AFTER LIFE IN ROMAN PAGANISM
YALE UNIVERSITY
MRS. HEPSA ELY SILLIMAN
MEMORIAL LECTURES
SILLIMAN MEMORIAL LECTURES
PUBLISHED BY YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS
ELECTRICITY AND MATTER. _By_ JOSEPH JOHN THOMSON, D.SC., LL.D., PH.D.,
F.R.S., _Fellow of Trinity College and Cavendish Professor of
Experimental Physics, Cambridge University_. (_Fourth printing._)
THE INTEGRATIVE ACTION OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. _By_ CHARLES S.
SHERRINGTON, D.SC., M.D., HON. LL.D. TOR., F.R.S., _Holt Professor
of Physiology, University of Liverpool_. (_Sixth printing._)
RADIOACTIVE TRANSFORMATIONS. _By_ ERNEST RUTHERFORD, D.SC., LL.D.,
F.R.S., _Macdonald Professor of Physics, McGill University_.
(_Second printing._)
EXPERIMENTAL AND THEORETICAL APPLICATIONS OF THERMODYNAMICS TO
CHEMISTRY. _By_ DR. WALTER NERNST, _Professor and Director of the
Institute of Physical Chemistry in the University of Berlin_.
PROBLEMS OF GENETICS. _By_ WILLIAM BATESON, M.A., F.R.S., _Director of
the John Innes Horticultural Institution, Merton Park, Surrey,
England_. (_Second printing._)
STELLAR MOTIONS. With Special Reference to Motions Determined by Means
of the Spectrograph. _By_ WILLIAM WALLACE CAMPBELL, SC.D., LL.D.,
_Director of the Lick Observatory, University of California_.
(_Second printing._)
THEORIES OF SOLUTIONS. _By_ SVANTE ARRHENIUS, PH.D., SC.D., M.D.,
_Director of the Physico-Chemical Department of the Nobel Institute,
Stockholm, Sweden_. (_Third printing._)
IRRITABILITY. A Physiological Analysis of the General Effect of
Stimuli in Living Substances. _By_ MAX VERWORN, M.D., PH.D.,
_Professor at Bonn Physiological Institute_. (_Second printing._)
PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN GEOLOGY. _By_ WILLIAM NORTH RICE, FRANK D. ADAMS,
ARTHUR P. COLEMAN, CHARLES D. WALCOTT, WALDEMAR LINDGREN, FREDERICK
LESLIE RANSOME, AND WILLIAM D. MATTHEW. (_Second printing._)
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(_Second printing._)
ORGANISM AND ENVIRONMENT AS ILLUSTRATED BY THE PHYSIOLOGY OF
BREATHING. _By_ JOHN SCOTT HALDANE, M.D., LL.D., F.R.S., _Fellow of
New College, Oxford University_. (_Second printing._)
A CENTURY OF SCIENCE IN AMERICA. With Special Reference to the
American Journal of Science 1818–1918. _By_ EDWARD SALISBURY DANA,
CHARLES SCHUCHERT, HERBERT E. GREGORY, JOSEPH BARRELL, GEORGE OTIS
SMITH, RICHARD SWANN LULL, LOUIS V. PIRSSON, WILLIAM E. FORD, R. B.
SOSMAN, HORACE L. WELLS, HARRY W. FOOTE, LEIGH PAGE, WESLEY R. COE,
AND GEORGE L. GOODALE.
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F.R.S. (_Second printing._)
RESPIRATION. _By_ J. S. HALDANE, M.D., LL.D., F.R.S., _Fellow of New
College, Oxford, Honorary Professor, Birmingham University_.
AFTER LIFE IN ROMAN PAGANISM. _By_ FRANZ CUMONT.
AFTER LIFE IN ROMAN PAGANISM
LECTURES DELIVERED AT YALE UNIVERSITY ON THE SILLIMAN FOUNDATION
BY
FRANZ CUMONT
[Illustration]
NEW HAVEN
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS
LONDON · HUMPHREY MILFORD · OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
MDCCCCXXII
COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS
TO MY FRIEND
GEORGE LINCOLN HENDRICKSON
1888–1922
THE SILLIMAN FOUNDATION
In the year 1883 a legacy of eighty thousand dollars was left to the
President and Fellows of Yale College in the city of New Haven, to be
held in trust, as a gift from her children, in memory of their beloved
and honored mother, Mrs. Hepsa Ely Silliman.
On this foundation Yale College was requested and directed to establish
an annual course of lectures designed to illustrate the presence and
providence, the wisdom and goodness of God, as manifested in the natural
and moral world. These were to be designated as the Mrs. Hepsa Ely
Silliman Memorial Lectures. It was the belief of the testator that any
orderly presentation of the facts of nature or history contributed to
the end of this foundation more effectively than any attempt to
emphasize the elements of doctrine or of creed; and he therefore
provided that lectures on dogmatic or polemical theology should be
excluded from the scope of this foundation, and that the subjects should
be selected, rather, from the domains of natural science and history,
giving special prominence to astronomy, chemistry, geology, and anatomy.
It was further directed that each annual course should be made the basis
of a volume to form part of a series constituting a memorial to Mrs.
Silliman. The memorial fund came into the possession of the Corporation
of Yale University in the year 1901; and the present volume constitutes
the sixteenth of the series of memorial lectures.
PREFACE
At the invitation of the President of Yale University and of Professor
Russell H. Chittenden, chairman of the committee in charge of the
Silliman Foundation, the lectures which are here presented to a wider
public were delivered in New Haven during the month of March of the year
1921. It was the wish of the committee that I should speak upon some
subject from the history of religion. I chose therefore as my theme a
matter which had occupied my attention for many years, viz., the ideas
current in Roman paganism concerning the lot of the soul after death.
The argument has been treated more than once by distinguished scholars
and notably—to mention only an English book—by Mrs. Arthur Strong in her
recent work “Apotheosis and After Life,” a study characterised by
penetrating interpretation, especially of archaeological monuments. But
we do not yet possess for the Roman imperial epoch a counterpart to
Rohde’s classical volume, “Psyche,” for the earlier Greek period, that
is, a work in which the whole evolution of Roman belief and speculation
regarding a future life is set forth. These lectures cannot claim to
fill this gap. They may however be looked upon as a sketch of the
desired investigation, in which, though without the detailed citation of
supporting evidence, an attempt at least has been made to trace the
broad outlines of the subject in all its magnitude.
The lectures are printed in the form in which they were delivered. The
necessity of making each one intelligible to an audience which was not
always the same, has made inevitable some repetitions. Cross references
have been added, where the same topics are treated in different
connections. However, in a book intended primarily for the general
reader, the scholarly apparatus has been reduced to a minimum and as a
rule indicates only the source of passages quoted in the text.
My acknowledgment is due to Miss Helen Douglas Irvine, who with skill
and intelligent understanding of the subject translated into English the
French text of these lectures. I wish also to express my gratitude to my
friends, Professor George Lincoln Hendrickson, who took upon himself the
tedious task of reading the manuscript and the proofs of this book and
to whom I am indebted for many valuable suggestions both in matter and
in form, and Professor Grant Showerman, who obligingly consented to
revise the last chapters before they were printed.
Rome, September, 1922.
CONTENTS
PREFACE. P. xi.
HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION. General view of the subject, 1—The ancient
beliefs: after life in the tomb, 3—in the nether world,
4—Philosophical criticism, 5—Academic and Peripatetic schools,
6—Epicureans, 7—Stoics, 12—Scepticism at the end of the Republic,
16—Earthly immortality, 19—Rebirth of Pythagorism, 20—Its teaching,
24—Posidonius, 27—Cicero, 31—Diffusion of the mysteries, 33—Hermetic
writings and Chaldean oracles, 38—Plutarch, 39—The second and third
centuries, 39—Neo-Platonism, 40—Conclusion, 43.
I. AFTER LIFE IN THE TOMB. Survival of primitive beliefs, 44—After
life of the body, 45—The tomb “eternal house,” 48—Food for the dead,
50—Sacrifices, 51—Funeral meals, 52—Gardens, 56—Connection of the
dead with the living, 57—The aerial souls, 59—Beneficent, 60—or
Malevolent, 63—Souls of the unburied, 64—Become ghosts, 67.
II. THE NETHER WORLD. Belief in the nether world, 70—After life
prolongation of earthly life, 72—Greek doctrines introduced into
Italy, 73—Philosophical criticism, 76—Hades transported to this
life, 78—Distinction of “soul” and shade, 79—Hades is the lower
hemisphere, 79—Hades in the air, 81—Scepticism, 83—Persistence of
old tradition in literature and art, 84—Ancient beliefs maintained
in the people, 86—Neo-Platonists, 87—Persian dualism, 89.
III. CELESTIAL IMMORTALITY. Widespread beliefs that souls rise to the
stars, 91—Unknown in ancient Greece, 94—Pythagorism, 95—Lunar
immortality, 96—Solar immortality, 100—Combination of both,
102—Stellar immortality, 103—Combined with the other doctrines:
three stages, 106—Passage through the planetary spheres, 107—Souls
rise above the stars, 108.
IV. THE WINNING OF IMMORTALITY. Ancient conception of immortality,
110—Eminent men gods on earth, 111—Immortality of the few,
114—Mysteries claim to procure “deification,” 116—Lustrations,
118—Unctions, 119—Ritual banquets, 120—The _gnosis_,
121—Identification with a particular god, 122—Illumination by the
astral divinities, 123—Philosophy also leads to union with God, 124.
V. UNTIMELY DEATH. Children not admitted to the Elysian Fields,
128—Those who die violent deaths, 129—Influence of astrology,
131—Pythagorism, 132—Magic, 134—Philosophical reaction, 136—Children
initiated, 138—Their souls rise to heaven, 139—Different categories
of _biothanati_, 141—Soldiers slain in battle, 142—Suicides,
143—Executed criminals, 145—Persistence of ancient beliefs, 146.
VI. THE JOURNEY TO THE BEYOND. Journey to the nether world, 148—The
Pythagorean Y, 150—The two roads, 152—How the dead reach heaven,
153—On foot, by means of a ladder, 153—In a boat, 154—On horseback,
155—In a chariot, 156—As a bird, 157—Carried by an eagle, 158—Solar
attraction, 160—Physical theory, 161—The air peopled with demons,
162—The gates of the planetary spheres, 162—Guide of the souls,
163—Physical character of the dead, 164—The shade and the soul,
167—Distinction of soul and reason, 168—Neo-Platonic “vehicle,” 169.
VII. THE SUFFERINGS OF HELL AND METEMPSYCHOSIS. Origin in Homer,
170—Orphic theology, 171—Resemblance to penal law, 172—Apocryphal
gospel of Peter, 173—Oriental influence, 174—Fire of hell,
175—Metempsychosis, its animistic basis, 177—Origin in Greece,
177—Souls passing continuously through different kinds of beings,
179—Reincarnation a punishment, 180—“Palingenesis” or uncontinuous
reincarnation, 182—Transmigration from man to man, 183—Purification
of the soul in the air, 184—by water and fire, 185—Purgatory in the
atmosphere, 186—The purified spirit remains in heaven, 187.
VIII. THE FELICITY OF THE BLESSED. Rest in the tomb, 190—in the nether
world, 193—in the light of heaven, 193—Persistence of these ideas
among the Christians, 196—Repast of the dead, 199—Repast in the
nether world, 201—The funeral banquet and the sacred meal of the
mysteries, 203—Banquet in heaven, 205—Persistence in Christianity,
206—The sight of the god, 207—In the astral cults, 208—Communion of
man with the stars, 209—Immortality a contemplation of the astral
gods, 210—Astral mysticism, 211—Ecstasy of the Neo-Platonists,
212—Last conception of eternal bliss, 213.
INDEX. P. 215.
HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION
The idea of death has perhaps never been more present to humanity than
during the years through which we have just passed. It has been the
daily companion of millions of men engaged in a murderous conflict; it
has haunted the even larger number who have trembled for the lives of
their nearest and dearest; it is still constantly in the thoughts of the
many who nurse regret for those they loved. And doubtless also, the
faith or the hope has never more imposed itself, even on the
unbelieving, that these countless multitudes, filled with moral force
and generous passion, who have entered eternity, have not wholly
perished, that the ardour which animated them was not extinguished when
their limbs grew cold, that the spirit which impelled them to
self-sacrifice was not dissipated with the atoms which formed their
bodies.
These feelings were known to the ancients also, who gave to this very
conviction the form suggested by their religion. Pericles[1] in his
funeral eulogy of the warriors who fell at the siege of Samos declared
that they who die for their country become like the immortal gods, and
that, invisible like them, they still scatter their benefits on us. The
ideas on immortality held in antiquity are often thus at once far from
and near to our own—_near_ because they correspond to aspirations which
are not antique or modern, but human, _far_ because the Olympians now
have fallen into the deep gulf where lie dethroned deities. These ideas
become more and more like the conceptions familiar to us as gradually
their time grows later, and those generally admitted at the end of
paganism are analogous to the doctrines accepted throughout the Middle
Ages.
I flatter myself, therefore, that when I speak to you of the beliefs in
a future life held in Roman times I have chosen a subject which is not
very remote from us nor such as has no relation to our present thought
or is capable of interesting only the learned.
We can here trace only the outlines of this vast subject. I am aware
that it is always imprudent to hazard moral generalisations: they are
always wrong somewhere. Above all, it is perilous to attempt to
determine with a few words the infinite variety of individual creeds,
for nothing escapes historical observation more easily than the intimate
convictions of men, which they often hide even from those near them. In
periods of scepticism pious souls cling to old beliefs; the conservative
crowd remains faithful to ancestral traditions. When religion is
resuming its empire, rationalistic minds resist the contagion of faith.
It is especially difficult to ascertain up to what point ideas adopted
by intellectual circles succeeded in penetrating the deep masses of the
people. The epitaphs which have been preserved give us too scanty and
too sparse evidence in this particular. Besides, in paganism a dogma
does not necessarily exclude its opposite dogma: the two sometimes
persist side by side in one mind as different possibilities, each of
which is authorised by a respectable tradition. You will therefore make
the necessary reservations to such of my statements as are too absolute.
I shall be able to point out here only the great spiritual currents
which successively brought to Rome new ideas as to the Beyond, and to
sketch the evolution undergone by the doctrines as to the lot and the
abode of souls. You will not expect me to be precise as to the number of
the partisans of each of these doctrines in the various periods.
At least we can distinguish the principal phases of the religious
movement which caused imperial society to pass from incredulity to
certain forms of belief in immortality, forms at first somewhat crude
but afterwards loftier, and we can see where this movement led. The
change was a capital one and transformed for the ancients the whole
conception of life. The axis about which morality revolved had to be
shifted when ethics no longer sought, as in earlier Greek philosophy, to
realise the sovereign good on this earth but looked for it after death.
Thenceforth the activity of man aimed less at tangible realities,
ensuring well-being to the family or the city or the state, and more at
attaining to the fulfilment of ideal hopes in a supernatural world. Our
sojourn here below was conceived as a preparation for another existence,
as a transitory trial which was to result in infinite felicity or
suffering. Thus the table of ethical values was turned upside down.
“All our actions and all our thoughts,” says Pascal, “must follow so
different a course if there are eternal possessions for which we may
hope than if there are not, that it is impossible to take any directed
and well-judged step except by regulating it in view of this point which
ought to be our ultimate goal.”[2]
We will attempt first to sketch in a general introduction the historical
transformation which belief in the future life underwent between the
Republican period and the fall of paganism. Then, in three lectures, we
will examine more closely the various conceptions of the abode of the
dead held under the Roman Empire, study in three others the conditions
or the means which enable men to attain to immortality and in the last
two set forth the lot of souls in the Beyond.
* * * * *
The cinerary vases of the prehistoric period are often modelled in the
shape of huts: throughout, funeral sculpture follows the tradition that
the tomb should reproduce the dwelling, and until the end of antiquity
it was designated, in the West as in the East, as the “eternal house” of
him who rested in it.
Thus a conception of the tomb which goes back to the remotest ages and
persists through the centuries regards it as “the last dwelling” of
those who have left us; and this expression has not yet gone out of use.
It was believed that a dead man continued to live, in the narrow space
granted him, a life which was groping, obscure, precarious, yet like
that he led on earth. Subject to the same needs, obliged to eat and to
drink, he expected those who had been nearest to him to appease his
hunger and thirst. The utensils he had used, the things he had cared
for, were often deposited beside him so that he might pursue the
occupations and enjoy the amusements which he had forsaken in the world.
If he were satisfied he would stay quietly in the furnished house
provided for him and would not seek to avenge himself on those whose
neglect had caused him suffering. Funeral rites were originally inspired
rather by fear than by love. They were precautions taken against the
spirit of the dead rather than pious care bestowed in their interest.[3]
For the dead were powerful; their action was still felt; they were not
immured in the tomb or confined beneath the ground. Men saw them
reappear in dreams, wearing their former aspect. They were descried
during shadowy vigils; their voices were heard and their movements
noted. Imagination conceived them such as they had once been;
recollection of them filled the memory and to think of such apparitions
as idle or unreal seemed impossible. The dead subsisted, then, as
nebulous, impalpable beings, perceived by the senses only exceptionally.
Here the belief that their remains had not quite lost all feeling
mingled with the equally primitive and universal belief that the soul is
a breath, exhaled with the last sigh. The vaporous shade, sometimes a
dangerous but sometimes a succouring power, wandered by night in the
atmosphere and haunted the places which the living man had been used to
frequent. Except for some sceptical reasoners, all antiquity admitted
the reality of these phantoms. Century-old beliefs, maintained by
traditional rites, thus persisted, more or less definitely, in the
popular mind, even after new forms of the future life were imagined.
Many vestiges of these beliefs have survived until today.
The first transformation undergone by the primitive conception was to
entertain the opinion that the dead who are deposited in the ground
gather together in a great cavity inside the bowels of the earth.[4]
This belief in the nether world is found among most of the peoples of
the Mediterranean basin: the _Sheol_ of the Hebrews differs little from
the Homeric _Hades_ and the Italic _Inferi_.
It has been conjectured that the substitution of incineration for
inhumation contributed to spreading this new manner of conceiving life
beyond the tomb: the shade could not remain attached to a handful of
ashes enclosed in a puny urn. It went, then, to join its fellows who had
gone down into the dark dwelling where reigned the gods of a
subterranean kingdom. But as ghosts could leave their graves in order to
trouble or to help men, so the swarms of the infernal spirits rose to
the upper world through the natural openings of the earth, or through
ditches dug for the purpose of maintaining communication with them and
conciliating them with offerings.
The Romans do not seem to have imagined survival in the infernal regions
very differently from the survival of the vague monotonous shades in
their tombs. Their _Manes_ or _Lemures_ had no marked personality or
clearly characterised individual features. The _Inferi_ were not, as in
Greece, a stage for the enactment of a tragic drama; their inhabitants
had no original life, and in the lot dealt to them no idea of
retribution can be discerned. In this matter it was the Hellenes who
imposed their conceptions of Hades on the Italic peoples and gave them
those half mythical and half theological beliefs which Orphism had
introduced in their own religion. Hellenic influence was felt directly
through the colonies of Greater Greece, indirectly through the
Etruscans, whose funeral sculpture shows us that they had adopted all
the familiar figures of the Greek Hades—Charon, Cerberus, the Furies,
Hermes Psychopompos and the others.[5]
From the time when Latin literature had its beginnings and the Latin
theatre was born, we find writers taking pleasure in reproducing the
Hellenic fables of Tartarus and the Elysian Fields; and Plautus[6] can
already make one of his characters say that he has seen “many paintings
representing the pains of Acheron.” This infernal mythology became an
inexhaustible theme which gave matter to poetry and art until the end of
antiquity and beyond it. We shall see, in later lectures, how the
religious traditions of the Greeks were subjected to various
transformations and interpretations.
* * * * *
But Greece did not introduce poetic beliefs only into Rome: she also
caused her philosophy to be adopted there from the second century
onwards, and this philosophy tended to be destructive both of those
beliefs and of the old native faith in the Manes and in the Orcus.
Polybius,[7] when speaking appreciatively of the religion of the Romans,
praises them for having inculcated in the people a faith in numerous
superstitious practices and tragic fictions. He considers this to be an
excellent way of keeping them to their duty by the fear of infernal
punishment. Hence we gather that if the historian thought it well for
the people to believe in these inventions, then, in his opinion,
enlightened persons, like his friends the Scipios, could see in them
nothing but the stratagems of a prudent policy. But the scepticism of a
narrow circle of aristocrats could not be confined to it for long when
Greek ideas were more widely propagated.
Greek philosophy made an early attack on the ideas held as to a future
life. Even Democritus, the forerunner of Epicurus, spoke of “some people
who ignore the dissolution of our mortal nature and, aware of the
perversity of their life, pass their time in unrest and in fear and
forge for themselves deceitful fables as to the time when follows their
end.”[8] It is true that in the fourth century Plato’s idealism had
supplied, if not a strict proof of immortality, yet reasons for it
sufficient to procure its acceptance by such as desired to be convinced.
But in the Alexandrian age, which was the surpassingly scientific period
of Greek thought, there was a tendency to remove all metaphysical and
mythical conceptions of the soul’s destiny from the field of
contemplation. This was the period in which the Academy, Plato’s own
school, unfaithful to its founder’s doctrines, was led by men who, like
Carneades, raised scepticism to a system and stated that man can reach
no certainty. We know that when Carneades was sent to Rome as ambassador
in 156 B. C. he made a great impression by maintaining that justice is a
matter of convention, and that he was consequently banished by the
senate as a danger to the state. But we need only read Cicero’s works to
learn what a lasting influence his powerfully destructive dialectics
had.
The dogmatism of other sects was at this time hardly at all more
favourable to the traditional beliefs in another life.
Aristotle had thought that human reason alone persisted, and that the
emotional and nutritive soul was destroyed with the body, but he left no
personality to this pure intelligence, deprived of all sensibility. He
definitely denied that the “blessed” could be happy. With him begins a
long period during which Greek philosophy nearly ceased to speculate on
destiny beyond the grave. It was repugnant to Peripatetic philosophy to
concern itself with the existence of a soul which could be neither
conceived nor defined by reason. Some of Aristotle’s immediate
disciples, like Aristoxenus and Dicaearchus, or Straton of Lampsacus,
the pupil of Theophrastus, agreed in denying immortality altogether; and
later, in the time of the Severi, Alexander of Aphrodisias, the great
commentator of The Stagirite, undertook to prove that the entire soul,
that is the higher and the lower soul, had need of the body in order to
be active and perished with it, and that such was the veritable thought
of the master. But profoundly as Peripateticism affected Greek thought,
directly and indirectly, in practically discarding the future life, this
was not the philosophy which dominated minds towards the end of the
Roman Republic. Other schools then had a much wider influence and made
this influence felt much more deeply on eschatological beliefs. These
schools were Epicureanism and Stoicism.
Epicurus took up again the doctrine of Democritus, and taught that the
soul, which was composed of atoms, was disintegrated at the moment of
death, when it was no longer held together by its fleshly wrapping, and
that its transitory unity was then destroyed for ever. The vital breath,
after being expelled, was, he said, buffeted by the winds and dissolved
in the air like mist or smoke, even before the body was decomposed. This
was so ancient a conception that Homer had made use of a like
comparison, and the idea that the violence of the wind can act on souls
as a destructive force was familiar to Athenian children in Plato’s
time.[9] But if the soul thus resolves itself, after death, into its
elementary principles, how can phantoms come to frighten us in the
watches of the night or beloved beings visit us in our dreams? These
simulacra (εἴδωλα) are for Epicurus no more than emanations of particles
of an extreme tenuity, constantly issuing from bodies and keeping for
some time their form and appearance. They act on our senses as do colour
and scent and awake in us the image of a vanished being.
Thus we are vowed to annihilation, but this lot is not one to be
dreaded. Death, which is held to be the most horrible of ills, is in
reality nothing of the sort, since the destruction of our organism
abolishes all its sensibility. The time when we no longer exist is no
more painful for us than that when we had not yet our being. As Plato
deduced the persistence of the soul after death from its supposed
previous existence, so Epicurus drew an opposite conclusion from our
ignorance of our earlier life; and, according to him, the conviction
that we perish wholly can alone ensure our tranquillity of spirit by
delivering us from the fear of eternal torment.
There is no one of the master’s doctrines on which his disciples insist
with more complacent assurance. They praise him for having freed men
from the terrors of the Beyond; they thank him for having taught them
not to fear death; his philosophy appears to them as a liberator of
souls. Lucretius in his third book, of which eighteenth-century
philosophers delighted to celebrate the merits, claims, with a sort of
exaltation, to drive from men’s hearts “that dread of Acheron which
troubles human life to its inmost depths.”[10] The sage sees all the
cruel fictions, with which fable had peopled the kingdom of terrors,
scattered abroad, and, when he has rid himself of the dismay which
haunts the common man, which casts a mournful veil over things and
leaves no joy unmixed, he finds a blessed calm, the perfect quietude or
“_ataraxia_.”
This doctrine, which Lucretius preached with the enthusiasm of a
neophyte won to the true faith, had a profound reaction in Rome. Its
adepts in Cicero’s circle were numerous, including Cassius, the murderer
of Caesar. Sallust goes so far as to make Caesar himself affirm, in full
senate, that death, the rest from torment, dispels the ills which
afflict mankind, that beyond it there is neither joy nor sorrow.[11] Men
of science, in particular, were attracted by these theories. In a
celebrated passage Pliny the Naturalist, after categorically declaring
that neither the soul nor the body has any more sensation after death
than before the day of birth, ends with a vehement apostrophe: “Unhappy
one, what folly is thine who in death renewest life! Where will
creatures ever find rest if souls in heaven, if shades in the infernal
regions, still have feeling? Through this complacent credulity we lose
death, the greatest boon which belongs to our nature, and the sufferings
of our last hour are doubled by the fear of what will follow after. If
it be indeed sweet to live, for whom can it be so to have lived? How
much easier and more certain is the belief which each man can draw from
his own experience, when he pictures his future tranquillity on the
pattern of that which preceded his birth!”[12]
Even Seneca in one of his tragedies, an early work, makes the chorus of
Trojan women declaim a long profession of faith which is the purest
Epicureanism.[13]
The invasion of the Roman world by the Oriental mysteries and
superstitions in the second century caused the unbelievers to exalt
Epicurus yet higher. The satirist Lucian, using almost the same
expressions as Lucretius, proclaims the truly sacred and divine
character of him who alone knew the good with the true, and who
transmitted it to his disciples, to whom he gave moral liberty.[14]
Believers everywhere looked upon him as a terrible blasphemer. The
prophet Alexander of Abonotichos enjoined all who would obtain divine
graces to drive away with stones “atheists, Epicureans and Christians,”
and exclude them from his mysteries.[15] He ordered by an oracle that
the writings of him whom he called “the blind old man” should be burnt.
When mysticism and Platonism triumphed in the Roman world, Epicureanism
ceased to exist. It had disappeared in the middle of the fourth century,
yet Julian the Apostate thought it advisable to include the writings of
Epicurus among the books which were forbidden to the priests of his
revived paganism.[16]
Thus during several centuries this philosophy had won a multitude of
followers. The inscriptions bear eloquent witness to this fact. The most
remarkable of them is a long text which was set out on the wall of a
portico in the little town of Oenoanda in Lycia. A worthy citizen,
Diogenes by name, who seems to have lived under the Antonines, was a
convinced partisan of the doctrine of Epicurus; and feeling his end draw
near, he wished to engrave an exposition thereof on marble for the
present and future edification of his countrymen and of strangers. He
does not fail to evince his contempt for death, at which, he says, he
has learnt to mock. “I do not let myself be frightened by the Tityi and
the Tantali whom some represent in Hades; horror does not seize me when
I think of the putrefaction of my body ... when the links which bind our
organism are loosened, nothing further touches us.”[17] These are ideas
which we find reproduced everywhere, in various forms, for Epicureanism
did not only win convinced partisans in the most cultivated circles, but
also spread in the lowest strata of the population, as is proved by
epitaphs expressing unbelief in an after life. Some do not go beyond a
short profession of faith, “We are mortal; we are not immortal.”[18] One
maxim is repeated so often that it is sometimes expressed only by
initials, “I was not; I was; I am not; I do not care.”[19] So man goes
back to nothingness whence he went forth. It has been remarked that this
epigraphic formula was engraved especially on the tombs of slaves, who
had slight reason for attachment to life. Gladiators also adopted the
sentence: these wretched men, who were to prove their indifference to
death in the arena, were taught that it marked the destruction of
feeling and the term of their suffering.
The same thought is sometimes expressed less brutally, almost
touchingly. Thus a comedian, who has spouted many verses and tramped
many roads, voices in his epitaph the conviction that life is a loan,
like a part in a play: “My mouth no longer gives out any sound; the
noise of applause no longer reaches me; I paid my debt to nature and
have departed. All this is but dust.”[20] Another actor, who recited
Homer’s verses in the festivals, tells us that he “laughs at illusions
and slumbers softly,” returning to the Epicurean comparison of death
with an unconscious sleep which has no awakening.[21]
Some wordier unbelievers felt the need of enlarging on their
negations.[22] “There is no boat of Hades, no ferryman Charon, no Aeacus
as doorkeeper, no dog Cerberus. All we, whom death sends down to the
earth, become bones and ashes and no more.... Offer not perfumes and
garlands to my stele: it is but a stone; burn no fire: the expenditure
is vain. If thou have a gift, give it me while I live. If thou givest to
my ashes to drink, thou wilt make mud: and the dead will not drink....
When thou scatterest earth on my remains, say that I have again become
as I was when I was not.” This last thought occurs frequently. Thus on a
Roman tomb we read: “We are and we were nothing. See, reader, how
swiftly we mortals go back from nothingness to nothingness.”[23]
Sometimes these dead adopt a joking tone which is almost macabre. Thus a
freedman, merry to the grave, boasts of the amenities of his new state:
“What remains of man, my bones, rests sweetly here. I no longer have the
fear of sudden starvation; I am exempt from attacks of gout; my body is
no longer pledged for my rent; and I enjoy free and perpetual
hospitality.”[24]
Often a grosser Epicureanism recommends that we make profit of our
earthly passage since the fatal term deprives us for ever of the
pleasures which are the sovereign good. “Es bibe lude veni”—“Eat, drink,
play, come hither”—is advice which is several times repeated.[25] Not
uncommonly, variations occur, inspired by the famous epitaph which was
on the alleged tomb of Sardanapalus and is resumed in the admonition:
“Indulge in voluptuousness, for only this pleasure wilt thou carry away
with thee”; or as it is expressed in the Epistle to the Corinthians,
“Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.”[26] So we read on a stone
found near Beneventum: “What I have eaten and what I have drunk; that is
all that belongs to me.”[27] A well-known distich states that “Baths,
wine, and love impair our bodies, but baths, wine, and love make
life”;[28] and a veteran of the army had advice based on his own example
engraved on his tomb, “While I lived, I drank willingly; drink, ye who
live.”[29] The exhortation to enjoy a life soon to be interrupted by
death is a traditional theme which has lent itself to many developments
in ancient and modern poetry. It is the formula which resumes the wisdom
of the popular Epicureanism. Some silver goblets, found in Boscoreale
near Pompeii,[30] show us philosophers and poets among skeletons, and
inscriptions urging them to rejoice while they live, since no man is
certain of the morrow. Epicurus appears in person, his hand stretching
towards a cake on a table; and between his legs is a little pig lifting
his feet and snout to the cake to take his share of it. Above the cake
are the Greek words, ΤΟ ΤΕΛΟΣ ΗΔΟΝΗ, “The supreme end is pleasure.”
Horace, when he advises us to live from day to day without poisoning the
passing hour with hopes or fears for the future, speaks of himself,
jestingly, as a fat “hog of Epicurus’ herd.”[31] It was thus that the
vulgar interpreted the precepts of him who had in reality preached
moderation and renunciation as the means of reaching true happiness.
* * * * *
If Epicureanism chose its ground as the passionate adversary of
religious beliefs, the other great system which shared its dominance of
minds in Rome, Stoicism, sought, on the contrary, to reconcile these
beliefs with its theories. But the allegorical interpretations which
Stoicism suggested, led, indirectly, to nearly the same result as a
complete negation, for when it changed the meaning of the ancient myths
it really destroyed the traditions which it sought to preserve. This is
true in particular of its ideas as to the future life.
It will be remembered that man is for the Stoics a microcosm, who
reproduces in his person the constitution of the universe. The entire
mass of the world is conceived by them as animated by a divine Fire, a
first principle which evokes the succession of natural phenomena. An
uninterrupted chain of causes, ordered by this supreme reason,
necessarily determines the course of events and irresistibly governs the
existence of the great All. This cosmic life is conceived as formed of
an infinite series of exactly similar cycles: the four elements are
periodically reabsorbed into the purest of their number, which is the
Fire of intelligence, and then, after the general conflagration, are
once more dissociated.
In the same way our organism lives, moves and thinks because it is
animated by a detached particle of this fiery principle which penetrates
everything. As this principle reaches to the limits of the universe, so
our soul occupies the whole body in which it lodges. The pantheism of
the Porch conceives as material both God and the reason which rules us,
the reason which is, in the emphatic words of Epictetus,[32] “a fragment
of God.” It is defined as a hot breath (πνεῦμα πυρῶδες, _anima
inflammata_); it is like the purest part of the air which maintains life
by respiration, or the ardent ether which feeds the stars. This
individual soul maintains and preserves man, as the soul of the world,
by connecting its various parts, saves it from disintegration. But on
both sides this action is only temporary; souls cannot escape the fatal
lot imposed on the whole of which they are but a tiny portion. At the
end of each cosmic period the universal conflagration (ἐκπύρωσις) will
cause them to return to the divine home whence all of them came
forth.[33] But if the new cycle, making its new beginning, is to
reproduce exactly that which preceded it, a “palingenesis” will one day
give to the same souls, endowed with the same qualities, the same
existence in the same bodies formed of the same elements.
This is the maximum limit of the immortality which the materialistic
pantheism of the Stoic philosophy could concede. Nor did all the doctors
agree in granting it. The variations of the school on a point which
seems to us of capital importance are most remarkable. While Cleanthes
did indeed admit that all souls thus subsisted after their brief passage
on earth for thousands of years and until the final _ekpyrosis_, for
Chrysippus only the souls of the sages had part in this restricted
immortality. In order to win it they must temper their strength by
resisting the passions. The weak, who had let themselves be conquered in
the struggle of this life, fell in the Beyond also.[34] At the most they
obtained a short period of after life. The brevity or the absence of
this other existence was the chastisement of their weakness.
Thus, almost the same moral consequences and incitements to good could
be drawn from a conditional and diminished immortality, as from the
general eternity of pains and rewards which other thinkers taught. But
the Stoics were not unanimous in adopting these doctrines. We do not
clearly perceive how far they agreed in admitting that the soul,
deprived of corporeal organs, was endowed with feeling and, in
particular, kept an individual conscience connected with that possessed
on earth. It is certain that a definitely negative tendency showed
itself in Rome among the sectaries of Zeno. Panaetius, the friend of the
Scipios, and one of the writers who did most to win the Romans over to
the ideas of the Porch, here dissociated himself from his masters and
absolutely denied personal survival.[35] This attitude was subsequently
that of many Roman Stoics of those who represented the school’s
tradition most purely. The master of the poet Persius, Cornutus, of whom
a short work remains to us, declared that the soul died with the body,
immediately.[36] Similarly, at a later date, Epictetus and Marcus
Aurelius, although they sometimes seem to admit the possibility of
survival, certainly incline rather to believe that souls are
disintegrated and return to the elemental mass whence they were formed.
Even Seneca, who is more swayed by other tendencies and whose wavering
thought does not always remain consistent nor perspicuous, is not
convinced of the truth of immortality. It is no more to him than a
beautiful hope.
How is it that Stoicism thus hesitated at a point on which the whole
conception of human life seems to us to depend? It was that
eschatological theories had in reality only a secondary value in this
system, of which the essential part was not affected by their
variability. True Stoicism placed the realisation of its ideal in this
world. For it the aim of our existence here below was not preparation
for death but the conquest of perfect virtue, which freed him who had
attained to it from the passions and thus conferred on him independence
and felicity. Man could, of himself, reach a complete beatitude which
was not impaired by the limits placed to his duration. The sage, a
blissful being, was a god on earth: heaven could give him nothing more.
Therefore for these philosophers the answer to the question, “What
becomes of us after death?” did not depend on moral considerations as it
generally does for us. For them it rather followed on physical theories.
If these theories allow of different solutions of the problem of
immortality, they agree on one point—the impossibility that the soul, if
it is to last longer than we, should go down into the depths of the
earth; for the soul was, as we have said, conceived as an ardent breath;
that is to say, as formed of the two elements, air and fire, which have
the property of rising to the heights. Its very nature prevented its
descent: “it is impossible to conceive that it is borne downwards.”[37]
Thus all the vulgar notions as to Hades were in contradiction with Stoic
psychology, a point to which we will return in treating of the nether
world.[38] These philosophers do indeed speak of Hades but, faithful to
their habits, while they use traditional terms they give them a new
meaning. “The descent into Hades” is for them simply the departing from
life, the transference of the soul to new surroundings. Thus Epictetus,
who uses this expression (κάθοδος εἰς Ἄιδου), clearly states in another
passage, “There is no Hades, no Acheron, no Cocytus, no Pyriphlegethon,
but all is filled with gods and demons.”[39] These gods and demons were,
however, no more than personifications of the forces of nature.[40]
The true Stoic doctrine is, then, that souls, when they leave the
corpse, subsist in the atmosphere and especially in its highest part
which touches the circle of the moon.[41] But after a longer or less
interval of time they, like the flesh and the bones, are decomposed and
dissolve into the elements which formed them.
This thought, like Epicurean nihilism, often appears in epitaphs, and
shows how Stoic ideas had spread among the people. Thus on a tombstone
found in Moesia we read first the mournful statement that there is
neither love nor friendship among the dead and that the corpse lies like
a stone sunk into the ground. Then the dead man adds:[42] “I was once
composed of earth, water and airy breath (πνεῦμα), but I perished, and
here I rest, having rendered all to the All. Such is each man’s lot.
What of it? There, whence my body came, did it return, when it was
dissolved.” Sometimes there is more insistence on the notion that this
cosmic breath, in which ours is gathered up, is the godhead who fills
and rules the world. So in this epitaph: “The holy spirit which thou
didst bear has escaped from thy body. That body remains here and is like
the earth; the spirit pursues the revolving heavens; the spirit moves
all; the spirit is nought else than God.”[43] Elsewhere we find the
following brief formula, which sums up the same idea: “The ashes have my
body; the sacred air has borne away my soul.”[44] Very characteristic is
an inscription inspired by verses of a Greek poet, on the tomb of a
Roman woman: “Here I lie dead and I am ashes; these ashes are earth. If
the earth be a goddess, I too am a goddess and am not dead.”[45]
These verses express the same great thought in various forms: death is
disappearance into the depths of divine nature. It is not for the
preservation of an ephemeral personality that we must hope. Our soul, a
fleeting energy detached from the All, must enter again into the All as
must our body: both are absorbed by God,
“When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.”[46]
The fiery breath of our intelligence is gathered, as are the matter and
the humours of our organism, into the inexhaustible reservoir which
produced them, as one day the earth and the heavens will be gathered
thither also. All must be engulfed in one whole, must lose itself in one
forgetfulness. When man has reached the term of his fate, he faints into
the one power which forms and leads the universe, just as the tired
stars will be extinguished in it, when their days shall be accomplished.
Resistance to the supreme law is vain and painful; rebellion against the
irresistible order of things is impious. The great virtue taught by
Stoicism is that of submission to the fatality which guides the world,
of joyous acceptance of the inevitable. Philosophic literature and the
epitaphs present to us, repeatedly and in a thousand forms, the idea
that we cannot strive against omnipotent necessity, that the rule of
this rigid master must be borne without tears or recriminations. The
wise man, who destroys within himself desire of any happenings, enjoys
even during this existence divine calm in the midst of tribulations, but
those whom the vicissitudes of life drive or attract, who let illusions
seduce or grieve them, will at last obtain remission of their troubles
when they reach the tranquil haven of death. This thought is expressed
by a distich which often recurs on tombs, in Greek and in Latin. “I have
fled, escaped. Farewell, Hope and Fortune. I have nothing more to do
with you. Make others your sport.”[47]