In this intelligent and expansive book, Emily Clifford aims “to build a picture of how Athenian visual and verbal culture helped Athenians grapple with death and its knowability” (5). By framing death as a problem of knowledge, Clifford offers a fresh approach to her subject, one that sets the book apart from familiar accounts of Greek death such as those of Donna Kurtz and John Boardman, Robert Garland, Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood, John Oakley, Nathan Arrington, Elena Walter-Karydi, or even Emily Vermeule, whose Aspects of death in early Greek art and poetry is cited as a touchstone.[1] Unlike these studies, Figuring death is not focused on art, archaeology, or literature specifically associated with the funerary realm, nor does it investigate phenomena such as mourning rituals, burial practices, or eschatology. Instead, the book casts a much wider net, turning to a broad range of artistic and literary representations of death in order to ask not what Classical Athenians believed about death, but how they came to form an understanding of it in the first place.
At the outset, Clifford presents her project as cultural history. Yet throughout, death is investigated as an epistemological problem—how can the living know what dying entails?—rather than a social reality shaped by ideology and politics. Events such as the Peloponnesian War are understood as intensifying a concern with death in particular historical moments. But death itself remains the same, to the point that the book’s central questions are presented as transhistorical, applicable in our own time and place as much as in Classical Athens. The works of art and literature that form the book’s central focus are treated not as sources through which we can recover Greek conceptions of death, but the very materials through which people in antiquity grappled with what it meant to die. Texts and images do not simply describe or represent death, but mediate encounters with it by structuring how it is imagined, perceived, or concealed.
The book consists of five chapters, each offering close readings of well-known literary and artistic representations of death created in Classical Athens. The granular focus of the chapters is balanced by four “Conversations”—short essays that seek to draw out interconnections between the chapters. The book’s larger stakes are explored in the first and final Conversations, which effectively serve as introduction and conclusion.
The death of Socrates as portrayed in Plato’s Phaedo, which is the focus of Chapter One, makes a natural starting point for Clifford’s epistemological investigation of death. While attending to the text’s central questions concerning the afterlife and the immortality of the soul, Clifford is above all interested in how knowledge of death is articulated through the dialogue’s form and language. Focusing on its shifting perspectives, she explores how varying degrees of proximity to Socrates’s death serve both to access his death and frustrate attempts to understand it. In the process, both internal characters and the dialogue’s readers are simultaneously immersed in Socrates’s experience of death and denied a full understanding of that experience. In this sense, the text self-consciously reperforms its own philosophical arguments about the nature of death.
In Chapter Two, Clifford investigates how representations of death on Athenian painted pottery are mediated through the conditions of clay and painted slip. She begins with two celebrated red-figure kylikes, each attributed to the Brygos Painter and each decorated with a mythical depiction of death: the suicide of Ajax in the tondo of one, the fall of Troy on the exterior of the other. In each case, the corpse is constructed as a presence and an absence whose dualities serve the user as they navigate the cup’s iconography and formal properties. In the second part of the chapter, this intersection of form and image is brought to objects more firmly grounded in the space of death: white-ground lekythoi used as unguent vessels at gravesites and decorated with depictions of encounters between the living and the dead around a funerary marker. A following Conversation helps bring out the connections between pottery and the epistemological concerns introduced in the first chapter by way of a brief analysis of Hector’s death in the Iliad and the famous relief pithos from Mykonos.
Chapter Three explores how Attic tragedy, by shifting its moments of death offstage and presenting them through the accounts of eye-witnesses, structures the audience’s perception of death and dying through the same dynamics investigated in the first two chapters. The chapter takes as its case study two scenes from Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus, a play whose central character’s death is even more ambiguous than most. By predicting Oedipus’s death while he is still alive, the play constructs dying as an imaginative event filtered through a variety of contrasting perspectives, including Oedipus’s own. The chapter’s central focus is the messenger speech reporting Oedipus’s death and disappearance, which is construed (in terms familiar from the first two chapters) as simultaneously revealing and obscuring, making death both knowable and imperceptible. In the process, the play, while staging a highly unusual death, provides its audience a meditation on the uncertainty of life more generally. A subsequent Conversation links the prior two chapters through the figure of Niobe, who appears both in Sophocles’s Antigone and on a red-figure krater as an exemplar for navigating the material effects of dying.
In Chapter Four, the Ionic frieze of the Temple of Athena Nike on the Athenian Acropolis provides a case study for examining the medium of marble sculpture. Focusing on the corpses of the battle scene on the west frieze, Clifford examines how they are presented as objects assimilated with the marble material of the frieze itself. Resisting a straightforward iconographical reading of these figures, she sees them as an opportunity for creative visual engagement, imagining how a viewer could use their familiarity with other related depictions of battlefield corpses in Classical art, such as iconography of the death of Sarpedon, to visualize them in a multiplicity of ways. In the frieze itself, the shifting status of the corpse is signaled by the trophy in the background, a monument that acts both like a living and a dead warrior, and that serves as a metonym for the temple itself. Where scholarship on the temple has often sought to uncover a political message within it, Clifford concludes by arguing that its imagery is deliberately open, encouraging viewers to make the stories it depicts their own.
Thucydides’s first-hand account of the plague serves as the focus of the fifth and final chapter. Where Thucydides’s text has often been analyzed as an invaluable historical document of the most significant mass epidemic to devastate Athens in the Classical period, Clifford turns to it instead to interrogate how it presents the plague as an experience of death that deflects visibility and knowability. The mismatch between the disease’s internal and external symptoms provides an opening between truth and appearance that, in turn, is mobilized to interrogate the distance between the plague as a social event and as a subjective experience. By deliberately adopting poetic language, Thucydides generates a friction between an imaginative and an historical account of dying, one that Clifford presents as contributing to a picture of death’s elusiveness.
Throughout the book, discussions of both texts and objects are consistently fine-grained and carefully documented. Focusing on the processes through which works of art and literature generate knowledge rather than the knowledge that they generate, Clifford offers artful analyses that are intended to stimulate new ways of thinking, not discover new historical facts. This is a book, in other words, with more questions than answers, many left refreshingly open-ended. Nonetheless, the programmatic impulse to read epistemological uncertainty into every moment of interpretive ambiguity can impose its own form of meaning, to the point that the argument sometimes appears self-fulfilling. In the chapter on pottery, for instance, virtually every formal feature and every artistic choice, from the thickness of a painted line to the profile orientation of a head, is treated as a commentary on the death’s unknowability, even when other explanations are more plausible. Yet the author’s own readings are never presented to the exclusion of others, many of which are discussed in the text and in the copious footnotes. Indeed, to the extent that the book sometimes pushes its analysis beyond what is historically verifiable, it could be read as deliberately staging its own performance of the very epistemological challenge it investigates.
The book’s most distinctive accomplishment lies not in the individual case studies, however, but in their cumulative effect. Mobilizing a range of sources rarely brought together, Clifford addresses across the span of one study some of the most important materials that survive from Classical Athens: vase painting, sculpture, philosophy, tragedy, and history. As she moves among them, she displays a remarkable facility and depth of knowledge with each subject area. Bringing the same broad questions concerning the nature of death to such a wide array of texts, objects, and contexts, she makes visible unexpected connections across media, ones that are often structural rather than merely thematic. She shows, for instance, how a tragic play might both present and withhold a corpse in the same way as a ceramic vessel, while carefully attending to the specific contingencies of each medium. By reframing familiar works of art and literature, Clifford encourages readers approaching the book from various subfields of Classics to wade into potentially unfamiliar territory. The results are manifold: an original account of an evergreen topic, a rich exploration of the artistic complexity of Classical Athens, and a model of scholarship that is truly interdisciplinary.
Notes
[1] Donna C. Kurtz and John Boardman, Greek burial customs (Ithaca, 1971); Emily Vermeule, Aspects of death in early Greek art and poetry (Berkeley, 1979); Robert Garland, The Greek way of death (Ithaca, 1985); Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood, ‘Reading’ Greek death: to the end of the classical period (Oxford, 1995); John H. Oakley, Picturing death in classical Athens: the evidence of the white lekythoi (Cambridge, 2004); Nathan T. Arrington, Ashes, Images, and Memories: The Presence of the War Dead in Fifth-Century Athens (Oxford, 2015); Elena Walter-Karydi, Die Athener und ihre Gräber (1000-300 v. Chr.) (Berlin, 2015).