At Athens[[2668]] this ceremony took place immediately before day-break,[[2669]] numerous individuals bearing the mortuary torches, preceding the bier,[[2670]] and lighting up its melancholy way. The men next of kin marched silently in the rear of the coffin to intimate that they should shortly follow in the same track, and the women who kept together in a body,[[2671]] closed the procession, weeping and lamenting as they went. Stationed here and there in the crowd, were certain funeral musicians playing airs solemn and sad, but with an intermixture of enthusiastic notes, upon Lydian or Phrygian flutes. Sometimes the company was mounted in chariots or upon horses, but when especial honour was intended to the dead, everybody accompanied the hearse on foot. And surely a group like this, moving along by night through the narrow winding streets of Athens skirting the rocks of the Acropolis, flitting across the agora, between its silent booths and stately plane-trees, and issuing forth through the city gates into the sepulchral suburbs of the Cerameicos, where a forest of tombs stretched a considerable distance along the said way, to deposit, as if by stealth, the dust of a human being in the bosom of the earth, must have exhibited a striking and a solemn spectacle; more particularly if we suppose that, roused by the mournful music, thousands of neighbours and fellow-citizens hurried to their casements to behold their countryman carried to his long home. Having reached the destined spot, the body, if to be interred, was laid in the grave with its face looking towards the west.[[2672]] The earth was then thrown upon the coffin, and a monument, in most cases, speedily erected over it. If by special desire of the deceased, or for any other reason, cremation[[2673]] was preferred, they constructed a funeral pile of unctuous and odoriferous woods upon which oil and sweet unguents were commonly poured.
On the summit of this the corpse was then placed, and a torch having been applied to the pyre by some near relation of the dead, the whole was reduced to ashes. Before, however, the flames were quite extinguished, custom required that a little wine should be cast upon them, after which if any bones of the dead remained unconsumed they were carefully collected together with the ashes, and deposited in an urn, which in Greece was usually committed to the earth.[[2674]] All the surviving relations now returned mourning to their dwelling, where, towards evening, a funeral feast was celebrated in honour of the dead.[[2675]] Twice during the same month were sacred rites performed at the tomb, and afterwards for ever on the anniversary of the deceased’s birth, as well as on a certain day of the festival of Anthesteria, when unfading flowers were strewed around, and heaps of crowns and garlands suspended on the monument. The outward tokens of the grief felt inwardly consisted of black garments,[[2676]] heads partially shorn and a sad and neglected countenance.
In nearly all parts of the world, the moment death sets the impress of his seal on the human clay it appears to acquire an awful and mysterious sanctity, which none but the hardened and base will consent to violate. Belonging to the grave, its everlasting calm and silence seem already to brood over it. It presents itself to our eyes like the inhabitant of another world, and therefore though voiceless it reveals to us, as it were, some particulars respecting a state of being of which we know nothing, but feel necessarily the most devouring curiosity. Besides, when the deceased has been dear to us in life, we regard his corpse as the deserted mansion of a friend, as the tabernacle of a soul scarcely different, though divided from our own. On this account the ancient Greeks, a people beyond most others pious, imaginative, and affectionate, cultivated with peculiar care the duties which we owe the dead. Ancient writers abound with illustrations of this truth. When the Thebans, after the defeat of Adrastos and Polyneices refused burial to the fallen Argives, it was considered by the Athenians a sufficient cause for declaring war against Bœotia. It was not pretended that the invaders had been engaged in an honourable war; but having expiated their transgression by death, their remains had passed under the protection of the infernal deities, and to refuse them the rites of sepulture was not so much to insult them as Pluto, and the other gods of Hades, whose subjects they were now become. The unburied corpse was, moreover, a polluting object which defiled the temples of the celestial divinities, and therefore they also were interested in watching over the rights of the dead; for dogs and beasts of prey might carry their flesh or bones into the fanes, and thus render them unclean. And this sentiment, which constituted one of the most amiable parts of the Greek character, tended likewise to confer imperishable beauty and interest on the Hellenic land. For, the numerous tombs, public and private,[[2677]] which clustered over and hallowed its surface, addressed themselves still more powerfully to the heart than to the eye. Everywhere the devotion of the people clung around them. They were at once the creations and the monuments of human love, of public gratitude, of holy reverence for intellect and virtue.
The same observation, indeed, applies universally. The pyramid, the solitary barrow, rising like a hillock on the plains of Asia, the crowded cemetery, the vast suites of sepulchres excavated beneath the surface of the earth, each and all of these must ever be regarded by men of sensibility and unsophisticated understanding as so many unequivocal tokens of the ineradicable goodness of human nature. Examples without number might be adduced in illustration. When a North American chief was urged to cede to the European invaders the hunting-ground of his tribe, he stated his objection in these words: “How can we abandon the country in which all our ancestors lie interred? Shall we say to the bones of our forefathers, ‘Arise, and go along with us into a strange land’?” In many countries a more absorbing interest attaches to the abodes of the dead than to the habitations of the living. Who, for example, can traverse, without the most profound emotion, those suites of subterraneous palaces at Thebes denominated the Tombs of the Kings? You seem, in these vast painted halls and dusky passages, to hold actual converse with death. The grave unfolds its mysteries on all sides around. The imagination is kindled and takes a colour from the unearthly creations presented to it, and you return with something like reluctance to the glare and turmoil and busy passions of the world. Among the Greeks, as we have observed, the dead were invested with a sanctity which all good men esteemed inviolable, and this persuasion acquired additional force from the belief, that, though separated, the spirit and the body were not yet wholly independent of each other. For, upon the treatment experienced by its remains the state of the soul was in some measure regulated in the realms below. If these received the rites of interment, the spirit was allowed freely to traverse that stream, dusky and inviolable, which surrounded the realm of Hades. If not, the ghost, cold and desolate, wandered along its hither shore during the space of a hundred years; after which, the laws of Orcus relented, and permitted it to taste of happiness amid the groves of Asphodel,[[2678]] and those blissful bowers where poets and sages devoted the circle of eternity to the culture and pure delights of wisdom. From this persuasion, the ghosts of persons denied the rites of sepulture[[2679]] are represented by the poets hovering around their corses and presenting themselves in visions to their surviving friends, requesting them to sever, by the performance of their obsequies, the sad links which still bound them to their dwellings of clay. Thus Homer introduces Elpenor[[2680]] conjuring Odysseus to perform this last sad office for his remains. Often when, by shipwreck or murder, the body was cast on some solitary shore, or abandoned in the recesses of some forest or mountain, inhumation was solely dependent on chance. But if fortune conducted any stranger to the spot, it was considered incumbent on him to discharge, in one way or another, the ties of humanity to the dead. But, because he might not be able to dig a grave or consume the body on a funeral pile, it was reckoned sufficient to cast three handfuls of dust upon the corpse, of which one, at least, was to be sprinkled on the head. Thus we find, in Horace,[[2681]] the manes of the Pythagorean philosopher, Archytas, intreating the mariners, who had found his body on the beach, to honour it with this rite:
Quamquam festinas, non est mora longa, licebit
Injecto ter pulvere curras.
Though great thy haste, this will not much delay;
Cast thrice the dust, then hasten hence away.
In order the more certainly to secure this act of humanity from the passer-by[[2682]] persons about to perish by shipwreck were accustomed to tie around their body gold, or jewels, or whatever else they possessed of value, that it might defray the expenses of their interment, and reward him who undertook it.
There were, however, certain classes of men who, by their open or secret wickedness, were supposed to be placed beyond the expansive circle of human sympathy, on whom it would have been criminal to lavish sepulchral rites. These were, in the first place, individuals struck by lightning, whom the gods were believed thus to have destroyed,[[2683]] from a knowledge of their guilt, though hidden from all other eyes. Corpses of this kind were usually covered with earth where they lay without the slightest ceremony, unless they happened to have fallen in some public temple, or agora, or highway, under which circumstances a hook was fastened to the body, by which it was dragged and cast into some pit. On other occasions the carcase was hedged round and so left. Men guilty of suicide were likewise denied the honours of burial, but more especially those of the funeral pile. Their carcases were simply thrown into a pit and covered over, to prevent their becoming a nuisance to the living. Villains who committed sacrilege, and traitors to their country were not suffered to enjoy in death the protection of those divinities whom they had outraged, or the refuge of a grave in a country which they had basely betrayed to the enemy.[[2684]] Their dishonoured bones were cast beyond the borders, nor was it permitted any citizen to celebrate for them the rites of burial. Thus King Pausanias, who sought to enslave his country to the Persians, was treated by the Lacedæmonians, Aristocrates by the Arcadians, and Phocion by the people of Athens,[[2685]] though in this last case, perhaps, through error and misapprehension. The last and worst class were tyrants[[2686]] equally objects of hatred to gods and men, who usually when overcome by their subjects expiated their guilt by the most unheard-of torments, while, in the nether world, the worst pangs of Tartarus were reserved for them. To deposit in the bosom of the earth the carcases of malefactors so heinous would of itself have been esteemed a crime of a very deep dye. The remains were, therefore, trodden under foot, subjected to every other species of indignity, and then cast forth to be devoured by the dogs and vultures. Nay, if we may interpret the expression of Plato literally, the punishment of men who even aimed at tyranny in a free state and failed in the attempt was tremendous: they were tortured and mutilated, had their eyes burned out, suffered every imaginable insult and injury, and at last crucified, or covered with pitch and burned alive: their wives and children suffered the same punishment—the innocent being confounded with the guilty. To protect their ashes from insults such as the above, the kings of Egypt who erected the pyramids and were in character fierce and tyrannical, are supposed by Herodotus not to have entrusted their bones to the keeping of those structures. A wild story is also related of Periander of Corinth,[[2687]] who, conscious of having ruled his countrymen with a rod of iron, dreaded the effects of their resentment on his corpse. Effectually to conceal the place of his interment he is said to have directed two of his satellites to go forth at night on a certain road and kill and bury clandestinely the first man they should meet. Four others were despatched to execute the same vengeance upon them, and another crowd of assassins received orders to exterminate and bury these four. Periander, then old and infirm, presented himself to the first murderers, was slain and buried, and the place, from the sudden death of all who might have known it, thus remained undiscovered for ever.