re primitive population; and it is perhaps to this population that
we must look for the origin of the more detailed and imaginative notions
of the life of the dead. Of the Greeks in this matter I have not space
here to speak, nor am I competent to do so. But the conviction is
steadily gaining ground that in early Rome we have to recognise the
existence of two races; whether the older of these was Ligurian, as
Prof. Ridgeway thinks, or primitive Latin, _i.e._ old Italic, as Binder
believes, does not matter for our present purpose;[855] nor are the
arguments drawn from religion which these writers have used at all
convincing to my intelligence. But they have not noticed what is to me a
really valid argument, viz. the double festival of the dead in the
calendar of Numa. In February we find the cheerful and orderly festival
of the Parentalia, the yearly renewal of the seemly rite of burial; in
May, on the other hand, the student of the calendar is astonished to
find three several days called Lemuria, the rites belonging to which are
never mentioned, except where Ovid treats us to a grotesque account of
the driving out of ancestral spirits from the house.[856] No one
doubts, I think, that the Lemuria represents an older stratum of thought
about the dead than the other festival,[857] but no one, so far as I
know, has ventured to claim the Lemures and their three days as
belonging to the religion of the more primitive race. If I make this
suggestion now, it must be taken as a hypothesis only, but as a
hypothesis it can at least do no harm. If I am asked why Lemuria should
have been admitted into the patrician calendar, I answer that I have
long held that a few of the non-patrician religious customs were
absorbed into the religion of the city of the four regions, the
Lupercalia, for example;[858] and nothing could be more likely than that
the old barbarous ideas about the dead should win this amount of
respect, seeing that by the limitation to three days in the year order
and decency might be brought into their service. I may repeat, with a
slight addition, what I wrote ten years ago about these two Roman
festivals of the dead: "If we compare Ovid's account of the grotesque
domestic rites of the Lemuria with those of February, which were of a
systematic, cheerful, and even beautiful character, we may feel fairly
sure that the latter represent the organised life of a City-state, the
former the ideas of an age when life was wilder