Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/566

534 BOOK II. The Asphodel Meadows.

tribunal of Minos, Rhadamanthys, and Aiakos ; and they whose faith was in truth a quickening power might draw from the ordeal those golden lessons which Plato has put into the mouth of Sokrates while awaiting the return of the theoric ship from Delos. These, however, are the inferences of later thought. The belief of earlier ages was content to picture to itself the meeting of Odysseus and Laertes in that blissful land, the forgiveness of old wrongs. the reconciliation of deadly feuds as the hand of Hektor is clasped in the hand of the hero who slew him. There, as the story ran, the lovely Helen, "pardoned and purified," became the bride of the short-lived yet long-suffering Achilleus, even as lole comforted the dying Herakles on earth, and Hebe became his solace in Olympos. But what is the meeting of Helen and Achilleus, of lole, and Hebe, and Herakles, but the return of the violet tints to greet the sun in the west, which had greeted him in the east in the morning? The idea was purely physical, yet it suggested the thoughts of trial, atonement, and purification ; and it is unnecessary to say that the human mind, having advanced thus far, must make its way still further.

To these islands of the blessed only they could be admitted who on earth had done great things, or who for Avhatever reasons might be counted among the good and noble of mankind. But of the beings who crossed the fatal streams of Styx, there would be some as far exceeding the common crowd in wickedness or presumption as these were unworthy to tread the asphodel meadows of Elysion. Hence one of the names of the unseen world, which denoted especially its everlasting unrest, would be chosen to signify the hope- less prisons of the reprobate. There can be little doubt that in the name Tartaros we have a word from the same root with Thalassa, the heaving and restless sea, and that Tartaros was as strictly a mere epithet of Hades as Plouton or Polydegmon. The creation of a place of utter darkness for abandoned sinners was a moral or theolo- gical, not a mythical necessity ; and hence the mythology of Tartaros as a place of torment is as scanty and artificial as that of the Nereid and Okeanid nymphs ; for when the Hesiodic Theogony makes Tartaros and Gaia the parents of the Gigantes, of Typhoeus, and Echidna, this only places Tartaros in the same rank with Poseidon, who is the father of Polyphemos or of Here, who, according to another myth, is herself the mother of Typhaon, another Typhoeus.