Figuring Death in Classical Athens: Visual and Literary Explorations

Figuring Death in Classical Athens puts art and literature in conversation to explore how ancient Athenians grappled with the uncertainties of death. How did objects and texts generate thinking about what death is and might be like? Were Athenians aware of the imaginative frameworks that underpinned their thinking? Did they worry not just about death, but whether they could figure it out?

Death in the ancient world has long been a subject of interest. Studies abound that examine its social and ideological dimensions, funerary practices, and changing attitudes and beliefs. This book takes a fresh approach, cutting across sub-disciplines (art, text, philosophy, and so on) to build a picture of how ancient art and literature got their audiences thinking-thinking not just about death but about its knowability. Whether in the theatre, at the symposium, or on the Acropolis, representations of death challenged Athenians by presenting problems of exteriority (how can the living know what dying might be like?) and particularity (can one person’s experience hold for another? is death truly a ’leveller’?).

The material covered is wide ranging. Unlike other studies, which often focus on either art or text and on one category of objects or one literary genre, the book pulls together exemplary texts and objects (including Plato, drinking cups, Sophocles, temple sculpture, and Thucydides) and makes each accessible to readers from multiple sub-disciplines and, indeed, from beyond Classics.

It will be critical reading for those interested in ancient attitudes to death, as well as those interested in cultural imagination and intellectual history. As a multi-media study, it will appeal to those working on ancient image and text (and their intersection), and, more broadly, to those in other disciplines working on visuality, mediality, materiality, and culturally situated ideas.

Emily Clifford, Assistant Professor in Classical Languages and Literature, University of Warwick

Emily Clifford is Assistant Professor in Classical Languages and Literature at the University of Warwick. From 2020 to 2024 she was a Junior Research Fellow at Christ Church, Oxford. She works on art and literature from the Graeco-Roman world with interest in the generative role played by cultural artefacts in processes of thought and imagination. Her publications in The Journal of Roman Studies (2023) and with Routledge, The Imagination of the Mind in Classical Athens (2024, as co-editor), focus respectively on imperial Rome and Classical Athens.