The lying-in-state of the body seems invariably to have lasted for one day only.[50\5] In the early morning of the third day[51\5] after death the corpse, together with the bier on which it lay, was borne out of the house. Legislation was in some places necessary to check excessive ostentation at the funeral procession.[52\5] What pomp and ceremony was customary in the time of the old aristocratic rule at this part of the cult of the dead, we may gather (if it corresponded at all to reality) from the picture of a funeral procession represented on a very archaic "Dipylon vase".[53\5] There the body is carried on high on a wagon drawn by two horses: men carrying swords surround it, and a whole company of women, making lamentation and beating their heads, follow the procession. At Athens the attendance in the procession was confined, in the case of women at least, to those of the immediate kinsfolk (for three generations). The men, who had their place in front of the women seem to have been admitted without such restriction.[54\5] The admission of hired companies of Karian women and men, singing the national dirges, seems at Athens not to have been forbidden.[55\5] At Keos and elsewhere, the laws ordered processions to the grave to be conducted in silence.[56\5] On the whole, the discipline of respectable city life reduced the "excessive and barbaric",[57\5] which must once have been the rule in the display of mourning, to a discreet symbolism. On the details of the burial procedure our information is incomplete. Occasional expressions used by Greek authors allow us to conclude--and this is confirmed by the excavation of graves in Greek countries--that besides the custom, exclusively prevailing in Homeric times, of cremation, the more ancient practice of burying the body unburnt was still kept up.[58\5] The body was not intended to be completely destroyed. Out of the ashes of the funeral pyre the son carefully gathers the remains of his father's bones[59\5] in order to bury them, enclosed in an urn or a box. If on the other hand the body remains unburnt, it is either enclosed in a coffin made of baked clay, or wood[60\5]--a custom clearly betraying its foreign origin, or else--and this must have been certainly the older and more purely native Greek usage--it is let down into the earth without a coffin, and laid upon a bed of leaves;[61\5] at other times, if the nature of the ground allows, it may rest unburied in a rock-chamber, upon a bed of stonework.[62\5]