What to Expect When You're Dead Robert Garland
Event details
Take an ancient tour of death and the afterlife with classicist Robert Garland.
Robert, the author of What to Expect When You’re Dead, will explore the fascinating death-related beliefs and practices of a wide range of ancient cultures and traditions. By drawing on the latest scholarship on ancient archaeology, art, literature and funerary inscriptions, he will invite you to put yourselves in the sandals of ancient peoples and to imagine their mental state moment by moment as they sought - in ways that turn out to be remarkably similar to ours - to assist the dead on their journey to the next world and to understand life’s greatest mystery.
Join Robert and discover the ways ancient peoples answered questions such as: How to achieve a good death and afterlife? What’s the best way to dispose of a body? Do the dead face a postmortem judgement - and where do they end up? Do the dead have bodies in the afterlife - and can they eat, drink, and have sex? And what can the living do to stay on good terms with the non-living?
This event will take place live on Zoom Webinar. You will receive a link to join a couple of days before the event and a reminder an hour before. During the event, you can ask questions via a Q&A function, but audience cameras and microphones will remain muted throughout.
Book sales
You can buy copies of many of our speakers’ books from Fox Lane Books, a local independent bookseller and Festival partner. In some cases, author signed bookplates are available too.
About the speaker
Robert Garland is the Roy D and Margaret B Wooster Professor Emeritus of the Classics at Colgate University, New York, US. He is the author of many books, including The Greek Way of Death, Wandering Greeks, Athens Burning and What to Expect When You’re Dead (Princeton University Press, 2025). He has also recorded six courses for the Great Courses, most recently God against the Gods.
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