The offerings brought to the seated pair in the relief first cited are such as belonged in a special way to the dead. The pomegranate was the food of the Shades, which, when Persephone had tasted in the palace of Hades, she belonged to him beyond recall. The cock and the egg are the simplest meat-offerings which were brought to the dead and enjoyed by the living. Flowers in all countries and in all ages have been laid on the tomb; and the Greeks who loved to deck their banquets with them were not an exception to the general rule. The winecup in the hand of the seated hero may be characterized as a very broad hint to his descendants that at the tomb were due the libations which were grateful alike to the gods and to the spirits of the dead. The serpent who is sometimes represented as drinking from the cup is either the companion of the dead or even his spirit in another form. The way in which a serpent disappears into the ground marks him out as essentially a chthonic being. A few more characteristic specimens of this class of monuments must be cited. On a stele from Chrysapha (Fig. 30) we see a man, depicted in an archaic style of art, seated, holding winecup and pomegranate; at his feet leaps a dog, while a horse is depicted in relief in the background. In discussing this relief Dr. Furtwängler[77] advocates the view that horse and dog have a symbolical reference, the horse being [Illustration: FIG. 30. SEATED HERO.] nearly connected with Hades and the dog with Hecate, both mythologic beings closely connected with the dead. I have proposed[78] a somewhat bolder view, that these animals sculptured on the stone bear the same relation to the mortal horse and dog which had belonged to the hero that the portrait bears to himself, and that they are really a survival of an ancient custom, whereof we find traces in the graves of Greece and Italy, by which the horse and dog of a deceased warrior were slain and buried in the same place with him. Whether their bones were mingled with their master’s, or whether they are merely figured on his gravestone, the meaning is much the same, that wherever the lord is, there are his faithful attendants: ‘Admitted to that equal sky, his faithful dog shall bear him company,’ as Pope says. In any case, horse and dog on a tomb are certainly a mark of knightly rank.