Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/546

 53^ Recent Gi'cek Archcsology and Folk-lore.

body is burnt, goes far away to its own place at the end of the world, and thenceforth it has no cult from the living, no power nor activity among them a tout jamais. It is clear then that this Homeric belief is a break in the direct tradi- tion of ideas : we have seen that the most primitive people in Greece certainly seemed to have a cult of the dead, and that this cult was continued in Greece from the earliest his- toric times ; the epos has, it is true, some indication of a transitional stage, in the episode of the descent of Odysseus into Hades {Odyss. xi), and in the existence of exceptional punishments after death, such as those of Sisyphos and Tantalos; but the fact remains, that the period of the epic influence represents a break in the regular stratification. How is this to be explained ? Rohde conjectures that the reason lies in the general political disturbances caused by the Doric invasion. So long as the tribes had no fixed settlement, they had to burn their dead, and forego the cult which depended on the local existence of ancestral tombs ; the shades, moreover, were for the time collected into a common Hades always remote, instead of hovering each about his own ancestral grave. Then, when the race is settled again, the old rites and the old local cult is revived. The explanation is ingenious, but hardly satisfactory. In the first place it presupposes a continuous inheritance of ideas between the primitive, Mycenaean, and the Dorian peoples, which is no more certain than their relative dating. The most recent evidence goes to show that the Mycenaean civilisation went on down to a comparatively late date, at any rate for some considerable period side by side with the " geometric" (Dorian ?). Are we then to confine the epic idea of the dead to the period after the expulsion of the Mycenaean peoples, that is, when they were homeless nomads? Even if we admit this, it would be strange that the epos should reflect only this temporary makeshift re- ligion, and tell us nothing of the ideas of the future state which the Achaeans must have had in the long ages when they still inhabited Mycenae and Tiryns. The whole ques-