Originally, as we said at the beginning of these lectures, two beliefs as to life beyond the grave existed together. On the one hand, the illusion was kept that the corpse which lay in the grave continued in some obscure way to live, feel and nourish itself there. Side by side with this simple faith the idea was maintained that the soul is a breath, emitted by the dying man, which floats in the atmosphere and which reproduces, when it makes itself visible in dreams and apparitions or in remembrance, the outward appearance of the person from whom it issued.[412] These two conceptions of life beyond the grave are combined in the nature with which the inhabitants of the infernal regions are credited, and give these fantastic beings a character full of contradictions. Cicero justly remarks that acts are attributed to them which would be conceivable only if they had bodies. Thus they are supposed to speak, although they have neither tongue, palate, throats nor lungs.[413] The common belief was indeed that the shades fed, even in their deep abode, on the offerings made on their burial places; and the pains which might be inflicted on them presupposed that they had retained the sensibility and needs of men; while the pleasures accorded to them in the Elysian Fields were in part very material—to participate in a banquet was an essential part of them.[414] Hence, when the dead showed themselves, they were sometimes given the appearance not of the living being but of the corpse: it was the body, as it was when buried, which issued from the entrails of the earth. Ennius, when he showed Homer appearing to him in a dream, said that the shades were “of prodigious paleness,”[415] and the idea is often expressed that ghosts are bloodless in colour. Not only are their faces wan: their mouths are mute; they are the _taciti_, the silent Manes. Much more, it is sometimes in the form of skeletons that they return to terrify men. The most usual way of figuring the soul in funeral sculpture is to show a person completely wrapped, save for his face, in a long garment, the shroud in which his body was buried.[416] But on the other hand, side by side with this more or less unconscious belief as to a survival of the body, the soul continued to be regarded as a light breath. The beings who peopled the infernal regions were imagined as almost immaterial forms. They were called “shades” (σκιαί, _umbrae_) or “images” (εἴδωλα, _simulacra_). The former term implies, besides the idea of a subtle essence, the notion that the inhabitants of the dusky spaces underground were black, and this is in fact the colour often given to them. It is also the colour of the victims offered them and of the mourning garments worn in their honour. These sombre phantoms, which passed unnoticed in the darkness of night, returned after the sunset to haunt the houses of men, and this is why the _Inferi_ or beings of the nether world are above all appeased by nocturnal sacrifices.