The Greek way of death
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
The Greek way of death
(Bristol classical paperbacks)
Bristol Classical Press, 2001
2nd ed
Available at 1 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
First published 1985 by Gerald Duckworth
Bibliography: p. [172]-187
Includes indexes
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Hardly any aspect of Greek culture, of its religious and philosophical bases, proves as revealing as its way of confronting human mortality and its observances in relation to the dead. Using both historical and anthropological approaches and sources, both visual and written, Garland describes the extensive and elaborate funerary rituals performed by the Greeks for their dead from the time of Homer to the fourth century BC. The book attempts to revive and re-live the complex texture of feelings provoked in the living by the dead as, moment by moment, the two shifted their ground in relation to one another. Death for the Greeks was not an instantaneous event, rather a process or passage which required strenuous efforts on the part of the living to ensure that the dead achieved full and final transfer to the next world. The central questions which this book attempts to answer are: the extent to which death was a preoccupying concern among the Greeks; the feelings with which the individual may have anticipated his death; the nature of the bonds between the living and the dead; and the light shed by burial practices upon characteristic elements of Greek society.
While the beliefs of ordinary Greeks about their ordinary dead from the book's central focus, there is also a chapter on "special dead" - the unburied, murderers and their victims, children and suicides.
by "Nielsen BookData"