According to Pindar (Ol. 6, 23, Nem. 9, 54), during the combat of the Seven against Thebes, funeral pyres were burning at each of the seven gates of the city, to consume those slain in battle. The heathens, as they are called, were not to be charged with any lack of respect to their departed dead. On the contrary, the most tender sentiments conceivable were attached to the practice of cremation. There was a Theban regulation that no one should build a house without a specific repository for the dead. Æneas and the other Trojans, who escaped with him from the burning city of the hundred gates (as Priam’s capital was sometimes called), introduced cremation (Virgil’s Æneid, B. IV, 7) into Carthage, if it did not exist there previous to their arrival. It is possible that the inhabitants of Carthage, which was one of the Phœnician cities in Africa, derived the practice from the mother-country. At all events, the tragedy of love, in which Æneas was involved, ended with the suicide of Dido, who cremated herself. The eleventh book of the Æneas gives a description of an incineration among the ancient inhabitants of Latium. Self-cremation seems to have been one of the favorite means of disposing of one’s self in ancient times, especially among the royalty and aristocracy. Both tradition and history report of many women, friends, and servants who, of their own free will, mounted the funeral pyre with the departed head of the family. Besides Hercules and Dido, already mentioned, Sardanapalus, the last king of the Assyrians, burned himself in the year 600 before Christ, because the Tigris had destroyed the fortifications of besieged Nineveh, and the following also mounted the pyre for the same purpose: Marpessa, Polydora, and Cleopatra (Vide Pausanias, 4, 2), three noble women of Messenia, and Euadne, the wife of Capaneus, who threw herself into the flames which consumed her husband. The pyre of Sardanapalus, we are told, was very large and contained many rooms, which were elegantly furnished, and in which the royal treasures were heaped up, before the king entered them with his women, while his servants set the pile on fire. It is well known that the widows of India, until very recently, perished of their own free will in the flames that consumed their husbands.