Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/537

 in the world above; nor is the lot of all the same, for it is only the righteous who enjoy this bliss.

The popular character of this conception is equally clear. The distinction between the varying fortunes of the dead—the hope of happiness for some in contrast with the universal misery of the Homeric under-world—is an idea which finds expression throughout ancient literature; and if the house of Hades often remains none the less a place of gloom, that is because the abode of the righteous is often transferred to the islands of the blest, and the dark under-world left as a place of punishment for the wicked. At the present day too the same ideas are widely current among the common-folk. It is true that the dirges more generally pourtray the lower world as wrapped in Homeric gloom, and the condition of the departed as monotonously miserable; but the express purpose of these dirges, recited beside the dead body before it is carried out to burial, is to excite the mourners to a frenzy of grief, and the professional dirge-singer (for there are still women in some parts of Greece who follow that calling) would soon lose her work if, instead of harrowing the feelings of the mourners, she took upon herself to comfort them; her whole business is to move to tears those whom the bereavement itself has left unmoved, or to stimulate to fresh outbursts of lamentation those who are already spent with sorrow. But in a few folk-songs is found the more cheerful belief that the departed still continue the pursuits which they followed in this life ; while as for their abode, any peasant who should have the Pindaric description of the future home of the blessed explained to him, would unhesitatingly identify it with that which he himself calls Paradise. Some points perhaps in that description would surprise him no less than they would please him, as for example the permission to play draughts, but they would not obscure his recognition; the place of fair flowers and fruits and scents could be none other than Paradise. "The people of modern Greece," says a Greek writer, "unable to comprehend the idea of spiritual joys, consider Paradise a place of largely material and sensuous pleasures. The Paradise of the Greek folk is watered by great rivers,  and in it there grow trees which diffuse odours sweet past telling Agreeably with this reception of the idea of Paradise by, p. 407 ff.]