Greek PantheonRealm
Elysian Fields
A paradise at the end of the earth where heroes and the virtuous were sent after death to live in eternal bliss.
About Elysian Fields
A meadow for a few
Homer does not send every hero to bliss. In Odyssey 4 Proteus tells Menelaus he will go to the Elysian plain at the world's end, because he is Helen's husband and Zeus's son-in-law. Pindar later opens a similar meadow to the initiated and the just. Virgil's Elysium in Aeneid 6 is already a Roman civic park of ancestors. Ordinary Greek dead go to Hades. Elysium is a privilege with shifting entrance rules, not a default afterlife.
Sources and further reading
Source notes
These references are recorded in the catalog. Their passage wording and translation have not been checked, so quotations are not displayed here.
- Homer, Odyssey 4
About this entry
By Elizabeth Stein for Mythos Atlas. About the author. Editorial notes are grounded in the site's cited sources and can be challenged through the contact page.
Coordinates mark where the myths place a site, or where the tradition locates it today. Mythic realms are left off the map or marked as symbolic placements.
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