[Preface]
[Table of Contents and Index]
[List of Illustrations]

SCULPTURED TOMBS OF HELLAS

Plate I

Frontispiece

SCULPTURED TOMBS
OF HELLAS

BY
PERCY GARDNER, Litt.D.
LINCOLN AND MERTON PROFESSOR OF CLASSICAL ARCHAEOLOGY AND ART
IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
WITH THIRTY PLATES, AND EIGHTY-SEVEN ENGRAVINGS IN THE TEXT

London
MACMILLAN AND CO., Ltd.
NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN CO.
1896
[All rights reserved]

OXFORD: HORACE HART
PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY

Few griefs and many joys my life has held,
Out-lengthened to the utmost bounds of eld.
My name is Symmachus, in Chios born,
Which rich with grapes the branching vines adorn;
But when I died, my bones were hidden here,
In Attic land, to gods and men most dear.
Athenian Epitaph.

PREFACE

The monuments erected to the dead belong in every country, like funeral customs generally, to a deeper stratum of the national consciousness than do openly expressed beliefs. This is, in fact, a phase of the general law that in the history of religion cultus is more venerable and more conservative than doctrine. And as, further, the beliefs which find an expression in literature are those of the most enlightened and the least conservative spirits, it is misleading if one attempts to learn from the higher literature of a people how the masses really think and feel in regard to death and the life which lies beyond death.

These considerations are certainly applicable in the case of Greece. The two great literatures of Greece, the Epic and the Attic, belong each to a class, to an aristocracy whether of birth or of talent, and stand high above the beliefs of the common people. If we wish to ascertain what the ordinary Greek citizen, l’homme sensuel moyen, thought and felt in the presence of death, whether his own or that of friends, we must supplement the study of the poets, the orators, and the philosophers by an investigation of ritual, of burial customs, and of the lines of tombs which stretched from the gates of many Greek cities on both sides of the main roads.

The purpose of the present book may best be accomplished if we proceed to consider in succession, first the burial customs of the Greeks, next the ideas as to the future life which prevailed among them, and finally the monuments of the dead.

It is the last-mentioned memorials which are the principal concern of this book. For a long while English-speaking scholars, and even tourists, have felt a special interest in the sepulchral monuments which form so marked a feature of the great museum at Athens, and in the Dipylon cemetery, part of which still survives. I have tried to set forth, for scholars and for lovers of art, a concise account of these monuments, their periods and classes, their inscriptions and their reliefs. And as an introduction and supplement to an account of the tombs of Athens, I have added a still slighter account of the tombs of the pre-historic age in Greece, of the monuments of Asia Minor, of the tombs of Sparta, Boeotia, and other districts, and of the magnificent Greek sarcophagi recently discovered at Sidon.

It would occupy much space if I tried here to detail all my obligations to previous scholars. The whole success of this work must depend on its due illustration; and though the nucleus of my illustrations consists of photographs taken for me during a visit to Athens, I have been obliged also to borrow from a variety of learned and valuable works. In every case in which I asked permission to copy a published engraving that permission was courteously granted. If by mischance I have in any case copied without permission, I trust that I may be pardoned. References to the sources of engravings will be found at the foot of my pages.

Special thanks are due to Dr. Conze and the German Archaeological Institute for allowing me to use the plates of their magnificent work, Die Attischen Grabreliefs, which furnishes representations by photography or drawing of almost all important Attic tombs. Where the photographs of this work were better than my own, I have in some cases used them in preference.

To M. Cavvadias and the Greek Government I am indebted for permission to photograph freely in the Athenian Museums; and to the Trustees of the British Museum for leave to reproduce two interesting monuments (Figs. [28] & [35]) which are hitherto unpublished.

When I have had occasion to quote from Homer and the poets of the Anthology, I have usually attempted a rendering in English verse. For Greek elegiacs I have used rhymed heroic verse, and for Greek hexameters English ballad metre. I have also to thank my colleague, Dr. James Williams, of Lincoln College, for allowing me to use several of his excellent versions of poems of the Anthology.

After careful consideration, I have decided that in a work of this kind, which does not attempt completeness, but is methodical in arrangement, the best form of Index is a detailed table of contents and list of engravings. By the aid of these, anything included in the book can be very readily found.

Percy Gardner.

Oxford, August, 1896.

PS. Most of the abbreviations used in the notes will explain themselves; but I should explain the following:—

C. A. G. (‘Corpus of Attic Grave-reliefs’) is Die Attischen Grabreliefs, ed. A. Conze.

Kaibel, is G. Kaibel, Epigrammata Graeca ex Lapidibus conlecta.

TABLE OF CONTENTS AND INDEX

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
WITH THEIR SOURCES

CHAPTER I
BURIAL CUSTOMS IN GREECE

The burial of the dead was a matter as to which the ancient Greeks had very strong feelings. When a corpse was not committed to earth or fire, the unfortunate spirit to which it had served as a dwelling-place was condemned to find no rest either on earth or in the world of shades, but to wander unhappily around the spot where it had met its fate, or to flutter on the verge of the river of death, which it was not permitted to cross. For such reasons, it was the first and most important duty of an heir to see that the person whom he succeeded met with due burial. In war, as a rule, each side buried its own dead; and so great was the horror at neglect of this pious office, that after a drawn battle the side which was not in possession of the battle-field would commonly ask for a truce for the purpose of burying the slain, though it thereby acknowledged defeat. It is well known how bitterly the Athenians accused their generals, because their dead were not duly buried after the battle of Arginusae. When Admetus, in the Alcestis of Euripides, wishes utterly to cast off his filial relation to his father Pheres, he threatens that he will not bury him. And when in the Antigone of Sophocles, Creon forbids the burial of his slain enemy Polynices, the prohibition is represented as an act of barbarous cruelty, bringing with it the vengeance of the offended gods. In order to perform the last rites to her brother, Antigone incurs death. The plot of the last half of the Ajax, which seems intolerably tedious to a modern reader, turns on the question whether the body of the hero shall receive sepulture or not.

It is true that all the more serious evils of want of burial were obviated by an inhumation of a merely formal character. The dead man who in the ode of Horace[1] begs the passer-by to give him formal or ceremonial burial, tells him that it will be quite sufficient if he casts over the body three handfuls of dry earth. If the body of a man was lost at sea, or otherwise had become undiscoverable, an empty tomb or cenotaph was erected, and his spirit laid with ceremonies.

In the case of an ordinary death, there was a regular order of ceremonies, which are detailed in Lucian’s De Luctu. To the women of the house belonged the melancholy duty of washing and anointing the corpse, and preparing it for burial. In the mouth was sometimes placed an obolus, the fee of Charon. The body was dressed as if for a wedding rather than a funeral, in rich and clean clothes; the face was painted, and wreaths were placed on head and breast. Then took place what was called the π�όθεσις, or exhibition of the corpse, in order that friends and relatives might take a last farewell of it. Vase-paintings give us many representations of the scene. Father and mother, or brothers and sisters, or children, thronged round the bier with expressions of love and sorrow, while the dirge of the hired wailing-women resounded through the house. A terra-cotta tablet of the sixth century, engraved in the text[2] (Fig. I), gives us a quaint and vivid picture of the room of death. The dead man, whose face appears, while the rest of the painting is broken away, is evidently a youth in the bloom of his days, who lies on the bier, clad in an embroidered garment. Close by his head stands his mother, ΜΕΤΕΡ, at whose feet is his little sister, ΑΔΕΛΦΕ; a somewhat older sister stands at the foot of the bier. To the left is a group of men, the father, ΠΑΤΕΡ, a grown-up brother, ΑΔΕΛΦΟΣ, and two other men. To the extreme right appears the name, though not the figure, of the grandmother, ΘΕΘΕ, between whom and the group of men are two other matrons, carefully distinguished as the aunt and the aunt on the father’s side, ΘΕΘΙΣ and ΘΕΘΙΣ ΠΡΟΣ ΠΑΤΡ[ΟΣ]. A little child also appears by a stool quite at the foot of the couch. The letters ΟΙΜΟΙ in the field represent the wailings of the women.

FIG. 1. LYING IN STATE.

A beautiful Attic vase of the fifth century ([Fig. 2]) gives us a less quaint but more graceful representation of the prothesis[3]. In this case the corpse is that of a woman, who lies on her bier not merely clad in green garments, but decked with a necklace. The friends grouped about her are all women, with hair cut short in sign of mourning, clad in garments of dark brown, green, or blue. The lady who stands at the foot of the bier and her neighbour place their hands on their heads in sign of grief; their dress is that of burgher ladies; no doubt they are the nearest relatives of the dead. The girl who stands at the head of the bier is a slave or hired attendant. She is more simply clad, and carries in one hand a flapper or fan to keep off the flies, in the other a basket containing fillets or ribbons. A wreath hangs against the wall of the room. Three small, naked, winged idola hover in the air. They are doubtless spirits of the dead: but the motive for their presence is not clear. One might at first be disposed to regard them as merely ready to receive the departed spirit; the figure nearest to the mouth of the corpse might even be regarded as the soul which has just taken flight. But these views scarcely account for the attitude, which is clearly in each of the three idola a recognized sign of grief. In fact, the close resemblance of gesture between the lady who stands at the foot of the bier and the winged figure above her seems to show that they share the same feeling, which is one of sorrow. But why should spirits grieve at receiving a companion from the land of the living? The question is not easy to answer. We may observe that in all scenes of this kind, when these little sprites are introduced, they are in the same attitude. The lamentations of the living seem always to awake a responsive echo in their breasts.

FIG. 2. LYING IN STATE.

After the laying out, π�όθεσις, came the �κφο�ά, or burial. Early in the morning the body was taken, decked and clad as it was, and laid on a wagon, or on a bier to be carried on the shoulders of friends. A procession was formed, including near friends, musicians, hired wailing-women, and others who carried the vessels needed for the last sad rites. To the modern visitor in Greece none of the existing customs is more striking than that of bearing to the grave bodies decked out and painted, and looking more like wax images from Tussaud’s than the actual relics of humanity.

Several monuments of the early period present us with representations of the �κφο�ά so clear that we can judge with certainty even of its details. Of these the earliest are vases of the eighth century from the Dipylon cemetery. One engraved in the Monumenti of the Roman Institute[4] clearly represents the funeral of a distinguished chief. The body lies on the top of a lofty bier, supported by four columns, which again is carried on a car drawn by two horses. Immediately behind the car come the relatives: and it is accompanied by long strings of mourners, who are depicted in the childish fashion of the art of the time as alike naked. The women are distinguished by the breast merely, the men by swords which they carry at the waist. The geese which seem to follow the procession are only inserted to fill up vacant spaces in the design; since there is nothing to which the early vase-painter objects more strongly than leaving any part of the ground without figures. On another contemporary vase, published on the same plate, is a scene of π�όθεσις; the corpse on its bier is surrounded by mourners, who seem to be sprinkling it with lustral water. These glimpses into the daily life of pre-historic Athens are very attractive; and the life which they reveal differs but little from that of the historic Athens of the Persian wars.

An archaic terra-cotta, here engraved ([Fig. 3])[5], gives us a vivid representation of the appearance of the funeral cortége.

FIG. 3. FUNERAL PROCESSION.

FIG. 4. ARRIVAL AT THE TOMB.

The corpse is placed on a car drawn by two horses. It is accompanied by a woman who bears on her head a jar of wine for the funeral libations, and by two wailing-women who tear their hair as they walk. Behind, comes a bearded flute-player, and two young men, doubtless the next of kin. A vase of the sixth century, which also we engrave ([Fig. 4]), represents a comparatively modest funeral[6]. The arrival at the tomb is depicted. The dead man, whose face is uncovered, lies on a bier drawn by two asses. The procession resembles that of the last representation; the flute-player, who wears a long white robe, and the next of kin follow the bier; of the wailing-women, two are perched on the funeral wagon, other two stand in front of the grave, which appears as a square erection to the right. The cock who is to form part of the offerings to the dead stands between two trees which mark the graveyard.

Such was the actual prosaic procession to the grave. But the artists who painted the white Athenian lekythi, vessels especially made to be placed in the tomb[7], preferred in their representations of funerals to take refuge in the realm of imagery and fancy. For the actual carriage of the body to the place of burial they substitute a poetic fiction. When in the battles before Troy, Sarpedon fell beneath the spear of Patroclus, we are told in the Iliad that the gods took charge of his body which the foeman had despoiled[8].

To Phoebus then his Father spake
Who drives the clouds along,
‘Dear Phoebus go, Sarpedon find
Amid the battle throng,
From purple gore his body lave;
Then bear him far away,
And wash him in the flowing stream,
And in ambrosia lay;
With garments clothe that wax not old,
And let the winged pair,
The brethren Sleep and Death, from thence
His body swiftly bear
To wealthy Lycia’s goodly land,
Where kinsmen shall be fain
To heap the mound and set the stone,
The guerdon of the slain.’

It is thoroughly in accord with the spirit of Greek art that it should have welcomed and dwelt on the idea thus suggested by the epic poet. Greek painters and sculptors, like Greek dramatists and lyric poets, loved above all things to escape from the prosaic details of actual life into the ideal world of myth and fancy, into the language of which they translated the facts of every-day existence. On a very beautiful red-figured vase, ascribed to Euphronius, is represented the bearing away of Sarpedon’s dead body by Sleep and Death, Sleep being a benign daemon with yellow hair, Death a dark-haired being of more forbidding aspect[9]. And after the precedent furnished by Sarpedon, Sleep and Death have been introduced into scenes on other Greek vases, wherein the body is not that of any ancient hero, but of an ordinary citizen. We give an example from an Attic white lekythos[10] ([Fig. 5]). The dead body, the eyes of which are not closed in death, is that of a girl, who is borne to the resting-place indicated by a sepulchral stele by two winged figures, of whom the bearded one is doubtless Death and the younger, or beardless, Sleep. The god Hermes, as conductor of souls, is present to preside at the deposition at the tomb.

The twin brethren Sleep and Death belong to poetry rather than to real belief. And it is the bodies, not the spirits, of the dead which they bear to the last resting-place. Other Athenian lekythi represent the journey of the soul to the land of shades, under the guidance of Hermes or in the boat of Charon. With these pictures I will deal in the third chapter, which treats of Greek beliefs as to the future life. Meantime we must follow the funeral procession to the cemetery.

In the Homeric age the bodies of fallen chiefs were burned with much ceremony, and funeral games celebrated at their tombs. The classical instance is the burning of the body of

FIG. 5. DEPOSITION AT THE TOMB.

Patroclus in the Iliad. But even at that time it is doubtful whether so expensive a method of disposing of the body was at all universal. In historical times, as may be abundantly proved from ancient writers and from existing remains, the customs of burning and of burying flourished together. Distinguished and wealthy men commonly had their funeral pyres, but the bodies of the Kings of Sparta, for example, when they died abroad, were embalmed and carried home for burial, instead of being burned. In various cemeteries of Greece we find sometimes the one custom most prevalent and sometimes the other. It is unnecessary in the present place to go beyond this general statement. When the body was buried, it was not, save very rarely, placed in a sarcophagus of stone, but far more commonly in a hole in the rock; or a grave was dug in the soil and a small chamber constructed of slabs of stone or terra-cotta. In case of burning, a pyre of wood was erected in or near the cemetery, and after the flames had burned themselves out, the human ashes, which are readily to be distinguished, were carefully and piously collected and placed in a vessel of bronze or of earthenware, which might either be buried or preserved in some hallowed spot in the house.

FIG. 6. PYRE OF PATROCLUS.

A late vase of Canusium[11] furnishes us with a representation of the pyre of Patroclus, and of the sacrifices which according to Homer were performed at it ([Fig. 6]). In the midst is the pyre of great logs, on which is heaped the armour of Patroclus. This detail shows, we may observe, how free are even the later vase-painters in their treatment of Homeric scenes, for Patroclus’ armour, which Hector had carried off, is not mentioned in the Iliad as being placed on his pyre. While Agamemnon pours a libation to the soul of the dead hero, Achilles plunges his sword into the neck of one of the Trojan captives, while the rest sit by, awaiting their fate. The inscription beneath, ΠΑΤΡΟΚΛΟΥ ΤΑΦΟΣ makes the identification certain.

It does not appear that among the Greeks there were any regular ceremonies as an accompaniment of burial, any ritual of prayer or dedication. When a public funeral took place it is true that an oration was delivered at the grave; we have record of orations pronounced by Pericles and Demosthenes over those who had fallen in battle on various occasions. Sometimes also there was a funeral feast at the tomb. But in ordinary cases the mourners seem to have returned immediately after the burial to partake of the funeral feast at the house of a near relative or heir of the deceased, who was himself regarded as the host on the occasion. By thus eating and drinking with the dead, the survivors entered into a kind of sacred communion with him; speeches were made in his honour, and libations poured from the cups of which in ghostly fashion he might partake.

CHAPTER II
THE WORSHIP OF THE DEAD

No Greek custom constituted a larger part of religious cultus than did the offerings to the dead. And no custom is more frequently portrayed on ancient vases. Such offerings did not begin merely with the funeral, but even earlier.

According to the beliefs of most barbarous or semi-barbarous races, the dead have needs and desires as imperious as those of the living. Indeed, the life of the next world is regarded as in the main a ghostly continuation of previous existence, a life marked by the same habits and requirements as that which men live on earth. But, as the dead man is less materialist in his needs, his wants may be supplied at smaller cost and in less completeness.

In many primitive countries we find the dead man living in his tomb as he had lived in his house, the tomb being often a copy of the house. There he treasures the goods which were buried with him, and there he receives the constant homage and frequent gifts of his descendants.

In Greece, as far back as we can trace burial customs, it was usual to deal liberally with chiefs and warriors when they went to their last resting-place. Indeed, the further back we go, the greater seems to have been the liberality. The richest graves yet discovered in Greece are those of the pre-historic rulers of Mycenae, spoiled by Dr. Schliemann in 1877. In these sepulchres were found treasures sufficient to stock a great museum—armour and ornaments of gold, swords and arrows, drinking-cups and sceptres, every kind of object in which the wealth of semi-barbarous chiefs is commonly displayed. In the historic age the profusion is less marked, but we yet find abundant proofs of the survival of the custom of fully equipping the dead for their existence in the world of shades. Mingled with human bones are sometimes those of horses and dogs, slain to accompany their master, sometimes those of flesh and fowl brought to him for food. Vessels for holding food and wine and oil are among the ordinary equipment of the tomb, lamps are very common, and jewelry and coins in which the thickness of the gold is reduced to that of paper shows the gradual growth of the belief that it is safe to cheat the dead. Ladies take with them to their graves their mirrors and the vessels which contained rouge and other necessaries of the toilet.

In later Greek graves terra-cotta plays a large part. Not only are vessels of this cheap material substituted for the golden or bronze vases and cups of early graves, but also loaves and animals of terra-cotta take the place of more genuine food. And terra-cotta images, sometimes of deities but more often apparently of mere human beings, are laid up in store by the corpse, each being broken, perhaps to render it unfit for the possession of the living. An engraving of a child’s coffin with its contents, which I reproduce from Stackelberg[12] ([Fig. 7]), will give some idea of the abundant contents of the richer Greek tombs. The symmetrical arrangement of the various vases and of the terra-cotta images is noteworthy; and as parts only of a human skeleton are present, it seems that in this case the body was not placed complete in the coffin, but only the skull, the shin-bones, and other parts of a corpse which had been for the most part disposed of in some other way.

I have been present at excavations at Terranova in Sicily, on which site the resting-places of the dead are formed of several slabs of terra-cotta. Around the skeletons are heaped vases, most commonly of the lekythos form, with occasional coins and other antiquities. But it would be a long task to give anything like a satisfactory account of the contents of tombs in various parts of the Greek world. Every district or city follows its own customs in the matter.

FIG. 7. CHILD’S COFFIN.

We turn to the sacrifices brought to the tomb. While the burial was taking place, the friends of the deceased threw into the grave terra-cotta figures, vases and the like, breaking them as they threw them. Such at least is the usage traced by Messrs. Pottier and Reinach at Myrina, and they observe that proofs of the existence of a similar custom have been found at Tanagra and Kertch[13]. Libations would take place at the same time from the vessels carried to the tomb for the purpose, as well as afterwards at the funeral feast.

Thenceforward at set seasons sacrifices were offered at the tomb. These seasons were, the third day after burial, τ�ίτα, the ninth day, ἔνατα, the thirtieth day, which came at the end of the mourning, besides the νεκ�σια or general feast of the dead, corresponding to the All Souls’ Day of the Middle Ages, and the γενέσια or birthday of the deceased[14]. And such sacrifices were also made at irregular times, when any portent or significant dream made the survivors suppose that their ancestors were displeased with them. At the beginning of the Choëphori of Aeschylus, of the Electra of Sophocles, and of the Electra of Euripides, mention is made of sacrifices at the tomb of Agamemnon, offered by Clytemnestra in consequence of a dream, which had disturbed her mind. In the Iphigeneia in Tauris of Euripides, Iphigeneia prepares, also in obedience to a dream, to sacrifice to the spirit of her brother Orestes, whom she supposes to be dead.

These passages from the great dramatists exhibit the Athenian custom of the fifth century B.C. How late this custom lasted in Greece may be shown from the language of Lucian, in the second century A.D. Speaking with contempt of the popular beliefs, he writes[15]: ‘People fancy that souls rising from below dine as they can, flitting about the smell and the steam, and drink the honeyed draught from the trench.’ Again, in another place[16], Lucian writes: ‘The shades are nourished by our libations, and by the offerings at the tomb; so that those who have no friend or relative left on earth, live foodless and famished among the rest.’

The offerings brought to the dead were of a simpler and less sumptuous character than those dedicated to the gods. Through Greek history they tended to become less costly. In the Iliad Achilles sacrifices to the spirit of Patroclus not only horses and dogs, oxen and sheep, but also twelve Trojan prisoners. At the taking of Troy, according to the legend, Polyxena was sacrificed on the tomb of Achilles. Not only did the custom of sending slaves to attend a dead chief, and horses for him to ride, die out, but the food of the dead became much less solid than beef and mutton. The laws of Solon forbade the sacrifice of oxen to the dead[17]. As late as the sixth century, an inscription of Ceos[18] speaks of sacrifice at tombs according to the old ritual; but after that time more serious sacrifices were reserved for actual heroes and exceptional tombs. A black ox, for example, was annually offered to the heroes of Plataea down to the time of Plutarch[19], with wreaths and fillets. Ordinary souls had to be content with something much simpler; cakes and flowers, with wine, honey, and milk, sometimes a fowl or a few eggs, sufficed for their somewhat ethereal needs. But in early, and still more in later times, the survivors would sometimes try to show their respect, in exceptional cases, by a great display of grief and by costly sacrifices.

Excavations sometimes reveal to us traces not merely of presents brought to the dead, but of actual sacrifices made to them. For example, when the mound which covered the bodies of those who fell at Marathon was recently excavated[20], traces were found in broken vessels and animals’ bones of the feast held by the survivors at the time of the burial, as well as a trench cut to receive offerings, and considerable masses of ashes, dating no doubt from the yearly sacrifices which in the month of Boedromion the people of Athens offered in gratitude to the heroes who had first dared to look the Mede in the face.

In historic Greece there were recognized heroes of every grade of dignity and importance. A few, such as Amphiaraus and Trophonius, rivalled the gods in their functions, in the number of their worshippers, and the splendour of their shrines. Others, such as Aeacus at Aegina, and Jason at Pherae, were venerated as semi-divine progenitors and supernatural defenders of the cities against all enemies. Others, such as Pelops at Olympia, and Hyacinthus at Amyclae, had tombs in close connexion with some of the most frequented and highly appreciated shrines of the Greek world. But beside these more dignified members of the clan of heroes there stood many whose influence and whose worship belonged only to a locality, to a clan, or a family. The Dorians in particular[21], like all conservative races, carried the worship of deceased parents and ancestors to the furthest point. But all over Greece there were small heroa or chapels belonging to families, the cultus of which was merely an extension of the worship which made sacred the domestic hearth. In modern cemeteries, and more especially in those of France, the tombs are frequently adorned with wreaths of real or artificial flowers, with crosses and designs of beadwork or with religious pictures. So in Greece it was usual to see in the neighbourhood of the tombs of those who had recently passed away, or who had left behind them many friends, the traces of libations, wreaths of flowers, sashes of various colours, even pieces of armour or other more solid gifts which were protected against theft by the sacred character of the spot.

Serious sacrifices to the dead are, as we shall see in a future chapter, a frequent subject of votive tablets and even of actual sepulchral reliefs. The lighter and less solemn offerings to the dead are commonly depicted on white Attic lekythi, which were specially made to be placed in graves, and which take their subjects from that use.

FIG. 8. OFFERINGS AT A TOMB.

The simplest of these vase-paintings consist merely of representations of a gravestone, bound with sashes or with wreaths, on either side of which stands a survivor, male or female, holding a basket, wreaths, a sash, or the like. In our example ([Fig. 8])[22] from a vase of Eretria in the Museum of Athens, the stele is truncated by a licence in drawing, but the relief on it, a woman seated on a chair and holding out a bunch of grapes to a seated boy, is similar to many of the groups in our plates. A mirror is represented as hung on the wall: this no doubt stands for a part of the marble relief. On one side of the stele stands a young man leaning on a staff, who seems to be directing a maiden who stands on the other side, where she shall place two wreaths which she carries. Our engraving makes no attempt to reproduce the brilliant colouring of the original, in which the dresses of the seated lady of the relief and the standing girl who ministers at the tomb are bright red, the garment of the youth brown, and the hair of all the figures a golden brown. In some of these scenes, the stele is hung with more serious offerings than flowers: sometimes a lekythos is suspended from the top or placed on the steps: in some cases, a sword is slung round it by means of a baldric[23]. Sometimes the attendant girls bring elaborate toilet-vases and flasks of oil.

By a curious convention, often the dead person is introduced into the scene, seated on the steps of the basis which supports the sepulchral slab, between the two ministrants. In one case[24] a lady thus seated holds on her finger two little birds, perhaps an indication of a sacrifice, ‘a pair of turtle-doves or two young pigeons.’ On other vases she holds an oil-flask or a toilet-vase. Sometimes, especially if the person represented be a man, he holds a lyre[25]. In our example ([Fig. 9]) of this curious scheme, a ghost is seen flitting through the air, and one of the attendants brings a little bird. The precise meaning of the lyre has been doubted. M. Pottier thinks that it represents music played before the dead, as part of their cultus. But this, of course, assumes the seated person to be a survivor, and we shall presently show this view to be untenable. It is, however, well known that to be able to play on the lyre as it passed from hand to hand at banquets was part of the training of the Athenian gentleman. It may well seem then that the musical employment of the dead man is merely an instance of the general rule that the Athenians loved to represent their dead in some employment which had been a favourite and characteristic one when they lived. And this view is confirmed by the occurrence on an early stele of the figure in relief of a man carrying a lyre[26].

FIG. 9. SPIRIT SEATED ON STELE.

That the seated personage who plays the lyre if a man, or who if a woman holds a tray of offerings or a lekythos, is not a survivor but a dead person, may be readily shown by a comparison of certain vase-paintings. For an example we may take two lekythi figured on one plate[27] in the Sabouroff Collection. On one of these is represented a young man seated beside a stele, playing on a lyre which he holds, while an attendant girl brings him a sash or fillet. On the other the stele is absent, and the scene, which is given in the text

FIG. 10. TOILET SCENE, SEPULCHRAL.

([Fig. 10]), seems one taken from daily life. A lady, fully draped, is seated on a chair; in her lap rests a flat box containing sashes; a maid-servant comes to her holding a smaller box with open lid, probably a casket of jewelry. This last scene is closely like many of the Attic sepulchral reliefs[28], and the artist who painted it can scarcely have had in his mind any other intention than that of representing a lady who had died. The former scene must be of parallel significance; and the man seated with the lyre can scarcely be other than the proprietor of the stele beside which he sits.

FIG. 11. GIFTS AT TOMB.

We add, from a late vase in the British Museum[29], a very interesting sepulchral group ([Fig. 11]). The tomb is in the form of a pillar with acanthus ornament at the base, resting on a flat slab or table[30]. This latter is heaped up with vases and sashes, the gifts of survivors. Among these gifts stands a female figure in sorrowful attitude, either a statue of the deceased, or more probably herself in spiritual presence. On one side a man raises his hand in greeting or adoration, on the other approaches a girl bearing some offering.

CHAPTER III
BELIEFS AS TO THE FUTURE LIFE

The group of vase-paintings with which we dealt in the last chapter raises a curious question. In all, or almost all, of them the locality is clearly implied by the presence of a stele in the background. The offerings which they represent were made, it seems, at the tomb itself. Is it not, however, a strange thing that wealthy and educated Athenians should suppose the souls of the dead to have nothing better to do than to rest beside the tomb, and there await the offerings of survivors? Did they not believe in a region of the dead, a kingdom of Hades, where the bad were punished and the good received the recompense of their merits? And if so, how could the souls of the departed be at the same time in Hades, and in the neighbourhood of the graveyard? In order to find a solution for these difficulties we must give some account of the views of ordinary Greeks, at different periods of the national history, in regard to the life after death, and the condition of the departed.

We must begin our examination of Greek belief as to the future life by turning to the Homeric poems. The outlines of the psychical doctrine which these contain has been traced with masterly hand by Dr. Erwin Rohde[31], whose conclusions agree well with all that we have of late learned from history and archaeology as to the Homeric age and literature.

It is only superficial theorizing which will find in the Homeric poems the ordinary barbaric views as to the nature of the soul and the future life. Primitive elements there may be in the Homeric beliefs on these subjects; but these primitive elements are mostly of the nature of a survival. The Homeric poems belong to a race of singular gifts and remarkable intellectual capacity, a small clan or aristocracy which had by the force of inborn genius penetrated to views in all matters of practical wisdom which must be considered decidedly advanced. Like the Vedas of India and the Zend Avesta, the Iliad and the Odyssey are the flowers of special developments of civilization, of the culture of pure-blooded clans, which had worked their way forward, amid surrounding barbarism, to a comparatively civilized survey of the world and of mankind.

The notion which is the common property of barbarous peoples, that the dead dwell among the living, and constantly interfere for good and for evil in their affairs, that they must be appeased by constant sacrifices and receive their share of all increase,—this notion has indeed left traces in the Homeric poems, but they are slight. It rather shows through the psychology of Homer than regulates or inspires it.

The intellectual aristocracy of Homer has in this matter a strong bias towards scepticism. It is really remarkable how nearly the Homeric theories of the soul correspond with the facts recorded by that cautious and sceptical body of inquirers, the Psychical Society.

The psyche to Homer is not in the least like the Christian soul, but is a shadowy double of the man, wanting alike in force and in wisdom. It has no midriff, but lives as dreams live; appearing to the living in visions, sleeping or waking, but without power. While the body of a dead man remains unburnt or unburied, his ghost wanders about the place of death: when the body has received due meed of funeral rites, the spirit departs to the land of shades, never to return, nor to vex the survivors.

The realm of Hades appears in the more antique parts of the poems of Homer as a land where shades dwell under the rulership of King Hades and august Persephone, living a life which is a sort of reflex and corollary of the past. Orion, the mighty hunter, still pursues in that land the spectres of wild beasts over the meadows of asphodel. Agamemnon still deplores his sad fate, Ajax will not be reconciled to his enemy Odysseus, Achilles lives on the memory of his past exploits, and rates the life of the greatest heroes in Hades as beneath that of the meanest serving-man on earth. Even these shadowy passions do not stir the hearts of the dead until they have drunk of the blood of the sacrifice, and their vital force is thus in some degree renewed. To Teiresias alone, says Circe, has Persephone granted that even after death he shall have living sense, while the rest flit like shadows.

It is quite clear that this view, which removes the dead to Hades, and deprives them of all sense and power, is not to be reconciled with some of the customs of Homeric cultus, especially with the offering of victims, animal and human, at the tombs of heroes. This, however, is not strange: cultus has infinitely greater power of persistence among men than mere speculative beliefs; and among peoples of all religions we find a want of harmony between the religious belief and the religious custom which needs explanation. Homer does not fear the dead; but the burial customs described in his poems must have arisen at a time when the dead were greatly feared, and regarded as meddlesome in human affairs.

And this marked inconsistency which we find in the Homeric age persists throughout Greek history. The customs of the cultus of the dead are, as we have seen, persistent among all Greek tribes, though more fully appreciated by some than others, and remain in force down to the very decline of Paganism. But at the same time speculation as to the world of spirits and the condition of the departed went on, on lines almost independent of custom and cultus. If the dead were safe in Hades they could not also live in their tombs; why then take offerings thither? If their life was the life of dreams and of shadows, why did they need food, both animal and vegetable, and abundant drink? This is sufficiently obvious to us. Yet Greek belief in all ages must have found some means of reconciling theory and cultus, and of preventing the course of speculation as to the state of the departed from interfering with the practical piety of the worship of ancestors.

We are able to follow, at all events in outline, the gradual development of the belief in Hades among the Greeks. The voyage of Odysseus to Hades in the Odyssey, whatever may be its date (a somewhat doubtful point), shows us that belief at a very early and incomplete stage. The main interest of the author of the Odyssey is evidently to give a glimpse at the later fortunes of some of the principal personages of the Iliad; though with this he includes a curious vision of fair women, Tyro, Alcmena, and Leda and the like. He accomplishes his purpose by taking the widely wandering Odysseus to Hades under the pretext that he will there learn how best he may win back to his native Ithaca. To Homer Hades is not, as in later belief, situated beneath our feet. Odysseus has to reach it by sailing to the confines of the ocean, to the land of the Cimmerians, enveloped in mist and cloud, where the bright rays of the sun do not shine. When he reaches the groves of poplar and willow, amid which flow the rivers Acheron and Pyriphlegethon and Cocytus, he digs a trench, and makes sacrifices to the dead, offering libations and barley-cakes, and slaying a ram in honour of Teiresias. No sooner is this done than the spirits of the dead begin to flock about him, and those whom he permits to drink of the blood of his sacrifice can answer his questions and inform him of their fate. The only class of persons whom Homer represents as punished in Hades are perjurers, perhaps because their punishment on earth was so problematic. But a few noted criminals of legend, such as Tityus and Tantalus, are also represented as undergoing a chronic punishment.

Hades, however, is by no means the only dwelling-place of souls known to the authors of the Homeric poems. Every scholar is familiar with the beautiful lines in which Proteus foretells the future destiny of Menelaus[32].

In Argos’ horse-abounding plain
To die is not thy fate,
O Menelaus, there for thee
No mortal chances wait.
Thee shall the immortals far away
To earth’s remotest end,
Where fair-haired Rhadamanthys dwells
In Plains Elysian, send.
There life flows on in easy course,
There never snow nor rain
Nor winter tempests vex the land;
But Ocean sends amain
Fresh Zephyr breezes breathing shrill
To cool the untroubled life.
There dwell, since thou art kin to Zeus,
And Helen is thy wife.

In dealing with the Homeric poems we can never escape the difficulties as to chronology and genuineness which at present envelop the whole Homeric question, on its literary side, like a thick mist. Dr. Rohde thinks that this passage is of later date than that which describes the voyage to Hades of Odysseus. The last line has a curious ring. Menelaus is to be rescued from the common fate, not for any virtue or merit of his own, but because he is the son-in-law of Zeus. We are reminded of the still more aristocratic belief of certain existing races of barbarians, who think that a happy state in the future life is reserved for the chiefs and those of high lineage.

According to the Cyclic Poets, the Islands of the Blessed were destined not for Menelaus only, but for others of the heroes who fought at Troy. In the Aethiopis, Eos (the Dawn) is allowed not merely to bear away her dead son Memnon, as Sarpedon had been borne away by Sleep and Death, but to awake him again to an immortal life. In the same poem, Thetis is represented as carrying off the body of Achilles from the funeral pyre, and transporting it over the sea to a new life in the island of Leuce, the white island, which popular fancy placed in the Euxine sea. In the Works and Days of Hesiod all the godlike heroes who fought at Troy are said to dwell still in the Islands of the Blessed. Odysseus after his death was said to have been translated to the island of Aeaea. And an Athenian drinking-song of about B.C. 500 tells how Harmodius and Aristogeiton, who slew the Tyrant and restored liberty to the Athenians, are not dead but dwell in the Happy Isles with Diomedes and swift-footed Achilles.

It may be doubted how far the Islands of the Blessed, the Elysian Fields, and the Realm of Hades are really distinct in Homeric geography. All seem to be reached by a voyage across the sea in the direction of the setting sun. Subsequent poets, however, gradually determine and map out the land of the dead. It is a conjecture, the truth of which is more than probable, that the great teacher of the lore of the future world was Orphism.

Orphism is one of the most important, but at the same time one of the most obscure phases of ancient religion. The original documents of the sect have perished, and forgeries have taken their place. It is only by putting together a number of occurrences, and collecting phenomena from all quarters, that we are able even to conjecture the tenets and observances of the Orphists; yet it seems certain that they exercised a deep and long-continued influence on the development of religion in Greece. We first clearly trace their activity in the sixth century B.C., when Onomacritus, a contemporary of Peisistratus at Athens, committed to writing much of their lore, and when Pythagoras attempted to found among the Greek cities of Southern Italy something like an Orphic church. Yet from what we learn as to Orphism, we see that it must contain elements handed down from a barbaric and primitive state of religion. It was essentially mystic and ecstatic in character. Zagreus, who was a form of Dionysus, was the principal object of Orphic worship,—the young god who was torn to pieces by the wicked hands of Titans, but restored to life by the favour of Zeus and Athena. By mystic communion with Zagreus, who was regarded as the ruler of the dead, the votary escaped from the trammels of the flesh, became pure and chaste, and fit for a nobler existence hereafter. Of course, in this religion, as in all, mere ritual tended to encroach on the religion of conduct; it was supposed by many that a mere partaking in mysterious rites would secure for them a favourable reception in the world of shades, and a verdict of acquittal from the stern judges of the dead.

It is certain, as I have already observed, that this ecstatic form of religion contains primitive elements. Anthropology has informed us that the wizard or medicine-man among savage tribes commonly acquires and retains his influence by means of trances or ecstasies, in which he professes to be inspired by the spirits of the dead. This is the original germ whence all ecstatic religion takes its rise; though, of course, it may reach a high moral level under some circumstances, and tend greatly to the help and elevation of mankind. What was the precise ethical level of the Orphic religion it is very hard to say.

However, we are at present concerned only with one aspect of Orphism—its lore as to the world of spirits. It is believed that this lore gradually works its way into current literature and art. After we leave the Homeric age, the next important landmark in the history of Hades is to be found in the great painting of Polygnotus in the Leschè or arcade of Delphi. Of this picture we possess so careful and detailed a description from the pen of Pausanias[33] that a skilled archaeologist, Professor Robert, has succeeded, with the help of certain vase-paintings of Polygnotan style, in restoring, figure for figure, the whole composition, with a sureness of hand which may well surprise those who do not realize the degree in which the scientific methods of archaeology have been developed in recent years.

In the upper part of the picture is a group which is almost a transcript from the Odyssey: Odysseus sword in hand over his trench, the unburied Elpenor behind him in sailor’s dress, and Teiresias and Anticleia approaching to hold converse with him. But this group seems somewhat apart from the rest of the scene, which is composed of elements mostly foreign to the Homeric circle of ideas. On the left is the river Acheron, full of reeds and peopled with shadowy fish; on which floats the bark of the ferryman Charon, who is taking to their last home the spirits of a man and a girl. Pausanias observes that Polygnotus has borrowed Charon from the epic poem called the Minyas, in which the voyage to Hades of Theseus and Peirithous was narrated. Whencesoever Charon may have originally come, he certainly held a great place in the beliefs of the later Greeks. The obol, his fee, was sometimes placed in the mouth of the dead. In later writers, such as Virgil and Lucian, he is very prominent. Some of the sepulchral lekythi, of which I have spoken already, furnish us with a representation of the River of Death and the boat of Charon. One here

FIG. 12. THE BOAT OF CHARON.

copied ([Fig. 12]) from a vase at Athens[34], presents a most curious scene. Charon, a being of traditional ugliness, clad in sailor’s cap and short chiton, drives his boat to the bank by means of a pole. He is awaited by a girl who bears in her hands her favourite bird, a goose, while a box for the toilet rests on a rock, and near it sits a young child. This flitting to the world of shades has quite a domestic aspect: it seems that Charon was expected to convey not only passengers, but also as baggage the offerings brought to them at the tomb. Sometimes the boat of Charon appears in these vase-paintings in close proximity to the stele of the grave; and the dead wait for him on the steps of the stele[35]. On another vase, Hermes, with herald’s staff, leads the soul down to the edge of the river[36].

It is a well-known fact, though one not easy to explain, that Charon, under the form Charuns, figures as the messenger of death in several of the mural paintings of Etruscan tombs. He is there depicted as a hideous monster, with hooked nose, sometimes winged, wielding an axe, and entwined with serpents. That the mild and quiet Charon of the Greeks should have his counterpart in a fierce and deformed daemon in the more monstrous pantheon of Etruria is quite natural; but it is less clear whence the Greeks and Etruscans originally borrowed their respective divinities.

We must, however, resume our description of the picture of Polygnotus. About the entrance of Hades cluster the transgressors whose punishment is eternal. They are very few in number: the parricide, the temple-robber, and such noted personages of legend as Tityus, who is devoured by a vulture after the fashion of Prometheus. Next we reach a group of fair women, who must indeed have been delightful creations under the hands of the most dignified and majestic of all painters—Ariadne and Tyro, Procris and Chloris. For some who had to be punished a most gentle meed of punishment is provided. Phaedra in her lifetime, as is well known, was inspired with a disastrous passion for her stepson Hippolytus, and after his death she went and hanged herself. In the painting of Polygnotus, as Pausanias observes, ‘Phaedra is borne through the air on a swing, and holds the ropes on each side in her hands: this attitude, in spite of the extreme gentleness of the allusion, refers to the manner of her death.’ Near the group of women Theseus and Peirithous are seated. They had dared, with overweening impiety, to make their way into Hades, in order to carry off Persephone, Queen of the Shades. But they were made prisoners by the nether powers and kept in chains. Such a fate for heroes of the race of the gods naturally seemed to Polygnotus too harsh. In his picture they merely keep their seats. So Virgil writes, ‘Sedet aeternumque sedebit infelix Theseus.’ Pausanias quotes Panyasis, a late Epic poet, to the effect that Theseus and Peirithous on their seats did not appear to be prisoners, but really the rock grew to their flesh in the place of bonds. But Polygnotus was content with a mere hint: in his painting nothing indicated either bondage or torture. Near by are Cameiro and Clytie, daughters of Pandareus. In the Odyssey Penelope tells how they were carried away by the fierce storm-winds and given to the hateful Erinnyes. But Polygnotus will know nothing of the Erinnyes. He merely represents the girls as crowned with flowers and playing with astragali or knuckle-bones. The storm-winds seem to have done them little harm.

Presently we come to the central part of the picture. It is occupied by the grove of Persephone, represented in the sparing fashion of Greek painting by a single tree, under which sits Orpheus, his lyre in his hands. No doubt we have here the key to the picture. Orpheus is the central figure of the whole. To Polygnotus he is not merely a departed hero, but priest and hierophant. The song which he sings is the mystic song of immortality. About him there cluster the heroes who fought at Troy: on the one side Agamemnon, Protesilaus, Achilles, Patroclus; on the other, Hector, Paris, Memnon, Sarpedon, and Penthesileia, queen of the Amazons. Paris makes love to Penthesileia, who looks back at him with contempt. The Greek and Trojan heroes may fight again their battles in memory; but peace has fallen on them, and they no longer wish to wield the lance. We need not dwell on other groups: Palamedes and Thersites busy with the dice; Thamyris, who had once challenged the Muses, seated in dejection over his broken lyre; the strange apparition of Marsyas, who teaches the boy Olympus to play the flute; and many others.

Towards the right end of the painting we again find punishments of a kind going forward. Sisyphus heaves his rock up the hill. Tantalus stands up to the chest in water which he may not drink, and clutches at fruit which eludes his grasp. These punishments had already been mentioned in the Odyssey; Polygnotus adds a rock, which hangs over the head of the sufferer, ever threatening to fall, but never falling. There appears also a great cask set in the earth, which it is the fate of an approaching train ever to try to fill with water from broken water-vessels. This was, according to tradition, the allotted task of the fifty daughters of Danaus, who had all save one in one night slain their husbands. But Polygnotus followed a different account: he calls the approaching men and women merely ἀμ�ητοι, uninitiated. Pausanias observes that they must be those who held in contempt the sacred mysteries of Eleusis; but this does not seem to be the meaning. They are ordinary persons, men and women who did not necessarily sin overtly against the Mysteries, but merely neglected to avail themselves of the ‘means of grace’ offered them by the hierophants of Eleusis, and suffer in the next world for their carelessness or obstinacy.

The general tone of the painting of Polygnotus bears a close resemblance to that of the sepulchral reliefs which we shall describe in this book. This is the less curious, when we consider that the sculptors of the reliefs were of that Attic school of sculpture which took so much of its character from Polygnotus. In spirit also the painting is like the Homeric poems, when they deal with the future life. The cultivated Greek mind looked for little bliss in the world to come, except such as could come from the reunion of friends and families, and the memory of past deeds. Still less did it look for future punishments. These were ordinarily reserved for the noted criminals of legend. The only classes which Polygnotus seems to have thought in any peril were the parricides, the temple-robbers, and the uninitiated. He seems to have thought that spirits were of the stuff of which dreams are made, and passed an existence of quiet and gentle melancholy, of which the worst feature was its exposure to tedium.

There do not appear in the picture of Polygnotus, as in some paintings which we must presently consider, any malignant beings to act as the police of the under-world. Not even Cerberus appears. The only spirit of inauspicious type who is seen is Eurynomus. Pausanias says[37]: ‘The interpreters at Delphi say that Eurynomus is one of the spirits that dwell in Hades, and that his office is to devour the bodies of the dead, leaving only their bones.’ Eurynomus does not appear, adds Pausanias, in Homer nor in the Cyclic poets. The daemon shows his teeth, and is seated on the skin of a vulture. Probably it was from the facts just mentioned that the interpreters at Delphi deduced the function of Eurynomus. But their opinion goes for little, and the name Eurynomus has nothing to do with the decay of the flesh. In the time of Polygnotus it was usually fire rather than decay which made away with the bodies of the dead. This daemon, who was possibly an archaic form of Hades himself, remains then unexplained. At any rate, we have no right to regard him as a punisher of souls. The punishments of Hades, according to Polygnotus, seem to go on by some law, without present enforcement.

With the Hades of Polygnotus we must compare that which is depicted on a class of large amphorae which come to us from Apulia in Italy. I have engraved ([Fig. 13]) a fair specimen of these vase-paintings, which are all closely alike, from a vase of Canusium[38].

Here in the centre we have, in place of the sacred grove of Persephone, the palace of Hades and his Queen. He is seated, and holds a long sceptre; she carries a torch. The palace has not unnaturally taken the form of a chapel of the deities; the wheels hung up in the background seem to be votive offerings. The motive of the whole picture is curiously twofold. Two visits to Hades, which really took place at quite different times, are depicted as going on together, the quest of Orpheus for his lost Eurydice, and the attempt of Herakles to carry off the dog Cerberus and to rescue his friend Theseus.

FIG. 13. THE GREEK UNDER-WORLD.

Orpheus stands, lyre in hand, before the chapel of the nether deities. He is clad in the variegated embroidered robes of the Orientals, with sleeves down to the wrists and a Phrygian tiara. In the painting of Polygnotus Orpheus was, as Pausanias expressly states, clad in the ordinary Greek dress. Later art rejoiced in the picturesque costume of the Persians and Phrygians: and the Thracian home of Orpheus allowed artists to consider him as belonging to a semi-Greek, Anatolian race. Orpheus is evidently using his art to persuade Hades to restore Eurydice, and that dread deity seems, from the position of his uplifted right hand, to be addressing him; but Eurydice, in this as in most of the vase-paintings, is wanting; a curious fact, which may indicate that the motive of the quest of Orpheus was originally something different. It seems indeed, as will appear clearly later, that the vase-painter combines without much skill or purpose groups taken from the works of older and more thoughtful artists.

In the lowest line Herakles struggles with Cerberus, around whose three necks he has fastened a chain. Hermes, who carries a herald’s staff, points out to his brother the road to the upper air, and urges departure. A more terrifying figure behind Herakles also gives cause for haste. One of the Poenae or Furies, a female servant of Hades, wearing hunting-boots and holding over her arm a leopard’s skin, advances with a torch to defend the realm of the dead against rash invaders. In the upper line, on the right, a similar figure, with drawn sword, guards the captives whom Herakles has come to release. Peirithous sits and cannot rise, but Theseus is standing; so far as he is concerned, the attempt of the invincible Herakles is successful, and he is allowed to return to earth.

The other groups which make up the picture have no special connexion either with Orpheus or with Herakles, and are introduced merely to complete the picture of Hades. On some of these under-world vases the names are written over the various persons, so that we can identify them with ease and certainty. In the upper line to the left is Megara, the wife of Herakles, and the two children of hers whom their father slew in a fit of madness. They stand near a spring-house, where water flows from a lion’s-head fountain. Drops of blood still stand on their breasts. Why they alone should thus bear in Hades the marks of mortal calamity we cannot say; nor indeed why they should appear at all as prominent inhabitants of the land of shades. One is inclined to fancy that some tale or legend may have connected them with the voyage of their father to Hades.

Beneath them is a curious domestic group: a young husband who is in the act of crowning himself with a wreath, a wife, and their little son, who drags behind him a plaything. It is a veritable scene of the reconstitution, in the land of shades, of a family endued with perpetual youth and leisure. Who these people may be is quite uncertain; but it is reasonable to think that they are such as have undergone initiation, and whose future life is thus assured. Opposite are the three judges of the dead, Minos, Aeacus, and Rhadamanthys, or, as some give the name, Triptolemus. Bearded and venerable figures, they carry long sceptres, but do not look so stern as one would expect from their terrible function.

The other scenes, in the two corners below, are of not much more than geographical import. They show the place to be Hades by introducing some of the well-known inhabitants of that region. On the left is Sisyphus uprearing his rock; and lest he should loiter at the task, one of the Poenae with snakes in her hair urges him with a double-thonged whip; in her other hand she carries a javelin and leopard’s skin. On the right is Tantalus, in the dress of an Oriental prince, and still carrying his sceptre. The Homeric pains have ceased to trouble him; he no longer stands in water, nor reaches after fruit. But he is still threatened by the hanging rock.

On other vases of the class, while the general arrangement is the same, the groups are varied. Peleus and Myrtilus, the faithless charioteer who arranged his victory at Olympia, sometimes take the place of Theseus and Peirithous. In the place of Tantalus we have a group of women ever drawing water, whether they be the Danaides or women who died uninitiated.

It is likely that all these Apulian vase-paintings go back to some original of a great painter which was known throughout the Greek world. An original by Polygnotus it cannot be; the composition is quite unlike his, and the Oriental garments worn by some of the personages indicate a different and a later school than his. We know that Nicias, a contemporary of Praxiteles, made a great picture of the under-world; but as we know nothing of its details, the inquiry whether this was the original copied in Italy has no certain basis.

Singularly instructive and suggestive is the comparison of these Hellenic pictures of the under-world with those which our ancestors of the Middle Ages painted on the walls and in the windows of their churches. There we see the ecstatic bliss of the saved, conducted by angels to the abode of God and the saints, and the fearful tortures inflicted upon the damned by hosts of hideous and malignant demons, who bind, burn, tear, and outrage them with fiendish ingenuity. In the Christian paintings there is no mean, everything is extreme. The destiny to eternal life or eternal torment seems to hang upon a decision by no means easy: angels and devils dispute the possession of souls, and the latter are at least as successful as the former in their raids. Our ancestors can scarcely have taken these representations as seriously as we are disposed to take them, or life shadowed by such a terrific future would have been unendurable. But still they embodied the teaching of the Church, which few dared dispute, at all events openly. They give us a glimpse at the terrible moral pressure necessary in order that the realities of the moral and spiritual life should be burned into the heart of the European peoples.

In the Greek pictures, on the other hand, nothing is extreme, but everything is in moderation. Setting aside the torments of a few legendary heroes, like Tityus and Tantalus, which had little relation to actual life, there was no torture, as there was certainly no bliss, in Hades. Between the punishment of the uninitiated and the reward of the initiated there is not very much difference. Whether Megara and her children belong to the class of the happy or the wretched we do not know. They bear the marks of suffering, but as one of the boys carries the oil-flask and strigil of the athlete, he would seem to pass his time in Hades as suitably as the little boy of the initiated pair who trundles his toy. The only unpleasant feeling which is roused by our vase-painting or the more exquisite Hades of Polygnotus is that its tenants must suffer from infinite ennui, and the same reproach has been brought sometimes against the heaven of the Middle Ages. But probably only highly civilized people learn to realize that ennui may become a torment.

In particular, we may compare the swarms of black and hideous devils, with horn and hoof of the mediaeval pictures, with the Greek Poenae. We can trace the genealogy of these latter from early times. The Oriental imagination had from very early times delighted in depicting evil spirits in the form of monsters and winged beasts, who are overcome and slain by the gods in human form. For winged monsters the Greek artists of the sixth century had tended to substitute winged human beings of hideous aspect, Gorgons and Harpies, Eris and Phobos, and the like. It was Aeschylus who, wishing to bring on the stage in bodily form in his Eumenides the powers that avenge kindred blood, transformed the Erinnyes, who had hitherto been worshipped at Athens as the Eumenides or gentle goddesses, in beautiful and dignified form[39]. He took as his models the Gorgons and Harpies of earlier art. So he himself tells us in the Eumenides[40], where his priestess thus describes the sleeping visitors: ‘I call them not women, but Gorgons; yet cannot I quite liken them to the forms of Gorgons. In a picture once I saw Harpies painted bearing off the food of Phineus: these, however, are unwinged in aspect, but black and utterly abominable.’

Pausanias too says, when speaking of the shrine of the Eumenides at Athens[41]: ‘It was Aeschylus who first wreathed snakes in their hair; but in their statues there is nothing terrible, nor in the other statues set up in honour of the nether gods.’ In a series of vase-paintings which represent the flight to Delphi and the purification of Orestes, the Erinnyes appear sometimes in Aeschylean guise as women, unwinged, but with snakes in their hair and of terrible aspect. With these the Poenae of our vase-painting are almost identical in dress, though the ugliness is softened down. And as Polygnotus knows not the Poenae, it seems likely that it was in part the influence of Aeschylus which introduced them as ministrants of evil in the realm of Hades. But the Poenae certainly fill very inefficiently the place of the Christian demons. Greek art loved to soften, to generalize, while mediaeval art rejoiced, like Dante, in exact detail. Greek art was always ready to sacrifice precise meaning to beauty and grace, while mediaeval art had little sense of beauty, but tried to work on the emotions of fear and horror.

Side by side with the evidence derived from the works of ancient painters we must place that derived from ancient poets and other writers. The philosophers are outside our scope, except so far as they testify to the opinions of ordinary men: to regard the views of Plato and Epicurus as ordinary Greek opinions would of course be as absurd as to regard John Stuart Mill or Herbert Spencer as representatives of the ordinary Englishman.

In ordinary Greek belief, then, we find abundant traces of the eternal conflict between the priest and the prophet, between ritual and ethics. There was a general feeling that those who died nobly or after a well-spent life were sure of a friendly reception in Hades. Xenophon says of Agesilaus[42], ‘He ever feared the gods, being of opinion that those who lived nobly were not yet happy, but that those who had died with good name were at once among the blessed.’ The chorus in the Alcestis speak of their mistress immediately after her death as a blessed spirit. And a multitude of epitaphs[43] express the conviction that those who had lived nobly were sure of a favourable reception from Persephone. Beside this ethical view we find the opinion of the sacerdotal party that initiation in the Mysteries or attachment to the cultus of some deity was necessary for the attainment of future bliss. This was especially the view of the Orphists, and as such it is ridiculed by Plato in the Republic[44]: ‘They persuade not individuals merely, but whole cities also, that men may be absolved and purified from crimes, both while they are still alive and even after their decease, by means of certain sacrifices and pleasureable amusements which they call Mysteries: which deliver us from the torments of the other world, while the neglect of them is punished by an awful doom.’ We have seen that Polygnotus gives some countenance to those who regarded the Mysteries as the gate of future happiness. And there was certainly in Greece a generally spread conviction, which may be well traced in the Frogs of Aristophanes, that initiation was, if not a passport to future happiness, at least a safeguard amid the dangers which surround the soul from the moment of its departure from the body until its final doom is fixed.

In the mentions of Hades to be found in the Tragedians, it appears more especially as the place of the reassembling of families. Sophocles’ Antigone expresses a hope of being well received in Hades by the relations to whom at her peril she has performed the rites of burial. The Oedipus of Sophocles wants to blind himself in order that in Hades he may not see the father and mother whom he has so deeply though ignorantly injured. In the Agamemnon of Aeschylus, Clytemnestra anticipates the meeting of Agamemnon in Hades with his daughter Iphigeneia. Hyperides, in his Funeral Oration, takes a somewhat wider view. He imagines the fallen heroes of the Lamian War as received in friendly fashion in Hades not merely by their kinsfolk, but by the worthies of Troy and of Marathon, and by the tyrannicides Harmodius and Aristogeiton.

As regards the imagery and geography of Hades the ordinary Greeks do not seem to have greatly troubled themselves. There were the views of poets and painters, and there were the more definite and dogmatic views of the professors of Orphic lore. These the people received or neglected as suited the bent of the mind of each. Hades was a realm of the imagination, as to the nature of which each man might innocently indulge his own hopes and aspirations.

In the epitaphs of later times we find, as will be shown in a future chapter[45], numerous allusions to the realm of Hades and Persephone. But they do not strike the reader as embodying strong belief; often they are of an epideictic or rhetorical character, like the statements which also occur that the soul of the dead has made its way to the Islands of the Blest or to the abodes of the gods. The beliefs which confined the spirits of the dead to the tomb and its neighbourhood belong to a lower and worse-educated stratum of the population, but have more vitality.

Greek religion and tradition knew of many mortals who had gone down alive into the earth, and there abode, giving for the most part oracles from their hiding-places. Such was Amphiaraus, the Argive hero, who after the bootless siege of Thebes went down with chariot and horses into the ground, and whose shrine was in later times a great oracular seat. Such was Trophonius of Lebadeia, whose cave is described for us by Pausanias. Caeneus, when overwhelmed with rocks by the Centaurs, vanished alive into the earth, and there lived on. It is, in fact, a marked feature of the cultus of heroes that their power is exercised only at the place where they disappeared or where their bodies were laid. They are intensely local, earth-daemons who possess a piece of land, and whose favour must be conciliated by any one who expects that land to yield him increase. Pelopidas, in the course of a campaign against the Spartans[46], unwittingly slept near the graves of some virgins of Leuctra, who had in old time been violated and slain by the Spartans. They appeared at night to the Theban general, and promised him victory if he made them the sacrifice of a foal. This is but one among a hundred instances of the fact that a hero had power only at his spot of burial: elsewhere he was helpless.

It is remarkable that this tendency to localization has been in all ages a mark of the ghost, and still marks him in the cases investigated by the Psychical Society. Yet the local character of ghosts has not become an impediment in the way of the acceptance of the Christian doctrines of Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory. Among our ancestors, just as among the Greeks, beliefs could lie in strata, and inconsistencies between a belief of one stratum and a belief of another stratum had little disturbing power. When Campbell writes in his noble address to the Mariners of England, ‘The spirits of your fathers shall start from every wave,’ he can scarcely be supposed to deny that the souls of British naval heroes had found a heavenly resting-place.

Sometimes, however, the Greek mind was disturbed by inconsistencies of this kind, and evolved a theory for their explanation. Thus a later interpolator of the Odyssey, being scandalized by the assertion of Odysseus that he saw in Hades the mighty Herakles, adds[47], ‘his ghost (εἴδωλον) only; since he himself joys amid the delights of the immortal gods.’ Others supposed that it was only the spirits of the unburied which hovered around their bodies: and it is an ingenious modern theory that the custom of burning the bodies of the dead arose out of the desire to prevent them from disturbing the living. But in spite of everything, the Greek dead retained to the last their right to levy tribute on their descendants and friends.

CHAPTER IV
THE PRE-HISTORIC AGE OF GREECE

When we turn from the facts of Greek cult and belief as to a future life to the monuments of the dead, and set them in chronological order, the first group which commands our attention is that which belongs to the pre-historic city of Mycenae. We cannot here speak of the wealth of gold and silver, of bronze and ivory, which the fortunate spade of Dr. Schliemann brought to light within the sacred circle in the Acropolis of the city[48]. We must pass by the contents of the graves of the wealthy pre-historic monarchs of Mycenae, and confine our survey to the outward and sculptural adornments of their tombs. These fall into two well-marked and clearly distinguished classes. First, we have the conical so-called treasuries, of which several exist in the neighbourhood of Mycenae, as well as at Orchomenus, Menidi and other spots of Greece; secondly, we have the carved tombstones which were set up over the graves in the Mycenaean Acropolis.

The larger and more elaborate of the so-called treasuries of pre-historic Greece, such as the Treasury of Atreus at Mycenae, and the Treasury of Minyas at Orchomenus, consist of two chambers, a larger outer chamber, which is circular in plan and of conical form, resembling in fact the beehive to which it has often been compared, and a cubical inner chamber, of much smaller dimensions. The accompanying engraving will make this clear ([Fig. 14]). The architect of the Mycenaean tomb had no small skill. The colossal size of the stones, especially of that over the door and of some in the dromos or approach, arouses the astonishment of the modern visitor, who wonders by what machinery and appliances blocks so colossal were transported from the quarries and placed in position. The gradual inward slope of the walls, each course of which somewhat overlaps the course below, is managed with great skill and accuracy. Rows of nails, some remains of which are still to be seen in the inner walls, supported, not indeed as some have supposed, a complete bronze lining to the conical chamber, but rows of stars or other ornaments, on which would glitter the light of the torches ([Fig. 15]). Perhaps the most expressive characteristic of all is the lavish expenditure of labour on a building which was entirely buried with earth, and on the magnificent approach built of hewn stones, when something far simpler and more effective might have been arranged. Evidently the builders of these monuments thought no trouble and no expense wasted, if only the dead were honoured and gratified.

FIG. 14. SECTIONAL PLAN OF THE SO-CALLED TREASURY OF ATREUS[49].

A simpler form of tomb of the same age and style dispensed with the square side-chamber, and consisted of a beehive building only. The engraving ([Fig. 16]) gives the plan of such a tomb near the Lion Gate of Mycenae.

FIG. 15. RESTORATION OF INTERIOR OF TREASURY, BY C. CHIPIEZ[50].]>

The excavations of recent years have given us abundant information on three important points, first as to the architectural decoration of these splendid memorials of the dead, second as to their purpose, and third as to their date. On each of these subjects I must briefly touch.

There have been for a long time in the British Museum interesting fragments from the doorway of the Treasury of

FIG. 16. PLAN AND FAÇADE OF TREASURY[51].

Atreus, and attempts have been made, on the ground of these fragments and others once known which have disappeared, to reconstruct the entrance of the building. Such attempt has best succeeded in the hand of M. Chipiez[52], who has produced a design at once faithful to the data, and of noble architectural effect. A more recent discovery is that of the decoration, in relief, of the ceiling of the side-chamber of the tomb of Orchomenus, which was excavated by Dr. Schliemann in 1880[53] ([Fig. 17]). The pattern of this ceiling bears a close resemblance to some of the Egyptian patterns in use for painted ceilings, thus giving us a valuable suggestion as to the origin of the art of the Mycenaean age.

FIG. 17. CEILING OF TREASURY, ORCHOMENUS.

That the conical underground buildings of early Greece were really erected as burial-places of the kings and nobles is now certain. Pausanias, in whose times less was known as to primitive Greece than is now known, calls the beehive tomb at Orchomenus the treasury of Minyas, and those at Mycenae the treasuries of Atreus and his sons. And doubtless they were in a sense treasuries, since in them were stored all the rich spoils which at that time were so freely bestowed on the great dead. But primarily they were burial-places, and the use as treasure-houses was only a derivative one. A few years ago this was a matter of dispute among the learned, K. O. Müller taking one side and Welcker the other. But in this case, as in so many others, the spade has cut the Gordian knot which the wit of man could not untie. Excavation has brought to light within the beehive grave of Menidi, in Attica, six skeletons; and at Vaphio, though the bodies which had been buried in the conical chamber had passed into dust, yet the disposition of the rich booty which was found buried beneath the floor showed that it was certainly a sepulchral deposit.

In the case of the more elaborate tombs with two chambers, there can be little doubt that the smaller side-chamber was that wherein the corpses were laid, while the outer chamber served for the purposes of the cultus with which the dead were honoured: thither was brought the tribute of sacrifice and offering which the dead demanded from the living. But in those cases where there is a single chamber, the dead rested beneath the floor of that chamber in the midst of their wealth, their arms and ornaments and vessels of silver and gold.

A number of recent discoveries, a full account of which would take us too far from our immediate subject, have helped us to determine the date of the beehive tombs of early Greece. The earliest date indicated for them seems to be about the fifteenth, and the latest the tenth, century before our aera. They belong to the age of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth dynasties of Egypt, when the land of the Pharaohs was more than once exposed to invasion by the powerful chiefs of the islands of the north. As the mists of the past are lifting, we gain a clearer and clearer view of a somewhat highly developed civilization in Hellenic lands at a time long before the Greece which is known to us came into being, of kings before Agamemnon, and palaces older and more splendid than those described in the Homeric poems. We may venture, though perhaps not without some trepidation, to ascribe the tombs of which we have spoken to the Achaean heroes whose fame still echoes in the earliest poetry of Greece; though it is certain that after their erection great changes had taken place in the country before the Homeric poems acquired anything like their present form. Our trepidation arises from the fact that the last word is certainly not said, nor the last theory put forth in this matter. The claims of the Carians and the Pelasgi to the remains of the Mycenaean age find adherents. Mr. Helbig, in an able recent work[54], has tried to prove that the contents of the Mycenaean tombs are almost entirely Phoenician. But the verdict of the majority of archaeologists goes in favour of the Achaeans, and the sober judgement of M. Perrot has accepted their claims in his great work on La Grèce primitive.

It is supposed by many archaeologists that the graves which were dug in the rock just within the Lion-gate of Mycenae, those tombs the rich spoil of which dazzled Europe a few years ago, are of older period than the beehive tombs. It is not unusual to recognize in the graves of prehistoric Greece two periods, an older period of rock-cut graves, and a later of beehive graves. But this distinction rests on no solid proof. There is no reason for deciding that the contents of the beehive tomb at Vaphio belonged to a later age than the contents of the Mycenaean rock-tombs. In the opinion of Professor Petrie, an opinion eminently worthy of consideration, they belong to an earlier time. Mr. Evans, another excellent authority, has accepted a view, first put forward by myself, that the bodies and the treasures found in the rock-graves at Mycenae had been moved thither, on some alarm of invasion, from an earlier resting-place in the beehive tombs which lie outside the acropolis walls of that city. In any case we are justified, in the present state of knowledge, in declining to recognize the line of division of which we have spoken. And so we may persist in regarding the sculptural decorations of the rock-tombs as not earlier than the architectural decorations of the beehive tombs. Very probably they may be later, but in any case they belong to the same race and the same age.

Over several of the rock-cut fosses in which the wealth of the early kings of Mycenae lay mingled with their bones, there was erected, either at the time of burial or later, an upright slab to mark the spot. Some of these slabs were plain, but others were carved with reliefs, of which some account must here be given, as it is desirable to compare them with the sepulchral reliefs of later Greece.

These slabs were made of the calcareous stone of the district: with time their surface has naturally suffered, but we can still trace on them the scenes sculptured by hands evidently quite unaccustomed to dealing with such materials. The designs are in many cases mere patterns, such as appear with far greater appropriateness on the gold plates used for the adornment of the dead. But in a few cases we have transcripts from the life of the period. [Fig. 18][55] represents part of one tombstone. We here see a warrior charging the foe in a chariot, the horse of which gallops with an almost preternatural energy. The driver holds with his right hand the reins, while the left hand grasps the hilt of a sword slung to his side by a sword-belt. In front of him flies an enemy who brandishes a leaf-shaped sword. The whole field is occupied by spiral designs. [Fig. 19][56] presents

FIG. 18. TOMBSTONE, MYCENAE.

a scene still ruder in execution, but similar in design, save that the enemy is still defiant, instead of in flight, though

FIG. 19. TOMBSTONE, MYCENAE.

the lance of the charioteer has already pierced him. A third stele (Fig. 20[57]) represents a mixed scene of war and the chase. In the background a warrior charges in his chariot as before; the enemy has fallen before him, and lies under the horse’s feet, endeavouring vainly to shelter himself under his huge shield. In the foreground a lion pursues a stag. Here it may be doubted whether the lion stands in a close relation to the charioteer or not. When Rameses II, on the monuments of Egypt, charges his foes, a lion gallops beside him, and shares in the fray. Have we some such scene here in imitation of Egyptian art? Or is the lion merely seeking his own prey? Or is he, as is not impossible, only a dog?

FIG. 20. TOMBSTONE, MYCENAE.

All three of these scenes come from slabs erected over one grave at Mycenae, the fifth. The other slabs with reliefs are in too fragmentary a condition to be studied to much purpose; and in fact it is to be feared that the reader may accuse us of somewhat straining evidence in interpreting these more complete scenes, though in reality none of our statements is open to much doubt.

We need but carry our thoughts for a minute to the sculptures which adorned the walls of the palaces of the kings of Assyria, which are full of the triumphs of those powerful monarchs alike over human foes and the beasts of the field, in order fully to recognize the meaning of the Mycenaean reliefs. Here also we doubtless have a court chronicle, though material and style will not bear for a moment any comparison with the magnificent records of Nimroud. Here also we may discern the king, in whose honour the slab was set up, slaying and pursuing his enemies. And although at Mycenae we are in a time of comparative barbarism, yet at least for the choice of subject we may find parallels in the later age of Greece. Dexileos riding down his foe on horseback on the splendid monument of the Cerameicus ([Pl. XII]) may be considered a parallel to the nameless chief of Mycenae who pursues his enemy in the chariot of an earlier age. But a still closer resemblance of subject is to be found in monuments of Asia Minor, in the paintings of the sarcophagi of Clazomenae, which date from the sixth century[58]. On these we have frequent battle scenes, and chiefs riding in two-horse chariots occur. The graves of Lycia and the sarcophagi of Sidon also preserve in their reliefs extracts from the lives of the chiefs buried in them, of their military expeditions, hunting exploits and domestic enjoyments.

The extraordinary inferiority of the sculpture of Mycenae in comparison either with the architecture of walls and gates, or with the working of the gold and silver cups and ornaments found in the tombs, may at first surprise us. But in spite of this inferiority, there are touches of similarity between the representations on the stone and those in the metal plates which show them to belong to one age. We may account best for the curious discrepancy by reflecting how very closely art is dependent on material. The artists of Mycenae were evidently used to gold and metal work. They had learned to adapt their devices perfectly to a material which could be engraved and hammered. But to making reliefs in stone they were clearly quite unaccustomed. No mason who thought as a mason would attempt so absurd a task as the working out on stone of these spiral and interlaced patterns. They are taken straight from metal to limestone. And complete ignorance of the art of working in relief is shown also in the way in which the scenes are executed, each figure being quite flat, and the outlines only made clear against the ground of the relief. A distant report of reliefs in stone to be found in the lands of the far east and the south seems to have reached the workmen of Mycenae, and set them to work, when they naturally carried with them into the new branch of art the style of the repoussé metalwork which was familiar to them. Even the Lion Gate of Mycenae, though a work of a character very superior to that of the tombstones, is very weak on the side of technique.

CHAPTER V
ASIA MINOR: EARLY

After the heroic or Achaean age we find in all branches of Greek history a marked break. Some great cataclysm in Greece, in all likelihood the Dorian conquest of Peloponnesus in the eleventh and tenth centuries, separates the age which is called Mycenaean from historic times. The young tree of Hellenic civilization had produced a few flowers, but a long period of comparative barbarism had to pass before it obeyed a second time the call of the season and brought forth mature fruit. This course of events is clearly mirrored in the graves of Greece Proper. The tombs of the later Mycenaean age, which have been discovered in great abundance, especially at Mycenae itself, are far less rich than those of the earlier period. And not only are their contents less plentiful and less interesting, but they present us with no external adornment which should justify us in here dwelling upon them. As our subject is the outsides rather than the insides of sepulchral monuments in Greece, we must pass almost in silence over a long period of time, and begin again, amid quite different surroundings, on the threshold of the Olympiads, and of Greek history as opened to us by Herodotus.

There can be little doubt that if excavations were carried out on a large scale on the coast of Asia Minor, amid the early Aeolic and Ionic settlements, we should be able to bridge the gap now existing between pre-historic and historic Greece. Doubtless by degrees the lacuna in our knowledge will be filled up. But at present it remains a lacuna.

Before however we proceed to an account of the cemeteries of the great cities of Greece Proper, of Sparta and Athens and Thebes, we must glance at the tombs erected in semi-Greek districts of Asia, such as Phrygia and Lycia, in honour of the wealthy kings who there bore sway. Greek history may, in a sense, be said to begin with the Mermnadae of Lydia, and all our histories of Greek art contain a chapter on the archaic monuments of Lycia.

A great part of the interior of Asia Minor is full of rock-sculptures, carved partly in the service of religion, partly as a record of the dead. Much of this sculpture is of great but unknown antiquity, and less closely related to any Hellenic work than to that of the races of Syria and Mesopotamia. The best general account of these remains will be found in the fifth volume of Perrot and Chipiez’ Histoire de l’Art dans l’Antiquité. It is only necessary in the present work to mention a few groups of monuments of a later time, which may be advantageously compared with early Greek monuments.

Pausanias, who was well acquainted with the Ionian coast, tells us that he had seen[59] on Mount Sipylus a notable tomb ascribed by tradition to Tantalus, son of Zeus and Pluto (Πλο�τω), and father of Pelops, who gave his name to the Peloponnesus. This monument has been identified[60] in a tumulus of which the remains still stand on a spur of Sipylus. It was excavated, and partly destroyed, by M. Texier, whose drawings, which are here repeated, give us a notion of its original form and disposition ([Fig. 21]).

Save for the fact that it was not covered with earth, but stood free, this tumulus bears a striking resemblance to the tombs at Mycenae and Orchomenus. And the chamber within

FIG. 21. TUMULUS ON SIPYLUS.

FIG. 22. SECTION OF CHAMBER[61].

([Fig. 22]) in many points of construction recalls the chamber of the beehive tombs, though its ground plan is not circular like theirs, but oblong. It is certainly remarkable to find, in the very district whence, according to the legends, Pelops came, a tomb so closely resembling those said to have been erected in Greece by his sons and grandsons. This however leads us to historical questions into which we must not at present enter.

FIG. 23. TOMB OF MIDAS.

The inner lands of Phrygia also furnish monuments parallel to those of Mycenae. In the neighbourhood of Kumbet, Leake found a large necropolis containing many tombs of ancient Phrygian kings and notables, some of which are remarkable for their architecture, and some for their sculpture. And here we are not dependent upon mere tradition, for the most notable tomb of the group bears an inscription in Phrygian, stating that it was set up by Atys in honour of Midas the king ([Fig. 23]). M. Perrot has allowed me to reproduce here a drawing of this tomb, made by M. Tomaszkievicz from a photograph taken by Mr. Blunt[62].

FIG. 24. GEOMETRICAL FAÇADE OF TOMB.

Several other façades adorned with patterns of a similar character have been found in the same district by recent travellers, especially Mr. W. M. Ramsay. These also in most cases adorned tombs, though perhaps in some cases the tombs were but cenotaphs and did not contain actual remains. We repeat an engraving ([Fig. 24]) of a carved front, which seems of a somewhat later date than the Midas Tomb[63].

FIG. 25. TOMB FLANKED BY LIONS.

If the geometric decorations of these early Phrygian monuments remind us of the carving of pillar and lintel at Mycenae, a still closer parallel to the Gate of the Lions is furnished by

FIG. 26. HEAD OF LION.

other Phrygian tombs of which Mr. Ramsay was the fortunate discoverer. At Ayazinn he found a tomb entrance surmounted by a tall column on either side of which ramped a colossal lion ([Fig. 25]), rudely executed it is true, but by no means wanting in vigour. Under each of the lions is a small cub. We reproduce the drawing of this monument made by M. St. Elme Gautier[64]. Fragments also of colossal lions of a far nobler type, which had in like heraldic pose served to decorate a tomb, were found in the same district: an engraving of a fragment of one of these ([Fig. 26])[65] will give us, so to speak, the high-water mark of Phrygian art, and we must confess that it is a level which the Greeks themselves scarcely reached before the end of the sixth century.

For the sake of completeness I have reproduced some of the most clearly marked types of Phrygian tombs. But it is impossible here to enter into the historic questions which they suggest, and which have given rise to much discussion[66]. Almost the only fact which we know as to the history of Phrygia is that recorded by Strabo[67], who tells of a Phrygian king Midas, who, when his kingdom was devastated about B.C. 680 by an invasion of the Cimmerians, committed suicide by drinking bull’s blood. After the Cimmerians had retired, the kingdom of the Lydians arose to a great height of power and splendour, but that of the Phrygians did not fully recover, remaining a dependency of Lydia.

The Midas of the Midas Tomb can scarcely be the monarch who fell in the darkest hour of his country’s history. Are we to suppose that the king Midas of the tomb was a predecessor of Strabo’s monarch, or a successor? Or are we to suppose with M. Perrot that he was no historic monarch, but a deity, and that the supposed tomb is really rather a shrine? That the monument was really a tomb Mr. Ramsay argues with great force. But its date is more problematic, and we cannot venture in this matter to express an opinion.

According to Mr. Ramsay the tombs guarded by lions are more ancient than those with geometric façades, and go back to quite a remote antiquity. But the opposite opinion, that the geometrical tombs are the older, has found advocates. Between them, the two classes of monuments seem to occupy the period between the eighth century, or earlier, and the age of Croesus and Cyrus.

That there was some not distant relation between the sepulchral art of Phrygia and that of Mycenae cannot be denied. It would however be a mistake hence to leap to the conclusion that the art of Mycenae was of Phrygian origin. It appears that the remains which come to us from Mycenae are earlier by several centuries than those which we find in Phrygia. It might even be suggested that the stream of art flowed rather in the opposite direction, from Mycenae to Phrygia. A more reasonable view, however, is that the art of Phrygia and that of Mycenae were not mother and daughter, but rather cousins, derived alike from some stem of Asiatic art which has yet to be traced out.

More interesting, because more full of human meaning, are the sculptural adornments of the early tombs of the district of Lycia in southern Asia Minor. Early Greek tradition shows a close relation subsisting between Lycia and Peloponnesus. There is a well-known Homeric story which tells how Bellerophon, the descendant of Aeolus, was sent to Lycia by Proetus, who desired that he should there be slain at the hands of the Lycian king, his father-in-law; and how nevertheless Bellerophon prospered in Lycia in all that he undertook, slaying the Chimaera, and overcoming the hosts of Solymi and Amazons. Glaucus, the grandson of Bellerophon, and Diomedes of Argos meet under the walls of Ilium as cousins. And tradition connected the name of the Lycian Cyclopes with the mighty walls of Tiryns and of Mycenae. The genealogies of the legends are no doubt quite untrustworthy, yet they are often confirmed as indications of race by other evidence. And there is, as we shall see, so near an analogy between the monuments of Lycia and those of Peloponnesus that we are obliged to assume between the two countries also some connexion.

When we consider the series of Lycian tombs, which may be studied better in the British Museum than in any other museum of Europe, we find a most interesting blending of Oriental and Greek elements[68]. Their architecture is local; the main feature of it being that it renders directly, in stone and in rock, forms which are clearly in origin wooden. Everywhere we see the square beam as it were petrified. In the roof of the ordinary Greek temple we see that the forms were thought out while the building material was still wood, and only modified when stone took the place of beams. In the Lycian tombs this feature is still more notable, because the Lycian architects lacked the nimbleness of the Greek intellect, and were more conservative of settled forms. The sculptures which adorn these curious constructions have also local elements, but in this field the art of Ionia comes in as a controlling force in the sixth century, rendering the native customs and beliefs in forms to which the student of Greek art is accustomed. It may be that our familiarity with the forms and style of the sculpture in some degree misleads us. When we know the words of a language we sometimes too hastily think that we are masters of its thought. The religion and the customs of Lycia may resemble those of Greece less closely than the monuments would lead us to think. But in ancient times art influenced custom as well as custom art. In the present state of our knowledge we cannot regard the early monuments of Lycia as outside the pale of Greek art.

There are indeed, as M. Perrot has well shown, among Lycian archaic monuments a few which seem to precede the Ionic influence. Such is the square chest of the British Museum[69], on one side of which is a lion strangling an ox, on another side a lioness with her cubs, on the third a man slaying a lion, and on the fourth a group of horsemen and warriors on foot. The lion-slayer in particular takes our thoughts not to Greece but to Egypt and Assyria. Many of the tombs which do show Ionic influence are not suggestive in the present connexion. Their sculptural adornment is such as we might expect to find as soon on a temple as on a tomb; satyrs, animals, sphinxes and the like. We will here consider only a few monuments, the sculpture of which seems to be really sepulchral in character.

Incomparably the most interesting of the archaic grave-monuments of the Xanthus valley is the beautiful tomb called the Harpy Monument, the reliefs of which now adorn the British Museum, having been brought thither by Sir Charles Fellows. When complete the tomb was in the form of a square tower of masonry about twenty feet high, which was surmounted by a small chamber, wherein doubtless in ancient times lay the bodies of those to whose honour the whole was erected, together with the riches heaped around their biers. This chamber reminds us of the tomb of Cyrus, as described by Arrian[70]. ‘Below,’ writes Arrian, ‘it was built of squared masonry in the form of a four-sided tower, on which was a chamber roofed with stone, having a narrow door to it, through which a man of no great stature could with pain and difficulty pass. In the chamber stood a golden coffin wherein was buried the body of Cyrus, and beside the coffin a couch with feet of beaten gold, whereon was laid a coverlet of Babylonian carpets, and below purple rugs. On these was placed a candys and other garments of Babylonian workmanship: also Median trousers and robes of hyacinth dye, some of purple, some of other colours; and torques and swords, and gold earrings set with stones.’

Similar, though no doubt less splendid, may have been the contents of the Harpy Tomb; and it is noteworthy that in it also there is a small opening at the side, intended not for the entrance of men, but either for admission of dues of food and drink, or more probably to give free ingress and egress to the ghosts of the dead. The Persians and the Lycians must have been of kindred stocks; and we may well suppose that their burial customs would be similar.

The reliefs which decorate the outer faces of the Harpy Tomb are among the most charming memorials of antiquity. In spite of a certain crudity and poverty in design, which is discovered on a close inspection, the style in its elegant and graceful conventionality is very attractive. And the difficulty which exists in the identification of the figures of the reliefs, and the determination of their meaning, adds an intellectual fascination to that which is aesthetic. (See [Fig. 27].)

On the side which faces the west we find the door already mentioned, over which is a figure of a cow suckling her calf. At the two ends sit, face to face, two dignified female figures. They are clad alike in the Ionian dress with long sleeves, but in attributes they differ. The figure to the left holds a vessel of offerings; a sphinx supports the arm of her chair; she is severe in type and solitary. The figure to the right holds in her two hands flower and fruit; the bar of her chair ends in a ram’s head. Three votaries approach her, whereof the first is busy with her drapery, the second carries flower and fruit, the third bears an egg. It is clear that the lady on the right is more approachable; her flower and fruit, and the ram’s head, all symbolize the genial abundance of life in nature. The libation-vessel of the lady to the left, and her sphinx, seem to belong to the grave rather than to life.

Let us pass to the other three sides of the tomb. The central group of each of them represents a seated male figure receiving offerings from a votary, also male. But the motive of the groups and the age of the votaries varies. On the east, a young boy brings an egg and a cock to an elderly man who holds a flower and a sceptre: a Triton supports the arm of his chair. On the south, a youth carries a dove to a clumsy figure who holds fruits. On the north, a warrior brings armour to a bearded personage, beneath whose throne is a bear. The flanking figures on the east side are merely more votaries with offerings. But on the north and south sides we find the remarkable beings from whom the tomb takes its name, strange monsters having the head, arms, and breasts of women, but the tails and feet of birds, who carry each in her arms a young girl clad in long drapery. In the corner of the north side is a woman, who sits in an attitude of grief.

FIG. 27. NORTH AND WEST SIDES OF HARPY TOMB.

Such are the details of reliefs, the precise import of which will probably never be recovered, unless a new light dawns on Lycian customs and religion. Earlier explanations saw in the winged figures the Harpies or storm-winds bearing away the daughters of Pandareus, according to a well-known tale of the Odyssey[71]. But an objection to this interpretation at once arises from the fact that the girls who are being borne away cling lovingly to their captors, and show neither dread nor anger. Hence it has appeared more reasonable to find in them souls of women gently carried by guardian spirits to the land of the future. In the seated male and female figures, it has been proposed to find the deities of the Lycian race, though who these were is not clear. If the seated ladies be goddesses, it seems clear that they must preside respectively over life and death. Yet it would be very bold so far to Hellenize them as to call them Demeter, the impersonation of the fruitful earth, and Persephone, queen of the shades below.

The most recent explanation of the reliefs, first propounded by Milchhoefer, regards them as memorials of the worship, not of the gods, but of the heroized dead. Certainly they in some points nearly resemble the Spartan reliefs, of which we shall treat in the next chapter, and which do beyond doubt belong to the hero-worship of Lacedaemonian families. The offerings, too, in the hands of the votaries, the flower, the fruit, the egg, and the cock, are such as were brought in Greece to the tomb, and such as are figured in the Spartan monuments. No offering could be more appropriately offered to a deceased ancestor, in an artistic representation, than the armour which was sometimes in early days placed, in Greek and Asiatic graves, on the head and the breast of him who had worn it during his life; and in later days was sometimes attached to his tomb. And however we interpret the winged figures, we can hardly make them other than the ministers of death, a fact which seems to strike a keynote with which all the rest of the explanation must harmonize.

Yet when we try to explain the sculptures as memorials of Lycian ancestor-worship we soon come to difficulties. On the stelae of Sparta we find a pair, ancestor and ancestress, or the ancestor alone. On Attic tombs we do not find more than a family group. But here, on the monument of Xanthus, there are five detached seated figures, three men and two women. What kind of a group of ancestors will these form, and why are they separate? In the little seated lady of the north side one is tempted, on the analogy of mediaeval paintings, to see the dedicator of the whole tomb. But this again is uncertain. In the whole matter we walk like the Mystae at Eleusis in the dark, seeing only vague forms and hearing words which we cannot interpret.

To the winged figures with their prey we may certainly find an analogy in the Sirens of the Athenian monuments (see below, Chap. VIII). The Siren was with the Greeks a sepulchral figure, and signified a death gentle rather than violent. The small beings in their arms on the Xanthian monument are almost certainly souls, which Greek art often represents as of very small size.

The Siren, in her ordinary Greek form, is found on another Lycian monument, which has not hitherto been engraved. In the British Museum[72] only the gable end of this tomb is preserved. In the midst of it is a column of Ionic type, though not of the ordinary form, on which stands the Siren of whom we speak. She is clad in a short chiton, girt at the waist, with loose sleeves. Though the wings and legs are those of a bird, she has human arms, outstretched. On either side of the column sits a figure: on the left a beardless elderly man, on the right a bearded man; each holds a staff, and extends the unoccupied hand. These two dignified men appear to be the heroes to whom the tomb belongs; and the Siren represents the mourning of the survivors. Here, even more than in the Harpy Tomb, we seem within the range of Greek conceptions and Ionic art.

FIG. 28. GABLE OF LYCIAN TOMB.

Another monument[73], probably not much later than 500 B.C., was adorned with what appears to be a funeral procession—old men in chariots, young horsemen, and armed men marching. One of the venerable figures in the chariots holds in one hand a flower, in the other apparently a cup, symbols which we shall presently see to have a decidedly sepulchral signification. Another fragment of archaic Lycian work in the British Museum[74] represents a woman standing at the foot of a couch, whereon it appears that a man reclined, for one of his feet is visible; but whether alive or dead we cannot be sure. But we must not linger over these fragments, though they might repay a more careful and detailed study. The threads which we are now obliged to drop, we shall regather when we treat of the tombs of Athens, and of the monuments erected by Attic artists on the coast of Asia Minor.

CHAPTER VI
SPARTA

The group of grave reliefs which constitutes our record of the customs and beliefs of the Lacedaemonians in regard to the tomb, a group which is inferior to few sets of ancient monuments in historical interest, has not very long been known to the world. Attention was first called to it in 1877 by Drs. Dressel and Milchhoefer, and it has since then found a place in all the histories of sculpture.

Of these reliefs the most important and the best preserved is now in the Museum of Berlin. It was found at Chrysapha near Sparta. It is represented in one of our plates (II), from which representation it is possible to gain some notion of the fashion of its carving, which is remarkable, and has been generally considered to indicate a hand or a school more versed in the carving of wood than in the sculpturing of marble. As in the carving of an onyx, we find several distinct planes one behind the other, on which are respectively projected the different parts of the relief, the outlines of each part being slightly rounded, and the inner markings graven in shallow lines with a tool. The face and arm of the nearest figure project most from the background; next, his body; and so on, layer beyond layer, to the ground of the relief. The style is rude, hard, and vigorous; though the capacity of the artist is narrowly limited, he moves within his limits with

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firm steps. The date of the work is probably the latter part of the sixth century.

Perhaps even more striking than the style of the relief is its subject. Seated side by side, no doubt on two chairs, though one only can be made out, are a pair, a bearded man who faces outwards and who holds in his right hand a winecup, and a woman, who bears a pomegranate in her right hand, while with the left she draws forward her veil. Both figures are fully clad. Behind the pair is erect a bearded snake; before their knees we see advancing two smaller figures, male and female, bringing as offerings a cock and an egg, a flower, and a fruit.

In the same volume of the Athenian Mittheilungen (ii), in which this relief was originally published, may be found photographs of other reliefs which closely resemble it in character, but show small differences in period and detail. On Plate 24 is a relief wherein the snake is wholly wanting: on Plate 23 the snake is transposed, being erect in front of the wine-cup, and the style of the work is decidedly more advanced: on Plate 22 a dog appears beside the seated pair.

These four reliefs then make up a strongly defined group; and before we turn to other reliefs of the Spartan class, it may be well to determine what meaning may be assigned to the representations which they exhibit.

We may begin by rejecting without hesitation some of the theories on the subject which might naturally be suggested by a first impression. The wine-cup in the hands of the male figure might dispose one to think of Dionysus and his consort Ariadne; but this explanation would leave the serpent and other features unexplained, nor have we reason to think that the cultus of Dionysus had struck deep roots at Sparta in early times. Again, the serpent might suggest Asklepius with his daughter Hygieia, since the healing deity commonly carries a staff round which a serpent twines. But to this explanation the winecup offers difficulties; and, again, the evidence for a local cult at Sparta is insufficient.

Far nearer to the mark is the view which Dr. Milchhoefer accepted, that in the dignified seated pair we have embodied the deities of the world of shades. The wine-cup would in that case refer to the frequent offerings of wine made to the shades below; and the serpent is the well-known companion and friend of the dead. We are not well informed as to the names borne at Sparta by the king and queen of the world of the dead. At Argos they were not so well known by the Homeric names of Hades and Persephone, which they commonly bore in Greece, as by the names of Klymenos and Chthonia. But in fact the pair were known by many names in various places.

An interesting terra-cotta ([Fig. 29]) from Locri in Italy[75] presents a group at first sight nearly resembling the seated pair of Sparta. We find on it Hades and his Queen seated side by side: he is wreathed and holds flowers; she carries a cock and ears of corn. This is valuable evidence, and shows that in southern Italy monuments of the class we are considering might well belong to the worship of the recognized deities of the nether world. But a closer consideration shows that at Sparta the worship took another and a less generalized form, natural to a race among whom ancestors were held in special and unusual honour.

Though Hades and his Queen are frequently mentioned in sepulchral inscriptions, they are but rarely figured together in sculpture. A comparison of two or three other stelae of Sparta will suggest at all events a modification of the view that the seated pair of the reliefs already mentioned are merely the rulers of the world below. In the fourth volume of the Athenian Mittheilungen are published two reliefs which beat

FIG. 29. HADES AND PERSEPHONE.

important inscriptions. On one is represented a man wrapped in a cloak seated: in his left hand is a pomegranate; in his right a wine-cup, out of which a coiled serpent drinks. The stone bears the name ΤΙΜΟΚΛΗϹ. If this inscription were of the same date as the relief it would of course at once prove that the stone is a memorial of an individual, and not a dedication to Hades. But in the opinion at least of Prof. Furtwängler the inscription is decidedly the later; it cannot therefore be regarded as conclusive evidence. But such evidence is afforded us by the next monument. Here we have a bearded man seated, in a decidedly later and more finished style of art, holding in his right hand a wine-cup, from which a serpent feeds. The inscription here is ΑΡΙΣΤΟΚΛΗϹ Ο ΚΑΙ ΖΗΘΟϹ; and it seems not merely to show that the memorial belongs to a man, Aristocles, but also that this Aristocles received a second name after his death in the quality of hero or demi-god. We learn from other sources of several such heroic names bestowed on distinguished men after their death. The rarity of names on the Spartan tombs may be readily accounted for by the existence of a stern law of Lycurgus[76], that names were not to be recorded on the tombs except in the case of priestesses, or of warriors who had fallen in battle. Another regulation of the great lawgiver ordained that bodies might be buried within the city, and memorials of the dead set up in the neighbourhood of the temples. Such monuments were not always gravestones, but sometimes memorials of those who were buried in a different place, or had fallen on foreign service.

In view of such facts as these we cannot hesitate to see in the sepulchral reliefs of Sparta reference to individuals, the ancestor, or the ancestor and his wife. They are the shrines of the family worship of the Laconians. But yet in a sense the dead man is identical with Hades. In Egypt each of the virtuous dead became part of Osiris. According to Herodotus the Getae thought that their dead returned to their deity Zalmoxis. In Greece, by dying, men put away the individual accidents of the flesh and became in a sense united with Hades. This no doubt is one reason why down to the second century B.C. we scarcely ever find individual portraits on tombs, a fact to which we shall hereafter return.

The cultus of ancestors was closely parallel to that of the gods. To both, sacrifices of food and of drink were constantly brought. To the temple of the gods corresponded the family heroum or shrine. To the statues of the gods corresponded the representation of the human dead in an ideal or heroized form. And gods and ancestors alike partook with their votaries of food at stated times, becoming the guest-friends of the worshipper.

Regarding the relation of the Spartan stelae to the cultus of ancestors as certain, we may proceed to consider in the light of that connexion the meaning of various details of the reliefs. The thing that is perhaps of the highest interest in them is the high honour paid to women. Ancestor and ancestress sit in state side by side, and are approached by their descendants, the smallness of whose figures is intended to portray the humility of their approach to their heroic progenitors. That ancestor-worship should find a special home at Sparta need not surprise us. We know that respect for elders and for parents was almost as strongly rooted among the conservative Laconians as it is in our days among the Chinese and Japanese. An exhortation to be worthy of their predecessors was the appeal which most readily stirred the hearts of the Spartan spearmen. They lived under the shadow of the past to an extent which we can hardly realize. But it is scarcely so familiar a fact that Sparta was the city in all Greece where women were held in highest honour. The Athenians inherited something of the Ionian desire for the seclusion of women, and to the contemporaries and countrymen of Thucydides it seemed high praise of a woman to say that she was never talked of. At Sparta, on the other hand, in some of the great crises of history, women are prominent in the foreground, from the days when little Gorgo saved her father Cleomenes from being bribed, to the days when Agiatis stirred up a later Cleomenes to his projects of political reform. The Spartan education, which seemed to regard women as only of use for bearing children to uphold the State, can scarcely have aimed at a high intellectual ideal. Modern German writers are fully convinced that sharing the exercises and games of the men must have rendered Laconian women coarse and masculine. Yet the Spartan ladies had a great share in the ownership of land; Spartan nurses were sought for in all Greece for the rearing of boys; and we learn from Plutarch that in all matters the Spartans were ready to take the advice of their women, and looked on their approval as the highest of rewards. On this regard for women among the Laconians, the treatment of women in their sepulchral reliefs is an excellent commentary.

The offerings brought to the seated pair in the relief first cited are such as belonged in a special way to the dead. The pomegranate was the food of the Shades, which, when Persephone had tasted in the palace of Hades, she belonged to him beyond recall. The cock and the egg are the simplest meat-offerings which were brought to the dead and enjoyed by the living. Flowers in all countries and in all ages have been laid on the tomb; and the Greeks who loved to deck their banquets with them were not an exception to the general rule. The winecup in the hand of the seated hero may be characterized as a very broad hint to his descendants that at the tomb were due the libations which were grateful alike to the gods and to the spirits of the dead. The serpent who is sometimes represented as drinking from the cup is either the companion of the dead or even his spirit in another form. The way in which a serpent disappears into the ground marks him out as essentially a chthonic being.

A few more characteristic specimens of this class of monuments must be cited. On a stele from Chrysapha ([Fig. 30]) we see a man, depicted in an archaic style of art, seated, holding winecup and pomegranate; at his feet leaps a dog, while a horse is depicted in relief in the background. In discussing this relief Dr. Furtwängler[77] advocates the view that horse and dog have a symbolical reference, the horse being

FIG. 30. SEATED HERO.

nearly connected with Hades and the dog with Hecate, both mythologic beings closely connected with the dead. I have proposed[78] a somewhat bolder view, that these animals sculptured on the stone bear the same relation to the mortal horse and dog which had belonged to the hero that the portrait bears to himself, and that they are really a survival of an ancient custom, whereof we find traces in the graves of Greece and Italy, by which the horse and dog of a deceased warrior were slain and buried in the same place with him. Whether their bones were mingled with their master’s, or whether they are merely figured on his gravestone, the meaning is much the same, that wherever the lord is, there are his faithful attendants: ‘Admitted to that equal sky, his faithful dog shall bear him company,’ as Pope says. In any case, horse and dog on a tomb are certainly a mark of knightly rank.

Among many proofs that the animal companions of the hero had reference rather to his occupations and necessities than to any symbolism, the evidence afforded by a grave at Tanagra[79] seems worth citing. Although that grave is of a period later than Alexander the Great, it seems to preserve early Greek ways of looking at death and what lies beyond. The interior of this grave contained paintings of the head and neck of a horse, a sword and a loom, besides a house and various articles of furniture. Here the paintings seem closely to represent what might at an earlier time have been the contents of the grave. The horse and the sword belong to the husband, the loom to the wife, whether we are to consider these as reflections of the past life of the pair or as an accompaniment of their ghostly existence. The furniture and the house are provision for their spiritual need of a domicile, just as in the graves of Egypt we find paintings of the life of the house and farm, there placed to break the shock of death, and provide for the shadow of a departed landlord a shadow of his past employments[80].

We pass to the representations which serve to bridge the gap between the grave-monuments of Sparta and those of other districts. Among the Spartan reliefs published by Milchhoefer, the following occupy one plate[81]:—

A female figure, seen from the waist upwards, clad in a chiton, holding in her left hand a tall flower.

A youth, standing, clad in a chlamys; he holds a staff in one hand, in the other a cake or fruit; before him a snake erect.

Both of these are of quite early style: with the latter of them we may compare the following in the Museum at Athens[82]:—

FIG. 31. STELE, MAN FEEDING SNAKE.

Man standing wrapped in a mantle; in his left hand a pomegranate, in the right a winecup, out of which feeds a serpent coiled and erect.

In these instances we approach the ordinary representation of the dead as standing, so common on the tombs alike of Athens and of Northern Greece, numerous instances of which will be found in the ninth chapter. Yet the snake, the flower, the pomegranate, all belong to the special cultus of the dead; and there is not in these cases a reference to the past life, as is probably the case with the great majority of Attic stelae.

CHAPTER VII
HEROIZING RELIEFS

Before we proceed further, one distinction of importance has to be made. It will be found that all the sepulchral monuments of Greece belong to one of two classes:—

1. Actual tombs, whether temples, or tables, or slabs hewn to be let into the ground.

2. Commemorative tablets. These may readily be distinguished in form, because their width is greater than their height, whereas in the true grave-stele, the height is greater than the width. They were made usually not to be fixed into the ground of the cemetery, but to be set up in chapels or mounted on walls in its neighbourhood. An example will be found in [Pl. III]. These slabs have a closer relation to actual cultus than have the gravestones. Their likeness in shape and in composition to tablets dedicated to the deities is obvious. In fact they belonged to the chapels and shrines sacred to the worship of heroes and exalted ancestors, rather than to the ordinary dead.

When we proceed to trace down the lines of descent of the memorials of ancestor-worship from Sparta in various districts of Greece, we shall find that some of these lines lead us to groups of actual tombstones, but more usually they lead to dedicatory reliefs, closely connected with the cultus of the dead, but not usually coming from actual cemeteries.

One line takes us to the so-called sepulchral banquets of Athens. The best specimen of these reliefs, found at the Piraeus, and dating from the end of the fifth century, is represented in our plates ([Pl. III]). It has passed by the absurd name, The Death of Socrates. On a couch, supported by cushions, reclines a bearded citizen, holding in his hand a cup, and apparently pouring the libation with which the Greeks preluded their feasts. At his feet sits his wife, occupied, like many of the ladies represented on Athenian tombs, in admiring a necklace, which she holds in both hands, or possibly a wreath, for the object itself, having been represented in colour and not in the marble, has disappeared. A young slave as cup-bearer is occupied in fetching wine in a jug from the huge crater or mixing bowl which appears on the left of the relief; beneath the couch a dog is occupied with a bone. On the right of the scene there enters a bearded man, of smaller stature than the reclining hero, who raises his hand out of the folds of his himation in a fashion which to the Greeks implied adoration.

At the first glance there seems but small likeness between this scene of domestic feasting and the stiff Spartan reliefs. Yet when we compare the two in detail, we find that the differences between them lie in the different customs of varying ages, and in the artistic rendering, rather than in the signification. Let us make the comparison.

In the Spartan relief the hero is seated, in the Athenian reclining. Here we have an illustration of the well-known fact that during the historic age the Greeks changed their custom from sitting at meals, as do the Homeric heroes, for a reclining posture. The habit of lying at meals, awkward as it seems to us, was a result of growing luxury. It had long, as we know from the reliefs of the Assyrian palaces, been customary in the East. [Fig. 32][83] shows King Assur-bani-pal and his Queen

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feasting in their palace, in the seventh century B.C. From the East, the custom spread to the Ionians of Asia Minor, and thence to Greece itself, with other traits of Ionian luxury.

An archaic relief from Tegea ([Fig. 33])[84] seems to mark the point of transition in Hellas from the seated to the reclining position. Although only the feet of the hero are seen, yet these feet sufficiently prove that he was extended on a couch. His wife draws forward her veil; between husband and wife is a youth holding a wreath, in regard to whom it is not easy to say whether he is the child of the pair, or merely a cup-bearer, or an adorer.

FIG. 32. ASSUR-BANI-PAL AND QUEEN.

It is a consequence of the assumption of a reclining position by the man in the reliefs, that the woman must be separated from him. In the somewhat unrestrained vase-paintings of Euphronius and his contemporaries we frequently find women reclining at table with men and sharing their cups. But these, as the disorder of the scenes clearly shows, were hetaerae, slaves of abandoned character. No wife, and no self-respecting concubine would even be present at a Greek banquet. When a husband dined at home, his wife might be present, but would probably not take a share in the repast. She would sit opposite her husband, to cheer him with her talk. But for a Greek wife to sit like the Queen of Assur-bani-pal drinking wine, and pledging her lord in a cup, would be an impossibility. Alike on the Tegean and the Athenian relief she is wholly occupied with her dress, like a true daughter of Greece. The Spartan wife had more in common with her husband.

FIG. 33. STELE FROM TEGEA.

Another marked divergence between the Spartan and the Athenian relief lies, so to speak, in its tense. In the former, the past is set aside, and we find allusion only to the life beyond the grave. The snake, the pomegranate, the offerings, all have reference to the status of the dead as hero and as an associate of the nether gods. But the Athenian relief might at first sight be supposed to be an excerpt out of daily domestic life. There is no symbolism, no exaltation. Husband, wife, and slave may have met thus a hundred times in their ordinary life on earth. In this we find the influence of the ordinary spirit of grave-reliefs at Athens, which, as we shall see in a future chapter, dwells on and draws from the past daily life rather than the more ghostly life of the future.

Yet a clear indication which unites the two classes of representation is furnished by the votaries who appear in both alike. They are in the Spartan relief very small in stature; a naive way of indicating how far below the hero they rank. The votary of the Athenian relief is scarcely smaller than his ancestral hero. Yet his presence is an undoubted proof of the connexion of the monument with actual worship. On many of the later representations of banquets, this is further emphasized by the introduction of the well-known symbolism of ancestor-worship. In some a snake is depicted in the foreground. In others a horse’s head appears in the background. In others the superhuman character of the hero is indicated by the lofty crown, which belongs to the god of the lower world, Hades or Sarapis, and which appears on the head of the reclining hero[85].

The Spartan monuments were probably in many cases set up as tombstones over the actual graves of ancestors. But the Athenian banqueting reliefs were not usually on tombstones, more often on memorial tablets preserved in chapels devoted to the cultus of the dead. This their shape clearly indicates. All tombstones are almost of necessity higher than they are broad, usually tall and narrow. But the banqueting reliefs are oblong in the opposite direction, broader than they are high. This difference indicates a different use and destination. In fact they come rather into line with the reliefs which belong to the worship of civic or local heroes, or those set up by grateful votaries in the shrines of Asklepius and other healing deities, than with the immediate memorials of the dead.

FIG. 34. COIN OF BIZYA.

The likeness between some of the votive monuments of Asklepius and the ordinary sepulchral banquets is so close as to have caused considerable confusion. The Asklepian reliefs appear to borrow of set purpose much of the symbolism which belongs to ancestor-worship. As an instance we engrave ([Fig. 34]) a coin of Bizya, a Greek city of Thrace[86], struck in the reign of Philip the Arab. On the reverse of the coin we see Asklepius reclining on a couch, against which rests his serpent-twined rod. His daughter or wife Hygieia is seated beside him; a human attendant brings in a wine-jar. The accessories, a coat of mail hung on a tree, a shield suspended from the wall, a horse who trots in from the right, are among the ordinary features of sepulchral banqueting reliefs, and seem inappropriate to a peaceful and non-equestrian deity like Asklepius. Such contamination of one class of monuments by another, such transfer of symbols from one artistic field to another, is among the common phenomena offered by Greek art.

We have now reached phenomena which require careful consideration. We have found that there is no clear line of distinction to be drawn between banqueting reliefs which were set up in honour of dead persons and reliefs which belong to the cultus of heroes, and even of deities who partake of the nature of heroes, such as Asklepius. It is always difficult in dealing with ancient monuments to separate the particular class of which we propose to treat from other classes which are akin to it in origin and in meaning. It is always necessary at last to draw a somewhat arbitrary line, and to adhere to it for the sake of order and method.

In Greek cultus and belief there is no broad distinction to be made between the veneration paid to the more noteworthy of those who were recently dead, and the worship accorded to local and national heroes, Theseus and Orestes, the Dioscuri and Asklepius. In a sense, all the dead were heroes, and any of them might become a worthy object of periodic sacrifice, proprietor of a sacred domain, and lord of a priesthood. I have already (Chap. II) dwelt on these facts from the point of view of custom and cultus; it remains to show their working in the field of art.

In dealing, not with actual gravestones, but with the oblong reliefs which had a closer relation to cultus, and were dedicated only to the more distinguished of the dead, it is quite impossible to distinguish clearly those which were set up in honour of recognized mythic heroes, from those which belonged strictly to the cult of ancestors. Sometimes the inscription may help us to a decision, or sometimes we may find direction in the place where the relief is found. Apart from these external indications, those offered by the relief itself are usually ambiguous.

That some of the banqueting reliefs were set up in honour of persons recently dead may be proved[87]. Indeed, in later times, such scenes not unfrequently decorate actual tombstones. This being the case, it is reasonable to assume that the great majority of them belong to tribal and family worship. They were set up, not usually at the tomb, but in shrines and heroa in the neighbourhood of the cemetery, or in the chapels of deities or heroes; sometimes, perhaps, in private houses, to be a constant reminder to the survivors.

In an early and interesting sepulchral relief in the British Museum[88] we have an unusual group. On a couch there recline an old man and a young, doubtless father and son, while a second son leads in a horse. This relief may serve as a transition to another class of oblong cultus-reliefs. The cult of heroized ancestors does not find its only memorials in Greece in the reliefs in which they are represented as seated or reclining. There is another group of monuments in which they appear as horsemen, or as leading horses.

The connexion of the horse with the heroic dead, whencesoever the notion may have arisen, was certainly in some districts of Greece very close. Milchhoefer has shown[89] how the sculptural evidence indicates that this connexion was closest in Thrace and Northern Greece. And this is but natural. The aristocracies of Thessaly, of Boeotia, and other northern parts of Greece were essentially equestrian; whereas in Peloponnesus the horse, being unsuited to the rugged mountain paths, was comparatively rare. The strength of a Thessalian army lay in its cavalry; the strength of a Spartan army in its array of spearmen. To a horse-loving race it was natural to think of the mighty dead as horsemen. Even at Sparta the national heroes, the sons of Zeus, Castor and Pollux, were essentially riders; and on monuments they seldom appear without their steeds. Still more close is the connexion between heroes of Northern Greece and their horses.

A great deal of learning has been expended by a variety of archaeologists to prove that the horse, when he appears in the sepulchral banquets and the present class of reliefs, is of chthonic signification; that he belongs mythologically to the gods of the world below, and to mortals assimilated to them[90]. It may be doubted whether they have proved their case. Hades is in Homer κλυτόπωλος, in allusion to the dread chariot in which he bore away Persephone[91]; but he does not appear as a rider. The wild rider or hunting ghost is familiar in northern lands, but not in ancient Greece. It seems preferable to take the simpler explanation, that a chief accustomed all his life to riding would scarcely be supposed to lack a horse in the fields of Hades. We have ancient evidence that the presence of a sculptured horse beside a sculptured man showed his knightly rank in the Athenian Constitution of Aristotle[92], where we are told that a statue of one Diphilas on the Athenian Acropolis, which was set up to mark his rise to the knightly rank, had a horse standing beside it.

Several extant monuments show how the god-like heroes of Northern Hellas came as horsemen to receive the tribute of the living. And this kind of monument spread from the north into other parts of the Greek world.