Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

Private Life 179
The burial itself was performed by the relatives of the deceased.
Little is known about the details. The service, such as it was, probably
consisted mainly of ritualized laments. If a prayer was delivered
at the moment of interment, we know nothing of it. Although
both inhumation and cremation were practiced with differing
degrees of popularity at different times, cremation was regarded
as the more prestigious, since this is how the dead are disposed of
in the Homeric poems. There is no clear evidence that the different
methods of disposal reflected different beliefs, however. After cremation,
the ashes were gathered and placed in an urn, which was
then buried. Once the grave had been filled in, a grave marker was
erected. The mourners then returned to the house of the deceased
for a commemorative meal.
Keeping Pollution at Bay
Because a dead body constituted a strong source of pollution,
relatives were required to take elaborate precautions to prevent
its contagiousness from seeping out into the community. Such
was the degree of public concern that many states passed detailed
laws to ensure that the polluting effect of a corpse did not extend
beyond the members of the immediate family. For this reason,
too, Solon allowed only close family members and women over
the age of 60 to enter the house of the deceased and take part in
the funeral. Measures that seem to have been intended to combat
the polluting effect of the dead include the following: placing
a bowl of water brought from outside the house so that visitors
could purify themselves upon entering and leaving; hanging a
cypress branch on the door (a custom that may have served to
warn passersby of the presence of a corpse within); placing oil
flasks known as lêkythoi containing olive oil around the couch on
which the dead was laid out; and, most important of all, bathing
the corpse. Once the dead had been transported to the place of
interment, the house was ritually cleaned. Inscriptions from different
parts of the Greek world indicate that it was customary to
debar relatives from participating in the life of the community for
several weeks after the funeral.
Burial Grounds
The Greeks had no conception of a necropolis in the literal meaning
of the word (though necropolis is, of course, a Greek word)—a