important inscriptions. On one is represented a man wrapped in a cloak seated: in his left hand is a pomegranate; in his right a wine-cup, out of which a coiled serpent drinks. The stone bears the name ΤΙΜΟΚΛΗϹ. If this inscription were of the same date as the relief it would of course at once prove that the stone is a memorial of an individual, and not a dedication to Hades. But in the opinion at least of Prof. Furtwängler the inscription is decidedly the later; it cannot therefore be regarded as conclusive evidence. But such evidence is afforded us by the next monument. Here we have a bearded man seated, in a decidedly later and more finished style of art, holding in his right hand a wine-cup, from which a serpent feeds. The inscription here is ΑΡΙΣΤΟΚΛΗϹ Ο ΚΑΙ ΖΗΘΟϹ; and it seems not merely to show that the memorial belongs to a man, Aristocles, but also that this Aristocles received a second name after his death in the quality of hero or demi-god. We learn from other sources of several such heroic names bestowed on distinguished men after their death. The rarity of names on the Spartan tombs may be readily accounted for by the existence of a stern law of Lycurgus[76], that names were not to be recorded on the tombs except in the case of priestesses, or of warriors who had fallen in battle. Another regulation of the great lawgiver ordained that bodies might be buried within the city, and memorials of the dead set up in the neighbourhood of the temples. Such monuments were not always gravestones, but sometimes memorials of those who were buried in a different place, or had fallen on foreign service. In view of such facts as these we cannot hesitate to see in the sepulchral reliefs of Sparta reference to individuals, the ancestor, or the ancestor and his wife. They are the shrines of the family worship of the Laconians. But yet in a sense the dead man is identical with Hades. In Egypt each of the virtuous dead became part of Osiris. According to Herodotus the Getae thought that their dead returned to their deity Zalmoxis. In Greece, by dying, men put away the individual accidents of the flesh and became in a sense united with Hades. This no doubt is one reason why down to the second century B.C. we scarcely ever find individual portraits on tombs, a fact to which we shall hereafter return. The cultus of ancestors was closely parallel to that of the gods. To both, sacrifices of food and of drink were constantly brought. To the temple of the gods corresponded the family heroum or shrine. To the statues of the gods corresponded the representation of the human dead in an ideal or heroized form. And gods and ancestors alike partook with their votaries of food at stated times, becoming the guest-friends of the worshipper.