Cremation, therefore, is intended to benefit the dead, whose soul no longer wanders unable to find rest; but still more the living, for they will not be troubled by ghosts that are securely confined to the depths of the earth. The Greeks of Homer, accustomed by long usage to the burning of the dead, are free from all fears of haunting "ghostly" presences. But when the practice of the fire-funeral was first adopted, that which was to be guarded against in the future by the destruction of the body with fire must have been a real cause of fear.[43\1] The souls that were so anxiously relegated to the other world of the Unseen must have been feared as awesome inhabitants of this world. And so, from whatever source it may have come to them,[44\1] the custom of cremation gives firm ground for {22} supposing that at some period of their history the belief in the power and activity of the spirits of the dead and their influence upon the living--a subject of fear rather than reverence--must have been prevalent amongst the Greeks; even though only a few scattered hints still bear witness to such beliefs in the Homeric poems. § 8 And evidence of these ancient beliefs we can now see with our eyes and touch with our hands. Owing to an inestimable series of fortunate circumstances, we are enabled to catch a glimpse of a far distant period of Greek history, which not only supplies a background to Homer, but makes him cease to be the earliest source of our information upon Greek life and thought. He is brought suddenly much nearer, perhaps deceptively nearer, to ourselves. The last decades of excavation in the citadel and lower town of Mycenæ and other sites in the Peloponnese right into the centre of the peninsula and as far northwards as Attica and Thessaly, have resulted in the discovery of graves--shaft-graves, chamber-graves, and elaborately constructed domed vaults, which were built and walled up in the period before the Dorian invasion. These graves prove to us--what was already hinted at by a few isolated expressions in Homer[45\1]--that the Greek "Age of Burning" was preceded, as in the case of the Persians, Indians, and Germans, by a period in which the dead were buried in the ground intact.[46\1] The lords and ladies of golden Mycenæ, and lesser folk, too (in the graves at Nauplia, in Attica, etc.), were buried when they died. Chieftains take with them into the grave a rich paraphernalia of gorgeous furniture and ornaments--unburnt like their own bodies; they rest upon a bed of small stones, and are covered by a layer of loam and pebbles;[47\1] traces of smoke and remains of ashes and charred wood bear witness to the fact that the dead were laid upon the place where the "sacrifice for the dead" had already been made; upon the hearth where offerings had been previously burnt inside the grave chamber.[48\1] This may very well be a burial procedure of the most primeval antiquity. Our oldest "Giants'" graves, in whose