§ 2
It is certain that the intention of this poet cannot possibly have been simply the description of the underworld for its own sake. Even the scenery of these mysterious incidents which might well have attracted his fancy, is only given in brief allusions. The ship sails over Okeanos to the people of the Kimmerians[64] that never see the sun, and reaches at last the “barren coast” and the “Grove of Persephone”, with its black poplars and weeping willows. Odysseus with two companions goes on ahead to the entrance of Erebos, where Pyriphlegethon and Kokytos, a branch of the Styx, flow into Acheron. There he digs his sacrificial trench to which the souls flock upward out of Erebos over the asphodel-meadows. It is the same underworld in the bowels of the earth that is presupposed in the Iliad, too, as the dwelling-place of the dead, only more accurately described and more fully realized.[65] The details of the picture are so lightly sketched in that one might well suppose that they, too, had been taken from some older mythical material. At any rate, he borrowed the “Styx”, so well known in the Iliad; and it may be supposed that the same applies to the other rivers as well, whose names are clearly derived from words meaning burning (of dead bodies?),[66] lamentation, and sorrow.[67] The poet himself, interested only in the representation of character, is not at all disposed to dwell upon the merely fanciful, and confines himself to a few brief allusions. Nor does he give any very lengthy account of the dwellers in Erebos, and what he does say of them keeps well within the limits of the usual Homeric belief. The Souls resemble shadow- or dream-pictures, and [36] are impalpable to the human touch.[68] They are without consciousness when they appear. Elpenor alone, whose body still lies unburnt, has for that very reason retained his senses and even shows a form of heightened consciousness that approaches prophecy; resembling in this respect Patroklos and Hektor at the moment when the psyche is parted from the body.[69] This, however, is to leave him as soon as his corpse is destroyed. Teiresias alone, the prophet famed above all others in Theban legend, has preserved his consciousness and prophetic vision even in the Shadow-world through the good-will of Persephone; but this is an exception which only establishes the rule. What Antikleia tells her son of the powerlessness and immateriality of the soul after the burning of the body[70] sounds almost like an official confirmation of the orthodox Homeric view. Everything, in fact, in this poet’s description enforces the truth of this belief, and though the living are, indeed, untroubled by the feeble souls banished to outer darkness, yet out of Erebos itself the piteous knell of this decree reaches us in the lament of Achilles as he refuses his friend’s attempt at comfort—everyone knows the unforgettable words.