Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/524

 been in use, for they bear marks of the flame; but of course they may have been in every-day use before they were devoted to the service of the dead. Yet the few facts known would at least fit the theory that the procession which carried out the dead man carried also fire from his home to the grave, and that either the torches themselves or a lamp lighted from them was put in the grave beside the body. If that view were correct, it would further be note-worthy that most of the lamps found are of little intrinsic value and of late date. Now the fact that they are mostly worthless implies that they were often given by poor persons, or, if the other contents of the grave be of value, that the lamp was not brought as a gift for its intrinsic worth or beauty, but for some practical purpose; while the fact that they are mainly of late date means that the practice of putting them in the graves increased in frequency during the period which begins with the fifth century —that is to say, during that period in which we have already noted an increasing preference for cremation. Further the increase in the frequency of lamps makes it improbable that they are to be reckoned as part and parcel of the ordinary furniture of a grave; for the lekythi and other vases which were the ordinary gifts to the dead had already in the fifth century assumed a conventional character. Any fresh departure therefore after that century, or any increase in the frequency of one particular object among the contents of graves, must be a sign of some new or more strongly marked feeling towards the dead. Now all these facts and inferences are intelligible on one hypothesis; and that hypothesis is that the lamps found in the graves were put there lighted and burning, as the ceremonial minimum of the rite of cremation for which a growing preference is evident during some four centuries before the Christian era.

When we pass on to the early days of Christianity, a similar series of facts meets our view. The Church officially rejected and reprobated the practice of cremation. Converts therefore were bound to use inhumation; and this obligation probably excited the less repugnance, in that interment was no new thing to them, but had always been alternative, if slightly inferior, to cremation.