and less secure, and the
fear of the dead, of ghosts and demons, was a powerful factor in the
minds of the people. If we may argue from Ovid's account, it is not
impossible that the Lemuria may have been one of those periodical
expulsions of demons of which we hear so much in the _Golden Bough_, and
which are performed on behalf of the community as well as in the
domestic circle among savage peoples. It is noticeable that the offering
of food to the demons is a feature common to these practices, and that
it also appears in those described by Ovid."[859] To this I should now
add the suggestion above made, that the Lemuria represents the ideas of
the older race that occupied the site of Rome, while the Parentalia is
originally the festival of the patrician immigrants.

But what has all this to do with the eschatology which Lucretius
attributes to the common people at Rome in his own day? Simply this,
that the ideas at the root of the Lemuria may well have provided the raw
material for such an eschatology, while those at the root of the
Parentalia could not have done this. Dr. Westermarck has recently shown
that primitive religions do spontaneously generate the idea of moral
retribution after death, _e.g._ the notion that the souls of bad people
may reappear as evil spirits or obnoxious animals.[860] We have no proof
whatever of the existence of such notions at Rome; but I contend that
the permanence of this type of belief about the dead which is
represented by the Lemuria--a permanence which is attested by Ovid's
description--raises a presumption that the lower stratum of the Roman
population, if the chance were given it, would the more readily
understand the pictures of Etruscan artists and the allusions of Greek
playwrights, and the more easily become the prey of the eschatological
horrors which Lucretius describes as terrifying them. The material was
there from the earliest times, and all that was needed was for Greeks
and Etruscans to work upon it.

Before leaving this point it may be worth while to remember that though
the well-to-do and educated classes cremated their dead, the poor of the
crowded city population of the period I am now dealing with enjoyed no
such orderly and cleanly funeral rites. The literary evidence is
explicit on this point, and has been confirmed by modern excavation on
the Esquiline, where we know from Varro and Horace that the poor and the
slaves were thrown _en masse_ into _puticuli_, _i.e