The Sather Lectures of 1975: A Discipline-Defining Performance

Emily Vermeule’s Aspects of Death in Early Greek Art and Poetry originates in the Sather Classical Lectures she delivered at Berkeley in spring 1975 and was published in revised book form by the University of California Press in 1979. Vermeule, a classical archaeologist at Harvard whose earlier monumental Greece in the Bronze Age (1964) had remade the field’s understanding of Mycenaean civilization, brought to the Sather lectures a methodological breadth that the Sather format had rarely seen. The book treats early Greek mortality not as the province of any single sub-discipline — not strictly archaeological, not strictly philological, not strictly historical — but as a single coherent imaginative-ritual-iconographic culture whose surviving evidence must be read together. The result is a six-chapter integration that begins from the physical phenomenology of dying as the early Greeks observed and described it (chapter one), moves through the iconographic vocabulary of the death-figures (chapter two), the carnivorous imagery of warrior death (chapter three), the ritual practices that gave death its cultural shape (chapter four), the cosmological geography of the underworld (chapter five), and concludes with a meditation on the meaning of immortality in early Greek thought (chapter six). Each chapter integrates Mycenaean and Geometric iconographic material — vase paintings, funerary stelai, the gold death masks of Mycenae, the lekythoi — with the Homeric, Hesiodic, and lyric poetic record. The book is a discipline-defining performance.

The Carnivorous Phenomenology of Greek Death

The book’s central iconographic-philological argument concerns the predator-prey imagery that saturates the Greek death record. The lions of the Mycenaean Lion Gate, the lions and lionesses of the funerary stelai, the eagles taking hares, the dogs of Hekate, the carrion birds of the battlefield, the crab and serpent of the chthonic margins — these are not decorative accessories to a death imagination organized around other principles. They are the death imagination itself, in its iconographic specificity. The complementary philological evidence runs through Homer: the warrior whose corpse is fought over by Greeks and Trojans because the unrecovered body will be food for dogs and birds (the closing lines of the Iliad’s opening hymn); the psychē that flies out of the dying body as a bird (the famous similes at the death of Patroclus); the death-as-devourment imagery that runs through the lyric tradition. Vermeule reads these together to demonstrate that the Greek imagination treats death as devourment rather than as departure. The implication for any depth-psychological reading of Greek mortality is consequential. The Hellenic vocabulary of psychē, thumos, menos, kradiē, atē, and lussa sits inside an imaginative culture in which the body, the soul-bird, and the carnivorous predator are not separable images but a single image-complex whose components mutually inform each other. Ruth Padel’s reading of lussa — the wolf-rage of the Erinyes, the carnivorous madness of Heracles — has its iconographic substrate in Vermeule’s reading.

Ritual Mourning, Funerary Architecture, and the Cosmological Geography

The middle chapters of the book treat the ritual practices of Greek death — the prothesis (laying out of the body), the ekphora (procession to the grave), the kommos (lament), the enagisma (offering to the dead) — and the cosmological geography of the underworld as the early Greeks pictured it. Vermeule’s archaeological-historical reconstruction of these practices is detailed and grounded in the surviving evidence: the lekythoi that depict the prothesis with the women’s torn cheeks and bared breasts, the funerary stelai that mark the boundaries of family burial enclosures, the ritual vessels and the libations they carried. The cosmological geography is reconstructed equally from the iconographic and the poetic evidence: the rivers of the underworld (Acheron, Styx, Phlegethon, Cocytus, Lethe), the figure of Hermes Psychopompos, the gates of horn and ivory, the architectural conception of the underworld as a vast house. Margaret Alexiou’s The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition (1974), published just before Vermeule’s lectures, is a complement, and the two together — Alexiou’s philological account of the lament tradition from Homer through modern Greek folk practice, Vermeule’s iconographic-philological account of death’s wider imaginative apparatus — constitute the philological resource that any depth reading of Greek mortality must work from.

The Long Inheritance: From Vermeule into Depth-Psychological Practice

The book’s influence on subsequent classical scholarship has been substantial — Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood’s ‘Reading’ Greek Death (1995), Ian Morris’s Death-Ritual and Social Structure in Classical Antiquity (1992), the broader “material religion” turn in Greek archaeology — and the depth-psychological inheritance has been comparable, though less often acknowledged. James Hillman’s The Dream and the Underworld (1979, the same year as Vermeule’s book) cites her in passing; Ruth Padel’s 1992 In and Out of the Mind and 1995 Whom Gods Destroy draw upon her iconographic-philological method directly; Cody Peterson’s philological work on thumos and the early Greek lexicon of inner suffering — including the readings advanced in Iron Thumos and the JAP paper on Achilles’ grief and Priam’s supplication — depend upon the integrated imaginative culture Vermeule reconstructs. The depth practitioner working with Greek tragic material, with the Homeric figures, with the cosmological imagery of the underworld in dream and active imagination requires the iconographic-philological substrate that Vermeule supplies. Without it, the depth reading risks aestheticising what was concrete, ritual-specific, and culturally particular.

For any reader of depth psychology engaging Greek mortality, Aspects of Death in Early Greek Art and Poetry is the indispensable archaeological-philological companion to the depth literature on the underworld. To read it is to inherit the iconographic specificity by which Vermeule restored the early Greek imagination of death from generic mythological reverence to the concrete predator-prey-warrior-ritual culture it actually was. After Vermeule, the analyst who hears the patient’s underworld dream meets the dream with a longer historical-imaginative inheritance — and recognises, in the patient’s carnivorous figures, the early Greek substrate that depth psychology has been quietly drawing upon since Hillman.