Page:Greece from the Coming of the Hellenes to AD. 14.djvu/396

366 of travel and adventure, with pictures ever and again of still life. To sea-going folk like the Greeks, who for many generations had been sending off swarms of their kindred in search of fresh homes in distant lands, its recitation must have stirred the imagination and roused curiosity in a hundred ways; and the descent of the hero to Hades is the earliest view we have of the vague terror of the hereafter, which has inevitably been encountered sooner or later by all peoples whose minds have in any way been roused to speculate on the mystery of life and death.

Connected with this there seems to have been at one time a considerable mass of poetry which may be classed as “Orphic,” from Orpheus, the chief reputed author. It dealt generally with the mystic interpretation of the received theology, and treated of the rites of initiation and symbolic cleansing that atoned for sin or gave hopes of a life to come. Thus initiation in the Eleusinian mysteries was said “to cause those who shared in them to have sweeter hopes concerning the end of life and all eternity.” “Happy he,” says Pindar, “who has seen these mysteries before he goes below the earth! He knows the end of life, and knows its divinely-given beginning.” But though traces of these doctrines or imaginings may perhaps be found in most extant Greek poetry, the original poems of this class are lost. Those that now go under the name are of very late origin. Greek country life, however, has its epic in the “Works and Days” of Hesiod (of uncertain date), which contains a kind of manual of the