Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

188 Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks
Hades is well summed up by Achilles’ observation in Book 11 of The
Odyssey that he would rather work as a day laborer for a man who
had little property than be lord of all the spirits of the dead (lines
489–91). Because the dead have been worn out by their earthly existence,
it is not surprising that they are described as “strengthless”
and bereft of their physical powers.
Worse than that, the dead are condemned to experience for all
eternity the mental anguish to which they were subjected when
alive. The shade of Agamemnon, the leader of the Greek forces at
Troy, can do nothing but eternally lament the untrustworthiness of
women—a subject particularly dear to his heart in view of the fact
that he was murdered by his wife Klytaimnestra on his return from
the war. Similarly, the Greek hero Ajax is unable to forget the rancor
that he feels toward Odysseus, who was judged more worthy
than himself in the contest for Achilles’ gold armor. Although we
cannot know whether the Greeks would have drawn any edifying
moral from such memorable images of unresolved mental torment,
they serve as chilling reminders of the unending pain that awaits
those in Hades who have left “unfinished business” up on earth.
Equally pathetic is the preoccupation of the dead with the life that
they have left behind. When summoned from below, they are eager,
indeed greedy, for news of their relatives. Shorn of existence, however,
they have nothing to report in return. All in all, it is as if the
Homeric dead are caught in a time warp, unable to move beyond
the recollection of their last moments on earth.
They remain, too, in the same physical condition as they were
at the precise moment of their death. In The Odyssey, we hear that
the shades include “marriageable virgins and much-enduring old
men . . . and many who had been wounded with bronze spears and
war-killed men holding their bloodied armor” (11.38–41). Similarly,
in Sophokles’ Oedipus the King, the king informs the citizens of Thebes
that the reason why he blinded himself after discovering that he
had killed his father and married his mother was so that he would
not have to endure their gaze down in Hades (lines 1371–73).
The Perpetually Damned
Deep in the bowels of Hades was a windy region called Tartaros,
to which were consigned all the most miserable sinners. This did not
include serial killers and rapists—they would almost certainly have
ended up among the general mass of mankind—but those who had
outraged and insulted the dignity of the gods. Such was Tantalos,