[78] περὶ τὰ πένθη . . . ὁμοπαθείᾳ τοῦ κεκμηκότος κολοβοῦμεν ἡμᾶς αὐτοὺς τῇ τε κουρᾷ τῶν τριχῶν καὶ τῇ τῶν στεφάνων ἀφαιρέσει, Arist. fr. 108 (101) Rose.
[79] περίδειπνον. This is implied as universally occurring by Aen. Tact. 10, 5. This meal shared by the relatives (who alone are invited: Dem. 43, 62) must be meant by Heraklid., Pol. 30, 2, παρὰ τοῖς Λόκροις ὀδύρεσθαι οὐκ ἔστιν ἐπὶ τοῖς τελευτήσασιν, ἀλλ’ ἐπειδὰν ἐκκομίσωσιν εὐωχοῦνται.
[80] ἡ ὑποδοχὴ γίγνεται ὑπὸ τοῦ ἀποθανόντος, Artemid. 5, 82, p. 271, 10 H.
[81] Cic., Lg. ii, 63 (cf. λέγειν ἐπιδέξια ἐπὶ τεθνηκότι, Anaxandr. ap. Ath. 464 A.). On the other [195] hand, mentiri nefas erat. And yet εἰώθεσαν οἱ παλαιοὶ ἐν τοῖς περιδείπνοις τὸν τελευτηκότα ἐπαινεῖν, καὶ εἰ φαῦλος ἦν, Zenob. v, 28, and other Paroemiogr.—Besides this the lamentation for the dead may have been renewed at the various commemorations of the dead; the funeral regulation of the Labyadai at Delphi forbids expressly (not the festival but) the funeral dirge on such occasions: l. 46 ff. μηδὲ τᾷ ὑστεραίᾳ (after the burial, on which day the περίδειπνον was held) μηδὲ ἐν ταῖς δεκάταις μηδ’ ἐν τοῖς ἐνιαυτοῖ[ς] (we should expect rather ἐν τ. ἐνιαυτίοις, cf. [nn. 88]–92 of this chap.) μήτ’ οἰμώζεν μήτ’ ὀτοτύζεν.
[82] These meals given to the dead took place at the grave itself. Ar., Lys. 612 f. ἥξει σοι . . .; Is. 8, 39, τὰ ἔνατα ἐπήνεγκα.
[83] The τρίτα and ἔνατα, at any rate, were held on the third and ninth days after the funeral, and not after the day of death. It is true the references to these sacrifices in Ar., Lys. 612 ff., Is., etc., do not make this very clear. But if the τρίτα had taken place on the third day after death it would have coincided with the ἐκφορά itself, which is against all the evidence. Further, the Roman novemdiale, which was clearly modelled on Greek custom, also occurred on the ninth day after the burial, acc. to the unequivocal testimony of Porph. on Hor., Epod. xvii, 48 (nona die qua sepultus est). This is also deducible from Vg., A. v, 46 ff., and 105; cf. also Ap., M. ix, 31.
[84] That this was the object of the Novemdialia festival at Rome is shown clearly enough by the evidence; that the same was true of Greece is at least highly probable; cf. K. O. Müller, Aesch. Eum., p. 143 [120 E.T.]. Leist, Graecoitalische Rechts., p. 34.—Nine is evidently a round number, esp. in Homer; i.e. the division of periods of time into groups of nine was in antiquity a very common and familiar practice. Cf. now, Kaegi, Die Neunzahl bei den Ostariern, Phil. Abh. f. Schweitzer-Sidler, 50 ff. Mourning customs were really intended to ward off maleficent action on the part of the dead. They lasted as a rule as long as the return of the soul of the dead was to be feared (esp. so in India: see Oldenberg, Rel. d. Veda, p. 589), and acc. to ancient belief the soul can return once more on the ninth day after death. See below, chap. xiv, ii, [n. 154].
[85] A χρόνος πένθους of eleven days, the mourning concluded with a sacrifice to Demeter: Plu., Lyc. 27; cf. Hdt. vi, 58 fin. The Labyadai at Delphi celebrate the tenth day after the funeral as a feast of the dead; see above, [n. 81] of this chapter. This mourning period is not otherwise demonstrable for Greece (SIG. 633, 5, is different), but it is met with again among the Indians and Persians (cf. Kaegi, p. 5, 11), and may be primitive.
[86] Lex. Rh., in AB. 268, 19 ff.; Phot. a little differently: καθέδρα· τῇ τριακοστῇ (πρώτῃ Phot.: Α instead of Λ) ἡμέρᾳ τοῦ ἀποθανόντος οἱ προσήκοντες συνελθόντες κοινῇ ἐδειπνοῦν ἐπὶ τῷ ἀποθανόντι—καὶ τοῦτο καθέδρα ἐκαλεῖτο (Phot. adds: ὅτι καθεζόμενοι ἐδείπνουν καὶ τὰ νομιζόμενα ἐπλήρουν·) ἦσαν δὲ καθέδραι τέσσαρες (the last clause is absent from Phot.) It was a meal shared by the relatives of the dead in honour of the dead and held “on the thirtieth day”; possibly nothing more nor less than the oft-mentioned τριακάδες. The guests eat their food sitting after the old custom prevailing in Homeric times and always observed by women; as applied to men it survived in Crete only, see Müller, Dorians, ii, 284. Perhaps this primitive attitude preserved in cultus is what we see in the Spartan sculptured reliefs representing “feasts of the dead” where the figures are seated. There were four such καθέδραι, i.e. the period of mourning extended over four months: thus it was the law in Gambreion (SIG. 879, 11 ff.) that [196] mourning might last at the most three months, or in the case of women four. We often hear of monthly repetitions of the feasts of the dead: monthly celebration of the εἰκάδες for Epicurus in acc. with his will, D.L. x, 18; cf. Cic., Fin. ii, 101; Plin. 35, 5; κατὰ μῆνα sacrifice to the deified Ptolemies, CIG. 4697, 48. (In India, too, the sacrifices to the dead on the thirtieth of the month were several times repeated: Kaegi, 7; 11.)
[87] The Lexicographers, Harp., Phot., etc. (AB. 308, 5, is ambiguous, too), speak of the τριακάς in a way that makes it hard to see whether they mean the traditional sacrifice of the dead taking place regularly on the thirtieth day of the month, or a special offering on the thirtieth day after burial or after the day of death (ἡ τριακοστὴ ἡμέρα διὰ τοῦ θανάτου Harp., Phot. μετὰ θάνατον is the correction of Schömann on Is., p. 219, but διὰ θανάτου is formed, not quite correctly, on the analogy of διὰ χρόνου, διὰ μέσου [even διὰ προγόνων “since the time of our forefathers”, Polyb. 21, 21, 4], and must mean the same thing, viz. “after death”). But in Lys. 1, 14, we have the idea clearly expressed that the period of mourning should last till the thirtieth day (see Becker, Char.2 3, 117 E.T.3, p. 398), and in this case it is natural to suppose that the τριακάδες corresponding with the τρίτα and ἔνατα, took place on the thirtieth day after burial. So, too, the ins. from Keos, SIG. 877, 21, ἐπὶ τῷ θανόντι τριηκόστια μὴ ποιεῖν. For Argos see Plu., Q. Gr. 24, p. 296 F. It is evident that the τριακάδες were not so firmly established in Athens (at least in the fourth century) as the τρίτα and ἔνατα: e.g. Isaeus generally only refers to these last as the indispensable νομιζόμενα: 2, 36–7; 8, 39. It appears also that it is wrong to regard the τριακάδες as otherwise exactly on a footing with the τρ. and ἔνατα, as is generally done. The last-mentioned pair were sacrifices to the dead, the τριακάδες seems to have been a commemorative banquet of the living.—These fixed periods of mourning like so much else in the cult of the dead may have been handed down by tradition from a very early time. The third, ninth (or tenth), and thirtieth days after the funeral marked stages in the gradually diminishing “uncleanness” of the relatives of the dead, and this existed, it appears, already in “Indo-Germanic” times. Until the ninth day the relatives were still in contact with the departed and were consequently “unclean”; the thirtieth day puts an end to this, and is a memorial festival (though often repeated); cf. Kaegi, pp. 5, 10, 12 (of the separate edition); Oldenberg, 578. In Christian usage, sanctioned by the church, the third, ninth, and fortieth days after death or after burial were very early observed as memorial days (sometimes third, seventh, thirtieth; cf. Rochholz, D. Gl. u. Brauch, i, 203), and survive in some cases to the present day: see Ac. Soc. ph. Lips. v, 304 f.