Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/561

 CHAPTER VII.

THE UNION OF GODS AND MEN.

The similitude of death with sleep is an idea of ancient date and of wide distribution, which for many of mankind, whatever be the creed professed, has mitigated the fears or lightened the uncertainties which attach to the cessation of this life. Adopted by the founder of the Christian religion as an illustration of the doctrine that men 'shall rise again with their bodies,' the thought has become a part of the heritage of Christendom, and in our own language the word 'cemetery' bears testimony to it. But the idea had been evolved by pagan thought long centuries before the dawn of Christianity, and probably enough by the thinkers and poets of many nations independently one of another. In the oldest literature of Greece we meet with the thought already fully developed and evidently familiar. 'To sleep an iron slumber ' is already in Homeric language a simple and natural synonym for 'to die'; and so too we are told that in the far off golden age men 'died as it were overborne by sleep .' And in yet plainer terms, where Death and Sleep are personified, they are spoken of as twin brethren, the children of Night. This conception seems too to have been a favourite in art, and provided one of the scenes on the renowned chest of Cypselus.

When we turn to the folk-songs of the present day, we cannot of course hope to find the imagery of Death and Sleep pourtrayed as infants sleeping in the lap of Night, nor indeed, so far as I know, are they even described as brothers; for the personification of them by the modern peasants is rare. But the old resemblance