So stringent was the law concerning the duty of burial among the ancient Greeks. Yet there were extreme cases where burial was forbidden. It was the severest aggravation of the penalty of execution for a crime that the body of the criminal was denied interment. Such corpses, both at Athens and Sparta, were cast with the halter and their garments into a pit in an allotted quarter of the city, where the flesh might decay or be eaten by carrion birds. At Athens this _barathrum_[8], as it was usually called, was situated in the quarter called _Melita_, very near the house of Themistocles, and the temple which he had erected to Artemis _Aristobule_[9]. Sparta also had a pit or underground cavern, called Caeadas[10], to which were consigned the corpses of malefactors. After the Lacedemonians had kept Pausanias confined till he was starved to death, they first meditated throwing his remains into this disgraceful place, but afterwards, changing their minds, they buried him in the ground somewhere thereabouts[11]. Those who destroyed their own lives became felons, but were not so hardly dealt with as those who had been executed for crime. Interment was allowed the suicide, but the hand which committed the deed was chopped off and buried apart from the body[12]. A modern scholar[13] attributes this treatment to the fear which the Greeks had that the corpse might become a vampire; but the sentimental reason of Josephus, that the felonious hand was considered alien to the body, appears much more like the ancient manner of thought. As an additional degradation to the corpses of suicides, Plato recommends that they be buried without honor apart from the other dead in an uncultivated and nameless region, and that their place of interment be unmarked by any pillar or name[14]. From this suggestion and the fact that burials sometimes did take place after dark, as when Cassandra prophesied to Agamemnon that “being a base fellow, basely shall you be buried at night, and not in the day[15],” Becker has concluded that “the witching time of night” might have furnished the occasion for the entombment of self-destroyers[16]. That is certainly reasonable. From the fate of many traitors, the conclusion is warranted that those who were guilty of the heinous crime of treason were refused burial in their native land. For this reason, the heroes Polynices, Palamedes and Telamonian Ajax, on the conclusion of their mythical career, were each prevented from burial at home[17]. Even the bones of Themistocles, according to some, were interred secretly at Athens, without the knowledge of the Greeks, “for,” says Thucydides, “it was against the law to bury him there, as he had been outlawed for treason[18].”