Renovating the House of Hades

Abstract

Chapter nine utilises the metaphor of extension-building to examine the different ways in which important religious and philosophical thinkers appropriated and adapted poetic visions of the Underworld. Hooper argues that the Homeric vision of the House of Hades represented an attractive and flexible vision of the Underworld, which later thinkers could draw on in order to conceptualise and communicate their novel thinking concerning post-mortem fate. Hooper contrasts the extension-building undertaken in representations of Eleusinian eschatological thought with the more radical procedure of Plato’s Socrates. Taking the Myth of Er of the Republic as a case study, Hooper argues that Socrates deploys traditional material to ensure that his audience never feels ‘quite at home’ in this Underworld journey in order to provoke reflection on the key philosophical issues raised in this passage.