“The shades,” he says, “wander bloodless, bodiless, boneless; some gather in the forum, others follow their trades, imitating their former way of life.” And this is no fancy due to the poet’s imagination. An awkward epitaph of a young, probably Syrian, slave[176] tells us that he is glad still to be able to discharge his service zealously in the retired place where dwells the god of the infernal abode. In these instances we find, in spite of the transformation undergone by eschatological ideas as a whole, a survival of the old conception of the destiny of the dead. We have not to seek far to discover how this transformation took place. It was provoked by the desire to subject souls to different treatment according to their deserts, and to distribute them in distinct compartments in which they would be rewarded or punished in accordance with their past works. It was much prior to the Roman period, going back to the distant age at which Orphic theology, with its sanctions beyond the grave, modified Homeric tradition and popular religion in Greece. In the West the doctrine which imposed itself with the Hellenic civilisation on peoples of foreign race was ready-made. It spread through the south of Italy by way of the colonies of Greater Greece in which Pythagorism came to its full power. It is in this country that some of the Orphic tablets intended as guides to the dead in their journey through the infernal realm have been discovered in the tombs;[177] and the great amphorae of a later date, bearing representations of scenes of Hades, which were also found in southern Italy, show the importance which continued to be attached there to the idea of the future life. In Campania, Lake Avernus was even regarded as one of the entrances to the nether world, through which Ulysses and Aeneas had descended.