Restless Dead: Encounters between the Living and the Dead in Ancient Greece

by Sarah Iles Johnston

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.

The living, for their part, can expect the dead’s cooperation, so long as they keep the dead happy.

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.

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.

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...

Tracing the child’s death to the angry dead avoids all of these problems: the dead serve as convenient scapegoats, shouldering burdens of bla...

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.

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.

I seek to show how eloquently the Greek dead can speak to us about the Greek living.

The multi-talented goēs, 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.

katabasis (katabaseis) a journey to the Underworld

mormō (mormones) a female ghost who attacks women and children

oikos (oikoi) a household or family

parthenos (parthenoi) a woman who has never been married

pharmakon (pharmaka) and pharmakeutrides magical material, especially drugs, and the female specialists who gather and use them

psychagōgos (psychagōgoi) and psychagōgia one who invokes souls and the art by which he does so

theoxenia a meal to which a god is invited

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.

belief in a world beyond the immediately visible one, however unpleasant that other world may be, is absolutely necessary for the expression of otherwise inexpressible fears and desires. Retaining one’s sanity, as Jackson’s first sentence insists, depends upon occasional vacations from reality.

the world constructed by the narrator must make enough sense to the audience for them to be able to enter into it without being constantly distracted by internal contradictions.

the screenwriter has been careful to construct a fictional universe that follows its own rules and because those rules bear some similarity to rules of the real world.

Even more interesting are the existential rules of many fictional worlds.

Witness for example the Orthodox Jewish belief that the entire body, including any severed limbs, must be buried properly if the deceased is to enjoy the eventual resurrection promised to the faithful. Even when they cannot articulate precise reasons that proper burial is necessary, survivors usually feel compelled to provide it; the importance placed on the recovery of bodies from battlefields or accident sites—sometimes at great expense and risk to those undertaking the recovery—attests to this.

Although a good narrator will not incorporate into a story elements that his audience will reject as “illogical” or “anachronistic,” a good narrator may incorporate elements that mislead us—his distant audience—because they provide only part of a bigger picture.

A contemporary American man or woman may take flowers to the grave of a loved one, perhaps in the assumption that the departed soul somehow needs or appreciates the gifts of survivors and can receive them at the location where his corpse was deposited. And yet that survivor might simultaneously believe that the departed soul dwells in a Heaven cut off from the physical world, where all needs are met and neither flowers nor anything else of a material nature has any relevance.

The Greeks held similarly contradictory views about the disembodied soul, imagining it now in Hades and again at the tomb.

the Greeks tended to describe ghosts as being either sooty black or transparently pale. These descriptions reflect, on the one hand, the grim and threatening nature of many ghosts and, on the other, the washed-out, lifeless appearance of a corpse.

The Homeric poems3 are about the spectacular exploits of vigorous heroes. And yet, they leave us with no doubt that death is the inevitable end to life, except for a few extraordinary individuals such as Menelaus, who escape by virtue of their special relationship to the gods.

What came after this end? Homeric descriptions of funerary cult and mourning imply that the recently dead were able at least to hear the living and receive their offerings.

Teiresias does speak briefly to Odysseus before drinking the blood, in order to demand access to it, but he does not speak “knowledgeably” or “clearly” (nēmertea) until afterwards.

The souls of Agamemnon and Odysseus’s mother, Anticleia, do not even recognize him until after consuming the blood.4

It is only by means of the blood—a striking emblem of the vigorous life they have left behind forever—that they temporarily become capable of normal human converse.

This insubstantialness is also reflected in Homeric descriptions of the dead as “flitting like shadows” and being “smokelike” or “dreamlike.”

it was by instructing his wife not to give his body funeral rites that Sisyphus ensured he would not really “die.” His soul, excluded from the Underworld because his body was unburied, was given permission by the gods to return to the upper world long enough to ask for funeral rites, and once there it took advantage of the situation by repossessing his body.

Many cultures believe that until the body is properly removed from the presence of the living, the soul of a dead person must wander restlessly betwixt and between the two worlds, no longer allowed to share in the society of the living and yet not admitted amongst the dead either.11 This belief that the unburied dead are restless gives rise to another very common idea, which we also find expressed in the Odyssey. Elpenor tells Odysseus that if his funeral rites are not carried out as soon as the men return to Circe’s island, he will become “a cause for the gods’ wrath” (theōn mēnima) upon Odysseus.

In ancient Greece, as in many other cultures, souls not yet admitted to the Underworld have the ability—and apparently the desire—to compel the gods to bring harm upon the living who have done them wrong.

no good Greek would allow the corpse of a friend to go to its grave uncleansed and without the proper shroud.

it is their abnormal status that keeps them from entering the Underworld.

In Odyssey 4, we learn that at least one individual—Menelaus—will escape death altogether and be allowed to dwell forever in the Elysian Fields, an idyllic paradise.

First, these passages concern extraordinary individuals.

It is notable that their punishments take place in the Underworld, but this may be nothing more than a way of making the punishment more odious by situating it in the most unpleasant realm imaginable.

situating the punishments in the Underworld may be a way of moving them outside of the normal world into the marginal sort of location where fantastic things occur.

Neither of these groups of people—the sinners or the favored—are anything like ordinary people, and neither group, therefore, are meant to serve as models for what might happen to those listening to the poems.

To be snatched away by the gods before life was over is not at all the same thing as dying. Proteus explicitly tells Menelaus that he will be carried away by the immortals instead of dying.

none of them can be used to delineate beliefs about what would happen to real people in the afterlife.

The most we can say is that the stories would have helped to pave the way for later beliefs in a system of universal postmortem rewards and punishments,

What we hear about in the Odyssey—Achilles’ glum existence in a gloomy Hades—is the poet’s innovation, a contradiction of the established story.