xxiv. 595, he promises to Patroclus a share of the ransom of Hector's

body; but all these things are spoken of only in connection with the passion of Achilles. Customs almost forgotten revive or are reinvented in the mind of the hero, extravagances of grief and anger.

There is a variation in the last book of the _Odyssey_; the souls of the unburied Wooers arrive among the dead in Hades, though their bodies are unburned. The passage is usually reckoned late, and these spirits are under the special guidance of Hermes.

Even in these shadowy matters, Homer presents a view' unusually consistent; and the view was not held either in Aegean times, or in "Dipylon" days, or in the eighth century by the Cyclic poets, or in historic Greece. In this, as in all things, the world of Homer stands apart. There is possibly one note of change in Homeric burial. The phrase κτέρεα κτερεΐξαι, as in _Iliad_, xxiv. 38, means the burning of some of a man's possessions on his funeral pyre. It occurs but once in the _Iliad_, in the case of the funeral of Hector; but frequently in the _Odyssey_, about the funeral rites of Odysseus, if he proves to have died abroad. The only possessions of Patroclus which are burned are dogs and horses; not his arms, as in the cases of Eetion and Elpenor. In these cases, perhaps, a slight variation in burial rites may be detected. It looks as though, in the cases where the arms of the dead are burned with them, they were expected to be of use to them in the future life, as to Melissa, wife of Periander, who was cold in Hades, because her wardrobe had not been burned.

[1] _Beowulf_, 184-188, Mr. Clark Hall's translation.

[2] _Odyssey_, xi. 489-491.

[3] _Beowulf_, 2803-2808.

[4] _Odyssey_, xi. 74-76.

[5] Burrows, _Discoveries in Crete_, p. 101. Evans, _Prehistoric Tombs of Knossos_, p. 134.

[6] 1 Sam. xxxi. 10-13.

[7] 2 Chron. xvi. 14.

[8] 2 Chron. xxi. 19.

[9] Jer. xxxiv. 5.

[10] Hastings' _Dict. of Bible_, art. "Cremation."

[11] _R. G. E_. pp. 72, 73. Mr. Murray supposes cremation, with _secret_ burial. If so, the cairn was a later addition made in settled times, after the Migrations.

[12] Mr. Burrows remarks: "Neither Professor Ridgeway nor Mr. Lang is able to make the slightest use of the combinations suggested by the East Cretan graves," in which, for example, bronze weapons and inhumated bones are found side by side with burned bones, in urns, and iron weapons (_Discoveries in Crete_, p. 215). The facts are certainly of no use to any theory of mine: they are quite un-Homeric facts. I can only state the question thus: Homer uniformly describes a very well known mode of burial. Did he invent it? Did he receive it from tradition; and if so, from a tradition of what place and period? Is it possible that a poet of the age of overlapping of bronze and iron, of inhumation and cremation, in Greece, persists in reproducing, in great detail, a method of burial removed from his own experience by all the time that had passed since the Achaeans left their northern forests? If they retained the mode in Greece, where are the cairns?

[13] Iliad, vii. 85. The word is also found, Iliad, xvi. 456 = 674.

[14] xxiii. 170, 171.

[15] xxiii. 23.