Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 2.djvu/40

 Funereal Rites. 19 they should have differed in this essential point from their fellows in the lower city ? The ruler who had prepared for himself this ostentatious vault, would doubtless mark out beforehand a place in it for his wives, his children, and nearest kinsmen. There came a time, however, when the whole available space was filled up. Then, and only then, the tomb was closed for ever, the passage was filled up, and the facjade buried out of sight with stones and imported earth ; whilst the reigning sovereign built him a tomb hard by, where he and his would find their last dwelling-place, even as those of a former generation had done before him. Was the notion relating to this primitive mode of burial kept alive among the ancients — in despite of the change which had intervened in this direction — by discoveries made in these tombs by treasure-seekers, or was it tradition which kept green the memory of the primitive rite ? To this question we can give no positive answer, except that the Hellenes pictured to themselves the pre- Homeric heroes as having been interred and not burnt. When, in the sixth and fifth century B.C., the Greek cities, on the advice of the Delphic oracle, looked about them for the remains of their founders, the possession of which was to secure triumph to their arms and the welfare of the State, what they removed within their walls, with great pomp and circumstance, were not ashes but skeletons, held to be those of men of unusually lofty stature.^ Again, the fact that an erudite poet, Apollonius of Rhodes, dared to conform in this matter with historical truth, in opposition to the revered authority of the Epics, is full of significance. In his Argonauticay the heroes who accompany Jason bury and do not burn their dead.^ Pit-Graves in t/ie Mycenian Citadel. Our description, in a former chapter, of the shaft-graves, when we surveyed the primitive culture of the Greek world, (Plutarch, Theseus) and of Pelops (Pausanias). 2 Apollonius, Argonautica.
 * This is told both of Orestes and Protesilas (Herodotus); of Theseus