tances permitted--perhaps for the sake
of signalling the course of events to others at a distance. But what
ritual? That question I was able to answer when I knew the answer to
these others,--why _under the tongue,_ and why _smeared with honey?_
For no reason, except that the Greeks (not the Romans till very late in
their history) always placed an _obolos,_ or penny, beneath the tongue
of the dead to pay his passage across the Stygian river of ghosts; for
no reason, except that to these same Greeks honey was a sacred fluid,
intimately associated in their minds with the mournful subject of
Death; a fluid with which the bodies of the deceased were anointed, and
sometimes--especially in Sparta and the Pelasgic South--embalmed; with
which libations were poured to Hermes Psuchopompos, conductor of the
dead to the regions of shade; with which offerings were made to all the
chthonic deities, and the souls of the departed in general. You
remember, for instance, the melancholy words of Helen addressed to
Hermione in _Orestes:_

[Greek: _Kai labe choas tasd'en cheroin komas t'emas
elthousa d'amphi ton Klutaimnaestras taphon
melikrat'aphes galaktos oinopon t'achnaen._]

And so everywhere. The ritual then of the murderers was a _Greek_
ritual, their cult a Greek cult--preferably, perhaps, a South Greek
one, a Spartan one, for it was here that the highly conservative
peoples of that region clung longest and fondliest to this
semi-barbarous worship. This then being so, I was made all the more
certain of my conjecture that the central figures on the papyrus were
drawn from a Greek model.

'Here, however, I came to a standstill. I was infinitely puzzled by the
rod in the man's hand. In none of the Greek grave-reliefs does any such
thing as a rod make an appearance, except in one well-known example
where the god Hermes--generally represented as carrying the _caduceus_,
or staff, given him by Phoebus--appears leading a dead maiden to the
land of night. But in every other example of which I am aware the
sculpture represents a man _living_, not dead, banqueting _on earth_,
not in Hades, by the side of his living companion. What then could be
the significance of the staff in the hand of this living man? It was
only after days of the hardest struggle, the cruellest suspense, that
the thought flashed on me that the idea of Hermes leading away the dead
female might, in this case, have been carried one step farther; that
the male figure