b. The first region of Tartarus contains the cheerless Asphodel Fields, where souls of heroes stray without purpose among the throngs of less distinguished dead that twitter like bats, and where only Orion still has the heart to hunt the ghostly deer. None of them but would rather live in bondage to a landless peasant than rule over all Tartarus. Their one delight is in libations of blood poured to them by the living: when they drink they feel themselves almost men again. Beyond these meadows lie Erebus and the palace of Hades and Persephone. To the left of the palace, as one approaches it, a white cypress shades the pool of Lethe, where the common ghosts flock down to drink. Initiated souls avoid this water, choosing to drink instead from the pool of Memory, shaded by a white poplar [?], which gives them a certain advantage over their fellows. Close by, newly arrived ghosts are daily judged by Minos, Rhadamanthys, and Aeacus at a place where three roads meet. Rhadamanthys tries Asiatics and Aeacus tries Europeans; but both refer the difficult cases to Minos. As each verdict is given the ghosts are directed along one of the three roads: that leading back to the Asphodel Meadows, if they are neither virtuous nor evil; that leading to the punishment-field of Tartarus, if they are evil; that leading to the orchards of Elysium, if they are virtuous.
c. Elysium, ruled over by Cronus, lies near Hades’s dominions, its entrance close to the pool of Memory, but forms no part of them; it is a happy land of perpetual day, without cold or snow, where games, music, and revels never cease, and where the inhabitants may elect to be reborn on earth whenever they please. Near by are the Fortunate Islands, reserved for those who have been three times born, and three times attained Elysium. But some say that there is another Fortunate Isle called Leuce in the Black Sea, opposite the mouths of the Danube, wooded and full of beasts, wild and tame, where the ghosts of Helen and Achilles bold high revelry and declaim Homer’s verses to heroes who have taken part in the events celebrated by him.
d. Hades, who is fierce and jealous of his rights, seldom visits the upper air, except on business or when he is overcome by sudden lust. Once he dazzled the Nymph Minthe with the splendour of his golden chariot and its four black horses, and would have seduced her without difficulty had not Queen Persephone made a timely appearance and metamorphosed Minthe into sweet-smelling mint. On another occasion Hades tried to violate the Nymph Leuce, who was similarly metamorphosed into the white poplar standing by the pool of Memory. He willingly allows none of his subjects to escape, and few who visit Tartarus return alive to describe it, which makes him the most hated of the gods.
e. Hades never knows what is happening in the world above, or in Olympus, except for fragmentary information which comes to him when mortals strike their hands upon the earth and invoke him with oaths and curses. His most prized possession is the helmet of invisibility, given him as a mark of gratitude by the Cyclopes when he consented to release them at Zeus’s order. All the riches of gems and precious metals hidden beneath the earth are his, but he owns no property above ground, except for certain gloomy temples in Greece and, possibly, a herd of cattle in the island of Erytheia which, some say, really belong to Helius.
f. Queen Persephone, however, can be both gracious and merciful. She is faithful to Hades, but has had no children by him and prefers the company of Hecate, goddess of witches, to his. Zeus himself honours Hecate so greatly that he never denies her the ancient power which she has always enjoyed: of bestowing on mortals, or withholding from them, any desired gift. She has three bodies and three heads-lion, dog, and mare.
g. Tisiphone, Alecto, and Megaera, the Erinnyes or Furies, live in Erebus, and are older than Zeus or any of the other Olympians. Their task is to hear complaints brought by mortals against the insolence of the young to the aged, of children to parents, of hosts to guests, and of householders or city councils to suppliants-and to punish such crimes by hounding the culprits relentlessly, without rest or pause, from city to city and from country to country. These Erinnyes are crones, with snakes for hair, dogs’ heads, coal-black bodies, bats’ wings, and bloodshot eyes. In their hands they carry brass-studded scourges, and their victims die in torment. It is unwise to mention them by name in conversation; hence they are usually styled the Eumenides, which means ‘The Kindly Ones’-as Hades is styled Pluton, or Pluto, ‘The Rich One’.
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1. The mythographers made a bold effort to reconcile the conflicting views of the afterworld held by the primitive inhabitants of Greece. One view was that ghosts lived in their tombs, or underground caverns or fissures, where they might take the form of serpents, mice, or bats, but never be reincarnate as human beings. Another was that the souls of sacred kings walked visibly on the sepulchral islands where their bodies had been buried. A third was that ghosts could become men again by entering beans, nuts, or fish, and being eaten by their prospective mothers. A fourth was that they went to the Far North, where the sun never shines, and returned, if at all, only as fertilizing winds. A fifth was that they went to the Far West, where the sun sets in the ocean, and a spirit world much like the present. A sixth was that a ghost received punishment according to the life he had led. To this the Orphics finally added the theory metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls: a process which could be to some degree controlled by the use of magical formulas.
2. Persephone and Hecate stood for the pre-Hellenic hope of regeneration; but Hades, a Hellenic concept, for the ineluctability of death. Cronus, despite his bloody record, continued to enjoy the pleasures of Elysium, since that had always been the privilege of a sacred king, and Menelaus was promised the same enjoyment, not because he had been particularly virtuous or courageous but because he had married Helen, the priestess of the Spartan Moon- goddess. The Homeric adjective asphodelos, applied only to leimones (‘meadows’), probably means ‘in the valley of that which is not reduced to ashes’ (from a-not, spodos-ash, elos- valley)-namely the hero’s ghost after his body has been burned; and, except in acorn-eating Arcadia, asphodel roots and seeds, offered to such ghosts, made the staple Greek diet before the introduction of corn. Asphodel grows freely even on waterless islands and ghosts, like gods, are conservative in their diet. Elysium seems to mean ‘apple-land’-alisier is a pre- Gallic word for sorb-apple-as do the Arthurian ‘Avalon’ and the Latin ‘Avernus’, or ‘Avornus’, both formed from the Indo-European root abol, meaning apple.
3. Cerberus was the Greek counterpart of Anubis, the dog-headed son of the Libyan Death-goddess Nephthys, who conducted souls to the Underworld. In European folklore, which is partly of Libyan origin, the soul of the damned were hunted to the Northern Hell by a yelling pack o hounds-the Hounds of Annwm, Herne, Arthur, or Gabriel-a myth derived from the noisy summer migration of wild geese to their breeding places in the Arctic circle. Cerberus was, at first, fifty-headed, like the spectral pack that destroyed Actaeon; but afterwards three-headed, like his mistress Hecate.
4. Styx (‘hated’), a small stream in Arcadia, the waters of which were supposed to be deadly poison, was located in Tartarus only by later mythographers. Acheron (‘stream of woe’) and Cocytus (‘wailing’) are fanciful names to describe the misery of death. Aornis (‘birdless’) is; Greek mistranslation of the Italic ‘Avernus’. Lethe means ‘forgetfulness’ and Erebus ‘covered’. Phlegethon (‘burning’) refers to the custom o cremation but also, perhaps, to the theory that sinners were burned in streams of lava. Tartarus seems to be a reduplication of the pre-Hellenic word tar, which occurs in the names of places lying to the West; its sens of infernality comes late.
5. Black poplars were sacred to the Death-goddess; and white poplars, or aspens, either to Persephone as Goddess o Regeneration, or to Heracles because he barrowed Hell. Golden head-dresses of aspen leaves have been found in Mesopotamian burials of the fourth millennium BC. The Orphic tablets do not name the tree by the pool of Memory; it is probably the white poplar into which Leuce was transformed, but possibly a nut-tree, the emblem of Wisdom. White-cypress wood, regarded as an anti-corruptive, was used for homehold chests and coffins.
6. Hades had a temple at the foot of Mount Menthe in Elis, and his rape of Minthe (‘mint’) is probably deduced from the use of mint in funerary rites, together with rosemary and myrtle, to offset the smell of decay. Demeter’s barley-water drink at Eleusis was flavoured with mint. Though awarded the sun-cattle of Erytheia (‘red land’) because that was where the Sun met his nightly death, Hades is more usually called Cronus, or Geryon, in this context.
7. Hesiod’s account of Hecate shows her to have been the original Triple-goddess, supreme in Heaven, on earth, and in Tartarus; but the Hellenes emphasized her destructive powers at the expense of her creative ones until, at last, she was invoked only in clandestine rites of black magic especially at places where three roads met. That Zeus did not deny her the ancient power of granting every mortal his heart’s desire is a tribute to the Thessalian witches, of whom everyone stood in dread. Lion, dog, and horse, her heads, evidently refer to the ancient tripartite year, the dog being the Dog-star Sirius; as do also Cerberus’s heads.
8. Hecate’s companions, the Erinnyes, were personified pangs of conscience after the breaking of a taboo-at first only the taboo of insult, disobedience, or violence to a mother. Suppliants and guests came under the protection of Hestia, Goddess of the Hearth, and to ill- treat them would be to disobey and insult her.
9. Leuce, the largest island in the Black Sea, but very small at that, is now a treeless Romanian penal colony.
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