Imagining the Afterlife in the Ancient World

Juliette Harrisson is a Senior Lecturer in Ancient History at Newman University in Birmingham, UK. Her primary research interests lie in Roman period myth and religion, and in the reception of ancient Greece and Rome in modern popular culture, especially film, television and novels. Her monograph, Dreams and Dreaming in the Roman Empire: Cultural Memory and Imagination was published in 2013, and she is also the co-editor of Memory and Urban Religion in the Ancient World (with Martin Bommas and Phoebe Roy).

Imagining the Afterlife in the Ancient World explores these key questions through a series of wide-ranging studies, taking in ghosts, demons, dreams, cosmology, and the mutilation of corpses along the way, offering a valuable resource to those studying all aspects of death in the ancient world.

List of figures; List of contributors; Acknowledgements; Introduction, Juliette Harrisson; Part 1: The Afterlife at Greek Funerary Sites; 1. Visualizing the Afterlife in Classical Athens: Interactions between the Living and the Dead on White-Ground Lêkythoi, Molly Evangeline Allen; 2. Phrasikleia: Playing with Signs, Nick Brown; Part 2: The afterlife at Roman and Etruscan Funerary Sites; 3. "Break on Through to the Other Side": The Etruscan Netherworld and its Demons, Isabella Bossolino; 4. Guide of Souls? Mercurius Psychopompos in Roman Dalmatia, Josipa Luli¿; 5. Funerary Dining Scenes in Roman Tombs: Ensuring Happiness in the Afterlife, Gabriela Ingle; Part 3: The Afterlife in Literature; 6. Cosmology, Psychopomps, and Afterlife in Homer's Odyssey, Safari F. Grey; 7. Daphnis' Tomb: Space for Immortality in Virgil's 5th Eclogue, Stephanie Crooks; 8. Reality and Unreality: Literature and Folklore in Propertius 4.7, Juliette Harrisson; Part 4: The Afterlife in Late Antique Tradition; 9. A Ritual of the Afterlife or the Afterlife of a Ritual: Maschalismos in Ancient Greece and Beyond, Julia Doroszewska and Janek Kucharski; 10. Servius on Virgil's Underworld in Late Antiquity, Frances Foster; Index