But the tombs have kept for us only a small part of the offerings made to those who were leaving this world, for often their wardrobe and implements were delivered with them to the flame of the pyre in the belief that somehow they would find them again in the Beyond. Lucian relates that a husband loved his wife so dearly that at her death he caused all the ornaments and the clothes which she liked to wear to be buried with her. But seven days after her death, as, stretched on a couch, he was silently reading Plato’s _Phaedo_, seeking therein solace for his grief, his wife appeared, seated herself beside him, and reproached him for not having added to his offering one of her gilt slippers which had been left behind a chest. The husband found it there, and hastened to burn it in order that the poor woman might no longer remain half barefooted.[113] Above all, the dead must be offered food, for the shade, like the human body which it replaces, needs nourishment for its subsistence. Its feeble and precarious life is quickened and prolonged only if it be constantly sustained. The dead are hungry; above all they are thirsty. Those whose humours have dried, whose mouths have withered, are tortured by the need to refresh their parched lips. It therefore is not enough to place in the tombs the drinks and dishes, the remains of which have often been found beside skeletons; by periodic sacrifices the Manes must be supplied with fresh food also. If they are left without nourishment they languish, weak as a fasting man, almost unconscious, and in the end they would actually die of starvation. This is why the flesh of victims was, in funeral sacrifices, wholly destroyed by fire, none of it being reserved for those present. People always retained the conviction that the offerings burnt on the altar or the libations poured into the grave were consumed by him for whom they were intended. Often there is in the tombstone a circular cavity, the bottom of which is pierced with holes; the liquid poured into it went through the perforated slab and was led by a tube to the urn which held the calcinated bones. It is comprehensible that an unbeliever protested against this practice in his epitaph. “By wetting my ashes with wine thou wilt make mud,” he says, “and I shall not drink, when I am dead.”[114] But how many other texts there are which show the persistence of the ancient ideas! “Passer-by,” says a Roman inscription, “the bones of a man pray thee not to soil the monument which covers them; but if thou be benevolent pour wine into the cup, drink and give me thereof.”[115]