What happens to us when we die? Our bodies decay, but is there a spirit, a soul, an essence of our personalities that survives us? And if so, how should we deal with the dead? How can we speak of them in terms we can relate to? Can we contact them - can they contact us? Religions, philosophies, and folk beliefs - past and present - try to provide answers to such questions as these and, as in many societies, Greek beliefs about survival after death varied widely and were not particularly consistent. Some Greeks denied any possibility of an afterlife, saying that the soul perished with the body; others, such as Plato, believed the soul was immortal. Some believed that the spirit survived death, but as an insensate shell of its former self in a meaningless existence, lacking intelligence or understanding; others believed that the individual soul lived on after death with a recognizable personality. In the Odyssey, gloomy ghosts survive the body only to wander in a dreary, depressing afterlife; other works depict an underworld where life goes on rather as it had on earth. Also in the Odyssey, most of the dead know nothing of what goes on in the world of the living, whereas some Greeks believed the dead were sources of arcane knowledge and could be summoned by necromancy to share such knowledge with the living. Some philosophical sects, such as the Pythagoreans, believed in metempsychosis, or transmigration of the soul; others, including the Peripatetics, admitted that they just didn’t know what to believe and remained generally ambiguous and noncommittal on the subject. The Epicureans were perhaps the most resistant to the existence of supernatural phenomena of any kind, including restless spirits, and tried to provide material explanations for them.
World History
