The Greek underworld

The teaching

As the Greek and Roman tradition of Homer, Plato and Virgil teaches it.

The shade

In Homer, death parts a person in two. The body stays behind for the fire. What goes down to Hades is the psyche, the shade: a likeness of the living person, with their face and even their wounds, but without strength, warmth or understanding. Odysseus's mother explains it to him among the dead. When life leaves, she says, the sinews no longer hold the flesh and bones together, the fire consumes them, and the soul slips away and hovers like a dream. The shades flit and twitter like bats in a cave. Only the prophet Tiresias keeps his mind there, by the gift of Persephone. She is the realm's queen: the daughter of Demeter, whom Hades, brother of Zeus and king of the dead, carried off below, and who spends part of each year with him and part in the upper world with her mother.

The guide, the ferry and the fare

The dead do not find the way alone. Hermes, the guide of souls, leads them down with his golden wand. At the water's edge waits Charon, the old ferryman, who takes the fare, a small coin called an obol that the living lay in the mouth of the dead. In most Greek tellings he ferries them over the Acheron; in Virgil and many later writers the crossing is over the Styx.

The fare is not enough without the rites. The shade of Patroclus comes to Achilles in a dream and begs to be buried quickly, so that he may pass the gates, for the other shades keep him back. In Virgil the unburied crowd the bank for a hundred years, stretching out their hands in longing for the farther shore, until at last they are allowed to cross.

The five rivers

Rivers bound and cross the realm, and their names say what they hold. Styx is the hateful, the river by whose water the gods swear their most binding oath. Acheron is woe. Cocytus is wailing. Pyriphlegethon, the fire-blazing, runs with flame. Lethe is forgetting, and whoever drinks its water loses the memory of their life.

The hound at the gate

At the gate lies Cerberus, the hound of Hades. Hesiod gives him fifty heads, and later art three. He fawns on those who come in, wagging his tail and laying back his ears, and devours any who try to leave. Only the great figures of myth get past him: Heracles drags him up into the light as the last of his labours, Orpheus lulls him with the lyre, and in Virgil the Sibyl throws him a cake of honey and drugged grain so that Aeneas can go by.

The judges at the crossroads

In the myth Socrates tells at the end of Plato's Gorgias, Zeus decrees that the dead be judged naked, stripped of body, rank and fine clothes, by judges who are naked too, so that soul looks upon soul and nothing hides the truth. His sons sit in a meadow where the road divides: Rhadamanthys judges those who come from Asia, Aeacus those from Europe, and Minos gives the final word when they are in doubt. One road leads to the Isles of the Blessed and the other to Tartarus. The judges read a soul as a doctor reads a body: a life of cruelty and lies leaves it scarred and crooked, and a life of justice leaves it straight.

The Asphodel Meadow

Most of the dead go neither up nor down. In Homer they wander the Asphodel Meadow, a plain of pale flowers, keeping something of their old manner and nothing of their old strength. Agamemnon still grieves over his murder, Achilles still asks after his son, and Ajax, still angry over the armour of Achilles, turns away from Odysseus without a word. It is not a punishment. It is the common lot, faint and joyless, and the poems tell it to show how much the living have.

Tartarus

Tartarus lies as far beneath the earth as the sky is above it: Hesiod says that a bronze anvil would fall nine days and nights from the sky to the earth, and nine more from the earth to Tartarus. The Titans are shut there behind bronze gates. Of the great offenders against the gods, Odysseus sees three. Tityos lies stretched over the ground while two vultures tear at his liver. Tantalus stands in a pool up to his chin, and the water drains away whenever he stoops to drink, while the wind tosses the fruit above him out of reach. Sisyphus heaves a great stone up a hill, and just short of the top it rolls back down.

Plato gives the pit a second use. In the Phaedo those whose wrongs cannot be cured are thrown in and never come out. Those whose wrongs were great but curable, such as one who struck a parent in anger and repented all his life, are cast in for a year and then washed out by the rivers to the Acherusian lake. There they cry out to those they wronged and beg to be let out. If the wronged forgive them, their suffering ends; if not, they are swept back, and so again, until they are forgiven.

Elysium and the Isles of the Blessed

For a favoured few there is another lot. Homer's Elysian plain lies at the ends of the earth, where fair-haired Rhadamanthys rules and life is easiest: no snow, no heavy storm, no rain, only the west wind blowing cool from the Ocean. Hesiod sets the heroes of the age of Troy in the Isles of the Blessed beside deep-swirling Ocean, where the earth bears honey-sweet fruit three times a year. Pindar opens the isles to those who keep their souls from all wrong through three lives in this world and three in the next. Virgil moves Elysium below the earth and gives it its own sun and stars, broad meadows, games, dances and song: the home of the good, the pious, the poets, and those who made life better by their arts.

The tale of Er

Plato ends the Republic with the story of Er, a soldier who lay ten days among the dead of a battle and on the twelfth woke on his funeral pyre to tell what he had seen. The souls came to a meadow with two openings into the earth and two into the sky, and judges sat between them. The just were sent up to the right, through the sky, and the unjust down to the left, each wearing a token of the judgement. From the other openings souls returned from journeys of a thousand years, those from below dusty and worn, those from above clean, and told one another what they had seen: every wrong repaid tenfold, and every kindness rewarded in the same measure.

After seven days in the meadow they journeyed to a column of light that binds the heavens, brighter than a rainbow, where the spindle of Necessity turns, with a Siren on each of its whorls singing a single note, so that together they make one harmony. Around it sit the three Fates, daughters of Necessity: Lachesis singing of what was, Clotho of what is, and Atropos of what will be.

The choice of lives

A prophet takes lots and patterns of lives from the lap of Lachesis and proclaims that each soul will choose its own life and its own guardian spirit: the blame belongs to the one who chooses, and god is blameless. The patterns are of every kind, tyrannies, beauty, fame, obscurity, the lives of animals. The soul with the first lot, which had come down from the heavens after a life of good habit without wisdom, seizes at once the greatest tyranny, and only afterwards sees that it holds the eating of his own children.

The others choose by what their last life taught them. Orpheus, who died at the hands of women, chooses to be a swan; Ajax a lion; Agamemnon an eagle. Odysseus, with the last lot, cured of ambition by his labours, searches a long time and finds lying neglected the life of a private man who minds his own business, and says he would have chosen it had his lot been first. Each soul is given its guardian spirit, its choice is spun fast by Clotho and made irreversible by Atropos, and it passes beneath the throne of Necessity.

The river of forgetting

Then the souls cross the burning plain of Lethe and camp by the river of Unmindfulness, whose water no vessel can hold. All must drink a measure, those without wisdom drink more, and each as they drink forgets everything. At midnight there is thunder and an earthquake, and they are carried up to their births like shooting stars. Er was not allowed to drink, and so he remembered.

The Greek mysteries taught their initiates the other road. The gold leaves buried with some of the dead tell them to pass by the first spring, beside a white cypress, and go on to the lake of Memory, and to say to its guardians that they are a child of Earth and starry Heaven, parched with thirst, and to ask for a drink of its cold water.