For Halloween in 2026 we are exploring the scary things in Homer’s (and sometimes Nolan’s!) Odyssey. Our writers investigate how the monstrous and mysterious are narrated, adapted, and situated in both ancient and modern societies through the many iterations of this wondrous tale. What are the deeper meanings of these characters and scenes, and why do they continue to captivate us into the twenty-first century?
In the Odyssey’s eleventh book, known as the Nekyia, the ‘Book of the Dead’, Odysseus sails, at the behest of the witch Circe, to the realm of the dead to seek prophesies from the ghost of the seer Tiresias to help him find his way home to Ithaca and Penelope.
The Odyssey is a traditional, oral poem built by an infinite number of mouths over hundreds – and in some respects thousands – of years. Prior to ca. 700 BC, when its text became fixed in the form in which we have it (more-or-less), each bard that passed the narrative on would partly repeat what he had inherited from other singers, but partly make the narrative his own, pulling its constituent episodes into, or at any rate towards, shapes that appealed to him. The result of this is that our final text is full of little oddities, contradictions, doublets and narrative cul-de-sacs that reveal the traces – the ghosts (!) – of different underlying tales still fighting to get out, some slightly different from the surface tale, some vastly so.
A striking example is found in the role of another mysterious seer, Theoclymenus. Odysseus’ son Telemachus brings back with him to Ithaca, after coming across him in the course of his frustratingly unsuccessful attempt to find his father, in the lengthy episode that occupies the first four books of the poem. The seer doesn’t have much to do once he gets to the island, despite this build-up. Almost certainly this narrative dead-end hints at another version of the Odyssey story in which Telemachus’ attempt to find his father was, gratifyingly, more successful, and Theoclymenus was none other than Odysseus himself, returning to his home in yet another of his disguises.
The Nekyia book is a big oddity in itself. Odysseus and his crew travel to the realm of the dead from the witch Circe’s island and return to it directly afterwards, only to have Circe herself repeat to Odysseus the prophecies he has just learned from the ghost of Tiresias, rendering the terrible experience he has just endured pointless. It seems that two originally alternate prophecy episodes (‘Witch as prophet’ vs ‘Ghost as prophet’) have been combined into a sequence.
The book is also replete with internal contradictions. It begins by describing a scene of necromancy, in which Odysseus, having dug a pit and filled it with the blood of jugulated sheep, calls the ghosts up to him from somewhere below (possibly up through the river Acheron, besides which he performs the rite: that’s how Aeschylus was to imagine it in his own retelling of the episode in his tragedy Soul-Evocators). But as he proceeds to converse with the various ghosts that press around him, it becomes clear that Odysseus is now walking around within the realm of the dead himself – in other words he has performed a descent, a katabasis into the underworld: he is no longer calling the ghosts up to him, he is himself going down to visit them.
In another contradiction Odysseus is told that the dead are witless, and need to drink the blood he offers them to recover their wits, recognize him and speak to him. Underpinning this is the notion that the mind belongs to the body, not to the soul, and the blood restores to the disembodied souls a little of their former corporeality, enabling the mind to function. But then several of the ghosts – Elpenor, Tiresias and Ajax, amongst others – remain fully in their possession of their wits and are able to recognize Odysseus and speak to him without touching the blood: a different understanding of the consciousness of the dead here.
A further oddity: the ghost of the prophet Tiresias seems like an awkward insertion into the episode of which he is the star. Why does Odysseus have to subject himself to the ordeal of visiting a dead prophet in the realm of the dead when he could have visited a living one in the realm of the living? Once again, we have a sense that originally alternate episodes have been combined: one in which Odysseus visited the living prophet Tiresias somewhere in the realm of the living, and one in which he visited the realm of the ghosts for his prophecy because ghosts themselves possessed not only their wits but actually an exceptional power of prophecy – this being the entire point of necromancy.
A Nekyia without Tiresias: from which ghost, then, might Odysseus have received his prophecy? The obvious answer, if only because he is the first ghost Odysseus encounters, and the ghost with whom he has the most significant meeting, is the fresh ghost of his young crewman Elpenor. As Odysseus and his men were leaving Circe’s island to make their way to the realm of the dead, Elpenor had been sleeping off a drinking session on the roof of her house; when the shout went up to depart, the still-disoriented lad had leaped up and fallen off the roof, breaking his neck. His body still lies where he fell, and now his restless ghost pleads with Odysseus to return to the island and give it due burial (and this indeed is Odysseus’ justification for returning to Circe’s island).
But why does Elpenor’s body remain unburied? Why hasn’t Circe, now a dependable friend to Odysseus and his crew, buried him herself in the meantime? Why didn’t his bench-mates on the ship alert Odysseus to his absence before casting off? Perhaps because – in the ‘Elpenor’ version – Circe and Odysseus alike knew that he would need a ghost both vigorous and friendly from whom to take his prophecy. It was later held that the emperor Hadrian’s favourite Antinous (nothing to do with the Odyssey’s suitor of that name!) had deliberately drowned himself in the Nile to provide Hadrian with a vigorous and friendly ghost for his necromantic experiments. Indeed, we may wonder whether there weren’t versions of Elpenor’s story in which Circe deliberately brought his death about in order to facilitate Odysseus’ necromancy. She remained the friend of the crew, but Odysseus’ need was great….
Additional Resources
Bremmer, J. N. 2002. The Rise and Fall of the Afterlife. London. 71-86.
Carp, Teresa. 1979. ‘Teiresias, Samuel, and the way home’ California Studies in Classical Antiquity 12: 65–76.
Clark, R.J. 1979. Catabasis: Vergil: and the Wisdom Tradition. Amsterdam. 37-78.
Clarke, M. J. 1999. Flesh and Spirit in the Songs of Homer. Oxford.
Dakaris, S. I. 1993. The Nekyomanteion of the Acheron. Athens.
de Jong, I. J. F. 2001. A Narratological Commentary on the Odyssey. Cambridge.
Ekroth, G., and I. Nilsson eds. 2018. Round Trip to Hades in the Eastern Mediterranean Tradition: Visits to the Underworld from Antiquity to Byzantium. Leiden. 37-56, 215-39.
Gazis, G.A. 2018. Homer and the Poetics of Hades. Oxford.
Griffin, J. 1980. Homer on Life and Death. Oxford.
Heubeck, A., et al. 1988-92. A Commentary on Homer’s Odyssey. 3 vols. Oxford.
Kerrigan, M.B. 1980. ‘A theme by the CA painter: Necromancy at lake Avernus’ Archaeology News 9: 21–32.
Kirk, G. S. 1962. The Songs of Homer. Cambridge.
Louden, B. 2011. Homer’s Odyssey and the Near East. Cambridge. 197-221.
Ogden, D. 2001. Greek and Roman Necromancy. Princeton.
Tsagarakis, O. 2000. Studies in Odyssey 11. Stuttgart.
West, M. L. 2015. The Making of the Odyssey. Oxford.
Daniel Ogden is Professor of Ancient History in the University of Exeter. He has published widely on magic and witchcraft in the ancient world, including Greek and Roman Necromancy (Princeton 2021); Magic, Witchcraft and Ghosts in the Greek and Roman Worlds: A Sourcebook (Oxford 2002); and The Werewolf in the Ancient World (Oxford 2021), among many other books, edited volumes, and articles.
