Note 8 — Chapter VIII · Conclusion.

In classical times belief in the necessity of proper burial was widespread. Patroclus, it will be remembered, appears to his friend Achilles, and admonishes him that he should not neglect the dead, at the same time giving a dire picture of the state of the unburied.8 Pausanias speaks9 of the conduct of Lysander as reprehensible in not burying the bodies of Philocles and the four thousand slain at Aegospotami, saying that the Athenians did as much for the Medes after Marathon, and even Xerxes for the Lacedaemonians after Thermopylae. The story told by Cicero10 of Simonides gives definite proof of the concrete nature of the reverential feeling among both Greeks and Romans. Suetonius in his life of Caligula relates that when the emperor’s body was left half burned and unburied, ghosts filled the palace and garden.