Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/255

233 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE. 233 femal regions, but in a much more elevated sense than that in which Hades is usually employed. Another poem of this period, the Minyas^ gave an ample description of the infernal regions ; the spirit of which may be inferred from the fact that this part (which was called by the name of " The Descent to Hades") is attributed, among- other authors, to Cecrops, an Orphic poet, or even to Orpheus himself*. t) 4. At the time when the first philosophers appeared in Greece, poems must have existed which diffused, in mythical forms, conceptions of the origin of the world and the destiny of the soul, differing from those in Homer. The endeavour to attain to a knowledge of divine and human things was in Greece slowly and with difficulty evolved from the religious notions of a sacerdotal fanaticism ; and it was for a long period confined to the refining and rationalizing of the traditional mythology, before it ventured to explore the paths of independent inquiry. In the age of the seven sages several persons appeared, who, (being mainly under the influence of the ideas and rites of the worship of Apollo,) partly by a pure and holy mode of life, and partly by a fanatical temper of mind, surrounded themselves with a sort of supernatural halo, which makes it difficult for us to discern their true character. Among these persons was Epimenides of Crete, an early contemporary of Solon, who was sent for to Athens, in his character of expiatory priest, to free it from the curse which had rested upon it since the Cylonian m;is c acre (about Olymp. 42. B.C. 612). Epime- nides was a man of a sacred and marvellous nature, who was brought up by the nymphs, and whose soul quitted his body, as long and as often as it pleased ; according to the opinion of Plato and other ancient^, his mind had a prophetic and inspired sense of divine thingsf. An- other and more extraordinary individual of this class was Abaris, who, about a generation later, appeared in Greece as an expiatory priest, with rites of purification and holy songs. In order to give more im- portance to his mission, he called himself a Hyperborean ; that is, one of the nation which Apollo most loved, and in which he manifested himself in person ; and, as a proof of his origin, he carried with him an arrow which Apollo had given him in the country of the HyperboreansJ. Together with Abaris may be mentioned Aristeas of Proconnesus, on the Propontis; who took the opposite direction, and, inspired by Apollo, f Whether the oracles, expiatory verses, and poems (as the origin of the Curetcs and Corybantes) attributed to him are his genuine productions cannot now be deter- mined. Damascius. De Princip. p. 3S3, ascribes to him (after Kudemus) a cosmo- gony, in which the mundane egg plays an important part, as in the Orphic cos- mogonies. t This is the ancient form of the story in Herod, iv. 3G, the orator Lycurgus. &c. According to the later version, which is derived«from Heraclides Ponticus, Abaris was himself carried by the marvellous arrow through the air round the world. Some expiatory verses and oracles were likewise ascribed to Abaris ; also an epic poem, called " the Arrival of Apollo among the Hyperboreans."
 * h U AiSsi/ xaraSuffi;.