Restless Dead: Encounters between the Living and the Dead in Ancient Greece PDF
Preview Restless Dead: Encounters between the Living and the Dead in Ancient Greece
Restless Dead Encounters Between the Living and the Dead in Ancient Greece SARAH ILES JOHNSTON UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley Los Angeles • London University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London; England © 1999 by the Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Johnston~S arah Uesj1 9 ;7- RestJess dead: encounters between the living and the dead in ancient Greece/ Sarah Ues Johnston. p+ cm. Inc.ludes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-520-21707-2 (alk. paper) 1. Ghosts-Greece-History. 2. Greece Religion. I. Tide. Bf147:i.G8J64 1999 133.r'09;8-dc21 98-44:;65 C[P .Nian ufactured in the United States of America IT IO 09 12 II IO 9 8 7 6 5 4 The paper used in this pubHcation meets the rnini mum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.4-8-r992 (R 1997) (Penna11enceo f Paper}.@> For Carole E. Newlands, in friendship and admiration. Contents Prologue Acknowledgments xv Frequently Used Terms XVl+l. . Abbreviations XXI PART I. A SHORT HISTORY OF THE DEAD IN ANCIENT GREECE 1. Elpenor and Others: Narrative Descriptions of the Dead 3 .z. To Honor and Avert: Rituals Addressed to the Dead 3. Magical Solutions to Deadly Problems: The Origin and Roles of the Goes PART II. RESTLESS DEAD 4. The Unavenged: Dealing with Those Who Die Violently 127 . VI Contents 5. Childless Mothers and Blighted Virgins: Female Ghosts and Their Victims 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 Sernnai Theai Bibliography 289 General Index 309 Index Locorum Texts 315 Inscriptions 329 Prologue The Corinthian tyrant Periander sent his henchmen to the oracle of the dead to ask where he had lost something. The ghost of Periander's dead ,vife, Melissa, was conjured up but she refused to tell them where the object was because she was cold and naked-she said that the clothes buried with her were useless because they had not been burnt prop erly. To prove who she was, she told the men to tell Periander that he had put his bread into a cold oven. This convinced Periander" who knew that he had made love to Melissa's corpse after she died+ Periander immediately ordered every woman in Corinth to assemble at the temple of Hera. They all came wearing their best clothes, assuming there was going to be a festival. Periander then told his guards to srrip the women naked and burn their clothes in a pit while he prayed to Melissa. Then Melissa'"s ghost told him where the missing object was. So goes one of our oldest ghost stories. 1 The Greek historian Herodotus tells it to illustrate the moral flaws of a tyrant: to serve his own purposes, Periander was willing to rob and humiliate all the women in Corinth,, to say nothing of indulging in necrophilia. But at the same time, Herodotus provides a textbook example of how relations between the living and the dead were supposed to work. We learn from the story that the dead de mand proper funerals, which ought to include gifts that they can use in the afterlife. This afterlife must be similar to life itself, considering that clothing is de rigeur~ The living, for their part, can expect the dead,s co operation, so long as they keep the dead happy. Transactions between the living and the dead can take place on home territory (Periander burns the clothing in Corinth), but special deals may be negotiated at a place such as the oracle of the dead, under the guidance of experts. Even then, t. Hdt. 5 +9117s, lightly adapted. ,. vu .. , Prologue VIU one can't be too careful: to be sure that the ghost who appears is really the right ghost, one ought to have some sort of proof. Melissa's proof not only reveals Periander'"s personal proclivities but shows that she knows what has been happening in the upper world since she died, as does her knowledge of where Periander'"s lost object can be found. Fi nally, the story shows that dealing with the dead may become a civic concern even if their anger is caused by the act of a single citizen .. It was Periander's failure to send Melissa to Hades with the proper wardrobe that made her mad, but it requires contributions from the whole female population to bring her around. We find each of these ideas in other ancient Greek sources as well, but it is their assemblage that n1akes Herodotus's story fascinating, for it presents a paradox: it acknowledges that a person who once ate and drank and laughed with the rest of us is gone, but it also reflects the vigor with which she continues to inhabit the world of those who knew her. Because the dead remain part of our mental and emotional lives long after they cease to dwell beside us physically, it is easy to assume that they are simply carrying on their existence elsewhere and might oc casionally come back to visit us. From this assumption arise a variety of hopes and fears~ Hopes that the dead may aid the living, by revealing hidden information? by bringing illness to enemies, and by a variety of other favors-even by simply visiting those whom they have left behind: "by wandering into my dreams you may bring me joy," Admetus says to his wife, Alcestis, as she lies dying, expressing hope that their love will survive death. 2 Fears that the dead may somehow punish the living for the injuries or neglect they suffered,,b y bringing illness, by causing night mares, or simply by refusing to cooperate when needed, as Melissa did .. The dead are very much like us, driven by the same desires, fears, and angers, seeking the same sorts of rewards and requiring the same sort of care that we do. For this reason, the world of the dead is not only a source of both possible danger and possible help, but a mirror chat re flects our own. The reflection is frequently a distorted one, to be sure: the dead are often credited with remarkable powers, and thus manifest their desires, fears, and angers in ways that go beyond any available to us" But the distortion is not random: through their excesses, the dead re veal, like E.ngerprint powder shaken over a table, where desires., fears, and angers are most acute among the living. 2. E. Ale. 354-55+ Prologue !' X Every detail in which a culture cloaks its ideas about the dead has the potential to reveal something about the living. The types of misfortune that a culture traces to the anger of the dead often reveal what that cu] ture fears losing-and correspondingly values-the most, for blaming the dead can be a way of avoiding other explanations that would chal lenge the culture's social coherence or theodicy. If one were to blame the death of one's child on the witchcraft of one's neighbor, for instance, the relationship between one"s own family and the family of the neighbor might be irreparably damaged. If one were to blame it on divine wrath, one would be forced to acknowledge either that one deserved to lose the child or that divinity was morally fickle. .T racing the child's death to the angry dead avoids all of these problems: the dead serve as convenient scapegoats, shouldering burdens of blame too heavy for other agents to carry. To take another example, many cultures believe that death under certain circumstances or before certain milestones of life have been passed will condemn the soul to become a restless ghost. Studying the conditions that produce these ghosts offers insight into what the culture considers, conversely, to constitute a full life and a good death. The models that I have just sketched will be familiar to many reade[s because they are taken from well-known studies published earlier in this century. Anthropologists who did fieldwork with tribal cultures at that time recognized the contribution that analysis of mortuary rituals and eschatological beliefs could make toward constructing a picture of the way that those cultures worked; scholars of other cultures eventually be gan to apply these models to their own materials as welL3 There have been few attempts to apply them to materials from ancient Greece, how• ever .. This is all the more unfortunate because Greek literature abounds with incidents in which the Jiving and the dead interact. Already in the Iliad and the Odyssey, ghosts appear to complain of poor treatment and demand that the living help them; tragedy, that most Greek of literary genres, frequently focuses on the dead, their problems, and the obliga tions that the living bear toward them. Students of Greek culture and literature have much to learn from the dead and yet have virtually ig nored them. I suspect that this neglect is due to a deep-rooted reluctance to accept the idea that the Greeks believed in the possibility of anything so «irra- 3. For a review of some of the most prominent workst see Metcalf and Huntington, esp. the introduction and eh. I. X Prologue tional ,, as interaction between the Hving and the dead. This reluctance may seem remarkable, given that substantial advances have been made toward acknowledging and understanding other manifestations of sup posed irrationality among the Greeks: the study of Greek magic, most notably, has attracted considerable interest in recent years. But, if one so chooses, magic can be presented as a technology, as sornething ap proaching our own concept of an ~'applied science," pace James Frazer. After aU, it works by certain rules that our ancient sources claim have been "tested" and can be passed from teacher to student. Indeed, the very fact that there are teachers and students lends magic the look of a seri ous discipline. Moreover, magic is intensely concerned with power: the power of the magician over those whom he enchants and his power to persuade or compel deities and daimones to work his spe11s.A nd power in aU of its incarnations and from all angles-who wields it, who sub mits to it, and why-is a topic that has always found a respectable place in classical studies+ The possibility that the Greeks believed that the dead and the living might interact, in contrast, has seldom even been entertained. A. D .. Nock, an eminent historian of Greek religion of the generation previous to our own, confidently declared that «The Greeks were not dominated by any fear of ghosts" and described their religion as one of ''joyous festivals." 4 Sjmilarly, although Martin P. . Nilsson-probably the single most influential scholar of Greek religion ever-conceded that the Greeks belieYed in such things as the return of the dead, he did so only with regret: The general opinion is that the Greeks of the classical age were happily free from superstition. I am sorry that I am obliged to refute this opinion. There was a great deal of superstition in Greece, even when Greek culture was at its height and even in the center of that cuh:urc\ Athens. Superstition is very sel dom mentioned in the literature of the period simply because great writers found such base things not worth mentioning45 We note how carefuUy Nilsson has distanced such beliefs from great (o ne suspects he really means "intelligent'') 1ninds. 4. Fro1n A. D. Nock~ ''The Cult of Heroes, H,"' originally published in HThR 3 7 ( I 944}; rpt+ in Nock, 57 5-602.; quotation from p. ; 82. Nock does. concede, in a footnote to the portion quoted, that the Greeks were not completely free of the fear of ghosts,. ei dier, but the do1ninanl' tone of the discussion is that of the •'joyous festivaJ."" 5 + Nilsson 1940, 1 r T.
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