In Virgil, Æneas, preparing for flight from the overthrow of Troy, says to his father,—“Do you, my father, in your hand take the consecrated things and the ancestral gods? To me, just returned from such and so recent a battle and slaughter, it were sacrilege to touch them, until I shall have washed in a living stream.”[48] In another place the closing rites at the funeral pyre of Misenus are thus described,—“The same (Chorinaeus) passed thrice around his companions with water, sprinkling them with a gentle spray, and with a branch of the auspicious olive purified the men and uttered the parting words.”[49] Footnote 48: Æn. ii, 717. Footnote 49: Ibid. vi, 229.—The (novissima verba) last or parting words, were addressed to the deceased,—“Vale! Vale! Vale!” Farewell! Farewell! Farewell! Of funeral lustrations at Rome, Adams in his Antiquities, gives this account: “When the remains of the dead were laid in the tomb, those present were, three times, sprinkled by a priest with pure water, from a branch of olive or laurel, to purify them.... The friends when they returned home, as a further purification, after being sprinkled with water, stepped over a fire.[50]... The house itself also was purified and swept with a certain kind of a broom.” The classic writers frequently refer to similar observances among the Greeks. Thus, in Euripides, the people are perplexed as to the death of Alcestis, king Admetus’ wife, because “they do not see the lustral water before the door, as is customary at the doors of the dead.”[51] Footnote 50: Compare above, p. 138. Footnote 51: Euripides in Alcest. 398. See, also, Aristophanes in Eccl. 1025. The census of the population of Rome was taken every five years, and was followed by a lustration of the city. From this custom the word _lustrum_ (a lustration), came to signify a period of five years. There was also a lustration for new born infants, when their names were given. For boys it was usually on the ninth day after birth; for girls, by some, on the eighth day, and by others, on the fifth, or the third day, while some performed it on the last day of the week wherein the child was born. “On the lustral day, a feast was prepared, over which the goddess Nundina was supposed to preside. The assembled women handed the child backward and forward around the fire burning on the altar of the gods; after which they sprinkled it with water, in which were mingled saliva and dust.”[52]