be his psyche relegated to Hades, is quite strange both to Homer and to Greek thought of later times.[79\1] It is, in fact, an example of the earliest "harmonizer's" solution of a difficulty. The poet does, indeed, attempt to connect Herakles with Odysseus by making the two enter into conversation, in imitation of the conversations with Agamemnon and Achilles. But it is soon evident that these two have really nothing to say to each other; Odysseus, in fact, is silent. There was no real relationship between them, at most an analogy; Herakles, too, having once descended alive into Hades. This analogy alone, in fact, appears to have suggested the introduction of Herakles in this place.[80\1] {40} There now remains (inserted after Minos and Orion and before Herakles and probably composed by the same hand that was responsible for them) the incident of the three "penitents" undergoing punishment; a passage that no reader can possibly forget. First Tityos, whose giant frame is preyed upon by two vultures, is seen, then Tantalos, who in the middle of a lake is parched with thirst and cannot reach up to the fruit-laden branches over his head, and last Sisyphos, who is bound to roll up-hill the stone that ever rolls back again. The limits of the Homeric conception (with which the pictures of Minos, Orion, and Herakles might still perhaps be reconciled) are in these pictures definitely overstepped. The souls of these three unfortunates are credited with complete and continuous consciousness. Without this, their punishment would not have been felt and would not have been inflicted. And, observing the extraordinarily matter-of-fact and cursory description, which takes the reasons of the punishment for granted except in the case of Tityos, we cannot help feeling that these examples of punishment after death were not invented for the first time by the composer of these lines. They cannot have been offered to the astonished ears of their hearers as a daring novelty, but were rather recalled briefly to those hearers' recollection. Probably these three are selected as examples out of a much larger collection of such pictures. Can it be that still older poets (who may still, however, have been more recent than the poet of the earliest parts of the "Journey") had already dared to desert the Homeric view of the soul?