To Phoebus then his Father spake
Who drives the clouds along,
‘Dear Phoebus go, Sarpedon find
Amid the battle throng,
From purple gore his body lave;
Then bear him far away,
And wash him in the flowing stream,
And in ambrosia lay;
With garments clothe that wax not old,
And let the winged pair,
The brethren Sleep and Death, from thence
His body swiftly bear
To wealthy Lycia’s goodly land,
Where kinsmen shall be fain
To heap the mound and set the stone,
The guerdon of the slain.’
It is thoroughly in accord with the spirit of Greek art that it should have welcomed and dwelt on the idea thus suggested by the epic poet. Greek painters and sculptors, like Greek dramatists and lyric poets, loved above all things to escape from the prosaic details of actual life into the ideal world of myth and fancy, into the language of which they translated the facts of every-day existence. On a very beautiful red-figured vase, ascribed to Euphronius, is represented the bearing away of Sarpedon’s dead body by Sleep and Death, Sleep being a benign daemon with yellow hair, Death a dark-haired being of more forbidding aspect[9]. And after the precedent furnished by Sarpedon, Sleep and Death have been introduced into scenes on other Greek vases, wherein the body is not that of any ancient hero, but of an ordinary citizen. We give an example from an Attic white lekythos[10] ([Fig. 5]). The dead body, the eyes of which are not closed in death, is that of a girl, who is borne to the resting-place indicated by a sepulchral stele by two winged figures, of whom the bearded one is doubtless Death and the younger, or beardless, Sleep. The god Hermes, as conductor of souls, is present to preside at the deposition at the tomb.
The twin brethren Sleep and Death belong to poetry rather than to real belief. And it is the bodies, not the spirits, of the dead which they bear to the last resting-place. Other Athenian lekythi represent the journey of the soul to the land of shades, under the guidance of Hermes or in the boat of Charon. With these pictures I will deal in the third chapter, which treats of Greek beliefs as to the future life. Meantime we must follow the funeral procession to the cemetery.
In the Homeric age the bodies of fallen chiefs were burned with much ceremony, and funeral games celebrated at their tombs. The classical instance is the burning of the body of
FIG. 5. DEPOSITION AT THE TOMB.
Patroclus in the Iliad. But even at that time it is doubtful whether so expensive a method of disposing of the body was at all universal. In historical times, as may be abundantly proved from ancient writers and from existing remains, the customs of burning and of burying flourished together. Distinguished and wealthy men commonly had their funeral pyres, but the bodies of the Kings of Sparta, for example, when they died abroad, were embalmed and carried home for burial, instead of being burned. In various cemeteries of Greece we find sometimes the one custom most prevalent and sometimes the other. It is unnecessary in the present place to go beyond this general statement. When the body was buried, it was not, save very rarely, placed in a sarcophagus of stone, but far more commonly in a hole in the rock; or a grave was dug in the soil and a small chamber constructed of slabs of stone or terra-cotta. In case of burning, a pyre of wood was erected in or near the cemetery, and after the flames had burned themselves out, the human ashes, which are readily to be distinguished, were carefully and piously collected and placed in a vessel of bronze or of earthenware, which might either be buried or preserved in some hallowed spot in the house.
FIG. 6. PYRE OF PATROCLUS.
A late vase of Canusium[11] furnishes us with a representation of the pyre of Patroclus, and of the sacrifices which according to Homer were performed at it ([Fig. 6]). In the midst is the pyre of great logs, on which is heaped the armour of Patroclus. This detail shows, we may observe, how free are even the later vase-painters in their treatment of Homeric scenes, for Patroclus’ armour, which Hector had carried off, is not mentioned in the Iliad as being placed on his pyre. While Agamemnon pours a libation to the soul of the dead hero, Achilles plunges his sword into the neck of one of the Trojan captives, while the rest sit by, awaiting their fate. The inscription beneath, ΠΑΤΡΟΚΛΟΥ ΤΑΦΟΣ makes the identification certain.