That it was the custom in the heroic age to bury the dead with those objects which had been dear to them in life, is further proved by Homer, where the soul of Elpenor begs Ulysses to bury his body with his weapons, and to erect a mound over him.[385] My esteemed friend Professor Semiteles reminds me that Ajax, in the tragedy of Sophocles, prays to be buried with his arms.[386]
It would therefore appear that, in burying the fifteen royal personages with immense treasures, the murderers merely acted according to an ancient custom, and consequently only fulfilled a sacred duty.
AGAMEMNON'S IGNOMINIOUS BURIAL.
On the other hand, the usage of the age appears to have left the murderers at full liberty regarding the form of the sepulchres and the mode of the burial, which were consequently as ignominious as possible. The graves were merely deep irregular quadrangular holes, into which the royal victims were huddled by three and even by five, and on the bottom of which they were burnt, but each separately, so that their bones might not be mixed together.
I perfectly share Mr. Newton's opinion, that all the five immense and magnificent Treasuries in the lower city and in the suburb must necessarily be more ancient than the five royal tombs in the Acropolis; and if we reflect that princes, who used such magnificent underground palaces as store-houses of their wealth, should have been huddled away like impure animals into miserable holes, we find in this ignominious burial alone a powerful argument in favour of the veracity of the tradition which points to these sepulchres as those of the king of men, Agamemnon, and his companions, who on their return from Ilium were treacherously murdered by Aegisthus and Clytemnestra.
Professor Paley reminds me that the excellent Greek scholar, Miss A. Swanwick, the translator (among other works) of the Oresteia of Aeschylus, has already made the just remark, that the ancient tradition made Agamemnon to be buried in silence and ignominy; and the same friend calls my attention to the following passages in the tragic poets to show how all of them agree upon this. Thus we read in Aeschylus: "By our hands has he fallen and died, and we shall bury him not with the lamentations of his household."[387] But we see continually in Homer that the lamentations of relations and of all those who belonged to the household were regarded as quite essential to the honour as well as the peace of the dead. So, for instance, we read in the Iliad[388]: "So spoke (Briseïs) weeping, and the women (the other female slaves) broke out into lamentations, seemingly for Patroclus, but in reality every one of them was merely lamenting over her own misfortune."
We further read in Aeschylus: "O insolent mother, with the funeral of an enemy thou hast dared to bury your lord, a king without the tear of his citizens, a husband without his wife's"[389]: and "O father, who hast not died in the manner of kings."[390] Also in Sophocles: "Having ignominiously slain him like an enemy, she chopped and hacked his limbs."[391] Likewise in Euripides: "Certainly like a criminal thou wilt be buried ignominiously by night, not in the daytime."[392]
I may here observe that Sophocles seems never to have visited Mycenæ, for he fancied Agamemnon's sepulchre to have the form of a tumulus[393]: "On the mound of this grave I proclaim this to my father."
CUSTOM OF BURIAL WITH TREASURES.