The funeral usually took place in the early morning before sunrise, and throughout the whole of antiquity both burying and burning were common, sometimes subsisting side by side, while at other times one fashion or the other was more general. It seems as though burying had at first been more common among the Greeks than burning. It is true we find only burning mentioned in the Homeric poems, but we must not forget that we are concerned with exceptional circumstances in the Iliad, since the warriors who fell before Troy did not die at home; and in such cases, even in later times, burning was preferred, since it enabled the survivors to bring the ashes of the dead man home with them. Still, even in those early times, burying was very common, as is proved, in spite of the lack of literary evidence, by the ancient burial grounds discovered at many places in Greece; and similarly, in the historic period, the burning of dead bodies, though certainly practised, was not so common as burying, if only for the very practical reason that the latter was far cheaper and much less troublesome. Whichever form was chosen by the friends, or had been appointed by the dead man himself, the solemn funeral procession was never omitted; the crematoria, like the cemeteries, were outside the city gates, since at Athens, and probably in most Greek states, they were not allowed to bury their dead within the walls; the Doric states alone seem to have made an exception to this rule. A very ancient painted vase seems to afford a proof that it was customary in early times to convey the dead to the cemetery on a car drawn by horses, but in the historical age, at any rate, the corpse was taken to the grave on the same couch on which it had been exposed to view. This duty was generally performed by the slaves of the household, and where there were not sufficient of these, gravediggers were specially hired; while in the case of men who had deserved well of their country, the citizens regarded it as an honour to perform this duty themselves. If the dead man had died a violent death, a spear was carried in front of him, which pointed to the revenge to be taken; the spear was then fixed in the earth near the grave, and the nearest relation pronounced a curse against the murderer, after which the place was watched for three days. This did not, however, point to revenge on the part of the relations alone, but to the punishment to be inflicted by the legal authorities. As a rule, the male relations and friends walked at the head of the processions, and the women behind the corpse; but one of Solon’s ordinances limited the female followers to the nearest relations not extending beyond the nieces. Among the more distant relations, only women over sixty years of age were allowed to follow. This law does not, however, seem to have been quite strictly observed. All the mourners wore grey or black mourning; the nearest