Again the plague sent by Apollo on the Achaean host before Troy suggests to Achilles that the god may be angered at a failure to perform some vow or to offer a hecatomb.[46] It is little wonder that the enlightened Plato felt horror and disgust at such notions as these and that he condemned this kind of worship as an “art of trafficking” (ἐμπορικὴ τέχνη).[47] Still this Homeric idea of the relations between men and gods—an idea which has not wholly disappeared from the world today—rests on the notion that gods and men belong to one common society in which the obligations are binding on both sides. Especially to be avoided was insolent pride; man must not boast himself overmuch; there were fixed bounds set for him which he might not transgress. So Ajax met his fate because of his insolent defiance: “Even so he had escaped his doom, hateful though he was to Athena, if he had not let fall an insolent speech and committed great folly. He said that in spite of the gods he had escaped the great gulf of the sea; but Poseidon heard his loud boasting. Straightway then he took his trident in his mighty hands and struck the Gyraean rock and cleft it in twain. Part remained in its place, but a portion fell in the deep, that part on which Ajax first sat and uttered his great folly; but it now bore him down beneath the vast billowy sea.”[48] But Achilles showed the approved attitude of mind when he thus addressed the dead Hector: “Lie now dead; but my doom I will accept whenever it please Zeus and the other immortal gods to send it.”[49] This fear of punishment from heaven, of that which Aeschylus and Herodotus call “the envy of the gods,” long operated to keep in check excess of speech and added no doubt to the comfort of Greek society. Of magic whereby man can compel the gods there is nothing in Homer; the inferiority of mortals to the immortals is complete. We may now properly consider the Homeric view of life after death. The epic psychology made no sharp distinction between the soul and the body; on the whole the body was identified with the self rather than the soul (ψυχή), which goes to the realm of Hades when the man is dead. There in the world of shadows beneath the earth or far out by the stream of Oceanus the shades, pale images of the men who were, exist; they do not live. The pathetic plaints of the shades that come up to Odysseus in the eleventh book of the Odyssey show how hopeless is their lot. Though Orion pursue the wild beasts over the cheerless plains of asphodel and Minos hold his golden staff and sit in judgment over the dead, yet all is insubstantial and far less than life. The often quoted words of Achilles’ shade sum up the whole matter: “Speak not to me of death, glorious Odysseus. For so I might be on earth, I would rather be the servant of another, of a poor man who had little substance, than to be lord over all the dead.”[50]