Babylonia and was transplanted to Egypt, and which spread in the
Graeco-Latin world from the second century B. C. onwards, propagating
its mechanical and fatalistic conception of the universe. According to
this pseudo-science, all physical phenomena depended absolutely, like
the character and acts of men, on the revolutions of the celestial
bodies. Thus all the forces of nature and the very energy of
intelligence acted in accordance with an inflexible necessity. Hence
worship had no object and prayer no effect. In this way the sidereal
divination, which had grown up in the temples of the East, ended in
Greece, among certain of its adepts, in a negation of the very basis of
religion.[48] It is noteworthy that in the writings left to us there is
hardly an allusion to the immortality of the soul. When they speak of
what comes after death there is question only of funerals and posthumous
glory. We never find in them a promise to the unfortunate, weighed down
by misadventure and infirmities, of consolation or compensation in the
Beyond. The systematic astrology of the Greeks limits its horizon to
this world, although traces of the belief in Hades subsist in its
vocabulary and its predictions and although this same astral divination
inspired in the mysteries certain eschatological theories, as we shall
see later.[49]
* * * * *
The rationalistic and scientific period of Hellenic thought which began,
as we have said, with Aristotle, filled the Hellenistic period and
continued until the century of Augustus. Towards the end of the Roman
Republic faith in the future life was reduced to a minimum and the
scepticism or indifference of the Alexandrians was carried into Italy.
The mocking verses of an epigram of Callimachus, a man of learning as
well as a poet, is well known.[50] “Charidas, what is there down below?
Deep darkness. But what of the journeys upwards? All lies. And Pluto? A
fable. Then we are lost.” Catullus was to say as much, less lightly,
with a deeper feeling. “Suns can set and rise again, but we, when our
brief light is extinguished, must sleep for an eternal night.”[51] The
religions belief in retribution in the Beyond was shaken, as all the
others were, not only in literary and philosophic circles but among a
large section of the population. The old tales of the Elysian Fields and
Tartarus no longer found credence, as convincing testimony will show
us.[52] Those who sought to preserve them could do so only by using a
daring symbol which altered their character. But the idea of conscious
survival after death was itself no longer looked upon as sure. Many who
did not go so far as to deny it brutally were firmly agnostic. When we
turn over the pages of the thick volumes of the _Corpus inscriptionum_,
we are struck by the small number of the epitaphs which express the hope
of immortality. The impression received is quite the contrary of that
given by going through our own graveyards or surveying the collections
of Christian epitaphs of antiquity. On by far the larger number of the
tombs the survival of the soul was neither affirmed nor denied; it was
not mentioned otherwise than by the banal formula _Dis Manibus_—so
bereft of meaning that even some Christians made use of it. Or else the
authors of funereal inscriptions, like the contemporary writers, used
careful phrases which showed their mental hesitations: “If the Manes
still perceive anything.... If any feeling subsist after death.... If
there be reward for the righteous beneath the ground.”[53] Such doubting
propositions are most frequent. The same indecision made people return
to an alternative presented by Plato in the _Apology_,[54] before his
ideas had evolved, and repeat that death is “an end or a passage,”—_mors
aut finis aut transitus_,—and no choice is made between the two
possibilities: the question is left open. The future life was generally
regarded as a consoling metaphysical conception, a mere hypothesis
supported by some thinkers, a religious hope but not an article of
faith. The lofty conclusion which ends Agricola’s eulogy will be
remembered. “If,” says Tacitus, “there be an abode of the spirits of
virtuous men, if, as sages have taught, great souls be not extinguished
with the body, rest in peace.” But side by side with the supposition
thus hazarded, the historian expresses the assurance that Agricola will
receive another reward for his merits. All that his contemporaries have
loved and admired in his character will cause the fame of his deeds to
live in men’s memory through the eternity of ages.
We here see how the perplexity in which men struggled, when they thought
of psychic survival, gave earthly immortality a greater value in the
eyes of the ancients. It was for many of them the essential point
because it alone was certain. Not to fall into the abyss of
forgetfulness seemed a sufficient reward for virtue. “Death is to be
feared by those for whom everything is extinguished with their life, not
by those whose renown cannot perish.”[55] That the commemoration of our
merits may not cease when the short time of our passage here below has
ended, but may be prolonged for as long as the sequence of future
generations lasts—this is the deep desire which stimulates virtue and
excites to effort. Cicero, when celebrating in the _Pro Archia_[56] the
benefits wrought by the love of glory,—from which he was by no means
exempt himself,—remarks shrewdly that even philosophers, who claim to
show its vanity, are careful to place their names at the beginning of
their books, thus showing the worth they attach to that which they
exhort others to despise. Even more than today, the hope of a durable
renown, the anxiety that their fellows should be busy about them even
after their departure, the preoccupation lest their life should not be
favourably judged by public opinion, haunted many men, secretly or
avowedly dominated their thought and directed their actions. Even those
who had played only a modest part in the world and had made themselves
known only to a narrow circle, sought to render their memory
unforgettable by building strong tombs for themselves along the great
roads. Epitaphs often begin with the formula _Memoriae aeternae_, “To
the eternal memory,” which we have inherited, although the idea it
represents no longer has for most of us any but a very relative value.
In antiquity it was first connected with the old belief in a communion
of sentiments and an exchange of services between the deceased and their
descendants who celebrated the funeral cult. When the firm belief in the
power of the shades to feel and act ceased to exist, offerings were made
with another intention: survivors liked to think that he who had gone
had not entirely perished as long as his remembrance subsisted in the
hearts of those who had cherished him and the minds of those who had
learnt his praises. In some way, he rose from the grave in the image
made of him by the successors of those who had known him. Epicurus
himself stipulated in his will that the day of his birth should be
commemorated every month,[57] and under the Roman Empire his disciples
were still piously celebrating this recurring feast. Thus this deep
instinct of preservation, which impels human beings to desire survival,
showed itself even in him who contributed most of all to destroy faith
in immortality.
* * * * *
It is always with difficulty that men resign themselves to dying wholly.
Even when reason admits, nay when it desires, annihilation, the
subconscious self protests against it; our personality is impelled by
its very essence to crave the persistence of its self. Besides, the
feelings of survivors rebel against the pain of an unending separation,
the definite loss of all affections. In the troubled times which marked
the end of the Roman Republic, at a moment when changing fortune
periodically turned all the conditions of existence upside down, there
grew up a stronger aspiration to a better future, a search, to use the
words of the ancients, for a sure haven, in which man, tossed by the
storms of life, might find quiet. Thus in the first century B. C. the
birth was seen, or rather the rebirth, of a mystic movement which
claimed to give by direct communication with God the certainties which
reason could not supply. The chief preoccupation of philosophers began
to be those capital questions as to the origin and end of man which the
schools of the earlier period had neglected as unanswerable. It was
above all the Neo-Pythagoreans who gave up pure rationalism, and thus
brought Roman thought to admit new forms of immortality.
When the scientific school of the old Pythagorism came to an end in
Italy in the fourth century, the sect perpetuated itself obscurely in
mysterious conventicles, a sort of freemasonry of which the influence in
the Hellenistic period is difficult to measure or circumscribe. It again
took on new power in Alexandria under the Ptolemies. In this metropolis,
in which all the currents of Europe and Asia were mingled, Pythagorism
admitted at this time many ideas foreign to the teaching of the old
master of Samos. This teaching seems not to have set forth a rigid,
logically constructed theology, and the points of contact with the
beliefs of the East, which its ideas supplied, favoured an accommodating
syncretism. Pythagoras was said to have had Plato as a disciple, and
Plato was venerated almost as much as the teacher he followed. The
powerful structure of Stoic pantheism did not fail to exercise an
ascendancy over the theorists of the school. This school had been, from
its origin, in touch with the Orphic mysteries and those of Dionysos and
it remained so, but it was also subject to the more remote influence of
Babylonian and Egyptian religions, and particularly of those Chaldean
doctrines which the Greeks had learnt to know after Alexander’s
conquest.
This vast eclecticism, open to all novelties, did not bring about a
break with the past. Theology succeeded in effecting a reconciliation
with all, even the rudest and most absurd traditions of fable, by an
ingenious system of moral allegories. “Divine” Homer thus became a
master of piety and wisdom, and mythology a collection of edifying
stories. Demonology made it possible to justify all the traditional
practices of the cult, as well as magic and divination: everything which
seemed incompatible with the new idea of the divinity was ascribed to
lower powers. Thus the Pythagoreans could take up the position not of
adversaries or reformers but of interpreters of the ancestral religion.
They claimed that they remained faithful to the wisdom of the sages who,
at the dawn of civilisation, had received a divine revelation, which had
been transmitted first to Pythagoras and then to Plato. They felt so
sure that they were expressing the thought of these masters, whose
authority made law, that they did not hesitate to subscribe the
venerated names, by a pious fraud, to their own writings. Nowhere did
apocryphal literature have a more luxuriant efflorescence than in these
circles.
When the sect was introduced into Rome it sought, according to its wont,
to connect itself with old local traditions, and without much difficulty
it succeeded. The national pride of the conquerors of Greece could, with
some complacency, regard it as Italic. Pythagoras passed for the teacher
of King Numa, the religious legislator of the city. Ennius had expressed
this philosopher’s doctrine in his poems, and altogether, from the time
of the ancient republic onwards, the half mythical moralist of Greater
Greece enjoyed singular consideration in Rome.[58]
But the first to give new life to the Pythagorean school, which had died
in Italy centuries before, was, according to Cicero, his friend, the
senator Nigidius Figulus, a curious representative of the scientific
religiosity which characterised the sect. This Roman magistrate, a man
of singular erudition, was bitten with all the occult sciences. A
grammarian, a naturalist and a theologian, he was also an astrologer and
magician and, on occasion, a wonder-worker. He did not confine himself
to theory but gathered about him a club of the initiate, of whom we
cannot say whether they were most attracted by scientific curiosity, by
austere morals or by mystic practices. Vatinius, the relative and friend
of Caesar, and, probably, the spiritualist Appius Claudius Pulcher were
the most prominent of this circle of converts.
It is significant that at much the same time the historian Castor of
Rhodes claimed to interpret Roman usages by Pythagorism,[59] and the
stories establishing a connection between the Roman state and the
reformers of Greater Greece were multiplied. In the Augustan age a
worldly poet like Ovid[60] thought it permissible to introduce into his
_Metamorphoses_, where no digression of the sort was to be looked for, a
long speech of Pythagoras explaining vegetarianism and transmigration. A
little later Antonius Diogenes, the romancer, found in the same
philosophy inspiration for his fantastic pictures of the lot of
souls.[61] All this goes to show how powerfully seductive the new sect
proved to be as soon as it was revived in Rome.
But it did not lack enemies. Public malignity did not spare these
mysterious theosophists who met in subterranean crypts. They were blamed
for neglecting the national cult, which had ensured the greatness of the
city, in order to indulge in condemned practices or even to commit
abominable crimes. It was a more serious matter that their secret
gatherings also excited the suspicion of the authorities, and that the
partakers were prosecuted as persons who dealt in magic, which was
punishable by law. The little Pythagorean church seems not to have been
able to maintain itself in the capital for long. In Seneca’s time it was
dead.[62]
But Pythagorism continued to find adepts in the empire and soon returned
to Rome. Under Domitian, Apollonius of Tyana made the East resound with
his preaching and miracles, and although thrown into prison by this
emperor he was in favour with his successors. Under the Antonines, the
false prophet Alexander of Abonotichos, unmasked by Lucian, claimed to
be a new incarnation of the sage of Samos, whose wisdom he pretended to
reveal in his mysteries. The literary tradition of the sect maintained
itself until the third century, when it was absorbed by Neo-Platonism.
In a period of syncretism, the originality of this philosophy resided
less in its doctrine than in its observances, and when its conventicles
were dissolved, it easily merged itself in the school which professed to
continue it. During its long life Pythagorism had indeed had a powerful
influence, not only on the system of Plato and Plotinus, but also on the
Oriental cults which spread under the empire. It had supplied the first
type of the learned mysteries in which knowledge (γνῶσις) is at once the
condition and the end of sanctification.[63] Possibly it even penetrated
into Gaul at an early date, by way of Marseilles, and was thus known to
the Druids.
It would certainly be a mistake to look upon Pythagorism as a pure
philosophy, like Epicureanism and Stoicism. Its sectaries formed a
church rather than a school, a religious order, not an academy of
sciences. From a recent discovery in Rome, if my interpretation of the
monument is right,[64] we have learnt that the Pythagoreans met in
underground basilicas, constructed on the model of Plato’s cavern, in
which, according to the great idealist, the chained men see only the
shades of the higher realities.[65] A foundation sacrifice, that of a
dog and a young pig, was made before this basilica was constructed. Its
stucco decoration is borrowed almost entirely from Greek mythology or
the ceremonies of the mysteries. Secret rites and varied purifications
had to be accomplished in it; hymns accompanied by sacred music were
sung; and from a chair within the apse the doctors gave esoteric
teaching to the faithful. They taught them the symbols in which the
truths of faith and the precepts of conduct, formerly revealed by
Pythagoras and the other sages, were handed down in enigmatic form.
These remote disciples interpreted all the myths of the past, and
especially the Homeric poems, by psychological or eschatological
allegories. They laid down, as definite commandments, a rule of strict
observance which included all the acts of daily life. At dawn, after he
had offered a sacrifice to the rising Sun, the pious man must decide on
the way in which his day was to be employed. Every evening he must make
a threefold examination of conscience, and, if he had been guilty of any
sin of omission or commission, must make an act of contrition. He was
obliged to follow a purely vegetarian diet and to practise many
abstinences, to make repeated prayers, to meditate lengthily. This
austere and circumstantial system of morals would ensure happiness and
wisdom on earth and salvation in the Beyond.
All the Neo-Pythagoreans agree in stating that the human soul is related
to God and therefore immortal. Many, like the Stoics, look upon it as a
parcel of the ether, an effluvium of burning and luminous fluid which
fills the celestial spaces and shines in the divine stars. Others, who
are nearer to Plato, believe it to be immaterial and define it as a
number in movement. Always, generation is regarded as a fall and a
danger for the soul. Enclosed in the body as in a tomb, it runs the risk
of corruption, even of perishing. Earthly existence is a hard voyage on
the stormy waters of matter, which are perpetually rolling and surging.
Thus a fundamental pessimism looked upon life here below as a trial and
a chastisement; a radical dualism placed the body in opposition to the
divine essence residing in it. The constant care of the sage was to keep
his soul from pollution by its contact with the flesh. He abstained from
meat and other foods which might corrupt it; a series of tabus protected
it against all contagion. Ritual purifications restored to it its purity
(ἁγνεία) which was continually threatened. The unwearying exercise of
virtue, the scrupulous practice of piety preserved its original nature.
Music, which caused it to vibrate in harmony with the universe, and
science, which lifted it towards divine things, prepared its ascension
to heaven. Meditation was a silent prayer, which placed reason in
communication with the powers on high. Seized by love for the eternal
beauties, it rose in its transports even in this life to God, identified
itself with Him and so rendered itself worthy of a blessed
immortality.[66]
When the death determined by destiny occurred, the soul escaped from the
body in which it was captive but kept its bodily form and appearance,
and this simulacrum (εἴδωλον) appeared to men in dreams and after
evocations. According to some Pythagoreans, this subtle form was
distinct from the soul (ψυχή), which ascended immediately to the higher
spheres. Others believed that, like a light garment, it wrapped the
soul, which was for some time constrained to dwell here below.[67] After
this shade had remained beside the body or somewhere near the tomb for a
certain number of days, it rose in the atmosphere in which contended
winds, water and fire, and was purified by the elements. This zone, the
lowest circle of the world, was what fable had called hell (_Inferi_),
and it was of this passage from one circle to that next it that poets
spoke when they told of the Styx and Charon’s boat.[68] When the soul
had been purified it was borne, uplifted by the winds, to the sphere of
the moon. Here lay the boundary of life and death, the limit which
divided the residence of the immortals, where all was harmony and
purity, from the corrupt and troubled empire of generation. Thus the
luminary of the night was the first dwelling of the Blessed, and there
lay the Elysian Fields of the poets, Proserpina’s kingdom where rest the
shades. And the Fortunate Islands, of which the ancients sung, were no
other than the sun and the moon, celestial lands bathed by the waters of
the ether.[69]
The shade remained in the moon or was dissolved there, and pure reason
rose to the sun whence it came forth, or even reached the summit of the
heavens where reigned the Most High. A helpful escort, called by
mythology Hermes the Soul-Guide, or _psychopompos_, led the elect to
these Olympian peaks. There they regained their true country, and as
birth had been to them a death, so their death was their rebirth. They
enjoyed the contemplation of the luminous gods. They were rapt by the
ravishing tune of the harmony of the spheres, that divine melody of
which earthly music is but a feeble echo.[70]
Some souls were kept on the banks of the Styx and could not cross it: in
other words, they were constrained to remain on the earth. The dead who
had not had religious burial must linger beside their neglected bodies
for a hundred years, the normal span of a human life, before they were
admitted to the place of purgation, where they would sojourn for ten
times that period.[71] In the same way those who had died young or whose
days had been cut short by violence would not enter the purgatory before
the due term of their life.[72] But especially the souls of the criminal
and the impious were thus condemned to wander, restless and in pain,
through the lower air, which they filled with their multitude. It was
these demoniac spirits who returned as dismal phantoms to frighten the
living, who were evoked by wizards and who revealed the future in
oracles. Demonology accounted for all the aberrations of magic and
divination. These spirits rose to the aerial purgatory after they had
for long years tormented and been tormented, but they could not reach
the moon, which repelled them; they were condemned to reincarnation in
new bodies, either of men or of beasts, and were once again delivered to
the fury of the passions. These passions are the Erinyes, of whom poets
sung, that in Tartarus they burnt criminals with their torches and
scourged them with their whips. For there was no subterranean hell:
Hades was in the air or on our earth, and the infernal sufferings
described by mythology were the various tortures inflicted on the souls
condemned to transmigration.[73]
This religious philosophy, which, by a symbolism transforming the
meaning of the traditional beliefs, reconciled these with men’s
intelligence, did more than any other to revive faith in immortality.
Many enlightened men, like Cicero and Cato, had sought consolation for
the misfortunes of this world and a hope for the Beyond in reading
Plato, but Plato’s proof of immortality could convince only those
already convinced.[74] Pythagorism, on the other hand, offered to
restless souls a certainty founded on a revelation made to ancient
sages, and it satisfied at once the Roman love for order and rule, and
the human love for the marvellous and the mysterious. The evidence of
the effect of this philosophy is still recognisable, although it often
has not been recognised, in the compositions decorating many sepulchral
monuments and in the wording of several epitaphs. A tombstone found at
Philadelphia in Lydia is particularly curious.[75] It bears a
representation of the Y symbol, that is, of the diverging roads between
which man must choose when he leaves childhood behind him. On the one
side earthly travail leads the virtuous man to eternal rest; on the
other softness and debauchery bring the vicious man to a gulf into which
he falls. A metrical epitaph, found at Pisaurum (Pesaro), hints covertly
at the ideas of the school. This commemorates a child who, in spite of
his youth, had learnt the dogmas of Pythagoras and read “the pious
verses of Homer” as well as the philosophers, and had studied in Euclid
the sacred science of numbers. His soul, runs the inscription,[76] “goes
forward through the gloomy stars of deep Tartarus towards the waters of
Acheron,” a sentence which can be understood only on the supposition
that Tartarus and Acheron had for the author a figurative meaning and
lay in the depths not of the earth but of the sky.
* * * * *
The belief in a celestial immortality which was thus propagated by the
half philosophical, half religious sect of the Pythagoreans was to find
a powerful interpreter in a thinker who had a predominant influence over
his contemporaries and the succeeding generation—in Posidonius. We know
little of his life. Born at Apamea in Syria, about the year 135, he
early left his native country, of which he seems to have kept a poor
opinion, and as a young student in Athens he attended the lectures of
the older Stoic Panaetius. The universal curiosity which was to make him
a scholar of encyclopaedic knowledge soon impelled him to take long
journeys, in which he even reached the shores of the Atlantic and
studied the tides of the ocean. Upon his return he opened a school in
the free city of Rhodes and there numbered Cicero among his hearers.
When he died at the age of eighty-four the prestige he enjoyed both in
the Roman world and among the Greeks was immense. He owed his
intellectual ascendancy as much to the marvellous variety of the
knowledge which he displayed, as philosopher, astronomer, historian,
geographer and naturalist, as to his copious, harmonious and highly
coloured style.