Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/449

 his works in the Phaedo—could not accept the notion that the body under any conditions remained incorruptible; his whole doctrine is imbued with his belief that the gross and material perishes, and only the pure and spiritual endures. When therefore he came to utilise the popular doctrine, which the tragedians had endorsed, that certain sinners were condemned to incorruption, some modification of the idea was necessary; and accordingly he makes the wicked to wander as ghosts, not as corporeal revenants, just as Homer and the tragedians seem to have done in the case of the unburied and those who had met their death by violence. Plato's extension of the literary tradition suggests that its earlier development had been such as I have indicated.

Lastly, the literary tradition, as represented by earlier writers than Plato, is by no means uniform. If it had been a definite religious doctrine, and not merely a literary convention, that the unburied returned as ghosts, the presentment of Patroclus and of Polydorus should have been in all respects similar. But what do we find? Each certainly appears as a ghost and asks for burial; but there the resemblance ends. According to Homer the spirit of Patroclus, in craving burial of his body, declares that, ere that rite be performed, the spirit itself cannot pass the gates of Hades but is held aloof by the spirits of the other dead, and moreover that having once passed it can no more return to this world. According to Euripides, familiar though he must have been with Homer's teaching, the spirit of Polydorus had passed within the gates of Hades and by permission of the nether gods had returned to demand the burial of his body. Homer's reason for the soul's anxiety about the body's burial is none too convincing in itself; for it only raises a further question: if death means the final separation of soul from body, and the lower world is tenanted by souls only—for so Homer at any rate teaches—why should the denizens of that world make the admission of a newly-sped soul conditional upon the burial of the body which it had finally quitted? But, what is more important, Homer's reason, such as it is, is flatly disavowed by Euripides, who yet advances no reason of his own why the spirit of Polydorus, having once passed into Hades' halls, should have any further interest in its old carnal