Death & Burial
Why Burial Mattered
For ancient Greeks and Romans, proper burial was not a formality — it was a religious and moral necessity. The unburied dead were believed to wander the banks of the underworld rivers, unable to cross into the realm of Hades until their body had received the correct rites. Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone turns on this very point: Antigone defies the king’s edict in order to bury her brother, because leaving him unburied would condemn his soul to restless wandering. The obligation to bury the dead — and to bury them correctly — was one of the most powerful moral imperatives in the ancient world.
Greek Funeral Customs: The Prothesis
The Greek funeral followed a set sequence of three stages. The first was the prothesis — the laying-out of the body. Once someone died, the women of the household washed the body, anointed it with oil, dressed it in grave clothes, and placed it on a bier or low table in the entrance hall of the house, with the feet pointing towards the door. The body was wreathed with garlands. Family and friends gathered to lament, with women performing formal ritualised mourning — wailing, beating their breasts and tearing their hair. Athens eventually passed laws limiting the extremes of this mourning behaviour, suggesting it had become a competitive display of grief among wealthy families.
Evidence for the prothesis comes from surviving painted pottery. Attic geometric-period pottery from the 8th century BC shows schematic but unmistakeable scenes of the prothesis: the body laid horizontally on a bier, surrounded by rows of stylised mourning figures, with arms raised in the gesture of lamentation. These vessels were themselves often grave goods, placed in the tomb alongside the deceased.
The three stages of a Greek funeral: (1) Prothesis — the preparation and laying-out of the body in the home; (2) Ekphora — the funeral procession to the place of burial or cremation; (3) Burial or cremation — the body interred in the earth or burned on a pyre, with grave goods.
The Ekphora and Burial
The second stage was the ekphora — the funeral procession. It took place before dawn, a rule probably intended to prevent excessive public display. The body, on its bier, was carried or transported on a cart to the burial ground, which lay outside the city walls — death was ritually impure and had to be kept apart from the living community. Male relatives walked in the procession; female mourners were often (in Athenian law) restricted to those over sixty or close family, again reflecting attempts to control the scale of display.
The body could be either buried in the earth or cremated, depending on period and local custom. Grave goods — pottery, jewellery, weapons, figurines — were placed in the tomb to accompany the dead. Graves were often marked above ground by stone stelai or sculpted monuments. The stele (plural stelai) typically bore the deceased’s name and sometimes a relief carving. Some of the finest examples survive from classical Athens: the Hegeso Stele (now in the National Archaeological Museum, Athens) shows a seated woman receiving a jewellery box from a standing female attendant, rendered with quiet elegance and carved in relief.
A widely attested Greek and Roman practice was placing a coin in the mouth of the deceased. This coin was the fare for Charon, the ferryman who transported souls across the river Styx (or Acheron) to the underworld. Without this payment, the soul could not cross and would be left to wander the bank for a hundred years. Archaeological evidence — coins found in graves in both the Greek and Roman worlds — supports the literary accounts, though the custom was far from universal. The practice is vivid evidence of how Greek and Roman beliefs about the soul’s journey after death shaped funerary behaviour.
Greek Festivals for the Dead: Genesia
The dead were not forgotten after burial. The Genesia was an Athenian public festival in honour of the dead and the ancestors, held annually. Offerings of food and libations were brought to the graves, and the family commemorated their dead together. Private family commemoration of the dead also took place on the third day after death (the trita) and the ninth day (the enata).
Roman Funeral Practices
Roman funerals closely paralleled their Greek counterparts in structure but had distinctively Roman features. The body was washed and prepared by the family, but wealthy Romans could belong to funeral clubs (collegia funeraticia), which guaranteed a proper burial for members who could not afford one independently. The funeral procession in Rome was often elaborate: for a noble Roman, professional mourners (praeficae) were hired, musicians played, and actors wearing the death masks (imagines) of the deceased’s ancestors walked in the procession, creating a living tableau of the family’s lineage.
Roman burial law required interment outside city walls, and the major roads leading out of Rome — especially the Via Appia — were lined with tombs, mausoleums and grave monuments. Romans used both burial and cremation. Cremation was common from the later Republic into the early Empire, then inhumation gradually became more common. The reasons for this change are uncertain.
The Parentalia (13–21 February) was a period of private commemoration of dead family members, when temples closed, marriages were forbidden, and families visited graves with offerings. The Lemuria (9, 11 and 13 May) was a festival to appease the lemures — restless, potentially harmful spirits of the dead — through a midnight ritual performed by the paterfamilias.
Both cultures shared the belief that the dead required ongoing attention and offerings — neglecting the dead was dangerous as well as impious. The Greek Genesia and the Roman Parentalia served the same basic function: keeping the dead appeased through annual ritual. However, the Roman Lemuria suggests a stronger anxiety about potentially malevolent spirits of the dead returning to harm the living — a belief with no clear Greek parallel at the same level of elaboration. The Roman use of ancestor masks (imagines) in funerary processions was also distinctively Roman, serving the political function of displaying the family’s social prestige and distinguished history.