poetical story of the ferryman of the dead, and this plausible explanation of the strange custom might then become a part of popular belief. The custom itself ought rather to have been brought into connexion with the practice common in many lands of satisfying the requirements of the dead by the gift of some diminutive and all but symbolical object which is offered at burial and put in the grave (see something of the kind in Tylor, i, 193-4). Parva petunt Manes: pietas pro divite grata est munere; non avidos Styx habet ima deos. The obol may be the last symbolical vestige of the entire property of the dead which the ancient law of the dead required to be placed undiminished in their graves. ~tethnê/xê| . . . ek pollô=n obolo\n {246} mou=non enegka/menos~: the epigram of Antiphanes Maced. (_AP._ xi, 168) expresses more nearly perhaps, though in sentimental language, the original and primitive intention of the gift of an obol, than does the fable of Charon's penny (cf. _AP._ xi, 171, 7; 209, 3). According to German superstition "money should be laid in the mouth of the dead man so that if he has buried a treasure he may not return", Grimm, p. 1785, n. 207. Here the undoubtedly ancient conception is quite clearly betrayed: that by giving a coin the property of the dead was _bought up_. The evidence for this first and proper meaning of the custom has been preserved in the strangest fashion, together with the custom itself, even down to the eighteenth century, when J. Chr. Männlingen voices it, _Albertäten_ 353 (summarized in A. Schultz, _Alltagsleben e. d. Frau im_ 18 _Jh._, p. 232 f.): this custom, common both to heathendom and Christianity, of putting a penny in the coffin of the dead "means that men buy up the property of the dead, whereby they think they will have good luck in their life".]