ancient world, its fulness of speech and action, its copiousness of
life, made the contrast more sudden and appalling; and it seems to be
only at a later period, when the brightness was a little dimmed and
the tide of life did not run so full, that the feeling grew up which
regarded death as the giver of rest. With a last word of greeting to
the bright earth the dying man departs, as into a mist.[21] In the
cold shadows underground the ghost will not be comforted by ointments
and garlands lavished on the tomb; though the clay covering be
drenched with wine, the dead man will not drink.[22] On an island of
the Aegean, set like a gem in the splendid sea, the boy lying under
earth, far away from the sweet sun, asks a word of pity from those who
go up and down, busy in the daylight, past his grave. Paula of
Tarentum, the brief-fated, cries out passionately of the stone
chambers of her night, the night that has hidden her. Samian girls set
up a monument over their playfellow Crethis, the chatterer, the story-
teller, whose lips will never open in speech again. Musa, the singing-
girl, blue-eyed and sweet-voiced, suddenly lies voiceless, like a
stone.[23] With a jarring shock, as of closed gates, the grave closes
over sound and colour; /moved round in Earth's diurnal course with
rocks, and stones, and trees./

Even thus there is some little comfort in lying under known earth; and
the strangeness of a foreign grave adds a last touch to the pathos of
exile. The Eretrians, captured by the Persian general Datis, and sent
from their island home by endless marches into the heart of Asia, pine
in the hot Cassian plains, and with their last voice from the tomb
send out a greeting to the dear and distant sea.[24] The Athenian laid
in earth by the far reaches of Nile, and the Egyptian whose tomb
stands by a village of Crete, though from all places the descent to
the house of Hades is one, yet grieve and fret at their strange