Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

Private Life 189
who served his son Pelops to the gods to test whether they had the
capacity to distinguish human from animal flesh. Tantalos was condemned
to stand in a pool of water with fruit trees dangling overhead.
He is, to use the word that derives from his particular form
of punishment, eternally tantalized, because whenever he bends to
drink water it recedes and whenever he stretches for the fruit overhead
the boughs sway out of reach. The overwhelming majority of
the dead were spared the ordeal of having to go through any postmortem
judgment. Although we hear of a judge named Minos in
The Odyssey, his task appears to have been confined to settling disputes
between the litigious dead. He did not have to determine their
moral culpability, far less to distinguish between the saved and the
damned.
The Privileged Few
In any system there often exists a privileged minority who do not
endure the same miserable lot as the rest of humanity, and the Greek
afterlife was no different in this respect. In The Odyssey, the old man
of the sea, called Proteus, delivers the following prophecy:
In your case, Zeus-born Menelaos, it is not fated that you should die and
meet your doom in horse-rearing Argos [where Menelaos ruled as king].
Instead the immortals will convey you to the Elysian plain and to the
bounds of the earth, where fair-haired Rhadamanthys [presumably the
king of this region] dwells, and where life is easiest for men. There is no
snow, nor heavy storm, nor rain, but Okeanos always sends the breezes of
soft-blowing Zephyros [the west wind] to refresh men. (4.561–68)
Menelaos is accorded this privileged status not because he has distinguished
himself during his life time, but because he married one
of Zeus’s daughters. What kind of existence awaited those who
dwelt in the Elysian fields is unclear. Apart from the extremely
favorable climatic conditions, whose predictability would surely
pall after a while, the environment appears to have been stultifying
in the extreme.
Hadean Bureaucracy
Charon, the ferryman who transported the dead across the
River Styx or the River Acheron, was elderly, unkempt, and disagreeable.
It was certainly advisable to pay him for his services.
A small coin called an obol was therefore placed in the deceased’s