They had their roots—these beliefs—not in any form of speculative thought but in the practice of the Cult of Souls: and that Cult, as it has been described[1] for an earlier stage of Greek life, still went on unaltered and with undiminished vigour. This may be asserted with confidence, though we can produce no very important evidence from the literature of this later period. The character and content of that literature is such that we should hardly expect to find such evidence in it. But for the most part the literary evidence from which we were able to illustrate the Cult of Souls in an earlier period may be taken to apply equally to the age with which we are now dealing. Even in its final years Lucian’s pamphlet On Mourning bears express witness to the survival of the ancient and sanctified usages in their fullest compass. We hear again of the washing, anointing, [525] and crowning of the dead, the ceremonious lying-in-state upon the bier, the violent and extravagant lament over the dead body, and all the traditional customs that are still in full force. Last comes the solemn interment of the body—the articles of luxury burnt together with the corpse of the dead man or buried with him in the grave—articles that had once belonged to him and which he is supposed to enjoy even in death—the feeding of the helpless soul of the dead with libations of wine and burnt-offerings—the ritual fasting of the relatives only broken, after three days, in the Banquet of the Dead.[2]
The dead man must not be deprived of a single one of “the customary things”—only so can his well-being be fully secured.[3] The most important of these is the solemn interment of the body. This is carried out not only by the family of the dead man, but in many cases also by the society to which he may have belonged.[4] In these times when the cities sought to make up for the loss of more serious interests in their life by an often touching care for the immediate and the insignificant, deserving citizens were frequently honoured with elaborate funeral processions in which the municipality took part;[5] the city fathers would then probably decree that representatives should be sent to the survivors and commissioned to express the sympathy of the city in their loss and distract their minds from their grief by a speech.[6]
The ritual act of burial, the object of so much pious zeal, was the very reverse of the indifferent matter that philosophy loved to represent it.[7] The sanctity of the place where rests the dead is also a matter of great importance, not only for the dead man himself but for the rest of the family which desires to be still united in the life of the spirit world, and so inhabits a common burial-ground (generally outside the city, very rarely within,[8] but sometimes, even yet, actually inside the house).[9] The founder of a family-grave desires the members of it to be joined together in the same grave for at least three generations.[10] Those who have a right to be buried there take steps—religious and legal or municipal—against the profanation of this family tomb and sanctuary by the burying in it of strangers or the pillaging of the vault—a practice that became increasingly common in the final period of the antique world.[11] There are innumerable grave-notices threatening money penalties in accordance with the ancient law of the city, to be paid into the public treasury by those who violate the peace of the grave.[12] No less common are the inscriptions which place the grave and its sanctity [526] under the protection of the underworld deities, invoking at the same time the most shocking curses—torments and calamities both temporal and eternal—against profaners of the holiness of the tomb.[13] Especially the inhabitants of certain districts of Asia Minor, only very superficially Hellenized, give themselves free rein in the accumulation of such violent execrations. In their case the dark superstitions of ancestral and native worship of gods or spirits may have infected the Hellenes also—it is often the Greeks who become barbarian rather than the barbarians who are Hellenized in the history of Greek relations with these stubborn and barbarous native populations.[14] But even in lands where the Greek population has maintained itself without admixture such execrations are occasionally to be found in graves.
As time went on and the sanctity and peace of the grave began to be more and more seriously threatened, measures of all kinds were taken for its protection. The grave is no mere chamber of corruption; the souls of the dead dwell there,[15] and therefore is it holy; as a sanctuary it becomes completely sanctified when it has received the last member of the family, and is enclosed for ever.[16] The family so long as it lasts continues to pay the regular Soul-Cult to its ancestors;[17] sometimes special foundations ensure the payment for ever[18] of the Soul-Cult of which the dead have need.[19] Even those whose burial place lies far away from the graves of their own family[20] are not entirely deprived of benevolent care and cult.
The pre-supposition of all Cult of Souls—that the dead survive to enjoy at least a gloomy sepulchral existence in their last resting-place—is everywhere vividly implied. It speaks to us with archaic simplicity from those grave-stones upon which the dead, as though still accessible to the sounds of the human voice and able to understand the words of the living, are addressed with the customary words of greeting.[21] Sometimes the dead man himself is provided with a similar greeting which he is supposed to address to the passers-by[22]—between him, confined to his grave, and the others who still walk about in the daylight a dialogue takes place.[23] The dead man is not entirely cut off from the affairs of the upper world. He feels an access of fresh life when he is called by the name that he had once borne in his life-time, and the memory of which is now preserved only by his gravestone. His fellow-citizens call upon him three times by name at his burial;[24] but even in the grave [527] he is capable of hearing the precious sound. On a gravestone at Athens[25] the dead man enjoins upon the members of the actors’ guild to which he had belonged to call upon his name in chorus whenever they pass by his grave, and to gladden him with the sound of hand-clapping, to which he had been accustomed in life. At other times the passer-by “kisses his hand”[26] to the dead man; a gesture which denotes the honour paid to a Hero.[27] The soul is not merely alive; it belongs now, as primitive and age-long belief expressed it, to the Higher and Mightier Ones.[28] Perhaps this exaltation of the wrath and power of the dead is the meaning of the custom by which the dead are called the Good, the Honest (χρηστοί). This usage must have become established at an early period,[29] but it is not until these later days that it is first employed as an addition to the simple words of greeting addressed to the dead on gravestones. In this use it is not uniformly current; it is rare in Attica (at least, on graves of natives of that country); whereas in Boeotia, Thessaly, and the countries of Asia Minor it is frequent and almost universal.[30] In fact it is natural to suppose[31] that this mode of address, originally a euphemistic title addressed to the ghosts of the dead who were conceived as quite capable of acting in a manner the very reverse of that attributed to them by the word, was intended to suggest the power belonging to the personality so addressed as one who has risen to a higher form of existence—and to venerate him with becoming awe.[32]
§ 2
The conception of the departed spirit as one who has been raised to a higher state of dignity and power receives clearer and more conscious expression where the departed one is called a Hero.
This class of intermediate beings standing on the border line between mankind and godhead—the world of the Heroes—was in no danger of extinction at this period of Greek religious belief. The attitude of mind that could think of certain special souls as withdrawn from the limitations of visible existence and raised to a higher spiritual state remained still vigorous and was even able to give birth to new conceptions.
In its original and proper sense the name Heros never indicated an independent and self-sufficient spirit. Archegetes, “leader” or “originator”, is his real and distinctive title. The Heros stands at the beginning of a series, taking its origin [528] from him, of mortal men for whom he is the leader and “ancestor”. The genuine Heroes are the ancestors, whether real or imaginary, of a family or a house; in the “Heroes”, after whom they wish to be called, the members of a society, a clan, or even a whole race honour the archegetai of those groups. They are always men of power and influence, prominent and distinguished from other men, who are regarded as having thus entered into the life of Heroes after their death. And even in later times the Heroes of a more recent elevation, though they may no longer be the leaders of a train of descendants taking their origin from them, are yet regarded as distinguished from the people who worship them by their peculiar virtue and dignity. To become a Heros after death was a privilege reserved for a few great and uncommon personalities who even in their lifetime were not as other men were.
The companies of these old and specially chosen Heroes did not suffer the fate of forgetfulness which would have been their second and real death. The love of country and city, undying among the Greeks, attached itself in reverent memory to the illuminated spirits of the past who had once protected and defended their native land. When Messene was refounded in the fourth century the Heroes of the country were solemnly called upon to become inhabitants of the city as they had been before—more particularly Aristomenes, the never-forgotten champion of Messenian freedom.[33] Even at Leuctra he had appeared in the melée of the fight, doing battle for the Thebans.[34] Before the battle, Epameinondas had secured the favour of the Heroines of the place, the daughters of Skedasos, by means of prayer and sacrifice.[35] These were events of the last heroic age of Greek history, but the cult and memory of the local Heroes of the Greek countries survived into a much later age. Leonidas was worshipped by the people of Sparta for many centuries,[36] and the champions of the Persian Wars, the saviours of Hellas, were worshipped by their remote descendants.[37] Even in imperial times the inhabitants of the island of Kos still worshipped those who had fallen to secure their freedom centuries before.[38] Such individual cases allow us to see what was the general rule: the memory and cult of a Hero lived on as long as the community remained in existence whose duty it was to maintain his worship. Even those Heroes—a class by themselves—who have secured their immortality through their fame in ancient poetry[39] still retained their cult undiminished. The heroic [529] figure of Hektor still preserved life and reality for his worshippers in the Troad or at Thebes.[40] Even in the third century of our era the district of Troy and the neighbouring coasts of Europe still kept fresh the memory and the cult of the Heroes of Epic renown.[41] Of Achilles, who had a special fate, we must speak in another [connexion].[42]