Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion: A Study...

Thus far the investigation of customs and beliefs in ancient and modern times relating to the treatment of the dead has established the fact that the dissolution of the body was a thing eagerly to be desired in the interests of the dead. With complete disintegration the summum bonum of the dead, so far as it was in the power of their surviving friends to win it for them, was secured. It remains to consider in what way the dead profited thereby.

Now I have hitherto spoken designedly of dissolution as a benefit, not to the souls of the dead nor to their bodies, but simply ‘to the dead’ without further specification. It will now limit the range of discussion as to the nature of the summum bonum to which dissolution gave access, if we can first answer the old question, cui bono? Is it the body alone or the soul alone or both conjointly on which the benefit is conferred? This question once answered, we shall have eliminated a certain number of possible conceptions of future happiness.

That the body alone might have been the recipient of the whole benefit is an idea which no one will entertain. Was it then the soul alone to which the dissolution of the body brought gain? Death, as we have learnt, was not a complete and final severance of soul from body; the soul might re-enter and re-animate the corpse. Was dissolution then believed to complete the severance?

The deliverance of the soul from the bondage of the body, the divorce of spirit from matter, is an idea which has appealed and does appeal to many, and would therefore furnish a motive of considerable intrinsic probability for the treatment which the Greek people have consistently accorded to their dead; the dissolution of the body, it might be supposed, was desired and hastened in order that the soul might be freed from its last link with this material world and pass away winged and unburdened towards things ethereal.

But such an explanation savours too much of philosophy and too little of popular religion. ‘The rehearsal of death,’ that is of the severance of soul from body, was according to Socrates the proper occupation of the philosopher; and death itself was welcome to him as a final release of the soul, the true self, from the fetters of physical existence. But the very emphasis which the whole of the Phaedo gives to this idea, the insistence of Socrates that his real self is that which converses with his friends and seeks to convince them of his views, and not the corpse which they will soon be burying or burning as seemeth them good[1292], suggest, if anything, that in the popular religion the severance of soul from body was not desired, and the true self was not conceived as a thing apart from body. At any rate the reason for desiring dissolution must be sought from more popular sources.

I return therefore to a passage[1293] on which I have already touched more than once, the earliest passage of extant literature, in which a dead man is represented as craving the dissolution of his body. Why was it that the soul of Patroclus desired so urgently the last rites for his body? Was it for the benefit of his soul only? Popular religion, as we have seen, did not reckon death a final severance of soul and body; for the soul might return and re-animate the body. Was then dissolution believed to complete the severance, annihilating the body and emancipating the soul? Did the future happiness of the soul depend upon such emancipation? Did Patroclus, in the case before us, crave dissolution in order that his soul, finally severed from his body, might find happiness?

Homer certainly peoples the lower world with souls only, severed from their former bodies. It is clearly the soul only of Patroclus which will pass the gates of Hades, when once his request for the burial of his body has been fulfilled; for it is ‘the souls, the semblances of the dead[1294],’ who bar his entrance thereto meanwhile. But those souls are not happy souls. The house of Hades is not a place of happiness; it is dank, murky, mouldering; and the souls themselves are not of a nature to enjoy anything; they are feeble, impotent wraiths, mere semblances of men, all doomed to the same miserable travesty of life; the bodies from which they are now severed were their real selves[1295], and there remain now only impalpable joyless phantoms. ‘Sooner,’ cries the spirit of Achilles to Odysseus, ‘would I be a serf bound to the soil, in the house of a portionless man whose living were but scant, than lord over all the dead that are perished[1296]’; for the old valour even of Achilles avails him no more; his soul fares in the house of Hades even as all others fare; all alike are doomed to everlasting futility in a land of everlasting gloom. Fitly is the soul of Patroclus said to have sped, at the moment of death, towards Hades’ realm ‘bewailing its fate in that it had left vigour and manhood[1297].’

How then comes it that anon the same soul is eager to pass the gates of Hades? Surely the wanderings of the dead Patroclus, whether in the form of a revenant as the popular belief would have had it, or, according to Homer’s version, as a disembodied spirit, would hardly be more pitiable than the lot which he in common with all the dead must suffer below. Why then this eagerness?

And this inconsistency is of wide bearing. The cases of Patroclus and Elpenor are not isolated. The same eagerness for dissolution on the part of the dead has, as we have seen, been steadily recognised in all the relations between the living and the dead from the days of Homer until now. That which is at variance with the Homeric conception of the hereafter is not merely the petition of Patroclus, but the idea on which the funeral-customs of a whole people have been based for nearly three thousand years.

That the whole picture of the house of Hades and of the condition of the departed therein was not an Homeric invention is, I suppose, indisputable. Its two main features are the gloom of the place and the lack of distinction between the lots of those who dwell there[1298]. Of these the first at any rate is frequent enough in later literature, and indeed held so firm a place in the Greek mind that ‘to see the light’ became synonymous with ‘to live in this upper world’; and even down to the present day both ideas live on. The constant epithets which Homer applies to the house of Hades, ‘cold’ (κρυερός) and ‘mouldering’ (εὐρώεις), are exactly reproduced in the epithets with which Hades, now a place instead of a person, is described in modern dirges—κρυοπαγωμένος, ‘frozen,’ and ἀραχνιασμένος, ‘thick with spiders’ webs’[1299]; and the same uniform misery of all the departed is likewise a common theme in the many songs that deal with Charon and the lower world. All this could not have been effected by the influence of Homer alone, great though it was, if he had himself invented the whole conception. It is clear that he utilised a conception which was before his time, and still is, a popular conception.

But there is equally good evidence of a totally different presentation of the future state. A fragment of one of Pindar’s dirges contradicts the Homeric description of the lower world in every point. ‘Upon the righteous the glorious sun sheddeth light below while night is here, and amid meadows red with roses lieth the space before their city’s gate, all hazy with frankincense and laden with golden fruits; and some take their joy in horses and feats of prowess, and others at the draught-board, and others in the music of lutes, and among them every fair flower of happiness doth blossom; and o’er that lovely land spreadeth the savour of all manner of spices that be mingled with far-gleaming fire on the gods’ altars[1300].’ So then this under-world is not cold and murky, but is warmed and lighted by the sun; its inhabitants are not frail spirits incapable of joy, but take their pleasure as aforetime in the world above; nor is the lot of all the same, for it is only the righteous who enjoy this bliss.

The popular character of this conception is equally clear. The distinction between the varying fortunes of the dead—the hope of happiness for some in contrast with the universal misery of the Homeric under-world—is an idea which finds expression throughout ancient literature; and if the house of Hades often remains none the less a place of gloom, that is because the abode of the righteous is often transferred to the islands of the blest, and the dark under-world left as a place of punishment for the wicked. At the present day too the same ideas are widely current among the common-folk. It is true that the dirges more generally pourtray the lower world as wrapped in Homeric gloom, and the condition of the departed as monotonously miserable; but the express purpose of these dirges, recited beside the dead body before it is carried out to burial, is to excite the mourners to a frenzy of grief, and the professional dirge-singer (for there are still women in some parts of Greece who follow that calling) would soon lose her work if, instead of harrowing the feelings of the mourners, she took upon herself to comfort them; her whole business is to move to tears those whom the bereavement itself has left unmoved, or to stimulate to fresh outbursts of lamentation those who are already spent with sorrow.

But in a few folk-songs is found the more cheerful belief that the departed still continue the pursuits which they followed in this life[1301]; while as for their abode, any peasant who should have the Pindaric description of the future home of the blessed explained to him, would unhesitatingly identify it with that which he himself calls Paradise. Some points perhaps in that description would surprise him no less than they would please him, as for example the permission to play draughts, but they would not obscure his recognition; the place of fair flowers and fruits and scents could be none other than Paradise. “The people of modern Greece,” says a Greek writer[1302], ... “unable to comprehend the idea of spiritual joys, consider Paradise a place of largely material and sensuous pleasures. The Paradise of the Greek folk is watered by great rivers, ... and in it there grow trees which diffuse odours sweet past telling.... Agreeably with this reception of the idea of Paradise by the people, the fathers of the church also were compelled to describe Paradise in terms of the senses as well as of the spirit, thus making certain concessions to popular feeling and ideas. ‘Some,’ says John of Damascus[1303], ‘have imagined a sensuous Paradise, others a spiritual Paradise.

For my part I think that, just as man himself has been created with senses as well as with spirit, so the most holy close (ἱερώτατον τέμενος) to which he has access appeals alike to the senses and to the spirit.’” The compromise in this passage is cleverly justified, but it has not lasted; the pagan part of it alone has survived, and the Paradise of the modern folk is none other than that abode which Pindar described. Even the rivers thereof, which are naturally desired above all things by the inhabitants of a dry and dusty land, were probably not absent from Pindar’s picture; for Plutarch, to whom we owe the preservation of the fragment, passes in one passage from actual quotation of the opening lines to a mention of smooth and tranquil rivers flowing through the land[1304]; and in the kindred picture of the Islands of the Blest, which Pindar paints elsewhere, he does not omit to mention the water wherewith the golden flowers are refreshed[1305]; for in his eyes too water was the best of earth’s gifts, even as gold was the brightest of wrought treasures[1306].

It was this high appreciation of water which first informed a custom prevalent all over Greece on the occasion of funerals. As the bier passes along the road, the friends and neighbours of the dead man empty at their doorway or from their windows a vessel of water, and usually throw down the vessel itself to be broken on the stones of the road. This custom is evidently very old, for in some places the use of the water, the very essence of the rite, has become obsolete, and all that remains of the custom is the breaking of a piece of crockery. And even though in most places the custom is observed in full, its meaning has generally been forgotten, and curious conjectures have been made to explain it. Some interpret the custom as a symbol of that which has befallen the dead man; the vessel is his body, the water is his soul; the pouring out of the water symbolises the vanishing of the soul, and the dead body will fall to pieces like the broken crock. Others say that they pour out the water ‘in order to allay the burning thirst of the dead man[1307],’ a notion ominously suggestive of the boon which Dives sought of Lazarus. But the real purpose of the rite is still known in some of the Cyclades, where exactly the same custom is followed also on the occasion of a man’s departure from his native village[1308], to live, as they say, in exile. And the purpose is to promote the well-being of the dead or of the exile in the new land to which he is going.

The pouring out of the water is in fact a rite of sympathetic magic designed to secure that the unknown land shall also be well-watered and pleasant and plentiful; and the breaking of the vessel which held the water is due, I suppose, to a feeling that an instrument which has served a magical purpose must not thereafter be put to profane and mundane uses. This custom then in itself bears witness how wide-spread is, or has been, the conception of the other world as a land of delight wherein the pleasant things of this world shall still abound.

Thus then it must be acknowledged that two contradictory popular conceptions of the hereafter have survived side by side as a twofold inheritance from the ancient world. The one pervades the whole of Homer; the other is best expounded in a fragment of Pindar[1309]; and the fundamental difference between them is this, that the one consigns all the dead alike to gloom and misery, while the other distinguishes between the future fortunes of the righteous and the unrighteous, and holds out the hope of happiness in a yet brighter world than this. Whence came these two conceptions?

The world which Homer describes is the Achaean world, and I suspect that his under-world is likewise the Achaean under-world. The Achaean religion, as exhibited in Homer, is in no way profound. The gods are only Achaean princes on a yet grander scale, endowed with immortality. Men’s relations with them are eminently simple and practical; sacrifice is expected if prayers are to be answered. But both gods and men are concerned with this upper world only; death closes all relations between them. The gods are unconcerned, unless it be for some special favourite; they live on Olympus as aforetime amid feasting, quarrelling, laughter, and love; but men leave these pursuits and pastimes, and go down to the misery of Hades’ house; their souls which fled lamenting from their limbs at the hour of death still exist, else could they not appear to living men in the visions of night; but their existence is all misery, for they lack all that made this life pleasant. Their joys had been the joys of a strenuous, full-blooded life, the joys of battle, of feasting, of song, of comradeship; and these joys were no more. The future existence of the soul was, to the Achaeans, simply the negation of the present bodily life.

But the religion of a later age was by no means so simple. The Homeric gods were still worshipped in the old way, and received their sacrifices in exchange for favours desired or granted. But there was another element in religion of which Homer shows little trace—an element of awe and mystery. Homer indeed names the Erinyes as beings concerned with the punishment of certain sins; but he shows no knowledge of that awful doctrine of blood-guilt which Aeschylus associates with them; the murdered man’s power of vengeance is wholly ignored; for among the Achaeans the next of kin might accept a price at the hands of the murderer, and allow him to remain in the land[1310], without himself incurring any pollution or any manifestation of his dead kinsman’s wrath. Again Homer knows indeed of Demeter as a goddess connected with the crops; but there is nothing in his casual mention of her to suggest that the mysteries of her worship transcended the rites of all the Olympian gods. Yet no one, I suppose, would imagine that these profounder elements in ancient religion were of post-Homeric growth or could possibly have been evolved from the transparently simple religion of the Achaeans.

On the contrary it is known that the more mysterious rites and doctrines of the Greek religion were a legacy from the Pelasgians. That the mysteries of Demeter were Pelasgian in origin is proved by the localities in which her worship most flourished, and is corroborated by the explicit statement of Herodotus[1311], who was disposed to refer other mystic cults also to the same source[1312]. In fact the co-existence, or even the conflict, of the old Pelasgian and the newer Achaean religions is constantly recognised in ancient literature, and to the Pelasgian is ascribed all that most touched men’s hearts, be it with awe or with pity—with awe as in the conflict between the Erinyes and the new dynasty of gods whom Apollo and Athene represent, with pity in the dolorous struggle of Prometheus against the tyrant Zeus. The Pelasgian religion, with all its horrors, drew the real sympathies of the mystic Aeschylus; he could worship in deepest reverence Demeter and her mysteries[1313]; he could worship perhaps even the ‘reverend goddesses,’ horrible though they were in their displeasure; but his heart must have been cold towards the usurping Olympian gods. There is true insight in that passage of Aristophanes[1314] where Aeschylus summarises the benefits conferred by great poets on the Greek race, and praises Homer, the Achaean poet, for his lessons in discipline and valour and warfare, but Orpheus, sometimes reputed the founder of the Pelasgian mysteries, for instituting religious rites and teaching men to abstain from bloodshed.

And the feelings of Aeschylus were the feelings of his countrymen. The Athenians boasted of a great Achaean goddess as the foundress and patroness of their city, but their personal hopes of future happiness centred in the Pelasgian Demeter. The same generation of Athenians listened with delight to Aristophanes’ ridicule of those gods whom Homer accounted greatest, and were aghast at the thought that the mysteries had been profaned. The Achaean gods, it would seem, made good figure-heads for the official religion of the state; they served as majestic patrons of a city, or of a great national festival where religion was of less real account than horse-racing, athletics, and commerce; but the hearts of the people clave to the older, more awful, more mysterious deities of the Pelasgians, and the holiest sanctuaries[1315] were those which had been holy long before the intrusion of the Achaean gods.

It was to this Pelasgian element in Hellenic religion that the doctrine of future rewards and punishments belonged; for, as we shall see more fully in the next chapter, participation in the Pelasgian mysteries of Demeter at Eleusis was held to be an earnest of future bliss, from which the impure or uninitiated were excluded.

Thus then there were two popular conceptions of the future life—the Achaean conception of universal misery in a cold and gloomy under-world, and the Pelasgian conception which distinguished between the lots of the righteous and the unrighteous, and held out to some men the promise of bliss. Now with the former conception, as we have already seen, the belief that the dead eagerly desired dissolution is utterly inconsistent; none could be in haste to pass the gates of Hades with the prospect of nothing but misery within. But where there were hopes of happiness, the eagerness for dissolution as a means of attaining thereto is at once intelligible. This desire then, which has constantly pervaded the mind of the Greek people and has furnished the single motive of their funeral-rites down to the present day, is of Pelasgian origin; and if Homer borrowed it and incongruously combined it with a purely Achaean presentation of the under-world, we must no more judge of its real meaning by the Homeric setting of it than we would form an opinion of the place of the Erinyes or of Demeter in Greek religion by Homer’s occasional references to them.

The fact then that Homer, in accordance with the Achaean religion, considered the dissolution of the body to mean the annihilation of the body and represented the soul as alone entering into the lower world is wholly immaterial to the present enquiry. It is the Pelasgian conception of future bliss with which we are concerned; for that alone can account for the eagerness of the dead to obtain dissolution. What then are the blissful occupations of the righteous in the other world? ‘Some,’ says Pindar, ‘take their joy in horses and feats of prowess, and others at the draught-board, and others in the music of lutes.’ Clearly these dead are very different beings from the souls which peopled the Homeric under-world. Athletics could be no pastime for feeble unsubstantial spirits; the game of draughts would be ill suited to them that have no mind in them[1316]; and those whose thin utterance is like the squeak[1317] of a bat would get and give little pleasure by singing to the lute. No; the pursuits of the dead as depicted by Pindar are the pursuits which men of flesh and blood enjoy; and the abode in which they dwell, the paradise of flowers and fruits and sweet odours, is an abode to gladden men of flesh and blood. But a people whose ideal of future bliss lay in bodily enjoyments cannot surely have looked forward to the annihilation of the body and the survival of the soul alone; the joys which they anticipated hereafter presupposed the continuance of some kind of bodily existence.

Such a notion moreover cannot but seem more in harmony with the whole spirit of the Greek world than the Homeric doctrine of the survival of the soul only. A nation so conspicuous for their love of human beauty and their delight in the human form could not have viewed the extinction thereof with any feeling other than the most poignant regret—a feeling which, as we know, the Homeric doctrine did actually inspire in those who accepted it. The more thoughtful and hopeful religion of the Pelasgians, unless it had anticipated the philosophy of Plato in decrying the body and exalting the soul—an idea of which there is no trace—was bound to give promise that body as well as soul should survive death and dissolution.

Again it may fairly be claimed that in any religion of a profounder character than the Achaean, in any religion which contains some positive ideas of the future life and does not view it merely as the negation of the present life, that which men hope to become in the future state is something more similar to the deity or deities in whom they believe. Their conception of godhead and their conception of their own condition after death are of necessity founded upon the same ideal of happiness—a happiness which the gods already enjoy and which men hope to share. The Buddhist looks forward to the day when he shall become like his deity—even one with his deity—clean from the grossness of matter, free from bodily desires and necessities, spirit unalloyed. The Christian believes in a God who became man and survived the death of man not in the form of a spirit only but with flesh and bones, and he himself looks forward to the resurrection of the body. Socrates held that wisdom and goodness were one and pertained to the soul only, and the God into whose presence his soul would pass after death was ‘the good and wise God,’ rightly called Hades, that is, the invisible and spiritual, with whom the soul has kinship[1318]. But what of the ordinary Greek? His gods were not invisible or spiritual. Pelasgian and Achaean deities alike were beings of flesh and blood, robust, active, sensuous; they ate and drank, they waked and slept, they married, they begot or bore children. Such was the Greek’s conception of godhead, such his ideal of blessedness.

I suggest then that the dissolution of the body, which the dead so eagerly desired, far from being regarded as a final and complete severance of soul and body, was in the Pelasgian religion the means of their re-union in another world. Death was only a temporary severance of the two entities which together form a living man capable of enjoying physical pleasures. The soul at the moment of death went down to the nether world in advance, or, it may be, as is sometimes held by the peasants of modern Greece[1319], hovered about the body until its dissolution was complete. But the dead body certainly remained in this world, at the place where it lay evident to men’s eyes; it could not pass to the other world at once; it could not ever pass thither without the assistance of friends still living; it was too gross and too impotent, bereft of the soul, to make its own way to the home of the dead. Therefore upon the survivors was imposed the sacred charge of resolving it into elements more refined, and of enabling it thus to pass out of human touch and sight to a home which the soul could reach unaided.

When this process was effected by inhumation, the period of forty days required for complete dissolution was the critical period in the dead man’s existence; if the body was ‘bound’ and indissoluble for any cause and the soul re-entered it before the proper time, the revenant was a pitiable wanderer, sharing in the joys neither of this world nor of the next; the mourners therefore took such measures as they could to prevent that calamity, by entertaining the acquaintances of the dead man and prevailing upon them to revoke any curses wherewith he was bound, and by laying in the dead man’s mouth a charm which should bar the soul’s re-entry. When cremation was employed, the dissolution of the body was more speedy and more sure; and it is not therefore difficult to understand that the Pelasgians, conscious though they must have been that in religion they were as far in advance of the Achaeans as in material civilisation they were behind, should have early adopted the use of fire in the interests of the dead. But no matter which rite was employed, the ultimate effect was the same; the heavy, helpless corpse that had been laid upon the pyre or in the grave vanished, and nought but the bones remained. Whither then had it vanished? How had the visible become invisible? Surely by passing from this visible world to the world invisible.

There is nothing to suggest that this disappearance meant to the Greeks annihilation; that word indeed had no counterpart in their speech; the strongest term of the Greek language by which one might attempt, and would still fail, to render the word ‘annihilate,’ would be ἀφανίζειν or ἀιστοῦν, ‘to make unseen.’ And on the other hand their conception of future happiness in another world is positive evidence that they believed dissolution to mean not annihilation, but the vanishing of the body to be re-united with the soul in the unseen world.

I am of course far from suggesting that these views which I have sketched formed a definite religious doctrine to which every Greek would have subscribed. No people have evinced greater liberty of thought on religious matters; no people have been less hampered by hierarchical limitations and the claims of authority; nowhere have wider divergences of religious opinion been tolerated; nowhere else have the advocates of material philosophies and of spiritual philosophies been brought into sharper contrast and yet held in equal repute. But it is not with the vagaries of individuals and the new departures of great thinkers that I am concerned; my purpose is simply to trace the general trend of thought as regards the relation of body and soul after death among the mass of the Greek people.

And in so doing I fully realise the danger of over-statement. Probably the mass of mankind in religious matters perform many acts without full consciousness of their motive; they instinctively follow tradition without enquiring into the meaning and the mutual relation of the customs with which they comply; and if ever they try to justify to their reason the acts to which instinct prompts them, they may be at a loss to form a consistent theory out of the several motives which they would assign to the several acts. If therefore I try not only to disengage from among the network of religious and philosophical speculation a thread of simple popular belief, but also to present that thread unknotted and continuous, I may be attempting that which the mass of the Greek people seldom and with difficulty performed for themselves. To enunciate as a doctrine that which may have been a subconscious or only partially realised belief—to present as a consistent theory ideas which, separately apprehended, formed the acknowledged motives of separate acts, but whose mutual relations were seldom investigated—to formulate in words that which may have been no more than a vague aspiration of men’s hearts—this is necessarily to over-state. There lies the danger.

But for my part, while admitting that in all probability there was among the Greek people of old, as among the Greek people and others too to-day, a large amount of unintelligent religion, I claim that some such conception as I have outlined of the relation between soul and body and of their future existence is the only possible explanation of the manifold customs and beliefs relating to death and dissolution which have been discussed, and fairly represents the general trend of thought among the inheritors of the Pelasgian religion.

This conclusion is not a little strengthened by the evidence of a custom common to both ancient and modern Greece, which presupposes the continuance of physical desires and needs after death. To make a present of food indicates a belief on the part of the donor that the recipient can eat; to make a present of clothing implies a belief that the recipient has a body to be covered; and it is these two things, food and clothing, the elementary requisites of living men, which have most constantly been brought, either at the time of the funeral or later, as gifts to the dead. Other gifts there were also in different ages; treasures of wrought gold for the princes of Mycenae; articles of the toilet for Athenian ladies whose first care even beyond the grave would be their complexion; toys for the children. But while each grave that is opened may tell its own story, humorous or pathetic, of those tastes and pursuits of the occupant for which the same provision was made in the next world as in this, it is in the supply of the common necessaries of all mankind that the popular Greek notions concerning the dead are most clearly revealed; for the custom has continued without intermission or sensible alteration down to this day.

In the Mycenaean age the dead were supplied with a store of food at the time of the funeral, but there is no evidence to show whether the gifts were renewed subsequently[1320]. I incline to suppose that they were; for the belief of later ages in some sort of bodily existence after death has already been traced back to the Pelasgians; and the custom of later ages therefore of continuing to supply the dead with bodily necessaries was probably derived from the same source. But in any case the Mycenaean custom of providing food for the dead at the time of the funeral is sufficient proof that the dead were thought to have bodily needs, and therefore also bodily existence.

The Achaeans of the Homeric age seldom presented the dead man with gifts of food at the funeral, and never apparently afterwards. The only gift, if such it can be called, which was commonly burned along with the dead body was the warrior’s own armour; but it is so natural, quite apart from any religious motive, for a soldier’s body to be laid out arrayed in its wonted accoutrements and to have, as it were, a military funeral, that little importance can attach to it. Other gifts were rare. The funeral of Patroclus is quite exceptional, and, like the return of Patroclus’ soul with its urgent petition for burial, seems wholly inconsistent with the Homeric presentment of after-death existence. The soul being doomed to a shadowy impotent semblance of life could have no part in physical needs or pleasures[1321]. Nor does Homer enlighten us as to the purpose of the abundant gifts, which included not only food but slaughtered dogs and horses[1322]; he speaks only of providing ‘all that it beseemeth that a man should have when he goeth beneath the murky gloom[1323].’ Indeed I question whether Homer had any clear conception of their utility; they seem rather to have been vaguely honorific; and since the custom of making such gifts is neither usual in Homer nor in harmony with his idea of future existence, I hold it likely that once again he was drawing upon the Pelasgian religion in order to give to the last rites of Patroclus the maximum of splendour.

The Dipylon-period puts an end to all uncertainty; thenceforward down to the present day the Greek custom of providing the dead with the necessaries of bodily life will be found to have been uniform and continuous. There has been no interruption of the simple practice of providing the dead with food both at the time of the funeral and at stated intervals thereafter. For the Dipylon-period this has been proved by the contents of the graves and by the strata of burnt soil observed at Eleusis[1324] above them. The same phenomena continue to present themselves also in the case of later graves at Athens, certainly down to the third century B.C., and, though any detailed description of graves of a still later date is hard to find, the custom unquestionably still prevailed; for literary evidence, overlapping that of archaeology at the start, carries on our knowledge of the custom into the Christian era.

The Choephori of Aeschylus takes its very name from the practice of pouring wine or other beverages on the graves of the dead for them to consume; and the word χοαί was specially applied to this kind of libation as opposed to the λοιβαί or σπονδαί wherewith gods were propitiated. Similarly the Greek language possessed a special word for gifts of food (or other perishable gifts such as flowers) brought to the graves of the dead; these were called ἐναγίσματα in strict contrast with the sacrifices (θυσίαι, etc.) by which gods were appeased[1325]. These presents of food were regularly made on two occasions at least after the funeral; there were the τρίτα brought, according to modern computation, on the second day, and the ἔνατα on the eighth day: how regular was the custom of bringing them may be judged from the passing references of Aristophanes[1326], Isaeus[1327], and Aeschines[1328]. In addition to these two meals there were others either on the thirtieth day after the funeral or on the thirtieth of each month—for the interpretation to be put on the term τριακάδες[1329] seems doubtful—also γενέσια[1330], apparently a birthday-feast given to the dead, and νεκύσια[1331] to commemorate the anniversary of the death.