It is proper now to consider the conduct and dress during the period of mourning. As with us, the predominant manifestation of sorrow was abstinence from every pleasure[317]. Admetus weepingly declares to his wife that, when she is gone, he will put an end to all the feasts and meetings in his house, at which they had been wont mutually to enjoy wine, garlands, and song[318].
The other tokens of bereavement were the cutting of the hair and the wearing of black garments. These customs seem to have been practiced at a very early period and to have lasted well down through Grecian history. The tragic poets bear witness to their prevalence. Orestes shears his hair, and his sister is dressed in black[319]; Helen mourns her husband with both these signs of grief[320]; the chorus consider the advisibility of employing the badges of sorrow while Alcestis is still hovering between life and death[321]; and Iphigenia begs her mother not to mourn her by severing her locks and donning robes of sable hue[322]. Even for a long time after Grecian independence had been lost, the same customs existed. Plutarch praised his wife for not defiling herself or her maids nor putting on a black garment[323]. Artemidorus, in his work on the interpretation of dreams, says that a black dress is used for mourning[324]. Athenaeus is authority for the fact that in his time the mourner still polled his head[325]. Plutarch seems to differ about this clipping of the hair. He says: “In the case of mourning among the Greeks, the women have their hair cut close, but the men wear it long since it is customary for the men when not afflicted by grief to have it cut short and for the woman to let it grow long[326].” In another place he declares that you may take away a man’s signs of mourning _by cutting his hair_ and drying his tears, and still bring him no comfort[327]. Undoubtedly, in Plutarch’s time, the fashion had changed and the later Greeks were wont to let their hair grow long to indicate their sorrow.
The underlying thought in this matter of mourning was that one manifested his sympathy with the dead by making himself appear as hideous as possible[325]. In the early times, when the Greeks wore beards and long hair, the desired effect might be gained by polling but, when the Roman fashion of close-cutting had been adopted, it must have looked as odd to see the hair streaming down the neck of a bereaved man, as one of the enormous ruffs worn by Raleigh would appear in New York to-day. Whatever may have been the custom in the Romanized era of Plutarch, it is very certain that black robes and shorn hair betokened bereavement during the largest portion of the history of Greece.