The nature of sin is clearly summed up by the Sibyl as she continues; just as clear is the moral conviction that assigns happiness to the good in the paradise of Elysium (608-751): "Here are imprisoned and await punishment those who hated their brothers while they were alive or struck a parent and devised guile against a dependent or who hovered over their acquired wealth all alone and did not share it with their relatives (these misers were the greatest throng), and those who were killed for adultery or took up arms in an impious cause and were not afraid to betray the pledges made to their masters. Do not seek to learn the nature of the crime and fate of each and every sinner and the punishment in which he is submerged. Some roll a huge rock, others hang stretched on the spokes of a wheel; Theseus sits in his misery and he will remain sitting forever; wretched Phlegyas admonishes all as he bears testimony in a loud voice among the shades: 'Be warned! Learn justice and not to despise the gods.' This one sold his country for gold, set up a tyrannical despot, made laws, and revoked them for a price. This one invaded the bedroom of his daughter in forbidden incestuous marriage. All dared enormous crime, and were successful in the attainment of their daring. I should not be able to recount all the forms of wickedness or enumerate all the names of the punishments if I had a hundred tongues and a hundred mouths." After the aged priestess of Phoebus had uttered these words, she continued: "But come now, proceed on your way and accomplish the task you have undertaken. Let us hurry. I see opposite fortifications of Pluto's palace erected by the forges of the Cyclopes and the vaulted arch of its door where we have been ordered to lay down this gift!" She had spoken and making their way together through the gloom of the path they hurried over the space between, and approached the gates. Aeneas reached the entrance, sprinkled himself with fresh water and placed the bough on the threshold. When this had been done and the gift had been given to the goddess, then at last they came to the happy places, the pleasant green glades of the Woods of the Fortunate, the home of the blessed. Here air that is more pure and abundant clothes the plains in soft-colored light and they have their own sun and their own stars.

Some exercise their limbs on the grassy wrestling grounds, vie in sport, and sing songs and the Thracian priest, Orpheus, in his long robe, accompanies their measures on the seven strings of his lyre, plucking them now with his fingers, now with an ivory quill. Here is the ancient Trojan line of king Teucer, a most beautiful race, great-souled heroes born in better years, and Ilus, Assaracus, and Dardanus, the founder of Troy. Aeneas marvels at the unreal arms of the heroes and their chariots nearby. The spears stand fixed in the ground, and horses browse freely everywhere on the plain. The same pleasure that they had in their chariots and arms and in tending their sleek horses follows them after they have been laid in the earth. Behold he sees others feasting to the right and to the left on the grass and singing a happy paean in a chorus amidst a fragrant grove of laurel, from which the full stream of the Eridanus river rolls through the woods in the upper world. Here in a group were those who suffered wounds while fighting for their country, and the priests who remained pure while they lived, and the poets who were devout in their art and whose words were worthy of their god, Phoebus Apollo, or those who made life better by their discoveries in the arts and the sciences and who through merit made others remember them. All of these wore around their temples a snowy white garland; the Sibyl spoke to them as they surrounded her, singling out Musaeus especially: "Tell my happy souls and you, 0 illustrious poet, what region, what place does Anchises inhabit? We crossed the great rivers of Erebus and have come on his account." Musaeus replied in these few words: "No one has a fixed abode; we inhabit shady groves living in meadows fresh with streams along whose banks we recline. But if the desire in your heart so impells you, cross over this ridge; I shall show you an easy path." He spoke and walked ahead of them pointing out the shining fields below; then they made their way down from the height. Father Anchises was eagerly contemplating and surveying souls that were secluded in the depths of a green valley and about to enter upon the light of the upper air. It happened that he was reviewing the whole number of his own dear descendants; the fate, fortune, character, and exploits of Roman heroes.

When he saw Aeneas coming toward him over the grass, he quickly extended both his hands and a cry escaped his lips as the tears poured down his cheeks: "At last you have come and your long-awaited devotion to your father has overcome the hard journey. Is it granted to me to see your face, to hear your voice, to speak to you as of old? I have been pondering your visit, thinking about when it would be, counting out the time, and my anxiety has not gone unrewarded. I receive you here after your travels over so many lands and so many seas, harried by so many dangers! How much I feared that Dido in her African kingdom might do you some harm!" Aeneas replied: "The vision of you in your sadness appearing to me again and again compelled me to pursue my way to this realm. My ships are moored on the Italian shore. Give me, give me your right hand, father, do not shrink from my embrace." As he was speaking his face was moist with many tears. Three times he attempted to put his arms around his father's neck, three times he reached in vain as the phantom escaped his hands as light as a breeze, like a fleeting vision of the night." Meanwhile, Aeneas saw in this valley set apart, a secluded grove and the rustling thickets of a wood and the stream of Lethe, which flowed by the serene abodes. Around the river countless tribes and peoples were flitting, just as when bees settle on different flowers in a meadow in the calm'heat of summer and swarm about the white lilies; the whole plain was filled with a murmuring sound. Aeneas, who did not understand, gave a sudden shudder at the sight, and seeking reasons for it all, asked what the river was in the distance and what crowd of men filled its banks. Then father Anchises replied: "The souls to which bodies are owed by Fate at the stream of the river Lethe drink waters that release them from previous cares and bring everlasting forgetfulness. Indeed I have desired for a long time to tell you about these souls, to show them before your very eyes, and to list the number of my descendants; now all the more may you rejoice with me that you have found Italy." "0father, am I to think that some souls go from here to the upper air and enter sluggish bodies again? What is this dread desire of these poor souls for light?" "To be sure I shall tell you and not hold you in suspense." Thus Anchises replied and proceeded step by step to reveal the details in order. "In the first place a spirit within sustains the sky, the earth, the waters, the shining globe of the moon, and the Titan sun and stars; this spirit moves the whole mass of the universe, a mind, as it were, infusing its limbs and mingled with its huge body. From this arises all life, the race of men, animals, and birds, and the monsters that the sea bears under its marble surface. The seeds of this mind and spirit have a fiery power and celestial origin, insofar as the limbs and joints of the body, which is of earth, harmful, and subject to death, do not make them dull and slow them down.

Thus the souls, shut up in the gloomy darkness of the prison of their bodies, experience fear, desire, joy, and sorrow, and do not see clearly the essence of their celestial nature. Moreover, when the last glimmer of life has gone, all the evils and all the diseases of the body do not yet completely depart from these poor souls and it is inevitable that many ills, for a long time encrusted, become deeply engrained in an amazing way. Therefore they are plied with punishments and they pay the penalties of their former wickedness. Some spirits are hung suspended to the winds; for others the infection of crime is washed by a vast whirlpool or burned out by fire. Each of us suffers his own shade. Then we are sent to Elysium and we few occupy these happy fields, until a long period of the circle of time has been completed and has removed the ingrown corruption and has left a pure ethereal spirit and the fire of the original essence. When they have completed the cycle of one thousand years, the god calls all these in a great throng to the river Lethe, where, of course, they are made to forget so that they might begin to wish to return to bodies and see again the vault of heaven." Anchises then led Aeneas and the Sibyl to a mound from which they could view the souls as they came up, and he pointed out to them with affection and pride a long array of great and illustrious Romans who were to be born. The book ends with Aeneas and his guide leaving by the gate of ivory; why Vergil has it so, no one knows for sure (893-99): "There are twin gates of Sleep; one is said to be of horn, through which easy exit is given to the true shades. The other is gleamingly wrought in shining ivory, but through it the spirits send false dreams up to the sky." After he had spoken Anchises escorted his son and the Sibyl and sent them out by the gate of ivory. Aeneas made his way to his ships and rejoined his companions. Vergil is writing in the second half of the first century B.C., and variations and additions are apparent when his depiction is compared to the earlier ones of Homer and Plato. There are, of course, many other sources for the Greek and Roman conception of the afterlife, but none are more complete or more profound than the representative visions of these authors, and a compar'ison of them gives the best possible insight into the general nature and development of the ancient conception both spiritually and physically. Vergil's geography is quite precise. Aeneas and the Sibyl go through various regions. First of all a neutral zone contains those who met an untimely death (infants, suicides, and persons condemned unjustly); next the Fields of Mourning are inhabited by victims of unrequited love and warriors who fell in battle. The logic of these allocations is not entirely clear. Is a full term of life necessary for complete admission to the Underworld?

Then appear the crossroads to Tartarus and the Fields of Elysium. The criteria for judgment are interesting; like many another religious philosopher and poet, Vergil must decide who will merit the tortures of his hell or the rewards of his heaven both on the basis of tradition and of personal conviction. Other writers vary the list. Some have observed that the tortures inflicted are often imaginative and ingenious, involving vain and frustrating effort of mind and body, and therefore characteristically Greek in their sly inventiveness. Perhaps so, but depicted as well is sheer physical agony through scourging and fire. Attempts made to find a logic in the meting out of a punishment to fit the crime are only sometimes successful. Vergil's paradise is very much the idealization of the life led by Greek and Roman gentlemen and the values illustrated in the assignment of its inhabitants are typical of ancient ethics: devotion to mankind and country, to family, and to the gods. Yet despite the Greek and Roman coloring of the picture, the morality is universal and germane to all humanity and civilization. In Elysium, too, details supplement the religious philosophy of Plato that has been labeled Orphic and Pythagorean in particular, and mystic in general. Man's body is of earth, evil, and mortal; the soul is of the divine upper aether, pure and immortal, and must be cleansed from contamination and sin. Once again we are reminded of the myth of Dionysus, which explains man's dual nature in terms of his birth from the ashes of the wicked Titans (the children of Earth) who had devoured the heavenly god Dionysus. Presumably in the cycle of rebirth and reincarnation the weary chain is ultimately broken and we are no longer reborn into this world but join the oneness of divinity in the pure spirit of the upper air. Some identification and clarification of various names and terminology linked with the Underworld are now in order. The realm as a whole may be called Tartarus or Erebus, or these are the names given solely to the region of torment as opposed to Elysium or the Elysian Fields. Sometimes the realm of paradise is located elsewhere in some remote place of the upper world, such as the Islands of the Blessed. There are usually three judges of the Underworld: Minos, Rhadamanthys (or Rhadamanthus), and Aeacus, whose duties are variously assigned.

Aeacus is sometimes relegated to more menial tasks, like that of gatekeeper in comedy. The rivers are generally five in number with appropriate names: Styx (the river of hate); Acheron (of woe); Lethe (of forgetfulness); Cocytus (of wailing); Pyriphlegethon, or Phlegethon (of fire). It was a custom to bury the dead with a coin in their mouths to provide Charon with his fare. Hermes often plays his role of guide for the souls from this world to the next. Hades, king of the Underworld, is also called Pluto or (in Latin) Dis, which means the wealthy one, referring to him either as a god of earth and fertility or as a deity rich in the numbers of those who are with him. The Romans called him and his realm Orcus, which probably means "the one or the place that constrains or confines." Sometimes Hades (this word may mean the unseen one) is given no name at all or is addressed by some complimentary epithet, as is the custom for all deities or spirits, such as the devil, whom one dreads. Hades and his realm and its inhabitants are in general called Chthonian, that is, of the earth, as opposed to the bright world of the Olympian gods of the upper air, and Hades himself may even be addressed as Chthonian Zeus. The Furies (Erinyes) usually have their home in the realm of Hades; so does Hecate, who sometimes resembles them in appearance and in character. Hesiod, as we have seen, tells how the Furies were born from the blood that fell onto the earth after the castration of Uranus; according to others they are the offspring of Night. Both versions are appropriate in terms of their sphere and their powers. They vary in number but may be reduced to three with specific names: Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. In literature and art they are depicted as formidable, bearing serpents in their hands or hair and carrying torches and scourges. They are the pitiless and just avengers of crime, especially murder; blood guilt within the family is their particular concern, and they may relentlessly pursue anyone who has killed a parent or close relative. It has been conjectured that originally they were thought of as the ghosts of the murdered seeking vengeance on the murderer or as the embodiment of curses call-ed down upon the guilty. The Furies very definitely represent the old moral order of justice within the framework of primitive society, where the code of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth is meted out by the personal vendetta of the family or the clan. This is Aeschylus' conception of them in his dramatic trilogy, the Orestela.

The Furies persecute Orestes after he has murdered his mother, but e~entuall~theroirle is taken over by a new regime of right; the Areopagus, the court of Athens, decides Orestes' case through the due process of law and significantly it is Apollo and Athena (the new generation of progressive deities) who join forces with the justice of advanced civilization. The last play in the trilogy is called The Eurnenides, which means the Kindly Ones; this is the name for the Furies as they are worshiped in Athens, after having finally been appeased and put to rest once and for all. The Christian concept of the devil should not be confused with the ancient portrayal of Hades, who is not fighting with his brother Zeus for man's immortal soul. We all end up in his realm, where we may or may not find our heaven or our hell. The only exceptions are those who (like Heracles) are specifically made divinities and therefore allowed to join the gods in heaven or on Olympus. Hades, to be sure, is terrible in his severity and inexorable, buthe is not in himself evil or our tormentor; we may fear him as we fear death and its possible consequences which we cannot avoid. But he does have assistants, such as the Furies, who persecute with devilish and fiendish torments. Hades' wife, and queen of his realm, Persephone, has beeli considered in the previous article. The profundity and intensity of the Greek and Roman visions of an afterlife have been all-pervasive in the art and literature of Western civilization. Dante was steeped in its radiance, which he suffused with Christian imagination and dogma, taking Vergil as his guide. It would be misleading to imply that all Greek and Roman literature treats the realm of Hades and the afterlife with such serious profundity. One thinks immediately of Aristophanes' play the Frogs, in which the-god Dionysus rows across the Styx to the accompaniment of a chorus croaking brekekekex koax koax; his tour of the Underworld is different and at times.hilarious. From the wealth of material we can only include two dialogues by the satirist Lucian, who wrote in Greek during the second century A.D. A choice among his many brilliant Dialogues of the Dead is difficult.

Two brief examples of his wit and varying moods must suffice here. The character, Menippus, was a famous Cynic philosopher of the third century B.C. The Cynics were poor and extremely frugal; their dirty and ragged dress usually included a staff and wallet or sack; they were unconventional and outspoken in their indignation at the standard and unthinking attitudes of the individual and society. 22. Charon, Menippus, and Hermes CHARON: Abominable fellow, pay up the fare. MENIPPUS: GO ahead and shout, Charon, if this gives you some pleasure. CHARON: Pay up, I say, for ferrying you across. MENIPPUS: YOU can't get it from one who doesn't have it. CHARON: IS there anyone who doesn't have an obol for the fare? MENIPPUS: I don't know whether anyone else has or not, but I don't. CHARON: By Pluto, you rogue, I'll throttle you if you don't pay. MENIPPUS: And I'll smash your skull open with my stick. CHARON: Then you will have made this crossing to no avail. MENIPPUS: Let Hermes pay you for me, since he handed me over to you. HERMES: By Zeus, I'll be damned if I am going to pay for the shades, too. CHARON: I won't give in to you. MENIPPUS: Then haul your boat up and stay here; how can you take what I don't have? CHARON: Didn't you know that you had to bring it? MENIPPUS: I knew but I didn't have it. What was I to do? Should I not have died on account of it? CHARON: SO you will be the only one to boast that you were ferried across free? MENIPPUS: Not free, my fine fellow. I bailed water and helped row and I was the only one of the passengers who did not weep and wail. CHARON: These things have nothing to do with it. You must pay the obol; no exceptions allowed. MENIPPUS: Then take me back to life. CHARON: A fine remark, so that I may get a beating from Aeacus if I do, MENIPPUS: Then don't be so upset. CHARON: Show me what you have in your sack. MENIPPUS: Legumes, if you want, and one of Hecate's suppers CHARON: From where did you bring this dog to us .He kept babbling like this during the crossing, laughing and jeering at the other passengers; he alone was singing while they were moaning. HERMES: Charon, don't you know what man you have ferried across?

Scrupulously free, he doesn't care about anyone or anything. This is Menippus. CHARON: Indeed if I ever get hold of you- MENIPPUS: If you do, my fine fellow. You won't get another chance. 18. Menippus and Hermes MENIPPUS: Where are the handsome men and the beautiful women, Hermes? Show me the sights, since I am a stranger here. HERMES: I don't have the time, Menippus. But look over there to the right; there are Hyacinthus, Narcissus, Nireus, Achilles, Tyro, Helen, Leda, and in brief, all the beauties of old. MENIPPUS: I see only bones and skulls stripped of flesh, many of them alike. HERMES: These bones that you seem to despise are what all the poets marvel at. MENIPPUSB: ut still show me Helen; for I should not recognize her. HERMES: This is the skull of Helen. MENIPPUS: Was it for this then that the thousand ships were launched from all of Greece and so many Greeks and non-Greeks fell and so many cities were destroyed? HERMES: But, Menippus, you did not see the woman when she was alive; you too would have said it worthwhile "to suffer sorrows so much time for such a woman." For if one looks at flowers when they are dry and have lost their hues obviously they will seem ugly, but when they are in bloom and have their color they are most beautiful. MENIPPUS: And so I wonder at this: whether or not the Achaeans realized that they were toiling for a thing so short-lived and so easily destroyed. HERMES: I do not have the time to philosophize with you. So pick out a spot wherever you wish and be comfortable there; now I shall go to fetch the other shades.