That the seated personage who plays the lyre if a man, or who if a woman holds a tray of offerings or a lekythos, is not a survivor but a dead person, may be readily shown by a comparison of certain vase-paintings. For an example we may take two lekythi figured on one plate[27] in the _Sabouroff Collection_. On one of these is represented a young man seated beside a stele, playing on a lyre which he holds, while an attendant girl brings him a sash or fillet. On the other the stele is absent, and the scene, which is given in the text [Illustration: FIG. 10. TOILET SCENE, SEPULCHRAL.] (Fig. 10), seems one taken from daily life. A lady, fully draped, is seated on a chair; in her lap rests a flat box containing sashes; a maid-servant comes to her holding a smaller box with open lid, probably a casket of jewelry. This last scene is closely like many of the Attic sepulchral reliefs[28], and the artist who painted it can scarcely have had in his mind any other intention than that of representing a lady who had died. The former scene must be of parallel significance; and the man seated with the lyre can scarcely be other than the proprietor of the stele beside which he sits. [Illustration: FIG. 11. GIFTS AT TOMB.] We add, from a late vase in the British Museum[29], a very interesting sepulchral group (Fig. 11). The tomb is in the form of a pillar with acanthus ornament at the base, resting on a flat slab or table[30]. This latter is heaped up with vases and sashes, the gifts of survivors. Among these gifts stands a female figure in sorrowful attitude, either a statue of the deceased, or more probably herself in spiritual presence. On one side a man raises his hand in greeting or adoration, on the other approaches a girl bearing some offering. CHAPTER III BELIEFS AS TO THE FUTURE LIFE The group of vase-paintings with which we dealt in the last chapter raises a curious question. In all, or almost all, of them the locality is clearly implied by the presence of a stele in the background. The offerings which they represent were made, it seems, at the tomb itself. Is it not, however, a strange thing that wealthy and educated Athenians should suppose the souls of the dead to have nothing better to do than to rest beside the tomb, and there await the offerings of survivors? Did they not believe in a region of the dead, a kingdom of Hades, where the bad were punished and the good received the recompense of their merits? And if so, how could the souls of the departed be at the same time in Hades, and in the neighbourhood of the graveyard? In order to find a solution for these difficulties we must give some account of the views of ordinary Greeks, at different periods of the national history, in regard to the life after death, and the condition of the departed.