What Every Other Greek Shade Was Promised Instead

Homer's own epics describe the fate the Mysteries were an exception to. In the Odyssey's account of the underworld, the ghost of Achilles, greatest of the Greek dead, tells Odysseus he would rather be a landless labourer serving a poor man on earth than rule as king over all the perished, and the poem gives no other shade a better portion to hope for, the dead in Homer being witless shades in an indistinct grey crowd, heroes and cowards alike, with nothing in the epic tradition resembling reward or judgement. Burkert reads the Eleusinian promise directly against this backdrop rather than in isolation, as the specific point where Greek religion broke with its own dominant epic picture of death and offered something Homer's poems had refused anyone, a portion after death that depended on something a person had done in life. The mysteries did not replace the Homeric underworld with a different geography, no Eleusinian text describes one, a silence the ancient sources themselves leave unexplained. What they added was a distinction inside a fate that had previously admitted none, initiated and uninitiated where Homer had only the dead, and it is against the flatness of Achilles's complaint that the promise of a better lot reads as the departure it was, rather than as one more variation on a theme Greek religion had already supplied.