With yet more cause did those who had been condemned to capital punishment seem to deserve posthumous torment and the pains reserved for the impious. These maleficent spirits, transformed to demons, continued to work harm to the human race. The odium which attached to the word _biothanati_ ended by concentrating itself on these two classes—those who had committed suicide and those who had been executed. The horror which both inspired was marked by the withholding of honourable burial. Even in pagan times, sacred or civil law in many places denied funeral honours to children who died young, and to suicides—in order, says a text,[351] that those who had not feared death might fear something after death—and, above all, to criminals, whose corpses were not deposited in a tomb but were thrown without any ceremony into a common ditch (πολυάνδριον). In Rome persons executed in prison were dragged with a hook through the streets to the Tiber, where they were flung into the water. There was in the fact that they were deprived of funeral rites a second reason, besides their guilt, for their suffering in the Beyond.[352] Families and friends of the condemned endeavoured therefore to spare them this fearful penalty, and could obtain from the magistrates the surrender of their bodies to them. But the authorities often refused this supreme consolation to Christians who wished to pay this last duty to their martyred brothers. By scattering abroad the ashes of martyrs the pagans hoped to prevent their graves from becoming the sites of cults. The denial of a religious funeral was also from the earliest time onwards ordered by Church discipline and sanctioned by the Councils in the case of suicides, and was similarly extended, in virtue of the law in force, to malefactors. In the Middle Ages the corpses of criminals were still to be seen carried to a shameful charnel-place in Byzantium. For instance, the chronologist Theophanes[353] relates indignantly that in 764 the iconoclastic Emperor Constantine Copronymus caused the arrest of a hermit of Bithynia, who supported the cult of the images. The emperor’s guards tied a cord round the monk’s foot and dragged him from the praetorium to the cemetery, where, after cutting him to pieces, they flung his remains into the ditch of the _biothanati_. Curiously this word, _biothanati_, was derisively applied to the Christians themselves, either because they adored a crucified Saviour, or in mockery of the martyrs, who believed that through death by execution they earned a glorious immortality. The poet Commodianus returns this insult by applying the term to the pagans, whose way of life condemned them to everlasting flames.[354] The opprobrious word remained in use until the Middle Ages, when it denoted all whose crimes deserved capital punishment, so that the final meaning of _biothanatus_ was gallows-bird, gallows-food.[355]