Page:The Ancient City- A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome.djvu/30

 24 ANXIENT BELIKFS. BOOK I. called them good, holy, happy. For them they had all the veneration that man can have for the divinity whom he loves or fears. In their thoughts the dead were gods.^ This sort of apotheosis was not the privilege of great men ; no distinction was made among the dead. Cicero says, " Our ancestors desired that the men wha had quitted this life should be counted in the number of the gods." It was not necessary to have been even a virtuous man: the wicked man, as well as the good man, became a god ; but he retained in the second life all the bad inclinations which had tormented him in the first.'^ The Greeks gave to the dead the name of subter- ranean gods. In ^schylus, a son thus invokes his deceased father: "0 thou who art a god beneath the earth." Euripides says, speaking of Alcestis, " Near her tomb the passer by will stop and say, ' This is now a thrice happy divinity.' "^ The Romans gave to the dead the name of Manes. " Render to the manes what is due them," says Cicero ; " they are men who have quitted this life ; consider them as divine beings." * The tombs were the temples of these divinities, and they bore the sacramental inscription, Dls Manibus^ and in Greek, &i6ig x^ovloiq. There the god lived JEsch., Choeph., 4G9. Sophocles, Antig., 451. Plutarch, ■Jolon, 21; Rom. Quest., 52; Gr. Quest., 5. Virgil, V. 47; V. 80. VIII. 26. •■' Eurip., Ale, 1003, 1015, God, VIII. 2G.
 * Cicero, De Legib., 22. St. Augustine, City of God, IX. 11 ^
 * Cicero, De Legib., II. 9 Varro, in St. Augustine, Citii of