The Underworld

The Greek Underworld is not a punishment. It is where nearly everyone goes, and the oldest picture of it is bleak precisely because it is universal: Homer's dead are shadows who have lost what made them individuals. Achilles, asked in the Odyssey whether death has compensations, says he would rather be a landless labourer among the living than king of all the dead.

It is bounded by rivers — Styx, the river of oaths; Acheron, of pain; Lethe, of forgetting; Cocytus, of wailing; Phlegethon, of fire. Charon ferries those who were buried with the fare across; the unburied wait a hundred years on the wrong bank. Cerberus keeps them in once they are through.

There are regions. The Asphodel Meadows take the ordinary majority. Elysium, or the Isles of the Blessed, receives heroes and the exceptionally virtuous, and there the sun still shines. Tartarus lies as far beneath the Underworld as earth is beneath the sky, and holds the Titans and the notoriously damned — Sisyphus and his stone, Tantalus in reach of food he can never take.

Three judges sort the arriving dead: Minos, Rhadamanthys and Aeacus, all mortal kings in life. Hades rules it all and rarely leaves, which is why he is the least-worshipped Olympian and the most misread. He is not evil. He is simply where everyone ends up.