The hero who conquers death, like a resurrection god, experiences the afterlife, and returns to this world, knowing with certainty the ultimate truth about life and death, unlike us poor, ordinary mortals who can never do the same. This is what Anticlea reveals to her son: This is the doom of mortals when they die, for no longer do sinews hold bones and flesh together, but the mighty power of blazing fire consumes all, as soon as the life breath leaves our white bones and flesh, and the soul like a dream flutters and flies away, Many other souls come up, including a parade of beautiful heroines.
Odysseus sees a group of illustrious heroes, among whom is Achilles. Odysseus also saw a group of sinners being punished, for example, Tantalus and Sisyphus, who will be identified below. The Homeric Underworld. The Homeric picture of the Underworld is not clearly defined. The heroes seem to form a special group in a meadow of asphodel, but no special paradise is described like the Elysian Fields of later authors. These souls are vague spirits with all the passions they had while alive, drifting joylessly in the gloom.
The group of great mythological sinners identified may occupy a special hell, but this is not clear. There is no mention at all of the souls of ordinary mortals, who must also end up in this realm. This then is the afterlife as imagined in the eighth and seventh centuries B. Plato concludes his Republic with a religious and philosophical vision of the afterlife.
A man named ER died in war; after twelve days his body was uncorrupted and he returned to life, sent as a messenger from the other world to describe all that he had seen. After his soul had departed, it traveled with many other souls and came to a divine place where there were two openings in the earth; opposite were two other openings in the upper region of the sky.
In the space between these four openings were judges who passed sentence. They ordered the just to go to the right through one of the openings upward into the sky, but they sent the unjust to the left through one of the downward openings. Er also saw from the remaining two openings some souls coming up out of the earth, covered with dust and dirt, and others descending from the sky, pure and shining.
When they were all reunited on the plain, they recounted their experiences. The Sinners. The first group from out of the earth wept as they recounted their torments, which lasted one thousand years. Everyone had to suffer an appropriate penalty for each sin, ten times over.
Those who were extraordinarily wicked such as the evil tyrant Ardiaeus , guilty of many murders and other unholy deeds were never allowed to return out of the earth; but wild men of fiery aspect seized and flayed them and hurled them down into Tartarus. The Virtuous. According to these epic heroes, the journey is not a pleasant one. Throughout the description of the underworld in Book XI of the Odyssey, Homer depicts the land of the dead as gloomy, frightening, dark and generally unpleasant for his heroes to endure.
There is nothing rewarding about an existence there. The darkness of the atmosphere of the underworld stands in direct contrast to the lavish and luxurious lifestyle enjoyed by the gods on Mount Olympus. Translations by E. Rieu Aeneas cannot meet his mother in the Underworld, as she is a goddess. He also knows that his father is dead and is told to go and visit him in a dream.
Odysseus may not be able to meet his father in the Underworld because he is still at home, on his farm, mourning for Odysseus and, if Homer did indeed compose Book 24 of the Odyssey, then Odysseus must meet him and there finish the reconciliation that must take place for the poem to be rounded off successfully. From a view to the composing of the poem, it would be too much for Odysseus to meet both his parents in the Underworld.
Thus, Homer has made a conscious choice. However, it may also be symbolic that Odysseus meets the woman who gave him life in the Kingdom of the Dead. Thus, the poems are similar, but also different. This ties in with the points made above — Aeneas has to be half-immortal to add prestige to the Roman race, whose story The Aeneid really is.
Odysseus has to have mortal parents, because his is a story about a man and going home. Both men also meet unburied friends. This is a moment of light comedy, which makes the darkness all around seem more black, but also reminds us that Homer was performing for a live audience and could not afford to bore them with over long seriousness.
For Aeneas, the friend is Palinaurus, sacrificed for their safe passage, and killed by vagabonds on the very shores of Italy. This is ironic, and raises a wry smile. Both of these unburied friends beg for burial. The Sybil who accompanies Aeneas scolds Palinaurus, but promises that he will be buried, not by Aeneas but by the locals, and that the areas will bear his name forever.
The difference in the stories however, also highlights the differences between the heroes. Odysseus is a man, a leader and a friend — he will return to bury his comrade. Aeneas, however, is bound for higher things. Odysseus also sees King Minos judging the dead, as does Aeneas. Aeneas sees the souls of women who had died for love, and even more importantly, meets Dido. She will not speak to him, and runs away.
The story of Dido and Aeneas, and of their quarrel when he has to leave, and her subsequent suicide, take up all of Books 3 and 4. In The Iliad also, if tradition is to be believed, by Homer , Ajax and Odysseus have a quarrel, and Ajax kills himself after realises that he has killed some sheep in a fit of madness, thinking they were soldiers approximately.
Odysseus meet Ajax, but Ajax will not speak to him, and runs away. The resulting route in the eastern Mediterranean to the Ionian Islands is rather restricted, portrayed as a historical journey that later became greatly exaggerated. A cave there was sometimes linked with heroic catabasis. Though T. Severin is sympathetic to the view that western Greece could once have been regarded as the edge of the world cf.
Severin is an expert seaman and is reasonably well informed about ancient evidence, but the argument is naively historicist. And as often with popular localization, the book expends more energy on trying to astound the reader than explaining the methodology in a clear manner. One would place the Odyssean Underworld at or just outside the pillars of Heracles.
Soon afterward Ernle Bradford, an experienced sailor with a background in Classics, made the same argument more diffidently. The Gibraltar localization at least has the benefit of respecting the peripheral nature of the Odyssean underworld entrance, and the Pillars of Heracles were not uncommonly considered the edge of the world in early Greek myth However, a glance at E. This is proposed by Armin Wolf, a Medievalist who with the assistance of a brother produced the most comprehensive compilation of localization theories Noting that the abduction of Persephone was located in the fields outside of Enna in Antiquity, A.
The excellent travel writer Wolfgang Geisthovel follows A. Wolf in this and other localizations, and at least makes the theory entertaining as travel writing But of course the hypothesis is not defensible if judged in geographical or rational terms. Poor Odysseus must moor his boat at Himera, a far walk from Enna, and if Enna is apparently where Hades ascends, it is not where he descends with Persephone The wanderings are told by a character who is perpetually lost, and his travel to the underworld episode depends on the instructions and magical assistance of Circe.
As with indications of travel in the rest of the wanderings usually wind direction and duration of sailing , the information that Odysseus reports about his voyage to and back from the Underworld is meager and incomplete.
The Odyssey would seem more interested in exploring the poetics of Odysseus meeting shades than providing an itinerary, explicit or latent, for travel to and from Hades.
The epic does not plausibly motivate the journey and seems unconcerned by inconcinnity, such as the apparent conflation of necromancy with catabasis. But localizers tend to disregard reception of the poem, portraying themselves as uncovering hidden meanings. Ancient as well as modern localizers would have us believe that the wanderings contain key bits of information about real Mediterranean locations, whether vestigial or allusive Conceiving of the text as a transformed or veiled account of an actual journey by a historical Odysseus, they are confident in their ability to crack its code.
But we should also recognize that Homerists indulge in similar proclivities, if less baldly and clumsily. With recourse to varying degrees of historicism and intentionalism, they have interpreted the wanderings as a reflection or transformation of a preceding reality. The supposition that the Homeric wanderings innovatively modify a geographically anchored version of the wanderings, as in the lying tales, is especially popular.
The possibility that the Homeric poem inspired subsequent localization is of less interest to Homerists, since localization is dismissed as non-Homeric. But ancient localization of the wanderings, which may be an organic aspect of Odyssean myth rather than reception of the Odyssey , is an important aspect of the cultural history of Antiquity.
Though the poem does not locate the scene at a known geographical place, the behavior of Odysseus suggests necromancy. The relevance of historical places of necromancy to the poem, whether in terms of origins or reception, should continue to be discussed. This point of view, both in Antiquity and in the modern world, tends to contain the unfortunate implication that myth and poetry are free of the taint of the real world.
The Homeric text does not place the wanderings of Odysseus in locations known to the hero, but the wanderings would seem to occur in a Mediterranean inhabited by exotic non-Greeks as well as more supernatural beings The postcolonial interpretation of the epic as employing discourses arising from historical and geographical realities of the time of its composition avoids the positivism of other interpretative positions surveyed above.
The concerns of this approach, however, are not as relevant to underworld episode. But besides identifying difficulties of popular localization, I have pointed out that its methodology is comparable to that of Homerists to some degree Both popular localization and Homeric studies undertake close reading in a search for clues, and the arguments of both can be breathtaking in their boldness. This may seem to condemn the propensity of Homerists to speculate as much as it defends popular localization.
But the spatiality of the wanderings remains a fascinating and important topic, if best pursued with self-conscious awareness of our assumptions and methodology Braccesi ed.
My website « In the Wake of Odysseus » provides more recent examples. See A. Wolf , Hatte Homer eine Karte? Heubeck , S. Finkelberg ed. Heubeck, op. See I. Malkin , The Returns of Odysseus , Berkeley, University of California Press, , for the historical and geographical employment of nostoi myths, including that of Odysseus. Kirk , J. Hesiod is essential ; see D.
Clay, « The World of Hesiod », Ramus 21 , p. See further A. Tradizioni, Rotte, Paesaggi , Paestum, Pandemos, , p. The observations of D. Ogden , op. Human perception of spatiality may be impossible at the edge of the earth, but see J. Burgess , « Belatedness in the Odyssey », in F. Montanari , A. Burgess , op.
0コメント