This principle may be studied in detail upon the tombstones of Athens. You may often get much illumination about the character of people from their attitude in presence of death. The Turk plants cypresses in his cemeteries, carves a turban on a shaft over his graves, and then leaves the dead to keep their own graveyards tidy. The Frenchman adorns his tombs with conventional wreaths of tin flowers. The Englishman advertises the virtues of the wealthy deceased and the emotions of the survivors in Biblical texts or rather insincere epitaphs. The Italian, when he can afford it, erects florid monuments in Carrara marble. The nomad barbarian burns his dead, the jungle savage leaves the corpse in a tree for sepulture by the birds of heaven. The Egyptian preserves the body in balms and spices for the great awakening. The Roman generally used the pyre and stored the ashes methodically in tombs and catacombs.
We have seen that a divergence in funeral practice probably marks the difference between the two races which went to make up the population of ancient Greece. The aboriginal Southerners seem to have preserved their dead in shaft-graves and dome-graves, when their means allowed, sometimes only in earthenware jars. Rock-tombs of a similar character are found in great numbers all over Asia Minor, especially in Phrygia and Lycia. Sometimes in more civilised times they are replaced by large sarcophagi of stone, wood, or earthenware. Such is the Harpy Tomb at Xanthus, and the sculptures upon
[Illustration: PLATE LVIII. ORPHEUS AND EURYDICE. [TOMBSTONE RELIEF]
it indicate the religious beliefs which accompany that form of burial--the winged angels which carry the soul away after death, whether called Fates or Harpies. Then the soul itself is often represented as a tiny winged figure, sometimes issuing from the mouth of the dead. It was thus that the Greek word Psyche came to mean both “soul” and “butterfly.” Tombs of this architectural character were obviously intended as houses for the dead, and, indeed, their design often follows the character of the houses occupied by the living. In accordance with the same idea, objects dear to the living are buried with the dead, such as the weapons and accoutrements of a warrior, the jewels and personal belongings of a woman, the toys of a child. Sometimes economical motives lead to a mere conventional copying of the real object, and many of the axes and swords found in the old tombs are far too weak ever to have been made for practical use. Blood and libations were sometimes poured into the graves, and vessels containing oil, or even food and drink, were often placed in the tomb, and when money came into use as much of that as could conveniently be spared. That too was conventionalised into the penny due to Charon, who ferried souls across the Styx. The “sop to Cerberus” was also a mythological explanation of the food buried with the body.