The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains

by Thomas W. Laqueur,
The Huffington Post, October 21, 2015

For more than two thousand years, some people, inspired perhaps by Diogenes the Cynic (ca. 412-323 B.C.E.), have made fun of burial practices and monuments. Poor, naked, inert, decomposing dead bodies, corpses without consciousness, they have insisted, are nothing. As Thomas Paine maintained, the moment that Death "obtains a conquest he loses a subject."