SCULPTURED TOMBS OF HELLAS [Illustration] [Illustration: PLATE I _Frontispiece_ ] SCULPTURED TOMBS OF HELLAS BY PERCY GARDNER, LITT.D. LINCOLN AND MERTON PROFESSOR OF CLASSICAL ARCHAEOLOGY AND ART IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD WITH THIRTY PLATES, AND EIGHTY-SEVEN ENGRAVINGS IN THE TEXT [Illustration] London MACMILLAN AND CO., LTD. NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN CO. 1896 [_All rights reserved_] OXFORD: HORACE HART PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY Few griefs and many joys my life has held, Out-lengthened to the utmost bounds of eld. My name is Symmachus, in Chios born, Which rich with grapes the branching vines adorn; But when I died, my bones were hidden here, In Attic land, to gods and men most dear. _Athenian Epitaph._ PREFACE The monuments erected to the dead belong in every country, like funeral customs generally, to a deeper stratum of the national consciousness than do openly expressed beliefs. This is, in fact, a phase of the general law that in the history of religion cultus is more venerable and more conservative than doctrine. And as, further, the beliefs which find an expression in literature are those of the most enlightened and the least conservative spirits, it is misleading if one attempts to learn from the higher literature of a people how the masses really think and feel in regard to death and the life which lies beyond death. These considerations are certainly applicable in the case of Greece. The two great literatures of Greece, the Epic and the Attic, belong each to a class, to an aristocracy whether of birth or of talent, and stand high above the beliefs of the common people. If we wish to ascertain what the ordinary Greek citizen, _l’homme sensuel moyen_, thought and felt in the presence of death, whether his own or that of friends, we must supplement the study of the poets, the orators, and the philosophers by an investigation of ritual, of burial customs, and of the lines of tombs which stretched from the gates of many Greek cities on both sides of the main roads. The purpose of the present book may best be accomplished if we proceed to consider in succession, first the burial customs of the Greeks, next the ideas as to the future life which prevailed among them, and finally the monuments of the dead.