'Reading'Greek Death: To the End of the Classical Period (review) (original) (raw)
Changing Conceptions of Death in Ancient Greece (Draft)
‘Changing Conceptions of Death in Ancient Greece’ in Reflections on the History of Ideas of Death, 2025
Responses to death, that most universal of all human experiences, comprise some of the richest, most enduring and varied aspects of ancient Greek myth, art, literature and ideas. From the vastly influential epics of Homer, to the philosophies of Plato and others, to funerary monuments and remains found in tombs, we encounter a diversity of attitudes to death as well as differing notions of what happens to us after we die. This in some ways reflects the fact that for the Greeks of the pre-Christian era, there was no canonical religious text accepted as providing a universal dogma for the faithful to uphold. Their thinking about death can be considered an open system, just as religion in Greece can be understood as a diverse phenomenon embracing a wide range of cult practices and concepts of the divine. But, just as Greek religion had clearly recognisable and consistent elements, such as the overriding importance of the twelve Olympian gods, so, too, in Greek eschatology, prevalent themes emerge that enable us to speak of its major attributes.
Death in the modern Greek Culture
Hawaii Pacific Journal of Social Work Practice (HPJSWP), 2013
Each culture recognizes and identifies death, dying and bereavement in unique ways. Commonly, a culture may be seen through the lens of death rituals; how those are shaped, interpreted and used by the society. This paper aims to look at the Modern Greek culture and depict its 'visualization' of death, as well as capture the rituals that mostly identify this specific culture. The Greek culture in overall is strongly influenced by the Greek Orthodox Church. Hence, the experiences of death, dying and bereavement are thread through religious beliefs and customs, alongside cultural norms.
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The Pitfalls of Resurrection: Disquieting Hellenicities by the Time of the Greek Revolution
Peripheries of the Revolution: The 1821 Greek insurrection in transnational context, 2021
Trois fois cernant sous le voile des cieux De vos tombeaux le tour devotieux, A haute voix trois fois je vous appelle: J'invoque ici votre antique fureur. (I, 9-12) (Du Bellay 1919 [1558]: 1) Rome n'est plus, et si l'architecture Quelque ombre encore de Rome fait revoir, C'est comme un corps par magique sçavoir, Tiré de nuist hors de sa sepulture. (V, 5-8) (Du Bellay 1919 [1558]: 5) Álvaro GARCÍA MARÍN 372 2 Jacob Burckhardt (1892: 181-182) popularized Cyriac's expression «to wake the dead» isolated from its proper context. As Patricia Phillippy (2018: 228) has clarified, the fragment is part of a letter to Giacomo Veneri de Racaneto, bishop of Ragusa. For the original Latin text, see Cyriac of Ancona n.d.: 55. Accounts of the belief in the vrykolakas, in fact, served to Orientalize the Greeks by underscoring their inherent superstitious nature 9. Superstition, denounced in virtually every Western work about Greece, acted as the proof of otherness and cultural debasement that allowed to place the Greeks in a separate epistemic frame defined by "fable", credulity and a deranged imagination 10. As a cultural weakness, it was alternatively counterposed to different Western opposites: the healthy Christian doctrine of Catholicism or Protestantism (in religious works on the Eastern Church from predominantly the 16 th to the 18 th centuries) 11 or, in later secular pieces, to Cartesian rationality, an essential characteristic of the European mind inherited, precisely, from the ancient Greeks. Joseph Pitton de Tournefort's conclusion to his detailed account of a case of vampirism in Mykonos in 1700 shows how this distinctive tradition of the vrykolakas activates an internal displacement within the signifier 'Greece' that partially evacuates modern Greeks from its most prestigious associations while simultaneously enabling their modern (re)emergence: «After such an instance of folly, can we refuse to own that the present Greeks are no great Grecians, and that there is nothing but ignorance and superstition among them?» (1741: 148). The Pitfalls of Resurrection: Disquieting Hellenicities by the Time of the Greek Revolution 375 9 As Terence Spencer (1974: 32-47) has demonstrated, among the negative stereotypes about the Greeks prevailing in Western Europe between the 16 th and the 18 th centuries was that of being liars, superstitious, and prone to every kind of absurd fables. 10 The epistemic division between the Greek East and the European (or "Latin") West was usually internalized by the Greeks themselves. In his account of a vrykolakas infestation in Mykonos in 1700, Joseph Pitton de Tournefort relates how the locals appealed to the authority of Latin writers, apparently more reliable (at least for a Westerner), to overcome his incredulity: «Those that believ'd we doubted the Truth of the Fact, came and upbraided us with our Incredulity, and strove to prove that there were such things as Vroucolacasses, by citations out of the Buckler of Faith, written by F. Richard, a Jesuit Missionary. He was a Latin, say they, and consequently you ought to give him credit» (Tournefort 1741: 145). 11 Leo Allatios, a Chiot Greek who converted to Catholicism and advocated an ecumenical perspective aimed to reunite the Roman and the Eastern Church, even published in 1645 a whole treatise on the issue entitled On the Beliefs of the Greeks (De Graecorum hodie quorundam opinationibus) where he presented, usually in a derisory tone, the "delusions" of the Greek people. This work is one of the main sources for the belief in the vrykolakas before the 18 th century. For the complex question of superstition in Allatios, see Hartnup 2004: 269-270. Other condemnations of superstition on religious terms can be found for example in Dannhauer and Veiel 1666: 35 (who, on account of superstition, denominate the Greeks a "miserable nation" [misera natio]), Smith 1680: 230-233, or Stuss 1733: 12, among others.