MANES. This term, which is clearly euphemistic, meaning “goodies” or “good fellows,” was applied by the Romans to the spirits of the departed. As in all nations of antiquity, and in many existing savage tribes, these spirits were held by them in great awe and veneration, as being powerful for good or for harm. The doctrine, whether imported from the Egyptian theology or of Turanian origin through the Etruscan tomb-builders, is closely allied to that of the Greek belief in the existence of the souls of heroes, ancestors, and generally of the “mighty dead,” whom they called δαίμονες, but, of course, in a sense widely different from our notion of demons. Thus in Aeschylus the spirits of Agamemnon and of Darius are invoked as δαίμονες, and in the Suppliant Women (24) they are appealed to as βαρν-ημοι χθόνιοι, where the notion of “heavily-punishing” seems conveyed by the compound epithet. Generally, the daemones were regarded as hostile, or at least dangerous, and blood-offerings (εvαγurμoi) were made to them to propitiate their wrath, and to induce them to send aid or material blessings from the realms below. The idea appears to have been that the spirits ranged the earth, hungry and forlorn, and seeking whom they might devour. Hence pestilences and sudden deaths were attributed to them, and in this sense they came to be regarded as the enemies of the living. Victims were given to them, that they might not themselves make victims of whomsoever they pleased. Offerings of all kinds were placed in the tomb or burnt on the pyre, and the rites of burial were, with the lamentations of surviving friends, thought necessary for the repose of the ghost. Hesiod, however, in a remarkable passage (Op. et D., 122), speaks of the ...

MANETHO. Manetho Sebennyta (Mαvε‰v, Mavε0ω, Mavε0ως, Mavε0ω0, <fcc., i.e., Mai en Thoth, “beloved by Thoth”), Egyptian priest and annalist, was a native of Sebennytus (Semmenùd) in the Delta. His name is connected by Plutarch with the reign of Ptolemy I., and he is usually stated to have written under Ptolemy II. Philadelphus, though the only authority for this is an epistle to that king of the Pseudo-Manetho, author of the forged Book of Sothis preserved by Syncellus. He was instructed in Greek— so Josephus tells us—and the three books of his Αιγυπτιακά composed in that language opened to foreigners the history of Egypt from the mythical period downwards, as it was preserved in the records of the priests. Unhappily the book is now known only by some lists and fragments preserved by Josephus in his treatise Against Apion, by Eusebius in his Chronica, and by Syncellus. Syncellus used the work of Eusebius (also known to us through Jerome and the Armenian version) and the lost Pentabiblan of Africanus. Thus the little that we know of Manetho’s history has reached us through a process of transcription and retranscription very unfavourable to the correct transmission of the lists of kings and dynasties, to which Josephus alone adds any considerable narrative excerpts. It seems indeed that our authorities themselves used varying and partly corrupt recensions of the original text, and that deliberate corruptions of the Manethonic tradition were not wanting appears from the existence of the Book of Sothis cited by Syncellus, which was undoubtedly a spurious work. That Manetho himself made honest use of his Egyptian sources is generally recognized, since the Egyptian monuments have afforded confirmation of many, though by no means all, of his ...