The earliest picture of paradise comes in the Odyssey, Homer's epic of the hero Odysseus and his long journey home from the Trojan War. Menelaus, the red-haired king of Sparta, had fought ten years at Troy to win back his wife Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world, and on his own wanderings home he wrestled with Proteus, the shape-shifting Old Man of the Sea who knows all secrets, and forced from him a prophecy of his end. You will not die in horse-pasturing Argos, the sea god told him. The immortals will carry you to the Elysian Plain at the ends of the earth, where fair-haired Rhadamanthys, the just judge of the dead, has his dwelling. There life is easiest for men: no snow falls, no winter storms blow, no rain ever comes, but the stream of Oceanus, the river that rings the world, sends up the singing breezes of the West Wind to cool the people who dwell there. This, Proteus explained, is because Menelaus is the husband of Helen and therefore the son-in-law of Zeus himself. The first paradise in Western literature was, quite frankly, a family favour.

The poet Hesiod, a rough contemporary of Homer who sang of the ages of mankind, widened the guest list. Between the bronze race and the men of his own iron age, he said, Zeus made a fourth race, nobler and more just: the demigods, the heroes who fought at seven-gated Thebes and in the war for Troy, and were destroyed there. To some of them Zeus granted a life apart, settling them at the ends of the earth on the Isles of the Blessed, where the grain-giving soil bears honey-sweet fruit three times a year. And their king is Cronus, the old Titan who once ruled the Golden Age of the world before his son Zeus cast him down: released from his bonds, the deposed god of the world's best age became the shepherd of its best dead.

The Theban poet Pindar, who sang victory odes for the athletes of the games in the fifth century BCE, gave paradise its most gorgeous image. After death, he sang, the good pass to a land where the sun shines through the darkness of our night, in meadows red with roses and shaded by frankincense trees and golden fruit. There the blessed take their pleasure with horses and wrestling, with draughts and with the lyre, and around them blossoms a golden flower, blazing on the trees of the land and fed by the water of the sea, from which they twine wreaths for their heads. But the highest road of all belongs to those who have kept their souls from wrong three times on each side of death: they travel the road of Zeus to the tower of Cronus, the Isle of the Blessed, where ocean breezes blow, and there Rhadamanthys sits in judgment, and Peleus and Cadmus, great kings beloved of the gods, have their place, and Achilles was brought when his mother Thetis, the sea nymph, begged Zeus to grant it.

As the centuries turned, paradise moved house. What Homer and Hesiod had placed at the western edge of the living world, the philosophers and mystery cults placed below it. In the dialogues of Plato, the Athenian philosopher of the fourth century BCE, the dead come before three judges in the underworld, Minos, Rhadamanthys and Aeacus, all just kings in life, who sort every soul between the road to punishment and the road to the blessed. The secret rites of Eleusis near Athens, the Mysteries that promised initiates a better fate after death, filled their hymns with meadows of the blessed, and the little gold tablets buried with Orphic initiates guided the soul towards them. Then the Roman poet Virgil fixed the map forever in his Aeneid, the epic of the Trojan refugee Aeneas who founded the Roman race. Guided by the Sibyl, the prophetess of Cumae, Aeneas descends to the underworld and comes to the Elysian Fields, a joyful country of green meadows and groves that has its own sun and its own stars, where Orpheus, the singer who had once charmed death itself, plays his lyre for the dancers, and famous warriors lie at ease, and by the river Eridanus the souls of patriots and poets shine white with garlands. There his dead father Anchises shows him the souls of Romans yet unborn, drinking the water of Lethe, the river of forgetfulness, before returning to the light.

Elysium outlived its gods. The word Elysian slipped into the languages of Europe as the simplest shorthand for perfect happiness, and when Paris laid out the grand avenue that runs from the Tuileries Garden to the Arc de Triomphe, it was christened the Champs-Elysees, the Elysian Fields, a name it has carried since 1709. New Orleans named a riverside district for it, and Hoboken in New Jersey held its own Elysian Fields, where some of the first organised baseball games were played in the 1840s. The Greeks had imagined a meadow at the end of the world where the chosen few never wept again, and every city that borrows the name is still trying to build it.