Attitudes Toward Death in Archaic Greece

25 Pages·1989·3.24 MB·English

by  Ian Morris

IAN MORRIS
Attitudes Toward Death
in Archaic Greece
W AST HERAE SIGNIFICASNHTI FTin a ttitudes towardd eath inA rchaic Greece?
In this paper, I argue both yes and no, according to how "attitudes toward death"
isd efined. My thesis is a reply to two important articles by Christiane Sourvinou
Inwood. Dr. Sourvinou-Inwood claims that the rise of the polis affected mentali
tiesw ithin the intellectual elite, and that death began to be fearedm ore after 700
B.C.S he further suggests that the changes identified by Philippe Aries in eleventh
to twelfth-century-A.D.F rance provide a useful analogy forA rchaic Greece.' Her
case has far-reaching consequences: if theG reeks had to any extent anticipated
Western developments by twom illennia, much thinkinga bout the history of death
would be challenged, and the theoretical basis for the archaeology of burials
would crumble. The argument also raises serious questions about the possibility of
"intellectualist" interpretations of archaeological evidence.2 The question, then,
is of interest even beyond the field of Greek religious history.
I am grateful to a number of readers in Cambridge and Oxford, and to seminar audiences in
Cambridge and Chicago, for valuable comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Iw ould particularly
like to thankA nthony Snodgrass, Paul Cartledge, and Tony Long for their help, without wishing to
implicate them in the results.
1. C. Sourvinou-Inwood, "A Trauma in Flux: Death in the Eighth Century and After," in R.
Hagg, ed., The Greek Renaissance of theE ighth Century B.C. (Stockholm, 1983) 33-49; Sourvinou
Inwood, "To Die and Enter the House of Hades: Homer, Before and After," in J. Whaley, ed.,
Mirrors of Mortality (London, 1981) 15-39. P. Aries (The Hour of Our Death [New York, 19811)
himself believes that there was no change in antiquity; he speaks of a single attitude, which "is the
unchronicled death throughout the long ages of most ancient history, and perhaps of prehistory" (p. 5).
2. I. Morris, Burial and Ancient Society: The Rise of the Greek City-State (Cambridge, 1987)
32-36; cf. I. Hodder, Reading the Past (Cambridge, 1986) 5. I was unable to discuss Sourvinou
Inwood's theories there, owing to lack of space.
(0 1989 BY THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
MORRIASt:t itudes Toward Death inA rchaic Greece 297
Dr. Sourvinou-Inwood suggests that therew as a large-scalec hange in individ
ual psychologies around 700 B.C. I dispute this view, arguing that there was
fundamental continuity inp ersonal attitudes towardd eath from the earliest times
to the Classical period and beyond. There were some eschatological changes,
such as the arrival of Eastern ideas about the soul around 500, but I believe that
these had very limited impact.W hat did change, though, was the communal use
made of the dead, in rituals evoking and creating the structure of society.
For simplicity's sake, I refer to the ritual uses of death to "create" the polis
community as "ideologies of death," and to individuals' concepts about the fear
of death and the afterlife as "individual attitudes to death." The two are not
completely separable, and to some extent they overlap;3 but for the analysis
here, this rather crude distinction is a useful tool.
I begin by considering the methodological problems involved in this ques
tion, focusing on the role of generalization. I then outline Dr. Sourvinou
Inwood's case and its links with Aries's model in more detail, arguing that her
causalm odel is inadequate. Finally, Iw ill offer alternative interpretationso f the
literary and archaeological evidence, emphasizing social rather than psychologi
cal factors. I am certainly not claiming that personal belief-religious or
otherwise-has no place in the analysis of death and burial; rather, I suggest that
it is much harder to carry out a study at this level than is often assumed. Struc
tural and intellectualist interpretations of rituals are complementary ways of
viewing the same data, not competing alternatives; but in this particular case,
there is insufficient evidence for an individualist approach, and Dr. Sourvinou
Inwood's theory lacks an empirical basis.4
ANCIENT MENTALITIES
How do we know when there has been a significant shift in attitudes toward
death? There are two general problems to consider.
Evidence. Most people's ideas about death change frequently.5 Archaic
Greek poetry probably represents only elite attitudes, but even so we will expect
to findm any viewpoints within it.6T o talk about the history of death is to try to
3. See M. Bloch, "Death, Women and Power," in M. Bloch and J. Parry, eds., Death and the
Regeneration of Life (Cambridge, 1982) 223-30.
4. I explore this theme more fully in By Their Dead Shall You Know Them: Burial and Social
Structure inC lassical Antiquity (Cambridge, inp ress) chap. 1.O n the structural/intellectualistd istinc
tion, see E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Theories of Primitive Religion (Oxford, 1965); M. Bloch, From
Blessing to Violence (Cambridge, 1986) 3-9. A psychohistory of death may be possible, but note that
David Stannard, one of the leading historians of death, is also a stern critic of psychohistory; see his
The PuritanW ay of Death (Oxford, 1977) and ShrinkingH istory: Freud and theF ailure of Psychohis
tory (Oxford, 1980).
5. See R. Hinton, Dying (Harmondsworth, 1967) 21-49.
6. Compare the arguments of R. Favre, La mort dans la literature et la pensee francaise au
siecle des lumieres (Lyon, 1978). R. G. Osborne ("Death Revisited, Death Revised: The Death of
298 CLASSICAALN TIQUITY Volume 8/No. 2/October 1989
capture a "spirito f the age," which is necessarily a very high-level generalization,
in a distant and complex relationship to any single datum.
Such abstraction affects thew ays we may use the sources. The risk of error in
picking out just a few witnesses is obvious. People do not think all alike; we can
only understand a "mentality" by ironing out human diversity, taking a huge
sample of the thought of an age and standing so far back that its internal differ
ences disappear from view.7 Some historians respond statistically. Studying links
between "total" Christianity and attitudes toward death, Vovelle drew on over
two thousand wills; while Chaunu, arguing for demography as a prime mover
behind attitudes toward death, used some eight thousandw ills and a huge mass
of population statistics.8
Quantification has its own drawbacks,9b ut it throws theH ellenist's problems
into sharp relief. Our evidence is fragmentary, has been pre-selected by transmis
sion processes we can rarely observe, and is unevenly distributed in time and
space; itw as written by people of whom we know little or nothing, for purposes
now generally unrecoverable, and in several very different literary genres. We
cannot even claim to be able to describe the attitude toward death of a single
Greek poet at any time in his (or in a few cases her) career. When we make
sweeping generalizations about "collective representations" on the basis of this
patchwork of snippets, we should remember Alan Macfarlane's warning that
"every poem and every line has to be carefully weighed in order to discover the
stylistic and traditional constraints on the expression of thought and emotion.""'
This is not a counsel of despair, but a plea for an appropriate methodology.
Our sources cannot support Aries's type of wide-ranging eclecticism, and still
less Vovelle's rigorous serial analyses. But simply ignoring the problems and
letting the sources speak for themselves, as it seems to me that Sourvinou
Inwood has tried to do, is unacceptable. If we wish to study ancient mentalities,
we are forced to build a simplifyingm odel from prior probabilities, establishing
which way the burden of proof lies, and then to examine it in the light of the
evidence, modifying, adjusting, or discarding the original hypothesis as neces
the Artist inA rchaic and Classical Greece," Art History 11 [1988] 1-16) illustrates the variety of
responses available to the ancient Greeks using artistic evidence. I am not persuaded by his
empathetic methods, but he does raise very interesting possibilities.
7. See J. Le Goff, "Mentalities: A History of Ambiguities," in J. Le Goff and P. Nora, eds.,
Constructing the Past (Cambridge, 1985) 166-80; P. and C. Stearns, "Emotionology: Clarifying the
History of Emotions and Emotional Standards," AHR 90 (1985) 813-36.
8. M. Vovelle, Piete baroque et dechristianisation en Provence au XVI1Ie siecle abr. ed. (Paris,
1978); P. Chaunu, La mort a Paris, 16e, 17e, 18e sicles (Paris, 1978) and more briefly inA nnales
(ESC) 31 (1976) 29-50.
9. The literature is large; for an introduction, see R. Fogel and G. Elton, Which Road to the
Past? (New Haven, 1983).
10.A. Macfarlane, "Death and the Demographic Transition: A Note on the English Evidence
on Death, 1500-1700," in S. C. Humphreys andH . King, eds., Mortality and Immortality (New York
and London, 1981) 252.
MORARtItSit:u dTeso warDde athi nA rchaGic reece 299
sary." The texts are so difficult that them ost we can hope for is compatibility
with a theory. Analysis of the logic and structure of the models used and the
sophistication of the questions asked is every bit as important as discussion of the
sources that support them.
Concepts. Discussions of historical change are only meaningful within some
explicit framework. Golden's recent study, "Did theA ncients Care When Their
Children Died?," is a case in point; the issue is reduced to a black-and-white
question. His simple answer-yes-does not tell us very much about ancient
society.12 Similarly, asking "Was there a change in attitudes toward death in
Archaic Greece?" is pointless. The pool of ideas about death current in 500 B.C.
must have been different from those views that existed in Homer's time, simply
because different people were alive. Even when consciously trying to reproduce
rules and ideas, people inevitably transform their structures of thought."3T he
question is not whether Greek attitudes were the same in 500 as they had been
ten generations earlier-they simply cannot have been-but whether we see the
changes as historically significant; and the facts can only be called important or
unimportant relative to a specific theory. Sourvinou-Inwood linked her studies
to those by Aries, and it is from this that her argument derives its interest. We
can see changes in individuals' attitudes in our sources, but all Archaic and
Classical writers can be encompassed within the category that Aries calls the
Tame Death. This is not to say that Aries's system is too broad to have analytical
value; rather, itm eans that in historical terms the continuities and similarities in
attitudes found in eighth- to sixth-century literaturev astly outweigh the elements
of change.
FEAR OF DEATH: MEDIEVAL FRANCE AND ARCHAIC GREECE
Only the first two stages of Aries's history of death concern us here. He calls
these the Tame Death and the Death of the Self. He describes the first as "an
attitude toward death that remained almost unchanged for thousands of years,
an attitude that expressed a naive and spontaneous acceptance of destiny and
nature."'4 It is familiar, "the recognition of an evil inseparable from man."15
Only the mystic welcomes death,'6 but it is not loathed or shunned. Above all,
death was a shared transition: "Death was always public."'7 The Tame Death
produced a characteristic idea of the Good Death, a fate met with composure.
11. Generally, see M. I. Finley, Ancient History: Evidence andM odels (London, 1985).
12. M. Golden, "Did the Ancients Care When Their Children Died?" G&R, n.s., 35 (1988)
152-63.
13. See A. Giddens, The Constitution of Society (Oxford, 1984).
14. Aries (supra n. 1) 29.
15. Ibid. 605.
16. Ibid. 13-14.
17. Ibid. 19.
300 CLASSICAALN TIQUITY Volume 8/No. 2/October 1989
The dying person was forewarned, and had time tom ake farewells, quitting life
with dignity.W hether death was in bed or in battle, the same pattern of accept
ance, goodbyes, and mourning was called for.'8
Aries sees a second model, theD eath of the Self, appearing among intellec
tuals around A.D. 1100. New weight was put on individuality, and on death as a
lonely fate: "Death ceased to be a weighing, a final reckoning, judgement or
repose, and became carrion and corruption; it ceased to be the end of life, the
last breath, and became physical death, suffering and decomposition."'" Aries
explains the psychological change through greater chances for the educated to
achieve upward social mobility, coupled with frequent failure to do so. This led
to a widespread sense of personal failure, which, given the facts of medieval
demography, was blamed on death. Death began to be a hateful individual
doom, cutting off a rewarding life.'2
The Tame Death was still important inE urope in the eighteenth century and
even later, but, Aries adds, "the fact thatw e keep meeting instances of the same
general attitude from Homer to Tolstoi does not mean we should assign it a
structural permanence."2' The Death of the Self displaced the Tame Death
"among the rich, the well educated, and the powerful,"22w hile theT ame Death
lingered on among the peasantry.
Aries has been attacked for his impressionism, but his distinctions between
the Tame Death and later forms and between elite and commoner attitudes are
widely accepted.23 Sourvinou-Inwood uses his great achievement as an analogy
for her model of Greek attitudes:24
In Homer there is one dominant model of attitudes towards death, firmly
rooted in the epic, and then signs of a tentative beginning of a partial
movement away from it. The dominant model is the "familiar" or "tradi
tional" type of attitude toward death, a version of the "Tamed Death"
attitude analysed by Aries.... The new stirrings, by contrast, some of
which are also reflected in eighth-century archaeological evidence, are
the first beginnings of a series of developments which will gain momen
tum in the succeeding, archaic period (c. 700-c. 480) duringw hich we can
18. Ibid. 603.
19. Ibid. 138.
20. Ibid. 137-39.
21. Ibid. 28.
22. Ibid. 138.
23. Aries (ibid., xiii) describes his methods as "intuitive and subjective." See also M. Vovelle,
"Les attitudes devant la mort: Problemes de methode, approches et lectures differentes," Annales
(ESC) 31 (1976) 120-32; D. Ilmer, Zeitschrift fur Historische Forschung 6 (1979) 213-15; J.W haley,
"Introduction," and J. McManners, "Death and the French Historians," inW haley, ed. (supra, n. 1)
1-14, 106-30; A. J. Gurevic, "Au moyen age: Conscience individuelle et image de l'au-dela,"
Annales (ESC) 37 (1982) 255-75. Lawrence Stone (The Past and the Present Revisited [London.
19871 310-27) has suggested that moves away from the Tame Death only began in the sixteenth
century.
24. Sourvinou-Inwood, "To Die" (supra n. 1) 16-17.
MORRIASt:t itudes Toward Death inA rchaic Greece 301
detect a (partial) shift away from familiar acceptance, towards a more
individual, and anxious approach towardo ne's own death-broadly com
parable to the change which occurred in the late [sic]M iddle Ages in
Europe. The changing demographic, socio-economic, political and intel
lectual realities of eighth-century Greece, in interactionw ith each other,
affected the existing system of funerary behaviour, attitudes towards
death, and afterlife beliefs; they initiated a process of change, feedback,
and interactionw ith the interlocking parts of the funerary system (multi
plier effect), and continued to fuel it during the following period.
Comparing Aries' translation with what she saw inG reece, Sourvinou-Inwood
added:25
The similarities, especially that in the basic mentality, the "elementary
syntax" of the model, suggest that certain (general) types of attitude
towardd eath depend on a certain nexus of demographic, socio-economic,
political and "intellectual" conditions, and so characterize certain general
types of society.
I will argue that the complexity of Homeric attitudes is best explained not as the
beginnings of changes, but as part of a general pattern of attitudes that remained
little changed from 800 to 500 B.C. First, though, I will consider Sourvinou
Inwood's causalm odel, which asserts that "the [eighth-century]p opulation explo
sion and the resulting urbanization . . . expanded drastically Greek physical and
mental horizons, and dislocated or destroyed many of the structures on which
the 'familiar'd eath attitudes had
depended."26
DEMOGRAPHY, THE INDIVIDUAL, AND DEATH
Did population growth transform attitudes toward death? Most historians
agree that it could,27 and there was population growth in eighth-century
Greece-according to Snodgrass, at a rate of up to 4 percent per annum at
Athens.28 This would surely have had a profound impact, but it strains demo
graphic plausibility and has a weak evidential base. I am not persuaded that the
known burials represent a constant proportion of the ancient populations.29B ut
even if we do use the graves as a yardstick, major problems remain. The age
25. Ibid. 39.
26. Sourvinou-Inwood, "Trauma" (supra n. 1) 34.
27. The demographic argument ism ade by Chaunu (supra n. 8), although F. Lebrun docu
mented similar changes in attitudes inA njou without population growth in Les hommes devant la
mort a Anjou au XVIle et XVIIIe siecles (Paris, 1971). Vovelle (supra n. 8) tried to balance the
material and the mental.
28. A. M. Snodgrass, Archaeology and the Rise of the Greek State (Cambridge, 1977) 10-18;
Archaic Greece (London, 1980) 18-25; "Two Demographic Notes," in Hagg, ed. (supra n. 1) 167
71.
29. Morris (supra n. 2) 57-155.
302 CLASSICAALN TIQUITY Volume 8/No. 2/October 1989
structure of the cemeteries fluctuates: in Sub-Mycenaean (ca. 1125-1050 B.C.)
and Late Geometric II (735-700), the adult-child ratio isw hat we would expect
in an agrarian society; but in Protogeometric to Late Geometric I (1050-735),
the young are underrepresented, probably being buried in an archaeologically
less visible way.30 This sharply reduces the proposed population growth. The
Late Geometric increasew as also temporary: as Camp points out, if graves show
population growth in the eighth century, theym ust also show a massive decline
in the seventh, which Sourvinou-Inwood's model does not accommodate.31
Settlement evidence does indicate eighth-century growth,32b ut this did not
necessarily have am ajor influence on attitudes towardd eath. Most historians see
the "demographic transition," a sudden decline in birth rates and infantm ortal
ity, as the decisive factor in changing attitudes.33T here is no evidence for such a
transition in antiquity. The fifth-centuryK erameikos cemetery atA thens and the
fourth-century cemetery at Olynthus have typical pre-transition age structures,
with child:adult ratios of 9:10 and 8:10, respectively;34a nd Aristotle remarked
that most deaths occurred in the first week after birth, again a typical pre
transition pattern.35
Sourvinou-Inwood suggests that population growth led to urbanization,
which influenced people's attitudes toward death. But "urbanization" is an inap
propriate concept forA rchaic Greece. Few would put the population of Athens
above five to ten thousand in 700 B.C., or forty thousand in 450 B.C., and most
poleis were very much smaller.36T his level of growth and absolute population
30. Ibid. 57-62.
31. J.M cK. Camp, "A Drought in the Late Eighth Century B.C.,"H esperia 48 (1979) 397-411.
Sourvinou-Inwood ("Trauma" [supra n. 1] 34 n. 5) rejects his interpretation. Iw ould like to thank
Professor Camp for corresponding with me about his theory. I would now modify my critique in
Morris (supra n. 2) 155-67, which oversimplifies the problem, but I am still not persuaded by his
arguments. However, ifw e see an eighth-century increase in graves as an increase in population, his
logic cannot be faulted.
32. Morris (supra n. 2) 156-59.
33. Of the many accounts of the demographic transition, I have found the following the most
useful: E. A. Wrigley, Population and History (London, 1969);C . M. Cipolla, The Economic History
ofW orld Population, 7th ed. (Harmondsworth, 1978); and the comparative evidence of J.C . Caldwell,
P. H. Reddy, and P. Caldwell, The Causes of Demographic Change (Madison,W isc., 1988).
34. J. L. Angel's findings at Olynthus and elsewhere are conveniently summarized inM . D.
Grmek, Diseases in theA ncient Greek World (Baltimore, 1989) 99-103. No equivalent study of the
Kerameikos is available. The actual numbers involved are 445 children and 510 adults, with 54
uncertain cases. The main reports are in AM 81 (1966) 4-135; K. Kiibler, Kerameikos VII.1 (Berlin,
1976); U. Knigge, Kerameikos IX (Berlin, 1976). I discuss some of thism aterial in "Monumental
Burial: The Family and the State in Classical Athens," in D. Charles and J. Thomas, eds.. Monu
ments to theD ead (forthcoming, Cambridge).
35. Ar. HA 7.588a. See M. H.. Hansen, Demography and Democracy (Copenhagen, 1986) 7
13; P. Garnsey, ed., "Food, Health and Culture in Classical Antiquity," Cambridge Faculty of
ClassicsW orking Papers, no. 1 (1989).
36. Morris (supra n. 2) 99-101, with references. M. H. Hansen's revision of the number of fifth
centuryA thenian citizens upwards to 60,000 ("Three Studies inA thenian Demography," Kongelike
Dansk Videnskabernes Selskab, Historisk-filosofiske Meddelelser 56 [1988] 14-28) does not affect this
MORRIASt:t itudes Toward Death inA rchaic Greece 303
size cannot meaningfully be compared with even the medieval situation, and
could in no way have created an "urban anomie" in T6nnies's or Wirth's sense,
undermining the Tame Death.37
Neither the demographic and socioeconomic parts of Sourvinou-Inwood's
"nexus" of conditions nor what she calls the "intellectual realities" provide con
vincing motors for change. The idea of a "rise of the individual" loosening the
bonds of kinship and changing attitudes toward death around 700 depends very
heavily on the contrast in genres between Homer and later poets, and compares
poorly with the rich medieval evidence with which Sourvinou-Inwood draws
another analogy.38 The chain of cause and effect is left unclear in her argument,
and, more important, even in the fourth century the obligations of the ayXLOTEia
inA thenian funeralsw ere very like those of the near kin inH omer.39T here is no
evidence that a rise of the individual disembedded death from its communal
context.40
Sourvinou-Inwood's causal model is not persuasive: the demographic and
intellectual background inA rchaic Greece cannot be said to be sufficiently like
that in high medieval France for us to expect a priori that there might have been
comparable changes in attitudes toward death. Iw ill therefore proceed with the
hypothesis that individual attitudes remained essentially constant. In the next
section, I review the textual evidence. This is consistent with my argument for
changes in ideologies of death but continuity in individual attitudes.
THE POETICS OF DYING
The first and fullest source is the Iliad, the poem of death: 318 heroes, 243 of
them named, get killed.41 But the very abundance of heroic corpses is a problem.
figure. E. Ruschenbusch ("Die Zahl der griechischen Staaten und Arealgrosse und Burgerzahl der
'Normalpolis,' "Z PE 59 [1985] 253-63) puts the "Normalzahl" of citizens at just 133 to 800.
37. See I. Morris, "The Early Polis as City and State," in J. Rich and A. Wallace-Hadrill, eds.,
City and Country in theA ncient World (London, forthcoming). On medieval urbanism, see P. M.
Hohenberg and L. H. Lees, TheM aking of Urban Europe, 1000-1950 (Cambridge,M ass., 1985) 22
105. The classic (although now rathero ld-fashioned) studies of the "urbanm entality" are F. Tonnies,
Community and Association (London, 1955); and L. Wirth, "Urbanism as aW ay of Life," American
Journal of Sociology 44 (1938) 1-24.
38. Sourvinou-Inwood, "Trauma" (supra n. 1) 48 n. 89. On medieval individualism, see G.
Duby and P. Braunstein, "The Emergence of the Individual," inG . Duby, ed., A History of Private
Life II, Revelations of theM edieval World (Cambridge,M ass., 1988) 507-630.
39. Compare the accounts of Homeric funerals by R. Garland, "Geras Thanonton," BICS 29
(1982) 69-80, and by M. Edwards, "The Conventions of a Homeric Funeral," in J. H. Betts, J. T.
Hooker, and J. R. Green, eds., Studies inH onour of T. B. L. Webster (Bristol, 1986) 84-92, with
those of Classical Athens byW . K. Lacey, The Family in Classical Greece (London, 1968) 147-50,
and the remarks throughout S. C. Humphreys' The Family, Women and Death (London, 1983).
Generally, see R. Garland, The Greek Way of Death (London, 1985).
40. The distinctive notion of individual judgment of the dead known in the late sixth century
probably began with Pherecydes of Syros: see M. L. West, Early Greek Philosophy and theO rient
(Oxford, 1971) 255. I dicuss it later in this paper.
41. Counted by S. E. Bassett, The Poetry of Homer (London, 1938) 256 n. 37.
304 CLASSICAALN TIQUITY Volume 8/No. 2/October 1989
The warrior's death was special in Greek literature, and we have to distinguish
between the death of the hero and the deaths of ordinary folk. Looking at the
Song of Roland, Aries saw a contradiction: death in bed in peaceful old age and
violent death in battle were both Good Deaths. He suggested a functional
explanation-"in a society founded on chivalric and military ideals, the stigma
attached to sudden death was not extended to the noble victims of war."42 We
find a similar "double good death" inH omer, but its structure ism ore complex. I
will try to bring this out with a few examples.
In Iliad Book 22, Hector is waiting outside the walls of Troy. Priam calls
down to him to come back inside, for Achilles will surely kill him. In this
moment of crisis, Hector should think not of his own death, but of his father's:43
For a young man all things are seemly, if he falls in battle, lying dead,
pierced by the sharp bronze; yes, all things are beautiful for the dead
man, whatever happens; but when the dogs defile the grey hair, grey
beard, and genitals of an old man who has been killed, this is the most
miserable thing forw retched mortals.
The contrast is strong. Violent death makes Hector beautiful, but it degrades
and defiles Priam. Death fixes the hero in his youthful bloom, and fixes his glory
(xXeos). His &aQoxliaw ill be remembered for generations to come, when they
sing of the fames of men. The hero killed in battle lives on through epic and his
well-marked tomb. Hades is a dismal place far worse than any life,44 but death is
inevitable, and it is this rather than earthly honors that drives the hero to em
brace his doom.45H ere is the essential tension of the heroic condition-the very
awfulness of Hades drives him to death in battle as the only way to survive.4
Through the Good Death in battle, the hero beats fate and becomes almost
immortal by doing just what the immortals never do-dying. Homer calls the
42. Aries (supra n. 1) 12. His approach to the poem is criticized in R. F. Cook, The Sense of
"The Song of Roland" (Ithaca. N.Y., 1987) 141.
43. 11. 22.71-76:
VO, 6E TE aTUVT'E tCEOLXEV,
dQrli'xctiaEVa. 6e6iy?1EVW O6i; XOXtkx
XElCO O(- 6vTaV6TO xXk6t 0av6OVTl JTEQ,6 OTt
-
4)atvt]
(&X' OTE 6ti JTnot6v TV xdctt JtOOt6v TE y?VEtov
(tl6( T' aXioxiV(ool XlVEC XT(LI 01VO0OyE OOVTOCg.
toU TO 6h OiXTILOOV JTk?ETctL6 ELXkOOi pOQ OtlOV.
44. Od. 11.487-91.
45. See esp. II. 12.310-28.
46. J. M. Redfield, Nature and Culture in the Iliad (Chicago, 1975) 30-35; J. Griffin, Homer
On Life and Death (Oxford, 1980) 95-102; J.-P. Vernant, "Death with Two Faces," in S. C.
Humphreys and H. King, eds., Mortality and Immortality (New York, 1981) 285-91; "La belle mort
et le cadavre outrage," in G. Gnoli and J.-P. Vernant, eds., La mort, les morts, dans les societies
anciennes (Cambridge, 1982) 45-76; "nHvta xakx: D'Homere a Simonide," in J. Harmatta, ed.,
Proceedings of the Vllth Congress of the International Federation of the Societies of Classical Studies I
(Budapest, 1984) 167-73.
MORARtItSit:u dTeso warDde athi nA rchaGic reece 305
doomed or dead hero "godlike," at once heightening the audience's awareness of
the hero's victory in death, the frailty of humanity, and the gulf that finally
separates us from the gods.
Let us return to Hector's fightw ith Achilles. The Trojan is speared through
the throat, and his soul speeds away, bewailing its loss of life. Looking to the
Achaeans, Achilles tells them to sing the triumph:47
"We have won great glory; we have killed godlike Hector, to whom the
Trojans in the city pray like a god." And then he did disgraceful things
to godlike Hector.
Godlike Hector ism utilated and dragged round thew alls behind Achilles' char
iot. Thus he wins his xXkog: "If the hero were really god-like, if he were exempt,
as the gods are, from age and death, then he would not be a hero at all."48
This violent and often humiliating Good Death is no poetic whim. The Tame
Death attitudes of the eighth century are used to create an ideology of the
permanence and power of the nobility. Vernant argues that heroic tombs and
poems provided early Greeks with a collective past throughw hich they defined
themselves,49 and Bloch develops the links between the hero's beauty in death
and his permanence as cremated bones:5'
The ideal is . . . for the body to be immediately cremated so that disfigu
ration and decay do not occur. The image of the uncorrupted youth
continues and maintains the undiminished life of the ideal society. The
perfect body is in itself the source of the timelessness of the second side
of the funeral, in that it represents an unchangingly vigorous martial
order of society composed forever of incorruptible heroes.
But what of Priam? His death will not be a good one. He will vanish
utterly and his line will end. For an old man, a violent death is no Good
Death. In this case, it comes in the sack of a city, not on a battlefield; it
creates no timeless past; it is simply degrading. Women and old men should
die peacefully in bed, resigned to fate, well mourned. Children should not die
at all. Only immortal xXeog gives the hero cause to die young. Griffin echoes
47. II. 22.393-95:
"rdl.Etc-a aneya xvbog- ej:e4voEav "EXTooCx 6Fov.
,XT QCoEC xaTa aoTv 6eTOC 5 EUXEToO)VTO."
i1e a, xci "ExToQa 6rov &etLXa jI6ltTo Eiya.
On &etxea, see Griffin (supra n. 46) 85 n. 9.
48. Griffin (supra n. 46) 92-93.
49. Vernant (supra n. 46).
50. Bloch (supra n. 3) 228. Vernant also links this process with the sacrifice of animals-see
particularly "Sacrificial and Alimentary Codes inH esiod's Myth of Prometheus," inR . L. Gordon,
ed., Myth, Religion and Society (Cambridge, 1981) 77; andW . Burkert, Homo Necans (Berkeley and
Los Angeles, 1983) 48-58.