Thus throughout antiquity, in spite of the evolution of ideas as to the future life, the persuasion always remained invincible that the spirits of the dead moved about among men. These disincarnate intelligences, which were, however, provided with light and swift bodies, did not let themselves be imprisoned in the tomb. They fluttered unceasingly around living beings, causing them to feel the effects of their presence. There is here, mingled with the primitive idea that a mysterious being, like it in appearance, has its place in the ground beside the buried corpse, the other and equally ancient idea that the soul is a breath exhaled by the dead at the moment when they expire. To breathe is the first act which marks the life of a newly born infant and to cease to breathe is the first sign which betokens the extinction of life. Primitive people therefore naturally thought that the principle which animated the body was a breath, which entered it at birth and left it at death. The very name which denotes the vivifying essence is in most languages witness to the general predominance of this conception. Ψυχή in Greek is connected with ψύχω, “to blow”; the Latin animus or anima corresponds to ἄνεμος, “wind,” and in the Semitic languages nefeš̱ and ruaḥ have a similar meaning. At the moment in which man expired, his soul escaped through his mouth and floated in the ambient air. The Pythagoreans, when they taught that “the air is full of souls,”[[139]] were conforming to an old belief which is not Greek only but universal. When Virgil[[140]] shows us Dido’s sister, at the time of the queen’s suicide, receiving the last breath which floats on her dying lips, he is lending a Roman custom to the Carthaginians, the custom of the last kiss which, according to a widely held belief, could catch on its way the soul which was escaping into the atmosphere.
This soul was often imagined as a bird in flight and we will see elsewhere the conclusions drawn from this naïve conception.[[141]] Here we wish merely to indicate how the idea of the aerial soul was combined with that of the spirit inhabiting the tomb. This shade or simulacrum of those who were no longer of this world, but who still existed, since they showed themselves to the living in their previous guise, was a body like the wind—intangible, invisible, save when it thickened like clouds or smoke. A multitude of these vaporous beings, innumerable as past generations, moved unceasingly on the earth’s surface, and, above all, roamed around the tombs, where they were retained by their attachment to their bodies. Whether, like the Greeks, men identified them with the “demons,” or, like the Romans, called them “Manes gods,” “genii” or “lemures,” or by other names, the unanimous opinion was that their power was superior to that of mankind and that they caused it to be felt by a constant intervention in the affairs of human society.
It was generally held that if the required cult were not rendered them, they would punish this neglect with wrath, but that they showed their benevolence to those who deserved it by zeal in serving them.[[142]] The dead were capable, like the living, of gratitude as well as of resentment. The greater had been their power in this world, the more considerable it remained in the other, and the more advantage there was in securing their protection or even their co-operation.
Servius reports the existence of the singular belief that souls had to swear to Pluto never to help those they had left behind them on earth to escape from their destiny.[[143]] Such was, then, the extent of their supposed power. But all the dead were not, like some of the heroes who had become the equals of the gods, capable of performing prodigious deeds. Many, gifted with less force, were concerned with lesser interests; they did no more than protect their family, the domestic hearth and the neighbouring field, and render small daily services. “Farewell, Donata, thou who wast pious and just,” says an epitaph, “guard all thy kin.”[[144]]
The idea that the ancestors become the tutelary spirits of their descendants who were faithful to their duty to them, goes back to the remotest antiquity and probably lies at the foundation of the cult of the Lares.[[145]] But the field of action of these genii was multiple, since they were a multitude, and their functions underwent a further development when they were considered to be the equivalents of the demons of the Greeks. “The souls of the dead,” Maximus of Tyre[[146]] tells us, “mingle with all kinds of men, with every destiny, thought and pursuit of man; they support the good, succour the oppressed and punish the criminal.” Plotinus, recalling the universal custom of paying cult to those who have gone, adds: “Many souls which belonged to men do not cease to do good to men when they have left the body. They come to their aid especially in granting them revelations.”[[147]]
The wish is therefore entertained to see in dreams those who have left an empty place in the family dwelling or the marriage couch. A woman whom a murder has separated from her young husband prays the most holy Manes to be indulgent to him and to allow her to see him again during the hours of the night.[[148]] But it was not only in dreams that men hoped to descry again those who were lost to sight. “If tears are of any avail,” says another epitaph, “show thyself by apparitions (visis).”[[149]] Is it a question here also of nocturnal apparitions? Perhaps; but the belief that the spirits of the dead returned to the earth and made themselves visible to people who were wide awake met with very little incredulity among the ancients. It was not only the common man who accepted it; most thinkers upheld this opinion. Lucian[[150]] shows us a meeting of philosophers in which no one doubts “that there are demons and phantoms and that the souls of the dead do wander on earth and show themselves to whom they please.” A single fact will suffice to prove how general was this conviction. The sober historian Dio Cassius[[151]] relates that in his time, more precisely in the year 220 A. D., a demon (who was evidently a flesh and blood impostor) appeared in the Danubian countries in the form of Alexander the Great. He was followed by four hundred Bacchantes carrying the thyrsus and the nebris. This troop went through all Thracia without doing any harm to the inhabitants, who hastened to give them shelter and food, and not a single official dared oppose their passage. Arrived near Chalcedon, the pseudo-Alexander made a strange sacrifice one night, burying a wooden horse, and thereupon immediately disappeared.
Like modern spiritualists, the ancients saw in these apparitions an irrefutable proof of the after life. “Thou who doubtest the existence of the Manes,” we read on the tomb of two young girls, “invoke us after making a vow and thou wilt understand.”[[152]] Revelations were indeed to be expected of the wisdom of the disincarnate souls. In spite, therefore, of the laws forbidding magic, necromancy never ceased to be practised. By a nocturnal sacrifice, analogous to that offered on tombs (p. 52) and by the virtue of their incantations, the wizards obliged the dead to appear before them and answer their questions. The poets and romancers liked to introduce in their works descriptions of the atrocious ceremonies which were intended to give momentary life even to a corpse and cause it to pronounce oracles.
The dead in these scenes often appear as restive and even hostile beings who were forced to such actions by the power of witchcraft. The dominant feeling among all peoples is indeed that the dead are unhappy and therefore malevolent. They were believed to be excessively sensitive: great care must be taken to do nothing to offend them. If their rights were overlooked, if they were forgotten, they showed their wrath by sending illnesses and scourges to the guilty. This unpleasant and sometimes cruel, even ferocious character of the Manes is very marked in Rome, perhaps in consequence of the influence of the Etruscans or the beliefs concerning after life. A legend had it that the ceremonies of the Parentalia having on one occasion been omitted, the plaintive ghosts scattered about the town and the fields and caused many deaths.[[153]] What we know of the rites performed at the Lemuria and at funerals shows that they tended to protect the house against the spirits haunting it and to rid it of them. “The dead are welcome neither to the gods nor to men,” says an old Latin inscription.[[154]] To the family Lares who protected a household, the larvae were opposed, the wandering phantoms who spread terror and evil. “Spare thy mother, thy father and thy sister,” we read on a tomb, “in order that after me they may celebrate the traditional rites for thee.”[[155]] This hostile character attributed to inhabitants of the tombs explains the custom of placing in them leaden tablets on which curses were written calling down the most frightful ills on enemies. A large number of these tabellae defixionum in Greek and Latin have been found and they prove the frequency of this practice, which has perhaps an Oriental origin.[[156]] But the devotio to the Manes gods is an old Roman ceremony, which proceeds from the idea that they endeavour to tear the living from the earth and draw them to themselves.
There is one class of the dead which is peculiarly noxious, those namely who have not been buried. The ideas connected with them are so characteristic of the oldest conception of immortality that these ἄταφοι insepulti deserve to detain us for a few moments.