, 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.

No one of the moderns has caught the pagan feeling towards death better
than Giosue Carducci, a true spiritual descendant of the great Romans of
old, if ever there was one. He tells how, one glorious June day, he was
sitting in school, listening to the priest outraging the verb "amo,"
when his eyes wandered to the window and lighted on a cherry-tree, red
with fruit, and then strayed away to the hills and the sky and the
distant curve of the sea-shore. All Nature was teeming with life, and he
felt an answering thrill, when suddenly, as if from the very fountains
of being within him, there welled up a consciousness of death, and with
it the formless nothing, and a vision of himself lying cold, motionless,
dumb in the black earth, while above him the birds sang, the trees
rustled in the wind, the rivers ran on in their course, and the living
revelled in the warm sun, bathed in its divine light. This first vision
of death often haunted him in later years;[11] and one r