GREEK AND ROMAN DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE.
THE disembodied soul, as conceived by the Greeks, and after them
by the Romans, is material, but of so thin a contexture that it
cannot be felt with the hands. It is exhaled with the dying
breath, or issues through a warrior's wounds. The sword passes
through its uninjured form as through the air. It is to the body
what a dream is to waking action. Retaining the shape, lineaments,
and motion the man had in life, it is immediately recognised upon
appearing. It quits the body with much reluctance, leaving that
warm and vigorous investiture for a chill and forceless existence.
It glides along without noise and very swiftly, like a shadow. It
is unable to enter the lower kingdom and be at peace until its
deserted body has been buried with sacred rites: meanwhile, naked
and sad, it flits restlessly about the gates, uttering doleful
moans.
The early Greek authors describe the creation as a stupendous
hollow globe cut in the centre by the plane of the earth. The
upper hemisphere is lighted by beneficent luminaries; the lower
hemisphere is filled with unvarying blackness. The top of the
higher sphere is Heaven, the bright dwelling of the Olympian gods;
its bottom is the surface of the earth, the home of living men.
The top of the lower sphere is Hades, the abode of the ghosts of
the dead; its bottom is Tartarus, the prison of the Titans,
rebellious giants vanquished by Zeus. Earth lies half way from the
cope of Heaven to the floor of Tartarus. This distance is so great
that, according to Hesiod, it would take an anvil nine days to
fall from the centre to the nadir. Some of the ancients seem to
have surmised the sphericity of the earth, and to have thought
that Hades was simply its dark side, the dead being our antipodes.
In the Odyssey, Ulysses reaches Hades by sailing across the ocean
stream and passing the eternal night land of the Cimmerians,
whereupon he comes to the edge of Acheron, the moat of Pluto's
sombre house. Virgil also says, "One pole of the earth to us
always points aloft; but the other is seen by black Styx and the
infernal ghosts, where either dead night forever reigns or else
Aurora returns thither from us and brings them back the day."1 But
the prevalent notion evidently was that Hades was an immense
hollow region not far under the surface of the ground, and that it
was to be reached by descent through some cavern, like that at
Avernus.
This subterranean place is the destination of all alike, rapacious
Orcus sparing no one, good or bad. It is wrapped in obscurity, as
the etymology of its name implies, a place where one cannot see.
"No sun e'er gilds the gloomy horrors there; No cheerful gales
refresh the stagnant air."
The dead are disconsolate in this dismal realm, and the living
shrink from entering it, except as a refuge from intolerable
afflictions. The shade of the princeliest hero dwelling there the
1 Georg. lib. i. II. 242-250.
swift footed Achilles says, "I would wish, being on earth, to
serve for hire another man of poor estate, rather than rule over
all the dead." Souls carry there their physical peculiarities, the
fresh and ghastly likenesses of the wounds which have despatched
them thither, so that they are known at sight. Companies of
fellow countrymen, knots of friends, are together there,
preserving their remembrance ofearthly fortunes and beloved
relatives left behind, and eagerly questioning each newly arriving
soul for tidings from above. When the soul of Achilles is told of
the glorious deeds of Neoptolemus, "he goes away taking mighty
steps through the meadow of asphodel in joyfulness, because he had
heard that his son was very illustrious."2 Sophocles makes the
dying Antigone say, "Departing, I strongly cherish the hope that I
shall be fondly welcomed by my father, and by my mother, and by my
brother."3 It is important to notice that, according to the early
and popular view, this Hades, the "dark dwelling of the joyless
images of deceased mortals," is the destination of universal
humanity. In opposition to its dolorous gloom and repulsive
inanity are vividly pictured the glad light of day, the glory and
happiness of life. "Not worth so much to me as my life," says the
incomparable son of Peleus, "are all the treasures which populous
Troy possessed, nor all which the stony threshold of Phoebus
Apollo contains in rocky Pytho. Oxen, and fat sheep, and trophies,
and horses with golden manes, may be acquired by effort; but the
breath of man to return again is not to be obtained by plunder nor
by purchase, when once it has passed the barrier of his teeth."
It is not probable that all the ornamental details associated by
the poets with the fate and state of the dead as they are set
forth, for instance, by Virgil in the sixth book of the Aneid were
ever credited as literal truth. But there is no reason to doubt
that the essential features of this mythological scenery were
accepted in the vulgar belief. For instance, that the popular mind
honestly held that, in some vague sense or other, the ghost, on
leaving the body, flitted down to the dull banks of Acheron and
offered a shadowy obolus to Charon, the slovenly old ferryman, for
a passage in his boat, seems attested not only by a thousand
averments to that effect in the current literature of the time,
but also by the invariable custom of placing an obolus in the dead
man's mouth for that purpose when he was buried.
The Greeks did not view the banishment of souls in Hades as a
punishment for sin, or the result of any broken law in the plan of
things. It was to them merely the fulfilment of the inevitable
fate of creatures who must die, in the order of nature, like
successive growths of flowers, and whose souls were too feeble to
rank with gods and climb into Olympus. That man should cease from
his substantial life on the bright earth and subside into sunless
Hades, a vapid form, with nerveless limbs and faint voice, a
ghostly vision bemoaning his existence with idle lamentation, or
busying himself with the misty mockeries of his former pursuits,
was melancholy enough; but it was his natural destiny, and not an
avenging judgment.
But that powerful instinct in man which desires to see villany
punished and goodness rewarded could not fail, among so cultivated
a people as the Greeks, to develop a doctrine of future
compensation for the contrasted deserts of souls. The earliest
trace of the idea of
2 Odyssey, lib. xi. II. 538, 539.
3 Antigone, II. 872-874.
retribution which we find carried forward into the invisible world
is the punishment of the Titans, those monsters who tried by
piling up mountains to storm the heavenly abodes, and to wrest the
Thunderer's bolts from his hand. This germ is slowly expanded; and
next we read of a few specified criminals, who had been
excessively impious, personally offending Zeus, condemned by his
direct indignation to a severe expiation in Tartarus. The insulted
deity wreaks his vengeance on the tired Sisyphus, the mocked
Tantalus, the gnawed Tityus, and others. Afterwards we meet the
statement that condign retribution is always inflicted for the two
flagrant sins of perjury and blasphemy. Finally, we discern a
general prevalence of the belief that punishment is decreed, not
by vindictive caprice, but on the grounds of universal morality,
all souls being obliged in Hades to pass before Rhadamanthus,
Minos, or Aacus, three upright judges, to be dealt with, according
to their merits, with impartial accuracy. The distribution of
poetic justice in Hades at last became, in many authors, so
melodramatic as to furnish a fair subject for burlesque. Some
ludicrous examples of this may be seen in Lucian's Dialogues of
the Dead. A fine instance of it is also furnished in the Emperor
Julian's Symposium. The gods prepare for the Roman emperors a
banquet, in the air, below the moon. The good emperors are
admitted to the table with honors; but the bad ones are hurled
headlong down into Tartarus, amidst the derisive shouts of the
spectators.
As the notion that the wrath of the gods would pursue their
enemies in the future state gave rise to a belief in the
punishments of Tartarus, so the notion that the distinguishing
kindness of the gods would follow their favorites gave rise to the
myth of Elysium. The Elysian Fields were earliest portrayed lying
on the western margin of the earth, stretching from the verge of
Oceanus, where the sun set at eve. They were fringed with
perpetual green, perfumed with the fragrance of flowers, and
eternally fanned by refreshing breezes. They were represented
merely as the select abode of a small number of living men, who
were either the mortal relatives or the special favorites of the
gods, and who were transported thither without tasting death,
there to pass an immortality which was described, with great
inconsistency, sometimes as purely happy, sometimes as joyless and
wearisome. To all except a few chosen ones this region was utterly
inaccessible. Homer says, "But for you, O Menelaus, it is not
decreed by the gods to die; but the immortals will send you to the
Elysian plain, because you are the son in law of Zeus."4 Had the
inheritance of this clime been proclaimed as the reward of heroic
merit, had it been really believed attainable by virtue, it would
have been held up as a prize to be striven for. The whole account,
as it was at first, bears the impress of imaginative fiction as
legibly upon its front as the story of the dragon watched garden
of Hesperus's daughters, whose trees bore golden apples, or the
story of the enchanted isle in the Arabian tales.
The early location of Elysium, and the conditions of admission to
it, were gradually changed; and at length it reappeared, in the
under world, as the abode of the just. On one side of the
primitive Hades Tartarus had now been drawn up to admit the
condemned into its penal tortures, and on the other side Elysium
was lowered down to reward the justified by receiving them into
its peaceful and perennial happiness; while, between the two,
Erebus
4 Odyssey, lib. iv. II. 555-570.
remained as an intermediate state of negation and gloom for
unsentenced shades. The highly colored descriptions of this
subterranean heaven, frequently found thenceforth, it is to be
supposed were rarely accepted as solid verities. They were
scarcely ever used, to our knowledge, as motives in life,
incitement in difficulties, consolation in sorrow. They were
mostly set forth in poems, works even professedly fictitious. They
were often denied and ridiculed in speeches and writings received
with public applause. Still, they unquestionably exerted some
influence on the common modes of thought and feeling, had a
shadowy seat in the popular imagination and heart, helped men to
conceive of a blessed life hereafter and to long for it, and took
away something of the artificial horror with which, under the
power of rooted superstition, their departing ghosts hailed the
dusky limits of futurity:
"Umbra Non tacitas Erebi sedes, Ditisque profundi Pallida regna
petunt."
First, then, from a study of the Greek mythology we find all the
dead a dull populace of ghosts fluttering through the neutral
melancholy of Hades without discrimination. And finally we discern
in the world of the dead a sad middle region, with a Paradise on
the right and a Hell on the left, the whole presided over by three
incorruptible judges, who appoint the new corners their places in
accordance with their deserts.
The question now arises, What did the Greeks think in relation to
the ascent of human souls into heaven among the gods? Did they
except none from the remediless doom of Hades? Was there no path
for the wisest and best souls to climb starry Olympus? To dispose
of this inquiry fairly, four distinct considerations must be
examined. First, Ulysses sees in the infernal regions the image of
Herakles shooting the shadows of the Stymphalian birds, while his
soul is said to be rejoicing with fair legged Hebe at the banquets
of the immortal gods in the skies. To explain this, we must
remember that Herakles was the son of Alcmene, a mortal woman, and
of Zeus, the king of the gods. Accordingly, in the flames on Mount
Oeta, the surviving ghost which he derived from his mother
descends to Hades, but the purified soul inherited from his father
has the proper nature and rank of a deity, and is received into
the Olympian synod.5 Of course no blessed life in heaven for the
generality of men is here implied. Herakles, being a son and
favorite of Zeus, has a corresponding destiny exceptional from
that of other men.
Secondly, another double representation, somewhat similar, but
having an entirely different interpretation, occurs in the case of
Orion, the handsome Hyrian hunter whom Artemis loved. At one time
he is described, like the spectre of the North American Indian,
chasing over the Stygian plain the disembodied animals he had in
his lifetime killed on the mountains:
"Swift through the gloom a giant hunter flies: A ponderous brazen
mace, with direful sway, Aloft he whirls to crush the savage prey;
5 Ovid, Met. lib. ix. II. 245-272.
Grim beasts in trains, that by his truncheon fell, Now, phantom
forms, shoot o'er the lawn of hell."
In the common belief this, without doubt, was received as actual
fact. But at another time Orion is deified and shown as one of the
grandest constellations of the sky,
"A belted giant, who, with arm uplift, Threatening the throne of
Zeus, forever stands, Sublimely impious."
This, obviously, is merely a poetic symbol, a beautiful artifice
employed by the poets to perpetuate a legend by associating it
with the imperishable hieroglyphs of the galaxy. It is not
credible that men imagined that group of stars only outlined in
such shape by the help of arbitrary fancy to be literally the
translated hunter himself. The meaning simply was that he was
immortalized through the eternal linking of his name and form with
a stellar cluster which would always shine upon men. "The
reverence and gratitude of a weak world for the heroes and
benefactors they could not comprehend, named them divinities, whom
they did star together to an idolatrous immortality which
nationalized the heavens" with the shining shapes of the great and
brave. These types of poetry, symbols lent to infant science, were
never meant to indicate a literal translation and metamorphosis of
human souls, but were honors paid to the memories of illustrious
men, emblems and pledged securities of their unfading fame. With
what glorious characters, with what forms of deathless beauty,
defiant of decay, the sky was written over! Go out this evening
beneath the old rolling dome, when the starry scroll is outspread,
and you may still read the reveries of the marvelling minds of the
antique world, as fresh in their magic loveliness as when the
bards and seers of Olympus and the Agean first stamped them in
heaven. There "the great snake binds in his bright coil half the
mighty host." There is Arion with his harp and the charmed
dolphin. The fair Andromeda, still chained to her eternal rock,
looks mournfully towards the delivering hero whose conquering hand
bears aloft the petrific visage of Medusa. Far off in the north
the gigantic Bootes is seen driving towards the Centaur and the
Scorpion. And yonder, smiling benignantly upon the crews of many a
home bound ship, are revealed the twin brothers, joined in the
embrace of an undying friendship.
Thirdly, it is asserted by several Latin authors, in general
terms, that the ghost goes to Hades but the soul ascends to
heaven; and it has been inferred most erroneously that this
statement contains the doctrine of an abode for men after death on
high with the gods. Ovid expresses the real thought in full,
thus:
"Terra tegit carnem; tumulum circumvolat umbra; Orcus habet manes;
spiritus astra petit."
"The earth conceals the flesh; the shade flits round the tomb; the
under world receives the image; the spirit seeks the stars." Those
conversant with the opinions then prevalent will scarcely doubt
that these words were meant to express the return of the composite
man to the primordial elements of which he was made. The
particulars of the dissolving individual are absorbed in the
general elements of the universe. Earth goes back to earth, ghost
to the realm of ghosts, breath to the air, fiery essence of soul
to the lofty ether in whose pure radiance the stars burn.
Euripides expressly says that when man dies each part goes whence
it came, "the body to the ground, the spirit to the ether."6
Therefore the often misunderstood phrase of the Roman writers,
"the soul seeks the stars," merely denotes the impersonal mingling
after death of the divine portion of man's being with the parent
Divinity, who was supposed indeed to pervade all things, but more
especially to reside beyond the empyrean.
Fourthly: what shall be said of the apotheosis of their celebrated
heroes and emperors by the Greeks and Romans, whereby these were
elevated to the dignity of deities, and seats were assigned them
in heaven? What was the meaning of this ceremony? It does not
signify that a celestial immortality awaits all good men; because
it appears as a thing attainable by very few, is only allotted by
vote of the Senate. Neither was it supposed actually to confer on
its recipients equality of attributes with the great gods, making
them peers of Zeus and Apollo. The homage received as gods by
Alexander and others during their lives, the deification of Julius
Casar during the most learned and skeptical age of Rome, with
other obvious considerations, render such a supposition
inadmissible. In view of all the direct evidence and collateral
probabilities, we conclude that the genuine import of an ancient
apotheosis was this: that the soul of the deceased person so
honored was admitted, in deference to his transcendent merits, or
as a special favor on the part of the gods, into heaven, into the
divine society. He was really a human soul still, but was called a
god because, instead of descending, like the multitude of human
souls, to Hades, he was taken into the abode and company of the
gods above the sky. This interpretation derives support from the
remarkable declaration of Aristotle, that "of two friends one must
be unwilling that the other should attain apotheosis, because in
such case they must be forever separated."7 One would be in
Olympus, the other in Hades. The belief that any, even a favored
few, could ever obtain this blessing, was of quite limited
development, and probably sprang from the esoteric recesses of the
Mysteries. To call a human soul a god is not so bold a speech as
it may seem. Plotinus says. "Whoever has wisdom and true virtue in
soul itself differs but little from superior beings, in this alone
being inferior to them, that he is in body. Such an one, dying,
may therefore properly say, with Empedocles, 'Farewell! a god
immortal now am I.'"
The expiring Vespasian exclaimed, "I shall soon be a god."8 Mure
says that the doctrine of apotheosis belonged to the Graco
Pelasgic race through all their history.9 Seneca severely
satirizes the ceremony, and the popular belief which upheld it, in
an elaborate lampoon called Apocolocyntosis, or the reception of
Claudius among the pumpkins. The broad travesty of
6 The Suppliants, l. 533.
7 Nicomachean Ethics, lib. viii. cap. 7.
8 Suetonius, cap. xxiii.
9 Hist. Greek Literature, vol. i. ch. 2, sect. 5.
Deification exhibited in Pumpkinification obviously measures the
distance from the honest credulity of one class and period to the
keen infidelity of another.
One of the most important passages in Greek literature, in
whatever aspect viewed, is composed of the writings of the great
Theban lyrist. Let us see what representation is there made of the
fate of man in the unseen world. The ethical perception, profound
feeling, and searching mind of Pindar could not allow him to
remain satisfied with the undiscriminating views of the future
state prevalent in his time. Upon such a man the problem of death
must weigh as a conscious burden, and his reflections would
naturally lead him to improved conclusions. Accordingly, we find
him representing the Blessed Isles not as the haven of a few
favorites of the gods, but as the reward of virtue; and the
punishments of the wicked, too, are not dependent on fickle
inclinations, but are decreed by immutable right. He does not
describe the common multitude of the dead, leading a dark sad
existence, like phantoms in a dream: his references to death and
Hades seem cheerful in comparison with those of many other ancient
Greek authors. Dionysius the Rhetorician, speaking of his
Threnes, dirges sung at funerals, says, "Simonides lamented the
dead pathetically, Pindar magnificently."
His conceptions of the life to come were inseparably connected
with certain definite locations. He believed Hades to be the
destination of all our mortal race, but conceived it subdivided
into a Tartarus for the impious and an Elysium for the righteous.
He thought that the starry firmament was the solid floor of a
world of splendor, bliss, and immortality, inhabited by the gods,
but fatally inaccessible to man. When he thinks of this place, it
is with a sigh, a sigh that man's aspirations towards it are vain
and his attempts to reach it irreverent. This latter thought he
enforces by an earnest allusion to the myth of Bellerophon, who,
daring to soar to the cerulean seat of the gods on the winged
steed Pegasus, was punished for his arrogance by being hurled down
headlong. These assertions are to be sustained by citations of his
own words. The references made are to Donaldson's edition.
In the second Pythian Ode10 Pindar repeats, and would appear to
endorse, the old monitory legend of Ixion, who for his outrageous
crimes was bound to an ever revolving wheel in Hades and made to
utter warnings against such offences as his own. In the first
Pythian we read, "Hundred headed Typhon, enemy of the gods, lies
in dreadful Tartarus."11 Among the preserved fragments of Pindar
the one numbered two hundred and twenty three reads thus: "The
bottom of Tartarus shall press thee down with solid necessities."
The following is from the first Isthmian Ode: "He who, laying up
private wealth, laughs at the poor, does not consider that he
shall close up his life for Hades without honor."12 The latter
part of the tenth Nemean Ode recounts, with every appearance of
devout belief, the history of Castor and Pollux, the god begotten
twins, who, reversing conditions with each other on successive
days and nights, spent their interchangeable immortality each
alternately in heaven and in Hades. The astronomical
interpretation of this account may be correct; but its
applicability to the wondering faith of the earlier poets is
extremely doubtful.
10 L. 39.
11 LI. 15, 16.
12 L. 68.
The seventh Isthmian contains this remarkable sentence: "Unequal
is the fate of man: he can think of great things, but is too
ephemeral a creature to reach the brazen floored seat of the
gods."13 A similar sentiment is expressed in the sixth Nemean:
"Men are a mere nothing; while to the gods the brazen heaven
remains a firm abode forever."14 The one hundred and second
fragment is supposed to be a part of the dirge composed by Pindar
on the death of the grandfather of Pericles. It runs in this way:
"Whoso by good fortune has seen the things in the hollow under the
earth knows indeed the end of life: he also knows the beginning
vouchsafed by Zeus." It refers to initiation in the Eleusinian
Mysteries, and means that the initiate understands the life which
follows death. It is well known that a clear doctrine of future
retribution was inculcated in the Mysteries long before it found
general publication. The ninety fifth fragment is all that remains
to us of a dirge which appears, from the allusion in the first
line, to have been sung at a funeral service performed at
midnight, or at least after sunset. "While it is night here with
us, to those below shines the might of the sun; and the red rosied
meadows of their suburbs are filled with the frankincense tree,
and with golden fruits. Some delight themselves there with steeds
and exercises, others with games, others with lyres; and among
them all fair blossoming fortune blooms, and a fragrance is
distilled through the lovely region, and they constantly mingle
all kinds of offerings with the far shining fire on the altars of
the gods." This evidently is a picture of the happy scenes in the
fields that stretch around the City of the Blessed in the under
world, and is introduced as a comfort to the mourners over the
dead body.
The ensuing passage the most important one on our subject is from
the second Olympic Ode.15 "An honorable, virtuous man may rest
assured as to his future fate. The souls of the lawless, departing
from this life, suffer punishment. One beneath the earth,
pronouncing sentence by a hateful necessity imposed upon him,
declares the doom for offences committed in this realm of Zeus.
But the good lead a life without a tear, among those honored by
the gods for having always delighted in virtue: the others endure
a life too dreadful to look upon. Whoever has had resolution
thrice in both worlds to stand firm, and to keep his soul pure
from evil, has found the path of Zeus to the tower of Kronos,
where the airs of the ocean breathe around the Isle of the
Blessed, and where some from resplendent trees, others from the
water glitter golden flowers, with garlandsofwhich they wreathe
their wrists and brows in the righteous assemblies of
Rhadamanthus, whom father Kronos has as his willing assistant."
The "path of Zeus," in the above quotation, means the path which
Zeus takes when he goes to visit his father Kronos, whom he
originally dethroned and banished, but with whom he is now
reconciled, and who has become the ruler of the departed spirits
of the just, in a peaceful and joyous region.
The following passage constitutes the ninety eighth fragment. "To
those who descend from a fruitless and ill starred life Persephone
[the Queen of the Dead] will grant a compensation for their former
misfortune, after eight years [the judicial period of atonement
and lustration for great crimes] granting them their lives again.
Then, illustrious kings, strong,
13 Ll. 42-44.
14 Ll. 4-6.
15 Ll. 55-78.
swift, wise, they shall become the mightiest leaders; and
afterwards they shall be invoked by men as sacred heroes." In this
piece, as in the preceding one where reference is made to the
thrice living man, is contained the doctrine, early brought from
the East, that souls may repeatedly return from the dead and in
new bodies lead new lives. One other fragment, the ninety sixth,
added to the foregoing, will make up all the important genuine
passages in Pindar relating to the future life. "By a beneficent
allotment, all travel to an end freeing from toil. The body indeed
is subject to the power of death; but the eternal image is left
alive, and this alone is allied to the gods. When we are asleep,
it shows in many dreams the approaching judgment concerning
happiness and misery." When our physical limbs are stretched in
insensible repose, the inward spirit, rallying its sleepless and
prophetic powers, foretells the balancing awards of another world.
We must not wholly confound with the mythological schemes of the
vulgar creed the belief of the nobler philosophers, many of whom,
as is well known, cherished an exalted faith in the survival of
the conscious soul and in a just retribution. "Strike!" one of
them said, with the dauntless courage of an immortal, to a tyrant
who had threatened to have him brayed in a mortar: "strike! you
may crush the shell of Anaxarchus: you cannot touch his life."
Than all the maze of fabulous fancies and physical rites in which
the dreams of the poets and the guesses of the people were
entangled, how much more
"Just was the prescience of the eternal goalThat gleamed, 'mid
Cyprian shades, on Zeno's soul, Or shone to Plato in the lonely
cave, God in all space, and life in every grave!"
An account of the Greek views on the subject of a future life
which should omit the doctrine of Plato would be defective indeed.
The influence of this sublime autocrat in the realms of intellect
has transcended calculation. However coldly his thoughts may have
been regarded by his contemporary countrymen, they soon obtained
cosmopolitan audience, and surviving the ravages of time and
ignorance, overleaping the bars of rival schools and sects,
appreciated and diffused by the loftiest spirits of succeeding
ages, closely blended with their own speculations by many
Christian theologians have held an almost unparalleled dominion
over the minds of millions of men for more than fifty generations.
In the various dialogues of Plato, written at different periods of
his life, there are numerous variations and inconsistencies of
doctrine. There are also many mythical passages obviously intended
as symbolic statements, poetic drapery, by no means to be handled
or looked at as the severe outlines of dialectic truth.
Furthermore, in these works there are a vast number of opinions
and expressions introduced by the interlocutors, who often belong
to antagonistic schools of philosophy, and for which, of course,
Plato is not to be held responsible. Making allowance for these
facts, and resolutely grappling with the many other difficulties
of the task, we shall now attempt to exhibit what we consider were
the real teachings of Plato in relation to the fate of the soul.
This exposition, sketchy as it is, and open to question as it may
be in some particulars, is the carefully weighed result of
earnest, patient, and repeated study of all the relevant passages.
In the first place, it is plain that Plato had a firm religious
and philosophical faith in the immortality of the soul, which was
continually attracting his thoughts, making it a favorite theme
with him and exerting no faint influence on his life. This faith
rested both on ancient traditions, to which he frequently refers
with invariable reverence, and on metaphysical reasonings, which
he over and over presents in forms of conscientious elaboration.
There are two tests of his sincerity of faith: first, that he
always treats the subject with profound seriousness; secondly,
that he always uses it as a practical motive. "I do not think,"
said Socrates, "that any one who should now hear us, even though
he were a comic poet, would say that I am talking idly."16 Again,
referring to Homer's description of the judgments in Hades, he
says, "I, therefore, Callicles, am persuaded by these accounts,
and consider how I may exhibit my soul before the judge in the
most healthy condition."17 "To a base man no man nor god is a
friend on earth while living, nor under it when dead," say the
souls of their ancestors to the living; "but live honorably, and
when your destined fate brings you below you shall come to us as
friends to friends."18 "We are plants, not of earth, but of
heaven."19 We start, then, with the affirmation that Plato
honestly and cordially believed in a future life.
Secondly, his ethical and spiritual beliefs, like those of nearly
all the ancients, were closely interwoven with physical theories
and local relations. The world to him consisted of two parts, the
celestial region of ideas, and the mundane region of material
phenomena, corresponding pretty well, as Lewes suggests, to our
modern conception of heaven and earth. Near the close of the
Phado, Socrates says that the earth is not of the kind and
magnitude usually supposed. "We dwell in a decayed and corroded,
muddy and filthy region in the sediment and hollows of the earth,
and imagine that we inhabit its upper parts; just as if one
dwelling in the bottom of the sea should think that he dwelt on
the sea, and, beholding the sun through the water, should imagine
that the sea was the heavens. So, if we could fly up to the summit
of the air as fishes emerging from the sea to behold what is on
the earth here and emerge hence, we should know that the true
earth is there. The people there dwell with the gods, and see
things as they really are; and what the sea is to us the air is to
them, and what the air is to us the ether is to them." Again, in
the tenth book of the Republic, eleventh chapter, the soul is
metaphorically said in the sea of this corporeal life to get
stones and shell fish attached to it, and, fed on earth, to be
rendered to a great extent earthy, stony, and savage, like the
marine Glaucus, some parts of whose body were broken off and
others worn away by the waves, while such quantities of shells,
sea weed, and stones had grown to him that he more resembled a
beast than a man. In keeping with the whole tenor of the Platonic
teaching, this is a fine illustration of the fallen state of man
in his vile environment of flesh here below. The soul, in its
earthly sojourn, embodied here, is as much mutilated and degraded
from its equipped and pure condition in its lofty natal home, the
archetypal world of Truth above the base Babel of material
existence, as Glaucus was on
16 Phado, 40.
17 Gorgias, 173.
18 Menexenus, 19.
19 Timaus, 71.
descending from his human life on the sunny shore to his encrusted
shape and blind prowling in the monstrous deep.
At another time Plato contrasts the situation of the soul on earth
with its situation in heaven by the famous comparison of the dark
cave. He supposes men, unable to look upwards, dwelling in a
cavern which has an opening towards the light extending lengthwise
through the top of the cavern. A great many images, carrying
various objects and talking aloud, pass and repass along the edge
of the opening. Their shadows fall on the side of the cave below,
in front of the dwellers there; also the echoes of their talk
sound back from the wall. Now, the men, never having been or
looked out of the cave, would suppose these shadows to be the real
beings, these echoes the real voices. As respects this figure,
says Plato, we must compare ourselves with such persons. The
visible region around us is the cave, the sun is the light, and
the soul's ascent into the region of mind is the ascent out of the
cave and the contemplation of things above.20
Still again, Plato describes the ethereal paths and motions of the
gods, who, in their chariots, which are the planets and stars,
ride through the universe, accompanied by all pure souls, "the
family of true science, contemplating things as they really are."
"Reaching the summit, they proceed outside, and, standing on the
back of heaven, its revolution carries them round, and they behold
that supercelestial region which no poet here can ever sing of as
it deserves." In this archetypal world all souls of men have
dwelt, though "few have memory enough left," "after their fall
hither," "to call to mind former things from the present." "Now,
of justice and temperance, and whatever else souls deem precious,
there are here but faint resemblances, dull images; but beauty was
then splendid to look on when we, in company with the gods, beheld
that blissful spectacle, and were initiated into that most blessed
of all mysteries, which we celebrated when we were unaffected by
the evils that awaited us in time to come, and when we beheld, in
the pure light, perfect and calm visions, being ourselves pure and
as yet unmasked with this shell of a body to which we are now
fettered."21
To suppose all this employed by Plato as mere fancy and metaphor
is to commit an egregious error. In studying an ancient author, we
must forsake the modern stand point of analysis, and envelop
ourselves in the ancient atmosphere of thought, where poetry and
science were as indistinguishably blended in the personal beliefs
as oxygen and nitrogen are in the common air. We have not a doubt
that Plato means to teach, literally, that the soul was always
immortal, and that in its anterior states of existence, in the
realm of ideas on high, it was in the midst of those essential
realities whose shifting shadows alone it can behold in its lapsed
condition and bodily imprisonment here. That he closely
intertwisted ethical with physical theories, spiritual destinies
with insphering localities, the fortunes of men with the
revolutions of the earth and stars, is a fact which one can hardly
read the Timaus and fail to see; a fact which continually
reappears. It is strikingly shown in his idea of the consummation
of all things at regular epochs determined by the recurrence of a
grand
20 Republic, lib. vii. cap. 1 4.
21 Phadrus, 56-58, 63, 64.
revolution of the universe, a period vulgarly known under the name
of the "Platonic Year."22 The second point, therefore, in the
present explanation of Plato's doctrine of another life, is the
conception that there is in the empyrean a glorious world of
incorruptible truth, beauty, and goodness, the place of the gods,
the native haunt of souls; and that human souls, having yielded to
base attractions and sunk into bodies, are but banished sojourners
in this phenomenal world of evanescent shadows and illusions,
where they are "stung with resistless longings for the skies, and
only solaced by the vague and broken reminiscences of their former
state."
Thirdly, Plato taught that after death an unerring judgment and
compensation await all souls. Every soul bears in itself the plain
evidence of its quality and deeds, its vices and virtues; and in
the unseen state it will meet inevitable awards on its merits. "To
go to Hades with a soul full of crimes is the worst of all
evils."23 "When a man dies, he possesses in the other world a
destiny suited to the life which he has led in this."24 In the
second book of the Republic he says, "We shall in Hades suffer the
punishment of our misdeeds here;" and he argues at much length the
absolute impossibility of in any way escaping this. The fact of a
full reward for all wisdom and justice, a full retribution for all
folly and vice, is asserted unequivocally in scores of passages,
most of them expressly connecting the former with the notion of an
ascent to the bright region of truth and intellect, the latter
with a descent to the black penal realm of Hades. Let the citation
of a single further example suffice. "Some souls, being sentenced,
go to places of punishment beneath the earth; others are borne
upward to some region in heaven."25 He proves the genuineness of
his faith in this doctrine by continually urging it, in the most
earnest, unaffected manner, as an animating motive in the
formation of character and the conduct of life, saying, "He who
neglects his soul will pass lamely through existence, and again
pass into Hades, aimless and unserviceable."26
The fourth and last step in this exposition is to show the
particular form in which Plato held his doctrine of future
retribution, the way in which he supposed the consequences of
present good and evil would appear hereafter. He received the
Oriental theory of transmigration. Souls are born over and over.
The banishment of the wicked to Tartarus is provisional, a
preparation for their return to incarnate life. The residence of
the good in heaven is contingent, and will be lost the moment they
yield to carelessness or material solicitations. The circumstances
under which they are reborn, the happiness or misery of their
renewed existence, depend on their character and conduct in their
previous career; and thus a poetic justice is secured. At the
close of the Timaus, Plato describes the whole animal kingdom as
consisting of degraded human souls, from "the tribe of birds,
which were light minded souls, to the tribe of oysters, which have
received the most remote habitations as a punishment of their
extreme ignorance." "After this manner, then, both formerly and
22 Statesman, 14, 15.
23 Gorgias, 165.
24 Republic, lib. vi. cap. i.
25 Phadrus, 61.
26 Timaus, 18.
now, animals transmigrate, experiencing their changes through the
loss or acquisition of intellect and folly." The general doctrine
of metempsychosis is stated and implied very frequently in many of
the Platonic dialogues. Some recent writers have tried to explain
these representations as figures of speech, not intended to
portray the literal facts, but merely to hint their moral
equivalents. Such persons seem to us to hold Plato's pages in the
full glare of the nineteenth century and read them in the
philosophic spirit of Bacon and Comte, instead of holding them in
the old shades of the Academy and pondering them in the marvelling
spirit of Pythagoras and Empedocles.
We are led by the following considerations to think that Plato
really meant to accredit the transmigration of souls literally.
First, he often makes use of the current poetic imagery of Hades,
and of ancient traditions, avowedly in a loose metaphorical way,
as moral helps, calling them "fables." But the metempsychosis he
sets forth, without any such qualification or guard, with so much
earnestness and frequency, as a promise and a warning, that we are
forced, in the absence of any indication to the contrary, to
suppose that he meant the statements as sober fact and not as
mythical drapery. As with a parable, of course we need not
interpret all the ornamental details literally; but we must accept
the central idea. And in the present case the fundamental thought
is that of repeated births of the soul, each birth trailing
retributive effects from the foregone. For example, the last four
chapters of the tenth book of the Republic contain the account of
Erus, a Pamphylian, who, after lying dead on the battle field ten
days, revived, and told what he had seen in the other state. Plato
in the outset explicitly names this recital an "apologue." It
recounts a multitude of moral and physical particulars. These
details may fairly enough be considered in some degreeas mythical
drapery, or as the usual traditional painting; but the essential
conception running through the account, for the sake of which it
is told, we are not at liberty to explain away as empty metaphor.
Now, that essential conception is precisely this: that souls after
death are adjudged to Hades or to heaven as a recompense for their
sin or virtue, and that, after an appropriate sojourn in those
places, they are born again, the former ascending, squalid and
scarred, from beneath the earth, the latter descending, pure, from
the sky. In perfect consonance with this conclusion is the moral
drawn by Plato from the whole narrative. He simply says, "If the
company will be persuaded by me, considering the soul to be
immortal and able to bear all evil and good, we shall always
persevere in the road which leads upwards."
Secondly, the conception of the metempsychosis is thoroughly
coherent with Plato's whole philosophy. If he was in earnest about
any doctrine, it was the doctrine that all knowledge is
reminiscence. The following declarations are his. "Soul is older
than body." "Souls are continually born over again from Hades into
this life." "To search and learn is simply to revive the images of
what the soul saw in its pre existent state of being in the world
of realities."27 Why should we hesitate to attribute a sincere
belief in the metempsychosis to the acknowledged author of the
doctrine that the soul lived in another world before appearing
here, and that its knowledge is but reminiscence? If born from the
other world
27 Menexenus, 15.
once, we may be many times; and then all that is wanted to
complete the dogma of transmigration is the idea of a presiding
justice. Had not Plato that idea?
Thirdly, the doctrine of a judicial metempsychosis was most
profoundly rooted in the popular faith, as a strict verity,
throughout the great East, ages before the time of Plato, and was
familiarly known throughout Greece in his time. It had been
imported thither by Musaus and Orpheus at an early period, was
afterwards widely recommended and established by the Pythagoreans,
and was unquestionably held by many of Plato's contemporaries. He
refers once to those "who strongly believe that murderers who have
gone to Hades will be obliged to come back and end their next
lives by suffering the same fate which they had before inflicted
on others."28 It is also a remarkable fact that he states the
conditions of transmigration, and the means of securing exemption
from it, in the same way that the Hindus have from immemorial
time: "The soul which has beheld the essence of truth remains free
from harm until the next revolution; and if it can preserve the
vision of the truth it shall always remain free from harm," that
is, be exempt from birth; but "when it fails to behold the field
of truth it falls to the earth and is implanted in a body."29 This
statement and several others in the context corresponds precisely
with Hindu theology, which proclaims that the soul, upon attaining
real wisdom, that is, upon penetrating beneath illusions and
gazing on reality, is freed from the painful necessity of repeated
births. Now, since the Hindus and the Pythagoreans held the
doctrine as a severe truth, and Plato states it in the identical
forms which they employed, and never implies that he is merely
poetizing, we naturally conclude that he, too, veritably
inculcates it as fact.
Finally, we are the more confirmed in this supposition when we
find that his lineal disciples and most competent expounders, such
as Proclus, and nearly all his later commentators, such as Ritter,
have so understood him. The great chorus of his interpreters, from
Plotinus to Leroux, with scarcely a dissentient voice, approve the
opinion pronounced by the learned German historian of philosophy,
that "the conception of the metempsychosis is so closely
interwoven both with his physical system and with his ethical as
to justify the conviction that Plato looked upon it as legitimate
and valid, and not as a merely figurative exposition of the soul's
life after death." To sum up the whole in one sentence: Plato
taught with grave earnestness the immortality of the soul, subject
to a discriminating retribution, which opened for its temporary
residences three local regions, heaven, earth, and Hades, and
which sometimes led it through different grades of embodied being.
"O thou youth who thinkest that thou art neglected by the gods,
the person who has become more wicked departs to the more wicked
souls; but he who has become better departs to the better souls,
both in life and in all deaths."30
Whether Aristotle taught or denied the immortality of the soul has
been the subject of innumerable debates from his own time until
now. It is certainly a most ominous fact that his great name has
been cited as authority for rejecting the doctrine of a future
life by so many
28 The Laws, b. ix. ch. 10.
29 Phadrus, 60-62.
30 The Laws, lib. x. cap. 13.
of his keenest followers; for this has been true of weighty
representatives of every generation of his disciples. Antagonistic
advocates have collected from his works a large number of varying
statements, endeavoring to distinguish between the literal and the
figurative, the esoteric and the popular. It is not worth our
while here, either for their intrinsic interest or for their
historic importance, to quote the passages and examine the
arguments. All that is required for our purpose may be expressed
in the language of Ritter, who has carefully investigated the
whole subject: "No passage in his extant works is decisive; but,
from the general context of his doctrine, it is clear that he had
no conception of the immortality of any individual rational
entity."31
It would take a whole volume instead of a chapter to set forth the
multifarious contrasting tenets of individual Greek philosophers,
from the age of Pherecydes to that of Iamblichus, in relation to a
future life. Not a few held, with Empedocles, that human life is a
penal state, the doom of such immortal souls as for guilt have
been disgraced and expelled from heaven. "Man is a fallen god
condemned to wander on the earth, sky aspiring but sense clouded."
Purged by a sufficient penance, he returns to his former godlike
existence. "When, leaving this body, thou comest to the free
ether, thou shalt be no longer a mortal, but an undying god."
Notions of this sort fairly represent no small proportion of the
speculations upon the fate of the soul which often reappear
throughout the course of Greek literature. Another class of
philosophers are represented by such names as Marcus Antoninus,
who, comparing death to disembarkation at the close of a voyage,
says, "If you land upon another life, it will not be empty of
gods: if you land in nonentity, you will have done with pleasures,
pains, and drudgery."32 And again he writes, "If souls survive,
how has ethereal space made room for them all from eternity? How
has the earth found room for all the bodies buried in it? The
solution of the latter problem will solve the former. The corpse
turns to dust and makes space for another: so the spirit, let
loose into the air, after a while dissolves, and is either renewed
into another soul or absorbed into the universe. Thus room is made
for succession."33 These passages, it will be observed, leave the
survival of the soul at all entirely hypothetical, and, even
supposing it to survive, allow it but a temporary duration. Such
was the common view of the great sect of the Stoics. They all
agreed that there was no real immortality for the soul; but they
differed greatly as to the time of its dissolution. In the words
of Cicero, "Diu mansuros aiunt animos; semper, negant:" they say
souls endure for a long time, but not forever. Cleanthes taught
that the intensity of existence after death would depend on the
strength or weakness of the particular soul. Chrysippus held that
only the souls of the wise and good would survive at all.34
Panatius said the soul always died with the body, because it was
born with it, which he proved by the resemblances of children's
souls to those of their parents.35 Seneca has a great many
contradictory passages on this subject
31 Hist. Anc. Phil. p. iii. b. ix. ch. 4.
32 Meditations, lib. iii. cap. 3.
33 Ibid. lib. iv. cap. 21.
34 Plutarch, Plac. Phil. iv. 7.
35 Tusc. Quast. lib. i. cap. 32.
in his works; but his preponderant authority, upon the whole, is
that the soul and the body perish together.36 At one time he says,
"The day thou fearest as the last is the birthday of eternity."
"As an infant in the womb is preparing to dwell in this world, so
ought we to consider our present life as a preparation for the
life to come."37 At another time he says, with stunning bluntness,
"There is nothing after death, and death itself is nothing."
Post mortem nihil est, ipsaque mors nihil. 38
Besides the mystics, like Plotinus, who affirmed the strict
eternity of the soul, and the Stoics, like Poseidonius, who
believed that the soul, having had a beginning, must have an end,
although it might endure for a long period after leaving the body,
there were among the Greeks and Romans two other classes of
believers in a future life, namely, the ignorant body of the
people, who credited, more or less fully, the common fables
concerning Hades; and an educated body of select minds, who, while
casting off the popular superstitions, yet clung tenaciously to
the great fact of immortality in some form or other, without
attempting to define the precise mode of it.
There was among the illiterate populace, both Greek and Roman,
even from the age of Eumolpus to that of Augustus, a good deal of
firm faith in a future life, according to the gross scheme and
particulars preserved to us still in the classic mythology. A
thousand current allusions and statements in the general
literature of those times prove the actual existence of a common
and literal belief in Hades with all its accompaniments. This was
far from being, in the average apprehension, a mere myth. Plato
says, "Many, of their own accord, have wished to descend into
Hades, induced by the hope of there seeing and being with those
they have loved."39 He also says, "When a man is about to die, the
stories of future punishment which he had formerly ridiculed
trouble him with fears of their truth."40 And that frightful
accounts of hell really swayed and terrified the people, even so
late as the time of the Roman republic, appears from the earnest
and elaborate arguments employed by various writers to refute
them.
The same thing is shown by the religious ritual enacted at
funerals and festivals, the forms of public and private worship
observed till after the conversion of Constantine. The cake of
rice and honey borne in the dead hand for Cerberus, the periodical
offerings to the ghosts of the departed, as at the festivals
called Feralia and Parentalia,41 the pictures of the scenery of
the under world, hung in the temples, of which there was a famous
one by Polygnotus,42 all imply a literal crediting of the vulgar
doctrine. Altars were set up on the spots where Tiberius and Caius
Gracchus were murdered, and services were there performed in honor
of their manes. Festus, an old Roman lexicographer who lived in
the second or third century, tells us there was in the Comitium a
stone covered pit which was supposed to be the
36 Christoph Meiners, Vermischte Philosophische Schriften.
Commentarius quo Stoicorum Sententia; de Animorum post mortem
Statu satis illustrantur.
37 Epist. 102.
38 Troades, 1. 397.
39 Phado, 34.
40 Republic, lib. i. cap. 5.
41 Ovid, Fasti, lib. ii. II. 530-580.
42 Pausanias, lib. x. cap. 28.
mouth of Orcus, and was opened three days in the year for souls to
rise out into the upper world.43 Apuleius describes, in his
treatise on "the god of Socrates," the Roman conceptions of the
departed spirits of men. They called all disembodied human souls
"lemures." Those of good men were "lares," those of bad men
"larva." And when it was uncertain whether the specified soul was
a lar or a larva, it was named "manes." The lares were mild
household gods to their posterity. The larva were wandering,
frightful shapes, harmless to the pious, but destructive to the
reprobate.44
The belief in necromancy is well known to have prevailed
extensively among the Greeks and Romans. Aristophanes represents
the coward, Pisander, going to a necromancer and asking to "see
his own soul, which had long departed, leaving him a man with
breath alone."45 In Latin literature no popular terror is more
frequently alluded to or exemplified than the dread of seeing
ghosts. Every one will recall the story of the phantom that
appeared in the tent of Brutus before the battle of Philippi. It
pervades the "Haunted House" of Plautus. Callimachus wrote the
following couplet as an epitaph on the celebrated misanthrope:
"Timon, hat'st thou the world or Hades worse? Speak clear! Hades,
O fool, because there are more of us here!" 46
Pythagoras is said once to have explained an earthquake as being
caused by a synod of ghosts assembled under ground! It is one of
the best of the numerous jokes attributed to the great Samian; a
good nut for the spirit rappers to crack. There is an epigram by
Diogenes Laertius, on one Lycon, who died of the gout:
"He who before could not so much as walk alone, The whole long
road to Hades travell'd in one night!"
Philostratus declares that the shade of Apollonius appeared to a
skeptical disciple of his and said, "The soul is immortal."47 It
is unquestionable that the superstitious fables about the under
world and ghosts had a powerful hold, for a very long period, upon
the Greek and Roman imagination, and were widely accepted as
facts.
At the same time, there were many persons of more advanced culture
to whom such coarse and fanciful representations had become
incredible, but who still held loyally to the simple idea of the
survival of the soul. They cherished a strong expectation of
another life, although they rejected the revolting form and
drapery in which the doctrine was usually set forth. Xenophon puts
the following speech into the mouth of the expiring Cyrus: "I was
never able, my children, to persuade myself that the soul, as long
as it was in a mortal body, lived, but when it was removed from
this, that it died; neither could I believe that the soul ceased
to think when separated from the unthinking and senseless body;
but it seemed to me most probable that when pure and free from any
union with the body, then it became most
43 De Significatione Verborum, verbum "Manalis."
44 Lessing, Wie die Alten den Tod gebildet.
45 Ayes, I. 1485.
46 Epigram IV.
47 Vita Apollonii, lib. viii. cap. 31.
wise."48 Every one has read of the young man whose faith and
curiosity were so excited by Plato's writings that he committed
suicide to test the fact of futurity. Callimachus tells the story
neatly:
"Cleombrotus, the Ambracian, having said, 'Farewell, O sun!'
leap'd from a lofty wall into the world Of ghosts. No deadly ill
had chanced to him at all; But he had read in Plato's book upon
the soul." 49
The falling of Cato on his sword at Utica, after carefully
perusing the Phado, is equally familiar.
In the case of Cicero, too, notwithstanding his fluctuations of
feeling and the obvious contradictions of sentiment in some of his
letters and his more deliberate essays, it is, upon the whole,
plain enough that, while he always regarded the vulgar notions as
puerile falsehoods, the hope of a glorious life to come was
powerful in him. This may be stated as the result of a patient
investigation and balancing of all that he says on the subject,
and of the circumstances under which he says it. To cite and
criticize the passages here would occupy too much space to too
little profit.
At the siege of Jerusalem, Titus made a speech to his soldiers, in
the course of it saying to them, "Those souls which are severed
from their fleshly bodies by the sword in battle, are received by
the pure ether and joined to that company which are placed among
the stars."50 The beautiful story of Cupid and Psyche, that
loveliest of all the myths concerning the immortality of the soul,
was a creation by no means foreign to the prevalent ideas and
feelings of the time when it was written. The "Dissertations" of
Maximus Tyrius abound with sentences like the following. "This
very thing which the multitude call death is the birth of a new
life, and the beginning of immortality."51 "When Pherecydes lay
sick, conscious of spiritual energy, he cared not for bodily
disease, his soul standing erect and looking for release from its
cumbersome vestment. So a man in chains, seeing the walls of his
prison crumbling, waits for deliverance, that from the darkness in
which he has been buried he may soar to the ethereal regions and
be filled with glorious light."52
The conception of man as a member of the cosmic family of gods and
genii was known to all the classic philosophers, and was cherished
by the larger portion of them. Pindar affirms one origin for gods
and men. Plato makes wise souls accompany the gods in their
excursions about the sky. Cicero argues that heaven, and not
Hades, is the destination of the soul at death, because the soul,
being lighter than the earthly elements surrounding it here, would
rise aloft through the natural force of gravitation.53 Plutarch
says, "Demons are the spies and scouts of the gods, wandering and
circuiting around on their commands." Disembodied souls
48 Cyropadia, lib. viii. cap. 7.
49 Epigram XXIV.
50 Josephus, De Bell. lib. vi. cap. 1.
51 Diss. XXV.
52 Diss. XLI.
53 Tusc. Quest. lib i. cap. 17.
and demons were the same. The prevalence of such ideas as these
produced in the Greek and Roman imagination a profound sense of
invisible beings, a sense which was further intensified by the
popular personifications of all natural forces, as in fountains
and trees, full of lapsing naiads and rustling dryads. An
illustrative fact is furnished by an effect of the tradition that
Thetis, snatching the body of Achilles from the funeral pile,
conveyed him to Leuke, an island in the Black Sea. The mariners
sailing by often fancied they saw his mighty shade flitting along
the shore in the dusk of evening.54 But a passage in Hesiod yields
a more adequate illustration: "When the mortal remains of those
who flourished during the golden age were hidden beneath the
earth, their souls became beneficent demons, still hovering over
the world they once inhabited, and still watching, clothed in thin
air and gliding rapidly through every region of the earth, as
guardians over the affairs of men."55
But there were always some who denied the common doctrine of a
future life and scoffed at its physical features. Through the
absurd extravagances of poets and augurs, and through the growth
of critical thought, this unbelief went on increasing from the
days of Anaxagoras, when it was death to call the sun a ball of
fire, to the days of Catiline, when Julius Casar could be chosen
Pontifex Maximus, almost before the Senate had ceased to
reverberate his voice openly asserting that death was the utter
end of man. Plutarch dilates upon the wide skepticism of the
Greeks as to the infernal world, at the close of his essay on the
maxim, "Live concealed." The portentous growth of irreverent
unbelief, the immense change of feeling from awe to ribaldry, is
made obvious by a glance from the known gravity of Hesiod's
"Descent of Theseus and Pirithous into Hades," to Lucian's
"Kataplous," which represents the cobbler Mycillus leaping from
the banks of the Styx, swimming after Charon's boat, climbing into
it upon the shoulders of the tyrant Megapenthes and tormenting him
the whole way. Pliny, in his Natural History, affirms that death
is an everlasting sleep.56 The whole great sect of the Epicureans
united in supporting that belief by the combined force of ridicule
and argument. Their views are the most fully and ably defended by
the consummate Lucretius, in his masterly poem on the "Nature of
Things." Horace,57 Juvenal,58 Persius,59 concur in scouting at the
tales which once, when recited on the stage, had made vast
audiences perceptibly tremble.60 And Cicero asks, "What old woman
is so insane as to fear these things?"61
There were two classes of persons who sought differently to free
mankind from the terrors which had invested the whole prospect of
death and another world. The first were the materialists, who
endeavored to prove that death was to man the absolute end of
every thing. Secondly, there were the later Platonists, who
maintained that this world is the only Hades, that heaven is our
home, that all death is ascent to better life. "To remain on high
with the gods is life; to descend into this world is death, a
descent into Orcus," they said. The following couplet, of an
unknown date, is translated from the Greek Anthology:
"Diogenes, whose tub stood by the road, Now, being dead, has the
stars for his abode."
54 Muller, Greek Literature, ch. vi.
55 Works and Days, lib. i. II. 120-125.
56 Lib. ii. cap. 7.
57 Lib. i. epist. 16.
58 Sat. II.
59 Sat. II.
60 Tusc. Quest. lib. i. cap. 16.
61 Ibid. cap. 21.
Macrobius writes, in his commentary on the "Dream of Scipio,"
"Here, on earth, is the cavern of Dis, the infernal region. The
river of oblivion is the wandering of the mind forgetting the
majesty of its former life and thinking a residence in the body
the only life. Phlegethon is the fires of wrath and desire.
Acheron is retributive sadness. Cocytus is wailing tears. Styx is
the whirlpool of hatreds. The vulture eternally tearing the liver
is the torment of an evil conscience."62
To the ancient Greek in general, death was a sad doom. When he
lost a friend, he sighed a melancholy farewell after him to the
faded shore of ghosts. Summoned himself, he departed with a
lingering look at the sun, and a tearful adieu to the bright day
and the green earth. To the Roman, death was a grim reality. To
meet it himself he girded up his loins with artificial firmness.
But at its ravages among his friends he wailed in anguished
abandonment. To his dying vision there was indeed a future; but
shapes of distrust and shadow stood upon its disconsolate borders;
and, when the prospect had no horror, he still shrank from its
poppied gloom.
62 Lib. i. cap. 9, 10.