ON THE DISPOSAL OF THE DEAD. 
165 
gency. The traveller who should find a dead body was asked to 
bury it, or at least three times to cast dust upon it : 
Quanquam festinas, non est mora longa. licebit 
Injecto ter pulvere, curras. 
And the sailor who floated ashore from the sea bore on his 
body the most costly gift he possessed for him who should give 
its lifeless bearer the rite of burial. But these acts were excep- 
tional, the necessities inflicted upon those who could not be 
submitted to the pyre. 
Beyond this reason, moreover, the Greek found and felt 
another motive for that system of cremation he all but univer- 
sally practised. Strange as it might seem to men of other 
races, the very process of submitting the body to be burned was 
to him the sign of the life that is immortal. The body he with 
so much ceremonial committed to the fire was not in his ideal 
destroyed. Great men, according to that ideal, were to be 
raised to the world of the higher intelligences ; and Pluto him- 
self, because he taught the very art of disposal of the dead, was, 
for his art, believed to have been received into the number of 
the gods. No ! the thought that animated the Greek was the 
simple reverse of the material conception of organic structure, 
living or dead. The men who transformed their heroes into 
divinities, and who carried out their young dead to the pile 
before the dawn, that the sun might not be the witness of so 
terrible a calamity as the cessation of life while yet it had not 
approached its perfected glory, were hardly the men to be 
tainted with the belief of the cessation of individual phenomena 
with the cessation of that visible motion from which we infer 
that the body that once was living has ceased to live. With 
the Greek, the burning, to which he subjected the dead body, 
was a process for the purification of the soul. The soul, left 
unclean in its earthly state, required to be rendered quite 
perfect by the absolute purification even of the casement in 
which it had been enshrined during its mortal course, and to 
which it must still cling. So they submitted the casement to 
the pur, the great and absolute purifier, the fire. Further, they 
conceived that in this purification they set free the indestructible 
principle of life, that it might enter the more speedily into the 
domains of the blessed. This was the Greek ideal of what we 
call cremation. Symbolised, somewhat differently, it remains 
to this day connected with a faith to which millions pay 
allegiance. 
It accorded with the disposition of the ancient Egyptian to 
retain his dead as perfectly as art could enable him. The body, 
the receptacle of the soul, was too precious to be cast away to 
the earth to rot there, or to the sea to be devoured of animals, 
