The doctrine which placed the subterranean kingdom of Pluto and Proserpina on the other side of the earth and in the other celestial hemisphere, made a poor resistance to this criticism of the Alexandrian geographers. If it did not entirely disappear, if its transmission can be followed down to the end of antiquity and even to the Middle Ages, it never was so widespread nor so active as another doctrine claiming to reconcile the beliefs of the past with accepted science.
This bold doctrine transported the whole subterranean world above the earth’s surface. We shall see, in the next lecture, on celestial immortality (p. 96), that the Pythagoreans conceived the idea of placing the Elysian Fields in the moon, and that the Fortunate Isles were similarly explained by them as being the sun and the moon bathed by the fluid of the ether. The Inferi were thus the lower space, that is, the space extending between the sphere of the moon, which was the limit of the world of the gods, and our globe, which was the centre of the cosmic system. In the Inferi the souls which had to suffer the chastisement of their faults were kept prisoners; they could not win to the stars but wandered plaintively on the earth’s surface and especially about their own tombs, and then rose through the atmosphere in which, little by little, they were purified by the elements. Allegorical interpretations found a place for the infernal rivers in this new topography of the Beyond: Acheron was explained as being the air, the Pyriphlegethon as the zone of hail and fire, and the meanderings of the Styx became the circles of the universe. We shall have occasion to return to the passage of the soul through this aerial purgatory and its ascension to the Elysian Fields of the sky.[[195]]
This cosmological interpretation of the tales referring to Hades had a more powerful influence than the moral allegory which did too much violence to tradition in claiming to make our earthly life the mythological hell. The doctrine that the Inferi were in the atmosphere was adopted by Stoicism at least from the time of Posidonius and was therefore widely believed from the end of the Roman Republic onwards. Even the mysteries, which first kept alive the belief in a subterranean kingdom of the infernal gods, did not escape the influence of these new ideas and were brought to adapt their esoteric teaching to them.[[196]]
The transformation of ancestral beliefs by this theology cannot today be better apprehended than from the sixth book of the Aeneid. Virgil, when he relates the descent of Aeneas into the abode of the shades, is inspired by the Nekyia of the Odyssey and other poetic tales. He remains apparently faithful to mythological and literary tradition, retaining the conventional decoration, the unvarying geography of the infernal kingdom; but he does not admit the literal truth of these beliefs of an earlier time; he is aware of the figurative sense given by the philosophers to the old fables of Hades. At the risk of seeming to contradict himself, he recalls this learned eschatology—the purification, the ascension and the transmigration of souls—in connection with what might have been no more than the story of a marvellous journey to the country of the dead. The unity of the conception and the composition is the less seriously compromised because it was believed that the ancient poets themselves had wished to indicate these truths in their verses under the veil of allegory. The descent to the nether world has therefore a much loftier bearing in Virgil than a mere embellishment. It is the expression of a conviction or at least a hope, not only a brilliant fiction based on an old poetic theme.
However, the symbolical interpretations of the pagan theologians who respected tradition and the purely negative criticism of the sceptics led finally to a common result, to the destruction, namely, of the ancient beliefs, even when it was claimed that they were being saved. Whether the souls were held captive in the other hemisphere or in the atmosphere, or whether they were condemned to reincarnation in a body, Hades was transformed either to the lower sky, the air or the earth, and the early conception of a subterranean world, whither the dead who had been laid in the grave descended, was abolished. There are abundant texts to prove that from the end of the Roman Republic this belief had lost its grip on many minds. Cicero[[197]] claims that there was not an old woman left foolish enough to fear the deep dwellings of Orcus and the gloomy regions peopled by the livid dead. “No one is childish enough,” Seneca repeats,[[198]] “to fear Cerberus and the phantoms which appear in the form of skeletons.” “That there are Manes,” says Juvenal,[[199]] “a subterranean kingdom, a ferryman armed with a pole, and black frogs in the gulfs of the Styx, that so many thousands of men can cross the dark water in a single boat,” these are things in which everyone had ceased to believe except very young children. Pliny[[200]] brings forward a paradoxical argument, that, had there been infernal regions, the zeal of the miners who had dug deep galleries in the ground would have pierced their boundaries; and even the devout Plutarch, when he comes to speak of the punishments reserved by mythology for the wicked, sees in them only nurses’ tales to frighten babies.[[201]]
The multiplicity of this testimony and its precision allow no doubt that not only the educated classes but a large portion of the population rejected the fables as to the nether world. These fables were in any case a foreign importation in the Latin world. Moralists, while they ceased to believe in them for themselves, sometimes pretended to retain them in order to inspire the people with salutary fear, but Tartarus had lost much of its terror for those it should have kept from ill-doing.
Is this to say that these ideas no longer found credence anywhere? A faith which has long dominated minds disappears hardly and leaves persistent traces behind it in customs and feeling. Thus we find that, more or less everywhere, the practice was perpetuated of placing in the mouth of the corpse a piece of money which served, it was said, to pay Charon for the crossing of the Styx.[[202]] Excavators have found these coins in many Roman tombs. But they are doubtless evidence of no more than a traditional rite which men performed without attaching a definite meaning to it.
Moreover, the metrical epitaphs continue to speak of the Elysian Fields and of Tartarus, of Styx and of Acheron; they complain of the cruelty of Pluto who bears away mortals before their time, or of the Parcae or Fates who cut the thread of their days; they mention the avenging Furies, the sufferings of Tantalus, Sisyphus and Ixion. But these are no more than ready-made formulas of poetical language, literary reminiscences or traditional metaphors. Yet sometimes this infernal mythology is curiously developed. Thus a long inscription on a Roman tomb describes a young man descending from the ether in order to announce to those near and dear to him that he has become a celestial hero and has not to go to Pluto’s kingdom. “I shall not wend mournfully to the floods of Tartarus; I shall not cross the waters of Acheron as a shade, nor shall I propel the dusky boat with my oar; I shall not fear Charon with his face of terror, nor shall old Minos pass sentence on me; I shall not wander in the abode of gloom nor be held prisoner on the bank of the fatal waters.”[[203]] This epitaph dates from the century of Augustus, but did its author, any more than the writers of that time, believe in the reality of the beings with which he peoples Hades? He decorates his language with a literary ornament which Christian poetry was later to inherit. This poetry did not hesitate to employ these pagan commonplaces, which had passed from hand to hand until they were so worn out that their first meaning had been effaced. The Renaissance and the age of modern classicism were again to use and to abuse them.