CHAPTER FIVE
The Dead
D. Felton
What happens to us when we die? Our bodies decay, but is there a spirit, a soul, an
essence of our personalities that survives us? And if so, how should we deal with the
dead? How can we speak of them in terms we can relate to? Can we contact them –
can they contact us? Religions, philosophies, and folk beliefs – past and present – try
to provide answers to such questions as these and, as in many societies, Greek beliefs
about survival after death varied widely and were not particularly consistent. Some
Greeks denied any possibility of an afterlife, saying that the soul perished with the
body; others, such as Plato, believed the soul was immortal. Some believed that the
spirit survived death, but as an insensate shell of its former self in a meaningless
existence, lacking intelligence or understanding; others believed that the individual
soul lived on after death with a recognizable personality. In theOdyssey, gloomy
ghosts survive the body only to wander in a dreary, depressing afterlife; other works
depict an underworld where life goes on rather as it had on earth. Also in theOdyssey,
most of the dead know nothing of what goes on in the world of the living, whereas
some Greeks believed the dead were sources of arcane knowledge and could be
summoned by necromancy to share such knowledge with the living. Some philo-
sophical sects, such as the Pythagoreans, believed in metempsychosis, or transmigra-
tion of the soul; others, including the Peripatetics, admitted that they just didn’t
know what to believe and remained generally ambiguous and noncommittal on the
subject. The Epicureans were perhaps the most resistant to the existence of super-
natural phenomena of any kind, including restless spirits, and tried to provide material
explanations for them.
Honoring the Dead
Whether the average Greek believed in the soul or not, he at least believed that certain
rites were due to the dead. Death was a passage to be marked with ceremony, and