Rome.
Although Rome, above all else, was a warlike republic, and religion principally a State cult, that allowed but slight opportunity for the outer expression of spirituality, none the less did it inherit the beliefs of Egypt, Greece, and Persia; the Bacchic mysteries, previous to their degradation, were a copy of the Orphic and Eleusinian mysteries. In the reign of Pompey, Mithraism, a cult borrowed from Persia, was spread throughout the empire. Consequently, we need not be surprised at finding the doctrine of Rebirth mentioned by the great Latin writers.
We will quote only from Virgil and Ovid.
In the speech addressed by Anchises to Æneas, his son, the Trojan prince deals with the life beyond death, the tortures endured by souls in expiation of their misdeeds, their purification, their passing into Tartarus,[164] into the Elysian Fields,[165] then their return to earth after having drunk of the river of forgetfulness. In Book VI. of the Æneid, we find Æneas visiting the lower regions:
"After having for a thousand years turned the wheel (of existence), these souls come forth in a mighty troop to the Lethean stream to which God calls them that they may lose the memory of the past, see the higher regions,[166] and begin to wish to return into bodies."
Ovid, in his Metamorphoses also deals with the teaching of Pythagoras, his master, on the subject of palingenesis:
"Then Death, so-called, is but old matter drest
In some new figure, and a varied vest;
Thus all things are but alter'd, nothing dies,
And here and there th' embodied spirit flies,
By time, or force, or sickness dispossest,
And lodges, when it lights, in man or beast.
Th' immortal soul flies out in empty space
To seek her fortune in some other place."