ΘYPAZE KHPEE BY J. TER VRUGT-LENTZ The heading of this article might seem to be a protest against the paper of R. Ganszyniec in Eranos 45 (1947), 100 sqq., which is headed OYPAZE KAPEE. This is, however, not quite the case. I would premise, indeed, that I do not agree with the gist of his argumentation, but on some points, as will be observed, his objec- tions to the generally received opinion concur with mine. As for his arguments in favour of I think the fact that the Anthes- teria-phrase is a iambic trimeter is neither an argument against its being old nor an argument in favour of its being a line from a comedy; the Carians have, as far as I know, passed into a proverb as mercenaries, but are there any instances of K«p being used as a collective noun for slaves apart from the Anthesteria-phrase? Finally, is it probable that the slaves were sent to their work only after the Chytroi, the feast of the dead, was over, and not immedi- ately after the Choes had been concluded? Though I stick to the view that the original version of the phrase is Cupels Kipcq etc., and that the word Kipcq was replaced by Kapeq because people no longer understood the meaning of Kipcq in this connection, I am fully convinced, like Ganszyniec, that the word did not mean "souls" or "ghosts" of the dead. For a long time it has been assumed that the Keres were originally souls of dead persons. The chief champions of this view were Rohde, Crusius and Jane Harrison, who brought forward two arguments. The first was the title of a tragedy of Aeschylus, c?uXoa?«ai«, which word takes the place of the Homeric with this title some vase-paintings were connected, representing the weighing of the xipcq of Achilles and Memnon. This led to the identification of and because the vase-painters seemed to have painted The second argument was the phrase Kipcq, oux€T' which was spoken at the end of the Anthesteria-feast at Athens. 239 Nilsson, who deals with the question in his Geschichte der grie- chischen Religion 1), argues that the first argument does not hold . good, because the vase-painters, who could not represent the fates of death, tried to get out of the difficulty by picturing little figures of the heroes, which bear a striking resemblance to the e:t8CùÀoc. The title of Aeschylus' drama cannot, therefore, be used as an argument for the thesis that §uxal and were identical 2). I would also contest the assertion of Crusius 3), according to whom the "Sprachbewusstsein" of Aeschylus' time, "as it is apparent from the phrase spoken at the Anthesteria", suggested to the poet the image of the weighing of souls. If, indeed, in the linguistic feeling of the fifth century, x?pe5 and §uxal were identical, Aeschylus would have had no reason at all to replace the expression known from Homer by another expression. Moreover, Crusius follows a circular reasoning, as Professor J. H. Waszink has observed: the Anthesteria-phrase would only then give evidence of the Attic "Sprachbewusstsein" if it were an established fact that in the phrase in question meant "souls of the deceased", which is still to be proved 4). It is also significant that the only figure which with certainty can be styled Ker, viz., the one which was painted on the so-called Cypselus-chest described by Pausanias (V i9, 6), did not resemble the §uxal painted on the vases mentioned above; this seems to me to show that for Aeschylus and his contemporaries x11pec;and Y;UIOCLwere not identical. So there remains only the second argument, the Anthesteria- phrase. The Anthesteria, celebrated about the end of February or the beginning of March, were a wine-feast with Dionysus as the central figure, but also a feast of the dead, a sort of All Souls' Day. The feast as a whole extended over three days: on the first day, the Pithoigia, the jars with the new wine were opened; on the second day, the Choes, strange things would happen: though it is .a feast- 1) M. P. Nilsson, Gesch. der griechischen Religion I (München, i955), 224/5. 2) Cp. also R. Onians, The Origins of European Thought (Cambridge, 1951), 397/8. 3) O. Crusius in Roscher's Mythol. Lex. s.v. Keren, kol. II47. 4) H. J. Rose, Keres and Lemures, Harv. Theol. Rev. 4i (1948), 225, makes a similar remark with regard to the hypothesis that the were originally souls of the dead. .