These provisions clearly show an official belief that death did not create an impassable barrier between the dead and the living. The spirits of the departed still belonged to the city of their birth, and took an interest in their old home. They could even return to it on the days when "the trench of the gods of gloom lies open and the very jaws of hell yawn wide."[3] Their rights must be respected, if evil was to be averted from the State. In fact, the dead were gods with altars of their own,[4] and Cornelia, the mother of the Gracchi, could write to her sons, "You will make offerings to me and invoke your parent as a god."[5] Their cult was closely connected with that of the Lares--the gods of the hearth, which symbolized a fixed abode in contrast with the early nomad life. Indeed, there is practically no distinction between the Lares and the Manes, the souls of the good dead. But the dead had their own festival, the "Dies Parentales," held from the 13th to the 21st of February, in Rome;[6] and in Greece the "Genesia," celebrated on the 5th of Boedromion, towards the end of September, about which we know very little.[7]
There is nothing more characteristic of paganism than the passionate longing of the average man to perpetuate his memory after death in the world round which all his hopes and aspirations clung. Cicero uses it as an argument for immortality.[8]
Many men left large sums to found colleges to celebrate their memories and feast at their tombs on stated occasions.[9] Lucian laughs at this custom when he represents the soul of the ordinary man in the next world as a mere bodiless shade that vanishes at a touch like smoke. It subsists on the libations and offerings it receives from the living, and those who have no friends or relatives on earth are starving and famished.[10] Violators of tombs were threatened with the curse of dying the last of their race--a curse which Macaulay, with his intense family affection, considered the most awful that could be devised by man; and the fact that the tombs were built by the high road, so that the dead might be cheered by the greeting of the passer-by, lends an additional touch of sadness to a walk among the crumbling ruins that line the Latin or the Appian Way outside Rome to-day.