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 4 GREEK AND ROMAN MYTHOLOGY the earth appeared personally in a dream to those that slept in his sanctuary (incubatio), and gave them his counsel. Almost as ancient as these conceptions seems to be the idea that when the soul departed from the body it assumed animal form. The serpent especially, a creature of noiseless and rapid movements, which often lives in the ground, was commonly regarded as the soul in brute form ; and among other forms attributed to souls, at least by the Greeks, were those of bats, birds, and, later, butterflies. 5. From the observation that a dead body gradually crumbles away, the belief at length became common that the dead are not body, but spirit; and as people saw that the cessation of life's activity was coinci- dent with the expiration of the last breath, they came in time to look upon the breath itself as the funda- mental principle of life, i.e. as the soul, a fact that is demonstrated by the double signification of i/or^ anima, "breath/ 7 and similar words. Therefore souls that had left the body were imagined to be airy ; but still, on ac- count of an intermixture of the earlier idea, there was attributed to them a human or animal form. So they were conceived of sometimes as shadowy figures (O-KICU, umbrae), or smoke-like phantoms (etSooAa, simulacra, ima- gines), sometimes as tiny, winged creatures with human form. 6. At Kome, in connection with the worship of the dead, the older conceptions endured. In Greece also, where they had ceased to prevail generally about the beginning of the seventh century B.C., they spread again everywhere at a comparatively late period, under the influence of the Boeotians and Dorians, who had not ad-