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Liber X · Greek Mythology

Liber X · Greek Mythology · Chapter IX: The Underworld & the Afterlife

Greek Burial, the Dead and Hero Cults in Ancient Greece

Ancient Greek burial customs and hero cults: funeral rites, laments, offerings to the dead, the Odyssey's nekyia, oracles of the dead and the cult of heroes.

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Ancient Greeks believed that the dead needed proper burial and continuing care from the living, and they marked death with a sequence of rites: the laying out of the body, the funeral procession, burial or cremation, and offerings at the tomb on fixed days afterwards. Beyond the ordinary dead stood the heroes, mighty men and women of the past whose tombs became shrines and who were worshipped as protectors of a city or a land. Myth, tragedy and a few real "oracles of the dead" show that the Greeks also imagined, and sometimes attempted, conversation with the dead.

Ancient Greek Funeral Rites: Prothesis, Ekphora and Burial§

The best evidence comes from Athens, from laws, vase paintings and the excavated graves of the Kerameikos cemetery. When someone died, the women of the household closed the eyes and mouth, washed and anointed the body, dressed it in clean clothes, crowned it with a wreath and laid it on a bier. This was the prothesis, the lying in state, usually at home for a day. Relatives gathered to lament: the formal song of mourning (thrēnos) and the more personal wailing (goos), with women tearing their hair, beating their breasts and scratching their cheeks. Great Geometric vases from the Dipylon cemetery (c. 750 BCE) show this scene, the dead on the bier amid mourners with hands raised to their heads.

The ekphora, the procession to the grave, set out before dawn. The body was either buried or cremated and the ashes placed in an urn; both customs were practised side by side, with changing fashions between periods and regions. Grave goods, often oil flasks, vessels and personal objects, accompanied the dead, and a marker was set over the grave: in Archaic Attica a great vase or a sculpted kouros, in Classical Athens a carved relief stele showing the dead in a quiet family scene. A coin was sometimes placed with the body for the ferryman, a custom discussed in Hades and the Greek underworld.

Death brought pollution (miasma) on the house, marked by a vessel of water outside the door for those leaving to purify themselves. After the burial came a funeral meal (perideipnon), and offerings were made at the tomb on the third, ninth and thirtieth days, with annual commemorations afterwards. According to Plutarch, the Athenian lawgiver Solon limited the expense of funerals and the violence of women's lamentation.

Why Burial Mattered: Elpenor, Patroclus and Antigone§

Greek literature presents burial as a duty owed by the living and a need of the dead. In the Iliad, the ghost of Patroclus appears to Achilles in a dream and begs to be buried quickly so that he may pass the gates of Hades, and Achilles honours him with a vast pyre and funeral games (book 23). The poem ends with the burial of Hector. In the Odyssey, the young sailor Elpenor, who fell from Circe's roof and was left unburied, is the first shade Odysseus meets, and he asks for a mound and his oar to mark it.

Sophocles' Antigone (c. 441 BCE) turns the duty into a conflict of laws. Antigone buries her brother Polynices, declared a traitor and left for the dogs and birds by the king's decree, appealing to the unwritten laws of the gods. Where a body was lost at sea, an empty tomb, a cenotaph, was raised instead.

Offerings to the Dead and the Festivals of Ghosts§

Care for the dead did not end at the funeral. Families brought libations (choai) of water, milk, honey, wine or oil and poured them into the ground at the tomb, together with cakes, ribbons and locks of hair; Aeschylus' Libation Bearers (458 BCE) opens with Orestes and Electra bringing such offerings to the grave of Agamemnon. Athenian white-ground oil flasks (lekythoi) often show women bringing such offerings to a tomb.

The dead could also return. At the Anthesteria, the Athenian spring festival of new wine, one day was believed to bring the spirits of the dead, or the kēres, among the living. People chewed buckthorn leaves and smeared their doors with pitch for protection, and at the end of the festival the spirits were sent off with a formula telling them that the Anthesteria was over. The dangerous dead, the restless souls of those who died too young, by violence or unburied, were thought to wander in the following of Hecate, and it was to such restless dead that many lead curse tablets were later entrusted.

The Nekyia: Calling Up the Dead in the Odyssey§

The nekyia ("rite of the dead") of Odyssey book 11 (see the wanderings of Odysseus) is the earliest and most influential Greek account of contact with the dead. On Circe's instructions Odysseus sails to the edge of the world, digs a pit, pours libations and sacrifices sheep; the shades gather, but they can recognise him and speak only after drinking the blood. He consults the prophet Tiresias about his return home, speaks with his mother Anticleia, who explains that the dead have no sinews, flesh or bones but flit away like a shadow or a dream, and then meets the heroes of Troy, including Agamemnon and Achilles.

Scholars debate whether Odysseus visits the underworld or raises the dead at its edge; the text seems to combine both pictures. In Aeschylus' Persians (472 BCE) the chorus and the queen raise the ghost of the Persian king Darius from his tomb, and Aeschylus also wrote a lost play called the Psychagogoi ("Soul-Raisers").

Oracles of the Dead and Greek Necromancy§

Several places in the Greek world were known as nekyomanteia or psychomanteia, oracles where the dead could be consulted. The most famous stood by the river Acheron in Thesprotia, north-west Greece. Herodotus tells how Periander, tyrant of Corinth, sent messengers there to ask his dead wife Melissa where she had hidden a stranger's deposit. Her ghost refused to answer because she was cold and naked, the clothes buried with her not having been burned for her use; Periander had the women of Corinth strip off their finery and burned it for her, and she then answered. Other oracles of the dead were reported at Cape Taenarum, at Heraclea Pontica on the Black Sea and at Lake Avernus in Italy.

In 1958 the archaeologist Sotirios Dakaris began excavating a complex at Mesopotamos near the Acheron that he identified as the oracle of the dead, with corridors and an underground vaulted chamber. Later scholars have argued that the building is more probably a fortified Hellenistic farmhouse, and its identification remains disputed. Greek writers also mention goētes and psychagōgoi, specialists said to raise or lay ghosts; the Spartans reportedly brought such men from Italy to placate the ghost of their regent Pausanias. Plato's Laws proposes severe penalties for those who claim to lead the souls of the dead. As with biblical necromancy and its medieval successor, this is the history of a belief and its regulation, not a guide to any practice.

Hero Cults: Worshipping the Mighty Dead§

A Greek hero (hērōs) was not simply a brave person but a powerful dead man or, less often, woman who received cult at a tomb and could help or harm the living. From the late eighth century BCE, offerings begin to appear at Bronze Age tombs in Attica, the Argolid and Messenia, as if newcomers were honouring unknown ancestors of the land. Some archaeologists link this tomb cult to the spread of Homeric epic, others to communities claiming land and identity as the city-state took shape; the debate is unresolved.

Hero cult took many forms. Heroes received offerings at a low hearth-altar, sometimes with blood poured into a pit, and older scholarship sharply contrasted this "chthonic" ritual with sacrifice to the Olympians; more recent studies, notably by Gunnel Ekroth, have shown that worshippers often feasted at hero shrines just as at other sacrifices. Cities competed for heroes' bones. Herodotus tells how Sparta, on the advice of Delphi, recovered the bones of Orestes from Tegea, and Plutarch how the Athenian general Cimon brought home bones identified as those of Theseus from Skyros around 475 BCE. Founders of colonies were honoured as heroes after death, and the Spartan commander Brasidas was given heroic honours at Amphipolis in 422 BCE.

Heroes could also be dangerous. Pausanias tells of Cleomedes of Astypalaea, a boxer who killed his opponent, pulled down a schoolhouse roof on the children inside and then vanished; Delphi ordered him honoured as a hero. Great figures such as Heracles stood on the border between hero and god. The relationship between hero cult, the Olympian gods and the mysteries is surveyed in Greek religion and the mysteries, and the hopes of some initiates for a better afterlife in the Orphic gold tablets.

Frequently asked questions§

Did the ancient Greeks bury or cremate their dead?§

Both. Inhumation and cremation were practised side by side, and the preferred custom changed from period to period and place to place; Homer's heroes are cremated, while many Classical Athenians were buried.

What is a nekyia?§

A nekyia is a rite or scene of calling up the dead to question them. The term is used above all for book 11 of the Odyssey, in which Odysseus consults the seer Tiresias and meets the shades of his mother and the heroes of Troy.

What was a Greek hero cult?§

It was the worship of a powerful dead person at a tomb or shrine, called a heroon. Heroes were believed to protect, or sometimes to punish, the community that honoured them, and cities valued their bones as sacred possessions.

Where was the Greek oracle of the dead?§

The best known was by the river Acheron in Thesprotia, north-west Greece, which Herodotus mentions in the story of Periander. Others were reported at Cape Taenarum, Heraclea Pontica and Lake Avernus in Italy.

Sources and further reading§