One touching inquiry both Agamemnon and Achilles put to their visitor from the upper world. How fare their sons? Where is Orestes?—asks the great king. Did Neoptolemus, in the later days of the war, prove himself worthy of his father?—inquires Achilles. When he has been assured of this, the shade of the mighty hero, well satisfied,
“Passed striding through the fields of asphodel.”
There is no distinct principle of reward or punishment discernible in the regions of the dead, as seen by Ulysses. Indeed, anything like happiness in this shadowy future seems incompatible with the feelings put into the mouth of Achilles. Orion, the mighty hunter, appears to enjoy something like the Red Indian’s paradise—pursuing, in those shadowy fields, the phantoms of the wild creatures which he slew on earth; but, with this exception, there is no hint of pleasurable interest or occupation for the mighty dead. Punishments there are for notorious offenders against the majesty of the gods:—
“There also Tantalus in anguish stood,
Plunged in the stream of a translucent lake;
And to his chin welled ever the cold flood.
But when he rushed, in fierce desire to break
His torment, not one drop could he partake.
For as the old man stooping seems to meet
That water with his fiery lips, and slake
The frenzy of wild thirst, around his feet,
Leaving the dark earth dry, the shuddering waves retreat.
“Also the thick-leaved arches overhead
Fruit of all savour in profusion flung,
And in his clasp rich clusters seemed to shed.
There citrons waved, with shining fruitage hung,
Pears and pomegranates, olive ever young,
And the sweet-mellowing fig: but whensoe’er
The old man, fain to cool his burning tongue,
Clutched with his fingers at the branches fair,
Came a strong wind and whirled them skyward through the air.”
“And I saw Sisyphus in travail strong
Shove with both hands a mighty sphere of stone:
With feet and sinewy wrists he, labouring long,
Just pushed the vast globe up, with many a groan;
But when he thought the huge mass to have thrown
Clean o’er the summit, the enormous weight
Back to the nether plain rolled tumbling down.
He, straining, the great toil resumed, while sweat
Bathed each laborious limb, and his brow smoked with heat.”
Both these are examples of punishment inflicted in the Shades below, not for an evil life, but for personal offences against the sovereign of the gods. Tantalus had been admitted as a guest to the banquet of the immortals, and had stolen their nectar and ambrosia to give to his fellow-men. Sisyphus had been, it is true, a notorious robber on earth, but the penalty assigned him was for the higher crime of betraying an amour of Jupiter’s which had come to his knowledge. The stone of Sisyphus has been commonly taken as an illustration of labour spent in vain; but a modern English poet has found in it a beautiful illustration of the indestructibility of hope. In one of Lord Lytton’s ‘Tales of Miletus,’ when Orpheus visits the Shades in search of his lost wife—
“He heard, tho’ in the midst of Erebus,
Song sweet as his Muse-mother made his own;
It broke forth from a solitary ghost,
Who, up a vaporous hill,
“Heaved a huge stone that came rebounding back,
And still the ghost upheaved it and still sang.
In the brief pause from toil while towards the height
Reluctant rolled the stone,
“The Thracian asked in wonder, ‘Who art thou,
Voiced like Heaven’s lark amidst the night of Hell?’
‘My name on earth was Sisyphus,’ replied
The phantom. ‘In the Shades