Homer and His Age

After gifts of hair and the setting up of jars full of oil and honey, Achilles has the body laid on the top of the pyre in the centre. Bodies of sheep and oxen, two dogs and four horses, are strewed around: why, we know not, for the dead is not supposed to need food: the rite may be a survival, for there were sacrifices at the burials of the Mycenaean shaft graves. Achilles slays also the twelve Trojans, "because of mine anger at thy slaying," he says (XXIII. 23). This was his reason, as far as he consciously had any reason, not that his friend might have twelve thralls in Hades. After the pyre is alit Achilles drenches it all night with wine, and, when the flame dies down, the dead hero's bones are collected and placed in the covered cup of gold. The circle of the barrow is then marked out, stones are set up round it (we see them round Highland tumuli), and earth is heaped up; no more is done; the tomb is empty; the covered cup holding the ashes is in the hut of Achilles.

We must note another trait. After the body of Patroclus was recovered, it was washed, anointed, laid on a bier, and covered from head to foot {Greek: heano liti}, translated by Helbig, "with a linen sheet" (cf. XXIII. 254). The golden cup with the ashes is next wrapped {Greek: heano liti}; here Mr. Myers renders the words "with a linen veil." Scottish cremation burials of the Bronze Age retain traces of linen wrappings of the urn. {Footnote: Proceedings of the Scottish society of Antiquaries, 1905, p. 552. For other cases, cf.Leaf, Iliad, XXIV. 796. Note.} Over all a white {Greek: pharos} (mantle) was spread. In Iliad, XXIV. 231, twelve {Greek: pharea} with chitons, single cloaks, and other articles of dress, are taken to Achilles by Priam as part of the ransom of Hector's body. Such is the death-garb of Patroclus; but Helbig, looking for Ionian i

To the ordinary reader this does not seem, in the circumstances, a strong mark of different ages and different burial customs. Priam did not bring any linen sheet—or whatever {Greek: heanos lis} may be—in the waggon as part of Hector's ransom; and it neither became Achilles to give nor Priam to receive any of Achilles's stuff as death-garb for Hector. The squires, therefore, gave back to Priam, to clothe his dead son, part of what he had brought; nothing can be more natural, and there, we may say, is an end on't. They did what they could in the circumstances. But Helbig has observed that, in a Cean inscription of the fifth century B.C., there is a sumptuary law, forbidding a corpse to wear more than three white garments, a sheet under him, a chiton, and a mantle cast over him. {Footnote: op. laud., p. 209.} He supposes that Hector wore the chiton, and had one {Greek: pharos} over him and the other under him, though Homer does not say that. The Laws of Solon also confined the dead man to three articles of dress. {Footnote: Plutarch, Solon, 21.} In doing so Solon sanctioned an old custom, and that Ionian custom, described by the author of Book XXIV., bewrays him, says Helbig, for a late Ionian bearbeiter, deserting true epic usages and inserting those of his own day. But in some Attic Dipylon vases, in the pictures of funerals, we see no garments or sheets over the corpses.

Penelope also wove a {Greek: charos} against the burial of old Laertes, but surely she ought to have woven for him; on Helbig's showing Hector had two, Patroclus had only one; Patroclus is in the old epic, Hector and Laertes are in the Ionian epics; therefore, Laertes should have had two {Greek: charea} but we only hear of one. Penelope had to finish the {Greek: charos} and show it; {Footnote: Odyssey, XXIV. 147.} now if she wanted to delay her marriage, she should have begun the second {Greek: charos} just as necessary as the first, if Hector, with a pair of {Greek: charea} represents Ionian usage. But Penelope never thought of what, had she read Helbig, she would have seen to be so obvious. She thought of no funeral garments for the old man but one shroud {Greek: speiron} (Odyssey, II. 102; XIX. 147); yet, being, by the theory, a character of late Ionian, not of genuine old AEolic epic, she should have known better. It is manifest that if even the acuteness and vast erudition of Helbig can only find such invisible differences as these between the ma

Hector, when burned and when his ashes have been placed in the casket, is laid in a {Greek: kapetos}, a ditch or trench ( Iliad, XV. 356; XVIII. 564); but here (XXIV. 797) {Greek: kapetos} is a chamber covered with great stones, within the howe, the casket being swathed with purple robes, and this was the end. The ghost of Hector would not revisit the sun, as ghosts do freely in the Cyclic poems, a proof that the Cyclics are later than the Homeric poems. {Footnote: Helbig, op. laud., pp. 240, 241.}

If the burning of the weapons of Eetion and Elpenor are traces of another than the oldAEolic epic faith, {Footnote: Ibid., p. 253.} they are also traces of another than the late Ionicepic faith, for no weapons are burned with Hector. In the Odysseythe weapons of Achilles are not burned; in the Iliadthe armour of Patroclus is not burned. No victims of any kind are burned with Hector: possibly the poet was not anxious to repeat what he had just described (his last book is already a very long book); possibly the Trojans did not slay victims at the burning.

The howes or barrows built over the Homeric dead were hillocks high enough to be good points of outlook for scouts, as in the case of the barrow of AEsyetes ( Iliad, II. 793) and "the steep mound," the howe of lithe Myrine (II. 814). We do not know that women were usually buried in howe, but Myrine was a warrior maiden of the Amazons. We know, then, minutely what the Homeric mode of burial was, with such variations as have been noted. We have burning and howe even in the case of an obscure oarsman like Elpenor. It is not probable, however, that every peaceful mechanic had a howe all to himself; he may have had a small family cairn; he may not have had an expensive cremation.

The interesting fact is that no barrow burial precisely of the Homeric kind has ever been discovered in Greek sites. The old Mycenaeans buried either in shaft graves or in a stately tholos; and in rock chambers, later, in the town cemetery: they did not burn the bodies. The people of the Dipylon period sometimes cremated, sometimes inhumed, but they built no barrow over the dead. {Footnote: A