Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

Private Life 187
believed to circle the inhabited earth, and “beneath the depths of
the earth.” In other words, it could be reached by sailing to the far
west or by entering certain caves. In Book 10 of The Odyssey, the
witch Kirke informs Odysseus, who is eager to consult the dead,
that he must sail across Okeanos until he comes to the wild coast
and groves of Persephone “where the tall poplars grow and willows
that quickly shed their seeds” (508ff.). After beaching his ship,
he is to seek the rock where the rivers Pyriphlegethon (“Blazinglike-fire”)
and Kokytos (“Wailing”) flow into a river called Acheron
(possibly “Sorrow”). Perhaps Odysseus is instructed to take this
route because he is a seasoned seafarer, or perhaps it is simply less
unpleasant than the land route.
In Book 24 of The Odyssey, Hermes, the escort of the dead, leads
his charge by the land route. This traverses “the dark, mouldy
ways”—a fitting path, we might say, for rotting cadavers. Hermes
and his crew of gibbering dead then pass Okeanos, the White
Rock, the gates of the sun god Helios, and the realm of dreams.
Eventually they reach the asphodel meadow, so named for a type
of wild flower that grows there. They are now officially in the
realm of Hades, where “the spirits of the dead dwell, the phantoms
of men who are worn out,” as Homer puts it. And it is here,
too, that Homer’s description peters out. We learn nothing about
the appearance of Hades, its size, its notable landmarks, or its
divisions. All that we know is that it was dark and windy. Perhaps
Homer’s imagination failed him, or perhaps he thought it illomened
to say more. It is possible, too, that the featurelessness of
Hades may have something to do with its impenetrable darkness.
The word Hades, which denotes both the god of the underworld
and the underworld itself, means literally “that which is unseen.”
Not the least forbidding aspect of the kingdom is its essential
unknowability.
It may strike us as something of a paradox that the Greeks had
such an elaborate ritual for dealing with death and burial when
their ideas about the afterlife were apparently so indistinct and colorless.
Their pictorial imagination also seems to have stopped dead
at the entrance to Hades. Vase paintings rarely provide more than a
glimpse of what lies beyond.
The Miserable Homeric Dead
Everything that Homer tells us about the dead suggests that
their condition was lamentable in the extreme. The quality of life in