Asphodel Meadows

The Asphodel Meadows is a section of the ancient Greek underworld where ordinary souls are sent to live after death.

Later depictions

The Asphodel Meadows is most probably where the souls of people who lived mediocre lives remain, but its relationship to other places in the Greek afterlife remains uncertain.

For later Greek poets the very ancient pre-Homeric association of the asphodel flower with a positive form of afterlife as well as the enlarged role of Elysium as it became the destination of more than just a few lucky heroes, altered the character of the meadows. Greek poets who wrote after Homer's time describe them as untouched, lovely, soft and holy. Such an evolutionary change is quite common: "Like most cultures throughout human history, both ancient and modern, the Greeks held complex and sometimes contradictory views about the afterlife".

Some depictions describe it as a land of utter neutrality. That is, while the inhabitants were in life neither good nor evil, so they are treated in the afterlife. Other depictions have also stated that all residents drink from the river Lethe before entering the fields, thus losing their identities. This somewhat negative outlook on the afterlife for those who make little impact was perhaps passed down to encourage militarism in Greek cultures (as opposed to inaction). In fact, those who did take up arms and became heroes were rewarded with everlasting joy in the fields of Elysium.

Edith Hamilton suggests that the asphodel of these fields are not exactly like the asphodel of our world, but are "presumably strange, pallid, ghostly flowers." Others suggest that they were actually narcissi.

In popular culture

In the 2020 video game Hades, the Asphodel Meadows, known in the game only as "Asphodel," serve as the second of four levels (called biomes) that the protagonist, Zagreus, must traverse in his attempts to escape the Underworld. The game splits the difference between the two competing images: having reportedly once been a verdant and peaceful meadow, it has since been overflown by the river Phlegethon and is depicted during play as charred, barren land surrounded by gigantic pits of magma, which deal damage and are traversable only by raft. In Asphodel, Zagreus must defeat a variety of enemies, including walking skeletons (some armed with bombs), Gorgon heads, and living statues that drop onto the player. The exit to the biome is guarded by the animate skeletal remains of the Lernaean Hydra, who serves as the biome's final boss.

Bibliography

• Hanks, Gordon R (2002). Narcissus and Daffodil: The Genus Narcissus. London: Taylor and Francis. ISBN 0415273447. Retrieved 2 October 2014.
• Anonymous (May–October 1887). "Homer the botanist". Macmillan's Magazine. 56. London: Macmillan and Company: 428–436. Retrieved 3 November 2014.