In Egypt the souls also travelled to the dwelling of the gods in the boat of Ra, the solar deity. This idea does not seem to have passed into the mysteries of Isis in the West but in the East it was retained by the Manicheans. The moon and the sun were the ships which plied through the heavenly spaces carrying the luminous spirits.[374] For the Greeks it was to the Islands of the Blest, situated somewhere in the distant ocean, that ships transported the dead. This crossing of the sea, peopled by monsters of the deep, was one of the favourite subjects of the decorators of Roman sarcophagi. But under the Empire the Fortunate Islands, we know,[375] were often explained as being the moon and the sun, washed by the ether, and it was therefore to the moon that the bark of salvation had to bear souls across the stormy waters of matter. The Styx had become a celestial or aerial river; Charon, with the help of the winds, caused pious souls to pass not to the subterranean world but to the heavenly dwelling of heroes.[376] The bark which should bear the Blessed to the abode of delight, where they would live together, is often represented in funeral sculpture,[377] and continued to be in Christian art, the symbol of a happy passage to the shores of Paradise. Epitaphs sometimes cause the passer-by to wish the dead “Εὐπλοῖ,” “A happy voyage!”[378] The Etruscan tombs often show the dead man on horseback on the road of the underworld, and in early Greek tombs terra cotta shoes and horses have been discovered which were intended to make easier the long and dangerous journey to the country whence there is no return. But in order that a rider may win to heaven his horse must be provided with strong wings. Primitively these wings were probably intended to indicate only the swiftness of this mythical steed.[379] But in Roman times they undoubtedly meant that it could fly up to the sky. The great Paris cameo, said to represent the apotheosis of Augustus, shows a prince of his house, Germanicus or perhaps Marcellus, thus borne away by a winged courser.[380] There is a similar representation on a coin which commemorates the apotheosis of an empress, probably Faustina. The same Pegasus, who probably has nothing in common with Bellerophon’s steed, appears again on a fragment of a relief recently discovered in England at Corstopitum (Corbridge-on-Tyne).[381] He is carrying off a personage, probably an emperor, who wears the _paludamentum_ or military cloak and has his head bound with a radiate crown, on either side of whom are the Dioscuri, the symbols of the two celestial hemispheres. The dead are mounted on Pegasus because he was brought into relation with the Sun, who is the creator and saviour of souls.