We don’t know his name, nor how he died, but given the grandeur of his tomb—a rock-cut chamber, deep in the earth—and the armor with which he was buried, his funeral was surely a spectacle. Five, large, elaborately decorated, terracotta vessels, some as tall as four feet, were placed in the tomb. These had required time and skill to make as well as a delicate and demanding effort to move them from the workshop to the burial chamber.
Some of the mourners may have tried to look closely at the mythical scenes, which seem to speak to the need for consolation or inspiration. One of the vessels was a huge krater (mixing bowl) with a sweeping vista of the afterlife, populated by Greek heroes and divinities. Above a rocky shoreline, Herakles strives to contain Kerberos, the three-headed guard dog of the dead. Nearby, Sisyphus struggles to push his rock, suffering eternally for his wrongdoings, while the poet Orpheus plucks at the strings of his lyre. Overseeing them all, in an elaborate palace, are the gods Persephone and Hades.
What did it mean to behold a vision of the Underworld like this? Was the crowd of deities, heroes, and notorious wrongdoers comforting to the family and friends of the deceased?
The krater pictured above was excavated in 1813, and in the 200 years following its discovery, some 40 more depictions of the afterlife have come to light. Underworld: Imagining the Afterlife in Ancient South Italian Vase Painting brings them together in a single volume, accompanied by essays that provide a framework for interpreting these fascinating scenes. Few of the findspots for the vessels are well-documented, and this—together with the scarcity of written evidence for the beliefs of local communities in Southern Italy—makes it challenging to pin down what these images of the afterlife connote. Nonetheless, in the course of five years of working on this topic, some themes are apparent.
The first is that the mythical characters in these scenes are solidly Greek, yet the practice of adorning funerary vessels with the ancient equivalent of an Underworld movie poster is distinctly South Italian. Almost all the vessels were made in Apulia—roughly the southeastern “heel” of the Italian peninsula. The population was not Greek, but some, at least, were deeply familiar with aspects of Greek culture, often adapting it to their own needs.
Second, there is shared imagery in each of these Underworld scenes. For example, a slightly earlier krater, now in Naples, has a palace with Persephone and Hades at the center, like the vessel described above. (The krater in Naples was the starting point for this whole project, following its conservation and display at the Getty Villa in 2018.) On both works, Orpheus plays his lyre on the left, and judges of the Underworld are on the right. But the depictions can vary substantially. For example, Sisyphus and Kerberos are rarer than one might expect, given their prominence in later descriptions of the afterlife. My hunch—and that’s all it can be, given the limits of the evidence—is that painters adjusted a general Underworld composition to the needs or interests of an individual.
Third, perhaps because of the variation in the details, it’s possible to identify one common thread: a desire to correspond directly with the rulers of the Underworld. In a number of scenes, Orpheus plays his lyre before Persephone and Hades. The story goes that he went down to the Underworld to recover his bride, Eurydice, and won her back by charming the gods with his song. Famously, though, he neglected their instruction not to look back on his way out, and he lost his wife for a second time. But that detail of the story doesn’t appear on these pots—indeed, Eurydice is hardly ever depicted. What is important, however, is the reception that Persephone and Hades grant to Orpheus when he enters their domain. Similarly, there’s another cluster of scenes that shows a warrior shaking hands with Hades or Persephone. This figure’s identity isn’t entirely clear, but what seems significant is, again, the fact that he’s received by the gods. As with the Orpheus images, what seems important is the idea that the gods of the Underworld could be welcoming.
These depictions of Hades’s domain embody hope, knowledge, grief, and consolation, yet much remains unreachable. But I take a lesson from Odysseus’s experience in seeking to embrace his mother in the Underworld: “Three times I sprang toward her, and my will said, ‘Clasp her,’ and three times she flitted from my arms like a shadow or a dream” (Homer, Odyssey 11.206–8). Each time, Odysseus fails to hold her—but trying is the only way to come closer to understanding the nature of the dead.
