[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review]
Non-existence is unknowable. This philosophical truism underlies the myriad ways in which humans imagine and respond to death. In the succinct formulation of Michel Conche, “Death is the horizon of thought.”[1] Sekita and Southwood approach this horizon in a volume devoted to perceptions of death and dying within a broadly defined timeframe (antiquity) and geographical focus (the Mediterranean); a single chapter on Mesoamerica is included. Controlled for space and time, the principal variable is culture, specified as Mesopotamian, Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Etruscan, Incan, Judaic. The sources are literary and (predominantly) archaeological. There are no chapters on death in philosophical or historiographical texts. The book is divided into three sections, each with a brief introduction by the editors: Processing Death, Perceiving Death through Ritual and Burial, and The Beyond. These seem to allude to distinct temporal criteria (duration, for example) but also gesture toward a comparative method which, while observed in individual chapters, is aspirational across the volume. Nonetheless, a general pattern does emerge: death is a journey (with obstacles); the journey is made by a soul (under various descriptions); it has geographical coordinates (although these are difficult to map); it culminates in some form of an afterlife (sometimes with moral or ethical implications); and it requires the assistance of the living (for example, by providing sustenance). In spite of this general patten, the reader is everywhere confronted with the elusiveness of death compounded by the fragmentary and contingent nature of the ancient sources.
A short introduction serves as an up-to-date review of the relevant bibliography. In the absence of a theoretical orientation, the editors focus on what they call perceptions of death, as opposed to beliefs about death. It is not clear how these differ, although perceptions—as opposed to beliefs—seem to be closely aligned with sensory and emotional responses to death. When the object (i.e., an afterlife) is outside human experience, however, perceptions and beliefs are arguably co-productive rather than competitive or hierarchical.
Richard Hunter opens the volume with a close reading of Euripides’ Alcestis, a strange play in which the title character agrees to die for her husband, Admetus. The chapter includes a discussion of epitaphic analogies, mythological parallels, funerary objects (the Orphic gold tablets), and philosophical texts (Plato’s Phaedrus). In short, it exemplifies the productive interrelation of literary and material sources for making sense of death. At the end, Hunter offers a compelling analysis of Admetus’s infamous wish to have a statue made of his dead wife, predicated on the belief that art mitigates death.
Dina Katz’s chapter on death in Mesopotamia focuses on what she calls “conceptual metaphors.” Of special interest is the way in which these metaphors function as euphemisms that can alleviate fear and grief. But euphemism vies with carceral imagery. In Sumerian, death “seizes” its victims (the verb is dab), an image also found in Hesiod’s Theogony (where the verb is lambano). Once the dead have completed their journey, there is no escape. And yet, as if in defiance of this mandate, the dead require continued sustenance from the living. In short, Katz’s chapter demonstrates that the living need to be needed by the dead.
In an unusually short chapter, Rita Lucarelli reviews evidence from ancient Egypt in which death (again) is a journey. With reference to spells and images preserved in The Book of the Dead, Lucarelli maps this journey in various transformations of the physical body of the deceased, from a “static” corpse, to a hybrid creature, to a soul that must return to the tomb each night. The chapter moves quickly to reveal that the ancient Egyptian afterlife comprises a reciprocal relationship between body and soul, rather than the abandonment of the former by the latter. If there is some perceptual or emotional content in the Egyptian understanding of death, it may be in the soul’s need (desire?) to return to the body.
Lidia Ozarowska begins by acknowledging the scarcity of direct sources for indigenous Incan conceptions of death. Here too death is a journey, centered on myths of autochthony; the soul ideally begins its arduous journey from the birthplace of the deceased. Its success and continued post-mortem existence depend on ethical and moral criteria. The souls of those who do not meet these criteria are trapped in their decomposing bodies and, like zombies, can return to feed on human flesh. Here the body/soul relation takes a gruesome turn. The soul can also reside in an object such as a stone, where it attests to life and death as a cyclical process. What stands out in Ozarowska’s account is the extent to which the dead are embedded in the Incan landscape, comprising what might be called an ecology of death based on an emotional connection to the land.
Dimitrios Bosnakis surveys what he calls non-normative burials, principally in Hellenistic Greece. The chapter explores the social hierarchies that inform the treatment of dead infants, criminals, and enslaved persons. Bosnakis posits the notion of “social waste,” exemplified by the bodies of infants deposited in wells, to describe those whose social identity at death had not yet been established or was marginalized. With reference to modern Greek parallels, he argues for the apotropaic effects of burying these “wretched dead,” including an account of the ancient evidence for vampires. Bosnakis notes that the only defense against such frightening creatures is the complete decomposition of the body. This raises the question of the miracle of bodily incorruptibility as an alternative non-normative death in early Christianity.
Valerie M. Hope reviews the evidence for age as a variable in understanding how death was imagined in ancient Rome. Surveying the epitaphs for those who died as young adults, she argues that such deaths were bitter (acerbus) because the deceased had not yet reached their adult potential; they left the taste of unripe fruit. These untimely deaths can be further specified as children who pre-decease their parents, an all too common occurrence in antiquity. Yet, Hope also notes that the deaths of infants and very young children were infrequently referred to as bitter, presumably because their social status (and therefore their adult potential) was not yet calculable. In Bosnakis’ phrase, they were “social waste.” As a metaphor in public expressions of grief, a bitter death thus links sensory experience with a kind of transactional expectation: if this child had lived he would have confirmed his parents’ status.
Valeria Riedemann investigates the presence of altars on Etruscan “mythological” sarcophagi. In the absence of inscriptions and given the small sample, much depends on speculation. The altar scenes seem to depict well-known sacrifices from Greek myth and tragedy, such as those of Iphigenia or Cassandra. Riedemann’s detailed descriptions of these scenes, while informative, raise questions: Why are these scenes of violent death (mostly of females) on sarcophagi? What is the relationship between Greek sacrificial iconography and dead Etruscans? That such scenes “satisfied a funerary purpose” is undeniable. If the absence of inscriptions leaves the modern scholar in the dark, it does shed light on the ancient viewer whose response was perhaps more emotional than intellectual.
In something of a companion piece to Riederman, Matthew J. Suriano looks at Iron Age tombs in East Jerusalem. Following a survey of the history of excavation, Suriano concludes that these tombs are distinguished by the fact that they are visible above ground and that they are single rather than multi-generational. He argues that together these point to an emerging elite class of individuals as distinct from traditional ruling families. The inscriptional evidence for this conclusion – in situ or in the British Museum – is highly speculative. The most legible inscription tells the reader that there is no silver and gold in the tomb and puts a curse upon whoever opens it. This message deserves more attention than it gets; the tomb’s unique visibility is paradoxically the source of its vulnerability.
Cornelia Weber-Lehmann looks at painted “false” doors, i.e., doors that cannot be opened, in Etruscan tombs. Noting the contradictions inherent in early Greek depictions of the afterlife, she questions their usefulness for understanding Etruscan eschatology. While both include a journey, there is little evidence for the separation of the body from the soul in the latter. Nonetheless, Weber-Lehmann suggests that false doors may be evidence for the soul’s immateriality. The question raised is why a door (false or real) is required. And here the relation between doors and death in the Greek imaginary seems relevant. I’m thinking, for example, of the skênê door as a barrier between the living and the dead in tragedy. Or the common references to Hades’ house (domos) in epic. Given the fragmentary state of the evidence, the chapter is necessarily speculative. Still the question of what lies behind those doors attests both to a desire to imagine an afterlife and to the difficulty of its fulfillment.
Panayiotis Christoforou explores public reactions to the deaths of imperial Romans, principally Germanicus and Septimius Severus, as evidence for general attitudes toward death during the principate. Christoforou’s principal interest is in the sensory experience of death in which rituals, including dining, music and incense, attest to “the importance placed on experiences of life itself.” As he points out, however, the emperor’s death also called for the suspension of daily activities in the city. Death, in other words, seems to comprise a balance between public action and inaction. Turning to the wax effigy of Septimius Severus described by Herodian, Christoforou argues that it aided the emperor’s deification by, in effect, preserving his body. This seems plausible. But we might ask why this transition is marked by a fake emperor, reminding us of Weber-Lehmann’s fake doors or of the fake Alcestis in Hunter’s chapter. If these fakes gesture toward immortality in some form, they do so by dulling our sensory experience of actual dead humans.
In the book’s final chapter, Christopher B. Hays offers a history of scholarship on the Psalms. This history—what Hays refers to as a “notorious episode”—begins with the commentaries of Mitchell J. Dahood in the mid 20th century. The central question is whether the ancient Israelite religion was distinct from other contemporary religions in asserting a post-mortem existence. According to Hays, Dahood’s affirmative answer is based on a “hasty” synchronic reading of the sources, motivated by the belief that Judaism and Christianity are superior religions. Here methodology and ideology are co-dependent and linguistic and political assumptions are exposed. What do “resurrection” and “immortality” really mean in the ancient sources? Did the Psalms actually grant some sort of afterlife to the Davidic kings? And, if so, what kind of an afterlife? In the end, Hays offers no definitive answers to these questions. His accomplished aim is to examine the variables at play in biblical scholarship, in which Dahood’s work is both a model and a cautionary tale.
The volume ends with a short Epilogue by Jan N. Bremmer in which he draws attention to continuities and discontinuities across the chapters, some of which I mention above. He also reminds readers that death can be the object of varying emotional responses, from grief to parodic laughter.
The chapters are substantial and informative overall, although several suffer from repetitiveness; each includes an extensive bibliography. Some would benefit from additional contextualization for non-specialists and to greater attention paid to the different media in which a response to death is represented (a tragedy or a tomb inscription, for example). At a higher level—and with the exception of a brief comment by Hays—the book misses an opportunity to confront philology and archaeology as complementary or competing methodologies, with mythology as a common denominator. In Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, the Titan Prometheus claims that he “stopped mortals from foreseeing their death … and caused blind hopes to dwell within them” (PV 250-252). The volume shows us how the imagination nurtures these hopes, beginning in antiquity.
Works Cited
Conche, Marcel. La mort et la pensée. Villers sur Mer: Éditions de Mégare, 1973.
Schumacher, Bernard N. Death and Mortality in Contemporary Philosophy. Cambridge, UK Cambridge University Press (2005) 2011.
Authors and Titles
Preface, Katherine E. Southwood and Karolina Sekita
Introduction, Karolina Sekita and Katherine E. Southwood
- Processing Death
Section Introduction, Katherine E. Southwood and Karolina Sekita
- Death and Mourning in Euripides’ Alcestis, Richard Hunter
- The Mesopotamians’ Perception of Death in Metaphor, Dina Katz
- The Perception of the Human Body in the Ancient Egyptian Funerary Literature and the Book of the Dead, Rita Lucarelli
- Incan Death as Challenge – Conceptualisations of the Mysterious Way from kay pacha to hurin pacha, Lidia Ożarowska
- Perceiving Death Through Ritual and Burial
Section Introduction, Katherine E. Southwood and Karolina Sekita
- A Disregard of Decency: Concepts and Metaphors of “Waste” and “Binding” Behind Some Non-Normative Burial Rituals in Ancient Greece and Modern Greek Folklore, Dimitrios Bosnakis
- The Bitter Taste of Death: Mourning for the Young in Ancient Rome, Valerie M. Hope
- Rethinking Depictions of Altars on Etruscan Mythological Sarcophagi, Valeria Riedemann Lorca
- Memory, Monumentality, and the Tomb of the Royal Steward, Matthew J. Suriano
III. The Beyond
Section Introduction, Katherine E. Southwood and Karolina Sekita
- Where Does the Soul Go? Some Thoughts on Etruscan Afterlife, Cornelia Weber-Lehmann
- Grief is Displayed as a Mix Between Festival and Rite: The Roman Emperor and the Experience of Death, Panayiotis Christoforou
- Imagining the Afterlife in the Psalms: The Episode of Mitchell Dahood and His Commentary, Christopher B. Hays
Epilogue, Jan N. Bremmer
Notes
[1] Conche 1973, 14, cited by Schumacher 2011, 86 with note 4.