One great fault of Homer, for which Plato never forgave the poet, was that he omitted any serious comment on the structure of the cosmos. The heavens were anonymous and superfluous. For the purposes of his narration, he used only three levels: Olympus, high in the ether; the earth, a multicolored disk, a supine body to whose back clung the invisible parasite of Hades; and, finally, the frozen Tartarus. But between Zeus’s palace and the earth, and between the earth and the ice of Tartarus, there was simply nothing Homer was interested in talking about.
That immense void yawning beneath the surface of the earth was testimony to a blasphemous euphoria. It was a way of omitting, even obliterating the celestial machinery, the mathematical works of the Artificer. It was a first cataclysm wrought by poetry: the cosmos was made oblivious of itself. But with the Orphics, followers of the Book, and later with Plato, Chaldaean wisdom took its revenge on Homer. The roving islands of celestial bodies, the frayed progress of the Milky Way, the soft sounds of the spheres all regained their privileges. The wonderful flatness of the Homeric vision was lost in the ordered chasms that once again opened up between one heaven and the next. Hades was winkled out from his moldy underworld to be catapulted up into the atmosphere and settled in the cone of shadow between earth and moon, as if the lining of the planet had been turned inside out and shaken skyward, dispatching the multitude of souls it housed out into a turbulent dark. Such was the immense, windblown waiting room of the dead.
There is a radical and shocking divergence between Homer and all later theologians, Hesiod included. Homer, as Plutarch remarks, refuses to distinguish between gods and daímones: “he seems to use the two words as equivalents and speaks of the gods as daímones.” This makes it impossible to blame the daímones for the murkier activities of the gods and precludes any idea of a ladder of being, on which, through a series of purificatory acts, one might ascend toward the divine, or alternatively the divine might descend in orderly fashion toward man. This idea, which forms the point of departure for every form of Platonism, is already implicit in Hesiod’s division of beings into four categories: men, heroes, daímones, gods.
But Homer ignores such mediation. For him the word “hero” can be substituted more generically with “man,” nor did he see any need to introduce a separate class of daímones. He thus brought the extremes into immediate contact, leaving nothing to soften the violence of the collision. Yet, as one reads once again in Plutarch, “those who refuse to admit the existence of a class of daímones alienate the things of men from the things of the gods, making it impossible for them to mix, and eliminating, as Plato said, ‘the interpretative and ministering role of nature,’ or alternatively they force us to make a general hotchpotch, introducing gods into our human passions and goings-on and dragging them down to our level whenever it suits us, the way the women of Thessaly are supposed to be able to pull down the moon.” Never perhaps as in this passage from the late and knowing Plutarch was the invincible scandal of Homer, the enemy of mediation, so clearly exposed. When the Christian Fathers railed against Homeric debasement, they were really doing no more than dusting off Plato’s sense of scandal, and likewise that of his followers, here so lucidly summed up by Plutarch. The course of Greek civilization thus reveals itself as a process in which its founding authority, Homer himself, becomes ever more unacceptable.
Timarchus was a young disciple of Socrates who wanted to “know the power of his master’s demon.” He was “courageous and had only recently had his first taste of philosophy.” So he decided to put himself to a fearful test: he would climb down into Trophonius’s cave in Lebadeia, where Kore had once gone to play with the Nymph Hercynia, who kept a goose. When the Nymph was distracted for a moment, the goose disappeared into a cave hidden behind a stone. So Kore went into the cave to look for the bird, caught it, and lifted the stone, upon which a flood of water came rushing from the darkness. Of all the variations of Kore’s adventures, this was the most remote and secret, so secret that no one knew about it: the only remaining record of the affair was the statue of a young girl with a goose in her arm in Hercynia’s temple.
Having reached Lebadeia, Timarchus spent a few days purifying himself in the house of Good Fortune and Good Spirit. He bathed in the freezing waters of the river Hercynia. He ate the meat of the animals offered up as sacrifices. And every time the priests sacrificed another victim, a seer would read the entrails to see if Trophonius was well-disposed toward the visitor and would receive him kindly. One night Timarchus was taken from the house and led to the river. Two youths washed him with the deference of slaves. Then they led him to some priests, near where the water rose. They told him to drink from two springs. The first they called the water of Forgetfulness. The other was the water of Memory. Then Timarchus set off toward the oracle, dressed in a linen tunic with ribbons. On his feet he wore the heavy local boots. Two bronze poles linked by a chain stood in front of the oracle. Behind was the cave: a narrow, artificial opening, like an oven for baking bread.
Timarchus was carrying a light ladder and some honey cakes for the snakes. He slipped into the opening feet first and immediately felt himself being sucked into the darkness — where the snakes were waiting for him. For a long time he lay in the dark. Then he realized that the plates of his skull were slowly coming apart. His spirit slipped out, breathing freely as though after long compression, and began to rise. It swelled and spread. It was a sail in the sky. The sea it plowed was dotted with “islands sparkling with delicate fire,” large islands, though of different sizes, and all round. High above, he saw the face of the moon approaching. Persephone was rushing across the sky with her dogs, the planets, behind her. From beneath, where the earth was, rose a murmur of groans, as though of a never-ending but remote tumult.
On climbing down into Trophonius’s cave, Timarchus had imagined he was going toward Hades. But now he realized that Hades had been turned inside out into the sky, become the shadowy cone between the moon and the earth, and the earth was nothing more than the continuation of Hades into the abyss. But then why should the two worlds be so different from each other after all, given that both were places of exile? As the spirit of Timarchus thus reflected, he saw the place, near the moon, where the cone of shadow narrowed to a point, and saw that it was here that the drifting souls were gathering. They were trying to land on that woman’s face, the moon, despite the fact that it grew more and more terrifying the nearer they got. The face seemed to be made up with an extremely fine powder, which the dead recognized as the substance of other souls. The moment they tried to grab hold of some wrinkle on the lunar surface, blinded by the white light, many would find themselves dragged back by an irresistible undertow, until they were falling through space again. Yet it was there that salvation lay, and they had come so close. Had they managed to set foot on this outpost of Persephone, they would one day have undergone a second death, more gradual and more delicate than the first. One day Persephone would have separated their minds, noûs, from their souls, the way Apollo could prize the armor from a warrior’s shoulders. Then, when the substance of their souls had been left behind on the white dust, and keeping only “husks and dreams of life,” they would have emerged on the other side of the moon, where the Elysian Fields stretch across a land terrestrial beings have never seen. When Timarchus came back, feet first, from the oracular oven, his body was glowing with light. Three months later he died in Athens.