XI. OLD AGE

Old age is feared and mourned beyond wont by the life-loving Greeks. Even here, however, it has its consolations; for as the used-up body is returned like worn currency to the mint, it has the solace of seeing, before it is consumed, the fresh new life through which it cheats mortality. It is true that Greek history reveals cases of selfish carelessness or coarse insolence towards the old. Athenian society, commercial, individualistic, and innovating, tends to be unkind to old age; respect for years goes with a religious and conservative society like Sparta’s, while democracy, loosening all bonds with freedom, puts the accent on youth, and favors the new against the old. Athenian history offers several instances of children taking over their parents’ property without proof of imbecility in the elders;¹²³ but Sophocles rescues himself from such an action simply by reading to the court some passages from his latest play. Athenian law commands that sons shall support their infirm or aged parents;¹²⁴ and public opinion, which is always more fearful than the law, enjoins modesty and respect in the behavior of the young towards the old. Plato takes it for granted that a well-bred youth will be silent in the presence of his seniors unless he is asked to speak.”¹²⁵ There are in the literature many pictures of modest adolescence, as in the earlier dialogues of Plato or the Symposium of Xenophon; and there are touching stories of filial devotion, like that of Orestes to Agamemnon, and of Antigone to Oedipus.

When death comes, every precaution is taken that the soul of the departed shall be spared all avoidable suffering. The body must be buried or burned; else the soul will wander restlessly about the world, and will revenge itself upon its negligent posterity; it may, for example, reappear as a ghost, and bring disease or disaster to plants and men. Cremation is more popular in the Heroic Age, burial in the classic. Burial was Mycenaean, and will survive into Christianity; cremation apparently entered Greece with the Achaeans and the Dorians, whose nomad habits made impossible the proper care of graves. One or the other is so obligatory among Athenians that the victorious generals at Arginusae are put to death for allowing a severe storm to deter them from recovering and burying their dead.

Greek burial customs carry on old ways into the future. The corpse is bathed, anointed with perfumes, crowned with flowers, and dressed in the finest garments that the family can afford. An obol is placed between the teeth to pay Charon, the mythical boatman who ferries the dead across the Styx to Hades.* The body is placed in a coffin of pottery or wood; to “have one foot in the coffin” is already a proverb in Greece.¹²⁶ Mourning is elaborate: black garments are worn, and the hair, or part of it, is shorn as a gift for the dead. On the third day the corpse is carried on a bier in procession through the streets, while the women weep and beat their breasts; professional wailers or dirge singers may be hired for the occasion. Upon the sod of the covered grave wine is poured to slake the dead soul’s thirst, and animals may be sacrificed for its food. The mourners lay wreaths of flowers or cypress upon the tomb,”¹²⁷ and then return home to the funeral feast. Since the departed soul is believed to be present at this feast, sacred custom requires that “of the dead nothing but good” shall be spoken;¹²⁸ this is the source of an ancient saw, and perhaps of the unfailing lauds of our epitaphs. Periodically the children visit the graves of their ancestors, and offer them food and drink. After the battle of Plataea, where the Greeks of many cities have fallen, the Plataeans pledge themselves to provide for all the dead an annual repast; and six centuries later, in the days of Plutarch, this promise will still be performed.

After death the soul, separated from the body, dwells as an insubstantial shade in Hades. In Homer only spirits guilty of exceptional or sacrilegious offense suffer punishment there; all the rest, saints and sinners alike, share an equal fate of endless prowling about dark Pluto’s realm. In the course of Greek history a belief arises, among the poorer classes, in Hades as a place of expiation for sins; Aeschylus pictures Zeus as judging the dead there and punishing the guilty, though no word is said about rewarding the good.¹²⁹Only rarely do we find mention of the Blessed Isles, or the Elysian Fields, as heavens of eternal happiness for a few heroic souls. The thought of the gloomy fate awaiting nearly all the dead darkens Greek literature, and makes Greek life less bright and cheerful than is fitting under such a sun.