Again the pretty myth of Alcestis would be completely spoiled, if we venture to assume that her body was burned. Even Lucian seems to admit exceptions to his rule that the Greeks always burned, when he speaks of an old man as “having one foot in the grave, if not the other[170].” That the Athenians of Solon’s time did sometimes, at least, employ burial is shown by the clever argument put forward by Solon, and the brilliant reply by Hereas in the dispute between Athens and Megara for the possession of Salamis. Solon contended that the island belonged rather to the Athenians on the ground that “the manner of burying in Salamis is in accordance with the custom of Athens and not that of Megara, for the Megarians inter the dead with their faces to the east, and the Athenians turn theirs to the west.” Hereas of Megara begs leave to differ, asserting that the Megarians likewise turn the faces of the dead toward the west; and, what is more, like the people of Salamis, they put three or four corpses in the same tomb, whereas the Athenians have a separate tomb for each[171]. Further reading shows that there was a law among the Athenians which compelled any man coming upon an unburied corpse, to bury it so that it may look toward the west[172]. At Sparta, inhumation was probably the prevailing custom, since we know that Lycurgus ordered the corpses to be buried in the city, that the people might become habituated to the sight of death[173]. We also know, to take a specific case, that the Spartan general Pausanias was buried in the area before the temple of Artemis[174]. To the same purport, is the description given by a Greek traveler of the simple custom among the Sicyonians of burying without inscribing the name of the deceased person’s father and we may assume that burial without cremation was resorted to in other states than Athens and Sparta[175]. This examination leads to the conclusion that burial and cremation existed throughout the entire history of Greece side by side. A certain old miser, choosing between the two methods, prefers to be simply buried, in order that his money, which he has hidden in his grave-garment, may go with him to the next world[176]. Plato makes Socrates in one of his dialogues speak as if he were quite uncertain whether his body would be burned or immediately interred[177]. Finally, apart from the evidence of manuscripts, we have an undeniable verification in the fact that tombs have been excavated both in Magna Graecia and in Greece itself in which the skeletons are flanked on either side by funeral urns, thus exhibiting both customs as taking place in the same family[178].