The episode of Odysseus' journey to Hades (even in its latest portions) suggests no acquaintance whatever with any general class of sinners who receive their punishment in that place. If, indeed, it had alluded to the punishment in the after-world of _perjurers_, orthodox Homeric doctrine would not in that case have been violated. Twice over in the Iliad, on solemn occasions of oath-taking, besides the gods of the upper world, the Erinyes also are called upon as witnesses of the oath; for they punish under the earth those who break their oath.[83\1] Not without reason have these passages been held to show "that the Homeric conception of the phantasmal half-life of the souls under the earth, where they are without feeling or consciousness, was not a general folk-belief."[84\1] We must add, however, that the belief held in Homeric times of the punishment of oath-breakers in the realm of shadows cannot as yet have been very vital, for it was quite unable to prevent the success of the totally incompatible belief in the unconscious nothingness of disembodied spirits. A solemn oath-formula (so much that is primitive persisting, even after it has become dead letter, in formula) preserved a reference to that ancient belief, which had become strange to Homeric ears--a vestige, in fact, of a bygone point of view. It may be {42} that in the dim past, when men still vividly and literally believed in the reality of a punishment in after life for perjury, all the souls in Hades were credited with a conscious existence; but there never was a time when men generally believed that earthly sins (including perjury as only one among many) were punished in Hades. Oath-breaking was not punished as a specially outrageous moral failing--it may well be doubted whether the Greeks ever considered or felt it to be such. The perjurer, rather than any other particular sinner, was the special victim of the dread goddesses, for the simple reason that the perjurer in his desire to emphasize in the most awful manner his aversion to falsehood, has invoked against himself, if he fails to keep his oath, the most terrible fate of all--to suffer torment in the realm of Hades whence is no escape.[85\1] To the Infernal Spirits of the Underworld, to whom he had condemned himself, he falls a victim if he breaks his word. Belief in the supernatural power of such imprecations,[86\1] and not any special moral importance attached to truth-telling--an idea quite strange to the older Antiquity--gave to the oath its peculiar terrors. § 5