Roman mythological ideas were, as has been said, nearly related to those of Greece; they underwent as great modifications, while the opinions of her philosophers were equally abstruse, varied, and difficult to understand. The author above quoted, treating of the notion of the soul and a future state entertained by the Roman philosophers, proves their ideas to have been extremely vague and ill- defined. Still, there were not wanting those who held to the belief of an existence after this life. Plutarch, a Greek, "has left us a view of the state of the departed. The souls of the dead, ascending through the air, and in part reaching the highest heaven, are either luminous and transparent or dark and spotted, on account of sins adhering to them, and some have even scars upon them. The soul of man, he says elsewhere, comes from the moon; his mind, intellect,--from the sun; the separation of the two is only completely effected after death. The soul wanders awhile between the moon and earth for purposes of punishment--or, if it be good, of purification, until it rises to the moon, where the _vouç_ [1] leaves it and returns to its home, the sun; while the soul is buried in the moon. Lucian, on the other hand, whose writings for the most part are a pretty faithful mirror of the notions in vogue among his contemporaries, bears testimony to a continuance of the old tradition of the good reaching the Elysian fields, and the great transgressors finding themselves given up to the Erinnys in a place of torment, where they are torn by vultures, crushed on the wheel, or otherwise tormented; while such as are neither great sinners nor distinguished by their virtues stray about in meadows as bodiless shadows, and are fed on the libations and mortuary sacrifices offered at their sepulchres. An obolus for Charon was still placed in the mouth of every dead body." [2] Here, again, we have both the belief in the existence of a middle state and of the assistance afforded to those detained there. [Footnote 1: Mind] [Footnote 2: "The Gentile and the Jew," Vol. II., p. 146.]