§ 8
And evidence of these ancient beliefs we can now see with our eyes and touch with our hands. Owing to an inestimable series of fortunate circumstances, we are enabled to catch a glimpse of a far distant period of Greek history, which not only supplies a background to Homer, but makes him cease to be the earliest source of our information upon Greek life and thought. He is brought suddenly much nearer, perhaps deceptively nearer, to ourselves. The last decades of excavation in the citadel and lower town of Mycenæ and other sites in the Peloponnese right into the centre of the peninsula and as far northwards as Attica and Thessaly, have resulted in the discovery of graves—shaft-graves, chamber-graves, and elaborately constructed domed vaults, which were built and walled up in the period before the Dorian invasion. These graves prove to us—what was already hinted at by a few isolated expressions in Homer[45]—that the Greek “Age of Burning” was preceded, as in the case of the Persians, Indians, and Germans, by a period in which the dead were buried in the ground intact.[46] The lords and ladies of golden Mycenæ, and lesser folk, too (in the graves at Nauplia, in Attica, etc.), were buried when they died. Chieftains take with them into the grave a rich paraphernalia of gorgeous furniture and ornaments—unburnt like their own bodies; they rest upon a bed of small stones, and are covered by a layer of loam and pebbles;[47] traces of smoke and remains of ashes and charred wood bear witness to the fact that the dead were laid upon the place where the “sacrifice for the dead” had already been made; upon the hearth where offerings had been previously burnt inside the grave chamber.[48] This may very well be a burial procedure of the most primeval antiquity. Our oldest “Giants’” graves, in whose treasures no metal of any kind is found, and whose age is on that account considered to be pre-Teutonic, exhibit similar features. Either on the ground, or, occasionally, on a specially prepared basis of fire-brick, the sacrificial fire is lighted, and, when it has burnt out, the corpse is set down upon the place and given [23] a covering of sand, loam, and stone.[49] Remains of burnt sacrificial animals (sheep and goats) have also been found in the graves at Nauplia and elsewhere.[50] In conformity with such different burial customs, the conceptions then held of the nature and powers of the disembodied spirits must have differed widely from those of the Homeric world. Offerings to the dead at a funeral occur in Homer only on special and isolated occasions and accompanied by an obsolete and half-understood ritual. Here they were the regular procedure both with rich and poor alike. But why should they have made offerings to their dead if they did not believe in their power? And why should they have taken away gold and jewellery and art treasures of all kinds and in astonishing quantities from the living and given them to the dead if they had not believed that the dead could find enjoyment in their former possessions even in the grave? Where the material body still remains intact, there the second self can at least occasionally return. Its treasured possessions laid by its side in the tomb are there to prevent its appearing uninvited in the outer world.[51]
Supposing, however, that the soul could return if and where it liked, it is evident that the cult of the dead would not be confined to the occasion of the funeral. And, indeed, that very circumstance—the prolongation of the cult paid to the dead beyond the time of the funeral—of which we could not find a vestige in Homer, can at last (as it seems to me) be traced in pre-Homeric Mycenæ. Over the middle one of four shaft-graves found on the citadel stands an altar which can only have been placed there after the grave was closed and sealed up.[52] It is a round altar, hollow inside, and not closed in at the bottom; in fact, a sort of funnel standing directly upon the earth. If, now, the blood of the victim, mingled with the various drink-offerings, were poured down into this receptacle, the whole would flow downwards into the ground beneath and to the dead man lying there. This is no altar (βωμός) such as was in use in the worship of the gods above, but a sacrificial hearth (ἐσχάρα) for the worship of the inhabitants of the underworld. This structure corresponds closely with the description we have of the hearths upon which offerings were made in a later age to “Heroes”, i.e. the souls of transfigured human beings.[53] Here, then, we have a contrivance for the permanent and repeated worship of the dead; for such worship alone can this structure have been intended. The funeral offering to the dead had already been completed inside the grave-chamber. We thus find a [24] meaning in the “beehive” tombs, for the vaulted main-chamber, beside which the corpse lay in a smaller chamber by itself. They were evidently intended to allow sacrifices to be made inside them—and not once only.[54] At least this is the purpose which the outer chamber serves elsewhere in double-vaulted graves. The evidence of the eye is therefore able to establish the truth of what could only be made out with difficulty from the Homeric poems. We can thus see that there had been a time in which the Greeks, too, believed that after the separation of body and soul the psyche did not entirely cease from intercourse with the upper world. Such a belief naturally called forth a cult of the soul, which lasted on even when the method of burying the body had changed, and even survived into Homeric times, when, with the prevalence of other beliefs, such observances ceased to have any meaning.