When Cicero in his _Tusculans_[101] first touches on the question of the immortality of the soul, he begins by citing in its support the fact that belief in it has existed since earliest antiquity. He states that unless the first Romans were convinced that man was not reduced to nought, when he left this life, and that all feeling was not extinguished in death, there could be no explanation of the rules of the old pontifical law as to funerals and burials, rules the violation of which was regarded as an inexpiable crime. This remark is that of a very judicious observer. There subsist in the funeral rites of all peoples, in the ceremony of mourning established by the religious law or by tradition, customs which derive from archaic conceptions of life beyond the tomb and which are still followed although their original meaning is no longer understood. Modern learning has sometimes successfully sought to elucidate them, borrowing light from the practices of savage peoples and from European folk-lore. We will not enter the domain of these researches, for since our special purpose here is to expound the ideas as to immortality held in later times, we have to consider only the beliefs which were still alive in that period. A false interpretation supplied by a philosopher may have more historical value for us than the true explanation of an institution which had lost its meaning. But even among the ideas which were neither obliterated nor discredited, conceptions which originated at very different dates have to be distinguished. The doctrines of paganism, like the soil of our planet, are formed of superimposed strata. When we dig into them we discover successive layers under the upper deposits of recent alluvia. Nothing was suddenly destroyed in ancient religions; their transformations were never revolutionary. Faith in the past was not entirely abolished when new ways of believing were formed. Contradictory opinions could exist side by side for a long time without any shock being caused by their disagreement; and it was only little by little and slowly that argument excluded one way of thinking to give place to the other, while there were always hardy survivals left, both in thought and in customs. Thus the beliefs as to the future life which were current under the Roman Empire present a singular mixture, coarse ideas going back to the prehistoric period mingling with theories imported into Italy at a late date. We will today examine the oldest of all the ways of considering survival in the Beyond: life in the tomb. * * * * *