(M66) The Romans and Greeks appear to have also believed that the souls of the dead were incarnate in the bodies of serpents. Among the Romans the regular symbol of the _genius_ or guardian spirit of every man was a serpent,(286) and in Roman houses serpents were lodged and fed in such numbers that if their swarms had not been sometimes reduced by conflagrations there would have been no living for them.(287) In Greek legend Cadmus and his wife Harmonia were turned at death into snakes.(288) When the Spartan king Cleomenes was slain and crucified in Egypt, a great serpent coiled round his head on the cross and kept off the vultures from his face. The people regarded the prodigy as a proof that Cleomenes was a son of the gods.(289) Again, when Plotinus lay dying, a snake crawled from under his bed and disappeared into a hole in the wall, and at the same moment the philosopher expired.(290) Apparently superstition saw in these serpents the souls of the dead men. In Greek religion the serpent was indeed the regular symbol or attribute of the worshipful dead,(291) and we can hardly doubt that the early Greeks, like the Zulus and other African tribes at the present day, really believed the soul of the departed to be lodged in the reptile. The sacred serpent which lived in the Erechtheum at Athens, and was fed with honey-cakes once a month, may have been supposed to house the soul of the dead king Erechtheus, who had reigned in his lifetime on the same spot.(292) Perhaps the libations of milk which the Greeks poured upon graves(293) were intended to be drunk by serpents as the embodiments of the deceased; on two tombstones found at Tegea a man and a woman are respectively represented holding out to a serpent a cup which may be supposed to contain milk.(294) We have seen that various African tribes feed serpents with milk because they imagine the reptiles to be incarnations of their dead kinsfolk;(295) and the Dinkas, who practise the custom, also pour milk on the graves of their friends for some time after the burial.(296) It is possible that a common type in Greek art, which exhibits a woman feeding a serpent out of a saucer, may have been borrowed from a practice of thus ministering to the souls of the departed.(297)