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.