Necromancies in ancient epic

The interaction between the dead and the living is one of the stock scenes and most popular topics in Graeco-Roman epic since Homer (Hom. Od. 11.13-640). Many important studies have been dedicated to the analysis of the great importance of this bauform froma metapoetic perspective with necromancies affording the epic poets the opportunity to incorporate popularmyths and historical figures of the past or (retrospective) future into their narrative, and to go beyond the scope of the epic plot. The same applies for Homer's, Vergil's, and more recently also Seneca's and Lucan's great influence on the descriptions of the underworld and the necromantic rituals in the Flavian epics of Valerius Flaccus, Statius, and Silius Italicus. One of the core elements of this type scene, the communication between the living and the dead, which is the climax of and the main reason for necromancies, has, however, been widely neglected - and with good reason, as the nature of the dead is "notoriously complex, ambiguous, and even contradictory."1 While it is not possible to reconcile and explain all contradictions of the obscure verbal interactions in the necromantic episodes under discussion, this contribution delineates the most important narrative patterns and intra- and intertextual allusions in the depiction of the dead and their conversation with the living throughout the epic tradition from Homer to Silius Italicus. It argues that the obscurity and inconsistencies in the portrayal of the dead are a deliberate literary device used to compress the narrative and to highlight that life after death and the nature of the dead surpass human comprehension and that each epic poem gives its own unique voice to the dead in the underworld - either through striking innovations or interesting and unusual combinations of the already established narrative patterns

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