The underworld was not Hell, which is a place designed specifically for suffering and punishment. How a person lived life while on earth certainly had a bearing on what happened in the afterlife, but by and large the classical world was less judgmental than many other contemporary and later cultures. Partly this was because even as a human lay in the maternal womb, Clotho of the Moirai wove the threads of his or her life and Lachesis, the second of the Dread Sisters, measured its length. (The Moirai are those children of Nyx also called the ‘Fates’, but the actual Greek means something more like ‘allotters’.) Thanks to the Moirai, what happened to a human during his mortal days was largely preordained – the important thing was instead how a person’s immortal spirit coped with whatever destiny threw at it.
But in a further twist, one’s character was considered as fixed from birth, which is how the Fates were able to factor a person’s reactions into his predestined path through life. The best a human could do was to assume that he had an inherently noble nature, and to be true to that nature when his character was tested (and the nature of most heroes – especially in Greek tragedy – was tested in an intense crucible indeed). In short, you were measured not by what you made of your life, but by how well your character stood up to it. In this respect, the Greeks and Romans had a different concept of what it meant to be human. Success or failure was preordained, and indeed, what the fates had in store might be ascertained by diligent enquiry at an oracle. What mattered was how you coped with it.
To the ancients, the earthly sojourn was the equivalent of taking the soul for a vigorous workout in the gym. It was a brief period spent at an unsustainable intensity which left you either a better person or a total wreck. When your ordained time was up, you had to leave, and in classical myth time was called by the third of the Fates who cut the thread and brought a human’s life to a close. This third fate was Atropos, whose name ‘the inexorable’ has been passed to atropine, the poison in deadly nightshade.
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tithonus and the perils of immortality
Cheating death was always a tricky business for a mortal, and most attempts did not turn out well. For example, Eos, goddess of the dawn, once asked Zeus to make her human lover Tithonus immortal. So Tithonus did not die. He just got older and older and more dried up and shrivelled, until eventually he became the first grasshopper. Since immortality cannot be taken away, Tithonus is still out there somewhere, hopping away.
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The Afterlife
Yours is the sleep eternal by which the soul
breaks the bonds of the body
Be it man, woman or child, none escapes
if you would gather them in
Youth finds no mercy, strength and
vigour eventually succumb
Here is found the end of nature’s work,
in you who passes no judgment
Whom no prayers can weaken, whose
purpose no vows can turn aside.
orphic hymn to death 86
To the Greeks and Romans, death was a new beginning. If the relatives of the deceased had done their work and performed the proper rituals, the deceased would be met by Hermes, god of those who pass boundaries. Hermes guided the recently departed to the banks of a river at the border of the underworld which they had to cross.
A ferryman guards these waters. This is dreadful Charon, unkempt and filthy, his tangled white beard dangling from his chin and his ragged cloak loosely knotted about his shoulders. He is aged, but a god is still vigorous and green in age, and a steady flame burns in his glowing eyes. He poles his boat along and tends to the sail, and his battered craft takes each soul across.
virgil aeneid 6.290ff
Charon, the ferryman, was the child of the two aspects of night, Nyx and Erebus, and thus himself a god. He was a servant of Hades (the brother of Zeus), and once, when Heracles forced the boatman to ferry him across though yet alive, an outraged Hades had the boatman bound in chains for a year. Charon’s services were not free, and the riverbank was packed with those who had suffered an irregular burial and therefore had not the coin to pay their fare. (For the Greeks this coin was an obol – a low denomination coin that was placed over the eyelids or in the mouth of the deceased.) What Charon did with the money is unknown – certainly boat maintenance and personal grooming were not over-represented in his budget.
Most believed the river bordering the underworld to be the Styx (‘the hateful’), though another candidate was the River Acheron, in northwestern Greece. This was believed to flow from the earthly to infernal realms because, not far from its headwaters, the river plummets through a series of terrifying gorges. The ancients thought that some part of the torrent plunged straight into the underworld, while the remainder went on to wind its peaceful way to the sea.
It is hard for living souls to enter the underworld because the entry to it is guarded by the great three-headed watchdog Cerberus. If the living stumble across the portal he guards, Cerberus makes sure that the trespassers continue their journey as the recently and messily deceased.
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later art and culture:
charon
So powerful is the image of Charon that he appears in Michelangelo’s otherwise Christian Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel, 1537–41. There, Charon is depicted rather as he is in Dante’s Inferno, which describes a trip to the Hades of antiquity as seen through a Christian perspective. Charon has been depicted in his own right in pictures such as Charon Ferrying the Shades by Pierre Subleyras in the 1730s, and the wonderful Joachim Patinir painting in the Prado Art Gallery in Madrid, 1515–24, but he is probably best known in modern times from the 1982 pop song by Chris de Burgh Don’t Pay the Ferryman.
Charon, a sole mythological character in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment.
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The shades of the dead
King Minos (the son of Europa,) was famed as a law-giver in life and in the underworld he was the judge of the dead. Mostly he arbitrated disputes among the dead themselves, but some felt he also had a say in the rough triage that followed the arrival of a new soul. For not all entered the halls of Hades. Some passed on to the Isles of the Blessed, the Elysian Fields. This destination was reserved for those souls who had acquitted themselves with such distinction and nobility in life that they were removed altogether from the mortal plane. Short of being asked to join the company of the gods themselves, this was the best a mortal could hope for.
On the other hand, there were those who had shown themselves unfit to be a part of the human stock at all. The human spirit is as indestructible as that of any god, so destroying these reprobates was not an option. Instead, they were tossed into the cosmic dustbin of Tartarus. There they joined the imprisoned Giants, Titans and others deemed unfit ever again to set foot on mother Gaia.
The vast majority of humanity ended in the underworld, as shades. A shade was essentially the same person as the deceased, but in greatly attenuated form. It remembered, indeed yearned for, the intense sensations and passions of an earthly existence. With the right ritual a shade could be evoked from the infernal realms, and converse with the living. Thus Odysseus once sought counsel from the dead, feeding them with blood from sacrificial victims, which he poured into a small pit dug in the earth.