Restless Dead: Encounters between the Living and the Dead in Ancient Greece

Restless Dead

Encounters Between the Living

and the Dead in Ancient Greece

SARAH ILES JOHNSTON

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley • Los Angeles • London

Restless Dead

Encounters Between the Living

and the Dead in Ancient Greece

SARAH ILES JOHNSTON

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley • Los Angeles • London

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

© 1999 by

the Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Johnston, Sarah Iles, 1957–

Restless dead : encounters between the living and the dead in ancient Greece / Sarah Iles Johnston.

    p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-520-21707-2 (alk. paper)

e-ISBN 978-0-520-92231-0 (ebook)

1. Ghosts—Greece—History. 2. Greece—Religion. I. Title.

For Carole E. Newlands,

in friendship and admiration

Contents

Prologue

Acknowledgments

Frequently Used Terms

Abbreviations

PART I. A SHORT HISTORY OF THE DEAD IN ANCIENT GREECE

1. Elpenor and Others:

Narrative Descriptions of the Dead

2. To Honor and Avert:

Rituals Addressed to the Dead

3. Magical Solutions to Deadly Problems:

The Origin and Roles of the Goēs

PART II. RESTLESS DEAD

4. The Unavenged:

Dealing with Those Who Die Violently

5. Childless Mothers and Blighted Virgins:

Female Ghosts and Their Victims

PART III. DIVINITIES AND THE DEAD

6. Hecate and the Dying Maiden:

How the Mistress of Ghosts Earned Her Title

7. Purging the Polis:

Erinyes, Eumenides, and Semnai Theai

Notes

Bibliography

General Index

Index Locorum

Texts

Inscriptions

Prologue

The Corinthian tyrant Periander sent his henchmen to the oracle of the dead to ask where he had lost something. The ghost of Periander’s dead wife, Melissa, was conjured up but she refused to tell them where the object was because she was cold and naked—she said that the clothes buried with her were useless because they had not been burnt properly. To prove who she was, she told the men to tell Periander that he had put his bread into a cold oven. This convinced Periander, who knew that he had made love to Melissa’s corpse after she died.

Periander immediately ordered every woman in Corinth to assemble at the temple of Hera. They all came wearing their best clothes, assuming there was going to be a festival. Periander then told his guards to strip the women naked and burn their clothes in a pit while he prayed to Melissa. Then Melissa’s ghost told him where the missing object was.

So goes one of our oldest ghost stories.¹ The Greek historian Herodotus tells it to illustrate the moral flaws of a tyrant: to serve his own purposes, Periander was willing to rob and humiliate all the women in Corinth, to say nothing of indulging in necrophilia. But at the same time, Herodotus provides a textbook example of how relations between the living and the dead were supposed to work. We learn from the story that the dead demand proper funerals, which ought to include gifts that they can use in the afterlife. This afterlife must be similar to life itself, considering that clothing is de rigeur. The living, for their part, can expect the dead’s cooperation, so long as they keep the dead happy. Transactions between the living and the dead can take place on home territory (Periander burns the clothing in Corinth), but special deals may be negotiated at a place such as the oracle of the dead, under the guidance of experts. Even then, one can’t be too careful: to be sure that the ghost who appears is really the right ghost, one ought to have some sort of proof. Melissa’s proof not only reveals Periander’s personal proclivities but shows that she knows what has been happening in the upper world since she died, as does her knowledge of where Periander’s lost object can be found. Finally, the story shows that dealing with the dead may become a civic concern even if their anger is caused by the act of a single citizen. It was Periander’s failure to send Melissa to Hades with the proper wardrobe that made her mad, but it requires contributions from the whole female population to bring her around.

We find each of these ideas in other ancient Greek sources as well, but it is their assemblage that makes Herodotus’s story fascinating, for it presents a paradox: it acknowledges that a person who once ate and drank and laughed with the rest of us is gone, but it also reflects the vigor with which she continues to inhabit the world of those who knew her. Because the dead remain part of our mental and emotional lives long after they cease to dwell beside us physically, it is easy to assume that they are simply carrying on their existence elsewhere and might occasionally come back to visit us. From this assumption arise a variety of hopes and fears. Hopes that the dead may aid the living, by revealing hidden information, by bringing illness to enemies, and by a variety of other favors—even by simply visiting those whom they have left behind: by wandering into my dreams you may bring me joy, Admetus says to his wife, Alcestis, as she lies dying, expressing hope that their love will survive death.² Fears that the dead may somehow punish the living for the injuries or neglect they suffered, by bringing illness, by causing nightmares, or simply by refusing to cooperate when needed, as Melissa did.

The dead are very much like us, driven by the same desires, fears, and angers, seeking the same sorts of rewards and requiring the same sort of care that we do. For this reason, the world of the dead is not only a source of both possible danger and possible help, but a mirror that reflects our own. The reflection is frequently a distorted one, to be sure: the dead are often credited with remarkable powers, and thus manifest their desires, fears, and angers in ways that go beyond any available to us. But the distortion is not random: through their excesses, the dead reveal, like fingerprint powder shaken over a table, where desires, fears, and angers are most acute among the living.

Every detail in which a culture cloaks its ideas about the dead has the potential to reveal something about the living. The types of misfortune that a culture traces to the anger of the dead often reveal what that culture fears losing—and correspondingly values—the most, for blaming the dead can be a way of avoiding other explanations that would challenge the culture’s social coherence or theodicy. If one were to blame the death of one’s child on the witchcraft of one’s neighbor, for instance, the relationship between one’s own family and the family of the neighbor might be irreparably damaged. If one were to blame it on divine wrath, one would be forced to acknowledge either that one deserved to lose the child or that divinity was morally fickle. Tracing the child’s death to the angry dead avoids all of these problems: the dead serve as convenient scapegoats, shouldering burdens of blame too heavy for other agents to carry. To take another example, many cultures believe that death under certain circumstances or before certain milestones of life have been passed will condemn the soul to become a restless ghost. Studying the conditions that produce these ghosts offers insight into what the culture considers, conversely, to constitute a full life and a good death.

The models that I have just sketched will be familiar to many readers because they are taken from well-known studies published earlier in this century. Anthropologists who did fieldwork with tribal cultures at that time recognized the contribution that analysis of mortuary rituals and eschatological beliefs could make toward constructing a picture of the way that those cultures worked; scholars of other cultures eventually began to apply these models to their own materials as well.³ There have been few attempts to apply them to materials from ancient Greece, however. This is all the more unfortunate because Greek literature abounds with incidents in which the living and the dead interact. Already in the Iliad and the Odyssey, ghosts appear to complain of poor treatment and demand that the living help them; tragedy, that most Greek of literary genres, frequently focuses on the dead, their problems, and the obligations that the living bear toward them. Students of Greek culture and literature have much to learn from the dead and yet have virtually ignored them.

I suspect that this neglect is due to a deep-rooted reluctance to accept the idea that the Greeks believed in the possibility of anything so irrational as interaction between the living and the dead. This reluctance may seem remarkable, given that substantial advances have been made toward acknowledging and understanding other manifestations of supposed irrationality among the Greeks: the study of Greek magic, most notably, has attracted considerable interest in recent years. But, if one so chooses, magic can be presented as a technology, as something approaching our own concept of an applied science, pace James Frazer. After all, it works by certain rules that our ancient sources claim have been tested and can be passed from teacher to student. Indeed, the very fact that there are teachers and students lends magic the look of a serious discipline. Moreover, magic is intensely concerned with power: the power of the magician over those whom he enchants and his power to persuade or compel deities and daimones to work his spells. And power in all of its incarnations and from all angles—who wields it, who submits to it, and why—is a topic that has always found a respectable place in classical studies.

The possibility that the Greeks believed that the dead and the living might interact, in contrast, has seldom even been entertained. A. D. Nock, an eminent historian of Greek religion of the generation previous to our own, confidently declared that The Greeks were not dominated by any fear of ghosts and described their religion as one of joyous festivals.⁴ Similarly, although Martin P. Nilsson—probably the single most influential scholar of Greek religion ever—conceded that the Greeks believed in such things as the return of the dead, he did so only with regret:

The general opinion is that the Greeks of the classical age were happily free from superstition. I am sorry that I am obliged to refute this opinion. There was a great deal of superstition in Greece, even when Greek culture was at its height and even in the center of that culture, Athens. Superstition is very seldom mentioned in the literature of the period simply because great writers found such base things not worth mentioning.⁵

We note how carefully Nilsson has distanced such beliefs from great (one suspects he really means intelligent) minds.

One wonders whether Nock’s dismissal and Nilsson’s regret in part reflect the fact that to most European and American ears, the word ghost smacks of childish fears at bedtime and the kind of gullibility on which spiritualists prey. E. R. Dodds, another scholar of their generation, had his heart in the right place when he undertook to study ancient ideas about ghosts and related phenomena, but he may have hurt his cause as much as he helped it when he compared ancient testimonies for them to contemporary reports of the same (1936; revised in 1971). By using what happens at modern séances to clarify what happened during attempts to raise ghosts in antiquity, Dodds implicitly cast upon any Greeks who participated in such activities the same taint of blind credulity that many of us cast upon modern participants.⁶

Scholars of our own generation, apparently sharing either Nock’s reluctance or Nilsson’s regret, have paid the topic little attention. A four-and-a-half page section on afterlife beliefs in Walter Burkert’s masterly Greek Religion briefly acknowledges the possibility that the dead might return and that their anger was feared, but concentrates on what the soul experiences once it is firmly ensconced in the Underworld itself. Jan Bremmer’s The Early Greek Concept of the Soul offers an excellent analysis of funerary rites and the transition of the soul to Hades, but says relatively little about the return of the dead to the upper world or how the living might affect them; most of what he does say focuses on a single festival during which the dead were invited back, the Anthesteria. In the third edition of the Oxford Classical Dictionary (1996), Robert Garland’s article on Greek attitudes to death only briefly refers to the possibility that the dead might return, and Soul, by Christopher Rowe, merely mentions that by the fifth century, the concept that the soul might survive death was well established.⁷ There are no articles entitled Eschatology or Ghosts.

The single voice that breaks this silence is the exception that proves the rule. Erwin Rohde, who in 1894 published Psyche: Seelencult und Unsterblichkeitsglaube der Griechen, was anything but a traditional classicist. A friend of Nietzsche’s and adversary of Wilamowitz’s, Rohde rebelled in this work and many others against mainstream views of the ancient Greeks.⁸ Rohde’s contribution to our understanding of Greek ideas and practices concerning the dead was immense, but the century since Psyche’s publication has brought not only much new evidence—new inscriptions, new material remains, and even new papyri with new fragments of literature—but also the new anthropological models that I mentioned above and an enhanced understanding of the ways in which the Greeks interacted with their Mediterranean neighbors, trading ideas and ritual techniques. It is high time to look anew at Greek ideas about encounters between the living and the dead.

This book does so. By making use of new materials and adapting models developed by cultural anthropology, I seek to show how eloquently the Greek dead can speak to us about the Greek living. I begin, in the three first chapters, with a historical overview of how Greek ideas about the relationship between the living and the dead evolved in response to changing social and cultural conditions during the archaic and classical ages—most notably changes that are associated with the development of the polis (city-state), such as funerary legislation, and changes due to increased contacts between the Greeks and cultures of the ancient Near East, such as Mesopotamia and Egypt. The first of these chapters focuses on narrative sources, which can be dated with relative ease and thereby provide a rough picture of chronological development. The second chapter deals with non-narrative sources, which help to confirm the picture sketched in chapter 1. I conclude this overview, in chapter 3, by taking a close look at the goēs, the Greek practitioner who made interaction with the world of the dead his specialty, and show that his duties were both complex and integral to other aspects of Greek religious life.

Then I show, in four more closely focused chapters, how stories about the restless, unhappy dead and rituals designed to control them reiterated Greek social values and simultaneously expressed the danger that the dead posed to individuals and cities alike. As our anthropological models would lead us to expect, the Greek dead frequently served as scapegoats, and even more often served as mirrors, now taking the blame for disasters and now again reflecting the fears and desires of the living. The multi-talented goēs, being a sort of combination magician/undertaker/shaman, was essential to the polis because he possessed skills that helped to protect it against the chaos these dead might bring. The polis also developed institutional methods of controlling the dead, including civic rituals in which they were prevented from attacking those who were most at risk, such as girls on the brink of marriage. Divinities such as Hecate and the Semnai Theai, who gradually metamorphosed during the archaic and classical periods into mediators between the living and the dead, also helped to ease the tension between the two worlds. The book concludes with my reading of one of Greek literature’s most famous literary texts about interaction between the living and the dead, Aeschylus’s Eumenides. Athena, the goddess who emblematizes the well-run polis, takes on a goetic role in this play, employing magical means of controlling the dead in order to establish new rules for their interaction with the living and thus ensure her city’s welfare. In doing this, she replicates the actions of the legendary figure Epimenides, who once saved Athens from the wrath of the dead and who thus was one of the earliest Greek versions of the goēs himself.

A few practical notes. There are several topics that I have chosen not to discuss in any depth because they have been thoroughly investigated by others: hero cult, oracles of the dead, and mystery religions, for example. Although these phenomena are important to the subjects considered in this book, my own views do not differ significantly from the most widely accepted recent opinions and, thus, extensive analyses seem unnecessary. Footnotes guide the reader to fuller treatments. I have transliterated most single Greek words and short phrases; longer phrases that scholars may find important for evaluating my arguments are given in both Greek and English. I use a Latinate system of transliteration for most proper names (e.g., Cronus, not Kronos) but a system of transliteration that produces a spelling closer to the original Greek for other words (e.g., "katagraphō, not catagraphō). Each of these guidelines is sometimes rejected, however, in favor of retaining commonly used spellings (e.g., psychē, not psuchē, and Knossos, not Cnossus"). A list of frequently used Greek terms that may be unfamiliar to nonspecialists is offered here.

Acknowledgments

Good colleagues are a scholar’s greatest resource, and I am fortunate in having had many who were willing to discuss ideas with me at various stages of this book’s completion. First of all, I thank Philippe Borgeaud and David Frankfurter, both of whom critiqued early versions of my theories during a shared semester of fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1995, and who later, in their capacity as referees for the completed manuscript, made suggestions that greatly improved the book’s final form. I also thank Richard Beal, Kevin Clinton, Chris Faraone, Fritz Graf, David Jordan, David Leitao, Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Timothy McNiven, Kathryn Morgan, Carole Newlands, Richard Seaford, JoAnn Scurlock, Michael Swartz, Wendy Watkins, and Victoria Wohl for their help during the period in which the manuscript was being finished. I am grateful to my editor, Mary Lamprech; to her assistant, Kate Toll; to the University of California Press’s internal referee, John Lynch; to the production editor, Cindy Fulton, for suggestions that improved the presentation of my material; to LeRoy Johnston III, for encouragement and practical advice; and to my students Douglas Freeble and Jack Emmert, who proofread the manuscript.

The support of several institutions facilitated my work: the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton; the Fondation Hardt, Geneva; and (within The Ohio State University) the Department of Greek and Latin, the Division of Comparative Studies, the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, the Melton Center for Jewish Studies, and the College of Humanities.

I thank HarperCollins Publishers, the University of California Press, and the Associated Press for permission to reprint portions of works to which they hold the copyrights and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, for permission to depict a red-figure vase from their collection (inv. 34.79) on the dust jacket. The vase, which shows Odysseus conversing with the ghost of Elpenor at the entrance to the Underworld while Hermes looks on, is attributed to the Lycaon Painter and dated to the mid fifth century B.C.E.

Frequently Used Terms

I use many transliterated Greek words in this book, translating the term when it first is used but not thereafter. For convenience, here are definitions of the most important terms. Plurals follow in parentheses.

agalma (agalmata) anything that delights a god, including a statue of the god or a tree or animal sacred to the god

aition (aitia) a myth explaining the origin of something

alastōr (alastores) and elasteros (elasteroi) a vengeful ghost or an agent who works on the ghost’s behalf

aōros, aōrē (aōroi, aōrai) a man or woman who dies too young

ataphos (ataphoi) a dead person whose body has not received funeral rites

biaiothanatos (biaiothanatoi) a person who died violently

choē (choai) a libation poured out to the dead

eidōlon (eidōla) a ghost (literally image)

epōidē/epaoidē (epōidai/epaoidai) a chanted or sung spell

erinys (erinyes) a deity who works to avenge the dead, among other things

gellō (gelloudes) a female ghost who attacks women and children (no plural of this word exists in ancient Greek; I had to adopt the plural form used in some Byzantine Greek sources)

genos (genē) kin (often with political implications)

goēs (goētes) and goēteia an expert in dealing with disembodied souls and the art that he practices; hence, also goetic

goös (gooi) a highly emotional funeral lament

katharos (katharoi) and katharsis an adjective meaning pure and noun meaning purification

katabasis (katabaseis) a journey to the Underworld

katadesmos (katadesmoi) a curse tablet

kēr (kēres) a supernatural agent who brings death or other misfortune

kleos glory, renown

kourotrophos (kourotrophoi) one who nurtures children

lamia (lamiai) a female ghost who attacks women and children

lex sacra (leges sacrae) LATIN: law concerning religious practices

lithica a work describing magical stones and their properties

maschalismos the ritualized act of severing a corpse’s extremities

miaros (miaroi) and miasma (miasmata) an adjective meaning polluted and noun meaning pollution

mormō (mormones) a female ghost who attacks women and children

mormolukeion/mormolukē (mormolukeia/mormolukai) a female ghost who attacks women and children

nekuia (nekuiai) an encounter between living and dead individuals, usually initiated through ritual

nekuomanteion (nekuomanteia) an oracle in which the dead prophesy

oikos (oikoi) a household or family

palamnaios (palamnaioi) either a murderer or a spirit who avenges murder

parthenos (parthenoi) a woman who has never been married

pharmakon (pharmaka) and pharmakeutrides magical material, especially drugs, and the female specialists who gather and use them

phasma (phasmata) and phantasma (phantasmata) ghosts

progonoi progenitors

prostropaios (prostropaioi) either a person (or god) who should be averted or a person (or god) or functions as an averter

psychagōgos (psychagōgoi) and psychagōgia one who invokes souls and the art by which he does so

psychē (psychai) soul

psychopompos (psychopompoi) a leader of souls

strix (striges) a female ghost who attacks women and children

teletē (teletai) rites, especially those associated with mysteries

theos (theoi) a god, either male or female; but cf. thea (theai), goddess

theoxenia a meal to which a god is invited

thrēnos (thrēnoi) a formal funeral lament, often professionally composed

xenos (xenoi) and xenia a guest with whom one has a formal friendship and the friendship itself

Abbreviations

For the abbreviations of Greek and Roman authors and their works, journals, and lexica, I follow the lists in Liddell, Scott, and Jones’s A Greek-English Lexicon; The Oxford Latin Dictionary, edited by Peter Glare; The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3d ed., edited by Simon Hornblower and Antony Spawforth; and L’Année Philologique. In addition, note the following special abbreviations:

PART I

A Short History of the

Dead in Ancient Greece

CHAPTER 1

Elpenor and Others

Narrative Descriptions of the Dead

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.

Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House (1959)*

So begins one of the most effective ghost stories of the twentieth century. It is an appropriate overture for a tale that explores how human beings cope not only with incursions by the restless dead but also with the uncertainty of whether what they are experiencing is really the work of ghosts or only the creation of their own imaginations. When the main character, Eleanor, is challenged by the other members of a group investigating a haunted house as to whether she has really seen a ghost, she responds, I could say ‘all three of you are in my imagination; none of this is real’. Eleanor is half joking when she says this, but Dr. Montague, the professor of anthropology who has organized the investigation, gravely replies that if he thought she were serious, he would send her home immediately, for she would be venturing too close to the state of mind which would welcome the perils of Hill House with a kind of sisterly embrace.

Dr. Montague—a well-trained academic—wishes to keep what he considers real and what he considers imaginary firmly separated. By the end of the story, however, we have learned that for Eleanor (and for many other people as well, Shirley Jackson implies), belief in a world beyond the immediately visible one, however unpleasant that other world may be, is absolutely necessary for the expression of otherwise inexpressible fears and desires. Retaining one’s sanity, as Jackson’s first sentence insists, depends upon occasional vacations from reality.

Conversely, as Jackson also knew very well, a ghost story succeeds only when the narrator has managed to persuade her audience to suspend their disbelief, at least temporarily. Of course, this is one variation on a rule that applies to all fiction: the world constructed by the narrator must make enough sense to the audience for them to be able to enter into it without being constantly distracted by internal contradictions. Even if there is little expectation that a story’s occurrences could take place in the real world, therefore, a properly constructed story will provide glimpses into the real world’s system of beliefs because it will adhere to rules that resemble those of the real world. For example, although the vast majority of contemporary Americans who watch a vampire film do not believe that vampires really exist, they are able to suspend their disbelief long enough to enjoy watching the story unfold, both because the screenwriter has been careful to construct a fictional universe that follows its own rules and because those rules bear some similarity to rules of the real world. Thus, if a vampire is averted by a crucifix early in the story, then the crucifix must serve as a reliable means of averting vampires throughout the rest of the story, unless some good explanation that nullifies the rule is subsequently offered. Why a crucifix, and not, for instance, a piece of coral, such as some Polynesian cultures use to avert demons? Because the crucifix is a symbol of beneficent power that can be understood by any audience member who has grown up within the predominantly Christian American culture.

Even more interesting are the existential rules of many fictional worlds. As viewers of a vampire movie, we have agreed to believe that there are some corpses that return to life, but not that all corpses do. Vampires may arise from those who die under tragic or abnormal circumstances. This includes suicides, those who are unburied or who are buried improperly, and those who die cursing God. This rule makes a certain kind of sense because the early truncation of a life or the marring of a soul’s passage from life to death disrupts what we like to believe is the normal progression from birth to death. People who would laugh at the idea that vampires really exist might still believe that death under such circumstances brings unhappiness to the soul or prevents its postmortem reunion with God. Witness for example the Orthodox Jewish belief that the entire body, including any severed limbs, must be buried properly if the deceased is to enjoy the eventual resurrection promised to the faithful. Even when they cannot articulate precise reasons that proper burial is necessary, survivors usually feel compelled to provide it; the importance placed on the recovery of bodies from battlefields or accident sites—sometimes at great expense and risk to those undertaking the recovery—attests to this. At least one of the rules governing vampire stories, then, indirectly reflects the values of those who listen to them. What would be impossible to accept, even within the artificially constructed confines of a vampire story, is that a pious person who died of natural causes at an advanced age, and whose funeral was conducted properly, could become a vampire.

Effective ghost stories, like effective vampire stories, reflect the values of the culture in which they developed. There are further problems to be considered before we use them as evidence for real beliefs, however, particularly when we are studying a culture like that of ancient Greece, where few people would have understood, much less accepted, Dr. Montague’s assumption that a clear line can be drawn between what we call the natural and the supernatural worlds. Although a good narrator will not incorporate into a story elements that his audience will reject as illogical or anachronistic, a good narrator may incorporate elements that mislead us—his distant audience—because they provide only part of a bigger picture. Part of our interpretive task, therefore, whenever we use narrative sources as evidence for real belief, is to recreate, as best we can, the situation in which the narrative was originally presented. When we are dealing with narrative presentations of the dead and the afterlife, with ghosts, the journey to the Underworld, its geography, and the rules by which it works, this can become complicated, for the factor that constrains narrative treatments of civic rites such as the Panathenaia—realization that the audience can compare the narrative construction to what they see and hear in real life—is no longer fully operative. We can probably assume that no one who listened to the story of Odysseus’s journey to the Underworld believed that they themselves had also traveled to Hades. Few people who watched the Erinyes pursue their victim in Aeschylus’s Eumenides thought that they had ever seen one of these monstrous creatures themselves. The reality against which Homer’s or Aeschylus’s presentations of these phenomena were evaluated by an ancient audience, therefore, consisted of other things that they had heard—of other constructions of a world beyond the normal sensory perceptions provided over the course of their lives by their friends, their parents, by other narrators of stories, and by the visual artists who created vase paintings, wall paintings, and temple decor.

The situation is made even more difficult by the fact that beliefs existing under no official societal sanction or control, which includes most of those concerning the afterlife, tend to be fluid, changing easily from time to time, from locale to locale, from neighbor to neighbor, and even from one statement to the next during a single conversation with a given individual. This is particularly so for beliefs about the dead because they arise in response to death itself, a phenomenon that, although inevitable and ubiquitous, is unpredictable, poorly understood, and cloaked in conflicting emotions. As the feeling of grief or guilt about another’s death shifts to resignation or relief, as fear concerning one’s own inevitable end shifts to hope for postmortem bliss or back again, the ways in which the afterlife and the passage into death are pictured shift as well. A contemporary American man or woman may take flowers to the grave of a loved one, perhaps in the assumption that the departed soul somehow needs or appreciates the gifts of survivors and can receive them at the location where his corpse was deposited. And yet that survivor might simultaneously believe that the departed soul dwells in a Heaven cut off from the physical world, where all needs are met and neither flowers nor anything else of a material nature has any relevance.

Even if the beliefs of an individual are fluid and sometimes contradictory, however, each of them has its place within a range of culturally acceptable beliefs. The example I just gave reflects the fact that contemporary American views of the dead admit both the idea that the soul lingers near the grave and the idea that the soul completely escapes the earthly realm. The Greeks held similarly contradictory views about the disembodied soul, imagining it now in Hades and again at the tomb. Similarly, beliefs about such things as the way the dead look can shift from one extreme to another: the Greeks tended to describe ghosts as being either sooty black or transparently pale. These descriptions reflect, on the one hand, the grim and threatening nature of many ghosts and, on the other, the washed-out, lifeless appearance of a corpse. Independently, either representation works well, even if they do not work well together.¹ Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood has discussed a similar phenomenon, namely, the way that new beliefs concerning death and the afterlife can enter into a culture without completely displacing the old ones. As the needs of a situation demand, now the new beliefs and now the old ones are called upon to serve.²

These methodological problems do not imply that we should ignore narrative sources when we study ancient beliefs concerning the dead—as noted, narrative texts can in fact be excellent sources of information when handled sensitively. With due caution, let us now proceed on our survey, examining narrative sources grouped chronologically and by genre. At the end of each section, I shall pause to consider what general conclusions might be derived from the evidence. I shall not, however, offer detailed analyses of most of the material; that is the job of later chapters.

HOMER

The Homeric poems³ are about the spectacular exploits of vigorous heroes. And yet, they leave us with no doubt that death is the inevitable end to life, except for a few extraordinary individuals such as Menelaus, who escape by virtue of their special relationship to the gods.

What came after this end? Homeric descriptions of funerary cult and mourning imply that the recently dead were able at least to hear the living and receive their offerings. The nekuia of Odyssey 11, however, suggests that in the long run, the dead were capable of very little interaction with the living. Although they looked just as they did while alive, and could be held at bay by Odysseus’s sword, they were unable to converse with him in any meaningful way until they had drunk the blood that he provided. Teiresias does speak briefly to Odysseus before drinking the blood, in order to demand access to it, but he does not speak knowledgeably or clearly (nēmertea) until afterwards. He later tells Odysseus that the same is true for all of the souls—Odysseus can learn nothing profitable from them until they drink. The souls of Agamemnon and Odysseus’s mother, Anticleia, do not even recognize him until after consuming the blood.⁴

It seems, therefore, that although the dead are not completely senseless in their natural state—after all, they swarm up to the blood as soon as it is poured, like instinct-driven animals—they exist in a sort of twilight state, incapable of any meaningful interaction with the living. They are, in a word, aphradeis, lacking all those qualities expressed by that complex notion phradē and its cognates that make converse between intelligent creatures possible: wit, reflection, and complexity of expression.⁵ It is only by means of the blood—a striking emblem of the vigorous life they have left behind forever—that they temporarily become capable of normal human converse. Even after they have drunk the blood, the souls of the dead remain physically insubstantial, unable to embrace, much less affect, those who are still alive, as Odysseus’s futile attempt to hug his mother illustrates; his arms close upon the air. This insubstantialness is also reflected in Homeric descriptions of the dead as flitting like shadows and being smokelike or dreamlike.⁶

The Homeric Underworld, then, is filled with ghosts who must be specially nourished before they can interact with even those members of the living world who arrive at their own doorstep. There is no indication that these ghosts can return to the land of the living. Indeed, Anticleia expressly claims that the opposite is true: she tells her son that terrible rivers form an uncrossable barrier between the two worlds. Odysseus has traveled to the bitter edge of the upper world in order to make his sacrifice and speak with the dead.⁷ It is only at this special place, carefully designated by the goddess Circe, that any interaction between those who inhabit the upper and lower worlds is possible.⁸

Homer knows of some members of the dead, however, who are able to interact with the living precisely because they have not yet crossed the river that Anticleia mentions. The dead Patroclus reappears to Achilles and complains that he cannot cross the river and find peace because he has not yet received burial rites. Similarly, the ghost of Odysseus’s companion Elpenor, who is among the first to arrive at the pit, and who is able to recognize and speak with Odysseus even without drinking the blood, has not yet been admitted into the Underworld because his body has not yet received funerary rites.⁹ The myth of Sisyphus, to which Homer alludes, and for which Alcaeus, Theognis, and Pherecydes already offer full details,¹⁰ plays with this idea, for it was by instructing his wife not to give his body funeral rites that Sisyphus ensured he would not really die. His soul, excluded from the Underworld because his body was unburied, was given permission by the gods to return to the upper world long enough to ask for funeral rites, and once there it took advantage of the situation by repossessing his body. Sisyphus, the ultimate trickster, made what most people feared work to his own advantage.

This idea, that the dead are not admitted to the Underworld until their physical remains are ceremonially honored and disposed of in the upper world, is extremely common throughout the world. Many cultures believe that until the body is properly removed from the presence of the living, the soul of a dead person must wander restlessly betwixt and between the two worlds, no longer allowed to share in the society of the living and yet not admitted amongst the dead either.¹¹ This belief that the unburied dead are restless gives rise to another very common idea, which we also find expressed in the Odyssey. Elpenor tells Odysseus that if his funeral rites are not carried out as soon as the men return to Circe’s island, he will become a cause for the gods’ wrath (theōn mēnima) upon Odysseus. Similarly, in the Iliad, the dying Hector tries to use this threat to persuade Achilles to return his body to the Trojans for burial.¹² In ancient Greece, as in many other cultures, souls not yet admitted to the Underworld have the ability—and apparently the desire—to compel the gods to bring harm upon the living who have done them wrong. This is an idea that continues throughout Greek history.¹³

Elpenor’s is not the only soul that Odysseus encounters at the border of the Underworld: the souls of brides, unmarried men, virginal girls, men killed in battle who still wear their bloody armor, and elders who have suffered many things also wander up out of Erebus en masse as soon as Odysseus pours blood into the pit, giving forth an uncanny cry.¹⁴ The warriors still wearing bloody armor are probably unburied, like Elpenor; no good Greek would allow the corpse of a friend to go to its grave uncleansed and without the proper shroud. It has often been noted that the brides, virgins, and unmarried men match the types of souls that later sources describe as having died untimely—without having married and had children.¹⁵ Although it is not explicitly stated, information from later sources suggests that it is their abnormal status that keeps them from entering the Underworld. This is a topic that I take up in depth in another chapter; here I would note only that, by making these dead the first to rise up to meet Odysseus and by describing him as being afraid of them (in contrast to his fearless conversation with the other, fully dead souls), the poet implies familiarity with the ideas that the abnormal dead lingered between the two worlds and that they were a source of potential trouble for the living. Another hint of this idea occurs at Odyssey 20.61–82, where the daughters of Pandareus are snatched away on the eve of their weddings to wander eternally with the Erinyes, frightful creatures of the Underworld who sometimes harm the living.¹⁶ In later sources, we shall hear a lot more about how these unhappy souls returned to the upper world of their own volition, like the unburied. We shall also hear about them being invoked by the living and forced, by means of curse tablets or other special techniques, to accomplish tasks. There is no trace of this latter idea here, however.

There is one more possible trace of the idea that the dead might affect the living to be found in the Homeric poems. We get a glimpse of what looks like hero cult at Iliad 2.547–51, where it is said that the Athenians worship their deceased king Erechtheus alongside Athena in her rich temple, offering yearly sacrifices of bulls and lambs. It is generally agreed among current scholars, on the basis of archaeological evidence, that hero cult began in the eighth century or so—just before or at approximately the same time as most scholars think that the bulk of the Homeric poems were assuming their final forms. If a hero was essentially a dead person who had retained more of his vitality after death, or indeed had even become more powerful than he was while alive, then hero cult represents the belief that some very special dead were capable of more than we see them doing in the nekuia of Odyssey 11.¹⁷ Granted that they are the exceptions, this passage nonetheless suggests that the notion that some dead might directly affect the living was developing at this time.

Before leaving Homer, we must pause at the issue of how souls were treated in the afterlife. Although this has little direct bearing on the question of whether the dead can interact with the living, there is some connection between the two topics, as discussed in chapter 3; thus it is important to be aware of how such ideas changed. In the nekuia of Odyssey 11, we hear about how Tantalus, Tityus, and Sisyphus suffer great punishments after death. In Odyssey 4, we learn that at least one individual—Menelaus—will escape death altogether and be allowed to dwell forever in the Elysian Fields, an idyllic paradise. Other Homeric passages, such as Iliad 20.232–35, where Zeus’s abduction of Ganymede is narrated, similarly describe individuals being carried off alive to enjoy eternal bliss in lovely places.¹⁸ The epic Aethiopis tells of Achilles’ conveyance to Leuke, the marvelous White Island, where he is to spend a very pleasurable eternity.¹⁹

Some scholars have argued that these passages prove that at the time they were composed, people already believed that a broad span of possible afterlives were available and that one’s behavior or station while alive affected