Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 7, 1896.djvu/393

Rh high bed of timber out in the open, on which they seated the dead body, having first taken out the intestines.

Still, in spite of this precaution, in hot weather the face would undoubtedly undergo some decomposition. To avoid the sight of anything so ill-omened and to cover the whole face, the rest of the body being shrouded, it would be natural enough to use a mask. This naturally would have to resemble the deceased so far as lay in the power of the artist or craftsman to make it. In early times the mask might represent the eyes as open or shut, but there would be no hole or aperture in any part of it, corresponding to the positions of the eyes, nostrils, or mouth. This we find to be the case in all the oldest masks, those from Mycenæ and Olbia, at least with adults. The only exception is the child's mask from Mycenæ. This anomaly might arise from the fact that children were buried at once, with little ceremony, and certainly without a delay of several days, as was the case with men of royal and patrician birth. In the later masks of Roman Imperial times it was otherwise. All the masks of bronze, silver, or copper, and some in terra-cotta, have apertures for the eyes and often for the nostrils and mouth. The difference may have arisen from following a totally different tradition and line of thought; one that pointed to a belief that the ghost of the dead still wanted to see, still needed to breathe, in the other world. But there is another, I believe, better explanation. At the funeral of a Roman patrician part of the procession was formed of men wearing wax masks (imagines) representing the illustrious ancestors of the dead and dressed in the robes of office that the prototype of the mask had worn. It was necessary that these wax masks should be perforated to allow the wearers to see and to breathe. As the archimime, who wore a mask of the deceased about to be buried, imitated the speech of the latter and even cut jokes at his