Asphodel Meadows

Also Known As: Greek asphodelos leimon, “the asphodel meadow”; also the Asphodel Meadow, the Fields of Asphodel; some ancient copies of the Odyssey read sphodelos or spodelos, the second taken by its readers to mean “ashy”
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Greek Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Mythological Places
Mythical Attributes: The asphodel meadow is the ground of the house of Hades where the spirits of the dead walk, in Homer’s words the dwelling of those who have done with toil.
Role in Mythos: In the Odyssey it is where Achilles strides away from Odysseus, where the hunter Orion still drives his ghostly quarry, and where Hermes delivers the shades of the suitors.
Relation to Humans: No living person enters it in Homer; the dead are led there, and the living reach it only as visitors at its edge or in visions. Later Greeks planted asphodel on graves, held the flower sacred to Persephone, and in Lucian’s report of popular belief fed the shades who wandered the meadow with libations poured on their tombs.

The ghosts made a noise like bats. Hermes went in front with his golden wand, the wand that closes men’s eyes in sleep and opens them again, and behind him came the shades of the suitors Odysseus had just killed, squeaking and gibbering the way bats squeak in the back of a cave when one of them drops from the cluster on the rock. He led them past the streams of Ocean and past the rock called Leucas, the White Rock, past the gates of the sun and the land of dreams, and set them down at last in the asphodel meadow, where the spirits live, the phantoms of men who have finished with work.

That is nearly everything Homer says about the place. The phrase “the asphodel meadow” turns up three times in the Odyssey, all in the underworld, and never once does the poet stop to look at it. Here is the whole record. In the eleventh book Achilles, having spoken with Odysseus, strides off across it. A few lines later the giant hunter Orion is seen on it, driving together the ghosts of the wild beasts he had killed on the lonely mountains, swinging a bronze club that will never break. In the twenty fourth book the suitors arrive. Steve Reece, writing in Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies in 2007, points out that these three lines are the earliest references to an asphodel meadow anywhere and the earliest extended pictures of Hades in Greek, and that the Hades around them is dark, sunless and mirthless, full of spirits who weep, wail and flit about like shadows or dreams.

The Achilles scene is the one that stays. Odysseus has tried to cheer him: he was honoured like a god in life and now he is a great power among the dead. Achilles will not have it. He would rather be a hired man working for some poor farmer up in the daylight than king over all the dead. Then Odysseus gives him news that his son Neoptolemus fought bravely at Troy and came away without a wound, and the ghost of Achilles goes away across the asphodel with long strides, glad.

Orion is the other glimpse, and it is the closest Homer comes to showing what the meadow is for. A hunter remains a hunter. The beasts are dead, he is dead, and the chase goes on over the asphodel exactly as it went on over the mountains, without end and without any obvious point.

Where the meadow came from is a question about a word. The asphodel itself was an ordinary plant of the Greek countryside, and the Greeks ate it. Hesiod, in the Works and Days, scolds the bribe-swallowing lords who do not know how much good there is in mallow and asphodel, the poor man’s fare. A Greek lexicon of the second century AD describes it as a plant with long leaves whose stalk is eaten, whose seed is roasted and whose root is chopped up with figs. The name has no clear ancestry. Reece notes that it has no convincing Indo-European etymology, no appearance in the Linear B tablets and no relatives in Greek, and that most modern etymologists take it as a loan from the language spoken in Greece before the Greeks, like narcissus and hyacinth.

Some ancient readers heard something darker. The grammarian Herodian reports that some copies of the Odyssey wrote the word without its first letter, and that some wrote spodelon instead, because of the spodos, the ashes, of the dead who were burned. Eustathius, the Byzantine archbishop who wrote a vast commentary on Homer, repeats the report. The French scholar Suzanne Amigues argued in 2002 that “ashy” makes better sense of the three passages than “flowery”, and Walter Burkert had already entertained the idea of an ash-strewn meadow in Hades. Reece goes further. He suggests that the epic formula was once kata spodelon leimona, “throughout the ash-filled meadow”, and that a bard mishearing it split the words differently and made the asphodel out of the ashes. In this reading the meadow of the dead was never meant to be in flower at all.

Most of antiquity preferred the flowers. Herodian himself kept the usual reading because, he said, the place was Persephone’s meadow. Aristarchus called the asphodel fragrant. The lexicon of the Atticist Pausanias calls the plant sacred to Persephone and the gods below the earth, and says the people of Rhodes crowned Kore and Artemis with it. Eustathius adds that asphodel grew on graves and was planted there, and quotes an epitaph that turns up across the Greek world in several versions, the tomb itself speaking. On my back I hold mallow and many-rooted asphodel, it says, and in my bosom I hold the dead man, whose name changes from stone to stone. One version names Oedipus, son of Laius. The Homeric Hymn to Hermes even gives the earth an asphodel meadow of its own, the pasture in Pieria where Apollo’s cattle grazed until the newborn Hermes stole them.

Lucian of Samosata, the satirist of the second century AD, turned the meadow into a stage set. In his Menippus the philosopher goes down into darkness behind a Persian magus called Mithrobarzanes, holding on to him, until they reach a great meadow of asphodel, where the shades of the dead flit round them with thin voices. On the same trip Menippus finds the dead reduced to bare bones, and cannot tell the ugly Thersites from the beautiful Nireus or a beggar from Agamemnon. In The Lover of Lies a credulous old man claims to have seen Hades open in front of him and reports that the dead were lying about on the asphodel among their friends and kinsmen, arranged by clans and tribes. Lucian puts that in a liar’s mouth on purpose.

His essay on mourning is where the meadow acquires a population. Lucian sets out what ordinary people believe, taking Homer and Hesiod as their textbooks. Past the lake that no one crosses without the ferryman lies a meadow where asphodel grows, and with it the spring of Lethe that wars on memory. The judges Minos and Rhadamanthus send the just to the Elysian Plain and hand the wicked to the Furies. Between them is the numerous class of people neither good nor bad, and these wander about the meadow, formless phantoms that slip through the hand like smoke. They live on the libations and victims offered at their tombs, so a shade with no surviving family goes hungry. That tidy three way division, good to Elysium, bad to punishment, everyone else to the asphodel, is how the meadow is usually explained today. Its fullest ancient statement comes from a writer who was laughing at it.

English poets after the Renaissance went the other way and made the meadow lovely. Reece collects them: Alexander Pope’s happy souls in yellow meads of asphodel, Sir Thomas Browne’s dead made to eat asphodels about the Elysian meadows, Tennyson’s weary limbs resting on beds of asphodel, and William Carlos Williams, cheered to learn that there were flowers in hell. The word kept travelling. English daffodil comes from asphodel too, with a stray letter picked up on the way.

What the meadow does is hold the dead. In Homer nobody is rewarded there and nobody is tortured there; the punished, Tityus with the vultures and Sisyphus with his stone, appear in the same book with no asphodel anywhere near them. It keeps what a person was and loses what a person had: Achilles keeps his pride and his stride, Orion keeps his club. Its danger is that there is nothing to do. The shades are strong enough to grieve and too weak to matter, and in Lucian they depend on the living for food. There is no way out that any source records. Hermes brings the dead in. Nobody leads them back.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the Asphodel Meadows in Greek mythology?

The Asphodel Meadows are the meadow of the underworld where the spirits of the dead live in Homer’s Odyssey. Homer calls it the asphodel meadow and mentions it three times: Achilles walks across it, the hunter Orion hunts on it, and Hermes leads the ghosts of the suitors to it. Homer gives no description of the place beyond its name.

Who goes to the Asphodel Meadows?

In the Odyssey the asphodel meadow is simply where the dead are, including great heroes such as Achilles, Patroclus and Ajax. The idea that it holds the ordinary dead who were neither good nor bad comes from Lucian’s essay on mourning, written in the second century AD. Lucian presents that three way scheme of Elysium, punishment and the asphodel meadow as popular belief, and he is mocking it.

What is asphodel?

Asphodel is a plant native to Greece with long leaves that the ancient Greeks ate, which Hesiod mentions as poor man’s food alongside mallow. It was held sacred to Persephone and the gods below the earth, and it grew on graves. The English word daffodil derives from asphodel.

Does asphodel meadow mean a meadow of ashes?

Possibly. Some ancient copies of the Odyssey read spodelon, which ancient readers connected with spodos, the ashes of cremated bodies. Steve Reece argued in 2007 that the Homeric phrase was originally “throughout the ash-filled meadow” and was later misheard as “asphodel meadow”, but the reading is debated.

What happens in the Asphodel Meadows in the Odyssey?

In book 11 the ghost of Achilles strides across the asphodel meadow after hearing that his son fought bravely, and Orion is seen there driving the ghosts of the beasts he killed. In book 24 Hermes leads the shades of the suitors past the streams of Ocean, the White Rock, the gates of the sun and the land of dreams to the asphodel meadow, where they meet Achilles and Agamemnon.