If we turn over collections of ancient inscriptions we find, as when we go through our own cemeteries, a number of epitaphs in which the grief caused by the early death of a friend or relative is expressed. But in antiquity this sorrow was called forth not alone by regret for a loved being, too soon lost to sight, and by painful disappointment because of the irreparable ruin of the hopes to which his youth had given rise. Along with these human feelings, which are of all time and all societies, there were mingled in antiquity ideas which caused the loss of those who died before their time to seem more fearful and bitter.
Virgil’s celebrated lines, in which he describes the descent of Aeneas to Hades, will be remembered:[[296]]
“Continuo auditae voces, vagitus et ingens,
Infantumque animae flentes in limine primo,
Quos dulcis vitae exsortes et ab ubere raptos
Abstulit atra dies et funere mersit acerbo.”
“Ever were heard, on the outermost threshold, voices, a great wailing, the weeping souls of infants bereft of sweet life and torn from the breast, whom the ill-omened day swept off and whelmed in bitter death.”
In an eschatological myth of Plutarch,[[297]] the traveller beyond the grave also sees a deep abyss, in which moan the plaintive voices of a multitude of children who had died at the moment of their birth and were unable to rise to heaven. It has been shown that the Latin poet and the Greek philosopher are here interpreters of an old Pythagorean belief, to which Plato alludes:[[298]] children who died young, like persons who met with violent deaths, the ἄωροι καὶ βιαιοθάνατοι, found no rest in the other life, but their souls wandered on the earth for the number of years for which their life would normally have lasted. The souls of the shipwrecked who perished at sea roamed the surface of the waters and sailors believed that they were incarnated in the seagulls.[[299]]
How did this belief in the miserable lot of innocent children arise? Its origin should probably be sought in that fear of death which haunts all primitive peoples, and it developed owing to the frequency in antiquity of infanticide by abandoning or “exposing” newly born infants. Remorse provoked terror. This conclusion is especially suggested because the fate of those who died prematurely was approximated to the lot of those who died violent deaths. Beings who had been prevented from completing the natural span of life were feared; their shades were conceived as being unquiet and in pain, because it was believed that they could return to disquiet and pain the living. The idea was entertained that a spirit brutally separated from the body came to hold it in horror and did not consent to inhabit the tomb until a reconciliation had been disobtained by expiatory ceremonies. Being grievously disincarnated, the soul became harmful. Souls, said the ancients, whom a cruel and untimely end has violently or unjustly torn from their bodies, themselves tend to be violent and unjust in order that they may avenge the wrong they have suffered.[[300]] It is no rare thing to find evidence in the inscriptions of a suspicion that a person cut off in the flower of his years has been the victim of some foul play; the curse of Heaven is called down on the head of his assumed murderer. The Sun, who discovers hidden crimes, is often invoked in Roman epitaphs against this unknown offender:[[301]] “Towards the Most High god, who watches over everything, and Helios and Nemesis, Arsinoë, dead before her time, lifts up her hands; if any one prepared poison for her or rejoices in her end, pursue him,” says an inscription of Alexandria. But the victim was himself believed to be capable of vengeance. It seemed incredible that one still full of strength and life should be entirely blotted out and that the energy which had animated him should also have disappeared suddenly, and the reprisals of this mysterious power were apprehended. This spirit pursued above all the murderer and, more generally, those who had given it cause for complaint. It showed itself to them in the form of terrifying monsters which tormented them. “As soon as I shall have expired, doomed to death by you,” says the child in Horace whom the witches sacrificed, “I will haunt your nights like a Fury, I will tear your faces with my hooked nails, as the Manes gods can, and weighing on your unquiet hearts I will take sleep from your affrighted eyes.”[[302]] Suetonius[[303]] relates that after the death of Agrippina, Nero was, on his own confession, often troubled by the vision of her spectre and attempted to calm her spirit by a sacrifice and an evocation which he caused his magicians to make. The same historian gravely recounts that the house in which Caligula was murdered was every night haunted by dreadful apparitions until the time when it was destroyed by fire.[[304]] A scholiast defines the lemures as “the wandering shades of men who died before their normal time and are hence redoubtable.”[[305]] Even today popular belief in many countries attributes a maleficent power to the spirits of those who have died a violent death.
These disquieting superstitions acquired new force through the teachings of astrology, which by incorporating them in its system gave them a doctrinal foundation. Astrology spread the belief, which was and is common to all ancient and modern peoples of the East, that each soul has a predetermined number of years to spend on earth. The mathematici multiplied calculations and methods in order to be able to predict the instant of death predetermined by the horoscope. “This is the great work of astrology, held by its adepts to be its most difficult and by its enemies to be its most dangerous and blameworthy operation.”[[306]] But by an internal contradiction this pseudo-science admitted that the natural end could be hastened by the intervention of a murderous star (ἀναιρέτης): Saturn and Mars can in certain positions call forth sudden death by accident, killing, execution. A fragment attributed to Aristotle asserts that a Syrian mage predicted to Socrates that he would meet such a fate.[[307]] Sometimes the maleficent planets tear a nursing child from its mother’s breast before a single revolution of the sun has been accomplished. All astrological treatises devote chapters to these “unfed” children (ἄτροφοι) and also to the biothanati whose life has been interrupted by misfortunes of any kind. Petosiris was even concerned to discover—Ptolemy declared such preoccupation to be ridiculous[[308]]—what the stars reserved until the end of their life for those who had gone through only a portion of it. The texts which have been preserved—and often expurgated—by the Byzantines give no more than a bare indication of astral influences on the lot of men. In antiquity other more religious and more mystical works doubtless existed in which the inauspicious action of the murderous star, still affecting after death the souls torn from their mortal wrappings, was shown.