A Path Neither Simple Nor Single: The Afterlife as Good to Think with
Author: Radcliffe Edmonds
Source: Aspects of Death and the Afterlife in Greek Literature, Liverpool University Press
Publication Type: Chapter in a book
Abstract: Competing accounts of life after death are common in the Greek tradition, and each account represents a different perspective and presents a different message about the relation of life and death. Levi-Strauss noted that cultures see certain things as good to eat – bonne à manger – and that likewise certain things are bonne à penser – good to think (with). The afterlife proves to be a tasty concept that whets the appetite of many a thinker in cultures throughout the world, and the evidence from ancient Greece includes a wide variety of such concoctions of ideas of afterlife by creative chefs – poets and painters, physicists and philosophers – among which we may distinguish visions of continuation, compensation, and the cosmos.