How did this belief in the miserable lot of innocent children arise? Its origin should probably be sought in that fear of death which haunts all primitive peoples, and it developed owing to the frequency in antiquity of infanticide by abandoning or “exposing” newly born infants. Remorse provoked terror. This conclusion is especially suggested because the fate of those who died prematurely was approximated to the lot of those who died violent deaths. Beings who had been prevented from completing the natural span of life were feared; their shades were conceived as being unquiet and in pain, because it was believed that they could return to disquiet and pain the living. The idea was entertained that a spirit brutally separated from the body came to hold it in horror and did not consent to inhabit the tomb until a reconciliation had been disobtained by expiatory ceremonies. Being grievously disincarnated, the soul became harmful. Souls, said the ancients, whom a cruel and untimely end has violently or unjustly torn from their bodies, themselves tend to be violent and unjust in order that they may avenge the wrong they have suffered.[300] It is no rare thing to find evidence in the inscriptions of a suspicion that a person cut off in the flower of his years has been the victim of some foul play; the curse of Heaven is called down on the head of his assumed murderer. The Sun, who discovers hidden crimes, is often invoked in Roman epitaphs against this unknown offender:[301] “Towards the Most High god, who watches over everything, and Helios and Nemesis, Arsinoë, dead before her time, lifts up her hands; if any one prepared poison for her or rejoices in her end, pursue him,” says an inscription of Alexandria. But the victim was himself believed to be capable of vengeance. It seemed incredible that one still full of strength and life should be entirely blotted out and that the energy which had animated him should also have disappeared suddenly, and the reprisals of this mysterious power were apprehended. This spirit pursued above all the murderer and, more generally, those who had given it cause for complaint. It showed itself to them in the form of terrifying monsters which tormented them. “As soon as I shall have expired, doomed to death by you,” says the child in Horace whom the witches sacrificed, “I will haunt your nights like a Fury, I will tear your faces with my hooked nails, as the Manes gods can, and weighing on your unquiet hearts I will take sleep from your affrighted eyes.”[302] Suetonius[303] relates that after the death of Agrippina, Nero was, on his own confession, often troubled by the vision of her spectre and attempted to calm her spirit by a sacrifice and an evocation which he caused his magicians to make. The same historian gravely recounts that the house in which Caligula was murdered was every night haunted by dreadful apparitions until the time when it was destroyed by fire.[304] A