an effect of the tradition that
Thetis, snatching the body of Achilles from the funeral pile,
conveyed him to Leuke, an island in the Black Sea. The mariners
sailing by often fancied they saw his mighty shade flitting along
the shore in the dusk of evening.54 But a passage in Hesiod yields
a more adequate illustration: "When the mortal remains of those
who flourished during the golden age were hidden beneath the
earth, their souls became beneficent demons, still hovering over
the world they once inhabited, and still watching, clothed in thin
air and gliding rapidly through every region of the earth, as
guardians over the affairs of men."55

But there were always some who denied the common doctrine of a
future life and scoffed at its physical features. Through the
absurd extravagances of poets and augurs, and through the growth
of critical thought, this unbelief went on increasing from the
days of Anaxagoras, when it was death to call the sun a ball of
fire, to the days of Catiline, when Julius Casar could be chosen
Pontifex Maximus, almost before the Senate had ceased to
reverberate his voice openly asserting that death was the utter
end of man. Plutarch dilates upon the wide skepticism of the
Greeks as to the infernal world, at the close of his essay on the
maxim, "Live concealed." The portentous growth of irreverent
unbelief, the immense change of feeling from awe to ribaldry, is
made obvious by a glance from the known gravity of Hesiod's
"Descent of Theseus and Pirithous into Hades," to Lucian's
"Kataplous," which represents the cobbler Mycillus leaping from
the banks of the Styx, swimming after Charon's boat, climbing into
it upon the shoulders of the tyrant Megapenthes and tormenting him
the whole way. Pliny, in his Natural History, affirms that death
is an everlasting sleep.56 The whole great sect of the Epicureans
united in supporting that belief by the combined force of ridicule
and argument. Their views are the most fully and ably defended by
the consummate Lucretius, in his masterly poem on the "Nature of
Things." Horace,57 Juvenal,58 Persius,59 concur in scouting at the
tales which once, when recited on the stage, had made vast
audiences perceptibly tremble.60 And Cicero asks, "What old woman
is so insane as to fear these things?"61

There were two classes of persons who sought differently to free
mankind from the terrors which had invested the whole prospect of
death and another world. The first were th