Question

How did the the the Ancient Greeks before the Orphics and Pythagoreans view the afterlife?

Answer 1

Note: This response is in UK English, please paste the response to MS Word and you should be able to spot discrepancies easily. You may elaborate the answer based on personal views or your classwork if necessary.

(Answer) The ancient Greeks believed that when a person was to die, their psyche or spirit would leave their body like a “puff of air” and go on to the next world.

This other world was known as “Hades” and the keeper of this world was also known by the same name. The Greeks had a dark and eerie view of the afterlife through their beliefs of the world of the dead. Furthermore, the gates of the netherworld according to the Greeks was guarded by a three-headed dog that belonged to Hades. This dog, known as “Cerberus” would prevent people from leaving the underworld to enter the world of the living.

The common people of Greece, therefore, viewed the afterlife as a form of imprisonment and not really something that would enlighten the soul.

Plato’s theory of forms: According to Plato’s theory of forms, the physical world is a mere image or shadow of the spiritual realm of ideas. He believed that these non-physical items were proper representations of the world. In other words, Plato believed that it was the ideas that would live on in the spiritual realm and not really the body. This was, however, the ideology of a philosophical perspective and perhaps not really that of the community as a whole.

Plato also explained that the dividing line is a line between that mind and body. This meant that the line divides the visible world (seen by the eye) and the intelligible world (seen by the mind’s eye). With such dichotomous philosophies of Hades in Greek mythology and Plato through his ideology, it can be said that the Greeks had a varied view of the afterlife. However, the Greek civilisation began with the mythology we know of today and eventually culminated into an intellectual mecca that is the world of Plato, Pythagoras and other thinkers.