because, for a moment, they awoke their dormant thoughts and feelings and gave them glimpses of the true life, the life above ground and in the sunshine.[1] If they were kept waiting too long they became angry and revenged themselves upon those who had caused their sufferings. Woe to the family or city which was not careful to interest the dead in its stability and thus to associate them with its prosperity![2]
These beliefs seem to have been common to all ancient peoples during that period of their existence which is lost in the shadow of prehistoric times. From India to Italy all the primitive forms of public and private rights betray their presence. For this fact and its consequences we may refer our readers to the fine work of M. Fustel de Coulange, La Cité antique.[3]
- ↑ In the eleventh book of the Odyssey it is only after "they have drunk deep draughts of black blood" that the shades are capable of recognising Ulysses, of understanding what he says and answering. The blood they swallowed restored their intelligence and powers of thought.
- ↑ The speeches of the Greek orators are full of proofs that these beliefs had a great hold upon the popular mind, even as late as the time of Demosthenes. In contested cases of adoption they always laid great stress upon the dangers which would menace the city if a family was allowed to become extinct for want of precautions against the failure of the hereditary line; there would then be some neglected tomb where the dead never received the visits of gift-bringing friends, a neglect which would be visited upon the city as a whole as the accomplice in such abandonment. Such an argument and others like it may not seem to us to be of great judicial value, but the talent of an Isæus understood how to make it tell with an audience, or we should not find it so often repeated in his pleadings (see G. Perrot, L'Éloquence politique et judiciare à Athènes. Les Précurseurs de Demosthène, pp. 359-364).
- ↑ Seventh edition, Hachette, 18mo, 1879.
