in antiquity, spirits or hobgoblins; restless ghosts of departed persons, who return to terrify and torment the living.

These are the same with larvae, which the ancients imagined to wander round the world, to frighten good people, and plague the bad. For which reason at Rome they had lemuria or feasts instituted to appease the manes of the dead. See Lares.

Apuleius explains the ancient notion of manes thus: the souls of men released from the bands of the body, and freed from performing their bodily functions, become a kind of demons or genii, formerly called lemures. Of these lemures, those that were kind to their families were called lares familiares; but those who, for their crimes, were condemned to wander continually, without meeting with any place of rest, and terrified good men, and hurt the bad, are vulgarly called larvae.

An ancient commentator on Horace mentions, that the Romans wrote lemures for remures; which last word was formed from Remus, who was killed by his brother Romulus, and who returned to the earth to torment him. But Apuleius observes, that in the ancient Latin tongue *lemures* signifies the soul of a man separated from the body by death.