religious legends which reposed upon the same fundamental doctrine; but sometimes, we know, it was the priestesses of Demeter who officiated at wedding-ceremonies, and in those cases it cannot be doubted that it was Persephone and not Hera who was the divine prototype of the bride, and the thought that her wedding was a wedding with the god of death could not have been excluded. At funerals, on the other hand, the story of Zeus and Hera which was preferred at weddings owing to its less obvious allusion to death, would for that same reason have found less favour than those other marriage-legends in which the identity of death with marriage was more clearly enunciated; and of these, owing to the exceptional reverence in which the Eleusinian mysteries were held, the story of Persephone seems to have been among the most frequent. Yet in the picture drawn by Aristophanes at which we have just glanced, for one subtle touch which suggests the connexion of Hera's wedding with human weddings, there is another subtle touch which suggests its relation with human death. The first is an epithet applied to Eros who drove the wedding-car—the epithet [Greek: amphithalês], used of one who has both parents living[1]. The allusion to human weddings is clear. It was no doubt imperative in old time, as it still is, in Greece, that anyone who attended upon a bride or bridegroom, as for instance the bearer of water for the bridal bath, should have both parents living; and the use of the same term in reference to Eros, the attendant upon Zeus and Hera, marks the intimate connexion between the divine marriage and the marriage of living men and women. But another epithet in the passage conveys no less clear an allusion to the marriage of those, whom men call dead, with their deities. Hera is named [Greek: eudaimôn], a word which, meaning 'favoured by God,' may seem strangely applied to one who herself was divine[2]. But it was selected by Aristophanes for a good reason; by the word [Greek: eudaimonia] was commonly denoted that future bliss which the initiated believed to consist in wedlock with their deities. Like [Greek: theophilês], 'god-beloved,' the term [Greek: eudaimôn], 'blessed,' was, so to speak, a catch-word of the mysteries[3]; and the applica-*
- ↑ Cf. Schol. ad Aristoph. l. c.
- ↑ This, I am aware, is not an unique case. Plato applies the same epithet to the gods as a whole, but above all to Eros, clearly, I think, with something of the same significance. See Plato, Sympos. § 21, p. 195 A.
- ↑ Cf. Theo Smyrnaeus, Math. I. 18; Aristid. Eleusin. p. 415; Plato, Phaedrus, p. 48.
