Page:The Ancient City- A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome.djvu/49

 •CHAP. IV. DOMESTIC EELIGION. 43 he says the man who has died without leaving a son, receives no offerings, and is exposed to perpetual hunger.' In India, as in Greece, an offering could be made to a dead person only by one who had descended from him. The law of the Hindus, like Athenian law, for- bade a stranger, even if he were a friend, to be invited to the funeral banquet. It was so necessary that these t)anquets should be offered by the descendants of the dead, and not by others, that the manes, in their resting- place, were supposed often to pronounce this wish: ^' May there be successively born of our line sons who, in all coming time, may offer us rice, boiled in milk, honey, and clarified butter."* Hence it was, that, in Greece and Rome, as in India, it was the son's duty to make the libations and the sacrifices to the manes of his father and of all his ances- tors. To fail in this duty was to commit the grossest act of impiety possible, since the interruption of this worship caused the dead to fall from their happy state. This negligence was nothing less than the crime of parricide, multii^lied as many tirnes as there were an- cestors in the family. Ifj on the contrary, the sacrifices were always ac- complished according to the rites, if the provisions were cariied to the tomb on the appointed days, then the ancestor became a protecting god. Hostile to all who had not descended from him, driving them from his tomb, inflicting diseases upon them if they ap- proached, he was good and provident to his owa family. ' Lucian, De Ludu. » Laws of Manu, III. 138; III. 274.