Mythos: A Retelling of the Myths of Ancient Greece

The god Hades found, to his great delight – or the closest to delight that gloomy god could ever manage – that the shades of more and more dead humans began to arrive at his subterranean kingdom. Hermes was assigned a new role – that of Arch Psychopomp, or ‘chief conductor of souls’ – a duty he discharged with his customary sprightliness and puckish humour. Though, as the human population grew, only the most important dead were granted the honour of a personal escort by Hermes, the rest were taken by Thanatos, the grim, forbidding figure of Death.

The instant that human spirits departed their bodies, Hermes or Thanatos would lead them to the underground cavern where the River Styx (Hate) met the River Acheron (Woe). There the grim and silent Charon held out his hand to receive his payment for ferrying the souls across the Styx. If the dead had no payment to offer they would have to wait on the bank a hundred years before the disobliging Charon consented to take them. To avoid this limbo it became a custom amongst the living to place some money, usually an obolus, on the tongue of the dying to pay the ferryman and assure safe and swift passage.fn8 When he had taken his fee, Charon would pull the dead soul aboard and pole his rust-coloured punt or skiff over the black, Stygian waters to the disembarkation stage, hell’s muster point.fn9 Once dead, no mortal could go back to the upper world. Immortals, if they tasted so much as a morsel of food or drink in Hades, were fated to return to the infernal kingdom.

And what was their final destination? It seems that this rather depended on the kind of life they had led. At first Hades himself was the arbiter, but in later years he delegated the Great Weighing Up to two sons of Zeus and EUROPA – MINOS and RHADAMANTHUS who, after their own deaths, were appointed, along with their half-brother aeacus, Judges of the Underworld. They decided whether an individual had lived a heroic, average or punishably wicked life.fn10

The heroes and those deemed exceedingly righteous (as well as the dead who had some divine blood in them) found themselves transported to the Elysian Fields, which lay somewhere on the archipelago known as the Fortunate Isles, or Isles of the Blessed. There is no real agreement as to where this might actually be. Perhaps they are what we now call the Canaries, perhaps the Azores, the Lesser Antilles or even Bermuda.fn11 Later descriptions place the Elysian Fields within the kingdom of Hades itself.fn12 In these accounts souls who reincarnated three times, on each occasion leading a heroic, just and virtuous life, then earned themselves a transfer from Elysium to the Isles of the Blessed.

The blameless majority, whose lives were neither especially virtuous nor especially vicious, might expect to be parked for eternity in the Meadows of Asphodel, whose name derived from the white flowers that carpeted its fields. These souls were guaranteed a pleasant enough afterlife: before they arrived they drank of the waters of forgetfulness from the River Lethe so that a blithe and bland eternity could be passed, untroubled by upsetting memories of earthly life.

But the sinners – the debauched, blasphemous, wicked and dissolute – what of them? The least of them flitted in the halls of Hades, eternally without feeling, strength or any real consciousness of their existence, but the most profane and unpardonable were taken to the Fields of Punishment, which lay between the Meadows of Asphodel and the abysmal depths of Tartarus itself. Here tortures that fitted their crimes with diabolical exactness were inflicted on them for all eternity. We will meet some of the more celebrated of these sinners at a later date. Names like SISYPHUS, IXION and TANTALUS still ring through the ages.

While Homer describes the spirits of the departed as keeping the faces and appearance they had in life, alternative accounts tell of a hideous demon called EURYNOMOS who met the dead and, like the Furies, stripped the flesh from their bones. Other poets suggest that the souls of the underworld were capable of speech and given to relating their life stories to each other.

Hades was the most jealous of all his jealous family. Not one soul could he bear to lose from his kingdom. Cerberus the three-headed dog patrolled the gates. Few, very few, heroes circumvented or duped Thanatos and Cerberus and managed to visit Hades’ realm and return alive to the world above.

And so death became a constant in human life, as it remains to this day. But the world of the Silver Age, it should be understood, was very different from our own. Gods, demigods and all kinds of immortals still walked amongst us. Intercourse of the personal, social and sexual kind with the gods was as normal to men and women of the Silver Age as intercourse with machines and AI assistants is to us today. And, I dare say, a great deal more fun.

Prometheus Bound