The dying, sickening, and the living world
Exhaled, to sully Heaven’s transparent dome
With dim mortality.”
That interment, or enclosing the dead in a grave, is a most ancient custom, there cannot be a doubt. Amongst the ancient Jews to have no burial was reckoned among the greatest of calamities. The exposure in any manner of their dead (even criminals) was looked upon as a pollution of their land. The Egyptians and Asiatics practised interment from the beginning of time. Subsequently, it became the custom to burn the bodies of the dead. By Homer’s description of the funeral of Patroclus, it would appear that the Greeks used burning as early as the Trojan war. They also had recourse to interment, as is seen by their historians, who give an account of the manner in which the body was placed in the grave: Plutarch tells us that they were laid with their faces towards the east or towards the west; and Cicero informs us that, in early times, as those of Cecrops, interment was altogether made use of by the Greeks,—but we have ample testimony in history that it always took place without their cities, particularly amongst the Jews and Greeks, from whom the Romans derived the practice. We have several passages in the New Testament, showing that the Jews buried their dead without their city. Thus, the sepulchre in which Joseph of Arimathea laid our Saviour’s body was in the same place where he was crucified (John xix. 41), which was near the city (John xix. 20). And we are taught in St. Matthew (xxviii. 52–53), that, at our Lord’s passion, the graves were opened, and many bodies of the saints which slept, arose and came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the Holy City, and appeared unto many.
Servius, in giving an account of the unhappy death of his colleague Marcellus, which happened in Greece, says that he could not by any means obtain leave of the Athenians to allow him a burying-place within the city. The Romans observed the same custom from the first building of their city; it afterwards became a law, as settled by the Decemviri, “Neither burn nor bury within the city.” They generally buried near the highways, in fields appropriated for the purpose. Their reason seems to have been founded on sacred as well as civil considerations: among the former, that passengers might see the graves, and be reminded of their own mortality—hence, as Varro tells us, the inscription on the monuments, ‘Sta viator!’—among the latter, “that the air might not be corrupted by the stench of putrifying bodies.” It is related of Propertius, that he was very earnest in desiring that he might not be buried after the ordinary custom, near a road, for fear it should disturb his shade. There were, however, exceptions amongst the Romans to the prohibition of intramural burials, as in the case of the Vestal Virgins, who, Servius informs us, were allowed by law a burying-place within the city. The same privilege or honour was permitted to some extraordinary persons, as to Valerius Publicola and to Fabricius, to continue to their heirs; yet none of their families were afterwards interred there, but the body being carried thither, some one placed a burning torch under it, and then immediately took it away, as an attestation of the deceased’s privilege, and his receding from the honour. The body was then removed for burial to another place without the city.
The ancient Persians never buried in cities or towns. Their kings were interred on a high hill on the east of Persepolis: generally throughout Persia and the Levant, there were no burying-places except those without the city.
The cemeteries of the Turks were always without the towns, that the air might not be corrupted by the vapours arising from the graves: they, in like manner as the Romans, also bury by the sides of highways, that travellers may be reminded to pray to God for the deceased. The Chinese adopt a similar kind of sepulture. Eusebius informs us that when the Christians, by favour of Constantine, built churches in the cities, they had their burial-places allotted them outside the cities and towns.
According to Gregory of Tours, it was not until the latter part of the sixth century, about A.D. 590, that funeral places and cemeteries within the towns were consecrated.
Intramural burials and churchyards, it would seem, originated in the idea that persons passing the graves of their relatives or friends on their way to worship, might be reminded to offer up prayers for them; and the profit might also be another motive. The gross and horrible indignities now so frequently offered to the dead in consequence of over-crowding, to the great scandal of our national religion and character as a Christian people, could never have been contemplated; on the contrary, it was intended to offer a sacred asylum for the mortal remains of those whose memories were dear to us.
It was a maxim, not only with the Jews, but with all nations of the world, that holy places are polluted by the presence of dead carcases or of dead men’s bones. Hence we find that when Josiah desired to profane the altars dedicated to idols, he burned dead men’s bones upon them, which he took out of the sepulchres that were on the mount (2 Kings xxiii. 16). And when God threatened by Ezekiel to punish Israel, he told them that their altars should be desolate: “and I will lay the dead carcases of the children of Israel before their idols, and I will scatter your bones round about your altars.” (Ezekiel vi. 5.) As the Jews by the divine law had ablutions, washings, and purifications for defilements by the dead, which is called Βαπτισμὸs ἀπὸ νεκρῶν (Ecclesiasticus xxxiv. 25),—a washing from the pollution contracted by the touch of a dead body,—so the Gentiles also from them had the rite of purification for defilements contracted from the dead; for the Flamens or Funera Mater, when dismissing the people after a funeral, sprinkled them with water to purge them of the pollution received by the sight of the interment; and on their entering into a temple, they were first sprinkled with holy water, the ωυραντιεια, so often mentioned by heathen writers, lest they should appear polluted before the gods.