THE GREAT BEYOND

The ancient Greeks thought much about the dead – how their remains should be disposed of, how their spirits might be summoned, how malignant they could be if unavenged. Classicist David Stuttard brings us face to face with the Greek dead.

- David Stuttard

Near the western shores of Greece, just south of Corfu’s southern tip and the lovely mainland seaside town of Parga, the modern village of Ephyra sprawls on a low hill above well-watered farmland. Sheep’s bells clack hypnotically; crows caw from nearby trees, and far off to the east the jagged mountains of Thesprotia shimmer like a mirage in the morning haze. It is a place of such beguiling peace and beauty that even the most well-informed, imaginative visitor must struggle to envisage how it looked 3,000 years ago. For then, instead of fertile ploughland, marshes stretched towards the seashore; a shallow lake, reedy and loud with frogs, lapped against the cliffs that fall sheer from the hillock’s farther flank; and the sluggish streams that fed it bore foreboding names – Acheron, Cocytus, Pyriphlegethon – names they shared with darker, more sepulchral rivers, the rivers of the Underworld, of Hades. Then, too, the atmosphere was foetid with the stench of stagnant water and the still air thick with screaming clouds of myriad mosquitoes. Can there be any wonder that Bronze Age Greeks associated Ephyra with the dank lands of the dead, or that it was here (some say) that the bewitching Circe sent Odysseus on a mission to commune with hungry ghosts?