Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [127]
Later in Greco-Roman culture, corpses were buried in tombs in a sarcophagos (literally: “flesh-eater”) until their flesh decayed. Then, the bones could be collected and placed in an ossuary, often of exquisite design. This process is called “secondary burial” and was practiced in Israel as well. Secondary burial in the form of disinterrment can still be found in England today, where charnel houses are used for depositing the collected bones of the dead. This makes possible the reuse of valuable churchyard plots. So too, in ancient Greece and in Hellenistic Israel, sarcophagi would be reused after the bones were gathered.
Personal depictions of the dead were quite frequent in affluent memorials, some with evocative poses of the person’s characteristic habits. For example, a girl could be pictured with her pet dove, as in the beautiful memorial stone on display at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City.
Some possible hints of more pleasures awaiting the dead can be found in sarcophagus art. In certain Mycenaean tombs one finds depictions of a judgment scene with a scale, a psychostasia (weighing of souls), as well as butterflies, a symbol of the goddess Psyche and who is, in turn, the emblem and namesake of the soul.14 But it is hard to know exactly how to evaluate these depictions since, in the Iliad, Zeus is represented as weighing the fates of Achilles and Hector at their earthly combat.15 The parallel between the two actions-judgment during life and after death-suggests that we grow to understand our roles in life not only directly but also indirectly, by considering our ultimate ends and what our lives will be like when continued beyond the grave.
Graves and tombs were also the location of offerings to the dead. Like those of the Mesopotamians and Canaanites, tombs and graves, especially in the Hellenistic period, could be fitted with sophisticated plumbing pipes for periodic libations delivered to the remains.16 When the bones or ashes were laid to rest in buried urns, the pipes conveyed the gifts into the urns.
Hades: The Location of the Dead
THE DOMINANT explanation for the location of the dead in the Homeric period was already the dark, underground kingdom of the god variously called Hades, Pluto, or Radamanthys. Later, the picture became more detailed: The dead were depicted as migrating, with Hermes as a guide, on a journey in which they encounter Cerberus the three-headed watchdog and pay their coins to Charon the ferryman to cross the river Styx. Small coins called obols were frequently placed in the corpse’s mouth before the funeral to cover the ferry costs. The Homeric view of Hades was less articulated than these later familiar portraits but it was certainly part of later Greek notions and, what is more, quite close to the many other ancient views of the abode of the dead that we have seen in the ancient Near East.
In Homer’s writing, Hades is merely where a soul (psychō) goes when its body dies. Besides the famous cases of Tantalus, Tityus, and Sisyphos and a handful of others, there are no real attempts to make Hades into a place of punishment or reward for a life deficient in happiness or virtue. Retributive justice was not the real function of Hades. Possibly, Hades was seen as punishment for all the dead for reckless behavior, as John Garland suggests.17 But the Greeks apparently concluded that since death comes to all, Hades was the final destination for all.
One sure thing is, except for the specially treated mythical characters like Tantalus and Sisyphus, the virtuous and the sinners all lead the same life in Hades. The dead are weak and very much in the dark. Hades is a gloomy and very remote place, even though the sun visits it at night. As Odysseus’ journey underground shows, souls need the living to provide blood libations in order to even materialize partially and, most of all, for information about the world of the living. Unlike Patroklus and the dead in the ancient Near East, who are prescient and can be consulted for divination, the Greek shades live in “that distant