Introductory description

Building on my 2025 book, Figuring Death in Classical Athens: Visual and Literary Explorations (OUP), this module explores the ways in which art and literature helped ancient Greeks grapple with the uncertainties of death. How did objects and texts generate emotions towards and reflections upon what death is and might be like? Were their audiences aware of the imaginative frameworks that underpinned their thinking? Did they worry not just about death, but whether they could figure it out?

The material covered is wide ranging, pulling together texts and objects (including e.g. philosophy, drinking cups, drama, temple sculpture, and history). Classical Athens is the focus, but there will be opportunities throughout the module to explore earlier material as well as its legacy in ancient Rome and beyond.

One theme permeating the course is the tension between universality (how far might experience of death transcend culture/historical moment?) and particularity. The topic of death brings us closer than ever to the ancient world and invites us to reflect not just upon an ancient culture, but our own.

Other themes include:

• Encounters with art/literature: How do art and text involve their audiences in processes of thought? How do they generate thinking and ideas as agents in the world (rather than simply reflecting the world…)? How do form and content work together?
• Distance/Exteriority: How can the living know what dying might be like?
• Particularity: Can one person's experience hold for another? Is death truly a 'leveller'? How far is death ‘the great constant’?
• Virtuality: What can a virtual experience—namely, the sort of realistic but unreal experience that is offered by art or literature—offer?

This module is also available to undergraduates from other departments, subject to the agreement of the Classics Department and their home department.

Module aims

Outline syllabus

This is an indicative module outline only to give an indication of the sort of topics that may be covered. Actual sessions held may differ.

Primary Texts to be studied in translation:
All students are generally encouraged to read in translation the wider plays/books from which the following extracts come and/or some comparative material (as indicated in square brackets). The translations are all taken from the most recent Loeb editions.
Homer, Iliad 16.419–683 [Iliad 16, Bacchylides Ode 5];
Homer, Iliad 24.602–18 [Iliad 24];
Anacreon fr. 395;
Aeschylus, Agamemnon 218–57, 1372–406 [Aeschylus, Agamemnon];
Sophocles, Antigone 806–943 [Sophocles, Antigone];
Sophocles, Niobe fr. 441a;
Sophocles, Oedipus the King 167–88 [Sophocles, Oedipus the King];
Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus 1456–1779 [Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus];
Euripides, Alcestis 1–434 [Euripides, Alcestis];
Euripides, Trojan Women 1156–332 [Euripides, Trojan Women];
Aristophanes, Frogs;
Thucydides, History 2.34–54 [Book 2];
Plato, Phaedo 111c4–118a [Plato, Phaedo];
Plato, Republic 10.613e4–10.615b7 [Republic 10];
Quintus of Smyrna, The Fall of Troy 1.891–922 [Book 1];

Primary Texts, Original Greek (for Q800/Q801):
Knowledge of all the above in translation, plus specific knowledge of the following in the original
Greek. The Greek text used will be the OCT unless otherwise indicated below.
Homer, Iliad 16.419–683;
Homer, Iliad 24.602–18;
Anacreon fr. 395 (text: Campbell, LCL 143, 'Greek Lyric II');
Aeschylus, Agamemnon 218–57, 1372–406;
Sophocles, Antigone 806–943;
Sophocles, Niobe fr. 441a (text: Lloyd-Jones, LCL 483, 'Sophocles Fragments');
Sophocles, Oedipus the King 167–88;
Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus 1456–1779;
Euripides, Alcestis 1–434;
Euripides, Trojan Women 1156–332;
Thucydides, History 2.34–54;
Plato, Phaedo 111c4–118a;
Plato, Republic 10.613e4–10.615b7;
Quintus of Smyrna, The Fall of Troy 1.891–922 (text: Hopkinson, LCL 19, 'Posthomerica').

Indicative outline of lectures:
TERM 1 .
LECTURES 1–5: SKILL DEVELOPMENT IN METHODOLOGICAL REFLECTION AND VISUAL AND LITERARY ANALYSIS.
Week 1. Introduction: hello from the other side (including e.g. Plato's myth of Er; Euripides' Alcestis; Aigina warriors).
Week 2. Deaths old and new (including e.g. Mykonos pithos; deaths in the Iliad; Bacchylides 5; Sarpedon in art and text).
Week 3. Whose eyes? Ways of approaching ancient art and text.
Week 4. Literary analysis.
Week 5. Visual analysis.
Week 6. READING WEEK - NO LECTURES .
LECTURES 7–10: EXEMPLARY DEATH / HEROIC DEATH.
Week 7. Death in the symposium (including e.g. drinking cups and mixing bowls; Anacreon fr. 395).
Week 8. Death in the theatre (including e.g. Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus; Euripides' Trojan Women; Aristophanes' Frogs).
Week 9. Death on the Acropolis (including e.g. temple of Athena Nike; Parthenon; Alcamenes' Procne and Itys).
Week 10. Death in philosophy (including e.g. Plato's Phaedo; Plato's Republic).

TERM 2.
LECTURES 1–5: MOURNING, GROUP DEATH, REMEMBRANCE, EMPATHY.
Week 1. Kerameikos / private death (focus on lekythoi).
Week 2. State funeral / public death (including e.g. funeral speech; casualty lists; funerary stelai).
Week 3. Historiography of death (including e.g. Thucydides on the plague; mythological and real sickness and mass death in art and text).
Week 4. Materiality of death (including e.g. Sophocles on Niobe and Antigone; funerary stelai).
Week 5. Laughing at death (including e.g. Aristophanes' Frogs, Euripides' Alcestis, Plato's Phaedo; Roman sarcophagi).
Week 6. READING WEEK - NO LECTURES .
LECTURES 7–9: RECEPTION / LEGACY OF GREEK ART OF DEATH. LECTURE 10: PLANNING / WRITING A SYNOPTIC ESSAY OR PROJECT.
Week 7. Death and desire (including e.g. Iphigenia; Polyxena; Achilles and Penthesilea).
Week 8. The ongoing moment of death (including e.g. Alcestis and the deathbed scene).
Week 9. Vanitas and beyond (including e.g. Vanitas, death in VR, and AI death; ancient–modern in dialogue).
Week 10. Writing a synoptic essay / project design.

TERM 3.
WEEKS 1–3: PEER / LECTURER SUPPORT WITH ESSAYS / PROJECTS.
Week 1. Essay / project support.
Week 2. Essay / project support.
Week 3. Essay / project support.

Learning outcomes

By the end of the module, students should be able to:

• Recognise, identify and describe a range of ancient visual and literary culture (including sculpture, painting, drama, hexameter, historiography, philosophy, and lyric poetry).
• Carry out thorough and creative analysis of visual and literary culture, exploring the relations each enter into with their audiences and the thinking they generate.
• Understand and articulate some different ways in which readers and viewers have approached and might approach ancient art and text, including some influential ancient literary reflections.
• Appreciate the enduring influence of Greek art over western art and norms in antiquity and beyond.
• Take more risks by sharing a personal response to ancient material or a point of view.
• Carry out independent work on a chosen topic, including independent reading, and present the work clearly.
• Q800/801 students and students taking an ancient text option will be able to: • Read literature in the original language with greater confidence and fluency. • Analyse and respond to ancient literature with reference to the original language (for instance by commenting on word choice and placement).

Indicative reading list

Arrington, N. T. 2014. ‘Fallen Vessels and Risen Spirits: Conveying the Presence of the Dead on White-Ground Lekythoi’. In Athenian Potters and Painters, vol. 3, ed. J. H. Oakley, 1–10. Oxford/Philadelphia.
Arrington, N. T. 2015. Ashes, Images, and Memories: The Presence of the War Dead in Fifth-Century Athens. New York.
Arrington, N. T. 2018. ‘Touch and Remembrance in Greek Funerary Art’. The Art Bulletin, 100(3): 7–27.
Barthes, R. 1977 [1968]. ‘The Death of the Author’. In Image, Music, Text, trans. S. Heath, 142–8. London.
Bassi, K. 2018. ‘Morbid Materialism: The Matter of the Corpse in Euripides’ Alcestis’. In The Materialities of Greek Tragedy: Objects and Affect in Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, ed. M. Telò and M. Mueller, 35–48. London.
Boardman, J. 1955. ‘Painted Funerary Plaques and Some Remarks on Prothesis’. The Annual of the British School at Athens, 50: 51–66.
Bonanno, G. A. 1999. ‘Laughter During Bereavement’. Bereavement Care, 18: 19–22.
Bonanno, G. A. 2021. The End of Trauma: How the New Science of Resilience Is Changing How We Think About PTSD. New York.
Clark, T. J. 2006. The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing. New Haven/London.
Clark, T. J. 2010. ‘Living Death’, London Review of Books, 32(1).
Clifford, E. 2025. Figuring Death: Visual and Literary Conversations. New York.
DeShazer, M. K. 2009. ‘Cancer Narratives and an Ethics of Commemoration: Susan Sontag, Annie Leibowitz, and David Rieff’. Literature and Medicine, 28(2), 214–36
Elias, N. 2001. The Loneliness of the Dying, trans. E. Jephcott. London/New York. [First published in 1982.]
Elsner, J. 2006. ‘Reflections on the “Greek Revolution” in Art: From Changes in Viewing to the Transformation of Subjectivity’. In Rethinking Revolutions through Ancient Greece, eds S. Goldhill and R. Osborne, 68–95. Cambridge.
Elsner, J. 2007. Roman Eyes: Visuality and Subjectivity in Art and Text. Princeton.
Elsner, J. 2010. ‘Art History as Ekphrasis’. Art History, 33: 10–27.
Elsner, J. 2018a. ‘The Embodied Object: Recensions of the Dead on Roman Sarcophagi’. Art History, 41(3): 546–65.
Elsner, J. 2018b. ‘Ornament, Figure, and Mise en Abyme on Roman Sarcophagi’. In Ornament and Figure in Graeco-Roman Art: Rethinking Visual Ontologies in Classical Antiquity, eds N. Dietrich and M. Squire, 353–91. Berlin.
Estrin, S. 2016. ‘Cold Comfort: Empathy and Memory in an Archaic Funerary
Monument from Akraiphia’. Classical Antiquity, 35(2): 189–214.
Estrin, S. 2018. ‘Memory Incarnate: Material Objects and Private Visions in Classical Athens, from Euripides’ Ion to the Gravesite’. In The Materialities of Greek Tragedy: Objects and Affect in Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, eds M. Telò and M. Mueller, 111–32. London.
Fischer, J. M. and B. Mitchell-Yellin. 2016. Near-Death Experiences: Understanding Visions of the Afterlife. Oxford.
Frontisi-Ducroux, F. 1989. ‘In the Mirror of the Mask’. In A City of Images: Iconography and Society in Ancient Greece, eds C. Bérard et al., trans. D. Lyons, 151–65. Princeton. [First published in 1984.]
Garland, R. 1989. ‘The Well-Ordered Corpse: An Investigation into the Motives behind Funerary Legislation’. Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, 36: 1–15.
Garland, R. 2001. The Greek Way of Death, 2nd edition. Ithaca. [First published in 1985.]
Glynn, D. 2022. ‘The (Un)performability of Death and Violence on Stage’. In Last Scene of All: Representing Death on the Western Stage, ed. J. Goodman, 95–108. Cambridge.
Goldhill, S. D. 1996. ‘Refracting Classical Vision: Changing Cultures of Viewing’. In Vision in Context: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Sight, eds T. Brennan and M. Jay, 15–28. New York/London.
Goldhill, S. D. 2000. ‘Placing Theatre in the History of Vision’. In Word and Image in Ancient Greece, eds N. K. Rutter and B. Sparkes, 161–79. Edinburgh.
Goldhill, S. D. 2012. Sophocles and the Language of Tragedy. Oxford/New York.
Goodman, J. 2022. ‘Death on Stage: A Never-Ending Ending’. In The Last Scene of All: Representing Death on the Western Stage, ed. J. Goodman, 1–9. Cambridge.
Griffith, M. 2013. Aristophanes’ Frogs. Oxford Approaches to Classical Literature. Oxford and New York.
Halliwell, S. 2007. ‘The Life-and-Death Journey of the Soul: Interpreting the Myth of Er’. In The Cambridge Companion to Plato’s Republic, ed. G. R. F. Ferrari, 445–73. Cambridge.
Hanson, V. D. 2005. A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War. New York.
Herrero de Jäuregui, M. 2013. ‘Emar Tode: Recognizing the Crucial Day in Early Greek Poetry’. Classical Antiquity, 32(1): 35–77.
Holmes, B. 2010. The Symptom and the Subject: The Emergence of the Physical Body in Ancient Greece. Princeton.
Holmes, B. 2018. ‘Body’. In The Cambridge Companion to Hippocrates, ed. P. E. Pormann, 63–88. Cambridge.
Hurwit, J. M. 2004. The Acropolis in the Age of Pericles. Cambridge/New York.
Jacobs, K. 2017. ‘Retouching Queer Kinship: Sontag, Leibovitz, and the Ends of the Photographic Lens’. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 23, 1–29
Joho, T. 2017. ‘Thucydides, Epic, and Tragedy’. In The Oxford Handbook of Thucydides, eds S. Forsdyke, E. Foster, and R. Balot, 587–604. Oxford.
Jones, N. 2015. ‘Phantasms and Metonyms: The Limits of Representation in Fifth-Century Athens’. Art History, 38(5): 814–37.
Knappett, C. 2020. Aegean Bronze Age Art: Meaning in the Making. Cambridge/New York.
Kousser, R. 2009. ‘Destruction and Memory on the Athenian Acropolis’. The Art Bulletin, 91(3): 263–82.
Kurtz, D. C. and J. Boardman. 1971. Greek Burial Customs. London.
Kuspit, D. 2020. Mortality: A Survey of Contemporary Death Art. Washington, DC. https://doi.org/10.57912/23856474.v1.
Liatsos, Y. ‘Temporality and the Carer’s Experience in the Narrative Ecology of Illness: Susan Sontag’s Dying in Photography and Prose’. Humanities, 9(3), 81.
Loraux, N. 1986a. The Invention of Athens: The Funeral Oration in the Classical City, trans. A. Sheridan. Cambridge, MA and London. [First published in 1981.]
Loraux, N. 2002. The Mourning Voice: An Essay on Greek Tragedy, trans. E. T. Rawlings, foreword by P. Pucci. Ithaca/London.
Low, P., G. Oliver, and P. J. Rhodes (eds) 2012. Cultures of Commemoration: War Memorials, Ancient and Modern. Oxford.
Macintosh, F. 2022. ‘The Whole Point of Living Is Preparing to Die: Dying into Death in Tragic Drama’. In The Last Scene of All: Representing Death on the Western Stage, ed. J. Goodman, 163–75. Cambridge.
Marconi, C. 2017. ‘The Frames of Greek Painted Pottery’. In The Frame in Classical Art: A Cultural History, eds V. Platt and M. Squire, 117–53. Cambridge/New York.
Martin, B. 2016. ‘Cold Comfort: Winged Psychai on Fifth-Century BC Greek Funerary Lekythoi’. Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, 59(1): 1–25.
McCabe, M. M. 2008. ‘Plato’s Ways of Writing’. In The Oxford Handbook of Plato, ed. G. Fine, 88–113. Oxford.
Metcalf, P. and R. Huntingdon. 1991. Celebrations of Death: The Anthropology of Mortuary Ritual, 2nd edition. Cambridge. [First published in 1979.]
Monthéard, O. 2020. ‘Negation and Poetic Capability in Keats’s Odes’. Etudes anglaises, 73(2): 171–85.
Moody, R. A. 2022. Life after Life. London. [First published in 1975.]
Morgan, T. E. 1994. ‘Plague or Poetry? Thucydides on the Epidemic at Athens’. Transactions of the American Philological Association, 124: 197–209.
Morgan, K. 2000. Myth and Philosophy from the Presocratics to Plato. Cambridge.
Murray, O. 1988. ‘Death and the Symposion’. AION, Sezione di archeologia e storia antica, 10: 239–57.
Mylonopoulos, J. 2020. ‘Gory Details? The Iconography of Human Sacrifice in Greek Art (Plates II-IX)’. In Sacrifices humains : Perspectives croisées et représentations, eds P. Bonnechere, and R. Gagné, 61-85. Liège. https://doi.org/10.4000/books.pulg.8088
Neer, R. 2002. Style and Politics in Athenian Vase-Painting: The Craft of Democracy, ca. 530–460 B.C.E. Cambridge.
Neer, R. 2010. The Emergence of the Classical Style in Greek Sculpture. Chicago/London.
Neer, R. 2012. ‘“A Tomb Both Great and Blameless”. Marriage and Murder on a Sarcophagus from the Hellespont’. Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 61/2: 99–115.
Neer, R. 2012. ‘Sacrificing Stones: On Some Sculpture, Mostly Athenian’. In Greek and Roman Animal Sacrifice: Ancient Victims, Modern Observers, eds C. A. Faraone and F. S. Naiden, 99–119. Cambridge.
Newby, Z. and R. E. Toulson (eds.) 2019. The Materiality of Mourning: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives. London.
Nightingale, A. 2002. ‘Toward an Ecological Eschatology: Plato and Bakhtin on Other Worlds and Times’. In Bakhtin and the Classics, ed. R. Bracht Branham, 220–49. Evanston, IL.
Oakley, J. H. 2004. Picturing Death in Classical Athens: The Evidence of the White Lekythoi. Cambridge/New York.
Oakley, J. H. 2020. A Guide to Scenes of Daily Life on Athenian Vases. Madison.
Osborne, R. 1988. ‘Death Revisited; Death Revised: The Death of the Artist in Archaic and Classical Greece’. Art History 11, 1-16.
Osborne, R. 2010. ‘Democratic Ideology, the Events of War and the Iconography of Attic Funerary Sculpture’. In War, Democracy, and Culture in Classical Athens, ed. D. M. Pritchard, 245–65. Cambridge.
Osborne, R. 2018. The Transformation of Athens: Painted Pottery and the Creation of Classical Greece. Princeton/Oxford.
Parry, A. 1969. ‘The Language of Thucydides’ Description of the Plague’. Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, 16: 106–18.
Platt, V. 2017. ‘Framing the Dead on Roman Sarcophagi’. In The Frame in Classical Art: A Cultural History, eds V. Platt and M. Squire, 353–81. Cambridge.
Porter, J. I. 2016. The Sublime in Antiquity. Cambridge.
Rimell, V. 2024. 'Philosophers' Stone: Enduring Niobe'. In Niobes: Antiquity, Modernity, Critical Theory, eds M. Telò and A. Benjamin, 69–84. Columbus.
Scarry, E. 1985. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York/Oxford.
Segal, C. 1993. ‘Euripides’ Alcestis: How to Die a Normal Death in Greek Tragedy’. In Death and Representation, eds S. W. Goodwin and E. Bronfen, 213–41. Baltimore/London.
Segal, C. 1993. Euripides and the Poetics of Sorrow: Art, Gender, and Commemoration in Alcestis, Hippolytus, and Hecuba. Durham, NC/London.
Sekita, K. 2024. ‘Morbid Phantasies: The “After-Death” and the Dead between Imagination and Perception’. In The Imagination of the Mind in Classical Athens, eds E. Clifford and X. Buxton, 103–25. London/New York.
Shapiro, H. A. 1991. ‘The Iconography of Mourning in Athenian Art’. American Journal of Archaeology, 95(4): 629–56.
Sourvinou-Inwood, C. 1981. ‘To Die and Enter the House of Hades: Homer, Before and After’. In Mirrors of Mortality: Studies in the Social History of Death, ed. J. Whaley, 15–39. London.
Sourvinou-Inwood, C. 1991. ‘Reading’ Greek Culture: Texts and Images, Rituals and Myths. Oxford.
Spivey, N. J. 2018. The Sarpedon Krater: The Life and Afterlife of a Greek Vase. London.
Squire, M. 2018. ‘Embodying the Dead on Classical Attic Grave-Stelai’. Art History, 41(3): 518–45.
Squire, M. 2018. ‘“To haunt, to startle, and way-lay”: Approaching Ornament and Figure in Graeco-Roman Art’. In Ornament and Figure in Graeco-Roman Art: Rethinking Visual Ontologies in Classical Antiquity, eds N. Dietrich and M. Squire, 1–35. Berlin.
Topper, K. 2010. ‘Maidens, Fillies, and the Death of Medusa on a Seventh-Century Pithos’. Journal of Hellenic Studies, 130: 109–19.
Trimble, J. 2018. ‘Figure and Ornament, Death and Transformation in the Tomb of the Haterii’. In Ornament and Figure in Graeco-Roman Art: Rethinking Visual Ontologies in Classical Antiquity, eds N. Dietrich and M. Squire, 327–52. Berlin.
Turner, S. 2016. ‘Sight and Death: Seeing the Dead through Ancient Eyes’. In Sight and the Ancient Senses, ed. M. Squire, 143–60. London/New York.
Vermeule, E. 1979. Aspects of Death in Early Greek Art and Poetry. Berkeley/London.
Vernant, J.-P. 1991. ‘A “Beautiful Death” and the Disfigured Corpse in Homeric Epic’. In Mortals and Immortals: Collected Essays of Jean-Pierre Vernant, ed. by F. I. Zeitlin, 50–74. Princeton.
Vout, C. 2014. ‘The Funerary Altar of Pedana and the Rhetoric of Unreachability’. In Art and Rhetoric in Roman Culture, eds J. Elsner and M. Meyer, 288–315. Cambridge.
Vout, C. 2018. Classical Art: A Life History. Princeton/Oxford. Chs. 1, 7, 9.
Wohl, V. 2018. ‘Stone into Smoke: Metaphor and Materiality in Euripides’ Troades’. In The Materialities of Greek Tragedy: Objects and Affect in Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, eds by M. Telò and M. Mueller, 17–33. London.
Worman, N. 2021. Tragic Bodies: Edges of the Human in Greek Drama. London/New York.

Interdisciplinary

The module cuts across sub-disciplinary boundaries by incorporating literary and visual culture. This (1) builds bridges between different areas and methods of classical study; (2) enables students to put ancient written theories of art in dialogue with modern ways of thinking; and (3) raises theoretical questions surrounding the difference between words and pictures.

Subject specific skills

By the end of this module all students should expect to have:

• developed a broad understanding of a variety of a range of ancient visual and literary culture and its relevance for a range of issues pertinent to Classical study, including ancient socio-cultural significance and contributions to broader debates in critical theory and classical reception;
• honed skills in visual and literary analysis;
• developed an ability to think creatively about the relationship between form and content, including the contribution made by medium;
• developed an understanding of a range of ways of approaching ancient material, including approaches centred on, among others, ancient viewers, audiences, and readers, and an ability to reflect critically upon different (modern and ancient) ways of approaching ancient art and text, including their own methodology and approach;
• developed an ability to consider ancient art and text within a wider comparative context, drawing in other aspects of the study of the ancient world;
• engaged creatively with a range of secondary literature that includes discussion of ancient art and text and/or sets it within broader comparative and critical-theoretical frames;
• developed an appreciation of the enduring legacy of Greek art and literature over western art and norms in antiquity and beyond.

Transferable skills

• Communication
• Information Literacy
• Critical Thinking
• Creativity
• Risk taking