Introduction

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The Introduction explains how this volumes aims to build on the considerable interest in ancient concepts of the afterlife by offering a novel and unique approach to the study of death and the afterlife in Greek literature. Although scholars from various disciplines (including classics, philosophy, archaeology, literary studies, history, and theology) have provided examinations of the conception, evolution and distribution of beliefs concerning death and the afterlife in the Greek world, these examinations are too often constrained by modern disciplinary boundaries; boundaries that are, if not absent, then far more porous in the ancient world. It explains how this is the first volume to examine the influences, intersections, and developments of understandings of death and the afterlife between poetic, religious, and philosophical traditions in ancient Greece in one resource. Greek thinking on death and the afterlife was neither uniform, simple, nor static, and by offering an examination of these matters in a properly interdisciplinary context we aim to demonstrate the full richness, complexity, and flexibility of this these ideas in the ancient Greek world, and illuminate how freely writers from various genres drew inspiration from each other’s thinking concerning eschatological matters.