Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, 422 Red-figure calyx krater attributed to the Dolon Painter. Mixing Vessel with Odysseus Summoning the Shades from the Underworld, South Italian, made in Lucania, 390–380 BC found in Pisticci, Italy, terracotta. This exhibition was organized in collaboration with the National Archaeological Museum of Naples – Laboratory of Conservation and Restoration. These works, alongside funerary offerings, grave monuments, and representations of everlasting banquets, convey some of the ways in which the hereafter was imagined in the fifth and fourth centuries bc. Monumental funerary vessels are painted with elaborate depictions of Hades’s realm, and rare gold plaques that were buried with the dead bear directions for where to go in the Underworld. Some of the richest evidence for ancient beliefs about the afterlife comes from southern Italy, particularly indigenous sites in Apulia and the Greek settlement of Taras (present-day Taranto). Outside of mainstream religious practice, devotion to the mythical singer Orpheus and the god Dionysos also offered paths to achieving a better lot after death. Initiation in the Eleusinian Mysteries, an annual festival in Greece, promised good fortune in both this world and the next. Yet as this exhibition explores, individuals did seek ways to secure a blessed afterlife. Perpetual torment awaited only the most exceptional sinners, while just a select few-heroes related to the Olympian gods-enjoyed an eternal paradise. The Underworld was a shadowy prospect for most ancient Greeks, characterized primarily by the absence of life’s pleasures.
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