Historic Greece had no one orthodox belief as to the condition of departed souls. Homer has, on the other hand, an orthodoxy; the ghost of the man who does not receive due burning and burial is an outcast, perhaps a mischievous outcast from the company in the halls of Hades and in the meads of asphodel, while they are but shadows of themselves, unfed, unless some bold adventurer goes to them and sheds the blood of the black ram. That was another thing than pouring libations into the tomb.
Considering the fact that phantasms of the dead are probably as common in one age as in another, Homer is singularly free from superstition about them. Even Lucretius did not deny that such apparitions appear; he tried to explain their appearance as traces left, somehow, on something, we know not what or how, a theory lately revived. Homer denies ghosts; and his view, we may say, can never, in his own time, have been popular: it is the view of a class, not of a people.
But, as Mr. Leaf justly observes, there are vestiges in Homer of other rites than his own. The word ταρχύειν, to preserve, whether by embalment, or merely by drying or kippering, is used, in a general sense, for doing all the rites of the dead.[13] The word may survive from an age when mummification, not cremation, was the rule; honey may have been employed; and the pots of honey and of oil placed by Achilles against the bier of Patroclus may represent a faint vestige of survival.[14] The usage lasted at Athens, the pointed lekythoi were ranged round the bier. Why Achilles slew two dogs and four horses, and threw them on the pyre, he did not know himself; he thought that he slaughtered twelve Trojan prisoners merely in anger.[15] He had no conscious purpose to send horses, dogs, and thralls into Hades for the use of his friend; he did not burn the arms of his friend. In Iliad, xxiv. 595, he promises to Patroclus a share of the ransom of Hector's body; but all these things are spoken of only in connection with the passion of Achilles. Customs almost forgotten revive or are reinvented in the mind of the hero, extravagances of grief and anger.
There is a variation in the last book of the Odyssey; the souls of the unburied Wooers arrive among the dead in Hades, though their bodies are unburned. The passage is usually reckoned late, and these spirits are under the special guidance of Hermes.
Even in these shadowy matters, Homer presents a view' unusually consistent; and the view was not held either in Aegean times, or in "Dipylon" days, or in the eighth century by the Cyclic poets, or in historic Greece. In this, as in all things, the world of Homer stands apart. There is possibly one note of change in Homeric burial. The phrase κτέρεα κτερεΐξαι, as in Iliad, xxiv. 38, means the burning of some of a man's possessions on his funeral pyre. It occurs but once in the Iliad, in the case of the funeral of Hector; but frequently in the Odyssey, about the funeral rites of Odysseus, if he proves to have died abroad. The only possessions of Patroclus which are burned are dogs and horses; not his arms, as in the cases of Eetion and Elpenor. In these cases, perhaps, a slight variation in burial rites may be detected. It looks as though, in the cases where the arms of the dead are burned with them, they were expected to be of use to them in the future life, as to Melissa, wife of Periander, who was cold in Hades, because her wardrobe had not been burned.
[1] Beowulf, 184-188, Mr. Clark Hall's translation.
[2] Odyssey, xi. 489-491.
[3] Beowulf, 2803-2808.