The World of Homer

by Andrew Lang

"Weal is his who may after his death-day stand before the Lord, and claim a refuge in the Father's arms."[1]

This burial by fire, this want of hope, this changeless, helpless future, are what Achilles endured and deplored.[2] "Rather would I on earth be the hind of a landless man than king over all the dead." Thus the dying Beowulf asks to be buried: "Bid ye the warriors raise a far-seen cairn for me after the funeral fire on a head-land by the sea ... so that seafarers who drive their tall ships over the spray of ocean shall thereafter call it Beowulf's barrow."[3]

So, too, spoke the ghost of Elpenor on the limit of Oceanus to Odysseus: "Burn me with my armour, all that is mine, and pile for me a cairn by the shore of the grey sea, memorial of a luckless man, that men unborn may inquire of me."[4] The customs and ideas are identical, but no such cairns have we found in Homeric lands, whereas they are common in our islands.

Meanwhile the burial customs of the Aegean folk in Crete and in Greece were not those known to Homer. They used "shaft-graves," deeply sunk in earth, luckily for us, since in these were found the unsunned treasures of Mycenae. They also used "chamber-tombs," and "pit-graves," and stone-built tholos chambers, beehive shaped, not cairns of earth covering a small chamber of stone. They did not, in the Bronze Age, burn the dead, but buried him, often in a large larnax or coffer of pottery; and they deposited rich grave-goods, which Homer never mentions. In a chamber-tomb at Muliana in Crete were found unburned bones with weapons of bronze, and an Aegean "false-necked vase"; while hard by in the same chamber were "cremated bones, in a cinerary geometric urn," and an iron sword and dagger.[5]

"Here," says Mr. Evans, "we have the interesting spectacle of the succession of corpse-burial by cremation, and of iron weapons by bronze, apparently without any break in the indigenous stock." The Aegean Bronze Age of burial passes into the Iron Age of cremation. About the change of custom without change of stock or race we cannot be quite certain, but cremation makes its appearance in association with iron weapons, which Homer's men do not use, while they do practise cremation and cairn-burial, which has left no known traces in the Bronze Age of Greece.

It is suggested by Mr. Murray, as by Helbig, that cremation was adopted, during the dark age of the Migrations, by men who wished to burn their dead "into their ultimate dust," that the dust might not be violated by hostile hands. The custom, Mr. Murray suggests, was a revival of what the Northerners had used "in the forest country from which they came." Possibly if wood were very scarce in Crete and Greece, the Northerners there might adopt the local method of burial, and revert to their own custom at Troy, where Ida furnished forests. But Homer supposes cremation and caim-burial to be universal in Greece; and his whole theory of the future life rests on cremation. The rite admits the dead to the House of Hades, ineffectual shadows, unfed, unfeared, unworshipped; and from the House of Hades they never return. By the eighth century, and so on continuously, ghosts can appear to men, and are fed, feared, and worshipped, as they had been in Aegean times. The belief of Homer is the belief of Israel, Hades is the Sheol of Samuel. The manners of ancient Israel are of interest as regards cremation. The Philistines treated the corpse of Saul as Hector meant to treat that of Patroclus, whose head he would have set on a spike above the wall of Troy. "They fastened Saul's body to the wall of Beth-shan." His sons' corpses were used in the same way, but were rescued by valiant Israelites, who burned the bones and buried them under a tree. This appears to have been done for the purpose of concealing the bones from further outrage. No cairn is mentioned.[6] But cremation, in the case of kings at least, appears to have persisted in Israel and Judah. Asa, king of Judah, when he died, was "laid in the bed which was filled with sweet odours and divers kinds of spices; and they made a very great burning for him." His tomb he had caused to be digged for him; there his bones were laid.[7] Of Jehoram we read that "his people made no burning for him, like the burning of his forefathers."[8] Jeremiah prophesies for Zedekiah: "Thou shalt die in peace: and with the burnings of thy forefathers, the former kings which were before thee, so shall they burn odours for thee."[9] In Israel an unusual lack of interest in the future life accompanied cremation of kings, if cremated they were; but the commentators prefer to believe that they were not, and that only odorous substances and "furniture" were burned. Why burn furniture?[10] But Homer's faith is unique in Greece, Aegean or historic it represents a single age of culture—which has left no material proof of its existence.

Homer's burial rites cannot have arisen out of a practice adopted during the Migrations, for no people that wished to conceal the resting-place of their dead would raise above it a conspicuous cairn and pillar, for the very purpose of keeping the dead in perpetual memory. Such cairns would merely have invited desecration during the Migrations.[11]

I can only conclude that Homer describes what is certainly an actual and widely-diffused non-Aegean mode of burial, with the equally non-Aegean and non-historic belief about the future life. Why the practice has left no material traces, as of cairns, is an insoluble question at present.[12] The historical Hellenes, however, knew many tombs, probably barrows or cairns, which they assigned to men and women of the Heroic Age. Pausanias often mentions such tombs, which he saw, but he does not usually describe them. In a few cases he speaks of barrows or cairns of earth, as at Epidaurus the grave of Phocus, slain by Peleus. It was a "mound of earth, and on it a rough stone." At Olympia was the tomb of Oenomaus, "a piled up mound, with stones" (vi. 21. 3). At Pergamus beyond Caicus, the grave of Auge, "a mound of earth with a stone wall round it" (viii. 4-9). The grave of Aepytus (mentioned in Iliad, ii. 604), "a pile of earth, not very high, surrounded by a coping of stone" (viii. 16. 3). The tomb of Homer's Areithous of the iron mace was near Mantinea in Arcadia; it is "a tomb with a stone base" (viii. 11). The attribution of the graves to known heroes may often have been fanciful; in many cases two or more have claimed one hero's grave. While the belief in heroes existed, barrows would not be robbed. Pausanias speaks, however, twice of cinerary urns containing heroic ashes of Ariadne at Argos (ii. 23. 8), and of Eurytus, son of Melaneus; but here a dream warned Pausanias to be silent about the urn of bronze (iv. 33).

Thus there were cairns enough, believed to be of heroic and pre-Homeric date.

It has been suggested that the elaborate enclosure of circles of stone, with a coping, round the shaft-graves of the acropolis of Mycenae, was originally meant to contain a barrow of earth. But several grave-stones were found in the earth; and it is unlikely that a barrow would be heaped over the grave-pillars, or that so many would be set up on the top of a barrow. The cairn seems to be Homeric, not "Mycenaean."