umerous jokes attributed to the great Samian; a
good nut for the spirit rappers to crack. There is an epigram by
Diogenes Laertius, on one Lycon, who died of the gout:

"He who before could not so much as walk alone, The whole long
road to Hades travell'd in one night!"

Philostratus declares that the shade of Apollonius appeared to a
skeptical disciple of his and said, "The soul is immortal."47 It
is unquestionable that the superstitious fables about the under
world and ghosts had a powerful hold, for a very long period, upon
the Greek and Roman imagination, and were widely accepted as
facts.

At the same time, there were many persons of more advanced culture
to whom such coarse and fanciful representations had become
incredible, but who still held loyally to the simple idea of the
survival of the soul. They cherished a strong expectation of
another life, although they rejected the revolting form and
drapery in which the doctrine was usually set forth. Xenophon puts
the following speech into the mouth of the expiring Cyrus: "I was
never able, my children, to persuade myself that the soul, as long
as it was in a mortal body, lived, but when it was removed from
this, that it died; neither could I believe that the soul ceased
to think when separated from the unthinking and senseless body;
but it seemed to me most probable that when pure and free from any
union with the body, then it became most

43 De Significatione Verborum, verbum "Manalis."

44 Lessing, Wie die Alten den Tod gebildet.

45 Ayes, I. 1485.

46 Epigram IV.

47 Vita Apollonii, lib. viii. cap. 31.

wise."48 Every one has read of the young man whose faith and
curiosity were so excited by Plato's writings that he committed
suicide to test the fact of futurity. Callimachus tells the story
neatly:

"Cleombrotus, the Ambracian, having said, 'Farewell, O sun!'
leap'd from a lofty wall into the world Of ghosts. No deadly ill
had chanced to him at all; But he had read in Plato's book upon
the soul." 49

The falling of Cato on his sword at Utica, after carefully
perusing the Phado, is equally familiar.

In the case of Cicero, too, notwithstanding his fluctuations of
feeling and the obvious contradictions of sentiment in some of his
letters and his more deliberate essays, it is, upon the whole,
plain enough that, while he always regarded the vulgar notions as
puerile falsehoods, the hope of a glorious life to come was
powerful in him. This may be