The visit to the dead

On Circe's instruction Odysseus sails to the edge of the world, digs a trench, and pours offerings of milk and honey, sweet wine, water, barley, and the blood of a black ram and a black ewe. The ghosts of the dead come crowding to the blood; he holds them off with his sword until Tiresias, the prophet, has drunk first. Tiresias gives him the prophecy of the rest of his journey: he will reach Ithaca, but only after great suffering; he will find his house overrun and will retake it.

And after that, Tiresias says, he must walk inland with an oar over his shoulder until he comes to a country where someone, seeing the oar, asks him what kind of winnowing-fan he is carrying. There he must plant the oar, sacrifice to Poseidon, and go home to die a peaceful death “from the sea” — the strangest prophecy in classical literature. Then his mother Anticleia comes forward. He had not known she was dead. She has died of grief waiting for him. He tries three times to embrace her and three times she slips through his arms like smoke.

Then the great heroes of the Trojan War: Agamemnon, who tells the bitter story of his murder by his own wife and warns Odysseus not to trust any woman; and Achilles, the greatest warrior of the Greeks, whose famous reply to Odysseus's flattery is that he would rather be a slave to a poor farmer above ground than king of all the dead. It is the line that turns the heroic ethos of the Iliad on its head — and the deepest argument anywhere in classical literature for the value of being alive.