The cultus of ancestors was closely parallel to that of the gods. To both, sacrifices of food and of drink were constantly brought. To the temple of the gods corresponded the family heroum or shrine. To the statues of the gods corresponded the representation of the human dead in an ideal or heroized form. And gods and ancestors alike partook with their votaries of food at stated times, becoming the guest-friends of the worshipper.
Regarding the relation of the Spartan stelae to the cultus of ancestors as certain, we may proceed to consider in the light of that connexion the meaning of various details of the reliefs. The thing that is perhaps of the highest interest in them is the high honour paid to women. Ancestor and ancestress sit in state side by side, and are approached by their descendants, the smallness of whose figures is intended to portray the humility of their approach to their heroic progenitors. That ancestor-worship should find a special home at Sparta need not surprise us. We know that respect for elders and for parents was almost as strongly rooted among the conservative Laconians as it is in our days among the Chinese and Japanese. An exhortation to be worthy of their predecessors was the appeal which most readily stirred the hearts of the Spartan spearmen. They lived under the shadow of the past to an extent which we can hardly realize. But it is scarcely so familiar a fact that Sparta was the city in all Greece where women were held in highest honour. The Athenians inherited something of the Ionian desire for the seclusion of women, and to the contemporaries and countrymen of Thucydides it seemed high praise of a woman to say that she was never talked of. At Sparta, on the other hand, in some of the great crises of history, women are prominent in the foreground, from the days when little Gorgo saved her father Cleomenes from being bribed, to the days when Agiatis stirred up a later Cleomenes to his projects of political reform. The Spartan education, which seemed to regard women as only of use for bearing children to uphold the State, can scarcely have aimed at a high intellectual ideal. Modern German writers are fully convinced that sharing the exercises and games of the men must have rendered Laconian women coarse and masculine. Yet the Spartan ladies had a great share in the ownership of land; Spartan nurses were sought for in all Greece for the rearing of boys; and we learn from Plutarch that in all matters the Spartans were ready to take the advice of their women, and looked on their approval as the highest of rewards. On this regard for women among the Laconians, the treatment of women in their sepulchral reliefs is an excellent commentary.
The offerings brought to the seated pair in the relief first cited are such as belonged in a special way to the dead. The pomegranate was the food of the Shades, which, when Persephone had tasted in the palace of Hades, she belonged to him beyond recall. The cock and the egg are the simplest meat-offerings which were brought to the dead and enjoyed by the living. Flowers in all countries and in all ages have been laid on the tomb; and the Greeks who loved to deck their banquets with them were not an exception to the general rule. The winecup in the hand of the seated hero may be characterized as a very broad hint to his descendants that at the tomb were due the libations which were grateful alike to the gods and to the spirits of the dead. The serpent who is sometimes represented as drinking from the cup is either the companion of the dead or even his spirit in another form. The way in which a serpent disappears into the ground marks him out as essentially a chthonic being.
A few more characteristic specimens of this class of monuments must be cited. On a stele from Chrysapha ([Fig. 30]) we see a man, depicted in an archaic style of art, seated, holding winecup and pomegranate; at his feet leaps a dog, while a horse is depicted in relief in the background. In discussing this relief Dr. Furtwängler[77] advocates the view that horse and dog have a symbolical reference, the horse being
FIG. 30. SEATED HERO.
nearly connected with Hades and the dog with Hecate, both mythologic beings closely connected with the dead. I have proposed[78] a somewhat bolder view, that these animals sculptured on the stone bear the same relation to the mortal horse and dog which had belonged to the hero that the portrait bears to himself, and that they are really a survival of an ancient custom, whereof we find traces in the graves of Greece and Italy, by which the horse and dog of a deceased warrior were slain and buried in the same place with him. Whether their bones were mingled with their master’s, or whether they are merely figured on his gravestone, the meaning is much the same, that wherever the lord is, there are his faithful attendants: ‘Admitted to that equal sky, his faithful dog shall bear him company,’ as Pope says. In any case, horse and dog on a tomb are certainly a mark of knightly rank.
Among many proofs that the animal companions of the hero had reference rather to his occupations and necessities than to any symbolism, the evidence afforded by a grave at Tanagra[79] seems worth citing. Although that grave is of a period later than Alexander the Great, it seems to preserve early Greek ways of looking at death and what lies beyond. The interior of this grave contained paintings of the head and neck of a horse, a sword and a loom, besides a house and various articles of furniture. Here the paintings seem closely to represent what might at an earlier time have been the contents of the grave. The horse and the sword belong to the husband, the loom to the wife, whether we are to consider these as reflections of the past life of the pair or as an accompaniment of their ghostly existence. The furniture and the house are provision for their spiritual need of a domicile, just as in the graves of Egypt we find paintings of the life of the house and farm, there placed to break the shock of death, and provide for the shadow of a departed landlord a shadow of his past employments[80].
We pass to the representations which serve to bridge the gap between the grave-monuments of Sparta and those of other districts. Among the Spartan reliefs published by Milchhoefer, the following occupy one plate[81]:—
A female figure, seen from the waist upwards, clad in a chiton, holding in her left hand a tall flower.