Hades

Hades names both the Greek lord of the dead and the realm he rules, and as a place it is the common destination of nearly all the dead, regardless of how they lived, a shadowy subterranean kingdom rather than a place of reward or punishment. The dead are ferried across the river Styx (or Acheron) by the boatman Charon, for whose fee a coin was placed in the mouth of the corpse; the far side is guarded by the three-headed hound Cerberus, who permits entry but no return.

Within, the realm is divided, the gray Asphodel Meadows for the ordinary dead, Elysium for the blessed, Tartarus for the damned, but for most souls the afterlife is simply a diminished, bloodless continuation, the shades retaining a faded semblance of their living selves. Hades is emphatically a one-way country: the myths that fascinate the Greeks are precisely the exceptions, the heroes who enter and return, Orpheus seeking Eurydice, Heracles fetching Cerberus, Odysseus consulting the dead. Its ruler is a grim but not evil god, and the whole conception reflects a religion oriented far more toward this life than the next: death is universal, dim, and final, and the underworld is less a moral reckoning than the place where the unseen simply are.

Hades is furnished in unusual detail for a place the Greeks did not much want to think about. Five rivers are named, Styx, Acheron, Lethe, Cocytus and Phlegethon, and the ferryman requires payment. That last detail is archaeologically visible: coins have been found in the mouths and hands of the dead across the Greek world and beyond, and while the practice is not universal it is common enough that the poetry is describing something that was done.

The default fate is not punishment. It is diminishment. Achilles, given the chance to speak from there in the Odyssey, says he would rather be a hired labourer for a poor man on earth than king among all the dead, and that line is the single most quoted statement of the Greek attitude to it.

Against that background the mystery cults sold something specific. Initiates at Eleusis were promised a better portion after death, and Orphic burials have included thin gold leaves inscribed with directions for the dead: which spring to avoid, which to drink from, and what to say to the guardians. Actual tablets have been recovered from graves in southern Italy, Crete and Thessaly. They are instructions for an examination, buried with the person who would have to pass it.