SARAH ILES JOHNSTON
Prologue vii
Acknowledgments xv
Frequently Used Terms xvii
Abbreviations xxi
PART I. A SHORT HISTORY OF THE DEAD IN ANCIENT GREECE
i. Elpenor and Others: Narrative Descriptions of the Dead 3
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
PART II. RESTLESS DEAD
4. The Unavenged: Dealing with Those Who Die Violently I17
5. Childless Mothers and Blighted Virgins: Female Ghosts and Their Victims 161
PART III. DIVINITIES AND THE DEAD
6. Hecate and the Dying Maiden: How the Mistress of Ghosts Earned Her Title 203
7. Purging the Polis: Erinyes, Eumenides, and Semnai Theai 150
Bibliography z89
General Index 309
Index Locorum
Texts 315
Inscriptions 32.9
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.' 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.' 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 "irra tional" 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 al
l, 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.'
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 seances 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.'
Scholars of our own generation, apparently sharing either Nock's reluctance or Nilsson's regret, have paid the topic little attention. A fourand-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 and 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.' 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 evidencenew 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 i. I conclude this overview, in chapter 3, by taking a close look at the goes, 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 goes, 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 goes 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., "katagrapho," not "catagrapho"). Each of these guidelines is sometimes rejected, however, in favor of retaining commonly used spellings (e.g., "psyche," not "psucbe," and "Knossos," not "Cnossus"). A list of frequently used Greek terms that may be unfamiliar to nonspecialists is offered on page (xvii).
Good colleagues are a schol
ar'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 Re naissance 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.
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