But experience proved that the corpse decomposed rapidly in the soil, all that remained of it being a skeleton bereft of the organs of sensation. When the custom of incineration, followed in Italy from the prehistoric period, became practically general in Rome, the destruction of the body took place regularly before the eyes of those present. Thus men reached the belief that those near and dear to them, whom they sometimes saw again in their dreams or seemed to feel beside them, who were kept alive at least in memory, differed from the beings of flesh and bones whom they had known. From those material individuals subtle elements detached themselves, filled with a mysterious force which subsisted when the human organism had crumbled to dust or been reduced to ashes. It was this same principle which temporarily departed from persons who lost consciousness in a faint or a lethargy. If this light essence did not leave a dying man at the moment of his death—whether or not it could escape from his body immediately was indeed uncertain—it was set free by the funeral fire,[104] but it still inhabited the tomb in which his remains rested. The idea that it was somehow attached to his remains had taken root in men’s minds, and even literature bears witness to the persistence of this deeply implanted popular belief. Propertius,[105] when cursing a woman, desires that “her Manes may not be able to settle near her ashes.” And at Liternum in Campania, where Scipio Africanus caused himself to be buried because, as he said, he did not wish to leave even his bones to his ungrateful country, the grotto was shown where he rested and where, so men believed,[106] “a serpent kept guard over his Manes.”