There seems to have been no one place at Athens selected for the situation of all the tombs except for those who died in poverty. Those Athenians who left no land or money behind them were entombed in a public cemetery. This place was situated just outside the city[246] on one of the roads to the Peiraeus[247]. The Itonic gate, through which the bodies of these paupers were carried, was, on this account, called the “gravegate[248].” The people of the richer classes, when they possessed a bit of land, often directed that they should be interred therein; so it happened that there was no large assemblage of graves at any one place. In one of Demosthenes’s orations, the stone-cutter comes to the house that he may complete the tomb in the neighboring field[249]. More frequently the graves were constructed by the side of some much traveled road where the passer-by might observe the monument. From an inscription on a child’s tomb, we learn that “her parents sorrowfully buried her at the junction of three roads[250].” The square cut tombs of Isocrates and his relations, which have been described, were situated near the Cynosarges, the great exercising ground[251], while Thucydides was buried in the family burying ground of Cimon[252], near the Melitic gate[253]. The place of interment, as one might suppose, belonged exclusively to the family, and strangers were forbidden burial there by some well accepted law of the Athenians[254]. This law, together with that making it a crime to destroy a tomb, is attributed by Cicero to Solon[255]. Accordingly, from the fact of a person being buried in the tomb of a certain family, the orators sometimes argued his relationship with that family, for the purpose of establishing the connection of some direct descendant. By that method, Demosthenes sought to prove the descent of Eubulides from Buselus[256], and, in the same manner, demonstrated to the court the citizenship of Euxitheus[254]. In the earliest times, the reason for selecting the former residence of the deceased as a place of burial was that the departed might be near his family[257]. Later, however, in many of the states, there were enactments passed which prohibited interments within the city limits. At Delos, after 425 B. C., the Athenians cleared the whole island of those already interred there, and commanded that, thereafter, all corpses should be carried to the adjoining small island of Rhene[257]. Among the Sicyonians, there was an ancient law against burials within the city walls, and it had been so religiously observed that even when the great Aratus died, the people hesitated about entombing him in the city until re-assured by a special dispensation from the Delphic oracle[258]. The Athenians were so particular about preserving the very letter of a similar law that even the cenotaphs of those who had been slain in battle were erected in a beautiful suburb of the city[259] on the way which led to the Academy[260].