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In the Ancient World death came - on average - at a far earlier age than in today's West, and without the authoritative warnings given by modern medicine. Consolation for the trauma of loss had, accordingly, a more prominent role to play. This volume presents eight original studies on consolatory writings from ancient Greek, Roman, early Christian and Arabic societies. The authors include internationally recognised authorities in the field. They offer insight into the ancient experience of loss and the methods used to palliate it. They explore how far there was a consolatory 'genre', involving letters, funerary oratory, epicedia, and philosophical prose. Focusing on responses to grief in numerous ancient authors, this volume finds elements of continuity and of individual variety in modes of consolation, and reveals instructive tensions between the commonplace and the personal.

The ancient Greeks devoted a significant portion of their poetic and artistic energy to exploring themes of death. Vermeule examines the facts and fictions of Greek death, including burial and mourning, visions of the underworld, souls and ghosts, the value of heroic death in battle, the quest for immortality, the linked powers of death, sleep, and love, and more.

In ancient Greece, from the sixth century onwards legislation was introduced in Athens and a number of the more advanced city states which was specifically aimed at the restriction of mourning of the dead, particularly women's laments. This book investigates the threat which such mourning posed to the society and the way in which the state attempted to subdue and subvert laments. The author argues that laments are a complex art form that gives women a means to express not only pain, but frustration and anger. In the larger social unit of the ancient Greek polis, women's prominence in the death rituals and their use of the public forum of the funeral to express grief and anger presented a powerful challenge to established social order. The state's need to raise a standing army meant that death in war had to be glorified, not lamentd; at the same time the existence of official law courts discouraged the cycle of private retribution which was inflamed by laments.