conversion of Constantine. The cake of
rice and honey borne in the dead hand for Cerberus, the periodical
offerings to the ghosts of the departed, as at the festivals
called Feralia and Parentalia,41 the pictures of the scenery of
the under world, hung in the temples, of which there was a famous
one by Polygnotus,42 all imply a literal crediting of the vulgar
doctrine. Altars were set up on the spots where Tiberius and Caius
Gracchus were murdered, and services were there performed in honor
of their manes. Festus, an old Roman lexicographer who lived in
the second or third century, tells us there was in the Comitium a
stone covered pit which was supposed to be the

36 Christoph Meiners, Vermischte Philosophische Schriften.
Commentarius quo Stoicorum Sententia; de Animorum post mortem
Statu satis illustrantur.

37 Epist. 102.

38 Troades, 1. 397.

39 Phado, 34.

40 Republic, lib. i. cap. 5.

41 Ovid, Fasti, lib. ii. II. 530-580.

42 Pausanias, lib. x. cap. 28.

mouth of Orcus, and was opened three days in the year for souls to
rise out into the upper world.43 Apuleius describes, in his
treatise on "the god of Socrates," the Roman conceptions of the
departed spirits of men. They called all disembodied human souls
"lemures." Those of good men were "lares," those of bad men
"larva." And when it was uncertain whether the specified soul was
a lar or a larva, it was named "manes." The lares were mild
household gods to their posterity. The larva were wandering,
frightful shapes, harmless to the pious, but destructive to the
reprobate.44

The belief in necromancy is well known to have prevailed
extensively among the Greeks and Romans. Aristophanes represents
the coward, Pisander, going to a necromancer and asking to "see
his own soul, which had long departed, leaving him a man with
breath alone."45 In Latin literature no popular terror is more
frequently alluded to or exemplified than the dread of seeing
ghosts. Every one will recall the story of the phantom that
appeared in the tent of Brutus before the battle of Philippi. It
pervades the "Haunted House" of Plautus. Callimachus wrote the
following couplet as an epitaph on the celebrated misanthrope:

"Timon, hat'st thou the world or Hades worse? Speak clear! Hades,
O fool, because there are more of us here!" 46

Pythagoras is said once to have explained an earthquake as being
caused by a synod of ghosts assembled under ground! It is one of
the best of the n