punishment in Hell. Once again, the Homeric representation of the afterlife seems
typical of general Greek belief. When Odysseus visits Hades, the twilight world of the
dead, he does indeed see eternal punishment in the case of the fate of the immortal
Titans who had sought to overthrow Zeus, but mortal life is not subject to judgement.
Mortal consciousness continues in Hades in a twilight world of gibbering spirits, one
of whom, Achilles, tells Odysseus plaintively that he would rather be the meanest
slave on earth than king of the underworld (Odyssey10, 488–491). The concept of
Elysium occurs in Homer; it is a paradise where a privileged few can live like gods
after death, but this heavenly paradise is beyond the aspirations of ordinary mortals,
though it seems that initiates into the Eleusinian mysteries described below might
have been promised an easier afterlife as a major benefit.
What is less apparent in Homeric Olympian religion is the seemingly darker side
associated with the chthonic powers of the underworld. This lack is apparent not only
in Homer but in later sources too. An obvious exception is Aeschylus’ Oresteian
Trilogy in which the terrifying Furies pursue Orestes after the matricide which he has
undertaken on the orders of Apollo. These pre-Olympian deities who are particularly
concerned with matters of family and kinship are defeated in the trial scene by the
Olympians Apollo and Athena but offered an honoured place of worship in Athens,
not in any temple but in a home beneath the ground. These older deities cannot be
banished and evidently need to be placated.
In addition to the principal Olympians, there are many lesser deities; for example,
Poseidon is often accompanied by a train of minor deities, such figures as Phorcus,
Nereus and a host often unnamed but indwelling nymphs of the sea. Nymphs might
also inhabit fresh water rivers and springs (Naiads), trees (Hamaydryads) and
mountains (Oreads). Indeed the whole of nature was interpenetrated with a sense of
the divine. Pan, the god of shepherds, a local god of Arcadia in the Peloponnese, his
original home, came to be a Pan-Hellenic god only later in the fifth century. As well
as the gods, there are figures who have one divine parent, which is the strict definition
of a hero, such as Achilles, son of the mortal Peleus and Thetis, a minor sea deity,
Heracles, a son of Zeus by the mortal Alcmene, who, exceptionally, was rewarded
with divinity for his various heroic labours, and Asclepius, son of Apollo to a mortal
Coronis, who later became a patron of medicine and healing. Local heroes might be
invoked as guardian gods, rather like saints in the Catholic tradition.
From a reading of Homer, Hesiod and the Homeric Hymns, it soon becomes
apparent that there are many, often contradictory, stories about the gods. Hephaestus,
the fire-god, is a case in point; in one account he is born without a father to Hera, in
rival response to the birth of Athena from Zeus without a mother; in another he is a
son of Zeus and Hera and is present at the birth of Athena acting as a kind of ‘midwife’
in aiding the birth by splitting open Zeus’ head with an axe. Neither of these stories
is in Homer or Hesiod, but from earliest times there must have been various rival
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