analyzes events immediately following the death of the eleventh Imam with no apparent offspring. In spite of his strong claim as son of the tenth Imam, Jaʿfar “the Liar” ultimately failed to succeed to his father. Opposing camps generated anti-Jaʿfar propaganda which survives in our sources and can be used to reconstruct key events and early discourses. It is argued that within twenty-four hours of the eleventh Imam’s death, several events of central symbolism for future understandings of the Occultation had occurred, including funerary rituals for the dead Imam; the claim that one of his concubines was posthumously pregnant with his child; and the dispute over the inheritance of the Imam’s property. These events were related to claims for Imamic mediation including claims made for the mother of the dead Imam, Ḥudayth; servants within the household of the Imam; and the concubine pregnant with the Imam’s child.

Chapter 1 examines the motif of corpse treatment in the Iliad and Aeneid. The chapter sets a baseline for the motif by looking at these foundational works, with the intention of establishing a normative framework which will prove valuable for highlighting deviations from the norm in the treatment of corpses in imperial epic. The section on the Iliad demonstrates the basic pattern of corpse treatment in the poem by examining the aftermath of the deaths of Sarpedon, Patroclus, and Hector. The section closes with a discussion of Locrian Ajax’s abuse of Imbrius (Il. 13.201-5), a scene that problematizes the general picture of corpse treatment in the poem. The next section considers Virgil’s narrative strategies concerning the abuse of corpses in the Aeneid. While it is clear that Virgil departs from Homer in allowing a wider range of corpse abuse into his poem, in every case Virgil pulls back from describing it and blankets the abuse in narrative silence. The section offers a consideration of the civil war violence and corpse mistreatment from Marius and Sulla to Actium and the establishment of the principate, as a means of contextualizing some of the (silent) abuses contained within the Aeneid.