more poignant moment is the voluntary death of the man’s wife. This reflects
a custom practised in a number of ancient Indo-European (and not only
Indo-European) societies. There is already evidence suggesting it in burials of
the Globular Amphora culture in north-central and eastern Europe, around
3400–2800.^156
In Vedic India it is an ‘old-established rule’,dhárma- pura ̄ ́n
̇
a-(AV 18. 3. 1),
though after symbolically lying down beside her dead husband on his pyre
the widow is apparently allowed to get up again and marry another.^157 It
remained a Hindu ideal, however, for the ‘true’ wife (Sanskrit satı ̄, from which
English suttee). Krishna’s four wives ascend his pyre in the Maha ̄bha ̄rata
(16. 8).
It was certainly not practised in archaic Greece, and there is no mention of
it in Homer. But Euadne’s determination to leap onto Capaneus’ pyre makes
a dramatic scene in Euripides’Supplices (980–1071), and it is possible that the
incident comes from the epic tradition about the Theban wars.
Among the northern Thracians, according to Herodotus (5. 5), a man
had several wives, and on his death the one he was judged to have loved
best had the much coveted honour of being put to death and buried with
him. Propertius (3. 13. 15–22) ascribes a similar rivalry among wives to
unspecified peoples of the East. Ibn Fad
̇
la ̄n, cited above, describes how a
volunteer was found from among the dead man’s maids to die with him.
Another tenth-century Arab writer, Ibn Rusta, reports that if a man in ‘Slavia’
(S
̇
aqlabiyya) died he was cremated and his ashes put into an urn, which
was set on (in?) a mound. If he had three wives, the one who believed herself
his favourite hanged herself and her body was thrown into the fire and
burned.^158
There is earlier evidence for suttee among Slavonic peoples. The Byzantine
emperor Mauricius, or the author of the Strategika attributed to him, attests
it around 600. Bonifatius in a letter of 746–7 avers that the Wends (quod est
foedissimum et deterrimum genus hominum) consider that woman praise-
worthy who commits suicide on her husband’s death and burns beside him
on the pyre.^159 Baltic wives, some of them at least, showed the same devotion.
It is recorded that when in 1205 a Lithuanian war-band was slaughtered,
(^156) J. P. Mallory in EIEC 227b.
(^157) Cf. RV 10. 18. 8, AV 18. 3. 1–3; Oldenberg (1917), 576, 586 f.
(^158) C. H. Meyer (1931), 93. 6–27.
(^159) Mauricius, Strategika 11. 4; Bonifatius, Epist. 73 Tangl (MGH Epistolae selectae, i. 150. 22).
Cf. also the anonymous Persian geographer in C. H. Meyer (1931), 94. 34 f.; MasUu ̄dı ̄, ibid. 95.
23–30 (both tenth century); Thietmar of Merseburg, Chron. 8. 3 (MGH Scriptores rerum
Germanicarum ix. 494. 30, on the Poles; early eleventh century); Vánˇa (1992), 135 f., 252 f.
500 12. Arms and the Man