After Life in Roman Paganism

A CENTURY OF SCIENCE IN AMERICA. With Special Reference to the American Journal of Science 1818–1918. _By_ EDWARD SALISBURY DANA, CHARLES SCHUCHERT, HERBERT E. GREGORY, JOSEPH B...

Greek philosophy made an early attack on the ideas held as to a future life. Even Democritus, the forerunner of Epicurus, spoke of “some people who ignore the dissolution of our...

The fiery breath of our intelligence is gathered, as are the matter and the humours of our organism, into the inexhaustible reservoir which produced them, as one day the earth a...

This religious philosophy, which, by a symbolism transforming the meaning of the traditional beliefs, reconciled these with men’s intelligence, did more than any other to revive...

Towards the end of the Republic the mysteries of Isis and Serapis, which had come from Alexandria and had already spread through the south of Italy, established themselves in Ro...

This primitive conception of the persistence of a latent life in the cold and rigid corpse or of its passage to a vaporous being like the body, is connected with the belief that...

This soul was often imagined as a bird in flight and we will see elsewhere the conclusions drawn from this naïve conception.[141] Here we wish merely to indicate how the idea of...

Originally no idea of retribution was attached to this descent of the dead into the infernal regions; it was neither their merits nor their demerits which determined their condi...

Moreover, the metrical epitaphs continue to speak of the Elysian Fields and of Tartarus, of Styx and of Acheron; they complain of the cruelty of Pluto who bears away mortals bef...

The eclectic Stoics of the same period, and especially Posidonius of Apamea, gave this lunar eschatology a place in their system, and undertook to justify it by the physical doc...

A fundamental difference distinguishes the conception of immortality as it appears in the religion of the Roman Empire from our modern ideas. Immortality, as we conceive of it,...

The fervent disciple to whom the god has united himself suffers a metamorphosis and takes on divine qualities. In magic this process is sometimes very grossly indicated: “Come i...

Thus a logical series of beliefs was pushed to its extreme consequence. At the moment of birth Fate fixed for each man the length of his career; if this were interrupted, the so...

The old poetry of Hesiod already speaks of two roads of life, a short and easy road which is that of vice, and the path of virtue, which is at first steep and rugged but becomes...

The dangers to which the soul was exposed did not always end when, after having crossed the most dangerous zone of the air, it reached the moon.[405] Those who believed that sou...

Among all the forms of punishment that by fire predominates. The idea that the Erinyes burnt the damned with their torches is ancient, and the Pyriphlegethon is an igneous river...

We have seen that metempsychosis helped the philosophers to shake, if not to ruin, the belief in infernal punishment. But this belief again had power towards the end of antiquit...

Sometimes in the reliefs of the “funeral banquet” the dead are seen wearing on their head the bushel (_modius_) of Serapis, with whom, after a virtuous life, they have been iden...

Dead; food of, 50; partake of banquets, 54 s.; communicate with living, 58 s.; feared, 47; malevolent, 63 s.; tutelary spirits, 60 s.; keep character of living, 73; received by...

“Non ego Tartareas penetrabo tristis ad undas, Non Acheronteis transvehar umbra vadis, Non ego caeruleam remo pulsabo carinam, Nec te terribilem fronte timebo Charon, Nec Minos...

Punishment by fire is mentioned for the first time in Philodemos, Περὶ θεῶν, XIX, 16 ss. Philodemos being a Syrian, it is not unlikely that this tenet is of Oriental origin. _Cf...