Deviations from Funerary Normality in the Ancient Greek World: Managing the Dead Body, Methods and Symbolisms

Given in Greek, this lecture by Dimitris Bosnakis of the University of Crete examines atypical and dishonouring burials across the ancient Greek world, drawing on his book on humiliated and despised dead. Between the customary funerary honours due to a citizen and the legal denial of burial reserved for traitors and temple-robbers, Bosnakis identifies a grey zone of five non-normative burial practices through which Greek cities managed crisis, pollution and social deviance.

The first category comprises anonymous public mass graves dug during epidemics or wartime, including the late 5th-century BC plague pit in the Athenian Kerameikos and mass burials at Himera, Olynthus, Chania, Lete and Failaka; none received a permanent marker or commemorative cult once order returned. The second covers silent disposals in disused wells: Geometric-period adults with physical disabilities around the Athenian Agora, and Hellenistic deposits of hundreds of perinatal infants mixed with dog bones in wells at Athens, Messene and Eretria, which he links to purification rites.

The third category encompasses burials in iron fetters, such as the 4th-century BC mass pit at Pydna and twelve shackled skeletons in individual graves at Akanthos. The fourth covers public executions, notably the men killed by apotympanismos at Phaleron and an unpublished mass grave of some twenty-nine crucified individuals on Rhodes containing thirty-eight lead curse tablets, which Bosnakis connects to Roman reprisals recorded by Cassius Dio. The fifth groups private rites of subjugation designed to prevent a revenant from returning: mutilated or stone-pinned skeletons at Thoreai and Kamarina, and prone burials.

In the discussion, questions address dog sacrifices, folklore about unbaptised infants, execution cemeteries and rushed cremations during the Athenian plague, and Bosnakis briefly notes Hellenistic atypical burials with infants and dogs at Paphos published by Efstathios Raptou.