Thus a conception of the tomb which goes back to the remotest ages and persists through the centuries regards it as “the last dwelling” of those who have left us; and this expression has not yet gone out of use. It was believed that a dead man continued to live, in the narrow space granted him, a life which was groping, obscure, precarious, yet like that he led on earth. Subject to the same needs, obliged to eat and to drink, he expected those who had been nearest to him to appease his hunger and thirst. The utensils he had used, the things he had cared for, were often deposited beside him so that he might pursue the occupations and enjoy the amusements which he had forsaken in the world. If he were satisfied he would stay quietly in the furnished house provided for him and would not seek to avenge himself on those whose neglect had caused him suffering. Funeral rites were originally inspired rather by fear than by love. They were precautions taken against the spirit of the dead rather than pious care bestowed in their interest.[3] For the dead were powerful; their action was still felt; they were not immured in the tomb or confined beneath the ground. Men saw them reappear in dreams, wearing their former aspect. They were descried during shadowy vigils; their voices were heard and their movements noted. Imagination conceived them such as they had once been; recollection of them filled the memory and to think of such apparitions as idle or unreal seemed impossible. The dead subsisted, then, as nebulous, impalpable beings, perceived by the senses only exceptionally. Here the belief that their remains had not quite lost all feeling mingled with the equally primitive and universal belief that the soul is a breath, exhaled with the last sigh. The vaporous shade, sometimes a dangerous but sometimes a succouring power, wandered by night in the atmosphere and haunted the places which the living man had been used to frequent. Except for some sceptical reasoners, all antiquity admitted the reality of these phantoms. Century-old beliefs, maintained by traditional rites, thus persisted, more or less definitely, in the popular mind, even after new forms of the future life were imagined. Many vestiges of these beliefs have survived until today. The first transformation undergone by the primitive conception was to entertain the opinion that the dead who are deposited in the ground gather together in a great cavity inside the bowels of the earth.[4] This belief in the nether world is found among most of the peoples of the Mediterranean basin: the _Sheol_ of the Hebrews differs little from the Homeric _Hades_ and the Italic _Inferi_.