I first became fascinated by death when I was 8 and my mummy took me to the British Museum to look at the mummies. When, at a slightly older age, I began to study death and the ancient world what struck me most, despite many fascinating cultural variants, was the uniformity, and limitation of the human imagination over the millennia vis-à-vis what to expect when we’re gone.
The COVID pandemic and its aftermath have killed more than 1,220,000 people in the U.S. alone, and this has made everybody more aware of death’s omnipresence. But in the ancient world, you needed no such wake-up call. Your chances of celebrating your first birthday weren’t much better than two in three. If you survived and were male, you could perhaps expect to reach your mid-40s. If you were female, your life expectancy dropped to your mid- to late 30s. A birthing mother’s odds of surviving labor were grim. “I’d rather fight in battle three times than give birth once,” says Medea, in the play by Euripides.
Big killers of the ancient world were bronchitis, gastroenteritis, tuberculosis, malaria and cholera, which affected people of all social status. Plague was a regular seasonal visitor, sometimes carrying off as much as a third of the population. Floods washed away entire settlements, and fire was an ever-present hazard. Earthquakes, too, took a very heavy toll. The Roman poet Horace’s advice to “seize the day” — carpe diem —could not have been more fitting.
Today, people have the option of dying in a hospital or in a hospice . But there was nothing remotely comparable to professional, institution-based palliative care in antiquity. If you didn’t die in war or at sea, you breathed your last in the bosom of your family.
And except in Egypt and Rome, where the death industry was lively, undertakers were virtually unknown. Instead, the family, women especially, took care of the dead, washing and clothing the corpse in a shroud and preparing it for viewing in the home. Perhaps because of these intimacies, the funeral itself was anything but the solemn and muted affair it tends to be in our culture. Men and women beat their heads and breasts, poured dust on their hair, tore their clothing, rolled on the ground and bewailed their loss in a paroxysm of grief. Polytheistic religion had little to offer by way of comfort or consolation. How could it? The Olympian gods knew nothing of death and conducted themselves without any regard for mortality.
And yet, the ancients did have their share of ideas about the afterlife. Most believed that the dead not only continued to exist elsewhere but also, paradoxically, depended on sustenance deposited beside their remains. The modern practice of laying flowers on a grave is fueled by the same vague idea that the dead are contactable at the place where they are interred.
In Homer’s “Odyssey” everyone ends up in the same dank, dark, dreary region called Hades, irrespective of what lives they have led. Only a tiny minority — three people in total — get punished for being very bad. Tantalus, for instance, who cooked his son in a casserole and served him up to the gods, is “tantalized” for eternity by food and drink that is always just out of his reach.
The idea of a dualistic afterlife with some kind of heaven for the blessed derives from the ancient Egyptians. According to them, before being admitted to the Field of Reeds, where you’ll be able to hunt and party like there’s no tomorrow, you have to appear before the underworld judge Osiris, who will cross-examine you to see if you’ve led a virtuous life. Your heart will be weighed on a scale, against a feather of truth. If it’s heavier than the feather, a monster will devour you, but after that you’ll simply cease to exist. No hell, in other words.
Over time, a number of Greeks came to believe that a blessed afterlife was available for those who had been initiated into the so-called mystery cults, though what exactly this blessedness amounted to is unclear. Over time, too, the belief that Hades was a place of punishment gained traction. Aeneas, making a pit stop on his way to catch up with his father in Hades, learns that numerous categories of criminals experience gruesome punishments. This anticipates the eternal fires that both Christianity and Islam suggest will consume the ungodly.
The late Pope Francis’ comment relayed by a journalist back in 2018 — “Hell does not exist; there is the disappearance of sinful souls” — was a welcome sign for sinners like myself, even though the Vatican quickly asserted that he wasn’t speaking ex cathedra. By contrast, the Hebrew Bible shows little interest in the plight of individuals after death. Good and bad end up in Sheol, a region very similar to Hades.
Today, according to Pew Research Center data, some 80% of Americans believe in an afterlife. Their thoughts about what to expect there remain somewhat confused, but perhaps it’s telling that the most commonly held idea is that they will be reunited with loved ones and — if they’re lucky — with pets. That view, absent the pets, also prevailed in antiquity. Greek funerary monuments frequently show the dead, or the living and the dead, shaking hands. The same theme is evinced most movingly in Etruscan sarcophagi that depict husband and wife lying in bed together for all eternity. Not even the Egyptians came up with a better way of conveying the hope that the life awaiting us will be as sensual and as pleasurable as our best moments here on Earth.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned studying all of this, it’s that inconsistency and illogicality lie at the heart of the human effort to imagine what to expect when we’re dead. Even some hardened atheists find it difficult to imagine extinction. The belief that humans will continue to exist in a different realm or on a different plane and that they will face a reckoning are ideas that have been around for thousands of years. So, too, has the belief that nothing survives death. “I didn’t exist. I existed. I don’t exist. I don’t care,” reads an epitaph often found on Roman gravestones.
Mark Twain put it equally memorably: “I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and hadn’t suffered the slightest inconvenience.”
Robert Garland, professor emeritus of the classics at Colgate University, is the author, most recently, of “What to Expect When You’re Dead: An Ancient Tour of Death and the Afterlife.” This article was produced in partnership with Zocalo Public Square.
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