irrefutable proof of the after life. “Thou who doubtest the existence of
the Manes,” we read on the tomb of two young girls, “invoke us after
making a vow and thou wilt understand.”[152] Revelations were indeed to
be expected of the wisdom of the disincarnate souls. In spite,
therefore, of the laws forbidding magic, necromancy never ceased to be
practised. By a nocturnal sacrifice, analogous to that offered on tombs
(p. 52) and by the virtue of their incantations, the wizards obliged the
dead to appear before them and answer their questions. The poets and
romancers liked to introduce in their works descriptions of the
atrocious ceremonies which were intended to give momentary life even to
a corpse and cause it to pronounce oracles.
The dead in these scenes often appear as restive and even hostile beings
who were forced to such actions by the power of witchcraft. The dominant
feeling among all peoples is indeed that the dead are unhappy and
therefore malevolent. They were believed to be excessively sensitive:
great care must be taken to do nothing to offend them. If their rights
were overlooked, if they were forgotten, they showed their wrath by
sending illnesses and scourges to the guilty. This unpleasant and
sometimes cruel, even ferocious character of the Manes is very marked in
Rome, perhaps in consequence of the influence of the Etruscans or the
beliefs concerning after life. A legend had it that the ceremonies of
the _Parentalia_ having on one occasion been omitted, the plaintive
ghosts scattered about the town and the fields and caused many
deaths.[153] What we know of the rites performed at the _Lemuria_ and at
funerals shows that they tended to protect the house against the spirits
haunting it and to rid it of them. “The dead are welcome neither to the
gods nor to men,” says an old Latin inscription.[154] To the family
_Lares_ who protected a household, the _larvae_ were opposed, the
wandering phantoms who spread terror and evil. “Spare thy mother, thy
father and thy sister,” we read on a tomb, “in order that after me they
may celebrate the traditional rites for thee.”[155] This hostile
character attributed to inhabitants of the tombs explains the custom of
placing in them leaden tablets on which curses were written calling down
the most frightful ills on enemies. A large number of these _tabellae
defixionum_ in Greek and Latin have been found and they prove the
frequency of this practice, which has perhaps an Oriental origin.[156]
But the _devotio_ to the Manes gods is an old Roman ceremony, which
proceeds from the idea that they endeavour to tear the living from the
earth and draw them to themselves.
* * * * *
There is one class of the dead which is peculiarly noxious, those namely
who have not been buried. The ideas connected with them are so
characteristic of the oldest conception of immortality that these ἄταφοι
_insepulti_ deserve to detain us for a few moments.
From the most ancient times the beliefs reigned among all the peoples of
antiquity that the souls of those who are deprived of burial find no
rest in the other life. If they have no “eternal house” they are like
homeless vagabonds. But the fact that the dead had been buried did not
suffice; their burial must also have been performed according to the
traditional rites. Perhaps the liturgical formulas were supposed to have
power to keep the shade in the tomb, as other incantations could summon
it thence. Above all, however, it was believed, as we have already
stated, that when the dead had not obtained the offerings to which they
had the right, they suffered and that their unquiet spirits fluttered
near the corpse and wandered upon the surface of the earth and the
waters, taking vengeance on men for the ills men had inflicted on them.
The denial of interment was thought to be the source of infinite torment
for the dead as for the living, and to throw earth on abandoned corpses
was a pious duty. The pontiffs, who believed the sight of a corpse made
them unclean, might not for all that leave it unburied if they happened
to find one on their way. To bury the dead has remained a work of mercy
in the Church, and in Rome a confraternity still exists which brings in
from far away the dead found lying in the desert Campagna. The pain
represented by lack of burial was the worst chastisement called down by
imprecations on enemies on whom vengeance was desired. Among believers
it gave rise to an anxiety comparable with that which the refusal of the
last sacrament now causes to Roman Catholics. In the Greek cities, as in
Rome, the law often condemned to it those who had committed suicide or
had been executed, hoping thus to divert desperate and outrageous men
from their fatal design by the apprehension of a wretched lot in the
Beyond.[157] Sometimes the law merely laid down that the guilty must not
be interred in the soil of their country, an almost equally terrible
penalty, since it cut them off from the family cult, by which their
descendants could give satisfaction to their Manes. When, therefore,
through some accident, a traveller or soldier died abroad or was
shipwrecked at sea, his body was, when possible, brought back to his
country, or, if this could not be done, a cenotaph was raised to him,
and his soul was summoned aloud to come and inhabit the dwelling
prepared for it. When cremation became general in Rome, the old
pontifical law invented another subterfuge which allowed the ancient
rites to be accomplished: a finger was cut from the body before it was
carried to the pyre, and earth was thrown three times on this “resected
bone” (_os resectum_).
Against these ancient beliefs, which were the source of so much anguish
and so many superstitions, the philosophers fought energetically. First
the Cynics and then the Epicureans and the Stoics endeavoured to show
their absurdity. They are fond of quoting the answer of Theodore the
Atheist to Lysimachus who was threatening him with death without
burial—“What matters it whether I rot on the earth or under it?” Since
the corpse was unconscious and without any sensibility, it was indeed of
no consequence whether it were burnt or buried, eaten by worms or by
crows. Why should it be a misfortune to die abroad? Only the living had
a country; the whole earth was the dwelling of the dead. If such cares
troubled men they were the victims of the invincible illusion that the
body retained capacity to feel even beyond the grave.
The very frequency with which these commonplaces of the school are
repeated shows how tenacious were the prejudices which they attempted to
eradicate. Here, as in other connections, the renewal of Pythagorism
supervened at the end of the Republic to favour the persistence of the
old beliefs. A doctrine, to which Plato alludes,[158] taught that souls
which had not been appeased by funeral rites, had to wander for a
hundred years, the normal term of a human life. Confined in the air near
the earth, they remained subject to the power of magicians. Especially
if the wizards had been able to obtain possession of some portion of the
corpse, whence the soul could not entirely detach itself, they gained
influence over it and could constrain its obedience. When this century
of suffering had elapsed, these souls were admitted to a place of
purification, where they sojourned ten times longer, and when these
thousand years had passed they returned to reincarnate themselves in new
bodies. We will see in another lecture[159] that the Pythagoreans
enunciated analogous theories as to the lot of children swept off before
their time and of men who died a violent death.
Virgil describing the descent of Aeneas into the infernal regions
recalls these Pythagorean speculations when he shows us the miserable
crowd of the unburied shades fluttering for a hundred years on the bank
of the Styx before they obtained from Charon their passage to its other
shore.[160]
Favoured by these new tendencies of philosophy, the unreasoning
apprehension inspired by omission of burial subsisted under the Empire,
not only among the ignorant many, but also in the most enlightened
classes. This fear explains why everyone took extreme care to have a
tomb built for himself and to ensure, if he could, that funeral
ceremonies were celebrated in it, why many epitaphs threaten with
judicial penalties and divine punishments the sacrilegious offenders who
should violate the grave, and why such a number of popular colleges were
founded, of which the principal object was to secure decent obsequies to
their members. The rules of the _cultores_ of Diana and Antinoüs at
Lanuvium stipulate that when a slave dies and his master maliciously
refuses to deliver his body for burial, a “_funus imaginarium_” be made
for him, that is, that the ceremony be celebrated over a figure
representing the dead man and wearing his mask.[161] From this
“imaginary” burial effects were expected as beneficent as those results
are maleficent which a wizard anticipated when he fettered and pierced a
waxen doll to work a charm.
From the stories of the gravest writers we perceive what lot was
believed to threaten the unfortunate who were burnt or interred without
the rites being observed. After Caligula’s murder his corpse was hastily
shovelled into the ground in a garden on the Esquiline (_horti
Lamiani_), but then the keepers of this park were terrified by
apparitions until the imperial victim’s sisters caused his body to be
exhumed, and buried it in accordance with the sacred rules.[162] Pliny
the Younger in one of his letters seriously relates a story which seems
to have been often repeated, for we find it, little changed, in
Lucian.[163] There was in Athens a haunted house which remained empty,
no one daring to live in it because several of its tenants had died of
fright. In the silence of the night a noise was heard as of clanking
iron; then a horrible spectre moved forward in the shape of an emaciated
old man, bearded and hairy, rattling the chains which were about his
feet and legs. A philosopher dared to take this house, and he settled
himself there one evening, resolved to keep himself awake by working.
The ghost appeared to him, came towards him with its usual clatter,
signed to him to follow and disappeared in the courtyard. When daylight
came, a hole was dug in the place where the phantom had vanished, and a
skeleton in fetters was found. The bones were taken up and burned
according to the rites, and thereafter nothing troubled the quiet of the
house. Lucian, in his version of this ghost story, specifies the
philosopher as a Pythagorean and shows him repelling the apparition by
the virtue of his spells. The Pythagoreans were indeed often
necromancers, convinced defenders of spiritualism, in which, as we have
said (p. 62), they sought an immediate proof of the immortality of the
soul, and by their doctrines they contributed to keeping alive the
superstitious fear attached to omission of burial.
But they were no more than theorists as to a belief which was widespread
and which the invasion of Oriental magic was to revive. The
curse-tablets often evoke, together with other demons, “those who are
deprived of a sacred tomb” (ἄποροι τῆς ἱερᾶς ταφῆς).[164] They associate
them with those who have died before their time or by a violent
death.[165] Heliodorus[166] the romancer, a priest of Emesa in Syria,
who probably lived in the third century, pictures for us a very
characteristic scene: a child has been killed; a wizard takes its body,
places it between two fires, and performs a complicated operation over
it, in order to restore it to life by his incantations and to obtain a
prediction of the future. “Thou forcest me to rise again and to speak,”
the child complains, “taking no thought for my funeral and thus
preventing me from mingling with the other dead.” For the shades of the
nether world rejected one who had been left unburied.[167]
These ancient beliefs, which the East shared with the West, were, more
or less modified, to survive the downfall of paganism. If the Christians
of the first centuries no longer feared that they would go to join the
shades who wandered on the bank of the Styx, they were still pursued by
the superstitious dread that they would have no part in the resurrection
of the flesh if their bodies did not rest in the grave.[168] Nay, the
terrors of former ages still haunt the Greeks of today. The people
remain persuaded that those who have not had a religious funeral return
to wander on the earth, and that, changed to bloody vampires, they
punish men, and in particular their kin, for their neglect.[169] A
nomocanon of the Byzantine Church orders that if the body of a ghost be
found intact, when disinterred, its maleficent power thus being proved,
it be burnt and a funeral service with an offering of meats be
afterwards celebrated for its soul. This is exactly what was done in
antiquity in order to appease the dead who had not been buried according
to the rite, _rite conditi_.
II
THE NETHER WORLD
Among most peoples the primitive idea of an after life in the grave was
enlarged into the conception of a common existence of the dead in the
depths of the earth. The dead man does not stay confined in the narrow
dwelling in which he rests; he goes down into vast caverns which extend
beneath the crust of the soil we tread. These immense hollows are
peopled by a multitude of shades who have left the tomb. Thus the tomb
becomes the antechamber of the true dwelling of the spirits who have
departed; its door is the gate of Hades itself. Through the tomb, the
great company of the beings who have been plunged in the darkness of the
infernal regions remains in communication with those who still sojourn
in our upper world. The libations and offerings made by the survivors on
the grave descend to this gloomy _hypogeum_ and there feed and rejoice
those for whom they are intended. Until the time of the Roman Empire,
nay, to the end of antiquity, the common man believed in this
wonder.[170] To attempt to define the means by which it was brought
about would be vain. These were beliefs which went back so far and were
so deeply rooted in the mind of the people that men accepted them
without seeking to explain them.
In Rome, the idea that the spirits of the dead inhabit a common dwelling
in the nether world existed from the time when the city had its
beginnings. It kept in religion a coarsely naïve form which proves how
archaic it was. According to a rite borrowed by the Romans from the
Etruscans, a pit was dug in the centre of the city, when the latter’s
foundations were laid, in order to make the _Inferi_ communicate with
the upper world. First fruits and other gifts were thrown into the pit,
as well as a clod of the earth of the settlers’ native country. Thus
they restored their broken contact with the Manes of their ancestors. In
all probability this hole was formed of a vertical pit ending in a
chamber with an arched roof curved like the heaven—hence the name
_mundus_ given to it. The key of the vault of this lower cellar was
formed of a stone, the _lapis Manalis_, which could be raised in order
to let the spirits pass. Three times a year, on the twenty-fourth of
August, the fifth of October and the eighth of November, this ceremony
took place: the door of hell was opened and the dead had free access to
the atmosphere. These days were therefore sacred, _religiosi_, and all
business was suspended on them.
Recently the _mundus_ of the ancient _Roma Quadrata_ was believed to
have been discovered during excavations of the Palatine, but the
underground space in question is probably only a silo or a cistern.
Other pits used for the cult of the dead existed elsewhere in the city.
It has recently been suggested that the altar of the god Consus, which
was hidden in a ditch in the middle of the Circus Maximus and uncovered
during the races, was one of these mouths of hell and like that shown in
representations of the funeral games of the Etruscans.[171]
But on certain days the souls of the dead rose to the earth’s surface of
themselves, although nothing had been done to make their coming thither
easier, and they then had to be appeased by sacrifices. This was what
happened from the thirteenth to the twenty-first of February, during the
_Parentalia_, when the souls of ancestors were honoured, and on the
ninth, the eleventh and the thirteenth of May, the dates of the
_Lemuria_, on which, at midnight, according to a prescribed ceremonial,
the father of the family nine times threw black beans to the _Lemures_
to keep them away from the house.
_Lemures_ and _Manes_ are used only in the plural: these words stand for
the vague conceptions formed of the shades of the dead who dwelt beneath
the ground. These were a nameless crowd, hardly individualised, not
distinguishable from the fleeting phantoms who fluttered about the
tombs. The Romans were a people of little imagination, and their
infernal mythology remained rudimentary until the time when they
borrowed from the Greeks the picturesque stories about the adventures of
travellers to Hades and the blessings and misfortunes which there
awaited them.
Originally no idea of retribution was attached to this descent of the
dead into the infernal regions; it was neither their merits nor their
demerits which determined their condition. On the contrary, the
inequalities of human society were perpetuated: a nobleman kept a higher
rank than that of his servants; each man in some sort continued his
occupations, even preserved his tastes and his passions. Existence in
the Beyond was conceived as a mere prolongation of earthly life. It is
to this idea, which was generally entertained, that the old custom
corresponds of placing in the grave the implements and other objects
which a dead man was in the habit of using. We have already touched on
this point in speaking of life in the tomb (p. 49), but the things
deposited beside the corpse were not only those which could be used by
the dweller of the “eternal house.” If he were a powerful lord his
chariot, his horses and his arms would be buried with him;[172] a hunter
would be supplied in the other world with his spears and his nets;[173]
a craftsman with the tools of his trade; a woman with the objects which
enabled her to spin and to weave. These funeral customs were more than a
tradition, followed without reference to the reasons inspiring it. Among
the Greeks, as among the Romans, the idea survives persistently, in
poetic descriptions of the Elysian Fields, that each man will there keep
the character and retain the habits which distinguished him before his
death. Virgil, taking his inspiration from Pindar, shows us the blessed
occupied by the contests of the palestra, by song and poetry and by
chariot races; for, he tells us, the passion which the dead had in life
for arms and for horses still pursues them when they have been buried in
the earth.[174] Ovid[175] sketches with rapid touches an analogous
picture. “The shades,” he says, “wander bloodless, bodiless, boneless;
some gather in the forum, others follow their trades, imitating their
former way of life.” And this is no fancy due to the poet’s imagination.
An awkward epitaph of a young, probably Syrian, slave[176] tells us that
he is glad still to be able to discharge his service zealously in the
retired place where dwells the god of the infernal abode. In these
instances we find, in spite of the transformation undergone by
eschatological ideas as a whole, a survival of the old conception of the
destiny of the dead.
We have not to seek far to discover how this transformation took place.
It was provoked by the desire to subject souls to different treatment
according to their deserts, and to distribute them in distinct
compartments in which they would be rewarded or punished in accordance
with their past works. It was much prior to the Roman period, going back
to the distant age at which Orphic theology, with its sanctions beyond
the grave, modified Homeric tradition and popular religion in Greece. In
the West the doctrine which imposed itself with the Hellenic
civilisation on peoples of foreign race was ready-made. It spread
through the south of Italy by way of the colonies of Greater Greece in
which Pythagorism came to its full power. It is in this country that
some of the Orphic tablets intended as guides to the dead in their
journey through the infernal realm have been discovered in the
tombs;[177] and the great amphorae of a later date, bearing
representations of scenes of Hades, which were also found in southern
Italy, show the importance which continued to be attached there to the
idea of the future life. In Campania, Lake Avernus was even regarded as
one of the entrances to the nether world, through which Ulysses and
Aeneas had descended.
The Greek doctrines were also introduced among the Etruscans and
combined with the beliefs of this people as to an underworld in which
the Manes of the dead were threatened by horrible demons and protected
by beneficent genii. This Greek influence and its alliance with the
native traditions appear in Etruria in a great number of funeral
monuments on which we find represented many figures which, according to
mythology, peopled the kingdom of Pluto. One of the most significant is
the fine sarcophagus, discovered a few years ago at Torre San Severo
near Bolsena, which seems to date from the third century B. C.[178] The
two long sides hold corresponding reliefs, the one showing Achilles’
sacrifice of the Trojan prisoners on the grave of Patroclus, the other
the sacrifice of Polyxena, last of Priam’s daughters, on the tomb of
Achilles. These scenes, borrowed from the Greek epic poetry, are placed
between two Etruscan demons, winged figures which bear serpents and are
male on one side and female on the other. The small sides are decorated
by two scenes from the Odyssey, the myth of Circe changing the
companions of Ulysses into animals—perhaps an allusion to
metempsychosis—and Tiresias’ evocation of the shades of the dead, the
Elysian Fields being curiously indicated. This instance—and many others
might be cited—shows how closely the Hellenic legends of Hades had been
intermingled with Etruscan demonology.
This Greek conception of the infernal regions, which literature and art
were to popularise and perpetuate even after credence had ceased to be
given to it, remains familiar to us. Taken altogether and in the large,
it is that of a kingdom imagined as an imitation of the cities of our
world, in which, however, there reigns such a rigorous justice as is on
our poor earth no more than a dream of minds morally disposed. This
underground state, of which the frontier is defended by an unbridged
river, the Styx, is governed by powerful rulers, Pluto and Proserpina.
It has its judges, Minos, Aeacus and Rhadamanthus; its executioners, the
Erinyes or Furies; and its prison, Tartarus, surrounded by high walls.
This jail, in which the guilty, laden with chains, suffer the torments
enacted in Greece by the penal laws or others more atrocious,[179] is
distinctly contrasted with the abode of the good citizens who freely
enjoy in delightful gardens all the pleasures which make the joy of
human beings.
Books treating of the “Descent into Hades,” of which a considerable
number were in circulation, and the poets’ descriptions embroidered
various patterns around this central design. There was a whole
mythological and theological efflorescence which peopled with more and
more numerous figures the fantastic kingdom occupying the great cavern
of the earth. Infinite variations were imagined on a traditional theme,
of which, however, even certain details were preserved from age to age
with a surprising fidelity. Lucian in his satirical description of
Charon and his boat reproduces types fixed in the sixth century before
our era, for, as has been observed, his picture is in exact agreement
with the recently discovered fragment of a black-figured vase.[180]