10
Mortality and Fame
The gods are of heaven, and immortal; mankind is of the earth, and subject
to death. Each of us is conscious that he is but one of a countless number
who have lived, are living, or are yet to be born, and that his individual life is a
brief detail in the long tale of generations, soon to be cut short and in all
probability sunk in oblivion.
The Indo-European believed in a kind of afterlife, to be sure. He would go
to join his forefathers, and with them receive homage from his descendants.
But a limited number of great men –– kings, warriors, seers –– and even some
women associated with them –– lived on in the memory of the people, in
poem and story. Their bodies and souls had passed away, but their name had
survived death; they had achieved unfading fame. This was a prize that out-
standing individuals could strive for and anticipate even in life. So Horace
exults (Carm. 3. 30. 6–8):
non omnis moriar, multaque pars mei
uitabit Libitinam: usque ego postera
crescam laude recens.THE ORIGIN OF HUMANKINDHow did our terrestrial race come into being in the first place? The Indo-
Europeans perhaps had no fixed and definite doctrine on the question. But as
we saw in Chapter 4, there was a general idea that we are the children of Earth,
the universal mother, whose fertility comes from Father Sky.
How is this parturition to be imagined? We see trees and plants growing up
out of the soil, and there are myths according to which men, or a particular
ancestor of men, grew up from the earth in tree form or came somehow from
trees or plants. Hesiod’s Bronze Race came $κ μελι|ν, that is, from ash-trees
or born of ash-tree nymphs. Of Pelasgus, the first man in Arcadian legend,