Chapter I: Burial Customs in Greece

The burial of the dead was a matter as to which the ancient Greeks had very strong feelings. When a corpse was not committed to earth or fire, the unfortunate spirit to which it had served as a dwelling-place was condemned to find no rest either on earth or in the world of shades, but to wander unhappily around the spot where it had met its fate, or to flutter on the verge of the river of death, which it was not permitted to cross. For such reasons, it was the first and most important duty of an heir to see that the person whom he succeeded met with due burial. In war, as a rule, each side buried its own dead; and so great was the horror at neglect of this pious office, that after a drawn battle the side which was not in possession of the battle-field would commonly ask for a truce for the purpose of burying the slain, though it thereby acknowledged defeat. It is well known how bitterly the Athenians accused their generals, because their dead were not duly buried after the battle of Arginusae. When Admetus, in the _Alcestis_ of Euripides, wishes utterly to cast off his filial relation to his father Pheres, he threatens that he will not bury him. And when in the _Antigone_ of Sophocles, Creon forbids the burial of his slain enemy Polynices, the prohibition is represented as an act of barbarous cruelty, bringing with it the vengeance of the offended gods. In order to perform the last rites to her brother, Antigone incurs death. The plot of the last half of the _Ajax_, which seems intolerably tedious to a modern reader, turns on the question whether the body of the hero shall receive sepulture or not.

It is true that all the more serious evils of want of burial were obviated by an inhumation of a merely formal character. The dead man who in the ode of Horace[1] begs the passer-by to give him formal or ceremonial burial, tells him that it will be quite sufficient if he casts over the body three handfuls of dry earth. If the body of a man was lost at sea, or otherwise had become undiscoverable, an empty tomb or cenotaph was erected, and his spirit laid with ceremonies.

In the case of an ordinary death, there was a regular order of ceremonies, which are detailed in Lucian’s _De Luctu_. To the women of the house belonged the melancholy duty of washing and anointing the corpse, and preparing it for burial. In the mouth was sometimes placed an obolus, the fee of Charon. The body was dressed as if for a wedding rather than a funeral, in rich and clean clothes; the face was painted, and wreaths were placed on head and breast. Then took place what was called the πρόθεσις, or exhibition of the corpse, in order that friends and relatives might take a last farewell of it. Vase-paintings give us many representations of the scene. Father and mother, or brothers and sisters, or children, thronged round the bier with expressions of love and sorrow, while the dirge of the hired wailing-women resounded through the house. A terra-cotta tablet of the sixth century, engraved in the text[2] (Fig. I), gives us a quaint and vivid picture of the room of death. The dead man, whose face appears, while the rest of the painting is broken away, is evidently a youth in the bloom of his days, who lies on the bier, clad in an embroidered garment. Close by his head stands his mother, ΜΕΤΕΡ, at whose feet is his little sister, ΑΔΕΛΦΕ; a somewhat older sister stands at the foot of the bier. To the left is a group of men, the father, ΠΑΤΕΡ, a grown-up brother, ΑΔΕΛΦΟΣ, and two other men. To the extreme right appears the name, though not the figure, of the grandmother, ΘΕΘΕ, between whom and the group of men are two other matrons, carefully distinguished as the aunt and the aunt on the father’s side, ΘΕΘΙΣ and ΘΕΘΙΣ ΠΡΟΣ ΠΑΤΡ[ΟΣ]. A little child also appears by a stool quite at the foot of the couch. The letters ΟΙΜΟΙ in the field represent the wailings of the women.

A beautiful Attic vase of the fifth century (Fig. 2) gives us a less quaint but more graceful representation of the prothesis[3]. In this case the corpse is that of a woman, who lies on her bier not merely clad in green garments, but decked with a necklace. The friends grouped about her are all women, with hair cut short in sign of mourning, clad in garments of dark brown, green, or blue. The lady who stands at the foot of the bier and her neighbour place their hands on their heads in sign of grief; their dress is that of burgher ladies; no doubt they are the nearest relatives of the dead. The girl who stands at the head of the bier is a slave or hired attendant. She is more simply clad, and carries in one hand a flapper or fan to keep off the flies, in the other a basket containing fillets or ribbons. A wreath hangs against the wall of the room. Three small, naked, winged idola hover in the air. They are doubtless spirits of the dead: but the motive for their presence is not clear. One might at first be disposed to regard them as merely ready to receive the departed spirit; the figure nearest to the mouth of the corpse might even be regarded as the soul which has just taken flight. But these views scarcely account for the attitude, which is clearly in each of the three idola a recognized sign of grief. In fact, the close resemblance of gesture between the lady who stands at the foot of the bier and the winged figure above her seems to show that they share the same feeling, which is one of sorrow. But why should spirits grieve at receiving a companion from the land of the living? The question is not easy to answer. We may observe that in all scenes of this kind, when these little sprites are introduced, they are in the same attitude. The lamentations of the living seem always to awake a responsive echo in their breasts.

After the laying out, πρόθεσις, came the ἐκφορά, or burial. Early in the morning the body was taken, decked and clad as it was, and laid on a wagon, or on a bier to be carried on the shoulders of friends. A procession was formed, including near friends, musicians, hired wailing-women, and others who carried the vessels needed for the last sad rites. To the modern visitor in Greece none of the existing customs is more striking than that of bearing to the grave bodies decked out and painted, and looking more like wax images from Tussaud’s than the actual relics of humanity.

Several monuments of the early period present us with representations of the ἐκφορά so clear that we can judge with certainty even of its details. Of these the earliest are vases of the eighth century from the Dipylon cemetery. One engraved in the _Monumenti_ of the Roman Institute[4] clearly represents the funeral of a distinguished chief. The body lies on the top of a lofty bier, supported by four columns, which again is carried on a car drawn by two horses. Immediately behind the car come the relatives: and it is accompanied by long strings of mourners, who are depicted in the childish fashion of the art of the time as alike naked. The women are distinguished by the breast merely, the men by swords which they carry at the waist. The geese which seem to follow the procession are only inserted to fill up vacant spaces in the design; since there is nothing to which the early vase-painter objects more strongly than leaving any part of the ground without figures. On another contemporary vase, published on the same plate, is a scene of πρόθεσις; the corpse on its bier is surrounded by mourners, who seem to be sprinkling it with lustral water. These glimpses into the daily life of pre-historic Athens are very attractive; and the life which they reveal differs but little from that of the historic Athens of the Persian wars.

An archaic terra-cotta, here engraved (Fig. 3)[5], gives us a vivid representation of the appearance of the funeral _cortége_.

The corpse is placed on a car drawn by two horses. It is accompanied by a woman who bears on her head a jar of wine for the funeral libations, and by two wailing-women who tear their hair as they walk. Behind, comes a bearded flute-player, and two young men, doubtless the next of kin. A vase of the sixth century, which also we engrave (Fig. 4), represents a comparatively modest funeral[6]. The arrival at the tomb is depicted. The dead man, whose face is uncovered, lies on a bier drawn by two asses. The procession resembles that of the last representation; the flute-player, who wears a long white robe, and the next of kin follow the bier; of the wailing-women, two are perched on the funeral wagon, other two stand in front of the grave, which appears as a square erection to the right. The cock who is to form part of the offerings to the dead stands between two trees which mark the graveyard.

Such was the actual prosaic procession to the grave. But the artists who painted the white Athenian lekythi, vessels especially made to be placed in the tomb[7], preferred in their representations of funerals to take refuge in the realm of imagery and fancy. For the actual carriage of the body to the place of burial they substitute a poetic fiction. When in the battles before Troy, Sarpedon fell beneath the spear of Patroclus, we are told in the _Iliad_ that the gods took charge of his body which the foeman had despoiled[8].

To Phoebus then his Father spake
Who drives the clouds along,
‘Dear Phoebus go, Sarpedon find
Amid the battle throng,
From purple gore his body lave;
Then bear him far away,
And wash him in the flowing stream,
And in ambrosia lay;
With garments clothe that wax not old,
And let the winged pair,
The brethren Sleep and Death, from thence
His body swiftly bear
To wealthy Lycia’s goodly land,
Where kinsmen shall be fain
To heap the mound and set the stone,
The guerdon of the slain.’

It is thoroughly in accord with the spirit of Greek art that it should have welcomed and dwelt on the idea thus suggested by the epic poet. Greek painters and sculptors, like Greek dramatists and lyric poets, loved above all things to escape from the prosaic details of actual life into the ideal world of myth and fancy, into the language of which they translated the facts of every-day existence. On a very beautiful red-figured vase, ascribed to Euphronius, is represented the bearing away of Sarpedon’s dead body by Sleep and Death, Sleep being a benign daemon with yellow hair, Death a dark-haired being of more forbidding aspect[9]. And after the precedent furnished by Sarpedon, Sleep and Death have been introduced into scenes on other Greek vases, wherein the body is not that of any ancient hero, but of an ordinary citizen. We give an example from an Attic white lekythos[10] (Fig. 5). The dead body, the eyes of which are not closed in death, is that of a girl, who is borne to the resting-place indicated by a sepulchral stele by two winged figures, of whom the bearded one is doubtless Death and the younger, or beardless, Sleep. The god Hermes, as conductor of souls, is present to preside at the deposition at the tomb.

The twin brethren Sleep and Death belong to poetry rather than to real belief. And it is the bodies, not the spirits, of the dead which they bear to the last resting-place. Other Athenian lekythi represent the journey of the soul to the land of shades, under the guidance of Hermes or in the boat of Charon. With these pictures I will deal in the third chapter, which treats of Greek beliefs as to the future life. Meantime we must follow the funeral procession to the cemetery.

In the Homeric age the bodies of fallen chiefs were burned with much ceremony, and funeral games celebrated at their tombs. The classical instance is the burning of the body of

Patroclus in the _Iliad_. But even at that time it is doubtful whether so expensive a method of disposing of the body was at all universal. In historical times, as may be abundantly proved from ancient writers and from existing remains, the customs of burning and of burying flourished together. Distinguished and wealthy men commonly had their funeral pyres, but the bodies of the Kings of Sparta, for example, when they died abroad, were embalmed and carried home for burial, instead of being burned. In various cemeteries of Greece we find sometimes the one custom most prevalent and sometimes the other. It is unnecessary in the present place to go beyond this general statement. When the body was buried, it was not, save very rarely, placed in a sarcophagus of stone, but far more commonly in a hole in the rock; or a grave was dug in the soil and a small chamber constructed of slabs of stone or terra-cotta. In case of burning, a pyre of wood was erected in or near the cemetery, and after the flames had burned themselves out, the human ashes, which are readily to be distinguished, were carefully and piously collected and placed in a vessel of bronze or of earthenware, which might either be buried or preserved in some hallowed spot in the house.

A late vase of Canusium[11] furnishes us with a representation of the pyre of Patroclus, and of the sacrifices which according to Homer were performed at it (Fig. 6). In the midst is the pyre of great logs, on which is heaped the armour of Patroclus. This detail shows, we may observe, how free are even the later vase-painters in their treatment of Homeric scenes, for Patroclus’ armour, which Hector had carried off, is not mentioned in the _Iliad_ as being placed on his pyre. While Agamemnon pours a libation to the soul of the dead hero, Achilles plunges his sword into the neck of one of the Trojan captives, while the rest sit by, awaiting their fate. The inscription beneath, ΠΑΤΡΟΚΛΟΥ ΤΑΦΟΣ makes the identification certain.

It does not appear that among the Greeks there were any regular ceremonies as an accompaniment of burial, any ritual of prayer or dedication. When a public funeral took place it is true that an oration was delivered at the grave; we have record of orations pronounced by Pericles and Demosthenes over those who had fallen in battle on various occasions. Sometimes also there was a funeral feast at the tomb. But in ordinary cases the mourners seem to have returned immediately after the burial to partake of the funeral feast at the house of a near relative or heir of the deceased, who was himself regarded as the host on the occasion. By thus eating and drinking with the dead, the survivors entered into a kind of sacred communion with him; speeches were made in his honour, and libations poured from the cups of which in ghostly fashion he might partake.