Egypt, thought Herodotus, had been the teacher of immortality to Greece. The statement is at least interesting as a sign that in the traveller's view the Hellenic faith of his day possessed some analogies with the Egyptian. The ethical element in it, at any rate, was gaining more and more force. In Homer Hades, who is after all another form of Zeus in the underworld, is sovereign, but not judge, of the nether realm. The Erinnyes, who are originally ghosts of the dead, inflict their punishments mostly in the life of earth; only for broken oaths is penalty imposed below; and Tartarus, in the lowest deep, is reserved for the giant Titans who had challenged the majesty of heaven. In the stony asphodel meadow Achilles is but a shade among the rest; if Menelaus is admitted to the Elysian plain, it is no superior valour but aristocratic connection which wins him his place. Rare is the allusion to a judgment; the tribunal of Minos, son of { 239} Zeus, may be the moralising addition of some later bard.
But in the fifth century B.C. fresh influences are at work. Pythagoras has founded his communities, half philosophical, half religious. The higher thought has become markedly monotheistic, and Orphism with its rude sacrament (p. 147) has helped to develop conceptions of fellowship with deity which made new hopes for the future possible. So Pindar, nearest of kin among Greek poets to the prophetio voices of Israel, emphasises the retributive government of God. Man may be nothing more than "a dream of a shadow," nevertheless he is not too insignificant to escape the dooms of heaven upon his guilt, and if there is requital for evil there are also happy islands for the blest. The ethical leaven is already powerfully at work. The language of Cebes and Simmias in Plato's dialogue of the _Phædo_ shows, however, that the belief was by no means universal; and the beautiful sepulchral reliefs at Athens give no hint of that august tribunal of Minos, Rhadamanthus and Æacus, which Plato pictures as engaged in judging souls.
But the great mysteries of Eleusis certainly fostered the hope of immortality. The conviction grew stronger that the initiated would have a happier lot in the life to come, so that Diogenes sarcastically inquired whether an initiated robber would be better off than an uninitiated honest man. The inscriptions of { 240} the last centuries before our era show nothing like the consensus of feeling in an Egyptian cemetery or a modern English graveyard. The soul is piously committed to the ether, or, if there be rewards in the realm below, is confided to Persephonê; or it is reverently placed among the stars, in the councils of the immortals, or in the home of the gods. Such were the popular conventions. Philosophical speculation gathered round the idea of transmigration, or pleaded for at least a continuance of consciousness till the great conflagration which should end the world; while Orphic religion held out the hope that the soul, entangled in this earthly scene, might after long discipline rise once more to its home with God.