From Oblivion to Judgment

Abstract

How does the afterlife affect ethical and political considerations in this life when a culture has no unified religious dogma? This article focuses on the afterlife as an uncertain “elsewhere” invoked to rethink political imperatives in specific Ancient Greek literary and philosophical texts. First, it uncovers the political implications of radically divergent notions of the afterlife in both Aeschylus’s Oresteia and Sophocles’s Antigone—from nothingness, to continuation in a society of souls below, to ethical judgment by a divinity—significant examples of which have been neglected. It then follows out the almost congruent diversity of afterlife notions in Plato’s Apology and Phaedo. By examining how Socrates uses “unbelief” (apistia, among other words) concerning the afterlife to interrogate ethics and politics, this article gives a fresh perspective on the structure of debate in the Phaedo. The very emphasis on “unbelief,” however, demonstrates that the dialogue itself may not present Socratic views as definitive.