Grief and Consolation in Greece and Rome: Ancient and Modern Perspectives

Abstract

In this talk I surveyed various ancient and modern approaches to grief in order to study the enduring problem of how we humans cope with grief and how these can be productively studied from a comparative angle. The recent upsurge in the study of grief and consoling strategies is especially interested in the healing arts, which is making use of various mechanisms from the humanistic tradition to cope with grief and loss. The paper hopes to spark new debates on how a diachronic analysis can allow for discovering new approaches. It will become clear that we need a great variety of solutions to allow for the processing of grief across a broad spectrum of personalities.