classical mythology lecture week 5

missed monday notes


5.2 (tuesday)

The Underworld and Afterlife

  • house of hades - presents the underworld

  • hades not the devil in greek myth

    • part of nature/natural order of things

    • not opposing zeus but existing alongside him

  • Charon - the boat man who carries dead souls across Styx river to where they need to be (with Hermes)

  • Hades’ wife is Persephone (he abducted her)


The Homeric Afterlife

  • Odyssey 11: Odysseus to Alcinous

  • traveled to oceanus (far west) 

  • performed Cnithonian sacrifice and is calling the dead up from the underworld

  • Odysseus does not enter the underworld as Herakles did, he calls the dead UP to him

    • why does he call them up? to get wisdom, the dead have knowledge and wants to know how to get home

    • Nekuia - procession of the dead


Nekuia

  • Elpenor - Odysseus friend who died but is unburied

  • Tiresias - blind prophet

  • Anticleia - Odysseus mother

  • Achilles - greatest of ALL greek warriors

    • “I’d rather be a hired hand on earth than lord of dead” - this means everyone is the same in underworld, no matter accomplishments or worldly accolades everyone levels out


There I saw Minos…

  • Judging the dead as he sat in the wide gated house of Hades

  • later insertion

  • Odysseus can see Minos judging the underworld


The Great Sinners

  • place of punishment for CERTAINLY bad people

  • Tityos - tried to carry off Leto

  • Tantalus - perpeturally tantalized (out of reach)

  • Sisyphus - “Sisyphean” task - when you do something over and over again yet it doesn’t accomplish anything

  • reflect that humans cannot compete at the level of gods, they are minute and limited


The Isles of the Blessed

  • aka Elysium

  • Hesiod - all generations of heroes go to Elysium

  • Homer - only Menelaus goes to Elysium


Plato’s Myth of Er

  • Not a tale of Alcinous

  • Er - a warrior who dies and comes back to life

    • 1) general judgement

    • 2) reincarnation, transmigration of souls

    • 3) dualism - some (body) and psyche (soul)

      • death is the separation of the soul form the body


Orpheus

  • missed number 1

  • 2) Death of Orpheus

    • Thrace

    • Maenads, sparagamos

    • Lesbos - island where Orpheus’ head floats after he dies (his head sings even after his death)

      • someone wrote down the song and those writing supposedly became the scriptures of a later cult dedicated to him

Orphism - mystery cult for Orpheus

  • myths

    • cosmogyny

    • anthropogony

    • titans and dionysus incinerated by zeus and their ashes birthed humans