Greek Way of Dying

Εἰκὼν ἡ λίθος / εἰμί. τίθησί με / Σεικίλος ἔνθα / μνήμης ἀθανάτου / σῆμα πολυχρόνιον

“I am an image and a stone; Seikilos sets me up here as a long-lasting marker of undying memory.” (Seikilos epitaph, translated by Armand D’Angour)

Memorializing the Dead

Dated to around the second century AD, the commonly-called ‘Seikilos Epitaph’ demonstrates the aspiration for (and achievement of) immortality in the form of monumentation. While we do not know who Seikilos was, his memory survives in oral, aural, and physical memorial. Seikilos’ marble column tells us, the viewer, of its purpose, and afterwards, it invites the reader to participate in a musically notated song:

ὅσον ζῇς, φαίνου / μηδὲν ὅλως σὺ λυποῦ / πρὸς ὀλίγον ἔστι τὸ ζῆν / τὸ τέλος ὁ χρόνος ἀπαιτεῖ.

(“While you live, shine bright: Don’t let sorrow you benight; We don’t have life for long my friend: To everything time demands an end,” translation from D’Angour). 

While the clear, epigraphic invitation to lament alongside the stele is a common feature in Greek memorials, many funerary reliefs invited participants to mourn through their depiction of the dead surrounded by mourning figures. Scenes of touch in these reliefs may likewise have encouraged the living to actively participate in the scene of grief by touching the very reliefs of their now-deceased family and friends.

Further Readings

• Armand D’Angour, “The Song of Seikilos: A Musically Noted Ancient Greek Poem,” Antigone Journal (2021). 
• Nathan Arrington, “Touch and Remembrance in Greek Funerary Art,” The Art Bulletin 100, no. 3 (2018): 7-27.
• Seth Estrin, Grief Made Marble: Funerary Sculpture in Classical Athens (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023). 

Note on the music: Read more about the Seikilos epitaph here. 

Tragic Death

Death abounds and shapes Greek Tragedy.  Omens and symbols throughout the performance, such as the red carpet in Agamemnon, warned the audience and characters alike of their foreordained demise. While the dying did not usually occur on stage, as often a messenger delivered the news to the surviving kin, tragedies provided space for family and loved ones to grieve. Witnesses, be they the audience or the actual actors, observed the dramatic suffering and sacrifice of the characters. In the fragmentary excerpts of Sophocles’ Eurypylus, in which the titular character dies in a duel, his mother Astyoche performs a crushing lamentation. Her moans of oioi oioi are answered in kind by the Chorus, the two joining together in a rhythmic kommos (a kind of poetic composition) for the dead. Surviving papyri fragments of tragedies such Carcinus’ Medea, Euripides’ Orestes and Iphigeneia in Aulis, and Sophocles’ Achilleus and Ajax all include musical notation, indicating the clear function of music for mourning. 

Performing Death Rituals

While the soul and image of the dead descend into Hades at the moment of their demise, the bodily remains retain the now-decaying strength and faculties of the individual. Those around them—their kin, friends, and loved ones—are held responsible by the gods to arrange a proper burial. In a ceremony called the prothesis, the kin (usually female family members) cleaned, clothed, adorned, and laid out the body for public observance. In the succeeding ekphora, the entourage of the mourning processed to the tomb with their dearly departed. Finally, in the deposition, the living (often) cremated the dead, then placing the ashes in an urn, rested it within the tomb alongside offerings of food, water, and oil. The wealthiest of the living may have even been entombed with their treasures from life: Gold coins and tokens, ornate jewelry, beloved personal items, fabulous garments, and beautifying cosmetics. The living mourned, and while they resumed their lives in time, they returned to leave offerings or requests (through inscribed magical tablets) to the dead. 

Further Readings

• Leyla Ozbek, “Shattered Mothers (and Relatives): Representing Maternal Grief and Responsibility in Greek Tragic Fragments,” SCO 65 (2019): 53-70.
• M. L. West, “A New Musical Papyrus: Carcinus, ‘Medea,'” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 161 (2007): 1-10.
• Robert Garland, The Greek Way of Death (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985). 
• Sorana-Christina Man, Instance of Death in Greek Tragedy (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2020).

Note on the music: P. Berlin 6870/DAGM 17, a papyrus fragment housed in Berlin, contains a fragment from Sophocles’ Ajax (with musical notation). The Hellenistic tragic fragment contains dialogue of Tecmessa and the Chorus of women crying aloud about Ajax’s suicide. More information is available in Egert Pohlmann and Martin L. West (eds.), Documents of Ancient Greek Music: The Extant Melodies and Fragments (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), 56-60.

Death and Rebirth/Descent and Ascent

In the Greek traditions, the dead were believed to inhabit Hades. In the Hellenistic and Roman periods, however, many people across the Mediterranean participated in local, religious temples (called Mystery Cults), which sometimes included variant philosophies of death. Individuals would be inducted into the rites of a particular tradition. For instance, some praised the Egyptian goddess Isis and her counterpart Osiris, both of whom are tied to resurrection mythologies; others celebrated Demeter and Persephone as part of the Eleusinian Mysteries at sanctuaries across Greece; others still worshiped at the altar to ‘orphic’ deities, singing hymns to Orpheus, Dionysus-Zagreus, and chthonic deities who have their own resurrection mythos. One such incantation, recorded on a small lamella, offers a dialogue between an initiate of the cult and a sacred spring of the underworld. Those faithful in the Orphic Mysteries believed in the reincarnation of the soul—something which likewise appears in Platonic philosophy. Just as Orpheus descended and ascended from Hades, and just as Zagreus died and was reborn as the god Dionysus, so too shall did believers pray to be reborn into this world. 

A gold foil amuletic prayer part of the Orphic mystery rituals. From the fourth century BC. J. Paul Getty Museum (75.AM.19).

ΔΙΨΑΙΑΥΟΣΕΓΩΚΑΠΟΛΛΥΜΑΙ ΑΛΛΑΠΙΕΜΟΥΚΡΑΝΑΣΑΙΕΙΡΟΩ ΕΠΙΔΕΞΙΑΛΕΥΚΗΚΥΠΑΡΙΣΣΟΣ ΤΙΣΔΕΣΙΠΩΔΕΣΙΓΑΣΥΙΟΣΕΙΜΙ ΚΑΙΟΥΡΑΝΟΥΑΣΤΕΡΟΕΝΤΟΣ ΑΥΤΑΡΕΜΟΙΓΕΝΟΣΟΥΡΑΝΙΟΝ

(Initiate): I am parched with thirst and perishing!
(Spring): Then come drink of me, the Ever-Flowing Spring. On the right there is a bright cypress. Who are you? Where are you from?
(Initiate): I am the son of Earth and Starry Heaven. But my race is heavenly.
Translation from the Getty Museum’s entry on the Lamella Orphica. Listen below for a recitation of the ritual procedure, provided by the Getty. 

Further Readings

• Maarten Schmaal, “To Descend into Oblivion: The Landscape of the Underworld, Identity, and Escape from Reincarnation in the Orphic Tablets,” The Journal of Greco-Roman Studies 62, no. 3 (2023): 67-85. 
• Robert Turcan, The Cults of the Roman Empire, trans. Antonia Nevill (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996). 

Note on the music: Michael Levy is a renowned lyre musician who composed songs rooted in ancient tradition. While in this particular piece, Levy operates in the Hypodorian Mode, he has likewise composed music based on ancient Near Eastern, Egyptian, Roman, and other traditions.