Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/108

 92 HISTORY OB GREECE. again to the treatment of the dead body of an enemy wo find all the Greek chiefs who come near (not to mention the conduct of Achilles himself) piercing with their spears the corpse of the slain Hector, while some of them even pass disgusting taunts upon it. We may add, from the lost epics, the mutilation of the dead bodies of Paris and Deiphobus by the hand of Menelaus. 1 But at the time of the Persian invasion, it was regarded aa unworthy of a right-minded Greek to maltreat in any way the dead body of an enemy, even where such a deed might seem to be justified on the plea of retaliation. After the battle of Pla- taea, a proposition was made to the Spartan king Pausanias, to retaliate upon the dead body of Mardonius the indignities which Xerxes had heaped upon that of Leonidas at Thermopy- lae. He indignantly spurned the suggestion, not without a severe rebuke, or rather a half-suppressed menace, towards the pro- poser: and the feeling of Herodotus himself goes heartily along with him. 2 The different manner of dealing with homicide presents a third test, perhaps more striking yet, of the change in Grecian feelings and manners during the three centuries preceding the Persian invasion. That which the murderer in the Homeric times had to dread, was, not public prosecution and punishment, but the personal vengeance of the kinsmen and friends of the deceased, who were stimulated by the keenest impulses of honor and obli- gation to avenge the deed, and were considered by the public as specially privileged to do so. 3 To escape from this danger, he 1 Iliad, xxii. 371. oW upa ol ru; UVOVTTJTL ye Trapearri. Argument of Iliad. Minor, ap. Ddntzer, Epp. Fragm. p. 17 ; Virgil, jEneid, vi. 520. Both Agamemnon and the Oiliad Ajax cut off the heads of slain warriors, and send them rolling like a ball or like a mortar among the crowd of war- riors (Iliad, xi. 147 ; xiii. 102). The ethical maxim preached by Odysseus in the Odyssey, not to utter boastful shouts over a slain enemy (O6/c oairj, Krafievoiatv in' avSpucriv ev%i- raaadai, xxii. 412), is abundantly violated in the Iliad. 2 Herodot. ix. 78-79. Contrast this strong expression from Pausanias, with the conduct of the Carthaginians towards the end of the I'eloponnesian war, after their capture of Scllnus in Sicily, where, after having put to death 16,000 persons, they mutilated the dead bodies, KOTU TO irurpiov ISot (Diodor. xiii. 57-86^. ' The Mosaic law recognize? this habit and duty on the part of the ral*