of Aeacus brought the number of judges to three (Apology41a;Gorgias523e–524a).
All were famous during their lives for being lawgivers, and their job was to assign
souls to the appropriate places within Hades, deciding whether each soul would be
rewarded or punished. Those to be rewarded were assigned to Elysium which, in the
earliest Greek literature (Homer and Hesiod), was imagined to be separate from
Hades, and was reserved for mortals related to the gods and for heroes who had
fought and died gloriously in battles such as the Trojan War. By the fifth century
Elysium was described as a part of Hades itself, as a place where the souls of the good
were rewarded by leading enjoyable afterlives.
Souls of those who had offended the gods did not enjoy a pleasant afterlife in
Hades, however. In Homer’s Hades, where most of the dead mingle, such criminals
are not confined to a separated location, but they are indeed punished (Odyssey
11.572–600). Criminals in Hades were relegated to Tartarus. Hesiod describes
Tartarus as being ‘‘as far below earth as sky is above the earth’’ (Theogony720–5),
not a particularly helpful description, and the place is used as a prison for the Titans
who fought against Zeus. But by the fifth century Tartarus had become a segment of
Hades in which famous criminals were punished. Many of them were mortals who
had been favored by the gods but then dared to challenge the immortals: one of the
greatest offenses possible was for a mortal to exhibithubristoward the gods. Tantalus,
partly because he was a son of Zeus, was favored by the gods and often dined with
them before being shunned by them. There are several different versions of the crime
that landed him in Tartarus. In one, Tantalus abused the gods’ hospitality by stealing
their nectar and ambrosia. In another, Zeus and other gods told him secrets, which he
promptly revealed to other mortals. In the best-known version of Tantalus’ crime,
though, he exhibited hubris by deciding to test the gods’ omniscience in a particularly
gruesome manner. He invited them to a feast, cut up his own son, Pelops, and served
him up to the gods in a stew. The gods weren’t fooled, and refused to eat the
horrifying meal – all except Demeter, who inadvertently ate part of Pelops’ shoulder,
distracted as she was by the loss of her daughter to Hades. Zeus restored Pelops to
life, giving him an ivory shoulder to replace the missing one, and punished Tantalus
by condemning him to an eternity of perpetual hunger and thirst, mirroring the
nature of his crime. In Hades, then, Tantalus stood in a pool of water, but whenever
he bent over to drink, the water receded; trees heavy with fruit hung overhead, but
whenever he reached for them they moved out of his grasp – a punishment described
as early as theOdyssey(11.582–92).
Another famous offender undergoing eternal punishment in Hades was Ixion, a
mortal king who tried to seduce Hera. Zeus punished him by chaining him to an
eternally revolving fiery wheel, which perhaps reflected his burning and uncontrol-
lable lust. Sisyphus, too, was a mortal king, renowned for his cunning. In the most
popular version of his crime and punishment, he betrayed Zeus by publicizing one of
the god’s affairs. The god then condemned Sisyphus to spend eternity trying to push
a huge boulder up a hill. Whenever Sisyphus neared the top, the boulder rolled back
down, and Sisyphus had to retrieve it and begin again. Women as well as men were
punished in Hades for their sins. The Danaı ̈des, daughters of king Danau ̈s, killed their
husbands on their wedding night. In the afterlife they were condemned to draw water
for all eternity, as they were given leaky jars that could never remain filled. Although
all the criminals in Hades described here are mythological characters, such stories
The Dead 93