Herodotus states that the women of the Thracians, in Eastern Europe, who were probably of Germanic origin, frequently disputed among themselves as to which of them should be allowed to ascend the pyre together with the deceased husband. Œnone, the lawful wife of Paris, whom he had forsaken to live with Helen the beautiful, forgot all her grievances at the sight of his misfortune. When the man, whom she had formerly loved so ardently, wounded by the arrow of Philoctetes, fled to her into the Ida, she refused to cure him; but when the greedy flames, after death, devoured his form, she voluntarily ascended the pyre to intermix her ashes with his. Thus are the ways of the world; the noble deed of the faithlessly deserted wife is hardly ever mentioned, but frivolous Helena was made the subject of many works of art, and leads an immortal life in the songs and poems of man. [Illustration: CREMATION IN CALCUTTA.] The ancient Etruscans practiced cremation, both before and after Etruria became a Roman province; they, no doubt, adopted it from the Greeks, who were first their rulers and afterward their close neighbors. The tombs of Etruria were rich in art; the urns in which the ashes of the dead were kept were either of alabaster or baked clay, the latter often being decorated with tasty paintings. The ancient Latins, in turn, borrowed the practice of incineration from the Etruscans. According to _Mazois_, some cinerary urns, found in the neighborhood of Alba Longa, prove that the custom of burning the dead was current among the original population of Latium long before any recorded epoch of Italian history, for the place in which those urns were detected was covered entirely over with dense layers of lava, which apparently came from the mountain Albanus, a volcano, the eruptions of which have long been buried in oblivion. The urns mentioned are especially noteworthy, because many of them bear pictures of the habitations of the earliest residents of Latium, which shows that cremation was known to them at that time. Such a hut of the aborigines of Latium was preserved for a long time in the capitol at Rome and was regarded with great reverence. It is but natural that the Latins, on becoming the founders of Rome, should have introduced incineration into their new home. Pliny asserts that the burning of the dead was not customary among the Romans of old, but Virgil describes it as a usage that existed long before the foundation of Rome, and Ovid affirms that the body of Remus was committed to the flames.