Homer, that incomparable Hellenic poet (There is, I know, a dispute whether the name Homer stands for one person or for a number of bards. As far as I am concerned, I believe that Homer was an individual, a poor mendicant perhaps, wandering all over Greece, singing or reciting his heroic epics, and living on the grace of an admiring public. No collection of bards could have possibly written the Odyssey and Iliad, which are so uniform in character throughout.), has preserved for us, in immortal verse, the records of the Trojan war, in which we find many instances of cremation chronicled. The recent explorations of Dr. Heinrich Schliemann on the site of Troy have demonstrated beyond a doubt that the poems of Homer rest on a basis of actual fact. During the war that was fought for Helen the beautiful, it was customary among the Greeks and Trojans to reduce to ashes the bodies of those who had been slain in battle. Line 69 of the first book of the Iliad proves that the Greeks burned their dead for sanitary reasons. The bodies of cowards, criminals, and slaves were not incinerated, but left unburied, a prey for the beasts of the field and the birds of the air. Agamemnon, the king, addressing his warriors warns them (_vide_ Pope’s translation of the Iliad, B. II, L. 466) that, during battle:— “Who dares, inglorious, in his ships to stay, Who dares to tremble on this signal day, That wretch, too mean to fall by martial power, The birds shall mangle, and the dogs devour.” Incineration was denied Ajax, one of the greatest Grecian heroes, because he had slain himself in a fit of indignation. Hector’s defiance of the Greek princes (Iliad, B. VII, L. 85) shows that it was also the custom among the Trojans to burn the dead. There is further evidence of this in the truce, between Priam and Agamemnon (_vide_ Iliad, B. VII, L. 898 and 450), for the purpose of burning the dead of both armies. Homer’s narration of the burning of Patroclus, Achilles’ friend, gives such an accurate description of the method then in use, that I will be pardoned for quoting it here. The passage to which I refer occurs in the twenty-third book of the Iliad, and is as follows:—