The house of Hades
Where Odysseus goes to question the dead. The poem gives sailing directions to it — and they lead past the edge of the world, which is why this entry carries no coordinates at all.
Circe's instructions are unusually precise for a destination that cannot exist: cross Ocean, beach the ship by the grove of Persephone where three named rivers meet, dig a pit, pour the offerings, and the dead will come. The precision is the point — it is ritual instruction, not navigation.
Real places have collected the association since antiquity. Herodotus reports an oracle of the dead on the Acheron in Thesprotia, and the site excavated at Ephyra was long presented as that oracle, though the identification is now disputed by archaeologists who read the building as a fortified farmhouse.
Those are real places with a real cult history. They are not the house of Hades, and the atlas does not pin one as the other.
Identifications proposed
No coordinates — this place is not located.
Why this class
Mythical and unlocated: no hypothesis is recorded, because none can be. This is the only class in the atlas that carries no coordinates by rule — the schema forbids an unlocated place from having any, so nothing can quietly acquire a pin later.
What is disputed
What is debated is not the location of Hades but the geography of the passage: whether Circe's directions preserve a real sailing tradition toward the north-west, whether the rivers are borrowed from the Thesprotian Acheron, and whether the Nekyia belongs to the oldest layer of the poem at all.
Sources
- Primary textHomer, Odyssey 10.504–540; 11.1–50
- Primary textHerodotus, Histories 5.92
- ArchaeologySotirios Dakaris, excavations at the Nekyomanteion of Ephyra, Thesprotia (from 1958)