Every one who examines the early graves of Attica must be struck with the fact that whereas it would seem natural that tombs should be set up by children for their parents, at Athens the opposite rule seems to prevail. Commonly tombs profess to be erected for those who died young by their sorrowing relatives. Not only were young men who fell in battle honoured with fine monuments, but young men who died of disease, and unmarried girls. A large proportion of the women whose tombs we find seem either to have died unmarried or else to have perished in childbirth. It would seem that ordinary citizens, who died in the course of nature, were buried in great family vaults; but that separate tombs with fine sculptural decoration were erected in special cases, when a father lost a promising and beloved boy or girl, or a young husband lost at one blow his wife and his hope of a progeny to carry on his name and tend his old age. The erection of a tomb to relative or friend was no matter of course, but an exceptional proceeding, adopted when feeling ran strongly, and required some satisfaction in outward act. The stern law of Sparta allowed only the names of men who fell in battle or women who were priestesses to be publicly set up. At Athens feeling took the place of law; and while those who died for their country were sure of honourable burial, ornate tombs were the gifts of special affection. We are told that the effeminate people of Agrigentum erected special tombs to their horses and pet birds. Here, as in so many cases, the Athenians maintained the human mean, between harsh rigour on the one hand, and luxurious effusiveness on the other. To the second period, B.C. 480-300, belongs the great mass of the fine sepulchral monuments of Athens. In the age of Pheidias, the custom comes in of flanking the sculptural group of stelae with a pair of pilasters supporting a small gable, as seen in several of our plates, and by degrees the ground between the pilasters recedes, and a deep interior is seen, as in Plates XI, XXVI, &c. By this recessing is produced the monument in the form of a small and shallow temple, within which we see in very high relief some scene from the daily and domestic life of Athens. These are the most splendid of the Athenian tombs, in date almost confined to the fourth century. They are the monuments of which Cicero writes; ‘amplitudines sepulcrorum quas nunc in Ceramico videmus’: even in Cicero’s time they were evidently one of the great sights of Greece; how much more notable are they now, when we have but a wreck of the artistic wealth and splendour of Greece with which to compare them!