tic age, may have had the like
experience, with or without a mystical philosophy to guide their
thoughts? In the last words of the famous Laudatio Turiae, of which I
have written at length in my _Social Life in the Age of Cicero_,[843] we
may perhaps catch an echo of a similar religious feeling: "Te di Manes
tui ut quietam patiantur atque ita tueantur opto" (I pray that thy
divine Manes may keep thee in peace and watch over thee). These words,
expressing the hope of a practical man, not of a philosopher, are very
difficult to explain, except as the unauthorised utterances of an
individual. They hardly find a parallel either in literature or
inscriptions. We must not press them, yet they help us to divine that
there was in this last half-century B.C. some mystical yearning to
realise the condition of the loved ones gone before, and the relation of
their life to that of the living. This religious instinct, let us note
once for all, is not identical with the old one which we expressed by
the formula about the Power manifesting itself in the universe. The
religious instinct of the primitive Roman was concerned only with this
life and its perils and mysteries; the religious instinct of Cicero's
time was not that of simple men struggling with agricultural perils, but
that of educated men whose minds could pass in emotional moments far
beyond the troubles of this present world, to speculate on the great
questions, why we are here, what we are, and what becomes of us after
death.

But what of the ordinary Roman of this age--what of the man who was not
trained to think, and had no leisure or desire to read? What did he
believe about a future life, or did he believe anything? This brings us
to a curious question about which I must say a very few words--did this
ordinary Roman, as Lucretius seems to insist, believe in Hades and its
torments? Not in one passage only does Lucretius insist on this. "That
fear of Hell" (so Dr. Masson translates him) "must be driven out
headlong, which troubles the life of man from its inmost depth, and
overspreads everything with the blackness of death, and permits no
pleasure to be pure and unalloyed."[844] I need not multiply quotations;
evidently the poet believed what he said, though he may be using the
exaggeration of poetical diction. And to a certain extent he is borne
out by the literature of his time. In fact Polybius, writing nearly a
century earlier of the Romans and their religion, implies