canty literary evidence as I have just
mentioned does not come to much. Dr. Masson indeed concludes on this
evidence that the fear of future torments played a considerable part in
the religious notions both of the common people and possibly of some of
the educated. I think it may have been so, but on other grounds, which I
must briefly explain.

From all that I have said in these lectures about the religious ideas
represented in the earliest calendar, _i.e._ those of the governing
Romans of the earliest City-state, it will be plain that a gruesome
eschatology was an impossibility for them. Just the same may be said of
the Greek ideas represented in the Homeric poems; for with the exception
of the Nekuia of the _Odyssey_, which almost all scholars agree in
attributing to a later age than the bulk of the two Homeric epics, in
this poetry _il se fait grand jour_.[853] This is not the first time
that I have compared the religion of the Roman patricians to that of
Homer;[854] and there is a growing conviction among experts that we have
in each case the ideas of a comparatively civilised immigrant
population, whose religion, though it has developed in very different
ways, has the common characteristic of cleanness and brightness. In
Italy it is practical, in Homer imaginative; but in both it is free from
the brutal and the grotesque. Even the eschatology of the eleventh
_Odyssey_ is not cruel, it is comparatively colourless; and, as I said
just now, this also may be said of the Roman ideas of Orcus and the
Manes.

In each case it is life, not death, that is of interest to the living;
death is rather a negation than anything distinctly realised. The state
of the dead in Homer is shadowy and _triste_, a state not to be desired,
as Achilles so painfully expresses it in a famous passage; but the
_life_ of the Achaean in the poems is vivid--nay, such a vivid
realisation of life can alone account for the production of such poems.
So, too, the immigrant population at Rome, to whom is due the regulation
of the religion as we know it, and the inspiring force that made for
ordered government and warlike enterprise, was too full of practical if
not of imaginative vitality to be apt to dwell upon the possibilities of
existence after death, to conceive of such existence as either happy or
miserable, the reward or the punishment for things done in this world.

But in each peninsula this immigrant race was living in the midst of a
far mo