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``Pure Pagan: Seven Centuries of Greek Poems and Fragments,'' selected and translated by Burton Raffel; Modern Library ($17.95)
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According to a 2003 survey conducted by the Barna Group, 81 percent of Americans believe in an afterlife. An additional 9 percent are open to the idea, but aren't sure. Only 10 percent actually doubt that there is life after death. Even more interesting, 76 percent believe there's a heaven, and 64 percent think that's where they'll end up.
Judging by the poems in "Pure Pagan,'' had such a survey been taken in ancient Greece, the results would have been rather different. The ancient Greeks may have believed in some sort of survival after death, but they didn't think it amounted to much of a life. And it sure wasn't something they looked forward to. Here's "Message to the Living," by the always-interesting Anonymous:
"I'm dead, but waiting for you, and you'll wait for someone:
``The darkness waits for everyone, it makes no distinctions.''
Even grimmer is a poem by Callimachus. Standing on the grave of Charidas, "the son of Arimnas of Cyrene," the poet calls out: "Charidas: what's it like down there?" The answer he gets is, "Dark, all dark." "And do the dead come back?" the poet wonders. "Lies, all lies," is the response. Pluto, he is told, is "a myth, no more." Which prompts the poet to declare, "I've no hope left." Whereupon Charidas assures him:
"I speak the truth.
``But I can tell you good news, too:
``Meat is cheap, down here.''
The worldview on display in these poems is certainly clear-sighted. It is also bluntly unsentimental. Consider Menecrates' "Old Age":
"We all pray for it
``Before it comes,
``Then blame it
``When it arrives.
``Old age is a debt
``We like to be owed,
``Not one we like to collect.''
This is a world with gods, but gods who take scant interest in the affairs of humans, and the little they do take isn't necessarily beneficent. Here's Simonides explaining how to identify a god:
"Blamed for nothing,
``Able to do
``Everything: this
``Is how we know
``A god.''
We're a long way from the Lord's Prayer. But not far from the professed viewpoint of many a contemporary secularist. As translator Burton Raffel says in his preface, "most of the poetry in this book is more quintessentially `modern' than most of what you will find in our contemporary literary periodicals."
One distinction worth making, though, is that a good many contemporary secularists come by their viewpoint in reaction to a Judeo-Christian upbringing. The viewpoint of these ancient poets, by contrast, seems to be precisely the one they were raised by. They have no ax to grind. They're just telling it as everybody agrees it is. That's what makes their poems so bracing.
This may seem odd coming from a practicing Catholic of a somewhat traditionalist persuasion, but it shouldn't. For me, as for John Henry Newman, faith means "being capable of bearing doubt," not being free of doubt. "Pure Pagan'' offers a fascinating glimpse of what the world looked like to people who walked the Earth centuries before a certain preacher in Galilee ever set foot there.
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(c) 2005, The Philadelphia Inquirer. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service.
