In the last lecture we endeavoured to show that in the ancient world immortality was at first conceived as being precarious and conditional, and that only the heroes, the exceptional men, who were in truth gods on earth, obtained apotheosis after their death. We afterwards saw that the mysteries extended the promise of eternal salvation to all the initiate, who by virtue of the rites were made equal to the gods, and finally that the philosophers contested the necessity of sacred ceremonies and affirmed that human reason by its own unaided power could win union with God. We will now consider in more detail what lot was reserved for a special class of the dead, those whose life had been interrupted by an untimely end, and how in their case philosophy modified the old traditional beliefs. If we turn over collections of ancient inscriptions we find, as when we go through our own cemeteries, a number of epitaphs in which the grief caused by the early death of a friend or relative is expressed. But in antiquity this sorrow was called forth not alone by regret for a loved being, too soon lost to sight, and by painful disappointment because of the irreparable ruin of the hopes to which his youth had given rise. Along with these human feelings, which are of all time and all societies, there were mingled in antiquity ideas which caused the loss of those who died before their time to seem more fearful and bitter. Virgil’s celebrated lines, in which he describes the descent of Aeneas to Hades, will be remembered:[296] “Continuo auditae voces, vagitus et ingens, Infantumque animae flentes in limine primo, Quos dulcis vitae exsortes et ab ubere raptos Abstulit atra dies et funere mersit acerbo.” “Ever were heard, on the outermost threshold, voices, a great wailing, the weeping souls of infants bereft of sweet life and torn from the breast, whom the ill-omened day swept off and whelmed in bitter death.” In an eschatological myth of Plutarch,[297] the traveller beyond the grave also sees a deep abyss, in which moan the plaintive voices of a multitude of children who had died at the moment of their birth and were unable to rise to heaven. It has been shown that the Latin poet and the Greek philosopher are here interpreters of an old Pythagorean belief, to which Plato alludes:[298] children who died young, like persons who met with violent deaths, the ἄωροι καὶ βιαιοθάνατοι, found no rest in the other life, but their souls wandered on the earth for the number of years for which their life would normally have lasted. The souls of the shipwrecked who perished at sea roamed the surface of the waters and sailors believed that they were incarnated in the seagulls.[299]