of thirteen by the inexorable Fates, but who, “living among the stars, by the will of the immortals, has taken her place in the sacred abode of the blessed.” At Amorgos, a child of eight was, we are assured, led by Hermes to Olympus, shone in the ether, and would henceforth protect the young wrestlers who emulated him in the palaestra. Even the precise spot in which he twinkled was fixed, the horn of the constellation of the Goat—an appropriate place for this little fighter.[329] Curiously, an epitaph of Africa, which repeats Virgil’s very expression (p. 129), states, in contradiction to the poet, that a baby, “cut off on the threshold of life,” has not gone to the Manes but to the stars of heaven,[330] and a relief of Copenhagen shows the bust of a little girl within a large crescent surrounded by seven stars, thus indicating that she has risen towards the moon, the abode of blessed souls.[331] Examples of these premature apotheoses might be multiplied. I shall merely show, by a characteristic case, how it was possible for old popular beliefs to be combined with the new astral doctrine. The ancients attributed to the rustic nymphs the strange powers which the Greek peasant today recognises in beings which he still designates as the Nereids.[332] Sometimes these fantastical goddesses possess themselves of the spirit of men and change them into seers or maniacs νυμφόληπτοι; sometimes their fancy is caught by handsome youths whom they carry off and oblige to live with them. But above all they love pretty children and steal them from their parents, not to harm them but in order that they may take part in their own divine pastimes. Doubtless it was at first to mountain caverns, near limpid springs, in the depths of tufted woods, that they bore him whom they made their little playfellow. Such were the archaic beliefs of the country folk. But the mysteries of Bacchus taught that an innocent child, thus rapt from the earth, mingled in the train of the Naiads in the flowery meadows of the Elysian Fields;[333] and when Paradise was transferred to the sky it was in the “immortal dwelling-place of the ether” that the nymphs, we are told, placed a little girl whose charm had seduced them.[334] Transported thus to heaven, these loved beings were transformed by the tenderness of their relatives into protectors of the family in which their memory survived, or of the friends who shared regret for them. Whether they were called “heroes” in Greek, or as elsewhere “gods,”[335] they were always conceived as guardian powers who acknowledged by benefits the worship rendered them. Thus in the middle of the second century the _familia_ of a proconsul of Asia, C. Julius Quadratus, honoured a child of eight years as a hero, at the prayer of his father and mother;[336] and at Smyrna the parents of a dearly loved child of four, raised to this baby as their tutelary god, a tomb on which an epitaph described in detail all his illnesses.[337]