CHAPTER XIX. ON THE RIGHT OF BURIAL. Right of burying the dead founded on the law of nations - Origin of this right - Due to enemies-Whether due to those guilty of atrocious crimes-Whether to those, who have committed suicideOther rights also authorised by the law of nations. I. THE right of burying the dead is one of those originating in the voluntary law of nations. Next to the right of ambassadors Dion Chrysostom places that of burying the dead, and calls it a moral act, sanctioned by the unwritten law of nature: And Seneca, the elder, ranks the law, which commands us to commit the bodies of the dead to their parent earth, among the UNWRITTEN precepts, but says, they have a stronger sanction than the RECORDED laws of all ages can give. For, in the language of the Jewish writers, Philo and Josephus, they are marked with the seal of nature, and under the name of nature, we comprehend the customs, that are common to all mankind, and agreeable to natural reason. We find it some where said by Aelian, that our common nature calls upon us to cover the dead, and some writer, in another place, observes that all men are reduced to an equality by returning to the common dust of the earth. Tacitus informs us, in b. vi. of his Annals, that, when Tiberius made a general massacre of all, who had been connected with Sejanus, and that he forbad them the rites of burial, every one was struck with horror to see the last offices of humanity refused; offices, which Lysias the orator calls the common hopes of our nature. As the ancients measured the moral character of every people by their observance or neglect of these rights, in order to give them a greater appearance of sanctity, they ascribed their origin to the authority and institutions of their Gods; so that in every part of their writings we meet with frequent mention of the rights of ambassadors, and the rights of burial, as founded upon divine appoint ment. In the Tragedy of the Suppliants, Euripides calls it the law of the Gods, and in the Antigone of Sophocles, the heroine makes the following reply to Creon, who had for |