“Virtus recludens immeritis mori
Caelum,”
as Horace says.[[343]] The Greek theory of the divinity of the heroes here comes to temper the severity of an unreasonable and dangerous doctrine. According to Josephus,[[344]] Titus, when haranguing his soldiers, promised immortality to such as fell bravely, and condemned the others to destruction. “Who does not know,” he asked, “that valiant souls, delivered from the flesh by the sword in battle, will inhabit the purest of ethereal elements, and, fixed in the midst of the stars, will make themselves manifest to their descendants as good genii and benevolent heroes? On the other hand, souls which are extinguished when their body is sick, vanish, even if they are free from all stain and defilement, into subterranean darkness and are buried in deep oblivion.” In the military monarchies of the Hellenistic East, as in the Roman Empire, eternal life was certainly promised to those who had perished arms in hand, faithful to their military duty. We know that the same belief was transmitted to Islam: a Mussulman who dies in battle “in the way of Allah” is a martyr (shahîd) to whom the joys of Paradise are assured. The Jews, who had been reluctant to admit such ideas before, from the time of the Maccabees onwards associated with warriors those who sacrificed themselves in order to be faithful to their persecuted religion, and to these especially they promised a glorious immortality. Faith in this celestial reward was later to cause the Christians, who won the martyr’s crown, to face all sufferings.
The treatment which the gods reserved for another class of biothanati was more uncertain. In the Greek cities, as in Rome, moral reproof and posthumous penalties were anciently attached to suicide. The old pontifical law refused ritualistic burial to persons who had hanged themselves; and instead of funeral sacrifices it prescribed for these dead merely the hanging up of small images (oscilla) consecrated to their Manes,[[345]]—probably a magical, “sympathetic” rite, which was intended to purify their wandering souls by air, as other souls were purified by water and fire. The horrible appearance of men who died by strangulation had given rise to the belief that the breath of life had vainly sought to issue from their tightly closed throats.[[346]] A rich inhabitant of Sarsina in Umbria granted land for a graveyard to his fellow citizens, but excluded from the benefit of his gift those who had hired themselves as gladiators, had died by the rope by their own hand, or had followed an infamous calling.[[347]] This association shows how loathsome this kind of death was. Funeral colleges founded under the Empire introduced into their rules a clause stipulating that if anybody had for any motive whatsoever put himself to death, he should lose his right to burial.[[348]] This provision seems to have been inspired less by the fear that fraud would be practised on this society of mutual insurance against supreme abandonment, than by the conviction that funeral honours cannot deflect the curse which weighs on the suicide and renders his company undesirable for other dead.
But there was against popular opinion and religion, which attached an idea of infamy to self-murder, a philosophical reaction which, among the Stoics, led to an entirely contrary moral judgment. The powerful sect of the Porch caused the doctrine to prevail that suicide was in certain cases commendable. It saw in this end the supreme guarantee of the wise man’s freedom, and praised those who by voluntary death had withdrawn from an intolerable life. Cato of Utica, who killed himself lest he should survive liberty, was held to be the wise man’s ideal, and as worthy of apotheosis as Hercules. He himself, who is shown to us by the historians as reading and rereading Plato’s Phaedo before he pierced himself with his sword,[[349]] certainly hoped for the immortality of heroic souls. Here, as on other points, the Neo-Pythagoreans, and the Neo-Platonists after them, brought the minds of men back to the old religious beliefs. Plotinus, yielding to the opinion which still prevailed in his time, still authorises suicide in certain cases, but we know that his exhortations dissuaded his pupil Porphyry from putting an end to his days, when he was seized with a disgust for life. This latter philosopher afterwards resolutely opposed the Stoic doctrine. Although the soul, said the Pythagoreans and Platonists, is enclosed in the body as in a prison, in order to suffer chastisement, it is forbidden by God to escape therefrom by its own act. If it do so escape, it incurs from the masters of its fate infinitely harder penalties. It must await the hour willed by these masters, and then it can rejoice in the deliverance which it obtains at the term of old age. If it itself break the link which joins it to the body, far from ridding itself of servitude, it remains chained to the corpse, for necessarily it is subject to passion at the moment of death and thus contracts impure desires. The only liberation worthy of the wise man is that of the soul which still dwells in the body but succeeds in freeing itself from all fleshly leanings and in thus rising, by the force of reason, from earth to heaven.[[350]]
The prohibition of voluntary death anticipating the hour fixed by Providence for each man, was strengthened and enforced everywhere by the Christian Church.
With yet more cause did those who had been condemned to capital punishment seem to deserve posthumous torment and the pains reserved for the impious. These maleficent spirits, transformed to demons, continued to work harm to the human race. The odium which attached to the word biothanati ended by concentrating itself on these two classes—those who had committed suicide and those who had been executed. The horror which both inspired was marked by the withholding of honourable burial. Even in pagan times, sacred or civil law in many places denied funeral honours to children who died young, and to suicides—in order, says a text,[[351]] that those who had not feared death might fear something after death—and, above all, to criminals, whose corpses were not deposited in a tomb but were thrown without any ceremony into a common ditch (πολυάνδριον). In Rome persons executed in prison were dragged with a hook through the streets to the Tiber, where they were flung into the water. There was in the fact that they were deprived of funeral rites a second reason, besides their guilt, for their suffering in the Beyond.[[352]] Families and friends of the condemned endeavoured therefore to spare them this fearful penalty, and could obtain from the magistrates the surrender of their bodies to them. But the authorities often refused this supreme consolation to Christians who wished to pay this last duty to their martyred brothers. By scattering abroad the ashes of martyrs the pagans hoped to prevent their graves from becoming the sites of cults.
The denial of a religious funeral was also from the earliest time onwards ordered by Church discipline and sanctioned by the Councils in the case of suicides, and was similarly extended, in virtue of the law in force, to malefactors. In the Middle Ages the corpses of criminals were still to be seen carried to a shameful charnel-place in Byzantium. For instance, the chronologist Theophanes[[353]] relates indignantly that in 764 the iconoclastic Emperor Constantine Copronymus caused the arrest of a hermit of Bithynia, who supported the cult of the images. The emperor’s guards tied a cord round the monk’s foot and dragged him from the praetorium to the cemetery, where, after cutting him to pieces, they flung his remains into the ditch of the biothanati. Curiously this word, biothanati, was derisively applied to the Christians themselves, either because they adored a crucified Saviour, or in mockery of the martyrs, who believed that through death by execution they earned a glorious immortality. The poet Commodianus returns this insult by applying the term to the pagans, whose way of life condemned them to everlasting flames.[[354]] The opprobrious word remained in use until the Middle Ages, when it denoted all whose crimes deserved capital punishment, so that the final meaning of biothanatus was gallows-bird, gallows-food.[[355]]
If the meaning of the word biothanati was thus restricted in the Latin world, the old ideas which it called forth have had a singular vitality in folk-lore, especially among the Greeks. The Greeks believe even today that such as perish by a sudden and violent death became vrykolakes.[[356]] Their bodies can again be reanimated, can leave the grave, and can travel through space with extreme rapidity as vampires and become so maleficent that mere contact with them causes loss of life. Suicides and victims of unavenged murders are particularly fearful. It was the custom as late as the eighteenth century to open the grave of a dead man suspected of being a vrykolakas, and if his body had escaped corruption, thus proving his supposed character, it was cut into pieces or burnt in order to prevent it from doing further harm. So lively did the belief remain that the biothanatus could not detach himself from his body, and that his existence, which had been too soon interrupted, was prolonged in the tomb.