dwelling-place of the spirit was not unnaturally assumed to be the place where the body was laid. Men, therefore, sought to conciliate the spirit of some distinguished stranger whose last home was, or might be made, in the land of his votaries. Thus the Thebans and the Athenians disputed over the body of Œdipus, and the Argives and the Trojans fought for the bones of Orestes. Thus the Acanthians offered sacrifice to the gigantic Persian engineer who died amongst them, and the people of Amphipolis to the gallant Brasidas.[1] So, too, the Hindu of the present day adores the name of any prominent English official that happens to be buried near his village. Such worship was natural, according to archaic ideas; but far more natural, by the same standard, was the belief that the spirits of those whom men loved and honoured in their life continued after death their vigilance and their aid. The interests of men in the flesh were also their interests in the spirit, and the loves and the hates of this world followed the deceased to that world which lay beyond the grave.
Manes-worship, therefore, stands on the same base as the more picturesque worship of Olympos. As the latter is the explanation which the youth of the world offers of physical phenomena, so the former is its attempt to solve the mightier problems of human existence. The one is primitive physics, the other is primitive biology. But they agree in applying to these different classes of facts the same method, that method which we still observe in children and in uncultured races, that method so natural to man when he seems to himself the measure of all things. In both cases alike, the phenomena are interpreted by the presence and the action of some sentient being, feeling and thinking as man himself feels and thinks. Thus, primitive worship and that great
- ↑ Herodotus, vii., 117; Thucyd., v. 11.
