Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/547

 Recent Greek Archceology and Folk-lore. 539

tion is one which must await further excavation ; we need to study the contents of many more " Mycenaean" tombs, and to be able to define more accurately the dating of the Mycenaean period, before we can attempt to reach the solu- tion of this problem.

Between the Homeric conception of the future state and that of the Platonic philosophy,^ from the descent into Hades of Odysseus to that of Er, son of Armenius, what a gap is here ! The century immediately preceding Plato was a pregnant period for Athenian thought. The sixth and fifth centuries brought into Athens a horde of strange religions from the East, the Sabazian rite, the Adonian, and the various forms of Pythagoreanism, especially the Orphic teaching which became so popular there towards the close of the sixth century. The names of Onomakritos, Musaeus, Bakis, Epimenides, all point to the superstitions rife in Peisistratid Athens. The influence of these new ideas on Athenian thought is illustrated in a comparison of the three great tragedians.- In ^schylus we have the new awakening, the enthusiastic preaching of purity and right for their own sake ; in Sophocles the reaction in favour of peace and reunion ; and in Euripides the " troubled ques- tioning, the sceptic silence, the half-contemptuous calm". The excavations on the site of the Kabirion at Thebes have thrown considerable light on the Orphic doctrine ; we now know that it was written for Athens, as an attempt to combine the nature philosophy of the lonians, the teach- ing of the school of Thales, with their already existing theogonic system.^ It was mainly an attempt to observe the deeper truths of the nature which surrounds us ; but it also embraced the life of the soul, the teaching of a genuine doctrine of immortality. Plutarch, writing to console his wnfe on the death of their infant daughter, comforts her with this thought as taught by tradition and revealed in

^ Republic, x, 614.

2 See Miss Daniel in Classical Review, iv, 81.

2 Kern in Hermes, 1890, p. i foil.

N N 3