feelings of the homely Athenian bourgeoisie whom no enlightenment had ever disturbed in the beliefs of their fathers.[129\5] All cult, all prospect of a full life and future well-being--for so we may express the naive conception--of the soul on its separation from the body, depends upon the holding together of the family. To the family itself the souls of its former ancestors are, in a limited sense, of course, gods--_its_ gods.[130\5] It can hardly be doubted that here we have the root of all belief in the future life of the soul, and we shall be tempted to subscribe to the belief--as a guess tending in the right direction--of those who see in such family worship of the dead one of the most primitive roots of all religious belief--older than the worship of the higher gods of the state and the community as a whole; older even than the worship of Heroes, and of the ancestors of large national groups. The family is older than the state,[131\5] and among all peoples that have not passed beyond family-organization and formed states, we find this type of belief about the soul invariably present. Among {173} the Greeks, who in the course of their history learnt so much that was new without ever quite discarding the old, this belief lived on in the shadow of the great gods and their cults, even in the midst of the tremendous increase in the power and organized influence of the state. But these larger and wider organizations cramped and hindered its development. Left to itself, and given more freedom to grow, such belief might possibly have elevated the souls of the family ancestors to the position of all-powerful spirits of the house under whose hearth they had once been laid to rest. The Greeks, however, never had anything to correspond exactly with the Italian _Lar familiaris_.[132\5] The nearest equivalent to it would be the Good Daimon which the Greek household honoured. Careful examination shows this Daimon to have been originally the soul of an ancestor who has become the good spirit of his house--but the Greeks themselves had forgotten this.[133\5] § 5