The wish is therefore entertained to see in dreams those who have left an empty place in the family dwelling or the marriage couch. A woman whom a murder has separated from her young husband prays the most holy Manes to be indulgent to him and to allow her to see him again during the hours of the night.[148] But it was not only in dreams that men hoped to descry again those who were lost to sight. “If tears are of any avail,” says another epitaph, “show thyself by apparitions (_visis_).”[149] Is it a question here also of nocturnal apparitions? Perhaps; but the belief that the spirits of the dead returned to the earth and made themselves visible to people who were wide awake met with very little incredulity among the ancients. It was not only the common man who accepted it; most thinkers upheld this opinion. Lucian[150] shows us a meeting of philosophers in which no one doubts “that there are demons and phantoms and that the souls of the dead do wander on earth and show themselves to whom they please.” A single fact will suffice to prove how general was this conviction. The sober historian Dio Cassius[151] relates that in his time, more precisely in the year 220 A. D., a demon (who was evidently a flesh and blood impostor) appeared in the Danubian countries in the form of Alexander the Great. He was followed by four hundred Bacchantes carrying the thyrsus and the nebris. This troop went through all Thracia without doing any harm to the inhabitants, who hastened to give them shelter and food, and not a single official dared oppose their passage. Arrived near Chalcedon, the pseudo-Alexander made a strange sacrifice one night, burying a wooden horse, and thereupon immediately disappeared. Like modern spiritualists, the ancients saw in these apparitions an irrefutable proof of the after life. “Thou who doubtest the existence of the Manes,” we read on the tomb of two young girls, “invoke us after making a vow and thou wilt understand.”[152] Revelations were indeed to be expected of the wisdom of the disincarnate souls. In spite, therefore, of the laws forbidding magic, necromancy never ceased to be practised. By a nocturnal sacrifice, analogous to that offered on tombs (p. 52) and by the virtue of their incantations, the wizards obliged the dead to appear before them and answer their questions. The poets and romancers liked to introduce in their works descriptions of the atrocious ceremonies which were intended to give momentary life even to a corpse and cause it to pronounce oracles.