“When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.”[[46]]
The fiery breath of our intelligence is gathered, as are the matter and the humours of our organism, into the inexhaustible reservoir which produced them, as one day the earth and the heavens will be gathered thither also. All must be engulfed in one whole, must lose itself in one forgetfulness. When man has reached the term of his fate, he faints into the one power which forms and leads the universe, just as the tired stars will be extinguished in it, when their days shall be accomplished. Resistance to the supreme law is vain and painful; rebellion against the irresistible order of things is impious. The great virtue taught by Stoicism is that of submission to the fatality which guides the world, of joyous acceptance of the inevitable. Philosophic literature and the epitaphs present to us, repeatedly and in a thousand forms, the idea that we cannot strive against omnipotent necessity, that the rule of this rigid master must be borne without tears or recriminations. The wise man, who destroys within himself desire of any happenings, enjoys even during this existence divine calm in the midst of tribulations, but those whom the vicissitudes of life drive or attract, who let illusions seduce or grieve them, will at last obtain remission of their troubles when they reach the tranquil haven of death. This thought is expressed by a distich which often recurs on tombs, in Greek and in Latin. “I have fled, escaped. Farewell, Hope and Fortune. I have nothing more to do with you. Make others your sport.”[[47]]
Stoic determinism found support in the astrology which originated in 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.