ough the meadow of asphodel in joyfulness, because he had
heard that his son was very illustrious."2 Sophocles makes the
dying Antigone say, "Departing, I strongly cherish the hope that I
shall be fondly welcomed by my father, and by my mother, and by my
brother."3 It is important to notice that, according to the early
and popular view, this Hades, the "dark dwelling of the joyless
images of deceased mortals," is the destination of universal
humanity. In opposition to its dolorous gloom and repulsive
inanity are vividly pictured the glad light of day, the glory and
happiness of life. "Not worth so much to me as my life," says the
incomparable son of Peleus, "are all the treasures which populous
Troy possessed, nor all which the stony threshold of Phoebus
Apollo contains in rocky Pytho. Oxen, and fat sheep, and trophies,
and horses with golden manes, may be acquired by effort; but the
breath of man to return again is not to be obtained by plunder nor
by purchase, when once it has passed the barrier of his teeth."

It is not probable that all the ornamental details associated by
the poets with the fate and state of the dead as they are set
forth, for instance, by Virgil in the sixth book of the Aneid were
ever credited as literal truth. But there is no reason to doubt
that the essential features of this mythological scenery were
accepted in the vulgar belief. For instance, that the popular mind
honestly held that, in some vague sense or other, the ghost, on
leaving the body, flitted down to the dull banks of Acheron and
offered a shadowy obolus to Charon, the slovenly old ferryman, for
a passage in his boat, seems attested not only by a thousand
averments to that effect in the current literature of the time,
but also by the invariable custom of placing an obolus in the dead
man's mouth for that purpose when he was buried.

The Greeks did not view the banishment of souls in Hades as a
punishment for sin, or the result of any broken law in the plan of
things. It was to them merely the fulfilment of the inevitable
fate of creatures who must die, in the order of nature, like
successive growths of flowers, and whose souls were too feeble to
rank with gods and climb into Olympus. That man should cease from
his substantial life on the bright earth and subside into sunless
Hades, a vapid form, with nerveless limbs and faint voice, a
ghostly vision bemoaning his existence with idle lamentation, or
busying himself with the misty