The Greeks believed that such as had not received funeral rites would be excluded from Elysium
- Date of account
- Late nineteenth-century compilation
- Source
- The Ghost World
- Reference
- The Ghost World · selected passage 15
- Rights
- public_domain
- Language
- English
- Record updated
- 2026-08-24
Record summary
The Greeks believed that such as had not received funeral rites would be excluded from Elysium
Published source text
Read the available text below. Archive transcriptions may contain OCR errors; later context is labelled separately. A recorded claim is not a finding that it happened.
Source passage
Source text · mention onlyThe Greeks believed that such as had not received funeral rites would be excluded from Elysium. The younger Pliny tells the tale of a haunted house at Athens, in which a ghost played all kinds of pranks owing to the funeral rites having been neglected. It is still a deep-rooted belief that when the mortal remains of the soul have not been honoured with proper burial, it will walk. The ghosts of unburied persons not possessing the _obolus_ or fee due to Charon, the ferryman of Styx, and Acheron, were unable to obtain a lodging or place of rest. Hence they were compelled to wander about the banks of the river for a hundred years, when the portitor, or 'ferryman of hell,' passed them over _in formâ pauperis_. The famous tragedy of 'Antigone' by Sophocles owes much of its interest to this popular belief on the subject.
Historical context
Contextual commentary · mention onlyThis material belongs to a folklore tradition. Story type, collector, community, transmission and literary editing matter when comparing it with other sources.
Modern context
Contextual commentary · mention onlyLattice compares motifs and reported features without assuming that a traditional being is a biological species or that similar stories document one external cause.
Investigate related details with Anomaly Graph’s account-based search, or read how matching and provenance work.