Elysium

Elysium, the Elysian Fields, is the blessed afterlife of Greek belief, and its interest lies in its being an exception to the general Greek gloom about death. Where the mass of the dead faded into the gray Asphodel Meadows, Elysium was a place of ease, sunlight, and eternal spring reserved for a favoured few: heroes, the specially virtuous, and those related to or loved by the gods. Homer places it (as the "Elysian plain") at the western edge of the earth, a land with no snow or storm where the fortunate live at ease; later writers, especially under the influence of mystery cults and philosophy, moved it into the underworld proper and expanded who might reach it, tying admission to initiation, purity, or a life of justice rather than mere heroic birth.

Pindar and others describe cycles in which the pure soul, after repeated righteous lives, wins passage to the "Isles of the Blessed." Elysium thus marks the point at which Greek thought began to make the afterlife a matter of merit rather than status, a development that fed into Orphic and Pythagorean ideas of the soul and its judgement, and ultimately into later Western images of paradise.

In Homer the Elysian plain is not a reward for virtue. Menelaus is told he will go there because he is married to Helen and is therefore son-in-law to Zeus, and the reason given is kinship. It is an exemption granted by connection, which is how a good deal of archaic Greek privilege worked.

The moralising came later and unevenly. Hesiod places the heroes of the fourth age on the Isles of the Blessed. Pindar, writing for aristocratic patrons, gives a version in which souls who keep their oaths through three lives in each world reach the island of the blessed, which introduces both a moral criterion and reincarnation. Virgil in the sixth book of the Aeneid gives Elysium a population of the pious, the patriotic and the artistically gifted, which is a Roman list.

By the time the idea reaches the schoolroom it has become one third of a tidy scheme with Elysium for the good, the Asphodel Meadows for the ordinary and Tartarus for the wicked. No ancient author sets it out that way. The scheme is a later convenience assembled from authors who were writing centuries apart with different purposes, and it is worth knowing that the neatness is a modern contribution.

The location drifted as well. Homer places it at the ends of the earth by the stream of Ocean, later writers move it to islands in the far west, and Virgil puts it underground alongside Tartarus. A paradise that is over the horizon and a paradise that is below your feet are answering different questions, and the tradition used both without reconciling them.