Psyche: The Cult of Souls and Belief in Immortality among the GreeksRohde, Erwin
Religion
Psyche: The Cult of Souls and Belief in Immortality among the Greeks
Rohde, Erwin
Greece -- Religion
[36\4: Plu., _Cim._ 8; _Thes._ 36; Paus. 3, 3, 7.--In the year 437-6
we hear of the removal by Hagnon and his Athenians, at the command
of the oracle, of the bones of Rhesos from Troy to Amphipolis:
Polyaen. vi, 53. The neighbourhood of the mouth of the Strymon on
the western slopes of Mt. Pangaios was the original home of Rhesos:
he was already known to the Doloneia as the son of Eïoneus; to later
writers as the son of Strymon and (like Orpheus) a Muse--which is
the same thing (see Conon, 4). On M. Pangaios he still lived as an
oracular deity: this must have been the popular belief of the
district which the author of the _Rhesus_ explains after Greek
fashion (ll. 955-66). He is a tribal god of the Edonians, of the
same pattern as Zalmoxis of the Getai, and Sabos or Sabazios of
other Thracian tribes. In the mind of the Greeks he had become since
the poem of the Doloneia entirely detached from the site of his
worship and was a mere mortal champion with whom fancy might do what
it chose (cf. Parth. 36). The restoration of his bones to the
neighbourhood of the lower Strymon (~mnêmei=on tou= Rhê/sou~ in
Amphipolis: Marsyas ~ho neô/teros~ in Sch., _Rhes._ 346), and the
heroic cult which was undoubtedly paid to him in connexion
therewith, may have been a kind of official recognition by the
Greeks of the worship of Rhesos discovered in that neighbourhood by
the Athenian colonists. I see no reason for doubting the historical
fact of the occurrence, though some of the details of Polyaenus'
account have a fabulous colouring. It is true Cicero says of Rhesos,
_nusquam_ {144} _colitur_ (_ND._ iii, 45), and so it may have been
in C.'s time: for the earlier period the close of the tragedy
clearly suggests the cult of R. as a divinity, while the story of
Polyaen. implies his Hero-cult.]
[37\4: Sometimes only single parts of the body, e.g. the
shoulder-blade of Pelops at Olympia (Paus. 5, 13).--In Argos on the
road to the Akropolis their heads were buried in the ~mnê=ma tô=n
Aigu/ptou pai/dôn~, while the rest of their bodies were in Lerne,
Paus. 2, 24, 2.]
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