I flatter myself, therefore, that when I speak to you of the beliefs in a future life held in Roman times I have chosen a subject which is not very remote from us nor such as has no relation to our present thought or is capable of interesting only the learned.
We can here trace only the outlines of this vast subject. I am aware that it is always imprudent to hazard moral generalisations: they are always wrong somewhere. Above all, it is perilous to attempt to determine with a few words the infinite variety of individual creeds, for nothing escapes historical observation more easily than the intimate convictions of men, which they often hide even from those near them. In periods of scepticism pious souls cling to old beliefs; the conservative crowd remains faithful to ancestral traditions. When religion is resuming its empire, rationalistic minds resist the contagion of faith. It is especially difficult to ascertain up to what point ideas adopted by intellectual circles succeeded in penetrating the deep masses of the people. The epitaphs which have been preserved give us too scanty and too sparse evidence in this particular. Besides, in paganism a dogma does not necessarily exclude its opposite dogma: the two sometimes persist side by side in one mind as different possibilities, each of which is authorised by a respectable tradition. You will therefore make the necessary reservations to such of my statements as are too absolute. I shall be able to point out here only the great spiritual currents which successively brought to Rome new ideas as to the Beyond, and to sketch the evolution undergone by the doctrines as to the lot and the abode of souls. You will not expect me to be precise as to the number of the partisans of each of these doctrines in the various periods.
At least we can distinguish the principal phases of the religious movement which caused imperial society to pass from incredulity to certain forms of belief in immortality, forms at first somewhat crude but afterwards loftier, and we can see where this movement led. The change was a capital one and transformed for the ancients the whole conception of life. The axis about which morality revolved had to be shifted when ethics no longer sought, as in earlier Greek philosophy, to realise the sovereign good on this earth but looked for it after death. Thenceforth the activity of man aimed less at tangible realities, ensuring well-being to the family or the city or the state, and more at attaining to the fulfilment of ideal hopes in a supernatural world. Our sojourn here below was conceived as a preparation for another existence, as a transitory trial which was to result in infinite felicity or suffering. Thus the table of ethical values was turned upside down.
“All our actions and all our thoughts,” says Pascal, “must follow so different a course if there are eternal possessions for which we may hope than if there are not, that it is impossible to take any directed and well-judged step except by regulating it in view of this point which ought to be our ultimate goal.”[[2]]
We will attempt first to sketch in a general introduction the historical transformation which belief in the future life underwent between the Republican period and the fall of paganism. Then, in three lectures, we will examine more closely the various conceptions of the abode of the dead held under the Roman Empire, study in three others the conditions or the means which enable men to attain to immortality and in the last two set forth the lot of souls in the Beyond.
The cinerary vases of the prehistoric period are often modelled in the shape of huts: throughout, funeral sculpture follows the tradition that the tomb should reproduce the dwelling, and until the end of antiquity it was designated, in the West as in the East, as the “eternal house” of him who rested in it.
Thus a conception of the tomb which goes back to the remotest ages and persists through the centuries regards it as “the last dwelling” of those who have left us; and this expression has not yet gone out of use. It was believed that a dead man continued to live, in the narrow space granted him, a life which was groping, obscure, precarious, yet like that he led on earth. Subject to the same needs, obliged to eat and to drink, he expected those who had been nearest to him to appease his hunger and thirst. The utensils he had used, the things he had cared for, were often deposited beside him so that he might pursue the occupations and enjoy the amusements which he had forsaken in the world. If he were satisfied he would stay quietly in the furnished house provided for him and would not seek to avenge himself on those whose neglect had caused him suffering. Funeral rites were originally inspired rather by fear than by love. They were precautions taken against the spirit of the dead rather than pious care bestowed in their interest.[[3]]
For the dead were powerful; their action was still felt; they were not immured in the tomb or confined beneath the ground. Men saw them reappear in dreams, wearing their former aspect. They were descried during shadowy vigils; their voices were heard and their movements noted. Imagination conceived them such as they had once been; recollection of them filled the memory and to think of such apparitions as idle or unreal seemed impossible. The dead subsisted, then, as nebulous, impalpable beings, perceived by the senses only exceptionally. Here the belief that their remains had not quite lost all feeling mingled with the equally primitive and universal belief that the soul is a breath, exhaled with the last sigh. The vaporous shade, sometimes a dangerous but sometimes a succouring power, wandered by night in the atmosphere and haunted the places which the living man had been used to frequent. Except for some sceptical reasoners, all antiquity admitted the reality of these phantoms. Century-old beliefs, maintained by traditional rites, thus persisted, more or less definitely, in the popular mind, even after new forms of the future life were imagined. Many vestiges of these beliefs have survived until today.
The first transformation undergone by the primitive conception was to entertain the opinion that the dead who are deposited in the ground gather together in a great cavity inside the bowels of the earth.[[4]] This belief in the nether world is found among most of the peoples of the Mediterranean basin: the Sheol of the Hebrews differs little from the Homeric Hades and the Italic Inferi.