Juliette Harrisson
It is a common platitude that there are only two certain things in life: death and taxes. Just as citizens of democratic countries tend to show a great deal of interest in what happens to their taxes after they have paid them, people in cultures across the world and throughout history have shown a great deal of interest in what happens (or does not happen) after death. In so many different times and places, people have asked whether or not there is such a thing as a soul, and what happens to it after it leaves the body. Where will we go after we die? What should be done with our physical remains (and will we need them again)? How will we be remembered?
The papers collected here address various aspects of what we might loosely call ‘the afterlife’. Some examine what is traditionally understood as ‘the afterlife’ – the destination of the soul after death, and whether it might return from that realm. Some look at the treatment of the corpse and the meaning behind its deposition. And some consider the afterlife created for the dead here on Earth by those still living – the preservation of their memory and the deliberate attempts to keep them ‘alive’ in some form, even after their physical and metaphysical passing.
Our title Imagining the Afterlife encompasses a range of attitudes towards, and ideas about, the afterlife that might traditionally be considered ‘afterlife belief’. Indeed, that phrase recurs throughout the book. However, the methodological issues surrounding how to talk about afterlife belief in the ancient world are significant.
In the first place, the very notion of ‘belief’ is controversial in the context of ancient religion. Ancient religion took many different forms and varied hugely across city-states or provinces, across geographical and chronological boundaries. Traditional Greco-Roman religion had no set dogma and no holy book setting down exactly what adherents were expected to believe; rather it existed through a multiplicity of practices. This has led some scholars to suggest, in the words of Simon Price, that ‘practice not belief is the key’ to ancient religion (Price, 1999, p. 3). In Price’s view, the very concept of ‘belief’ belongs to monotheistic, Abrahamic religion, and he has suggested that it is, in fact, profoundly Christian in its implications (Price, 1984, p. 10).
However, others have expressed some concern with the suggestion that we should not talk about ‘belief’ in regard to ancient religion. H. S. Versnel refers to the question itself as ‘intrinsically absurd’, though he adds that if an answer were absolutely required, it would be ‘in the positive’ (Versnel, 2011, p. 559). Some scholars have tried to re-frame the question; for example, Frankfurter argues in favour of an anthropological approach, in which concepts of ‘belief’, ‘salvation’ and so on are understood as ‘functions of shrine placement, ritual action, economic pursuit, institutional competition, and local or urban identity . . . The scholar interprets religion according to what people do (and where and when) rather than in terms of belief systems and theories’ (Frankfurter, 2010, p. 547).
The trend now is to suggest a more balanced interpretation, which emphasises the importance of ritual in ancient religion, but does not argue that this necessarily rules out ‘belief’ as well. This was the view proposed by Walter Burkert, who argued that Greek religion ‘is not founded on the word but on ritual tradition’, but added that this does not imply that Greek ‘piety’ should be dismissed, even if it was different in some ways from Christian piety (Burkert, 1985, p. 275). Bruit Zaidman and Schmitt Pantel similarly argued that, although Greek religion was ‘ritualistic’ in the sense that it was ‘the opposite of dogmatic’, ‘this Greek ritualism did not exclude either religious “thought” or religious “beliefs” ’ (Bruit Zaidman and Schmitt Pantel, 1992, p. 27). Charles King suggests that the difference is one of emphasis; while a pagan and a Christian might both pray for a sick child to a god, the pagan will emphasize offerings and rituals and approach more than one deity, where the Christian is restricted to prayer to a single God, which may be accompanied by ritual, but ‘ritual would not usually be the main focus’ (King, 2003, p. 308).1
Even if we accept that ‘belief’ is something that formed a part of ancient religion and ancient religious practice, the problem of how exactly to establish what people may or may not have ‘believed’ remains. Any discussion of ‘belief’ or ‘beliefs’ is, inevitably, a discussion of ideas that some members of a particular group of people may have held to be true, but it certainly does not automatically encompass all members of that group. Atheism – a Greek word (ἄθεος, atheos, without god) – was far from unknown in the ancient world (see Whitmarsh 2015). On the subject of the afterlife specifically, the Elder Pliny referred to the very idea that life would renew itself after death as ‘dementia’, ‘madness’ (Pliny, Natural History, 7.55). He appeared to believe that there was a soul in human beings, describing souls leaving the body and returning, but did not believe that the soul was immortal (Pliny, Natural History, 7.53, 55).
Further methodological problems present themselves when we consider the nature of the evidence we are using. For example, one method of trying to establish what people believed about the afterlife in the ancient world is to examine funerary sites, including grave goods, the method of burial, and funerary art, and draw conclusions based on these. Up until the 1960s, there had been a tendency, particularly among archaeologists of prehistory, to assume certain things on the basis of funerary sites – that grave goods indicated a belief in an afterlife (and that the deceased might have need of them there), that the orientation of the body might imply the direction of the next world, or that cremation might indicate a belief in the survival of a soul outside of the body (Pearson, 1999, .p. 21). Even more recently, this tendency can be seen in archaeological studies of death. For example, the following extract from a book on the afterlife in ancient Egypt aimed at a general audience is fairly typical in the conclusions it draws from the evidence available:
The earliest clear signs of a belief in the survival of death date from the beginning of the fourth millennium BC . . . Gifts for the dead were placed with the body . . . The essentially practical character of most of the objects provided – ceramic and stone jars of food and drink, maceheads, flint knives and other tools and weapons, cosmetic palettes and personal jewellery – indicate that at this stage the afterlife was regarded as an extension of earthly existence, a state in which the deceased would experience the same needs and require the same comforts as those in life . . . Moreover, the provision of objects of amuletic or magical significance, even at this early date, is indicative of a belief that the individual could gain personal access to the supernatural.
(Taylor, 2001, pp. 13–14)
However, following the ethnographic comparative work of Peter Ucko, there is now a broader understanding that such customs may have other meanings for the people following them. Ucko cited as examples the Lugbara people in Uganda, who bury personal items with the dead as a visual representation of who they were and their social role in life, and Western pet cemeteries, where pets may be buried with toys, blankets or food, as a way to dispose of objects that held an emotional connection with the dead pet, as part of the grieving process. None of these objects are intended for use in any kind of afterlife (Ucko, 1969, p. 265). Similarly, the UK stillbirth and neonatal death charity Sands provides memory boxes for parents dealing with a stillbirth or neonatal death. In their advice for both religious and non-religious parents, the charity explains that these include two small teddy bears, one for the parents to keep in memory of the baby and one to ‘stay with your baby’ through inhumation or cremation (Sands, 2016, p. 19). The advice is aimed at parents of vastly differing religious views, and many of the babies concerned will never have had the opportunity to hold a teddy bear, particularly if stillborn – the item is not intended to be of use to the child in the afterlife (something not all the parents reading the booklet are expected to believe in), nor is it something the baby used themselves. Rather, it is intended as a tangible memory of the baby for the grieving parents to create a link with their child and, quite literally, to hold on to.
Ancient funerary sites frequently feature mythological inscriptions or images relating to stories about the afterlife or the underworld. However, it is just as likely that a reference to mythology or the gods in a funerary context is meant as a metaphor than as a literal statement. As Lattimore long ago suggested, ‘the description of the underworld [in funerary epitaphs] consists mainly of various poetical figures, and seldom has more than a fanciful significance’ (Lattimore, 1942, p. 87). For example, one tomb from Roman-period Egypt reads:
Weep for me, stranger, a maiden ripe for marriage, who formerly shone in a great house. For, together with my bridal garments, I, untimely, have received this hateful tomb as my bridal chamber. For when the noise of the revellers at my . . . was going to make my father’s house resound, suddenly Hades came and snatched me away, like a rose in a garden nurtured by fresh rain.
(Venit, 2015, p. 90)
The reference to the myth of Hades, who abducted the young Persephone and took her to the underworld to be his bride, is a metaphorical reference to the young woman who has been denied marriage with a living man and taken by death instead. It does not necessarily imply that the mother who had the tomb built believes the god has literally come to take her daughter, but is a poetic way of expressing her loss. Indeed, in modern Greece deceased children are still sometimes dressed in wedding clothes, and some funeral laments are similar to wedding songs, symbolising the tragedy of death before marriage (Papadatou, 2015, p. 153).
In other cases, mythical images can fulfil a largely decorative function. For example, the early third century sarcophagus of Roman woman Claudia Arria features images telling the story of Endymion and Selene, of Cupid and Psyche, and of Venus and a male figure, as well as scenes of nature and herdsmen among animals (Sorabella 2001; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2018). Endymion was a beautiful mortal who had been granted eternal youth in an eternal sleep. While he slept, the Moon goddess, Selene, fell in love with him and visited him. The metaphorical power of the story for a sarcophagus is clear, as death is likened to falling asleep and being watched over by a goddess, and it appears on a number of Roman sarcophagi, as do other images of sleeping figures (Koortbojian, 1995, p. 131; Sorabella, 2001, p. 70). The story also associates the sleep of death with gaining eternal love, a theme underlined on Claudia Arria’s tomb by the presence of Cupid and Psyche (Love and Soul, their romance one of the few stories in Greek mythology with a truly happy ending) and Venus, goddess of love. It is possible that Claudia Arria’s husband had predeceased her (this may be why her daughter, Aninia Hilara, dedicated the sarcophagus; Sorabella, 2001, p. 70) and that the images suggest they have been reunited in death. However, as Sorabella has pointed out, Claudia Arria herself is depicted in a separate portrait, and not associated with any particular character. Nothing on the sarcophagus suggests belief in any particular god or afterlife and the confusion of images is more indicative of a general mood than offering a strong statement with regard to a particular myth (Sorabella, 2001, p. 77).
Pearson has observed that there is a ‘strange paradox’ in funerary archaeology – that the physical remains of the dead and their context are more likely to tell us about the individual’s life, rather than their death (Pearson, 1999, p. 3). Similarly, while funerary sites may seem an obvious source of information on how people approached and conceptualised the afterlife, they are not always as helpful in terms of understanding ideas about the traditionally understood ‘afterlife’ – the possible continued existence of the soul – as they might first appear. Many of the rituals surrounding death and burial relate more to the psychological needs and social customs of the surviving friends and family than to ideas about what may or may not await the deceased in the afterlife.
Funerary sites can tell us a lot more about another kind of ‘afterlife’ – the afterlife created for the dead by the living through memory. The continued construction of memory around a dead person is, in this world, their ‘afterlife’, and considerable thought is often put into how they will be kept within the family even in their absence. The teddy bears provided by Sands are one example of this sort of conscious memory-creation. The maintenance of a funerary or memorial site may also play a part in this. For example, gifts, flowers and mementoes are often left at the Vietnam Wall Memorial in Washington, D. C. One visitor who left a piece of ticker tape at the Wall wrote that he did so because he was returning from the New York Welcome Home Parade for returning soldiers and ‘I wanted to share this experience with my fallen friends’ (Small, 1994, p. 82). In a rather different twentieth century example, Pearson points out that Lenin’s body was mummified and preserved as part of a ‘hero cult’ despite belonging to what Pearson refers to as a ‘secular religion’, communism (Pearson, 1999, p. 170). The preservation of Lenin’s body relates to a variety of issues concerning power, cultural memory and identity, but is not related to afterlife belief. It is also important to bear in mind that, while the initial impetus for a custom like grave goods or the maintenance of a funerary site might have been rooted in afterlife belief, this does not necessarily continue to be the case for everyone who carries out the practice. Many burial traditions are carried out because that is the way it has always been done (Rebay-Salisbury, 2012, p. 15), though the initial reason for doing so may have been long lost.
While ‘belief’ may be difficult to locate or prove, there is a body of evidence from ancient funerary sites that strongly implies a lack of belief in an afterlife. One Roman monument, for example, says:
To the spirits of the departed, Cerellia Fortunata, a very dear wife, with whom I lived 11 years without quarrel. Marcus Antonius Encolpus made this for himself and Antonius Athenaeus, his very dear freed slave, and for his freedmen and freedwomen and their descendants, except Marcus Antonius Athenionus.
Traveller, do not pass by my epitaph, but stop and listen, and then, when you have learned the truth, carry on. There is no boat in Hades, no ferryman Charon, no Aeacus holder of the keys, nor any dog called Cerberus. All of us who have died and gone below are bones and ashes: there is nothing else. What I have told you is true. Now leave, traveller, so that you will not think that, although dead, I talk too much.
CIL I 6298 (see Hope, 2007, p. 228)
(What Marcus Antonius Athenionus had done to deserve not just being excluded from the memorial, but pointedly dismissed, is sadly lost to history).
This is a fairly lengthy example from a wealthy tomb, but shorter expressions of unbelief were so common as to have a standard abbreviation: ‘NF F NS NC’, which stands for non fui, fui, non sum, non curo – ‘I did not exist, I existed, I do not exist, I don’t care’ (Hopkins, 1983, p. 230; see further Lattimore, 1942, pp. 55–61, and p. 84 for some Greek equivalent examples). It is very clear that, just as many people in the modern Western world do not believe that human beings have a soul that survives after death, many people in the ancient world did not believe in any kind of eternal soul or afterlife either. Any discussion of afterlife ‘belief’, therefore, is discussing the beliefs of a portion of the population, not the whole.
Having said that, there is evidence that a number of people in the ancient world did believe that the soul survived and went on to another life after death. Among those epitaphs Lattimore suggested imply belief in what he called ‘immortality’ are Greek inscriptions featuring statements such as, ‘I have gone to the gods, I am among the immortals’ (ἐς δὲ θεοὺς ἀνέλυσα [κ]αὶ ἀθανάτοισι μέτειμι, es de theous anelusa kai athanatoisi meteimi); ‘Parthenis lies here. She is ageless and immortal’ (Παρθενὶς ἐνθάδε κεῖται ἀγήρατος ἀθανάτη τε, Parthenis enthade keitai agēratos athanatē te), and ‘I am not dead; you must not say that good men die’ (οὐχὶ θανών· θνή[σ]κ[ειν] μὴ [λ]έγε τοὺς ἀγαθοὺς, ouchi thanōn; thnēskein mē lege tous agathous) (Lattimore, 1942, pp. 49–50, his translations). Latin examples include, ‘vivis in eternum’, ‘you live in eternity’ and ‘set quia sunt Manes, sit tibi terra levis’ ‘but because there are Shades, may the earth rest lightly on you’ (Lattimore, 1942, p. 54).
Letters are a particularly useful body of evidence, for even though they are consciously published, and often written with a broad audience in mind, a letter is still a communication from one person to another and might reasonably be expected to represent the views of the writer accurately, at the very least. Consoling his wife on the death of their two-year-old daughter, Plutarch told her:
καὶ μὴν ἃ τῶν ἄλλων ἀκούεις, οἳ πείθουσι πολλοὺς λέγοντες ὡς οὐδὲν οὐδαμῇ τῷ διαλυθέντι κακὸν οὐδὲ λυπηρόν ἐστιν, οἶδ᾽ ὅτι κωλύει σε πιστεύειν ὁ πάτριος λόγος καὶ τὰ μυστικὰ σύμβολα τῶν περὶ τὸν Διόνυσον ὀργιασμῶν, ἃ σύνισμεν ἀλλήλοις οἱ κοινωνοῦντες. ὡς οὖν ἄφθαρτον οὖσαν τὴν ψυχὴν διανοοῦ ταὐτὸ ταῖς ἁλισκομέναις ὄρνισι πάσχειν. . .
And so you hear others; they persuade many people, saying there is nothing bad or painful anywhere for anyone who has ‘been dispersed’ – which I know that the Word [logos] of our fathers and the mystic signs of the rites concerning Dionysus, to which we both bear witness in common with each other, prevent you from trusting yourself. And so you should consider the soul to be undecaying, to be suffering like a captive bird . . .
Plutarch, Consolation to his Wife, 10 (Moralia, 611d–e, trans. my own)
Plutarch does not commit his and his wife’s specific beliefs to writing, because they are connected with the mystery cult of Dionysus, into which both had been initiated, and the secrets of which could not be revealed to others. However, it is clear that Plutarch was encouraging his wife to believe that the soul was immortal and set free from the trappings of the human body in death.
Others are less certain, but open-minded. The Younger Pliny, in stark contrast to his uncle Pliny the Elder, was intrigued by the particular subject of whether the dead not only survived in some form, but were able to visit the living after death in the form of ghosts. At the opening of a letter to his friend Sura, Pliny says, ‘I should very much like to know whether you think ghosts exist . . . I personally am encouraged to believe in their existence largely from what I have heard of the experience of Curtius Rufus’ (Pliny, Letters, 7.27). He goes on to tell three ghost stories in the course of the letter, one about Curtius Rufus, a haunted house story featuring a ghost clanking chains, and a spooky incident that happened to his freedmen. A discussion about belief in ghosts or life after death is often the prompt that encourages someone to tell a ghost story, now as well as in the ancient world, as Gillian Bennett has demonstrated in her work on belief and twentieth century stories of encounters with the dead (Bennett, 1999, p. 115). The subjects she interviewed said things like, ‘Shall I tell you why I have this belief as well . . . It’s the one thing that happened in my life when my father died’ (p. 125) or ‘Well I’ve never believed in it at all . . . But I saw my father’ (p. 130).
Even letters, however, are carefully constructed literary texts, including those, like Plutarch’s, that form part of the ancient genre of consolation. This sub-genre of its own, produced in various forms including letters, philosophical treatises and poetry, is dedicated to offering comfort to those who have recently experienced a bereavement.2 The genre can offer a unique insight into ancient emotion and the strategies employed for dealing with extremes of emotion (see Baltussen, 2013, p. xiii). In some cases, we seem to catch a glimpse of a touching communication between bereaved family members, with even a mention of shared afterlife belief, as in Plutarch’s letter to his wife. However, consolations often include standard themes and tropes, and in many cases, as Hope suggests, they were ‘more about promoting elite male relationships against the backdrop of the uncertain political times than providing real comfort’ (Hope, 2007, p. 195).
Even within the mind of one person, attitudes can vary according to context. It is possible to see some of these complexities by looking at a single author who has left us an unusually large body of work – Cicero. In some contexts, Cicero appears to express a lack of belief in matters relating to ghosts and the afterlife. For example, in De Divinatione (On Divination), Cicero appears to conclude that all forms of divination are largely useless and those who claim to be able to interpret signs from the gods are mostly charlatans. The text is written as a philosophical dialogue between two people, Cicero and his brother Quintus, with Quintus putting forward the case for divination and Cicero arguing against it, apparently converting Quintus to his own point of view. This includes not just divine signs, but dream-messages from the ghosts of murder victims revealing their murder; Quintus tells such a story (Cicero, De Divinatione, 1.57) but Cicero, in his response, rejects all dream-divination, including that apparently coming from ghosts. He suggests that, since we cannot know about other people’s dreams, some of these stories may have been made up, and asserts that dreams are the products of the dreamer’s own mind and whatever he happens to have been thinking about (Cicero, De Divinatione, 2.66–67).
However, at other times, Cicero seems to have been quite happy to tell others that he had personally been given signs from the gods through dreams, indicating that some course of action he wanted himself or others to take was the correct one. For example, he claimed to have had a dream about Octavian during the brief period he was supporting him after the death of Caesar, that indicated Octavian had been chosen for great things by the gods (Plutarch, Cicero, 44; Suetonius, Divine Augustus, 94; Dio Cassius, Roman History, 45.1–2). There were, of course political reasons it was expedient to present himself as a believer in divine signs in this case; even Plutarch suggests that:
These, then, were the reasons that were mentioned; but it was Cicero’s hatred for Antony in the first place, and then his natural craving for honour, that attached him to the young Caesar, since he thought to add Caesar’s power to his own political influence.
(Plutarch, Cicero, 45)
Less easily explainable in political terms is Cicero’s idea of dedicating a shrine (fanum) to his deceased daughter Tullia, with the expressed intention of achieving her ‘apotheosis’, that is, transforming her into a deity. Cicero tells his friend Atticus in a letter that he is considering the deification (ἀποθέωσις, apotheōsis) of Tullia – though he does refer to the idea as ineptia, a folly or fancy (Cicero, Letters to Atticus, 12.36), and the shrine does not appear to have been built (Hope, 2007, p. 150; see further Cole, 2013, pp. 1–7). Cicero even expresses a hope, in his Tusculan Disputations (written in the wake of Tullia’s death; Corbeill, 2013, p. 23), that both he and his unnamed addressee will one day ‘migrate to the heavens’ (Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, 1.82). The dialogue as a whole summarises various definitions of the soul and views on what might happen to it after death; perhaps Cicero was working through his own conflicted thoughts on paper.
It is, of course, possible for a person’s ideas and beliefs to change over time, or for the beliefs themselves to change according to context. If there is any subject on which human beings are especially prone to Paul Veyne’s ‘brain-balkanisation’ and to believing different things in different contexts and with different parts of the brain (Veyne, 1988, pp. 41–58, 87), then perhaps it is the subject of what may or may not have happened to those we love after their death, as grief brings such ideas into sharp focus. Even grief itself is not as universal we may have a tendency to assume, for ‘there are’ says Paul Rosenblatt, ‘no emotions or emotional expressions that are universally present at death’, and reactions to grief can vary considerably across different societies, from prolonged depression to greeting death with laughter (Rosenblatt, 2015, p. 28). However, the phenomenon of a bereaved person passing through a series of ‘stages’, including initial shock and confusion, followed by separation anxiety, followed by despair (made famous by Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’s five-stage model; Kübler-Ross, 1970) is frequently observable in many cases (see Bennett, 1999, pp. 81–83). These feelings of shock and aching separation may naturally provoke a renewed consideration of the possibility of life after death in the grieving party.
What did Cicero actually believe? I am not sure he himself could tell us. How did he intend to represent ‘belief’ in his published works? Even the answer to that question is complicated. For example, Cicero had received a letter of consolation from Servius Sulpicius Rufus on the death of Tullia, which included standard reassurances that she had been released from life’s difficulties, though with a political twist; ‘when the Republic was ruined, she withdrew from life’ (‘cum res publica occideret vita excessisse’; Cicero, Epistulae ad Familiares, 4.5.5). Cicero’s equally political reply insists that, with no Republic to return to, he can find no solace at home or in the Forum, for public affairs cannot console his private loss, nor his home life comfort him in the face of political upheaval (Cicero, Epistulae ad Familiares, 4.6.2; see further Hope, 2007, pp. 197–199). To what extent is the volume of correspondence produced on the death of his daughter a reflection of genuine intense grief, and to what extent is he using his dead daughter as a prompt to express his feelings on the political situation? In his published work as we have it, the two are inextricable.
An entirely different set of challenges present themselves in the study of imaginative literature on the subject of the afterlife. As with any work of fiction, and especially that which deals with the supernatural, the relationship between literary representation and genuinely held beliefs or ideas is fluid and ever-changing. It will, naturally, depend partly on what genre of literature we are looking at and on the context in which it is read or performed. Denis Feeney has proposed an investigation of ‘dialogue’ and ‘interactions’ as a way of exploring the complex relationships between the representation of and relationship to ‘belief’ in different literary genres; Feeney himself explores examples of interactions between philosophy and epic, satire and statuary, and lyric and sacrifice (Feeney, 1998, p. 21–46). The advantage of this type of analysis is that it preserves the central role of context within the investigation, without restricting the resulting analysis to boxed off groups – poetry in a box over here, letters over here, history over here – and ignoring the relationships between these different aspects of cultural expression in the ancient world. Several of the chapters on literature in this volume offer similar explorations of interactions between different genres or sources; between elegy and folklore (Harrisson), between drama and commentary (Doroszewska and Kucharski) and between epic and commentary (Foster).
It is for all these reasons that the chief subject of this book is not simply what people in the ancient world ‘believed’ about the afterlife, but how they imagined it. Questions about belief form an essential part of this subject and, indeed, my own contribution focuses on that very topic. However, there is more to the ancient afterlife than what people in the ancient world may or may not have literally believed to be true. Many ideas exist in the imagination of a culture and can tell us something important about that culture and its values without being the object of literal belief. These ideas may be shared among many people in their cultural imagination and form an important part of their cultural identity, even if they do not consider them to be factually accurate (see further Harrisson, 2013, p. 13).
The chapters in this volume represent a wide range of work on the ancient afterlife, covering different time periods and geographical spaces and using different methodologies. The first half of the book is devoted to funerary sites. These chapters explore issues such as the use of the site by the living, and the interaction between the living and the dead at these sites. The second half of the book focuses on literature, and these chapters similarly explore the representation of the afterlife in these texts and some of the ways the construction or reception of these texts might indicate ways in which the ancients thought about different types of afterlife, whether or not they believed in a literal afterlife themselves.
We open with two studies of Greek funerary sites. Molly Allen explores images of the dead on white-ground lekythoi in fifth century BC Athens. She concludes that, in this century marked by warfare, Athenians increasingly came to imagine they might be able to influence the well-being of the dead, and the funerary site became a space for communication with the dead. By contrast, Nick Brown concentrates on a single case study from the earlier, Archaic period; a monument to a young woman called Phrasikleia. He explores, not what the monument might tell us about the imagined afterlife of the soul, but the ways in which the monument creates an afterlife for Phrasikleia in this world by evoking her memory.
Moving across to ancient Italy, Isabella Bossolino outlines some of the qualities of Etruscan demons, especially Vanth, and suggests that Etruscan images of the afterlife bear some relation to Greek, due to the spread of Greek mystery cults. Josipa Lulic brings us into the Roman Empire, setting a series of unusual depictions of Mercury in the context of religion and religious practice in the provinces, as well as suggesting a link with Orphism. Gabriela Ingle returns to the theme of keeping the dead alive through memory and through communication at the funerary site, explored in Greek contexts by Allen and Brown. She examines two case studies of late Roman pagan tombs depicting dining scenes, concluding that these scenes are intended both to keep the dead alive through memory, and to ensure the well-being of the deceased’s soul in the afterlife.
Literary texts offer a very different, but equally fascinating, picture of the ways in which the ancients imagined the afterlife. Safari Grey expands our thinking about the Homeric afterlife in the Odyssey to incorporate ideas surrounding darkness, the dream state and anonymity, seeing all three as forms of temporary death with concomitant afterlives. Stephanie Crooks suggests that Virgil’s description of Daphnis’ tomb in Eclogue 5 draws on contemporary thinking about immortality, as well as literary tradition. Similarly, Juliette Harrisson explores the interactions between literary tropes surrounding the afterlife and folklore on the subject, with a particular focus on ghost stories and their relation to Propertius 4.7.
We finish with the afterlife of some ancient afterlives; two chapters exploring the reception of ancient ideas about the afterlife in late antique texts. Julia Doroszewska and Janek Kucharski take as their starting-point a strange ritual alluded to by Aeschylus and Sophocles, the maschalismos, a custom intended to dishonour the dead by mutilating their corpse. They examine both the original context of the custom and its interpretation in later scholiasts, who believed it to be a custom designed to avert the anger of a murder victim, involving cutting off the victim’s extremities and stringing them together, hung from the neck and through the armpits. Finally, Frances Foster offers a close study of Servius’ commentary on Virgil’s Aeneid 6, using it to broaden our understanding of what aspects of Virgil’s afterlife were considered especially important to teachers and students in Late Antiquity. Taken as a whole, the collection offers a broad spectrum of ways of approaching how the ancients imagined different forms of ‘afterlife’ in both image and text.
1 For more detailed discussions of the issue of ‘belief’ in ancient religion see, among others, Veyne 1988; Bruit Zaidman and Schmitt Pantel, 1992, pp. 11–15; Feeney, 1998, pp. 12–46; Harrison, 2000, pp. 18–23; King, 2003; Giordano-Zecharya, 2005; Versnel, 2011, pp. 539–560; Harrisson, 2013, pp. 2–8. On atheism in the ancient world, see Whitmarsh 2015.
2 On defining ‘consolation’ as a unique genre, see Scourfield, 2013.
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Bennett, G. (1999) Alas, Poor Ghost! Traditions of Belief in Story and Discourse, Logan, Utah State University Press.
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