He took from a niche a small piece of close-grained marble, about a foot square, and laid it before me.  On one side it was exquisitely sculptured in relief.

‘This,’ he continued, ’is a typical example of the Greek grave-stone, and having seen one specimen you may be said to have seen almost all, for there is surprisingly little variety in the class.  You will observe that the scene represents a man reclining on a couch; in his hand he holds a patera, or dish, filled with grapes and pomegranates, and beside him is a tripod bearing the viands from which he is banqueting.  At his feet sits a woman—­for the Greek lady never reclined at table.  In addition to these two figures a horse’s head, a dog, or a serpent may sometimes be seen; and these forms comprise the almost invariable pattern of all grave reliefs.  Now, that this was the real model from which the figures on the papyrus were taken I could not doubt, when I considered the seemingly absurd fidelity with which in each murder the papyrus, smeared with honey, was placed under the tongue of the victim.  I said to myself:  it can only be that the assassins have bound themselves to the observance of a strict and narrow ritual from which no departure is under any circumstances 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.