The ἄωροι are those who die “out of season,” that is to say, in the wide sense of the word, those whose existence ends abnormally, but more particularly those who die young, who die prematurely. They include the ἀνώνυμοι, those who have received no name, who have not, that is, reached the ninth or tenth day of life, the ἄτροφοι, non nutriti, or babes who are still being fed at the breast or, according to the astrologers, are not yet a year old, and the ἄγαμοι, the innupti, who have died before the age of marriage and have therefore left no posterity to render them funeral rites.
None of these children and adolescents deserved, in the opinion of the sages, any chastisement. The Pythagoreans placed the age of reason, at which man is capable of choosing between good and evil and may be made responsible for his faults, as late as sixteen, that is, the age of puberty. Until that age the “naked” soul, without virtue as without vice, was exempt from all merit and demerit which would later attach to it. We know the unhappy lot to which, according to these philosophers, they were doomed. But other theologians considered that these souls, which had not been weighted by a long contact with matter, should fly more easily to celestial heights. Unsullied by earthly pollution, their purity allowed them to rise without difficulty to a better life in a happier abiding-place.[[325]]
It is hard to determine to what degree these moral ideas had penetrated the popular mind. The reaction against a superstitious belief often led to pure negation. Those who held that death put an end to all sensibility, were content to affirm that the child they wept had gone down into everlasting night, and that nothing was left of him but dust and ashes. Certain epitaphs hope that, if his Manes still have some feeling, his bones may rest quietly in the tomb. But mother’s love was not to be satisfied with this negative assurance or to resign itself to anxious doubting. The people kept an unreasoning fear of the evils which awaited the ἄωροι, and of those which might be expected from them. Some also believed that an ancestral fault—such as was, according to the Orphic doctrine, the murder of Zagreus, by the Titans—made all humanity guilty from birth, and that this hereditary sin had to be effaced by purifications.[[326]] Religion offered a remedy for the ill to which, to speak with Lucretius, it had itself lent persuasion. The custom of initiating children to the mysteries which was, at least at Eleusis, originally connected with the family or gentile cult, became a means of preserving them from the fatal lot which threatened them and of ensuring their happiness in the other life. Thus pueri and puellae are found admitted at the most tender age among the adepts of the secret cults, both Greek and Oriental, perhaps even consecrated from birth to the godhead. They are imagined as partaking in the Beyond of the joys which these cults promised to those whose salvation they ensured. A child who has taken part in a ceremony of Bacchus lives endowed with eternal youth in the Elysian Fields in the midst of Satyrs.[[327]] Others continue the games proper to their years in another life, or if they have reached the age of first love they still sport with young Eros. Above all, however, the influence of the astral cults, added to that of philosophy, brought about an admission that innocent creatures ascended to the starry heavens. An epitaph of Thasos[[328]] speaks of a virgin, flower-bearer (ἀνθοφόρος) probably of Demeter and Kora, who was carried off at the age of thirteen by the inexorable Fates, but who, “living among the stars, by the will of the immortals, has taken her place in the sacred abode of the blessed.” At Amorgos, a child of eight was, we are assured, led by Hermes to Olympus, shone in the ether, and would henceforth protect the young wrestlers who emulated him in the palaestra. Even the precise spot in which he twinkled was fixed, the horn of the constellation of the Goat—an appropriate place for this little fighter.[[329]] Curiously, an epitaph of Africa, which repeats Virgil’s very expression (p. 129), states, in contradiction to the poet, that a baby, “cut off on the threshold of life,” has not gone to the Manes but to the stars of heaven,[[330]] and a relief of Copenhagen shows the bust of a little girl within a large crescent surrounded by seven stars, thus indicating that she has risen towards the moon, the abode of blessed souls.[[331]]
Examples of these premature apotheoses might be multiplied. I shall merely show, by a characteristic case, how it was possible for old popular beliefs to be combined with the new astral doctrine. The ancients attributed to the rustic nymphs the strange powers which the Greek peasant today recognises in beings which he still designates as the Nereids.[[332]] Sometimes these fantastical goddesses possess themselves of the spirit of men and change them into seers or maniacs νυμφόληπτοι; sometimes their fancy is caught by handsome youths whom they carry off and oblige to live with them. But above all they love pretty children and steal them from their parents, not to harm them but in order that they may take part in their own divine pastimes. Doubtless it was at first to mountain caverns, near limpid springs, in the depths of tufted woods, that they bore him whom they made their little playfellow. Such were the archaic beliefs of the country folk. But the mysteries of Bacchus taught that an innocent child, thus rapt from the earth, mingled in the train of the Naiads in the flowery meadows of the Elysian Fields;[[333]] and when Paradise was transferred to the sky it was in the “immortal dwelling-place of the ether” that the nymphs, we are told, placed a little girl whose charm had seduced them.[[334]]
Transported thus to heaven, these loved beings were transformed by the tenderness of their relatives into protectors of the family in which their memory survived, or of the friends who shared regret for them. Whether they were called “heroes” in Greek, or as elsewhere “gods,”[[335]] they were always conceived as guardian powers who acknowledged by benefits the worship rendered them. Thus in the middle of the second century the familia of a proconsul of Asia, C. Julius Quadratus, honoured a child of eight years as a hero, at the prayer of his father and mother;[[336]] and at Smyrna the parents of a dearly loved child of four, raised to this baby as their tutelary god, a tomb on which an epitaph described in detail all his illnesses.[[337]]
These sentimental illusions are eternal. Nothing is more frequently seen on tombstones in our own Catholic cemeteries than such invocations as “Dear angel in heaven, pray for us,” or even a figure of a winged baby flying away among winged cherubs. This faith is perhaps touching, but its orthodoxy is doubtful. For the doctors of the Church, except Origen, have, I think, never adopted the doctrine of Philo the Jew that human souls can be transformed into angelic spirits. But in the oldest Christian epitaphs the conviction is already expressed that, since children are without sin, they will be transported by angels to the dwelling of the saints and there intercede for their parents. “Thou hast been received, my daughter, among the pious souls, because thy life was pure from all fault, for thy youth ever sought only innocent play,”[[338]] says a metrical epitaph, once under the portico of St. Peter’s. And another and older epitaph is as follows, “Eusebius, a child without sin because of his age, admitted to the abode of the saints, rests there in peace.”[[339]] Still others end with the words “Pray for us,” “Pete pro nobis.”
Thus little by little in antiquity the conviction gained strength and became predominant that, as Menander said with another meaning, whom the gods love die young.[[340]] As to individuals whose days were cut short by a violent blow, they were not uniformly in the same case. The theorists here distinguished among different categories of the biothanati.[[341]] The classification seems to have originated with the astrologists who claimed to enumerate, in accordance with the position of Mars and Saturn, all the kinds of death reserved for victims of these murderous planets, and to foretell whether these unfortunates were to be drowned, burnt, poisoned, hanged, beheaded, crucified, impaled, crushed to death, thrown to the beasts, or given over to yet more atrocious tortures. But the moralists here also made a point of separating the innocent from the guilty. Only the guilty were to suffer after death and only their souls were to become demons. For, side by side with those who had deserved capital punishment for their crimes, or who administered death to themselves, were others cut off by a fatal accident, perhaps even killed while performing a sacred duty.
Such was the case of soldiers slain in battle. Logic ordered the theologians to place them among the biothanati, and so they are, for instance, in Virgil’s sixth book of the Aeneid.[[342]] But death on the field of honour could not be a source of infinite ills for them, and it was generally admitted that, on the contrary, their courage opened for them the gates of heaven.