The Greek Afterlife: A Guide to Hades and the Underworld

The Greeks envisioned the afterlife as a vast underground realm, the kingdom of Hades, god of the dead, and his queen Persephone. Called simply "Hades" after its ruler, or the kato kosmos ("lower world"), this was the destination of almost every soul after death, regardless of how they had lived.

Unlike the Christian heaven and hell, the Greek Underworld was not primarily a place of reward and punishment for the majority of souls. Most of the dead spent eternity in the grey, featureless Asphodel Meadows, a neutral, shadowy existence, neither bliss nor torment, simply an extension of mortal life drained of its vitality. Only the exceptionally virtuous reached Elysium, and only the spectacularly wicked were condemned to Tartarus.

When a person died, their psyche (soul or shade) departed the body and began its journey to the Underworld. Hermes, in his role as psychopomp ("guide of souls"), escorted the newly dead to the entrance of Hades's realm.

At the banks of the River Styx, the boundary between the living world and the dead, the ferryman Charon waited. He transported souls across the water, but only for a fee: an obol (a small coin) placed in the mouth or on the eyes of the deceased. This is why the Greeks buried their dead with coins, without payment, the soul was condemned to wander the near shore as an unquiet ghost for a hundred years before Charon would carry it across for free.

The three-headed dog Cerberus guarded the far bank, ensuring that the living could not enter and that the dead could not leave.

The Greek Underworld was threaded with five mythological rivers, each with a specific nature and function:

Styx ("Hate" or "Abomination") was the primary boundary river, by which the gods swore their most binding oaths. Breaking an oath on the Styx was the gravest act a deity could commit.

Lethe ("Oblivion") caused those who drank from it to forget their mortal lives. Most souls drank from Lethe before reincarnation. The mystery traditions taught initiates to drink instead from the spring of Mnemosyne (Memory), preserving their identity through death.

Acheron ("River of Woe") was an alternative boundary river, sometimes described as the river Charon actually ferried souls across.

Phlegethon ("River of Fire") burned with flame and flowed into Tartarus, surrounding the prison of the damned.

Cocytus ("River of Lamentation") was the river along whose banks the unburied dead were said to wander.

Upon arriving in the Underworld, souls were judged by one or more of three judges: Minos, Rhadamanthus, and Aeacus, all former kings known for their exceptional justice in life. In some accounts all three judged together; in others each specialised (Aeacus for Europeans, Rhadamanthus for Asians, Minos as the final arbiter in difficult cases).

The judges evaluated the whole of a person's life and assigned them to one of three regions:

Elysium (also called the Elysian Fields or the Isles of the Blessed) was the paradise of the virtuous and heroic, a land of perpetual sunshine, feasting, and joy. In the highest form, the Isles of the Blessed, those who had reached Elysium three times in successive lives were said to rule as kings in a land of perfect happiness.

The Asphodel Meadows received the majority of souls, ordinary people who had committed neither great good nor great evil. Here shades wandered in a grey twilight, re-enacting habits from their mortal lives without real feeling or purpose.

Tartarus was the deepest pit, reserved for those who had committed crimes against the gods or gross violations of divine law. The Titans were imprisoned there after the Titanomachy. Individual sinners were assigned specific, fitting eternal punishments.

Sisyphus was condemned to roll a boulder up a hill for eternity, only for it to roll back down just before reaching the top. His crime: cheating death twice, deceiving the gods with his cunning, and generally displaying an outrageous refusal to accept mortality.

Tantalus stood in a pool of water beneath fruit trees. When he tried to drink, the water receded; when he reached for the fruit, the branches pulled away. His crime: killing his own son Pelops and serving him as a feast to the gods to test their omniscience.

Ixion was bound to a spinning wheel of fire for eternity. His crime: attempting to seduce Hera, queen of the gods, and murdering his father-in-law.

The Danaids, forty-nine of the fifty daughters of Danaus who murdered their husbands on their wedding night, were condemned to carry water in leaking jars for eternity, never able to fill them.

A special category of Greek myth involves the living descending into the Underworld and returning, the katabasis. These journeys test the hero's courage and reveal the nature of the realm beyond death.

Orpheus descended to retrieve his dead wife Eurydice, charming Hades and Persephone with his music so beautifully that they agreed to release her, on the condition he not look back as he led her to the surface. He looked back, and lost her forever.

Odysseus performed the nekuia, a ritual summoning of the dead, at the entrance of Hades, speaking with shades including the prophet Tiresias, his dead mother, and the ghost of Achilles.

Heracles, as his twelfth labour, descended into Hades to capture Cerberus alive and bring him to the surface, the most extreme feat of mortal courage imaginable.

Hades was the stern, implacable king of the dead, not evil, but inexorable. He was not a god of death itself (that was Thanatos, the gentle spirit of death) but the sovereign administrator of the dead's realm. He was rarely worshipped directly, his name was often avoided in everyday speech, replaced with euphemisms like Plouton ("the Rich One," referring to the mineral wealth beneath the earth), which is the origin of the Roman name Pluto.

Persephone, daughter of Demeter, was abducted by Hades and became his queen. Her annual return to the surface world for six months brought spring and summer; her descent back to Hades brought autumn and winter. As queen of the dead, Persephone was sometimes more approachable than Hades, Orpheus and other petitioners directed their appeals to her, and she presided over the mystery religions that promised initiates a better afterlife.

Standard Greek religion offered little comfort about the afterlife, for most people, it meant the grey existence of the Asphodel Meadows. The mystery religions promised something better to initiates who underwent their rites and were deemed worthy.

The Eleusinian Mysteries, centred at Eleusis near Athens, were the most prestigious: initiates believed they would have a blessed existence in the afterlife, guided by what they had learned about Persephone's story. The Orphic tradition offered a more complex eschatology involving reincarnation and eventual liberation from the cycle of rebirth. Gold tablets found in graves throughout the Greek world contain instructions for navigating the Underworld, directing the soul to drink from the spring of Memory rather than Lethe, and to identify themselves correctly to the guardians of the dead.

These mystery traditions show that alongside the official, public religion of the Greek city-state, many Greeks sought, and found, deeper answers to the question of what awaited them after death.