Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/516

 described by Homer is found depicted on the great vases that served as monuments over the graves. A little later, the legislation of Solon is directed against the excesses to which the rite of solemn lamentation led. Next, an orator of Athens is found declaiming against the wrongs done to him by the thirty tyrants, who, not content with having put his brother to death, had actually refused the use of any of the three houses belonging to the family and had forced them to lay out the body in a hired hut. Again we have the ridicule of Lucian directed against the discordant scene of useless misery. In strange company with him appears St Chrysostom upbraiding Christians for their extravagances of grief and threatening them with excommunication if they continue to call in heathen women to act as professional mourners. Centuries passed without diminution of the custom, and the Venetians during their occupation of the Ionian islands enacted laws in the spirit of those formulated by Solon more than two thousand years before. Of this custom it might well be said, 'et vetabitur semper et retinebitur,' for it still maintains its old vogue and vitality, and is the necessary prelude of every peasant's funeral to-day.

My second illustration is a far more trivial circumstance, but not on that account less significant—the use of the foliage of the olive as a couch for the dead, whether on the bier which conveyed him to the grave or on the funeral-pyre. The reason for choosing olive-leaves does not concern us; there may have been, as Rohde suggests, some idea of purification connected with it; but it is only the wide-spread use of it which I have to illustrate. Among the ashes of those small pyres, on which the dead were laid in Mycenaean sepulchres, were recognised charred olive-leaves. Lycurgus in curtailing the funeral-rites of Sparta bade his countrymen wrap their dead for burial in the red military cloak (as became a race of warriors) and in olive-leaves. The Pythagoreans, who. 1888, p. 136.]