VIII.
THE COFFINS.
Numerous excavations and the close scrutiny which modern scholars have given to Grecian graves have made it possible to state with considerable accuracy the materials employed for coffins, and the various styles of coffins, tombs and monuments used in ancient Hellas.
The earlier coffins were usually made of baked clay[190], but the authors inform us that, in the case of those Athenians who fell in battle, and whose bodies were not found, chests of cypress-wood were buried as cenotaphs[191]. Stone coffins, also, were probably used among the Greeks. There are preserved traces of a letter to Plato, from two of his friends, in which they speak of this burying stone, as found at Assos, in Lydia[192]. The elder Pliny mentions this stone of Assos, called the sarcophagus, or flesh-eating. He assigns, as the reason for its name, the fact that “within forty days, it is known certainly to consume the bodies which are placed in it, skin, flesh, bones, and all else save the teeth[193].”
The coffins of baked clay were rudely fashioned, as might be expected from such coarse material. One of the oldest kind of coffins was that in which Dionysus, according to the fable, laid away whatever was mortal of the beautiful Ariadne. That rude contrivance was composed of three flat plates of clay, forming a kind of triangular prism[194], so that this casket of the wine god’s wife must have been as picturesque and shapely as a piece of sewer-pipe. Sometimes, however, these pottery coffins were very highly decorated. They were painted in brilliant colors[195], with representations of lily-leaves and palms, the flowering acanthus and the lotus, and with wreaths and arabesques and intricate tracery.
At a later period, the sides of the triangle assumed a curved shape. A section of the coffin was a spherical triangle, and the coffin became more complicated and durable. Stackelberg gives a very careful description of the construction of this style, together with an illustration[196]. On the under layer of curved tiling, rest the bones of the deceased, at the sides are double layers of tiling, with one at the top. Two upright tiles close the ends. Another specimen of great interest is the coffin of a child, unearthed at Athens by Stackelberg, in the beginning of the present century. It has an elliptical form, and looks like a movable bath-tub. Many utensils were found in this coffin, packed away with the skeleton. They will be described hereafter[197].