Having now gone through the whole circle of private life among the Hellenes, we shall consider them in the hour of death, and during the ceremonies with which dust was committed to dust. From a great variety of causes, the dissolution of the body was regarded by the pagans of antiquity with less terror and apprehension than modern nations experience. Their belief in the continuance of existence was not perhaps more unshaken than that of pious men in Christian countries, but the life to come was contemplated as more nearly resembling the present; and they imagined that, by the performance of certain rites and ceremonies, and through the favour of the gods in various ways obtained, they might easily secure to themselves a blissful immortality, which, according to their creed, was denied to none but the incorrigibly flagitious. In earlier times, moreover, before the birth of the sceptical systems of philosophy, no chilling doubts had been thrown on the doctrine of immortality. Ignorant they might be of the Divine nature, of the relations of man to his Creator, of the true duties, obligations, and rules of life; but they were so fully convinced of the existence of a race of superior beings, that they might almost be said to feel its truth as they did that of their own existence. These beings they believed to be everlastingly occupied with human, or rather with Hellenic, concerns; for it seems evident that most of the gods were looked upon more as the parents and guardians of the Grecian race than as remote and general watchers over the whole universe. To pass out of life, therefore, was but to pass out of the domains of one god into those of another; to exchange the protection of the celestial for that of the infernal Zeus. Everywhere and on all occasions Gods were supposed to attend their footsteps, but more especially at the moment of their decease, when a cloud of heavenly messengers hovered around them, some to accomplish the separation between soul and body, others to lead and protect the spirit in its descent to the subterranean world, and others again to watch over its happiness while there, sharing along with it the same dwelling-place, and bearing the same relation to it as a monarch does to his subjects.

Possessed firmly by persuasions of this kind, it is little to be wondered at that the ancient Greek experienced less reluctance to enter upon the domains of the dead than is now too commonly felt.^[2658] He had, besides, another motive to cheer his departure. It was his firm expectation to be welcomed on his entrance to the Elysian fields by his parents or friends or companions, by all, in short, whom he had loved in life, and who had preceded him to that sacred and serene abode. Thinking and feeling thus, death seemed scarcely death, but a mere shifting of the scene or change of locality. It was but falling asleep in one place to wake in another where their happiness could know no change; where God would wipe away tears from all eyes, and where there should be no more trouble or sorrow or suffering for ever.

These, nevertheless, must be regarded as the habitual convictions of the mind, which, however they might influence the actions and resolutions of men, could by no means stifle their feelings, or prevent that sorrow and regret which must always be experienced by persons about to be separated from those they love. Hence the death-bed of the Greeks presented not a scene of stoical indifference. All the tenderness and sympathy of which the human heart is capable was usually awakened. The friends, and more especially the women of the family, crowded about the couch to press the dying hand, and catch the last breath as it fluttered in broken murmurs from the lips.^[2659] Most persons, when about to bid an eternal adieu to the world, desired to lay some command on their sorrowing friends, not as an imperious task but as a labour of love, by performing which they might be reminded of the departed. Such commands as these the Grecian women were most anxious to receive, that they might treasure them up in their souls, and by pondering on them incessantly, day and night, keep vividly alive in their memory the idea of those who had once been all in all to them. Nor when the spirit had departed did they forsake the corpse, nor abandon it to the care of menials. With their own hands they closed the beloved eyes,^[2660] and tied up the mouth from which words of kindness or comfort were never more to sound. Putting a severe restraint upon their feelings, they straightened,^[2661] laved, anointed, and laid out the corpse,^[2662] covered it with costly garments,^[2663] and placed crowns of flowers upon its head: it was then borne to the vestibule of the mansion and laid with the feet towards the door,^[2664] to intimate that it was about to proceed on its last journey, and take up its abode in the house prepared for all living. Vessels of lustral water^[2665] were then placed beside it; that, being accounted unclean, all those who passed in or out and might be supposed to be reached by the effluvia which exhaled from the dead, might sprinkle and purify themselves. Branches of laurel and acanthus, with locks of hair, were suspended over the doorway, each being a symbol speaking to the imagination of that lively people. While thus exposed the corpse was watched day and night by its natural guardians, until the moment arrived for bearing it forth to the funeral pile or the grave. It was then laid in a coffin, generally of cedar or cypress-wood,^[2666] which, being placed upon a bier,^[2667] was borne away, the mourning friends and family attending.

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:

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.

Most opposed to these were those honourable citizens^[2688] who fell for their country in defence of its liberty and laws, whom their fellow-citizens followed to the tomb with every conceivable mark of public gratitude and honour, and whose names future generations were taught to reverence like those of gods. In some sense, indeed, they were actually deified. Rites and ceremonies and sacrifices were performed annually in their honour, and by their great and heroic spirits future generations swore as by the most ancient inhabitant of Olympos. Sometimes, as on the plain of Marathon, the remains of the warriors were collected together, and with holy rites enclosed in one common barrow, calculated by its dimensions to be co-lasting with the world. On other occasions their remains were brought to the city and buried there. Thus, at the outbreak of the Peloponnesian war, the first citizens who fell received the distinguished honours of a public funeral. Their remains were enclosed in coffins of cedar, and laid in open hearses, drawn by horses carefully caparisoned, and covered with garlands, were conveyed to the Cerameicos, the whole population of the state attending. When they had been there committed to the earth, Pericles, the greatest statesman and orator of those times, ascended a bema, and, in words which must thrill through the hearts of all posterity, pronounced on them an encomium to merit which most brave men would cheerfully have bartered life.

The modes of sepulture prevalent in different ages among the Hellenes were various in like manner as the monuments erected in honour of the dead. Originally, when public security was weak, men buried their dead within the walls of their own dwellings, where alone, perhaps, they could hope to preserve their resting-place inviolable. In accordance with this pious feeling a law was anciently enacted at Thebes in Bœotia, that whoever built himself a house should construct within or adjoining it a repository for the dead. But when states grew up and acquired strength, and the shadow of their protection fell around far and wide, it was found practicable to consult the public health without infringement of the reverence due to the divinities of Hades, and the habitations of the departed were erected, like a sacred circle, round the city walls.

Afterwards, in the period of Grecian decrepitude, the cities once more opened their gates to their ancestors, and permitted that they should share with themselves the imperfect security which was the lot of all in those degenerate times.

Much has been said on the custom which obtained among both Greeks and Romans, of extending their cemeteries along the high roads leading countrywards from the city gates.^[2689] Their object appears to have been twofold: first, by erecting the monuments of deceased friends in sight of all persons entering or quitting the city to render their memory more enduring; secondly, that by witnessing the honours paid to the brave and good of past times, those who came after them might be incited to imitate their example.

But no place was deemed too sacred to admit the remains of good or great men, which were occasionally enshrined within the precincts of temples or sacred groves.^[2690] Thus the children of Medea were buried in the temple of Hera, Œdipos found a tomb in the grove of the Eumenides at Colonos,^[2691] and Hesiod, whose body comes floating to the shore while the Samians are engaged in the performance of sacred rites, is honoured with a funeral in the grove of the Nemean Zeus.^[2692] Euchides, likewise, who died in consequence of the extraordinary celerity with which he performed the journey to and from Delphi in quest of the sacred fire, was interred by the Platæans in the temple of Artemis Euclea. Among the Spartans the practice commonly prevailed of burying around sacred edifices; nor did they, even in later times, banish their dead to the suburbs; the design of this departure from the fashion elsewhere established being to eradicate from the mind of youth all apprehensions of spectres, and reluctance to move, whether by night or by day, among tombs and graves. In all parts of Greece, families, at least when above the humblest in rank, possessed each their burial grounds, whether standing wholly apart in orchards or gardens,^[2693] or forming so many separate portions of the general cemetery.^[2694] But nowhere does so great stress appear to have been laid on this distinction of families in death as at Sparta, as may be inferred from the account of that battle in which, animated by the songs of Tyrtæos, the youth bound about their right arms tablets inscribed with their own names and those of their fathers, that so, should they all perish, their friends might be able to select from among the heaps of slaughter the bodies of their relatives, and inter them with scarlet mantles and olive-leaves in the cemeteries of their clans.^[2695]

Frequently the remains of distinguished persons were consigned to the dust in picturesque situations, remote from towns and the habitations of men, where chapels were in many instances erected to their memory. Thus we find the heroon of Androcrates^[2696] shrouded in thick copses and trees amid the spurs of Mount Cithæron, on the western extremity of the field of battle of Platæa. In a situation very similar stood the tomb and temple of Amphiaraos, and the heroon of Drimacos in the island of Chios. Among the Cretans, likewise, the sepulchre of Zeus occupied the lofty summit of a mountain, where its ruins are still pointed out to the traveller. A poetical sentiment, moreover, has, in modern times, given rise to the persuasion that the ruins of Themistocles’ tomb are still to be seen amid that line of ancient sepulchres which run along the surf-beaten rocks near the point of Cape Halimos. On this supposition is based the well-known passage of Byron: