Philip II and Alexander the Great: Father and Son ... - Historia Antigua

ALEXANDER IN THE UNDERWORLD 211
strangely more akin to the reincarnated lives that seemingly await the
souls that drink from the bad spring. 13
4. The Importance of Turning Right
Thirteen of the tablets explicitly discuss the direction in which one
should turn within the underworld (L1–L6a, L8). In all except two of
these, the direction mentioned is rightward. 14 In one particularly emphatic
though partly obscure tablet (L8), the tablet-bearer is directed
toward something (a group of worshippers?) on the right and then
again directed to follow a rightward road to the meadows and groves
of Persephone. 15 The tablets that mention only a single (good) water
source, such as those from Eleutherna, assert that this is “on the right”
(L5a–L6a). More complicated are the directions in the more elaborate
tablets. These for the most part assert, initially, that the bad source is
on the right, and tell the tablet-bearer not even to go near it. Does this
imply that the direction in which the bearer must turn to fi nd the
good source is leftward? Not necessarily. Some tablets (e.g., L1) seem
to imply that the good source is simply further on in the same direction,
i.e., further rightward. 16 The default notion that the good source
should be on the right, and the natural assumption that it should be
on the opposite side to the bad spring, may explain why one tablet,
the one from Petelia (L3) should begin by locating the bad source
explicitly on the left, for all that it does not then go on to specify the
location of the good source. One further tablet (L6a) does explicitly
locate the good spring “on the left,” albeit not on the left of Hades as
such but merely to the left of the cypress tree, which, confusingly, is
associated with the location of the bad source in the other tablets. 17
The importance of taking a right turn in the underworld has a pedigree
also in the broader literature of the underworld. In the Republic
Plato has the souls of the just, after judgment, take the right-hand
road, while the unjust take the left. We may map this onto his claim
in the Gorgias that the dead are judged in a meadow, from which two
paths lead away, one to the Isles of the Blessed, and one to Tartarus,
“Hell,” although no directions are specifi ed here. 18 And even more
famously Virgil too presents us with a bifurcation in the underworld,
with the left path leading to the tortures of Tartarus and the right to
the delights of the Elysian Fields. 19
How does this relate to the Romance? The Romance is emphatic
that the left-hand path is fruitless for Alexander, even taking him
down it for a wasted half day before bringing him back again just to
make the point. The right-hand path is similarly marked out as the