1. DEATH

2. • relatively strict separation uranian/chthonic • serious threat of contact miasma • association with malevolent daimonic powers • involvement in magic, especially curses • most rituals apotropaic and for appeasement • strong reluctance to speak of the dead • unstable threshold between death and fertility

3. Ministers of Death
EREBOS NYX (Darkness) (Night) MOROS (Doom) KER (Violent Death) THANATOS (Death) HYPNOS (Sleep)

4. psykhê (< psykhein : “blow”) person dêmas sôma eidolon

5. And as in the innermost recess of a cave bats flit around gibbering, when one has fallen off the rock from the chain in which they cling to one another, so the souls of the suitors followed him gibbering, and Hermes led them down the dank ways. They went past the streams of Oceanus, past the White Rock, past the Gates of Helios and the Land of Dreams, and quickly came to the Plain of Asphodel (kat’ asphodelon leimôna), where the souls dwell, phantoms of men whose toils are ended.
—Odyssey 24

6. sphodelon kat’ asphodelon leimôna ~ kata sphodelon leimôna

7. Charon

8. Styx
Far under the earth a branch of Oceanus flows through the dark night... With nine streams he winds about the earth and the sea's wide back, and then falls into the main stream; but the tenth flows out from a rock, a sore trouble to the gods. For whichever deathless god pours a libation of that water and breaks the oath, lies breathless until a full year is completed, and never tastes ambrosia and nectar, but lies spiritless and voiceless on a strewn bed; a heavy trance shadows him. But when he has spent a year in his sickness, another, harder penance follows after the first. For nine years he is cut off from the eternal gods and never joins their councils or feasts. But in the tenth year he again joins the assemblies of the gods. So great an oath, then, did the gods appoint to the eternal and primeval water of Styx. —Hesiod, Theogony

9. Cerberus

10. Tantalus, Ixion, Sisyphus

11. FUNERAL RITES

12. Prothesis (Display) Goös/Threnos (Lamentation) Ekphora (Carrying-Out) Perideipnon (Meal)

13. Prothesis (Display)
• washing and dressing of nekys • nekys displayed within household • coin in mouth/over eyes • shutting of mouth and eyes

14. Goös/Threnos (Lamentation)
Iris stormed down to deliver the message. She came to the house of Priam and found there mourning and lamentation [goös]. Priam’s sons sat in the courtyard around their father, fouling their clothes with tears. The old man, wrapped in his mantle, sat like a graven stone. His head and neck were covered with dung he had rolled in and scraped up with his hands. His daughters and sons’ wives were wailing throughout the house... —Iliad

15. Disfigurement
• genuine grief • institutionalized expression • public display • displacement of guilt • appeasement of deceased • symbolic dying of mourner

16. Ekphora (Procession)
• predawn procession to extramural gravesite • males lead, females follow • dirges played • public lamentation

17. Kerameikos

18. Funerary Legislation Solon of Athens (640-560 BCE)
• prothesis must be held indoors • ekphora must be held before sunrise on next day, men in front • only women over 60 or related to deceased within degree of second cousin can participate • women must not wear more than three himatia, nor deceased interred in more than three • food and drink in ekphora must be worth less than one obol • offering basket must be less than one cubit in length • mourners must not go out at night except in a lit funeral cart • laceration of flesh, singing of prepared dirges, mourning any but the deceased is forbidden • visiting tombs of non-relatives except at their funerals is forbidden

19. Burial & Burial Rites
• cremation and deposition of bones in urn, subsequently buried • inhumation and burial at gravesite • inhumation • cremation • pit burials • cremation • 300 — inhumation • gravesite offerings • food, wine, oil • favorite possessions • destructive sacrifices

20. burial urn

21. bomos

24. Perideipnon (Meal; Never Illustrated)

25. Special Dead
• ahôroi (untimely dead) • homicides • suicides • dioblêtoi (god-struck dead) • cf. Elysium < *enelysion? • deuteropotmoi (twice dead) • ataphoi (unburied dead)

26. Festivals of the Dead
• Genesia / Nemesia • 5th of Boidromion (August/September) • panêgyris • propitiate nemesis of the dead • washing, anointing, adornment of stelae • Anthesteria • Anthesterion (January/February)

27. ANTHESTERIA Day 3-4: Khutroi (Pots)
•Offering of cooked seeds and vegetables (panspermia, pankarpia)
•Pot left outside house for wandering spirits (kêres)
•Offering of porridge to Hermes Chthonios and souls of the dead.
•Women carry pots of water to chasm near temple of Zeus, where it is poured out to honor victims of great flood.
•Meal prepared for Erigone; children swing from trees (Aiora).
•At sunset, head of household shouts “Out the door! Anthesterion is over!”

28. sêma Monuments mnêmê stelê

29. Nikomedia, ca. 120 BCE
Θράσων Διογένους τήνδε ἀνέστησεν στυλλεῖδαν υἱῶν β’ Δεξιφάνους ἐτῶν ε’ Ξράσοωνος ἐτῶν δ’ Ἑρμῆ θρέψαντος αὐτῶν ἐτῶν κε’ ἐν τῇ συμπτώσει τοῦ σεισμοῦ οὕτως αὐτὰ περιειλήφει
Thrasōn, son of Diogenes, erected this funerary stele for his two sons, Dexi-phanes, age 5, and Thrasōn, age 4, and
for Hermēs, age 25, who brought them
up. In the earthquake collapse, so did he hold them in his arms.

31. I, the sêma of Phrasikleia, shall always be called a girl [kourê], having received this name from the gods instead of marriage. Ariston of Paros made me.

32. Afterlives

33. If a wealthy man knows the future, that immediately after death the lawless spirits pay the penalty, and sins committed in this kingdom of Zeus are judged both sternly and inexorably... —Pindar ( BCE), Olympian 2 [In Hades] it is said, another Zeus makes final judgment on wrongdoing among the dead. —Aeschylus ( BCE) Suppliants There you will see all other mortals who have impiously sinned against a god or a guest or their parents, each receiving the deserts for his crime. For there is a great Hades beneath the earth who is a punisher of mankind and who oversees everything with his mind that keeps record. —Aeschylus, Eumenides

34. [Aristogeiton (who allegedly failed to bury his father, attacked his mother, and sold his sister into prostitution) is] “a man unlikely to receive mercy from the gods of Hades, but to be cast out among the impious because of the depravity of his life.” —ps.-Demosthenes ( BCE) 25.53

35. Dexiosis

36. Feasting in the Underworld

37. • reunion with dead kin (cf
• reunion with dead kin (cf. joint burial) • gaming (dice, game boards) • gymnastics • lyre-playing • feasting • sex?
Cyzicus, ca. 150 BCE