Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 2.djvu/29

 8 Primitive Greece: Mycenian Art. is a person who eats and drinks, and enjoys the possession of riches buried with him in his eternal abode ; one who is accessible to joy and sorrow, to gratitude and anger, interested, too, in the movement and stir of this world, where he intervenes to reward pious children who honour his memory, and chastise those that are forgetful of him. The strange persistency of such concep- tions proves that they held supreme sway during those long centuries which correspond to the infancy of the Hellenic race ; they sank so deeply into these fresh minds, that the advance of speculative thought was unable to eradicate them. Hence it is that in the day of Plato and Aristotle, we find Isaeus appealing to them with telling effect upon an Athenian jury.^ Inhumation is the only mode of disposing of the body which does not rudely shake the belief in the existence of a nether- world, consequently it was the only one that was in practice where this same belief was dominant. Vision, nay, even hallu- cination cannot dispense with a modicum of reality to start with. This element, without which self-illusion could not be carried on, was supplied by the last impression left by the departed, ere he was lowered in the grave, surrounded by kinsmen and friends, when the lines of the face were as yet unchanged, and the features still preserved their natural contour. No great effort was required to conceive the human form keeping itself whole and lasting on for weeks, nay, months and even years, provided they abstained from following the destructive process which goes on silently in the darkness of the grave. They just as easily pictured to themselves the colour mounting to the pallid cheeks of the defunct, as he fed on the toothsome viands offered him, or seemed to watch his mouth, which had looked as if closed for all time, re-open and about to speak. However great may be the imaginative power in its first freshness, when it not only invents but keeps up the illusion in which it delights, it would not have been proof against the utter annihilation of the body on the funereal pyre. If, in despite of the change which ushered in the cremation system, this belief of a life continued in the grave still kept its ground, it is because it had been written in indelible characters in the innermost depths of thought when another mode of burial had prevailed. Had the order
 * G. Perrot, L eloquence politique et judiciaire a Athhies,