Within a few minutes’ walk of these splendid records of the dead, the traveller who returns to the town across the Observatory Hill will find a very different cemetery. For here he suddenly comes up to a long cleft in the rock, running parallel with the road below, and therefore quite invisible from it. The rising ground towards the city hides it equally from the Acropolis, and accordingly from all Athens. This gorge, some two hundred yards long, sixty wide, and over thirty feet deep, is the notorious _Barathrum_, the place of execution in old days; the place where criminals were cast out, and where the public executioner resided. It has been falsely inferred by the old scholiasts that the Athenians cast men alive into the pit. It is not nearly deep enough now to cause death in this way, and there seems no reason why its original depth should have been diminished by any accumulation of rubbish, such as is common on inhabited sites. “Casting into the Barathrum” referred rather to the refusing the rights of burial to executed criminals—an additional disgrace, and to the Greeks a grave additional penalty. Honor among the dead was held to follow in exact proportion to the continued honors paid by surviving friends. Here, then, out of view of all the temples and hallowed sites of the city, dwelt the public slave, with his instruments of death, perhaps in a cave or grotto, still to be seen in the higher wall of the gorge, and situated close to the point where an old path leads over the hill towards the city. Plato speaks of young men turning aside, as they came from Peiræus, to see the dead lying in charge of this official; and there must have been times in the older history of Athens when this cleft in the rock was a place of carnage and of horror. The gentler law of later days seems to have felt this outrage on human feeling, and instead of casting the dead into the Barathrum, it was merely added to the sentence that the body should not be buried within the boundaries of Attica. Yet, though the _Barathrum_ may have been no longer used, the accursed gate (_ἱερὰ πύλη_) still led to it from the city, and the old associations clung about its gloomy seclusion. Even in the last century, the Turks, whether acting from instinct, or led by old tradition, still used it as a place of execution.