meanwhile. But those souls are not happy souls. The house of Hades is not a place of happiness; it is dank, murky, mouldering; and the souls themselves are not of a nature to enjoy anything; they are feeble, impotent wraiths, mere semblances of men, all doomed to the same miserable travesty of life; the bodies from which they are now severed were their real selves[1], and there remain now only impalpable joyless phantoms. 'Sooner,' cries the spirit of Achilles to Odysseus, 'would I be a serf bound to the soil, in the house of a portionless man whose living were but scant, than lord over all the dead that are perished[2]'; for the old valour even of Achilles avails him no more; his soul fares in the house of Hades even as all others fare; all alike are doomed to everlasting futility in a land of everlasting gloom. Fitly is the soul of Patroclus said to have sped, at the moment of death, towards Hades' realm 'bewailing its fate in that it had left vigour and manhood[3].'
How then comes it that anon the same soul is eager to pass the gates of Hades? Surely the wanderings of the dead Patroclus, whether in the form of a revenant as the popular belief would have had it, or, according to Homer's version, as a disembodied spirit, would hardly be more pitiable than the lot which he in common with all the dead must suffer below. Why then this eagerness?
I can find nothing in Homer to justify it; it appears to me wholly inconsistent with the Homeric conception of the under-world.
And this inconsistency is of wide bearing. The cases of Patroclus and Elpenor are not isolated. The same eagerness for dissolution on the part of the dead has, as we have seen, been steadily recognised in all the relations between the living and the dead from the days of Homer until now. That which is at variance with the Homeric conception of the hereafter is not merely the petition of Patroclus, but the idea on which the funeral-customs of a whole people have been based for nearly three thousand years.
Such a discrepancy cannot but force upon us the question how far the Homeric conception of the hereafter was the popular conception.and [Greek: psychê], as in Iliad I. 3-4, and twice in the passage before us, Il. XXIII. 65 f. and 106 f.]
