Homer and the Birth of Hell

How the Ancient Greek Poet Shaped the Christian Underworld

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Hell is often thought of as a Christian invention, but Jesus himself had little to say about the underworld. If we examine his words in the two earliest Gospels—Mark and Matthew, considered by many scholars to be the most historically reliable—it becomes clear that the "Kingdom of God" Jesus prophesied was meant to be established in this world, with him as its king.

The ideas of Heaven and Hell emerged as a way for Jesus' followers to cope with his death, and as the years passed without his return, they became a means of reconciling the growing realization that he might not come back anytime soon. The Kingdom of God might be established in this world when Jesus finally came back, but until he did a new doctrine started to form in the early centuries of the Christian millennium. It was quite simple, and very much effective: Those who followed Jesus and his teachings in life would go to the Good Place, to Heaven – now open to us by his sacrifice. Those who did not will go to Hell, the place of eternal punishment.

While these ideas were new in some respects, Hell especially had precedents in the ancient so-called pagan world, much more so than in Jewish origins. Yes, the Hebrew Bible does mentions Sheol, but it is not wholly clear if this is the realm of death or a non-place where the bones of the dead rested. The Greeks and later the Romans had far more elaborate visions of the afterlife, and tracing their evolution helps illuminate how the "Great Below" transformed into our modern notion of Hell.

Homer is where this journey starts.

Odysseus in Hades, a painting by Russell Flint, 1924

The legendary author of The Iliad and The Odyssey did not lead us directly into Hell, but he certainly took us to the land of the dead, a realm that, in his vision, was still part of the physical world—located at its very edge. In The Odyssey, Book 11, Shining Odysseus must journey to this shadowy domain to receive a prophecy from the dead seer Tiresias.

This episode allows Homer to revisit the fates of various warriors from The Iliad, and the picture he paints is grim. This is not an afterlife of reward or punishment but a bleak "House of Death," where the shades of men and women linger, robbed of their senses and memories. They cannot experience joy or physical touch, and they do not even remember who they were in life—until they drink the blood of a sacrificial offering, temporarily restoring their consciousness.

One by one, the dead heroes of Greece come to him, drawn by the scent of blood, remembering who they were in life. All lament their fate, with mighty Achilles standing out among them and as usual, winning this contest easily. When Odysseus tells Achilles that he is much revered for his actions in the war and should take pride in that, what the unbeatable warrior replies has got to be, for me at least, the most moving moment in the whole epic:

Odysseus, you must not comfort me for death. I would prefer to be a workman, hired by a poor man on a peasant farm, than rule as king of all the dead.

To be sung about after death was the highest achievement a Greek man could hope for—for it meant being remembered for heroic deeds, living on in the minds and hearts of future generations. This was one major reason to strive for greatness in life. Yet even the greatest hero Greece had ever known, the mighty Achilles—now the king of the shades in the underworld—sees only the fleeting value of the brief life we all receive.

Still, Homer lets us know that even in that awful place, there are degrees of suffering, with the unburied dead as the lowest, most displaced among them. This is the fate of one of Odysseus' men, who died not long before the journey to the land of the dead:

First came the spirit of my man Elpenor,
who had not yet been buried in the earth.

We left his body in the house of Circe without a funeral or burial;
we were too occupied with other things.
On sight of him, I wept in pity, saying,
‘Elpenor, how did you come here, in darkness?
You came on foot more quickly than I sailed.’

Elpenor replies with his sad tale of demise and a heartfelt request to be properly buried, "so in the future, people will know of me and my misfortune."

As you can probably tell, almost all humans share the same fate in death. While most are forgotten and few are remembered, all become shades that wonder aimlessly in death.

And yet, according to Homer, only three figures suffer in the underworld eternally as punishment for their actions in life.

The first is the immortal Titan Tityus,

the son of Gaia,
stretched out nine miles. When Leto, Zeus’ lover,
was traveling to Pytho, through the fields
of beautiful Panopeus, he raped her.
Two vultures sit on either side of him,
ripping his liver, plunging in his bowels;
he fails to push them off.

Then come two mortals. The first, Tantalus, committed one of the most horrifying crimes imaginable—killing, boiling, and serving his own son, Pelops, to the gods as a test of their omniscience. His punishment was crafted to fit his crime:

He stood in water to his chin,
so parched, no way to drink.
When that old man bent down towards the water, it was gone;
some god had dried it up, and at his feet
dark earth appeared. Tall leafy trees hung fruit
above his head: sweet figs and pomegranates
and brightly shining apples and ripe olives.
But when he grasped them with his hands, the wind
hurled them away towards the shadowy clouds.

The second is perhaps the most famous—Sisyphus, punished for locking up the god of Death when it came to claim him, allowing mortals to escape their fate for a time. He is most well-known for his endless torment:

And I saw Sisyphus in torment, pushing
a giant rock with both hands, leaning on it
with all his might to shove it up towards
a hilltop; when he almost reached the peak,
its weight would swerve, and it would roll back down,
heedlessly. But he kept on straining, pushing,
his body drenched in sweat, his head all dusty.

As scholar Bart D. Ehrman writes in Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife: "These three would become the prototype of Hell as it develops later in the Western tradition", as only these suffer never-ending punishment.

What makes them unique? They angered the gods and defied them—but so did many other mortals. In a sense, they are stand-ins for divine justice. But we should not forget that Odysseus, the teller of this tale, was too afraid to press on into Erebus, the complete darkness where the vilest offenders are punished:

So then I hurried back and told my men
to climb on board the ship and loose the cables.

So, though we only meet the three, they are many more who suffer for their offences against the never-dying gods.

Now obviously this is not the end of the story of Hell, just its very inception in fact. Homer's underworld is not yet the Hell of fire and brimstone that Christianity would later envision, but it laid the initial groundwork. The next step in this evolution comes from Plato, some 400 years in the future, particularly in his dialogue Phaedo, where Socrates describes a system of divine justice. Those who lack virtue are sent to Tartarus, a realm of torment considered more deeper than Hades, while those who pursue philosophy and cultivate wisdom ascend to a "pure place of residence above."

If that structure sounds familiar, it should. Plato, Homer, and later Virgil—Homer’s greatest Roman imitator—profoundly shaped the Christian idea of the afterlife. It is no wonder that Virgil mentored Dante in the Inferno, where the both of them met Plato and Homer. If Dante could read Homer in Latin verse—the Greek poet wasn’t translate to Latin yet—maybe it would have been him to accompany Dante in his journey.

Hell, in its final form, may be a Christian creation, but its roots stretch deep into the poetry of Greek antiquity, where some, particularly unlucky and vile dead first learned what it meant to suffer beyond the grave, at least according to the gods and to Homer.

All excerpts from Homer are taken directly from Emily Wilson’s wonderful translation of The Odyssey (W. W. Norton & Company, 2017)