origin should probably be sought in that fear of death which haunts all
primitive peoples, and it developed owing to the frequency in antiquity
of infanticide by abandoning or “exposing” newly born infants. Remorse
provoked terror. This conclusion is especially suggested because the
fate of those who died prematurely was approximated to the lot of those
who died violent deaths. Beings who had been prevented from completing
the natural span of life were feared; their shades were conceived as
being unquiet and in pain, because it was believed that they could
return to disquiet and pain the living. The idea was entertained that a
spirit brutally separated from the body came to hold it in horror and
did not consent to inhabit the tomb until a reconciliation had been
disobtained by expiatory ceremonies. Being grievously disincarnated, the
soul became harmful. Souls, said the ancients, whom a cruel and untimely
end has violently or unjustly torn from their bodies, themselves tend to
be violent and unjust in order that they may avenge the wrong they have
suffered.[300] It is no rare thing to find evidence in the inscriptions
of a suspicion that a person cut off in the flower of his years has been
the victim of some foul play; the curse of Heaven is called down on the
head of his assumed murderer. The Sun, who discovers hidden crimes, is
often invoked in Roman epitaphs against this unknown offender:[301]
“Towards the Most High god, who watches over everything, and Helios and
Nemesis, Arsinoë, dead before her time, lifts up her hands; if any one
prepared poison for her or rejoices in her end, pursue him,” says an
inscription of Alexandria. But the victim was himself believed to be
capable of vengeance. It seemed incredible that one still full of
strength and life should be entirely blotted out and that the energy
which had animated him should also have disappeared suddenly, and the
reprisals of this mysterious power were apprehended. This spirit pursued
above all the murderer and, more generally, those who had given it cause
for complaint. It showed itself to them in the form of terrifying
monsters which tormented them. “As soon as I shall have expired, doomed
to death by you,” says the child in Horace whom the witches sacrificed,
“I will haunt your nights like a Fury, I will tear your faces with my
hooked nails, as the Manes gods can, and weighing on your unquiet hearts
I will take sleep from your affrighted eyes.”[302] Suetonius[303]
relates that after the death of Agrippina, Nero was, on his own
confession, often troubled by the vision of her spectre and attempted to
calm her spirit by a sacrifice and an evocation which he caused his
magicians to make. The same historian gravely recounts that the house in
which Caligula was murdered was every night haunted by dreadful
apparitions until the time when it was destroyed by fire.[304] A
scholiast defines the _lemures_ as “the wandering shades of men who died
before their normal time and are hence redoubtable.”[305] Even today
popular belief in many countries attributes a maleficent power to the
spirits of those who have died a violent death.
These disquieting superstitions acquired new force through the teachings
of astrology, which by incorporating them in its system gave them a
doctrinal foundation. Astrology spread the belief, which was and is
common to all ancient and modern peoples of the East, that each soul has
a predetermined number of years to spend on earth. The _mathematici_
multiplied calculations and methods in order to be able to predict the
instant of death predetermined by the horoscope. “This is the great work
of astrology, held by its adepts to be its most difficult and by its
enemies to be its most dangerous and blameworthy operation.”[306] But by
an internal contradiction this pseudo-science admitted that the natural
end could be hastened by the intervention of a murderous star
(ἀναιρέτης): Saturn and Mars can in certain positions call forth sudden
death by accident, killing, execution. A fragment attributed to
Aristotle asserts that a Syrian mage predicted to Socrates that he would
meet such a fate.[307] Sometimes the maleficent planets tear a nursing
child from its mother’s breast before a single revolution of the sun has
been accomplished. All astrological treatises devote chapters to these
“unfed” children (ἄτροφοι) and also to the _biothanati_ whose life has
been interrupted by misfortunes of any kind. Petosiris was even
concerned to discover—Ptolemy declared such preoccupation to be
ridiculous[308]—what the stars reserved until the end of their life for
those who had gone through only a portion of it. The texts which have
been preserved—and often expurgated—by the Byzantines give no more than
a bare indication of astral influences on the lot of men. In antiquity
other more religious and more mystical works doubtless existed in which
the inauspicious action of the murderous star, still affecting after
death the souls torn from their mortal wrappings, was shown.
Pythagorism, which was closely connected with astrology, took possession
of these ideas and adapted them to its speculations. According to this
philosophy one and the same harmony presided over all physical phenomena
and was, like music, subject to laws of number. These laws therefore
were at work during pregnancy, and a complicated arithmetic was employed
to show by a multiplication of days that a child might be born after
seven or nine months with power to live, but not after eight, for such
was the strange doctrine of the sect. Thus gestation became a melody in
which abortion was a false note.
Nature was said to be like an artist who sometimes breaks an instrument
of which he overstretches the chords, and sometimes leaves them too
slack and can produce no tune. Now, these harmonic laws necessarily
determined not only the formation but also the end of man: “There is a
fixed relation of determined numbers which unites souls to bodies,” says
a philosopher, “and while it subsists, the body continues to be animate,
but so soon as it fails, the hidden energy which maintained this union
is dissolved, and this is what we call destiny and the fatal time of
life.”[309] When the term fixed by nature is reached, the soul departs
without effort from the body in which it can no longer exercise its
office. But when the soul is violently ejected from the body and the
link connecting them is broken by an external force, it is troubled and
is afflicted by an ill which will cause it pain in the Beyond.
These ideas had sunk deep into the popular mind. The distinction between
an end in conformity with nature and one unexpectedly provoked by
extraneous intervention is often expressed in literature as well as in
inscriptions. Thus the epitaph of a young woman of twenty-eight, who was
believed to have been the victim of witchcraft, states that “her spirit
was torn from her by violence rather than returned to nature,”[310]
which had lent it to her; the Manes or the celestial gods will be the
avengers of this crime. Still more frequently an opposition is found
between an early death and _Fatum_. The hour of death is determined at
the moment of birth:
“Nascentes morimur; finisque ab origine pendet.”[311]
“At the moment we are born, we die; and our end is fixed from our
beginning.” He who reaches this term fixed for his life ends “on his
day” (_suo die_); otherwise he dies “before his day” (_ante diem_).[312]
The vulgar belief was that the intervention of a human or divine will
could oppose the fated course of things and abridge the normal duration
of existence. Often the expression occurs of a belief that a demon or,
what is more remarkable, an evil god has carried off innocent children
or young men whose life has thus been shortened.[313] But pagan theology
undertook the task of re-establishing the order of nature thus disturbed
by fortuitous accidents and by individual and unregulated interferences.
The breaking of the laws of the universe was only apparent: a soul might
by mischance or by a malevolent act be suddenly severed from its body,
but, remaining obedient to Fate, it had thereafter to linger on earth
until its appointed time was accomplished.
Its lot was supposed to be analogous to that of the unfortunate who had
been deprived of burial (ἄταφοι, _insepulti_) of whom we spoke in our
first lecture.[314] It circled about the corpse, which it could not
abandon, or fluttered here and there near the place of burial or on the
spot where the body which it had occupied had been assailed. Excluded
from the abode of the shades these wandering souls flitted near the
earth or on the surface of the waters, miserable and plaintive. The fear
of never being able to penetrate into the kingdom of blessed shades
seems to have inspired the following prayer, which occurs in a metrical
epitaph of Capri:[315]
“You who dwell in the country of Styx, beneficent demons, receive me too
into Hades, me the unfortunate who was not borne away in accordance with
the judgment of the Fates, but by a hasty and violent death provoked by
unjust anger.”
These brutally disincarnated souls became like the swift and harmful
spirits with which the air was filled: like them they belonged to the
train of Hecate, the goddess of enchantment, and like them were subject
to the power of magicians. At Lesbos, Gello, a young virgin carried off
before her time, became a phantom which killed children and caused
premature deaths.[316] The leaden tablets, which were slipped into tombs
in order to injure an enemy, and the magic papyri of Egypt bear a large
number of incantations in which these mischievous demons are invoked. In
the same way a series of conjurations, dating from the third century and
found in the island of Cyprus, appeal to the spirits of the dead thrown
in the common ditch, “who have met their death by violence, or before
their time, or who have been deprived of burial.”[317] In general the
sacrifice of newly born children, and the use of their vital organs and
bones, was, and not without reason, a most frequent charge against
sorcerers. Formulas preserved on papyrus recommend as powerful means to
work a charm “a baby’s heart, the blood of a dead maiden, and the
carrion of a dog.”[318] Witches were believed to steal children in order
to use the entrails in their occult operations, a ritualistic murder
analogous to that attributed by popular belief, in some countries, to
the Jews. Cicero, Horace in an epode, Petronius in his romance,[319] and
other authors bear witness to the extent to which this opinion was
entertained. The epitaph of a young slave of Livia, wife of Drusus,
relates his misfortune. Before he was four years old he was cut off by
the cruel hand, the “black hand” of a witch, who practised her noxious
art everywhere. “Guard well your children, ye parents,” adds the
epitaph.[320]
Likewise the murder of adults and the use made of objects which had
belonged to executed or murdered persons is frequently mentioned. The
wonder-workers believed that by practising with the bodies of this class
of the dead, or with objects they had used, they became masters of their
wandering souls and made them serve their designs. The nails of a
crucified criminal, the bloodsoaked linen of a gladiator, were
efficacious amulets.[321] Faith is still kept nowadays in the rope which
has hanged a man.[322] The books which circulated under the name of
Hostanes the Persian, Nectabis the Egyptian and other illustrious
wizards dealt with evocations of ἄωροι and βιαιοθάνατοι.[323]
Thus a logical series of beliefs was pushed to its extreme consequence.
At the moment of birth Fate fixed for each man the length of his career;
if this were interrupted, the soul had to complete it in suffering, near
the earth, and became a demon which lent its aid to diviners and
sorcerers. This doctrine, supported by astrology and Oriental magic,
imposed itself on many minds. Plato, who had found it among the
Pythagoreans, alludes to it, and Posidonius seems to have dealt with it
more at length in his treatise “On Divination” (περὶ μαντικῆς),[324]
although we cannot tell in how far he supported it. But it encountered
the objections of other Greek philosophers. The reproach made to this
theory was that it left out of account morality and merited retribution,
and brought together, as subject to the same misfortune, criminals
condemned to capital punishment and children whose age had kept them
from all sin. Feeling and reason at the same time protested against the
cruel doctrine which vowed indifferently the innocent and the guilty to
long torture. When accident or illness caused the death of a beloved
son, could his parents make up their mind to believe that he would
suffer undeserved chastisement? A distinction had to be made between
categories of persons, and to this task the pagan theologians applied
themselves. Let us follow them in their undertaking.
* * * * *
The ἄωροι are those who die “out of season,” that is to say, in the wide
sense of the word, those whose existence ends abnormally, but more
particularly those who die young, who die prematurely. They include the
ἀνώνυμοι, those who have received no name, who have not, that is,
reached the ninth or tenth day of life, the ἄτροφοι, _non nutriti_, or
babes who are still being fed at the breast or, according to the
astrologers, are not yet a year old, and the ἄγαμοι, the _innupti_, who
have died before the age of marriage and have therefore left no
posterity to render them funeral rites.
None of these children and adolescents deserved, in the opinion of the
sages, any chastisement. The Pythagoreans placed the age of reason, at
which man is capable of choosing between good and evil and may be made
responsible for his faults, as late as sixteen, that is, the age of
puberty. Until that age the “naked” soul, without virtue as without
vice, was exempt from all merit and demerit which would later attach to
it. We know the unhappy lot to which, according to these philosophers,
they were doomed. But other theologians considered that these souls,
which had not been weighted by a long contact with matter, should fly
more easily to celestial heights. Unsullied by earthly pollution, their
purity allowed them to rise without difficulty to a better life in a
happier abiding-place.[325]
It is hard to determine to what degree these moral ideas had penetrated
the popular mind. The reaction against a superstitious belief often led
to pure negation. Those who held that death put an end to all
sensibility, were content to affirm that the child they wept had gone
down into everlasting night, and that nothing was left of him but dust
and ashes. Certain epitaphs hope that, if his Manes still have some
feeling, his bones may rest quietly in the tomb. But mother’s love was
not to be satisfied with this negative assurance or to resign itself to
anxious doubting. The people kept an unreasoning fear of the evils which
awaited the ἄωροι, and of those which might be expected from them. Some
also believed that an ancestral fault—such as was, according to the
Orphic doctrine, the murder of Zagreus, by the Titans—made all humanity
guilty from birth, and that this hereditary sin had to be effaced by
purifications.[326] Religion offered a remedy for the ill to which, to
speak with Lucretius, it had itself lent persuasion. The custom of
initiating children to the mysteries which was, at least at Eleusis,
originally connected with the family or gentile cult, became a means of
preserving them from the fatal lot which threatened them and of ensuring
their happiness in the other life. Thus _pueri_ and _puellae_ are found
admitted at the most tender age among the adepts of the secret cults,
both Greek and Oriental, perhaps even consecrated from birth to the
godhead. They are imagined as partaking in the Beyond of the joys which
these cults promised to those whose salvation they ensured. A child who
has taken part in a ceremony of Bacchus lives endowed with eternal youth
in the Elysian Fields in the midst of Satyrs.[327] Others continue the
games proper to their years in another life, or if they have reached the
age of first love they still sport with young Eros. Above all, however,
the influence of the astral cults, added to that of philosophy, brought
about an admission that innocent creatures ascended to the starry
heavens. An epitaph of Thasos[328] speaks of a virgin, flower-bearer
(ἀνθοφόρος) probably of Demeter and Kora, who was carried off at the age
of thirteen by the inexorable Fates, but who, “living among the stars,
by the will of the immortals, has taken her place in the sacred abode of
the blessed.” At Amorgos, a child of eight was, we are assured, led by
Hermes to Olympus, shone in the ether, and would henceforth protect the
young wrestlers who emulated him in the palaestra. Even the precise spot
in which he twinkled was fixed, the horn of the constellation of the
Goat—an appropriate place for this little fighter.[329] Curiously, an
epitaph of Africa, which repeats Virgil’s very expression (p. 129),
states, in contradiction to the poet, that a baby, “cut off on the
threshold of life,” has not gone to the Manes but to the stars of
heaven,[330] and a relief of Copenhagen shows the bust of a little girl
within a large crescent surrounded by seven stars, thus indicating that
she has risen towards the moon, the abode of blessed souls.[331]
Examples of these premature apotheoses might be multiplied. I shall
merely show, by a characteristic case, how it was possible for old
popular beliefs to be combined with the new astral doctrine. The
ancients attributed to the rustic nymphs the strange powers which the
Greek peasant today recognises in beings which he still designates as
the Nereids.[332] Sometimes these fantastical goddesses possess
themselves of the spirit of men and change them into seers or maniacs
νυμφόληπτοι; sometimes their fancy is caught by handsome youths whom
they carry off and oblige to live with them. But above all they love
pretty children and steal them from their parents, not to harm them but
in order that they may take part in their own divine pastimes. Doubtless
it was at first to mountain caverns, near limpid springs, in the depths
of tufted woods, that they bore him whom they made their little
playfellow. Such were the archaic beliefs of the country folk. But the
mysteries of Bacchus taught that an innocent child, thus rapt from the
earth, mingled in the train of the Naiads in the flowery meadows of the
Elysian Fields;[333] and when Paradise was transferred to the sky it was
in the “immortal dwelling-place of the ether” that the nymphs, we are
told, placed a little girl whose charm had seduced them.[334]
Transported thus to heaven, these loved beings were transformed by the
tenderness of their relatives into protectors of the family in which
their memory survived, or of the friends who shared regret for them.
Whether they were called “heroes” in Greek, or as elsewhere “gods,”[335]
they were always conceived as guardian powers who acknowledged by
benefits the worship rendered them. Thus in the middle of the second
century the _familia_ of a proconsul of Asia, C. Julius Quadratus,
honoured a child of eight years as a hero, at the prayer of his father
and mother;[336] and at Smyrna the parents of a dearly loved child of
four, raised to this baby as their tutelary god, a tomb on which an
epitaph described in detail all his illnesses.[337]
These sentimental illusions are eternal. Nothing is more frequently seen
on tombstones in our own Catholic cemeteries than such invocations as
“Dear angel in heaven, pray for us,” or even a figure of a winged baby
flying away among winged cherubs. This faith is perhaps touching, but
its orthodoxy is doubtful. For the doctors of the Church, except Origen,
have, I think, never adopted the doctrine of Philo the Jew that human
souls can be transformed into angelic spirits. But in the oldest
Christian epitaphs the conviction is already expressed that, since
children are without sin, they will be transported by angels to the
dwelling of the saints and there intercede for their parents. “Thou hast
been received, my daughter, among the pious souls, because thy life was
pure from all fault, for thy youth ever sought only innocent play,”[338]
says a metrical epitaph, once under the portico of St. Peter’s. And
another and older epitaph is as follows, “Eusebius, a child without sin
because of his age, admitted to the abode of the saints, rests there in
peace.”[339] Still others end with the words “Pray for us,” “_Pete pro
nobis_.”
* * * * *
Thus little by little in antiquity the conviction gained strength and
became predominant that, as Menander said with another meaning, whom the
gods love die young.[340] As to individuals whose days were cut short by
a violent blow, they were not uniformly in the same case. The theorists
here distinguished among different categories of the _biothanati_.[341]
The classification seems to have originated with the astrologists who
claimed to enumerate, in accordance with the position of Mars and
Saturn, all the kinds of death reserved for victims of these murderous
planets, and to foretell whether these unfortunates were to be drowned,
burnt, poisoned, hanged, beheaded, crucified, impaled, crushed to death,
thrown to the beasts, or given over to yet more atrocious tortures. But
the moralists here also made a point of separating the innocent from the
guilty. Only the guilty were to suffer after death and only their souls
were to become demons. For, side by side with those who had deserved
capital punishment for their crimes, or who administered death to
themselves, were others cut off by a fatal accident, perhaps even killed
while performing a sacred duty.
Such was the case of soldiers slain in battle. Logic ordered the
theologians to place them among the _biothanati_, and so they are, for
instance, in Virgil’s sixth book of the Aeneid.[342] But death on the
field of honour could not be a source of infinite ills for them, and it
was generally admitted that, on the contrary, their courage opened for
them the gates of heaven.
“Virtus recludens immeritis mori
Caelum,”
as Horace says.[343] The Greek theory of the divinity of the heroes here
comes to temper the severity of an unreasonable and dangerous doctrine.
According to Josephus,[344] Titus, when haranguing his soldiers,
promised immortality to such as fell bravely, and condemned the others
to destruction. “Who does not know,” he asked, “that valiant souls,
delivered from the flesh by the sword in battle, will inhabit the purest
of ethereal elements, and, fixed in the midst of the stars, will make
themselves manifest to their descendants as good genii and benevolent
heroes? On the other hand, souls which are extinguished when their body
is sick, vanish, even if they are free from all stain and defilement,
into subterranean darkness and are buried in deep oblivion.” In the
military monarchies of the Hellenistic East, as in the Roman Empire,
eternal life was certainly promised to those who had perished arms in
hand, faithful to their military duty. We know that the same belief was
transmitted to Islam: a Mussulman who dies in battle “in the way of
Allah” is a martyr (_shahîd_) to whom the joys of Paradise are assured.
The Jews, who had been reluctant to admit such ideas before, from the
time of the Maccabees onwards associated with warriors those who
sacrificed themselves in order to be faithful to their persecuted
religion, and to these especially they promised a glorious immortality.
Faith in this celestial reward was later to cause the Christians, who
won the martyr’s crown, to face all sufferings.
* * * * *