These verses allow us a glimpse into a world about which the Homeric poems are otherwise silent. At the end of the {56} world, by the River Okeanos, lies the "Elysian Plain", a land where the sky is always clear, as in the land where the gods live.[1\2] There dwells the great Rhadamanthys, not alone, one may suppose as "men" are spoken of (565, 568). Thither shall the gods some day send Menelaos--he is not to die (562); that is to say, he is to reach that place alive nor shall he suffer death there. The place to which he is to be sent is not a part of the realm of Hades, but a land on the surface of the earth set apart as the abode not of disembodied "souls", but of men whose souls have not been separated from their visible selves--for only thus can they feel and enjoy the sense of _life_ (565). The picture which fancy has drawn here is the precise opposite of the blessed immortality of the soul in its separate existence. Just because such an idea remained quite unthinkable for Homeric singers, hope sought and found an exit from the shadow-world which swallows up all living energy. Hope imagined a land at the end of the world, but still of this world, to which occasionally some few favourites of the gods might be "translated" without the psyche being separated from its body and descending to Hades. The actual mention of such miraculous "translation" stands alone in the Homeric poems, and the passage in the Odyssey seems to have been introduced by a later hand.[2\2] But the conditions of such a miracle are all implied within the range of Homeric ideas. Menelaos is carried off by the power of the gods and lives an eternal life far from the world of mortals. The belief that a god could suddenly withdraw his earthly favourite from the eyes of men and invisibly waft him away on the breeze not infrequently finds its application in the battle-scenes of the Iliad.[3\2] The gods could also make a mortal "invisible" for a prolonged period. When Odysseus has been so long lost to his friends they suspect that the gods have "made him invisible" (_Od._ i, 235 ff.); they do not regard him as "dead" but "the Harpies have carried him away", and he is consequently withdrawn from all human ken (_Od._ i, 241 f.; xiv, 371). Penelope, in her grief, prays _either_ for swift death through the arrows of Artemis, _or_ that a storm wind may lift her up and carry her away on dark pathways to the mouths of Okeanos, that is, to the entrance of the Land of the Dead (_Od._ xx, 61-5; 79 ff.).[4\2] To explain her wish she recalls a fairy tale of the kind that must often have been told in the women's quarters; how the daughters of Pandareos, after the violent death of their parents, were brought up to lovely maidenhood by Aphrodite and provided by Hera, Artemis, and Athene with all kinds of gifts and {57} accomplishments; till one day when Aphrodite had gone to Olympos to ask Zeus to make a match for them, the Harpies came and carried them off and made them the hand-maidens