"Like the generations of leaves, the lives of mortal men.

Now the wind scatters the old leaves across the earth,

now the living timber bursts with the new buds

and spring comes round again. And so with men:

as one generation comes to life, another dies away."

(The Iliad, Book 6, Lines 171-75)

As the cornerstone of Greek culture it seems fitting to let Homer set the stage for our topic. Even though The Iliad is not "lyric" poetry every Greek poet would have been intimately familiar with the work.These famous lines, spoken as two heroes were on the precipice of engaging in combat, are frequently plucked from their context and taken as a kind of philosophical meditation. Homer paints a striking natural analogy of the brief amount of time afforded to mortals. This frank confrontation with man's fated demise, void of the comforts of an afterlife, is characteristic of Greek thought.

Notably Homer references generations rather than individuals. That does not mean the prescription does not apply to all individuals; rather it is the opposite. Every man is understood to eventually face the fate of death. On this matter Simonides of Ceos writes,

"Small is men's

strength, and without effect his cares;

in a brief span of life there is toil on toil.

Inescapable, death hangs over all alike,

for an equal portion of it falls both to the noble

and to the man who is base."

(Simonides, Fragment 520)

This rather bleak image reveals a foundational truth for the Greeks: no one held hopes for an afterlife. Unlike their southern neighbors, the Egyptians--who could strive to succeed on earth and take their wealth with them after death--the Greeks, as we will see, have a less rosy image of the underworld. Still more sobering, it is a fate promised to both the "noble" and "base." No one is escaping it. Not even the tyrants of the Hellenic world are enshrined as immortal gods. Indeed it was a point of absurd humor when an Athenian tyrant claimed to be coronated by a goddess (see Histories 1.60).

The Greeks do not reach up to the heavens, hoping to become gods. Instead their deities stoop down to them. In form and action the Greek conception of "god" is closer to a human than most of their neighbors. This leads Xenophanes to remark, rather wittily, that if they could "horses would draw pictures of gods like horses, and oxen like oxen" (Xenophanes, Fr. 15 D-K). Yet, he is wrong. Gods in other cultures are routinely strange amalgamations of various animals. The Greek pantheon is the exception and not the rule for their age and place. This means that there is little reason to strive to become a god. A god is not much different from a human. Along the way the hope of immortality was dropped as well. This keeps Greek thinkers from always having one foot in the afterlife. Instead they must confront the natural world directly.

With such existential pain comes some benefit. Simonides's brutal frankness also betrays the democratizing effect of death. If the noble and base are both bound for an equal share of death then perhaps they should have an equal share in other aspects of the community; say the governance? While it is certainly a cocktail of factors that contribute to the rise of Greek democracy it is within reason that sentiments like those of Simonides's fragment played a role. For such a dreary topic this is something of a silver lining.