Page:The Ancient City- A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome.djvu/478

 472 MUNICIPAL EEGIME DISAPPEARS. BOOK V. reined there for a lonix time; but from the fifth ccn- tury before our era, reflecting men freed themselves from these errors. They had other ideas of deatli. Some beHeved in anniliihiticn, others in a second and entirely spiritual existence in a world of spirits. In these cases they no longer admi'.tcd that the dead lived in the tomb, supporting themselves upon offerings. They also began to have too high an idea of the divine to persist in believing that the dead were gods. On the contrary, they imagined the soul going to seek its recompense in the Elysian Fields, or going to pay the penalty of its crimes; and by a notable progress, they no longer deified any among men, except those whom gratitude or flattery placed above humanity. The idea of the divinity was slowly transformed by the natural effect of the greater power of the mind. This idea, which man had at first applied to the invisi- ble force which he felt within himself, he transported to the incomparably grander powers which he saw in nature, whilst lie was elevating himself to the concep- tion of a being who was without and above nature. Then the Lares and Heroes lost the adoration of all who thought. As to the sacred fire, which appears to have had no significance, except so far as it was connected with the worship of the dead, that also lost its prestige.. Men continued to have a domestic fire in the house, to salute it, to adore it, and to offer it libations; but this was now only a customary worship, which faith no longer vivified. The public hearth of the. city, or prytanenm, was insensibly drawn into the discredit into which the do- mestic fire had fallen. Men no longer knew what it signified ; they had forgotten that the ever-living fire of the prytaneum represented the invisible life of the