Making Sense of Death

3 Credits

How do we make sense of death? Thinking about death can cause feelings of anxiety, stir up painful memories, or make us wish our loved ones could have lived longer. At the same time, we may think that death is not a bad thing, that we ought to joyously celebrate the lives of our beloved when they die, or even that the dead live on. This course investigates this mix of contrasting and sometimes contradictory attitudes and practices concerning death by looking at ancient Greek and Roman precedents. The ancient Mediterranean world, like ours, was a messy complex of different approaches and responses to the facts of death. By examining how ancient societies managed and constructed what death meant, we might be able to take a fresh look at our societies and our own relations to death. To aid our inquiry, we will use the field of death studies (or thanatology) to study death in Greek mythology, Roman religion, ancient philosophy, and ancient medicine.