Laudator Temporis Acti

Robert Garland, The Greek Way of Death (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 70-71:

The pleasures awaiting the dead in Hades are also suggested by the series of so-called 'Totenmahl' (death-feast) reliefs which would have us believe that life below was one long drinking-party. This is in striking contrast to the Homeric picture, where nobody eats or drinks except when summoned by the living to partake of an irregular sacrifice. The principal compositional features of the series include a man reclining on a klinê on the right, a table beside him laden with various kinds of food, including cakes, fruit, pomegranates and eggs, and a seated woman on his left. The exact schema, as Thönges-Stringaris (1965) notes, can be traced to a frieze from the North Palace of Assurbanipal at Nineveh. The inspiration for the series seems to derive from votive reliefs carrying representations of feasting deities and heroes, like the one of Pluto and Persephone discussed earlier in the chapter. These make their first appearance in Greece towards the end of the sixth century. The earliest Totenmahl relief appears to be a stêlê found in the Peiraios dated c. 400 B.C. (fig. 14). The series comes to an end c. 300-280 B.C. Examples have been found not only in Attika, but all over the Greek world, including Sparta, Argos, Corinth, Boeotia, Aetolia, Poteidaia, Melos, Delos, Thasos, Samos, as well as Asia Minor and Italy. They could be erected to members of both sexes, as their inscriptions prove. Other compositional features include the head of a horse in a square box in the top left-hand corner of the relief, the dead man's arms and armour suspended in the background as though hanging from a wall,

Fig. 14. A Totenmahl or 'Death feast' relief c. 400 B.C., showing the deceased as husband and wife drinking together. On the left a slave with an amphora attends. On the right a survivor watches on.

and a snake, either coiled under the table and perhaps raising its head in the direction of the food, or else entwined around a tree. Sometimes a wine-pourer attends.

What finally remains unclear is whether the figures represented on the reliefs are conceived of as enjoying in the afterlife the pleasures of earthly existence or whether they are frozen in life, caught at a characteristic moment, as it were, as their friends remembered them and as they themselves would wish to be remembered. Lending some support to the theory that they are in fact supposed to be dead is Sokrates' comment in the Republic quoted above that according to the Orphics the reward for the just in Hades is 'everlasting drunkenness' (2.363d).

Despite the emphasis on food and drink, bowels do not abound in Hades, as Vermeule (1979, 27) has sensitively observed — a point of contrast with the Egyptian notion of the afterlife, in accordance with which the dead were occasionally provided with both bathroom and lavatory so that they should feel 'perfectly at home' (Scharff 1947, 18).

Most descriptions of the afterlife seem boring to me, but I do find appealing the notion of "one long drinking-party." In Garland's figure 14 above (Athens, National Archaeological Museum, inv. 1501), note the dog under the table gnawing a bone.