Naturally it does not follow that, because Rome’s greatest poet chose to picture souls surviving their corporeal homes, the average man believed in a future life, but there is abundant evidence that the poet was appealing to widespread beliefs, when he wrote his apocalyptic book.[4] In fact from the earliest times known to us, both Greeks and Romans held to a belief in some kind of extended life for souls after the death of the body.[5] Both peoples had their cults of the dead, rites of tendance and of riddance, festivals both public and private, which leave no doubt that the great majority of men never questioned that the spirits of the departed existed after this life, and that those spirits were endowed with power to harm or to bless the living.[6] But beyond this rather elementary stage of belief the Romans never went of themselves. The Greeks, however, began early to develop eschatological ideas which had, and which still have, great importance. The eleventh book of the Odyssey, as I have already said, is the oldest “Descent to Hades” in European literature. The souls of the dead are there represented as dwelling in the land of shadows, having no life, but leading an insubstantial existence, without punishment or reward. Such a future world could have no moral or other value; it could only hang over men as a gloomy prospect of that which awaited them when the suns of this world had forever set. But in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C. other ideas came to the front, which were influential throughout later history. In those two centuries fall the first period of Greek individualism and a religious revival--two things not wholly disconnected. The Orphic sect, which appeared in the sixth century, was made up of religious devotees who adopted a purified form of the religion of Dionysus.[7] The center of the Orphic faith and mystic ceremonial was the myth of the birth, destruction, and rebirth of the god. According to the story, Dionysus was pursued by the Titans, powers hostile to Zeus. In his distress the god changed himself into various creatures, finally taking on the form of a bull, which the Titans tore in pieces and devoured. But the goddess Athena saved the heart and gave it to Zeus who swallowed it. Hence sprang the new Dionysus. The Titans Zeus destroyed with his thunderbolt and had the ashes scattered to the winds. From these ashes, in one form of the myth, man was made, and therefore he was thought to unite in his person the sinful Titanic nature and the divine Dionysiac spark. The parallelism between this story and the myths of Osiris, Attis, and Adonis is at once evident. They are all gods who die and live again, and thus become lords of death and life, through whom man gains assurance of his own immortality.