nto the
sphere of divinity, however vaguely he may have conceived of it. Perhaps
he remembered his own words in Scipio's dream, "Deum te esse scito."
The ashes of Tullia rested in the family tomb, but the godlike thing
imprisoned in her mortal body was to be honoured at this _fanum_, which,
strange as it may seem to us, her father wished to erect in a public and
frequented place. She does not fade away into the common herd of Manes,
but remains, though as a spirit, the same individual Tullia whom her
father had loved so dearly.

I long ago explained the old Roman idea of Manes,[828] a vague
conception of shades of the dead dwelling below the earth, and hardly,
if at all, individualised. But in Tullia's case we meet with a clear
conception of an individual spirit; and this alone would lead us to
suspect a Pythagorean influence at work, such as that under which Virgil
wrote the famous words "Quisque suos patimur Manes," which simply mean
"Each individual of us must endure his own individual ghosthood."[829]
This process of individualisation must have been gradually coming on,
but the steps are lost to us; we only know that the earliest sepulchral
inscription which speaks to it, in the vague plural Di Manes so familiar
in later times, is dateable somewhere about this very time.[830] My
friend Dr. J. B. Carter would explain it, in part at least, by the Roman
conception of Genius to which I alluded just now, and doubtless this
must be taken into account. For myself I would rather think of it as the
natural result of the growth of individualism in the living human being
during the last two centuries B.C. Surely it was impossible for
personality to grow as it did in that period without a corresponding
growth of the idea of individual immortality in the minds of all who
believed in a future life of any kind at all. The Epicureans did not so
believe; but Roman Stoics instructed by Panaetius and Posidonius might
not only believe in immortality but in an immortality of the individual.

Let me take this opportunity of noting that there was, of course, no
sort of restriction on a man's belief about this or any other religious
question. It was perfectly open to every one to hold what view best
pleased him about the state of the dead: all that the State required of
him was that he should fulfil his obligations at the tombs of his own
kin. No dogma reigned in the necropolis, only duty, _pietas_,--and that
_pietas_ implied no convictio