Nine years ago, I started a Ph.D. thesis about Early Iron Age Greece. I knew that very little literary evidence survived, but it came as something of a shock to discover that there was in fact almost nothing to work with except for brief descriptions of graves. At the first social function for new graduate students, I tried to explain to one of my neighbours, a specialist in Anthony Eden's German policies in the first six months of 1936, what I was planning to write about. He looked confused, and then asked me what a lot of graves had got to do with history. After a long delay I have found an answer, and this book is it.

I believe that burials allow us to go far beyond the limits of textual and iconographic evidence in the study of ancient ritual, and that by studying all aspects of death rites as integrated parts of ritual statements about the actors' perceptions of the world we can reach a new understanding of ancient social structure. The disconcerting experience of having nothing to study but graves turned out not to be such a bad thing after all; I argue that burials provide information of a kind which no other sources provide, and that even in the best documented periods of classical antiquity historians cannot afford to neglect them. I try to make this point with a series of examples drawn from 1,500 years of Greek and Roman history. There will be much for specialists to disagree with in each specific case, but overall I hope that there will be more which stimulates research and proves useful to social historians.