Nothing is further from our spiritual ideas as to the holiness of graveyards than the conviviality occasioned by the cult of the departed; among the guests crowned with flowers, the drinks went round (_circumpotatio_) and soon produced a noisy intoxication. Do not think this was an abuse due to a relaxation of morals and which came into being in later times. The character of these funeral banquets was such from the beginning, and such it has remained down to modern times in many countries. You all know the practice of the Irish “wake” which has been preserved even in the United States. For it was long believed that the dead had their part in the merriness and inebriation of the companions at table and were thus consoled for the sadness of their lot. “Thou callest,” says Tertullian,[128] “the dead careless (_securos_) when thou goest to the tombs with food and delicacies, but thy real purpose is to make offerings to thyself, and thou returnest home tipsy.” And indeed, as we shall see,[129] these feasts were no longer of profit to the dead only but to the living also, because there came to be a confusion between them and the Bacchic communions in which wine was a drink of immortality. No religious ceremony was more universally performed in the most diverse regions of the Empire than this cult of the grave. At every hour of every day families met in some tomb to celebrate there an anniversary by eating the funeral meal. Peoples remained strongly attached to practices the omission of which would have seemed to them dangerous as well as impious, for the spirits of the dead were powerful and vindictive. It is therefore not surprising that these practices persisted in the Christian era in spite of the efforts of the clergy to suppress them. St. Augustine reprimands those who, like pagans, “drink intemperately above the dead”—these are his words—“and who, while serving meals to corpses, bury themselves with these buried bodies, making a religion of their greed and their drunkenness.”[130] In the East, however, ecclesiastical authority tolerated a custom which it could not uproot, contenting itself with forbidding the abuse of wine and recommending a moderation the absence of which might often be deplored. Ecclesiastical authority also insisted that a part of the feast should be given to the poor, thus giving a charitable character to the old pagan practice.[131] Therefore in many countries, and especially in Greece and in the Balkans, the habit has survived to this day, not only of placing food on tombs, but also of eating there on certain anniversaries, with the idea that the dead in some mysterious way share and enjoy the meal. * * * * *