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 …show more content…
(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 …show more content…
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