Part 3

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 and the heavens will be gathered thither also. All must be engulfed in one whole, must lose itself in one forgetfulness. When man has reached the term of his fate, he faints into the one power which forms and leads the universe, just as the tired stars will be extinguished in it, when their days shall be accomplished. Resistance to the supreme law is vain and painful; rebellion against the irresistible order of things is impious. The great virtue taught by Stoicism is that of submission to the fatality which guides the world, of joyous acceptance of the inevitable. Philosophic literature and the epitaphs present to us, repeatedly and in a thousand forms, the idea that we cannot strive against omnipotent necessity, that the rule of this rigid master must be borne without tears or recriminations. The wise man, who destroys within himself desire of any happenings, enjoys even during this existence divine calm in the midst of tribulations, but those whom the vicissitudes of life drive or attract, who let illusions seduce or grieve them, will at last obtain remission of their troubles when they reach the tranquil haven of death. This thought is expressed by a distich which often recurs on tombs, in Greek and in Latin. “I have fled, escaped. Farewell, Hope and Fortune. I have nothing more to do with you. Make others your sport.”[47]

Stoic determinism found support in the astrology which originated in Babylonia and was transplanted to Egypt, and which spread in the Graeco-Latin world from the second century B. C. onwards, propagating its mechanical and fatalistic conception of the universe. According to this pseudo-science, all physical phenomena depended absolutely, like the character and acts of men, on the revolutions of the celestial bodies. Thus all the forces of nature and the very energy of intelligence acted in accordance with an inflexible necessity. Hence worship had no object and prayer no effect. In this way the sidereal divination, which had grown up in the temples of the East, ended in Greece, among certain of its adepts, in a negation of the very basis of religion.[48] It is noteworthy that in the writings left to us there is hardly an allusion to the immortality of the soul. When they speak of what comes after death there is question only of funerals and posthumous glory. We never find in them a promise to the unfortunate, weighed down by misadventure and infirmities, of consolation or compensation in the Beyond. The systematic astrology of the Greeks limits its horizon to this world, although traces of the belief in Hades subsist in its vocabulary and its predictions and although this same astral divination inspired in the mysteries certain eschatological theories, as we shall see later.[49]

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The rationalistic and scientific period of Hellenic thought which began, as we have said, with Aristotle, filled the Hellenistic period and continued until the century of Augustus. Towards the end of the Roman Republic faith in the future life was reduced to a minimum and the scepticism or indifference of the Alexandrians was carried into Italy. The mocking verses of an epigram of Callimachus, a man of learning as well as a poet, is well known.[50] “Charidas, what is there down below? Deep darkness. But what of the journeys upwards? All lies. And Pluto? A fable. Then we are lost.” Catullus was to say as much, less lightly, with a deeper feeling. “Suns can set and rise again, but we, when our brief light is extinguished, must sleep for an eternal night.”[51] The religions belief in retribution in the Beyond was shaken, as all the others were, not only in literary and philosophic circles but among a large section of the population. The old tales of the Elysian Fields and Tartarus no longer found credence, as convincing testimony will show us.[52] Those who sought to preserve them could do so only by using a daring symbol which altered their character. But the idea of conscious survival after death was itself no longer looked upon as sure. Many who did not go so far as to deny it brutally were firmly agnostic. When we turn over the pages of the thick volumes of the _Corpus inscriptionum_, we are struck by the small number of the epitaphs which express the hope of immortality. The impression received is quite the contrary of that given by going through our own graveyards or surveying the collections of Christian epitaphs of antiquity. On by far the larger number of the tombs the survival of the soul was neither affirmed nor denied; it was not mentioned otherwise than by the banal formula _Dis Manibus_—so bereft of meaning that even some Christians made use of it. Or else the authors of funereal inscriptions, like the contemporary writers, used careful phrases which showed their mental hesitations: “If the Manes still perceive anything.... If any feeling subsist after death.... If there be reward for the righteous beneath the ground.”[53] Such doubting propositions are most frequent. The same indecision made people return to an alternative presented by Plato in the _Apology_,[54] before his ideas had evolved, and repeat that death is “an end or a passage,”—_mors aut finis aut transitus_,—and no choice is made between the two possibilities: the question is left open. The future life was generally regarded as a consoling metaphysical conception, a mere hypothesis supported by some thinkers, a religious hope but not an article of faith. The lofty conclusion which ends Agricola’s eulogy will be remembered. “If,” says Tacitus, “there be an abode of the spirits of virtuous men, if, as sages have taught, great souls be not extinguished with the body, rest in peace.” But side by side with the supposition thus hazarded, the historian expresses the assurance that Agricola will receive another reward for his merits. All that his contemporaries have loved and admired in his character will cause the fame of his deeds to live in men’s memory through the eternity of ages.

We here see how the perplexity in which men struggled, when they thought of psychic survival, gave earthly immortality a greater value in the eyes of the ancients. It was for many of them the essential point because it alone was certain. Not to fall into the abyss of forgetfulness seemed a sufficient reward for virtue. “Death is to be feared by those for whom everything is extinguished with their life, not by those whose renown cannot perish.”[55] That the commemoration of our merits may not cease when the short time of our passage here below has ended, but may be prolonged for as long as the sequence of future generations lasts—this is the deep desire which stimulates virtue and excites to effort. Cicero, when celebrating in the _Pro Archia_[56] the benefits wrought by the love of glory,—from which he was by no means exempt himself,—remarks shrewdly that even philosophers, who claim to show its vanity, are careful to place their names at the beginning of their books, thus showing the worth they attach to that which they exhort others to despise. Even more than today, the hope of a durable renown, the anxiety that their fellows should be busy about them even after their departure, the preoccupation lest their life should not be favourably judged by public opinion, haunted many men, secretly or avowedly dominated their thought and directed their actions. Even those who had played only a modest part in the world and had made themselves known only to a narrow circle, sought to render their memory unforgettable by building strong tombs for themselves along the great roads. Epitaphs often begin with the formula _Memoriae aeternae_, “To the eternal memory,” which we have inherited, although the idea it represents no longer has for most of us any but a very relative value.

In antiquity it was first connected with the old belief in a communion of sentiments and an exchange of services between the deceased and their descendants who celebrated the funeral cult. When the firm belief in the power of the shades to feel and act ceased to exist, offerings were made with another intention: survivors liked to think that he who had gone had not entirely perished as long as his remembrance subsisted in the hearts of those who had cherished him and the minds of those who had learnt his praises. In some way, he rose from the grave in the image made of him by the successors of those who had known him. Epicurus himself stipulated in his will that the day of his birth should be commemorated every month,[57] and under the Roman Empire his disciples were still piously celebrating this recurring feast. Thus this deep instinct of preservation, which impels human beings to desire survival, showed itself even in him who contributed most of all to destroy faith in immortality.

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It is always with difficulty that men resign themselves to dying wholly. Even when reason admits, nay when it desires, annihilation, the subconscious self protests against it; our personality is impelled by its very essence to crave the persistence of its self. Besides, the feelings of survivors rebel against the pain of an unending separation, the definite loss of all affections. In the troubled times which marked the end of the Roman Republic, at a moment when changing fortune periodically turned all the conditions of existence upside down, there grew up a stronger aspiration to a better future, a search, to use the words of the ancients, for a sure haven, in which man, tossed by the storms of life, might find quiet. Thus in the first century B. C. the birth was seen, or rather the rebirth, of a mystic movement which claimed to give by direct communication with God the certainties which reason could not supply. The chief preoccupation of philosophers began to be those capital questions as to the origin and end of man which the schools of the earlier period had neglected as unanswerable. It was above all the Neo-Pythagoreans who gave up pure rationalism, and thus brought Roman thought to admit new forms of immortality.

When the scientific school of the old Pythagorism came to an end in Italy in the fourth century, the sect perpetuated itself obscurely in mysterious conventicles, a sort of freemasonry of which the influence in the Hellenistic period is difficult to measure or circumscribe. It again took on new power in Alexandria under the Ptolemies. In this metropolis, in which all the currents of Europe and Asia were mingled, Pythagorism admitted at this time many ideas foreign to the teaching of the old master of Samos. This teaching seems not to have set forth a rigid, logically constructed theology, and the points of contact with the beliefs of the East, which its ideas supplied, favoured an accommodating syncretism. Pythagoras was said to have had Plato as a disciple, and Plato was venerated almost as much as the teacher he followed. The powerful structure of Stoic pantheism did not fail to exercise an ascendancy over the theorists of the school. This school had been, from its origin, in touch with the Orphic mysteries and those of Dionysos and it remained so, but it was also subject to the more remote influence of Babylonian and Egyptian religions, and particularly of those Chaldean doctrines which the Greeks had learnt to know after Alexander’s conquest.

This vast eclecticism, open to all novelties, did not bring about a break with the past. Theology succeeded in effecting a reconciliation with all, even the rudest and most absurd traditions of fable, by an ingenious system of moral allegories. “Divine” Homer thus became a master of piety and wisdom, and mythology a collection of edifying stories. Demonology made it possible to justify all the traditional practices of the cult, as well as magic and divination: everything which seemed incompatible with the new idea of the divinity was ascribed to lower powers. Thus the Pythagoreans could take up the position not of adversaries or reformers but of interpreters of the ancestral religion. They claimed that they remained faithful to the wisdom of the sages who, at the dawn of civilisation, had received a divine revelation, which had been transmitted first to Pythagoras and then to Plato. They felt so sure that they were expressing the thought of these masters, whose authority made law, that they did not hesitate to subscribe the venerated names, by a pious fraud, to their own writings. Nowhere did apocryphal literature have a more luxuriant efflorescence than in these circles.

When the sect was introduced into Rome it sought, according to its wont, to connect itself with old local traditions, and without much difficulty it succeeded. The national pride of the conquerors of Greece could, with some complacency, regard it as Italic. Pythagoras passed for the teacher of King Numa, the religious legislator of the city. Ennius had expressed this philosopher’s doctrine in his poems, and altogether, from the time of the ancient republic onwards, the half mythical moralist of Greater Greece enjoyed singular consideration in Rome.[58]

But the first to give new life to the Pythagorean school, which had died in Italy centuries before, was, according to Cicero, his friend, the senator Nigidius Figulus, a curious representative of the scientific religiosity which characterised the sect. This Roman magistrate, a man of singular erudition, was bitten with all the occult sciences. A grammarian, a naturalist and a theologian, he was also an astrologer and magician and, on occasion, a wonder-worker. He did not confine himself to theory but gathered about him a club of the initiate, of whom we cannot say whether they were most attracted by scientific curiosity, by austere morals or by mystic practices. Vatinius, the relative and friend of Caesar, and, probably, the spiritualist Appius Claudius Pulcher were the most prominent of this circle of converts.

It is significant that at much the same time the historian Castor of Rhodes claimed to interpret Roman usages by Pythagorism,[59] and the stories establishing a connection between the Roman state and the reformers of Greater Greece were multiplied. In the Augustan age a worldly poet like Ovid[60] thought it permissible to introduce into his _Metamorphoses_, where no digression of the sort was to be looked for, a long speech of Pythagoras explaining vegetarianism and transmigration. A little later Antonius Diogenes, the romancer, found in the same philosophy inspiration for his fantastic pictures of the lot of souls.[61] All this goes to show how powerfully seductive the new sect proved to be as soon as it was revived in Rome.

But it did not lack enemies. Public malignity did not spare these mysterious theosophists who met in subterranean crypts. They were blamed for neglecting the national cult, which had ensured the greatness of the city, in order to indulge in condemned practices or even to commit abominable crimes. It was a more serious matter that their secret gatherings also excited the suspicion of the authorities, and that the partakers were prosecuted as persons who dealt in magic, which was punishable by law. The little Pythagorean church seems not to have been able to maintain itself in the capital for long. In Seneca’s time it was dead.[62]

But Pythagorism continued to find adepts in the empire and soon returned to Rome. Under Domitian, Apollonius of Tyana made the East resound with his preaching and miracles, and although thrown into prison by this emperor he was in favour with his successors. Under the Antonines, the false prophet Alexander of Abonotichos, unmasked by Lucian, claimed to be a new incarnation of the sage of Samos, whose wisdom he pretended to reveal in his mysteries. The literary tradition of the sect maintained itself until the third century, when it was absorbed by Neo-Platonism. In a period of syncretism, the originality of this philosophy resided less in its doctrine than in its observances, and when its conventicles were dissolved, it easily merged itself in the school which professed to continue it. During its long life Pythagorism had indeed had a powerful influence, not only on the system of Plato and Plotinus, but also on the Oriental cults which spread under the empire. It had supplied the first type of the learned mysteries in which knowledge (γνῶσις) is at once the condition and the end of sanctification.[63] Possibly it even penetrated into Gaul at an early date, by way of Marseilles, and was thus known to the Druids.

It would certainly be a mistake to look upon Pythagorism as a pure philosophy, like Epicureanism and Stoicism. Its sectaries formed a church rather than a school, a religious order, not an academy of sciences. From a recent discovery in Rome, if my interpretation of the monument is right,[64] we have learnt that the Pythagoreans met in underground basilicas, constructed on the model of Plato’s cavern, in which, according to the great idealist, the chained men see only the shades of the higher realities.[65] A foundation sacrifice, that of a dog and a young pig, was made before this basilica was constructed. Its stucco decoration is borrowed almost entirely from Greek mythology or the ceremonies of the mysteries. Secret rites and varied purifications had to be accomplished in it; hymns accompanied by sacred music were sung; and from a chair within the apse the doctors gave esoteric teaching to the faithful. They taught them the symbols in which the truths of faith and the precepts of conduct, formerly revealed by Pythagoras and the other sages, were handed down in enigmatic form. These remote disciples interpreted all the myths of the past, and especially the Homeric poems, by psychological or eschatological allegories. They laid down, as definite commandments, a rule of strict observance which included all the acts of daily life. At dawn, after he had offered a sacrifice to the rising Sun, the pious man must decide on the way in which his day was to be employed. Every evening he must make a threefold examination of conscience, and, if he had been guilty of any sin of omission or commission, must make an act of contrition. He was obliged to follow a purely vegetarian diet and to practise many abstinences, to make repeated prayers, to meditate lengthily. This austere and circumstantial system of morals would ensure happiness and wisdom on earth and salvation in the Beyond.

All the Neo-Pythagoreans agree in stating that the human soul is related to God and therefore immortal. Many, like the Stoics, look upon it as a parcel of the ether, an effluvium of burning and luminous fluid which fills the celestial spaces and shines in the divine stars. Others, who are nearer to Plato, believe it to be immaterial and define it as a number in movement. Always, generation is regarded as a fall and a danger for the soul. Enclosed in the body as in a tomb, it runs the risk of corruption, even of perishing. Earthly existence is a hard voyage on the stormy waters of matter, which are perpetually rolling and surging. Thus a fundamental pessimism looked upon life here below as a trial and a chastisement; a radical dualism placed the body in opposition to the divine essence residing in it. The constant care of the sage was to keep his soul from pollution by its contact with the flesh. He abstained from meat and other foods which might corrupt it; a series of tabus protected it against all contagion. Ritual purifications restored to it its purity (ἁγνεία) which was continually threatened. The unwearying exercise of virtue, the scrupulous practice of piety preserved its original nature. Music, which caused it to vibrate in harmony with the universe, and science, which lifted it towards divine things, prepared its ascension to heaven. Meditation was a silent prayer, which placed reason in communication with the powers on high. Seized by love for the eternal beauties, it rose in its transports even in this life to God, identified itself with Him and so rendered itself worthy of a blessed immortality.[66]

When the death determined by destiny occurred, the soul escaped from the body in which it was captive but kept its bodily form and appearance, and this simulacrum (εἴδωλον) appeared to men in dreams and after evocations. According to some Pythagoreans, this subtle form was distinct from the soul (ψυχή), which ascended immediately to the higher spheres. Others believed that, like a light garment, it wrapped the soul, which was for some time constrained to dwell here below.[67] After this shade had remained beside the body or somewhere near the tomb for a certain number of days, it rose in the atmosphere in which contended winds, water and fire, and was purified by the elements. This zone, the lowest circle of the world, was what fable had called hell (_Inferi_), and it was of this passage from one circle to that next it that poets spoke when they told of the Styx and Charon’s boat.[68] When the soul had been purified it was borne, uplifted by the winds, to the sphere of the moon. Here lay the boundary of life and death, the limit which divided the residence of the immortals, where all was harmony and purity, from the corrupt and troubled empire of generation. Thus the luminary of the night was the first dwelling of the Blessed, and there lay the Elysian Fields of the poets, Proserpina’s kingdom where rest the shades. And the Fortunate Islands, of which the ancients sung, were no other than the sun and the moon, celestial lands bathed by the waters of the ether.[69]

The shade remained in the moon or was dissolved there, and pure reason rose to the sun whence it came forth, or even reached the summit of the heavens where reigned the Most High. A helpful escort, called by mythology Hermes the Soul-Guide, or _psychopompos_, led the elect to these Olympian peaks. There they regained their true country, and as birth had been to them a death, so their death was their rebirth. They enjoyed the contemplation of the luminous gods. They were rapt by the ravishing tune of the harmony of the spheres, that divine melody of which earthly music is but a feeble echo.[70]

Some souls were kept on the banks of the Styx and could not cross it: in other words, they were constrained to remain on the earth. The dead who had not had religious burial must linger beside their neglected bodies for a hundred years, the normal span of a human life, before they were admitted to the place of purgation, where they would sojourn for ten times that period.[71] In the same way those who had died young or whose days had been cut short by violence would not enter the purgatory before the due term of their life.[72] But especially the souls of the criminal and the impious were thus condemned to wander, restless and in pain, through the lower air, which they filled with their multitude. It was these demoniac spirits who returned as dismal phantoms to frighten the living, who were evoked by wizards and who revealed the future in oracles. Demonology accounted for all the aberrations of magic and divination. These spirits rose to the aerial purgatory after they had for long years tormented and been tormented, but they could not reach the moon, which repelled them; they were condemned to reincarnation in new bodies, either of men or of beasts, and were once again delivered to the fury of the passions. These passions are the Erinyes, of whom poets sung, that in Tartarus they burnt criminals with their torches and scourged them with their whips. For there was no subterranean hell: Hades was in the air or on our earth, and the infernal sufferings described by mythology were the various tortures inflicted on the souls condemned to transmigration.[73]