The themes in these laments belong to a common tradition. Besides the more general concept of light, there is the sun, symbol of life, warmth and justice; the dawn, contrasting light with darkness; the moon and stars as cherished objects of brightness; the more homely lamp and candle, put out before their time and leaving the mourner to continue her way in gloom; and finally, the identification of light and sight, without which man is blind. Although the symbolism is naturally most explicit in the religious tradition, the images themselves are so closely integrated into the Greek lament of all periods that much of their allusive quality is lost without an understanding of their evolution and history.

Certainly, allusion to travel is nowhere so complex and flexible in Byzantine laments as in the modern ritual laments. During his lifetime, the dead man was ‘a well-equipped ship to his home’ (Politis 197.6). Without his protection, his orphaned children are desolate:

Nor is this all. When the dead is dressed for the wake before the funeral procession, he is thought of as a ship about to depart for the Underworld; and since it is a maiden voyage, it has golden masts, silver stem and sails of silk. As if unknowing, the mourner asks its destination: {191|192}

By the same complex allusive method, the dead was praised in his lifetime as ‘horseman among those on foot’ (Fauriel 2.62.7). Now that he is dead, they are saddling outside a horse with golden spurs and silver reins. It is the familiar preparation for any traveller’s journey on horse back. Yet the lament continues inexorably:

Finally, just as the image of the dead as a ship is fused with that of the ship of Charos, so here, parallel to the dead horseman about to set of on his perilous journey, is the terrible figure of Charos the huntsman:

Closely associated with spring and harvest is the imagery of the tree, but it deserves separate consideration because there are some sufficiently precise details both in the associations of the theme and in its application to trace its evolution continuously through Greek tradition.

The parallel between man and tree can be traced at every stage of growth. Just as Thetis mourns Achilles, thinking of his childhood in terms of a carefully tended shoot, so too, in the seventeenth-century Cretan play, The Sacrfice of Abraham, Sarah tells how she watched Isaac grow like the shoot of a tree (Il. 18.55-7, Thysia 379). The same thought is implicit in the modern laments, in the formulaic praise of a young man’s beauty ‘tall as a rod, slim as a reed’ and ‘straight as a cypress tree’ (Passow 347.16, 350.12), which can be traced back to the fifteenth-century Byzantine Achilleid (61-2).

The idea was traditional in antiquity, and is frequently found in association with the dead. Herodotos, compressing the simile into a single adjective πρόρριζος, applies it to the sudden downfall inflicted by a jealous fate on those who are tempted to greater wealth than the gods permit. Amasis, king of Egypt, warns the prosperous tyrant of Samos, Polykrates, that he has never yet heard of a man so fortunate through{198|199}out his life who did not come to a terrible end and ‘die root and branch’ (ἐτελεύτησε πρόρριζος 3.40). When his end finally comes, and his cruel death is announced to the people of Samos by Maiandrios, it is commented that Polykrates ‘fulfilled his own destiny’ (ἐζέπλησε μοῖραν τὴν ἑωυτοῦ 3.142). Solon’s famous warning to Kroisos on the dangers of excessive wealth contains the same allusion, that God may give wealth to many and then cause their downfall, root and branch (1.32-3); and the Spartans conclude the moral tale told to the Athenians about the perjuror Glaukos, pursued by an unseen avenger until his whole house was destroyed without a trace, with the words ‘and he has been wiped out root and branch from Sparta’ (ἐκτέτριπταί τε πρόρριζος ἐκ Σπάρτης 6.86). Herodotos has invested an old idea with a new significance: let the rich beware of tempting the gods too far, else his house will be uprooted for ever. The moral arose from the social conditions of the time, which saw the rise and fall of many a tyrant and aristocrat.

The full significance of allusion to spring, harvest and trees in popular tradition, then, is that the whole world is nothing but a garden, and the people are flowers, fruit and trees for Charos to pluck and uproot. In a Maniot lament, all the threads developed separately elsewhere are brought together with a fine sense of detail. The allusion in the last line is to the old men—the bare posts, which Charos makes his fence:

The identification of the dead man with an uprooted tree was sufficiently well established in Homeric tradition to be freely elaborated in similes. Herodotos extended it to include the divine aganecy in a man’s fate. In tragedy, it became part of the actual lament. Meanwhile, as the prose inscription from Amorgos shows, it had lived on in vigorous form in popular tradition, and probably continued to do so until it gave rise to a new interpretation in Byzantine vernacular poetry: no longer a jealous god on behalf of Díke, threatening to uproot the wealthy, but Charos, arbitrarily picking on the just and unjust alike. Nor has the image degenerated into a perfunctory formula: the cry ξεριζώθη! (he has been uprooted!) over the dead man has its counterpart in the blessing καλορίζικο! (good rooting!) on the newly married couple when they set up their new home together. Finally, ριζικό and μοῖρα are now synonymous, meaning fate. The ancient association of the two concepts has been completed by their actual identification. {201|202}

This analysis, although far from exhausting all the images and ideas, illustrates the importance of the allusive method throughout Greek tradition. The continuity, both in form and content, rests not so much in the static conservation of ancient poetic forms as in the constant rehandling of traditional beliefs and practices. The means of transmission and evolution was complex, dependent sometimes on the assimilation of eastern elements through Christian tradition and sometimes on incorporation into learned writing, especially rhetoric and erotic literature. But there is a sufficient number of specific images, found only in the modern laments outside ancient Greek, to suggest an independent transmission through popular tradition. Here, the evidence of the funerary inscriptions of late antiquity would seem to suggest a link. Finally, while the importance of the allusive method in the modern laments may be explained as a universal feature of folk poetry, the richness, complexity, and above all the interrelation of the different themes can be appreciated more fully and precisely when related to their long evolution. {205|206}