re usually held to be bound, more or less,
to the spot where their bodies lay, and to be able to enter into
communication with the living with comparative ease, even if they did
not actually haunt them. They were, in fact, evil spirits which had to
be propitiated and honoured in special rites. Their appearances among
the living were not regulated by religion. They wandered at will over
the earth, belonging neither to this world nor to the next, restless and
malignant, unable to escape from the trammels of mortal life, in the
joys of which they had no part. Thus, in the _Phaedo_[15] we read of
souls "prowling about tombs and sepulchres, near which, as they tell us,
are seen certain ghostly apparitions of souls which have not departed
pure ... These must be the souls, not of the good, but of the evil,
which are compelled to wander about such places in payment of the
penalty of their former evil way of life."

Apuleius[16] classifies the spirits of the departed for us. The Manes
are the good people, not to be feared so long as their rites are duly
performed, as we have already seen; Lemures are disembodied spirits;
while Larvae are the ghosts that haunt houses. Apuleius, however, is
wholly uncritical, and the distinction between Larvae and Lemures is
certainly not borne out by facts.

The Larvae had distinct attributes, and were thought to cause epilepsy or
madness. They were generally treated more or less as a joke,[17] and are
spoken of much as we speak of a bogey. They appear to have been
entrusted with the torturing of the dead, as we see from the saying,
"Only the Larvae war with the dead."[18] In Seneca's _Apocolocyntosis_,[19]
when the question of the deification of the late Emperor Claudius
is laid before a meeting of the gods, Father Janus gives it as his
opinion that no more mortals should be treated in this way, and that
"anyone who, contrary to this decree, shall hereafter be made,
addressed, or painted as a god, should be delivered over to the
Larvae" and flogged at the next games.

Larva also means a skeleton, and Trimalchio, following the Egyptian
custom, has one brought in and placed on the table during his famous
feast. It is, as one would expect, of silver, and the millionaire
freedman points the usual moral--"Let us eat, drink, and be merry, for
to-morrow we die."[20]

The Larvae were regular characters in the Atellane farces at Rome, where
they performed various "danses macabres." Can these possibly