Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/515

 its testimony is not to be outweighed by a few conspicuous divergences. So too, I think, in estimating the mutual relation of two rites, the coincidence of all the minor circumstances connected with them is of more significance than one large and evident contrast between them. Such a contrast, let it be granted, exists between cremation and inhumation when employed separately. Yet it would be a rash and faulty judgement, I hold, which should at once infer thence that the two rites were informed by different religious ideas. The minute coincidences claim examination. If all that preceded and accompanied and followed the actual disposal of the corpse, whether by burning or by burial, exhibited uniformity in scheme and in scope; if the washing and the anointing, the arraying and the crowning, were performed with the same tender care whether the body was destined for the cold, slow earth or for the rapid flame; if from the death-chamber, where the body had lain in state and the kinsfolk, grouped in order of dearness about it, had paid in turn their debt of lamentation, the same sad pomp escorted the dead whether to the pyre or to the grave; if the same gifts—the same provision as it seems for bodily comfort—were mingled as ashes with the ashes of the dead or were consigned intact with the body yet intact to the will and keeping of the earth; then, whichever means the mourners chose for effecting the actual dissolution of the fleshly remains, their religious attitude towards death and their conception of the hereafter must have been single and constant.

Space forbids me to enter into the evidence for the uniformity of all this detail in all periods of Greek life. I will confine myself to two illustrations. The first shall be the prothesis or lying-in-state of the body with the solemn lamentation of the kinsfolk, for the most part women, grouped about it. I have elsewhere described the scene; I have only to illustrate here the universality of it as the prelude alike to cremation and to inhumation, alike in Ancient and in Modern Greece, alike amid pagan and amid Christian surroundings. In the Mycenaean age the bodies of the dead were sumptuously arrayed—probably with a view to the lying-in-state; more than that cannot be actually asserted of the earliest epoch. But in the Homeric age, as at the funeral of Hector, the custom is seen already fully developed. In the Dipylon-age the scene