Death has always been one of the few certainties of human life. Correspondingly, the sudden change from a breathing and moving entity to an inert body and the fate of the much-valued life force that inhabits it have been a mystery for humans, eliciting puzzlement, fear, curiosity and intellectual speculation. 

The Ancient Greeks, who experienced death with a frequency and directness that exceeds that of most modern people, made it a major part of their thought, religion and culture. Indeed, there were several imaginations and modes of survival beyond death, which were presented and stressed in different contexts and therefore appear in various types of evidence. While the Greeks would often imagine themselves travelling across the murky river Styx and wandering, dream-like, through the boundless white Fields of Asphodel, at other times they had visions of eternal spring and lively banquets in the Elysian Fields. Being remembered by the living, especially through poetry and ritual commemoration, was another important way for humans to survive beyond death. 

This blog post will present the main ideas and practices surrounding these imaginations, as expressed through surviving literature, art and archaeological finds. Chiefly, attention will be paid to the Homeric epics, the cult of the dead, the philosophical conceptions of Pythagoras, Empedocles and Plato and artifacts belonging to the sphere of Orphic-Dionysiac mystery cults, namely the Golden Tablets and the Derveni Papyrus.

Homer on the Psyche, the Shades and the House of Death 

As with many other elements of life, the Greeks traced their paradigmatic ideas about death and the afterlife to Homer, their most celebrated poet, living sometime in the 8th century BCE. After all, death is a persistent theme throughout his famous poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, almost from the start. In the prologue to the Iliad (1.3), Homer defines the subject on which he will sing as the wrath of Achilles that sent the souls (ψύχαι, psychai) of countless brave heroes down to Hades, ᾽Αἲδης, so called from the god who is its ruler. Already in Homer, there is an implicit belief that the animated, ‘living’ part of a person (the ψύχη, psyche) keeps its appearance and personality and slips below the earth upon death. Whenever a warrior dies in the Iliad, a dark mist is said to cover his eyes as he collapses and his psyche flies away.

In Book 11 of the Odyssey, Odysseus has to travel to the western ends of the earth (the far west being associated with the land of the dead in many ancient cultures) to meet the soul of the blind seer Teiresias and ask him for directions on his journey. There, we see the souls, psychai, or more specifically the shades or images of the once-living people, their eidola (εἲδωλα), in their own territory. For as well as Teiresias, Odysseus also meets a whole host of the dead, who wander semi-consciously and need to partake of the sacrifice of a black ram, which Odysseus has brought, in order to regain full consciousness. Odysseus meets his mother, Anticleia, and tries three times to embrace her … in vain, as her shade simply slips past him (11.150-225). When Odysseus meets Achilles, expecting him to be enjoying his existence as the first of all shades, Odysseus’ friend quickly disillusions him by saying that he would rather be the slave of the meanest peasant on earth but be alive than rule the Underworld (11.488-503). 

Nevertheless, Homer mentions that some heroes with particularly close ties to the gods, like Menelaus, the son-in-law of Zeus (Odyssey 4.561-569) can look forward to being swept away to the Elysian Fields, where they live like the gods with a constant refreshing West Wind (Zephyros) and no winter or snow. A select remarkable few, like Heracles, son of Zeus, have their eidolon in Hades but themselves are transferred to live among the gods on Olympus (Odyssey, 11.601-604).

Epic poetry, defined by its re-tellings of the exploits of heroes of past ages, had its very raison d’étre in conferring and guaranteeing the survival of immortal fame on people considered to have led remarkable lives that were, in one way or another, important to the institutions, culture, customs and identities of their local (or even Pan-Hellenic) communities. Indeed, Achilles’ conscious choice to win immortality through epic memory of his deeds over a long but unremarkable life is a crucial focal point for the narrative of the Iliad. Thus, Homer’s focus is very much on the argument that this type of afterlife survival is more valuable than any other (Edmonds, 2015). 

A calyx krater from Lucania, 390-380 BCE, found in Pisticci, Italy, showing Odysseus Summoning the Shades from the Underworld, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, 422.

The Cult of the Dead

For the Ancient Greeks, death itself did not completely sever the soul’s ties with the body. Hence, a proper funeral was necessary to allow the soul to move on from its earthly life. Indeed, the hero Patroclus appears at Iliad 23.72-74 to his companion-in-arms and lover, Achilles, asking for a proper burial, as he cannot cross the Underworld river Styx and is stuck in the world above without this. 

The body (soma, σῶμα) was typically burnt on a pyre together with the person’s most prized possessions, those most integral to that individual’s personality and social status, or inhumed, depending on local usage. If the person had been wealthy, this often became an ostentatious display of their status and those of their family. The remains were placed in a chest (larnax) or a pot and buried in the ground with food, drink and several possessions, while a grave marker was erected at ground level to commemorate the memory of the deceased. This grave marker could be in the form of a monumental, decorated vase, like the Dipylon Krater, a marble stele depicting the deceased in a scene from their daily life or bidding farewell to their surviving family members. Many famous extant examples, such as the Stele of Hegeso, come from the Kerameikos Cemetery in Athens. Sometimes, the marker might even be a marble statue, like the Archaic kore (maiden-statue) Phrasikleia, although the laws of many cities, especially democratic Athens, often placed stringent limitations on how much the family could spend. Many vases painted with funeral scenes survive, some of which acted as receptacles for bodily remains, while others had been placed in the grave markers, like the numerous oil-flasks called lekythoi.

Funerary stelae at the Kerameikos cemetery, the Stele of Hegeso is on the far left Athens, Wikimedia Commons, photo by Therese Clutario

On a regular basis, the surviving members of the family would visit the grave and make offerings of food and drink to the beloved dead, which is also shown on a number of pottery vessels, specifically white-ground lekythoi from graves. Such vases sometimes portray Thanatos, the personification of Death, and his brother Hypnos, the personification of sleep, carrying the deceased together, symbolising the proximity between the two concepts. 

These rituals are also an important narrative element in several 5th century BCE Athenian dramas, notably Aeschylus’ Persians and Choephoroi (Libation-Bearers). The Persians, 604-632, features Atossa, the Persian queen, mother of Xerxes, who had recently suffered his catastrophic defeat in Greece, offering milk, honey, spring water, wine, olive-oil and flowers to the shade of her deceased husband, the king Darius, causing him to temporarily arise from the Underworld. The action of the Choephoroi, meanwhile, occurs between the tomb of Agamemnon, killed by his wife Clytaemnestra, and the palace, the residence of the murderous queen and her lover Aegisthus, two highly charged stage properties, framing the tragedy of the play. At 124-151, Electra prays and pours libations to her father Agamemnon at his tomb. 

The honouring of the souls of the departed was mostly a private affair but there were some public festivals, such as the Genesia in Athens on the 5th day of the month Boedromion (roughly comparable to modern September), that involved society collectively paying its respects to its dead members. 

The funerals and commemoration of citizens who died in war on behalf of their city-state (polis) would be public affairs on an even greater scale. The Athenian statesman, Pericles, gave his famous Funeral Oration, preserved in Thucydides’ Histories of the Peloponnesian War, 1.35-47, at the funeral of the Athenian war dead from the first years of the Great War with Sparta and the Peloponnesian League in 430 BCE. In some cases, individuals who had been particularly remarkable, beneficial and/or influential on their community were awarded heroic status, with statues and shrines being erected around their tombs and cult honours being paid to them. 

Visits to the grave pictured on an Attic white-ground lekythos by the Achilles Painter, c.440-425 BCE, British Museum, 1893,0917.1

Pythagoras, Empedocles and Plato – Philosophical Theories of Metempsychosis

Most Ancient Greeks, as we have seen, had only a vague and uncertain idea about what lies beyond the world of the living, although they tried to maintain contact with their beloved dead through rituals surrounding their graves. However, some poets, thinkers, ritualists and mystics claimed to be able to map the afterlife quite precisely and even offered to induct the souls of the dead into a blissful afterlife.

One of these fascinating figures was Pythagoras, who lived on the island of Samos and in the Greek cities of Southern Italy during the 6th century BCE. He postulated that a person’s life-force, rather than living in Hades and retaining the same personality it had whilst living on earth, in fact undergoes metempsychosis (transmigrates through many individual personalities and bodies). In fact, he seems to have believed in a cycle of rebirths that lasted three thousand years and saw the psyche travel through the three realms of land, sea and air (Porphyry, Life of Pythagoras 19; Herodotus, Histories, 2.123.2-3). A frequently re-told story tells of how he encountered a puppy being whipped and, recognising the voice of a dear friend in its howling, insisted that its owner stop maltreating it (Diels-Kranz 21 B7). Alongside being able to recognise the past incarnations of others, he himself is said to have remembered his own in detail, including living as Euphorbus, a warrior who died fighting for the Trojans during the Trojan War (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers, 8.4-5). 

Painting of Pythagoras by Augustus Knapp, 1926 

Empedocles, a philosopher and mystic from the Greek city of Akragas (Agrigento) on Sicily, who lived in the 5th century BCE, agreed with Pythagoras, putting metempsychosis into an even more sophisticated system of cosmology. He taught that souls transmigrate due to an original crime they had committed, according to a divine law, for thirty thousand years (Diels-Kranz B 115). Empedocles’ cosmology involves two powerful principles of Love and Strife, which govern all things in the world, and hence also transmigration (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers, 8.77). His philosophy is very systematic and he believed that the transmigration of souls leads to the gradual improvement of their condition. Empedocles seems to have devised an entire hierarchy of incarnations, with virtuous souls becoming the best of trees (the laurel), the best of animals (lions) and then the best of humans – poets, doctors and rulers – until they finally transform into gods (Diels-Kranz B 127 and 146-147). 

A third influential thinker was the Athenian Plato (428-347 BCE), who re-purposed many motifs from the mythology of the Underworld to fit with his grand system of viewing the cosmos, the gods and the soul, across several of his dialogues (including the Phaedo and Phaedrus). The Republic is the Platonic dialogue that addresses the topic most directly, however, as it ends with an account reportedly heard from Er, who had died, gone to the afterlife, and returned after three days to tell the tale. This story involves souls undergoing a thousand years of an existence reflecting the quality of the life they had lived on earth, followed by a re-incarnation which they choose themselves, based on a lottery and their own capacities of judgment. While previous thinkers imagined transmigrating souls, as we have seen, it was Plato who first infused this idea with a concept of cosmic justice, in which the type of body and life into which a soul enters upon incarnation corresponds with the virtue or vice it showed in its previous life. As a literary master as well as a marvellous thinker, he combined traditional views about the stay of the soul in Hades with metempsychosis, referring to the judgment of souls by Minos, Radamanthys and Aeacus, sons of Zeus who had been wise mortal kings. 

An Attic white-ground lekythos, c.435-425 BCE, by the Thanatos Painter, found in the Ampelokepoi Tomb, Athens, British Museum 1876.0328.1

The Orphic-Bacchic Golden Tablets: Passports to Bliss in the Afterlife

A certain class of grave goods puts a novel and intriguing spin on these traditions, which we have concisely surveyed. These objects are thought to belong to the realm of Orphic-Dionysiac mystery cults, an umbrella-term for various private ritual groups which used poems attributed to the mythological Orpheus, a famous musician who travelled to the Underworld to (unsuccessfully) retrieve his beloved wife Eurydice. The rituals these groups performed revolved around the worship and mythology of Dionysus, a god who is said to have been born three times (as the son of Zeus and Persephone, Zeus and Semele and finally Zeus alone) and died twice, including being killed and devoured by the Titans (the class of gods who held Olympus before the Olympians). After his mortal mother, Semele, a princess of Thebes, died, Dionysus is said to have retrieved her from Hades and made her into a goddess by the name of Thyone. 

Most of these grave goods are in the form of inscribed golden foil, either rectangular or shaped into leaves, often of myrtle or ivy, which were placed on the body of the deceased person (in the cases of interred bodies) or together with their ashes in their cinerary urn (in the case of cremations). To date, 40 of these have been discovered in graves across Greece and Southern Italy (which hosted many Greek cities) and even in Rome, spanning a time-period between the 4th century BCE and 2nd century CE. It is worth noting that myrtle and ivy wreaths were often used to decorate the head of banqueters in mundane life. These shapes were probably thought fitting for people who hoped to be going to an afterlife filled with feasting. Yet, apart from having these golden tablets/leaves, the graves that yielded them do not seem to have been extremely distinct. 

The texts inscribed on these sheets of gold mainly include instructions, intended directly for the soul of the dead, on how to join the initiates (mystai) and the followers of Dionysus (bacchae) in the afterlife, although quite a few are simply name-tags, labelled with the deceased person’s name and their title as an initiate (mystes). Of the first group, many involve the soul approaching underworld guardians, saying that they are of divine descent (from Gaia, the Earth, and Ouranos, the Sky) and that, since they are thirsty, they should be admitted to drink from the spring of Memory (Mnemosyne). The spring of Forgetfulness (Lethe) stands beside this spring, which the souls are reminded to avoid, as does a shining cypress tree, a common emblem of Hades. Another important element of the soul’s identity, which entitles it to drink from Memory, is that, when still associated with a body, it had participated in special rituals of Dionysus. By virtue of this, the soul would have had established a privileged personal relationship with the god. Having drunk from Memory, the soul is envisaged attending a meeting with Persephone and joining the banquets of the blessed in the Elysian Fields. 

It is likely that – as Riedweg (2011) argues – the disparate texts of these tablets, which have some considerable overlaps, are excerpts from a lost katabasis poem, i.e. a poem describing a journey into the Underworld, attributed to Orpheus. The idea behind the texts would be that people who had read this poem or heard it recited in a ritual would be able to claim a special right to pass into a happy afterlife based on already having knowledge of Hades. Excerpts from this poem were then placed in their grave to act as memory aids, in case they could not quite remember where to go and what to say to the underworld guardians. 

Orphic Golden Tablet (OF 484), c. 350-300 BCE, from Thessaly, J. Paul Getty Museum, photo by Remi Mathis (2011), Wikimedia Commons

The Derveni Papyrus

The strong connection between philosophy and the pursuit of a happy afterlife, which we see with Pythagoras, Empedocles and Plato, re-surface again in a striking way in a unique archaeological find made in 1962. It was then that a half-carbonated papyrus roll was discovered on the covering slabs of a wealthy grave at a cemetery dating to the 4th and 3rd centuries BCE at Derveni, a small locality in the ancient kingdom of Macedonia, approximately 10km north-east of the city of Thessaloniki. While many Greek papyri have been discovered in Egypt, dating to the Graeco-Roman periods of the country’s history, the Derveni Papyrus, as it has been called, is perhaps the oldest surviving book in Europe and one of only a handful of papyri to have been uncovered in Greece, owing to the immense fragility of this material. 

Ancient books were commonly written on sheets formed from inter-locking fibres from the papyrus plant (Cyperus Papyrus), which were often glued together. Depending on the length of such a roll, there could have been very many columns of writing, each neatly placed one next to another. The way to read such a book was to unroll it from left to right and, as one proceeded along the columns, to again roll what had already been read. The Derveni Papyrus has 26 columns of writing, most of which are missing their bottom halves, which seem to have been burnt by fire. It has taken the truly Herculean work of philologists and papyrologists, such as Gabor Betegh, Theokritos Kouremenos, George Parassoglou, Richard Janko, Valeria Piano and many others, to painstakingly piece the text together and read and interpret it. 

The Derveni Papyrus, c. 340-320 BCE, from Derveni Tomb A in Macedonia, northern Greece, Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki, Plate 20 in Kouremenos, Parrasoglou and Tsantsanoglou (2006).

The Papyrus can truly be compared to a Russian doll, composed as it is of many layers of texts, each a testimony to a slightly different time period and cultural environment. The Papyrus itself dates to 340-320 BCE and is contemporaneous with the reign of the most successful of Macedonian kings, Alexander the Great. It is an artifact testifying to the high culture of a Macedonian aristocracy that was heavily influenced by earlier Athenian cultural achievements just as it was re-modelling the known world by its conquests of the Persian Empire. The text which the Papyrus preserves was probably written in the late 5^th century BCE in Athens by an unknown author – hence called simply ‘the Derveni author’ – who seems to have been both a philosopher and a mystic. His fascination with explaining the universe through natural causes emerges clearly from his book. He drew many of his ideas from the Atomists Democritus and Leucippus, the first thinkers to contrive a theory of atoms, and Anaxagoras, the teacher of Pericles and perhaps the first to give a natural explanation for eclipses. So far as the fragmentation of the Papyrus allows us to judge, the anonymous author appears to have woven his philosophical treatise about the creation and order of the universe around an Orphic poem recounting the genealogy of the gods and assumption of kingship by Zeus, the so-called Derveni theogony, which had  likely been composed in the 6^th century BCE. Even as the ‘Derveni author’ was turning the poem into a momentous web of allegories and symbols, this poem would probably still have been sang by Orphic ritualists, perhaps even beside the katabasis poem, on which the texts of the Golden Tablets were based. 

While the Papyrus was burnt on the funerary pyre of the owner of the tomb on which it was found, it likely formed part of his library collection for about 20 years before this. Most interpretations of the connections between the original author, the text, the deceased reader and his grave quickly enter the territory of the theoretical, the speculative and the controversial. However, one theory holds that the owner-reader was involved in Orphic rituals that granted participants special relations with the gods and the right to a Bacchic afterlife. If so, he would have been a highly intellectual ritualist, presumably agreeing with the ‘Derveni author’ when he warns (especially in column XX) that one can easily stray into ignorance and misunderstanding if one approaches the Orphic poem literally, without trying to interpret it symbolically. The reader-owner would have believed, then, that simply participating in rituals, learning the Orphic lore and following the instructions contained in the katabasis poem was insufficient to join the feasts of the blessed in the afterlife. He wanted (or needed) to understand how these fitted into a wider rational idea of the order of the universe. With that in mind, his mourning family burnt the Papyrus on his pyre, rather than placing a golden tablet in his grave – not so much to destroy the text than ensure that it travelled to the Underworld with its owner. 

What may directly connect the Derveni Papyrus to the Orphic Golden Tablets is a ritual described in the Papyrus and a theory of the afterlife which it embodies. The first columns of the text describe the offering of libations of water and milk and countless many-knobbed cakes to propitiate the Erinyes, souls of people who had died untimely and violent deaths (and so seek recompense from the living) and daemons (spirits). In Ancient Greek religion, Erinyes are goddess who exact vengeance in the Underworld on souls who had committed crimes during their lives but are treated in the text as the same as the vengeful souls. The ritual is said to be performed to remove an obstruction which these dark and potentially dangerous beings were causing to the performance of the substantive rites, which were about to unfold. The latter probably involved the recitation of the Orphic poem which the ‘Derveni author’ was so concerned to interpret symbolically. The rituals may also have involved the recitation of the katabasis poem, as the concept of paying a penalty or propitiating before entering the happy afterlife also appears in some of the Golden Tablets.

Now, there is an interesting parallel to be found between two classes of supernatural beings. On the one hand, we have the Erinyes/vengeful souls blocking the mystic rituals of the living and requiring apologetic offerings in order to ‘unblock’ them and who are found in the Derveni Papyrus. On the other hand, there are the guardians in Hades seen in the Golden Tablets, who at first block the thirsty soul from drinking Memory and passing further, until they are satisfied that the soul, having taken part in the mysteries of the living, have earned appropriate credentials to pass into the happy afterlife. 

As was seen above, milk and water were two among several substances suitable to be offered to the souls of the beloved departed. It is known from some of the Golden Tablets that their texts may have been recited during the funeral of the people with whom they were buried. There is little other evidence to suggest that Orphic initiates – people who had participated in rituals using Orphic poetry and promising a happy afterlife – had funerals that were vastly different from those of their non-initiated peers. In fact, apart from the specifically Orphic texts with which they were buried, nothing else is distinctively Orphic about the manner in which they were buried or the objects given to them as grave goods. However, it may be that the ritual in which the Derveni theogony was sang or recited was adapted for use in funerals as well. If so, perhaps it was even performed during the funeral at Derveni in which the Papyrus was half-burnt. It must be emphasized, however, that the evidence we have to play with is quite literally full of holes and uncertainty. 

Research on the Derveni Papyrus, both in terms of reconstructing what the text actually says and in interpreting its meanings, is very much ongoing. There is certainly also more going on with it than can be presented here.  

Conclusion

The Ancient Greeks were fascinated by the possibility of having an afterlife and came up with rather sophisticated imaginings of it. The idea that the departed soul requires a dignified treatment and proper honours from the living, as embodied by the funeral and the continued tendance of the grave and nourishment of the soul through offerings, is a cornerstone of Greek thought. A major point of disagreement seems to have been whether an individual’s appearance, personality and character are truly integral to their individuality or not. For while most would have believed that souls remain ‘themselves’ beyond death, thinkers propounding the concept of metempsychosis asserted that as souls go between bodies, their appearance and personality change. Together with this, there was a wide belief that some souls could attain the privilege of an afterlife existence that parallels that of the Olympian gods. 

There was disagreement, however, on what precisely was necessary to gain this privilege. Some believed that establishing a particularly close relationship with the gods through ritual sufficed, while others argued that this could only happen through knowledge about the universe and a virtuous character. As is often the case in history, what we get from our historical sources depends on their nature – the maker of a certain object or text, their preferences and opinions, the purposes for which, and the material or genre in which, they were creating it. 

Further Reading:

Barnes, J. (2001) Early Greek Philosophy, 2nd edition, London:Penguin Books

Betegh, G. (2004) The Derveni Papyrus, Cosmology, Theology and Interpretation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 

Diels, H. and Kranz, W. (1952) Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 10th edition, Berlin

Edmonds, R. G. (2011) (ed,) The ‘Orphic’ Golden Tablets and Greek Religion: Further Along the Path, Cambridge 

Edmonds, R. G. (2015) Imagining the Afterlife in E. Eidinow and J. Kindt (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Greek Religion, Oxford

Kingsley, P. (1995) Ancient Philosophy, Mystery and Magic: Empedocles and Pythagorean Tradition, Oxford: Clarendon Press

Kouremenos, T., Parassoglou, G.M. and Tsantsanoglou, K. (2006) The Derveni Papyrus, Florence, Leo S Olschki

Laks, A. and Most, G. W. (eds.) (1997) Studies on the Derveni Papyrus, Oxford: Clarendon Press 

Most, G. W. Studies on the Derveni Papyrus, Vol. 2, Oxford: Oxford University Press 

Riedweg, C. (2011) Initiation – Death – Underworld: Narrative and Ritual in the Gold Leaves,  in Edmonds, R.G. The ‘Orphic’ Gold Tablets and Greek Religion: Further Along the Path’ Cambridge

Themelis. P.G. and Touratsoglou, G.P. (1997) Οι Τάφοι του Δερβενίου, Athens: TAP

Voutiras, E. (2015) Dead or Alive? in E. Eidinow and J. Kindt (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Greek Religion,Oxford

‘Underworld: Imagining the Afterlife‘ Getty.edu (last accessed 11/08/2026)https://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/ancient_underworld/inner.html