When it was believed that the dead went down into the depths of the earth where lay the infernal kingdom, another meaning was given to their rest. The funeral eulogy of a noble woman who towards the end of the Republican period saved the life of her husband, who had been proscribed, ends with the naïve words: “I pray that the gods thy Manes may grant thee rest and thus protect thee.”[475] The shades of the kinsmen of the dead must receive their souls in the subterranean world[476] and thus ensure their welfare. The road which must be travelled before the abode of the elect was reached was long and beset with dangers. The Book of the Dead in Egypt, the Orphic tablets in Greece, were guides to the Beyond which taught the dead not to stray from the right path and to avoid the various dangers threatening them.[477] Many of them, the impious who had to expiate their misdeeds and the unfortunate to whom funeral duties had not been rendered, wandered wretchedly on the banks of the Styx, vainly longing to enter the “peaceful abode” of the Elysian Fields.[478] There, lying in the cool shade, the blessed enjoyed a felicity exempt from all care. Serene quiet in a sweet idleness cheered by joyous relaxation and wise conversation—such was the ideal which some mysteries[479] opposed to the weary agitations of earthly life and to the long sufferings of the sinful and vagabond soul. For the adepts of these doctrines the _secura quies_ applied to the repose of the nether world, and this conception of beatitude beyond the grave is found to persist until the end of paganism.[480] But we have seen that another doctrine triumphed in the Roman period, the doctrine that souls rise to the skies to live there eternally among the stars. In this great metamorphosis of eschatological beliefs what became of the idea of the repose of the dead? The question deserves to be more closely investigated, for the transformation had lasting consequences of which the ultimate effects can be felt even today. The Pythagoreans were, as we have seen,[481] the first to promulgate the doctrine of celestial immortality in Greece and Italy. One of the allegories familiar to the teaching of the sect connected human destiny with the old myth of Hercules at the crossroads. The Greek letter Y, of which the stem divides midway into two, was in the school the symbol of this comparison—we have already alluded to it elsewhere.[482] When man reaches the age of reason two paths are open to him. One is smooth and easy but ends in an abyss: this is the way of pleasure. The other is at first rough and jagged—it is the hard road of virtue—but he who climbs to the summit of its slope can there _rest_ deliciously from his weariness. Funeral reliefs represent this contrast naïvely: at the bottom of the stele the dead man is often seen accomplishing the labours of his career; at the top of the stone he is shown stretched at his ease on a couch.