offered to the dead body of an enemy, "the children dashed against the stones"—the miserable sight which Priam foresees im the fall of his city, as Isaiah in the prophetic burden of Babylon.[1]
The outward tokens of grief are wholly Eastern. Achilles, in the Iliad, when he hears of the death of his friend Patroclus—Laertes, in the Odyssey, when he believes his son's return hopeless—throw dust upon their heads, like Joshua and the elders of Israel when they hear of the disaster at Ai. King Priam tears his hair and beard in his vain appeal to Hector at the Scæan gates, as Ezra does, when he hears of the trespasses of the Jewish princes.[2] Penelope sits "on the threshold" to weep, just as Moses "heard the people weeping, every man in the door of his tent." "Call for the mourning women," says the prophet Jeremiah,[3] "that they may come; and let them make haste, and take up a wailing for us." So when the Trojan king bears off his dead son at last to his own palace, the professional mourners are immediately sent for—"the bards, to begin the lament."[4] As Moses carries forth the bones of Joseph into Canaan, and David gathers carefully those of Saul and Jonathan from the men of Jabesh-Gilead, so Nestor charges the Greeks, when they have almost determined to quit Troy in despair, to carry the bones of their slain comrades home to their native land. Sarpedon's body is borne to his native Lycia, there to he honoured "with a mound and with a column"—as Jacob set up a pillar for his dead
- ↑ Isa. xiii. 16.
- ↑ Ezra ix. 3.
- ↑ Jer. ix. 17.
- ↑ Il. xxiv. 720.
