~_Olympian as compared with heroic life._~
In a word, still setting aside in some considerable degree the deities of traditive origin, who enter little into the general picture, but have their own portraiture apart, there are to be found in Olympus, as well as in the lower earth, the relations of degree in power and intelligence; and the gods with whom it is peopled, on the whole, possess it in large measure; but the law and purpose of their life is summed up in self-will and self-indulgence. They do not debate their own duties, or even those of men, to one another: rarely, if ever, those of men even towards themselves, except with reference to the quantity of libation poured out, of flesh offered, and of steam reeking from the altars. There is a mixture in their enjoyments: some are refined, others sensual, but both are alike selfish, and the latter are wholly unrestrained. It is said by Heyne, and with much of literal truth, that the description of the day’s employment in Olympus, which the first Iliad supplies, is a transcript of hero-life[642]; but it is of one part of hero-life only; it is of hero-life in its moments of indulgence and relaxation, which exhibit to us its lower and less noble side, without any view of its great sentiments and great duties, its sense of honour, its fine feeling, its reciprocal affections as developed in the relations of consanguinity and affinity, of friendship, of guestship, of sovereign and subject, and even of master and serf. What a wretched spectacle would Hector, Achilles, Diomed, Nestor, Ulysses, and the rest present to us, were their existence devoted simply to quaffing goblets and scenting or devouring the flesh of slain animals, even though with this there were present the mitigating refinement of perpetual harp and song. And yet such is the picture offered by the Homeric mythology.
Upon the whole, while it remains true that the deification of heroes, or their promotion to a happy immortality, in Homer’s time, depended upon virtue and merit; those who thus obtained admission to Olympus really found themselves introduced to a new and far lower law of life, upon taking their places there, than that to which they had been accustomed upon earth. Thus, for example, it is with Hercules; he has indeed a reward beyond the grave; but it consists simply in a life divested of the virtues of patience, obedience, valour, and struggle by which it had itself been earned.