Death and burial in ancient Greece

Most of what we know comes from Athens: from laws, books and pictures on vases. When someone died, the relatives organised the funeral, and women did most of the work. They washed the body, rubbed it with oil and dressed it.

The first step was the πρόθεσις, the laying out. The dead person lay on a high bed inside the house. Visitors came to weep and to show respect, and there were sad songs, the θρῆνοι.

The second step was the ἐκφορά, the walk to the cemetery. An Athenian law, read out in a court speech, says when it had to happen: the next day, before the sun came up. The men walked in front and the women behind. Women under sixty could go only if they were close relatives.

The third step was the ταφή, the burial. Some bodies were put straight into the earth. Others were burned first, and then the remains were buried.

The best-known cemetery of Athens is the Κεραμεικός, just outside the city gate called the Sacred Gate. People put few objects inside a grave, but the marker on top mattered a lot. In the 8th century BC, huge painted vases stood on some graves. One famous vase shows a dead person laid out.

Later, families set up a στήλη, a tall stone slab. Greeks felt that the dead lived on when the living remembered them. Women visited graves with small cakes and drink offerings. People also left λήκυθοι, slim flasks of oil. In the 5th century BC, many of these flasks in Athens were white and showed scenes of death and graves.

Funerals could become very expensive, so Athens made rules. According to the writer Plutarch, Solon banned killing an ox at the grave and burying more than three sets of clothes with the dead. In the late 4th century BC, a law of Demetrius of Phalerum allowed only a short column, a flat slab or a basin.

Many Greeks believed that the ψυχή, the soul, left the body and went down to the world of the dead, the land of Hades. In Homer’s Odyssey, the god Hermes leads souls there. In the Iliad, the ghost of Patroclus begs his friend Achilles to bury him quickly, so that he can pass the gates of Hades. This shows why burial mattered so much.

Greeks also told stories about a ferryman, Charon, who carried souls across the water. In the Frogs, a comedy by Aristophanes, the fare is two obols, which are small coins. The writer Lucian, in the 2nd century AD, makes fun of families who put an obol in the dead person’s mouth. However, archaeologists have found coins in only a small share of graves, and not always in the mouth. So this was not something every family did.

Many of these words are still Greek today. A grave is a τάφος, and a dead person is a νεκρός. In everyday speech, a grave is also a μνήμα, from an ancient word for a memorial. The modern word for cemetery, νεκροταφείο, is built from νεκρός and τάφος.

The word ἐπιτάφιος meant “at the grave”. Athens buried its war dead together at public cost, and a chosen speaker gave a funeral speech. Thucydides describes the ceremony: the bones lay in cypress coffins, one for each tribe, and an empty bed stood for those who were never found. The most famous speech is the one he gives to Pericles, for the first dead of the war in 431 BC.

Greeks today also know this word from Good Friday. The Επιτάφιος is the cloth showing the dead Christ, and also the decorated bier that holds it, which is carried in procession. This meaning began in the Middle Ages.