Indo-European Poetry and Myth

Pastures and herds

The Indo-Europeans were pastoralists, and it was pleasant to imagine that
their broad pasture-lands would be replicated in the other world.^53 A Hittite
mortuary ritual for a king includes the offering of a turf with the prayer:

Now, O Sun-god, confirm him in possession of this pasture! Let no one take it away
from him (or) contest it legally! May oxen, sheep, horses, and mules graze for him on
this pasture!^54

‘Go to the meadow’ was a Hittite expression for ‘die’. In the Rigveda the land
to which Yama has shown us the way is called a cattle-pasture, gávyu ̄ti-
(10. 14. 2), and his Iranian counterpart Yima is hva ̨θβa-, ‘having good herds’
(Y. 9. 4 f., Yt. 5. 25, al.). Odysseus in Odyssey 11 sees the dead Achilles and
Heracles going about in a meadow. Hades himself is κλυτο ́ πωλο, ‘having
famous colts’. The Latvian dead are imagined as having their herds:

Qui poussait un cri si joliment

au sommet de la montagne des tombeaux?

–– C’est la sœur qui poussait un cri,

gardant les vaches des Esprits. (LD 27714 = Jonval no. 1161)

Going to join the fathers

Dying was seen under another aspect as going to join those who have gone
before. Hector in the Iliad (15. 251 f.), after being knocked out by Ajax with a
rock, tells Apollo that ‘I thought I was about to see the dead and the house of
Hades this very day’. ‘Going to (join) the majority’ was a homely expression
for dying in both Greek and Latin (Leonidas AP 7. 731. 6, Crinag. AP 11. 42;
Plaut. Trin. 291, Petr. Sat. 42. 5). In Old Irish death was techt do écaib‘going
to the dead’. A number of the Latvian folk songs (Jonval nos. 1153–64) speak
of a deceased person as being taken to the Vel ̧i, the spirits of the dead.
More specifically, dying meant going to join the fathers, the dead of one’s
own family. Antigone, condemned to death, says she is going to dwell with her
parents (Soph. Ant. 867). The other world, in both Indian and Celtic concep-
tion, is the land of the fathers.^55 In Vedic funerary hymns the dead man
is exhorted to go and join the fathers and Yama: sám
̇

gachasva pitr ́

̇

bhih, sám

̇

(^53) Thieme (1952), 47–50.
(^54) L. Christmann-Franck, Revue hittite et asianique 29 (1971), 72; V. Haas in J. M. Sasson
(ed.), Civilizations of the Ancient Near East (New York 1995), iii. 2025 (his translation).
(^55) Oldenberg (1917), 544, 547; Wolfgang Meid, Die keltischen Sprachen und Literatur
(Innsbruck 1997), 66 f.

10. Mortality and Fame 393