Lethe

The water makes almost no sound. It slips over pebbles in a hollow so still that the poppies at the cave mouth seem loud by comparison, and the bank is crowded, and none of the crowd is speaking. They wait their turn. Each one stoops, lifts a handful, swallows, and straightens up a stranger to everything that ever happened to them.

Homer does not know this river. When Circe gives Odysseus his sailing directions she names three waters at the mouth of Hades, Pyriphlegethon and Cocytus and the branch of Styx, all of them running into Acheron at a rock where the two loud streams meet. Loud is the word that matters. Homer’s underworld rivers roar. The quiet one arrives later, and when it first appears in Greek verse it is not a river at all: Hesiod puts Lethe in a list of the children of Strife, standing between Toil and Starvation, in among the Murders, the Lies, the Quarrels and Lawlessness and Ruin. She is forgetting itself, one of the ugly abstractions that Eris turned loose on the world. Somewhere between that catalogue and the classical afterlife she became geography. Nobody in antiquity says who dug the channel.

Plato gives the fullest map of it, and his version is a desert. In the closing pages of the Republic the soldier Er comes back from the dead and reports what he saw: the souls, having chosen their next lives, walking out onto the plain of Lethe, bare of trees and every green thing, under a terrible stifling heat. They camp at evening beside the river, and Plato says its water can be held in no vessel. Each soul must drink a measure. Those not saved by their good sense drink more than the measure, and every one of them forgets everything as it goes down. Then they sleep, and at midnight there is thunder and the ground shakes and they are flung upward to their births, scattering like shooting stars. Er alone is forbidden the water, which is the only reason there is a story. He opens his eyes at dawn on his own funeral pyre.

Virgil moved the whole scene into a landscape a Roman reader could smell. In the sixth book of the Aeneid the hero looks down into a retiring valley, a secluded copse with the wind in the branches, and a river drifting past. The crowd along the bank is beyond counting. Aeneas does not understand what he is looking at, and his father Anchises explains: these are the souls owed a second body, and at the stream they are taking the long draught that quenches trouble, so that with their memory washed out they can go up and live again. That is the version most of Europe inherited. It also turned the name into shorthand. Latin poets say Lethe when they mean death outright, and they use it for anything that dulls: Virgil elsewhere talks of poppies steeped in Lethe’s sleep, and offers them as a due to the dead.

Ovid pushes the river up against the house of Sleep, in a cavern near the Cimmerians where the sun never reaches at any hour, and there the stream murmuring under the rock over its pebbly shallows is what does the lulling, with poppies and drowsy herbs at the entrance. Seneca gives it the most exact description anyone gives it. His Lethe is immeasurable and smooth and takes away care, and it winds so elaborately, doubling back on itself, hesitating between the sea and its own source, that no one who has gone along it can find the way back. The geography is the point. A soul cannot retrace a path that refuses to go anywhere.

The oddest thing about Lethe is that it had a working branch office. At Lebadeia in Boeotia, where Pausanias went down into the oracle of Trophonius himself and wrote up the procedure in the first person, the consultant spent days in purification, bathed only in the river Hercyna, sacrificed a ram over a pit at night, and was then taken by the priests not straight to the chasm but to two springs standing very close together. He drank the water called the water of Forgetfulness, to clear out everything he had been thinking about, and then the water of Memory, so he would be able to remember whatever he was shown below. After that he put on a linen tunic, thrust his feet into a hole the size of a hand span, and was sucked down like a man caught in an eddy.

Initiates hedged their bets in gold. Thin leaves of it, inscribed in hexameters and folded into graves across southern Italy, Crete and Thessaly from the fifth century onward, tell the newly dead what to do at exactly this fork. The tablet from Entella in Sicily warns of a lake with a white cypress standing beside it where the descending souls come to cool themselves, and then says flatly: do not even approach this spring. Go on to the cold water pouring from the Lake of Memory, meet the guards, and answer them with the password, I am a child of Earth and starry Sky. The tablets are worth reading closely, because they do not use the name. The forbidden water is simply the wrong spring, and the tablets do not even agree on which hand it lies to. Lethe is our label for it, not theirs.

The name eventually got out of the underworld altogether. Strabo, listing the rivers of Lusitania, comes to one that people called the River of Lethe, others Limaeas, others Belion, and he flatly declines the supernatural version. Celts and Turduli crossed it together on a campaign, he says, fell out afterwards, lost their leader, and simply scattered and stayed. The river was named for a company of men who went across it and were never heard of again.

What the water does is simple and it has no cure, only exemptions. It empties a soul completely and it does so at once, and there is nothing in any account about the loss wearing off. But the exemptions are everywhere in the sources, and they are the interesting part. Er is not allowed to drink. The philosopher drinks sparingly and keeps hold of what matters. The Trophonius pilgrim swallows a second cup that undoes the first. Apollonius says the herald Aethalides was lost long ago in the waters of Acheron and forgetting still has not overwhelmed his soul. And Statius, writing of a shade not yet received on the far bank of Lethe, lets slip the loveliest implication of all: for some of the dead, the river is not a terminus but a border, and there is a country on the other side of it.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the river Lethe?

Lethe is the underworld river of forgetfulness in Greek and Roman myth, whose water erased the memory of a soul’s life. The name is simply the ordinary Greek word for forgetting. Ancient writers place it either on a treeless plain or in a wooded valley, and describe it as slow, shallow and nearly silent.

What happens if you drink from the river Lethe?

Drinking from Lethe wipes out the memory of everything a person has lived through. In Plato’s account each soul is required to drink a set measure, and those with poor judgement drink more than that and forget absolutely everything. In Virgil, souls drink from Lethe specifically so they can be born again without carrying their old lives with them.

Is Lethe one of the five rivers of the underworld?

Lethe is counted as one of the five underworld rivers alongside Styx, Acheron, Cocytus and Pyriphlegethon, but it is the latecomer of the group. Homer’s Odyssey names the other four at the entrance to Hades and says nothing about Lethe. In Hesiod, Lethe is not a river at all but a daughter of Eris, forgetting personified among Toil, Starvation and Ruin.

Did anyone ever escape the water of Lethe?

Several figures do. Plato’s Er is forbidden to drink so that he can return and report what he saw, and Plato says the wise drink only sparingly. Apollonius writes that the Argonaut herald Aethalides kept his memory in the underworld. Initiates buried with the Orphic gold tablets were instructed to walk past the first spring entirely and drink instead from the Lake of Memory.

What was the spring of Lethe at the oracle of Trophonius?

At Lebadeia in Boeotia, anyone consulting the oracle of Trophonius drank from two springs before descending, one called the water of Forgetfulness and one the water of Memory. The first cleared his mind of everything he had been thinking about; the second let him remember whatever he was shown underground. Pausanias made the descent himself and left the only ancient first-person account of it.

Related Entries

Hades, Elysium, Tartarus, Charon, Cerberus, Persephone, Erebus, Nyx, Thanatos, Mnemosyne, Eris, Orpheus, Aeneas