Both religious and civil motives might have dictated the propriety of this regulation. The traveller, setting out upon a journey, and passing by the sepulchres of his sires, could in the presence of their manes invoke their protection; and on his return to his penates, safe from danger, he could put up thanks to the gods for his preservation. As a prudential measure, the interment of the dead beyond the walls of their towns prevented the fatal consequences that might have arisen from extensive putrefaction and infection, and moreover the burning of bodies would have exposed the adjoining buildings to the danger of frequent fires. It is also possible that policy dictated these sanatory enactments. The ancients held the remains of the departed as a sacred trust, in the defence of which they were ever prepared to fall; and it is not improbable that their warriors would have rushed forth to meet the invader, before he would have defiled, by his approach to their cities, the ashes of their ancestors. So scrupulously religious were the Athenians in performing the funeral rites of the dead, that they put to death ten of their commanders, after the battle of Arginusae, for not having committed to the earth the dead bodies that floated on the waters. Such was the dread of being deprived of sepulchral rites, that it is related of several citizens of Cappadocia, that during the pestilence that devastated their town in the reign of Gallus and Valerian, they actually shut themselves up to perish in their tombs. There is no doubt but that their dead were buried in such a manner as not to prove injurious to the survivors; and Seneca plainly says, "Non defunctorum causa, sed vivorum, inventa est sepultura." The ancients both burned and buried their dead, but inhumation appears to have been the most early and the most approved rite. "Let the dead be buried," says a law of Cecrops. Solon justifies the claims of the Athenians to the island of Salamis, from the circumstance of the dead bodies interred on its shores having been inhumed according to the Athenian custom, with their feet turned to the west, whereas the Megarensians turned theirs to the east. In various instances the burial or the burning appear to have been adopted upon philosophical doctrines. Democritus, with a view to facilitate resurrection, recommended interment, and Pliny thus ridicules the intention: "Similis et de asservandis corporibus hominum, et reviviscendis promissa a Democrito vanitas, qui non revivixit ipse." Heraclitus, who considered fire as the first principle, advocated the funeral pile; while Thales, who deemed water the chief element, urged the propriety of committing the departed to the damp bosom of the earth. Although burning the dead was customary, there were curious exceptions to the rule. Infants who died before cutting their teeth, persons struck dead with lightning, were buried. The place of interment of infants was called the _suggrundarium_.