Rhadamanthus

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Rhadamanthus is a figure of Greek myth: a son of Zeus and Europa, brother of Minos, remembered above all for an exact and incorruptible sense of justice, and held in the tradition to have become, after his own death, one of the judges who weigh the souls of the dead.

The earliest layer of the story places him among the living. Homer names him in passing as a son of Zeus, and later writers fill in a Cretan upbringing alongside his brothers and a reputation as a lawgiver whose rulings were so sound that the Cretans were said to have governed by them. Some accounts have him leave Crete for Boeotia and marry Alcmene, mother of Heracles, in her widowhood. The details vary from source to source, as such genealogies always do; what stays constant across them is the single trait — that he could be trusted to judge rightly.

That trait is what carries him into the underworld. In the developed Greek picture of the afterlife, the dead are sorted, and Rhadamanthus is one of those who do the sorting, usually paired with Minos and Aeacus. The arrangement is given its most influential shape by Plato, who closes the Gorgias with a myth in which Zeus appoints three judges so that each soul may be tried naked, stripped of body and circumstance, and seen for what it is: Rhadamanthus judges the souls of the East, Aeacus those of the West, with Minos holding the deciding vote. The Apology invokes him too, among the just dead Socrates says he would be glad to meet. Elsewhere in the tradition Rhadamanthus does not only judge but reigns — Homer’s Odyssey sets him in the Elysian plain, the windless country reserved for the favoured, and later poets make him a lord of that blessed place rather than a warder of the punished.

The two roles sit together without strain, because both rest on the same idea: that justice does not end at death but is completed there. Within Greek religious thought this was less a doctrine than a hope given narrative form — a way of saying that the books are balanced somewhere, even when they plainly are not balanced here. Later antiquity took the name as shorthand for severe and impartial judgment; the adjective Rhadamanthine still carries that sense in English. He is, in the end, a small but durable answer to an old question: who, if anyone, sees the whole of a life and renders the verdict it deserves.

→ In the library: Plato — Gorgias (Jowett, 1892)

→ Related: Orestes · Proserpina · Lycurgus Of Sparta