Pagan Ideas of Immortality During the Early Roman Empire

by Clifford Herschel Moore

The most important single religious document from the Augustan Age is the sixth book of Virgil’s Aeneid; for although the Aeneid was written primarily to glorify Roman imperial aims, the sixth book gives full expression to many philosophic and popular ideas of the other world and of the future life, which were current among both Greeks and Romans.[1] It therefore makes a fitting point of departure for our considerations. In this book, as you will remember, the poet’s hero, having reached Italian soil at last, is led down to the lower world by the Cumaean Sybil. This descent to Hades belongs historically to that long series of apocalyptic writings which begins with the eleventh book of the Odyssey and closes with Dante’s Divine Comedy. Warde Fowler deserves credit for clearly pointing out that this visit of Aeneas to the world below is the final ordeal for him, a mystic initiation, in which he receives “enlightenment for the toil, peril, and triumph that await him in the accomplishment of his divine mission.” When the Trojan hero has learned from his father’s shade the mysteries of life and death, and has been taught the magnitude of the work which lies before him, and the great things that are to be, he casts off the timidity which he has hitherto shown and, strengthened by his experiences, advances to the perfect accomplishment of his task.[2]

But we are not concerned so much with Virgil’s purpose in writing this apocalyptic book, as with its contents and with the evidence it gives as to the current ideas of the other world and the fate of the human soul. What then does the poet tell us of these great matters? We can hardly do better than to follow Aeneas and his guide on their journey. This side of Acheron they meet the souls of those whose bodies are unburied, and who therefore must tarry a hundred years—the maximum of human life—before they may be ferried over the river which bounds Hades. When Charon has set the earthly visitors across that stream, they find themselves in a place where are gathered spirits of many kinds, who have not yet been admitted to Tartarus or Elysium: first the souls of infants and those who met their end by violence—men condemned to death though innocent, suicides, those who died for love, and warriors—all of whom must here wait until the span of life allotted them has been completed. These spirits passed, the mortal visitors come to the walls of Tartarus, on whose torments Aeneas is not allowed to look, for

“The feet of innocence may never pass
Into this house of sin.”

But the Sybil, herself taught by Hecate, reveals to him the eternal punishments there inflicted for monstrous crimes. Then the visitors pass to Elysium, where dwell the souls of those whose deserts on earth have won for them a happy lot. Nearby in a green valley, Aeneas finds the shade of his own father, Anchises, looking eagerly at the souls which are waiting to be born into the upper world. In answer to his son’s questions, the heroic shade discloses the doctrine of rebirths—metempsychosis—with its tenets of penance and of purification.[3] Finally, to fulfill the poet’s purpose, Anchises’ spirit points out the souls of the heroes who are to come on earth in due season; the spirits of future Romans pass before Aeneas in long array; and at the climax he sees the soul of Augustus, that prince who was destined in the fullness of time to bring back the Golden Age and to impose peace on the wide world. This prophetic revelation ended, Aeneas enlightened and strengthened for his task, returns to the upper world.

This book seems at first a strange compound indeed of popular belief, philosophy, and theology, which is not without its contradictions. On these, however, we need not pause; but for our present interest we must ask what are the main ideas on which this apocalypse is based. First of all, a future life is taken for granted by the poet; otherwise the book could never have been written. Secondly, we notice that, according to ancient popular belief, the souls of those who had not received the proper burial rites, were doomed to wander on this side of Acheron until a hundred years were completed, and also that souls which were disembodied by violence or by early death, were destined to live out their allotted span of earthly existence before they could enter the inner precincts of Hades. Again the poet represents some few as suffering eternal torments for their monstrous sins or enjoying immortal bliss because of their great deserts. And finally, he shows that the majority of souls must pass through successive lives and deaths, until, purified from the sin and dross of the body by millennial sojourns in the world below, and by virtuous lives on earth, they at last find repose and satisfaction. The popular beliefs which concern details of the future life we shall leave one side for the moment; let us rather first observe that Virgil’s ideas as to rewards and punishments in the next world, as well as his doctrine of successive rebirths and deaths with their accompanying purifications, rest on a moral basis, so that the other world is conceived to be a complement of this: life on earth and life below are opportunities for moral advance without which final happiness cannot be attained. Whence came these ideas of the future life and how far were they current in the ancient world of Virgil’s day?

Naturally it does not follow that, because Rome’s greatest poet chose to picture souls surviving their corporeal homes, the average man believed in a future life, but there is abundant evidence that the poet was appealing to widespread beliefs, when he wrote his apocalyptic book.[4] In fact from the earliest times known to us, both Greeks and Romans held to a belief in some kind of extended life for souls after the death of the body.[5] Both peoples had their cults of the dead, rites of tendance and of riddance, festivals both public and private, which leave no doubt that the great majority of men never questioned that the spirits of the departed existed after this life, and that those spirits were endowed with power to harm or to bless the living.[6] But beyond this rather elementary stage of belief the Romans never went of themselves. The Greeks, however, began early to develop eschatological ideas which had, and which still have, great importance.

The eleventh book of the Odyssey, as I have already said, is the oldest “Descent to Hades” in European literature. The souls of the dead are there represented as dwelling in the land of shadows, having no life, but leading an insubstantial existence, without punishment or reward. Such a future world could have no moral or other value; it could only hang over men as a gloomy prospect of that which awaited them when the suns of this world had forever set. But in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C. other ideas came to the front, which were influential throughout later history. In those two centuries fall the first period of Greek individualism and a religious revival—two things not wholly disconnected. The Orphic sect, which appeared in the sixth century, was made up of religious devotees who adopted a purified form of the religion of Dionysus.[7] The center of the Orphic faith and mystic ceremonial was the myth of the birth, destruction, and rebirth of the god. According to the story, Dionysus was pursued by the Titans, powers hostile to Zeus. In his distress the god changed himself into various creatures, finally taking on the form of a bull, which the Titans tore in pieces and devoured. But the goddess Athena saved the heart and gave it to Zeus who swallowed it. Hence sprang the new Dionysus. The Titans Zeus destroyed with his thunderbolt and had the ashes scattered to the winds. From these ashes, in one form of the myth, man was made, and therefore he was thought to unite in his person the sinful Titanic nature and the divine Dionysiac spark. The parallelism between this story and the myths of Osiris, Attis, and Adonis is at once evident. They are all gods who die and live again, and thus become lords of death and life, through whom man gains assurance of his own immortality.

Our chief concern with the Orphics here is that they seem to have introduced among the Greeks the idea that the soul of man was divine, was a [Greek: daimôn] which had fallen, and for its punishment was imprisoned in the body as in a tomb. In its corporeal cell it was condemned to suffer defilement until released by death, when it passed to Hades. Its lot there depended on its life on earth. As an Orphic fragment says: “They who are righteous beneath the rays of the sun, when they die, have a gentler lot in a fair meadow by deep flowing Acheron.... But they who have worked wrong and insolence under the rays of the sun are led down beneath Cocytus’s watery plain into chill Tartarus.”[8] The soul’s sojourn in Hades therefore was a time of punishment and of purification, even as life itself was a penance for sin. According to a common belief, at least in Plato’s day, after a thousand years the soul entered a new incarnation, and so on through ten rounds of earth and Hades, until at last, freed from sin and earthly dross by faithful observance of a holy life on earth and by the purification which it underwent below, it returned to its divine abode; but those who persisted in sin were condemned to all the punishments which man’s imagination could devise; the wicked were doomed to lie in mud and filth, while evil demons rent their vitals. Indeed the horrors which the medieval Christian loved to depict in order to terrify the wicked and to rejoice the faithful, were first devised by the Orphics and their heirs, for exactly the same purpose.

But what bases did the Orphics find for their belief in the divine nature of the soul? In their mythology they had said that man was created out of the ashes of the Titans in which a spark of Dionysus still remained. But in fact they seem to have rested on faith or intuition, without working out clearly a philosophic answer. They were indeed deeply conscious of man’s dual nature; they perceived that on the one hand he is pulled by his baser instincts and desires, which they naturally attributed to the body, and that on the other hand he is prompted by nobler aspirations, which they assigned to his soul. This higher part of man’s dual self was, for them, the Dionysiac element in him. And man’s moral obligation they held to be to free this divine element from the clogging weight of the body, to cease to “blind his soul with clay.” So far as we are aware, the Orphics were the first among the Greeks to make the divinity of the soul a motive for the religious life, and perhaps the first to see that, if the soul is divine, it may naturally be regarded as eternally so, and therefore as immortal. What more momentous thoughts as to the soul’s nature and its destiny could any sect have introduced than these? They were shared by their contemporaries, the Pythagoreans; in fact it is hard to say with certainty which sect developed these concepts first.[9]

But the Orphic-Pythagorean confidence in the immortality of the soul was at the most only an emotional belief. It remained for Plato in the early fourth century to give that belief a philosophic basis and thereby to transform it into a reasonable article of religion. This he fundamentally did, when he brought his concept of the reasoning soul into connection with his doctrine of “forms” or “ideas.” He maintained that behind this transient phenomenal world known to us through the senses, lies another world, the world of ideas, invisible, permanent, and real, which can be grasped by the reason only. These permanent ideas, he said, are of various grades and degrees, the supreme idea being that of the Good and the Beautiful, which is the cause of all existence, truth, and knowledge; it at once comprehends these things within itself and is superior to them; it is the Absolute, God.[10]