These passages from the great dramatists exhibit the Athenian custom of the fifth century B.C. How late this custom lasted in Greece may be shown from the language of Lucian, in the second century A.D. Speaking with contempt of the popular beliefs, he writes[15]: ‘People fancy that souls rising from below dine as they can, flitting about the smell and the steam, and drink the honeyed draught from the trench.’ Again, in another place[16], Lucian writes: ‘The shades are nourished by our libations, and by the offerings at the tomb; so that those who have no friend or relative left on earth, live foodless and famished among the rest.’ The offerings brought to the dead were of a simpler and less sumptuous character than those dedicated to the gods. Through Greek history they tended to become less costly. In the _Iliad_ Achilles sacrifices to the spirit of Patroclus not only horses and dogs, oxen and sheep, but also twelve Trojan prisoners. At the taking of Troy, according to the legend, Polyxena was sacrificed on the tomb of Achilles. Not only did the custom of sending slaves to attend a dead chief, and horses for him to ride, die out, but the food of the dead became much less solid than beef and mutton. The laws of Solon forbade the sacrifice of oxen to the dead[17]. As late as the sixth century, an inscription of Ceos[18] speaks of sacrifice at tombs according to the old ritual; but after that time more serious sacrifices were reserved for actual heroes and exceptional tombs. A black ox, for example, was annually offered to the heroes of Plataea down to the time of Plutarch[19], with wreaths and fillets. Ordinary souls had to be content with something much simpler; cakes and flowers, with wine, honey, and milk, sometimes a fowl or a few eggs, sufficed for their somewhat ethereal needs. But in early, and still more in later times, the survivors would sometimes try to show their respect, in exceptional cases, by a great display of grief and by costly sacrifices. Excavations sometimes reveal to us traces not merely of presents brought to the dead, but of actual sacrifices made to them. For example, when the mound which covered the bodies of those who fell at Marathon was recently excavated[20], traces were found in broken vessels and animals’ bones of the feast held by the survivors at the time of the burial, as well as a trench cut to receive offerings, and considerable masses of ashes, dating no doubt from the yearly sacrifices which in the month of Boedromion the people of Athens offered in gratitude to the heroes who had first dared to look the Mede in the face.