... for it is futile and pointless to weep for the dead.
and Sappho, fragment 5 5
The poets choose to emphasize the permanence and irreversibility of death, rather than any possibility of contact between the living and the dead. Death is an emptiness, an absence of life .51
Nonetheless, the poets occasionally reveal familiarity with the possibility of something else. Simonides' ninth epigram seeks to emphasize the idealistic notion (very useful to the emerging city-state) that one's military valor (arete) survives death:
The verb anago, found here in the phrase "leads up from the House of Hades" (anagei domatos ex Aideo), is frequently used of the invocation of souls in the classical period. Although Simonides uses the idea of invoking the dead only symbolically, to give expression to the common place idea that glory survives death, the phrase suggests that his audience was familiar with the sort of ritualized psychagogia that we see acted out a few years later in Aeschylus's Persians, for example. If so, this would, with Empedocles' poem, be one of our earliest literary attestations of the idea that the dead could be made to rise up from the Underworld (the epigram is thought to refer to the Spartans who fell at Plataea, and thus can be dated to shortly after 479).
In Pythian 4. 1 5 g - 64, Pindar tells of how Pelias persuaded Jason to travel to Colchis by describing a dream in which Phrixus, their shared ancestor, said that his wrath could be assuaged if his soul (psyche) were brought home to Thessaly. The way in which this could be done, according to the ghost, was to retrieve the Golden Fleece.54 In many ways, this scene echoes the much earlier encounter between Achilles and Patroclus's ghost in Iliad z3, for in both cases, the dead appear to the living in order to ask them to perform rituals that will allow them to rest more easily in death. And yet there is a significant difference. Patroclus wants only the rites that will admit him to Hades; behind Phrixus's plea lies the assumption that a soul can be transferred by means of ritual from one place to another here in the upper world. This is the very essence of the sort of ritual that is described in stories, discussed in chapter 3, in which expert practitioners lead ghosts away from one spot to another. Although detailed accounts come only from later sources such as Plutarch, an allusion to such a process is made by Thucydides, and Euripides mentions the psychagogos, the professional "leader of souls," 55 which suggests that techniques for transferring ghosts from one place to another were available at Pindar's time. Phrixus's plea also confirms that the soul of a dead person, however much it may be imagined to dwell in Hades, has some attachment to a physical place in the upper world as well. A few decades later, Herodotus's story of Periander and Melissa's ghost rests on the same assumption, as do a number of scenes from tragedy.
Pindar's story adds one more detail that provides an important insight: Pelias claims that the Oracle at Delphi had confirmed and approved of his dream and its message. This not only reminds us that appearances of the dead in dreams were not automatically assumed to be valid (a double check might be necessary) but also indicates that the Oracle, one of Greece's most esteemed religious institutions, both upheld the possibility that the dead might convey information in dreams and advocated the use of rituals through which the living could interact with the dead. The ritual to which Thucydides referred similarly was commanded by Delphi, and we shall hear more about this Oracle, as well as the Oracle of Zeus at Dodona, giving instructions for such rituals later in chapters z and 3. This indicates that interaction with the dead and the experts who specialized in it were not anathema to mainstream Greek culture and religion. Indeed, Pindar's story suggests that even an old Greek hero like Jason could be imagined as engaging in psychagogic activities. Another old Greek hero, Odysseus, also interacted with the dead, of course. The Merlinesque figure of the magician-dark and mysterious, dwelling in the woods at the fringe of civilizationdoes not work well here. However frightening and potentially dangerous the dead themselves might be, the individual who could control and use them was welcome and sometimes even esteemed.
We find intimations of a darker form of postmortem activity in Sappho. Fragment 178 mentions Gello, who is "fond of children." This refers to a demonic creature whom we know well from later sources, the soul of a dead virgin who wandered around in the world of the living, enviously killing babies and pregnant women. Already in Homer, there are allusions to the belief that the unmarried dead were excluded from the Underworld and might harm the living, but it is in this fragment of Sappho that we first find reference to one by name, or any intimation of the specific form that this harm might take.
From lyric, elegiac, and epinician poetry, then, we have been able to glean several useful pieces of information. We find our earliest hints that the dead might be called out of Hades by the living (Simonides, cf. Empedocles) and the idea that the living could affect the circumstances of the dead through rituals (Pindar). We also get another glimpse of an unhappy soul returning to attack the living (Sappho). Finally, in Pindar, as in Empedocles and the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, we meet the idea that each individual soul survives and experiences an afterlife that is exclusively tailored to it, whether it take the form of punishment, reward, or metempsychosis.56
TRAGEDY AND CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE
Heraclitus said that Dionysus and Hades were really one and the same.57 Students of tragedy should find this easy to believe, for nowhere do we meet the dead more often than in the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides; the boundary that separates them from the living seems less secure than ever before. Quite a few of the dead transgress it, moving out of Hades either in flesh or in spirit; 58 two tragedies are introduced by a ghost; in one of them, a ghost speaks alone on stage for 58 lines before anyone living appears. In at least two tragedies, the dead rise in response to rituals performed by the living, which confirms that psychagogic techniques such as those alluded to by Empedocles, Simonides, and Pindar were becoming well known by this time. In the Alcestis, Heracles refers to professionals who made a living from such rituals: one of the names they use is "psychagogos," literally, a "leader of the soul." 59 In still other cases, where the dead themselves cannot rise in flesh or spirit, they send forth their agents, the Erinyes, to do their bidding.6o
A number of other tragic characters, falsely believed to be dead, miraculously "return" from Hades to make their presence felt among the living in various ways.61 Pretended death is central to the plots of several plays, either as a treacherous overture to real death (it is the "dead" Orestes who kills his own mother in Aeschylus's and Sophocles' versions of the story) or as a stratagem to escape from death (Helen rescues Menelaus by pretending to perform his funeral rites in Euripides' Helen). Even when not central to the plot, scenes in which survivors mistakenly mourn those who are still living make good dramatic fodder. Particularly interesting, because particularly perverse, are those in which a purportedly deceased person, like Tom Sawyer, watches his survivors mourn.62 Death seems rather weak in tragedy, no longer able to hold on to those it has snatched. It is punctuated by a question mark rather than a period.
Nor do the living stay in their proper place. Great heroes such as Heracles, Theseus, and Orpheus are said to have actually visited the land of the dead,63 and many other tragic characters move into it symbolically. For example, the condemned Antigone is described as a corpse lingering among the living. The Erinyes promise to make the living Orestes a "bloodless shadow" (anaimatos skia), and Philoctetes says that he is already dead from his illness, nothing more than a vaporous shadow or ghost (kapnou skia, eidolon). Electra cries out that in murdering Clytemnestra, her children have become like the dead themselves (isone- kues) When Heracles returns alive and victorious from Hades, he finds his family macabrely dressed in their funeral garments, awaiting death and praying that his ghost might aid them. Of course, it will be Heracles himself, this amazingly resurrected ghost, who kills them in the end, proving their costumes all too appropriate.64
The living and the dead, then, constantly exchange places in fifthcentur
y drama. Their worlds are dreadfully close; they move between them with a disarming ease. Unspoken questions about the nature of life and death-and challenges to their assumed dichotomy-linger over the tragic stage, seeming to reflect the arguments made by Empedocles and others of the time, who said that they were but two sides to the same coin: as we die we enter into a new sort of life that eventually brings us to birth again; as we are born, we begin a sort of death. We see more fully developed forms of what we only glimpsed before: a belief that death is not the end of everything at all, but only the beginning of a new sort of existence, for better or for worse.
We might be tempted to dismiss tragedy's fascination with death and the dead as something that came naturally to the genre. Tragedy loves both paradoxes and sudden reversals of plot, which are readily provided by situations in which, for example, those still living join the world of the dead (Antigone walking into her own tomb), or the dead turn out to be living (Orestes "rising" from Hades to rescue Iphigenia). Tragedy, moreover, is by its very nature a genre that challenges the boundary between reality and illusion, both in its performative aspects and by bringing mythic figures onto the stage. The ghost-the eidolon, the skia, the phasma, the thing that is here in front of our eyes and yet not really here-emblematizes quite nicely the slippage between reality and illusion that tragedy loved.
And yet, these observations alone cannot account for tragedy's fascination with the dead and their world, for there were other subjects that could lend themselves to paradox and reversal and other subjects through which the issue of illusion and reality could be explored. Tragedy's subject matter, however nicely it may generate plot twists and provocative paradoxes, always grapples with issues of contemporary concern; to borrow the words of one of the genre's foremost scholars, tragedy is "the epistomological genre par excellence, which continually calls into question what we know and how we think we know it." 65 We have to assume, therefore, that tragedy's constant references to the dead, their world, and the permeability of the boundary that separates it from ours reflect a genuine interest in and uncertainty about these matters in the fifth century. Of course, in some of the cases I have cited in the past few paragraphs, these topics are relatively peripheral to the main subject matter and action of the plays, but this actually helps to make my point: if even in those plays where they do not occupy a central role, death and the dead persistently manifest themselves, then these were indeed topics that longed for expression and resolution in the fifth century.
Richard Seaford's thesis, which finds allusions to eschatologically oriented mysteries of Dionysus in the Bacchae and suggests that tragedy's precursors, dithyramb and satyr-play, offered veiled dramatizations of Dionysiac initiations, is also important here, for it provides a reason that tragedy, of all the genres available in the fifth century, became the popular medium through which the topics of death and the dead were ex- plored.66 Seaford believes he must concede, however, that the Bacchae is unique among tragedies in retaining its precursors' interests, for in most other tragic plots we find little or no reference to eschatological mysteries, direct or symbolic. But I would suggest that it is precisely in tragedy's obsession with the dead, and particularly in its constant consideration of the possibility that the living and the dead might trade places, that we find tragedy carrying on this tradition. As the genre had continued to develop and become more important to civic identity, its subject matter naturally had expanded to address issues of contemporary concern that had "nothing to do with Dionysus" in his role as a god of the mysteries. The genre's traditional link to eschatological mysteries therefore came to be expressed in subtler, more allusive ways that enabled tragedy to expand its thematic horizons; tragedy chose to provoke thought about these matters rather than to encrypt the patterns of one single answer, the answer provided by Dionysiac mysteries.
Comedy's most extended commentary on tragedy-Aristophanes' Frogs-confirms this conclusion. Not only is the second half of the play set in Hades' palace-it is here that both tragedy and all of Athens either will be saved or be lost, like a mystery initiate facing his postmortem questioning-but, more important, the first half of the play comprises a journey into the Underworld. Our hapless guide on this journey is Dionysus himself, the very god of tragedy but also the very god who promised that those who were initiated into his mysteries would receive perfect knowledge of how their souls might travel safely to the best parts of the Underworld. Dionysus's complete ignorance regarding these matters in the Frogs surely is a spoof of his real role as a god of eschatological mysteries, for his ignorance specifically takes the form of needing Heracles to tell him about the best paths to travel by and the best places to visit in the Underworld. Apparently, these were precisely the things that the Dionysiac mysteries promised to teach the initiates, for the gold tablets that were buried with them reminded the initiate of the particular Underworld roads that they should choose, the landmarks that they should look for, and the phrases that they should pronounce to officials whom they encountered.67 Setting the second half of his play in the Underworld gave Aristophanes an interesting way to make his main point. Tragedy was dead; if Dionysus wanted it back he would quite literally have to revive it by reviving Aeschylus, leading him back to the upper world like one of the psychagogoi who were familiar in Athens by then. But by including Dionysus's trip into the Underworld, Aristophanes not only was making fun of the god's fame as a draftsman of infernal road maps but perhaps also parodying what he viewed as tragedy's fascination with the interaction between the two worlds. By the time he reaches Hades, Dionysus has poked his nose into all manner of mortuary, eschatological, and psychagogic matters.
The commingling of the upper world and Underworld that tragedy evinces, needless to say, would have been somewhat disquieting for the average person. For one thing, there would have been the feeling that we, the living, were being watched by numerous shades-not just Hesiod's beneficent daimones of the Golden Race, but potentially the spirit of every individual who had died. The many cracks in Hades' crumbling walls meant that more attention had to be paid to keeping these spirits happy; tragedy had much to say about this as well. The dead demanded libations, tears, dedications of hair and clothing, and even human sacrifices upon occasion. They liked to be greeted by the living who passed by.68 Of course, their first need was to be buried, a need around which the plots of Sophocles' Antigone and Ajax and Euripides' Suppliant Women revolve. Those who mistreated the dead, either while they were living or after death, would suffer dreadfully: illness, madness, and other, unspecified evils befell them, sometimes brought directly by haunting ghosts. "Those beneath the earth blame and are angered against their murderers," warn the Chorus of the Choephoroi.69 Plato, tragedy's younger contemporary, also discussed the fact that most people feared the wrath of the dead and the possibility that they might return to wreak vengeance. Such discussions arose in the context of other issues; indeed, popular belief in the return of the dead was used to clarify or illustrate other points, which implies that it was well understood and accepted. In one famous passage, for example, Socrates says:
The soul that is tainted by [the corporeal] is weighed down and dragged back into the visible world, through fear, as they say, of Hades or the invisible, and it hovers about tombs and graveyards. The shadowy apparitions that have actually been seen there are the ghosts of those souls that have not got clear away, but still retain some portion of the visible, which is why they can be seen.... Of course, these are not the souls of the good, but of the wicked, and they are compelled to wander about these places as a punishment for their bad wantonness in the past.70
Of similar interest is a passage from the Laws:
But let [the good man] take heed not to despise what the old and venerable myth teaches us. It tells us how he who is done to death with violence ... has his wrath kindled against the author of the deed in the days while it is still fresh, how he is filled with fear and horror at his bloody fate, how he is aghast to see his murderer traveling street
s that were once familiar to him, and how in its own turmoil [the disembodied soul] joins forces with the very memory of the murderer to bring all possible distraction upon him and all his works.71
Xenophon's Cyrus makes a similar point:
Have you never yet noticed what terror the souls of those who have been foully dealt with strike into the hearts of those who have shed their blood, and what avenging powers they send upon the track of the wicked? 72
The fact that at least three comedies about ghosts were written during the late classical period also confirms that a belief in ghosts was widespread-for how can one make comic something that is not taken at least a little seriously? 73
We also hear more about some specialized forms of ghosts in comedy. Midway through Dionysus's and Xanthias's descent to Hades in the Frogs, Empousa appears to the frightened travelers. She is a horrible, hybrid, demonic ghost who tries to frighten and impede them on their way to the Underworld.74 Elsewhere in Aristophanes, we hear about Lamia and Mormo, two other female ghosts who, like Gello, specialized in attacking children and pregnant women. Mormo also is referred to by Plato and Xenophon.71 As noted in later chapters, all of these creatures were said to be unhappy souls who vented their frustration by causing trouble for the living. Well-educated, upper-class men such as Plato may have laughed, but the existence of spells and amulets against such threatening creatures guarantees that not everyone found them to be so funny.
The dead might be frightening and vengeful, but they were also expected to provide help to the living who treated them well, or to those with whom they had a link based on affection, particularly a familial link. As Plato observes: "People should be properly fearful of ... the departed souls, whose natural inclination is to watch over their own children, to be kind to those who are kind to their children but cruel to those who are cruel to them." 76 Often, requests for help are made in the course of offering libations and mourning the dead; the Choephoroi provides the most famous instance of this, where Orestes and Electra beseech Agamemnon for aid at his grave.77 The Persians goes even further, presenting us with a scene in which a dead man is literally called to the upper world in order to give advice to his family.71 Herodotus gives evidence that by the time he wrote, and probably at least a century earlier, various nekuomanteia (oracles of the dead) were doing booming business, promising the living face-to-face encounters with the dead, during which questions might be asked.79 By the fifth century, we are also hearing a lot about hero cult, in which the dead were expected to help individuals or entire cities.80 A darker view is presented by some remarks in Plato, which allude to the practice of ritually manipulating the dead in order to injure other living individuals. The same specialists who did this, apparently, also offered to get rid of problems caused by the dead.81 All of this is quite different from the Homeric picture, in which, as we saw, the world of the dead is by and large cut off from that of the living.
Restless Dead Page 4