The story of a protagonist’s journey through Hell and conversing with the dead is an extremely old archetype. In the Bible there appears the story of the Witch of Endor: Saul, the first king of Israel, has her conjure the spirit of the prophet Samuel who proclaims the defeat of Saul by David. In Greek mythology there is the story of the musician Orpheus who descends into the domain of Hades to reclaim the soul of his dead wife Eurydice and to lead her back into the world only to lose her by defying the injunction against looking back to her as she follows. And in Book XI of Homer’s The Odyssey, “The Book of the Dead,” Odysseus consults the shades of the underworld on how to return to his home in Ithaca.
In this book of The Odyssey Odysseus calls the spirits of the dead to him by performing a ritual in which he digs a trench and fills it with blood. Upon doing so the spirits come to him. The first he sees is one of his soldiers, Elpenor, who had died the night before. It is here with Elpenor that we first begin to see the connection between history and the dead for Elpenor’s message is to implore the following of Greek tradition in his burial: “So burn me there with all my arms, such as they are, and raise a mound for me on the shore of the grey sea, in memory of an unlucky man” (173). Should Odysseus neglect to observe tradition, Elpenor warns, “the gods may turn against you when they see my corpse” (ibid.). Failing to emulate the dictates of history means destruction and ruin; history must be followed.
Next Odysseus sees his dead mother, a link to his personal history, but before he can speak with her he is confronted by the spirit he was seeking. The prophet Teiresias in a parallel to Saul-Samuel drinks the offered blood and foretells Odysseus’ fate. Teiresias gives a warning about the journey ahead; they will come across cattle and sheep belonging to the Sun God:
If you leave them untouched and fix your mind on getting home, there is some chance that all of you may yet reach Ithaca, though not in comfort. But if you hurt them, then I warrant you that your ship and company will be destroyed . . . (174)The warning continues, foreshadowing the events that will and do befall Odysseus during his journey. The implication here is clear: just as with Elpenor’s request the dictates of history here represented by Teiresias are ignored at great risk.
Afterwards Odysseus allows himself to speak with his mother. When she leaves she is followed by a procession of women, the mothers of the heroes of Greece. It seems in this passage that Odysseus and by extension Homer is paying homage to them and what they represent which is the history of Greece. Thus the ancient Greek conception of what we would now call Hell is really a representation of history whose function is to show us where we fit in relation to the past and to remind us to honor and cherish the past and to follow its example.
This interpretation of Hell carries over into the Roman worldview as seen in The Aeneid of Virgil. In Book VI Aeneis of Troy, Odysseus-like, seeks out a spirit who will foretell to him where he must go to build his kingdom. Aeneis’ ordeal here in fact is almost exactly like that related in The Odyssey with few differences: a blood sacrifice is made in order to interact with the spirits; Aeneis is (twice) implored to properly bury a corpse following his people’s traditions; and he meets and speaks with a progenitor, his father in this case. One of the two main differences is that Aeneis actually goes into the underworld to meet the dead instead of calling the dead to him. Before he can do so though he must observe the funeral rites of his ancestors: “First give the man his rest,/ Entomb him; lead black beasts to sacrifice;/ Begin with these amends” (153-55). The past must be honored and appeased before it will respond.
The other substantial difference in this text is the geography of the underworld. Whereas the Land of the Dead that Odysseus visits is inhabited by a jumble of spirits The Aeneid divides it into two regions analogous to the Christian Hell and Heaven: the fortress of Tartarus and the Elysian Fields. Within the fortress are the worst malefactors of history: the race of Titans, Theseus, Phlegyas and so on. Elysium however, while populated by the virtuous of history, is also unique in that is populated by Aeneis’ descendants, the figures of future history. Virgil’s underworld represents the continuum of time and the topography is significant: the confining fortress of Tartarus signifies the past as a closed circuit, dark and unable to be changed or affected by the present, for “it is decreed/ That no pure soul may cross the sill of evil” (559-60). Elysium by contrast is a space composed of light and open fields indicating the openness and freedom of the future. It is also a place of the past but it is a different history that inhabits this area than that which is in Tartarus; whereas Tartarus is occupied by a perverted past that refused to honor its own history the Elysian Fields is composed of a past that informs the future and guides it.
The Classical perception of history as represented by its perception of Hell is that history is something that must be emulated in order to maintain cosmic harmony. The Renaissance and later view is that history is an accumulation of disasters that must be transcended if humanity is to progress. As the twentieth century critic Walter Benjamin puts it in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History”:
This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. (257-58)
The Classical thinkers looked to history to see what to do; the Renaissance marked the modern change in perception that looks at history to see what not to do. Those who forget the past, the axiom goes, are doomed to repeat it. This perspective is perfectly captured by John Milton in Paradise Lost.
Milton’s view of history is larger and more expansive than that conceived of in the Classical world. For Milton history predates the creation of the world. His magnum opus opens in Hell shortly after the battle for Heaven and will later move even farther before that, narrating the events that lead to that conflagration. While the argument here concerns “man’s first disobedience, and the fruit/ Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste/ Brought Death into the world” (1.1-3) Milton examines the chain of causality that led to that event.
We see Satan and his minions bound on a lake of fire, recovering from their defeat and expulsion from Heaven. After rousing themselves they build the temple of Pandemonium and hold a war council on how to proceed. As their actions reveal the fallen angels refuse to learn from history and choose instead to repeat it. Pandemonium resembles a temple of Heaven from which “many a row/ Of starry lamps and blazing cressets, fed/ With naphtha and asphaltus, yielded light/ As from a sky” (1.727-30). It is clearly an attempt to reconstruct Heaven. Furthermore their decision to wage war with God is informed by their history; they are repeating their actions in Heaven instead of learning from their mistakes. Milton continually points out that Satan and the others have the option of repenting and undoing the damage done thereby negating history but they continually refuse to do so. “Yet not for those,/ Nor what the potent victor in His rage/ Can else inflict, do I repent, or change” (1.94-6).
Satan’s solution to turn humanity away from God is also indicative of an uninformed reaction to history. Man’s disobedience and challenge to God’s authority and subsequent fall and expulsion directly mirrors the experience of Satan and the fallen angels. Man didn’t learn from history’s bad example and thus repeated it. This experience curiously reflects Milton’s own experience with the Commonwealth; he disobeyed God by aligning himself with those who deposed Charles I, God’s anointed servant, and he was later punished for it. Milton himself failed to learn from the mistakes of history of which he seems to be well aware here.
Since this view of history is dependent on the idea of transcendence and that the wreckage of history must be righted and moved beyond, the question becomes how is that done? For Milton the answer is simple: repentance. Christian doctrine dictates that salvation can be gotten through repentance and the absolving of the self; one must ask God for forgiveness and truly believe that it is needed and possible. The key to repentance is understanding the nature of the transgression; in other words the sinner must ruminate on history in order to avoid falling into the same mistakes.
For Homer and Virgil however repentance is not an option because it is not necessary. If you honor your history and your ancestors and take pride in them then you are doing the right thing and will succeed. If you fail to see your place in history and ignore it then there is no salvation. While the Classical and Renaissance thinkers view history from antithetical perspectives they both believe in the same thing: a knowledge of history must inform the future.
Works Cited
Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Illuminations. Ed. by Hannah Arendt, trans. by Harry Zohn. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968.
Homer. The Odyssey. Trans. by E. V. Rieu. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1946.
Milton, John. “Paradise Lost.” The Annotated Milton. Ed. by Burton Raffel. New York: Bantam Books, 1999.
Virgil. The Aeneid. Trans. by Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Random House, 1981.
