Some kind of terrible, terrible fall

As discussed in the previous post, Greek and Roman religious belief was that the dead inhabited an underground kingdom, overseen by various chthonic deities such as Hades, Persephone and Charon. Unlike the Judaeo-Christian tradition of a subterranean Hell dedicated to the punishment of sinners (aka the burny fires, as my Presbyterian mum pleonastically called it), the classical Underworld was the final destination of us all, good and bad, just and unjust.

Punishment was certainly available for those who merited it, however; and it was meted out in the place called Tartarus. According to Hesiod’s Theogony (8^th or 7^th Century BCE), Tartarus (originally created by the gods as a prison for the troublesome Titans) is situated as far beneath us as we are beneath heaven:

τόσσον ἔνερθ᾽ ὑπὸ γῆς, ὅσον οὐρανός ἐστ᾽ ἀπὸ γαίης:
τόσσον γάρ τ᾽ ἀπὸ γῆς ἐς Τάρταρον ἠερόεντα.
ἐννέα γὰρ νύκτας τε καὶ ἤματα χάλκεος ἄκμων
οὐρανόθεν κατιὼν δεκάτῃ κ᾽ ἐς γαῖαν ἵκοιτο:
ἐννέα δ᾽ αὖ νύκτας τε καὶ ἤματα χάλκεος ἄκμων
ἐκ γαίης κατιὼν δεκάτῃ κ᾽ ἐς Τάρταρον ἵκοι.

Hesiod, Theogony 721-725

…as far beneath the earth as heaven is above earth; for so far is it from earth to Tartarus. For a bronze anvil falling down from heaven nine nights and days would reach the earth upon the tenth: and again, a bronze anvil falling from earth nine nights and days would reach Tartarus upon the tenth.

Incidentally, the Greek here for anvil (akmōn) has the same root as the word acme (meaning summit or peak); a linguistic link serendipitously developed by Chuck Jones some two-and-a-half millennia after Hesiod.

John Milton was probably alluding to Hesiod’s cosmology when, in Paradise Lost, the Archangel Raphael tells of the rebel angels falling “nine days” from Heaven into Hell. Milton presumably imagined that a rebel angel would fall twice as fast as a bronze anvil: obviously he was unaware of Galileo’s then recent proposal that bodies falling in a vacuum will fall with uniform acceleration.

Angel or anvil, nine days is an awful long time to be falling. Obviously it is a poetic trope, an expression of the metaphysical distance between the living and the dead, or the blessed and the damned. But to our post-Galilean and post-Newtonian (and post-Jonesian) world, it seems ridiculously exaggerated, not to say impossible. As a matter of interest, I tried to work out roughly how far away Hesiod’s Heaven and Hell might actually be if they were to be considered in terms of physical, rather than mythological cosmology: unfortunately, my brain very soon began to overheat, what with having to take into account the gravitational constant and all, so I gave up and am going to rely on this guy’s calculation of 65,800 kilometers.

In order to then get to Tartarus, the anvil must presumably fall through a hole in the Earth (diameter 12,742 km) and drop out the other side. Assuming it landed with a splash at the entrance to the River Acheron, in present–day Epirus, it would have popped out of the South Pacific antipode like a Trident missile and end up in Tartarus after travelling a further 53,058 km through space. Coincidentally (?), this is about the distance from Earth that a putative space elevator would have to extend in order for an object attached to it to achieve escape velocity.   

To confuse matters even further, Virgil (never one to allow Roman Epic to be outbid by the Greeks) claims that Tartarus is double this distance:

...tum Tartarus ipse
bis patet in praeceps tantum tenditque sub umbras
quantus ad aetherium caeli suspectus Olympum.

Aeneid VI 577-579

...Tartarus itself stretches down into darkness, twice the flying distance from heavenly Olympus.

Milton’s Tartarus is even trickier to locate. A curious blogger came to the conclusion that an angel falling for nine days to Earth would have to begin the drop somewhere on the far side of the Moon. Milton also tells us that Hell is:

…As far removed from God and light of Heaven
As from the centre thrice to th' utmost pole.

At first glance this would seem to suggest that the distance from Heaven to Hell is three times the radius of the Earth, or 19,113 km. This would imply that a rebel angel falls at 88.4 kph, which is coincidentally (?) just on the legal side of the average speed limit on the real road to Hell*. So not really very rebellious after all. Such calculations assume that Hell, as in the classical tradition, is somewhere under the Earth’s crust. But in Paradise Lost, the banishment of the rebel angels to Hell precedes the creation of Earth: their “dungeon horrible” therefore cannot be terrestrial and subterranean. Nevertheless, Milton’s pole and centre probably refer to the distance from the Earth’s pole to the centre of Heaven.

Blake: Casting the Rebel Angels into Hell

So Milton follows, and trumps, the classical writers: in a sort of poetic grade inflation, Hesiod locates Tartarus the same distance as Heaven is to Earth; Virgil goes with twice that distance; and Milton three times as far.

Our classical tourists in the Underworld, Odysseus and Aeneas, have slightly different takes on the geography of the home of the damned. In the Odyssey, Tartarus seems to be open-plan in the style of Camp X-Ray: from his rocky viewpoint, Odysseus can observe the torment of various hubristic ne’er-do-wells:

·       Tityos the giant (condemned to Tartarus for the attempted rape of Apollo’s mother): he is stretched out on the ground and his liver is eternally pecked by a pair of vultures.

·       Tantalus (food issues: he killed and cooked his own son, then tried to serve Junior to the gods at a banquet): he is eternally thirsty and hungry; he stands in a stream beneath a fruit tree, but is prevented from consuming either.

·       Sisyphus (generally taking the piss out of the gods, but in particular chaining up Death with the consequence that nobody could die): sentenced to endlessly roll a stone up a hill, only to see it roll back down again from the top.

Sisyphus, Ixion and Tantalus

The Aeneid, as always, has to be a bit more ornate: Tartarus has triple walls, a massive iron tower and a gate made of toughened steel. Aeneas can hear the howls of anguish and the crack of the lash, but is not permitted to enter to see for himself. Luckily, his companion, The Sibyl, has previously had a guided tour and fills our hero in on the various villains within. It is of course a longer list than Homer managed, and includes in addition to the usual suspects the hubristic ingrate Ixion.

Ixion, king of the Lapiths in Thessaly, was a thoroughly bad lot. According to Pindar (Pythian Odes 2) and other sources, he was the first human to kill his own relative (having murdered his father-in-law in a dispute about money). He was shunned by all mankind for this crime, but Zeus took pity on him and brought him home to Olympus. Ixion repaid the Zeus’ uncharacteristic good deed by trying to seduce his wife, Hera. When the god found out about this, he decided to deceive the deceiver by making a 3D model of Hera from a passing cloud: Ixion promptly did the deed with this blow-up doll named Nephele, then boasted of his supposed success with the goddess.

Rubens: Ixion and Nephele

In punishment for this egregious breach of houseguest etiquette, Ixion was bound to an eternally-revolving wheel of fire and dumped in Tartarus. In an odd postscript, the nebulous sex-toy gave birth to the race of the centaurs, half human and half horse.

In the Aeneid, the Sibyl’s description of Ixion’s punishment is a bit puzzling: she describes Ixion seated nervously beneath a tottering rock; there is a banquet spread before him, but he is unable to reach it because of a menacing Fury. This is the punishment associated with Tantalus: almost all other sources (including Virgil himself in the Georgics IV 484) have Ixion on a wheel. One commentator has explained the discrepancy away by suggesting that the Sibyl is giving an impressionistic description of the scene,  “a confused sense of terrors inextricably blended,” but this seems a bit like special pleading. Perhaps even Virgil, like Homer, nods occasionally.

More about the ungrateful Ixion in the next post.

* Correction: the E6 now bypasses Hell and goes straight to Trondheim airport.