Royal funerals
Herodotus gives us a detailed description of the ritual of royal funerals at Sparta:
These are the rights that the Spartan community has bestowed upon its kings during their lifetime, but they are given the following when dead. Horsemen convey the message of what has happened all round Laconia and women go about beating cauldrons in the city. Whenever this happens, it is required that two people from each house, a man and a woman, adopt the defiled dress of mourning. Substantial penalties are imposed upon those that do not do this. The Lacedaemonians have the same customs upon the deaths of their kings as do the barbarians in Asia. Most of the barbarians employ the same customs on the deaths of their kings. For whenever a king of the Lacedaemonians dies, a certain number of perioeci, drawn from the whole of Lacedaemon but excluding the Spartans, are compelled to come to the funeral. These, the helots and the Spartans themselves assemble together and, together with women, are many thousands in number. They beat their brows vigorously and wail at length. They claim that ever the latest of the kings to have died was the best one. If one of their kings dies in war, they prepare an effigy [eidoolon] of him and carry it out to burial on a richly decorated bier. When they bury a king, they hold no market for ten days, nor any election of magistrates, but they mourn for this period. (6.58)
The importance of the death of one of the two kings for the Lacedaemonian community as a whole is demonstrated by the great number of participants and the duration of the mourning. This death could take place in war, and in this case Herodotus presents the manufacture of an effigy of the dead king as a general rule, although it can only have occurred once in his own time, when Leonidas fell at Thermopylae in 480 BC in such a way that his body could not be immediately transferred back to Sparta (his remains were taken back there forty years after the battle, according to Pausanias 3.14.1; cf. Richer 1994).
In general, even when they had not died as gloriously as Leonidas did, the kings of Sparta were treated not as men but as heroes, according to Xenophon (Constitution of the Lacedaemonians 15.9). Furthermore, Sparta was protected on the borders of its conurbation by the tombs of the two royal dynasties, those of the Eurypontids, probably to the south, and those of the Agiads, probably to the northwest (Pausanias 3.12.8 and 14.2).
As to other tombs, Plutarch mentions the fact that ‘‘Lycurgus did not forbid the burial of the dead in the city,’’ and that this relieved the young men of‘‘the fear and horror of death’’ (Lycurgus 27.1). This notion should be understood, as it has been by the archaeologist Kourinou (2000:215-19 and 284), as an interpretation of the situation produced by Sparta’s urban development. Tombs that were initially situated on the periphery of the four villages were enveloped in urban sprawl as the villages coalesced into a single town. Kourinou notes that tombs were not deliberately built outside the urban area thus developed until the first century BC (and, she observes, many tombs must have disappeared in the Roman period).
Most importantly, it seems that distinctions may have been made between the dead themselves.
A hierarchy of the dead
According to Plutarch the dead were hierarchized, not in accordance with their wealth in life, but in accordance with their merit and their devotion to the city: ‘‘It was forbidden to inscribe the names of the dead on tombs, except those of men who had fallen in war and women in the hierai category’’ (Lycurgus 27.3; for the debates on this text, see Brule and Piolot 2002, 2004; Hodkinson 2000:237-70; Richer 1994). We should note the discovery of several funerary stelae referring to men who had died in war. It is probable that the hierai were women dedicated to religious functions (on women in religion at Sparta see Richer forthcoming (a)).
A general hierarchy of the dead obtained (Richer 1994): funerary honors were linked to the situation that the dead man had occupied in Lacedaemonian society and also to the bravery he had been able to demonstrate in combat. Above all, the varied styles of the funerals were doubtless a function of the strength of protection subsequent generations of Spartans anticipated from the dead. The dead were accordingly ranked, seemingly in the following order of increasing importance: (1) the anonymous; (2) (?)helots killed in battle; (3) (?)perioeci killed in battle; (4) women in the hierai category; (5) Spartans killed in battle; (6) hirees, people endowed with a certain charisma, a status to which the aristoi, the best of the Spartans killed in combat, were admitted, their quality being proven; (7) particularly deserving Spartan leaders, such as Brasidas, who died at Amphipolis in 422 BC (see Richer 1998a:277 n. 44); (8) kings; (9) exceptional people such as the regent Pausanias, guardian of the king, who fought victoriously against the Persians at Plataea in 479 BC only to fall victim to actions of his compatriots that Delphi judged to be impious, with the result that he was accorded, by way of compensation, honors comparable to those given to Leonidas; (10) a king, Leonidas, who combined in ideal fashion his own charisma, due to the exercise of his royal functions, with the merit of a warrior killed in battle (in observance of an oracle, according to Herodotus 7.220, although the oracle was perhaps post eventum).
Figure 15.4 Agamemnon and Cassandra (?). Relief from Chrysapha. Berlin, Staatliche Museum no.731. Based on Tod and Wace 1906:102 fig. 1 (catalog ‘‘a’’)
The protecting dead
Thus the Spartans seem to have accorded a great importance to their dead because they saw them as possible protectors of the living. This way of thinking is illustrated, for example, by some Laconian heroic reliefs from the sixth century, in which tiny figures bring offerings to a much larger seated couple, perhaps Agamemnon and Cassandra (Figure 15.4; Andronikos 1956 identified the people represented as Hades and Demeter, Stibbe 1978 as Dionysus and Demeter, whereas Salapata 1993 believes that the couple originally represented in this sort of configuration must have been Agamemnon and Alexandra/Cassandra).
Furthermore, Pausanias tells of the stele at Sparta inscribed with the names and patronymics of the warriors who fell at Thermopylae (3.14.1). Such a list must have made it possible to evocate the dead (for a similar practice at Plataea see Plutarch, Aristides 21.5). Since the Lacedaemonian kings, when dead, were honored not as men but as heroes, according to Xenophon (Constitution of the Lacedaemonians 15.9), to read out a list of kings of Sparta was to invoke heroes to secure the city’s prosperity. This particular status of the kings could help to explain why the royal role survived at Sparta up until the death of Nabis in 192 BC. Religious life and political life, which moderns distinguish, were, accordingly, tightly associated in Sparta.
World History
