Elysium

Elysium is the exception to a bleak system. Homer places it at the ends of the earth rather than underground: a plain where there is no snow, no storm and no hard winter, and the west wind blows in off the ocean to refresh those living there. Menelaus is told he will go, not for virtue but because he married Helen and is therefore Zeus's son-in-law.

Later writers moved it inside the Underworld and made entry more meritocratic. Pindar describes the deserving spending their days in sunlight, with meadows of red roses and shaded walks, exercising and playing music. Virgil's version has its own sun and its own stars.

Pindar adds a further tier: souls who live justly three times over, in three separate lives, pass to the Isles of the Blessed. That implies reincarnation between attempts, and it is one of the few places Greek myth offers an afterlife you can actively work toward rather than simply be assigned.

The river Lethe belongs to the same system. Drinking it erases memory, which is the necessary preparation for being born again — and, read another way, the price of a second chance.

Roman poets pushed the idea further still. Virgil gives Elysium its own laurel groves and its own light, and stations Musaeus there to direct new arrivals — the afterlife acquiring administration. By late antiquity the word had drifted loose of the myth entirely and become a byword for any perfect place, which is how a district of Paris ended up named after the fields of the blessed dead.