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for her husband and was offered resurrection to finish out her natural life. She was the subject of Euripedes’s famous drama. The first Greek casuality of the Trojan War, Protesilaus, was revivified to give a good example both to soldiers and good hope for loyal soldiers’ wives. All of these are legends turned to literature and more like resuscitations than actual resurrections because they do not live longer than their natural lives.

Both in the Hellenistic and Roman world, rulers eventually began to identify themselves with the gods, in some sense saying that their lives would emulate those of the heroes and achieve transcendent importance. We see this in the architecture of the great tombs, which came more and more to be modelled on temples, devoted to narrating the great deeds of the deceased as a hero. The Mausoleum, which enclosed the body of King Maussollos (ruled Caria from 377-353 BCE) of Halicarnassus (near Bodrum) and was accounted one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, is the most famous of these structures. It may not be the clearest example of a tomb emulating the architecture of a temple, except in its size and prominence in the city; but it may serve as the parade example of an ordinary ruler claiming heroic honors in death by erecting a monumental building to his memory.

The Afterlife in Orphic Myth and Pythagorean Philosophy

ARISTOTLE tells us (De anima, 410b, 28) that the Orphics taught that the soul enters the body from “the whole or the all” (to holon) as one breathes. After one dies, the soul abides in the upper atmosphere, as we learn from an inscription concerning the Athenians who perished at Potidea in 432 BCE: “The aether has received their souls, but their bo[dies the earth.]”32 The Orphics are still a very complex, scholarly mystery. Some doubt that Orphism is a real religion, considering it something of an ancient fraud. Others say it was early and profoundly influential.33 There are evidences of thiasoi, voluntary associations, which were devoted to Orphism. Still, that term may be misleading, as both Jewish synagogues and Christian churches were perceived as thiasoi in the Roman Empire because they neither met in temples nor sacrificed but instead met for instruction, discussion, and common meals. Evidently, Orphism could be construed as the latter, rather like Judaism and Christianity.

The Orphics took their cue from the famous story of Orpheus, the lyre player of Thrace, who went down to Hades to bring back his dead wife Eurydice. He lost her again because he turned to look at her just before he exited Hades, whereupon she vanished forever. Originally the story was about human being’s inability to defeat death, and so we must be satisfied with beautiful lamentation, perhaps yet again reminding us of the value of commemoration for the expression of grief and its conclusion. The Orphics appear to have believed that they were to live in the moral purities taught by the group, and that there were special techniques for climbing to heaven after death, even if it had to be after many reincarnations.

The Orphics apparently believed that human beings were punished for each life before being reincarnated.34 They placed gold leaves in the graves of the departed to help them through the various parts of the process:

Out of the pure I come, pure queen of them below,

And Eukles and Eubouleus, and other Gods and Daemons:

For I also avow me that I am of your blessed race

And I have paid the penalty for deeds unrighteous,

Whether it be that fate laid me low or the Gods immortal

• • •

I have flown out of the sorrowful weary Wheel;

I have passed with eager feet to the circle desired;

I have sunk beneath the bosom of Despoina, Queen of the

Underworld.

And now I come a suppliant of Holy Phersephoneia

That of her grace she receive me to the seats of the

Hallowed-

Happy and Blessed One, thou shalt be God instead of

mortal.35

The end of the poem promises that the deceased will be deified. The progress of the apotheosis suggests that they ascended to heaven to claim their divine status,