We tend to think of ancient stories of visits to the Underworld by Odysseus, Orpheus and Aeneas as being poetic fictions, but Robert Temple shows here that in fact, the Ancients believed the Underworld to be a place that actually existed. It was maintained by a college of priests who would prepare, through ritual fasting, prayer, animal sacrifice, bathing and solitude, whoever wished to meet the shades of the dead. The candidate would then be led through the entrance to the Underworld, a dark, terrifying place, far underground, where after a series of ordeals and apparitions, they would finally meet with the ghosts of the dead. All these features recur in the ancient stories.