Who did Odysseus meet in the underworld?

Why he went, and how the dead speak

Circe has told Odysseus that only the ghost of Tiresias can show him the way home. So he sails to the edge of the world, beyond the stream of Ocean, to a land of mist that the sun never reaches (Odyssey 11.13–19). There he digs a pit about a cubit across, pours in milk and honey, then wine, then water, sprinkles barley, and lets the blood of two sheep run into it.

The ghosts come swarming up. Homer’s dead are faint and witless: only a ghost that drinks the blood can know the living and speak the truth (11.147–149). Odysseus sits with his sword drawn and holds them all back until the prophet has drunk.

The dead, in Homer’s order

1. Elpenor. The youngest of the crew, who fell from Circe’s roof and was left unburied. He begs for a funeral, and for his oar to be planted on his grave (11.51–83).
2. Anticlea, his mother. She was alive when he sailed for Troy. He did not know she had died, and he weeps, but even she must wait (11.84–89).
3. Tiresias. The blind prophet of Thebes, holding a golden staff. He warns of Poseidon’s anger, the cattle of the Sun, the suitors at home and a last journey inland with an oar (11.90–137). The curse behind his warning is on why Poseidon was angry.
4. Anticlea again. Now she drinks and knows him. She died not of illness, she says, but of longing for him. Three times he tries to hold her, and three times she slips through his arms like a shadow or a dream (11.152–224).
5. The heroines. Persephone sends up famous women: Tyro, Antiope, Alcmene the mother of Heracles, Epicaste the mother of Oedipus, Leda, Ariadne and many more (11.225–332).
6. Agamemnon. Murdered at his own homecoming by Aegisthus and his wife. His advice: land on Ithaca in secret (11.385–464).
7. Achilles, with Patroclus and Antilochus. Odysseus flatters him and gets the best-known answer in the book (11.467–540).
8. Ajax. Still angry that Odysseus won the armor of Achilles, he turns away into the dark without a word (11.543–564).
9. The famous dead. Minos judging the ghosts, the hunter Orion, the giant Tityos, Tantalus, Sisyphus, and the phantom of Heracles, whose real self feasts with the gods (11.568–627).

What Achilles said

Say not a word in death’s favour; I would rather be a paid servant in a poor man’s house and be above ground than king of kings among the dead.

This is the hero of the Iliad, who chose a short, glorious life over a long, quiet one. Dead, he would trade it all for daylight. Then Odysseus tells him that his son Neoptolemus fought bravely at Troy, and the ghost strides off across the meadow of asphodel, glad. His own death, which the Iliad never narrates, is on how Achilles died.

Tantalus, Sisyphus and a sudden panic

Two of the punished gave English words. Tantalus stands in a pool up to his chin; each time he stoops to drink, the water vanishes, and the wind tosses the fruit above him out of reach (11.582–592). That is where “tantalize” comes from. Sisyphus heaves a huge stone uphill, and just before the top it rolls back to the plain (11.593–600), the first Sisyphean task.

Odysseus would have waited for Theseus and Pirithous, but the dead come crowding in their thousands with an unearthly cry, and he fears Persephone will send up the Gorgon’s head (11.630–635). He runs for the ship. The whole book is known as the Nekyia, from the Greek name for a rite that calls up the dead. The island that sent him there is on why Circe turned the men into pigs.