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Notes

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[1] In all Athenian legal documents, it was necessary to give the deme of the interested party or parties.

[2] In the important city of Argos, however, white was the proper funeral color.

[3] This was not originally (as later asserted) a fee to Charon the ferryman to Hades, but simply a "minimum precautionary sum, for the dead man's use" (Dr. Jane Harrison), placed in the mouth, where a Greek usually kept his small change.

[4] It must be remembered that the Greeks had no skilled embalmers at their service, and that they lived in a decidedly warm climate.

[5] See the well-known case of the wandering shade of Patroclus demanding the proper obsequies from Achilles (Iliad, XXIII. 71).

[6] The original idea of the honey cake was simply that it was a friendly present to the infernal gods; later came the conceit that it was a sop to fling to the dog Cerberus, who guarded the entrance to Hades.

[7] Women, unless they were over sixty years of age, were not allowed to join in funeral processions unless they were first cousins, or closer kin, of the deceased.

[8] As Von Falke (Greece and Rome, p. 141) well says of these monuments, "No skeleton, no scythe, no hour-glass is in them to bring a shudder to the beholder. As they [the departed] were in life, mother and daughter, husband and wife, parents and children, here they are represented together, sitting or standing, clasping each other's hands and looking at one another with love and sympathy as if it were their customary affectionate intercourse. What the stone perpetuates is the love and happiness they enjoyed together, while yet they rejoiced in life and the light of day."

A Day in Old Athens

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