Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [125]
Bear up, and do not unceasingly lament away your heart.
For you will not accomplish anything grieving for your son.
Nor will you raise him up, and sooner will you suffer another evil. (24.549-51)4
Achilles tells Priam that nothing will ever bring Hector back. We find an interesting comparison with Israel here: At approximately the same time in quite another corner of the globe, David legendarily says about his dead son that the living go to the dead, not the dead to the living: “Can I bring him back again? I shall go to him, but he will not return to me” (2 Sam 12:23). The dead, then, did not cease to exist in either culture. Rather they remained in a shadowy underworld, as insubstantial shades, without strength or pleasure. The dead head off to their final resting place although they can return to bring messages to the living:
• • •
and there appeared to him the ghost of unhappy Patroklus
all in his likeness for stature, and the lovely eyes, and voice,
and wore such clothing as Patroklus had worn on his body.
The ghost came and stood over his head and spoke a word
to him:
’You sleep, Achilles, you have forgotten me; but you
were not
careless of me when I lived, but only in death. Bury me
as quickly as may be, let me pass through the gates of Hades.
The souls, the images of dead men, hold me at a distance,
and will not let me cross the river and mingle among them,
but I wander as I am by Hades’ house of the wide gates.
(23.65-74)
• • •
Oh wonder! Even in the house of Hades there is left
something,
a soul and an image, but there is no real heart of life in it.
(23.103-104)
Achilles is describing the appearance of his dead companion Patroklus. His phantasm, his image (eidolon) has appeared in a dream but Patroklus has not yet taken up eternal residence in Hades.5 First, as Patroklus reminds him, he needs proper burial. Not to complete the proper burial would be the highest of moral breaches. He then utters a dire prophecy, that Achilles himself will fall before the walls of Troy (lines 80-81).
As in all ancient cultures, dreams, visions, and other religiously interpreted states of consciousness both gave the power to foretell the future and confirmed the culture’s depiction of the afterlife. In The Epic of Gilgamesh, for instance, Enkidu foresaw his own death in a dream. In this case, the soul and image which Achilles dreams is a visible but not a tangible likeness of the dead warrior, his comrade Patroklus. Patroklus dissolves into mist, slipping through Achilles’ arms when he tries to embrace him (lines 99-100). It is this visible likeness that is the religious background for the later philosophical understanding of soul (psyche) or the Latin animus (literally: wind)-that is, cognate with the Greek word for “wind,” anemos . Indeed, the root meaning of psyche is derived from the idea of breathing (cf. psychō, “I breathe, blow”).6 In its early usage, there does not seem to be any relationship between psyche and thinking or feeling, but at this poignant moment we see that the emotional relationship between the heroic duo has survived Patroklus’ death.7
Besides the aforementioned psyche and anemos, primary words which could point to parts of the “self” in the ancient Greek tradition would be phrenes, noos, and thymos but there were several others as well.8 One of the most popular is the use of the word “shadows” or “shades” to refer to the dead: skiai, as that was expressed in Greek; but another would be eidolon, “image” or “phantom.” The latter two have the advantage of referring to a likeness of the departed, even though it is an imperfect one. A unified concept of “self” was apparently won after a long battle which led to a notion of consciousness, then, to Socrates’ notion of a transcendent self, and