But the learning of Colonel Leake has clearly shown, that the monument of this illustrious statesman stood within the horns of the great port of Aphrodisium. In the city of Magnesia, where he died, his tomb stood in the agora, which was customary when extraordinary honour was designed the dead.^[2697] Thus the monument of Timoleon,^[2698] surrounded by porticoes and other public buildings, was erected in the agora of Syracuse; and that of Harmodios and Aristogeiton occupied the same place in the city of Athens, where, in more ancient times, the tombs of distinguished personages were hewn out in the face of the cliffs, lined with marble, and otherwise sumptuously adorned. Solon, however, sought to repress the luxury of cemeteries^[2699] by ordaining that no tomb should have an arched roof, or require more labour than could be performed by ten men in three days. But this law, in all probability, was never strictly observed; for the Cimonian sepulchres, still seen high amid the rocks overlooking the hollow valley which divides the Areopagos from the Pnyx, seem to have been of dimensions too spacious to have been hewn out within the legal term.^[2700] Afterwards, moreover, mortuary monuments of extraordinary magnificence were erected at Athens, as that, for example, of the hetaira Pythonicè. But it was in barbarous countries that funereal structures exhibited the greatest splendour, which reached possibly its acmè in the tomb of Mausolos, king of Caria, an edifice consisting of a pyramid erected on a square basis, adorned on all sides with sculptured figures in relief, and surmounted by a chariot drawn by four horses. The tomb of the mistress of Gyges, though for materials inferior, probably exceeded in dimensions this seventh wonder of the world. It was erected, too, as a memorial of affection; for, when the woman who, during her life, had ruled both him and his kingdom, had been removed from earth, that shepherd king collected together, we are told, the whole of his subjects, and threw up so vast a barrow over her remains, that, in whatever part of his realm he might be, within Mount Tmolos, he might enjoy the melancholy pleasure of beholding her grave.

In the structure of their tombs, as well as their mode of interment, the various nations of antiquity observed each a different style. Thus, in the purification of Delos, the monuments of the Carians were easily distinguished from those of the Greeks by the manner in which their remains were deposited in the grave. Certain sepulchral mounds, found in Peloponnesos, were distinguished by some characteristic features from those of the natives, and denominated the Tombs of the Phrygians; and the burying places of certain foreigners on whom the Greeks bestowed the name of Amazons, exhibited as long as they endured some distinctive marks^[2701] by which they were known to cover the ashes of some barbarous people. Over the tomb of Hippolyta, indeed, a pillar was erected in the Grecian manner; but at Chalcis, where there was an Amazonium, the structure would appear to have exhibited some peculiar features, as well as the tomb of these warlike ladies, which was shown in the Megaris, between the agora and a spot named Rhus, in the form of a lozenge,^[2702] resembling their shields. Similar in shape, likewise, were probably the Amazonian monuments found near Scotussa in Thessaly, as well as those on the banks of the rivulet Hermodon, in the neighbourhood of Cheronæa.^[2703] On the plains of Troy the Amazon Myrinna reposed under a vast barrow.^[2704]

The structures thus erected in honour of the dead might have proved more durable but for the practice common among the ancients, of interring jewels, gold, precious vases,^[2705] and other treasures with the corpse, which afterwards roused the cupidity of profligate men, and tempted them to rifle the last houses of their forefathers; for it is one of the most odious and debasing features of civilisation, at certain stages of it, that death is habitually desecrated, and the grave ceases to be a refuge. Thus the tombs of the Macedonian kings were plundered by the Gauls^[2706] in the alliance of Pyrrhos. Again, the colony of Roman freedmen sent to raise Corinth from its ashes, discovering by chance that the catacombs contained bronze and fictile vases of great beauty, rifled the whole cemetery, and filled Rome with the spoils, which were denominated Necrocorinthia. Even the obolos^[2707] placed beneath the tongue, and the simple ornaments of the humbler dead, proved sufficient to excite the avarice of a certain class of robbers, denominated from their practices tomb-spoilers.^[2708] When, however, the dust of the departed has reposed in its cerements for many ages, to disturb and plunder it becomes the pursuit of learned men, and is regarded as a branch of the science of antiquities. Thus the sepulchres of the Egyptian kings have been spoiled and polluted by travellers, who have burned by thousands the wooden gods of the Pharaohs in their kitchens, sawed off the faces of pillars, dragged forth bodies and coffins from their last hiding-place in order to pilfer the golden ornaments suspended around the necks of the dead. In Etruria, too, the same scientific havoc has been carried on, and the museums of Europe have been enriched by what was once a capital offence. Even in our own country, barrows have been habitually opened, and the bones of our ancestors dislodged from their homes. Very curious relics of antiquity, however, have thus been brought to light. Similar tumuli in the East, denominated topes, have been examined in Affghanistân. Beneath the centre is usually a well, in which the ancient remains, consisting of metallic vases, small cylinders of gold, rings, jewels, and gold pins, appear to be found.^[2709]

It was customary among the Greeks, not only while their grief was yet new, but habitually for many years, to visit the graves of the dead, to suspend garlands and crowns and fillets of wool upon their head-stones, or possibly, as is still the custom in Burgundy, to place wreaths or other ornaments of pure wool upon the grave itself,^[2710] and to protect them by a trellis-work of willow boughs. Hither, too, were brought baskets full of all fair and fragrant flowers, more particularly roses, myrtles, amaranths,^[2711] and lilies, to be strewed upon the beloved spot. Sometimes graves were covered by a netting of wild thyme,^[2712] which, like those characters that are ennobled by affliction, yielded forth a delicious perfume beneath the foot of the mourner. In cool and shady spots, graves were sometimes adorned with the small everlasting,^[2713] and the white flower called pothos.^[2714] Public cemeteries were likewise, in many places, beautified by trees, selected in some cases for their thick foliage and spreading form, as the elm; in others, for their graceful shape and evergreen leaf, as the poplar and the cypress. Other trees, also, whether planted by the hand of man or springing up spontaneously, covered the walks or spots of green sward found in the cemeteries of Greece, supplying in abundance that sombre shade into which grief loves to retire, and where the sepulchral plants chiefly delight to grow.

Such spots so shaded, so verdant, and full of fragrance, so consecrated to silence and repose, probably first suggested the idea of the Elysian Fields or Islands of the Blessed, which the poets of Greece assigned to be the abode of happy souls. At first perhaps the ghosts were believed to dwell in the cemeteries, retiring by day to the depths of the tombs and issuing forth during the dark and tranquil hours of night to enjoy, by the light of the moon or the stars, the sight of the world they had partially quitted. From this notion flowed all the modifications observable in the internal structure of tombs. First, care was taken that the earth should not press heavily on the corpse, somewhere within the dimensions of which the ghost was supposed^[2715] habitually to reside. Sentiments not greatly dissimilar still survive among ourselves. I once remember to have read on the gravestone of a little girl standing near the stile by which you enter the shady churchyard of Newport, in Monmouthshire, the following epitaph, in which this idea is clearly embodied:

Secondly spacious and elegant chambers were frequently constructed for the spirit’s use, where food was likewise placed, and lamps were kindled which, furnished with wicks of amianthos^[2716] and supplied with inexhaustible fountains of oil, were believed to burn on everlastingly. A similar notion leads many Mohammedan nations to turn a small arch in the stone basement of their tombs to accommodate the ghost with free ingress and egress. Connected also with this article in the creed of the ancients^[2717] was the opinion, that spirits might often be seen gliding in shadowy shapes among the tombs, which may be regarded as a notion almost co-extensive with humanity itself.

In their modes of sepulture the barbarous nations^[2718] of the ancient world differed widely from each other and from the Greeks. The Syrians, Egyptians, and even Persians, wholly eschewing the funeral pile, buried their dead, having first embalmed them with various conservative and aromatic substances, as myrrh and aloes, and cedar-gum,^[2719] and honey, and salt, and wax, and asphaltus, and resin, mingled with perfumes and precious unguents. Among the Pythagoreans, who adopted foreign rites in preference to those of their country, it was customary to wrap the dead in leaves of myrtle, poplar, and aloes, and thus to commit them to the earth. The Albani put money into the coffins with the corpse; the Taxilli, the Brahmins, and the Thracians, like the modern Parsees, exposed the bodies of their relations to be devoured by vultures; the Barchæi, a people inhabiting the borders of the Black Sea, followed the customs of these nations in the case of such of their countrymen as fell in war; but when they happened to be so effeminate as to die peaceably in their beds, they were condemned to the flames. Dogs and carnivorous birds constituted the sepulchres of the Parthians, Magians, Hyrcanians, and other savage nations, who, however, were careful to inter the bones which were left undevoured. Among these philosophical people no thought was more habitual than that of death, since men walked daily beside their graves; for persons of condition, who could afford to be luxurious in matters of this kind, fed and pampered huge dogs for the express purpose of being devoured by them after death, such mode of interment being among them esteemed the most honourable. The Essedones, the Calantii, the Massagetæ, the Derbices, and the Hybernians, on this point very strongly resembled in taste and habits the Battas of Sumatra, the custom among them having been to honour their parents and friends with a far superior sepulchre to that of the foregoing people, since they ate them themselves. It is remarked, however, in the case of the Essedones, that the skulls were carefully cleansed, gilded, and laid by, to be produced on their solemn annual festivals. The Derbices somewhat improved upon the method of their neighbours; for, when their old people were found to live too long, they hastened the approach of death in the case of the men, by slaughtering them like victims, and in that of the old women, by strangling them.them.

Among the Hyperboreans the practice was, when old people lived so long as to be thought troublesome, to give them a farewell feast, and then, having crowned their brows with chaplets, to pitch them over steep cliffs into the sea. The Caspians adopted a different method of bringing down the population to a level with the means of subsistence; for, when their parents and friends exceeded the age of seventy, they either exposed them in remote and desolate places, as infants in many countries were, or shut them up in huts to perish of hunger and thirst. The mode of disposing of the dead adopted by one of the Scythian nations was, to bind their corpses to the trunks of trees, where they remained a long time, congealed in the midst of ice and snow: to have interred them in the earth they would have regarded as a crime. Not greatly dissimilar was the Phrygian mode, according to which the dead were placed upright on ranges of stones fifteen feet high. A large cemetery of this kind, having many ranges of rude columns, each with its corpse or skeleton, viewed by the dubious light of the moon, with flights of ravens or vultures preying upon the bodies recently set up, must have presented a terrific spectacle. The Nasamones, a people of northern Africa, buried their dead in a sitting posture, which, as I am informed by General Miller, is still the custom among the Araucanian Indians, who, binding the corpse in the necessary posture with cords, excavate for it a grave beneath their own beds. In some parts of the world, as in Thrace, for example, and India, persons greatly advanced in years, more especially such as were distinguished for the cultivation of wisdom frequently ascended voluntarily the funeral pile, like the Yoghee Calanos, and Perigrinos who affected the airs of a philosopher, terminated their existence with composure, or even an appearance of gaiety in the flames. A certain tribe said to have inhabited the coast of the Red Sea, beyond the Æthiopians and the Arabs, interred their friends in the sand, within high-water mark, so that their graves should constantly be overflowed by the surge. The Æthiopians either cast the bodies of the deceased into the Nile, or enclosed them in glass coffins, through which the mouldering form might ever be contemplated. In some parts of Upper Nubia a similar practice still prevails; for the corpse being laid on the sand, a wall of loose rocks is built up around it, and secured with a slab atop. Through numerous apertures in the sides, of dimensions to admit light but exclude the jackals, the skeleton may easily be seen.

According to a tradition preserved by Ælian,^[2720] Belos was interred in a glass coffin, which, when Xerxes caused his tomb to be opened, was found nearly filled with oil, wherein the body lay floating. Beside it stood a small column, on which was this inscriptioninscription, “Woe to him who having broken into this sepulchre shall fail to fill my coffin.” At this Xerxes was troubled, and immediately gave orders that oil should be poured into the sarcophagus, but to no purpose; for, though they made the attempt once and again, it rose no nearer to the brim than before. Conceiving that some grievous calamity was impending over him, the king at length desisted, and quitted the monument in the deepest dejection. He shortly afterwards, adds the historian, undertook his unhappy expedition into Greece, at the conclusion of which, flying back to his own country, he was there assassinated, as believed, by his own son.

The Pœonians cast their dead into marshy pools; the Ichthyophagi into the sea. Very different was the custom of the Troglodytæ, who, tying their corpses neck and heels with the twigs of some flexible shrub, in this manner carried them forth, and raising over them heaps of stones, as the Phoceans did over Laïos and his servants, fixed, with laughter and merriment, the horns of goats upon the tumulus. Similar tombs exist at this day in Affghanistân, in which are stuck sticks bearing wreaths and shreds of cloth, together with tusks of the moufflon, the ibex, and markhur.^[2721] In China, at the annual festival in honour of the dead, the sepulchres are decorated with streamers of red and white paper. Dead bodies, in the Balearic isles, were jointed, cut up, and stowed in urns on which huge piles of rock were thrown. The Panebi, a people of Libya, had a custom resembling in part that of the Essedones: on burying the bodies of their kings they gilded their skulls, and suspended them in their temples as ornaments. The Sindi, a people of Scythia, doubtless a branch of the Ichthyophagi, used to bury in the graves of their warriors a small fish for every enemy he had slain in battle, which must, doubtless, if they were a brave people, have rendered their cemeteries anything but odoriferous.^[2722]

From the enumeration of these fantastic and barbarous rites we may perceive how striking was the contrast between the manners of the Hellenes and those of most other ancient nations. At one time, however, a practice, little inferior in atrocity to those above described, is said to have prevailed in the island of Ceos,^[2723] where men on reaching sixty years of age were constrained to drink hemlock or opium, in order to economise the means of subsistence. But this law, if it ever existed, must be thrown back to very remote times, it being wholly inconsistent with even the smallest advances of civilisation.

The ceremonies and symbols by which among the Hellenes sorrow was expressed for the loss of friends were numerous and significant. In the first place, all tokens of pleasure and enjoyment were suppressed, that affliction might seem to have extinguished every spark that might thereafter have kindled joy. From wine and sumptuous viands and whatever else brings gratification to the mind at ease, they abstained as though wholly unworthy to be honoured with even the semblance of a capacity to mitigate their sorrow for the departed. They banished all instruments of music which happened to be in the house, to intimate that they thenceforward renounced the delights derivable from sweet sounds.^[2724] The same practice precisely prevailed among the Arabs under the Kalifat. Thus “Haroon-er-Raschid, wept, we are told, over Shemselnihar, and, before he left the room, ordered all the musical instruments to be broken.” They excluded the light from their chambers, and retired to sob and lament in gloomy recesses, as different as possible from the spots which in the company of the beloved and lost object they were accustomed to frequent. They neglected the care of their persons, suffered in some places the hair and beard to grow, or disfigured themselves by cutting off a portion of their locks, casting ashes on their heads, and wrapping themselves in coarse and black apparel.^[2725] In consequence we find, that the very manes^[2726] of their mules and horses were shorn. Alexander, during the paroxysm of his grief for the loss of Hephæstion,^[2727] even demolished the battlements of cities, and, exaggerating the cruelty and barbarism of remoter ages, crucified the physician who had attended the youth, prohibited all music in his camp, and undertaking an expedition against certain tribes hitherto unsubdued, offered up whole hecatombs to the manes of his minion.^[2728] The mourning of the Lacedæmonians on the death of their kings partook largely of the spirit of barbarism. As soon as the event occurred, horsemen were despatched to make it known throughout the Lacedæmonian territories, while crowds of women paraded up and down the city, beating or sounding kettle-drums. From every family two persons, one of either sex, were then selected, who were compelled under grievous penalties to smear and disfigure themselves.^[2729] In fact, assembling in great numbers, Spartans, Laconians, and Helots, together with their wives, they beat their foreheads and uttered strange howlings, ever and anon affirming, amid their well-acted grief, that the last king was the best. When the prince happened to fall in battle, his effigy was borne home on a bier sumptuously adorned, and to this the same honour was paid as to the real corpse. During the ten days immediately succeeding the funeral no public business was transacted. For private individuals, the Lacedæmonians scarcely mourned at all, their system of ethics requiring them to suppress every more tender feeling of the heart.

The ceremonies designed to perpetuate the memory of brave men can scarcely perhaps be regarded as envious, but the glory which was like the Shekina on their land, appeared to purify and ennoble their descendants by inflaming them with the love of country and liberty. Grecian manners abounded with rites of this kind, but none seem more worthy of commemoration than those observed annually by the Platæans, in honour of the warriors who fell around their city. It is well-known that the Greeks regarded the spirits of good men of former ages as guardian genii, to whom belonged religious veneration amounting perhaps to worship. Their gods, in truth, were in many cases colonists from earth, which can surprise no one who observes, that among them the principle of life was deified, and this, derived from gods to mortals, resided for a time on earth, and then, by continuing to move on in the circle, returned to the heavens from which it sprang. They seem to have regarded the earth as a sort of nursery-ground in which the seeds of divinity were sown, to be afterwards transplanted and bloom elsewhere. But among the offspring of earth none appeared to them so nearly akin to deity as those in whom courage and energy shone preëminently, who loved passionately the soil from which they sprang, and who sought cheerfully in its breast a refuge from dishonour. Hence the apotheosis and adoration of the brave; hence the Platæan ceremonies, which, down even to Roman times, inspired the youth of Greece with admiration for their ancestors, and called to their mind those glorious days when their country teemed with freemen ready at any moment to shed their blood for the institutions and the land which those institutions alone rendered holy.^[2730] These anniversary rites were celebrated on the sixteenth day of the month Maimacterion, the Alalcomenios of the Bœotians. The procession moved forth from the city in the grey of the morning, having at its head a trumpeter sounding the signal of battle. Numerous chariots followed, filled with myrtle-branches, and wreaths, and garlands, succeeded by a black bull. Vessels of wine, and jars of milk, and vases of oil and odoriferous essences were borne next by a number of free youths, no slave being permitted to take part in these solemnities performed in honour of men who had died for liberty. Last in the procession came the archon, habited in a scarlet robe and armed with a sword, though on all other occasions he was forbidden the touch of steel, and went clad in white. In his hand he bore a water-jar taken from the Hall of Archives. In this he drew water from a fountain, and having laved therewith the pillars which surmounted the tombs, he perfumed them with the essences: next slaying the bull at the altar, and addressing his prayers to Zeus and the Chthonian Hermes, he invoked to partake of the funeral repast and the streams of blood, the spirits of those valiant men who had fallen for their country. Then, filling a goblet with wine and pouring it forth in libations, he concluded with these words: “I drink to the warriors who died for the liberties of Greece.”^[2731]