Page:The Ancient City- A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome.djvu/46

 40 ANCIENT BELIEFS. IJOOK U words."* So, too, ^neas, speaking of the sacred fire which he transports across the waters, designates it by the name of the Lar of Assaracus, as if he saw in thia fire the soul of his ancestor. The graminarian Servius, who was very learned in Greek and Roman antiquities (which were studied much more in his time than in the time of Cicero)^ says it was a very ancient usage to bury the dead in the houses; and he adds, "As a result of tliis custom, they honor the Lares and Penates in their houses.' This expression establishes clearly an ancient relation between the worship of the dead and the liearth-fire. We may suppose, therefore, that the domestic fire was in the beginning only the symbol of the worship of the dead ; that under the stone of the hearth an ancestor reposed ; that the fire was lighted there to honor him, and that this fire seemed to preserve life in him, or represented his soul as always vigilant. This is merely a conjecture, and we have no proof of it. Still it is certain that the oldest generations of the race from which the Greeks and Romans sprang worehipped botk the dead and the hearth-fire — an an- cient religion that did not find its gods in physical nature, but in man himself, and that has for its object the adoration of the invisible being which is in us, the moral and thinking power which animates and governa our bodies. This religion, after a time, began to lose its power over the soul ; it became enfeebled by degrees, but it did not disappear. Contemporary with the first ages of the Ai'yan race, it became rooted so deeply in the ' Euripides, Orestes, 1140-1142. » Servius, in JEn., V. 84 ; VI. 152. See Pl?,to, Minos, p. 315.