The Gray Country of the Ordinary Dead

The Asphodel Meadows are the Greek underworld's vast middle ground, the shadowy plain where the shades of the great majority of the dead, those neither heroic enough for Elysium nor wicked enough for Tartarus, spend a gray and diminished existence. The picture is bleak in its ordinariness: this is not a place of torment, but neither is it a reward. The dead here are eidola, thin images of their living selves, drifting without strong purpose or joy.

Homer gives the definitive expression of this vision in the Odyssey, when Odysseus meets the shade of Achilles in the underworld and the greatest of heroes tells him he would rather be a landless serf among the living than king over all the dead, a stark verdict on how little the ordinary Greek afterlife had to offer. The asphodel itself, a pale, hardy flower that grows on untended ground, gave the region its melancholy name. The Asphodel Meadows reflect an early Greek attitude in which the afterlife held out no great hope: existence continued, but faded, and the emphasis of Greek religion fell not on the world to come but on this one.