Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/543

 Recent Greek ArchcBology and Folk-lore. 535

itself as much as possible of the legend. We have a section of the tumulus with the tomb chamber surmounted externally by the votive tripod. On the floor of the chamber is the dead Glaukos. Polyeidos is striking at the snake, which, already dead, is being restored by its mate. The attitude of Glaukos is interesting ; he sits in a confined attitude with his knees drawn up to his chin and hands clasped round them ; exactly as we may presume primitive man to have slept. Now it is hardly likely that the Athenian vase-painter was here copying a practice which he had seen : on the contrary, it is highly improbable that such a mode of burial existed in Athens in the fifth century B.C. : we can only presume that he was following some tradition that in the legendary past the Greeks, and particularly perhaps the Kretans,^ buried their dead in a sitting position.

The other interesting point in this story is the fact of the boy being found in a cask of honey. We may presume that this cask was probably the ordinary pithos, such as was used for storing wine, olives, etc., and usually half buried in the ground. We have in the Museum a vase- picture of such a pithos, with a boy tumbling head-first into it, in which I should be inclined to see an earlier stage of the same story. Now, in the Glaukos legend, with its honey, its seated corpse, and its pithos, we are reminded of the stories that evidently circulated in antiquity as to actual burial customs which the Greeks did not understand, and which ma)^ have arisen out of some vague report of the mummifying practices of the Egyptians. Herodotos' story (iv, "jQ) of the mode of burial of the Scythian kings has a certain vraiseniblajtce as a method of embalming ; but the nearest to our legend is the account given by Xenophon {Hell., v, 3, 19) of the system applied in the case of the kings of Sparta. When any of these died abroad, the corpse was laid in honey in order to preserve it until such time as it could be buried at home. 1 Several of the large burial pithi have been found in Krete.