The Greek Way of Death
Surveying funerary rites and attitudes toward death from the time of Homer to the fourth century B.C., Robert Garland seeks to show what the ordinary Greek felt about death and the dead. The Second Edition features a substantial new prefatory essay in which Garland addresses recent questions and debates about death and the early Greeks. The book also includes an updated Supplementary Bibliography. Praise for the first edition: "This [volume] contains a rich and remarkably complete collection...
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"Hardly any aspect of Greek culture is as revealing as its way of confronting human mortality and its observances in relation to the dead. Using historical and anthropological approaches and sources both visual and written, Garland describes the extensive and elaborate funerary rituals performed by the Greeks for their dead from the time of Homer to the fourth century B.C." "Death for the Greeks was not an instantaneous event, rather a process or passage which required strenuous efforts on the part of the living to ensure that the dead achieved full and final transfer to the next world. The central questions which this book attempts to answer are: the extent to which death was a preoccupying concern among the Greeks; the feelings with which the individual may have anticipated his death; the nature of the bonds between the living and the dead; and the light shed by burial practices upon characteristic elements of Greek society. While the beliefs of ordinary Greeks about their ordinary dead form the book's central focus, there is also a chapter on 'special dead' - the unburied, murderers and their victims, children, and suicides."--BOOK JACKET.
Preface to the Second EditionPrefaceList of Illustrations1The Power and Status of the Dead12Dying133The Funeral214Between Worlds385Life in Hades486The Special Dead777Visiting the Tomb104Conclusions121Chronology of Greek Burial124Glossary128Notes133Bibliography172Supplementary Bibliography183General index189Index locorum196
