The Afterlife in the Classical and Italian Traditi

From the beginning of our conversation this semester I have been questioning why these heroes can only get the information they need from the underworld? I’m beginning to form a theory about why Odysseus, at least, needs to travel to the underworld. In Book 11 of the Odyssey the souls appear empty in all aspects and I would not expect a hero to put to much stock into their information. However, when addressed by Odysseus they can respond, for example Elpenor who asks for a proper burial after Odysseus first addresses him. [On a side note, how did Elpenor even get into the underworld to speak with Odysseus if no one preformed his burial?] Teiresias tells Odysseus that “Any one of the perished dead [he allows] to come up / to the blood will give [him] a true answer” (Book 11, 147-148). Thus the blood offering connects these souls to a place of truth which explains why Odysseus would want to speak with Teiresias, who not only was a great seer, but also after drinking the blood would be compelled to tell the truth. My mind cannot help but notice the similarity between the rituals Circe tells Odysseus to perform and the ceremonies used for magic in the later Greek world: the sacrifice of a black animal (a holocaust sacrifice even, meaning that the whole animal was burned to the gods) and its location in the underworld (which is where Hecate, goddess of magic lives. However, I’m not quite sure those are real connects yet so I will move on to my question.

After reading the Odyssey books assigned for this week I could not help but notice the inconsistencies with Homer’s view of the afterlife. My questions come from our reading of Book 24, where the souls are not gibbering at all, rather they are coherent. The souls of the suitors killed by Odysseus are taken to the underworld by Hermes Psycopomps and they immediately begin to tell their story. Agamemnon responds to them coherently as well, ignoring their story and praising Penelope. To me this shows a larger departure from thirteen books earlier when Teiresias alone is suppose to have mental facilities. Is this perhaps a part of the Odyssey that was written at a later date when there was a more complex idea of the afterlife? Or do the souls of the departed always have the capacity to speak to one another? Perhaps they can only speak of their own deaths and the circumstances surrounding their departure from the above world. That would certainly sound like gibbering after three months of hearing Agamemnon’s “my wife totally stabbed me” story. Either way, the stress placed on the emptiness and, dare I say, pointlessness of the souls as described in Homer Books 10 and 11 seem to contrast greatly with their later portray in the same epic.

At the close of the Inferno’s canto 26, Ulysses recounts that he and his crew had travelled for 5 months (l. 130) at sea when a mountain rose before them (l. 133-5) and a great storm hammered at their ship. The storm turned the ship around three times in the water, and during the fourth time, sunk the ship, “as pleased the Other, until the sea again closed–over us”. [tr. by A. Mendelbaum]

[The number three is significant in the katabases of Odysseus and Aeneas. Although I could cite many more examples, three will have to suffice. Odysseus attempts to wrap his arms around his mother's ghost in Od. 11. 205-8, "Three times I started toward her, and my heart was urgent to hold her, and three times she fluttered out of my hands like a shadow of a dream..." (tr. by R. Lattimore); and when the ghost of Palinurus provides to Aeneas an account of his own death in Aen. 6. 374-5, "Three nights I rode the waters, three nights of storm, and on the fourth morning..."; lastly, echoing Homer, Vergil's Aeneas attempts three times to embrace the shade of his father Anchises when they meet in Elysium, "Three times he reached out toward him, and three times the image fled like the breath of the wind or a dream on wings." (tr. from Aeneid by R. Humphries).]

Dante either purposefully deviates from or is unaware of the classical tradition’s account of Odysseus’ death. However, one might view Dante’s account as an imaginative elaboration of the prophecy made to Homer’s Odysseus by Teiresias.

During Odysseus’ encounter with Teiresias in the Homeric epic, Odysseus learns that death (”thanatos”) will come to him from out of the sea (Od. 11. 134) in an unwarlike way when he has reached a ripe old age. Teiresias’ prophecy, although seemingly transparent, actually invites misunderstanding. We are perhaps not surprised to learn that will die “from the sea”; after all, Odysseus has suffered for many years precisely because of his myriad adventures lost at open ocean.

The death of Odysseus in the epic tradition, however, offers another account of his death which runs contrary to Dante’s narrative. The Odyssey belongs to a cycle of epics on the Trojan War, the last of which follows the Odyssey in sequence. The Telegony features the adventures of Telegonus, Odysseus’ son by Circe, the sorceress in the Odyssey who enchants Odysseus’ men and who directs Odysseus how to reach the land of the dead. Although the actual text of the Telegony is lost, a few summaries and sources which reference the text survive from antiquity (particularly useful are Proclus’ Chrestomathia and Oppian’s work on fishing, Halieutica 2. 497ff). We know that in this epic, Telegonus accidentally kills his father on dry land with a weapon Circe had given him. This weapon, a spear barbed with the poisonous spine of a sting-ray, provides the means by which Odysseus dies “from the sea.”

Whether Dante had direct access to Homer’s text is a nettled issue, but Dante seems to allude to both the Odyssey and the Iliad (through the figure of Diomedes particularly). Although Dante may be working through intermediaries (most notably, Vergil), he still seems to understand the quintessential ethical nature of Homer’s “man of many turns,” who dies in the quest for experiential knowledge. To what degree does Dante’s Ulysses reflect the actual character of the Homeric hero, and to what degree (and why) is there some revision of the Homeric Odysseus?