ccessive nights, out on the Campus Martius, at an altar which
was called the _Tarentum_, and that the ceremony should be repeated at
the end of a hundred years. Here the myth-makers of later times have
been even more busily at work than they were in the case of Aesculapius.
The Aesculapius story was fitted out by them merely with a few
miraculous details, a few legendary ornaments, but the story of Dis and
Proserpina was so covered with their fabrications that it has only
recently been freed from them and seen in its true light, and certain
phases were so absolutely perverted that there are still a number of
very difficult points. To get a clear understanding of the situation we
must begin quite a distance back.

Taken as a whole, religious beliefs are among the most conservative
things in the world; the individual may grow as radical as you please,
but his effect on the general religious consciousness of his time is
extremely slight. Occasionally the number of radical individuals grows
larger and certain classes of society are affected by their views, but
even, in the periods of religious development which we are apt to think
of as most iconoclastic, society taken in the large, and on the average
of all classes, is not much more radical than in apparently normal
times. And while religion as a whole is conservative, there is one
section of it more conservative than all the rest, a section from which
change is almost excluded, that is the beliefs concerning the dead. In
our discussion of the religion of Numa we saw the very primitive
character of Roman beliefs in this field, the firm retention of the old
animistic idea of the dead, the tendency to class the dead together as a
mass and to believe in a collective rather than an individual
immortality, and above all the abhorrence of the dead and the
disinclination to dwell on their condition and to paint imaginary
pictures of life beyond the grave. In view of these feelings it is not
strange that we have great difficulty in finding any old Roman gods of
the dead, aside from the dead who are themselves all gods. These dead as
gods (_Di Manes_) and possibly Mother Earth (_Terra Mater_) are the only
rulers in the Lower World. In Greece on the contrary death was almost as
natural as life, and though the conditions in early times were not
unlike those in Rome, as Rohde in his _Psyche_ has so wonderfully
described them, the Greek soon grew beyond this, and the world of the
dead