The Greek Way of Death

Robert Garland's The Greek Way of Death, published by Cornell University Press in 1985, is an academic monograph on ancient Greek beliefs and practices surrounding death, covering the preparation of the corpse, funeral procession and burial rites, mourning custom and Greek conceptions of the afterlife, drawn from literary, epigraphic and archaeological evidence together. Garland is a classicist whose work focuses on the social history of everyday ancient Greek life. Its strength is bringing textual sources, funerary inscriptions and excavated grave evidence into a single account rather than relying on literature alone, which tends to describe elite or mythic death rather than ordinary practice. Its limit is that ancient Greek burial custom varied significantly by region, period and social class across the many centuries and city states the book surveys, so a claim about a specific place or era's funerary practice should be checked against evidence from that particular context rather than treated as uniform Greek practice.