Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius

by Samuel Dill

CHAPTER II

BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY

A great part of the charm of those oriental religions, on the study of which we are about to enter, lay in the assurance which they seemed to give of an immortal life. It would, therefore, appear a necessary preface to such a review to examine some of the conceptions of the state of the departed which the missionaries of Isis and Mithra found prevalent in the minds of their future votaries. Immortality, in any worthy sense, is inseparable from the idea of God. And the conception of continued life must always be shaped by the character of a people’s beliefs as to the powers of the unseen world. A pantheon of dim phantasms or abstractions will not promise more than a numb spectral future to the human shade. The nectar and ambrosia of Olympian feasts may have their human counterpart in an “eternal debauch.” The Platonist will find his eternal hope in emancipation from the prison of the flesh, and in the immediate vision of that Unity of all beauty, truth, and goodness, which is his highest conception of God. But not only does religion necessarily colour the conception of the eternal state: it may also furnish the warrant for a belief in it. And a religion which can give men a firm ground for that faith will have an immense advantage over others which are less clear and confident as to another world. It is generally admitted that the long array of philosophic arguments for immortality have by themselves little convincing power. They are not stronger, nor perhaps so strong as the argument from the wish for continued life, inveterate in the human spirit, on which Plutarch laid so much stress.[2507] Even amid the [pg 485]triumphant dialectic of the Phaedo, an undertone of doubt in any human proof of immortality is sometimes heard, along with the call for some “divine doctrine” as a bark of safety on perilous seas.[2508] The inextinguishable instinct of humanity craves for a voice of revelation to solve the mystery of life and death.

The Roman spirit, down to the Antonine age, had been the subject of many influences which had inspired widely various ideas of the future state. And the literary and funerary remains from Nero to M. Aurelius are full of contradictions on the subject. Nor, in the absence of authoritative revelation on a field so dark to reason, is this surprising. Even Christian teaching, while it offers a sure promise of a life to come, has not lifted the veil of the great mystery, and the material imagery of the Apocalypse, or the shadowed hints of Jesus or S. Paul, have left the believer of the twentieth century with no clearer vision of the life beyond the tomb than that which was vouchsafed to Plato, Cicero, Virgil, or Plutarch. “We know not what we shall be,” is the answer of every seer of every age. Something will always “seal the lips of the Evangelist,” as the key of the Eumolpidae closed the lips of those who had seen the vision of Eleusis.[2509] The pagans of the early Empire were thus, in the absence of dogma and ecclesiastical teaching, free to express, with perfect frankness, their unbelief or their varying conceptions of immortality, according to the many influences that had moulded them. Nor could these influences be kept apart even in the same mind. Even the poet seer, who was to be the guide of Dante in the shades, has failed to blend the immemorial faith of the Latin race with the dreams of future beatitude or anguish which came to him from Pythagorean or Platonic teaching.[2510] In the sixth book of the Aeneid the eschatologies of old Rome and Greece are combined, but not blended, with the doctrines of transmigration and purgatorial expiation descending from Pythagoras or the Orphic mystics. Virgil, in fact, mirrors the confusion of beliefs which prevailed in his own age, and which pre-eminently characterised the age of the Antonines.

Along with other archaic elements of the Latin faith, the cult of the Manes held its ground, especially in secluded homes of old Italian piety. The most ancient Indo-European conception of the state after death was that of a continuance or faint, shadowy reproduction of the life on earth; it was not that of a vast and mysterious change to a supernatural order. The departed spirit was believed to linger in a dim existence in the vault or grave near the familiar homestead.[2511] The tomb is not a temporary prison, but an everlasting home,[2512] and often provides a chamber where the living members of the family or clan may gather on solemn days around the ashes of the dead.[2513] Provision is made for the sustenance of this spectral life. Vessels for food and drink, the warrior’s arms, the workman’s tools, the cosmetics of the lady, the child’s playthings, are buried with them.[2514] Or they are figured on their tombs cheerfully engaged in their familiar crafts,[2515] not with folded hands, and calm, expectant faces, like the marble forms which lie in our cathedral aisles awaiting the Resurrection.

With such views of the tomb, the perpetual guardianship of it became to the Roman a matter of supreme moment. It is a chapel or an altar, as well as a last home.[2516] It is the meeting-place, in faint ghostly communion, of the society which embraced, by its solemn rites, the members of the household church in the light or in the shades. All the cautious forms of Roman law are invoked to keep the sepulchre, with its garden and enclosure, from passing into alien hands. Its site is exactly described, with the minutest measurements, and the intruder or the alienator is threatened with curses or with fines, to be paid into the public treasury.[2517] Here, among his children and remotest descendants, among his freedmen and freedwomen, the Roman dreamed of resting for ever undisturbed.[2518] And many an appeal comes to us from the original slab not to violate the eternal peace.[2519] What that dim [pg 487]life beneath the marble or the sod, at least in the later times, was conceived to be, how far it involved a more or less vivid consciousness of what was passing in the world above, how far it was a numb repose, almost passing into “the eternal sleep,” seems to be uncertain. The phrases on the tomb in all ages are apt to pass into conventional forms, and personal temperament and imagination must always give varying colour to the picture. Such phrases as “eternal sleep,” however, did not probably at any time imply complete unconsciousness. The old Latin faith that the Manes had a real life and some link of sympathy with the living was still strong and vivid in an age which was eager to receive or answer voices from the world beyond the senses. The wish to maintain, in spite of the severance and shock of death, a bond of communion between the living and the departed was one of the most imperious instincts of the Latin race. It was not a mere imagination, projected on far distant years, which craved for the yearly offering of violets and roses, or the pious ave of the passing traveller.[2520] The dwellers in the vault still remained members of the family, to which they are linked for ever by a dim sympathy expressed in ritual communion. Every year, on the dies parentales in February, there was a general holiday, cheerfully kept in honour of all those whose spirits were at peace.[2521] On the eighth day, the festival of cara cognatio, there was a family love-feast, in which quarrels were forgotten, and the members in the spirit-world joined in the sacred meal. But besides this public and national commemoration, the birthday of each departed member was observed with offerings of wine and oil and milk. The tomb was visited in solemn procession; dead and living shared the sacred fare; flowers were scattered, and with an ave or a prayer for help and good fortune, the shade was left to its renewed repose.[2522] Many a slab makes anxious provision for these communions, and the offering of violets and roses in their season.[2523]

But the Roman in his tomb longed to be near the sound of [pg 488]busy human life, and to feel the tread of pious feet, which might turn aside for a moment to salute even a stranger’s memory. This feeling is expressed in the long rows of vaults which line so many of the great roads, the Via Appia, or the way from Pompeii to Nola.[2524] There were many like that Titus Lollius who had himself laid close to the road into Aquae Sextiae, that the passers might for ever greet his spirit with an ave.[2525] Others leave a prayer for all good things to those who will stop an instant and read the legend; “may the earth lie light upon them when they too depart.”[2526] The horror of the lonely soul, cut off from the kindly fellowship of the living, and lingering on in a forgotten grave, to which no loving hand should ever more bring the libation or the violets in spring, which should one day awake no memory or sympathy in any human heart, was to the old Roman the worst terror in death. This passion for continued memory, especially in great benefactors of their kind, is used by Cicero as an argument for immortality,[2527] and the passion for enduring life blends indistinguishably with the wish to be long remembered. Even Epicurus, the apostle of annihilation, made provision in his last testament for yearly offerings in honour of himself and Metrodorus his disciple—a curious instance of agnostic conformity.[2528] The passion for remembrance was responded to by the dutiful devotion of many generations. The cult of the dead long survived in the cult of martyrs, and the pagan feasting at their tombs disturbed and perplexed S. Augustine and S. Paulinus of Nola.[2529]

The old Roman thought of his departed friends as a company of good and kindly spirits, who watched over the family on earth. But there was another conception of spirits in the other world, whether derived from the gloomy superstition of Etruria, or descending from days anterior to orderly devotion to the dead.[2530] The Lemures were a name of fear. They [pg 489]were dark, malevolent spirits who craved for blood, as they had departed this life by a violent end. Their festival, the Lemuria in May, was quite distinct from the festival of the Manes, and the household ritual for laying the ghosts by the spitting of black beans and a ninefold form of exorcism savours of a far-gone age. These maleficent powers were propitiated by blood—especially by the blood of men in the combats of the arena.

The visitations of these beings, whether as guardian, ministering spirits or as evil powers, were expected and believed in for many ages by all classes of Roman minds. The ancient Latin faith as to the state of the dead was, according to Cicero, confirmed by many tales of spiritual apparition. There are pathetic memorials which end with an appeal in which the lonely wife entreats the lost one sometimes to return in dream or vision.[2531] One vivacious inscription challenges the sceptic to lay his wager and make the experiment of a summons from the unseen world.[2532] The spread of cremation instead of burial gradually led to a new conception of the spirit as having a separate existence from the body, now reduced to a handful of grey ashes.[2533] And spirits no longer clung to the body in the family vault, but were gathered in a dim region near the centre of the earth, where, according to gloomy Etrurian fancy, they were under the cruel care of the conductor of the dead, a brutal figure, with wings and long, matted beard, and armed with a hammer, who for ages appeared in human form to close the last ghastly scene in the gladiatorial combats.[2534] From this limbo of the departed a sort of gateway was provided in every Latin town in the Mundus, a deep trench intended to represent an inverted heaven, which was dug before the pomoerium was traced. Its lower aperture was closed by the stone of the Manes, which on three solemn days, in August, October, and November, was lifted to permit the spirits from the deep to pass for a time into the upper world. Thus a public sanction was given to the belief in the commerce between this life and the next.[2535]

Cicero had said that the faith in immortality was sustained by the fact of spirits returning to the world of sense. In the first and second centuries there was no lack of such aids to faith. Apparitions became the commonest facts of life, and only the hardiest minds remained incredulous about them. Philosophers of all schools, except the Epicurean, were swept into the current. The Philopseudes of Lucian is a brilliant effort to ridicule the superstition of the age, but the attack would have been discredited if it had not had a foundation of fact. There, around the sick-bed of Eucrates, himself saturated with philosophy, are gathered a Stoic, a Peripatetic, a Pythagorean, a Platonist, and a trained physician.[2536] And they regale one another with the most weird and exciting tales of the marvellous. Ion, the Platonic student, has seen the exorcism of a black and smoky daemon.[2537] Eucrates has seen such spirits a thousand times, and, from long habit, has lost all fear of them. At vintage time, he once saw a gigantic Gorgon figure in the woods in broad daylight, and by the turning of a magic ring had revealed to him the gulf of Tartarus, the infernal rivers, and been even able to recognise some of the ghosts below.[2538] On another day, as he lay upon his bed reading the Phaedo, his “sainted wife,” who had recently died, appeared and reproached him because, among all the finery which had been burnt upon her pyre, a single gold-spangled shoe, which slipped under the wardrobe, had been forgotten.[2539] Plutarch reports, apparently with perfect faith, the appearance of such spectral visitors at Chaeronea.[2540] The younger Pliny consulted his friend Sura as to the reality of such apparitions, and reveals his faith in the gruesome tale of a haunted house at Athens, where a restless ghost, who had often disturbed the quiet of night with the clank of chains, was tracked to the mystery of a hidden grave.[2541] Suetonius, of course, welcomes tales of this kind from every quarter. Before Caligula’s half-burnt remains were borne stealthily to a dishonoured burial, the keepers of the Lamian Gardens had been disturbed each night by ghostly terrors.[2542] The pages of Dion Cassius abound in similar wonders. [pg 491]When Nero attempted to cut through the Isthmus of Corinth, the dead arose in numbers from their graves.[2543] In such an age the baleful art of “evocation” acquired a weird attraction and importance. By spells and incantations Hecate was invoked to send up spirits, often for evil ends.[2544] And there were dark rumours of the spell being fortified by the blood of children. Many of the emperors from Tiberius to Caracalla had dabbled in this witchcraft.[2545] When Nero was haunted by the Furies of his murdered mother, he is said to have offered a magic sacrifice to evoke and appease her spirit.[2546] The early Neo-Platonists were, of course, eager to admit the reality of such visits from the unseen world. In anxious quest of any link of sympathy between this world and the next, Maximus tries to fortify his doctrine of daemons by stories of apparitions.[2547] Hector has been often seen darting across the Troad in shining armour. At the mouth of the Borysthenes, Achilles has been espied by mariners, who were sailing past his isle, careering along with his yellow locks and arms of gold, and singing his paean of battle.