Among most peoples the primitive idea of an after life in the grave was enlarged into the conception of a common existence of the dead in the depths of the earth. The dead man does not stay confined in the narrow dwelling in which he rests; he goes down into vast caverns which extend beneath the crust of the soil we tread. These immense hollows are peopled by a multitude of shades who have left the tomb. Thus the tomb becomes the antechamber of the true dwelling of the spirits who have departed; its door is the gate of Hades itself. Through the tomb, the great company of the beings who have been plunged in the darkness of the infernal regions remains in communication with those who still sojourn in our upper world. The libations and offerings made by the survivors on the grave descend to this gloomy hypogeum and there feed and rejoice those for whom they are intended. Until the time of the Roman Empire, nay, to the end of antiquity, the common man believed in this wonder.[[170]] To attempt to define the means by which it was brought about would be vain. These were beliefs which went back so far and were so deeply rooted in the mind of the people that men accepted them without seeking to explain them.
In Rome, the idea that the spirits of the dead inhabit a common dwelling in the nether world existed from the time when the city had its beginnings. It kept in religion a coarsely naïve form which proves how archaic it was. According to a rite borrowed by the Romans from the Etruscans, a pit was dug in the centre of the city, when the latter’s foundations were laid, in order to make the Inferi communicate with the upper world. First fruits and other gifts were thrown into the pit, as well as a clod of the earth of the settlers’ native country. Thus they restored their broken contact with the Manes of their ancestors. In all probability this hole was formed of a vertical pit ending in a chamber with an arched roof curved like the heaven—hence the name mundus given to it. The key of the vault of this lower cellar was formed of a stone, the lapis Manalis, which could be raised in order to let the spirits pass. Three times a year, on the twenty-fourth of August, the fifth of October and the eighth of November, this ceremony took place: the door of hell was opened and the dead had free access to the atmosphere. These days were therefore sacred, religiosi, and all business was suspended on them.
Recently the mundus of the ancient Roma Quadrata was believed to have been discovered during excavations of the Palatine, but the underground space in question is probably only a silo or a cistern. Other pits used for the cult of the dead existed elsewhere in the city. It has recently been suggested that the altar of the god Consus, which was hidden in a ditch in the middle of the Circus Maximus and uncovered during the races, was one of these mouths of hell and like that shown in representations of the funeral games of the Etruscans.[[171]]
But on certain days the souls of the dead rose to the earth’s surface of themselves, although nothing had been done to make their coming thither easier, and they then had to be appeased by sacrifices. This was what happened from the thirteenth to the twenty-first of February, during the Parentalia, when the souls of ancestors were honoured, and on the ninth, the eleventh and the thirteenth of May, the dates of the Lemuria, on which, at midnight, according to a prescribed ceremonial, the father of the family nine times threw black beans to the Lemures to keep them away from the house.
Lemures and Manes are used only in the plural: these words stand for the vague conceptions formed of the shades of the dead who dwelt beneath the ground. These were a nameless crowd, hardly individualised, not distinguishable from the fleeting phantoms who fluttered about the tombs. The Romans were a people of little imagination, and their infernal mythology remained rudimentary until the time when they borrowed from the Greeks the picturesque stories about the adventures of travellers to Hades and the blessings and misfortunes which there awaited them.
Originally no idea of retribution was attached to this descent of the dead into the infernal regions; it was neither their merits nor their demerits which determined their condition. On the contrary, the inequalities of human society were perpetuated: a nobleman kept a higher rank than that of his servants; each man in some sort continued his occupations, even preserved his tastes and his passions. Existence in the Beyond was conceived as a mere prolongation of earthly life. It is to this idea, which was generally entertained, that the old custom corresponds of placing in the grave the implements and other objects which a dead man was in the habit of using. We have already touched on this point in speaking of life in the tomb (p. 49), but the things deposited beside the corpse were not only those which could be used by the dweller of the “eternal house.” If he were a powerful lord his chariot, his horses and his arms would be buried with him;[[172]] a hunter would be supplied in the other world with his spears and his nets;[[173]] a craftsman with the tools of his trade; a woman with the objects which enabled her to spin and to weave. These funeral customs were more than a tradition, followed without reference to the reasons inspiring it. Among the Greeks, as among the Romans, the idea survives persistently, in poetic descriptions of the Elysian Fields, that each man will there keep the character and retain the habits which distinguished him before his death. Virgil, taking his inspiration from Pindar, shows us the blessed occupied by the contests of the palestra, by song and poetry and by chariot races; for, he tells us, the passion which the dead had in life for arms and for horses still pursues them when they have been buried in the earth.[[174]] Ovid[[175]] sketches with rapid touches an analogous picture. “The shades,” he says, “wander bloodless, bodiless, boneless; some gather in the forum, others follow their trades, imitating their former way of life.” And this is no fancy due to the poet’s imagination. An awkward epitaph of a young, probably Syrian, slave[[176]] tells us that he is glad still to be able to discharge his service zealously in the retired place where dwells the god of the infernal abode. In these instances we find, in spite of the transformation undergone by eschatological ideas as a whole, a survival of the old conception of the destiny of the dead.
We have not to seek far to discover how this transformation took place. It was provoked by the desire to subject souls to different treatment according to their deserts, and to distribute them in distinct compartments in which they would be rewarded or punished in accordance with their past works. It was much prior to the Roman period, going back to the distant age at which Orphic theology, with its sanctions beyond the grave, modified Homeric tradition and popular religion in Greece. In the West the doctrine which imposed itself with the Hellenic civilisation on peoples of foreign race was ready-made. It spread through the south of Italy by way of the colonies of Greater Greece in which Pythagorism came to its full power. It is in this country that some of the Orphic tablets intended as guides to the dead in their journey through the infernal realm have been discovered in the tombs;[[177]] and the great amphorae of a later date, bearing representations of scenes of Hades, which were also found in southern Italy, show the importance which continued to be attached there to the idea of the future life. In Campania, Lake Avernus was even regarded as one of the entrances to the nether world, through which Ulysses and Aeneas had descended.
The Greek doctrines were also introduced among the Etruscans and combined with the beliefs of this people as to an underworld in which the Manes of the dead were threatened by horrible demons and protected by beneficent genii. This Greek influence and its alliance with the native traditions appear in Etruria in a great number of funeral monuments on which we find represented many figures which, according to mythology, peopled the kingdom of Pluto. One of the most significant is the fine sarcophagus, discovered a few years ago at Torre San Severo near Bolsena, which seems to date from the third century B. C.[[178]] The two long sides hold corresponding reliefs, the one showing Achilles’ sacrifice of the Trojan prisoners on the grave of Patroclus, the other the sacrifice of Polyxena, last of Priam’s daughters, on the tomb of Achilles. These scenes, borrowed from the Greek epic poetry, are placed between two Etruscan demons, winged figures which bear serpents and are male on one side and female on the other. The small sides are decorated by two scenes from the Odyssey, the myth of Circe changing the companions of Ulysses into animals—perhaps an allusion to metempsychosis—and Tiresias’ evocation of the shades of the dead, the Elysian Fields being curiously indicated. This instance—and many others might be cited—shows how closely the Hellenic legends of Hades had been intermingled with Etruscan demonology.
This Greek conception of the infernal regions, which literature and art were to popularise and perpetuate even after credence had ceased to be given to it, remains familiar to us. Taken altogether and in the large, it is that of a kingdom imagined as an imitation of the cities of our world, in which, however, there reigns such a rigorous justice as is on our poor earth no more than a dream of minds morally disposed. This underground state, of which the frontier is defended by an unbridged river, the Styx, is governed by powerful rulers, Pluto and Proserpina. It has its judges, Minos, Aeacus and Rhadamanthus; its executioners, the Erinyes or Furies; and its prison, Tartarus, surrounded by high walls. This jail, in which the guilty, laden with chains, suffer the torments enacted in Greece by the penal laws or others more atrocious,[[179]] is distinctly contrasted with the abode of the good citizens who freely enjoy in delightful gardens all the pleasures which make the joy of human beings.
Books treating of the “Descent into Hades,” of which a considerable number were in circulation, and the poets’ descriptions embroidered various patterns around this central design. There was a whole mythological and theological efflorescence which peopled with more and more numerous figures the fantastic kingdom occupying the great cavern of the earth. Infinite variations were imagined on a traditional theme, of which, however, even certain details were preserved from age to age with a surprising fidelity. Lucian in his satirical description of Charon and his boat reproduces types fixed in the sixth century before our era, for, as has been observed, his picture is in exact agreement with the recently discovered fragment of a black-figured vase.[[180]]