It would be easy to multiply examples from these sources, but with further regard to the seven sons of Saul it may be mentioned that “the victims were not, as the Authorized Version implies, hung, they were crucified. The seven crosses were planted in the rock on the top of the sacred hill of Gibeah.... The victims were sacrificed at the beginning of barley harvest,--the sacred and festal time of the Passover--and in the full blaze of the summer sun they hung till the fall of the periodical rain in October.... She spread on the rocky floor the thick mourning garment of black sackcloth, which as a widow she wore, and crouching there she watched that neither vulture nor jackal should molest the bodies.”[12] Thus the practice of gibbeting on a cross was in use at least as early as in the days of King David. The misery of having no burial, of rendering neither justice to the earth nor mercy to the dead, was recognized by the refined nature of the Greeks, and, while they refused decent sepulture to infamous persons and prisoners, they yearned both in peace and war for quiet burial in the ground, for they were dismayed at the thought of burial at sea.[13] Thus Mezentius, in the Æneid of Virgil, asks not Æneas to spare his life, “but let my body have The last retreat of human kind, a grave.”[14] And Turnus-- “Or if thy vowed revenge pursue my death, Give to my friends my body void of breath.”[15] And, to take another and a notable example, Hector, in his last hour, beseeched Achilles to take the ransom and suffer not his body to be devoured by the dogs of the Greeks, but to let the sons and daughters of Troy give him burial rites.[16] It is said that a certain Achæus, who disputed sovereign power with Antiochus, was betrayed by a Cretan, his limbs cut off, and his body wrapped in the skin of an ass, and exposed on a gibbet. Pliny, in his “Natural History,”[17] tells us that Tarquinius Priscus, who died 578 B.C., ordered the dead bodies of suicides to be exposed on a cross. He was a powerful ruler, and an Etruscan, and made his mark on Rome. He came from Etruria when it was in a high state of development, and, no doubt, the practice of gibbeting on a cross was early in use with that ancient and gifted race. The Romans dreaded the public exposure of their bodies, and shipwreck, no less than did the Greeks; thus Ovid-- “I fear not death, nor value how I die; Free me from seas, no matter where I lie. ’Tis somewhat, howsoe’er one’s breath depart, In solid earth to lay one’s meaner part; ’Tis somewhat after death to gain a grave, And not be food to fish, or sport to every wave.”[18] They refused sepulture to suicides, for they thought it unreasonable that any hands should bury him whose own had destroyed himself, and they withheld decent burial from criminals.