Once the Greeks had embraced the possibility of interacting with the dead, they took it to great lengths, invoking them for virtually any purpose, and especially to thwart the success of others with whom they were in competition. Perhaps this was a particularly Greek twist: in a culture that became increasingly agonistic in character as the city-state took its final form, new methods of gaining the upper hand in a matter-whether it be a love affair, an athletic competition, or something else-would always be welcome. So long as the sanctity of certain relationships between family members or xenoi were not damaged, there seems to have been little compunction about how one won life's contests. If the dead could be pressed into service, so much the better.
Exposure to other cultures is an important part of the explanation for why we see a change in Greek beliefs about the dead and their ability to interact with the living during the later archaic period, but we cannot stop there. Tracing a genealogy of practices and beliefs is only the first step in understanding their adoption. We must consider how the new ideas either validated or challenged existing Greek cultural values before we can fully understand the reasons for their adoption and their impact. Other than the obvious fact that it would have been useful to have the dead at one's disposal, what would have prepared the ground for the Greeks to accept belief in a more active dead during the later archaic age? What had changed in Greek society that made the new techniques of interacting with the dead desirable?
DISTANCING THE DEAD
Ironically, part of the answer may lie in the fact that, during this period, there was an increasing tendency to separate the world of the dead from that of the living, which manifested itself in a number of ways. Recently, for example, scholars have drawn attention to the fact that in the late eighth and seventh centuries, cemeteries began to be located outside of a settlement's boundaries, in contrast to the earlier practice of burying both inside and outside of city walls.31 Such extramural burial symbolically distanced the dead from the living. The corpse's journey to the grave through the city's gates marked the separation between the two in an especially emphatic way: a person who was so recently among the living was now banished from that group. Particularly when combined with various late archaic and classical laws that limited the number of people who could participate in a funeral, extramural burial made death and the dead increasingly unfamiliar. The dead were no longer, we might say, as much a part of life as they had been before.
There were also changes in the way that the process of dying itself was imagined to take place, as noted in chapter i. In the Homeric poems, most transitions to the Underworld are presented as simple and direct; the soul is described as merely "flying" to Hades, without any further ado.32 It is only in one of the youngest portions of the poemsbook 24 of the Odyssey-that we first hear about Hermes guiding the souls across the boundary into the Underworld, and only in the later epic Minyas that another famous psychopomp, Charon, makes his debut and begins ferrying souls across a river that divides the land of the living from that of the dead. The addition of these psychopompoi emphasizes the fact that the dead were spatially separated from the living, and that the process of passing from one world to the other was something complicated, something requiring the mediation of gods if it were to be completed successfully. In accompanying the souls, the psychopompic gods helped to reiterate the integrity of the boundary across which they traveled as well, for the more involved the process of transition was, the more difficult it would be to reverse.
Already, based on these few observations, we can see that during the archaic period there was a change from the outlook that Philippe Aries has called "Tamed Death"-a situation in which death is viewed as a familiar part of life, disliked but not particularly frightening-to an outlook in which both the process of death and the afterlife itself are cloaked in mystery and awaited with anxiety and fear.33 This change in attitude fits in well with the change in burial locations, too. Under the "Tamed Death" paradigm, the living feel little discomfort around the dead; they might even prefer to keep them nearby for the purpose of validating ancestral rights or expediting the periodic delivery of funeral offerings. When fear of death arises, however, the dead are likely to be exiled both because they are unpleasant reminders of what is to come and because they are frightening in their unfamiliarity. 34 It is important to realize that this defamiliarization of death would have a spiraling effect: as death and the dead became less familiar, they would become more frightening; as they became more frightening, they would be further distanced and, thus, would become even less a part of everyday life. All of this is likely to have led to the presumption that the dead were powerful, for as cultural anthropology has demonstrated again and again, it is common to attribute fantastic powers to those who are unfamiliar-to those who lurk outside of normal life. Typically, although these abilities are regarded as odd, they also have value for those who can successfully harness them. (In folk belief, for example, the hyena, which dwelt only in Asia and Africa, was regarded by the Greeks as an exotic animal whose body parts, when harvested for use as amulets, provided a variety of benefits.)35 In sum, the less familiar the dead became and the more uncertain people became about their nature, the more people were likely to begin wondering about the ways in which they might affect the living.
We shall never completely reconstruct the reasons that the Greeks began to distance the dead in the archaic period, but contributing factors can be identified. One of the most important involves the rise of the citystate. Several scholars have argued that as the city-state developed, and the focus of attention moved away from the family unit toward the corporate identity of the polis, focus would also have moved-either naturally, or more likely with encouragement from the city-away from small, family-centered burial plots within the city toward larger, corporate plots. Because of their size, these would have to have been located outside the city walls. As a corollary to this argument, some point to the development of two other phenomena in place of the elaborate funeral, both of which would have nurtured the unity of the polls in opposition to that of the extended family. The first was hero cult, which encouraged collective veneration of a single figure, usually portrayed as the founder or early benefactor of the city-state. This gave him a certain anonymity: in belonging to all, he belonged to no one and represented the collective welfare of the city-state rather than the welfare of a single family. The second was the cult and collective mourning of the war dead that developed in some poleis.36 Another factor encouraging the movement of cemeteries to places outside the city, and thus the further distancing of the ordinary dead, would have been the tendency of the time to demarcate more firmly than before spatial areas dedicated to different uses: there were secular areas and sacred areas, marked out by precinct walls and boundary stones, and there were areas for the living and areas for the dead.37 Everything and everyone was now supposed to stay in its place. (Notably, however, as Sourvinou-Inwood has pointed out, gods might have their spaces demarcated within the spaces of the living as well as without; the dead increasingly had their spaces demarcated outside those of the living.)
At the same time that the dead were being distanced from the living, their identity as individuals who retained the distinct personalities they had had when alive-and who could experience distinct rewards and punishments after death-was being elaborated; this aligns with the increasing tendency of the time to view the living as individuals as well .31 Although a few traces of the idea that souls will be rewarded or punished for actions taken while alive do show up in Homer, as noted in chapter i, the standard Homeric picture of the afterlife shows all souls-good or bad, noble or common-existing in something like a state of eternal boredom. The dead were a collective, and treated as such by Hades' rulers. The idea that everyone would receive postmortem rewards or punishments based on what he or she had done while alive only became widespread during the archaic period, leading to the emergence of the mystery religions during the seventh century. This point is important to our discussio
n because the postmortem suffering believed to await some souls would provide another reason to assume that those souls were predisposed to harm the living, as well as a new concern with ensuring that one's own soul was well prepared for the judgment that awaited it. It also provided a reason for the living to design rituals through which they might relieve the suffering of those already dead, as discussed with reference to the Tritopatores and progonoi in chapter z.
At this point we need to turn back to the topic of cultural influences. Given the change in attitudes toward death and the dead that I have just described, the Greeks would have been prone, first, to accept the belief that souls of all types could become dangerously active forces within the world of the living, and even be manipulated by the living, but also, second, to the belief that it required a specially trained expert to contact the now less familiar dead and direct their power toward any given goal. All of these new ideas and influences supported one another in various crisscrossing ways, of course. For example, expectation that the dead might be invoked to return would lead to further thought about the boundaries between the upper and lower worlds, and their permeability or lack thereof. Both the boundaries and theories about how they were to be crossed would be elaborated, therefore. Psychopompic figures, who started out as guides into the Underworld, would be likely to assume the additional role of leading souls out again when a practitioner asked them to; as already mentioned, Hermes is associated with returning souls as early as Aeschylus. Other divinities who were able to control these potentially dangerous souls would be added to the pantheon. The most important of these, as discussed in chapter 6, was Hecate, who only entered Greece from Asia Minor during the archaic age. The iconography of ghosts and the "rules" by which they operated would be given more attention as well. As noted in chapter i, this occurred in the fifth century.
Not all manifestations of this new belief that the living could cause the dead to return were grim and frightening. The possibility that a devoted lover might be able to resurrect his or her beloved is a more pleasant articulation of the same concept. Myths that explore this possibility begin to show up in our sources in the fifth century. Our earliest mention of Orpheus's trip to Hades to recover his wife is in Euripides' Alcestis.39 The earliest extent allusion to Alcestis's own return from Hades is at Eumenides 723-i4; we also have a fragment of Phrynichus's Alcestis, which would place the story in the late sixth century.40 The story of Protesilaus's return from the dead can first be securely dated to another tragedy of Euripides', now lost.41 To my knowledge, there are no earlier attestations of myths in which the living actually manage to resurrect the dead, however briefly.42 (The hypothesized "shaman" Orpheus of earlier myth, who allegedly specialized in retrieving lost souls, exists only in scholars' imaginations.)43 This absence is striking, particularly because the stories of Orpheus and Alcestis became quite popular following their first appearances. This does not necessarily mean, of course, that these stories developed only in the later archaic or early classical period, but their popularity in the fifth century at least bespeaks a new fascination with the possibility that death was not final.
SONGS OF MOURNING: GRIEF AND POWER
The change in attitude we have just traced is also reflected in the history of Greek lamentation for the dead. In the earliest stage for which we have evidence, that of the Homeric poems, there were two distinct ways of expressing grief after the death of an individual: threnos and gods (verbal cognates: threned and goad). Threnos was a more controlled and orderly expression of grief. Already in Homer it is associated with composed songs, sometimes sung by professional mourners. It was usually intended to soothe the deceased with assurances that his life had been a worthy one, for it frequently narrated his honorable accomplishments as well as expressing the survivors' grief. It was the type of lament most often associated with male mourners.
Gods, in contrast, was spontaneous and emotionally powerfulsometimes excessively so. It is connected primarily with women, especially women who were related to the deceased. The songs these women sang emphasized their pain as survivors, and sometimes reproached the deceased for having left his family unprotected. In the Iliad, for example, Andromache describes to the dead Hector how Astyanax will have to beg for food at the tables of other men. Somewhat later, gooi began to carry the additional purpose of rousing the listeners to revenge; the singers did this by focusing not only on their own pain but also on the injustice of the death suffered by the deceased. Thus, the Chorus of lamenting women in the Choephoroi urges the listening Orestes to avenge his father's death. Gods, in other words, became a means of eliciting help from the living, as well as a medium for complaining to the dead.44
Rousing the living to action by complaining to the dead is but a step away from asking the dead themselves to bring help as well. Once the idea that the dead could be made to return had been introduced to Greek culture, it would have been natural to include such a request as part of a gods. Our earliest examples of this, again, are found in Aeschylus. In the Choephoroi, Orestes and Electra beg Agamemnon to support their attack on his murderers. In the Persians, Darius is roused and asked to give his expert advice on how to win the war with Greece. Interestingly, in neither of these cases do we see the dead actually do anything; indeed, we do not see Agamemnon's ghost at all. Similarly, Clytemnestra's ghost, which rises of its own accord in the Eumenides, does not do much, either. She must ask the Erinyes to carry out her curse against Orestes, which implies that she cannot do it herself.45 The Greeks of this time might have believed in the power of the dead to return, and even to injure the living, but they do not seem to have devel oped exact ideas about how they might do it. We shall return to this in chapter 4.
In the late archaic and classical periods, both gods and threnos were restricted in many places by laws governing funerary practices. The gods was weakened by limiting the number of women permitted to participate, as well as by truncating its length and frequency and restricting the places where it could be performed. Although the motivations for this were probably complex, there is no doubt that one of them was to silence the mourning voices that called out for revenge and set in motion vendettas that fragmented the unity of the polis. The laws also prohibited the hiring of professional mourners in some places. All over Greece, the threnos moved toward a more artificial existence as a poetic form, which focused increasingly on the accomplishments of the deceased and said little about the pain of the survivors. Often, it was composed long after the death of the individual.46
These new laws and customs sharply curtailed the opportunities that the living had for speaking to the dead. In doing so, they not only accomplished the specific aims that the legislators had, such as discouraging vendettas, but also contributed to the growing distance between the living and the dead. Inevitably, as discussed above, this led to the view that the dead were mysterious, powerful, and frightening. Lycurgus knew this very well, according to Plutarch; he insisted that the Spartans bury their dead within the city specifically so that young men might get used to the notion of death and the dead and not superstitiously fear them.47
GOETEIA
And yet, it was at about the same time that these traditional means of talking to the dead were being restricted that, I have suggested, the Greeks were adopting new techniques for communicating with themand particularly for compelling them to serve the living. The technai of controlling the dead, in other words, arose at about the same time when lament-the everyday practice of conversing with them-was being restricted; communication with the dead was changing from an activity in which anyone might participate to some degree into a profession with special techniques and aims.
Judging from its uses, the special term for an expert in these techniques was goes (plural: goetes); the cognate noun describing the profession was goeteia.48 The most obvious evidence for this is linguistic: goes is derived from the same root as gods, a point to which I shall return later.49 But the ancients saw the connection as well. As is so often the case,
late sources, including the Suda, are the most explicit, and bluntly define goeteia as the invocation of the dead.50 But the same idea lurks behind earlier sources as well. Plato said, in the Laws, that those who practice goeteia claim that their sacrifices, prayers, and chants can do two things: lead up souls (psychag(5gein) and persuade the gods. I interpret the latter part of this, persuading the gods, with reference to what I proposed in chapter z about the curse tablets: to get control of a soul of the dead, one had first to persuade a deity such as Hecate to cooperate. Thus the two apparently separate halves of the goetic art as we glimpse it in the Laws really make one whole. Elsewhere, Plato uses the word goes in ways that are clearly metaphorical but that play with the essential link between goeteia and the dead. In the Sophist, for example, the Stranger describes sophists as using goeteia to bring to light "verbal ghosts"-eidola legomena-with their words, and in the Republic, that which does not really exist but only seems to is called a phantasma produced by means of goeteia.51
Empedocles seems to have earned his reputation as a goes explicitly with reference to his ability to revive the dead. Diogenes Laertius offers the following information:
Satyrus says that this same man [Gorgias] said that he assisted when Empedocles performed goeteia. Indeed, Empedocles himself lays claim to this talent through his own poetry, as well as to many other talents, when he says: "You will learn cures for ills and aids against old age, because for you alone will I accomplish all these things. You will stop the force of tireless winds, which blow over land and destroy fields with their blasts; and again, if you wish, you will lead forth breezes that compensate. You will make dry weather in the proper season for people, after dark rain, and you will make treenourishing streams pour forth from the sky where they dwell after summer's dryness. And you will lead forth from Hades the life-force of a dead man." Timaeus, in the eighteenth book of his Histories, also tells us that Empedocles was admired for many reasons. For instance, when the etesian winds began to blow violently once, damaging the crops, he ordered asses to be skinned and bags to be made out of the hides. These he stretched out at various places along the hill to check the wind and for this reason he was called "wind-stopper." 52
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