University of Tel Aviv

The Ancient Greek Underworld and ‘After-Death’: Between Imagination and Perception

This project examines Greek conceptions of the Underworld, death, and dying as cultural constructs shaped by historical contexts rather than fixed beliefs. By analysing metaphors, literary depictions, and ritual practices, it explores how narratives of the afterlife reflected social anxieties, memory, and identity, with comparisons to broader Mediterranean traditions.

Greek Dialogues

Shapes of Shades: Ancient Greek Concept(s) of Ghosts

Exploring how the ancient Greeks imagined and represented ghosts. Modern traditions often associate apparitions with terror or the uncanny, but Greek literature offers a far subtler picture, in which encounters with the dead are shaped by ritual, memory, and moral obligation. This lecture revisits familiar scenes from epic and myth to ask what it meant, in Greek thought, for the living to meet the shades of the departed, and how such encounters illuminate ancient ideas about identity, presence, and the boundaries between life and death.