How Does Odysseus Drive Their Philosophies

Life After Death in the Antiquities Through centuries of disagreeing philosophies and schools of thought there is one idea that is constant. Even today, through the world is beginning to seem like it is more divided than ever, there is one idea upon which people generally believe. Even looking back on the works of the most influential writers of the antiquities, this idea was present and seemed to drive their philosophies and their characters. This is the certainty, even the indisputable fact, that at some point in a person’s life, they will no longer have that life. Death is such an innate part of the understanding of existence, that it is logical that through time millions of people have tried to answer that immortal question: what happens
after we die? Most ancient writers addressed this question, attempting to answer it within the scope of how, according to their philosophies, judgement/justice is fulfilled in death.
Claim: While all interpretations of the nature of existence after death has shifted per philosophical school, there is a consistency in the justice that follows death.

This essay will examine through the Myth of Er, the Odyssey, the Aeneas, and the Nature of Things, the understanding of the afterlife.

Myth of Er At the very end of the treatise of the nature of humans and the ideal state Plato’s “The Republic” includes the myth of the warrior Er. For twelve days after being mortally wounded in battle, Er returns from the dead so that he may report upon situation of souls after death. Er tells of how once a soul dies they are led through a mouth into a wide-open space, that is almost explained as a meadow. Sitting there are judges who direct you to which path you are supposed to take. There are two sides, you can go in or out of the world above or you can go out or into the underground. Those who were just in their life would travel up to become perfected. Those who were unjust were sent down to live out their punishments.
Describe in a few sentences the nature of the underworld that the warrior Er witness during his brief time of being dead. Explain how the concept of beauty and an absolute knowledge is so prevalent in the story that Plato was compelled to end his work "The Republic" on the tale. It is thereby completely in line with the modern philosophical school of the day.

Odyssey In Homer’s “The Odyssey,” Odysseus, being the wonderful hero that he is portrayed as, he must travel down to “Hades, home of the witless dead and the dime phantoms of men outworn.
(462)” with the purpose of hearing the fate of his journey home from Tiresias. The scene that Homer outlines through the mouth of Odysseus is one of absolute sorrow heavily laden with the imagery of blood. This underworld is described as unable to be permeated by light saying “the sun never shines there, never climbs the starry sky to beam down at them, nor bathes them in the glow of its last golden rays; their wretched sky is always racked with night’s gloom. (452).” Beyond the gloomy outlook of sorrow, legitimatizing the mourning of and value place upon death, there is a significant amount of time spent with Odysseus dealing with, and observing the souls that are residing there, whose judgment has been passed down by “Minos, Zeus’ glorious son (465).” In Erebus, the souls of all the dead—old, young, suicides, war casualties—are residing together in the pit of souls. But, uniquely, Odysseus also describes the punishments that have been made for the heroes according to their works on earth, which is to be assumed as the major duty of Minos, since all other souls are destined together. Consequently, the reader can determine the value that is place upon the hero. If all other souls are doomed to spend life letting out an “eerie cry (452)” without any kind of love or connection it makes sense that
the society which Homer came from placed heavy influence on becoming, if possible, a kind of hero, through war or through position/birth. However, every soul is in the eternal depths of Hades, and thus no person is perfect, including the heroes. It is very introspective that none of the Heroes are living perfectly in their death, but instead are judged more harshly because they had a stronger constitution. Just as the other works have provided a motivation for life by describing what the layman may experience in the undergloom, one can conclude, that the moral of the journey of Odysseus in Book XI is that all actions are taken with you into the underworld, and if your life had value, you would be judged and still punished for it, because you are being held to a higher level than those who merely lived.

The Aeneid
In general, “The Aeneid” is shockingly similar to Homer’s epic, with a hero who is cast out to sea by the spite of one of the Gods, and through the aide of another God is led through their journey, with a stop in the underworld, and eventually restored to (re)build their home. In contrast to “The Odyssey,” Virgil spends a lot more time explaining the complex nature of the existence after death that his hero, Aeneas, observes.
The first area of hell that Aeneas must face is the mouth into the place of souls, where the titans reside, the beings that are spending eternity in the place of anxiety, fear, and distress, which are elements that accompany the death of a person, and thereby a place easily recognizable by the reader. Then, much like Odysseus, Aeneas sees Minos as the judge of the next area, however, instead of being the judge of all spirits, he presides over the area of lovers, babies, and suicides—the people who are innocent in the sight of duty. And thus, it is seen, that the ideals of stoicism are already present in the description of the afterlife. The stoics relied heavily on the ideal that duty to one’s family, state, and God were of the utmost importance and guided the lives of the people. None of the people under Minos’ reign were suffering to an extreme degree, because to the stoics they had technically lived sufficient life. Write an explanation of the nature of the underworld that Aeneas sees as he is traveling through it, and how the different sections are broken up, and how each of the sections of hell show value upon which Rome was predicated. How does the explanation of the underworld reflect the values of the stoics and the first Romans?

How are all three of these stories tied to the idea of a justice for the soul. With the myth of Er, each soul is literally judged according to the life which they lived, which would as Plato put it, the obvious way of discerning something just. with the Odyssey, each soul is suffering, but especially with the heroes, they are suffering according to whatever they are being damned for. In Greece, the actions and not the justifications are what they are judged on (see the thirst for retribution and how that is a complete societal norm), and thus that is exactly what their justice felt like, and thus it is what the justice looked like in Homer's epic with the Aeneid, each person is placed in their own level, and their own eternity because of how they held up to the values of the lives they were meant to lead. Isn't it just to suffer based off of what your soul was like. While all of this may be justice, it is justice on the level of the individual.
In each case, every person is judged per their personal experience on Earth, and the punishment for that is because that is how a soul must spend the rest of its eternity. Never in the three-addressed works does the author claim that the punishment must be carried out because of the law of the earth, or because that is how the unaversive is supposed to run, because it is just taken as a fact that the justice a soul faces is its own justice. However, there was a school of thought before Vigil which followed the teaching of Epicurus, and were not of the belief of any kind of divine plan, and thereby no existence of the Gods because of the observable science and logical inferences following those observations. Instead of relying on superstition or myth, the writers of Epicurean Doctrine were essentially the first scientists of the civilized world. If this school didn’t believe in Gods than all the beliefs of life after death are not feasible. Instead, Lucretius, a follower of Epicurus, in his poem On the Nature of Things discusses life after death in the terms of a finite amount of atomic material available in the unaversive, and if there is only a finite amount of atomic material available in the unaversive, then everyone is effected by what Lucretius explains is the end and thereby the justice of the soul., making his suppositions no longer on the level of individual justice. Lucretius wrote that
there is a finite amount of material in the world, and since he was of the believe that the soul had to also be made up of atomic material, since it could get sick, and it grew with the body, that when a person dies the soul dies, and thus the soul must dissolve so that there I enough material for another soul to inhabit the earth. He uses the metaphor of a dinner, where a person must stand up and leave before another person can take a seat at the table. One has had their chance at the table, and their justice is that another person can have that chance as well.
If each one of these authors is trying to explain what happens after death, it is for the purpose of having the readers strive for a. Better life, whether if it is because of judgment or if it is because it is really the only chance you are going to get for existence.