The Greek Way of Death
Robert Garland1985

This book describes the extensive and elaborate funerary ritual performed by the Greeks for their dead from the time of Homer to the fourth century BC. It is an attempt to re-live the texture of feelings produced in the living by the dead as, moment by moment, the two shifted their ground in relation to one another. Death, it is argued, was viewed by the Greeks not as an instantaneous event but rather as a process of passage, which required strenuous efforts on the part of the living for the dead to achieve full and final transfer to the next world. The beliefs of ordinary Greeks towards their ordinary dead are the chief concern, but detailed consideration is given also to "special dead" such as the unburied, murderers and their victims, children and suicides. Emphasis is placed on the close and enduring ties between the worlds of the living and the dead, a relationship that was essentially reciprocal.

Titre original : The Greek Way of Death (1985)