The most lavish funerary monuments were erected in the sixth century B.C. From depictions on white-ground lekythoi, we know that the women of Classical Athens made regular visits to the grave with offerings that included small cakes and libations. Immortality lay in the continued remembrance of the dead by the living. Very few objects were actually placed in the grave, but monumental earth mounds, rectangular built tombs, and elaborate marble stelai and statues were often erected to mark the grave and to ensure that the deceased would not be forgotten. Following the prothesis, the deceased was brought to the cemetery in a procession, the ekphora, which usually took place just before dawn. Lamentation of the dead is featured in Greek art at least as early as the Geometric period, when vases were decorated with scenes portraying the deceased surrounded by mourners. During the prothesis, relatives and friends came to mourn and pay their respects. After being washed and anointed with oil, the body was dressed ( 75.2.11) and placed on a high bed within the house. Relatives of the deceased, primarily women, conducted the elaborate burial rituals that were customarily of three parts: the prothesis (laying out of the body ( 54.11.5), the ekphora (funeral procession), and the interment of the body or cremated remains of the deceased. Ancient literary sources emphasize the necessity of a proper burial and refer to the omission of burial rites as an insult to human dignity ( Iliad 23: 71). The deceased was then prepared for burial according to the time-honored rituals. The Greeks believed that at the moment of death, the psyche, or spirit of the dead, left the body as a little breath or puff of wind. Indeed, the ghost of the great hero Achilles told Odysseus that he would rather be a poor serf on earth than lord of all the dead in the Underworld ( Odyssey 11: 489–91). In the Odyssey, Homer describes the Underworld, deep beneath the earth, where Hades, the brother of Zeus and Poseidon, and his wife, Persephone, reigned over countless drifting crowds of shadowy figures-the “shades” of all those who had died. The ancient Greek conception of the afterlife and the ceremonies associated with burial were already well established by the sixth century B.C.
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