If we had no other evidence than funeral poetry and art of the persistence of the beliefs of the past, the testimony would have to be accepted very cautiously. But other more convincing proofs assure us that popular faith clung, with characteristic tenacity, to the ancient conception of the _Inferi_. Without believing precisely in the strange tortures inflicted on the wicked heroes of mythology, the man in the street was still vaguely persuaded that the souls went down from the tomb to some deep places where they received rewards and punishments. Suetonius[206] relates that when the death of Tiberius became known in Rome the people “prayed Mother Earth and the Manes gods to give the dead man no other dwelling than that of the impious.” The Oriental slaves brought the same convictions from their countries like many other old beliefs which had faded away in the West. The romancer Heliodorus, a Syrian priest, shows us in his novel his heroine invoking “the demons who on the earth and under the earth watch over and punish unrighteous men,”[207] her prayer being that, after the iniquitous death which threatened her, they might receive her. The same conviction appears in the funeral inscriptions of the East. Thus an epitaph of Elaiousa in Cilicia[208] adjures “the heavenly god, the Sun, the Moon and the subterranean gods who receive us.” The common idea was that a dead man can be excluded from the dwelling of the shades and condemned to wander miserably on the earth. In the same way the thought is often expressed in the magic papyri of Egypt that the deceased were plunged into the dark gulfs underground and there became demons whom the wizard called up, when he summoned them by his incantations. Even in Greece, where rationalistic criticism had penetrated far deeper among the people, Plutarch, while he reports that few people were still really afraid of Cerberus, the lot of the Danaïdes and other bugbears of Hades, adds, however, that for fear of such pains recourse was had to purifications and initiations.[209]