"Published for the Center for Hellenic Studies."

Jan Bremmer presents a provocative picture of the historical development of beliefs regarding the soul in ancient Greece. He argues that before Homer the Greeks distinguished between two types of soul, both identified with the individual: the free soul, which possessed no psychological attributes and was active only outside the body, as in dreams, swoons, and the afterlife; and the body soul, which endowed a person with life and consciousness. Gradually this concept of two kinds of souls was replaced by the idea of a single soul. In exploring Greek ideas of human souls as well as those of plants and animals, Bremmer illuminates an important stage in the genesis of the Greek mind.

Belief in the afterlife is still very much alive in Western civilisation, even though the truth of its existence is no longer universally accepted. Surprisingly, however, heaven, hell and the immortal soul were all ideas which arrived relatively late in the ancient world. Originally Greece and Israel - the cultures that gave us Christianity - had only the vaguest ideas of an afterlife. So where did these concepts come from and why did they develop? In this fascinating, learned, but highly readable book, Jan N. Bremmer - one of the foremost authorities on ancient religion - takes a fresh look at the major developments in the Western imagination of the afterlife, from the ancient Greeks to the modern near-death experience.

In this wide-ranging work on Greek religion and mythology, Jan N. Bremmer brings together his stimulating and innovative articles, which have all been updated and revised where necessary. In three thematic sections, he analyses central aspects of Greek religion, beginning with the gods and heroes and paying special attention to the unity of the divine nature and the emergence of the category 'hero'. The second section begins with a discussion of the nature of polis religion, continues with various facets, such as seers, secrecy and the soul, and concludes with the influence of the Ancient Near East. The third section studies human sacrifice and offers the most recent analysis of the ideal animal sacrifice, combining literature, epigraphy, iconography, and zooarchaeology. Regarding human sacrifice, it concentrates on the famous cases of Iphigeneia and the werewolves of Mount Lykaion. The fourth and final section investigates key elements of Greek mythology, such as the definition of myth and its relationship to ritual, and ends with a brief history of the study of Greek mythology. The multi-disciplinary approach and rich footnotes make this work a must for anybody interested in Greek religion and mythology.