Favoured by these new tendencies of philosophy, the unreasoning apprehension inspired by omission of burial subsisted under the Empire, not only among the ignorant many, but also in the most enlightened classes. This fear explains why everyone took extreme care to have a tomb built for himself and to ensure, if he could, that funeral ceremonies were celebrated in it, why many epitaphs threaten with judicial penalties and divine punishments the sacrilegious offenders who should violate the grave, and why such a number of popular colleges were founded, of which the principal object was to secure decent obsequies to their members. The rules of the _cultores_ of Diana and Antinoüs at Lanuvium stipulate that when a slave dies and his master maliciously refuses to deliver his body for burial, a “_funus imaginarium_” be made for him, that is, that the ceremony be celebrated over a figure representing the dead man and wearing his mask.[161] From this “imaginary” burial effects were expected as beneficent as those results are maleficent which a wizard anticipated when he fettered and pierced a waxen doll to work a charm. From the stories of the gravest writers we perceive what lot was believed to threaten the unfortunate who were burnt or interred without the rites being observed. After Caligula’s murder his corpse was hastily shovelled into the ground in a garden on the Esquiline (_horti Lamiani_), but then the keepers of this park were terrified by apparitions until the imperial victim’s sisters caused his body to be exhumed, and buried it in accordance with the sacred rules.[162] Pliny the Younger in one of his letters seriously relates a story which seems to have been often repeated, for we find it, little changed, in Lucian.[163] There was in Athens a haunted house which remained empty, no one daring to live in it because several of its tenants had died of fright. In the silence of the night a noise was heard as of clanking iron; then a horrible spectre moved forward in the shape of an emaciated old man, bearded and hairy, rattling the chains which were about his feet and legs. A philosopher dared to take this house, and he settled himself there one evening, resolved to keep himself awake by working. The ghost appeared to him, came towards him with its usual clatter, signed to him to follow and disappeared in the courtyard. When daylight came, a hole was dug in the place where the phantom had vanished, and a skeleton in fetters was found. The bones were taken up and burned according to the rites, and thereafter nothing troubled the quiet of the house. Lucian, in his version of this ghost story, specifies the philosopher as a Pythagorean and shows him repelling the apparition by the virtue of his spells. The Pythagoreans were indeed often necromancers, convinced defenders of spiritualism, in which, as we have said (p. 62), they sought an immediate proof of the immortality of the soul, and by their doctrines they contributed to keeping alive the