Elysium, the Elysian Fields, is the blessed afterlife of Greek belief, and its interest lies in its being an exception to the general Greek gloom about death. Where the mass of the dead faded into the gray Asphodel Meadows, Elysium was a place of ease, sunlight, and eternal spring reserved for a favoured few: heroes, the specially virtuous, and those related to or loved by the gods. Homer places it (as the "Elysian plain") at the western edge of the earth, a land with no snow or storm where the fortunate live at ease; later writers, especially under the influence of mystery cults and philosophy, moved it into the underworld proper and expanded who might reach it, tying admission to initiation, purity, or a life of justice rather than mere heroic birth.
Pindar and others describe cycles in which the pure soul, after repeated righteous lives, wins passage to the "Isles of the Blessed." Elysium thus marks the point at which Greek thought began to make the afterlife a matter of merit rather than status, a development that fed into Orphic and Pythagorean ideas of the soul and its judgement, and ultimately into later Western images of paradise.