It is impossible to point to a single touch that accords with the belief implied by the {17} ceremonial. The poet's bias is a different and, indeed, an opposite one. Of this much at least there cannot be the slightest doubt: the funeral ceremonies over the body of Patroklos are not the first budding of a new principle, but rather represent a "vestige" of a more vigorous worship of the dead in earlier times, a worship that must once have been a complete and sufficient expression of belief in the great and enduring power of the disembodied spirit. It has, however, been preserved unaltered into an age that, with quite other religious beliefs, no longer understands, or at best half-guesses at the sense of such strange ceremonial observances. Thus ritual generally outlives both the state of mind and the belief which originally gave rise to it. § 6 Neither the Iliad nor the Odyssey contains anything that can equal the scenes at the funeral of Patroklos as evidence of primitive worship of the dead. But even the ordinary forms of interment of the dead are not entirely without such "vestigial" features. The dead man's eyes and mouth are closed,[25\1] the body is washed and anointed, and after being wrapped in a clean linen cloth is laid upon a bier,[26\1] and the funeral dirge begins.[27\1] It is hardly possible to see even the remotest, lingering, reminiscence of a once vigorous worship of the dead in such performances as these; or in the very simple burial customs that follow the burning of the body; the bones are collected in a jar or a casket and buried under a mound, and a post set up to mark the place as a "grave-mound".[28\1] But when we find that the body of Elpenor, in accordance with the command issued by his psyche to Odysseus (_Od._ xi, 74), is burned together with his weapons (_Od._ xii, 13); when, further, we read that Achilles burnt the weapons of his overthrown foe together with his body on the funeral pyre (_Il._ vi, 418), it is impossible not to feel that we have here, too, survivals of an ancient belief that the soul in some mysterious fashion was capable of making use of these objects that are burnt along with its discarded bodily envelope. No one doubts that this is the reason for such a custom when it meets us in the case of other nations; with the Greeks, too, it must have had an equally good foundation, however little such is to be discovered in the ordinary Homeric view of the soul. The custom, moreover, more precisely described in these cases, was of general observance; we often hear how the completeness of a burial requires the burning of the possessions of the dead along with the body.[29\1] We cannot {18} tell to what extent the duty of offering to the dead _all_ his movable possessions[30\1] (a duty originally without doubt interpreted quite literally) had come in Homeric times to be interpreted in a symbolical sense--a process which reached its lowest stage in the custom prevalent in later times of presenting an