Reflections on The Iliad, Part 3: Some Thoughts on Greek Thought

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This is a guest post from my good friend, Tabitha Alloway. We both have high schoolers this year, and they’re both going to read some Homer. While I’ve read The Iliad and The Odyssey recently so that I can be in conversation with my son about what he is reading, Tabitha has gone a step further and actually written out her thoughts, which I have found both interesting and helpful! I hope you will, too. Check out Part 1 and Part 2 if you haven’t already. Here’s Tabitha with Part 3:

Unless both of your parents were gods, you could expect a rather bleak and meaningless existence
after death.

The Underworld, ruled by the god Hades, was split into three parts: Tartarus (where the evil went), Asphodel meadows (essentially purgatory for all the souls of those who were not particularly good, evil, or noteworthy—this is where Achilles descends to), and the Elysium fields (for good men and great warriors/leaders). The Greeks had a sturdy sense of their own mortality. As Achilles acknowledges, “The grave…hugs the
strongest man alive.”

Radcliffe Edmonds III writes,

“The Homeric epics present a mixed picture of what happens to an individual after death… [The] bleak
vision of death and afterlife is fundamental to the Homeric idea of the hero’s choice – only in life is
there any meaningful existence, so the hero is the one who, like Achilles, chooses to do glorious deeds.
Since death is inevitable, Sarpedon points out, the hero should not try to avoid it but go out into the front of battle and win honor and glory. Such glory is the only thing that really is imperishable, the only meaningful form of immortality, since the persistence of the soul after death is so unappealing.
“As powerful as this grim vision of the afterlife is in the Homeric epics, commentators since antiquity have noticed that this uniformly dreary life for the senseless, strengthless dead is not the only vision of
afterlife presented in the Homeric poems.”
(A Lively Afterlife and Beyond: The Soul in Plato, Homer, and the Orphica)

There are times in Homer’s works in which the dead experience feelings and emotions and have memories of their former lives. Sometimes they even interfere in the world of human affairs.

But for the most part, Homer presents an existence in the House of Hades as empty, mindless, meaningless. When Odysseus speaks to the spirit of dead Achilles in The Odyssey, Achilles moans,

“By god, I’d rather slave on earth for another man—
some dirt-poor tenant farmer who scrapes to keep alive
than rule down here over all the breathless dead.”

There was little hope of joy in the afterlife. No general resurrection of the dead. This was reserved for only a small handful of privileged individuals—perhaps a mortal whose parentage included at least one god or goddess and who had done great deeds (such as Hercules, who was promoted to immortality). Or a man or woman who was very great and good might possibly be reincarnated up to three times, after which the soul could travel to the Blessed Isles and enjoy a happy existence.

The desire for a happier ending in the afterlife led some Greeks to turn to Middle Eastern mystery
religions. The Eleusis mysteries promised that those who lived a virtuous life and performed certain
religious rituals would experience a blessed afterlife. The Orphic cult assured followers that through special rites and initiation into secret knowledge they could escape the fate of most men and find the path to a better place in the afterlife. Members were buried with esoteric inscriptions on thin gold sheets that would guide the deceased through the Underworld.

Greek culture focused on glory. Eternity would probably be bleak, but if you could win a name for yourself, you would at least be remembered and praised after your death. Feats of courage and strength were applauded; cowardice and weakness, despised. This created a highly competitive culture that, arguably, was responsible for much of the country’s rise in the world.

Leaving behind great deeds was a way of becoming immortal, in a sense: the Greeks could not be reunited with their bodies, but they could be memorialized.

Avoiding bodily decay after death was a big deal: if a warrior did not receive a proper burial, his spirit was doomed to forever wander along the riverbank Styx. It could not properly rest in the house of the dead. This is why Achilles is desperate to recover the body of his friend Patroclus and see it gets an honorable burial—and to desecrate the body of Hector, his enemy.

While the Greeks valued life—the physical body and the material world—Plato would later (about 300 years after Homer’s time) present a different conception of life and death, meaning and purpose. He saw the body as something to one day happily put off, so that one’s soul might be set free from a prison that prevents a person from reaching true knowledge, True Being—the Beatific Vision. The physical and material were inferior to the spiritual and mystical. The body was a tomb to be cast off in order that one might become “other-worldly.” Plato spurned the idea of resurrection—for anyone. The Gnostics drew from his teachings.

True immortality for the Greeks meant the body must be resurrected and eternally united with the soul. All the immortal gods engaged in physical activities—eating, drinking, sleeping, having marital relations. Unless you were of the Platonian persuasion, it was a state much to be desired, but one which few, even among their best, could ever hope to attain.

The light of the Christian resurrection would one day pierce the darkness of this fear of death—and divide the Greeks at Mars Hill…

Lauren’s Note:

In reading The Republic, it’s so interesting to me that Plato didn’t want people to read/listen to Homer (though he acknowledges that Homer was pretty much the source of philosophical education for the Greeks in his day). Plato wanted gods that were far better examples than they were in Homer’s telling. He idealized and wanted a truly just and honorable God, and the truly just man according to Plato would be just even when not recognized as such, even when treated as though he were unjust, even to the point of …wait for it… crucifixion! What Plato longed for in a God, in a just man…he didn’t find it in Homer. But he was on to something.

Plato also didn’t like poetry. He was a “give it to me straight” kind of guy.