ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on theories about facing death's necessity and deals with human emotions, in particular, those familiar feelings of dread and helplessness. While holding onto the idea of the mind's inner light, let's now meet death and necessity as they were personified in art and drama by the ancient Greeks. A standard Greek image of death is pictured on the well-preserved Euphronios Krater, recently returned to Italy by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. For the Greeks, the example of Prince Sarpedon represents one sort of death, a good one, a kalos thanatos, the sort won by heroic warriors that is honored by the gods and celebrated by poets and painters. Both the ancient play and the modern dreams suggest ways of approaching death as a spiritual achievement, a kalos thanatos, redefined as the threshold of new life. The evidence of the spirit, so easy to see on the battlefield, is harder to discern in everyday life.
