Down in the murky underworld they now float unconscious, or, at most, with a twilight half-consciousness, wailing in a shrill diminutive voice, helpless, indifferent. Of course, flesh, bones, and sinews,[11\1] the midriff, the seat of all the faculties of mind and will--these are all gone for ever. They were attached to the once-visible partner of the psyche, and that has been destroyed. To speak of an "immortal life" of these souls, as scholars both ancient and modern have done, is incorrect. They can hardly be said to _live_ even, any more than the image does that is reflected in the mirror; and that they prolong to eternity their shadowy image-existence--where in Homer do we ever find this said? The psyche may survive its visible companion, but it is helpless without it. Is it possible to believe that a realistically imaginative, materially minded people like the Greeks would have regarded as immortal a creature incapable (once the funeral is over) of requiring or receiving further _nourishment_--either in religious cult or otherwise? The daylight world of Homer is thus freed from spectres of the night (for even in dreams the psyche is seen no more after the body is burnt); from those intangible and ghostly essences at whose unearthly activity the superstitious of every age tremble. The living are no longer troubled by the dead. The world is governed by the gods alone; not pale and ghostly phantoms, but palpable and fully materialized figures, working powerfully everywhere, and dwelling on the clear mountain tops: "and brightness gleams around them." No daimonic powers can compare with the gods or can avail against them; and night does not set free the departed souls of the dead. The reader starts involuntarily and begins to suspect the influence of another age, when in a part of Book XX of the Odyssey, added by a later hand, he reads how shortly before the destruction of the suitors the clairvoyant soothsayer beholds in hall and forecourt the soul-phantoms (eidôla) {10} floating in multitudes and hurrying down to the darkness under the earth: "the sun was darkened in the heaven and a thick mist came over all." The later poet has been very successful in suggesting the terror awakened by a foreboding of tragedy; but such terror in the face of the doings of the spirit world is entirely un-Homeric. § 4