Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/520

 entire desuetude, and all he knew of it was from reading. 'It is most probable,' says Bingham, 'that the heathen custom altered by degrees from the time of Commodus the Emperor; for Commodus himself and many of his friends were buried by inhumation and not by burning and from that time the custom of burning might decrease till at last under the Christian emperors, though without any law to forbid it, the contrary custom entirely prevailed, and this quite dwindled into nothing.' If this view be correct, it will mean that the old preference for cremation exhibited by the adherents of paganism was only excited to temporary intensity by a spirit of antagonism towards Christianity, and that they soon returned to the old way of thinking and recognised inhumation as a method alternative, if slightly inferior, to cremation. When the bitterness of religious strife was over, and pagans and Christians lived more at peace together, the former may readily have resumed the practice of interment, which after all was their own heritage from dim ages long before the dawn of Christianity.

But though Macrobius in the fifth century speaks of cremation as then in disuse, the memory of it cannot have passed away so soon. Only a few generations were to lapse before the infusion of a Slavonic population into Greece. Among the superstitions which these intruders disseminated was one which concerned the resuscitated dead. The Greeks, as we have seen, themselves held a superstition on which the horrid imaginings of the Slavs were soon grafted; the common-folk became haunted by the dread of vrykolakes. How then did they deal with the bodies of such dead persons as were suspected? Not by adopting the Slavonic custom of impaling them, but by a revival of cremation. The advantage which that rite possessed over burial was remembered; by its aid the dissolution of the dead could be rendered quick and sure. Thus cremation came once more into use as a means to the same end as in old time—the quick dissolution of the dead body; but the motive for promoting that dissolution was, under the altered conditions, itself altered. Instead of love it was fear; instead of solicitude for the welfare of the dead, it was anxiety for the protection of the living.

Yet even so, the act of burning the vrykolakas was a purely