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 AARHUS UNIVERSITY PRESS Langelandsgade 177 DK-8200 Aarhus N Fax (+45)89425380 www.unipress.dk 73 Lime Walk Headington, Oxford 0X3 7AD Fax (+44) 1865 750 079 Box 511 Oakville, Conn. 06779 Fax (+1)860 945 9468 ANSVNISO 23948*1992 . 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.