became almost as well known to him as the world of the living.
There was a kingdom of the dead, and a king and queen ruled over them.
These rulers were called by different names in different parts of
Greece, but the names which they had in certain parts of the
Peloponnesus, Hades the king of the dead and Persephone his bride, were
destined to survive the rest. The cult of this royal pair travelled far
and wide, but its most notable development occurred in Attica, where
Persephone became Kore the daughter of Demeter, stolen by Hades to
become his bride, while Hades himself under the sunny skies of Athens
lost some of his terrors and became Pluto, the god of riches, especially
the rich blessings of the earth. But all this was very foreign to Rome,
and while the Greeks were thinking these thoughts, the Romans were going
quietly along, content with their simple _Di Manes_. No better proof of
this can be desired than the one accidentally given us in the
introduction of Demeter and her daughter Kore into Rome as Ceres and
Libera in B.C. 493, and the absolute colourlessness and pointlessness of
Libera, in a word the entire lack of connexion in the religious
consciousness of Rome between Libera and Persephone. But in B.C. 249,
almost two and a half centuries later, matters were on a different
basis; Rome had been learning a great deal that was foreign to her old
beliefs, and there was no longer anything impossible to her in the idea
of individual rulers of the dead. Thus at the command of the books Pluto
and Persephone were received into the state-cult, though the strangeness
of the situation was acknowledged, at least in so far that they
translated Pluto into the Latin Dis; Persephone to be sure was left
alone, or more strictly speaking was accommodated to the Latin tongue by
being changed to Proserpina. It is of course impossible that the Romans
of B.C. 249 were entirely ignorant of Pluto and Persephone until the
Sibylline books bade them be brought in. Here again the traders from
Southern Italy had been their teachers; and the name _Tarentum_ of the
altar where the sacrifice was to be made may possibly indicate the town
of Tarentum as the source of the cult. The Romans knew Tarentum only too
well since the eventful war with Pyrrhus, which lay only a generation
back in their history.

And so the Romans adopted the Greek gods of the dead, and thus, at least
theoretically, put their dead ancestors into subjection to the Greeks