CHAPTER V.CREMATION AND INHUMATION.

The discussion of those abnormal cases of after-death existence, to which the last chapter has been devoted, has disclosed to us the fact that in all ages of Greece the condition most to be dreaded by the dead has been incorruptibility and the boon most to be desired a sure and quick dissolution; and that of the two methods by which the living might promote the disintegration of the dead, cremation and inhumation, the former alone has been accounted infallible. What benefit in the future existence was in old time thought to accrue to those whose bodies had been duly dissolved, and to be withheld fromrevenants, is a question which may conveniently be adjourned for a while. First we must verify the results obtained from the study of the abnormal by consideration of the normal; we must see whether ordinary funeral usage has had for its sole object the dissolution of the dead in the interests of the dead; and what, if any, distinction has been made between inhumation and cremation as a means of securing that object.

Now diverse methods of disposing of the dead, especially among a primitive folk, would naturally suggest diverse religious purposes to be served thereby, diverse conceptions of the future estate of the dead, or of their future abode, or of their future relations with the living; and for my part I do not doubt that, if our eyes could pierce the darkness of a long distant past which neither history nor even archaeology has illumined, we should see that the peoples who first used cremation and inhumation side by side in Greece were in so doing animated by diverse religious sentiments. But I hold also that in no period of which we have any cognisance have the Greeks regarded inhumationand cremation as means to different religious ends; but that, whichever funeral-method has been employed, one and the same immediate object has always been kept in view, the dissolution of the dead body, and one and the same motive (save in the quite exceptional circumstances where a scare ofvrykolakeshas temporarily arisen) has always prompted the mourners thereto, the motive of benefiting the dead.

But, while the object in view was single and constant, there would have been no inconsistency in making a certain distinction between the two methods available. On the contrary, if the sole object was the disintegration of the dead body, the surer and quicker means of attaining it should logically have been preferred. Cremation therefore might legitimately have been reckoned a superior rite to inhumation; for it cannot but have been recognised that the disintegration of the body is more rapidly and unfailingly effected by the action of fire than by the action of the soil.

It is true indeed that the solvent action of the earth upon the buried body—even with all due allowance for the absence of any coffin in many cases—is popularly regarded as far more rapid than it can actually be. The period usually reckoned by the common-folk as the limit of time requisite for complete dissolution is forty days. This is stated clearly enough in a few lines of a song of lamentation heard in Zacynthos:

καὶ μέσ’ ’στὸ σαραντοήμερο ἀρμοὺς ἀρμοὺς χωρίζουν,πέφτουνε τὰ ξανθὰ μαλλιὰ, βγαίνουν τὰ μαύρα μάτια,καὶ χώρια πάει τὸ κορμὶ καὶ χώρια τὸ κεφάλι[1226].

καὶ μέσ’ ’στὸ σαραντοήμερο ἀρμοὺς ἀρμοὺς χωρίζουν,

πέφτουνε τὰ ξανθὰ μαλλιὰ, βγαίνουν τὰ μαύρα μάτια,

καὶ χώρια πάει τὸ κορμὶ καὶ χώρια τὸ κεφάλι[1226].

‘And within the forty days, they (the dead) are severed joint from joint, their bright hair falls away, their dark eyes fall out, and asunder go trunk and head.’

The Zacynthian muse is horribly explicit; its utterances need no interpreter; itself rather gives the true interpretation of certain customs which are wide-spread in modern Greece and appear to date from pre-Christian days.

The fortieth day after death is almost universally observed in Greece as one on which the relations of the deceased should provide a memorial feast. There are indeed other fixed days for the like commemoration and ‘forgiveness[1227]’ of the dead, but theseall fall at periods of three, or a multiple of three, days, weeks, months, or years, from the date of death. These, I think, have been selected in deference to the mysterious virtue of the number three[1228], and not improbably multiplied by the importunities of a penurious priesthood, to whom some half-dozen hearty meals in the course of the year do not appear an inappropriate remuneration for their services at death-bed and burial. But the fortieth day was originally devoted to this purpose, it may reasonably be supposed, because it was the last opportunity of setting before the dead man’s neighbours and acquaintances savoury meat such as their soul loved, that they might eat thereof and ‘loose’ the dead man from any curse wherewith in his lifetime they had bound him; if dissolution was not to be retarded, the fortieth day was in popular reckoning the last opportunity for absolution.

From this it should follow that any memorial feasts held later[1229]than the fortieth day are of purely ecclesiastical contrivance; and the correctness of this inference is attested by a curious local usage which clearly distinguishes the popular and the ecclesiastical feasts. At Sinasos in Asia Minor two classes of commemorations are recognised. The one is calledκανίσκια, ‘little baskets,’ from the method in which food is distributed to the poor; this is held on the fortieth day. The other has usurped the nameμνημόσυνα, which commonly belongs to all memorial-feasts, and is held on the three anniversaries of the death (for, after the third, exhumation generally takes place, and no further memorial-feasts are needed) and consists in the presentation of an ornamental dish of boiled wheat (κόλλυβα) at the church and the reading of a service[1230]. In other words, the fortieth day is the popular festival, and the observances of later dates are ecclesiastical. Clearly the reason for this distinction must lie in the fact that the common-folk believe, as the song from Zacynthos shows, that dissolution is normally complete by the fortieth day, while the Church has prudently fixed the date, after which exhumation is permissible, at the end of the third year. Presumably then a period of forty days was the old pagan period, for which the Church has tried, with partial success, to substitute three years.

Several other small pieces of evidence point to the wide distribution of this popular notion. In Sinasos[1231], once more, and also in Patmos[1232], the fees paid to the priests for memorial services derive their name from the word ‘forty’ (σαράντα), as if the fortieth day were the limit; after that date, apparently, though my authorities are not explicit on the point, the priests have for their remuneration only the dish of boiled wheat or other presents in kind. In Crete, if a dead man is suspected of turningvrykolakassoon after his death, the people are anxious to deal with him before he enters upon his second period of forty days[1233]; for then all hope of natural dissolution is past, and he becomes as it were a confirmed vampire. In Scyros, the old custom of burning such corpses as were found on exhumation at the end of three years (or, in case of a panic, earlier) to be still whole, and were therefore suspected of vampire-like proclivities, has been replaced by the milder expedient of carrying the body round to forty churches in turn and then re-interring it, in the hope, as it seems, that each of the forty saints, whose sanctuaries have been honoured with a visit and a certain consumption of candles, will in return take a proportionate share in ‘loosing’ the suppliant dead—or, it may be, in the more mathematical expectation that the work effected in cases of ordinary burial by one funeral-service in forty days, will be achieved by forty funeral-services in one day. Whichever be the calculation on which the practice has been based, the number of churches to be visited is clearly governed by the number of days requisite, in popular belief, for ordinary dissolution.

But with all this reputed rapidity of the earth in ‘loosing’ the dead bodies committed to her care, the action of fire is incontrovertibly more rapid. In hours, not in days, may be counted the period of disintegration on the pyre. And as it is quicker, so also is it far surer. No body that has been burned can wander as arevenantover the earth, while for the buried there is no perfect assurance of dissolution. Some curse, some crime, the violence of their death, or the deficiency of their funeral rites, each and all of these may keep their bodies ‘bound’ and indissoluble.Cremation then is indisputably in theory the preferable means of securing to the dead that boon which they most desire; and I hold that in the practice of the Greek people there are signs that this preference was felt.

There are then two propositions to be established by reference to the actual funeral methods of Ancient and Modern Greece; first, that from the earliest ages of which we have cognisance cremation and inhumation have been identical in their religious purpose; second, that a preference for cremation, considered as a means to the single religious end, has been manifested.

The first thing needful in this twofold investigation is to understand the terms, which are to be used, in the sense in which the Greek understood them. Cremation means to us the consumption of the corpse by fire; inhumation the laying of the corpse out of sight in the earth; and unless one or other of those acts had been really performed, we should not consider that a funeral had taken place. But the Greeks judged rather by the intention than by the act. In certain cases, in which the actual digging of a grave was impossible, ancient usage prescribed a ceremonial substitute. The sprinkling of a handful of dust over a dead body was held to constitute burial. Such was all the funeral that Antigone could give to Polynices[1234]; such the minimum of burial enjoined by Attic Law on any who chanced upon a dead body lying unburied[1235]; such, according to Aelian, ‘the fulfilment of some mysterious law of piety imposed by Nature’ not only upon man but even on some of the brute creation, in such sort that the elephant, if he find one of his own kind dead, gathers up some earth in his trunk and sprinkles it over the prostrate carcase[1236]. ‘The fulfilment of some mysterious law of piety’—Aelian’s phrase accurately summarises the Greek view of burial. To us it is a necessary and decent method of disposing of the dead. To the Greeks it was something more—a provision for their dimly discerned welfare; and the intention of the living mattered so much more than the performance, that, in cases where real burial could not be given, a mere ceremony suggestive of burial was considered competent to ensure the same end.

Again in the case of a man drowned at sea or having met his death in any way which precluded the possibility of his body being brought home for burial, a means has always been found for fulfilling ‘the mysterious law of piety.’ Still, as in old time, the cenotaph serves the same end as the real sepulchre. A lay-figure, dressed if possible in some clothes of the dead man, receives on his behalf the full rite of burial[1237]; and if enquiry be made, to what purpose this empty ceremony, the answer is not slow in coming,γιὰ νὰ λυωθῇ ὁ πεθαμένος, ‘to the end that the dead man may be dissolved’; nor can I doubt that the same formal rite in old time served the same end.

And let no practical-minded critic here interpose the objection that a dead body lying unburied, exposed to sun and rain, must decompose at least as rapidly as one that has been buried; I have myself tried the effect of that criticism on the Greek peasants with instructive results. Once my suggestion was promptly met with a flat and honest denial—the most simple and final of answers, for, be it remembered, it is with the honest beliefs of the peasant, and not with physical facts, that we are dealing. Another time there was a pause, and then came the deliberate answer,βρωμάει τὸ κορμὶ, δὲν λυώνεται, ‘the corpse becomes putrid, but is not “loosed”.’ There was a distinction in the peasant’s mind between natural decomposition and the dissolution effected by a religious rite. But more often it has been pointed out to me that my apparently reasonable suggestion was really unpractical; a dead body left unburied would never suffer natural decay, but would be a prey to the beasts of the field and the fowls of the air; the vultures circling yonder overhead convicted me of unreason. And the answer could not but recall the threats of Achilles against Hector, or the fears of Antigone for Polynices, that dogs and carrion-birds should feast upon the corpse. So then it is perhaps a logical as well as an honest belief which the Greeks have always held, that dissolution of the body is afforded by one of two rites and by no third means.

Now one of these rites, inhumation, might on occasion be reduced to a mere ceremonial observance, the scattering of a handful of dust over the body, or the interment of an effigy in itsstead. Was the other rite, cremation, ever so reduced? Could the roar and crackle of the blazing pyre be ceremonially replaced by a small flame lighted in proximity to the dead body? Did the kindling of a fire, however incapable of consuming the dead body, constitute cremation in the same sense that a handful of earth, incapable of concealing the dead body, constituted interment?Prima faciethere is nothing wild in the supposition; it is consistent with the Greek conception of the funeral-rite, which looked rather to the intention than to the act; the proven fact of ceremonial inhumation guarantees the likelihood of ceremonial cremation. I take it therefore as a working hypothesis, and base its subsequent claim to be accepted as a fact on its ability to explain consistently a long series of phenomena in Greek funeral usage.

My first proposition, that from the earliest ages of which we have cognisance cremation and inhumation have served the same religious end, would have had an initial obstacle to surmount but for Professor Ridgeway’s work on the ethnology of early Greece. Diverse methods of disposing of the dead would at first sight, as I have said, suggest diverse conceptions of after-death existence. But Professor Ridgeway has shown conclusively, to my mind, that inhumation was the rite of the autochthonous Pelasgian people of Greece, and that cremation was introduced by the Achaean immigrants[1238]. Now it is improbable of course that these two peoples, when they first came into contact, held similar views concerning the hereafter. But the entry of the Achaean element was, according to all evidence, a long process of infiltration rather than a sudden invasion. The beginnings of it are conjecturally placed well back in the third millennium before Christ[1239]. There was ample time therefore, even before the later Mycenaean or the Homeric age, for differences of religious sentiment as between the two races to dwindle or to vanish, while the two rites of cremation and inhumation, with the inveteracy of all custom, still survived.

Thus there is no initial objection to the view that in any period known to us those who used cremation and those who used inhumation were animated by the same religious ideas; and at the same time I am relieved of the necessity of combating boththe old theory that cremation was adopted by the Greeks as a convenient substitute for inhumation during some period of migration or nomadic life, and Rohde’s more recent theory[1240]that fear of the spirits of the dead, which were believed to hover about graves where their bodies lay buried, led men to adopt cremation as a means of annihilating the body and thereby ridding themselves of the unwelcome spirit. Both those theories fail, apart from certain intrinsic defects, because they are attempts to explain a thing which never took place—a supposed substitution of cremation for inhumation between the Mycenaean and the Homeric ages. Professor Ridgeway has shown that the Mycenaean rite was that of the Pelasgians; the Homeric rite that of the Achaeans. It is an accident only that our earliest information respecting the two rites happens to be drawn from different periods of time; the real distinction between the two was a racial distinction; from the age when the Achaeans first entered Greece down to the Christian era cremation and inhumation were both continuously practised.

The positive evidence for my view that these two rites were mere racial survivals, which had already, in the earliest ages known to us, ceased to differ in religious import, is to be found not only in the fact that in historical times, or even earlier, the two rites were used side by side by the people of a single city in the same cemetery, but in an early tendency to fuse the two rites into one and to give to the same body the double treatment of cremation and inhumation combined; for clearly the only condition under which two such rites could be amalgamated must have been that there had ceased to be any conflict of religious significance between them.

How early this fusion began it is difficult to determine; but it is at least worth while to note a point which is apt to be overlooked, that the Homeric funeral-rite comprised inhumation. Cremation certainly was the main part of the rite, the actual means by which the corpse was disintegrated; but the funeral was not complete until the ashes had been collected and inhumed[1241]. This is an act of ceremonial inhumation just as much as the burial of an effigy dressed in a dead man’s clothes.

Moreover it is possible that the Mycenaean funeral-rite sometimes comprised an act of ceremonial cremation. To review here the archaeological evidence for some use of fire in Mycenaean graves is unnecessary; it will suffice to quote from the summary given by Rohde[1242]as the basis of his theory—to which I by no means assent—that a vigorous ‘soul-cult,’ involving propitiatory offerings to the dead, was a religious feature of that age. ‘Traces of smoke, remnants of ash and charcoal, point to the fact that the dead bodies were laid on the spot where were burnt those offerings to the dead which had previously been made in the tomb.... On the ground, or sometimes on a specially prepared bed of flints, the offerings were burnt, and then, when the fire had gone out, the bodies were laid on top and covered over with sand, lime, and stones.’

Now the fact that in Mycenaean graves gifts were actually consumed by fire while the corpse was left to the process of natural decay is indisputable; but, if the fire employed had no further purpose, the practice of the Mycenaean age would be unique. The custom of all later ages was to treat the corpse and the gifts alike, to burn both or to bury both. This is implied in ancient literature[1243], and confirmed by modern excavations; for funeral-urns seldom contain any remnants of gifts; which means that the gifts had been consumed on the pyre with the body, but that only the bones were collected and stored in the urn; whereas in graves the gifts are constantly found buried with the body and intact. Further the custom of burning both body and gifts is the old Achaean custom, as described by Homer in the funeral of Patroclus; and it would seem probable that the custom of interring both body and gifts intact was the original Pelasgian custom. Was then the use of fire in these Mycenaean graves the first step in the fusion of the Achaean and Pelasgian rites?

Again, the body was observed to lie on top of the burnt gifts. What is the meaning of this superimposition? According to Rohde the fire which consumed the gifts was allowed to go out, and the bodies were then laid on the cold ashes. But manifestly this cannot be proved. All that we know is that the fire did notconsume the bodies. No one can assert that they were untouched by flame or ember and that the smell of fire did not pass over them. Was then the act of laying the body on top of the burnt or burning gifts an act of ceremonial cremation?

These questions I cannot answer; but one thing is clear. Either the fusion of the Achaean and Pelasgian rites had already begun, or else, in their original forms, they both comprised usages which greatly facilitated their subsequent fusion.

When we pass on to the Dipylon-period, there is no longer any doubt. Cremation and inhumation were practised both severally side by side and also conjointly as a single rite. The evidence on which I mainly rely is derived from two series of excavations, those of Philios[1244]at Eleusis and those of Brückner and Pernice[1245]in the Dipylon cemetery at Athens.

The autochthonous population of Attica naturally adhered in the main to the old Pelasgian rite of inhumation. Yet at Eleusis, even according to Philios who strangely belittles the importance of his own discoveries[1246], there was one certain case of cremation; and in the Dipylon cemetery also was found one urn which could be dated with equal certainty. One or two other probable cases have also been recorded by others[1247]. Clearly then as early as the eighth centuryB.C.cremation was sometimes used, side by side with inhumation, as the effective means of disintegrating the dead body.

And there is equally sure proof that the two rites were also employed conjointly, in the sense that a ceremonial act of inhumation followed actual cremation, or a ceremonial act of cremation accompanied actual inhumation. A conspicuous instance of the former is the one certain case of actual cremation recorded by Brückner and Pernice[1248]. A bronze urn containing the calcined bones of a boy or girl had been deposited not in a mere hole dugto fit it, but in a grave fully prepared as if for the reception of a corpse. The measurements of the grave were of normal size; in it had been laid, along with the urn, gifts of the usual nature—an amphora, two boxes, a bowl, and a jug; and above the grave, in a prepared space considerably wider than the actual grave, stood one of the large Dipylon-vases. In every respect the interment had been carried out as if it were the interment of an unburnt body. An attempt had been made so to combine the two rites of cremation and inhumation that neither should seem subordinate to the other.

Instances of the other sort, in which ceremonial cremation accompanied actual inhumation, are furnished by Philios’ excavations at Eleusis. Speaking of the large earthenware jars which often served as coffins for children, he says, ‘Whereas the bones contained in these vessels were unburnt, all round the vessels in the soil traces of burning were abundant and varied[1249].’ Now these traces of fire cannot have been due to the burning of gifts brought subsequently to the interment; for that custom naturally resulted in a stratum of burnt soil above the grave. But here the traces were ‘all round the vessels, in the soil.’ Apparently then we have here a practice parallel to that of Mycenaean times. The body was interred and obtained its actual dissolution by natural decay; but before the interment a fire was kindled in the grave, and among the flames or on the embers the body in its coffin-jar was laid and covered over with the soil. Whether at Eleusis, as at Mycenae, the funeral-gifts were consumed in that fire, we do not know for certain; but since it is undoubtedly rare to find any gift along with the child’s body in these vessels, it is reasonable to suppose that the few gifts—few, because all the circumstances of these funerals seem humble—were burnt[1250]just as were the grander offerings at Mycenae. At any rate these cases reveal an intention of associating fire with the buried body, of adding to the rite of interment a ceremonial act of cremation.

The tendency towards fusion of the two funeral rites has now been traced through the pre-historic era; it is in the historic periodthat the fusion appears most general and most complete. I will take as typical instances a number of graves, ranging in date from the sixth to the fourth century, opened by the two German excavators on whose narrative I have largely relied for the Dipylon-period[1251]. These graves numbered somewhat under two hundred. In the classification of them there appears the important item—forty-five graves in which the body had been actually burned. In other words, in approximately a quarter of the cases observed the rites of cremation and inhumation had been combined, and that too in such a way that both elements, fire and earth, might well have seemed to share together the work of dissolution. Neither method is here exalted to sole efficacy, neither is degraded into mere ceremony. The balance of importance is adjusted, and the two acts which form the composite funeral-rite are recognised as equal. Indeed there are no longer two distinct acts; they have coalesced; the moment and the act of laying the body in the earth are also the moment and the act of laying the body on the pyre. Amalgamation is complete.

Having traced the history of Greek funeral-usage down to this point, I may now fairly claim, first, that my working hypothesis—the practice of ceremonial cremation as the counterpart of ceremonial inhumation—is justified by the single and consistent explanation which it affords of the phenomena which I have noticed (and I may add that I shall have occasion to explain other phenomena in the latter half of this chapter in the same way); secondly, if that explanation be accepted, I may claim that the only condition under which the two rites could have been employed both severally as alternatives and conjointly as one composite rite was that the religious purpose underlying them both was one and the same. And this purpose, if there is any meaning in the stories of Patroclus, Elpenor, Polynices, and Polydorus, was to give to the dead that which they most craved, a speedy dissolution.

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 inminutiaeis the true criterion of their common origin or other close kinship, andits 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 theprothesisor 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 scenedescribed 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, whoobjected 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 thatthe 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 ofvictims 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 intoentire 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 ofvrykolakes. 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 thevrykolakaswas a purelydefensive, 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 therevenantbut 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 invrykolakes, 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:

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