interrupted the song of mourning. Solon had ordered moderation in these marks of sorrow, but it must have been difficult, if not impossible, to keep within bounds by any legal decrees the expression of wild despair, especially on the part of the women.
Fig. 109.
The custom of these funeral laments is a very ancient one. We find it universally adopted in the Homeric period, and here, too, in the form of responsions; the wail is heard at Troy by the corpse of Hector, as well as in the Greek camp by the bier of Achilles. We find the laying-out of the corpse and the funeral lament represented on a great many vase paintings, as, for instance, in the one depicted in Fig. [108]. Here we see the dead man lying on a richly-decked couch, in front of which stands a footstool; he is enveloped in his mantle up to his neck, he wears a wreath, and his head rests on several cushions. In front of the couch and at the sides stand six women, all raising their arms with gestures of grief; some of them are touching their heads, as though to tear out their hair. A little girl in a similar attitude stands at the foot of the bed; on the right, turning away from the scene, stands a boy. Fig. [109] is similar. Here we see under the dead man’s couch his shield, helmet, and cuirass; of the wailing women, who are almost all tearing out their hair, one holds a lyre in her hand, and another a fillet; the former is accompanying the lament, the other is about to deck the corpse or the bier. The hot climate of the south generally necessitated limiting the duration of this ceremony to a single day, and, indeed, Solon expressly commanded that this should be done; only where special measures were taken for preserving the body was it possible to leave it for several days. Embalming was not customary in Greece; it was only when the corpses of those who had died in foreign lands were brought home to be buried, that they were placed in some substance to check the dissolution—for instance, in honey, as the Spartans did with those of their kings who died away from home.
The funeral usually took place in the early morning before sunrise, and throughout the whole of antiquity both burying and burning were common, sometimes subsisting side by side, while at other times one fashion or the other was more general. It seems as though burying had at first been more common among the Greeks than burning. It is true we find only burning mentioned in the Homeric poems, but we must not forget that we are concerned with exceptional circumstances in the Iliad, since the warriors who fell before Troy did not die at home; and in such cases, even in later times, burning was preferred, since it enabled the survivors to bring the ashes of the dead man home with them. Still, even in those early times, burying was very common, as is proved, in spite of the lack of literary evidence, by the ancient burial grounds discovered at many places in Greece; and similarly, in the historic period, the burning of dead bodies, though certainly practised, was not so common as burying, if only for the very practical reason that the latter was far cheaper and much less troublesome. Whichever form was chosen by the friends, or had been appointed by the dead man himself, the solemn funeral procession was never omitted; the crematoria, like the cemeteries, were outside the city gates, since at Athens, and probably in most Greek states, they were not allowed to bury their dead within the walls; the Doric states alone seem to have made an exception to this rule. A very ancient painted vase seems to afford a proof that it was customary in early times to convey the dead to the cemetery on a car drawn by horses, but in the historical age, at any rate, the corpse was taken to the grave on the same couch on which it had been exposed to view. This duty was generally performed by the slaves of the household, and where there were not sufficient of these, gravediggers were specially hired; while in the case of men who had deserved well of their country, the citizens regarded it as an honour to perform this duty themselves. If the dead man had died a violent death, a spear was carried in front of him, which pointed to the revenge to be taken; the spear was then fixed in the earth near the grave, and the nearest relation pronounced a curse against the murderer, after which the place was watched for three days. This did not, however, point to revenge on the part of the relations alone, but to the punishment to be inflicted by the legal authorities. As a rule, the male relations and friends walked at the head of the processions, and the women behind the corpse; but one of Solon’s ordinances limited the female followers to the nearest relations not extending beyond the nieces. Among the more distant relations, only women over sixty years of age were allowed to follow. This law does not, however, seem to have been quite strictly observed. All the mourners wore grey or black mourning; the nearest relations cut their hair off, for the custom of shaving the hair in case of death is a very old one, and even in Homer we read that the hair cut off was sometimes placed in the dead man’s hand. During the procession laments were again sung, and accompanied by the wailing tones of a flute; but here customs differed somewhat, and at Ceos, for instance, where the ordinances concerning burial, differing in many respects from the Attic customs, have been preserved to us, there were especial directions that the body should be carried out in silence. The dead man wore the clothes in which he had been laid out, but extravagance and excessive luxury necessitated some limitations by the law, so that Solon expressly ordained that the number of garments should not exceed three, and the above-mentioned ordinance allowed only one under garment, one cloak, and one pall or covering, the whole value not to exceed 300 drachmae, and also ordained that the couch on which the dead man was carried to the grave, and the other hangings or cushions, should not be burnt or buried, but brought back again.
Fig. 110.
There were various ways of burying the dead. If they were placed in a grave it was customary to make use of a coffin, which was let down into the grave by the bearers. We see this represented on the vase picture, Fig. [110]. Two men, who look like barbarian slaves or men of the lower classes, are standing in the grave and holding up their hands in order to receive the coffin, which is carefully let down by two men of similar appearance; on the right and left stand weeping women. The coffins were sometimes made of wood, especially Cyprus wood, which was occasionally decorated with costly carving and painting; sometimes of clay, less often of stone, although stone sarcophagi have been found in Greece, but the custom of decorating their sides with sculptured pictures did not become common until the Roman period. The shapes of the