It is strange that anyone should have maintained (as it has been in recent times[1\1]) that in any stage of the development of the Homeric poems the belief can be found that with the moment of death all is at an end: that nothing survives death. We are not warranted by any statement in either of the two poems (to be found perhaps in their oldest parts, as is suggested) nor yet by the tell-tale silence of the poet, in attributing such an idea either to the poet or his contemporaries. Wherever the occasion of death is described we are told how the dead man (still referred to by his name, or his "Psyche", hastens away into the house of Aïdes--into the kingdom of Aïdes and the grim Persephoneia; goes down to the darkness below the earth, to Erebos; or, more vaguely, sinks into the earth itself. In any case, it is no mere _nothing_ that can enter the gloomy depths, nor over what does not exist could one suppose that the divine Pair holds sway below. But how are we to think of this "Psyche" that, unnoticed during the lifetime of the body, and only observable when it is "separated" from the body, now glides off to join the multitude of its kind assembled in the murky regions of the "Invisible" (Aïdes)? Its name, like the names given to the {5} "soul" in many languages, marks it off as something airy and breathlike, revealing its presence in the breathing of the living man. It escapes out of the mouth--or out of the gaping wound of the dying--and now freed from its prison becomes, as the name well expresses it, an "image" (~ei/dôlon~). On the borders of Hades Odysseus sees floating "the images of those that have toiled (on earth)". These immaterial images withdrawing themselves from the grasp of the living, like smoke (_Il._ xxiii, 100) or a shadow (_Od._ xi, 207; x, 495), must at least recognizably present the general outlines of the once living person. Odysseus immediately recognizes his mother, Antikleia, in such a shadow-person, as well as the lately dead Elpenor, and those of his companions of the Trojan War who have gone before him. The psyche of Patroklos appearing to Achilleus by night resembles the dead man absolutely in stature, bodily appearance and expression. The nature of this shadowy double of mankind, separating itself from man in death and taking its departure then, can best be realized if we first make clear to ourselves what qualities it does _not_ possess. The psyche of Homeric belief does not, as might have been supposed, represent what we are accustomed to call "spirit" as opposed to "body". All the faculties of the human "spirit" in the widest sense--for which the poet has a large and varied vocabulary--are indeed only active and only possible so long as a man is still alive: when death comes the complete personality is no longer in existence. The body, that is the corpse, now becomes mere "senseless earth" and falls to pieces, while the psyche remains untouched. But