Aristotle had thought that human reason alone persisted, and that the emotional and nutritive soul was destroyed with the body, but he left no personality to this pure intelligence, deprived of all sensibility. He definitely denied that the “blessed” could be happy. With him begins a long period during which Greek philosophy nearly ceased to speculate on destiny beyond the grave. It was repugnant to Peripatetic philosophy to concern itself with the existence of a soul which could be neither conceived nor defined by reason. Some of Aristotle’s immediate disciples, like Aristoxenus and Dicaearchus, or Straton of Lampsacus, the pupil of Theophrastus, agreed in denying immortality altogether; and later, in the time of the Severi, Alexander of Aphrodisias, the great commentator of The Stagirite, undertook to prove that the entire soul, that is the higher and the lower soul, had need of the body in order to be active and perished with it, and that such was the veritable thought of the master. But profoundly as Peripateticism affected Greek thought, directly and indirectly, in practically discarding the future life, this was not the philosophy which dominated minds towards the end of the Roman Republic. Other schools then had a much wider influence and made this influence felt much more deeply on eschatological beliefs. These schools were Epicureanism and Stoicism. Epicurus took up again the doctrine of Democritus, and taught that the soul, which was composed of atoms, was disintegrated at the moment of death, when it was no longer held together by its fleshly wrapping, and that its transitory unity was then destroyed for ever. The vital breath, after being expelled, was, he said, buffeted by the winds and dissolved in the air like mist or smoke, even before the body was decomposed. This was so ancient a conception that Homer had made use of a like comparison, and the idea that the violence of the wind can act on souls as a destructive force was familiar to Athenian children in Plato’s time.[9] But if the soul thus resolves itself, after death, into its elementary principles, how can phantoms come to frighten us in the watches of the night or beloved beings visit us in our dreams? These simulacra (εἴδωλα) are for Epicurus no more than emanations of particles of an extreme tenuity, constantly issuing from bodies and keeping for some time their form and appearance. They act on our senses as do colour and scent and awake in us the image of a vanished being.