agricultural pursuits had taken
up their abode. Nothing can better show the anxiety of life in those
primitive times, especially in a country like Italy, full of forest and
mountain, where dwelt mischievous Brownies who would tease the settler
if they could. But on the ninth day after the birth (or the eighth in
the case of a girl) the child was "purified" and adopted into the family
and its sacra, and into the gens to which the family belonged, and
received its name--the latter a matter of more importance than we can
easily realise.[180] From this time till it arrived at the age of
puberty it was protected by amulet and _praetexta_; the tender age of
childhood being then passed, and youth and maiden endued with new
powers, the peculiar defensive armour of childhood might be dispensed
with.[181]

Lastly, the death of a member of the family was an occasion of extreme
anxiety, which might, however, be allayed by the exact performance of
certain rites (_iusta facere_). The funeral ceremonies of the City-state
were of a complicated character, and the details are not all of them
easy to interpret. But the principle must have been always the
same--that the dead would "walk" unless they had been deposited with due
ceremony in the bosom of Mother Earth, and that their natural tendency
in "walking" was to find their way back to the house which had been
their home in life. Whether buried or burnt, the idea was the same: if
burnt, as seems to have been common Roman practice from very early
times, at least one bone had to be buried as representing the whole
body. We have seen that certain precautions were taken to prevent the
dead man from finding his way back, such as carrying him out of the
house feet foremost; and if he were properly buried and the house duly
purified afterwards, the process of prevention was fairly complete. His
ghost, shade, or double then passed beneath the earth to join the whole
body of Manes in the underworld,[182] and could only return at certain
fixed times--such at least was the idea expressed in the customs of
later ages. But if a paterfamilias or his representative had omitted
_iusta facere_, or if the dead man had never been buried at all, carried
off by an enemy or some wild beast, he could never have descended to
that underworld, and was roaming the earth disconsolately, and with an
evil will. The primitive idea of anxiety is well expressed in the Roman
festival of the Lemuria in May, when the head