The recent Bigelow Institute contest rewarding the "best" evidence for life after death epitomizes much of what's wrong with the current state of survival research, its participants constituting a who's who list of contemporary survival researchers. Cases that are regularly hyped as among the best evidence for an afterlife are all too often easily susceptible to normal explanations--if only survival researchers would give them a chance. The consistently negative results of 121 years of experimental survival research ought to have spurred (...) soul-searching questions for survival researchers by now. And if we treat discarnate personal survival as a scientific hypothesis, then researchers are rationally obliged to seriously consider biological facts that tell against it, too. Limiting one's inquiry to attempts to only collect data that might confirm survival is one of the chief hallmarks of pseudoscience, and it's sadly a feature, not a bug, of the survival literature. This systematic review reveals that survival researchers would better serve science by setting aside their feelings and heeding what the data are telling them, for the probabilities should drive our beliefs, not the other way around. Is discarnate personal survival likely to occur in light of the total available evidence? The overall evidence doesn't even make personal survival more probable than not. -/- 1. Introduction 2. In Science the Quality of the Evidence is Paramount -- 2.1 Prospective Experimental Tests of Survival -- 2.2 Where Have All the Deceased Survival Researchers Gone? -- 3. What Does the Total Available Relevant Evidence Tell Us? -- 4. Ranking the Survival Evidence -- 5. The Mind-Body Problem, Botched -- 6. Conclusion: Not Much Better than Religious Faith. (shrink)

Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus has traditionally been regarded as the poet's primary tragedy involving hero cult; this essay explores the more subtle but no less ritually explicit hero cult of the Aias first outlined by Burian. The passage, as Burian saw, occurs when the young Eurysakes kneels at his father's body and Teukros conducts an unusual combination of rites: supplication, curse, offering of hair, and magic . One crucial direction to the child, kai phulasse , however, is here not understood (...) to be a paradox of the suppliant who "protects" what he seizes but rather his physical attachment to the locus where he abides as well as his ritual dependence on the source of protection . By saying a curse and obtaining protection, Teukros and Eurysakes indicate how the still-warm body of the dead hero has already acquired special powers after death: specifically, the power to bestow both blessings and curses on mortals. The argument turns from the body to the tomb, the physical and lasting monument of hero cult, which the Sophoclean audience would know. The preceding scene ends with a pivotal choral passage where the hero's burial and cult are prescribed in highly Homeric terms . This passage forms an important link between the opposing views of the fate of the corpse and also between the hero's death and burial. This choral celebration of the hero's future status is cast in traditional Homeric language, but with some revealing inversions. One is the reversal of the verb whereby the earth "holds" or possesses heroes in Homer, while Aias occupies and possesses his tomb . The evolution of Homeric views of death is traced . In Sophocles' Aias the chorus performs the burial as a ritual act establishing a cult, long before it happens at the end of the play. The article concludes with a discussion of the historical cults of Aias known to the Athenians and of the more significant way that Aias becomes a hero: not self-consciously, as Oedipus did, but through rituals performed by his family and community. In the Aias, the poet's sense of hero cult lies closer to Homer and the epic tradition than it does, for instance, to Aeschylus. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is to increase our understanding of what archaic verse epitaphs meant to contemporary readers. Section I suggests their fundamental message was praise of the deceased, expressed in forms characteristic of poetic encomium in its broad, rhetorical sense, i.e., praise poetry. In section II, the conventions of encomium in the epitaphs are compared to the iconographic conventions of funerary art. I conclude that verse inscriptions and grave markers, not only communicate the same message of praise, but (...) do so in a formally parallel manner. Section III, drawing on Pindar as a preserver of archaic thinking, attributes the parallelism between verse epitaph and grave marker to their common debt to funerary ritual. The epigrams will be seen to share with their monuments the goal of memorializing this ritual. (shrink)

Tristia3.3 purports to be a ‘death-bed’ letter addressed by the sick poet to his wife in Rome, in which Ovid, banished from Rome on Augustus' orders, foresees his burial in Tomi as the ultimate form of exilic displacement. In order to avoid such a permanent form of exclusion from his homeland, Ovid issues instructions for his burial in the suburbs of Rome, dictating a four-line epitaph to be inscribed upon his tomb. However, despite the careful instructions he outlines for his (...) burial and physical memorial, Ovid asserts:maiora libelli | et diuturna magis sunt monumenta mihi, expressing his belief in his continued poetic afterlife. Scholars have seen this poem's concerns as above all literary, concentrating on Ovid's exploitation and development of elegiac and Augustan models which also treat the themes of death and poetic immortality. However, although Ovid's portrayal of what purports to be personal experience draws extensively upon earlier poetry, and, as we shall see, the poem gains much of its power from its engagement with the tradition that poetry alone can memorialize, previous studies have failed to analyse how Ovid consistently plays up the element that marks him out from the predecessors who had imagined their own deaths and poetic afterlives: that is, his status as an exile. Ovid's insistence on burial in his native land – from which he had been excluded in life – and his assertion of his poetic immortality in a poem which repeatedly stresses his exilic status, thus take on a markedly political angle, which had been absent or more muted in the models he exploits. (shrink)

According to many recent interpretations of Catullus 101, the ritual performance it describes serves primarily as a foil, highlighting the greater expressiveness and communicative power of the poem itself. I argue instead for using the complexities of Roman funerary ritual as a model for understanding the poem's ambiguities. As funerary offerings at once establish a bond between family members and the dead and affirm a distinction between them that allows the survivors to rejoin the society of the living, so the (...) poem articulates a tension between assertions of the brother's absence and intimations of his presence as addressee, even as speaker. Similarly, the split between the poem's fictional context as a one-time-only farewell to the brother and its existence as a repeatable literary artifact further accentuates the double allegiance of the poet. In the second section I consider how the poem, without being an epitaph itself, fulfills the functions of an epitaph, by allowing for the re-performance of the ritual, constructing the opposition between permanence and temporality present in the epitaph/monument complex, "inscribing" the brother's death at the prominent literary "crossroads" of the beginning of the Odyssey, and finally making the commemoration of the brother performed through each reading of the poem a sacrum that builds its audience into a community. (shrink)

Ovid's Tristia4.10 has in the past chiefly been considered as a source of biographical information rather than as a poem, but increasing interest in the poetry of Ovid's exile has now at last started to promote serious efforts to appreciate its literary qualities. The poem presents a formidable challenge to the critic: at first reading it seems a singularly pedestrian account of the poet's life and, although one may adduce plenty of parallels for details in its phrasing elsewhere in the (...) poetry of Ovid and the other Augustans, it is clear that Ovid's thought-processes are not to be explained solely in terms of the main stream of Greco-Roman poetic tradition. Prose biography and autobiography, rhetorical apology and eulogy, subliterary epitaphs and inscriptional lists of achievements: all these types of writing could have influenced Ovid's selection of data. (shrink)

Ovid's Tristia4.10 has in the past chiefly been considered as a source of biographical information rather than as a poem, but increasing interest in the poetry of Ovid's exile has now at last started to promote serious efforts to appreciate its literary qualities. The poem presents a formidable challenge to the critic: at first reading it seems a singularly pedestrian account of the poet's life and, although one may adduce plenty of parallels for details in its phrasing elsewhere in the (...) poetry of Ovid and the other Augustans, it is clear that Ovid's thought-processes are not to be explained solely in terms of the main stream of Greco-Roman poetic tradition. Prose biography and autobiography, rhetorical apology and eulogy, subliterary epitaphs and inscriptional lists of achievements: all these types of writing could have influenced Ovid's selection of data. (shrink)

T. D. Barnes has recently impugned the authenticity of these verses and calls for a defence of their genuineness. Although I agree with Fergus Millar that ‘the problem of the Historia Augusta is one into which sane men refrain from entering’,2 yet I think we can at least counter Barnes's objections. Barnes musters four arguments which he naturally calls ‘quite conclusive’. He first points out that the verses are omitted in the epitome of Dio by Xiphilinus, who is our sole (...) source for Dio here, and claims that it is unlikely that Xiphilinus could have omitted such a ‘striking poem’. This is putting an extraordinarily high value on Xiphilinus, who is quite capable of omitting things of greater moment than five Latin verses which he would presumably have had to translate into Greek; as an epitomator of Dio, he is inferior to Zonaras, and his account of Hadrian's reign is particularly poor. (shrink)

T. D. Barnes has recently impugned the authenticity of these verses and calls for a defence of their genuineness. Although I agree with Fergus Millar that ‘the problem of the Historia Augusta is one into which sane men refrain from entering’,2 yet I think we can at least counter Barnes's objections. Barnes musters four arguments which he naturally calls ‘quite conclusive’. He first points out that the verses are omitted in the epitome of Dio by Xiphilinus, who is our sole (...) source for Dio here, and claims that it is unlikely that Xiphilinus could have omitted such a ‘striking poem’. This is putting an extraordinarily high value on Xiphilinus, who is quite capable of omitting things of greater moment than five Latin verses which he would presumably have had to translate into Greek; as an epitomator of Dio, he is inferior to Zonaras, and his account of Hadrian's reign is particularly poor. (shrink)