The Penguin Book of Hell
Page 3
Now the rest of the ghosts, the dead and gone
came swarming up around me—deep in sorrow there,
each asking about the grief that touched him most.
Only the ghost of Great Ajax, son of Telamon,
kept his distance, blazing with anger at me still
for the victory I had won by the ships that time
I pressed my claim for the arms of Prince Achilles.
His queenly mother had set them up as prizes,
Pallas and captive Trojans served as judges.
Would to god I’d never won such trophies!
All for them the earth closed over Ajax,
that proud hero Ajax . . .
So I cried out but Ajax answered not a word.
He stalked off toward Erebus, into the dark
to join the other lost, departed dead.
Yet now, despite his anger,
he might have spoken to me, or I to him,
but the heart inside me stirred with some desire
to see the ghosts of others dead and gone.
And I saw Minos there, illustrious son of Zeus,
firmly enthroned, holding his golden scepter,
judging all the dead . . .
Some on their feet, some seated, all clustering
round the king of justice, pleading for his verdicts
reached in the House of Death with its all-embracing gates.
I next caught sight of Orion, that huge hunter,
rounding up on the fields of asphodel those wild beasts
the man in life cut down on the lonely mountain-slopes,
brandishing in his hands the bronze-studded club that time can never shatter.
I saw Tityus too,
son of the mighty goddess Earth—sprawling there
on the ground, spread over nine acres—two vultures
hunched on either side of him, digging into his liver,
beaking deep in the blood-sac, and he with his frantic hands
could never beat them off, for he had once dragged off
the famous consort of Zeus in all her glory,
Leto, threading her way toward Pytho’s ridge,
over the lovely dancing-rings of Panopeus.
And I saw Tantalus too, bearing endless torture.
He stood erect in a pool as the water lapped his chin—
parched, he tried to drink, but he could not reach the surface,
no, time and again the old man stooped, craving a sip,
time and again the water vanished, swallowed down,
laying bare the caked black earth at his feet—
some spirit drank it dry. And over his head
leafy trees dangled their fruit from high aloft,
pomegranates and pears, and apples glowing red,
succulent figs and olives swelling sleek and dark,
but as soon as the old man would strain to clutch them
fast, a gust would toss them up to the lowering dark clouds.
And I saw Sisyphus too, bound to his own torture,
grappling his monstrous boulder with both arms working,
heaving, hands struggling, legs driving, he kept on
thrusting the rock uphill toward the brink, but just
as it teetered, set to topple over—
time and again
the immense weight of the thing would wheel it back and
the ruthless boulder would bound and tumble down to the plain again—
so once again he would heave, would struggle to thrust it up,
sweat drenching his body, dust swirling above his head.
And next I caught a glimpse of powerful Heracles—
his ghost, I mean: the man himself delights
in the grand feasts of the deathless gods on high,
wed to Hebe, famed for her lithe, alluring ankles,
the daughter of mighty Zeus and Hera shod in gold.
Around him cries of the dead rang out like cries of birds,
scattering left and right in horror as on he came like night,
naked bow in his grip, an arrow grooved on the bowstring,
glaring round him fiercely, forever poised to shoot.
A terror too, that sword-belt sweeping across his chest,
a baldric of solid gold emblazoned with awesome work . . .
bears and ramping boars and lions with wild, fiery eyes,
and wars, routs and battles, massacres, butchered men.
May the craftsman who forged that masterpiece—
whose skills could conjure up a belt like that—
never forge another! Heracles knew me at once, at first glance,
and hailed me with a winging burst of pity:
“Royal son of Laertes, Odysseus famed for exploits,
luckless man, you too? Braving out a fate as harsh
as the fate I bore, alive in the light of day?
Son of Zeus that I was, my torments never ended,
forced to slave for a man not half the man I was:
he saddled me with the worst heartbreaking labors.
Why, he sent me down here once, to retrieve the hound
that guards the dead—no harder task for me, he thought—
but I dragged the great beast up from the underworld to earth
and Hermes and gleaming-eyed Athena blazed the way!”
With that he turned and back he went to the House of Death
but I held fast in place, hoping that others might still come,
shades of famous heroes, men who died in the old days
and ghosts of an even older age I longed to see,
Theseus and Pirithous, the gods’ own radiant sons.
But before I could, the dead came surging round me,
hordes of them, thousands raising unearthly cries,
and blanching terror gripped me—panicked now
that Queen Persephone might send up from Death
some monstrous head, some Gorgon’s staring face!
I rushed back to my ship, commanded all hands
to take to the decks and cast off cables quickly.
They swung aboard at once, they sat to the oars in ranks
and a strong tide of the Ocean River swept her downstream,
sped by our rowing first, then by a fresh fair wind.
SOCRATES PONDERS THE PUNISHMENT OF SOULS1
The otherworldly punishment of mythic figures who had offended the gods was a commonplace in ancient Greek mythology and poetry, but the fate of ordinary souls was a subject worthy of philosophical speculation. On the final day of his life, the philosopher Socrates (c. 470–399 BCE) pondered the punishment of the soul in the company of friends. The goal of philosophy, he argued, was the cultivation of virtue, which prepared human beings for the separation of the body and soul that took place at the moment of death. Socrates believed that individuals weighed down by “the enormity of their errors” would be thrown into the subterranean prison of Tartarus with no hope of release. Perpetrators of lesser crimes received a lighter sentence. After a year in Tartarus, they would be freed to petition for mercy those whom they had injured in life. Meanwhile, virtuous individuals who purified themselves through philosophical inquiry would avoid the underworld altogether and ascend as beings of pure spirit to “that pure place of residence above.” Socrates’s parting message to his followers was clear: the pursuit of philosophy was the surest way to avoid punishment in the afterlife.
This, then, is the nature of the regions under the earth. Now when the dead come to the place to which each is conveyed by his divine guide, they first submit themselves to judgment, both those who have lived fine and pious lives and those who have not. Those judged to have lived a midd
ling kind of life journey to the river Acheron, where they board the vessels available to them and use these to journey to the lake; there they reside and undergo purification, each as he deserves, paying penalties to absolve him from any crimes committed and receiving honors for any benefits bestowed. As for those judged incurable because of the enormity of their errors—whether they have repeatedly stolen large sums from temples, persistently killed people contrary to justice and the law, or committed other such crimes as there may be, the fate of these, fittingly, is to be cast into Tartarus and never to emerge again. Another category fated to be thrown into Tartarus consists of those judged to have committed errors that are curable but serious, for example, people who have committed an act of violence toward a father or a mother but live out the rest of their lives regretting it, or who have become killers under some other similar circumstances; but when these have been in Tartarus for a year, the surge of the great river disgorges them, the killers by way of Cocytus and the father- and mother-beaters by way of Pyriphlegethon, and as they are carried along beside the Acherusian lake they scream and call out, the first sort to those they killed, the second to those they assaulted; their calls are followed by supplication, as they beg their victims to permit their exit from their river to the lake, and to admit them there; if they succeed in persuading them, they get out, and cease from their suffering, but if not, then they are carried off again into Tartarus, and from there back again into the rivers, and that will go on happening to them until they manage to persuade those they have wronged; because that is the penalty imposed upon them by the judges. But those judged to have done exceptionally well toward living piously are the ones who are freed from these regions here, within the earth, and are released as if from prisons, moving to that pure place of residence above and dwelling on the surface of the earth. And from among these very people, those who have purified themselves sufficiently well by means of philosophy dwell entirely without bodies for a time thereafter, and come to reside in places still more beautiful than those, places that it is not easy to show you, and not in the time we presently have. But it is for the sake of the things we have described, Simmias, that one must do everything to ensure one’s share of goodness and wisdom in one’s life; fine is the prize, and the hope great.
INTO THE REALM OF SHADOWS1
No ancient author was more influential in his depiction of the punitive afterlife than the Roman poet Virgil (70–19 BCE). Modeling himself after Homer, Virgil composed an epic poem called The Aeneid about the founding of Rome by a refugee from the Trojan War named Aeneas. Commissioned by the Roman emperor Augustus (63 BCE–14 CE), Virgil’s Aeneid was an instant bestseller. Romans adopted the poem not only as a sublime statement of their national identity but also as a model of Latin eloquence. The influence of The Aeneid in the Western tradition is difficult to overstate. The poem became a mainstay of the Roman education system for centuries. Even after the fall of the Roman Empire and the end of ancient paganism, Christian monks learned The Aeneid by heart, imitated its style in their own poems, and interpreted its mythological content as allegories for Christian truth.
In imitation of Homer’s hero Odysseus, who sought the advice of Tiresias’s ghost at the threshold of the House of Death, Virgil’s hero Aeneas ventures into the realm of shadows to speak with the shade of his dead father. With the assistance of a priestess of Apollo known as the Sibyl, he obtains a golden branch from a tree in the forest near her cave as a gift for Hades’ queen Persephone. With the priestess, Aeneas descends into the subterranean realm, where he meets the dreadful Charon, who ferried the souls of the dead across the River Styx; evades the three-headed Cerberus, the monstrous watchdog of Dis; and encounters the mournful shade of his former lover Queen Dido of Carthage, who committed suicide when Aeneas abandoned her to fulfill his destiny as Rome’s founder. Virgil’s harrowing depiction of the torments awaiting individuals who committed crimes like fraud, murder, incest, and sedition against the state inspired many medieval authors, including most famously Dante Alighieri (1265–1321 CE), who cast the shade of Virgil as his guide on his own journey through Hell and Purgatory in The Divine Comedy (see pp. 139–65, below).
The rite
performed, Aeneas hurries to carry out the Sibyl’s orders.
There was a vast cave deep in the gaping, jagged rock,
shielded well by a dusky lake and shadowed grove.
Over it no bird on earth could make its way unscathed,
such poisonous vapors steamed up from its dark throat
to cloud the arching sky. Here, as her first step,
the priestess steadies four black-backed calves,
she tips wine on their brows, then plucks some tufts
from the crown between their horns and casts them
over the altar fire, first offerings, crying out
to Hecate, mighty Queen of Heaven and Hell.
Attendants run knives under throats and catch
warm blood in bowls. Aeneas himself, sword drawn,
slaughters a black-fleeced lamb to the Furies’ mother,
Night, and to her great sister, Earth, and to you,
Proserpina, kills a barren heifer. Then to the king
of the river Styx, he raises altars into the dark night
and over their fires lays whole carcasses of bulls
and pours fat oil over their entrails flaming up.
Then suddenly, look, at the break of day, first light,
the earth groans underfoot and the wooded heights quake
and across the gloom the hounds seem to howl
at the goddess coming closer.
“Away, away!”
the Sibyl shrieks, “all you unhallowed ones—away
from this whole grove! But you launch out on your journey,
tear your sword from its sheath, Aeneas. Now for courage,
now the steady heart!” And the Sibyl says no more but
into the yawning cave she flings herself, possessed—
he follows her boldly, matching stride for stride.
You gods
who govern the realm of ghosts, you voiceless shades and Chaos—
you, the River of Fire, you far-flung regions hushed in night—
lend me the right to tell what I have heard, lend your power
to reveal the world immersed in the misty depths of earth.
On they went, those dim travelers under the lonely night,
through gloom and the empty halls of Death’s ghostly realm,
like those who walk through woods by a grudging moon’s
deceptive light when Jove has plunged the sky in dark
and the black night drains all color from the world.
There in the entryway, the gorge of hell itself,
Grief and the pangs of Conscience make their beds,
and fatal pale Disease lives there, and bleak Old Age,
Dread and Hunger, seductress to crime, and grinding Poverty,
all, terrible shapes to see—and Death and deadly Struggle
and Sleep, twin brother of Death, and twisted, wicked Joys
and facing them at the threshold, War, rife with death,
and the Furies’ iron chambers, and mad, raging Strife
whose blood-stained headbands knot her snaky locks.
There in the midst, a giant shadowy elm tree spreads
her ancient branching arms, home, they say, to swarms
of false dreams, one clinging tight under each leaf.
And a throng of monsters too—what brutal forms
are stabled at the gates—Centaurs, mongrel Scyllas,
part women, part beasts, and hundred-handed Briareus
and the savage Hydra of Lerna, that hissing horror,
the Chimaera armed with torches—Gorgons, Harpies,
and triple-bod
ied Geryon, his great ghost. And here,
instantly struck with terror, Aeneas grips his sword
and offers its naked edge against them as they come,
and if his experienced comrade had not warned him
they were mere disembodied creatures, flimsy
will-o’-the-wisps that flit like living forms,
he would have rushed them all,
slashed through empty phantoms with his blade.
From there
the road leads down to the Acheron’s Tartarean waves.
Here the enormous whirlpool gapes aswirl with filth,
seethes and spews out all its silt in the Wailing River.
Here the dreaded ferryman guards the flood,
grisly in his squalor—Charon . . .
his scraggly beard a tangled mat of white, his eyes
fixed in a fiery stare, and his grimy rags hang down
from his shoulders by a knot. But all on his own
he punts his craft with a pole and hoists sail
as he ferries dead souls in his rust-red skiff.
He’s on in years, but a god’s old age is hale and green.