Greek Mythology, page 29
Haides’ name (‘Unseen’) was considered so unlucky that by the fifth century BC people commonly refered to him as Plouton (‘Wealthy’), perhaps because of the rich minerals which, like his kingdom, lay beneath the earth.
Haides’ court included other deities. Chief was his wife, Persephone, who lived with him for only four months out of twelve. Lonely, Haides amused himself with Minthe (a nymph of the River Cocytus), but Persephone found out. She trampled her rival underfoot. Poor Minthe was transformed into a herb (mint) and a mountain near Pylos was named after her, with a sanctuary to Haides on its slopes. Another paramour was luckier. Leuce died a peaceful death and was changed into a white poplar.
From earliest times, Haides’ lieutenant was Thanatos (Death), the twin brother of Hypnos (Sleep), described by Hesiod as having: ‘An iron heart and a spirit as pitiless as bronze. He possesses whatever mortal he takes hold of and is hateful even to the gods.’
Hateful Thanatos may have been, but both he and Haides were considered to be as central to human experience as any other god: neither virtuous nor wicked, just inevitable. Only mortals were good or bad. Classical Greeks believed that in the Underworld each soul was judged to decide its fate and that the dead were punished or rewarded for their behaviour while alive. Plato’s Socrates playfully describes Zeus explaining:
I have appointed my own sons as judges: two, Minos and Rhadamanthus, are from Asia; one, Aeacus, is from Europe. When they are dead, they will sit in judgment in the field beside the crossroads. From here one road leads to the Islands of the Blessed, the other to Tartarus. Rhadamanthus shall judge the Asiatics, Aeacus the Europeans, with Minos as final arbiter, if the others have doubts.
When Plato wrote this in the fourth century BC, an ‘official’ geography of Hades was evolving – but it was very different from Homer’s vision.
Homeric Hades
In the Iliad, none of the action takes place in Hades, but we do learn about it. Sited beside the River Styx’s icy waterfall and protected by a grim dog, Hades lies just below the surface of the earth. When Poseidon causes an earthquake, Haides ‘ruler of the dead, sprang up in terror from his throne and bellowed loud in fear lest – up above – Poseidon, who encircles the dry land, might crack open the earth and expose to men and gods the houses of the dead, so hideous and mouldering that even the gods shudder as they see them.’
We learn, too, that being dead was not of itself sufficient qualification to enter Hades. Rather, corpses needed to be buried or cremated. Thus at Troy Patroclus’ ghost (the mirror of the hero when alive, with the same physique, eyes, voice and clothing) begs Achilles:
Bury me as quickly as you can and let me enter through the gates of Hades. The souls, which bear the image of the dead, are shunning me and will not allow me across the river to join them, but I am wandering just as I am by Haides’ house with its wide gates.
The three-headed dog Cerberus, guardian of the Underworld, sits at the feet of his master, Haides. (First-century BC statue from Gortyn, Crete.)
The Iliad also tells of a special area in Hades, called Tartarus, reserved for whoever disobeyed the gods’ will. Zeus threatens that if anyone defies him: ‘I shall hurl him down to the mists of distant Tartarus, in the deepest pit beneath the earth with its iron gates and brazen threshold, as far below Hades as earth is beneath the skies.’ The Odyssey fleshes out this subterranean landscape, revealing more about how the spirits journeyed there. Before Hermes conducts the souls of the dead suitors from Ithaca to the Underworld, using his kerykeion:
he roused them from their sleep, and, gibbering, they followed him. As gibbering bats flit back and forth in the darkest corners of a cave, when one falls from the cluster where they cling on to each another and the rock, so they went with him, gibbering, and gracious Hermes led them down the dripping path. Past Ocean’s streams, past the White Rock, past the gateway of the sun they went and past the Land of Dreams, and soon they came to the Asphodel Meadow, where the spirits live, which bear the image of those men who work no more.
The geography tallies reasonably well with the Odyssey’s description of Odysseus’ voyage to consult the spirits of the dead in a setting that bears some similarity to Ephyra. Here, Odysseus digs a pit into which he pours libations of milk, honey, wine and water, sprinkles white barley meal, slits the throat of sacrificial sheep, and lets the blood gush down. Greedily the spirits jostle to eat and drink. Homer describes them by category: first heroic women – Odysseus’ mother, Anticlea, Jocasta (called here ‘Epicasta’), Leda, Phaedra and many more; next heroic warriors, including Agamemnon, Patroclus and Ajax (who even in death blames Odysseus for his suicide). Grimly, Achilles, who at Troy preferred everlasting fame to long life, comments: ‘I would rather be a hired labourer, working in a poor man’s house, but alive, than the king of kings among the dead.’ Nonetheless when Odysseus tells him of Neoptolemus, ‘Achilles’ ghost strode off across the meadow thick with asphodel, rejoicing at the news of his son’s glory’. As, dreamlike, the scene shifts from the sacrificial pit, Odysseus witnesses the torture of the damned before the sheer volume of spirits and their blood-chilling screams cause him to flee, ‘terrified lest Persephone send up from Haides’ house the head of the grim Gorgon’.
Homer’s Hades is a place of monochrome monotony, where souls remember their past lives with aching nostalgia, a vision captured by Sappho: ‘When you are dead, you will lie forgotten. No one will mourn you, no one bring roses for you from Pieria. In death as in life you will be quite anonymous, wandering vaguely, with the aimless, nameless dead.’
Hesiodic Hades
Homer’s contemporary, Hesiod, imagines Haides’ realm more like a city than a single house. Thus the goddess of the River Styx has her own home, roofed with huge stones and supported with silver pillars, while her stream, ‘eternal and primordial’, ‘the famous icy water which trickles from a high and overhanging cliff’, spouts through the rocks.
Night (Nyx) too has a house:
swathed in dark cloud. Before it stands Atlas, rigid and immobile, holding the broad heaven on his head and tireless hands. Here Night and Day come close and greet each other as they pass the mighty brazen threshold.… Here, too, Night’s children have their homes – Sleep and Death, both terrifying gods.… And before them stand the echoing halls of mighty Haides, ruler of the Underworld, and dread Persephone.
In the Iliad ‘the hound of the hateful death god’ guards Haides’ house. Hesiod provides more details. He is ‘a monster which cannot be tamed or spoken of – Cerberus, who eats raw flesh, the hound of Haides, with a harsh bark, fifty-headed, merciless and strong’:
He has a vicious trick. He fawns on all who enter, wagging his tail and setting back his ears, but he will not let them leave. Rather, he keeps watch and feasts on any he finds leaving through the gates of mighty Haides and dread Persephone.
Charon
In the fifth century BC one of the most memorable of all Hades’ inhabitants is first mentioned: Charon, the ferryman who punts dead souls across the Acheron. Again, local geography may mirror that of Hades: east of Ephyra in antiquity was the Acherousian Lake, into which flowed the Acheron and Cocytus. It has since been drained, but some argue that pilgrims visiting the Necromanteion were rowed across the lake as if they were approaching Hades.
The first surviving work to name Charon (‘Keen-Sighted’) is Euripides’ Alcestis. Anticipating death, Alcestis herself exclaims: ‘I can see him sitting at the oars in his rowing boat in the lake – Charon, the ferryman of the dead. He is sitting at the oars and calling me: “Why are you waiting! Hurry! You are delaying us!” He is calling to me angrily, impatiently.’ Aristophanes provides a further detail. In Frogs, Heracles informs Dionysus that before crossing the Acheron he must pay Charon a fare of two obols. Usually it was half that sum, and from the fifth century BC the dead were regularly buried with an obol (a low-denomination coin) in their mouths. Only the dead of Hermione, the city in the Argolid, were exempt. Strabo explains that they knew a short-cut to Hades, which bypassed the Acheron.
The fifth-century BC artist Polygnotus depicted Charon in a wall-painting which adorned the Lesche (‘Club Room’) at Delphi. Elaborating on Odysseus’ visit to the Underworld, he could not resist including Charon. Pausanias describes:
a reedy river, clearly the Acheron, containing outlines of fish so indistinct that you might think them shadows. A boat is on the river with the ferryman at the oars … Charon, a man weighted by age.… By Charon’s boat on the Acheron’s banks is a large group, including one man who in life had not been dutiful to his father, and is now being strangled by him …
Eternal Punishment
The idea that the virtuous were rewarded in Hades while wrongdoers were appropriately punished became increasingly popular. Supervising these punishments were demi-gods, or daimones (though, unlike ‘demons’, the Greek word has no pejorative overtones). Polygnotus’ painting included:
Eurynomus, whom the guides at Delphi say is one of the daimones of Hades. He devours the flesh from corpses, leaving only bones.… His colour is the colour of meat flies, somewhere between blue and black; he is baring his teeth and squatting with a vulture’s skin spread out beneath him.
In the Odyssey, Odysseus witnesses some of these punishments: two vultures perch on Tityos (who attempted to rape Leto near Delphi), constantly tearing at his liver; Sisyphus (who tried to cheat death) forever pushes a boulder uphill, which always rolls back down just before reaching the top; while Tantalus, who fed his son Pelops to the gods is:
standing in a pool. The water almost reached his chin. He was thirsty but he could not drink. Whenever the old man bent down and tried to drink the water, it was swallowed up and disappeared, and at his feet was only the dark earth. A god had made all dry. Above his head were tall leafy trees, all thick with fruit – pear trees and pomegranates, apple trees with shining fruit, sweet figs, fat olives. But whenever the old man reached up to seize them in his hands, a wind blew, sweeping them all away towards the massing clouds.
Homer and Hesiod knew the place of punishment as Tartarus, setting it apart from Hades, reserving it specifically for the Titans. Hesiod described its location:
Falling from heaven for nine days and nights, a bronze anvil would reach the earth on the tenth. Similarly a bronze anvil falling from earth for nine days and nights would reach Tartarus on the tenth. A bronze barrier surrounds it. Night spreads in three circlets like a necklace all around it, and high above it grow the roots of earth and the barren sea.… It is clammy, at the very limits of the earth.
Elsewhere Hesiod says that anyone who entered Tartarus’ bronze gates and fell into the yawning chasm would plummet for a year, buffeted by winds, before he reached the ground.
By the fourth century BC Tartarus was included within Hades, a place of torture for not only Titans, but mortal criminals, too, a blueprint for Hell and Purgatory. The irredeemable stayed there forever, but each year lesser criminals were granted temporary release so they could beg their victims for mercy. If pardoned, their suffering ended. If not, the felon was led back to torture.
One of our earliest sources to imagine Tartarus, the late sixth- /early fifth-century BC Anacreon admitted his terror: ‘Often I shed tears in fear of Tartarus. The descent to Hades is racked with pain. Only one thing is for certain: once that descent is made, there’s no return.’
The Elysian Fields
As Tartarus became more ‘democratic’, so Elysium (or more properly the Elysian Fields), once the exclusive domain of heroes, increasingly admitted the souls of the mundanely virtuous. Its location too shifted over time. Hesiod sited it near Ocean’s shores on the Islands of the Blessed, where:
happy heroes live. Wheat-bearing earth produces for them fruit as sweet as honey, which ripens three times every year, far from the immortal gods. Cronus rules them – Zeus, the father of gods and men, released him from his chains – and they enjoy equal honour and glory.
To Homer, the Elysian Fields were equally remote: ‘There men live lives completely free from labour. There is no snow, no gale, no thunderstorm. Rather, Ocean cools men with soft-singing breezes from the west.’ Pindar imagined a similarly idyllic scene, where his patrician patrons could continue to enjoy their earthly pleasures: ‘In meadows outside their city red roses bloom and trees, fragrant with incense, weighed down with golden fruit. Some amuse themselves with riding and wrestling, others with draughts and the lyre…’ Developing the relatively common idea of metempsychosis (the transmigration of souls, where the dead are reborn as humans or animals), Pindar suggests that the virtuous experience the cycle of death and rebirth three times before being automatically admitted to the Islands of the Blessed. The idea probably evolved in Mystery religions, such as those at Eleusis. Indeed, ‘Elysium’ and ‘Eleusis’ may both come from eleusō, ‘I release’ (from suffering). In Frogs, Aristophanes explores this concept, imagining a party of dead Eleusinian initiates singing hymns to Iacchus, the god who is leading them to Elysium.
Leaving Hades
Plato’s Socrates believed in reincarnation, too. Advocating a virtuous life, he agreed that ‘man’s soul is immortal. At one point it reaches a conclusion, which we call “dying”; at another it is reborn; but it never perishes.’ However, to experience rebirth, the soul must first leave Hades and erase all memory of its time there and its former lives. This it achieves by drinking from another of the rivers of the Underworld: Lethe (‘Forgetfulness’).
Metempsychosis and reincarnation, however, belong to the worlds of metaphysics and philosophy more comfortably than to mythology. In Greek legend only a very few return from Hades with their memories intact. These are the heroes who have made the journey to the Underworld while still alive: Heracles and Theseus, as well as Odysseus. And Orpheus, who emerged from Hades to sing beside the waters of the Helicon ben-eath the snow-capped peaks of Mount Olympus at Dion, where this book began.
Ephyra in History & Today
Pausanias identifies Ephyra as the inspiration for Homer’s Hades in the Odyssey. ‘Here’, he writes, ‘is the Acherousian Lake, the River Acheron and the noxious stream called the Cocytus. It seems to me that Homer must have visited this area and in his bold description of Hades gave its rivers the names of those in Thesprotia.’ If so, Homer also gave himself license: elsewhere in the Odyssey he tells how Odysseus visited the city of Ephyra ‘in a swift ship, in search of man-killing poisons that he might smear on to his bronze-tipped arrows’.
The underground chamber at Ephyra is thought by some to be associated with the Oracle of the Dead.
While in more common versions of another myth, Theseus and Peirithous try to abduct Persephone from Hades, Pausanias records a tradition setting it at Cichyrus (as Ephyra was also known), while Plutarch elaborates (using the alternative names Epirus and Molossia for this region of Thesprotia and Aidoneus for Haides):
Theseus travelled with Peirithous to Epirus in his quest for the daughter of the Molossian king Aidoneus. This man called his wife ‘Persephone’, his daughter ‘Kore’ and his dog ‘Cerberus’. He instructed his daughter’s suitors to fight with this dog, and promised her to anyone who defeated it, but when he discovered that they were there not to woo but to steal his child he seized them both. He killed Peirithous (by means of the dog) and kept Theseus locked up in solitary confinement.
Bronze Age pottery has been found at Ephyra, but the Necromanteion (‘Oracle of the Dead’) first enters the record in a racy story by Herodotus (the raciest elements of which are omitted below). He writes of Periander, the early sixth-century BC tyrannos of Corinth:
One day he stripped all the Corinthian women naked because of his wife Melissa. He had sent envoys to the Necromanteion on the River Acheron in Thesprotia to ask about a monetary deposit which a friend had left him, but Melissa’s ghost refused to reveal its location because she was cold and naked and unable to wear the clothes she had been buried in, since they had not been burned in the fire.… So on Periander’s instruction, all Corinth’s women went to the sanctuary of Hera dressed in their finest clothes as if for a festival. There Periander posted guards and stripped them all, freeborn and servants alike, and heaping the clothes in a pit he burned them as he prayed to Melissa. When he sent a second envoy, Melissa’s ghost told him where the deposit had been left.
Ephyra flourished thanks to its proximity to the port at Glykis Limen (‘Sweet Harbour’), with capacity for 150 to 200 ships. In the fourth or third century BC the hill of the Necromanteion was flattened, erasing all traces of previous structures, and some of the buildings whose foundations still survive were erected. Burned by the Romans in 168 BC, the site was largely abandoned until in the eighteenth century AD a Church of St John the Baptist and a fortified two-storey house were built.
Debate bedevils the site. The remains are inconclusive – a series of outer rooms cluster round a central hall, beneath which is a vaulted chamber accessible only by ladder. Convinced that it was the Necromanteion, Sotirios Dakaris, excavating from the late 1950s to the mid-1970s, identified the outer rooms as dormitories, where pilgrims slept before undergoing initiation. The rituals (he said) included eating hallucinogenic lupin seeds and broad beans, whose remains he discovered. Dakaris claimed that initiates were led through a dark labyrinth (whose foundations survive), reminiscent of Plato’s description of the path to Hades: ‘There seem to be many forks and turnings, as I infer from the rites and rituals, which we perform here on earth.’
