Over my dead body

        Because we are so used to it, we hardly ever think of how odd it is that the underworld is arranged like a monarchy. Hades and Persephone are the king and queen of Hades, serving as rulers of the dead. The significance of an underworld understood to be a kingdom is that there are undeniable parallels between being dead and being alive. Even once death has struck you down, there is still an authority you must answer to. You are eternally the subject to authority rule. So what is it that differentiates life from death? We glean some sort of answer to this question from the ghosts interactions with Odysseus. The spirits miss their bodies. They miss physicality. They miss blood. Death, it seems, is the state of existence deprived of a body. Death is a "joyless kingdom" (252) to the Greeks because the body was the most important part of being--far more important than the spirit. The shades resent that all they are left with in the underworld are their spirits. The people Odysseus meets in the underworld are for the most part military heroes and mothers of heroes, emphasizing the importance of glory in warfare in Greek culture. It should be noted that everyone is glum and unhappy in the underworld; there is no sense of a "freedom" from the trials of life. Achilles expresses his wish to have a body again at any price, "I'd rather slave on earth for another man--some dirt-poor tenant farmer who scrapes to keep alive--than rule down here over all the breathless dead." (265) Being unable to do what is what that defined Achilles in life removes all sense of identity from him. The removal of the body is the removal of selfhood.