Alexander Pope (1688-1744) is considered one of the most prominent English poets. Pope was fascinated by Homer since childhood and by 1720, he completed his translation of The Iliad. Several short quotes from Book 23:
Next these the melancholy band appear;
Amidst, lay dead Patroclus on the bier;
O’er all the corpse their scattered locks they throw;
Achilles next, oppress’d with mighty woe,
Supporting with his hands the hero’s head,
Bends o’er the extended body of the dead.
Patroclus decent on the appointed ground
They place, and heap the sylvan pile around.
But great Achilles stands apart in prayer,
And from his head divides the yellow hair;
Those curling locks which from his youth he vow’d,
And sacred grew, to Sperchius’ honour’d flood:
Then sighing, to the deep his locks he cast,
And roll’d his eyes around the watery waste…
But to the king of men thus spoke the chief:
“Enough, Atrides! give the troops relief:
Permit the mourning legions to retire,
And let the chiefs alone attend the pyre;
The pious care be ours, the dead to burn—”
He said: the people to their ships return:
While those deputed to inter the slain
Heap with a rising pyramid the plain.
A hundred foot in length, a hundred wide,
The growing structure spreads on every side;
High on the top the manly corse they lay,
And well-fed sheep and sable oxen slay:
Achilles covered with their fat the dead,
And the piled victims round the body spread;
Then jars of honey, and of fragrant oil,
Suspends around, low-bending o’er the pile.
Four sprightly coursers, with a deadly groan
Pour forth their lives, and on the pyre are thrown.
Of nine large dogs, domestic at his board,
Fall two, selected to attend their lord,
Then last of all, and horrible to tell,
Sad sacrifice! twelve Trojan captives fell.
On these the rage of fire victorious preys,
Involves and joins them in one common blaze.
Smear’d with the bloody rites, he stands on high,
And calls the spirit with a dreadful cry…
N. G. L. Hammond in his book about Epirus observed:
The burial of his cousin Patroclus by Achilles provides an example. It does not correspond with any known practice in the Mycenaean world, and it is perhaps peculiar to Achilles and his people, whose origins and traditions seem to have come from Central Epirus. Now we know that in the Bronze Age, the most important burials in some of the tumuli of North Epirus were cremations; that such cremations, marked by a cairn of stones, became the centre of a large circle 20 m. or more in diameter, and that the circumference was marked sometimes by a single or a double layer of unworked stones; that jars for liquid (and at Vodhinë dippers) and weapons were placed beside the urn which contained the ashes; and that a tumulus of soil was raised over the circle to a height of at least 3 m.
The burial of Patroclus as it is described is on an epic scale. Yet the details correspond remarkably closely with the silent evidence of the Epirote tumuli. Although the huge conflagration will destroy them in the epic account, the jars of liquid are set by the place where the ashes will lie. {Iliad 23. 170) Indeed Homer has probably misunderstood the original ritual, in which the jars were added after the cremation. When the corpse is consumed, Achilles orders the construction of a mound immediately, a fitting mound (is raised). The ashes of Patroclus are put in a golden phiale and the urn is placed in his resting place in the centre of the burnt-out pyre. Then the tumulus is constructed…
In paraphrase ‘They marked out with a line {tornus) the circle of the tumulus and threw down the foundation (stones) around the pyre. And forthwith they heaped up loose earth, and they turned away when they had completed the tumulus.’ The θεμείλια are evidently the stones of the circumference or peribolos, unworked and serving as markers for the limits of the mound, rather than as a floor of stones or pebbles. Homer’s description comes so close to the practices of Vajzë and the sites in the Drin valley that it even enables us to see exactly how the tumuli of North Epirus were constructed. The tumulus for Patroclus is larger; for its diameter exceeded 40 m. (1. 164) as befitted an epic hero. There is one tumidus of this size at Pazhok in the Devoli valley;1 and it is constructed with a view to a further interment (like the tumuli in Epirus), because the ashes of Achilles when he dies are to be placed in the same um, a two-handled golden um, such as we see imitated in pottery in the cremation group at Vodhine…
Funeral rites performed by the warriors of Sviatoslav the Brave at Dorostolon in 971 >
< Ultimate Place of Origin of Indo-European Funeral Rites
‘Gardariki, Ukraine‘ ebook takes a closer look at two more outstanding burials of the Rus of that period.
