Here we have a picture of the funeral of a chieftain which, in the solemnity and ceremoniousness of its elaborate detail, is in striking conflict with the normal Homeric conception of the nothingness of the soul after its separation from the body. A full and rich sacrifice is here offered to such a soul. This sacrifice is inexplicable if the soul immediately upon its dissolution flutters away insensible, helpless and powerless, and therefore incapable of enjoying the offerings made to it. It is therefore not unnatural that a method of interpretation which isolates Homer as far as possible and adheres closely to his own fixed and determinate range of ideas, should attempt to deny the sacrificial character of the offerings made on this occasion.[12] We may well ask, however, what else but a sacrifice, i.e. a repast offered in satisfaction of the needs of the person honoured (in this case the psyche), can be intended by this stream of blood about the corpse; this slaughtering and burning of cattle and sheep, horses and dogs, and finally of twelve Trojan prisoners on or at the funeral pyre? To explain it all as a mere performance of pious duties, as is often done in interpreting many of the gruesome pictures of Greek sacrificial ceremonies, is impossible here. Besides, Homer often tells us of merely pious observances in honour of the dead, and they are of a very different character. And the most horrible touch of all (the human sacrifice) is not put in simply to satisfy Achilles’ lust for vengeance—twice over does Achilles call to the soul of Patroklos with the words: “To you do I bring what I formerly promised to you” (Il. xxiii, 20 ff., 180 ff.).[13] The whole series of offerings on this occasion is precisely of the kind which we may take as typical of the oldest sort of sacrificial ritual such as we often find in later Greek religion in the cultus of the infernal deities. The sacrificial offerings are completely burnt in honour of the Daimon and are not shared between the bystanders as in the case of other offerings. If such “holocausts”, when offered to the Chthonic and some of the Olympian deities, are to be regarded as sacrificial in character, then it is unjustifiable to invent some other meaning for the performances at the funeral pyre of Patroklos. The offering of wine, oil, and honey, at least, are normal in sacrificial rituals of later times. Even the severed lock of hair spread out over the dead body or laid in the cold hand is a well known sacrificial tribute, and must be supposed such here as much as in later Greek ceremonial or in that of many other peoples.[14] In fact, this gift in particular, symbolically representing as it does a more valuable sacrifice by means of another and less important [14] object (in the giving of which only the goodwill of the giver is to be considered)—this very offering, like all such symbolical substitutions, bears witness to the long duration and past development of the cultus in which it occurs—in this case of the worship of the dead in pre-Homeric times.
The whole narrative presupposes the idea that by the pouring out of streams of blood, by offerings of wine and burnt offerings of human beings and of cattle, the psyche of a person lately dead can be refreshed, and its resentment mollified. At any rate, it is thus thought of as accessible to human prayers and as remaining for some time in the neighbourhood of the sacrifice made to it. This contradicts what we expect in Homer, and, in fact, just in order to make this unusual performance plausible to an audience no longer familiar with the idea, and to make it admissible on a special occasion, the poet (though the actual course of his story does not really require it)[15] makes the psyche of Patroklos appear by night to Achilles. And, in fact, to the end of the narrative Achilles repeatedly greets the soul of Patroklos as though it were present.[16] The unusual way in which Homer deals with this whole affair, so full of primeval, savage ideas as it is, seems, indeed, to betray a certain vagueness about what its real meaning may be. That the writer has certain qualms on the subject is indicated by the brevity—not at all like Homer—with which the most shocking part of the story, the slaughter of human beings, together with horses and dogs, is hurried over. But the thing to be noted particularly is that the poet is certainly not devising such unpleasant circumstances for the first time out of his own imagination. This epic picture of the worship of the dead was adopted by Homer from an earlier source (whatever that source may have been),[17] and not invented by him. He makes it serve his special purpose, which is to provide a satisfactory climax to the series of vivid and emotional scenes beginning with the tragic death of Patroklos and ending with the death and dishonouring of the champion of Troy. After such emotional exaltation the overstrained nerves must not be allowed to relax too suddenly; a last flicker of the superhuman rage and grief that made Achilles rave so furiously against his foes must show itself in the serving up of this awful banquet to the soul of his friend. It is as though a primitive and long-suppressed savagery had broken out again for a last effort. Only when all is over does the soul of Achilles find repose in melancholy resignation. More calmly he calls upon the rest of the Achæans to take their seats “in a wide circle round about”; and there follows the [15] description of those splendid “Games”, a subject that must have awakened the enthusiasm of every experienced athlete in the audience—and was there ever a Greek who was not an athlete? It is true that athletic contests are described by Homer mainly on account of their own peculiar interest and for the sake of the artistic effects that their description allowed. Still, the selection of such games as a fitting conclusion to a chieftain’s funeral cannot be fully understood except as a survival of an ancient and once vigorous worship of the dead. Such athletic contests in honour of the great immediately after their death are often referred to by Homer;[18] indeed, a funeral is the only occasion[19] recognized by him as suitable for the exhibition of athletic prize-competitions. The practice never quite died out, and it became usual in later post-Homeric times to mark the festivals of Heroes and, later of gods, too, by Games which gradually became regularly repeated performances, developed from the traditional contests that had concluded the funeral ceremonies of great men. Now, no one doubts that the Agon at the festival of a Hero or a god formed part of their religious worship. It is only reasonable, then, to suppose that the funeral games which accompany the burial of a chieftain (and are confined to that one occasion) belong to the religious cult of the dead, and to recognize that such a mode of worship can only have been introduced at a time when men regarded the soul, in whose honour the ceremony took place, as capable of sharing consciously in its enjoyment. Even Homer is certainly conscious of the fact that the games, like the rest of the offerings made then, were intended for the satisfaction of the dead and not solely for the entertainment of the living.[20] We may also cite the declared opinion of Varro, who says that the dead in whose honour funeral games are celebrated are thereby proved to have been regarded originally, if not as gods, at least as very powerful spirits.[21] Of course, this feature of the original cultus of the soul was very easily stripped of its real meaning—it recommended itself quite apart from its religious significance—and for that very reason remained longer than other performances of the kind in general use.
If we now survey the whole series of ritual acts directed to the honouring of the soul of Patroklos, we can deduce from the seriousness of these attempts to please the disembodied spirit what must have been the strength of the original conception—how vivid must have been the impression of enduring sensibility, of formidable power possessed by a soul [16] to whom such a cult was offered. It is true of the cult of the dead, as of any other sacrificial custom, that its perpetuation is due solely to the hope of avoiding hurt and obtaining assistance at the hands of the Unseen.[22] A generation that no longer anticipated either help or harm from the “Souls” might be ready to perform last offices of all kinds to the deserted body out of pure piety, and to offer to the dead a certain traditional reverence. But this would testify rather to the grief of those left behind than to any special reverence felt for the departed.[23] This is mostly the case in Homer. It is not, however, what we should call piety, but much rather mistrust of a “ghost” become powerful through its separation from the body, that explains the exaggerated fullness of the funeral offerings that are made at the burial of Patroklos. They cannot be made to fit in with the ordinary circle of Homeric ideas. Indeed, that this circle of ideas excluded all misgiving at the possible action of unseen spirits is quite clearly shown by the fact that the honours paid even to a dead man held in such veneration as Patroklos are confined to the solitary occasion of his funeral. As the psyche of Patroklos himself assures his friend, once the burning of the body is completed, it, the psyche, will take its departure to Hades, never to return.[24] It is easy to see that from this point of view there was no motive whatever that could lead to a permanent cult of the soul such as was common among the Greeks of later times. But it should be noticed further that the luxurious repast offered to the soul of Patroklos on the occasion of his funeral had no point if the goodwill of the soul which was to be assured by that process would never have an opportunity in the future of making itself felt. The contradiction between Homeric belief and Homeric practice on this occasion is complete, and shows decisively that the traditional view that would see in this description of soul-worship at the funeral of Patroklos an effort after new and more lively ideas of the life after death, must certainly be wrong. When new surmises, wishes, conjectures begin to arise and seek a means of expression, the new ideas generally find incomplete utterance in the old and inappropriate external forms, but express themselves more clearly and certainly (generally with some tendency to exaggeration) in the less conservative words and language of men. Here just the opposite occurs: every word the poet utters about the circumstances contradicts the elaborately wrought ceremonial which those circumstances call forth. It is impossible to point to a single touch that accords with the belief implied by the [17] ceremonial. The poet’s bias is a different and, indeed, an opposite one. Of this much at least there cannot be the slightest doubt: the funeral ceremonies over the body of Patroklos are not the first budding of a new principle, but rather represent a “vestige” of a more vigorous worship of the dead in earlier times, a worship that must once have been a complete and sufficient expression of belief in the great and enduring power of the disembodied spirit. It has, however, been preserved unaltered into an age that, with quite other religious beliefs, no longer understands, or at best half-guesses at the sense of such strange ceremonial observances. Thus ritual generally outlives both the state of mind and the belief which originally gave rise to it.
§ 6
Neither the Iliad nor the Odyssey contains anything that can equal the scenes at the funeral of Patroklos as evidence of primitive worship of the dead. But even the ordinary forms of interment of the dead are not entirely without such “vestigial” features. The dead man’s eyes and mouth are closed,[25] the body is washed and anointed, and after being wrapped in a clean linen cloth is laid upon a bier,[26] and the funeral dirge begins.[27] It is hardly possible to see even the remotest, lingering, reminiscence of a once vigorous worship of the dead in such performances as these; or in the very simple burial customs that follow the burning of the body; the bones are collected in a jar or a casket and buried under a mound, and a post set up to mark the place as a “grave-mound”.[28] But when we find that the body of Elpenor, in accordance with the command issued by his psyche to Odysseus (Od. xi, 74), is burned together with his weapons (Od. xii, 13); when, further, we read that Achilles burnt the weapons of his overthrown foe together with his body on the funeral pyre (Il. vi, 418), it is impossible not to feel that we have here, too, survivals of an ancient belief that the soul in some mysterious fashion was capable of making use of these objects that are burnt along with its discarded bodily envelope. No one doubts that this is the reason for such a custom when it meets us in the case of other nations; with the Greeks, too, it must have had an equally good foundation, however little such is to be discovered in the ordinary Homeric view of the soul. The custom, moreover, more precisely described in these cases, was of general observance; we often hear how the completeness of a burial requires the burning of the possessions of the dead along with the body.[29] We cannot [18] tell to what extent the duty of offering to the dead all his movable possessions[30] (a duty originally without doubt interpreted quite literally) had come in Homeric times to be interpreted in a symbolical sense—a process which reached its lowest stage in the custom prevalent in later times of presenting an obol “for the Ferryman of the Dead”. Finally, the “funeral feast” offered by the king to the mourning people either after the funeral of a chieftain (Il. xxiv, 802, 665), or before the burning of his body (Il. xxiii, 29 ff.), could only have derived its full meaning from an ancient belief that the soul of the person thus honoured could itself take a share in the feast. In the banquet in honour of Patroklos the dead man is given a definite portion—the blood of the slaughtered animals which is poured round his body (Il. xxiii, 34). Like the funeral games, this banquet is apparently intended to propitiate the soul of the dead man. Consequently, we find even Orestes, after slaying Aigisthos, his father’s murderer, offering him a funeral feast (Od. iii, 309)—not, surely, in a mood of simple “piety”. The custom of inviting the whole people, on the occasion of important funerals, to such a banquet no longer appears in later times; it has little resemblance to the funeral feasts shared by the relations of the dead man (περίδειπνα) that were afterwards customary; it is far closer to the great cenæ ferales that accompanied the silicernia in Rome, to which the relations of the dead man, if he were an important person, invited the whole population.[31] After all, it is no harder to understand the underlying conception of the soul in this case sharing the feast with the whole people, than it is to understand the same conception when applied to the great sacrifices to the gods which, though the congregation partakes, are, in name and in fact, essentially “Banquets of the Gods” (Od. iii, 336).
Such are the relics of ancient soul-worship to be found within the limits of the Homeric world. Further attention to the spirits of the dead beyond the time of the funeral was prevented by the deeply ingrained conviction that after the burning of the body the psyche was received into the inaccessible world of the Unseen, from which no traveller returns. But, in order to secure this complete departure of the soul, it is necessary for the body to be burnt. Though we do occasionally read in the Iliad or the Odyssey that immediately after death and before the burning of the body “the psyche departed to Hades”,[32] the words must not be taken too literally; the soul certainly flies off at once towards Hades, but it hovers now between the realms of the living and [19] the dead until it is received into the final safekeeping of the latter after the burning of the body. The psyche of Patroklos appearing by night to Achilles declares this; it prays for immediate burial in order that it may pass through the door of Hades. Until then the other shadow-creatures prevent its entrance and bar its passage across the river, so that it has to wander restlessly round the house of Aïs of the wide gate (Il. xxiii, 71 ff.). This hastening off towards the house of Hades is again all that is meant when it is said elsewhere of Patroklos himself (Il. xvi, 856) that the psyche departed out of his limbs to the house of Hades. In exactly the same way it is said of Elpenor, the companion of Odysseus, that “his soul descended to Hades” (Od. x, 560). This soul meets his friend, nevertheless, later on, at the entrance of the Shadow-world, not yet deprived of its senses like the rest of the dwellers in that House of Darkness; not until the destruction of its physical counterpart is complete can it enter into the rest of Hades. Only through fire are the souls of the dead “appeased” (Il. vii, 410). So long, then, as the psyche retains any vestige of “earthliness” it possesses some feeling still, some awareness of what is going on among the living.[33]
But once the body is destroyed by fire, then is the psyche relegated to Hades; no return to this earth is permitted to it, and not a breath of this world can penetrate to it there. It cannot even return in thought. Indeed, it no longer thinks at all, and knows nothing more of the world beyond. The living also forget one so completely cut off from themselves (Il. xxii, 389). What, then, should tempt them, during the rest of their lives here, to try to hold communication with the dead by means of a cult?
§ 7
The practice of cremation itself will perhaps give us one last piece of evidence that there had been a time when the idea of the prolonged sojourn of the disembodied spirit in the realm of the living and its power of influencing the survivors existed among the Greeks. Homer knows of no other kind of funeral than that of fire. On a funeral pyre are burnt the bodies of king or leader with the most solemn ritual; those of the common people fallen in war are given to the flames with less ceremony; none are buried. We may well ask whence comes this custom, and what is its meaning for Greeks of the Homeric age? This means of disposing of the bodies of the dead is not by any means the most simple and obvious; it [20] is far easier to carry out, and far less expensive, to bury them in the earth. It has been suggested that the custom of cremation as observed by Persians, Germans, Slavs, and other peoples, is inherited from a nomadic period. The wandering horde has no permanent habitation in which or near which the body of the beloved dead can be buried and perpetual sustenance offered to his soul. Unless, therefore, as is the custom with some nomadic tribes, the dead body is given up to be the prey of beasts or weather, it might seem a natural idea to reduce it to ashes and carry the remains, preserved in a light jar, along with the tribe on its further journeyings.[34] Whether such practical reasonings can have had so much influence in a connexion that is generally governed entirely by fancy, and in which practical considerations are altogether scouted—I shall leave undecided. But, in any case, if we postulate a nomadic origin for the practice of burning the dead among the Greeks, we should have to go back altogether too far into the past to explain a mode of behaviour that, by no means exclusively practised in early times by the Greeks, becomes absolutely prescriptive in a period when they have long ceased to wander. The Asiatic Greeks, and in particular the Ionians, whose popular beliefs and customs are, in general outline, at least, reproduced for us in Homer, deserted one settled habitation in order to found another. Cremation then must have been so permanently established among them that it never entered their heads to seek any other method of disposing of their dead. In Homer not only the Greeks before Troy and Elpenor, far away from home, are burnt when they die; Eëtion, too, in his own home is given a funeral pyre by Achilles (Il. vi, 418). Hektor’s body is burnt in the middle of Troy and the Trojans themselves in their own native land burn their dead (Il. vii). The box or urn that holds the cremated bones of the dead is buried in a mound; the ashes of Patroklos, Achilles, Antilochos, and Aias rest on foreign soil (Od. iii, 109 ff.; xxiv, 76 ff.). It never occurs to Agamemnon that if Menelaos dies before Ilios his brother’s grave could be anywhere else than at Troy (Il. iv, 174 ff.). There is, therefore, evidently no intention on the part of the living of taking the remains of the dead with them on their return home;[35] and this cannot be the object of cremation. It will be necessary to look for some principle more in accordance with primitive modes of thought than such merely practical considerations. Jakob Grimm[36] suggested that the burning of the corpse might have been intended as an offering of the dead man to the gods. Among [21] the Greeks this could only mean the gods of the lower world; but nothing in Greek belief or ritual suggests such a grim intention.[37] The real purpose aimed at in cremation is not so far to seek. Since the destruction of the body by fire is supposed to result in the complete separation of the spirit from the land of the living,[38] it must be assumed that this result is also intended by the survivors who employ the means in question; and consequently that the complete banishment of the psyche once and for all into the other world is the real purpose and the original occasion of the practice of cremation. Isolated expressions of opinion among the nations that have practised the custom do, as a matter of fact, indicate as its object the speedy and entire separation of soul from body.[39] The exact nature of the intention varies with the state of belief about the soul. When the Indians turned from the custom of burying their dead to that of burning them, they were actuated, it appears, by the idea that the sooner and more completely the soul was freed from the body and its limitations, the more easily would it reach the Paradise of the Just.[40] Of the purifying effects of the fire implied in this conception, the Greeks knew nothing until the idea was revived in later times.[41] The Greeks of the Homeric age, innocent of any such “Kathartic” notion, thought only of the destructive powers of that element to which they entrusted the body of their dead, and of the benefit that they were conferring upon the soul in freeing it by fire from the lifeless body, thus adding their assistance to its own efforts to get free.[42] Nothing can destroy the psyche’s visible counterpart more quickly than fire. If, then, the body is burnt and the most treasured possessions of the dead man consumed along with it, no tie remains that can detain the soul any longer in the world of the living.
Cremation, therefore, is intended to benefit the dead, whose soul no longer wanders unable to find rest; but still more the living, for they will not be troubled by ghosts that are securely confined to the depths of the earth. The Greeks of Homer, accustomed by long usage to the burning of the dead, are free from all fears of haunting “ghostly” presences. But when the practice of the fire-funeral was first adopted, that which was to be guarded against in the future by the destruction of the body with fire must have been a real cause of fear.[43] The souls that were so anxiously relegated to the other world of the Unseen must have been feared as awesome inhabitants of this world. And so, from whatever source it may have come to them,[44] the custom of cremation gives firm ground for [22] supposing that at some period of their history the belief in the power and activity of the spirits of the dead and their influence upon the living—a subject of fear rather than reverence—must have been prevalent amongst the Greeks; even though only a few scattered hints still bear witness to such beliefs in the Homeric poems.