methods—Its fame spreads everywhere—Oracles in many tongues—Rutilianus, a great noble, espouses Alexander’s daughter—The Epicureans resist the impostor, but in vain—The mysteries of Glycon—Alexander, a second Endymion—Immense superstition of the time—Apotheosis in the air—The cult of Antinous—And of M. Aurelius—In Croton there were more gods than men!—The growing faith in daemons and genii—The evidence of inscriptions as to the adoption of local deities all over the world—Revived honours of classic heroes—The belief in recurring miracle—Christian and pagan were equally credulous—The legend of the “Thundering Legion”—Sorcery in Thessaly—The lawless romance of Apuleius Pages 443-483 CHAPTER II BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY The conception of immortality determined by the idea of God—Religion supplies the assurance denied by philosophy—Vagueness of the conception natural and universal—“It doth not yet appear what we shall be”—Confused and various beliefs on the subject in the Early Empire—The cult of the Manes in old Italian piety—The guardianship of the tomb, and call for perpetual remembrance—The eternal sleep—The link between the living and the dead—The craving for continued human sympathy with the shade in its eternal home—The Lemures and the Lemuria—Visitations from the other world—The _Mundus_ in every Latin town—The general belief in apparitions illustrated from the _Philopseudes_ of Lucian, from the Younger Pliny, Suetonius, Dion Cassius, and Maximus of Tyre—The eschatology of Virgil a mixture of different faiths—Scenes from the Inferno of the _Aeneid_—Its Pythagorean elements—How Virgil influenced later conceptions of the future state—Scepticism and credulity in the first century—Perpetuity of heathen beliefs—The inscriptions, as to the future state, must be interpreted with care and discrimination—The phrases often conventional, and springing from different orders of belief—Inscriptions frankly atheistic or sensualist—Ideas of immortality among the cultivated class—The influence of Lucretius—The Stoic idea of coming life, and the Peripatetic—The influence of Platonism—In the last age of the Republic, and the first of the Empire, educated opinion was often sceptical or negative—J. Caesar, the Elder Pliny, Tacitus—The feeling of Hadrian—Epictetus on immortality—Galen—His probable influence on M. Aurelius—The wavering attitude of M. Aurelius on immortality—How he could reconcile himself by a saintly ideal to the resignation of the hope of a future life—His sadness and pessimism fully justified by the circumstances of the time—“Thou hast come to shore, quit the ship”—Change in the religious character long before M. Aurelius—Seneca’s theology as it moulded his conception of immortality—A new note in Seneca—The influence of Pythagorean and Platonic conceptions in modifying Stoicism—The revival of Pythagoreanism in the