However, the symbolical interpretations of the pagan theologians who respected tradition and the purely negative criticism of the sceptics led finally to a common result, to the destruction, namely, of the ancient beliefs, even when it was claimed that they were being saved. Whether the souls were held captive in the other hemisphere or in the atmosphere, or whether they were condemned to reincarnation in a body, Hades was transformed either to the lower sky, the air or the earth, and the early conception of a subterranean world, whither the dead who had been laid in the grave descended, was abolished. There are abundant texts to prove that from the end of the Roman Republic this belief had lost its grip on many minds. Cicero[197] claims that there was not an old woman left foolish enough to fear the deep dwellings of Orcus and the gloomy regions peopled by the livid dead. “No one is childish enough,” Seneca repeats,[198] “to fear Cerberus and the phantoms which appear in the form of skeletons.” “That there are Manes,” says Juvenal,[199] “a subterranean kingdom, a ferryman armed with a pole, and black frogs in the gulfs of the Styx, that so many thousands of men can cross the dark water in a single boat,” these are things in which everyone had ceased to believe except very young children. Pliny[200] brings forward a paradoxical argument, that, had there been infernal regions, the zeal of the miners who had dug deep galleries in the ground would have pierced their boundaries; and even the devout Plutarch, when he comes to speak of the punishments reserved by mythology for the wicked, sees in them only nurses’ tales to frighten babies.[201] The multiplicity of this testimony and its precision allow no doubt that not only the educated classes but a large portion of the population rejected the fables as to the nether world. These fables were in any case a foreign importation in the Latin world. Moralists, while they ceased to believe in them for themselves, sometimes pretended to retain them in order to inspire the people with salutary fear, but Tartarus had lost much of its terror for those it should have kept from ill-doing. Is this to say that these ideas no longer found credence anywhere? A faith which has long dominated minds disappears hardly and leaves persistent traces behind it in customs and feeling. Thus we find that, more or less everywhere, the practice was perpetuated of placing in the mouth of the corpse a piece of money which served, it was said, to pay Charon for the crossing of the Styx.[202] Excavators have found these coins in many Roman tombs. But they are doubtless evidence of no more than a traditional rite which men performed without attaching a definite meaning to it.