But on certain days the souls of the dead rose to the earth’s surface of themselves, although nothing had been done to make their coming thither easier, and they then had to be appeased by sacrifices. This was what happened from the thirteenth to the twenty-first of February, during the _Parentalia_, when the souls of ancestors were honoured, and on the ninth, the eleventh and the thirteenth of May, the dates of the _Lemuria_, on which, at midnight, according to a prescribed ceremonial, the father of the family nine times threw black beans to the _Lemures_ to keep them away from the house. _Lemures_ and _Manes_ are used only in the plural: these words stand for the vague conceptions formed of the shades of the dead who dwelt beneath the ground. These were a nameless crowd, hardly individualised, not distinguishable from the fleeting phantoms who fluttered about the tombs. The Romans were a people of little imagination, and their infernal mythology remained rudimentary until the time when they borrowed from the Greeks the picturesque stories about the adventures of travellers to Hades and the blessings and misfortunes which there awaited them. Originally no idea of retribution was attached to this descent of the dead into the infernal regions; it was neither their merits nor their demerits which determined their condition. On the contrary, the inequalities of human society were perpetuated: a nobleman kept a higher rank than that of his servants; each man in some sort continued his occupations, even preserved his tastes and his passions. Existence in the Beyond was conceived as a mere prolongation of earthly life. It is to this idea, which was generally entertained, that the old custom corresponds of placing in the grave the implements and other objects which a dead man was in the habit of using. We have already touched on this point in speaking of life in the tomb (p. 49), but the things deposited beside the corpse were not only those which could be used by the dweller of the “eternal house.” If he were a powerful lord his chariot, his horses and his arms would be buried with him;[172] a hunter would be supplied in the other world with his spears and his nets;[173] a craftsman with the tools of his trade; a woman with the objects which enabled her to spin and to weave. These funeral customs were more than a tradition, followed without reference to the reasons inspiring it. Among the Greeks, as among the Romans, the idea survives persistently, in poetic descriptions of the Elysian Fields, that each man will there keep the character and retain the habits which distinguished him before his death. Virgil, taking his inspiration from Pindar, shows us the blessed occupied by the contests of the palestra, by song and poetry and by chariot races; for, he tells us, the passion which the dead had in life for arms and for horses still pursues them when they have been buried in the earth.[174] Ovid[175] sketches with rapid touches an analogous picture.