[237] Plutarch, _l. c._ The Solonian restrictions on the subject of funerals were to a great degree copied in the twelve tables at Rome: see Cicero, De Legg. ii, 23, 24. He esteems it a right thing to put the rich and the poor on a level in respect to funeral ceremonies. Plato follows an opposite idea, and limits the expense of funerals upon a graduated scale, according to the census of the deceased (Legg. xii, p. 959). Dêmosthenês (cont. Makartat. p 1071) gives what he calls the Solonian law on funerals, different from Plutarch on several points. Ungovernable excesses of grief among the female sex are sometimes mentioned in Grecian towns: see the μανικὸν πένθος among the Milesian women (Polyæn. viii, 63): the Milesian women, however, had a tinge of Karian feeling. Compare an instructive inscription, recording a law of the Greek city of Gambreion in Æolic Asia Minor, wherein the dress, the proceedings, and the time of allowed mourning, for men, women, and children who had lost their relatives, are strictly prescribed under severe penalties (Franz, Fünf Inschriften und fünf Städte in Kleinasien, Berlin, 1840, p. 17). Expensive ceremonies in the celebration of marriage are forbidden by some of the old Scandinavian laws (Wilda, Das Gildenwesen im Mittelalter, p. 18). Other penal enactments of Solon are yet to be mentioned. He forbade absolutely evil-speaking with respect to the dead: he forbade it likewise with respect to the living, either in a temple or before judges or archons, or at any public festival,—on pain of a forfeit of three drachms to the person aggrieved, and two more to the public treasury. How mild the general character of his punishments was, may be judged by this law against foul language, not less than by the law before mentioned against rape: both the one and the other of these offences were much more severely dealt with under the subsequent law of democratical Athens. The peremptory edict against speaking ill of a deceased person, though doubtless springing in a great degree from disinterested repugnance, is traceable also in part to that fear of the wrath of the departed which strongly possessed the early Greek mind.