Asphodel Meadows- Greek LocationLocation · Realm

Among the Shades

When Odysseus descended to consult the prophet Teiresias, he found the Asphodel Meadows crowded with the dead. His own mother Anticleia wandered there. Warriors who had fought at Troy drifted through the pale flowers — Ajax, still nursing his anger over the arms of Achilles, turned away without a word when Odysseus tried to address him. Even Achilles dwelt not in Elysium but here, among the ordinary dead. When Odysseus praised his glory, Achilles answered that he would rather serve as a landless laborer among the living than rule over all the dead. The shades pressed close around Odysseus, drawn by the blood he had poured for the ritual, desperate for even a moment's connection to the world they had left. Three times he tried to embrace his mother's shade, and three times she slipped through his arms like a shadow or a dream.

In the Odyssey's final book, Hermes led the souls of the slain suitors down to the meadows, their shades gibbering like bats as he guided them past the streams of Ocean and the White Rock to the gates of the sun and the land of dreams. There Agamemnon's shade recognized Amphimedon among the newcomers, and the dead suitor told him how Penelope's web had held them all at bay and how Odysseus had finally repaid their years of feasting in his hall.

The Grey Fields

Most of the dead came here — not the heroes bound for the Isles of the Blessed, not the wicked sentenced to Tartarus, but the vast ordinary multitude. Farmers and soldiers wandered among pale asphodel blossoms in a landscape that neither punished nor rewarded. Nearby ran the waters of Lethe, and later traditions held that shades drank from them as the centuries wore on, losing first their sorrows, then their names, then everything they had ever been — dissolving into the same grey stillness that surrounded them.