that such
notions were common, and that they were invented by "the ancients" to
frighten the people into submission.[845] Cicero, though he of course
thinks of them as merely the fables of poets, seems to suggest that the
ordinary man did believe in them; thinking of his own recent loss, he
says that our misery would be unbearable when we lose those we love, if
we really thought of them as "_in iis malis quibus vulgo
opinantur_."[846] Of course all these fables were Greek, not Roman.
There is no reason to believe that the old Romans imagined their own
dead experiencing any miseries in Orcus--the old name, as it would seem,
for the dimly imagined abode of the Manes, afterwards personified after
the manner of Plutus.[847] No doubt they believed that the dead were
ghosts, desiring to get back to their old homes, who, in the
well-ordered religion of the City-state, were limited in this strong
desire to certain days in the civic year.[848] But their first
acquaintance with Hades and its tortures may probably be dated early,
_i.e._ when they first became acquainted with Etruscan works of art,
themselves the result of a knowledge of Greek art and myth.[849] Early
in the second century B.C. Plautus in the _Captivi_ alluded to these
paintings as familiar;[850] and we must not forget that the Etruscans
habitually chose the most gruesome and cruel of the Greek fables for
illustration, and especially delighted in that of Charon, one likely
enough to strike the popular imagination. The play-writers themselves
were responsible for inculcating the belief, as Boissier remarked in his
work on the Roman religion of the early empire.[851] In the theatre,
with women and children present, Cicero says in the first book of his
_Tusculans_, the crowded auditorium is moved as it listens to such a
"grande carmen" as that sung by a ghost describing his terrible journey
from the realms of Acheron; and in another passage of the same book he
mentions both painters and poets as responsible for a delusion which
philosophers have to refute.[852] I need not say that the Roman poets
too continually use the imagery of Tartarus; but they use it as
literary tradition, and in the sixth _Aeneid_ it is used also to enforce
the idea of duty to the State which is the real theme of the poem.

As Dr. Masson truly observes, we have the literature but we have not the
folklore of the age of Cicero and Virgil; and it must be confessed that
without the folklore such s