death.

And the mysteries, which thus supplied a religion for the next world, became dear to the heart of Greece. The Chthonian deities rivalled the Olympian. Demeter and Persephone were goddesses loved and revered, holy and august, the most sacred names by which men could swear. Pindar sang that the man who had prior to death seen the mysteries was happy, knew the end of life and its god-given beginning. Sophokles pronounced the initiated thrice happy: to them alone was there life in Hades; to others evil. § Euripides makes Herakles say on his return from the underworld that he has Kerberos, because he had

'succeeded in his struggle with seen the mystic orgies. The initiated sing in Aristophanes, “To us alone shines the glad sunlight there."¶ Isocrates praises Demeter because of her two gifts, the fruits of the field and the mysteries, those who participate in the latter having sweeter hopes for the end of life and for all eternity.** Diodorus says that the gods grant through initiation an eternal life, spent in pleasant devotion.++ Cicero says these Attic mysteries have

Hymn 480-483. See Baumeister's note, "Hymni Hom.,” p. 333; also Voss, 142 f.

+ Welcker, "Griechis. Götterl.," ii. 532 f.; Grote's "History of Greece," i. 37-44.

"Frag.," xcvi., vol. iii., pt. i., 128 (Heyne's ed., 1798).

§ Plutarch, "De Aud. Poetis," p. 27; "Frag.," vol. ii. p. 244; Brunkii Sophokles.

"Herc. fur.," 612.

"Ranæ," 455. Cf. also 324 ff. (Bekker's ed.).

** 66 Paneg.," vi. 59.

++"Exerc. Vatic. Maii Coll.," ii. 8.

taught men not only to live cheerfully, but also to die with a better hope.* Krinagoras sends men to Athens to see the solemnities of Demeter, that they may live without care and die with a lighter heart.+

The worship of the Chthonian deities thus furnished a religious basis to the belief in a future life. While prayer and sacrifice implored from Zeus a happy life here, the mystic rites implored from Aides a happy life hereafter. The initiated were to dwell with the gods; the uninitiated to live in slime, or bear water in a sieve. The sound of the flute, sunlight beautiful as above, myrtle-groves, happy bands of men and women, delighted the initiated below.§ Death thus became the entrance on divine honours. || The dead were the blessed; the happy, the godlike. T Death ceased to

+ Ep. xxx. The varied and numerous allusions in Greek and Latin writers to the better hope in death derived from the Mysteries can neither be cited nor referred to in a short essay on a great subject. But see the scholarly discussions in Lobeck, "Aglaophamus," pp. 69 ff.; Welcker, "Griechis. Götterl.," ii. pp. 511 ff.; Preller, Art. "Eleusina," in Pauly's "Encyclop. ;" Creuzer's "Symbolik und Mythol.," iv. pp. 227 ff. Of course, Creuzer's peculiar theory of esoteric doctrines is a pure imagination. No such doctrines are needed to explain the better hope created by the Mysteries: worship of the Chthonian deities was enough.

Plato, "Phæd.," i. 69 (Steph.); II., iii. 28 (Bek.). Cf. "Repub.," II., ii. 363; "Gorgias," i. 493; see notes in Bekker.

§ Aristophanes, "Ranæ," 154-157 (Bekker).

Scholion on Ranæ, 158.

¶ Plato, "Legg.," bk. xii., vol. ii. p. 947; Eschylos, "Pers.," 63 f. (Paley).

be a descent into Hades, and became a departure to the blessed. Nor were the future rewards independent of ethical conditions. The mysteries known to the Christian fathers had degenerated,—shared in the corruption that had smitten the whole body of paganism. But at first initiation had bound to moral purity. To individuals, indeed, it became a substitute for virtue,* and an old man, haunted as Plato describes him by the fear of the death he had once mocked,† might wish, like the Trygaios of Aristophanes, to buy a little pig and get initiated before he died; but to the representative Greek thinkers, it stood connected with piety and righteousness and improvement of life. § The mysteries had helped to create and consecrate the noblest hope that can gladden the heart of man, and only in the most ignoble minds were made at once to pander to vice and promise future felicity. In general the faith they both embodied and evolved saved the heart of Greece from despair, and inspired some of its noblest spirits to produce works immortal as the Odes of Pindar or the Philosophy of Plato.

* Plato, "Repub.," bk. ii., vol. ii. pp. 364–366.

Ib., bk. i., vol. ii. 330.

Pax, 370, 371.

§ Isocrates, "Symmach.," xii.; cf. "Paneg.," vi.; Philem., "Frag.," xc.; Aristoph., “Ranæ,” 457–460; Epictetus, "Diss.," iii. 21, 15.

|| Ut supra (*). This abuse of the Mysteries is well rebuked in the characteristic story of Diogenes the cynic in "Diog. L.," vi. 39: "It were laughable were Agesilaos and Epaminondas to lie in mud, while worthless fellows, because initiated, should dwell in the Isles of the Blest."

2. THE ORPHICI.

The Greeks, accustomed to a religion defective and cheerless in its eschatology, became in the seventh century B.C. acquainted with religions, Eastern and Egyptian, whose eschatology was peculiarly elaborate and full.* The Greek genius, always receptive and susceptible, was just then, as the budding mysteries of Eleusis witness, sensitively alive to the action on this point of foreign influence. The result was an extraordinary religious development; the rise, on the one hand, of the Dionysian worship and mythology, on the other, of the Orphic Theosophy. The former increased the tendency to establish a secret eschatological religion,† the latter helped to originate the speculative and theosophic thought of Greece. It alone can be noticed here.

The Orphic Theology, so far as now decipherable, was an amalgam, with specific Greek modifications, of Oriental and Egyptian elements. Speculative principles, clothed in mythical forms, partly Grecian, partly foreign, were prefixed and appended to the native mythology,

* As to the time of the rise of the Orphic sects see Lobeck, “Aglaophamus," pp. 255 ff.; Brandis, "Geschich. der Griechis.-Rom. Philos.," i. 53 ff.; Grote's "Hist. of Greece," i. 28 ff.

+ Preller, "Griechis. Mythol.," i. 436.

Zeller, "Philos. der Griechen," i. 47.

and the whole made to embody a crude but elaborate Pantheism. The primordial principle was Chronos,* which generated chaos and ether,† by whom was produced a silver egg. From this egg sprang Phanes,§ a being who bore in himself the seed of the gods, generated night, and formed the Kosmos.** Night bore to him Uranos and Gaea.tt The origin and succession of the other gods is then described very much as in the traditional mythology.# Zeus and his brothers are born of Kronos and Rhea. §§ Zeus, nursed by Eide and Adrasteia in the cave of Night, dethrones Kronos, swallows and absorbs into himself the whole existing system of things,¶¶ and then generates a new one framed according to his own ideas. *** Universe, all things and beings, have thus issued from Zeus. And so Zeus is all things, first and last, head and middle, foundation of the earth and the starry heavens, male and female, the breath of all beings, the heat of the fire, the source of the sea, the sun, the moon, the Being who is all things, and in whom all beings live. +++ Zeus is thus transformed from the King

The

+++ See the Orphic Fragments in Lobeck, "Aglaoph.,” 519–525, Fragm. vi., Hermann's “Orphica,” pp. 456–463. Also the excellent expositions