Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [128]
Fame Is Better than Immortality in the Odyssey
WHEN WE MEET Odysseus in the Odyssey Book 5, he is not the person we remember from the Iliad. He is weeping on the beach of the magical island of Ogygia, seemingly at his wits’ end. But he is hardly in dire straits. He is the guest of the tall, beautiful, blonde, goddess Calypso, who has granted him immortality, an ever-new wardrobe, and her considerable sexual favors.
Tempted as we might be by this invitation, it was not satisfactory to Odysseus, though he certainly enjoyed his temporary lodgings.18 We know from the first books of the Odyssey that his kingdom of Ithaca was in grave danger. The suitors were conspiring to murder his son Telemachus and force Penelope to marry one of them. We learn from this incident that, for an Achaian hero, even immortality, fabulous sex with a beautiful blonde goddess, and an ever new wardrobe is not worth the price of family honor and fame. The island was a trap for Odysseus, preventing him from reentering the world to gain fame by protecting his kingdom. Ogygia—like Calypso herself, whose name means “covered up”—was hidden from human life, an unmanly temptation, and thus beneath the dignity of a hero. This epic functions as a moral exhortation to the ancient Greek to stop dallying on raids and return home, just as the Iliad was equally a moral example towards heroism in battle.
The cost of Odysseus’s proper decision to eschew nameless, hidden immortality with Calypso is further emphasized by the Odyssey Book 11. Book 11 is a set-piece describing Odysseus’ most daring journey, into Hades itself. Known as a Nekyia (literally: a séance), this chapter also resembles a warrior’s raid into the underworld. After performing the expected libations, Odysseus set out on his journey, meeting the deceased among his crew, including Elpinor who cannot actually enter because he was not buried properly (11.50-54). As Odysseus enters, he finds many of his other dear departed ones there, beginning with his mother (11.84) Tiresius (i.fjoff.), and, most importantly for our purposes, the greatest hero of the Greeks, Achilles (11.46yff.).
Although some Greek concepts of the afterlife were eventually inimical both to personal and to bodily resurrection, this depiction of spirits again shows that they retained an image of their physical selves. Everyone was recognizable by his or her bodily features; indeed, recognition was a major honor to the dead. The recently dead even retained their death wounds.19 Although not physically embodied, they gain a modicum of physicality by drinking the blood of the sacrifice which Odysseus brings (e.g., n.94-95). Embodiment was therefore part of the “revivication” process which Odysseus had learned how to accomplish ritually. But the “shades of the dead” are still intangible, dispersing like mist when Odysseus tries to embrace them. This is certainly not a concept of resurrection of the body, which we find in later Hebrew thought. But it is not yet the mature Platonic concept of bodiless souls either. It is more like our conception of ghosts.
One point of this description is to underline the value of honor. Odysseus had given up considerable pleasures and benefits to rescue his name and his honor. Needless to say, this book tells us that being dead, which will be his ultimate fate as well, is no fun either. Achilles says that he would rather be the poorest migrant worker or hireling on earth (this) than be the king of the dead (lines 489-91):
Nay, seek not to speak soothingly to me of death, glorious Odysseus. I should choose, so I might live on earth, to serve as the hireling of another, of some portionless man whose livelihood was but small, rather than to be lord over all the dead that have perished.20
The cost