Surveying funerary rites and attitudes toward death from the time of Homer to the fourth century B.C., Robert Garland seeks to show what the ordinary Greek felt about death and the dead. The Second Edition features a substantial new prefatory essay in which Garland addresses recent questions and debates about death and the early Greeks. The book also includes an updated Supplementary Bibliography. Praise for the first edition: "This [volume] contains a rich and remarkably complete collection of the abundant but scattered literary, artistic, and archaeological evidence on death in the ancient world as well as an extensive bibliography on the subject. Robert Garland conceives of death as a process, a rite of passage, a mutual but changing relationship between the deceased and [his or her] survivors. . . . A most useful collection of evidence, sensibly organized (no small feat) and lucidly presented. . . . A valuable source on the Greeks and on the always-lively subject of death."-American Historical Review "Much can be learned from this engaging survey of popular attitudes toward death, the dying, and the dead in Greece down to the end of the Classical period. . . . Appealing to scholars and the general audience."-Religious Studies Review
"In the extensive literature relating to ancient Greece, there is no work that serves the purposes of this volume. A Swedish proverb speaks of placing the church in the middle of the village, and that is precisely what Nilsson has here done. Homer and Hesiod formed the basis of the traditional education of the Greeks in general, and the great gods and goddesses as they appear in art show at all times the formative influence of the epic tradition. Nevertheless, the hard core of Greek religion is to be found in its observances: these took their shape among men whose focus was first the hearth and then the city-state, men moreover whose life and livelihood were tied to crops and herds and the annual cycle of nature."—Arthur Darby Nock, from the Foreword
Martin Nilsson writes about the popular religious observances of the Greeks, as practiced both earlier in the twentieth century and in classical times, the agricultural festivals and customs, the rituals of family and society. The folk religions of Greece that underlay and continually erupted into the more "elevated" Olympian mythology of Homer and Hesiod are explained in detail by a scholar with unparalleled understanding of the rites and customs of rural life.
