Part 2

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 mortal nature and, aware of the perversity of their life, pass their time in unrest and in fear and forge for themselves deceitful fables as to the time when follows their end.”[8] It is true that in the fourth century Plato’s idealism had supplied, if not a strict proof of immortality, yet reasons for it sufficient to procure its acceptance by such as desired to be convinced. But in the Alexandrian age, which was the surpassingly scientific period of Greek thought, there was a tendency to remove all metaphysical and mythical conceptions of the soul’s destiny from the field of contemplation. This was the period in which the Academy, Plato’s own school, unfaithful to its founder’s doctrines, was led by men who, like Carneades, raised scepticism to a system and stated that man can reach no certainty. We know that when Carneades was sent to Rome as ambassador in 156 B. C. he made a great impression by maintaining that justice is a matter of convention, and that he was consequently banished by the senate as a danger to the state. But we need only read Cicero’s works to learn what a lasting influence his powerfully destructive dialectics had.

The dogmatism of other sects was at this time hardly at all more favourable to the traditional beliefs in another life.

Aristotle had thought that human reason alone persisted, and that the emotional and nutritive soul was destroyed with the body, but he left no personality to this pure intelligence, deprived of all sensibility. He definitely denied that the “blessed” could be happy. With him begins a long period during which Greek philosophy nearly ceased to speculate on destiny beyond the grave. It was repugnant to Peripatetic philosophy to concern itself with the existence of a soul which could be neither conceived nor defined by reason. Some of Aristotle’s immediate disciples, like Aristoxenus and Dicaearchus, or Straton of Lampsacus, the pupil of Theophrastus, agreed in denying immortality altogether; and later, in the time of the Severi, Alexander of Aphrodisias, the great commentator of The Stagirite, undertook to prove that the entire soul, that is the higher and the lower soul, had need of the body in order to be active and perished with it, and that such was the veritable thought of the master. But profoundly as Peripateticism affected Greek thought, directly and indirectly, in practically discarding the future life, this was not the philosophy which dominated minds towards the end of the Roman Republic. Other schools then had a much wider influence and made this influence felt much more deeply on eschatological beliefs. These schools were Epicureanism and Stoicism.

Epicurus took up again the doctrine of Democritus, and taught that the soul, which was composed of atoms, was disintegrated at the moment of death, when it was no longer held together by its fleshly wrapping, and that its transitory unity was then destroyed for ever. The vital breath, after being expelled, was, he said, buffeted by the winds and dissolved in the air like mist or smoke, even before the body was decomposed. This was so ancient a conception that Homer had made use of a like comparison, and the idea that the violence of the wind can act on souls as a destructive force was familiar to Athenian children in Plato’s time.[9] But if the soul thus resolves itself, after death, into its elementary principles, how can phantoms come to frighten us in the watches of the night or beloved beings visit us in our dreams? These simulacra (εἴδωλα) are for Epicurus no more than emanations of particles of an extreme tenuity, constantly issuing from bodies and keeping for some time their form and appearance. They act on our senses as do colour and scent and awake in us the image of a vanished being.

Thus we are vowed to annihilation, but this lot is not one to be dreaded. Death, which is held to be the most horrible of ills, is in reality nothing of the sort, since the destruction of our organism abolishes all its sensibility. The time when we no longer exist is no more painful for us than that when we had not yet our being. As Plato deduced the persistence of the soul after death from its supposed previous existence, so Epicurus drew an opposite conclusion from our ignorance of our earlier life; and, according to him, the conviction that we perish wholly can alone ensure our tranquillity of spirit by delivering us from the fear of eternal torment.

There is no one of the master’s doctrines on which his disciples insist with more complacent assurance. They praise him for having freed men from the terrors of the Beyond; they thank him for having taught them not to fear death; his philosophy appears to them as a liberator of souls. Lucretius in his third book, of which eighteenth-century philosophers delighted to celebrate the merits, claims, with a sort of exaltation, to drive from men’s hearts “that dread of Acheron which troubles human life to its inmost depths.”[10] The sage sees all the cruel fictions, with which fable had peopled the kingdom of terrors, scattered abroad, and, when he has rid himself of the dismay which haunts the common man, which casts a mournful veil over things and leaves no joy unmixed, he finds a blessed calm, the perfect quietude or “_ataraxia_.”

This doctrine, which Lucretius preached with the enthusiasm of a neophyte won to the true faith, had a profound reaction in Rome. Its adepts in Cicero’s circle were numerous, including Cassius, the murderer of Caesar. Sallust goes so far as to make Caesar himself affirm, in full senate, that death, the rest from torment, dispels the ills which afflict mankind, that beyond it there is neither joy nor sorrow.[11] Men of science, in particular, were attracted by these theories. In a celebrated passage Pliny the Naturalist, after categorically declaring that neither the soul nor the body has any more sensation after death than before the day of birth, ends with a vehement apostrophe: “Unhappy one, what folly is thine who in death renewest life! Where will creatures ever find rest if souls in heaven, if shades in the infernal regions, still have feeling? Through this complacent credulity we lose death, the greatest boon which belongs to our nature, and the sufferings of our last hour are doubled by the fear of what will follow after. If it be indeed sweet to live, for whom can it be so to have lived? How much easier and more certain is the belief which each man can draw from his own experience, when he pictures his future tranquillity on the pattern of that which preceded his birth!”[12]

Even Seneca in one of his tragedies, an early work, makes the chorus of Trojan women declaim a long profession of faith which is the purest Epicureanism.[13]

The invasion of the Roman world by the Oriental mysteries and superstitions in the second century caused the unbelievers to exalt Epicurus yet higher. The satirist Lucian, using almost the same expressions as Lucretius, proclaims the truly sacred and divine character of him who alone knew the good with the true, and who transmitted it to his disciples, to whom he gave moral liberty.[14] Believers everywhere looked upon him as a terrible blasphemer. The prophet Alexander of Abonotichos enjoined all who would obtain divine graces to drive away with stones “atheists, Epicureans and Christians,” and exclude them from his mysteries.[15] He ordered by an oracle that the writings of him whom he called “the blind old man” should be burnt. When mysticism and Platonism triumphed in the Roman world, Epicureanism ceased to exist. It had disappeared in the middle of the fourth century, yet Julian the Apostate thought it advisable to include the writings of Epicurus among the books which were forbidden to the priests of his revived paganism.[16]

Thus during several centuries this philosophy had won a multitude of followers. The inscriptions bear eloquent witness to this fact. The most remarkable of them is a long text which was set out on the wall of a portico in the little town of Oenoanda in Lycia. A worthy citizen, Diogenes by name, who seems to have lived under the Antonines, was a convinced partisan of the doctrine of Epicurus; and feeling his end draw near, he wished to engrave an exposition thereof on marble for the present and future edification of his countrymen and of strangers. He does not fail to evince his contempt for death, at which, he says, he has learnt to mock. “I do not let myself be frightened by the Tityi and the Tantali whom some represent in Hades; horror does not seize me when I think of the putrefaction of my body ... when the links which bind our organism are loosened, nothing further touches us.”[17] These are ideas which we find reproduced everywhere, in various forms, for Epicureanism did not only win convinced partisans in the most cultivated circles, but also spread in the lowest strata of the population, as is proved by epitaphs expressing unbelief in an after life. Some do not go beyond a short profession of faith, “We are mortal; we are not immortal.”[18] One maxim is repeated so often that it is sometimes expressed only by initials, “I was not; I was; I am not; I do not care.”[19] So man goes back to nothingness whence he went forth. It has been remarked that this epigraphic formula was engraved especially on the tombs of slaves, who had slight reason for attachment to life. Gladiators also adopted the sentence: these wretched men, who were to prove their indifference to death in the arena, were taught that it marked the destruction of feeling and the term of their suffering.

The same thought is sometimes expressed less brutally, almost touchingly. Thus a comedian, who has spouted many verses and tramped many roads, voices in his epitaph the conviction that life is a loan, like a part in a play: “My mouth no longer gives out any sound; the noise of applause no longer reaches me; I paid my debt to nature and have departed. All this is but dust.”[20] Another actor, who recited Homer’s verses in the festivals, tells us that he “laughs at illusions and slumbers softly,” returning to the Epicurean comparison of death with an unconscious sleep which has no awakening.[21]

Some wordier unbelievers felt the need of enlarging on their negations.[22] “There is no boat of Hades, no ferryman Charon, no Aeacus as doorkeeper, no dog Cerberus. All we, whom death sends down to the earth, become bones and ashes and no more.... Offer not perfumes and garlands to my stele: it is but a stone; burn no fire: the expenditure is vain. If thou have a gift, give it me while I live. If thou givest to my ashes to drink, thou wilt make mud: and the dead will not drink.... When thou scatterest earth on my remains, say that I have again become as I was when I was not.” This last thought occurs frequently. Thus on a Roman tomb we read: “We are and we were nothing. See, reader, how swiftly we mortals go back from nothingness to nothingness.”[23]

Sometimes these dead adopt a joking tone which is almost macabre. Thus a freedman, merry to the grave, boasts of the amenities of his new state: “What remains of man, my bones, rests sweetly here. I no longer have the fear of sudden starvation; I am exempt from attacks of gout; my body is no longer pledged for my rent; and I enjoy free and perpetual hospitality.”[24]

Often a grosser Epicureanism recommends that we make profit of our earthly passage since the fatal term deprives us for ever of the pleasures which are the sovereign good. “Es bibe lude veni”—“Eat, drink, play, come hither”—is advice which is several times repeated.[25] Not uncommonly, variations occur, inspired by the famous epitaph which was on the alleged tomb of Sardanapalus and is resumed in the admonition: “Indulge in voluptuousness, for only this pleasure wilt thou carry away with thee”; or as it is expressed in the Epistle to the Corinthians, “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.”[26] So we read on a stone found near Beneventum: “What I have eaten and what I have drunk; that is all that belongs to me.”[27] A well-known distich states that “Baths, wine, and love impair our bodies, but baths, wine, and love make life”;[28] and a veteran of the army had advice based on his own example engraved on his tomb, “While I lived, I drank willingly; drink, ye who live.”[29] The exhortation to enjoy a life soon to be interrupted by death is a traditional theme which has lent itself to many developments in ancient and modern poetry. It is the formula which resumes the wisdom of the popular Epicureanism. Some silver goblets, found in Boscoreale near Pompeii,[30] show us philosophers and poets among skeletons, and inscriptions urging them to rejoice while they live, since no man is certain of the morrow. Epicurus appears in person, his hand stretching towards a cake on a table; and between his legs is a little pig lifting his feet and snout to the cake to take his share of it. Above the cake are the Greek words, ΤΟ ΤΕΛΟΣ ΗΔΟΝΗ, “The supreme end is pleasure.” Horace, when he advises us to live from day to day without poisoning the passing hour with hopes or fears for the future, speaks of himself, jestingly, as a fat “hog of Epicurus’ herd.”[31] It was thus that the vulgar interpreted the precepts of him who had in reality preached moderation and renunciation as the means of reaching true happiness.

* * * * *

If Epicureanism chose its ground as the passionate adversary of religious beliefs, the other great system which shared its dominance of minds in Rome, Stoicism, sought, on the contrary, to reconcile these beliefs with its theories. But the allegorical interpretations which Stoicism suggested, led, indirectly, to nearly the same result as a complete negation, for when it changed the meaning of the ancient myths it really destroyed the traditions which it sought to preserve. This is true in particular of its ideas as to the future life.

It will be remembered that man is for the Stoics a microcosm, who reproduces in his person the constitution of the universe. The entire mass of the world is conceived by them as animated by a divine Fire, a first principle which evokes the succession of natural phenomena. An uninterrupted chain of causes, ordered by this supreme reason, necessarily determines the course of events and irresistibly governs the existence of the great All. This cosmic life is conceived as formed of an infinite series of exactly similar cycles: the four elements are periodically reabsorbed into the purest of their number, which is the Fire of intelligence, and then, after the general conflagration, are once more dissociated.

In the same way our organism lives, moves and thinks because it is animated by a detached particle of this fiery principle which penetrates everything. As this principle reaches to the limits of the universe, so our soul occupies the whole body in which it lodges. The pantheism of the Porch conceives as material both God and the reason which rules us, the reason which is, in the emphatic words of Epictetus,[32] “a fragment of God.” It is defined as a hot breath (πνεῦμα πυρῶδες, _anima inflammata_); it is like the purest part of the air which maintains life by respiration, or the ardent ether which feeds the stars. This individual soul maintains and preserves man, as the soul of the world, by connecting its various parts, saves it from disintegration. But on both sides this action is only temporary; souls cannot escape the fatal lot imposed on the whole of which they are but a tiny portion. At the end of each cosmic period the universal conflagration (ἐκπύρωσις) will cause them to return to the divine home whence all of them came forth.[33] But if the new cycle, making its new beginning, is to reproduce exactly that which preceded it, a “palingenesis” will one day give to the same souls, endowed with the same qualities, the same existence in the same bodies formed of the same elements.

This is the maximum limit of the immortality which the materialistic pantheism of the Stoic philosophy could concede. Nor did all the doctors agree in granting it. The variations of the school on a point which seems to us of capital importance are most remarkable. While Cleanthes did indeed admit that all souls thus subsisted after their brief passage on earth for thousands of years and until the final _ekpyrosis_, for Chrysippus only the souls of the sages had part in this restricted immortality. In order to win it they must temper their strength by resisting the passions. The weak, who had let themselves be conquered in the struggle of this life, fell in the Beyond also.[34] At the most they obtained a short period of after life. The brevity or the absence of this other existence was the chastisement of their weakness.

Thus, almost the same moral consequences and incitements to good could be drawn from a conditional and diminished immortality, as from the general eternity of pains and rewards which other thinkers taught. But the Stoics were not unanimous in adopting these doctrines. We do not clearly perceive how far they agreed in admitting that the soul, deprived of corporeal organs, was endowed with feeling and, in particular, kept an individual conscience connected with that possessed on earth. It is certain that a definitely negative tendency showed itself in Rome among the sectaries of Zeno. Panaetius, the friend of the Scipios, and one of the writers who did most to win the Romans over to the ideas of the Porch, here dissociated himself from his masters and absolutely denied personal survival.[35] This attitude was subsequently that of many Roman Stoics of those who represented the school’s tradition most purely. The master of the poet Persius, Cornutus, of whom a short work remains to us, declared that the soul died with the body, immediately.[36] Similarly, at a later date, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, although they sometimes seem to admit the possibility of survival, certainly incline rather to believe that souls are disintegrated and return to the elemental mass whence they were formed. Even Seneca, who is more swayed by other tendencies and whose wavering thought does not always remain consistent nor perspicuous, is not convinced of the truth of immortality. It is no more to him than a beautiful hope.

How is it that Stoicism thus hesitated at a point on which the whole conception of human life seems to us to depend? It was that eschatological theories had in reality only a secondary value in this system, of which the essential part was not affected by their variability. True Stoicism placed the realisation of its ideal in this world. For it the aim of our existence here below was not preparation for death but the conquest of perfect virtue, which freed him who had attained to it from the passions and thus conferred on him independence and felicity. Man could, of himself, reach a complete beatitude which was not impaired by the limits placed to his duration. The sage, a blissful being, was a god on earth: heaven could give him nothing more. Therefore for these philosophers the answer to the question, “What becomes of us after death?” did not depend on moral considerations as it generally does for us. For them it rather followed on physical theories.

If these theories allow of different solutions of the problem of immortality, they agree on one point—the impossibility that the soul, if it is to last longer than we, should go down into the depths of the earth; for the soul was, as we have said, conceived as an ardent breath; that is to say, as formed of the two elements, air and fire, which have the property of rising to the heights. Its very nature prevented its descent: “it is impossible to conceive that it is borne downwards.”[37] Thus all the vulgar notions as to Hades were in contradiction with Stoic psychology, a point to which we will return in treating of the nether world.[38] These philosophers do indeed speak of Hades but, faithful to their habits, while they use traditional terms they give them a new meaning. “The descent into Hades” is for them simply the departing from life, the transference of the soul to new surroundings. Thus Epictetus, who uses this expression (κάθοδος εἰς Ἄιδου), clearly states in another passage, “There is no Hades, no Acheron, no Cocytus, no Pyriphlegethon, but all is filled with gods and demons.”[39] These gods and demons were, however, no more than personifications of the forces of nature.[40]

The true Stoic doctrine is, then, that souls, when they leave the corpse, subsist in the atmosphere and especially in its highest part which touches the circle of the moon.[41] But after a longer or less interval of time they, like the flesh and the bones, are decomposed and dissolve into the elements which formed them.

This thought, like Epicurean nihilism, often appears in epitaphs, and shows how Stoic ideas had spread among the people. Thus on a tombstone found in Moesia we read first the mournful statement that there is neither love nor friendship among the dead and that the corpse lies like a stone sunk into the ground. Then the dead man adds:[42] “I was once composed of earth, water and airy breath (πνεῦμα), but I perished, and here I rest, having rendered all to the All. Such is each man’s lot. What of it? There, whence my body came, did it return, when it was dissolved.” Sometimes there is more insistence on the notion that this cosmic breath, in which ours is gathered up, is the godhead who fills and rules the world. So in this epitaph: “The holy spirit which thou didst bear has escaped from thy body. That body remains here and is like the earth; the spirit pursues the revolving heavens; the spirit moves all; the spirit is nought else than God.”[43] Elsewhere we find the following brief formula, which sums up the same idea: “The ashes have my body; the sacred air has borne away my soul.”[44] Very characteristic is an inscription inspired by verses of a Greek poet, on the tomb of a Roman woman: “Here I lie dead and I am ashes; these ashes are earth. If the earth be a goddess, I too am a goddess and am not dead.”[45]

These verses express the same great thought in various forms: death is disappearance into the depths of divine nature. It is not for the preservation of an ephemeral personality that we must hope. Our soul, a fleeting energy detached from the All, must enter again into the All as must our body: both are absorbed by God,

“When that which drew from out the boundless deep Turns again home.”[46]