"Homer knows no influence of the Psyche on the realm of the visible, and also no cult implying it.... A later poet, who made the last addition to the Odyssey, first introduced Hermes the 'leader of souls' [perhaps taken from a popular belief in some part of Hellas].... Underneath, in the gloomy shades, the souls waver, unconscious or at the best in a glimmering half-consciousness, endowed with faint voices, feeble, indifferent.... To speak, as do many old and recent scholars, of the 'immortal life' of such souls, is erroneous. They live rather as the spectre of the living in a mirror.... If the Psyche outlives her visible mate (the body), she is powerless without him.... Thus is the Homeric world free from ghosts (for after the burning of the body the Psyche appears no more even in dream).... The living has peace from the dead.... No dæmonic power is at work apart from or against the Gods; and the night gives to the disembodied spirits no freedom" (Rohde, Psyche, 4te Aufl. 1907, pp. 9-11). This minimization of the normal primitive belief in spirits is one of the reasons for seeing in the Homeric poems the outcome of a period of loosened belief. It is not to be supposed that the pre-Homeric Greeks, like the easterns with whom the Greeks met in Ionia, had not the usual ghost-lore of savages and barbarians; and it may be that for all the early civilizations under notice the explanation is that primitive ghost-cults were abandoned by migrating and conquering races, who rejected the ghost-cults of the races whom they conquered, though they ostensibly accepted their Gods. In any case they made little religious account of a future state for themselves.