Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/365

 for any other than him whose funeral was in progress —customs which all still flourish.

The laceration is quite a common feature of such occasions. Indeed in some districts the women nearest of kin to the deceased are almost thought to fail in their duty to him if they do not work themselves up into an hysterical mood and testify to the wildness of their grief by tearing out their hair and scratching their cheeks till the blood flows. Such a display of agony, it must be remembered, comes easy to the Greeks: for their temperament is such that, even when the fact of the bereavement has moved them little, the rôle of the bereaved excites them to the most dramatic excesses. Men rarely if ever now take part in this scene, and are certainly not guilty of such transports; for their usual method of mourning is to let their hair grow instead of tearing it out, and to avoid laceration by forswearing the razor.

Again, the use of set dirges, composed or adapted beforehand to suit the estate and circumstances of the deceased, is almost universal; and so essential to the funeral-rite is the formal lamentation that there are actually women whose profession it is to intone dirges and who are hired for the occasion. These professional mourners ([Greek: myrologêtriais] or [Greek: myrologistriais]) take their seats round the corpse in order of seniority and assist the wife, mother, sisters, cousins, and aunts, who also take their seats according to degree of kinship (the head of the bier being of course the place of honour), to keep up an incessant flow of lamentation. The scene differs in no detail, save that the hired mourners now are always women, from that which was enacted round the body of Hector. There too 'they set singers to lead the lamentation,' and of the women present it was Andromache, the wife, who began the wailing, Hecuba, the mother, who followed next, and Helen whose voice was heard third and last. The singers who led the lamentation were probably then as now hired, for Plato speaks of paid minstrels at funerals using a particular style of music known as Carian —a custom suggestive of antiquity; and in all probability the singing of set dirges, which Solon tried to suppress, was the recognised business of professional