Morever, many of the works of art which have descended to us also prove that this excess of lamentation was not altogether abolished by the law of Solon. On the lecyths which represent the prothesis, it will be observed that the women have their hands on their heads as if tearing their hair[122] although this gesture may be only a conventional sign of mourning[123] adopted to indicate grief in the funeral monuments and vases just as an interior may be symbolized by a door or a pillar that supports the roof, a temple by an altar and the fact that the scene was out of doors was indicated by foliage in some form or by the branch of a tree[124].
VI.
THE PROCESSION.
By the third day[125], it was thought that time enough had elapsed to show whether life was really extinct[126]. A procession was then formed to accompany the body to the tomb. After a time, this delay of three days may have been less rigidly observed for the interment was permitted on the day immediately following the decease. Callimachus sings of a youth “whose friends saw him alive one day, and the next day they wept at his grave[127].” Again, Pherecydes, the philosopher, eaten up by disease, invites his physicians to attend his funeral on the morrow[128]. But, when a distinguished and worthy man, such as Timoleon, died, and it was necessary to make extensive preparations for the funeral, and to send notice to the neighboring inhabitants and strangers, the time intervening between the death and the burial was probably extended[129].
The hour set for the ekphora, or funeral procession, was in the early morning, before sunrise[130]. Bos[131] cites the cases of Patroclus[132] and Achilles[133] as proof that it was only those who died in the flower of youth that were buried before sunrise. Yet there are other passages[134] sufficient to convince us that the time for all funerals was usually the hour before dawn.
We know that the body was carried to the grave on a kline or bier[135], presumably that on which the prothesis had been accomplished, but who conveyed it thither is in doubt. It would naturally be expected that it was borne by relatives or friends of the deceased, yet no authority has been found to support the surmise. There is, on the contrary, a passage in Pollux[136] which might be construed to indicate that there was a class of men who were called, professionally, “corpse-bearers” or “buriers,” and whose sole business was pall-bearing. Pollux is rather late authority, but, on turning back to the tragedies, Electra appears, telling her brother to let the crows and dogs act as “buriers” of Ægisthus[137]. Furthermore, it is a number of trained slaves that carry Alcestis to the tomb[138].
When a man of prominence died, he was borne to the grave by youths chosen by the people[139]. There is a reported instance of the burial of a priest, where one hundred youths[140], trained in the gymnasium, were selected by the relatives of the deceased. It was the custom for members of a fraternity to act as pall-bearers for one of their fellows. Demonax[141], when he died, was borne along by his brother philosophers. That custom survives to our time in the funeral processions of the free-masons and odd-fellows.
In the van of the procession, just before the corpse[142], or immediately behind, came the hired dirge-singers, pouring forth their doleful lays[143]. Plato, perhaps through carelessness, speaks of these hired singers in the masculine gender[144]; but Hesychius is undoubtedly correct in stating that women[145] habitually took that part. They were first brought over from Caria[145], and hence the significance of the allusion to a dirge as a “Carian melody[144].”
The late authors, Pollux[146] and Sextius Empiricus[147], confounded the dirge-singers with the Roman praeficae and thought that they were flute-players. The flutes of ivory which have been discovered in some of the Grecian graves, would seem to support that view[148]. Schreiber has a picture of a funeral procession, in which a flute-player is seen behind the rude wagon that bears the body of the deceased[149].