From Greek and Roman Mythology & Heroic Legend, by Professor H. Steuding, Translated from the German and Edited by Lionel D. Barnett. The Temple Primers, London: J. M. Dent; 1901; pp. 9-11.
[9]Greek and Roman Mythology & Heroic Legend
GREEK MYTHOLOGY
Greek Religion from the Beginning of the Homeric Age.
Life After Death. § 15. Particularly striking is the change which now displays itself in the conception of the character and condition of departed spirits. Their ritual was more closely connected with the original place of worship than was the case with proper deities; for it consisted solely in offerings of nourishment for the corpse who lived on restfully in the grave. But after severance from the ancestral land, the service of the dead buried there came perforce to an end; men could not even carry away with them the relics of their universally adored first parents. To this was added the influence of the newly arisen custom of burning the deceased, which may have been intended to destroy as quickly as possible the departed soul’s strength and power hitherto preserved by attentions to the corpses, and thus to be secure from its wrath.
§ 16. In this train of thought the idea of the bodilessness of the dead gradually came into the foreground. In death, as men saw, the activity of life vanished with the expiration of the last breath; and so they looked upon the breath itself as the basis of life, that is, the soul, as is proved by the twofold meaning of ψυχή, anima, breath, and the like. Hence they now imagined the souls separate from the body as airy beings, but at the same time, confusing this with their former conception, they left them their human or animal form, so 10 that they were thought of sometimes as shadowy figures (σκιαί, umbrae) or smoke-like images (εἴδωλα, simulacra, imagines), sometimes as little winged, fluttering, but otherwise man-like figures.
At the same time the features common to all individual graves led to the notion of a general abode of souls, subterranean like the grave, but unapproachable for man by the agency of prayer and offering; it was sundered from the upper world by impassable rivers, such as Styx (‘The Loathly’), Acheron (‘Stream of Anguish’), Kokytos (‘River of Wailing’), Pyriphlegethon (‘Fire-River’), and Lethe (‘Forgetfulness’), from which the departed drank oblivion.
§ 17. As soon as the body of the dead man has been covered with earth, the ferryman Charon transports the soul awaiting him on the bank over Styx or Acheron. For this he receives as payment the obolos (about 1·3d.), which was placed beneath the tongue of every corpse, in one sense as purchase-price for his property, which else would have to go with him. In the lower world the departed, according to the belief of Homer, live a sad and empty life of unreality, continuing their earthly occupations unchanged but without consciousness or active power. Only in a few men especially loved or hated by the gods do consciousness and feeling still abide there, so that they may be rewarded or punished for their deeds on earth. From this realm of death there is no return. Hence the entrance, which men in later time ventured to identify with various ravines, e. g. at Kichyros in Thesprotia, at Pheneos in Arkadia, on the promontory of Tainaron in Lakonia, and by the lake Avernus near Cumae in Lower Italy, is guarded by the three-headed dog Kerberos; and Charon too ferries no man back over the Styx.
§ 18. The natural wish for a more cheerful form of life after death led after the Homeric Age to the conception of Elysion (Ἠλύσιον πεδίον), ‘the field of arrival,’ or ‘of the departed’ (compare ἐλήλυθα), which was imagined to be not in the nether world but at the western end of the earth by the Okeanos; and hither the gods translate to a blissful god-like 11 life of enjoyment many heroes and heroines especially dear to them, born to them from mortals or closely connected with them by other ties of kinship, without any necessity of previous death. In later poets the place of this is taken by the ‘Islands of the Blest.’
From the fifth century B.C., as the faith in a retributive justice increased, there grew up under the potent influence of the Orphic doctrine the idea of a Judgment of the Dead. In this doctrine, Minos, Rhadamanthys, and Aiakos assign to the departed according to their earthly life an abode in Elysion or in the gloomy prison of Tartaros, the deepest pit of the lower world.
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Erinyes.