The dead in these scenes often appear as restive and even hostile beings who were forced to such actions by the power of witchcraft. The dominant feeling among all peoples is indeed that the dead are unhappy and therefore malevolent. They were believed to be excessively sensitive: great care must be taken to do nothing to offend them. If their rights were overlooked, if they were forgotten, they showed their wrath by sending illnesses and scourges to the guilty. This unpleasant and sometimes cruel, even ferocious character of the Manes is very marked in Rome, perhaps in consequence of the influence of the Etruscans or the beliefs concerning after life. A legend had it that the ceremonies of the _Parentalia_ having on one occasion been omitted, the plaintive ghosts scattered about the town and the fields and caused many deaths.[153] What we know of the rites performed at the _Lemuria_ and at funerals shows that they tended to protect the house against the spirits haunting it and to rid it of them. “The dead are welcome neither to the gods nor to men,” says an old Latin inscription.[154] To the family _Lares_ who protected a household, the _larvae_ were opposed, the wandering phantoms who spread terror and evil. “Spare thy mother, thy father and thy sister,” we read on a tomb, “in order that after me they may celebrate the traditional rites for thee.”[155] This hostile character attributed to inhabitants of the tombs explains the custom of placing in them leaden tablets on which curses were written calling down the most frightful ills on enemies. A large number of these _tabellae defixionum_ in Greek and Latin have been found and they prove the frequency of this practice, which has perhaps an Oriental origin.[156] But the _devotio_ to the Manes gods is an old Roman ceremony, which proceeds from the idea that they endeavour to tear the living from the earth and draw them to themselves. * * * * * There is one class of the dead which is peculiarly noxious, those namely who have not been buried. The ideas connected with them are so characteristic of the oldest conception of immortality that these ἄταφοι _insepulti_ deserve to detain us for a few moments.