Now when in these details that have been enumerated (as well as in many others such as the washing, arraying, and crowning of the dead body, the antiquity of which will be treated in another chapter[1]) that portion of ancient usage which is known from literary sources is found surviving, point for point identical, as a portion of modern usage, then the defect of ancient literary sources is best and most reasonably supplemented from present observations. Thus we know from the Iliad that the women of the Homeric age used Patroclus' funeral as an occasion for renewing their wailing over their own losses; we know too from Plutarch that in Solon's age the same practice had attained such excessive proportions that legislation intervened to check it; the only detail which we are not told is whether the mourners in commemorating thus their own dead friends were wont to entrust messages for them to him about whose bier they were assembled. But when the ancient picture of funeral-usage corresponds thus in every distinguishable trait with the living scenes of to-day, clearly the right way of restoring that which is obscured or obliterated in the picture is to go and to see still enacted in all its traditional fulness that very scene which the remnants of ancient literature imperfectly pourtray. And by going and seeing we learn this—that one strongly marked characteristic of funeral-rites is the belief, both expressed in words and evidenced in acts, that he whose death has brought the mourners together is a messenger who can and will carry tidings to those who have preceded him to the world below. Then on looking back we may feel confident that that aspect of death, which prompted Polyxena to ask what message she should bear from Hecuba to Hector and to Priam, was no mere poetic conceit imagined by Euripides, but a common feature of the popular religion. The belief that the passing spirit is a sure and unerring messenger to another world has ever been the property of the Hellenic people.
Since then this belief existed in ancient times and the practice of human sacrifice also existed, it remains to enquire whether the two were correlated as cause and effect, as in my story from Santorini. In this enquiry the reticence of ancient literature on the subject precludes, as I have pointed out, actual certainty; but a passage from Herodotus offers a clue which is worth following up.
- ↑ See below, pp. 555 ff.
