Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/615

 a kindred phrase, [Greek: ta hypo kolpou], as an euphemism of the same kind. The Orphic therefore no less than others based his claim to future happiness on the fact that he had performed a ritual act, of the nature of a sacrament, which constituted a pledge that the wedlock between him and his goddess foreshadowed here should be consummated hereafter.

Even more abundant evidence is furnished by sepulchral monuments; and in support of my views I cannot do better than quote two high authorities who coincide in their verdict upon the meaning of the scenes represented. In reference to those scenes 'in which death is conceived in the guise of a marriage' Furtwängler writes: 'The monuments belonging to this class are extraordinarily numerous, and exhibit very different methods of treating the idea which they carry out. A relief upon a sarcophagus from the Villa Borghese shows the God of the dead in the act of carrying down the fair Kore to be his bride in the lower world. Above the steeds of his chariot, which are already disappearing into the depths of the earth, flies Eros as guide. The bride however appears to be going only under compulsion and after some struggle; the look of the bridegroom expresses sternness rather than gentleness; and the mother who sits with face averted seems to exclude all thoughts of the daughter's return. Only in the torches which the guide carries in his hand, in the snakes which are looking upward, and in the observant attitude of Hecate, can a suggestion of the return be found.

'On another sarcophagus—from Nazzara—which represents the same marriage-journey, Eros is not merely the guide of the steeds, but aids the bridegroom in carrying off Kore, so that in this case the struggle with death takes purely the form of a struggle with love. At the same time the mother is driving along with her chariot, thereby signifying the renewal of life, which is yet more clearly betokened in the ploughman and the sower at her side.