Against these ancient beliefs, which were the source of so much anguish and so many superstitions, the philosophers fought energetically. First the Cynics and then the Epicureans and the Stoics endeavoured to show their absurdity. They are fond of quoting the answer of Theodore the Atheist to Lysimachus who was threatening him with death without burial—“What matters it whether I rot on the earth or under it?” Since the corpse was unconscious and without any sensibility, it was indeed of no consequence whether it were burnt or buried, eaten by worms or by crows. Why should it be a misfortune to die abroad? Only the living had a country; the whole earth was the dwelling of the dead. If such cares troubled men they were the victims of the invincible illusion that the body retained capacity to feel even beyond the grave. The very frequency with which these commonplaces of the school are repeated shows how tenacious were the prejudices which they attempted to eradicate. Here, as in other connections, the renewal of Pythagorism supervened at the end of the Republic to favour the persistence of the old beliefs. A doctrine, to which Plato alludes,[158] taught that souls which had not been appeased by funeral rites, had to wander for a hundred years, the normal term of a human life. Confined in the air near the earth, they remained subject to the power of magicians. Especially if the wizards had been able to obtain possession of some portion of the corpse, whence the soul could not entirely detach itself, they gained influence over it and could constrain its obedience. When this century of suffering had elapsed, these souls were admitted to a place of purification, where they sojourned ten times longer, and when these thousand years had passed they returned to reincarnate themselves in new bodies. We will see in another lecture[159] that the Pythagoreans enunciated analogous theories as to the lot of children swept off before their time and of men who died a violent death. Virgil describing the descent of Aeneas into the infernal regions recalls these Pythagorean speculations when he shows us the miserable crowd of the unburied shades fluttering for a hundred years on the bank of the Styx before they obtained from Charon their passage to its other shore.[160]