the thing said or done which is immediately approachable to the historian.
1. Hesiod's reference to the five races of mankind can be taken as an exception, cf. Op. 109
ff., but does not strictly represent an eschatological issue.
2. In an attempt to define eschatology as different from the context of apocalyptic
writings, Geo Widengren holds that "Die Eschatologie umfaßt (...J sowohl die
individuelle Eschatologie als auch die allgemeine Eschatologie, umfaßt das Los sowohl
den einzelnen Menschen als auch der ganzen Menscheit nach dem Tode", 1969,440.
3. For the specific implications of the concept of discourse as 1 use it and understand it in
the context of ancient history, see Albinus, 1994; 1997a.
10 Introduction
Somewhere along the line, religious experience may inevitably come into the
picture; all I am saying is that by trying to grasp it as the real and original object
of study, one may, if perhaps unwittingly, take the texts hostage in attempt to
bridge what Seems for various reasons to be fractures and distortions of an
underlying world-view or just, say, an integrated but unwarranted conception
of afterlife. It will not only be the surviving texts, for that matter, but the missing
ones as well which then come to satisfy the expectation of continuity. Seen from
another angle we may ask: what if various inconsistencies, differences and
omissions that one may stumble upon in the investigation of ancient textual
traditions point more than anything else to different restrictions of discourse?
Take, for instance, the tradition of Homer. Why is it that "he" represents the
deceased as mere shadows when we know' from other texts as well as from
various archaeological findings that the Greeks actually had a cult of the dead?
True, the Homeric characters can appear post mortem in the form of ah image that
is capable of communicating with the living, but this motif is far from indicating
that various kinds of hero-cult formed the back-bone of local religion, as other
sources seem to suggest they did.4 What is the reason for this inconsistency? Is
it that the songs of Homer are not genuinely religious, but rather a work of art
having other interests than "living" beliefs at its centre, as has been suggested, for
example by Nilsson (1955,360 f.) and Harrison (1912,334 f.)? Or is it that Homer
is merely one of many voices of representation, with ”his" silence being strategic
and significant on that account? What makes a difference here is the notion of
religion as belief. If detached from this criterion, Homer may be as genuinely
religious as any other source speaking of the gods or other supernatural
referents. The fact that on several points, Homer is difficult to reconcile with
other testimonies to Greek religion may not be something to be explained away,
but rather the crux of the matter.
Following that line of thought, it should be additionally noted that not only
is Homer remarkably silent about a cult of the dead, but the firm distinction
between "the immortals" (αθάνατοι) and "the mortals" (θνητοί), which is
constitutive of the epic relationship between gods and human beings, is in
conflict with the representations in Classical texts of an immortal human soul.
Is it that a universal experience of a second soul connects the different
representations of ψυχή in Homer and Pindar, as Rohde suggests (1925,6)? Or
is it that the meaning of ψυχή simply changes from one discourse to another?
One thing is certain: the sources of ancient Greek religion are full of
discrepancies in terms of a supposed, overall belief-system. Not only are the
4. See, for example, Snodgrass, 1979, 31 ff.