ELYSIAN FIELDS. - A place where the ancient Greeks imagined that certain favorites of the gods—often their descendants or relatives—were transported, body and soul. Later beliefs also placed there the heroes of mythology and history, such as Achilles, Diomedes, Menelaus, and others.
Some ancient writers distinguished the Elysian Fields from the rest of the underworld, placing them at the edge of the earth or in the Ocean (in which case they were identified with the Islands of the Blessed), or in the sky. For others (Aristophanes, Virgil), they were part of the underworld and imagined to lie beneath the earth. It was a realm of perfect material and moral happiness, free from cares or labor, enlivened by wine, music, and dancing; the Attic poets who described it in the 5th–4th centuries BC took as their model the rites of Eleusis. At the head of the Elysian Fields were placed Rhadamanthus, Cronus, or both. According to some modern scholars, the name and concept of the Elysian Fields are pre-Eleusinian. The Romans followed the Greeks in their depiction of the Elysian Fields.