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

by Sarah Iles Johnston

Overview

During the archaic and classical periods, Greek ideas about the dead evolved in response to changing social and cultural conditions—most notably changes associated with the development of the polis, such as funerary legislation, and changes due to increased contacts with cultures of the ancient Near East. In Restless Dead, Sarah Iles Johnston presents and interprets these changes, using them to build a complex picture of the way in which the society of the dead reflected that of the living, expressing and defusing its tensions, reiterating its values and eventually becoming a source of significant power for those who knew how to control it. She draws on both well-known sources, such as Athenian tragedies, and newer texts, such as the Derveni Papyrus and a recently published lex sacra from Selinous.

Topics of focus include the origin of the goes (the ritual practitioner who made interaction with the dead his specialty), the threat to the living presented by the ghosts of those who died dishonorably or prematurely, the development of Hecate into a mistress of ghosts and its connection to female rites of transition, and the complex nature of the Erinyes. Restless Dead culminates with a new reading of Aeschylus' Oresteia that emphasizes how Athenian myth and cult manipulated ideas about the dead to serve political and social ends.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520280182
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	08/21/2013
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Sarah Iles Johnston is Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor of Religion and Professor of Classics at the Ohio State University. Her many books include Ancient Greek Divination and, with Fritz Graf, Ritual Texts for the Afterlife: Orpheus and the Bacchic Gold Tablets.

Table of Contents

Prologue vii

Acknowledgments xv

Frequently Used Terms xvii

Abbreviations xxi

Part I A Short History of the Dead in Ancient Greece

1 Elpenor and Others: Narrative Descriptions of the Dead 3

2 To Honor and Avert: Rituals Addressed to the Dead 36

3 Magical Solutions to Deadly Problems: The Origin and Roles of the Goes 82

Part II Restless Dead

4 The Unavenged: Dealing with Those Who Die Violently 127

5 Childless Mothers and Blighted Virgins: Female Ghosts and Their Victims 161

Part III Divinities and the Dead

6 Hecate and the Dying Maiden: How the Mistress of Ghosts Earned Her Title 203

7 Purging the Polis: Erinyes, Eumenides, and Semnai Theai 250

Bibliography 289

General Index 309

Index Locorum

Texts 315

Inscriptions 329