Elysium

Proteus came up out of the sea at midday to count his seals, and Menelaus, sweating under a flayed sealskin on the beach at Pharos, kept hold of him through every shape he took until the old god gave in and spoke. What he said was not what a man braces himself to hear. Menelaus would not die in horse-pasturing Argos. The deathless ones would carry him instead to the Elysian plain at the ends of the earth, where fair-haired Rhadamanthys was already living and life was easiest for men, where no snow fell and no storm came and no rain, and Ocean sent up the clear singing breezes of the west for the cooling of mankind. Then Proteus gave the reason, and the reason was not courage or piety. Menelaus had Helen. Helen’s father was Zeus.

That is the earliest Elysium in Greek, and it reads less like a doctrine than like a loophole. The Iliad grants nothing of the sort to anyone. Patroclus goes down under the earth, and so, apparently, does Sarpedon, whose father is Zeus. Even the Odyssey’s own underworld is the asphodel meadow, and its first audiences may have heard something colder in that phrase than later readers did. Steve Reece has argued that the Homeric formula was reshaped out of an older one meaning the ash-filled meadow, spodelon rather than asphodelon, a floor of cremation ash rather than a bed of flowers, and ancient commentators knew the variant reading and some of them preferred it. Somewhere between the two the meadow of the dead acquired blossoms.

Hesiod widened the door. His fourth race, the demigods, are broken partly at seven-gated Thebes fighting over the flocks of Oedipus and partly at Troy for the sake of rich-haired Helen, but the rest are given a home apart from men at the ends of the earth. They live untouched by sorrow in the Islands of the Blessed beside deep-swirling Ocean, where the grain-giving ground bears honey-sweet fruit three times a year, and the king over them is Cronus, whom his son released from his chains for the purpose. The Titan who ate his children retires to the pleasant island. Greek myth is rarely tidy about who deserves what.

Pindar tightened it into a rule and then bent the rule for a client. In the second Olympian, those who had the courage three times on either side of death to keep their hearts clean of all wrong travel the road of Zeus to the tower of Cronus, where the winds of Ocean play round the Islands of the Blest and golden flowers blaze, some on shining trees ashore and some fed by the water, and the blessed weave them into wreaths for their hands and crowns for their heads. Rhadamanthys sits at the right hand of Rhea’s husband and gives the judgements. Peleus is there, and Cadmus, and Achilles, whose mother prayed her way into the heart of Zeus to get him in. The ode was written for Theron of Acragas, a living Sicilian ruler being told, at length and in public, what he could expect.

Plato was stricter and funnier about it. In the Gorgias, Zeus complains that judgement had been going wrong because the dead were being tried in their clothes, alive and forewarned, with handsome bodies and good ancestry and wealthy witnesses to confuse the bench, and the judges themselves muffled in eyes and ears and flesh. So the trial was moved. Now the soul stands stripped and dead in a meadow at the fork of two roads, before a judge equally stripped and dead: Rhadamanthys for those out of Asia, Aeacus for those out of Europe, Minos with the golden sceptre to break a tie. One road goes to the Isles of the Blest. The other goes to Tartarus.

Getting there could be undignified. When Alcmene died of old age at Thebes, Zeus sent Hermes to steal her body out of the coffin and take her to the Islands of the Blessed as a wife for Rhadamanthys, and to leave a stone in her place. The sons of Heracles found the casket unaccountably heavy on the way to the grave, set it down, and lifted the lid on a rock.

There was also a version of the place you could actually sail to. Off the mouths of the Danube lay Leuke, the White Island, twenty stades around by Pausanias’ reckoning, wooded, full of animals, with a temple of Achilles and an image of him in it. Arrian, writing a coastal survey for Hadrian, reports an ancient wooden statue and offerings left by visitors, rings and cups and cut stones, and verse inscriptions in Greek and in Latin praising Achilles and Patroclus. The seabirds, he was told, kept the sanctuary: every morning they flew out over the water, wet their wings in it, hurried back, sprinkled the floor and then swept it clean with their feathers. Nobody lived there except goats, and a visitor arriving without a victim had to buy one from the god, raising his offer until the temple oracle accepted the price, while the goat in question was said to stand still and wait for the negotiation to finish. Achilles appeared to sailors on that coast while they were awake, sometimes at the masthead. Patroclus only ever came in dreams. Leonymus of Croton, sent there by the Pythia with a wound in his chest, came back saying he had been healed, that he had seen both men and both Ajaxes and Antilochus, that Helen was married to Achilles, and that she had a message for the poet Stesichorus about why he had lost his sight.

The geographers went hunting for the rest of it. Strabo put the Elysian plain in southern Iberia around Gades, on the reasonable grounds that the country is western, warm, and famously rich, and that Phoenician sailors had been talking. Pliny listed six Islands of the Gods off the Atlantic coast that some people called the Fortunate Islands. Diodorus flatly decided that the Islands of the Blessed were Lesbos, Chios, Samos, Cos and Rhodes, which had good air and good crops and an early king called Makareus, so the name meant nothing more mystical than prosperous.

Where the idea itself came from is not settled and probably never will be. The gloomy underground Hades sits close to the Mesopotamian and Hebrew pictures of the dead. The bright plain looks like something else entirely: Rhadamanthys carries a pre-Greek name of the kind ending in the same cluster as Corinth and hyacinth, he belongs to Crete, and an otherworld reached across the sea suits a seafaring people better than it suits inland ancestors, while Minoan funerary art puts the dead in boats on a voyage in a way that looks borrowed from Egypt. Underneath that there may be an older inheritance still, since a meadow of the otherworld also turns up in Hittite ritual as the wellu-, which some comparativists set directly beside Ēlysion, and in the Vedic cow-pasture of Yama. Nobody knows what the word means.

What the place offers is always the same short list: no weather, no work, no fear, and company worth having. Virgil gave it the fullest description anyone has, and moved it underground. The road forks beneath the walls of Dis, right to Elysium and left to the punishments, and Aeneas sprinkles himself with fresh water and fixes the golden bough on the threshold before the gates will pass him. Inside there is a wider sky, a rosier light, and a sun and stars belonging to the place. Some of the dead wrestle on yellow sand, some tread out a dance and sing, and a long-robed Thracian priest matches them on seven clear notes with an ivory quill. The old Trojan line is there, Ilus and Assaracus and Dardanus, and their spears stand fixed upright in the turf while their unyoked horses crop the plain, because the men who loved chariots and sleek animals in life are not going to stop now.

The limits arrive quickly after that. Deep in a green valley Aeneas finds his father counting souls, and beyond him the river Lethe with a crowd along its banks like bees working over summer meadows, humming. These are the ones owed second bodies. When the wheel has turned a thousand years the god calls them to the water, they drink the long forgetfulness, and they go back up to want life again. Only a few keep the fields. And at the end of the tour there are two gates of Sleep, one of horn for true shades to leave by and one of gleaming ivory through which the dead send up false dreams, and Anchises, having shown his son the whole future of Rome, walks him to the ivory one and lets him out.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Elysium in Greek mythology?

Elysium is the afterlife destination reserved for a small number of favoured or exceptionally virtuous dead, as opposed to the general house of Hades. In its earliest form, in the Odyssey, it is a plain at the ends of the earth with no snow, storm or rain, cooled by the west wind off the stream of Ocean. Later writers also called it the Islands of the Blessed or the White Island, and Virgil relocated it underground as a district of the Roman underworld.

Who rules Elysium and who lives there?

Rhadamanthys, a son of Zeus and a Cretan judge of the dead, is already living on the Elysian plain when Homer first mentions it, and Hesiod makes the Titan Cronus king over the Islands of the Blessed after Zeus released him from his chains. The named residents include Menelaus and Helen, Achilles, Peleus, Cadmus, Alcmene, and, on the White Island, Patroclus, Antilochus and both heroes called Ajax.

How did a person get into Elysium?

The requirements changed completely from author to author, which is the most consistent thing about them. Homer’s Menelaus qualifies purely because he is married to Helen and is therefore the son-in-law of Zeus, Hesiod admits the heroes who fought at Thebes and Troy, and Pindar demands three consecutive lives lived without wrongdoing on either side of death. Plato replaced all of that with a formal trial in which the naked soul is judged by Rhadamanthys, Aeacus and Minos at a fork in the road.

Was Elysium ever thought to be a real place?

Ancient writers repeatedly tried to put it on a map. Strabo located the Elysian plain in southern Spain near Gades, Pliny listed islands in the Atlantic that some called the Fortunate Islands, and Diodorus identified the Islands of the Blessed with Lesbos, Chios, Samos, Cos and Rhodes. The White Island of Achilles was genuinely visited: it lay off the mouths of the Danube, it held a temple with an image of the hero, and Arrian describes the offerings left there by sailors.

What is the difference between Elysium and the Asphodel Meadows?

The Asphodel Meadows are part of Hades, where the ordinary dead exist as senseless shades in gloom, while Elysium is the pleasant exception granted to a favoured few. Some scholarship argues that the Homeric phrase for the asphodel meadow was reshaped from an older formula meaning an ash-filled meadow, which would make the contrast between the two places even sharper than it looks in later poetry.

Related Entries

Hades, Tartarus, Rhadamanthus, Minos, Cronus, Persephone, Achilles, Ajax the Great, Helen, Thetis, Medea, Cadmus, Orpheus, Aeneas, Aaru