page_title: Elysium
section_title: Modern influence
hierarchical_section_title: Elysium / Modern influence
context_page_description: Elysium or the Elysian Fields is a conception of the afterlife that developed over time and was maintained by some Greek religious and philosophical sects and cults. Initially separate from the realm of Hades, admission was reserved for mortals related to the gods and other heroes. Later, it expanded to include those chosen by the gods, the righteous, and the heroic, where they would remain after death, to live a blessed and happy life, and indulging in whatever employment they had enjoyed in life.
  The Elysian Fields were, according to Homer, located on the western edge of the Earth by the stream of Okeanos. In the time of the Greek poet Hesiod, Elysium would also be known as the "Fortunate Isles", or the "Isles of the Blessed", located in the western ocean at the end of the earth. The Isles of the Blessed would be reduced to a single island by the Theban poet Pindar, describing it as having shady parks, with residents indulging in athletic and musical pastimes.
  The ruler of Elysium varies from author to author: Pindar and Hesiod name Cronus as the ruler, while the poet Homer in the Odyssey describes fair-haired Rhadamanthus dwelling there.
context_section_description: The term and concept of Elysium has had influence in modern popular culture; references to Elysium can be found in literature, art, film, and music. Examples include the New Orleans neighborhood of Elysian Fields in Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire as the déclassé purgatory where Blanche Dubois lives with Stanley and Stella Kowalski. New Orleans' Elysian Fields also provides the second-act setting of Elmer Rice's The Adding Machine and the musical adaptation Adding Machine (musical). In his poem "Middlesex", John Betjeman describes how a few hedges "Keep alive our lost Elysium – rural Middlesex again". In his poem An Old Haunt, Hugh McFadden sets an Elysian scene in Dublin's St. Stephen's Green park "Very slowly solitude slips round me in St. Stephen's Green. I rest: see pale salmon clouds blossom. I'm back in the fields of Elysium". In Spring and All, William Carlos Williams describes a dying woman's "elysian slobber/upon/the folded handkerchief".
  In David Gemmell's Parmennion series (Lion of Macedon and Dark Prince) and his Troy trilogy, his characters refer to Elysium as the "Hall of Heroes". In Siegfried Sassoon's Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, Sassoon writes "The air was Elysian with early summer". Its use in this context could be prolepsis, as the British countryside he is describing would become the burial ground of his dead comrades and heroes from World War I.
  The Avenue des Champs-Élysées, the most prestigious avenue in Paris and one of the most famous streets in the world, is French for "Elysian Fields". The nearby Élysée Palace houses the President of the French Republic, for which reason "l'Élysée" frequently appears as a metonym for the French presidency. Elysium and Elysian are also used for numerous other names all over the world - examples include Elysian Park, Los Angeles; Elysian Valley, Los Angeles, California; Elysian, Minnesota; Elysian Fields, Texas; and the Elysian Clinic in São Paulo, Brazil.
  Elysium is referenced in the Schiller poem which inspired Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" (9th symphony, 4th movement). Elysium is also referenced in Mozart's opera Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute). It is in Act II when Papageno is feeling very melancholy because he does not have a sweetheart or wife and he is drunk singing the song that could be called "Den Mädchen" (The Girls).
  There are many examples of use of the name "Elysium" in popular culture. For example, Elysium is briefly mentioned in Ridley Scott's film Gladiator, wherein the general Maximus addresses his troops thus: "If you find yourself alone, riding in the green fields with the sun on your face, do not be troubled. For you are in Elysium, and you're already dead!" In Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and its spin-off Xena: Warrior Princess, the actual Elysian Fields appears several times as a happy afterlife, with the families of the title characters dwelling there; Heaven appears as a separate location in the same universe. The name Elysium was used in a Star Trek novel, Before Dishonor, as the name of the fourth moon of Pluto.
  In Masami Kurumada's mythologically themed Saint Seiya comic books, the Elysium is the setting of the final chapters of the Hades arc. In it, the Saints, the warriors of Athena's army, traverse the Underworld to defeat its ruler, the ruthless Hades and rescue their kidnapped goddess. The Saints discover that the only way to kill Hades is to destroy his true body, which has rested in Elysium since the ages of myth. The Saints then invade Elysium, which Kurumada depicts as described in Greek mythology, and carry on their mission after a difficult battle with the deity.
  The 2012 opera "Dolls of New Albion", written by Paul Shapera, and its sequels, reference Elysium as an afterlife somewhat accessible to the living, though the living in Elysium are hunted by horrid creatures who guard Elysium.
  The 2013 dystopian film Elysium, starring Matt Damon used the name Elysium to describe the orbital space station of luxury that the rich live on in contrast to the ravaged Earth that the poor live on.
  In the novel, This Ruler, 
caption: Elysian Fields by Carlos Schwabe, 1903
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