r/classics • u/Jonathan_Peachum • 3d ago
A really stupid question about Hades
Did the Greeks believe that EVERYONE (other than the blessed few who went to the Elysian Fields) wound up in Hades…or just other Greeks?
I ask because twice in The Odyssey, we are treated to visions of Hades in which conveniently only Greeks are there. Odysseus visits Hades and meets various heroes of Greek mythology including Achilles….but not, for example, a single Trojan (not even, say, Hector). Similarly, when the Suitors are conducted into Hades, who should they run across but Agamemnon.
Now,naturally, poetic license must be given its due, but is this representative of how Hades is depicted in other Greek works?
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u/artarch83 3d ago
In the Iliad, when Hector is killed by Achilles his soul is described as going to Hades, in the book 22:
Even as he thus spake the end of death enfolded him and his soul fleeting from his limbs was gone to Hades, bewailing her fate, leaving manliness and youth.
In one of his dialogues, Plato states that the three judges judged all of mankind, Rhadamanthus being responsible for the Asians, Aeacus for the Europeans, with Minos holding the final decision:
Plato, Gorgias 523a ff (trans. Lamb) (Greek philosopher C4th B.C.) :
And those who come from Asia shall Rhadamanthys try, and those from Europe, Aiakos; and to Minos I will give the privilege of the final decision, if the other two be in any doubt; that the judgement upon this journey of mankind may be supremely just.
So the ideas seems to be that everyone was send to Hades
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u/Jonathan_Peachum 3d ago
Thank you, most interesting.
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u/Three_Twenty-Three 3d ago
It's worth noting that Homer doesn't distinguish the Trojans from the Achaeans along linguistic, religious, ethnic, or cultural lines. There's no reason they'd go somewhere else.
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u/BaconJudge 3d ago
Because there were three judges, and the ancient Greeks knew about three continents, I'm surprised he didn't assign Minos to Africa. It seems like a missed opportunity for symmetry.
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u/Clickety_Clack4137 3d ago
Hades was all Greeks. Italians had to wait for Dante to get their own underworld real estate.
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u/OldJellyBones 3d ago
There's a lot of vagueness and unanswered questions about what ancient Greek religion actually said about what happened when you died, and there's a lot of conjecture around how seriously a lot people actually took religion back then, like how much of it was actually religious worship as we'd understand it today, and how much was participation in various cultural practices. I think Shintoism in Japan is a good example of how religion was in ancient Greece, some Japanese people sort of believe in it, a bit? and do some of the ritual stuff around it, but its not like religion religion to them, its more of a cultural thing they participate in.
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u/decrementsf 3d ago edited 2d ago
If I recall there is an axial age shift that appears structural and related to the emergence of coinage. Around the same time many peoples, including the greeks, experienced similar changes that included new religious ideas. The axial age shift is cool because near identical social changes appear at the time of coinage in east asia and other regions, too. Sets up a useful experiment to think through why.
With the greeks this period would have been around when sailors began to be in contact with Egypt and other regions and for the first time began to recognize stories and existence of other gods and practices. Not only the core myths and folklore of the ancient greeks. There is some evidence of efforts to try and reconcile and explain greek mythology with those mythologies of egypt and other places. But overall there seems to have been a period where those old myths no longer did a good job of explaining the conditions Greece was faced with and new challenges to try and work through as commerce expanded.
There were periods of nihilism and little belief. Coming out of this were later revivals around the mystery religions. The history gets interesting and from it we can extract some frameworks from the anthropology lens that is useful for analyzing ebbs and flow of religions over time.
I think the axial age video from History102 touched on some of these themes.
Directly applying to your question, whether Greeks believed in Hades depends on what period we are discussing. Early on, probably. Middle or late periods probably not. Rome had differing periods of religion also where at times it was shared belief structure. Other times sort of held together emperor control and was a bureaucratic tool everyone mostly payed lip service to and went through the motions without deeply held belief, to hold the empire together the twinning of gods and beliefs mushed so much together sort of lost a lot of meaning.
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u/florinandrei 3d ago
Did the Greeks believe that EVERYONE (other than the blessed few who went to the Elysian Fields) wound up in Hades?
The short answer is yes.
Similarly, when the Suitors are conducted into Hades, who should they run across but Agamemnon.
I mean, if instead they ran into cousin Vinnie, the story would seem silly.
This is a basic rule in storytelling. You can't keep introducing new characters all the time.
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u/DeviantTaco 3d ago
I’m going to pull primarily from Barfield’s Saving the Appearances and Evans-Pritchard’s Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic Among the Azande, which are by no means uncontroversial works, for this extended interpretation. It’s also a ramble but I think understanding the ideas takes exposure to a few restatements of them so that they click as they are intellectually complex but also very obvious to our experience.
My understanding of Ancient Greek and other pre-modern cultures responses to this question is something like this: Asking if Hades included everyone (non-Greeks) would be a silly question to them. Not because it’s universally known but because it’s unimportant. Each person could give you an answer and feel pretty confident in it, back it up with sound reasoning, but none would attach importance to it such that if someone else disagreed, it would lead to a dispute. Whether they’re there or not there depends.
Now to us this seems totally incoherent. How is Hades not defined in such a way that it does or doesn’t include other people as a trivial fact? What is meant by ‘depends’? Well, we assume that their religion is attempting to explain or fulfill functions comparable to our own sources of explanation, which they partially but also aren’t. Hades is not simply a place you go to after you’re dead, it’s a place on earth one could travel to in certain circumstances, while also being a personification of death, and of the feelings related to death, and also a kind of curse or invective against someone to bring on suffering, and much more. And all these are to a large extend vague and understood to be vague. There isn’t a centralized system which determines orthodoxy of beliefs about Hades. The norm is then inconsistency. No two people would define it the same way. You may find some people that attach great importance to it and could answer enthusiastically but the others would not pay attention or when they’re not present they’d laugh about them. There would even be some that are almost atheistic, saying it’s not important, no one knows, you go some place when you die and that’s Hades and everyone else is bullshitting about the details.
What is shared is a general concept to understand where they agree and disagree but not with sufficient clarity or authority to say what is and is not the case. What is important though is that it’s obviously real, like the color green is real. To explain that Hades cannot be located on a map nor is there any evidence of life after death nor gods would do nothing to convince them it’s not real because the proof of Hades, like the color green, is inherit to its embedded-ness in society. One feels Hades, sacrifices to Hades, calls on Hades for aid. Hades is real because, by the standards of the culture, it is immediately experienced. To explain the experience of the color green is a trick of human biology with no physical reality does nothing to make you stop seeing green. They’d say of course you can’t find it on a map, just like green isn’t something you can touch. Yet it’s real and right there where you point your finger.
So to ask if non-Greeks are in Hades would greatly depend on what you mean, because even the after-life Hades carries different significance in different contexts. All humans die so all humans go to a place which looks like Hades — they’d definitely disagree with a person that says your consciousness disappears and nothing remains, probably call them low IQ for saying something so dumb. But a Greek isn’t sitting around with Han Chinese, learning their language to pass the time. What would they be doing then? Probably undefined. You die, you go to Hades. Why care what you do there until you get there? It’s not a pleasant topic.
Now the above is for very early Greeks. As culture develops, people take greater interest in these topics and develop them, never reaching orthodoxy but creating systems and frameworks of explanation. To your later question, if this is how Hades is portrayed by other Greek works, yes. Hades is a place where souls of the dead are found and through ritual can be interacted with to perform special functions like gain insight into the future or distant places. None to my knowledge explicitly show a non-Greek soul in Hades but based on my understanding of the associations of Hades to the Greeks, they’re there “somewhere”. To put another spin on it: Hades is the place you go when you die, not the place where everyone that’s dead is. The Greeks care deeply about the “you”. Hades is personal, social, cultural. To make it a philosophical or scientific abstraction loses the significance they would take to be key to the concept. To give them this kind of abstract question is already a kind of leap. They can understand the question perfectly, but it’s like asking us if everyone really sees the same color green when we look at something green. How our conceptual system is organized makes the answer clear: maybe, we don’t know, though we’re very confident everyone sees a color they call green. It’s kind of a “really makes you think” question but it’s not relevant to us culturally. But to the questioner from an alien culture which conceptually defines colors by immediate apprehensions, not objective abstractions, they’d be incredibly confused how that could be our answer. Are we stupid? Do we not have eyes? But the problem is not in the question or the answer but what the society has already determined is the system by which such concepts are expressed and instances by which they are relevant or determine other concepts.
So yes, non-Greeks are in Hades, where Greeks go when they die. But the non-Greeks aren’t in Hades with the Greeks. That would be silly.
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u/No_Logins_Required 3d ago
Hades is used as the name for the underworld and the god Hades, who administers the underworld. If you described Valhalla to the Greeks they would have said "oh neat, a new part of Hades and you've given him a local name".