Again it may fairly be claimed that in any religion of a profounder character than the Achaean, in any religion which contains some positive ideas of the future life and does not view it merely as the negation of the present life, that which men hope to become in the future state is something more similar to the deity or deities in whom they believe. Their conception of godhead and their conception of their own condition after death are of necessity founded upon the same ideal of happiness—a happiness which the gods already enjoy and which men hope to share. The Buddhist looks forward to the day when he shall become like his deity—even one with his deity—clean from the grossness of matter, free from bodily desires and necessities, spirit unalloyed. The Christian believes in a God who became man and survived the death of man not in the form of a spirit only but with flesh and bones, and he himself looks forward to the resurrection of the body. Socrates held that wisdom and goodness were one and pertained to the soul only, and the God into whose presence his soul would pass after death was ‘the good and wise God,’ rightly called Hades, that is, the invisible and spiritual, with whom the soul has kinship[1318]. But what of the ordinary Greek? His gods were not invisible or spiritual. Pelasgian and Achaean deities alike were beings of flesh and blood, robust, active, sensuous; they ate and drank, they waked and slept, they married, they begot or bore children. Such was the Greek’s conception of godhead, such his ideal of blessedness. How then should he look forward to the annihilation of the body with any feeling but dismay? How could his hopes of future bliss not involve of necessity a belief in the survival of both body and soul?
I suggest then that the dissolution of the body, which the dead so eagerly desired, far from being regarded as a final and complete severance of soul and body, was in the Pelasgian religion the means of their re-union in another world. Death was only a temporary severance of the two entities which together form a living man capable of enjoying physical pleasures. The soul at the moment of death went down to the nether world in advance, or, it may be, as is sometimes held by the peasants of modern Greece[1319], hovered about the body until its dissolution was complete. But the dead body certainly remained in this world, at the place where it lay evident to men’s eyes; it could not pass to the other world at once; it could not ever pass thither without the assistance of friends still living; it was too gross and too impotent, bereft of the soul, to make its own way to the home of the dead. Therefore upon the survivors was imposed the sacred charge of resolving it into elements more refined, and of enabling it thus to pass out of human touch and sight to a home which the soul could reach unaided. When this process was effected by inhumation, the period of forty days required for complete dissolution was the critical period in the dead man’s existence; if the body was ‘bound’ and indissoluble for any cause and the soul re-entered it before the proper time, the revenant was a pitiable wanderer, sharing in the joys neither of this world nor of the next; the mourners therefore took such measures as they could to prevent that calamity, by entertaining the acquaintances of the dead man and prevailing upon them to revoke any curses wherewith he was bound, and by laying in the dead man’s mouth a charm which should bar the soul’s re-entry. When cremation was employed, the dissolution of the body was more speedy and more sure; and it is not therefore difficult to understand that the Pelasgians, conscious though they must have been that in religion they were as far in advance of the Achaeans as in material civilisation they were behind, should have early adopted the use of fire in the interests of the dead. But no matter which rite was employed, the ultimate effect was the same; the heavy, helpless corpse that had been laid upon the pyre or in the grave vanished, and nought but the bones remained. Whither then had it vanished? How had the visible become invisible? Surely by passing from this visible world to the world invisible. There is nothing to suggest that this disappearance meant to the Greeks annihilation; that word indeed had no counterpart in their speech; the strongest term of the Greek language by which one might attempt, and would still fail, to render the word ‘annihilate,’ would be ἀφανίζειν or ἀιστοῦν, ‘to make unseen.’ And on the other hand their conception of future happiness in another world is positive evidence that they believed dissolution to mean not annihilation, but the vanishing of the body to be re-united with the soul in the unseen world.
I am of course far from suggesting that these views which I have sketched formed a definite religious doctrine to which every Greek would have subscribed. No people have evinced greater liberty of thought on religious matters; no people have been less hampered by hierarchical limitations and the claims of authority; nowhere have wider divergences of religious opinion been tolerated; nowhere else have the advocates of material philosophies and of spiritual philosophies been brought into sharper contrast and yet held in equal repute. But it is not with the vagaries of individuals and the new departures of great thinkers that I am concerned; my purpose is simply to trace the general trend of thought as regards the relation of body and soul after death among the mass of the Greek people.
And in so doing I fully realise the danger of over-statement. Probably the mass of mankind in religious matters perform many acts without full consciousness of their motive; they instinctively follow tradition without enquiring into the meaning and the mutual relation of the customs with which they comply; and if ever they try to justify to their reason the acts to which instinct prompts them, they may be at a loss to form a consistent theory out of the several motives which they would assign to the several acts. If therefore I try not only to disengage from among the network of religious and philosophical speculation a thread of simple popular belief, but also to present that thread unknotted and continuous, I may be attempting that which the mass of the Greek people seldom and with difficulty performed for themselves. To enunciate as a doctrine that which may have been a subconscious or only partially realised belief—to present as a consistent theory ideas which, separately apprehended, formed the acknowledged motives of separate acts, but whose mutual relations were seldom investigated—to formulate in words that which may have been no more than a vague aspiration of men’s hearts—this is necessarily to over-state. There lies the danger. But for my part, while admitting that in all probability there was among the Greek people of old, as among the Greek people and others too to-day, a large amount of unintelligent religion, I claim that some such conception as I have outlined of the relation between soul and body and of their future existence is the only possible explanation of the manifold customs and beliefs relating to death and dissolution which have been discussed, and fairly represents the general trend of thought among the inheritors of the Pelasgian religion.
This conclusion is not a little strengthened by the evidence of a custom common to both ancient and modern Greece, which presupposes the continuance of physical desires and needs after death. To make a present of food indicates a belief on the part of the donor that the recipient can eat; to make a present of clothing implies a belief that the recipient has a body to be covered; and it is these two things, food and clothing, the elementary requisites of living men, which have most constantly been brought, either at the time of the funeral or later, as gifts to the dead. Other gifts there were also in different ages; treasures of wrought gold for the princes of Mycenae; articles of the toilet for Athenian ladies whose first care even beyond the grave would be their complexion; toys for the children. But while each grave that is opened may tell its own story, humorous or pathetic, of those tastes and pursuits of the occupant for which the same provision was made in the next world as in this, it is in the supply of the common necessaries of all mankind that the popular Greek notions concerning the dead are most clearly revealed; for the custom has continued without intermission or sensible alteration down to this day.
In the Mycenaean age the dead were supplied with a store of food at the time of the funeral, but there is no evidence to show whether the gifts were renewed subsequently[1320]. I incline to suppose that they were; for the belief of later ages in some sort of bodily existence after death has already been traced back to the Pelasgians; and the custom of later ages therefore of continuing to supply the dead with bodily necessaries was probably derived from the same source. But in any case the Mycenaean custom of providing food for the dead at the time of the funeral is sufficient proof that the dead were thought to have bodily needs, and therefore also bodily existence.
The Achaeans of the Homeric age seldom presented the dead man with gifts of food at the funeral, and never apparently afterwards. The only gift, if such it can be called, which was commonly burned along with the dead body was the warrior’s own armour; but it is so natural, quite apart from any religious motive, for a soldier’s body to be laid out arrayed in its wonted accoutrements and to have, as it were, a military funeral, that little importance can attach to it. Other gifts were rare. The funeral of Patroclus is quite exceptional, and, like the return of Patroclus’ soul with its urgent petition for burial, seems wholly inconsistent with the Homeric presentment of after-death existence. The soul being doomed to a shadowy impotent semblance of life could have no part in physical needs or pleasures[1321]. Nor does Homer enlighten us as to the purpose of the abundant gifts, which included not only food but slaughtered dogs and horses[1322]; he speaks only of providing ‘all that it beseemeth that a man should have when he goeth beneath the murky gloom[1323].’ Indeed I question whether Homer had any clear conception of their utility; they seem rather to have been vaguely honorific; and since the custom of making such gifts is neither usual in Homer nor in harmony with his idea of future existence, I hold it likely that once again he was drawing upon the Pelasgian religion in order to give to the last rites of Patroclus the maximum of splendour.
The Dipylon-period puts an end to all uncertainty; thenceforward down to the present day the Greek custom of providing the dead with the necessaries of bodily life will be found to have been uniform and continuous. There has been no interruption of the simple practice of providing the dead with food both at the time of the funeral and at stated intervals thereafter. For the Dipylon-period this has been proved by the contents of the graves and by the strata of burnt soil observed at Eleusis[1324] above them. The same phenomena continue to present themselves also in the case of later graves at Athens, certainly down to the third century B.C., and, though any detailed description of graves of a still later date is hard to find, the custom unquestionably still prevailed; for literary evidence, overlapping that of archaeology at the start, carries on our knowledge of the custom into the Christian era.
The Choephori of Aeschylus takes its very name from the practice of pouring wine or other beverages on the graves of the dead for them to consume; and the word χοαί was specially applied to this kind of libation as opposed to the λοιβαί or σπονδαί wherewith gods were propitiated. Similarly the Greek language possessed a special word for gifts of food (or other perishable gifts such as flowers) brought to the graves of the dead; these were called ἐναγίσματα in strict contrast with the sacrifices (θυσίαι, etc.) by which gods were appeased[1325]. These presents of food were regularly made on two occasions at least after the funeral; there were the τρίτα brought, according to modern computation, on the second day, and the ἔνατα on the eighth day: how regular was the custom of bringing them may be judged from the passing references of Aristophanes[1326], Isaeus[1327], and Aeschines[1328]. In addition to these two meals there were others either on the thirtieth day after the funeral or on the thirtieth of each month—for the interpretation to be put on the term τριακάδες[1329] seems doubtful—also γενέσια[1330], apparently a birthday-feast given to the dead, and νεκύσια[1331] to commemorate the anniversary of the death. The exact details of date however are of minor importance; the significant fact is this, that at certain intervals after the well-known περίδειπνον or funeral-feast, held on the day of burial, other meals were served to the dead; and the Greek words themselves corroborate the view that ‘meals,’ not ‘sacrifices,’ is the right term to use; for as the funeral-feast is περίδειπνον, so also the νεκύσια are called by Artemidorus[1332] not ἱερὰ but δεῖπνα. These meals, being burnt over the place where the dead body lay, or being deposited unburnt in some large vase set up at the head of the grave, were thereby devoted to the use of the dead and became ἐναγίσματα in that curious half-way sense between ‘sacred’ and ‘accursed’ for which our language has no equivalent save the imported word ‘taboo’—objects devoted to a sacred purpose and bringing the curse of desecration on anyone who should pervert them to another use. The Greek language then was careful to mark the difference between gifts presented to the dead and propitiatory offerings made to the gods; and the difference was observed, not because the presents differed in kind, but because the conceptions of their purposes were different. The gods demanded sacrifices under pain of their displeasure; the dead needed food as living men need it, and their friends supplied it, not in fear, but in love.
These old pagan customs were at first discountenanced by the Church[1333]. But the common people clung to them with great tenacity[1334], and after a while they appear to have received even official encouragement; for St Anastasius Sinaites, bishop of Antioch during the latter half of the sixth century, enjoined the observance of them, and in so doing used some of the old names by which the customs were known in pre-Christian times. ‘Perform,’ he wrote, ‘the offices of the third day (τρίτα) for them that sleep, with psalms and hymns, because of him who rose from sleep on the third day, and the offices of the ninth day (ἔνατα) to remind those that yet live of them that have fallen asleep, and the offices of the fortieth day according to the old law and form (for even so did the people mourn for Moses), and the offices of the anniversary in memory of the dead, with gifts from his substance to the poor as a remembrance of him[1335].’ In this passage the cloak of Christian decency which St Anastasius provided does not entirely cover the nakedness of heathen superstition. There is indeed much aetiological skill in the saint’s manipulation of Biblical references; but the τρίτα and ἔνατα practised in his day, despite the addition of Christian prayers and hymns, were without doubt the same in essence as those to which Aristophanes and others allude—meals provided for the dead; for such indeed they still remain.