The reason is obvious. Mr. Leaf, with many other critics, distinguishes several successive periods of "expansion." In the first stratum we have the remains of "the original kernel." Among these remains is The Slaying of Hector (XXII. 1-404), "with but slight additions." [Footnote: Leaf, _Iliad_, vol. ii. p. xi.] In the Slaying of Hector that hero indicates cremation as the mode of burial. "Give them my body back again, that the Trojans and Trojans' wives grant me my due of fire after my death." Perhaps this allusion to cremation, in the "original kernel" in the Slaying of Hector, may be dismissed as a late borrowing from Book VII. 79, 80, where Hector makes conditions that the fallen hero shall be restored to his friends when he challenges the Achaeans to a duel. But whoever knows the curious economy by way of repetition that marks early national epics has a right to regard the allusion to cremation (XXII, 342,343) as an example of this practice. Compare _La Chancun de Williame_, lines 1041-1058 with lines 1140-1134. In both the dinner of a knight who has been long deprived of food is described in passages containing many identical lines. The poet, having found his formula, uses it whenever occasion serves. There are several other examples in the same epic. [Footnote: _Romania_, xxxiv. PP. 245, 246.] Repetitions in Homer need not indicate late additions; the artifice is part of the epic as it is of the ballad manner. If we are right, cremation is the mode of burial even in "the original kernel." Hector, moreover, in the kernel (XXII. 256-259) makes, before his final fight with Achilles, the same proposal as he makes in his challenge to a duel (VII. 85 et _seqq_.). The victor shall give back the body of the vanquished to his friends, but how the friends are to bury it Hector does not say--in this place. When dying, he does say (XXII. 342, 343). In the kernel and all periods of expansion, funeral rites are described, and in all the method is cremation, with a howe or a barrow. Thus the method of cremation had come in as early as the "kernel," The Slaying of Hector, and as early as the first expansions, and it lasted till the period of the latest expansions, such as Books XXIII., XXIV.