In this week’s discussion, we looked at Vernant’s work on Indian, Mesopotamian and Greek Ideologies of the afterlife and Marinatos and Wyatt’s work on Levantine, Egyptian, and Greek mythological conceptions of the Beyond and visited how they connected to book 11 of the Odyssey. In Marinatos and Wyatt’s work all three cultures have a kind of barrier leading to the the “Beyond.” Vernant’s dealt with the treatment of the physical body after death and found many differences and similarities in the how and why things were done in .
Book 11 of the Odyssey touches on both on these concepts and has Odysseus speak with many people in the underworld, some he knew while they were alive some he did not. Some of the more notable encounters, for this discussion, he had were of Achilles and Elpenor. When Odysseus speaks to them, they both highlight different aspect of being dead. Elpenor needed Odysseus to build him a burial mound so that his death could be honored. To Odysseus’s surprise, Achilles is very unhappy dead and would rather be some peasant of a on a farm who was alive rather than a an honored, but dead, warrior. This is
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Marinatos and Wyatt use Odysseus’s meeting with Circe to compare the gates to “the Beyond” to the Egyption gates of the Sun. It was also pointed out that some characters were constellations, like Tantalus and Sisyphus, because, similar like you can see many star from one place, Odysseus was able to able to see the depths of the underworld without moving. There was also some notion of a celestial sphere in both the Egyptian and Greek myths. Vernant wrote about Achilles speech seemed closer to the Indian Ideology. Rather than treasuring a great afterlife and glory in battle, Achilles placed value on living a simple, but long, life. This critique of normal Greek culture was possibly the result of Indian influence on the