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Index
Prologue
Acknowledgments
Frequently Used Terms
Abbreviations
i. Elpenor and Others: Narrative Descriptions of the Dead
z. To Honor and Avert: Rituals Addressed to the Dead 36
3. Magical Solutions to Deadly Problems: The Origin and Roles of the Goes 8z
4. The Unavenged: Dealing with Those Who Die Violently I17
5. Childless Mothers and Blighted Virgins: Female Ghosts and Their Victims
6. Hecate and the Dying Maiden: How the Mistress of Ghosts Earned Her Title
7. Purging the Polis: Erinyes, Eumenides, and Semnai Theai 150
Bibliography z89
General Index
Texts 315
Inscriptions 32.9
So goes one of our oldest ghost stories.'
"by wandering into my dreams you may bring me joy," Admetus says to his wife, Alcestis, as she lies
The models that I have just sketched will be familiar to many readers because they are taken from we
The possibility that the Greeks believed that the dead and the living might interact, in contrast, h
The general opinion is that the Greeks of the classical age were happily free from superstition. I a
One wonders whether Nock's dismissal and Nilsson's regret in part reflect the fact that to most Euro
Scholars of our own generation, apparently sharing either Nock's reluctance or Nilsson's regret, hav
rebelled in this work and many others against mainstream views of the ancient Greeks.'
Even if the beliefs of an individual are fluid and sometimes contradictory, however, each of them ha
afterlife can enter into a culture without completely displacing the old ones. As the needs of a sit
The Homeric poems
with him in any meaningful way until they had drunk the blood that he provided. Teiresias does speak
It seems, therefore, that although the dead are not completely senseless in their natural state-afte
It is only by means of the blood-a striking emblem of the vigorous life they have left behind fore
The Homeric Underworld, then, is filled with ghosts who must be specially nourished before they can
place, carefully designated by the goddess Circe, that any interaction between those who inhabit the
This idea, that the dead are not admitted to the Underworld until their physical remains are ceremon
that the unburied dead are restless gives rise to another very common idea, which we also find expre
In ancient Greece, as in many other cultures, souls not yet admitted to the Underworld have the ab
Elpenor's is not the only soul that Odysseus encounters at the border of the Underworld: the souls o
The warriors still wearing bloody armor are probably unburied, like Elpenor; no good Greek would a
the abnormal dead lingered between the two worlds and that they were a source of potential trouble f
There is one more possible trace of the idea that the dead might affect the living to be found in th
dwell forever in the Elysian Fields, an idyllic paradise. Other Homeric passages, such as Iliad 2o.2
The epic Aethiopis tells of Achilles' conveyance to Leuke, the marvelous "White Island," where he
Some scholars have argued that these passages prove that at the time they were composed, people alre
This is incorrect for a number of reasons, however. First, these passages concern extraordinary in
Those who won paradisical existences were extraordinary as well. Menelaus was rewarded because he
Neither of these groups of people-the sinners or the favored-are anything like ordinary people, an
We also have to wonder whether these extraordinary people were really imagined to be dead, at least
That is part of the boon that these individuals were granted: they avoid the pain and distress tha
Each of these stories makes a point (do not offend the gods; the gods' favor is valuable), but non
story. Edwards suggests that the Odyssean fate, which also is intimated in the Iliad, moves Achilles
Surely this could not have been the poet's intention.21
Because I agree with many scholars that the final book of the Odyssey was composed later than the re
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