of the hated Erinyes.[5\2] This folk-tale reveals more clearly than is usual with the generally cultured Homeric narrative the popular belief that men might be carried off permanently from the land of the living, and, without seeing death, live on in another dwelling-place. For the daughters of Pandareos are carried away alive--to the Kingdom of the Dead, it is true, for that is where they must go if they become the servants of the Erinyes, the spirits of the underworld.[6\2] That is where Penelope wishes to be carried off, and without dying first--away from the land of the living which has become intolerable for her. Such a translation is accomplished by means of the Harpies or the Stormwind, which is the same thing, since the Harpies are nothing else but wind-deities of a peculiarly sinister kind. They may be compared to the Devil's Bride or the "Whirlwind's Bride" of German folk-tales, who rides in the whirlwind and also carries off men with her.[7\2] The Harpies and what we are here told of them, belong to the "vulgar mythology" which so seldom finds any expression in Homer; a popular folk-lore that could tell of many things between heaven and earth of which the Homeric "grand style" takes little notice. In Homer the Harpies never act on their own authority; only as the servants of the gods or of a single god do they transport mortals where no word of man, no human power, can reach.[8\2] The prophesied removal of Menelaos to the Elysian fields at the end of the world is only another example of such a "translation" by the will and the might of the gods. Even the fact that prolonged habitation in that happy land, inaccessible to other men, is promised to him, does not differentiate the fate of Menelaos from that of the daughters of Pandareos, or from that which Penelope wishes for herself. For Menelaos, however, immortal life is promised not in Hades, or even at its entrance, but in a special country of the blest, as though in a new kingdom of the gods. He is to become a "god"; for since to the Homeric poets "god" and "immortal" are interchangeable terms, a man who is granted immortality (that is, whose psyche is never separated from his visible self) becomes for them a god. It is also a Homeric belief that gods can raise mortals to their own realm, to immortality. Kalypso wishes to make Odysseus "immortal and ageless for all time", that he may remain for ever by her side (_Od._ v, 135 f.; 209 f.; xxiii, 335 f.), {58} that is to say, make him a god like herself. The immortality of the gods is conditioned by the eating of the magic food ambrosia and nectar;[9\2] man, too, by eating continually the food of the gods, becomes an immortal god. What Odysseus in his longing for the earthly home, to which he is drawn by loyalty and duty, rejects, has been attained by other mortals. The Homeric poems can tell of more than one mortal promoted to immortal life.