Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

254 Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks
touching burial ran extremely high. One occasion was in 424/3 b.c.e.
after the battle of Delion, when the Boiotians prohibited the Athenians
from recovering their dead for 17 days, which would have
made identification of the bodies quite impossible (Thukydides
4.101.1). Euripides’ Suppliant Women, whose plot is based around
a mythical occasion when the Thebans refused to return the Argive
dead, is likely to have been inspired by this event. During their
retreat from Syracuse in 413 b.c.e. , at the end of the Sicilian expedition,
the demoralization of the Athenians was greatly increased by
the fact that they were unable to care for their dead and wounded
(Thukydides 7.75.3).
The dead were usually cremated on the field of battle. Their
ashes were then placed in individual cinerary urns identified
by name tags and brought home. The Athenians arranged their
dead in 10 piles according to their 10 tribes and publicly interred
their remains at the end of each campaigning season. Thukydides
(2.34.1) describes this ceremony as “an ancestral custom,” but it
probably originated in the mid-460s—barely a generation before
the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War. Only rarely, as in the case
of the 192 Athenians who died fighting the Persians at Marathon,
did they accord the war dead the honor of burial on the battlefield.
Likewise, the Spartans buried the 300 who died with their king
Leonidas while guarding the pass of Thermopylai, where they fell.
When the dead could not all be recovered, a kenotaphion, or “empty
tomb” (from which the word cenotaph derives), was erected in the
heart of the city.
Conclusions
Greek warfare was conducted on a miniscule scale in comparison
with its modern counterpart. It has been estimated that at no time
in history were the Greeks able to put more than 50,000 soldiers
into the field. Another major difference is that it was not conducted
under the full glare of publicity as it is today. Once an expedition
had departed, only general reports of its fortunes reached home.
Aeschylus in Agamemnon (line 437) memorably describes Ares, god
of war, as the “gold-broker of corpses,” who accepted soldiers in
exchange for the ashes that were brought back from the battlefield
in cinerary urns. Just as relatives waved good-bye on the quayside
as the fleet set sail at the beginning of a campaign, so, too, the same
relatives awaited the arrival of “urns in place of men” announcing
the death of a husband, brother, or son.