obol "for the Ferryman of the Dead". Finally, the "funeral feast" offered by the king to the mourning people either after the funeral of a chieftain (_Il._ xxiv, 802, 665), or before the burning of his body (_Il._ xxiii, 29 ff.), could only have derived its full meaning from an ancient belief that the soul of the person thus honoured could itself take a share in the feast. In the banquet in honour of Patroklos the dead man is given a definite portion--the blood of the slaughtered animals which is poured round his body (_Il._ xxiii, 34). Like the funeral games, this banquet is apparently intended to propitiate the soul of the dead man. Consequently, we find even Orestes, after slaying Aigisthos, his father's murderer, offering him a funeral feast (_Od._ iii, 309)--not, surely, in a mood of simple "piety". The custom of inviting the whole people, on the occasion of important funerals, to such a banquet no longer appears in later times; it has little resemblance to the funeral feasts shared by the relations of the dead man (~peri/deipna~) that were afterwards customary; it is far closer to the great _cenæ ferales_ that accompanied the _silicernia_ in Rome, to which the relations of the dead man, if he were an important person, invited the whole population.[31\1] After all, it is no harder to understand the underlying conception of the soul in this case sharing the feast with the whole people, than it is to understand the same conception when applied to the great sacrifices to the gods which, though the congregation partakes, are, in name and in fact, essentially "Banquets of the Gods" (_Od._ iii, 336).