Odysseus in the Underworld

Odysseus stands at the edge of the world of the dead. Around him, pale shades drift among rocks and tall reeds in a dim, colorless light — some labeled with their names in Greek, like figures in a map of the afterlife.

The painter's underworld is not a place of fire but of mist and distance, which is very close to Homer's own: the dead are weak, gray, and far away. It is the most haunting panel of the Esquiline frieze.

At the far shore of the world-circling river Ocean, Odysseus digs a trench and fills it with sacrificial blood, and the dead crowd up out of the dark to drink and speak. He has come for one ghost: Tiresias, the blind prophet who kept his wits even in death. The prophecy is conditional. He can still reach home — if his men leave the cattle of the sun god untouched. Either way he will arrive late, on a stranger's ship, to find arrogant men devouring his household.

Then come the ghosts he did not ask for. His mother Anticlea, who died of grief waiting for him; three times he tries to embrace her, and three times she drifts through his arms like smoke. Agamemnon, the Greek commander at Troy, murdered by his own wife the day he reached home — a dark mirror of the homecoming Odysseus hopes for. And Achilles, the greatest warrior of the war, who tells him flatly that he would rather be a poor farmhand alive than king of all the dead.

This panel belongs to the Odyssey Landscapes, a continuous frieze painted by an unknown Roman artist around 50 BC for a house on the Esquiline Hill in Rome.