BURIAL AND THE FUTURE LIFE
The most perplexing questions in Homer's picture of life are connected
with the disposal of the dead. It is just here, where archaeology as
a rule gives the surest evidence from the examination of graves, that
archaeology so far seems to fail us. Yet Homer speaks with no uncertain
voice. From the fifty-second line of the first book of the _Iliad_ to
the funeral of Hector in the twenty-fourth book, Homer always tells of
cremation, "and ever the pyres of the dead burned in multitude." There
may be slight variations in practice, as regards burning his armour
with the dead warrior; and the funeral of Patroclus, in which the love
and the rage of Achilles expended themselves, has features not usually
recorded by Homer,--the circumstances being peculiar,--but there is
always cremation, always the urn-burial of the bones, always the cairn
piled above them with its pillar on the summit; yet no such Homeric
cairn has yet been discovered.
Yet Homer certainly describes no invented rites: cremation, urn-burial,
the linen wrapping of the urn (gold, bronze, or of pottery), and the
cairn are familiar from remains of the Bronze and early Iron Age in
northern and central Europe: the custom in our islands appears to have
survived the dawn of Christianity, and is perfectly well remembered by
the Christian author of the Anglo-Saxon epic, _Beowulf_. Contrasting
pagan times with his own, he writes: "Woe is his who is destined,
through savage hate, _to thrust his soul into the fire's embrace, to
hope for no comfort, in no wise to change_."
"Weal is his who may after his death-day stand before the Lord, and
claim a refuge in the Father's arms."[1]
This burial by fire, this want of hope, this changeless, helpless
future, are what Achilles endured and deplored.[2] "Rather would I
on earth be the hind of a landless man than king over all the dead."
Thus the dying Beowulf asks to be buried: "Bid ye the warriors raise
a far-seen cairn for me after the funeral fire on a head-land by the
sea ... so that seafarers who drive their tall ships over the spray of
ocean shall thereafter call it _Beowulf's barrow_."[3]
So, too, spoke the ghost of Elpenor on the limit of Oceanus to
Odysseus: "Burn me with my armour, all that is mine, and pile for me a
cairn by the shore of the grey sea, memorial of a luckless man, that
men unborn may inquire of me."[4] The customs and ideas are identical,
but no such cairns have we found in Homeric lands, whereas they are
common in our islands.
Meanwhile the burial customs of the Aegean folk in Crete and in Greece
were not those known to Homer. They used "shaft-graves," deeply sunk
in earth, luckily for us, since in these were found the unsunned
treasures of Mycenae. They also used "chamber-tombs," and "pit-graves,"
and stone-built _tholos_ chambers, beehive shaped, not cairns of earth
covering a small chamber of stone. They did not, in the Bronze Age,
burn the dead, but buried him, often in a large _larnax_ or coffer
of pottery; and they deposited rich grave-goods, which Homer never
mentions. In a chamber-tomb at Muliana in Crete were found unburned
bones with weapons of bronze, and an Aegean "false-necked vase";
while hard by in the same chamber were "cremated bones, in a cinerary
geometric urn," and an iron sword and dagger.[5]
"Here," says Mr. Evans, "we have the interesting spectacle of the
succession of corpse-burial by cremation, and of iron weapons by
bronze, apparently without any break in the indigenous stock." The
Aegean Bronze Age of burial passes into the Iron Age of cremation.
About the change of custom without change of stock or race we cannot
be quite certain, but cremation makes its appearance in association
with iron weapons, which Homer's men do not use, while they do practise
cremation and cairn-burial, which has left no known traces in the
Bronze Age of Greece.
It is suggested by Mr. Murray, as by Helbig, that cremation was
adopted, during the dark age of the Migrations, by men who wished to
burn their dead "into their ultimate dust," that the dust might not
be violated by hostile hands. The custom, Mr. Murray suggests, was
a revival of what the Northerners had used "in the forest country
from which they came." Possibly if wood were very scarce in Crete
and Greece, the Northerners there might adopt the local method of
burial, and revert to their own custom at Troy, where Ida furnished
forests. But Homer supposes cremation and caim-burial to be universal
in Greece; and his whole theory of the future life rests on cremation.
The rite admits the dead to the House of Hades, ineffectual shadows,
unfed, unfeared, unworshipped; and from the House of Hades they never
return. By the eighth century, and so on continuously, ghosts _can_
appear to men, and are fed, feared, and worshipped, as they had been
in Aegean times. The belief of Homer is the belief of Israel, Hades
is the Sheol of Samuel. The manners of ancient Israel are of interest
as regards cremation. The Philistines treated the corpse of Saul as
Hector meant to treat that of Patroclus, whose head he would have set
on a spike above the wall of Troy. "They fastened Saul's body to the
wall of Beth-shan." His sons' corpses were used in the same way, but
were rescued by valiant Israelites, who burned the bones and buried
them under a tree. This appears to have been done for the purpose of
concealing the bones from further outrage. No cairn is mentioned.[6]
But cremation, in the case of kings at least, appears to have persisted
in Israel and Judah. Asa, king of Judah, when he died, was "laid in
the bed which was filled with sweet odours and divers kinds of spices;
and they made a very great burning for him." His tomb he had caused to
be digged for him; there his bones were laid.[7] Of Jehoram we read
that "his people made no burning for him, like the burning of his
forefathers."[8] Jeremiah prophesies for Zedekiah: "Thou shalt die in
peace: and with the burnings of thy forefathers, the former kings which
were before thee, so shall they burn odours for thee."[9] In Israel an
unusual lack of interest in the future life accompanied cremation of
kings, if cremated they were; but the commentators prefer to believe
that they were not, and that only odorous substances and "furniture"
were burned. Why burn furniture?[10] But Homer's faith is unique in
Greece, Aegean or historic it represents a single age of culture--which
has left no material proof of its existence.
Homer's burial rites cannot have arisen out of a practice adopted
during the Migrations, for no people that wished to conceal the
resting-place of their dead would raise above it a conspicuous cairn
and pillar, for the very purpose of keeping the dead in perpetual
memory. Such cairns would merely have invited desecration during the
Migrations.[11]
I can only conclude that Homer describes what is certainly an actual
and widely-diffused non-Aegean mode of burial, with the equally
non-Aegean and non-historic belief about the future life. Why the
practice has left no material traces, as of cairns, is an insoluble
question at present.[12] The historical Hellenes, however, knew many
tombs, probably barrows or cairns, which they assigned to men and
women of the Heroic Age. Pausanias often mentions such tombs, which he
saw, but he does not usually describe them. In a few cases he speaks
of barrows or cairns of earth, as at Epidaurus the grave of Phocus,
slain by Peleus. It was a "mound of earth, and on it a rough stone."
At Olympia was the tomb of Oenomaus, "a piled up mound, with stones"
(vi. 21. 3). At Pergamus beyond Caicus, the grave of Auge, "a mound of
earth with a stone wall round it" (viii. 4-9). The grave of Aepytus
(mentioned in _Iliad_, ii. 604), "a pile of earth, not very high,
surrounded by a coping of stone" (viii. 16. 3). The tomb of Homer's
Areithous of the iron mace was near Mantinea in Arcadia; it is "a tomb
with a stone base" (viii. 11). The attribution of the graves to known
heroes may often have been fanciful; in many cases two or more have
claimed one hero's grave. While the belief in heroes existed, barrows
would not be robbed. Pausanias speaks, however, twice of cinerary
urns containing heroic ashes of Ariadne at Argos (ii. 23. 8), and of
Eurytus, son of Melaneus; but here a dream warned Pausanias to be
silent about the urn of bronze (iv. 33).
Thus there were cairns enough, believed to be of heroic and pre-Homeric
date.
It has been suggested that the elaborate enclosure of circles of stone,
with a coping, round the shaft-graves of the acropolis of Mycenae, was
originally meant to contain a barrow of earth. But several grave-stones
were found in the earth; and it is unlikely that a barrow would be
heaped over the grave-pillars, or that so many would be set up on the
top of a barrow. The cairn seems to be Homeric, not "Mycenaean."
Historic Greece had no one orthodox belief as to the condition of
departed souls. Homer has, on the other hand, an orthodoxy; the
ghost of the man who does not receive due burning and burial is an
outcast, perhaps a mischievous outcast from the company in the halls
of Hades and in the meads of asphodel, while _they_ are but shadows of
themselves, unfed, unless some bold adventurer goes to them and sheds
the blood of the black ram. _That_ was another thing than pouring
libations into the tomb.
Considering the fact that phantasms of the dead are probably as common
in one age as in another, Homer is singularly free from superstition
about them. Even Lucretius did not deny that such apparitions appear;
he tried to explain their appearance as traces left, somehow, on
something, we know not what or how, a theory lately revived. Homer
denies ghosts; and his view, we may say, can never, in his own time,
have been _popular_: it is the view of a class, not of a people.
But, as Mr. Leaf justly observes, there are vestiges in Homer of
other rites than his own. The word ταρχύειν, to preserve, whether by
embalment, or merely by drying or kippering, is used, in a general
sense, for doing all the rites of the dead.[13] The word may survive
from an age when mummification, not cremation, was the rule; honey
may have been employed; and the pots of honey and of oil placed by
Achilles against the bier of Patroclus may represent a faint vestige
of survival.[14] The usage lasted at Athens, the pointed lekythoi were
ranged round the bier. Why Achilles slew two dogs and four horses,
and threw them on the pyre, he did not know himself; he thought that
he slaughtered twelve Trojan prisoners merely in anger.[15] He had no
conscious purpose to send horses, dogs, and thralls into Hades for the
use of his friend; he did not burn the arms of his friend. In _Iliad_,
xxiv. 595, he promises to Patroclus a share of the ransom of Hector's
body; but all these things are spoken of only in connection with the
passion of Achilles. Customs almost forgotten revive or are reinvented
in the mind of the hero, extravagances of grief and anger.
There is a variation in the last book of the _Odyssey_; the souls of
the unburied Wooers arrive among the dead in Hades, though their bodies
are unburned. The passage is usually reckoned late, and these spirits
are under the special guidance of Hermes.
Even in these shadowy matters, Homer presents a view' unusually
consistent; and the view was not held either in Aegean times, or in
"Dipylon" days, or in the eighth century by the Cyclic poets, or in
historic Greece. In this, as in all things, the world of Homer stands
apart. There is possibly one note of change in Homeric burial. The
phrase κτέρεα κτερεΐξαι, as in _Iliad_, xxiv. 38, means the burning of
some of a man's possessions on his funeral pyre. It occurs but once
in the _Iliad_, in the case of the funeral of Hector; but frequently
in the _Odyssey_, about the funeral rites of Odysseus, if he proves to
have died abroad. The only possessions of Patroclus which are burned
are dogs and horses; not his arms, as in the cases of Eetion and
Elpenor. In these cases, perhaps, a slight variation in burial rites
may be detected. It looks as though, in the cases where the arms of
the dead are burned with them, they were expected to be of use to them
in the future life, as to Melissa, wife of Periander, who was cold in
Hades, because her wardrobe had not been burned.
[1] _Beowulf_, 184-188, Mr. Clark Hall's translation.
[2] _Odyssey_, xi. 489-491.
[3] _Beowulf_, 2803-2808.
[4] _Odyssey_, xi. 74-76.
[5] Burrows, _Discoveries in Crete_, p. 101. Evans, _Prehistoric Tombs
of Knossos_, p. 134.
[6] 1 Sam. xxxi. 10-13.
[7] 2 Chron. xvi. 14.
[8] 2 Chron. xxi. 19.
[9] Jer. xxxiv. 5.
[10] Hastings' _Dict. of Bible_, art. "Cremation."
[11] _R. G. E_. pp. 72, 73. Mr. Murray supposes cremation, with
_secret_ burial. If so, the cairn was a later addition made in settled
times, after the Migrations.
[12] Mr. Burrows remarks: "Neither Professor Ridgeway nor Mr. Lang
is able to make the slightest use of the combinations suggested by
the East Cretan graves," in which, for example, bronze weapons and
inhumated bones are found side by side with burned bones, in urns, and
iron weapons (_Discoveries in Crete_, p. 215). The facts are certainly
of no use to any theory of mine: they are quite un-Homeric facts. I
can only state the question thus: Homer uniformly describes a very
well known mode of burial. Did he invent it? Did he receive it from
tradition; and if so, from a tradition of what place and period? Is it
possible that a poet of the age of overlapping of bronze and iron, of
inhumation and cremation, in Greece, persists in reproducing, in great
detail, a method of burial removed from his own experience by all the
time that had passed since the Achaeans left their northern forests? If
they retained the mode in Greece, where are the cairns?
[13] Iliad, vii. 85. The word is also found, Iliad, xvi. 456 = 674.
[14] xxiii. 170, 171.
[15] xxiii. 23.