Table Of ContentRestless 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.
