a man will strive steadfastly to overcome evil passions in this life, and in future lives, all will be well with him in the end. The very punishment which he fears will be for his ultimate good, for punishment regards the future which can still be modified, not the past which cannot be undone." Pardonfor so we may bring home to ourselves the deeper meaning of Plato's κábaρois-Pardon is thus involved in Punishment. This is a thought which cannot be set forth by the way of Science. Pardon is not found in the realm of Nature which Science describes. It comes of the Grace of God." It is received under another dispensation than that of Nature-a dispensation under which a man comes by "Faith "-Faith which Science can only chill, but Myth may confirm. Xpn τὰ τοιαῦτα ὥσπερ ἐπάδειν ἑαυτῷ. Besides containing this notable theory of Punishment and Pardon, the Gorgias Myth is remarkable for its powerful imaginative rendering of the wonder with which man regards death—a rendering which is best taken side by side. with another given in the Cratylus, 403, 4. Hades, Αΐδης, the God of Death, Socrates says in the Cratylus, is not called, as most people in their fear suppose, ἀπὸ τοῦ ἀειδοῦς—he is not the terrible Unseen One, who keeps the Dead in Hell, against their will, bound in the fetters of necessity. He is rather called ἀπὸ τοῦ πάντα τὰ καλὰ εἰδέναι — he is the All-wise, the Philosopher, who, indeed, holds the Dead in fetters, but not against their will; for his fetters are those of that desire which, in disembodied souls, is stronger than necessity-the desire of knowledge. The Dead cleave to Hades as disciples cleave to a great master of wisdom. The wisest of men go to learn of him, and will not return from his companionship. He charms the charmers themselvesthe Sirens so that they will not leave him. He is rightly 1 The Sirens, although they became eventually simply Muses, were originally Chthonian deities, and as such are sculptured on tombs and painted on lekythi: see Miss Harrison's Myths of the Odyssey, pp. 156-166; her Mythology and Monuments of Ancient Athens, pp. 582 ff.; and her article in J. H.S. vol. vi. pp. 19 ff. ("Odysseus and the Sirens-Dionysiac Boat - races Cylix of Nicosthenes"), 1885. "As monuments on tombs, the Sirens," writes Miss Harrison (Myth. and Mon. p. 581), "seem to have filled a double function; they were sweet singers, fit to be set on the grave of poet or orator, and they were mourners to lament for the beauty of youth and maiden. It is somewhat curious that they are never sculptured on Attic tombs in the one function that makes their relation to death clearly intelligible-i.e. that of death-angels. The called Pluto, because he has the true riches-wisdom. Here we have what is really a Myth offered in satisfaction of the deep wonder with which man regards that undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns. Plato appeals openly to the "science of etymology" in support of his "myth," and, I would suggest, also appeals tacitly to traditional cultus:-Hades communicates true oracles to those who go down into his cave to sleep the sleep of death-truer oracles than those dreams which Trophonius sends to the living who sleep in his cave at Lebadia.1 It is only with the disembodied soul that Hades will hold his dialectic, for only the disembodied soul, freed from the distractions of the bodily passions, can experience that invincible desire of knowledge, that epws without which diaλeKTIKη is vain, which makes the learner leave all and cleave to his Teacher. In this, that he will hold converse only with the disembodied soul, Hades declares himself the true Philosopher. It is at this point that the connection appears between the Cratylus Myth-for we may call it a Myth-and the Gorgias Myth. The judges in the Gorgias Myth are naked souls (the phrase ʼn vxǹ yνμνη тоû σάμaтos occurs also in Cratylus, 403 в)—naked souls, without blindness or bias of the flesh, which see naked souls through and through, and pass true judgment upon them There must be wisdom with Great Death: The wondering thought, that death may perhaps solve the enigma of life, has never been more impressively rendered than in these twin Myths of the Philosopher Death and the Dead Judges of the Dead. Siren of the Attic graves must surely be somehow connected with the bird deathangels that appear on the Harpy tomb, but her function as such seems to have been usurped for Attica by the male angels Death and Sleep." Eriuna's epitaph στᾶλαι, καὶ Σειρήνες ἐμαί, καὶ πένθιμε κρωσσέ, ὅστις ἔχεις ̓Αΐδα τὴν ὀλίγαν σποδιάν brings the Sirens and Hades into connection just as Crat. 403 D does--dià raûra ἄρα φῶμεν, ὦ Ερμόγενες, οὐδένα δεῦρο ἐθελῆσαι ἀπελθεῖν τῶν ἐκεῖθεν, οὐδὲ αὐτὰς τὰς Σειρήνας, ἀλλὰ κατακεκλῆσθαι ἐκείνας τε καὶ τοὺς ἄλλους πάντας· οὕτω καλούς τινας, ὡς ἔοικεν, ἐπίσταται λόγους λέγειν ὁ "Αιδης. According to Mr. J. P. Postgate (Journal of Philology, ix. pp. 109 ff., "A Philological Examination of the Myth of the Sirens "), they are singing birds souls winged for flight hence. 1 Cf. Rohde, Psyche, i. 115 ff. II Another point, and I have done with the "Philosophy" of the Gorgias Myth. I am anxious to have done with it, because I know that the "Philosophy of a Myth" too easily becomes "the dogmatic teaching which it covertly conveys"; but I trust that in the foregoing remarks I have avoided, and in the following remarks shall continue to avoid, the error of treating a Myth as if it were an Allegory. The point is this. The incurably wicked who suffer eternal punishment are mostly tyrants-men like Archelaus and Tantalus, who had the opportunity of committing the greatest crimes, and used it. All praise to the few who had the opportunity and did not use it. But Thersites, a mere private offender, no poet has ever condemned to eternal punishment. He had not the opportunity of committing the greatest crimes, and in this is happier than those offenders who had. Here a mystery is set forth. The man who has the opportunity of committing the greatest crimes, and yields to the special temptation to which he is exposed, is held worthy of eternal damnation, which is escaped by the offender who has it not in his power, and has never been effectively tempted, to commit such crimes. First, the greatness of the crime is estimated as if it were a mere quantity standing in no relation to the quality of the agent; and then the quality of the agent is determined by the quantity of the crime; so that vice with large opportunity comes out as infinitely worse than vice with narrow 'opportunity, the former receiving eternal punishment, the latter suffering correction only for a limited time. This mystery of the infinite difference between vice with large opportunity and vice with narrow opportunity—the mystery which is set forth in "lead us not into temptation"-this mystery is set forth by Plato in the Gorgias Myth as a mystery, without any attempt at explanation: "Men born to great power do not start with the same chance of ultimate salvation as men born to private stations." With that the Gorgias Myth leaves us. In the Vision of Er, however, an explanation is offered-but still the explanation, no less than the mystery to be explained, is mythically set forth-not to satisfy the understanding, but K to give relief to feeling in imaginative expression. The explanation offered in the Vision of Er is that the Soul, before each incarnation, is free, within certain limits, to choose, and as a matter of fact does choose, its station in life-whether it be the station of a tyrant with large opportunity of doing evil, or that of a private person with narrow opportunity. In this way the mystery of the Gorgias Myth is "explained ❞— explained by another Myth. So much for the "Philosophy" of the Gorgias Myth-so much for the great problems raised in it. Now let me add a few notes on some other points, for the better appreciation of the Myth itself as concrete product of creative imagination. III The judged are marked (Gorg. 526 B) as "corrigible" or "incorrigible." So, too, in the Myth of Er (Rep. 614 c) those sent to Heaven have tablets fixed in front, those sent to Tartarus tablets fixed behind, on which their deeds and sentences are recorded. The idea of tablets may have been derived from the Orphic custom of placing in the graves of the dead tablets describing the way to be taken and the things to be done on the journey through the other world.1 Before Dante enters Purgatory the Angel at the Gate marks him with seven P's, to denote the seven sins (peccata) of which he was to be cleansed in his passage through Purgatory Seven times The letter that denotes the inward stain He on my forehead, with the blunted point Of his drawn sword, inscribed. And "Look," he cried, The judgment-seat of Minos, Rhadamanthys, and Aeacus is ἐν τῷ λειμῶνι, ἐν τῇ τριόδῳ, ἐξ ἧς φέρετον τὼ ὁδώ, ἡ 1 See Comparetti, J. H. S. iii. 111, and Dieterich, Nekyia, 85, on the gold tablets of Thurii and Petelia; and cf. p. 156 ff. infra. The Orphic custom itself may have come from Egypt, where texts from the Book of the Dead were buried with the corpse. The Book of the Dead was a guide-book for the Ka, or Double, which is apt to wander from the body and lose its way. See Jevons' Introduction to the History of Religion, p. 323, and Flinders Petrie's Egyptian Tales, second series, p. 124. 2 Purg. ix. 101, and see Cary's note ad loc. μὲν εἰς μακάρων νήσους, ἡ δ ̓ εἰς Τάρταρον (Gorg. 524 Α). The topography of this passage corresponds with that of Rep. 614 c ff, where, however, it is added that the Xepov of the judgment-seat is also the spot in which the souls, returned from their thousand years' sojourn in Tartarus and Heaven (ie. the Islands of the Blessed), meet, and rest, before going on to the place where they choose their new lives before drinking of the water of Lethe. In the Gorgias the two ways mentioned are (1) that to Tartarus, and (2) that to the Islands of the Blessed; and the λepov of judgment is "at the parting of the ways"—ev Tỷ Tρiódw,—no reference being made to a third way leading to the throne of Necessity, and thence to the Plain of Lethe. In the parallel passage in Rep. 614 c ff. the ways are not mentioned as three; but they are three (1) the way to Tartarus, (2) the way to Heaven, and (3) the way to the Plain of Lethe all three diverging from the λειμών. The Three Ways," as indicated in the Myth of Er,-one to Tartarus, one to Heaven, and the third to Lethe (a river of the surface of the Earth),-constantly occur in the literature which reflects Orphic influence.1 They even appear in the folk-lore represented by the story of Thomas the Rhymer: Light down, light down now, true Thomas, Abide, and rest a little space, And I will show you ferlies three. Oh see ye not yon narrow road, So thick beset wi' thorns and briars ? And see not ye that braid braid road, That lies across the lily leven? That is the path of wickedness, Though some call it the road to Heaven. And see not ye that bonny road, That winds about the fernie brae? That is the road to fair Elf-land, Where thou and I this night maun gae. 1 See Dieterich, Nekyia, 89, 90, and especially Rohde, Psy. ii. 221, note. |