The Greek Way of Death - Softcover

Garland, Robert

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0801495288 ISBN 13: 9780801495281

Publisher: Cornell Univ Pr, 1988

Synopsis

Hardly any aspect of Greek culture, of its religious and philosophical bases, proves as revealing as its way of confronting human mortality and its observances in relation to the dead. Using both historical and anthropological approaches and sources, both visual and written, Garland describes the extensive and elaborate funerary rituals performed by the Greeks for their dead from the time of Homer to the fourth century BC. The book attempts to revive and re-live the complex texture of feelings provoked in the living by the dead as, moment by moment, the two shifted their ground in relation to one another. Death for the Greeks was not an instantaneous event, rather a process or passage which required strenuous efforts on the part of the living to ensure that the dead achieved full and final transfer to the next world. The central questions which this book attempts to answer are: the extent to which death was a preoccupying concern among the Greeks; the feelings with which the individual may have anticipated his death; the nature of the bonds between the living and the dead; and the light shed by burial practices upon characteristic elements of Greek society. While the beliefs of ordinary Greeks about their ordinary dead from the book's central focus, there is also a chapter on "special dead" - the unburied, murderers and their victims, children and suicides.

About this title

Review

"Presents a great deal of interesting material clearly and attractively... this enjoyable and attractive book has done much to get Death away from the cemetery and put it back where the Prayer Book tells us it is to be fouind 'in the midst of life'. Robert Parker, JACT Review... a rich and remarkably complex collection of the abundant but scattered literary, artistic and archaeological evidence on death in the ancient world. Jon D Mikalson, American Historical Review... can be recommended to the Greekless reader and the classicist alike for its concentration of ancient testimonia unencumbered by theory and laced with good sense... a book I have already recommended to students. Sarah P Morris, Phoenix"

About the Author

Robert Garland is Wooster Professor of Classics at Colgate University, Hamilton, New York. He is author of Religion and the Greeks (BCP Classical World Series), The Piraeus (also BCPaperback); The Greek Way of Life, Introducing New Gods, The Eye of the Beholder (all published by Duckworth).

About this edition

• Publisher: Cornell Univ Pr
• Publication date: 1988
• ISBN 10: 0801495288
• ISBN 13: 9780801495281
• Binding: Paperback