the interment of a deceased person. In almost all countries the rites of sepulture have been looked upon as a debt so sacred, that those who neglected to discharge it were thought infamous. Hence the Romans called them justa, and the Greeks νεκροποιησις, words implying the inviolable obligation which nature has laid upon the living to perform the obsequies of the dead. Nor need we wonder that the ancient Greeks and Romans were extremely solicitous about the interment of their deceased friends, seeing they were strongly persuaded that their souls could not be admitted into the Elysian fields till their bodies had been committed to the earth; and if it happened that they never obtained the rites of burial, they were excluded from the happy mansions for the term of a hundred years. For this reason it was considered as a duty incumbent upon all travellers who happened to meet with a dead body in their way, to cast dust or mould upon it three times; and of these, one portion at least was cast upon the head. The ancients likewise considered it as a great misfortune if they were not laid in the sepulchres of their fathers; for which reason the ashes of those who died in foreign countries were usually brought home and interred with those of their ancestors. But notwithstanding the great care in the burials of the dead, there were some persons whom they thought unworthy of the last office, and to whom therefore they refused it; namely, public or private enemies; such as betrayed or conspired against their country; tyrants, who were always looked upon as enemies to their country; villains guilty of sacrilege; such as died in debt, whose bodies belonged to their creditors; and offenders who had suffered capital punishment.

Of those who were allowed the rites of burial, some were distinguished by particular circumstances of disgrace attending their interment. Thus persons killed by lightning were buried apart by themselves, being thought odious to the gods; those who wasted their patrimony forfeited the right of being buried in the sepulchres of their fathers; and those who were guilty of self-murder were privately deposited in the ground, without the accustomed solemnities. Among the Jews the privilege of burial was denied only to self-murderers, who were thrown out to rot upon the ground. In the Christian church, though good men always desired the privilege of interment, yet they were not, like the heathens, so concerned for their bodies as to think it any detriment to them if either the barbarity of an enemy or some other accident deprived them of this privilege. The primitive Christian church denied the more solemn rites of burial only to the unbaptized, to self-murderers, and to excommunicated persons who continued obstinate and impenitent in contempt of the censures of the church.

The place of burial among the Jews was never particularly determined. They had graves in the town and country, upon the highways, in gardens, and upon mountains. Among the Greeks the temples were made repositories for the dead in the primitive ages; yet the general custom in later ages with them, as well as with the Romans and other heathen nations, was to bury their dead without their cities, and chiefly by the highways. Among the primitive Christians burying in cities was not allowed for the first three centuries, nor in churches for many ages after. Dead bodies were first deposited in the atrium or church-yard, and in the porches and porticoes of the church; and hereditary burying-places were forbidden till the twelfth century.