Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/567

 crystallised into a set form of words to be repeated without heed or understanding of their meaning. The very variety of treatment given to the idea proves that we are not dealing with a mere traditional expression or unmeaning commonplace, but with a vital belief still capable of stirring the ballad-maker's imagination. Further it is this thought which almost alone strikes a note of cheerfulness and of hope in the popular dirges. The usual picture of the lower world is nothing but gloom and despair. It is a place of darkness on which the sun never shines, a place of ice and snow, and full of cob-webs. There are no churches there with bright golden icons; no quoits for the young men to throw; no looms for the women to ply. Hunger is not appeased, thirst not quenched, and sleep is denied. All is mourning and regret for the warm stirring life of the upper world, and anxious fears for wife or children left behind. Happy those who are allowed even to taste of the river of death, and to forget their homes and orphaned little ones. Thus with strange medley of ancient and modern is the dirge-singer wont to describe that lower world to which all the dead without distinction go. Yet even into these dirges, which—in order to excite the mourners to wilder displays of grief—purposely emphasize the gloomiest aspects of death, there is allowed to enter the one cheering thought that the departed for whom lamentation is made is not dead nor yet fallen on eternal sleep, but wedded in a new world; and it is worthy of notice that it is with this thought that many of the dirges end, as if this one consolation and hope were designed to assuage the pangs of sorrow which the first part of the dirge had excited.

Thus a brief study of the modern Greek dirges reveals to us the curious fact that a mystic conception of death is widely prevalent among the simple-minded peasants of Greece, and that, with all their naïveté in pourtraying the horrors of the lower world, it is from a recondite doctrine that they draw consolation. How came they to be the stewards of a doctrine so strange, so remote from the primitive simplicity of their ordinary life?

Once more we must look back to a pre-Christian antiquity, and seek again in Greek Tragedy the evidence of popular belief. Just as Aeschylus above all others has preserved to us the awful doctrine of future retribution for the deadly sin of blood-guilt, so from Sophocles we may learn the more comfortable doctrine