Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion: A Study in Survivals

by J. C. Lawson

The evidence for this unity of purpose is, I hope, already sufficient; but confirmation may be found, if required, in the smaller details of funeral-custom. It is, I believe, a received principle of textual criticism that, in estimating the relation of two manuscripts of a given author, coincidence in minutiae is the true criterion of their common origin or other close kinship, and its testimony is not to be outweighed by a few conspicuous divergences. So too, I think, in estimating the mutual relation of two rites, the coincidence of all the minor circumstances connected with them is of more significance than one large and evident contrast between them. Such a contrast, let it be granted, exists between cremation and inhumation when employed separately. Yet it would be a rash and faulty judgement, I hold, which should at once infer thence that the two rites were informed by different religious ideas. The minute coincidences claim examination. If all that preceded and accompanied and followed the actual disposal of the corpse, whether by burning or by burial, exhibited uniformity in scheme and in scope; if the washing and the anointing, the arraying and the crowning, were performed with the same tender care whether the body was destined for the cold, slow earth or for the rapid flame; if from the death-chamber, where the body had lain in state and the kinsfolk, grouped in order of dearness about it, had paid in turn their debt of lamentation, the same sad pomp escorted the dead whether to the pyre or to the grave; if the same gifts—the same provision as it seems for bodily comfort—were mingled as ashes with the ashes of the dead or were consigned intact with the body yet intact to the will and keeping of the earth; then, whichever means the mourners chose for effecting the actual dissolution of the fleshly remains, their religious attitude towards death and their conception of the hereafter must have been single and constant.

Space forbids me to enter into the evidence for the uniformity of all this detail in all periods of Greek life. I will confine myself to two illustrations. The first shall be the prothesis or lying-in-state of the body with the solemn lamentation of the kinsfolk, for the most part women, grouped about it. I have elsewhere[1252] described the scene; I have only to illustrate here the universality of it as the prelude alike to cremation and to inhumation, alike in Ancient and in Modern Greece, alike amid pagan and amid Christian surroundings. In the Mycenaean age the bodies of the dead were sumptuously arrayed—probably with a view to the lying-in-state; more than that cannot be actually asserted of the earliest epoch. But in the Homeric age, as at the funeral of Hector[1253], the custom is seen already fully developed. In the Dipylon-age the scene described by Homer is found depicted on the great vases that served as monuments over the graves[1254]. A little later, the legislation of Solon is directed against the excesses to which the rite of solemn lamentation led[1255]. Next, an orator of Athens is found declaiming against the wrongs done to him by the thirty tyrants, who, not content with having put his brother to death, had actually refused the use of any of the three houses belonging to the family and had forced them to lay out the body in a hired hut[1256]. Again we have the ridicule of Lucian directed against the discordant scene of useless misery[1257]. In strange company with him appears St Chrysostom upbraiding Christians for their extravagances of grief and threatening them with excommunication if they continue to call in heathen women to act as professional mourners[1258]. Centuries passed without diminution of the custom, and the Venetians during their occupation of the Ionian islands enacted laws[1259] in the spirit of those formulated by Solon more than two thousand years before. Of this custom it might well be said, ‘et vetabitur semper et retinebitur,’ for it still maintains its old vogue and vitality, and is the necessary prelude of every peasant’s funeral to-day.

My second illustration is a far more trivial circumstance, but not on that account less significant—the use of the foliage of the olive as a couch for the dead, whether on the bier which conveyed him to the grave or on the funeral-pyre. The reason for choosing olive-leaves does not concern us; there may have been, as Rohde suggests[1260], some idea of purification connected with it; but it is only the wide-spread use of it which I have to illustrate. Among the ashes of those small pyres, on which the dead were laid in Mycenaean sepulchres, were recognised charred olive-leaves[1261]. Lycurgus in curtailing the funeral-rites of Sparta bade his countrymen wrap their dead for burial in the red military cloak (as became a race of warriors) and in olive-leaves[1262]. The Pythagoreans, who objected to cremation[1263], laid their dead to rest on a bed of leaves gathered from myrtle, poplar, and olive[1264]. An Attic law forbade the felling of certain olive-trees under penalty of a fine of a hundred drachmae per tree, but contained a saving-clause exempting cases in which olive-wood was wanted for funerals[1265]. This permission points to a special use of olive-wood as fuel for the pyre, for, if a few branches or sprays only had been needed for decking out the bier, there would have been no question of felling whole trees. It was probably then this custom which Sophocles also had in mind, when the messenger, who brought the news of Polynices’ tardy funeral, was made by him to specify ‘fresh-plucked olive-shoots’ as the material of the pyre[1266]. Again, in a number of sarcophagi found by Fauvel outside the gates of Athens on the road to Acharnae the skeleton was observed to lie ‘on a thick bed of olive-leaves[1267].’ In the second century of our era the custom of placing olive-branches on the bier still prevailed[1268]; and at the present day the olive is often conspicuous at the funerals of peasants, either in the garland about the dead man’s head or in the decoration of the bier.

Thus the uniformity of detail in funerals, whether the main rite was cremation or inhumation, no less than the tendency to amalgamate these two into a single rite, proves that, from the earliest ages known to us, their religious purpose had been identical—to give to the dead that speedy bodily dissolution which they desired.

But in spite of this unity of purpose, one or other rite doubtless continued long through force of custom to hold predominance in particular districts. In Attica it was perhaps not until the sixth or even the fifth century that the Pelasgian rite had entirely lost the support of ancestral tradition. But then and thenceforward the two methods appear to have been judged simply as methods, and the estimate of their respective merits was little affected by the old racial differences. But this does not mean that the methods were judged wholly on their religious merits—on their adaptability to the single religious purpose. Cost and convenience were necessarily factors in determining the choice between them. Thus the question of cost must often have decided the poorer classes to choose inhumation; and in that portion of the Dipylon cemetery to which I have already referred, it was actually found that, out of the graves in which no evidence of cremation was found, more than a hundred were of a poor character, mere shafts in the earth, or at the best walled with rough brick-built sides, while only thirteen were of a costly style—sepulchres built with slabs of stone, or regular sarcophagi. And similarly other practical considerations must often have turned the scale in favour of the one or the other rite. The soldiers who fell at Marathon were simply interred, presumably because to dig a trench and to raise a mound in the middle of the plain was a more feasible task than to collect masses of fuel from the surrounding hill-sides; but the victims of the plague at Athens were with good reason cremated.

Nevertheless, where none of these external causes operated, there are signs that cremation was held in somewhat higher esteem than inhumation. The story went that Solon’s body was burnt, by way of honour seemingly, and his ashes scattered over that island which he had won back for Athens. And we hear of cremation being accorded, apparently again as the more honourable rite, to other great men such as Dionysius, the famous tyrant of Syracuse, and Timoleon, her deliverer. But more conclusive is the evidence of literature, where not only the act itself is named, but a clear indication of the feeling of the actors is given. According to Aeschylus, the dead body of Agamemnon, king though he was, was merely hidden away in the ground by his blood-guilty wife; even in death she would show him no pity, do him no honour. But in Sophocles the dying Heracles is laid on a funeral-pyre, and the dead Polynices, to whom Antigone was perforce content to give the most meagre form of interment, obtains from Creon, when at last too late he repents, the full rite of cremation. And the tone too in which Herodotus once speaks of the two rites is significant: ‘the funeral-rites of well-to-do Thracians,’ he says, ‘are as follows: the body lies in state for three days, and they slaughter all manner of victims and make good cheer, when once the preliminary lamentation is done; and then they dispose of the body by cremation or merely by interment’—ἔπειτα δὲ θάπτουσι κατακαύσαντες, ἢ ἄλλως γῇ κρύψαντες[1269]. The ‘merely’ plainly betrays Herodotus’ own feeling that well-to-do persons might be expected to have the advantage of cremation.

In the following centuries the preference for cremation would seem to have become even more pronounced; for though both rites still continued in use, separately as well as conjointly, Lucian was able to call cremation the distinctively Hellenic rite[1270]. But more marked still was the feeling in favour of cremation among those who upheld the old Greek religion when first they had to face the invasion of Christianity. ‘The heathen for the most part,’ says Bingham[1271], ‘burned the bodies of the dead in funeral piles, and then gathered up the bones and ashes, and put them in an urn above ground: but the Christians abhorred this way of burying; and therefore never used it, but put the body whole into the ground.’ The conflict over this matter was bitter. The pagans taunted the Christians with fearing that, if their bodies were reduced to ashes by cremation, they would be incapacitated for the vaunted resurrection[1272], and as a final injury to Christian martyrs sometimes burnt their bodies and scattered the ashes to the winds[1273]. The Christians in retaliation condemned the rite of cremation as in appearance an act of cruelty to the dead body[1274], and ridiculed the pagans for first ‘burning up their dead in a most savage manner and then feasting them in a manner most gluttonous, using the flames alike for their service and for their injury[1275]’—for their service in cooking them a funeral-meal, for their injury in consuming them to ashes. The two now conflicting rites continued in use until the end of the fourth century of our era; for reference is made to them in the laws of Theodosius[1276]. But cremation must have been on the decrease; for Macrobius early in the fifth century says that in his time the practice had fallen into entire desuetude, and all he knew of it was from reading[1277]. ‘It is most probable,’ says Bingham, ‘that the heathen custom altered by degrees from the time of Commodus the Emperor; for Commodus himself and many of his friends were buried by inhumation and not by burning ... and from that time the custom of burning might decrease till at last under the Christian emperors, though without any law to forbid it, the contrary custom entirely prevailed, and this quite dwindled into nothing.’ If this view be correct, it will mean that the old preference for cremation exhibited by the adherents of paganism was only excited to temporary intensity by a spirit of antagonism towards Christianity, and that they soon returned to the old way of thinking and recognised inhumation as a method alternative, if slightly inferior, to cremation. When the bitterness of religious strife was over, and pagans and Christians lived more at peace together, the former may readily have resumed the practice of interment, which after all was their own heritage from dim ages long before the dawn of Christianity.

But though Macrobius in the fifth century speaks of cremation as then in disuse, the memory of it cannot have passed away so soon. Only a few generations were to lapse before the infusion of a Slavonic population into Greece. Among the superstitions which these intruders disseminated was one which concerned the resuscitated dead. The Greeks, as we have seen, themselves held a superstition on which the horrid imaginings of the Slavs were soon grafted; the common-folk became haunted by the dread of vrykolakes. How then did they deal with the bodies of such dead persons as were suspected? Not by adopting the Slavonic custom of impaling them, but by a revival of cremation. The advantage which that rite possessed over burial was remembered; by its aid the dissolution of the dead could be rendered quick and sure. Thus cremation came once more into use as a means to the same end as in old time—the quick dissolution of the dead body; but the motive for promoting that dissolution was, under the altered conditions, itself altered. Instead of love it was fear; instead of solicitude for the welfare of the dead, it was anxiety for the protection of the living.

Yet even so, the act of burning the vrykolakas was a purely defensive, not an offensive, measure. It was not an act of hostility or reprisal, but merely a necessary act of self-preservation, which inflicted no hurt on the revenant but simply interposed an impassable barrier between the living and the dead. The motive was fear; there was little or nothing of hatred mixed with it. This is made clear by the fact that cremation has been used even in recent times in a case which had nothing whatsoever to do with the belief in vrykolakes, and where the sole motive was the old desire to serve the interests of the dead.

The occasion was the evacuation of Parga in 1819. The inhabitants of that town had long defied the Turks, but the end was at hand, and it was only by the intervention of the English that they were saved from the tender mercies of Ali Pasha. The English offered them asylum in the Ionian Islands and obtained from the Porte on their behalf a sum of money which fully indemnified them for the houses and lands which they abandoned. But in spite of the terms obtained, the emigrants never forgave the English for treacherously selling to the Turks, as they said, the home which they had defended so stoutly and so long[1278]. This evacuation of Parga forms the theme of some ballads which have been preserved[1279]. One of them runs as follows: