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The care of the dead negotiated these two emotionally opposed attitudes. When properly honoured with funeral rites and memorials by the living, the spirits of the dead were thought to become benevolent ancestors and protect their descendants. Those who died "before their natural term" or without proper funeral rites were thought to wander the earth, and haunt the living as vengeful, vagrant ghosts (Lemures). In Horace's Ode 1.28, the shade of a drowned, unburied sailor, trapped

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