Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/548

 540 Recent Greek Archcsology and Folk-lore.

the mysteries of Dionysos.^ That it had in fact a firm hold upon the ancient world, down to a late period, we see from the monuments. Knapp^ has collected the different phases of the myth as it occurs on works of art, even down to the representation in the Christian catacombs. It is the works of art that enable us to follow the development of the popular idea of the underworld. Furtwangler (in the Collection Sahiroff, i, p. i6) has traced the successive con- ceptions on the sepulchral monuments of the sixth and fifth centuries ; starting from the Spartan grave-reliefs with their pairs of ancestors worshipped as of heroic proportions, at the tomb itself, to the idea of a place where all such ancestors meet, and finally to the evolution of a Hades with its archetypal pair of god and goddess as the king and queen.

On the Attic vase-paintings the image of the soul (the eidolon) is frequently represented. In the earlier pictures we have as a rule the single soul of the personage repre- sented beside it, a minute winged reproduction of the figure itself On the vases of the fifth and fourth centuries we often find a plurality of eidola around the grave or a corpse. It has been suggested^ that these are the souls who have been shut out of Hades, and who are still clinging to the earthly and sensual ; this is in keeping with the Orphic teaching as shown in the verses on the gold plates found at Thurion and Petelia, and corresponds with Plato {Phazdo, 30). Against this it is urged that the plurality of souls need only refer to the fact of a large number of people dying together, as by an epidemic, or to the others lying in the same family sepulchre. This practical idea docs not commend itself to us. On the other hand, we may recollect that on the Greek vases the eidolon is not necessarily always that of a dead person ; in the Psycho-

1 Frazer, Golden Bough, i, p. 324.

2 Wicrtenb. Correspondenzblati, Bd. xxvii (Stuttgart, 1880).

^ Hirsch, De ajiiniarum apud ant. tinagg., Lips., 1889 ; cf. Kern in Rorn. Mitth., 1890, p. 69.