To Phoebus then his Father spake Who drives the clouds along, ‘Dear Phoebus go, Sarpedon find Amid the battle throng, From purple gore his body lave; Then bear him far away, And wash him in the flowing stream, And in ambrosia lay; With garments clothe that wax not old, And let the winged pair, The brethren Sleep and Death, from thence His body swiftly bear To wealthy Lycia’s goodly land, Where kinsmen shall be fain To heap the mound and set the stone, The guerdon of the slain.’ It is thoroughly in accord with the spirit of Greek art that it should have welcomed and dwelt on the idea thus suggested by the epic poet. Greek painters and sculptors, like Greek dramatists and lyric poets, loved above all things to escape from the prosaic details of actual life into the ideal world of myth and fancy, into the language of which they translated the facts of every-day existence. On a very beautiful red-figured vase, ascribed to Euphronius, is represented the bearing away of Sarpedon’s dead body by Sleep and Death, Sleep being a benign daemon with yellow hair, Death a dark-haired being of more forbidding aspect[9]. And after the precedent furnished by Sarpedon, Sleep and Death have been introduced into scenes on other Greek vases, wherein the body is not that of any ancient hero, but of an ordinary citizen. We give an example from an Attic white lekythos[10] (Fig. 5). The dead body, the eyes of which are not closed in death, is that of a girl, who is borne to the resting-place indicated by a sepulchral stele by two winged figures, of whom the bearded one is doubtless Death and the younger, or beardless, Sleep. The god Hermes, as conductor of souls, is present to preside at the deposition at the tomb. The twin brethren Sleep and Death belong to poetry rather than to real belief. And it is the bodies, not the spirits, of the dead which they bear to the last resting-place. Other Athenian lekythi represent the journey of the soul to the land of shades, under the guidance of Hermes or in the boat of Charon. With these pictures I will deal in the third chapter, which treats of Greek beliefs as to the future life. Meantime we must follow the funeral procession to the cemetery. In the Homeric age the bodies of fallen chiefs were burned with much ceremony, and funeral games celebrated at their tombs. The classical instance is the burning of the body of [Illustration: FIG. 5. DEPOSITION AT THE TOMB.]