Of course, anyone who had been so foolish as to neglect or despise initiation has "not the same fate below", as the _Hymn to Demeter_ discreetly puts it. Only the initiated have life, says Sophokles: the uninitiated, with whom it goes ill in the land below, can hardly have been thought of otherwise than as floating in the glimmering half-life of the shadows in the Homeric Erebos. Well-meaning modern efforts to read a moral meaning into things Greek have sought to prove that the Greeks, too, had a genuine popular belief in a future judgment and recompense for the past deeds and character of the dead. Homer makes hardly the most distant allusion to such a belief. The perjurer alone suffers in Homer the punishment at the hands of the gods of the underworld which he had invoked upon himself in his oath. Even the "Sinners" and their punishment which later imitation added to the story of Odysseus' Journey to Hades, considered without prejudice, do not support the opinion that Homeric poetry knew of a belief in retribution hereafter. Later poets were only following this model when they made other enemies of the gods endure eternal punishment in Hades--Thamyris, for example, or Amphion (as the _Minyas_ related), and later Ixion in particular.[11\7] All this does not, even in the slightest degree, suggest a general belief in future rewards and punishment. Of course, there is the judgment that is given in Hades by "One" according to Pindar (_Ol._ ii, 65), but this occurs in connexion with a description of the "last things" which the poet has borrowed from the teachings of mystic separatists. Aeschylus[12\7] knows of a judgment pronounced by Hades himself; but his thoughts about divine retribution both on earth and hereafter are derived from his own religious temperament which was entirely opposed to the popular beliefs of his day and more inclined to accept the speculative doctrines of the theologians. The {239} first precise account of the three judges in Hades, Minos, Rhadamanthys, and Aiakos, who judge the deeds of men done in their lifetime upon earth occurs in Plato in a description of the other world which reproduces anything rather than the popular beliefs of the time.[13\7] Later on, the picture of the judges in Hades (to whom Triptolemos was also added),[14\7] like many other details of the Platonic eschatological myths, became a real part of popular fancy, as allusions in later literature and even, perhaps, pictures of the underworld on vase-paintings from Southern Italy, bear witness. But the idea that in the supreme period of Greek culture the belief in a judgment and judges in Hades, who passed sentence on the deeds of men done on earth, had really any root in popular belief, is quite unproved and can be shown to be erroneous from the argument _ex silentio_. And where there are no judges no judgment can take place.