Note 70.1 — Chapter III · THE SECOND PERIOD, 900-500 B.C.

That the ordinary head of the private household in this period received posthumous honours amounting to actual worship cannot be definitely proved. The tendance of the dead had become indeed a matter of religion, and at Athens was attached to the ritual of the state by the commemorative feast of All Souls, the χύτροι, or ‘Feast of Pots,’ the last day of the Anthesteria. But nothing that is recorded of this ghost-ceremony convicts it of actual worship; the ghosts are invited to spend the day with the household that holds them in affection; they are offered pots of porridge, and then at sunset are requested or commanded to depart. Prayers are proffered in their behalf to the powers of death, but not directly to the ghosts themselves; no cult is offered them as to superior beings endowed with supernatural power over the lives of individuals and states.70.1 Nevertheless, the passionate service of lamentation and the extravagant dedication of gifts which marked the funeral ceremonies of the eighth and seventh centuries and which certain early legislation was framed to check, reveals a feeling about the dead bordering on veneration and such as might inspire actual worship.