Page:Euripides the Rationalist.djvu/87

Rh the two cases so close a resemblance. When a man comes from the nether world to the upper, there is, it seems, a certain interval of transition, during which the claim of the nether powers is not entirely extinguished, but requires to be satisfied by proper observances. Just so, as we all know, when he goes the other way: the transition, in point of form, is not completed in a moment or in an hour. There is a time when he is, as it were, between the worlds, with us and yet with us no more, the time between our first perception of his death and the moment when we part with his body. By universal custom this interval should have a certain extension, and should be observed with careful ceremonies; nor could it be cut short without our feeling, for grave, manifest, and imperative reasons, that the rights of the upper gods were being infringed. And the analogy extends even to the length of prescription. On the third day from that of his resurrection inclusive, but not before, a man may be surrendered altogether to this life. Exactly the same minimum, verbally the same, is fixed by Plato in the contrary case, and commends itself by our common experience. Most remarkable of all, both in the nether world and in the upper, the reciprocal obligation was denoted by the same Greek word, hagnismos, which was applied, it appears, as it was familiarly among the living to the formalities of a funeral, so among the ghosts to those of a resurrection. In short the precept of Heracles is plainly so shaped as to rebuke (and to punish) the wrong lately committed by Admetus against ordinances less shadowy, if not more important, than those of Pluto and Persephoné: and that he means it so, he shows by following it up with a final caution about 'hospitality', another piety which the king has also neglected through the entangling consequences of his trespass against the dead. But in the midst of these witticisms, what are we to think of the miracle?

And so the heroes part, with adieux the briefest possible. Admetus in dismissing himself and the rest is equally brief, and exhibits in his proclamation of festivities the same disinclination to particularity about the cause of them, which we have already observed in Heracles. It is a 'good hap', and he himself is 'fortunate, as he will not deny'. A handsome concession,