The di manes, "the good ones" or "the kindly gods", were the collective, generalised spirits of the Roman dead, addressed as a class in official epitaphs and civic religion rather than as individually named beings, and the dedication Dis Manibus, "to the divine shades", appears on Roman tombstones across the empire as one of the most common funerary inscriptions surviving from antiquity.
Unlike the specifically threatening lemures, the manes as a collective were treated with respect bordering on veneration, occupying a religious category close to minor deities in their own right, addressed with offerings at the tomb and honoured at the annual festival of Parentalia in February, a period devoted to family visits to ancestral graves that closed with the public festival of Feralia. Roman state religion extended the same basic logic from the household to the community, treating the proper, ongoing honour of the collective dead as a civic obligation with consequences for the living city's wellbeing, not merely a private family matter, which is part of why neglecting Parentalia was considered capable of provoking real supernatural consequence for Rome as a whole.