When Odysseus descends to the underworld in Book 11, he finds the dead waiting for him as shades — visible, recognisable, but flickering and weak. They cannot speak until they drink the blood he pours. Even then, their words come thin, like wind through leaves.
The Greek shade isn’t a Christian soul. It has no second life, no judgement, no reward. It is what’s left when a person is finished — a faint outline, drained of will. Achilles in the underworld says he’d trade all his glory to be a labourer’s slave above ground. Once you’re across, you’d give anything to come back.
This bleak vision haunts the whole poem. The Odyssey’s drive toward nostos — toward home, toward life — gets its urgency from what death actually looks like in Greek imagination. Not torture. Just diminishment.