ealizes that
such must often have been the feelings of the Romans, and still more
often of the Greeks, for the joy of the Greek in life was far greater
than that of the Roman. Peace was the only boon that death could bring
to a pagan, and "Pax tecum aeterna" is among the commonest of the
inscriptions. The life beyond the grave was at best an unreal and
joyless copy of an earthly existence, and Achilles told Odysseus that he
would rather be the serf of a poor man upon earth than Achilles among
the shades.

When we come to inquire into the appearance of ghosts revisiting the
glimpses of the moon, we find, as we should expect, that they are a
vague, unsubstantial copy of their former selves on earth. In Homer[12]
the shade of Patroclus, which visited Achilles in a vision as he slept
by the sea-shore, looks exactly as Patroclus had looked on earth, even
down to the clothes. Hadrian's famous "animula vagula blandula" gives
the same idea, and it would be difficult to imagine a disembodied spirit
which retains its personality and returns to earth again except as a
kind of immaterial likeness of its earthly self. We often hear of the
extreme pallor of ghosts, which was doubtless due to their being
bloodless and to the pallor of death itself. Propertius conceived of
them as skeletons;[13] but the unsubstantial, shadowy aspect is by far
the commonest, and best harmonizes with the life they were supposed to
lead.

Hitherto we have been dealing with the spirits of the dead who have been
duly buried and are at rest, making their appearance among men only at
stated intervals, regulated by the religion of the State. The lot of the
dead who have not been vouchsafed the trifling boon of a handful of
earth cast upon their bones was very different. They had not yet been
admitted to the world below, and were forced to wander for a hundred
years before they might enter Charon's boat. AEneas beheld them on the
banks of the Styx, stretching out their hands "ripae ulterioris amore."
The shade of Patroclus describes its hapless state to Achilles, as does
that of Elpenor to Odysseus, when they meet in the lower world. It is
not surprising that the ancients attached the highest importance to the
duty of burying the dead, and that Pausanias blames Lysander for not
burying the bodies of Philocles and the four thousand slain at
AEgospotami, seeing that the Athenians even buried the Persian dead after
Marathon.[14]

The spirits of the unburied we