them by human purveyors. Homer is always careful to mention that, as often as a feast was toward, neither the gods nor the bards were forgotten, the former being fed before and the latter after the heroes themselves had been satisfied.
When, following the Persian division of the unseen world of spirits into good and bad, the idea of an evil-minded and consistently hostile god became popular, his odour was naturally enough the opposite of that of the kindly gods. And as in time he came to assume some of the attributes of the Roman di inferni, he, like the dragons of an even greater antiquity, sported the sulphury odour of his underground dwelling.
The Northern nations of ancient Europe, Grimm tells us, believed that hell was a place of burning pitch, whence arose an intolerable stench. Our English word “smell” is obviously related to a German dialect word for hell—smela—which in turn is itself akin to the Bohemian smola, resin or pitch.
The Christian “hell” was thus the lineal descendant of the subterranean “Hades” of the pagans, and what its stench was like may be gathered from that of the noxious fumes that rise out of clefts in volcanic rocks, such fumes, we may suppose, as in earlier days threw the Oracle at Delphi into her prophetic trances.
