Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 2.djvu/32

Funereal Rites. i i often been picked up in the dromos by which the bee-hive graves at Mycenae were entered. In one of these six skeletons were discovered, lying across the path, the one upon the other, along with other human bones and common pottery. What mean these skeletons ? They are assuredly not members of the family for which the vault was excavated. Why were they left without the common chamber, huddled up in the passage, and crushed under the weight of the fillings ? Are we to recognize in them poor relations, who were not allowed to share the same chamber as the tribal chief? But in those primitive societies personal property had scarcely come into being, and inequalities of rank cannot have been very marked between the inhabitants of a small borough, whose members were all acquainted with each other. All those who could claim a common ancestor enjoyed the same rights, had the same duties to perform in the place of their birth. Should we, then, view these remains in the light of slaves who had no right to enter a tomb purposely built and adorned for their masters ? We are met on the threshold by the following objec- tion : both Athens and Rome made room in the family vault for a faithful slave — previously initiated and made participator in the rites of the domestic worship — in days when simplicity of primitive manners was already a matter of antiquity.^ Admitting that there was no such usage at Mycenae, how are we to explain the fact of so many bodies having been found together in a tomb apparently undisturbed ? We have another explanation to propose : may we not be confronted here by the remains of captives who, like the Trojan prisoners sacrificed to the manes of Patroclus by the son of Peleus, were slain upon the chiefs grave ?^ If the Homeric tales describe human sacrifices which had fallen in desuetude in the ninth century b.c, it is because the remembrance of an epoch when the usage was general among the Hellenes, as it was among the Scythian tribes of Southern Russia, had not passed away.^ The rites observed at the royal funerals of the latter have been preserved to us ^ See texts collected by De Coulanges, La citi antique. ^ In the human remains discovered at Mycenae, amidst the soil and rubbish which covered the pit-graves of the slab-circle, the relics of human sacrifices have been recognized (Milchofer, Athenische MUtheilungen ; Schliemann, MycencB), ^ Achylles sacrificed twelve prisoners to his friend Patroclus {Iliad),