The Thracians were the next to embrace burial by fire. Of them Herodotus relates that they exhibited the corpse publicly for three days, brought many offerings, and bewailed the deceased. At the termination of the period stated, they cremated the body and then buried the ashes and bones. After they had erected a mound over the remains, they played gymnic games.
From Asia, by way of Thrace, cremation reached Greece. Among the Greeks burial was originally exceedingly primitive, as we learn from a law that compelled passers-by to place a handful of earth upon the breast of every unburied corpse. Interment undoubtedly preceded cremation in Greece. Heraclitus advanced the theory that everything in existence was created from fire. Therefore he argued that all corpses must be burned to free the soul from all material matter, and to return it to its primitive elements. According to Eustachius Hercules burned the body of Argius, the son of Likymnios, 1500 years before Christ. He had promised the father to return the youth, but when the latter fell in mortal combat, nothing remained for him but to cremate Argius and to bring home with him the ashes to the sorrowful parent. Hercules was unquestionably the first to cremate himself. When he was tormented by the pangs of approaching death, he built a pyre and ordered his servant to ignite it. When the servant failed to set the wood afire, Hercules descended from the pyre, kindled it himself and again mounted it to await his fate.
Pliny was disposed to attribute the origin of incineration among the Greeks to their custom of burning the dead on the field of battle, to render them secure from the revenge of the enemy.
Be that as it may, certain it is that incineration never became the only mode by which the inhabitants of Hellas disposed of their deceased; except in Athens, where it was practiced exclusively for some time. Suicides, those who had been struck by lightning, and unteethed children were not cremated, for it was the prevailing opinion that the pure flames would have been defiled by them.
GREEK FUNERAL URN.
Homer, that incomparable Hellenic poet (There is, I know, a dispute whether the name Homer stands for one person or for a number of bards. As far as I am concerned, I believe that Homer was an individual, a poor mendicant perhaps, wandering all over Greece, singing or reciting his heroic epics, and living on the grace of an admiring public. No collection of bards could have possibly written the Odyssey and Iliad, which are so uniform in character throughout.), has preserved for us, in immortal verse, the records of the Trojan war, in which we find many instances of cremation chronicled. The recent explorations of Dr. Heinrich Schliemann on the site of Troy have demonstrated beyond a doubt that the poems of Homer rest on a basis of actual fact.
During the war that was fought for Helen the beautiful, it was customary among the Greeks and Trojans to reduce to ashes the bodies of those who had been slain in battle. Line 69 of the first book of the Iliad proves that the Greeks burned their dead for sanitary reasons.
The bodies of cowards, criminals, and slaves were not incinerated, but left unburied, a prey for the beasts of the field and the birds of the air. Agamemnon, the king, addressing his warriors warns them (vide Pope’s translation of the Iliad, B. II, L. 466) that, during battle:—
“Who dares, inglorious, in his ships to stay,