despite the lack of a universal doctrine about the nature of the soul, actual funeral and
mourning customs in ancient Greece were relatively uniform (Richardson 1985:64).
The living needed a way to acknowledge the strangeness of death and a way to
comfort each other. So, the Greeks held certain burial rituals to be quite important.
And despite the varying attitudes toward the possibility of an afterlife, there existed a
widespread belief that if the dead weren’t properly laid to rest their spirits might take
revenge and haunt the living. Even if a good number of Greeks didn’t believe in the
soul or its survival after death, a pervasive folk-belief in vengeful ghosts might at least
be seen as an expression of guilt for failing to observe proper rituals. And, lest
individual families failed to tend their ancestors’ tombs, some Greek cities such as
Athens held annual state festivals to honor the dead.
The Greeks practiced both inhumation and cremation, though the popularity of
one method or the other varied over place and time. For example, archaeological
evidence indicates that throughout Greece, and in Mycenae in particular, inhumation
prevailed from ca. 1650 to ca. 1200 BC. At this point, cremation became popular,
and was even preferred in Attica until ca. 900, when it was replaced by pit burials. In
the archaic period cremation grew more popular again, but evidence from the classical
period seems to show no preference, although in fifth-century tragedy cremation
remained the usual method for disposal of the dead (Burkert 1985:191; Garland
2001:34). In the hellenistic period inhumation prevailed (Garland 2001:34). The
manner of disposal was perhaps less important than the accompanying rites per-
formed over the body. Ninth-century Greek geometric vases left as grave goods in
the Kerameikos depict mourning rituals such as a body lying on a bier surrounded by
women tearing their hair, or a body being carried out for burial. In the eighth-century
Iliad (which also preserves some traditions of earlier periods) King Priam risks
journeying to the Greek camp to beg Achilles for the body of Hector, and the epic
ends with Hector’s funeral. In the fifth century, Sophocles’AjaxandAntigone‘show
how a dead person’s relatives will risk or suffer death, rather than leave a body
unburied’ (Richardson 1985:51); in theAntigoneeven a symbolic burial, the scatter-
ing of dirt on a body, sufficiently honors the heroine’s dead brother.
A typical Greek burial ritual included several stages, in which the women of the
family played a prominent role. First came the ‘laying out’ of the corpse, orprothesis,
during which the women would wash the body, anoint it, dress it by wrapping it in
cloth, and lay it on a bier for the family to perform the traditional lament and pay
their last respects (Kurtz and Boardman 1971:144; Garland 2001:23–31). Once
coinage became widespread, in the sixth century and later, a coin was placed in the
mouth or hand of the deceased to symbolize payment for Charon, the mythological
ferryman who rowed the dead across the river Styx, the final boundary between the
living and the dead. After theprothesis, which lasted one day, the body would then
be transferred at night to its burial site in a formal but quiet procession, theekphora
or ‘carrying out’ of the body, accompanied by mourners and torches (Garland
2001:31–4). At the cremation or burial site the family would make offerings of
food, wine, olive oil, and various household possessions – such as weapons for the
men or jewelry for the women – burning or burying them with the body, the idea
being, at least in part, that the dead person might have use for these items in the
afterlife. The funeral would end with a family banquet in honor of the dead, the
perideipnon, or ‘‘feast around,’’ though the banquet was held not at the gravesite but
The Dead 87