revelled in the warm sun, bathed in its divine light. This first vision
of death often haunted him in later years;[11] and one realizes 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 æterna" 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