Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

Private Life 177
death was a domestic affair. Although the Olympian gods occasionally
mourn the passing of their favorites, as Zeus mourns the
death of his son Sarpedon on the battlefield outside Troy, this was
the exception rather than the rule. For the most part, they give the
impression of being indifferent to the experience of human loss.
We might seek to explain their indifference by arguing that their
own immortality shielded them from a comprehensive understanding
of the finite nature of human life. No less important, however,
was the fact that proximity to the dead and dying put the gods
severely at risk from the contamination caused by death. When, in
Euripides’ play Hippolytos (1437f.), Artemis’s favorite Hippolytos
is dying in agony after having been hurled from his chariot, the
goddess swiftly takes her leave of him before he expires, since, as
she explains to him, it is not permitted by divine law for a god or
goddess “either to look at the dead or to sully their eyes with the
expirations of the dying.” For the same reason, no priest or priestess
was permitted to enter the house of the deceased or attend a
burial. Just as the gods needed to preserve their purity, so, too, did
those who ministered to their needs.
The Funeral
No ritual was treated with more importance than that of burial.
A popular view quoted by Plato (Hippias Major 291de) was that the
best thing of all for everyone was “to be rich, healthy, honored by
one’s fellows, reach old age, and, after burying one’s parents well,
to be laid out well by one’s own children and be buried in magnificent
style.” The Greek funeral, like our own, was a three-act drama.
This comprised the laying out of the body in the home (prothesis),
the funeral cortege from the home to the place of burial (ekphora),
and the burial.
The prothesis was performed by the female relatives of the
deceased. At the moment of death, the deceased’s eyes and mouth
were closed. A chin strap was commonly tied around the head and
chin to prevent the unsightly sagging of the jaw. The body was
washed, anointed in olive oil, clothed, and wrapped in a winding
sheet. Finally, it was laid out on a couch with its head propped up
on a pillow and its feet facing the door. This last practice, which
seems to be nearly universal, has given rise to the expression
about carrying someone out “feet first.” From the fourth century
b.c.e. onward, there developed a tendency to dress the dead more
ornately, sometimes even to place a crown made of gold foil on the