But Charon and Cerberus seem to belong to a different series of ideas about the dead. The Northerners, such as the Achæans of Homer, burned their dead upon the funeral pyre, collecting their ashes in jars and urns, and in the case of a great man raising a barrow over the spot. They believed that the soul of the happy warrior departed to a Valhalla or Paradise in the Isles of the Blessed, where he lived thenceforth as he had lived on earth at his best, in continual feasting and athletic exercise. The soul could not attain to this blessed relief until it had received the rites of burial, and to deny burial was an awful crime against Greek morality. After a battle one side generally had to acknowledge its defeat by asking for a truce in order that it might bury its dead. Historical Athens practised both burial and cremation, after a period of lying in state. Burial would seem to have been the older custom, for it was assumed that the bones of Theseus must still be in existence somewhere, until they were eventually discovered in the island of Scyros. The Blessed Isles and the Heroic Valhalla doubtless survived as a literary tradition, but the “Hades” of ordinary Greek religion was the “grisly home” of Pluto and Persephone, a place of darkness and lamentation. We have seen that Pythagoras taught the immortality of the soul; but then, as now, it was not philosophy which created the popular ideas about death. The belief in immortality which undoubtedly prevailed generally in Greece seems to have been connected rather with the oldest religion of agricultural days. Such was the mystical hope given to the initiated in the secret nocturnal rites of Eleusis. It was intimately connected with the agricultural deities, Demeter the Earth Mother, Persephone the Maiden, her daughter, Triptolemus, the boy-god, and Eubouleus, the divine swineherd. The beautiful mythological representation of the doctrine in the story of Persephone, who was carried off by Hades to be his bride in the underworld while she was gathering flowers, and then at her mother’s powerful intercession was granted as a compromise the liberty to return to earth for half the year, is visibly a parable of summer and winter. It seems that current Greek theology so far as it related to Death was founded on naturalistic observation of the revival of the seasons and the rebirth of the crops. This theology was strongest across the water in Asia Minor, in its connection with the worship of Adonis. Nevertheless, belief in immortality was not in Greece any more than it is with us strong enough to assuage the sting of Death or to enable the Greeks to dispense with the formalities of funerals. The Athenians practised the usual rites of mourning with professional musicians and dirge-singers, black clothes, women tearing their hair and beating their breasts. All this was and is inevitable, but the public sense of Greece continually demanded decency and reserve in the presence of