exposure of the body of Polynices, violated the first great law of humanity, and had committed an act which was at once impious and barbarous, detestable alike in the eyes of gods and men. To the Greek, reverence for the dead was the most sacred of all duties. In his national creed, the ghosts of Hades seem more than disembodied spirits;—they retain their bodily senses; they remember the joys and brood over the sorrows of their former life; they carry traces of the mortal wounds or mutilation which caused their death; and so, in the Odyssey, we find them crowding to drink the blood which, like an elixir of life, seems to reanimate their veins, and give them speech and utterance. To the Greek the grave was not a barrier across which there was no return. Hercules had wrestled bodily with Death for the possession of Alcestis; Orpheus had almost regained his Eurydice; and Hesiod tells us how the spirits of the just revisit the loved scenes of their lifetime, like guardian angels—
"Earth haunting, beneficent, holy."[1]
But nothing could compensate to the dead for their cruel deprivation of a tomb. Not only was the spirit in such a case condemned to wander restlessly for a hundred years on the banks of Styx—a belief of which Lord Lytton has made such skilful use in his tale of 'Sisyphus'—but the laws of the gods in the lower world were violated, and the majesty of Proserpine, the queen of Hades, was set at nought. Few would
