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SATHER CLASSICAL LECTURES VOLtn!E FORTY-SIX
ASPECTS OF DEATH IN EARLY GREEK ART AND POETRY
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ASPECTS OF DEATH IN EARLY GREEK ART AND POETRY
. Emily Vermeule
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS BERKELEY, LOS ANGELES, LONDON
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BuJJdin of th~ iHuse.111t1 if Fi'fl4 Arts, Boskm A11nual . Chantrainc, 1Jieti411.1U'Jire lt)rrJttiqgiqur de Ia lansue tru~ ( 1g68-1976)
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ABBREVIATIONS
Ddtion Dtllt/()pmntt
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Dic,erich, NJ:yia':!
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Rohde, Psy4tll or at least how he might retai o a spa rk ofnous or lhumos, perception and feeling, which could help the intercourse with the other dead .
Body and Soul From the great range o f ancient testimonies about the dead a fe w elements of thought may be selected. T he G reeks made a clear distinction between body and soul, between the flesh that decayed attd must be buried, and the win dbreath p.r;•the that left the carcass and went elsewhere into a pool of personalities which could be activated by memory. T he d istinction was clearest at the moment of death itself, when from the mouth or from a wound a Httle element o r fragment of a breath or v.rind p assed, smaU and nca.rly unnoticed, from the body. Vee when the dead were considered as figures of the pa.c;t, this bit of wind grew curiously substantial. In both literature a nd cere mony we detect a fe.c ling among the early G reeks that there is a deeper concern for the body than fo r the soul, and that the body is perceived as d ouble : one stays in the grave where it
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CREATURES OF THE DAY
retains particular powers, and one goes to the kingdom of the dead, where it can still be burt. \\'hen the Greeks considered sin at all they punished it, in the dead, in an oddly physical ma nner. 11 For a thousand years after Homer the scene of the undcn"·orld tortures of the dead in the Odyssey remained corporeal, in the absence of mpora, physical for those who had not much physique left to speak of. As Tantalos is punished with hunger a nd thirst, appetitC$ alien to the ps;
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Charon, Hermes psychopompos, and the soula of lhe dead: Auic whicc~ground Jekythos, fifth century.
know that this little element would ever be wcighcd by modern science, although its images were often weighed in Greek and Egyptian art. Now a doctor in Dusseldorf has •ucceeded in quantifying the soul by p lacing the beds
of his terminal patients on extremely sensitive scales. "As they d ied and the souls left their bodies, the needle dropped n.,enty·one grams.m" Homer's successors would have enjoyed this scientific accuracy, although dte doctor does not cell us if something like a puff of s moke went past him, ~Vn Ka1TV6s-, or if he heard any slight batlike noise. T he Greek psyche picked up qualities of strength from the Jiving individual ; its poe.tic representation had necessarily to be ambiguous. When the PSJ'tM was corporeally conceived, it was a miniature replica of the individual, endowed with wings to account for its swift daimonic flight, retaining
some powers of memory and emotion. The psy-&e often flutters near the head from which it extracts its future q ualities, or ~rchcs upon it as on the lovely Jekythos by the Achilles Painter (fig. 5),' 5 weepiog and protesting with formal mourning gesturc.._..c)v 11&,.pov yo6woo., .\moDo-' js, who attracts the attention of the dead through songs and spells, exchanges messages with them, temporarlly resurrects them; the necromantic counterpart of the poet?• There are survivals of extremely archaic practices in Geometric funeral art, but almost nothing of the supernatural Sometimes the dead are fed, apparently;
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Mourners wearing dresses ornamented with horse, sphinx, and mourner: Attic funeral vase, seventh century.
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a row of dead ducks is tied to the bier, or a child holds a fish to his father's lips.3~ The only element of metaphysical belief which presents itself seems to be the occasional representatiorl of the PSJ'che as a bird, the renowned soul-bird whose native habitat is Egypt. who is at home until the late classical period in Greece also, Sophokles' Eint-rEpor Opvtr "one after the other like a lovely-winged bird you may see them rushing faster than ravening fire to the shore of the western
god " (OT 174}. T he famous tcrracotta funeral cart from rural Attica (fig. 12)
FlO. J 2 The procession to the grave with mourners) a child, and a sou) .. bird: terracoua funeral cart from Vari, Attica, seventh century.
which gives the essence of the calmer procession to the grave when mourning has been partly expressed and completed, has a shroud one could lift off to sex:
the image of the dead inside, hooded mourners, a little child crying on the shroud, and a bird perching." A seventh-century plaque (fig. 13) distils the essence of Attic feeling in both p hases of the ceremony, the mourning women, the goqs being sung, a flight of storks to the right, a good omen, and under the bier not a household pet but another soul-bird, with human feet. The soul-bird {fig. 14) continues to hover around mythical figures in death scenes for two centuries. From the beginning the behavior of the mourners, the grand state of the dead, and the pictorial re.n dering of the invisible ps;v:he, were the big themes of early Greek art. Burial was normally at night, a procession with mourners shouldering the coffin (fig. 15), or with the bier on a cart (fig. 16). In the Sappho and T heseus
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F1o. 13 Mourners, a Right of herons and a. JOUI·bird: Attic funerary plaque, late seventh ec.ntury.
Flo. 14 The soul-bird hover$ at the death of Prokris: Attic red-figured kratcr, fifth century.
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FJO. 15 The funeral procession with pall-bearers: Attic black-figured kanthai'O$, sixth century. FIG. 16 The funera1 procession with the bier on a cart: Anic black-figured kantharos, sixth century.
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21
Fxa. 17 Lowering the coffin into the grave at night:
Attic black-figured loutrophoros, fifth century. Painters' several scenes (fig. 1 7) the stages are marked; the carpenters and diggers have their lamp$, and the coffin is lowered down to the grave·diggers by torchlight. The funeral was finished and the slow process of death completed when the soul finally departed at the coming of dawn, as at the funerals of Patroklos and Hektor (XXII1.226f., XXIV. 788).3 ' This sequence of ceremonies was roQ[ed in the Bronze Age and barely changed through Greek history; the quiet scenes have a power of their own still in the time of the Peloponnesian Wars on white ground lekythoi. Nothing needed to change : the grief oftl1e women, the youth and gentleness of the dead, the contrast in fate and experience. The artio;t, like the poet, conc.entrates on the moment of last love, the heart of the celebration of a mortal.
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Within the long tradition of funeral painting, there is titUe of the mythical and fantastic. Early grave epigrams are almost equally innocent of references
to supernatural imagery. Hades is the familiar core of ideas of the afterlife, but the elaborations around it, or him, are not so much wanted as the facts about
the dead man, his parentage and place, his good qualities, like a permanent goos excerpted on stone. The epigram might be adorned sporadically with a few poetic tags, like moira kichei~ fate came; thanatoit> potmos, destiny of death ; tlzanatos dakruotis, tearful death; but ~uch allusions to epic language are rarer than one might suppose.35 There were points at which the sphe.res of real experience and of mythical imagery did intersect, and these linkages were intensified with the progress of
classical feeling, perhaps roughly from the time of Simonidcs to the time of Euripides. Ordinary behavior was increasingly retrojected onto the mythic past, and mythical figures brought comfort to the present. So Achilles is shown grieving at Patroklos' bier, on a vase of the 440's. (fig. t8), while the assembled
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Fro. 18 Achilles moun1ing Patroklos: on his bier; the Nereids sing (see also chapter 6 fig. ~8): Auic lckythos, rcd~figurcd and white.ground, fifth century.
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Nereids on their dolphins bring new armor and join Thetis in her mourning song, just as friends join the bereaved Athenian family. This easy sliding from present to past to present is a charac teristic of the way myth functioned in Greek society, where conjunction with the figures of old poetry could confer
heroic stature on present mortals, as in an ode of Pindar. The Nereids singing for the dead in the Iliad and Ot!Js.sty are reincarnated to add a poignant dignity
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to less gifted ordinary fUth-century songs. A mood of reminiscence is induced, for the long cha in of ancestors who had the experience of deatb since time began, as Simonides recalled it, "Not even those long ago, the sons of our lords the gods, the half-gods, eame to old age without pain and danger and dying" (18 P.) ; their finjshed lives had a nonnative power to illuminate the incomplete experience o f their descendants.
The Survivor Because the figures of the past were still on call for mortals of the present, most Greeks felt instinctively that the bod{sdeath did not mean total extinction of the individual. Tile twenty-one grams of deathless individuality which the)' usually called the pt)'CIIe, the wind or breath which passed from the flesh to another place, was d istinct in name as in function from the mind, or the aspect of intelligence called nou.s.~ 6 By classical times nou.r also came to have some immortal aspectS, independent or the body which had temporarily sheltered it. Nous was on the whole more importam for philosophical speculation than for the basic imagery of death, and played only a minor role in death-fict ion; while the PSJ'Uos rjE.\tou qtfoflow wo>..vtfopoaJva.,r {Theognis 702-r2). At least in the archaic period, for some poets, wit was the only reliable plumnakon for death, and was their favorite quality in themselves. T he spark of reftectivc intelligence was thought to distinguish men from childr en and animals, It was the faculty that contemplated death and in some
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Fra. 19 Hermes releases the souls of the dead from a jar into the light {?) : Attie white-ground lc:kythos, fifth century.
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sense controlled jt. Greek sugge.uions rhat incelligence was the only effective defense against death were literally true. Occasionally, in folk-tale, a dis play of muscular power could check death for a 1noment., but even Herakles fetching
Kerberos up from hell usually had divine help to support the intelligence for which he was not renowned, from Hermes, or Athena in many Athenian pictures. Strong emotions like anger might also resist the cn(Ccbling cfiCcts o f death; many heroes: d ie angry, like Sarpedon, KT"(w6,t£(vos p.). This paradise where the dead hunger and eat lies on the Islands if lhe Makare.s, like Hcsiod•s, where ocean breezes cool the climate and gold shjnes in the trees; or where Aowering prosperity blossoms for them as the dead play games, ptJJoi, or amuse themselves with music, horses and exercise, in a meadow red with roses, in a land heavy with gold fruit (fr. 114--, a,b B). These ideas arc very much those tbc Egyptians had long expressed about the paradise of the dead, tbe Stkhet lalu (laru), the Jalu Fields or Fields of ReedsThose dead who had qualified as maakhtrll lived there in pleasure: "Of the going in and coming out of the underworld, for a stay in the lalu Field, to be mighty there, to be blissful there . _. to cat there, to drink there, to be a
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husband there and to discharge all functions there as on earth." 80 This is like
the earlier Coffin Spells for the Field of Offerings, the Seklul Hetepu, " I row in its lakes and arrive at its cities ... I equip this your field ''lbich you love ... that I may be content and be mighty in it, that. I may cat and drink in it, that I may plow and reap in it, that I may make love and awaken in it. , . . I have
not perished and I have not been apprehensive in it . .. 11 ; 61 like Greek divinities with careless, happy spirits, r'E BA.ONZ'E Aoe
the soul-birds of both Bronze Age and Orientalizing Greece except for the portrait head t it shares with the Harpy the task of hovering O\'er the dead or transporting them, a nd with the Siren the task of the S'p iritual nourishment of of the dead; the Greek Siren more naturally stimulates the intelligence than
tbe flesh. Another traditional Egyptian theme with repercussions in Greece is the weighing scene of death, 70 with the dead man's heart in its preservative jar set in the balance against the feather of Ma 1at, Truth or Justice, while the
Devourer stands by the Judge. The first funeral scales of Greece appeared at the very beginning of tl•e Mycenaean age, in the Shaft Graves and a few of the richer burials of Late Helladic I-11, when there was only fitful contact with Egypt, and it is impossible to know whether the butterfly stamped on some Shaft Grave scale-pans might signify the soul as it did occasionally later. Perhaps the old Greek idea, which began w lapse in later Mycenaean times, was partly connected with a tradition at the funeral of Hittite kings, when a Wise \Voman heaped jewels in one scale-pan, and brick dust, mortal dust, in the other." 1 The classical Greek PJJ.iov, ¢B'IL£vo'o ·ri~ -r&tpov &.p+tfJlfJ"'~r; Bo~ye, .,.;s 'nls atls «fror ~&.!><Tis; "Tell me, lion, what dead man's tomb are you guarding between your legs?
Bull·eater, who was worthy of your p:lwer?" 1 14,..UJ1'1~eos: tbc lion is the dead man's battle-friend who has straddled the corpse: to keep it from being mutilated, stripped, fed to dog. and birds; he has saved it for the critieal ceremony of burial and from accidents after death, and continues to live on the tomb •• a guardian, checking the offering> (fig. 8). A• with aU death figures, it
is ambivalent, nnd the dead person is also like the cnrcn" of the liort's freshest kill, guarded from jackals or hyenas for future meals.•
In Homer, lions arc often interchangeable wilh boars- .. as when a boar or lion turns exulting in its power against the dogs and hunters .. . "(XII.41 )ns the two most dangerous animals of the hunt. A boar can disembowel a horse
Fto. 8 Lion as tomb-marker: limestone monument, Perachora, sixth century.
F10. 9 Dead dog Ormenos (Rusher) at the Kalydonia.n boar hunt : black~figured volute krater> early sixth century.
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on the run, and in Greek art its path is littered with dead men and dogs (fig. g).~ The artjstic, calligraphically-looped en trail$ of the poor hound Ormcnos on the Franc;ois Vase remind us that the favorite deadly confrontations of the Greeks are usually transmuted irlto a language more stylish than real. lt is in this style
that the boar takes his place on funeral monuments, eloquent of power and danger, a nd yet, as in hunting scenes, often the gallant loser. There is some pc rsjstcnt weakness in a c recuurc that d(){;s not eat meat; the boar was most useful to Homer as an image of bravery in retreat; the lion was the hero in attack bt.-cause of the old a na lo!,ry, or fact., of the predator-warrior style which demands that he claw and eat. his enemy with a literal blood thirst. When the
lion and boar are shown together in the sphere of death, as on a Klazomenian sarcophagus {fig. t o) the Lion should win. to become [he gtave watcher and guardian of the body; the boar, representing danger over which the dead man
Fto. 10 Confronted watrior heads wllh lion and bo.'\r: East Creek, Klazomenian sarcophagu$, sixth century.
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triumphed .in some way as a \1/arrior, must incarnate the victim. The lion and his counterpart soldier below taunt the other side, 1Arith roars and mocking words; the boar and hls counterpart soldier seem curiously immobilized and silenced. The style is coded . Patroklos was t1le lion while he was winning, and became the boar as he died (XVI.487, 75 t, 823); the lion role was inevitably assumed by Hektor. It was the normal, favored expression for the magnificence of a fight: ''as a lion does violence to a tireless boar in the joy of battle, when they both have grand ideas and fight on the h ill-tops around a little spring of water where they both wish to drink . .. " (XVT.8•3). Neandros painted a bestiary band-cup with the same vignette (fig. t t ) and writes out the results: "a lion got this boar, yes he did, well fought." The
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A bestiary, with a duel between lion and boar: Attic blaek-6gured band-cup, sixth century.
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tradicional poetic and visual languages coincide, even at very different periods, both because dte formula needs no change, and because a dininct advantage of formulaic language and design is the distance it sets be tween the audience and messy re.ality.Just as Home-r 's lions do not roar and his battlefield does not stink, as his earth is stained with blood when he wants it so but is dean and freshly fel'tile at other times, and in ten years all those men and attimals only leave one small pile of ordure (XXIII. 775), so his hunts and duels are generally protected from accident and dirt, and his bloodshed is constrained in a ballet as much sparked with humor and grace as Neandros' cup. The language, whcthel' it focuses on animals or other shapes, is not symbolic in any real sense. In Exekias' battle over the body of Patroklos (fig. 12), the corpse and the comestants are mirrored by the lions and the bull directly below, but they are not analogues-the soldiers are not partners, like the lions, and, with luc.k, the corpse will not be eacen. It is tlle simple conversion of the dead to the helpless animal. (The same animal scene appears on the other, happier side~ Heraklcs' apotheosis.) How light-heatted and patterned such conversions may be is clear on two vases where horses duel over a f.1.Uen mare, in parody of the usual combat scene1 or a dead soldier takes the mal:'e>S place
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Battle over dead PatroklosJ lions tearing a bull: Attic black-figured calyx-lmner~ sixth century.
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Ftc. 13 Stallions duel over a mare: Attic black-figured amphora~ sixth century.
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Ftc. '4 Stallions d\lel over a f..1.1len soldier: Attic black-fig-ured arnphord., sixth century.
(figs. 13 and 14). A symbolist might go mod trying to find a translation; but a Greek who had grown up in the ornamental vernacular wot~ld not bother. T he intense Greek use of animal language and beast mechanisms to express feelings about tl1e victories and defea ts of mortals is common in milit~uy or hunting societies. The warrior's model in the behavior of animals is apparently grounded so deeply in male emotion as to be nearly universal and free from change lhrough time; the soldiel' on the l"ampage will claw and eat. The Greeks entering Troy behaved no diffc rcntl)• than the Assyrians in
Egypt, And [the officers] put to the sword the inhabitants, young and old, of the towns of Sa is, Pindidi, Tanis, and of a lJ {he o ther towns which had associated with them to plot, they did not spal'e anybody among (them). They hung their corpses from stakes, flayed their skins a nd covered the wall of the town. (Annals of Ashurbanipal, ANET2 295]
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or the Cambodians in mutiny: Soldiers defiantly displayed the muti.l ated fly-covered corpse of one of their officers whom they had killed in ... dispute. They had eaten his lungs, liver, heart, biceps and calves . .. Villagers who had gathered around g iggled as one soldier p layfully stuck a cigarette in the corpse's mouth . . . . Cannibalism has been frequent practice in the Cambodian war, though the victims were almost invariably captured pnsoncrs or enemy corpses. [Los Angel<S Times, 6 April 1975) The scene recaJls the Achaians standing around dead Hektor, poking him and laughing (X.XII.369f.). Tbe Homeric soldier is usually protected by formula and convention from lapsing into the a nimal form of his daydreams; perhaps he C'.Ontemplated messy action, KaK4 Jlf o' (Epil4phws 5a D.).
Frcs. 20, 21 Birds on the battlefield: fragments of relief pithoi, Tenos and Eretria, sevemh century.
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Birds have an older and stro nger position in the arts (figs. 20 and 21) than dogs do; when the epic is being for med, eighth- and seventh-century Cycladic artists use them freely in battle scenes. They auack the organs of love, the eyes and genitals, in a way scholars have described as "exceptionally brutal" and marked with " Krudclitat," rejoicing that the idea left no trace in classical art. 25 There is no real reason to regard the theme as barbarous; it cannot match, in its Creek cxcc\ltion, t he brilliance of the reliefs of the same subject in the Assyrian palace ofScnnachcrib (fig. 22), but it is not ac aU on-Hellenic. Rather
FIG. 22 Birds picking at the enemy : Assyrian relief, palace ofScnnachcrib, Nineveh, seventh century.
it is an integral part of the rhetoric of war-mockery, an element in the general jovial tone and picturesque effect of Greek ep ic. A hero had to learn to take such rough joking in good part to be accepted . Even Aias son of Oileus, who slipped in the manure of the sacrific ial cows at the funeral games, had the se nse simply to spit the stuff ou t of his mouth and shrug while the other Greeks "laughed happily at him,",&.,..,'"' ~vni> >)6v y(~~""~" (X XIII.775-84)· It enters the gamesmanship of be ing a hero. HIt is not your mother and fatller who will dean your eyes when you are dead," boascs Odysseus over the Trojan Sokos, u but the birds who eat flesh raw will pluck them out as they strike you
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all over with their wings" (XL454). However true the prediction, Homer does not le t it happen. Death in wartime bc.comes a fc.asc, a pict.urc of communal festivity. So Patroklos will be melpelhron. for T rojan dogs, so 01cthing they can sing a nd da nce over as they eat (l\'V I.255) . So Pa troklos and Hektor a re bo th invited by t he gods, in a twist of phrase, not to d inner or assembly but to death, O..d.IJpo11; that is, Troy is dedicated to the gods, Like a sacrificiaJ animal, and becomes an
instrument of communication between men and gods. Sacrifice is nece~arily a bloody business, when animals are offered , and a serious on e involving tbe death of a living thing that one has nourished; • 1 and for the Greek hero, life was at many t imes a serious and bloody busi ness in which the gods were deeply involved . After sacrifice the animal is shared between gods and men, so that th e death bas meaning. I n wartime, it is the gods who charge themselves with giving meaning to the lives cut short below them, when men fail. The gods bury the dead children of Niobe with their own hands : "They lay nine da)'S in their blood, and there was no one to bury them, because the son of Kronos: tumed the people into stone; on the tenth day the heavenly gods buried them" {XXIV.610). T he gods direct the burials of two neglected fallen heroes, Patroklos a nd Hektor, bringing the men concerned out of animal savagery into human responsibility. T he gods order b urial, to complete tbe lives and tl.•e honor of efforts and love which m.ight seem wasted, but which would have been struck by innate mortality any·w ay, and to gain fo r the dead a measure of immortality in mourniu.g and ceremony. 'W ith Horoer a)) their necromancing in shape with the ,.~~~denvorld) or lower ca,,c; t.h.e reljcs of old ideas about the da imooic mouth 1 the Jtom-ion, or ker1 that swa1lowed the mortal again into earth ; the tomb as the mystery of the loc ked room, the trad ition of traveling spirit.li1 the central role of the goos a nd family mourning as the cclc~ bration of the passing of the dead and the invocation of his immortal renown; and the immense antiquity of such traditions, which were too powerful to be altered by even the greatest Greek poets. Successive poets and philosophers had a series of nev,· insights into the meaning of parts of the tradition, o r ex: pressed it in new figurcs7 but d id not have and pe rhaps did not want the genuinely creative demiurgic power to substitute a new conception. Of course additions were made to the basic imagery of the sad weak PSJttht in the walled kingdom of Ha des, as in the Eg}rpdan side-cunents which evoked happier pictures of the makares passing to the lain Fields like Elysion, to '"'Ork, plot1gh 7 harvcSt 1 eat and play7 with t.he attached images of the fcrryman7 the sunlit unde rwo rld7 t he gaming boatds1 t he gold fru it and water, and the ba-bird. Butthosca[tractivcideasofquasi-immortality forthe dead who passed certain tests of goodness never full}' re placed the older and more democratic vision of the kingdom of Hades where kings a nd commoners walked as equals. In the Homeric picture of de:lth, it seems likely enough that, behind the intricate combats of animals and men 7 and the rhetorical or witty humiliation of the body to which the soul responded courageously, there was a community acceptance of the C)'cle of life and death, for heroic tpl!tmtroi as for beasts. T he hero was a recognizable oxymoron, godlike, half~god, equal to the gods, la68E~, itp.l8co!)·, &v-rl8s blood and god's nurture, god-suckled, StorpEi r.ptff,os- (ooopivtJS ~Vp(v tlf60fJ•· TWv aE iU"'-"'-OI"TWV TET,J4>.,\wvrar. ~pa8ai.
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' ~ .. a.vi!pw-::or~ :wpa' Y''Wf'<w ~r.co£v, ip.?Ta.>t.w pi'' rlpif;&os, oC. ~'&vtapats ci.V1'•~ and with a bronze blade he would shave our cars off. So we both went away with hearts full of hate, angry for our pay, which he promised but did not give11 {XXI..t-50f.) . There arc several tales
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of this kind, with reversed roles of the helpless immortal and masterful mortal. One tale creates an ogre-mortal, Echetos the ogre-king of western Greece in the Odyssf£1, who specializes in mutilating visitors, cutting off a man's nose and ears with pitiless bronze, a nd d ra"•'iug oul his genitals for the dogs to cat raw (xviii.8s, 11 6). This is the folk-tale model for Melanthios' treatment at t he hands of his master Odysseus, who introduced lhe improvement of lopping o ff his hamb and fee t in a fury of anger (xxii.474). When gods arc d rawn in to such tales, the y depart from their normal religious roles, a nd raise d isturbing questions beyond the reach of any logic but a scholiast's. Are parts of gods i mmorta l>and other parts like cars and noses not ? \Vhat is god's ambition for wages? \ 'Vill he lose soc ia l stand ing among the blessed immortals if he has fewer cauldrons, stallions, and gold ornaments? Upon what docs Charon spend the obols. of the late Greek dead-nC\'1 steering oars and caulking? A drin k in the tavern of tbe dead ,.,·ho ha ve no ap petites? Tbe capacity to exalt and humiliate t he gods in fiction was a talent appreciated by early Greeks, a nd a sign of morta l dominion. The gap between mortals and immortals was bridged in other ways. One way was through the wonderful eompa:r\y of minor im.mortaJs who fo rmed, as it were, a continuum between earth-walking men without spl~cial powers a nd the high gods of OJympos. T hese are the rivers and springs, the nymphs o f glades and valleys, who come to O lympos at th e opening of Iliad XX; the minor gods like Pan~ or th e Nereids, the 1fusc.s, Maia, Amp hitrite, Triton, the Moirai, th e Houi, the Ch a ritcs; the gods who prefer the earth, like D emeter and Dionysos, or t be sky, like Helios, Selene and Nyx; tbc whole happy motley company of divinit ies who extt~nd in a n unbroke n chain from the life of the courtyard or t he fa rm or hills to the peak of the d ivine hierarchy on Olympos. Some of these a re like small landholders who need the great lords o f heaven to protect them. They are immortal but relatively wr.ak, like the river Skamander who, although he accepts sacrifices of horses like an eastern potentate, must call on supe riors to save him from death by fire. Hera saves him: "Hold on, H ephaistos, it is nor. decent to batter a n immortal thi:> way (or the sake of mortals" (XXI.186, 36g) . So the intelligent Sun cannot cnfotr.e his own rights when Odysseus' men eat h is cattle, but ca n only threacen to '' die" himself and descend to shining among the dead men (xii.377) . Nymphs may be called immortal, or merely long·l.ived ; but " immortal)! K irke can be frightened by mortal O dysseus with d rawn sword. Tha t is a pictorially sexual joke, of course, but it also matches other sets of images, like rbe psychai of the dead whom Odysseus warded off at sword 's edge from the b lood iu hjs sacrificia l trench, iu Odyssey xi, or the a rrow aimed by H crakles at Meleagcr' s ghost in BacchyHdes V. Neither the dead nor the immortals have reached a state of fuJI security. In theory> which myth was, the G reek wol'ld was clearly stratified . The gods were in heaven, men were on c.arth, and the dead walked below. Gods were
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the most mobile, visiting earth and rncn at will, a lthough only Hermes usuaUy visited the d ead. The stratification became a hierarchy, or was one from the start: considered as a lov.··caste class were those possessed of death; in the middle, those who had not yet auained or been possessed by it were stiU optimistic, although free to complain about the future; and at the top, the lucky, rich, and blessed divine, who would never descend the social order. The lower bridge to death could be crossed only by the middle class. Whether they could aspire upward, on rarer occasions, was a subject with which myth dealt in serious poetic fo nn. One of the archaic fictions was that the gulf between men and gods could not be crossed, "' the bronze heaven cannot be c limbed'" (Pindar, Pytltian X.27), but archaic myth was busy providing bridges, or, rather, a double ladder up which some c.rcaturcs ascend toward immortality and others sink down co the da rker mo.rtal condition. Because gods need rnen to support (as well as invent) them, they are bound to a series of associations which are not always happy. T he frequent unhappiness of mortals when gods intervene in their lives, or their wives, is notorious, and is summed u p in the myth of the reluctant Marpessa who preferred a mortal sex life with security to a brief passion in Apollo's arms. O n the other side, from the Iliad on, the atmosphere of feasting and unquenchable laughter arnong the blessed gods was spoiled in two ways: that only poets and artists reg>olarly saw it LO admire, or that other men they invited regularly p roved treacherous. T he feast was tinged with fear and weakness, and cootarrtinated by the mocking anxieties of men. T he ladder to the top was not like jacob 1s Ladder, with angels descending and ascending, or those depressing reljgious pictures where the poor aspirant to heaven reaches nearly to the top only to be pulled down by devas in the sight of the heavenly gatt".;.~J. For the Greeks, the entree was by invitation only, on grounds or with credentials we cannot now d iscover, but which evidently have tlJeir origins in local cult or folk-tale. Mort:dls invited to heaven regularly contained their own internal spoiler, as in all the best lbl.k-tales; they left their manners and wits a t home, and brought greed (for immortality) and malice. The big sinners in the Greek world are those most successful in spoiling their contacts with the gods: Tantalos who abused their special d iet trying to insert mortal flesh. into their ambrosia as a test of divine perspicacity; or, conversely, tried to steal nectar and ambrosia to share among those who had not been asked, although he was, o r should have been, aware that ntktar, so intimately connected with llti.Tos the corpse, may overcome death or itself be deadly to those not nurtured on it, and that am-brosia is not for mortal brotoi. 22 l xion the murderer was one of those perpetuaJly djssatisficd guests for whom no feas t was complete without trying to rape the bost's wife in another room.23 Tityos tried immortality by rape too; and Sisyphos wheedling his way out of the prison of death with an expert vocab ulary outwitted the gods and infi-inged upon their rights. 24
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Pegasos shrugs Bellerophon off: Cretan reliefpicbos, sevemh century.
The dividing line between men and gods was rarely crossed with complete success, but there was constant pressure to test it (in the fictions of men). The aspirant to heaven was generally sketched in such a manner as to leave no doubt of his singular lack of qualification to j oin the company of the blessed. The myths applaud the ambition, deplore the execution, and explain why
most of us die. 2 ~ Ascent to O lympos is, statistjcalJy, the least successful method of escaping death. To provide an immortal future for the morral in partnership with a long-term inhabitant, as for Ganymede and Tithonos, demands sexual cooperation from the gods. Those who went alone fueled only by ambition and a sense of competence, like Bellerophon, were shunted back to earth ; as Pcgasos, with that famous moral wriggle, threw hh human master in exchange for a divine one i rl the stalls of Zeus. rvlonstets or sports like Pegasos were 5ensitive indicators in Greek myth of the status of ambitious man; when monsters stand for death 1 man may kill them. His other fantasies of conquering or postponing death normally included transformation, dreams of food and drink, and the exercise of cunning over a simpleemindcd opponent. In transformation (quite apart from cult origins of such ancient figures as KaJiisto or Iphigeneia) the animal who receives the mortal into its own shape becomes the receptacle for mortal destiny, yet it is rarely killed. 26 The transformed arc often as long-lived as the nymphs, or even immortal, by virtue of losing mortal aspiration; it is a successful crossing of the downward bridge. One does not know if the wolves and lions whom Kirke had made out of men by
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Transfi)rmation from human to animal form- Kall.isto turns into a bear: South Italian, fourth century.
flo. 3 The traosforming pharmakon-Kirke alters Odysseus' crew: Attic black-figured cup, sixth century.
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The family ·waits for H elen•s birth from the egg: Attic red-figured skyphos, Jatcr fifth century.
charm (x.21 2) would have been as long.Jived as their mistress, but it seems likely. (One does not know because the storytellers before Ovid stop with the tJ•ar,sfor-m.Mion, or it!S successful revcnsal. and lose interest in the ultimate fa te of
the character.} \¥hen tra nsformation is a. simple aition for cult or natural history, for the bear cul ts of Arkadia and Brauron or for the wee.ping of the nightingale or the halcyon, it may have no essential relevance to the mythical escape from death, to the transformations up and down the ladder between earth and heaven, animal and man and god. Yet in so far as the mortal loses his PSJ'fhe through transfonnation and still remains sentient, he has done well. In the language of myth it was perhaps inevitable that the Minotaur, product of Queen Pasiphae's union with a buU in Crete, should grow up to lx: killed by a hero, since he was a grass-eat.er, a generally fatal attribute in the Homeric system of imagery. Perhaps it was inevitable, too, that Helen, born from an egg, should have airy and predatory traits, swooping off and delighting in or even feedi ng upon corpses, although destiny in Greek myth and poetry is not always so simple. At least, it seems safe to say that Greek mythology o ffers many incar-nations of the mutual shifu bet\veen mortality and immortality which Herakleitos later presented abstractly in his difficult text. There is a minor strain in Greek mythology to suggest that immortality may sometimes be a result not of nature but of nurture. Tltis is a simple extensi011 of the idea dtat the gods live on special food. T hey may not eat meat or grain, and may not drink wine, because these substances endanger their status (just
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as wine is the ruin of many giants, centaurs, and other innocent clean-living creative aberrations from the normal fo rms of life). O n the principle that you arc what you cat, you should be able to become something c:lse by eating differently. T here is a range of food and drugs able to achieve transformation both up and down- we cannot name it well, because the storytellers persist in mysterious allusions, since these materials arc magical and therefore hidden secrets. The Creeks v,rerc famiJiar with the perils of chancy highs and lows in the ingestion of these magica l substances, a nd used them to express a variety o f feelings about the instability of the mortal condition. K irke's drug which transforms man to be-ast is the best known, whatever it may have been-" drugs of gricf1" Homer says, '&.pp.a.'Co.. ,\vypd1 assisted by a touch of the magic waod. It alfects only the mortal exterior and leaves the emotions intact, except that, as the men who taste it become animals, they experience lethe, fotgetfulness of their desire to return to a human home, the ke.y the.me of the Od)•JJt)', se-en also in the effect of lotos food or Siren song. Their nou.s is basically unshaken, however, and when tbC)' emerge from animal form they arc finer than before, like the sun after bathing in the ocean at night, or the sleeper of H craklcitos' thoughts, who gets more brightly in touch with himself in the da rk. The converse upward push by food or drug is an old human ambition, though fewer magicians offer ic. 2-; T he principle is that one can escape death by ingesting particular substances which have the alchemical power to trans. form the blood from dull, mortal haima to divine ithor; with this new blood the quality oflife should improve, perhaps even pennanently. The gods support this state, of course, with nectar and ambrosia, fictions which may have developed simply from etymological playfulness. We are not io a position to know whether nectar, like ·makar with its uneasy chthonic history, may suggest an early recognjtiOI\ that god is dead, or at leas-t that drinking: nectar might be fatal to non·gods. Perhaps this is why Kalypso was so careful to separate her food from Odysseus': " T he nymph set before him every food, to eat and drink, of kinds mortals take, and she sat o pposite godlike Odysseus, where her servants put nectar and ambrosia before her" {v.1 96}. Since Kalypso wanted very much to make her m."l'l friend "immortal and ageless for all days" as other goddesses had done, one would have thought a quick switch in the kitchen might have achieved her hope, but evidently_. for Homer and his sources, a man cannot be made a god without consent of will; forced on him it may kHI him. For -some mortals the transformation occurred by acddent, therefore equally without an act of will. The chance ingestion of a strange substance could change a mild ordinary mortal into a truculent deity able to perform all sorts of feats too difficult for him before. The classic tale is told of Glaukos of Anthcdon,28 the fisherman who saw one of his dead fish land upon a bank of rare grass by the shore and come bac.k to life. G laukos tasted this "everliving undying grass,"
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& Til• ad{w• &..o-s 8a:wl,.ou> came gently and Thanatos could be helpful, as when he cared fo r the body of Sarpedon in that one grand abnormal figured scene; he came often as a dark cloud or a mist shed around the head and covering the eyes; he loosened a man's legs and veiled his sight. Love has done as much for many. Dc.ath's twin or little brother Sleep naturally shared the f.•mily traits of the children of Night, with attractive and dangerous sides. Twins are often con~ sidered dangerous, and dangers are easily personified as twins. Hypnos was 1 45
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F1o. 1 ]\.f:arricd couple united in death: Etruscan sarcophagus. fourth century.
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more completely personified in Ho mer than Thanatos, brought to a more visible shape out of general and inchoate idea..c;. He had a richer history and more ambitions. His two major scenes are with death and sex : the journey co Lyda with the battered body ofSal'}>edon, and Hera's seduction of Zeus wben Sleep turned off his shining eyes, through which the intelligent plans which governed the world expressed themselves, a temporary death (XIV.236). T he seduction scene made vivid the dominion of Sleep over both mortals and immortals, in a state where their cycles intersect, while Death has only one of these constituencies for his own. Sleep is small, ,,ringed and shimmcrlng, as he hides i.n the form of a chalk:is· k)mindis bird, perhaps a blue roller, in the branches of the mllest p ine on Mount Ida. The tree's branches stick through the skin of air into heaven, joining the worlds. Like other immortals, Sleep is unsatisfied and vulncl'able. He has desires- he wants a wife, a chair, a footstool- a11d he fears that once again Zeus may try to dro,•m hi.m or exile h im, as h.c t rl
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ON THE W I NGS OF THE MORNING
war art. Like other wind-gods and rapists the Harpies seem deeply a ttached to those they remove. However, the transformation they effect may be too private in its happy obscurity; so they arc thought to have snatched a,...·ay Odysse us without klt.os1 though probably careful of his other needs {i.2.p ). Of all the winged lovers and dcath-kt~res, Sphinx is the most muscular a nd erotic. \Vc have seen. her as a death-a ngel on Mycenaean coffins. and as a guardian of che house a nd the tomb.::.o Her glide into the classical world of war and fune rals was assured by the beginning of cbe seventh century, where she would join a proce-ssion of soldicrsJ accompany the ekphora, and mingle with the dogs and birds of battle, whose feaU.JI.'CS she combines. Like the funeral horse and the mourning woman, she is e mbro idered upon the robes of Athenian ladies performiug the lament, or painted on dice for the underworld gamc.39 She , . . a its beside the younger H arpies on the field of battle; like the Siren, she marks the tomb; h er most general function throughout classic.al antiquity is to act as watchdog on a grave stele or pillar, to punish those \•.rho disturb the dead. The dead arc at once her victims and her lovers. The Sphinx is exccptionaUy attract.ive and inte.lligent, a singer, the poetic hound, Pa4;w80r; J(Vwv (Sophokles) Oidipbus 391 ) who makes her victims sing or S\mg abo\lt) "carrying hel' tuneful huming in her talons,n dc{8,,..oov O.ypo.v (Euripides, Elektra 472) . She is sometimes t reated as the Hound of Hades, the equivalent of Kerbcros on the female side (in myth she is his njece, fathered by Geryon)s dog but harder to kiU than her father) ; like Kerberos, a wingless version of her can occasionally be seen following on a leash behind Hcraklcs, acquiescent because she is inte rested in men.40 Greek artists often emphasize her femininity, giving her human breasts or S\\'CJling teats, like a lion's, full as though she had jus! give n birth and were read}' to suckle, or were ready for an episode of passion. The difference is that a Lioness in this mood can usuaUy find a lion~ but the Creek male sphinx is notoriously rare and shy; in a ny case, the female sphinx really ptefcrs young men. Sphinx spcn.ds muc h of her artist ic life talkillg with young boys, with Oidipou.s or othel' youths ofThebe.s, posing them riddles of what life and man· hood may be when they are still too inexperienced to understand) like a demon lover offering new knowledge and sexual success. She combines the clawed body of a man·cater with the woiogs of a raptor and a face made for love, a.nd clulllS}' man who prides himself on his intellige1lCC is likely to e nd up eaten in her cave, a bordello full of bones, and a ca vernous passage to other places. A series o flate archaic pictures show Sphinx inflamed with crotk desire, pursuing yoWlg men (fig. 23) ; h im she catches she cradles in her paws close to her swollen belly- like a mother with her young? A lady with her lover? A hungry predator? •
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Faa. 22 The Sphinx on her pillar instructs che youth:J of Thebes : Attic red·figured pelike, flflh century.
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f'IG. 23 The Sphinx pursues attractive boys and gets one: Attic black-figured cup, late sixth century.
Hsnatching away in quick winged lionfooted motion." 41 The songs of the Spbjnx thac accompanied her quest for young men must have had different tunes we can barely imagine. Sometimes the boy is an cphcbc, armed and alarmed, who figlm back (though he may smile) ; sometimes he is quiet and contented, and seems to learn more from his mentor than the infant dead whom the Harpies carry. From small archaic gems to the great marble composition
F10. 24 Sphinx gets her man: chalcedony gem by the Semon Master> early fllth century.
which once ornamented the throne of the Pheidian Zeus at Olympia and was reproduced at Ephesos, the theme of the raping sphinx was a popular and important one for Greeks rcAcctlng on mortality. T he act of death could be an act of love. It could be painful or pleasant, but for Greeks it was usually insuuctive. T he winged agent of death might protect the body, or mother it, straddle it like a battle-companion> or mate it~ it always knew what to do next, and could guide a mortal to a state of which he had no experience before.42 Jn this context, it is not surprising to find on one odd gem a figu re of Eros masquerading as a sphinx (fig. 25}.4 3 Eros is a changeable power with d aimonic transfOrmations; as hunter> as raptor, as a winged companion of lions and a song-maker, as a form ofThanatos, he fuses well with Sphinx. But most of all, winged Eros is master of the cock, the favorite Athenian love gift; and of the cock-end of that typically Greek invention the pha!lo..bird, a playful and witty animal- the peeker, -rO 11'0v.\&xt, lr, oiseau que le.sftmmt.S lldorenl, das VOgel~ Jchen-it too can be the agent of travel in strange realms and may substitute for
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Fta. 25 Eros as a sphinx: bronze ring, fourth century.
more normal angels. It is surely in this sense that the phallos is sometimes marked on the tomb, defiant of death, and that the phallos·bird who shares with the de..1.d a consuming need for fresh water may haunt the bird-bath or
mark the grave (fig. 26).'* In other pictures the pha.llos-bird may have clawed talons like a Harpy, and carry a flower-tendril like Eros who comes with the
Fro. 26 A phallos-bird perthes
on a bird-bath (over a grave?): Attic red-figured pelikeJ flfth century.
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F10. 27 A phallos-bird as a soul·bitd in poetic reverie : East Greek kalpis, sixth century.
spring flowers, a soul-bird singing a siren song, unmistakeably headed in the right direction.46 The whole ra nge of games \•v hich Greek poets a nd painters play around the
theme of the winged angel of death springs from a very natural feeling that I.e coq, c'tst moi; and that both their generative and their imcUcctual powers arc welcome to the gods, a nd may, with god 's grace, survive death. This must be the message of one of the most peculiar of all Greek grave-reliefs- it seems to be a grave-relief and not a public monument-from the island of Kos, made r:tbout 530 e.c. ll presents death as a cont inuing \•.rild party, a symposium where the music sounds and the bodies refuse to yield to the chill of mortality, but enjoy life even beyond its natu ral end until collapsed in exhaustion on the floor.tf1 Even the Etruscans produced no mo1·e j oyful a nd hopeful monument. The same hope is expressed in one of Anakreon's pleasanter poems, which ends, unfo rtunately, in a pun I cannot translate: 47 There is gray upon my temples and my hair is turning white now; my delightful youth is passing and my teeth arc rather aged; of the sweetness of a lifespan not so many days are left me-
so my sobs rise close together because T artaros has scared me; for the inner room of Hades is a frightful place, and savage is the path down and a man m..ight never get it up again there.
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Fto. 28 Athena carries a dead soldier over the waves: Attie black-figured olpe, late sixLh century.
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J<arofJciVTt I'~ dvajl~vat: possibly "deflated," {(amputated/' "not mated/' but the rendering is difficult. So. for some poets, there is doubt that the v..-ay down and the way up is one and the same, but humor allays the common fear. What is perhaps wrongly called here the pornography of death is only one part of a far more general and serious theme, interconnected spheres of fictions through which the Greeks insisted upon thcil' real goodt'lCSS and dcsil'cabilityqualities which were noticed by the gods, and to which they responded by coming down swiftl}' from heaven with all medta flying. Greek fantasies of being lovers of the gods were linked to their certainty of being children of the gods. The gods Joved them as parcoers, and cared for them as parents, the creators and progenitors who would, in some hopes, take care of them when they died. Death on the wings or the morning had two sides. Eos the Dawn goddess' disappointment in a moJ:tal love was less euduting than her feeHng for her half-mortal son ~ou an there. If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts or the sea Even {here shall thy hand lead me and thy right hand shall hold me ... . . . the darkness and the light arc both alike to thee~ For thou hast possessed my reins: chou hast covered me in my mother's womb. . . . I am tearfully and wonderfully made. The Greeks shar-:ttenal
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Pilot or poet at case on his pig-headed ship: Late Geometric drinking horn, Doiotia.
belong to the fish, as though man's world and the sea's world were in mirror image, sometimes inimical, sometimes sympathetically linked, like men and gods! Most pictures cannot do this; they stay on top, and observe surface effects of the moving waves or the wind in the sails; the focus is on the ship, the sailors, the pleasure or danger of traveling, summed up in the early terracotta sometimes thought of as the poet Hcsiod on his nervous journey from Aulis to ChaJ.kjs to sing in the funeral gatncs, a distance of some six hundred yards which itlspired in him remarkable advic·e on how evil it is for man to desire uncom· fortable sea journeys, vaVT.Ai'l< Sv.&aGl}s- (Vl.44·3) ; numbers o f Persians were "ruined" there by the animals. Thcsc sounded more dangerous fo r not having specific names, j ust nameless "ktlto or dolphins or dogs whom Amphitrite breeds hl their thousands., (xi.96), and \vho perhaps gre w less tln eatcning a s marine biology dcvclopcc.l, d issecting and ch~ssifyiJ\g them . The Odysu;·, I'IOt yet dist inguishing much, d isplays fish at thei•· most dangel'ous, sea scavengel's like the birds a l\d dogs of the Iliad: "already the dogs and quick birds have pulled the skin off his bones,
Fro. 5 Sea serpent: Yarmoulh, 1897·
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or the fish have eaten him in the sea" (xiv.133); u either the fis h have eaten him in the sea or he is dessert for the animals and birds on dry land" (xxi v.291 ) ; or, like Eumaios' nurse, "they threw her out to be a plaything for the seals and fish , (xv.480). So today, if a corpse is found in Greek island waters, the better~ natured local cooks take lobster oR' the menu for a day, aware what it has been eating.& "Food fo r fishes, is worse than fo r birds and dogs, because it is harder to find the body again, and bury it properly. Poetic fish arc silent stealthy hunters, voiceless, QVQ~o'; Aischylos says "as voiceless as a tuna •• (fr. l67), registering surprise that such great creatures could be netted without the pov..•er to protest. Partly it is because they so look as if they were trying to speak, with potlws for a voice. Fish also eat their food raw, Wp..,\' hen the Siren later grows webbed feet and the Harpy keeps her talons they split o ff more markedly from their shared Egyptian model, the ba. 'When men arc not passing their island, Sirens may be pictured as plump and sclf~dclighting, chucking each other under the chin; the Si_ren _is sometimes imrovel't, trying on a necklace or looking at herself in a mirror (fig. 24), patt of her attraction for pocts. 28 In an early picture which we hope is an illustration of Odysseus' adventure with the Sirens, since the hero is strapped to the mast (fig. ~5), there is a con· fluence of elements, perhaps Kirke's palace with phalloi mounted at the corner, perhaps Kirke herself behind the Sirens. The Sirens stand peacefully and
Ftc. 24 A Siren exarnines her face in a tnitror and holds her necklace: carnelian gem. :sixth cc:ntury.
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Fro. 25 Odysseus and his men sail past the Sirens• rock 1 assaulted by birds: Late Corinthian arybaHos, sixth century.
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attractively a.ll the ship comes closer; they do nothing overtly dangerous, but simply watch their attendant birds, of whom one at least looks like a battlefield vulture at sea, who express the physical dangers accompanying the Sirens' song. \\'e know Sirens ate dangerous because Homer tells us so; in the flowets on their island lies "a big pile of bones of rotting men with the skin drawing smaller around them •• (x.ii.45), not eaten, apparently, but starved castaways. The "rotting men n derive from the same Greek pun as the rouing dragon Python at Delphi; che.~e are bones of a. .SpWv nv8op.ivwv, ''men who came to ask questions" (xii.46 ; H;•mn 1 more, and better, about themselves. A kind of paradise and immortality lies in the image or reputation held in the archives or the past by the singers overseas. The gods who escort the dead are shown also passing over the waves-Hermes traveling "over the wet and over the endless earth with a breath of wind," or Eros hyperponti6s. Some heroes get there on their own wing;s, some depend on poets for launching, like Thcognis' love, aol p.(v ty~ ~Tip' l&.u~ta., aVv oto' i1r' O.r.(lpoliO. 1r6vT<W r.wr4an (237). Some only travel there dead in the arms or a mothering goddess or ktr (chapter 5 fig. 28). One is aware, iit the period of change between the epic and the fifth century, of an increasing anxiety to transfer as many famous figures out of Hades as possible, and to install them on happy islands from which they may a ppear to passing sai lors. The old Iliad p icture of one gathering place for all dead men where all were treated alike seems a better expression of the archaic
Fro. 27
Musical Sirens on a pair of earth-heaped tombs in a grove: Attic black-figured lckythos, fifth cenlury.
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SEA MoNsTERS, MAGic, ANt> PoeTRY
honor of Greece, but even in the Od;•tSQ! it was stressed that the dead heroes were anxious to know what people 1hought about them, and that lravelers from oveneas were the only ones who could reassure them about their rcputa .. tions. Odysseus functioned for dead Achilles and Agamemnon as the Sirens offered co function for him, to bring intdUgence like the ba-soul, and unlock the secret of one's position jn the eyes of the living. The poetry, music, and renown which the Sirens offered on dangerous conditions to those who were still alive were combined in Greek imagery with
their function of mourning for the dead. In la1e classical times they almost supplanted the 1radi1ional sphinx and Harpy and lion figures, because 1hey had the power of music, piping and fluting in a sorrowful way over children and
adults, as they gradually turned into the "Muses of the Undenvorld." 30 They
,
Flo. 28 T hetis and the mourning Nereids bring armor to Achilles: white-ground band on an Attic red-figured lckythos, later fifth century.
became the virgin, childless, professional singers of the funeral lament, with more controlled attitudes than the sorrowing Nereids who were the first mythical creatures to sing it at Troy, riding their dolphins as Thetis .,made rise up in them the desire for the funeral song,,, 8i both a guardian of his land and a threat to living people who forgot to pay him respect. His worship was often sttange a nd local, and a testimony to a general Greek capacity to make myth out of bones. The hero of Corinth who
!os. stabilized, like the empleted d ead in the underworld, l'£K ~'W.,K«1"«1"ffh•Yjdnwv (x. 530, :Ofll(na• xl{A'I$' (.,j q.8,1W" rn.f.\4,~
[Euripido, .1/ku#s g8f.]
cr.
Ari:stoph~u·H~.
Ekkluin-l:h'IJJOi
TOJOf. In
gener:\11 S1engcl, KulrwiJitnriimrr 144; Eitrc:m, Opfmitul 76, 10~; fl.•t . Ninck, Die B4dtuftm8 dt.s Wasters im Kultund l.tkn tkr Al~n (Philo-logul Sup. 14 ( 1921]} : L. t\·loulincr. l.e Pur et l'lmjnndtnU Ia Pmslt cft1 Cuu ( 19.)2) ]6(.; R. G inouvC:s, BQ/t.mtutikt: R.khnchls sur It Bairt rlans l'antiquiti Gru.que ( 1967} 239f. Chtmip.. Q evidently a Bronz.c Age: word, rccordc.:d in Linear D texts a t Knossos, Ws 8+97 lce-m'·va.. with a-Jo-mi-to the tub. and at Mycenae, Wt 503 ke-ni·Vt"(l>.u:t,· cf. XXlV.Jo•h i.3o6. It. is not restricted to sacr-ifice and purilkation. There docs not seem to be aoy fear of pollution aftnder, AA {1!)3}) ..,_
r.
a.
For- &imilar
in f.cypt. tbe l..c\..nt and the Mycc:aaean world, ehaptcr., notes 4'2, ~6. 27. J. Kakridis, HOtftl'fie RmMrluJ (•9--19) 65r. See also Reiner, To~tk.lap, 2of. j Alexiou, Lnnwnl ••H G. Pecenmann, "'Die monologlJchc: 'J'otenklage dcr Jlias," R.hM 116 gestUTtS
{•u7sl sr.
26. Alexiou, LAmou, pas.'tim;J. M~avrogor
da1oJ .. Modern Greek Fotk·Songa or the ~ad," ]HS 75 ( •935) ,..,, Reiner, Tou.N.I.,t 20 n. ss., "'-d.l describes this as "Selb&tbckh.· guns ... du primiti"~ £gomnus dc.r Totcn~ kla(tyHoiia'
l"Yf"#t/Jti", ~~ ~· ~G POi
~~tiLl 1~'-•l•tixtto-- diMo,, C,.W Oi 'Yf'IPCI/luootOII o\w l,r'l, 'IC'~Do' Q .,w.l'fl. ""tk-.
11W "A16os Tciv ,·"o"
J" W&rcw
A funcbmmtcs:;sjmi$mO e nO•J pes:simismo
Pctllephone l$ not common before the 6fth century and had not much pic::torial or imagi· native quality eatliet. T here is no general use of Charon, the undc;rgrOll.lld rivers, g
'
.". ..1./l_
Q OJ1 KQI
or
nant, j ailer. For Hades' horKman:ship and horses on gra vatoncs and 'f otenmahl reliefs, L . Malten, Jdl ~9 (1914) 179f. ; D. Frame, N(W.S {note 36), p.1$Sim_; Penepbone pictures collected in A. Pescblow·Bindokat, Jdl 87 (1972) 6ot.; Hadt'!11 and Plouton,lfoi JlOipn Kpcmm1
Porph>'J1' : doud XVII.551, Htrmu ~ I]; r.W:.bow XVIl.sH; blood X V fl. 36 • ; .s-ea l.482, XVI.391 ,; hl!'~lrt X...X.I.55 ' • iv.oJ.'2i• 57~ .
X.309: XIV. J6 J...r s·o,.e r.-op!f,6pn ::ri.\o.yospiyo K6f.'Q.n Kw.X~ (cf. 391, 1.• 8~)> or Skamander
4\.\' ;"( f'Ot .-o.i .;J.IoJ 8-l"tHOS ..at p.oi.po. .,.povo•-.f
&.m
'~ ...:a( o;Jlar, .v11i wotVc11~. fl0/4t''{I(OI' b' Op4 ..&;.a bu:r4TOr
ft
...
J\1,170
r;'Ol'/f
;>-tip 'U
*p.oip"
ix.61• x-Ltog, x vi.421, li'X.2.JI a'Oyt J.~O\oo. o
.o.:al orr,&a QQ,o;r6r n ¢vytil' ..:oi ~a.AIW ~Af1'7'1t BOroT~:W OCGl ~'o.v Cr-o(pw~> e.ii'tHOS
[XXl.'l';]
T{-:-UI(TQ&
I V.~;o
ll-401 X Vl l.381
67. Black : C.l.l'th 11 1.699, XV. JIS, XVII. 416, XX.494, with blood; night XfV.439,
Vlll.oJ86, X.097, 394· ·lf>ll, VII I.; o>, IX.6;, XXIV.366. 6~g ; JI.E~ai.l.·"'r vt.'KTQS' d.jsoAyo/ XV.324. Od. and Hymr~s; blood IV. t.l97 VII. 262, X .2g8, ¥>9, X J.813 ofp.u. JSiAo.v J<EMpvCE · vOos y( ~vlp.1u"S,s '}fv, XII I.6ss, XXI.119, XV1.!)29, XXI\•'.!)87, XX.470, XXHl.8o6, iii.155• Hfr~ms 12'2 >cloud, of death XVL350, iv.18o, of grief xxiv.3 15 ; $ XVJII. ·o~s, v ••J88; dt•5t Hmnr.J •.JO, 3·•!>· Cf. tfopives GIJriHP.i;\o•wu~ 1.1031 Ais.chyiO$. Pmiq.n.r 116 IJ€•\a.yxi.,wv if>p~v Gl'60'u (T(U t$6P~·
Cloth.Vp(OS O&••o.g6o) >o4f., W. S. Smith, BAfFA 65 ( 1967) ;;f. Vulture Stele, :\, Moongat, tlrl oj tlfl(.i tnl Muopolomia ( 1969) pll. 116-121 ; Lou\'re AO 2346-2348; E. Stromnl enge•·, Atl Q.{ M~ll)ptltnmia ( 1964)
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222
NOTES TO PAGES 4 2-82
pll. 66-6' skeptical di!cu$.\ion in K·B, 149f. Al'(;haca. logica1 and literary evidence i.i eolleeted in R. Ci.nouvCs, 84/lttltuJiki, "l..e. bain et les rit« funerairn." 245(.; cf. H. Kenner, " Dat~ Luterion im K uh.'' O]h 29 ( 1935) 150. 11lere is no doubt lh at water was a key element in
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fu~1eral
rites (Eitnm 1 OhftrrihU ,Gf., SLC"ngcl,
Jf11!tw41Jnrllmn' •5!l.), but t hC're is tome doubt
th:!l.t the •• bride ofdeath"theme "'"' u popular uwetbi1\k {K·B 127, J,SI)i even the Alll~l'ltll is restrained on thit tOf)ic ( 1204 A..t96oTpwrot' ••• 'PUJl'$t:iov .ilt3ou KOiAcw), ytt lhe ida it 10 firmly hekl that Euripides, 1/tk.H 6u,
""' .. ~~a louf,efi' Nir •-""'f (..+........,. ?'M,,+- ._,.n- r ••.,.,._. ., .lo.:.. .,....,... , -
could be ltand3ttd.: "' I mwt ll\'C: lU}' daughter's body its INC bath I bJor-e h.u burial, thii w«kling which il dc:lth. For W marries Hada, :and I mt~~t b.'lthe: the bride I acd by her out :u dacn"CC" (W. Am>w· smith i:n l':.utphk Gt«.l Tr.,nu, Euripides 3· 3-f.). 1'he rderen« is to the unoeomunun.urd wcddjJlg wi1h the dead AthiJJa. 11~c: fin1 rcfCT('I'I(c: tA) (virginal) bridal In trades may 1x t hC' well·lu\l)wn (pigra.m (or Aule llbnu.i· klda, c. ,5401
"'c:
C ra'CC {D. Levi. "La Tomba a Tbolos di Ka.mit&J•i ptc:uo a l:e;sta,s," .4nm!W n..s. 23_..4 ( r!Jiir-6>) rosf'.). The ftclings and J>la.c.tion of the dead :are vert dif'Ferc:ntly estimated by authors different temperaments; 1001c like the livid, looging dead in th-eir gr&\U (e.s. A. Schnaufer, Frii!pirtdtUdtn
or
T~l-
[rg;o),
a. C. Sou.-.inou·lnwood,
]liS 92 (1912) 220), as oppo:5C'd.to the mcc:rful pragmatic spi.rit displayed tbrougbour in K-8. In some moods there is an o-."U-estim:t'ion of Greek fc-.ar of gbom and ~~~ in general, for wbkh we arc pattly iDdebtcd to the pc:mwive doquentt aod lelm.ing d jane H:.tri.aon; there is no good earl)· t.e:sti---
mooy roc ""killing" a
~·s w~poos
b)· (cf. chapte< r 6g. r, 1ol yx~n• with dead t hcjr nntique origios and their improved Acltillct, l... MRhen,Jdh!) ( 1!)14) tl6of.; ti.J . behav-ior. See Nilu(m, GGR 12 182 ; L. Colli· Rose, .. T he Ul'ide of Hada/' CP :~o ( •925) ~~~ Motley, Gr"k aM Romi.UI Glum SWrUs '2'38; F. Sthwenn. D•'t MmMJr~,wpfn btl tltll ( 1912); B. D ingwall, Glw#s and Spin'U Ut Jht Criuhr., ~rut R6rMr (19•l) 15-t, 166; U\1rk'-'1't1 Antiertl World ( 1930) ; J. Fonu:nrose, "Tbe 11)11 7!){. ( Po1yxena '"' "whore of 1he Army,). Hero :u Athlc:l ~ " California Studils Ut Clas.siud 26. S. lako\•idca, Ptrali 0 (1970) 76; lhc lf~triquify I (•g60) 79i ror lhe Trilopatreion in body evidently nill ~emed capable ofrceling. Athcru (windt and ancestra.l ghos-ts) L. ~7· C. W. ll1c:gen, Prourm•a ( 1937) toO, Deubner, Attix~~e Put. (1932) ......, n. 7; Rohde., ~13, ~5S. ror 1he prirtt :and the CArpenter; PS)'(k q46; S. E.iu<eJn , Eri:J'I{)J 20 ( 19101:1--22) gB; smiths and tOktien :t.re eaaily identified; such B. Hornber-g, /ii<MJ (1954) ,,.; D . Ohly, gifts are no proof of the fet:lingt olthc dea.d M ( r!Jiis) 3•7; K . KUbler-, M ( 1973) r8g; about their bdongi.ng~lince the 1-lyle or burial J. Trav~, Pirlllriol Dic.tiMwy tif ...tacitr:t Athens is detennin«< by the turvh'On who mw1 ( •97•) :J02i S . Denton, Shltii U. fN'II.»'e di I..iu often ha\oe b:p1 ..,;hal they wanted. The nocI'Ob;\bl)• dlO'o\-ed )()(:;ll diffe~ca in lJ>icc of " gtneral mainland homoguu:ity of tombt~']>O, t hc:re is no hop~ of reconst ructing them throuah any comb ination or Honu!.ric crtmtltion·paas3gcs a nd rec:aJdtrant Pylos texts, 3h hough some minor maniJettations likt: 8.iahc. arrows and $ma.shM drinkinJJ cuJ» arc: ra:ognizablc: enough. T he: Hittite: dc;uhwagon, pavilion, i:magts of ftulu, wi$c wCllm'f\ "ith telllcs and antipbonal.sonp.. muMc, pd C\lpl, ppevine cut wifb a silvu batcht:l~ ox.cn with aik-;8. 32. Collected tocemf)•, N. Th6nges-Striog~ ri;s, .. Oa.s griechilc':hc Totenmllh1," A.M 8o (1g6.)) tf.; d'. H . von Pritz, AM ig, bear and bitd, and wcte joined d em.nc:d to bale rhe leak y pith(l$ in Xenophon, br beds. c::hair:s omd bo"ts; E. fTtfleh, BSA 66 Oiktmumi.lw.J V f LJO. T h e o ld Hometie refct· ( •97 •} IS4f. . euc""ll to the plut i, hment of the d ead are \'ague 3i · /U'ad XXITI.~t-3• Otb'SII;)' xx i\'.7] w ith and concern breakers of oaths ( 11 1.~79• Antil(lChO$ SC:J>.arate in tlle same tumulu.s; XLX.259) ; con$id c:ring t he U$U:tl Ho m eric t his poetic union of fl'iends in death is no• fc.ars (chapter 3 p. 11o) weia) a lienat ion would continued in m~' th or a.rt; Achilles' cumulus $tl•ra w($l.\a," BCH fJ ( 1953) 293. ·me potent shoes ora m~enger ot t r:welcr are a natural idea, and for long journeys one would prefer bOOtl5 to sandals. The Homeric picture, or Hen:m.-s who JS?o11f.; S. 1\brin:noo, BCH !>1 ( 1933) 2::17, and
Tht
~\~y,tiUttaNJ
in tht &sttro MtdiltrrantiUl
( 1973) 3f.; A. W. Persson, Prthist()tit Rtligi0t1 Bo.f.; for "pre-C«:ek •• Rh:td:una.nthy:s, V . Ci01'gicv in R . CroftJand and A. Birchall, Bt()lt~e Agt .MigralifJns 243, N:-butul b)' J. C hadwick, '2s.J. T he l>e11t ship la.roa x, S. Alc:xiou, EpltA.rdt {1972) pl. 34 (from Ga'ti) ; dolphin coffin-lid , C. Mavri)•annaki, Ruhtrtht..s sur It-S Lamaku ( 1972) pl. 12; the common fish , dolphillS, octopods, waves, birds and plant! on Cretan collim; witn en to an c~xlc:n . sh·e and commonlr $harcd i (ll3ge~y. !J:l. Tanagra go!'lt5, AAA Ill ( tg;o) 191)97: Pyl0:5 (K ephalovr~i}, a n (l.'ll:, £rgon {t gfi4) ;g-.81, ( Koukounara) half u tag, Ergon (1!)63)
So. 53· M . Dclcourt, Ltgrruii'S II c.u/tts de ltltM Crtu ( 1942) ~; C. Cerma.in , Cmi.u d4 I'Od)•ssh (19.)4) 383; sec below chapter 5 note 4 t on sphin.:<es. 54· Alexiou, /ArfWil 1 ~ 1 (from O lympia); LMgrnphia ( t912-13) 183. 55· The Egyptian evidence is 150 large, and, bec-•ms.c- of iu O\\'n consi:stenC)' and a uthority. onlr periphera11y fi: levant to the G r«:k theme, only a sdection of useful texts can be: menlioned. For rela tions between C reccc and tit
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NOTES TO PAGES 42-82 tgypt in th e Bronze Age see V. Hankey, P. Warren, IJJCS 2 1 ( 1974) 142, with bib1iogrnphy; after the Oark Ages, J. Ooard_man, Tht Cruh Oc~ut«J ( 19f,.._) ' 3i· Gl:1.leral book$ on E@:YJ>ti.an funerary rmu::tice, belief, iltust r.uioru and texts: M. M. Ahdul-Quadar, Tlte Du:tJoJ;mtnt if Ftmtrory IJtli~fs
aud PYa' C . Cermain. G~nh1 de I'Od:tssh [1954}3~9 n. 1 from A. ~·foret, &iJ et dU~rx d'£s:,ptt ( 1925]) is philological!)' unpromising, Late Egyptian k1, a small boat, fuherboatt is not promising either, according to E. Brovarski, Museum ol' f ine Arts, Boston, and D. Larkin, University of C31iforni.a, l}crkeley; cf. A . Bn.•g;wh, HUrog{yjJhi.J~h·demoti~clrel Wirtubll4'11 ( t867- fn) 1466; A. Erman, H. Grapow, W6rterb"c.h d,_, ,Tgyptiuhe Sprache V, •34~ 14- 15, It may.. however.- have been a word used in arc.haie- Nat1kratis. For the moment, the oonne•c t he vulner~bJc li"·ing, a., 01'pheus should not hnve looked at the dead.) It hall oft en seemed curious that af1er th e use of the word £.1~"lion in Od. h•.s36 it does not recur in Literature until ApoUonios of Rhodes {Artt»Ututk4 4.81t) . The normal
s8.
s.tchaic and
clru...JrnQl' ·7tc"8w••, which i~: a mc.'1ldow (.\(lf«.J.,) in l.u
