None of these children and adolescents deserved, in the opinion of the sages, any chastisement. The Pythagoreans placed the age of reason, at which man is capable of choosing between good and evil and may be made responsible for his faults, as late as sixteen, that is, the age of puberty. Until that age the “naked” soul, without virtue as without vice, was exempt from all merit and demerit which would later attach to it. We know the unhappy lot to which, according to these philosophers, they were doomed. But other theologians considered that these souls, which had not been weighted by a long contact with matter, should fly more easily to celestial heights. Unsullied by earthly pollution, their purity allowed them to rise without difficulty to a better life in a happier abiding-place.[325] It is hard to determine to what degree these moral ideas had penetrated the popular mind. The reaction against a superstitious belief often led to pure negation. Those who held that death put an end to all sensibility, were content to affirm that the child they wept had gone down into everlasting night, and that nothing was left of him but dust and ashes. Certain epitaphs hope that, if his Manes still have some feeling, his bones may rest quietly in the tomb. But mother’s love was not to be satisfied with this negative assurance or to resign itself to anxious doubting. The people kept an unreasoning fear of the evils which awaited the ἄωροι, and of those which might be expected from them. Some also believed that an ancestral fault—such as was, according to the Orphic doctrine, the murder of Zagreus, by the Titans—made all humanity guilty from birth, and that this hereditary sin had to be effaced by purifications.[326] Religion offered a remedy for the ill to which, to speak with Lucretius, it had itself lent persuasion. The custom of initiating children to the mysteries which was, at least at Eleusis, originally connected with the family or gentile cult, became a means of preserving them from the fatal lot which threatened them and of ensuring their happiness in the other life. Thus _pueri_ and _puellae_ are found admitted at the most tender age among the adepts of the secret cults, both Greek and Oriental, perhaps even consecrated from birth to the godhead. They are imagined as partaking in the Beyond of the joys which these cults promised to those whose salvation they ensured. A child who has taken part in a ceremony of Bacchus lives endowed with eternal youth in the Elysian Fields in the midst of Satyrs.[327] Others continue the games proper to their years in another life, or if they have reached the age of first love they still sport with young Eros. Above all, however, the influence of the astral cults, added to that of philosophy, brought about an admission that innocent creatures ascended to the starry heavens. An epitaph of Thasos[328] speaks of a virgin, flower-bearer (ἀνθοφόρος) probably of Demeter and Kora, who was carried off at the age