As prophetic texts were charged with new meanings by readers of the Bible in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, exegetes, philosophers, artists, and poets tried to define what made a prophet strong and successful, hoping to find new models for artistic inspiration and political and national leadership, as well as integrity, courage, and authenticity. Yet even as prophetic figures were idealized as powerful men who could stride with towering authority and speak with majestic resonance, they also served as emblems of exile, failure, and alienation. Modern representations of prophecy vacillate between emptiness and fullness, strength and weakness. This instability in the representation of prophets and prophecy originates in the biblical text itself. We can trace a countertradition of poets, who, rather than trying to find heroes, create hierarchies, and systematize the biblical text, using prophecy’s instability to enliven and enrich their own texts. They actively exploit the fissures of both ancient and modern prophecy to create stirring, innovative, and often radical literary works from prophetic weakness itself.

One of the most striking things about myth on Roman sarcophagi is that, after exiting the stage during the second half of the third century, it returns with a vengeance in the fourth – this time in Christian guise. How are we to conceive of the relation between the polytheistic myths that had long adorned Roman coffins and the Christian myths that succeeded them? What was their altered view of temporality, allegory, and the afterlife? And what is the relevance of sculptural technique and tooling to understanding this relationship? Such is the subject of this book’s closing chapter.

The Ghost of Clytemnestra is the first afterlife figure in extant Greek literature to call for vengeance instead of ritual burial. Speaking for the sake of her own soul (psychē), the Ghost cites the ethical wrongs done to her as a mother killed by her own son and as a queen dishonored in the afterlife. The Ghost’s claims, however, have never been seriously considered by scholars. By contrast, the Erinyes do take up her cause, chasing down Orestes and arguing a universal version of Clytemnestra’s case in the trial. This chapter delves into the specifics of the Ghost’s rhetoric, her metatheatrical self-awareness, and her first-person depiction of the afterlife. The living Clytemnestra has already proven manipulative, politically usurping, and murderous; she continues these behaviors after death. Further, the Ghost’s lack of substance (as image, soul, or dream of the Erinyes) distances her from the living world. How can a character so far outside of societal norms demand serious ethical consideration?

This chapter covers a large literary category which I call ‘hagiographical’: it includes miracle stories that involve the Virgin Mary, full-length Lives of the Virgin (which began to be produced from the late eighth or early ninth century onward) and two Apocalypses. Many of the texts studied here are composed in a colloquial style that may have appealed to wider audiences in non-liturgical settings. This genre thus contrasts with the liturgical texts that are studied in the first four chapters: according to hagiography, Mary assumes power and agency that goes beyond her theological role in giving birth to Christ. Christians appeal to this female holy figure as one who is able to appeal to Christ and who is willing to help sinners or supplicants who despair of God’s direct favour. Christological teaching persists in these texts, but the emphasis has shifted to Mary’s intercessory role among Christians.

The introduction provides necessary background on Ancient Greek religious and literary ideas about the afterlife, methods for analyzing ethics in literature that several of the chapters will challenge, a working definition of tragic poetics, and historical context and preliminary definitions relevant for political structures and themes in the Oresteia.

The chapter aims to show that Plato’s engagement with mystery cults – the Eleusinian mysteries and Orphic cults in particular – can illuminate centrally important topics of Plato’s philosophy, including his conception of the philosophical life, its relation to the human good, the role of memory in the knowledge of the Forms, and the soul’s kinship to the divine. It explores why and how Plato presents philosophy as the true initiation which can fulfil the promise of the mystery cults to offer the best human life and afterlife. It analyses why and how Plato describes the knowledge of the Forms on the model of the direct encounter with the divine at the culmination of a mystery ritual. It further suggests that the ‘birth’ announced at the highest point of the Eleusinian mysteries can shed new light on the role of ‘giving birth’ at the culmination of the philosophical life in the Symposium. Finally, it shows how Pythagorean and Orphic focus on memory offered Plato a framework to develop his account of the relationship between the soul and the divine Forms, reincarnation, and the fate of our soul in the afterlife.

The year 2020 provides evidence of the Crimea’s continued relevance in troubled times. In Britain, 2020 marks the moment that Brexit was finally done. Several critics found resonance in the Charge of the Light Brigade and the cult around it, which valorized heroic failure. Like the officers of the Light Brigade, the Tory leadership blundered as it led the nation into the abyss. In Britain and beyond, 2020 will be remembered as the beginning of the Coronavirus pandemic. Like the battle against the cholera in the Crimea, the British struggle against the virus was marred by mismanagement. In response, the names of Nightingale and Seacole found their ways onto makeshift hospitals and rehabilitation centers. And, as in the Crimea, military men – here, centenarians whose youths overlapped with the longest-lived of the Victorian generation – captured the hearts of the public. Most notable was Captain Tom Moore, whose compassion and particular variety of courage spurred him, at the age of 100, to raise money for the NHS before dying a celebrity in 2021. Even now, the Crimean War’s long afterlife provides touchstones for success, failure, and hope.

The Crimean War bequeathed to Great Britain the Charge of the Light Brigade, a military disaster, and Florence Nightingale, a long-adored heroine. These epitomes of the conflict are not static emblems of Victorian England. They are lodestones for writing the nation’s past, forging its future, and assessing its annals. Other innovations and personages to emerge from the War also continue to exert their hold on ordinary Britons. The War inspired the Victoria Cross, a military award for valor, which holds its allure even today. More recently, Mary Seacole, a Caribbean-born hotelier and healer, has come to the fore as a Crimean heroine. Beyond the names of battles, heroes, and institutions, the Crimean War offered immaterial legacies. It engendered forms of masculinity and models of femininity, as well as practices of burial and structures of feeling. The notion of afterlife allows us to apprehend the longstanding, varied, and elusive effects of this mid-Victorian conflict. The six chapters of this book trace facets of the war and its legacies as they demonstrate the persistence of an overlooked conflict in the making of modern Britain.

This chapter covers a large literary category which I call ‘hagiographical’: it includes miracle stories that involve the Virgin Mary, full-length Lives of the Virgin (which began to be produced from the late eighth or early ninth century onward) and two Apocalypses. Many of the texts studied here are composed in a colloquial style that may have appealed to wider audiences in non-liturgical settings. This genre thus contrasts with the liturgical texts that are studied in the first four chapters: according to hagiography, Mary assumes power and agency that goes beyond her theological role in giving birth to Christ. Christians appeal to this female holy figure as one who is able to appeal to Christ and who is willing to help sinners or supplicants who despair of God’s direct favour. Christological teaching persists in these texts, but the emphasis has shifted to Mary’s intercessory role among Christians.

This study examines the evidence for the celestial afterlife in Greek philosophy before Plato. Starting from Plato’s Phaedo myth, where we find evidence for three levels of life for souls (our level, the ‘aithêr-dwellers’ above us, and, above that, a more mysterious third level), it argues that such a stratified cosmos was not original to Plato, but can be found in certain of his predecessors. The two best-documented instances of it occur in Heraclitus and the new, Strasbourg papyrus of Empedocles. Both thinkers, in attempting to frame the place of soul in the order of nature, also adopt a stratified, hierarchical cosmic scheme, with rewards and demotions along the vertical axis. But they also thereby take up positions on the nature of soul: What stuff is it made of? Is it (essentially) immortal or not? And if not, can its immortality be secured? Against Plato’s later doctrine of an essentially immortal soul, both conceive of soul as somehow physical and, for different reasons, appear to deny its full or essential immortality.

This chapter discusses Pope Gregory the Great’s ideas about visions and the afterlife, and how they were received in the early middle ages. To provide a fuller picture of Gregory’s ideas about afterlife visions, the chapter discusses his thought more generally about visions and dreams, especially the two main themes of this thought: the nature of dreams and visions, as ways through which invisible realities might be perceived; and the nature of afterlife visions, especially whether they represented the afterlife allegorically or as it was. The reception of Gregory’s ideas was influenced by the existing tradition of narrating afterlife visions and the way his works were excerpted and abbreviated to suit new needs. This process made Gregory known both as a proponent of the reality of visions and the author of a teaching critical of dreams, and his Dialogues an influential source of imagery for afterlife visions.

Dante’s distinctive political theology lies behind two of the most startling surprises of his otherworldly vision, in relation to previous traditions both popular and learned about the afterlife. First, of the approximately 300 characters in Dante’s otherworld, 84 are pagans, and 51 of these are located in a region entirely of Dante’s own invention: the limbo of the virtuous pagans. Second is Dante depiction of contemporary popes, at least four of whom are allotted a place in hell.

From the sixth century onwards, numerous visions of the afterlife and the otherworld were recorded by authors who operated in the post-Roman barbarian West. The most prevailing characteristics of all these accounts are their brevity and conciseness. More often than not, these stories were integrated into a larger historical or hagiographic narrative, in an attempt to stress various political, religious, or cultural points. It was only towards the end of the Merovingian period, with the composition of the so-called Visio Baronti, that more comprehensive accounts of the afterlife began to appear in the West, and thus paved the way for the emergence of a new literary genre. This chapter discusses the evolution of these narratives, as well as the various possible reasons why travels to the otherworld became a seminal component in the historiographical and hagiographical tradition of the early medieval West.