The spirits which after the death of the body were termed _manes_ by the Romans, were during its life called _genii_ (or in the case of women _Junones_). The belief in genii was not borrowed from Greece. How primitive it is may be seen from two facts. First, it is itself the essence of animism, for not only had every man a genius, but every place and every thing had, in the belief of the Romans, a soul, to which the same name, genius, was given.[46] Next, the genius was, I submit, the "external soul," which, as Mr. Frazer has shown, appears in the folk-tales of every Aryan nation, and in the religions of many savage peoples. The genius of a man did not reside inside the man. Amongst the Romans, as amongst the Zulus, it resided in a serpent. As, according to the Banks Islanders, "the life of the man is bound up with the life of his tamanin,"[47] so with the Romans, the man's health depended on his genius.[48] When the serpent which was the genius of the father of the Gracchi was killed, Tiberius died;[49] and, as all Romans were liable to the same mischance, these snakes were carefully protected from all harm, were reared in the house and the bed-chamber, and consequently grew so numerous, that Pliny says, had their numbers not been kept down by occasional conflagrations, they would have crowded out the human inhabitants of Rome.[50] This belief in the genius, however etherealised and spiritualised the form in which it appears in Horace or was held by highly-educated Romans, continued even in Imperial times amongst all other classes as primitive as it was tenacious. Its hold over the ordinary Italian mind was much greater than the Hellenised gods ever secured; for, in order to make them even comprehensible, the average Italian had to suppose that these fashionable, State-ordained gods were really worked by genii—just as it is self-evident to the savage that, if a locomotive engine moves, it is because it has horses inside. This, I suggest, is the explanation, in accord with the principle laid down at the beginning of this section, which must be given of the remarkable fact that, beginning from B.C. 58,[51] and in ever-increasing numbers afterwards, inscriptions are found which ascribe a genius to Apollo, Asclepius, Mars, Juno, Jupiter, &c.