Volume 26, Number 13 · August 16, 1979
On the Thanatos Trail
By Peter Green
Aspects of Death in Early Greek Art and Poetry (The Sather Classical Lectures, Vol. 46)
by Emily Vermeule
University of California Press, 270 pp., $22.50
Death, the one immutable element in every life, is at the same time the one transition that no one can claim as a conscious experience. We do not live through it—a paradox all ages have been disinclined to accept—and putative exceptions to the rule, from Lazarus to mediums' contacts or Ouija-board monologuists, all require a suspension (whether miraculous or not) of the normal laws of nature. Anxiety about death dictates many of our fundamental beliefs and behavior patterns, and all death imagery, in any age, is manifestly borrowed from the world men inhabit, since it is the only one they know. The disposal of corpses is a universal problem, with limited solutions. An archaic Greek and a modern urban American share a wide range of assumptions about death, funerals, burial, and the hereafter: where they differ sharply is in the spiritual luggage they carry with them. To study any group's attitudes to death becomes, in a very real sense, a refraction of their ideas about life, their social conventions and priorities, their more persistent sustaining myths.
Review, 3831 words
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