The Underworld

Circe tells Odysseus to sail to the land of the Cimmerians, where the sun never shines, and to consult Tiresias. He digs a trench, pours libations, and sacrifices sheep; the shades gather to drink the blood, and he holds them off with his sword until Tiresias arrives.

The description is the Odyssey’s most sustained piece of imaginative geography. The dead are shadowy and without strength, and only the blood gives them speech. Odysseus learns that death is not a continuation of life but a loss of everything that makes life worthwhile.

Odysseus speaks with Tiresias about his return, with his mother Anticleia about her death and the household, and with Achilles about honour and death. Achilles’ answer is one of the poem’s most famous: he would rather be a hired labourer among the living than king of the dead.

The underworld also contains the heroines, Agamemnon, and the great sinners. It is a gallery of myth and a meditation on mortality. When Odysseus returns to the upper world, he has learned what the poem’s heroes all know: that death is the horizon of every human action.