V. CREMATION AND INHUMATION

The discussion of those abnormal cases of after-death existence, to which the last chapter has been devoted, has disclosed to us the fact that in all ages of Greece the condition most to be dreaded by the dead has been incorruptibility and the boon most to be desired a sure and quick dissolution; and that of the two methods by which the living might promote the disintegration of the dead, cremation and inhumation, the former alone has been accounted infallible. What benefit in the future existence was in old time thought to accrue to those whose bodies had been duly dissolved, and to be withheld from revenants, is a question which may conveniently be adjourned for a while. First we must verify the results obtained from the study of the abnormal by consideration of the normal; we must see whether ordinary funeral usage has had for its sole object the dissolution of the dead in the interests of the dead; and what, if any, distinction has been made between inhumation and cremation as a means of securing that object.

Now diverse methods of disposing of the dead, especially among a primitive folk, would naturally suggest diverse religious purposes to be served thereby, diverse conceptions of the future estate of the dead, or of their future abode, or of their future relations with the living; and for my part I do not doubt that, if our eyes could pierce the darkness of a long distant past which neither history nor even archaeology has illumined, we should see that the peoples who first used cremation and inhumation side by side in Greece were in so doing animated by diverse religious sentiments. But I hold also that in no period of which we have any cognisance have the Greeks regarded inhumation and cremation as means to different religious ends; but that, whichever funeral-method has been employed, one and the same immediate object has always been kept in view, the dissolution of the dead body, and one and the same motive (save in the quite exceptional circumstances where a scare of vrykolakes has temporarily arisen) has always prompted the mourners thereto, the motive of benefiting the dead.

But, while the object in view was single and constant, there would have been no inconsistency in making a certain distinction between the two methods available. On the contrary, if the sole object was the disintegration of the dead body, the surer and quicker means of attaining it should logically have been preferred. Cremation therefore might legitimately have been reckoned a superior rite to inhumation; for it cannot but have been recognised that the disintegration of the body is more rapidly and unfailingly effected by the action of fire than by the action of the soil.

It is true indeed that the solvent action of the earth upon the buried body--even with all due allowance for the absence of any coffin in many cases--is popularly regarded as far more rapid than it can actually be. The period usually reckoned by the common-folk as the limit of time requisite for complete dissolution is forty days. This is stated clearly enough in a few lines of a song of lamentation heard in Zacynthos:

καὶ μέσ’ ’στὸ σαραντοήμερο ἀρμοὺς ἀρμοὺς χωρίζουν, πέφτουνε τὰ ξανθὰ μαλλιὰ, βγαίνουν τὰ μαύρα μάτια, καὶ χώρια πάει τὸ κορμὶ καὶ χώρια τὸ κεφάλι[1226].

‘And within the forty days, they (the dead) are severed joint from joint, their bright hair falls away, their dark eyes fall out, and asunder go trunk and head.’

The Zacynthian muse is horribly explicit; its utterances need no interpreter; itself rather gives the true interpretation of certain customs which are wide-spread in modern Greece and appear to date from pre-Christian days.

The fortieth day after death is almost universally observed in Greece as one on which the relations of the deceased should provide a memorial feast. There are indeed other fixed days for the like commemoration and ‘forgiveness[1227]’ of the dead, but these all fall at periods of three, or a multiple of three, days, weeks, months, or years, from the date of death. These, I think, have been selected in deference to the mysterious virtue of the number three[1228], and not improbably multiplied by the importunities of a penurious priesthood, to whom some half-dozen hearty meals in the course of the year do not appear an inappropriate remuneration for their services at death-bed and burial. But the fortieth day was originally devoted to this purpose, it may reasonably be supposed, because it was the last opportunity of setting before the dead man’s neighbours and acquaintances savoury meat such as their soul loved, that they might eat thereof and ‘loose’ the dead man from any curse wherewith in his lifetime they had bound him; if dissolution was not to be retarded, the fortieth day was in popular reckoning the last opportunity for absolution.

From this it should follow that any memorial feasts held later[1229] than the fortieth day are of purely ecclesiastical contrivance; and the correctness of this inference is attested by a curious local usage which clearly distinguishes the popular and the ecclesiastical feasts. At Sinasos in Asia Minor two classes of commemorations are recognised. The one is called κανίσκια, ‘little baskets,’ from the method in which food is distributed to the poor; this is held on the fortieth day. The other has usurped the name μνημόσυνα, which commonly belongs to all memorial-feasts, and is held on the three anniversaries of the death (for, after the third, exhumation generally takes place, and no further memorial-feasts are needed) and consists in the presentation of an ornamental dish of boiled wheat (κόλλυβα) at the church and the reading of a service[1230]. In other words, the fortieth day is the popular festival, and the observances of later dates are ecclesiastical. Clearly the reason for this distinction must lie in the fact that the common-folk believe, as the song from Zacynthos shows, that dissolution is normally complete by the fortieth day, while the Church has prudently fixed the date, after which exhumation is permissible, at the end of the third year. Presumably then a period of forty days was the old pagan period, for which the Church has tried, with partial success, to substitute three years.

Several other small pieces of evidence point to the wide distribution of this popular notion. In Sinasos[1231], once more, and also in Patmos[1232], the fees paid to the priests for memorial services derive their name from the word ‘forty’ (σαράντα), as if the fortieth day were the limit; after that date, apparently, though my authorities are not explicit on the point, the priests have for their remuneration only the dish of boiled wheat or other presents in kind. In Crete, if a dead man is suspected of turning vrykolakas soon after his death, the people are anxious to deal with him before he enters upon his second period of forty days[1233]; for then all hope of natural dissolution is past, and he becomes as it were a confirmed vampire. In Scyros, the old custom of burning such corpses as were found on exhumation at the end of three years (or, in case of a panic, earlier) to be still whole, and were therefore suspected of vampire-like proclivities, has been replaced by the milder expedient of carrying the body round to forty churches in turn and then re-interring it, in the hope, as it seems, that each of the forty saints, whose sanctuaries have been honoured with a visit and a certain consumption of candles, will in return take a proportionate share in ‘loosing’ the suppliant dead--or, it may be, in the more mathematical expectation that the work effected in cases of ordinary burial by one funeral-service in forty days, will be achieved by forty funeral-services in one day. Whichever be the calculation on which the practice has been based, the number of churches to be visited is clearly governed by the number of days requisite, in popular belief, for ordinary dissolution.

But with all this reputed rapidity of the earth in ‘loosing’ the dead bodies committed to her care, the action of fire is incontrovertibly more rapid. In hours, not in days, may be counted the period of disintegration on the pyre. And as it is quicker, so also is it far surer. No body that has been burned can wander as a revenant over the earth, while for the buried there is no perfect assurance of dissolution. Some curse, some crime, the violence of their death, or the deficiency of their funeral rites, each and all of these may keep their bodies ‘bound’ and indissoluble. Cremation then is indisputably in theory the preferable means of securing to the dead that boon which they most desire; and I hold that in the practice of the Greek people there are signs that this preference was felt.

There are then two propositions to be established by reference to the actual funeral methods of Ancient and Modern Greece; first, that from the earliest ages of which we have cognisance cremation and inhumation have been identical in their religious purpose; second, that a preference for cremation, considered as a means to the single religious end, has been manifested.

The first thing needful in this twofold investigation is to understand the terms, which are to be used, in the sense in which the Greek understood them. Cremation means to us the consumption of the corpse by fire; inhumation the laying of the corpse out of sight in the earth; and unless one or other of those acts had been really performed, we should not consider that a funeral had taken place. But the Greeks judged rather by the intention than by the act. In certain cases, in which the actual digging of a grave was impossible, ancient usage prescribed a ceremonial substitute. The sprinkling of a handful of dust over a dead body was held to constitute burial. Such was all the funeral that Antigone could give to Polynices[1234]; such the minimum of burial enjoined by Attic Law on any who chanced upon a dead body lying unburied[1235]; such, according to Aelian, ‘the fulfilment of some mysterious law of piety imposed by Nature’ not only upon man but even on some of the brute creation, in such sort that the elephant, if he find one of his own kind dead, gathers up some earth in his trunk and sprinkles it over the prostrate carcase[1236]. ‘The fulfilment of some mysterious law of piety’--Aelian’s phrase accurately summarises the Greek view of burial. To us it is a necessary and decent method of disposing of the dead. To the Greeks it was something more--a provision for their dimly discerned welfare; and the intention of the living mattered so much more than the performance, that, in cases where real burial could not be given, a mere ceremony suggestive of burial was considered competent to ensure the same end.

Again in the case of a man drowned at sea or having met his death in any way which precluded the possibility of his body being brought home for burial, a means has always been found for fulfilling ‘the mysterious law of piety.’ Still, as in old time, the cenotaph serves the same end as the real sepulchre. A lay-figure, dressed if possible in some clothes of the dead man, receives on his behalf the full rite of burial[1237]; and if enquiry be made, to what purpose this empty ceremony, the answer is not slow in coming, γιὰ νὰ λυωθῇ ὁ πεθαμένος, ‘to the end that the dead man may be dissolved’; nor can I doubt that the same formal rite in old time served the same end.

And let no practical-minded critic here interpose the objection that a dead body lying unburied, exposed to sun and rain, must decompose at least as rapidly as one that has been buried; I have myself tried the effect of that criticism on the Greek peasants with instructive results. Once my suggestion was promptly met with a flat and honest denial--the most simple and final of answers, for, be it remembered, it is with the honest beliefs of the peasant, and not with physical facts, that we are dealing. Another time there was a pause, and then came the deliberate answer, βρωμάει τὸ κορμὶ, δὲν λυώνεται, ‘the corpse becomes putrid, but is not “loosed”.’ There was a distinction in the peasant’s mind between natural decomposition and the dissolution effected by a religious rite. But more often it has been pointed out to me that my apparently reasonable suggestion was really unpractical; a dead body left unburied would never suffer natural decay, but would be a prey to the beasts of the field and the fowls of the air; the vultures circling yonder overhead convicted me of unreason. And the answer could not but recall the threats of Achilles against Hector, or the fears of Antigone for Polynices, that dogs and carrion-birds should feast upon the corpse. So then it is perhaps a logical as well as an honest belief which the Greeks have always held, that dissolution of the body is afforded by one of two rites and by no third means.

Now one of these rites, inhumation, might on occasion be reduced to a mere ceremonial observance, the scattering of a handful of dust over the body, or the interment of an effigy in its stead. Was the other rite, cremation, ever so reduced? Could the roar and crackle of the blazing pyre be ceremonially replaced by a small flame lighted in proximity to the dead body? Did the kindling of a fire, however incapable of consuming the dead body, constitute cremation in the same sense that a handful of earth, incapable of concealing the dead body, constituted interment? Prima facie there is nothing wild in the supposition; it is consistent with the Greek conception of the funeral-rite, which looked rather to the intention than to the act; the proven fact of ceremonial inhumation guarantees the likelihood of ceremonial cremation. I take it therefore as a working hypothesis, and base its subsequent claim to be accepted as a fact on its ability to explain consistently a long series of phenomena in Greek funeral usage.

My first proposition, that from the earliest ages of which we have cognisance cremation and inhumation have served the same religious end, would have had an initial obstacle to surmount but for Professor Ridgeway’s work on the ethnology of early Greece. Diverse methods of disposing of the dead would at first sight, as I have said, suggest diverse conceptions of after-death existence. But Professor Ridgeway has shown conclusively, to my mind, that inhumation was the rite of the autochthonous Pelasgian people of Greece, and that cremation was introduced by the Achaean immigrants[1238]. Now it is improbable of course that these two peoples, when they first came into contact, held similar views concerning the hereafter. But the entry of the Achaean element was, according to all evidence, a long process of infiltration rather than a sudden invasion. The beginnings of it are conjecturally placed well back in the third millennium before Christ[1239]. There was ample time therefore, even before the later Mycenaean or the Homeric age, for differences of religious sentiment as between the two races to dwindle or to vanish, while the two rites of cremation and inhumation, with the inveteracy of all custom, still survived.

Thus there is no initial objection to the view that in any period known to us those who used cremation and those who used inhumation were animated by the same religious ideas; and at the same time I am relieved of the necessity of combating both the old theory that cremation was adopted by the Greeks as a convenient substitute for inhumation during some period of migration or nomadic life, and Rohde’s more recent theory[1240] that fear of the spirits of the dead, which were believed to hover about graves where their bodies lay buried, led men to adopt cremation as a means of annihilating the body and thereby ridding themselves of the unwelcome spirit. Both those theories fail, apart from certain intrinsic defects, because they are attempts to explain a thing which never took place--a supposed substitution of cremation for inhumation between the Mycenaean and the Homeric ages. Professor Ridgeway has shown that the Mycenaean rite was that of the Pelasgians; the Homeric rite that of the Achaeans. It is an accident only that our earliest information respecting the two rites happens to be drawn from different periods of time; the real distinction between the two was a racial distinction; from the age when the Achaeans first entered Greece down to the Christian era cremation and inhumation were both continuously practised.

The positive evidence for my view that these two rites were mere racial survivals, which had already, in the earliest ages known to us, ceased to differ in religious import, is to be found not only in the fact that in historical times, or even earlier, the two rites were used side by side by the people of a single city in the same cemetery, but in an early tendency to fuse the two rites into one and to give to the same body the double treatment of cremation and inhumation combined; for clearly the only condition under which two such rites could be amalgamated must have been that there had ceased to be any conflict of religious significance between them.

How early this fusion began it is difficult to determine; but it is at least worth while to note a point which is apt to be overlooked, that the Homeric funeral-rite comprised inhumation. Cremation certainly was the main part of the rite, the actual means by which the corpse was disintegrated; but the funeral was not complete until the ashes had been collected and inhumed[1241]. This is an act of ceremonial inhumation just as much as the burial of an effigy dressed in a dead man’s clothes.

Moreover it is possible that the Mycenaean funeral-rite sometimes comprised an act of ceremonial cremation. To review here the archaeological evidence for some use of fire in Mycenaean graves is unnecessary; it will suffice to quote from the summary given by Rohde[1242] as the basis of his theory--to which I by no means assent--that a vigorous ‘soul-cult,’ involving propitiatory offerings to the dead, was a religious feature of that age. ‘Traces of smoke, remnants of ash and charcoal, point to the fact that the dead bodies were laid on the spot where were burnt those offerings to the dead which had previously been made in the tomb.... On the ground, or sometimes on a specially prepared bed of flints, the offerings were burnt, and then, when the fire had gone out, the bodies were laid on top and covered over with sand, lime, and stones.’

Now the fact that in Mycenaean graves gifts were actually consumed by fire while the corpse was left to the process of natural decay is indisputable; but, if the fire employed had no further purpose, the practice of the Mycenaean age would be unique. The custom of all later ages was to treat the corpse and the gifts alike, to burn both or to bury both. This is implied in ancient literature[1243], and confirmed by modern excavations; for funeral-urns seldom contain any remnants of gifts; which means that the gifts had been consumed on the pyre with the body, but that only the bones were collected and stored in the urn; whereas in graves the gifts are constantly found buried with the body and intact. Further the custom of burning both body and gifts is the old Achaean custom, as described by Homer in the funeral of Patroclus; and it would seem probable that the custom of interring both body and gifts intact was the original Pelasgian custom. Was then the use of fire in these Mycenaean graves the first step in the fusion of the Achaean and Pelasgian rites?

Again, the body was observed to lie on top of the burnt gifts. What is the meaning of this superimposition? According to Rohde the fire which consumed the gifts was allowed to go out, and the bodies were then laid on the cold ashes. But manifestly this cannot be proved. All that we know is that the fire did not consume the bodies. No one can assert that they were untouched by flame or ember and that the smell of fire did not pass over them. Was then the act of laying the body on top of the burnt or burning gifts an act of ceremonial cremation?

These questions I cannot answer; but one thing is clear. Either the fusion of the Achaean and Pelasgian rites had already begun, or else, in their original forms, they both comprised usages which greatly facilitated their subsequent fusion.

When we pass on to the Dipylon-period, there is no longer any doubt. Cremation and inhumation were practised both severally side by side and also conjointly as a single rite. The evidence on which I mainly rely is derived from two series of excavations, those of Philios[1244] at Eleusis and those of Brückner and Pernice[1245] in the Dipylon cemetery at Athens.

The autochthonous population of Attica naturally adhered in the main to the old Pelasgian rite of inhumation. Yet at Eleusis, even according to Philios who strangely belittles the importance of his own discoveries[1246], there was one certain case of cremation; and in the Dipylon cemetery also was found one urn which could be dated with equal certainty. One or two other probable cases have also been recorded by others[1247]. Clearly then as early as the eighth century B.C. cremation was sometimes used, side by side with inhumation, as the effective means of disintegrating the dead body.

And there is equally sure proof that the two rites were also employed conjointly, in the sense that a ceremonial act of inhumation followed actual cremation, or a ceremonial act of cremation accompanied actual inhumation. A conspicuous instance of the former is the one certain case of actual cremation recorded by Brückner and Pernice[1248]. A bronze urn containing the calcined bones of a boy or girl had been deposited not in a mere hole dug to fit it, but in a grave fully prepared as if for the reception of a corpse. The measurements of the grave were of normal size; in it had been laid, along with the urn, gifts of the usual nature--an amphora, two boxes, a bowl, and a jug; and above the grave, in a prepared space considerably wider than the actual grave, stood one of the large Dipylon-vases. In every respect the interment had been carried out as if it were the interment of an unburnt body. An attempt had been made so to combine the two rites of cremation and inhumation that neither should seem subordinate to the other.

Instances of the other sort, in which ceremonial cremation accompanied actual inhumation, are furnished by Philios’ excavations at Eleusis. Speaking of the large earthenware jars which often served as coffins for children, he says, ‘Whereas the bones contained in these vessels were unburnt, all round the vessels in the soil traces of burning were abundant and varied[1249].’ Now these traces of fire cannot have been due to the burning of gifts brought subsequently to the interment; for that custom naturally resulted in a stratum of burnt soil above the grave. But here the traces were ‘all round the vessels, in the soil.’ Apparently then we have here a practice parallel to that of Mycenaean times. The body was interred and obtained its actual dissolution by natural decay; but before the interment a fire was kindled in the grave, and among the flames or on the embers the body in its coffin-jar was laid and covered over with the soil. Whether at Eleusis, as at Mycenae, the funeral-gifts were consumed in that fire, we do not know for certain; but since it is undoubtedly rare to find any gift along with the child’s body in these vessels, it is reasonable to suppose that the few gifts--few, because all the circumstances of these funerals seem humble--were burnt[1250] just as were the grander offerings at Mycenae. At any rate these cases reveal an intention of associating fire with the buried body, of adding to the rite of interment a ceremonial act of cremation.

The tendency towards fusion of the two funeral rites has now been traced through the pre-historic era; it is in the historic period that the fusion appears most general and most complete. I will take as typical instances a number of graves, ranging in date from the sixth to the fourth century, opened by the two German excavators on whose narrative I have largely relied for the Dipylon-period[1251]. These graves numbered somewhat under two hundred. In the classification of them there appears the important item--forty-five graves in which the body had been actually burned. In other words, in approximately a quarter of the cases observed the rites of cremation and inhumation had been combined, and that too in such a way that both elements, fire and earth, might well have seemed to share together the work of dissolution. Neither method is here exalted to sole efficacy, neither is degraded into mere ceremony. The balance of importance is adjusted, and the two acts which form the composite funeral-rite are recognised as equal. Indeed there are no longer two distinct acts; they have coalesced; the moment and the act of laying the body in the earth are also the moment and the act of laying the body on the pyre. Amalgamation is complete.

Having traced the history of Greek funeral-usage down to this point, I may now fairly claim, first, that my working hypothesis--the practice of ceremonial cremation as the counterpart of ceremonial inhumation--is justified by the single and consistent explanation which it affords of the phenomena which I have noticed (and I may add that I shall have occasion to explain other phenomena in the latter half of this chapter in the same way); secondly, if that explanation be accepted, I may claim that the only condition under which the two rites could have been employed both severally as alternatives and conjointly as one composite rite was that the religious purpose underlying them both was one and the same. And this purpose, if there is any meaning in the stories of Patroclus, Elpenor, Polynices, and Polydorus, was to give to the dead that which they most craved, a speedy dissolution.

The evidence for this unity of purpose is, I hope, already sufficient; but confirmation may be found, if required, in the smaller details of funeral-custom. It is, I believe, a received principle of textual criticism that, in estimating the relation of two manuscripts of a given author, coincidence in minutiae is the true criterion of their common origin or other close kinship, and its testimony is not to be outweighed by a few conspicuous divergences. So too, I think, in estimating the mutual relation of two rites, the coincidence of all the minor circumstances connected with them is of more significance than one large and evident contrast between them. Such a contrast, let it be granted, exists between cremation and inhumation when employed separately. Yet it would be a rash and faulty judgement, I hold, which should at once infer thence that the two rites were informed by different religious ideas. The minute coincidences claim examination. If all that preceded and accompanied and followed the actual disposal of the corpse, whether by burning or by burial, exhibited uniformity in scheme and in scope; if the washing and the anointing, the arraying and the crowning, were performed with the same tender care whether the body was destined for the cold, slow earth or for the rapid flame; if from the death-chamber, where the body had lain in state and the kinsfolk, grouped in order of dearness about it, had paid in turn their debt of lamentation, the same sad pomp escorted the dead whether to the pyre or to the grave; if the same gifts--the same provision as it seems for bodily comfort--were mingled as ashes with the ashes of the dead or were consigned intact with the body yet intact to the will and keeping of the earth; then, whichever means the mourners chose for effecting the actual dissolution of the fleshly remains, their religious attitude towards death and their conception of the hereafter must have been single and constant.

Space forbids me to enter into the evidence for the uniformity of all this detail in all periods of Greek life. I will confine myself to two illustrations. The first shall be the prothesis or lying-in-state of the body with the solemn lamentation of the kinsfolk, for the most part women, grouped about it. I have elsewhere[1252] described the scene; I have only to illustrate here the universality of it as the prelude alike to cremation and to inhumation, alike in Ancient and in Modern Greece, alike amid pagan and amid Christian surroundings. In the Mycenaean age the bodies of the dead were sumptuously arrayed--probably with a view to the lying-in-state; more than that cannot be actually asserted of the earliest epoch. But in the Homeric age, as at the funeral of Hector[1253], the custom is seen already fully developed. In the Dipylon-age the scene described by Homer is found depicted on the great vases that served as monuments over the graves[1254]. A little later, the legislation of Solon is directed against the excesses to which the rite of solemn lamentation led[1255]. Next, an orator of Athens is found declaiming against the wrongs done to him by the thirty tyrants, who, not content with having put his brother to death, had actually refused the use of any of the three houses belonging to the family and had forced them to lay out the body in a hired hut[1256]. Again we have the ridicule of Lucian directed against the discordant scene of useless misery[1257]. In strange company with him appears St Chrysostom upbraiding Christians for their extravagances of grief and threatening them with excommunication if they continue to call in heathen women to act as professional mourners[1258]. Centuries passed without diminution of the custom, and the Venetians during their occupation of the Ionian islands enacted laws[1259] in the spirit of those formulated by Solon more than two thousand years before. Of this custom it might well be said, ‘et vetabitur semper et retinebitur,’ for it still maintains its old vogue and vitality, and is the necessary prelude of every peasant’s funeral to-day.

My second illustration is a far more trivial circumstance, but not on that account less significant--the use of the foliage of the olive as a couch for the dead, whether on the bier which conveyed him to the grave or on the funeral-pyre. The reason for choosing olive-leaves does not concern us; there may have been, as Rohde suggests[1260], some idea of purification connected with it; but it is only the wide-spread use of it which I have to illustrate. Among the ashes of those small pyres, on which the dead were laid in Mycenaean sepulchres, were recognised charred olive-leaves[1261]. Lycurgus in curtailing the funeral-rites of Sparta bade his countrymen wrap their dead for burial in the red military cloak (as became a race of warriors) and in olive-leaves[1262]. The Pythagoreans, who objected to cremation[1263], laid their dead to rest on a bed of leaves gathered from myrtle, poplar, and olive[1264]. An Attic law forbade the felling of certain olive-trees under penalty of a fine of a hundred drachmae per tree, but contained a saving-clause exempting cases in which olive-wood was wanted for funerals[1265]. This permission points to a special use of olive-wood as fuel for the pyre, for, if a few branches or sprays only had been needed for decking out the bier, there would have been no question of felling whole trees. It was probably then this custom which Sophocles also had in mind, when the messenger, who brought the news of Polynices’ tardy funeral, was made by him to specify ‘fresh-plucked olive-shoots’ as the material of the pyre[1266]. Again, in a number of sarcophagi found by Fauvel outside the gates of Athens on the road to Acharnae the skeleton was observed to lie ‘on a thick bed of olive-leaves[1267].’ In the second century of our era the custom of placing olive-branches on the bier still prevailed[1268]; and at the present day the olive is often conspicuous at the funerals of peasants, either in the garland about the dead man’s head or in the decoration of the bier.

Thus the uniformity of detail in funerals, whether the main rite was cremation or inhumation, no less than the tendency to amalgamate these two into a single rite, proves that, from the earliest ages known to us, their religious purpose had been identical--to give to the dead that speedy bodily dissolution which they desired.

But in spite of this unity of purpose, one or other rite doubtless continued long through force of custom to hold predominance in particular districts. In Attica it was perhaps not until the sixth or even the fifth century that the Pelasgian rite had entirely lost the support of ancestral tradition. But then and thenceforward the two methods appear to have been judged simply as methods, and the estimate of their respective merits was little affected by the old racial differences. But this does not mean that the methods were judged wholly on their religious merits--on their adaptability to the single religious purpose. Cost and convenience were necessarily factors in determining the choice between them. Thus the question of cost must often have decided the poorer classes to choose inhumation; and in that portion of the Dipylon cemetery to which I have already referred, it was actually found that, out of the graves in which no evidence of cremation was found, more than a hundred were of a poor character, mere shafts in the earth, or at the best walled with rough brick-built sides, while only thirteen were of a costly style--sepulchres built with slabs of stone, or regular sarcophagi. And similarly other practical considerations must often have turned the scale in favour of the one or the other rite. The soldiers who fell at Marathon were simply interred, presumably because to dig a trench and to raise a mound in the middle of the plain was a more feasible task than to collect masses of fuel from the surrounding hill-sides; but the victims of the plague at Athens were with good reason cremated.

Nevertheless, where none of these external causes operated, there are signs that cremation was held in somewhat higher esteem than inhumation. The story went that Solon’s body was burnt, by way of honour seemingly, and his ashes scattered over that island which he had won back for Athens. And we hear of cremation being accorded, apparently again as the more honourable rite, to other great men such as Dionysius, the famous tyrant of Syracuse, and Timoleon, her deliverer. But more conclusive is the evidence of literature, where not only the act itself is named, but a clear indication of the feeling of the actors is given. According to Aeschylus, the dead body of Agamemnon, king though he was, was merely hidden away in the ground by his blood-guilty wife; even in death she would show him no pity, do him no honour. But in Sophocles the dying Heracles is laid on a funeral-pyre, and the dead Polynices, to whom Antigone was perforce content to give the most meagre form of interment, obtains from Creon, when at last too late he repents, the full rite of cremation. And the tone too in which Herodotus once speaks of the two rites is significant: ‘the funeral-rites of well-to-do Thracians,’ he says, ‘are as follows: the body lies in state for three days, and they slaughter all manner of victims and make good cheer, when once the preliminary lamentation is done; and then they dispose of the body by cremation or merely by interment’--ἔπειτα δὲ θάπτουσι κατακαύσαντες, ἢ ἄλλως γῇ κρύψαντες[1269]. The ‘merely’ plainly betrays Herodotus’ own feeling that well-to-do persons might be expected to have the advantage of cremation.

In the following centuries the preference for cremation would seem to have become even more pronounced; for though both rites still continued in use, separately as well as conjointly, Lucian was able to call cremation the distinctively Hellenic rite[1270]. But more marked still was the feeling in favour of cremation among those who upheld the old Greek religion when first they had to face the invasion of Christianity. ‘The heathen for the most part,’ says Bingham[1271], ‘burned the bodies of the dead in funeral piles, and then gathered up the bones and ashes, and put them in an urn above ground: but the Christians abhorred this way of burying; and therefore never used it, but put the body whole into the ground.’ The conflict over this matter was bitter. The pagans taunted the Christians with fearing that, if their bodies were reduced to ashes by cremation, they would be incapacitated for the vaunted resurrection[1272], and as a final injury to Christian martyrs sometimes burnt their bodies and scattered the ashes to the winds[1273]. The Christians in retaliation condemned the rite of cremation as in appearance an act of cruelty to the dead body[1274], and ridiculed the pagans for first ‘burning up their dead in a most savage manner and then feasting them in a manner most gluttonous, using the flames alike for their service and for their injury[1275]’--for their service in cooking them a funeral-meal, for their injury in consuming them to ashes. The two now conflicting rites continued in use until the end of the fourth century of our era; for reference is made to them in the laws of Theodosius[1276]. But cremation must have been on the decrease; for Macrobius early in the fifth century says that in his time the practice had fallen into entire desuetude, and all he knew of it was from reading[1277]. ‘It is most probable,’ says Bingham, ‘that the heathen custom altered by degrees from the time of Commodus the Emperor; for Commodus himself and many of his friends were buried by inhumation and not by burning ... and from that time the custom of burning might decrease till at last under the Christian emperors, though without any law to forbid it, the contrary custom entirely prevailed, and this quite dwindled into nothing.’ If this view be correct, it will mean that the old preference for cremation exhibited by the adherents of paganism was only excited to temporary intensity by a spirit of antagonism towards Christianity, and that they soon returned to the old way of thinking and recognised inhumation as a method alternative, if slightly inferior, to cremation. When the bitterness of religious strife was over, and pagans and Christians lived more at peace together, the former may readily have resumed the practice of interment, which after all was their own heritage from dim ages long before the dawn of Christianity.

But though Macrobius in the fifth century speaks of cremation as then in disuse, the memory of it cannot have passed away so soon. Only a few generations were to lapse before the infusion of a Slavonic population into Greece. Among the superstitions which these intruders disseminated was one which concerned the resuscitated dead. The Greeks, as we have seen, themselves held a superstition on which the horrid imaginings of the Slavs were soon grafted; the common-folk became haunted by the dread of vrykolakes. How then did they deal with the bodies of such dead persons as were suspected? Not by adopting the Slavonic custom of impaling them, but by a revival of cremation. The advantage which that rite possessed over burial was remembered; by its aid the dissolution of the dead could be rendered quick and sure. Thus cremation came once more into use as a means to the same end as in old time--the quick dissolution of the dead body; but the motive for promoting that dissolution was, under the altered conditions, itself altered. Instead of love it was fear; instead of solicitude for the welfare of the dead, it was anxiety for the protection of the living.

Yet even so, the act of burning the vrykolakas was a purely defensive, not an offensive, measure. It was not an act of hostility or reprisal, but merely a necessary act of self-preservation, which inflicted no hurt on the revenant but simply interposed an impassable barrier between the living and the dead. The motive was fear; there was little or nothing of hatred mixed with it. This is made clear by the fact that cremation has been used even in recent times in a case which had nothing whatsoever to do with the belief in vrykolakes, and where the sole motive was the old desire to serve the interests of the dead.

The occasion was the evacuation of Parga in 1819. The inhabitants of that town had long defied the Turks, but the end was at hand, and it was only by the intervention of the English that they were saved from the tender mercies of Ali Pasha. The English offered them asylum in the Ionian Islands and obtained from the Porte on their behalf a sum of money which fully indemnified them for the houses and lands which they abandoned. But in spite of the terms obtained, the emigrants never forgave the English for treacherously selling to the Turks, as they said, the home which they had defended so stoutly and so long[1278]. This evacuation of Parga forms the theme of some ballads which have been preserved[1279]. One of them runs as follows:

‘Bird of black tidings, that art come from yon confronting coastland, Tell me what mean those sobs of woe, those dismal lamentations, That rise aloud from Parga’s walls and shake the very mountains. Hath the Turk overwhelmèd her, do fire and sword consume her?’ ‘The Turk hath not o’erwhelmèd her, nor fire and sword consume her; The men of Parga have been sold, as ye sell goats and oxen, And all must hie them thence to dwell in miserable exile. They must leave all, the homes they love, the tombs of their own fathers, The shrine whereat they bowed the knee, for infidels to trample. Women in anguish rend their hair and beat their bare white bosoms, Old men lift up their quavering voice in dismal lamentation, Priests amid flowing tears strip bare the churches where they worshipped. Dost see the glare of yonder fire? the pall of smoke above it? There are they burning dead men’s bones, the bones of valiant warriors, Who made the hosts of Turkey quail and fired their captain’s palace[1280]. Yonder, I tell thee, many a son his father’s bones is burning, Lest the Liápid[1281] light on them, lest Turk upon them trample. Dost hear the wailing manifold wherewith the woodlands echo? Dost hear the beating of the breast, the dismal lamentation? ’Tis that the parting hour has come, to part them from their country; They kiss her very stones, they clasp her dust in fond caresses.’

The incident in this ballad with which we are concerned is the exhumation and burning of the remains of those dead warriors who had valiantly maintained the liberty of their native town; and there need be little doubt that the incident is actually historical, for the story is confirmed by a second ballad in the same collection[1282]; but in any case all that concerns us here is the fact that the motive for such an act was known and appreciated by the authors of the two ballads.

Now in order to understand this motive, it must be remembered that the general custom of the Church in Greece is to exhume the bones of the dead at the expiration of three years from the time of burial, when dissolution is expected to be complete. Hence the kinsfolk for whose remains the men of Parga were concerned were those who had been recently buried and could not yet have attained complete dissolution. They feared that the Turks would disturb and desecrate the graves and thus obstruct the proper course of natural decay; and they therefore decided to adopt the alternative method of disintegration, and by cremation to effect speedily and surely that end which, without friends at hand to guard the graves from the molestation of foes and infidels, could not be secured by leaving the dead to the slow action of the earth. This decision then reveals a clear recognition of the superiority of cremation over inhumation as a means of compassing the final dissolution of the dead; and equally clear is the motive for seeking that end; it was not fear on their own account--to that feeling indeed the men of Parga had proved themselves strangers--but simply love and respect for the brave men who had fought, and perhaps had fallen, in the defence of freedom.

Since then the exhumation and cremation of the dead constituted in this case an act of love towards them, the same action in the case of suspected vrykolakes can never have been an act of hostility. It was rather a measure beneficial alike to the living and to the dead. To the living it gave immunity from the assaults of vrykolakes, and this without doubt was commonly the uppermost or indeed the only thought in the minds of those who had recourse to it; but to the dead too it gave repose. And indeed I cannot but suppose that this is the reason why the Greeks, when first confronted with the horror of vrykolakes, chose to burn them rather than to follow the Slavonic custom of impaling them. To impale them might have given security to the living, but it appeared as an act of cruelty and hostility against the dead. Cremation, by effecting immediate dissolution and the consequent severance of the dead from this world, was bound to give equal security to the living, and at the same time was an act of mercy and kindness to the dead. In effect, the new motive of dread which came along with Slavonic influence never excluded the old motive of love which inspired the sons of warriors at Parga no less than the chief of Homeric warriors at his comrade’s funeral, and perhaps will, if occasion arise, prove itself not yet extinct. Cremation, though often in recent times employed primarily as a safeguard for the living, has all along been felt to confer also a benefit on the dead, an even surer and speedier benefit than inhumation secured.

Now if this feeling existed, and if there existed also from early times, as I have shown to be probable, a system of combining cremation of a ceremonial kind with actual inhumation, it might reasonably be expected that many who recognised the superior merit of cremation, but had not the means to carry out so costly a rite in full, would have availed themselves of the inexpensive ceremonial practice. This, I believe, is what occurred, and in this I shall seek the explanation of a custom which, like the practice of real cremation, has been bequeathed by Ancient to Modern Greece.

In the funerals of Ancient Greece the procession, which escorted the dead body from the room where it had lain in state to the pyre or the grave, carried torches. Where cremation was to be employed, these were doubtless used for kindling the pyre; the fire brought from the dead man’s home in this world was used to speed him on his way to the next. But when inhumation was practised, what became of these torches? Was the fire brought from the dead man’s home put to no purpose? Or were the torches thrown into the grave along with him? That we cannot tell, for the torches were quickly perishable. But there is one object commonly found in tombs which is suggestive of the association of fire with the buried body. That common object is a lamp. Here again we cannot tell whether that lamp was lighted when it was put in the grave. Some that have been dug up have certainly been in use, for they bear marks of the flame; but of course they may have been in every-day use before they were devoted to the service of the dead. Yet the few facts known would at least fit the theory that the procession which carried out the dead man carried also fire from his home to the grave, and that either the torches themselves or a lamp lighted from them was put in the grave beside the body. If that view were correct, it would further be note-worthy that most of the lamps found are of little intrinsic value and of late date[1283]. Now the fact that they are mostly worthless implies that they were often given by poor persons, or, if the other contents of the grave be of value, that the lamp was not brought as a gift for its intrinsic worth or beauty, but for some practical purpose; while the fact that they are mainly of late date means that the practice of putting them in the graves increased in frequency during the period which begins with the fifth century B.C.--that is to say, during that period in which we have already noted an increasing preference for cremation. Further the increase in the frequency of lamps makes it improbable that they are to be reckoned as part and parcel of the ordinary furniture of a grave; for the lekythi and other vases which were the ordinary gifts to the dead had already in the fifth century assumed a conventional character. Any fresh departure therefore after that century, or any increase in the frequency of one particular object among the contents of graves, must be a sign of some new or more strongly marked feeling towards the dead. Now all these facts and inferences are intelligible on one hypothesis; and that hypothesis is that the lamps found in the graves were put there lighted and burning, as the ceremonial minimum of the rite of cremation for which a growing preference is evident during some four centuries before the Christian era.

When we pass on to the early days of Christianity, a similar series of facts meets our view. The Church officially rejected and reprobated the practice of cremation. Converts therefore were bound to use inhumation; and this obligation probably excited the less repugnance, in that interment was no new thing to them, but had always been alternative, if slightly inferior, to cremation. But while even cheerfully obeying the law of the Church thus far, they clung to many of the details of their old funeral-custom, some of which were allowed by the Church, others disallowed. The practice of laying out the dead in rich and choice robes continued and called down strong rebuke from St Jerome[1284]; the excessive lamentation and the use of hired mourners at the lying-in-state provoked St Chrysostom to threats of excommunication[1285]; yet both these customs still obtain. But the custom of carrying torches in the funeral-procession was continued without even a protest on the part of the Church. Perhaps it was felt to be a harmless concession to ancient custom; perhaps then as now ecclesiastical taste even favoured the consumption of many candles in religious ceremonies. At any rate the fact is clear that the pagan custom of carrying torches in the procession held a place also in Christian ritual. What was the reason for which the common people held to their old custom? The torches were not needed any longer to kindle pyres; for actual cremation was abolished by the Church. Nor were they needed to give light to the procession; for Christian funerals, except in times of persecution, took place in open daylight. The reason was, I believe, that by means of these torches fire was carried along with the dead from his home to his grave, and that there a ceremonial act, a semblance of cremation, was combined with the rite of inhumation. And there are some indications that the fire brought to the grave-side was actually associated in some way with the dead body. In a disquisition ‘about them that sleep,’ which passed for a work of St Athanasius[1286], there is a recommendation to burn a mixture of oil and wax at the grave of the dead; and though the practice inculcated is disguised as ‘a sacrifice of burnt-offering to God,’ it is possible to attribute it to a less Jewish and more Greek motive, a desire to keep up the old custom of cremation, be it only in a ceremonial form. Again we have evidence that the custom of burning lights at the graves of the dead was commonly followed for some non-Christian purpose; for the Council of Eliberis saw fit to forbid it under pain of excommunication[1287]. This non-Christian purpose will explain itself in the light of some modern customs.

There is a custom well known in Modern Greece which consists in the maintenance of what is called ‘the unsleeping lamp’ (τὸ ἀκοίμητο καντῆλι). A fair general idea of it may be given by saying that after a funeral a light is kept continuously burning either in the room where death took place or at the grave for a period of either forty days or three years. This variation in time and place requires examination. In customs, as in other things, there is a right way and a wrong way; variety in observance is not original; there is a proper time and a proper place.

First then, which is the proper place for this particular custom, the chamber of death or the grave-side?

The localities, in which that form of the custom which I shall show to be correct in this particular has come most conspicuously under my own observation, are Aráchova, a village near Delphi; Leonídi on the east coast of Laconia; a cemetery in the Thriasian plain belonging, I think, to the village of Kalývia; and the island of Aegina. In the last-mentioned it is an ordinary lantern which is used; it is placed at the head of the grave, and for forty days after the funeral is so trimmed and tended that the flame is not once extinguished. At Aráchova and in the Thriasian plain each grave is provided with an erection capable of sheltering a naked light. Some of the erections are like doll’s-houses with door and windows complete; others are mere boxes; others again are no more than a few tiles or flat stones set on edge to form a square and covered over with a roof of the same material. At Aráchova the lamps contained in these erections are tended both evening and morning, and the obligation to keep them burning uninterruptedly for three years, until the exhumation of the body, is strongly felt and scrupulously discharged. In the Thriasian plain the light is kept burning with equal care, but I am uncertain for what period. At Leonídi some shelters of the same kind as those described are in use; but there are also more elaborate tombs at the head of which is built a small recess below the level of the ground or at any rate under the slab of stone or marble which covers the grave, and in this recess, which is closed with a small door allowing the passage of air through its chinks, is placed ‘the unsleeping lamp.’ Here again the lights are kept burning until the exhumation takes place, and the lamps are fed and trimmed every evening. At Gytheion a device not dissimilar, though ruder, was formerly employed; among some old graves, now neglected, from which, it appeared, the bones of the dead had never been exhumed, I noticed several plastered over with a rough concrete in which was sunk at the head of the grave an iron vessel, like a sauce-pan docked of its handle; this vessel had presumably served the purpose of sheltering a light.

Such then is the main aspect of this custom; but the preliminary details also require notice. The fire with which to light the ‘unsleeping lamp’ must not be kindled on the spot beside the grave, but is conveyed from the house of the deceased. There, in general, the moment that death takes place or at any rate so soon as the body is laid out in state, candles or lamps are lighted and are placed at the head and at the foot of the couch on which the body reposes. These are kept burning until the funeral-procession is ready to start, and along with the procession either the same lights or other tapers and candles lighted from them are carried to the grave; and here the same fire which was burning in the house of the dead is transmitted to the ‘unsleeping lamp’ at the grave.

This I believe to be the correct form of the custom, but I must notice other varieties and give my reasons for regarding them as less authentic. It is stated in a reliable treatise on the island of Chios[1288], that there the people keep a lamp burning for forty nights in the room where a death has taken place, thinking that the soul wanders for forty nights before it goes down to Hades. The interpretation given evidently implies that the lamp is intended to give light to the spirit of the dead if in the course of its nightly wanderings it visits its former home.

Now so far as the Chian form of the custom is concerned, some such meaning might reasonably be assigned to it. But what of the more usual form of the custom by which the lamp is kept burning both night and day? A disembodied spirit, if it resemble an ordinary man, may reasonably be supposed to need a candle to see its way at night, but surely it needs none in the day-time; yet it is only the custom of burning the light all day long as well as at night that can have gained for it the name of ‘the unsleeping lamp,’ the lamp that is never extinguished. Here then is a visible defect in the Chian manner of observing the custom and likewise in the Chian manner of interpreting it; and a custom defective and misinterpreted in one important detail is open to suspicion in others. So far therefore as Chios is concerned, no great importance attaches to the fact that there the chamber of death is the place where the remnants of the custom are observed.

But there are other parts of Greece in which the death-chamber is the place for the ‘unsleeping lamp,’ and where the lamp still deserves that designation inasmuch as it is kept burning both day and night until the fortieth day after the funeral, and is not, as in Chios, lighted afresh each night. In such districts, I believe, the custom has long ceased to bear any meaning, and being on the wane has for convenience undergone a change. It is still felt to be obligatory to keep the flame that is lighted as soon as death has occurred burning constantly for forty days, but the work of tending it has been found to be more conveniently performed at home than in the grave-yard. The necessity to transmit the flame to the grave, to keep it continuously in close proximity to the dead, is no longer felt. This form of the custom can then be accounted for as a relaxation of that which I have put forward as the old and correct form; whereas on the other hand if the room where death occurred had originally been the proper place for maintaining the ‘unsleeping lamp,’ it would be impossible to account for the transference of the custom to the grave-side, where special shelters or receptacles must be made for the protection of the flame and where more trouble is needed to feed and to trim the lamps day by day. Aráchova and Leonídi where most pains are taken in the observance of the custom--and that not for forty days only but for three years--have the best claim to be regarded as the true exponents of the old custom. The proper place for the ‘unsleeping lamp’ is the grave-side.

But there is a variation also, as I have said, in the period of time during which this custom is kept up in different districts. In some it is a period of forty days, in others a period of three years; and in this respect there is a divergence between the usages even of those places which in other details have been shown to adhere faithfully to the old custom; for at Aráchova and Leonídi the longer period is customary, in Aegina the shorter. It is in this very variation that we find a clue to the meaning and purpose of the custom. In the earlier part of this chapter I showed, by quotation from a popular dirge and by the consideration of various customs connected with death, that in the belief of the common-folk the dissolution of a dead body is effected by the fortieth day after burial. On the other hand the Church has more prudently fixed three years as the time required for dissolution, the period which must elapse before the body may be exhumed. Thus there are two periods, fixed respectively by popular opinion and by ecclesiastical authority, between which there is a choice; the vox populi and the vox Dei are here in disagreement; and according as preference is locally given to the one or to the other mandate, so is a period of forty days or a period of three years locally believed to be that required for the dissolution of the body. But these two periods are also those between which there is a local variation in the custom of maintaining the ‘unsleeping lamp.’ Hence it is reasonably to be inferred that the ‘unsleeping lamp’ is in some way closely connected with the dissolution of the body.

Moreover this connexion is actually recognised by the common-folk themselves, as witness the following two couplets from a funeral-dirge. The words are put, as so often in the dirges, in the mouth of the dead man, who in this instance is supposed to be young and to be addressing his forlorn lady-love.

‘And when the priests with solemn song march toward the grave with me, Steal thou out from thy mother’s side and light me torches three; And when the priests shall quench again those lights for me,--ah then, Then, like the breath of roses, sweet, thou passest from my ken[1289].’

These lines are based on a belief which is fairly general among the Greek peasants, that consciousness of, and concern for, the things of this world are not broken off finally at the moment of death, but continue in some degree until the body of the dead is completely dissolved. Here the memories of love are spoken of as lasting until the priests quench the burning lights, which can be none other in the context than the ‘unsleeping lamp’--for three, the number mentioned, is merely a number of peculiar virtue and has no special force. It follows then that the quenching of the lights is understood in the passage to denote the accomplishment of that process of dissolution, which, though it mean the cessation of all intercourse with this upper world, is yet earnestly desired. Here in fact are plain words of popular poetry which recognise the connexion of the ‘unsleeping lamp’ with the dissolution of the body, and make the quenching of the one signify the completion of the other. It is going but a short step further to suppose that the presence of the lamp’s flame at the grave was originally intended to advance the process of dissolution--or, in other words, that the maintenance of the ‘unsleeping lamp’ at the grave until the body is finally dissolved is an act of ceremonial cremation.

This supposition gains yet more in probability when we compare with the custom of the ‘unsleeping lamp’ another not dissimilar custom which obtains in Zacynthos. There, as elsewhere, candles or lamps are lighted about the dead body while it is lying in state, and fire from them is carried to the grave. But, arrived there, instead of lighting an ‘unsleeping lamp,’ the bearers of the candles drop them into the grave beside the corpse. In this we have a close parallel to the ancient custom of putting a lamp, probably enough, as I have suggested, a lighted lamp, into the grave; and at the same time it cannot but be intimately connected with the custom of the ‘unsleeping lamp,’ the purpose of which is now known to concern the dissolution of the dead body. I claim then that the series of customs which we have reviewed, exhibiting as they do an intention to associate fire in some close way with the buried body and, as in the modern form of the custom, to associate it therewith until the process of dissolution is complete, find a common explanation in the continuance of a practice already exemplified in earlier ages, the practice of ceremonial cremation in conjunction with the full burial rite.

Nor is this explanation open to attack on the ground that a mere lamp lighted near the dead body bears so little outward resemblance to real cremation. To the outside observer the ceremonial act may seem a mere travesty of that for which it is substituted; but to the persons concerned the presence of fire, in however small a volume, may have seemed sufficient; for in all ritual it is not the act, but the intention, which has value. I have already pointed out how interment was occasionally reduced to an equally ineffective minimum; but I may perhaps cite a still closer parallel--another case in which a lamp is thought to have done duty for a real fire. There was in old time a custom, to which several ancient writers refer[1290], of keeping a lamp burning both day and night in the Prytaneum or in the chief temple of a Greek city; and both Athens and Tarentum are said to have had these lamps so constructed that they could hold a supply of oil sufficient to last a whole year. Such lamps, it has been suggested[1291], represented the fire on the city’s hearth which was not allowed to go out. The purpose of the lamp was clearly not to give light--for then it need not have been kept burning by day as well as by night--but it was a labour-saving appliance for keeping the sacred fire ever burning. The small flame was in fact a rudimentary fire. Thus all that I am supposing is that a lamp could represent a real fire just as well at the tomb as in the Prytaneum.

If then my explanation of the modern custom is right, the fact that the common-folk, though they have for many centuries employed inhumation as the ordinary Christian rite, have clung at the same time to a ceremonial form of cremation which they still connect in some way with the dissolution of the buried corpse, is additional proof of the favour with which the quicker and surer rite was formerly, and perhaps here and there still is, regarded.

Thus then the study of ordinary funeral-usage has confirmed the conclusions drawn in preceding chapters from the study of a certain abnormal state of after-death existence. As incorruptibility was the greatest bane to the dead, so dissolution was the greatest boon that the living could give them. This dissolution was to be effected by one of two methods, cremation and inhumation, which in theory were alternative but in practice were frequently combined. The combination of them was due in the first instance to the amalgamation of two races to which they respectively appertained; but in later times the racial difference between the two rites was obliterated, and they were judged on their own merits, with the result that a preference for cremation manifested itself in funeral-usage. This preference was due to a recognition that cremation was a quicker and surer method of dissolution, and is itself strong testimony to the desire to effect dissolution. The end to which both rites were directed was the same, but since one led to that end more quickly and surely than the other, it was rightly preferred.

Further the motive which prompted the living to effect the dissolution of the dead was not in general selfish; for dissolution, as we have seen, was a boon to the dead. That complete severance from this world, which came with the dissolution of the body, was in some way for the benefit of the dead. Patroclus sought for it, and Achilles granted his petition through love; and some three thousand years later the men of Parga are found effecting the rapid dissolution of their kinsfolk with the same motive. Only in one set of circumstances was the selfish motive of fear in operation, namely, where, the resuscitated dead were, by the influence of Slavonic superstition, invested with the character of malignant blood-thirsty monsters against whom self-defence was imperative, and whose complete severance from this world was desirable as a safeguard for the living. But such circumstances were the exception. The rule was that cremation and inhumation alike were means to the dissolution of the dead and their complete severance from this world, and the motive which prompted living men to seek that end was love of the dead who would in some way benefit thereby.

FOOTNOTES:

[1226] Bern. Schmidt, Lieder, Märchen, Sagen etc., Folk-song no. 33.

[1227] Cf. above, p. 389.

[1228] See above, p. 307, note 1, and p. 313.

[1229] The feasts at earlier dates, as on the third and ninth days, will be shown later to be popular in origin. See below, pp. 530 ff.

[1230] Ἰ. Σ. Ἀρχέλαος, ἡ Σινασός, p. 82.

[1231] Op. cit. p. 81. The form here is σαρανταρίκια.

[1232] Δελτίον τῆς ἱστορ. καὶ ἐθνολ. ἑταιρ. τῆς Ἑλλάδος, III. p. 337. The form is σαραντάρια.

[1233] See above, p. 373.

[1234] Soph. Antig. 256. Cf. Jebb’s note ad loc., from which I take the further references.

[1235] Aelian, Var. Hist. V. 14.

[1236] Aelian, Hist. Anim. V. 49.

[1237] Cf. Fauriel, Chants de la Grèce Moderne, Discours Préliminaire, p. 40; Μιχαὴλ Σ. Γρηγορόπουλος, ἡ νῆσος Σύμη, p. 46.

[1238] Early Age of Greece, Vol. I. cap. 7.

[1239] Bury, History of Greece, p. 41.

[1240] Rohde, Psyche, cap. I.

[1241] Hom. Il. VI. 417 ff., XXIII. 252 ff., XXIV. 791 ff.; Od. XI. 72 ff. and XII. 11 ff.

[1242] Psyche I. pp. 31-32.

[1243] Cf. Lucian, De Luctu 14, ἐσθῆτα καὶ τὸν ἄλλον κόσμον συγκατέφλεξεν ἣ συγκατώρυξεν.

[1244] Described in Ἐφημερὶς Ἀρχαιολ. 1889, pp. 171 ff.

[1245] Described in Athen. Mittheilungen, 1893, pp. 73-191.

[1246] The perusal of Philios’ narrative leaves the impression that several cases of cremation were discovered. Yet in his concluding summary he says: “Burial, not burning, of the dead was in those times the more prevalent custom, since in one case and one only can we admit that the corpse was not buried but burnt.” I note that Brückner and Pernice (op. cit. p. 149) in referring to Philios’ results tacitly soften his rigid ‘one and one only’ into the more supple ‘one or two.’ For justification of this see Philios, op. cit. pp. 178, 179, 180, 185.

[1247] Hirschfeld, in Annali, 1872, pp. 135, 167, cited by Brückner and Pernice op. cit. p. 148. Κουμανούδης, in Πρακτικὰ, 1873-4, p. 17.

[1248] Op. cit. pp. 91 ff.

[1249] Op. cit. p. 178.

[1250] Brückner and Pernice take this view of the fact, though the words which they use are coloured by their acceptance of Rohde’s theory of propitiatory offerings to the dead. ‘Vor der Beerdigung, so scheint es nach den Funden des Herrn Philios, sind an der Grabstätte des öfteren Brandopfer dargebracht worden.’ Op. cit. p. 151.

[1251] See op. cit. pp. 78-9.

[1252] See above, p. 347.

[1253] Il. XXIV. 719 ff.

[1254] Cf. Athen. Mittheil. 1893, p. 103.

[1255] Plutarch, Solon 20.

[1256] Lysias, Or. XII. 18, 19.

[1257] Lucian, de Luctu, 12 and 13.

[1258] Hom. 32 in Mat. p. 306.

[1259] Preserved among the archives of Zante, which the kindness of Mr Leonidas Zoës enabled me to inspect.

[1260] Psyche, I. pp. 209 and 360. From this source I draw several of the following references.

[1261] Tsountas in Ἐφημερὶς Ἀρχαιολ. 1888, p. 136.

[1262] Plut. Lycurg. 27.

[1263] Iambl. Vit. Pythag. 154.

[1264] Pliny, N. H. XXXV. 160.

[1265] Dem. Orat. 43 § 71.

[1266] Antig. 1201. Prof. Jebb in his note on this passage expresses the opinion that the θάλλοι νεοσπάδες were not fuel: in view of the Attic law above cited I am inclined to dissent. He also takes κλήματα in Ar. Eccles. 1031 to mean ‘olive twigs’ and not, as more usual, ‘vine-shoots.’ I pass by the passage as doubtful evidence.

[1267] Ross, Arch. Aufs. I. 31.

[1268] Artemid. Oneirocr. IV. 57.

[1269] Herod. V. 8.

[1270] Lucian, de Luctu, 21.

[1271] Antiquities of the Christian Church, Bk XXIII. cap. 2, whence I take the following references.

[1272] Minucius, p. 32.

[1273] Acta Tharaci ap. Baron. an. 299, n. XXI., Ammian. Marcell. lib. XXII. p. 241, Euseb. lib. VIII. cap. 6.

[1274] Tertull. De Anima, cap. 51.

[1275] Tertull. de Resur. cap. 1.

[1276] Cod. Th. lib. IX. tit. 17 de Sepulcris violatis, leg. 6.

[1277] Saturnal. lib. VII. cap. 7.

[1278] See Finlay, History of Greece, vol. V. pp. 274-6.

[1279] Passow, Popularia Carm. Graeciae recentioris, nos. 222-224. I translate here no. 222.

[1280] So I interpret, but without certainty, the words καὶ τὸ βεζύρη κάψαν, literally ‘and they burnt the Vizir.’

[1281] The Liápides were an Albanian tribe employed by the Turks.

[1282] No. 223.

[1283] Actual data on this point are difficult to obtain; but archaeologists whom I consulted in Greece were all agreed, that lamps are more frequent in graves of late date, most frequent in the Greco-Roman period.

[1284] Hieron. Vita Pauli 4, cap. 66.

[1285] Chrysostom, Hom. 32 in Mat. p. 306.

[1286] Cited by Durant, de Ritibus, lib. I. cap. XXIII. n. 14 (p. 235). I have been unable to discover the original passage. Cf. Bingham, op. cit. XXIII. 3.

[1287] See Bingham, Antiquities of the Christian Church, Bk XXIII. cap. 3 ad fin.

[1288] Κωνστ. Ν. Κανελλάκης, Χιακὰ Ἀνάλεκτα, p. 341.

[1289] These lines, or others in the same tenor, are well known among the professional μυρολογίστριαις (women hired to mourn at funerals). The version which I here follow is given by Passow, Popul. Carm. no. 377 A.

Κι’ ὄντες νά με περάσουνε ψάλλοντες οἱ παπᾶδες, Ἔβγα κρυφὰ ’π’ τὴ μάνα σου κι’ ἄναψε τρεῖς λαμπάδες· Κι’ ὄντες νά μου τὰ σβέσουνε παπᾶδες τὰ κηριά μου, Τότες τρανταφυλλένια μου βγαίνεις ἀπ’ τὴν καρδιά μου.

[1290] Theocritus XXI. 36 f.; Athenaeus 700 D; Pausan. I. 26. 7.

[1291] Frazer, in Journ. of Philol. XIV. 145 ff.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

VI. THE BENEFIT OF DISSOLUTION

Thus far the investigation of customs and beliefs in ancient and modern times relating to the treatment of the dead has established the fact that the dissolution of the body was a thing eagerly to be desired in the interests of the dead. With complete disintegration the summum bonum of the dead, so far as it was in the power of their surviving friends to win it for them, was secured. It remains to consider in what way the dead profited thereby.

Now I have hitherto spoken designedly of dissolution as a benefit, not to the souls of the dead nor to their bodies, but simply ‘to the dead’ without further specification. It will now limit the range of discussion as to the nature of the summum bonum to which dissolution gave access, if we can first answer the old question, cui bono? Is it the body alone or the soul alone or both conjointly on which the benefit is conferred? This question once answered, we shall have eliminated a certain number of possible conceptions of future happiness.

That the body alone might have been the recipient of the whole benefit is an idea which no one will entertain. Was it then the soul alone to which the dissolution of the body brought gain? Death, as we have learnt, was not a complete and final severance of soul from body; the soul might re-enter and re-animate the corpse. Was dissolution then believed to complete the severance?

The deliverance of the soul from the bondage of the body, the divorce of spirit from matter, is an idea which has appealed and does appeal to many, and would therefore furnish a motive of considerable intrinsic probability for the treatment which the Greek people have consistently accorded to their dead; the dissolution of the body, it might be supposed, was desired and hastened in order that the soul might be freed from its last link with this material world and pass away winged and unburdened towards things ethereal.

But such an explanation savours too much of philosophy and too little of popular religion. ‘The rehearsal of death,’ that is of the severance of soul from body, was according to Socrates the proper occupation of the philosopher; and death itself was welcome to him as a final release of the soul, the true self, from the fetters of physical existence. But the very emphasis which the whole of the Phaedo gives to this idea, the insistence of Socrates that his real self is that which converses with his friends and seeks to convince them of his views, and not the corpse which they will soon be burying or burning as seemeth them good[1292], suggest, if anything, that in the popular religion the severance of soul from body was not desired, and the true self was not conceived as a thing apart from body. At any rate the reason for desiring dissolution must be sought from more popular sources.

I return therefore to a passage[1293] on which I have already touched more than once, the earliest passage of extant literature, in which a dead man is represented as craving the dissolution of his body. Why was it that the soul of Patroclus desired so urgently the last rites for his body? Was it for the benefit of his soul only? Popular religion, as we have seen, did not reckon death a final severance of soul and body; for the soul might return and re-animate the body. Was then dissolution believed to complete the severance, annihilating the body and emancipating the soul? Did the future happiness of the soul depend upon such emancipation? Did Patroclus, in the case before us, crave dissolution in order that his soul, finally severed from his body, might find happiness?

Homer certainly peoples the lower world with souls only, severed from their former bodies. It is clearly the soul only of Patroclus which will pass the gates of Hades, when once his request for the burial of his body has been fulfilled; for it is ‘the souls, the semblances of the dead[1294],’ who bar his entrance thereto meanwhile. But those souls are not happy souls. The house of Hades is not a place of happiness; it is dank, murky, mouldering; and the souls themselves are not of a nature to enjoy anything; they are feeble, impotent wraiths, mere semblances of men, all doomed to the same miserable travesty of life; the bodies from which they are now severed were their real selves[1295], and there remain now only impalpable joyless phantoms. ‘Sooner,’ cries the spirit of Achilles to Odysseus, ‘would I be a serf bound to the soil, in the house of a portionless man whose living were but scant, than lord over all the dead that are perished[1296]’; for the old valour even of Achilles avails him no more; his soul fares in the house of Hades even as all others fare; all alike are doomed to everlasting futility in a land of everlasting gloom. Fitly is the soul of Patroclus said to have sped, at the moment of death, towards Hades’ realm ‘bewailing its fate in that it had left vigour and manhood[1297].’

How then comes it that anon the same soul is eager to pass the gates of Hades? Surely the wanderings of the dead Patroclus, whether in the form of a revenant as the popular belief would have had it, or, according to Homer’s version, as a disembodied spirit, would hardly be more pitiable than the lot which he in common with all the dead must suffer below. Why then this eagerness?

I can find nothing in Homer to justify it; it appears to me wholly inconsistent with the Homeric conception of the under-world.

And this inconsistency is of wide bearing. The cases of Patroclus and Elpenor are not isolated. The same eagerness for dissolution on the part of the dead has, as we have seen, been steadily recognised in all the relations between the living and the dead from the days of Homer until now. That which is at variance with the Homeric conception of the hereafter is not merely the petition of Patroclus, but the idea on which the funeral-customs of a whole people have been based for nearly three thousand years.

Such a discrepancy cannot but force upon us the question how far the Homeric conception of the hereafter was the popular conception.

That the whole picture of the house of Hades and of the condition of the departed therein was not an Homeric invention is, I suppose, indisputable. Its two main features are the gloom of the place and the lack of distinction between the lots of those who dwell there[1298]. Of these the first at any rate is frequent enough in later literature, and indeed held so firm a place in the Greek mind that ‘to see the light’ became synonymous with ‘to live in this upper world’; and even down to the present day both ideas live on. The constant epithets which Homer applies to the house of Hades, ‘cold’ (κρυερός) and ‘mouldering’ (εὐρώεις), are exactly reproduced in the epithets with which Hades, now a place instead of a person, is described in modern dirges--κρυοπαγωμένος, ‘frozen,’ and ἀραχνιασμένος, ‘thick with spiders’ webs’[1299]; and the same uniform misery of all the departed is likewise a common theme in the many songs that deal with Charon and the lower world. All this could not have been effected by the influence of Homer alone, great though it was, if he had himself invented the whole conception. It is clear that he utilised a conception which was before his time, and still is, a popular conception.

But there is equally good evidence of a totally different presentation of the future state. A fragment of one of Pindar’s dirges contradicts the Homeric description of the lower world in every point. ‘Upon the righteous the glorious sun sheddeth light below while night is here, and amid meadows red with roses lieth the space before their city’s gate, all hazy with frankincense and laden with golden fruits; and some take their joy in horses and feats of prowess, and others at the draught-board, and others in the music of lutes, and among them every fair flower of happiness doth blossom; and o’er that lovely land spreadeth the savour of all manner of spices that be mingled with far-gleaming fire on the gods’ altars[1300].’ So then this under-world is not cold and murky, but is warmed and lighted by the sun; its inhabitants are not frail spirits incapable of joy, but take their pleasure as aforetime in the world above; nor is the lot of all the same, for it is only the righteous who enjoy this bliss.

The popular character of this conception is equally clear. The distinction between the varying fortunes of the dead--the hope of happiness for some in contrast with the universal misery of the Homeric under-world--is an idea which finds expression throughout ancient literature; and if the house of Hades often remains none the less a place of gloom, that is because the abode of the righteous is often transferred to the islands of the blest, and the dark under-world left as a place of punishment for the wicked. At the present day too the same ideas are widely current among the common-folk. It is true that the dirges more generally pourtray the lower world as wrapped in Homeric gloom, and the condition of the departed as monotonously miserable; but the express purpose of these dirges, recited beside the dead body before it is carried out to burial, is to excite the mourners to a frenzy of grief, and the professional dirge-singer (for there are still women in some parts of Greece who follow that calling) would soon lose her work if, instead of harrowing the feelings of the mourners, she took upon herself to comfort them; her whole business is to move to tears those whom the bereavement itself has left unmoved, or to stimulate to fresh outbursts of lamentation those who are already spent with sorrow. But in a few folk-songs is found the more cheerful belief that the departed still continue the pursuits which they followed in this life[1301]; while as for their abode, any peasant who should have the Pindaric description of the future home of the blessed explained to him, would unhesitatingly identify it with that which he himself calls Paradise. Some points perhaps in that description would surprise him no less than they would please him, as for example the permission to play draughts, but they would not obscure his recognition; the place of fair flowers and fruits and scents could be none other than Paradise. “The people of modern Greece,” says a Greek writer[1302], ... “unable to comprehend the idea of spiritual joys, consider Paradise a place of largely material and sensuous pleasures. The Paradise of the Greek folk is watered by great rivers, ... and in it there grow trees which diffuse odours sweet past telling.... Agreeably with this reception of the idea of Paradise by the people, the fathers of the church also were compelled to describe Paradise in terms of the senses as well as of the spirit, thus making certain concessions to popular feeling and ideas. ‘Some,’ says John of Damascus[1303], ‘have imagined a sensuous Paradise, others a spiritual Paradise. For my part I think that, just as man himself has been created with senses as well as with spirit, so the most holy close (ἱερώτατον τέμενος) to which he has access appeals alike to the senses and to the spirit.’” The compromise in this passage is cleverly justified, but it has not lasted; the pagan part of it alone has survived, and the Paradise of the modern folk is none other than that abode which Pindar described. Even the rivers thereof, which are naturally desired above all things by the inhabitants of a dry and dusty land, were probably not absent from Pindar’s picture; for Plutarch, to whom we owe the preservation of the fragment, passes in one passage from actual quotation of the opening lines to a mention of smooth and tranquil rivers flowing through the land[1304]; and in the kindred picture of the Islands of the Blest, which Pindar paints elsewhere, he does not omit to mention the water wherewith the golden flowers are refreshed[1305]; for in his eyes too water was the best of earth’s gifts, even as gold was the brightest of wrought treasures[1306].

It was this high appreciation of water which first informed a custom prevalent all over Greece on the occasion of funerals. As the bier passes along the road, the friends and neighbours of the dead man empty at their doorway or from their windows a vessel of water, and usually throw down the vessel itself to be broken on the stones of the road. This custom is evidently very old, for in some places the use of the water, the very essence of the rite, has become obsolete, and all that remains of the custom is the breaking of a piece of crockery. And even though in most places the custom is observed in full, its meaning has generally been forgotten, and curious conjectures have been made to explain it. Some interpret the custom as a symbol of that which has befallen the dead man; the vessel is his body, the water is his soul; the pouring out of the water symbolises the vanishing of the soul, and the dead body will fall to pieces like the broken crock. Others say that they pour out the water ‘in order to allay the burning thirst of the dead man[1307],’ a notion ominously suggestive of the boon which Dives sought of Lazarus. But the real purpose of the rite is still known in some of the Cyclades, where exactly the same custom is followed also on the occasion of a man’s departure from his native village[1308], to live, as they say, in exile. And the purpose is to promote the well-being of the dead or of the exile in the new land to which he is going. The pouring out of the water is in fact a rite of sympathetic magic designed to secure that the unknown land shall also be well-watered and pleasant and plentiful; and the breaking of the vessel which held the water is due, I suppose, to a feeling that an instrument which has served a magical purpose must not thereafter be put to profane and mundane uses. This custom then in itself bears witness how wide-spread is, or has been, the conception of the other world as a land of delight wherein the pleasant things of this world shall still abound.

Thus then it must be acknowledged that two contradictory popular conceptions of the hereafter have survived side by side as a twofold inheritance from the ancient world. The one pervades the whole of Homer; the other is best expounded in a fragment of Pindar[1309]; and the fundamental difference between them is this, that the one consigns all the dead alike to gloom and misery, while the other distinguishes between the future fortunes of the righteous and the unrighteous, and holds out the hope of happiness in a yet brighter world than this. Whence came these two conceptions?

The world which Homer describes is the Achaean world, and I suspect that his under-world is likewise the Achaean under-world. The Achaean religion, as exhibited in Homer, is in no way profound. The gods are only Achaean princes on a yet grander scale, endowed with immortality. Men’s relations with them are eminently simple and practical; sacrifice is expected if prayers are to be answered. But both gods and men are concerned with this upper world only; death closes all relations between them. The gods are unconcerned, unless it be for some special favourite; they live on Olympus as aforetime amid feasting, quarrelling, laughter, and love; but men leave these pursuits and pastimes, and go down to the misery of Hades’ house; their souls which fled lamenting from their limbs at the hour of death still exist, else could they not appear to living men in the visions of night; but their existence is all misery, for they lack all that made this life pleasant. Their joys had been the joys of a strenuous, full-blooded life, the joys of battle, of feasting, of song, of comradeship; and these joys were no more. The future existence of the soul was, to the Achaeans, simply the negation of the present bodily life.

But the religion of a later age was by no means so simple. The Homeric gods were still worshipped in the old way, and received their sacrifices in exchange for favours desired or granted. But there was another element in religion of which Homer shows little trace--an element of awe and mystery. Homer indeed names the Erinyes as beings concerned with the punishment of certain sins; but he shows no knowledge of that awful doctrine of blood-guilt which Aeschylus associates with them; the murdered man’s power of vengeance is wholly ignored; for among the Achaeans the next of kin might accept a price at the hands of the murderer, and allow him to remain in the land[1310], without himself incurring any pollution or any manifestation of his dead kinsman’s wrath. Again Homer knows indeed of Demeter as a goddess connected with the crops; but there is nothing in his casual mention of her to suggest that the mysteries of her worship transcended the rites of all the Olympian gods. Yet no one, I suppose, would imagine that these profounder elements in ancient religion were of post-Homeric growth or could possibly have been evolved from the transparently simple religion of the Achaeans.

On the contrary it is known that the more mysterious rites and doctrines of the Greek religion were a legacy from the Pelasgians. That the mysteries of Demeter were Pelasgian in origin is proved by the localities in which her worship most flourished, and is corroborated by the explicit statement of Herodotus[1311], who was disposed to refer other mystic cults also to the same source[1312]. In fact the co-existence, or even the conflict, of the old Pelasgian and the newer Achaean religions is constantly recognised in ancient literature, and to the Pelasgian is ascribed all that most touched men’s hearts, be it with awe or with pity--with awe as in the conflict between the Erinyes and the new dynasty of gods whom Apollo and Athene represent, with pity in the dolorous struggle of Prometheus against the tyrant Zeus. The Pelasgian religion, with all its horrors, drew the real sympathies of the mystic Aeschylus; he could worship in deepest reverence Demeter and her mysteries[1313]; he could worship perhaps even the ‘reverend goddesses,’ horrible though they were in their displeasure; but his heart must have been cold towards the usurping Olympian gods. There is true insight in that passage of Aristophanes[1314] where Aeschylus summarises the benefits conferred by great poets on the Greek race, and praises Homer, the Achaean poet, for his lessons in discipline and valour and warfare, but Orpheus, sometimes reputed the founder of the Pelasgian mysteries, for instituting religious rites and teaching men to abstain from bloodshed. And the feelings of Aeschylus were the feelings of his countrymen. The Athenians boasted of a great Achaean goddess as the foundress and patroness of their city, but their personal hopes of future happiness centred in the Pelasgian Demeter. The same generation of Athenians listened with delight to Aristophanes’ ridicule of those gods whom Homer accounted greatest, and were aghast at the thought that the mysteries had been profaned. The Achaean gods, it would seem, made good figure-heads for the official religion of the state; they served as majestic patrons of a city, or of a great national festival where religion was of less real account than horse-racing, athletics, and commerce; but the hearts of the people clave to the older, more awful, more mysterious deities of the Pelasgians, and the holiest sanctuaries[1315] were those which had been holy long before the intrusion of the Achaean gods.

It was to this Pelasgian element in Hellenic religion that the doctrine of future rewards and punishments belonged; for, as we shall see more fully in the next chapter, participation in the Pelasgian mysteries of Demeter at Eleusis was held to be an earnest of future bliss, from which the impure or uninitiated were excluded.

Thus then there were two popular conceptions of the future life--the Achaean conception of universal misery in a cold and gloomy under-world, and the Pelasgian conception which distinguished between the lots of the righteous and the unrighteous, and held out to some men the promise of bliss. Now with the former conception, as we have already seen, the belief that the dead eagerly desired dissolution is utterly inconsistent; none could be in haste to pass the gates of Hades with the prospect of nothing but misery within. But where there were hopes of happiness, the eagerness for dissolution as a means of attaining thereto is at once intelligible. This desire then, which has constantly pervaded the mind of the Greek people and has furnished the single motive of their funeral-rites down to the present day, is of Pelasgian origin; and if Homer borrowed it and incongruously combined it with a purely Achaean presentation of the under-world, we must no more judge of its real meaning by the Homeric setting of it than we would form an opinion of the place of the Erinyes or of Demeter in Greek religion by Homer’s occasional references to them.

The fact then that Homer, in accordance with the Achaean religion, considered the dissolution of the body to mean the annihilation of the body and represented the soul as alone entering into the lower world is wholly immaterial to the present enquiry. It is the Pelasgian conception of future bliss with which we are concerned; for that alone can account for the eagerness of the dead to obtain dissolution. What then are the blissful occupations of the righteous in the other world? ‘Some,’ says Pindar, ‘take their joy in horses and feats of prowess, and others at the draught-board, and others in the music of lutes.’ Clearly these dead are very different beings from the souls which peopled the Homeric under-world. Athletics could be no pastime for feeble unsubstantial spirits; the game of draughts would be ill suited to them that have no mind in them[1316]; and those whose thin utterance is like the squeak[1317] of a bat would get and give little pleasure by singing to the lute. No; the pursuits of the dead as depicted by Pindar are the pursuits which men of flesh and blood enjoy; and the abode in which they dwell, the paradise of flowers and fruits and sweet odours, is an abode to gladden men of flesh and blood. But a people whose ideal of future bliss lay in bodily enjoyments cannot surely have looked forward to the annihilation of the body and the survival of the soul alone; the joys which they anticipated hereafter presupposed the continuance of some kind of bodily existence.

Such a notion moreover cannot but seem more in harmony with the whole spirit of the Greek world than the Homeric doctrine of the survival of the soul only. A nation so conspicuous for their love of human beauty and their delight in the human form could not have viewed the extinction thereof with any feeling other than the most poignant regret--a feeling which, as we know, the Homeric doctrine did actually inspire in those who accepted it. The more thoughtful and hopeful religion of the Pelasgians, unless it had anticipated the philosophy of Plato in decrying the body and exalting the soul--an idea of which there is no trace--was bound to give promise that body as well as soul should survive death and dissolution.

Again it may fairly be claimed that in any religion of a profounder character than the Achaean, in any religion which contains some positive ideas of the future life and does not view it merely as the negation of the present life, that which men hope to become in the future state is something more similar to the deity or deities in whom they believe. Their conception of godhead and their conception of their own condition after death are of necessity founded upon the same ideal of happiness--a happiness which the gods already enjoy and which men hope to share. The Buddhist looks forward to the day when he shall become like his deity--even one with his deity--clean from the grossness of matter, free from bodily desires and necessities, spirit unalloyed. The Christian believes in a God who became man and survived the death of man not in the form of a spirit only but with flesh and bones, and he himself looks forward to the resurrection of the body. Socrates held that wisdom and goodness were one and pertained to the soul only, and the God into whose presence his soul would pass after death was ‘the good and wise God,’ rightly called Hades, that is, the invisible and spiritual, with whom the soul has kinship[1318]. But what of the ordinary Greek? His gods were not invisible or spiritual. Pelasgian and Achaean deities alike were beings of flesh and blood, robust, active, sensuous; they ate and drank, they waked and slept, they married, they begot or bore children. Such was the Greek’s conception of godhead, such his ideal of blessedness. How then should he look forward to the annihilation of the body with any feeling but dismay? How could his hopes of future bliss not involve of necessity a belief in the survival of both body and soul?

I suggest then that the dissolution of the body, which the dead so eagerly desired, far from being regarded as a final and complete severance of soul and body, was in the Pelasgian religion the means of their re-union in another world. Death was only a temporary severance of the two entities which together form a living man capable of enjoying physical pleasures. The soul at the moment of death went down to the nether world in advance, or, it may be, as is sometimes held by the peasants of modern Greece[1319], hovered about the body until its dissolution was complete. But the dead body certainly remained in this world, at the place where it lay evident to men’s eyes; it could not pass to the other world at once; it could not ever pass thither without the assistance of friends still living; it was too gross and too impotent, bereft of the soul, to make its own way to the home of the dead. Therefore upon the survivors was imposed the sacred charge of resolving it into elements more refined, and of enabling it thus to pass out of human touch and sight to a home which the soul could reach unaided. When this process was effected by inhumation, the period of forty days required for complete dissolution was the critical period in the dead man’s existence; if the body was ‘bound’ and indissoluble for any cause and the soul re-entered it before the proper time, the revenant was a pitiable wanderer, sharing in the joys neither of this world nor of the next; the mourners therefore took such measures as they could to prevent that calamity, by entertaining the acquaintances of the dead man and prevailing upon them to revoke any curses wherewith he was bound, and by laying in the dead man’s mouth a charm which should bar the soul’s re-entry. When cremation was employed, the dissolution of the body was more speedy and more sure; and it is not therefore difficult to understand that the Pelasgians, conscious though they must have been that in religion they were as far in advance of the Achaeans as in material civilisation they were behind, should have early adopted the use of fire in the interests of the dead. But no matter which rite was employed, the ultimate effect was the same; the heavy, helpless corpse that had been laid upon the pyre or in the grave vanished, and nought but the bones remained. Whither then had it vanished? How had the visible become invisible? Surely by passing from this visible world to the world invisible. There is nothing to suggest that this disappearance meant to the Greeks annihilation; that word indeed had no counterpart in their speech; the strongest term of the Greek language by which one might attempt, and would still fail, to render the word ‘annihilate,’ would be ἀφανίζειν or ἀιστοῦν, ‘to make unseen.’ And on the other hand their conception of future happiness in another world is positive evidence that they believed dissolution to mean not annihilation, but the vanishing of the body to be re-united with the soul in the unseen world.

I am of course far from suggesting that these views which I have sketched formed a definite religious doctrine to which every Greek would have subscribed. No people have evinced greater liberty of thought on religious matters; no people have been less hampered by hierarchical limitations and the claims of authority; nowhere have wider divergences of religious opinion been tolerated; nowhere else have the advocates of material philosophies and of spiritual philosophies been brought into sharper contrast and yet held in equal repute. But it is not with the vagaries of individuals and the new departures of great thinkers that I am concerned; my purpose is simply to trace the general trend of thought as regards the relation of body and soul after death among the mass of the Greek people.

And in so doing I fully realise the danger of over-statement. Probably the mass of mankind in religious matters perform many acts without full consciousness of their motive; they instinctively follow tradition without enquiring into the meaning and the mutual relation of the customs with which they comply; and if ever they try to justify to their reason the acts to which instinct prompts them, they may be at a loss to form a consistent theory out of the several motives which they would assign to the several acts. If therefore I try not only to disengage from among the network of religious and philosophical speculation a thread of simple popular belief, but also to present that thread unknotted and continuous, I may be attempting that which the mass of the Greek people seldom and with difficulty performed for themselves. To enunciate as a doctrine that which may have been a subconscious or only partially realised belief--to present as a consistent theory ideas which, separately apprehended, formed the acknowledged motives of separate acts, but whose mutual relations were seldom investigated--to formulate in words that which may have been no more than a vague aspiration of men’s hearts--this is necessarily to over-state. There lies the danger. But for my part, while admitting that in all probability there was among the Greek people of old, as among the Greek people and others too to-day, a large amount of unintelligent religion, I claim that some such conception as I have outlined of the relation between soul and body and of their future existence is the only possible explanation of the manifold customs and beliefs relating to death and dissolution which have been discussed, and fairly represents the general trend of thought among the inheritors of the Pelasgian religion.

This conclusion is not a little strengthened by the evidence of a custom common to both ancient and modern Greece, which presupposes the continuance of physical desires and needs after death. To make a present of food indicates a belief on the part of the donor that the recipient can eat; to make a present of clothing implies a belief that the recipient has a body to be covered; and it is these two things, food and clothing, the elementary requisites of living men, which have most constantly been brought, either at the time of the funeral or later, as gifts to the dead. Other gifts there were also in different ages; treasures of wrought gold for the princes of Mycenae; articles of the toilet for Athenian ladies whose first care even beyond the grave would be their complexion; toys for the children. But while each grave that is opened may tell its own story, humorous or pathetic, of those tastes and pursuits of the occupant for which the same provision was made in the next world as in this, it is in the supply of the common necessaries of all mankind that the popular Greek notions concerning the dead are most clearly revealed; for the custom has continued without intermission or sensible alteration down to this day.

In the Mycenaean age the dead were supplied with a store of food at the time of the funeral, but there is no evidence to show whether the gifts were renewed subsequently[1320]. I incline to suppose that they were; for the belief of later ages in some sort of bodily existence after death has already been traced back to the Pelasgians; and the custom of later ages therefore of continuing to supply the dead with bodily necessaries was probably derived from the same source. But in any case the Mycenaean custom of providing food for the dead at the time of the funeral is sufficient proof that the dead were thought to have bodily needs, and therefore also bodily existence.

The Achaeans of the Homeric age seldom presented the dead man with gifts of food at the funeral, and never apparently afterwards. The only gift, if such it can be called, which was commonly burned along with the dead body was the warrior’s own armour; but it is so natural, quite apart from any religious motive, for a soldier’s body to be laid out arrayed in its wonted accoutrements and to have, as it were, a military funeral, that little importance can attach to it. Other gifts were rare. The funeral of Patroclus is quite exceptional, and, like the return of Patroclus’ soul with its urgent petition for burial, seems wholly inconsistent with the Homeric presentment of after-death existence. The soul being doomed to a shadowy impotent semblance of life could have no part in physical needs or pleasures[1321]. Nor does Homer enlighten us as to the purpose of the abundant gifts, which included not only food but slaughtered dogs and horses[1322]; he speaks only of providing ‘all that it beseemeth that a man should have when he goeth beneath the murky gloom[1323].’ Indeed I question whether Homer had any clear conception of their utility; they seem rather to have been vaguely honorific; and since the custom of making such gifts is neither usual in Homer nor in harmony with his idea of future existence, I hold it likely that once again he was drawing upon the Pelasgian religion in order to give to the last rites of Patroclus the maximum of splendour.

The Dipylon-period puts an end to all uncertainty; thenceforward down to the present day the Greek custom of providing the dead with the necessaries of bodily life will be found to have been uniform and continuous. There has been no interruption of the simple practice of providing the dead with food both at the time of the funeral and at stated intervals thereafter. For the Dipylon-period this has been proved by the contents of the graves and by the strata of burnt soil observed at Eleusis[1324] above them. The same phenomena continue to present themselves also in the case of later graves at Athens, certainly down to the third century B.C., and, though any detailed description of graves of a still later date is hard to find, the custom unquestionably still prevailed; for literary evidence, overlapping that of archaeology at the start, carries on our knowledge of the custom into the Christian era.

The Choephori of Aeschylus takes its very name from the practice of pouring wine or other beverages on the graves of the dead for them to consume; and the word χοαί was specially applied to this kind of libation as opposed to the λοιβαί or σπονδαί wherewith gods were propitiated. Similarly the Greek language possessed a special word for gifts of food (or other perishable gifts such as flowers) brought to the graves of the dead; these were called ἐναγίσματα in strict contrast with the sacrifices (θυσίαι, etc.) by which gods were appeased[1325]. These presents of food were regularly made on two occasions at least after the funeral; there were the τρίτα brought, according to modern computation, on the second day, and the ἔνατα on the eighth day: how regular was the custom of bringing them may be judged from the passing references of Aristophanes[1326], Isaeus[1327], and Aeschines[1328]. In addition to these two meals there were others either on the thirtieth day after the funeral or on the thirtieth of each month--for the interpretation to be put on the term τριακάδες[1329] seems doubtful--also γενέσια[1330], apparently a birthday-feast given to the dead, and νεκύσια[1331] to commemorate the anniversary of the death. The exact details of date however are of minor importance; the significant fact is this, that at certain intervals after the well-known περίδειπνον or funeral-feast, held on the day of burial, other meals were served to the dead; and the Greek words themselves corroborate the view that ‘meals,’ not ‘sacrifices,’ is the right term to use; for as the funeral-feast is περίδειπνον, so also the νεκύσια are called by Artemidorus[1332] not ἱερὰ but δεῖπνα. These meals, being burnt over the place where the dead body lay, or being deposited unburnt in some large vase set up at the head of the grave, were thereby devoted to the use of the dead and became ἐναγίσματα in that curious half-way sense between ‘sacred’ and ‘accursed’ for which our language has no equivalent save the imported word ‘taboo’--objects devoted to a sacred purpose and bringing the curse of desecration on anyone who should pervert them to another use. The Greek language then was careful to mark the difference between gifts presented to the dead and propitiatory offerings made to the gods; and the difference was observed, not because the presents differed in kind, but because the conceptions of their purposes were different. The gods demanded sacrifices under pain of their displeasure; the dead needed food as living men need it, and their friends supplied it, not in fear, but in love.

These old pagan customs were at first discountenanced by the Church[1333]. But the common people clung to them with great tenacity[1334], and after a while they appear to have received even official encouragement; for St Anastasius Sinaites, bishop of Antioch during the latter half of the sixth century, enjoined the observance of them, and in so doing used some of the old names by which the customs were known in pre-Christian times. ‘Perform,’ he wrote, ‘the offices of the third day (τρίτα) for them that sleep, with psalms and hymns, because of him who rose from sleep on the third day, and the offices of the ninth day (ἔνατα) to remind those that yet live of them that have fallen asleep, and the offices of the fortieth day according to the old law and form (for even so did the people mourn for Moses), and the offices of the anniversary in memory of the dead, with gifts from his substance to the poor as a remembrance of him[1335].’ In this passage the cloak of Christian decency which St Anastasius provided does not entirely cover the nakedness of heathen superstition. There is indeed much aetiological skill in the saint’s manipulation of Biblical references; but the τρίτα and ἔνατα practised in his day, despite the addition of Christian prayers and hymns, were without doubt the same in essence as those to which Aristophanes and others allude--meals provided for the dead; for such indeed they still remain.

At the present day the funeral service usually concludes with a distribution of baked-meats and wine to the company assembled at the grave-side, and a share of both is given to the dead. In some districts this function means more than the serving of light refreshments, and the grave-side becomes the scene of a substantial meal, from which however meat is excluded; for, owing to Christian ideas of fasting, it is generally held to be ‘spiritual’ for the mourners to abstain from meat for the period of forty days. It is to this meal at the graveside that the word μακαρία seems to be properly applied, in the sense of a ‘feast of blessing,’ and it obviously corresponds with the term μακαρίτης, ‘blessed,’ which was in antiquity, and still remains, the Greek equivalent of our ‘deceased’ or ‘late.’

Subsequently, in the evening after the funeral or even on two or three evenings thereafter, the nearer friends and relatives of the dead assemble for another funeral-feast. This meal, which in ancient times was called the περίδειπνον is now commonly known as the παρηγορία[1336] or ‘comforting.’ It is held in the house of the nearest relative[1337], as was done in the time of Demosthenes[1338], and its modern name seems to indicate that the ‘consolation’ of the bereaved is its chief purpose; and certainly some temporary solace is on many such occasions poured into the mourners’ breasts; for the Greek peasants, always abstemious save on certain great festivals such as Easter and these funeral-parties, make no scruple of drinking and pressing their host to drink until a riotous cheerfulness prevails. But though the feast is designed to assuage the grief of the living, the dead are not forgotten; for a special portion of food is often sent to the grave from the house of mourning before the guests of the evening arrive. Thus, though the dead is not felt to have any part in the actual ‘feast of comforting’--for this feast is really provided by the guests, who bring their own contributions of food and wine, while the host provides only the accommodation for the company[1339]--yet the physical needs of the departed are satisfied on this first day beneath the earth in the same measure as when he was above ground. Two meals are provided, one immediately after the funeral, the other in the evening.

Nor is the nature of this food lacking in interest. Locally indeed many varieties may be found, the gifts including such ordinary comestibles as bread, cheese, olives, caviare of the baser sort, piláf (the well-known Turkish dish of which the main ingredients are rice and oil), and probably indeed anything, save meat, which the peasant’s larder can supply; but the most generally approved viand is a specially baked flat cake spread with honey. Now it will be remembered that jars of honey were among the gifts of food on the pyre of Patroclus[1340], but a more striking coincidence is to be found in Aristophanes’ mention of a μελιτοῦττα or honey-cake in connexion with a funeral. ‘What,’ says Lysistrata mockingly to the old deputy (πρόβουλος), ‘what do you mean by not dying? You shall have room to lie; you can buy a coffin; and I myself will knead you a honey-cake at once[1341].’ From this passage it would appear that not only has the custom of providing food for the dead remained in force from very early days, but even the kind of food has not changed in more than two thousand years. The honey-cake, though no longer known as μελιτοῦττα, in reference to its chief attraction, but ψυχόπηττα[1342], ‘soul-cake,’ in reference to the occasion of its making, is still apparently prepared according to a classical recipe, and sweetness still gratifies the palate of the dead.

The dates subsequent to the funeral at which food is provided for the dead have already[1343] been mentioned. Where the custom is most fully observed, these are the third, sixth, ninth, and fortieth days, the last days of the third, sixth, and ninth months, and three anniversaries, the last of the three being also usually the day for the exhumation of the bones. But in many villages the custom is less extended, and it is held sufficient to observe in this way the third, ninth, and fortieth days[1344] and the first anniversary. This minimum of modern practice, it will be observed, is the exact tale of days recommended for observance by St Anastasius, and without doubt the sanction of the Church has helped to preserve the custom.

The Church likewise is wholly responsible for the name by which these days are known, μνημόσυνα or ‘memorial-feasts’; and it would be wrong to infer therefrom that the peasants attach no meaning to these rites save that which the name ‘memorial-feast’ suggests. Rather it would seem that the Church in permitting the continuance of a pagan custom tried to diminish its significance. The words of St Anastasius make it clear that such was his attitude. He bids that the anniversary be observed ‘in memory of the dead, with gifts from his substance to the poor as a remembrance of him’; and the repetition contained in the phrase shows in what aspect he wished the custom to be viewed. But as a matter of fact the real purpose of the custom was not to keep green the memory of the dead by charitable distributions of his goods, but partly, as we have seen, to induce those persons who were invited to the feast to forgive the dead man and to revoke any curses with which they had bound him, and partly to minister to the dead man’s own bodily needs; and in spite of ecclesiastical influence to the contrary, this twofold purpose is still generally recognised, and that portion of the food which is not consumed by the company invited or by the priests, but is actually left on the grave, is honestly intended as nourishment for the dead body there interred.

This motive was fully appreciated by a French traveller of the seventeenth century; describing these grave-side feasts, he says, ‘Frequent presents of cakes, wine, rice, fruits, and other eatables, decked out with flowers and ribbons, are taken to the tomb.’ There, he continues, the priest blesses the food and takes a good share of it, and a feast is then held ‘wherein they seek to make the dead man participate as well[1345].’ Thus even now, after centuries of Christianity, there seems to be no change of feeling among the common-folk, and their intention, or one part of it, is still best summed up in the phrase of Euripides, ‘to render sustenance unto the dead[1346].’

The food proper to these meals subsequent to the day of the funeral is known as κόλλυβα. It consists of grain, usually wheat, boiled whole, and thus closely resembles the English ‘frumenty.’ It is sometimes garnished and made more palatable by the addition of sugar ornaments, almonds, raisins, and pieces of pomegranate, but the essential thing is boiled grain[1347]. How the word κόλλυβα obtained this meaning is not known to me[1348]; but the food itself is quite probably a legacy from the ancient world. The silicernium or funeral-feast of the Romans took its name apparently from siliquae, some kind of pulse, which must therefore be supposed to have formed the chief dish; and beans are at the present day an important part of the funeral-meats in Sardinia[1349]. It is not unlikely therefore that the use of boiled beans or grain in the service of the dead is an old custom common to the coasts of the Mediterranean. The honey-cake on the day of the funeral is of ancient prescription; the boiled wheat on later occasions may equally well be so. At any rate the principle of supplying the dead with meals both at the funeral and on certain fixed days thereafter remains absolutely unchanged, and the custom is still understood to be a means of ministering to the bodily needs of the dead.

And as with the gifts of food, the ancient ἐναγίσματα, so also with the gifts of drink, the ancient χοαί. It is on record that among the Greeks of Macedonia, Cappadocia, and other outlying districts[1350], the custom of pouring out red wine on the graves of the dead at the so-called memorial-feasts is still sedulously observed; and though I have nowhere witnessed the practice, I have been told on good authority that in Aegina also and in some parts of Crete it is in vogue. For the use of water I can myself answer; and it is not a little interesting to observe that while the dates on which food is set before the dead man have been somewhat conventionally limited in number, water, the prime necessary of life, is often taken to the grave daily[1351] up to the fortieth day.

Again, in the matter of providing clothing for the dead, ancient practice is well known. A store of raiment was buried with the dead, and so great a store that it was necessary for Solon to impose a legal limit by which three outer garments (ἱμάτια) were named as the maximum[1352]. But this restriction applied only to the actual funeral, and did not prohibit renewed gifts of clothing at subsequent dates. To judge from a passage of Thucydides, this was an annual duty. The Plataeans, in their appeal to the Lacedaemonians for protection, are made to plead their performance of this kindness as a claim upon Spartan gratitude. ‘Turn your eyes,’ they say, ‘to the tombs of your fathers, who fell in the Persian wars and were buried in our land. Year by year we were wont to do them honour at the public charge with gifts of clothing and all else that is customary[1353].’

Some vestiges of this custom remain to the present day. The dead are commonly dressed in their best clothes for the lying-in-state and for the procession to the grave, during which, it must be remembered, the body is always carried on an open bier, exposed to view. Often too these clothes are buried with the dead; but sometimes when, as among the poorer peasant-women, the richly-embroidered festival dress is too costly a thing thus to abandon, and is handed down as an heirloom from mother to daughter, the body is stripped at the grave-side of its fine array; and indeed so far, I am told, has the custom degenerated in Athens and some of the other towns, that costumes of special magnificence may be hired from the undertakers and sent back from the churchyard to them. In such cases the old meaning of the custom is lost, and a vulgar desire for pomp and parade has taken its place. But among the simpler folk of the country this is not the case; for, apart from the custom of burying the dead in their best clothes, there is in the folk-songs mention of gifts of clothing and other necessaries of life sent by the hand of one recently dead to those who have gone before[1354].

It appears then that the ancient custom of providing for the bodily wants of the departed is still alive, still significant; and surely it is incredible that a people who for more than two thousand years have continued to resort to the graves in which the dead bodies of their friends are laid, and there to set out meat and drink and clothing and other things suited to their erstwhile needs and pursuits, could all along have believed that these gifts were vanity, that the food could not strengthen, the wine could not cheer, the clothing could not warm the departed, but that they lay henceforth cold, tasteless, insentient. For if men had so believed, then a custom, not merely lacking the alliance of religious belief, but standing in perpetual antagonism to it, could not have held its ground, as this custom has done, century after century with vigour unabated. Rather the continuity of the custom might alone prove, even if other considerations had not guided us to the same conclusion, that the departed were held to possess a nature no less corporeal, an existence no less material, than that which belonged both to living men and to the gods whom they hoped to resemble even more closely hereafter. The same food as men ate was offered to the gods in sacrifice that they too might eat; why bring it to the dead, if they had no power to eat? The wine that men drank was poured out for the gods in libation, that they too might drink; why waste it upon the soil of the grave, if the dead had no power to drink? A robe such as Athenian women wore was presented to Athene year by year, that she might wear it; why furnish the dead with gifts of raiment, if it must rot unworn? It is impossible to evade the conclusion that the same bodily needs and propensities were ascribed by the Greek folk to the departed as to living men and to deathless gods.

Thus then the people of Greece are shown to have pursued constantly two aims in their treatment of the dead--to ensure the dissolution of the body, and also to provide the body with the necessaries of existence. Unless therefore anyone is prepared to suppose that the Greek people have been constantly actuated by two conflicting motives, the desire to annihilate and the desire to keep alive, dissolution cannot have meant to them annihilation, but rather a modification of the conditions of bodily existence; and that modification can only have meant that the existence of the body in this world indeed ended--for the substance laid in the grave vanished--but continued in another world. But if bodily existence continued in that other world whither the soul too sped, the body and the soul having reached the same place would surely not be imagined to remain separate, but to be re-united. The eagerness for dissolution meant therefore eagerness for the re-union of body and soul.

And there is a good means of testing the popular belief even as regards this last step. If the body and soul were really believed to be re-united as soon as dissolution was complete, the dead man in the lower world would assuredly be as well able to take care of himself as he had been while dwelling in this world, and the obligation of his relatives to provide him with food would cease, although of course they might, voluntarily and without any compulsion of duty, continue their gifts[1355]. But it would be at any rate permissible, on this theory, to discontinue all care for the dead when once his body was no longer helpless but restored to its activity by re-union with the soul; and it is to be expected that the Greek people should sometimes avail themselves of the exemption from the task of feeding and otherwise tending the dead. Such action would be the natural outcome of the belief that dissolution meant the re-union of body and soul; and if I can show that such action has been or is commonly taken, the existence of the belief will have borne the best test, the demonstration of a custom arising from it.

The period required for dissolution, according to common belief, is either forty days or three years--the former being the really popular period, while the latter was fixed indeed by the Church but in many districts has been popularly accepted. Hence, if my views are correct, the meals provided for the dead and all other marks of care ought to cease sometimes at the fortieth day and sometimes at the third anniversary.

As regards the present time, I do not know of any place, though it would not surprise me to hear of one, in which the so-called memorial feasts are discontinued after the fortieth day; but I have already cited evidence to show that the memorial-feasts of later date are definitely ecclesiastical in origin, and even retain to this day in one district a distinctly ecclesiastical tone[1356]. Therefore before a necessitous priesthood had succeeded in extending the custom, the ministration to the bodily wants of the dead clearly did cease when dissolution was popularly supposed to be complete. This conclusion is fortified by a most striking piece of evidence. The priests’ interest has naturally been limited to the food and wine supplied to the dead; for a supply of water they have not been dependent upon the perquisites of their office. Hence it comes that the water, which, as I noted above, is often supplied to the dead day by day, without any accompanying provision of food, ceases to be brought after the fortieth day. The wants of the dead man have been assiduously satisfied until, in popular reckoning, his dissolution is complete, and ecclesiastical influence has had no motive for encouraging a longer continuance of the custom so far as water is concerned. The fortieth day then was without doubt the old popular limit of the time during which the supply of all kinds of provision was obligatory.

Nowadays, on the contrary, the presents of food to the dead are generally continued up to the third anniversary, when exhumation takes place. Then, if the evidence of men’s eyes assures them that dissolution has been duly effected--that the body is gone and only the white bones remain--there is no further thought or provision for the dead; but in the rare cases in which the disintegration of the corpse is not yet complete, the relatives are not freed from their obligations. I witnessed a remarkable case of this kind at Leonídi on the east coast of Laconia. Two graves had just been opened when I arrived, and the utmost anxiety prevailed because in both cases there was only partial decomposition--in one case so little that the general outline of the features could be made out--and it was feared that one or both of the dead persons had become vrykolakes. The remains, when I saw them, had been removed to the chapel attached to the burial-ground. Meanwhile the question was debated as to what should be done with them. Dissolution must be effected both in the interests of the dead themselves and in those of the whole community. Extraordinary measures were required. The best measure--I am reporting what I actually heard--the best measure next to prayer (which had been tried without effect) was to burn the remains, and the bolder spirits of the village counselled this plan; but this would have been a breach of law and order, and the authorities of the place would have none of it. The priest proposed re-interment; but here the relatives objected. They had had trouble enough and expense enough; they had kept ‘the unsleeping lamp’ burning at the grave, and had provided all the memorial feasts; they would not consent to re-inter the body and to be at the same charge for an indefinite time, without knowing when the corpse might be properly ‘loosed’ and their tendance of it over. They would find some way of dissolving it, and that speedily.

And so indeed they did; and I, for a short time, was a spectator of the scene. On the floor of the chapel there were two large baskets containing the remains; there were men seated beside them busy with knives; and there were women kneeling at wash-tubs and scouring the bones that were handed to them with soap and soda. The work continued for two days. At the end of that time the bones were shown white and clean. All else had disappeared--had probably been burnt in secret, but the secret was kept close. It was therefore claimed and allowed that dissolution was complete.

The attitude adopted by the relatives on this occasion makes it perfectly clear that all the care expended on the dead is obligatory up to the time of dissolution, but no longer. So long as the fleshly substance remains in this world, provision of food must be made for it; when it has disappeared and only the bones are left, the departed cease to be dependent upon their surviving relatives, and no further anxiety is felt for their welfare.

Nor must it be supposed that the cleaning and whitening of the bones in the case which I have described had anything to do with a desire to preserve the bones as relics of the dead. Such a custom is indeed well known in Greek monasteries; at Megaspélaeon, for instance, the wealthiest and most famous monastery of Greece proper, there is an ossuary in which the monks take great pride. On one side, ranged against the wall, stands a large triangular heap of skulls; the opposite wall is decorated with cleverly-designed geometrical figures carried out in other bones; while in a corner perhaps may be seen a basket or two full of material awaiting the decorator’s convenience. My guide, I remember, pointed out to me the skulls of many of the distinguished monks of past time, and indicated with great satisfaction the spot which he had bespoken for his own. But the usage of monastic bodies has in truth little bearing upon the popular semi-pagan beliefs and customs; the practice of storing up the bones of members of a religious order in an ossuary is more closely akin to the old custom of preserving relics of saints and martyrs; it is to the usage of the common-folk in such matters that we must look. And what do they do with the white or whitened bones? They throw them away and expend no more care upon them. At Leonídi itself, close beside the fenced-in burial-ground, but unprotected from the intrusion of man or beast, there is a square open pit into which the bones of many generations have been tipped like rubbish, lying at random in confusion as they fell. Nor is this a solitary case. In far-away Sciathos I recall the same scene as at Leonídi--a chapel set on a wooded hill, the churchyard about it neatly kept and the graves of the recently buried well-tended, but just beyond its precincts a rough hole in the ground open to sun and rain, and ‘some two fathoms of bones,’ as a peasant said jestingly, lying in neglect and disarray. These pits, which are to be seen throughout Greece, are indeed dignified by the Church with the name of cemeteries (κοιμητήρια[1357]); but they command no respect on the part of the peasant. He will cross himself as he passes chapel or enters churchyard, but he will jest over the depository of outcast bones. In a word, when it is seen that every trace of the dead body save only the white bones has disappeared, the common-folk exchange their extraordinary devotion to the duties of tending the dead for a total unconcern. And the reason for this can only be that the dead body no longer lies helpless and dependent for its existence upon the sustenance which they from time to time provide, but has vanished to a land where, re-united with the soul, it regains its activity and independence.

Such, I believe, is the trend of religious thought which, almost insensibly, has guided the actions of the Greek people from the Pelasgian age until now in their treatment of the dead; the benefit which they have sought to confer upon the dead by the dissolution of their bodies has been the re-union of body with soul and the resumption of that active bodily life which death had for a time suspended.

FOOTNOTES:

[1292] Plato, Phaedo 115 C ff.

[1293] Hom. Il. XXIII. 65 ff.

[1294] Hom. Il. XXIII. 72.

[1295] Cf. the constant contrast of αὐτὸς and ψυχή, as in Iliad I. 3-4, and twice in the passage before us, Il. XXIII. 65 f. and 106 f.

[1296] Hom. Od. XI. 489 ff.

[1297] Hom. Il. XVI. 857.

[1298] The few inconsistencies in the Odyssey, such as the physical punishment of Tityos, Tantalos, and Sisyphos (Od. XI. 576 ff.), or again the mention of the ‘asphodel mead’ (Od. XI. 539, XXIV. 13), are unimportant. They are, I think, adventitious Pelasgian elements in the Homeric scheme of the future life, and it may be noted that the Iliad is singularly free from them, while in Odyssey, Bk XI., where they chiefly occur, they are obviously incongruous with the general conception of the lower world.

[1299] See above, p. 99.

[1300] Pindar, Fr. 129 (95).

[1301] See above, p. 345.

[1302] Πολίτης, Μελέτη, p. 407 ff.

[1303] Ἐκθ. ὀρθοδοξ. πίστεως 11 (25); Migne, Patrolog. (ser. Graec.) Vol. XCIV. p. 916.

[1304] Plutarch, de occult. viv. cap. 7, cited by Bergk in Lyrici Graeci, ad loc.

[1305] Pind. Ol. II. 134.

[1306] Pind. Ol. I. 1.

[1307] νὰ δροσίσουν τὴ λαύρα τοῦ πεθαμένου.

[1308] Cf. Theodore Bent, The Cyclades, p. 220.

[1309] This is of course only one out of several passages in which Pindar speaks of the future life, and he does not adhere to any one doctrine; elsewhere, as in Ol. II., his views are coloured largely by Pythagorean or Orphic eschatology, although there is a close resemblance between the isles of the blest there described (126-135) and the abode depicted in this fragment.

[1310] Hom. Il. IX. 632 ff.

[1311] Herod. II. 51.

[1312] Herod. II. 171.

[1313] Aristoph. Frogs, 884.

[1314] Op. cit. 1032 ff.

[1315] A conspicuous example is Delphi, where the Achaean god Apollo had usurped the place of some oracular deity of the Pelasgians, cf. Plutarch, de defect. orac. cap. 15 p. 418. See Miss Harrison, Proleg. to the Study of Greek Religion, pp. 113 f.

[1316] Il. XXIII. 104.

[1317] Il. XXIII. 101.

[1318] Plato, Phaedo, cap. 29 (p. 80 D).

[1319] Cf. Κωνστ. Ν. Κανελλάκης, Χιακὰ Ἀνάλεκτα, p. 341.

[1320] Rohde (Psyche I. cap. 1) contends that the discovery of an altar, of the type used in the worship of Chthonian deities, superimposed upon one Mycenaean grave, proves both that offerings to the dead were continued after the interment and also that the offerings were of a propitiatory character. On this slight foundation he rears the edifice of his theory that a vigorous soul-cult flourished in Mycenaean and earlier ages. Accordingly he views all gifts to the dead, including those made at the time of the funeral, as offerings intended to propitiate departed souls, although he is forced to admit that from the Homeric age onwards there is no evidence that fear of the dead was a feature of Greek religion; the offerings made, on his view, to the soul of Patroclus were merely, he holds, a ‘survival,’ a custom no longer possessed of any meaning. The accident of an altar belonging to some Chthonian deity having been found above the grave of some man seems to me insufficient basis for any theory.

[1321] The blood which in the Odyssey is used to attract the souls of the dead and is given to Teiresias to drink forms, I imagine, part of a magic rite, which has no connexion with the present point.

[1322] I omit the twelve Trojan prisoners; the slaughter of these is clearly stated to have been an act of revenge. See Il. XXIII. 22 f.

[1323] Il. XXIII. 50.

[1324] Φίλιος, in Ἐφημερὶς Ἀρχαιολ. 1889, p. 183. Possibly also at Athens, cf. Brückner and Pernice, in Athen. Mittheil. 1893, pp. 89-90.

[1325] I am not overlooking the fact that ἐναγίσματα were also made to Chthonian deities (cf. Pausan. VIII. 34. 3), but there was a distinction in character even between these ἐναγίσματα and those made to the dead. Wine, for example, was excluded from the former and included in the latter. Possibly in origin ἐναγίζειν was the Pelasgian rite, θύειν the Achaean.

[1326] Lysist. 611.

[1327] Menecl. 46 and Ciron 55 (p. 73. 26).

[1328] Ctesiphon, 226 (p. 86. 5).

[1329] Pollux VIII. 146; Harpocrat. s.v. τριακάς.

[1330] Herod. IV. 26.

[1331] Artem. Oneirocr. IV. 83.

[1332] loc. cit.

[1333] Bingham, Antiq. of Christian Church, Bk 23, cap. 3.

[1334] See Chrysostom, Homily 47 in 1 Cor., p. 565.

[1335] Anastasius, Quaestio XXII., in Migne, Patrolog. Graeco-Lat. Vol. LXXXIX. 288.

[1336] Known also as τὸ ζεστόν (‘the warming’) according to Bybilakis, Neugriech. Leben, p. 67.

[1337] According to Bybilakis, loc. cit., in the dead man’s house. This, naturally, would be the usual case.

[1338] p. 321. 25.

[1339] Hence it is probable that the ancient περίδειπνον also was conducted on the principle of the ἔρανος.

[1340] Hom. Il. XXIII. 170. Cf. also the use of μελίκρατον, Hom. Od. XI. 27, and Eur. Or. 115. Cf. also Aesch. Pers. 614.

[1341] Ar. Lys. 599 ff.

[1342] In some villages of Chios, the diminutive ψυχοπῆττι or a word ψύτση is used (Κωνστ. Κανελλάκης, Χιακὰ Ἀνάλεκτα, p. 337). The commoner form ψυχόπηττα is that of Crete (cf. Bybilakis, op. cit. p. 69), Kasos, and other Asiatic islands (Πρωτόδικος, περὶ τῆς παρ’ ἡμῖν ταφῆς, p. 17) etc.

[1343] See above, pp. 486-7.

[1344] Called respectively τρίμερα, ἐννι̯άμερα, and σαράντα.

[1345] Sonnini de Magnoncourt, Voyage en Grèce et en Turquie, Vol. II. p. 153.

[1346] Eur. Or. 109.

[1347] Cf. Suidas s.v. κόλυβα, σῖτος ἑψητός. The spelling with λλ is preferable.

[1348] The classical meaning of κόλλυβα was ‘small coins.’ The scholiast on Aristoph. Plut. 768 mentions κόλλυβα among the καταχύσματα thrown over a new slave on his introduction to the household. These consisted mainly of sweetmeats, etc. (cf. op. cit. 798) whence apparently Hesychius (s.v. κόλλυβα) explains that word by τρωγάλια. More probably small coins were thrown along with various sweetmeats; for the kindred custom of throwing καταχύσματα over a bride on her entry into her new home has continued down to the present day, and these certainly now comprise small change as well as sticky edibles.

[1349] Gregorovius, Wanderings in Corsica, etc. (tr. Muir), II. p. 46.

[1350] Πρωτόδικος, περὶ τῆς παρ’ ἡμῖν ταφῆς, p. 17. Ἰ. Σ. Ἀρχέλαος, ἡ Σινασός, p. 92.

[1351] Cf. Bybilakis, Neugriechisches Leben, p. 67.

[1352] Plutarch, Vita Solon. cap. 21.

[1353] Thucyd. III. 58. 4.

[1354] See above, p. 345.

[1355] This occurred in old time in the case of heroes, whose offerings are called ἐναγίσματα and χοαί, like those of other dead men; but since the state and not the individual provided for them, the gifts were made not for a time only, but regularly year after year.

[1356] See above, pp. 487 f.

[1357] As opposed, in correct speech, to νεκροταφεῖον, the place of preliminary interment. But the two terms are often confused.

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V. CREMATION AND INHUMATION…

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V. CREMATION AND INHUMATION

VI. THE BENEFIT OF DISSOLUTION