The Extended Life Course in Ancient Athens

Abstract

Extended life course theory proposes that identities do not have to be embodied, meaning that the as-yet-unborn and the dead can have identities and personhood. Children are an apt case study for exploring whether societies envision identity extending beyond embodied existence, because non-adults exist towards the beginning of the life course and should they die before adulthood they have some predictable transformations outstanding. Literary sources indicate ancient Athenian ontology acknowledged extended life courses that deviated from embodied ones. Literary sources, burials, gravestones and painted pottery demonstrate juveniles existed both before birth and after death, and could retain prolonged identities following the latter. More rarely, their identities could be projected, moving juveniles further along the normative life course than they had corporeally experienced. This article argues that a social impetus for projecting identity in ancient Athens was acknowledging exceptional lost potential.