while Larvæ are the ghosts that haunt houses. Apuleius, however, is
wholly uncritical, and the distinction between Larvæ and Lemures is
certainly not borne out by facts.

The Larvæ had distinct attributes, and were thought to cause epilepsy or
madness. They were generally treated more or less as a joke,[17] and are
spoken of much as we speak of a bogey. They appear to have been
entrusted with the torturing of the dead, as we see from the saying,
"Only the Larvæ war with the dead."[18] In Seneca's _Apocolocyntosis_,[19]
when the question of the deification of the late Emperor Claudius
is laid before a meeting of the gods, Father Janus gives it as his
opinion that no more mortals should be treated in this way, and that
"anyone who, contrary to this decree, shall hereafter be made,
addressed, or painted as a god, should be delivered over to the
Larvæ" and flogged at the next games.

Larva also means a skeleton, and Trimalchio, following the Egyptian
custom, has one brought in and placed on the table during his famous
feast. It is, as one would expect, of silver, and the millionaire
freedman points the usual moral--"Let us eat, drink, and be merry, for
to-morrow we die."[20]

The Larvæ were regular characters in the Atellane farces at Rome, where
they performed various "danses macabres." Can these possibly be the
prototypes of the Dances of Death so popular in the Middle Ages? We find
something very similar on the well-known silver cups discovered at Bosco
Reale, though Death itself does not seem to have been represented in
this way. Some of the designs in the medieval series would certainly
have appealed to the average bourgeois Roman of the Trimalchio
type--e.g., "Les Trois Vifs et les Trois Morts," the three men riding