To all his questions Anticlea made answer with tender pity. Penelope, his faithful wife, still mourned for him uncomforted; Telemachus, now almost grown to manhood, ruled his realm; and old Laertes, bowed with grief, only waited in sorrow for the release of the tomb, since his son Ulysses returned no more. She herself, his mother, had died of a broken heart; for him she lived, and when he came not, for love of him she died.
Ulysses, deeply moved, strove thrice to clasp her in his arms, and thrice she slipped from his embrace, like a shadow or a dream. In vain he begged that his fond arms might enfold the parent so tenderly loved, that he might know it was she herself and no empty image sent by Hell's queen to mock his sorrow. But the pensive ghost admonished him that such were all spirits when they had quit their mortal bodies. No substance of the man remained, said she: all had been devoured by the funeral flames and scattered by the winds to the empty air. It was but the soul that flew, like a dream, to the infernal regions. "But go," she adjured him; "haste to climb the steep ascent; regain the day and seek your bride, to recount to her the horrors and the laws of Hell."
As she ceased and disappeared, a cloud of phantoms, wives and daughters of kings and heroes, flitted round the visitant of earth. Dauntless he waved his sword; the ghostly crew shrank away and dared not drink of the wine in the trench at his feet. They passed, and to each other Ulysses heard them recount their names and needs. There he saw Alcmena, mother of Alcides; Megara, wife of Hercules, who was slain by him in his madness; the beautiful Chloris, Antiope, and Leda, mother of the deathless twins Castor and Pollux, who live and die alternately, the one in Heaven and the other in Hell, the favored sons of Jove.
There walked Phædra, shedding unceasing tears of remorse for her slain love, and near her mournful Ariadne. All these, and many more, Ulysses recognized in that pale procession of departed spirits. When they had been summoned back to the black halls of Proserpine, the forms of the heroes slain by the foul Ægisthus came in sight. High above them all towered great Agamemnon. He drank the wine and knew his friend; with tears Ulysses greeted him and inquired what relentless doom, what fate of war, or mischance upon the ocean, had thrust his spirit into Hell? And Agamemnon told him all the dreadful story of his return from Troy, and the treachery of his wife Clytemnestra and her lover, who slew him as he feasted, and with him all his friends; most pitiful of all, the voice of the dying Cassandra, slain at his side as he himself lay dying, still rang in his ears.
And Ulysses answered him: "What ills hath Jupiter wreaked on the house of Atreus through the counsels of women!"
"Be warned," replied Agamemnon, "and tell no woman all that is in thy heart; not even Penelope, though she is discreet and true above all other women and will not plot thy death." And he grieved for his own son Orestes, on whom he had never looked, envying his friend an heir so wise and brave as the young Telemachus.
Then he saw Achilles and Patroclus, approaching through the gloom. Achilles knew his friend and hastened to his side. "Oh mortal, overbold," he asked, "how durst thou come down living to the realms of the dead?" Ulysses told him how he had come, though living, to seek counsel of the dead.
But Achilles made answer:
"Rather would I, in the sun's warmth divine,
Moil as a churl, who drags his days in grief,
Than the whole lordship of the dead were mine."
Then, like Agamemnon, he demanded news of his son, and Ulysses charmed the father's heart by telling of the gallant deeds of Neoptolemus at Troy town, and how he had escaped unscathed from the fight.