To allow burial to criminals must have been the practice in the time of Homer: for we are told, in the third book of the Odyssey, that Ægisthus, who had added the crime of murder to that of adultery, was honoured with funeral ceremonies by Orestes, the son of the murdered king. It was the custom with the Romans, as may be seen from Ulpian, never to refuse giving the bodies of criminals to their relatives, to bury. The Emperors, Diocletian, and Maximian, in a rescript, declared, that they did not refuse to deliver up, for burial, those, who had deservedly been put to death for their crimes. In reading the history of civil wars; we find more frequent instances of indignities offered to the dead, than in the accounts of any foreign wars. In some cases, the bodies of executed criminals are exposed to public view, and hung in chains, a custom the propriety of which is very much doubted both by Theological and Political writers. So far from approving of the practice, we find such writers bestowing praises upon many, who had ordered funeral honours to be paid to those, who would not themselves have allowed the same to others. An action of this kind was done by Pausanias the Lacedaemonian, who, being urged by the people of Aegina to retaliate upon the Persians for their treatment of Leonidas, rejected the advice, as unbecoming his own character and the Grecian name. The Pharisees allowed burial even to King Jannaeus Alexander, who had treated the dead bodies of their countrymen with every kind of insult. Though indeed on certain occasions, God may have punished some offenders with the loss of such a right, he did so by virtue of his own prerogative, which places him above the restrictions of all law. And when David exposed the head of Goliah, it was done to one, who was an alien, and a despiser of God, and might be justified by that law, which confined the name and privileges of neighbour to the Hebrews. V. There is one thing not improper to be observed, that the rule prevailing among the Hebrews with respect to burying the dead, contained an exception, as we are informed by Josephus, excluding those, who had committed suicide. Nor is it surprising that a mark of ignominy should be affixed to those, on whom death itself cannot be inflicted as a punishment. Aristotle in the fifth book of his Ethics, speaks of the infamy universally attached to suicide. Nor is the observation at all weakened by the opinions of some of the Grecian poets, that as the dead are void of all perception, they cannot be affected either by loss or shame. For it is a sufficient reason to justify the practice, if the living can be deterred from committing actions, for which they see a mark of infamy set upon the dead.