of sight were but efforts, tragically comic, to restore life to the ancient morality by choking attempts to answer problems which had been forced upon Athenian attention by altered social conditions and not merely suggested by hair-splitting sophists.
§ 50. But besides conceptions of inherited guilt and vicarious punishment, positive signs of the early communal life, the clan age left on Athenian thought a negative mark which deserves to be noticed in connection with the decay of Athenian morals. This is the absence of any profound belief in a future state of personal reward or punishment. Considerable progress toward the conception of such a state had been made in the interval between the Odyssean age and that of Pindar. In the Nekuia, or eleventh book of the Odyssey, the gathering-place of the clans[1] is as yet by no means divided into abodes of happiness and suffering. We are indeed introduced to the sight of suffering in Hades; but the persons singled out for punishment are not men, but demi-gods. Ulysses sees Tituos, son of far-famed Earth, outstretched many a rood, while two vultures on each side tear his liver for the wrong he had done to Latona. He sees Tantalus, expressly called a δαίμων,[2] thirsting while the water touches his chin, and putting forth his hands to touch the fruits which a wind "scatters to the shadowing clouds." Sisyphus, too, he sees, rolling with both hands the enormous stone that always falls back to the plain. But mere human personality is not yet distinguished in Hades by punishment or reward. The dead are but
