n. The Parentalia in February were
originally, so far as we can discern, only a yearly renewal of the rite
of burial on its anniversary;[831] this implies civilisation and some
kind of calendar, but not a creed. Later on, in the Fasti of the
City-state, the day was fixed for all citizens without regard of
anniversaries; and here the rites become a matter of _ius_, the _ius
Manium_, to the observance of which the Manes are entitled. Still there
is no creed, though Cicero speaks of this _ius_ as based on the idea of
a future life.[832] As a fact these rites are a survival from an age in
which the dead man was believed to go on living in the grave, but that
primitive idea was no longer held by the educated. Each man was free in
all periods to believe what he pleased about the dead, and as the Romans
began to think, this freedom becomes easy to illustrate. Cicero himself
is usually agnostic, as is in keeping with his Academic tendency in
philosophy; even in one of these very letters he seems to speak of his
own non-existence after death.[833] So, too, the excellent Servius
Sulpicius, in the famous letter of condolence written to Cicero at this
time from Athens, seems to be uncertain.[834] We all know the words of
Caesar (reported by Sallust), which are often quoted with a kind of holy
horror, as though a pontifex maximus might not hold any opinion he
pleased about death, and as though his doubt were not the common doubt
of innumerable thinking men of the age.[835] Catullus wrote of death as
"nox perpetua dormienda"; Lucretius, of course, gloried in the thought
that there is no life beyond. In the following century the learned Pliny
could write of death as the relapsing into the same nothingness as
before we were born, and could scoff at the absurdities of the cult of
the dead.[836]

But when a man like Cicero was deeply touched by grief, his emotional
nature abandoned its neutral attitude, and turned for consolation to
mysticism. As I have said, he was persuading himself that Tullia was
still living,--a glorified spirit. We can gain just a momentary glimpse
of what was in his mind by turning to the fragments of the _Consolatio_
which he was now writing at Astura.

This was a _Consolatio_ of the kind which was a recognised literary form
of this and later times,[837] though in this case it was addressed by
the writer to himself; to write was for Cicero second nature, and he was
sure to take up his pen when he had feelings th