It has been conjectured that the substitution of incineration for inhumation contributed to spreading this new manner of conceiving life beyond the tomb: the shade could not remain attached to a handful of ashes enclosed in a puny urn. It went, then, to join its fellows who had gone down into the dark dwelling where reigned the gods of a subterranean kingdom. But as ghosts could leave their graves in order to trouble or to help men, so the swarms of the infernal spirits rose to the upper world through the natural openings of the earth, or through ditches dug for the purpose of maintaining communication with them and conciliating them with offerings. The Romans do not seem to have imagined survival in the infernal regions very differently from the survival of the vague monotonous shades in their tombs. Their _Manes_ or _Lemures_ had no marked personality or clearly characterised individual features. The _Inferi_ were not, as in Greece, a stage for the enactment of a tragic drama; their inhabitants had no original life, and in the lot dealt to them no idea of retribution can be discerned. In this matter it was the Hellenes who imposed their conceptions of Hades on the Italic peoples and gave them those half mythical and half theological beliefs which Orphism had introduced in their own religion. Hellenic influence was felt directly through the colonies of Greater Greece, indirectly through the Etruscans, whose funeral sculpture shows us that they had adopted all the familiar figures of the Greek Hades—Charon, Cerberus, the Furies, Hermes Psychopompos and the others.[5] From the time when Latin literature had its beginnings and the Latin theatre was born, we find writers taking pleasure in reproducing the Hellenic fables of Tartarus and the Elysian Fields; and Plautus[6] can already make one of his characters say that he has seen “many paintings representing the pains of Acheron.” This infernal mythology became an inexhaustible theme which gave matter to poetry and art until the end of antiquity and beyond it. We shall see, in later lectures, how the religious traditions of the Greeks were subjected to various transformations and interpretations. * * * * *