Postcards to the Dead

Edited by Aaron Michael Ullrey.

This Research Reflection by guest contributor Danielle Layne is part of an ongoing series spotlighting the academic study of religions.

As a historian of ancient philosophy, I am surrounded by the dead, specters of men and women crying out, not from the grave but from leafy stacks and bookshelves built by the inspired. Libraries, like tombs, are haunted by phantoms refusing to accept their mortality. 

Some scholars, those damned objective types, command we box our ears to the supplications of the deceased: “Do not internalize the living thought of ancient thinkers. The immortal soul—obviously, an archaic fancy. Be a good record-keeper or, better yet, a critic; either collect or correct, but love the dead not. They are gone.” 

But I do love them because the dearly departed remain, rattling around in dusty manuscripts and darkened memories. Nietzsche, my first philosophical paramour, rejoins, “Verily, the historical art must serve the living!” Turn away from the impartial gravediggers and revive those figures longing to disturb, inspire, and reanimate our existence. Become a necromancer.

Clutch your pearls, dear reader, but listen still to a ghost story from my research. 

Last spring, at CSWR’s Living Platonism conference, my talk focused on the concrete women in Plato’s corpus and the possibility that their wisdom significantly influenced Socrates’ way of life. I turned to the Phaedo, a classic dialogue that closes with the condemned man’s last breath but whose narration poignantly opens with a mourning woman, Xanthippe, Socrates’ oft-dismissed wife. 

Xanthippe speaks only one line, a humble reminder to her husband that now will be the last time to speak with his friends. Promptly escorted home, she hears not the arguments aimed at dispelling the fear of death. Quietly, in the last few pages, she returns to face a grim obligation. She must bathe Socrates, wash a living corpse—before his eyes marble and the body stiffens, now will be the last time for her to speak with him. Remember the Phaedo’s vitality—a quiet boy sitting by his mother, Socrates’ penchant for caressing a young man’s hair, a remorseful jailer’s stammering apologies, a childhood friend anxious about not only the philosopher’s remains but also the education of his sons, and, of course, the controlled intellectuals who spontaneously break down, wailing with loss, like Xanthippe wails. All speak to the simple beauty of undying love and to the small, priceless peculiarities that every grieving soul remembers. 

Plato was ill the day Socrates died. Like Xanthippe, he was not present, but, like me, Plato was haunted by his absence. Bound to write, Plato begins his dialogue about that fateful morning with Xanthippe’s departing words and ends with her fulfilled duty, cleansing her beloved. Miraculously, this Platonic detail awakens my own memories of bathing a dying man, an aged, sly cowboy who, in 2020, taught me bravery as he struggled to live forever. A sudden image emerges of a big-chested Texan winking knowingly at Socrates. Memories seem to speak to each other. 

Additional recollections of Xanthippe surface. Gossiping hens, other authors cackle of her shrewishness. I hear their stories differently. I observe a wife and mother who bore neither resentment nor fear. A siren whose passion was doggedly equal to the philosopher’s intellect. An ever-perplexing woman who knew the allure of a few piercing words. 

Xanthippe’s words, what endures, become, for me, a tragic reminder of the unnoticed idiosyncrasies of life that remain after death. “See me,” she says, and I obey, turning over this strange postcard depicting not one immortal soul but two, an image of both him and her. 

She suffered loss, but she lives on, not in spite of her tears but because of them. Curiously, she conducts a séance, urging the materialization of one more spirit. . . Life herself. By loving Xanthippe, washing away the stains of neglect, a metamorphizing beauty appears, the élan vital that always births anew. Somehow, in doing history and tending to the living past, I touch something of the flesh, the heart, and the mystery of her, that aethereal power enlivening us with evermore. “The dead are not gone,” Life whispers. 

“Excuse me,” the veritable scholar clears his throat, interrupting, “Is this history true?” Of course it is! Why would the historian neglect truth unless it be cold, unwashed, and loveless? Should we not prefer a living truth to a muted corpse? Only vitality can speak to the soul, to you and me.