I - After Life in the Tomb

When Cicero in his Tusculans[101] first touches on the question of the immortality of the soul, he begins by citing in its support the fact that belief in it has existed since earliest antiquity. He states that unless the first Romans were convinced that man was not reduced to nought, when he left this life, and that all feeling was not extinguished in death, there could be no explanation of the rules of the old pontifical law as to funerals and burials, rules the violation of which was regarded as an inexpiable crime. This remark is that of a very judicious observer. There subsist in the funeral rites of all peoples, in the ceremony of mourning established by the religious law or by tradition, customs which derive from archaic conceptions of life beyond the tomb and which are still followed although their original meaning is no longer understood. Modern learning has sometimes successfully sought to elucidate them, borrowing light from the practices of savage peoples and from European folk-lore. We will not enter the domain of these researches, for since our special purpose here is to expound the ideas as to immortality held in later times, we have to consider only the beliefs which were still alive in that period. A false interpretation supplied by a philosopher may have more historical value for us than the true explanation of an institution which had lost its meaning.

But even among the ideas which were neither obliterated nor discredited, conceptions which originated at very different dates have to be distinguished.

The doctrines of paganism, like the soil of our planet, are formed of superimposed strata. When we dig into them we discover successive layers under the upper deposits of recent alluvia. Nothing was suddenly destroyed in ancient religions. Their transformations were never revolutionary. Faith in the past was not entirely abolished when new ways of believing were formed. Contradictory opinions could exist side by side for a long time without any shock being caused by their disagreement; and it was only little by little and slowly that argument excluded one way of thinking to give place to the other, while there were always hardy survivals left, both in thought and in customs. Thus the beliefs as to the future life which were current under the Roman Empire present a singular mixture, coarse ideas going back to the prehistoric period mingling with theories imported into Italy at a late date.

We will today examine the oldest of all the ways of considering survival in the Beyond, life in the tomb.

Ethnology has proved that among all peoples the belief that the dead continue to live in the tomb has reigned, and sometimes still reigns. The primitive man, disconcerted by death, cannot persuade himself that the being who moved, felt, willed, as he does, can be suddenly deprived of all his faculties. The most ancient and the crudest idea is that the corpse itself keeps some obscure sensitiveness which it cannot manifest. It is imagined to be in a state like sleep. The vital energy which animated the body is still attached to it and cannot exist without it. This belief was so powerful in Egypt that it inspired a whole section of the funeral ritual and called forth the infinite care that was taken to preserve mummies. Even in the West it survived vaguely, and traces of it might still be discovered today. Lucretius combats this invincible illusion of men who, even while they affirm that death extinguishes all feeling, keep a secret uneasiness as to the suffering which their mortal remains may undergo and are frightened by the idea that their bodies may be eaten by worms or carnivorous animals. They cannot separate themselves from this prone body, which they believe is still their self. Why, continues the poet, would it be more painful to be the prey of wild beasts than to be burnt by the flame of the pyre, to freeze lying on the icy slab of the grave or to be crushed by the weight of heaped-up earth?[102] This very fear that the earth may weigh heavily on those who are deposited in the grave shows itself among many peoples who inter their dead, and was expressed in Rome by a formula so very usual that it was recalled in epitaphs by initials only: “S(it) t(ibi) t(erra) l(evis),” “May earth be light for thee.” Until the Empire Stoic philosophers could be found who upheld that the soul endures only for the time for which the body is preserved.[103]

But experience proved that the corpse decomposed rapidly in the soil, all that remained of it being a skeleton bereft of the organs of sensation. When the custom of incineration, followed in Italy from the prehistoric period, became practically general in Rome, the destruction of the body took place regularly before the eyes of those present. Thus men reached the belief that those near and dear to them, whom they sometimes saw again in their dreams or seemed to feel beside them, who were kept alive at least in memory, differed from the beings of flesh and bones whom they had known. From those material individuals subtle elements detached themselves, filled with a mysterious force which subsisted when the human organism had crumbled to dust or been reduced to ashes. It was this same principle which temporarily departed from persons who lost consciousness in a faint or a lethargy. If this light essence did not leave a dying man at the moment of his death, whether or not it could escape from his body immediately was indeed uncertain—it was set free by the funeral fire,[104] but it still inhabited the tomb in which his remains rested. The idea that it was somehow attached to his remains had taken root in men’s minds, and even literature bears witness to the persistence of this deeply implanted popular belief. Propertius,[105] when cursing a woman, desires that “her Manes may not be able to settle near her ashes.” And at Liternum in Campania, where Scipio Africanus caused himself to be buried because, as he said, he did not wish to leave even his bones to his ungrateful country, the grotto was shown where he rested and where, so men believed,[106] “a serpent kept guard over his Manes.”

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 the dead retain all the needs and feelings which were previously theirs. The funeral cult, celebrated at the tomb, is born of this belief. It proceeds from fear as much as from piety, for the dead are prone to resentment and quick in vengeance. The unknown force which inhabits them, the mysterious power which causes them to act, inspired great awe. If the natural course of their existence had been interrupted, especially if they had died before their time, they were suspected of being victims of some mischievous enchantment, their sickness was looked upon as an invasion of maleficent spirits provoked by spells. The wrath of those who had thus been torn from their homes and their wonted way of life was to be dreaded. Loud outbursts of grief followed by prolonged manifestations of mourning must prove to them, in the first place, that they were truly lamented and that no attempt had been made to get rid of them. Then, in their new abode to which they were conveyed, they must be ensured a bearable existence, in order that they might remain therein quietly and not trouble their families nor punish, by some intrusion, those who neglected them. Solicitude for the beloved, the desire to prevent their suffering, the hope of obtaining their protection, partly account for the origin and maintenance of these practices, but they were above all inspired by the terror which spirits called forth, as is proved by the fact that they were the same for all the departed without distinction, for those who had been loved and those who had been hated.

The tomb is the house of the dead. This is an idea common to the whole ancient world, going back in Italy beyond the foundation of Rome. The prehistoric cemeteries of the first iron age have yielded a number of cinerary urns exactly reproducing the various types of huts which sheltered the tribes who then peopled the peninsula. The burial places of the Etruscans are often on the plan of their dwellings, and Roman epitaphs leave no doubt as to the persistence of the conviction that the dead inhabit the tomb. The diffusion of Oriental cults revived archaic beliefs on this point as on many others. The name “eternal house” (domus aeterna), borrowed from the Egyptians and the Semites, often occurs in funeral inscriptions of the imperial period.[107] One text even specifies that this is “the eternal house in which future life must be passed.”[108] The tomb is thus no mere passage through which the soul goes on its way to another region of the world; it is a lasting residence. “This,” says an inscription, “is our certain dwelling, the one which we must inhabit.”[109] In the Aeneid, a cenotaph is raised to Polydorus, whose body had been lost, and his “soul” is installed there by a funeral ceremony,[110] for the shade which has no sepulcher wanders, as we shall see, about the earth. But when a fine monument is given to a dead man, he is happy to be able to offer hospitality there to passers-by and invites them to stay on their way. Sometimes he is imagined as in a bedchamber, where he sleeps an endless sleep,[111] but this is not the primitive nor the dominant idea. This idea, on the contrary, was that his rest was at least not unbroken, since he had many requirements. It was necessary not only to ensure him a roof but also to provide for his support, for he had the same needs and tastes beneath the ground as he had upon it. Therefore the clothes which covered him, the jewels which adorned him, the earthen or bronze vessels which decked his table, the lamps which afforded him light, would be placed beside him. If he were a warrior he would be given the arms he bore, if a craftsman the tools he used; a woman would have the articles necessary to her toilet, a child the toys which amused him; and the amulets, by the help of which all that was maleficent would be kept away, were not forgotten. “It is against common sense,” says Trimalchio in Petronius’ romance,[112] “to deck the house of the living and not to give the same care to the house which we must inhabit for a longer time.” In fact, the larger number of the articles of furniture and household use preserved in our museums come from tombs, which, in the climate of Egypt, have sometimes been able to yield up to us, intact, some precious volume intended for a mummy’s bedside book.

But the tombs have kept for us only a small part of the offerings made to those who were leaving this world, for often their wardrobe and implements were delivered with them to the flame of the pyre in the belief that somehow they would find them again in the Beyond. Lucian relates that a husband loved his wife so dearly that at her death he caused all the ornaments and the clothes which she liked to wear to be buried with her. But seven days after her death, as, stretched on a couch, he was silently reading Plato’s Phaedo, seeking therein solace for his grief, his wife appeared, seated herself beside him, and reproached 50him for not having added to his offering one of her gilt slippers which had been left behind a chest. The husband found it there, and hastened to burn it in order that the poor woman might no longer remain half barefooted.[113]

Above all, the dead must be offered food, for the shade, like the human body which it replaces, needs nourishment for its subsistence. Its feeble and precarious life is quickened and prolonged only if it be constantly sustained. The dead are hungry; above all they are thirsty. Those whose humors have dried, whose mouths have withered, are tortured by the need to refresh their parched lips. It therefore is not enough to place in the tombs the drinks and dishes, the remains of which have often been found beside skeletons, by periodic sacrifices the Manes must be supplied with fresh food also. If they are left without nourishment they languish, weak as a fasting man, almost unconscious, and in the end they would actually die of starvation. This is why the flesh of victims was, in funeral sacrifices, wholly destroyed by fire, none of it being reserved for those present. People always retained the conviction that the offerings burnt on the altar or the libations poured into the grave were consumed by him for whom they were intended. Often there is in the tombstone a circular cavity, the bottom of which is pierced with holes; the liquid poured into it went through the perforated slab and was led by a tube to the urn which held the calcinated bones. It is comprehensible that an unbeliever protested against this practice in his epitaph. “By wetting my ashes with wine thou wilt make mud,” he says, “and I shall not drink, when I am dead.”[114] But how many other texts there are which show the persistence of the ancient ideas! “Passer-by,” says a Roman inscription, “the bones of a man pray thee not to soil the monument which covers them; but if thou be benevolent pour wine into the cup, drink and give me thereof.” [115]

If the dead ask for fresh water, with which to quench their insatiable thirst, they are above all eager for the warm blood of victims. This sacrifice to the dead was at first often a human sacrifice of slaves or prisoners, and barbarous immolations of this kind had not entirely disappeared even in the historic period. When, after the taking of Perugia, Octavius, on the Ides of March (that is, on the anniversary of the slaying of Julius Caesar), caused three hundred notables of the town to be slaughtered on Caesar’s altar,[116] this collective murder, inspired by political hatred, perpetuated an old religious tradition. Fights of gladiators, whose blood drenched the soil, originally formed part of the funeral ceremonies by which the last duty was paid to the remains of an illustrious personage. It is said that these sacrifices were intended to provide him who had gone to the other world with servants and companions, as the offering of a horse gave him a steed, or else that, in case of violent death, they were meant to appease the shade of a victim who claimed vengeance. And doubtless these ideas, which correspond to conceptions already evolved, contributed to keeping this cruel custom in force. But originally the object of this sacrifice, as of the sacrifice of animals, was essentially to ensure the duration of the undefinable something which still inhabited the tomb.

Among all the peoples of antiquity the blood was looked upon as the seat of life;[117] the vapor which rose from the warm red liquid, flowing from a wound, was the soul escaping therewith from the body; and therefore when blood was sprinkled on the soil which covered the remains of a relative or a friend, a new vitality was given to his shade. With the same motive women were wont to scratch their faces with their nails in sign of mourning.[118] This ancient conviction that fresh blood was indispensable to the dead, was maintained in some countries with surprising tenacity. In Syria, as late as the seventh century of our era, Christians insisted, in spite of episcopal objurgations, on immolating bulls and sheep on tombs, and in Armenia, where these practices were sanctioned by the national clergy, the faithful remained persuaded that the dead found no happiness in the other life unless the blood of victims had been made to flow for them on the days fixed by tradition.[119]

Other libations performed in the funeral rites of the Greeks, as of the Romans, were intended to produce the same effect, the libations, namely, of wine, milk, and honey. The use of wine has been explained as that of a substitute for blood, as wine is red. Servius even interprets the purple flowers which Aeneas threw on the tomb of his father Anchises by the same association of ideas, as an “imitation of blood in which is the seat of life.”[120] Many proofs could be cited of the fact that wine has often taken the place of the liquid which flows in our veins, but its use in connection with the dead can be explained also by its own virtue. It is the marvelous liquid which gives divine drunkenness and which in the mysteries ensures immortality to such as are, thanks to this sacred draught, possessed by Bacchus.[121] In the same way it vivifies the Manes to whom it is poured out. Similarly melikraton, a mixture of milk and honey, is the food of the gods, and when the dead absorb it, they too become immortal.

Such is the first meaning of these offerings, one which was never quite forgotten. Their object is the infusion of new vigor into the enfeebled shades who slumber in the tomb. This intention can also be discerned in the fact that the same offerings are used in magic, which often preserved ideas abolished or superseded in religion. In order to evoke the phantoms, the necromancers dug a ditch and poured blood, wine, milk and honey into it. These liquids had an exciting effect on the spirits of the dead, arousing them from their torpor, and the wizard took advantage of it to question them.

Precautions lest the dead should ever suffer from lack of nourishment were multiplied. In order that they might be fed on other days than those of sacrifices, all over the ancient world it was customary to place food on their tombs, eggs, bread, beans, lentils, salt, flour, with wine. Hungry vagrants did not always respect their offerings but would help themselves to the proffered viands.

The institution which is most characterized by the persistence of the ancient ideas of life in the tomb is however that of the funeral banquets. These family repasts, which had previously been celebrated among the Etruscans, took place in Rome on the grave immediately after the funeral (silicernium) and were repeated on the ninth day following (cena novemdialis). In Greece and in the East the ceremony took place thrice, on the third, ninth and thirtieth or on the third, seventh and fortieth day. Everywhere it was subsequently renewed every year on the anniversary of the death and on several other fixed dates, as on that of the Rosalia in May, on which it was customary to decorate the tombs with roses. Memorial monuments of some importance are often found to include, beside the burial chamber, a dining-room (triclinium) and even a kitchen (culina). The importance attached to these meals is proved by several wills which have been preserved, and which make considerable endowments to ensure their perpetuity. For instance, at Ravenna a son bequeaths a sum of money to a college on condition that its members annually scatter roses on his father’s grave and feast there on the Ides of July.[122] When Aurelius Vitalio had built at Praeneste a family tomb, surmounted by a room with a terrace, he wrote a letter in incorrect Latin to the brothers of the society to which he belonged: “I ask you, my companions, to refresh yourselves here without quarrelling.”[123] An African settled in Rome similarly writes to his relatives and friends, “Come here in good health for the feast, and rejoice together.”[124] And in Gaul a will commands that the burial vault be furnished and receive a bed with coverings and cushions for the guests who have to meet on the memorial days.[125]

These funeral repasts go back to a prehistoric antiquity. They are found in India and in Persia as well as among the European peoples. They are doubtless as ancient as wedding and festal banquets. Among the Egyptians and the Etruscans it was even customary to place the representation of a perpetual feast on the walls of a tomb in order to secure to the dead person the relief it gave. The shade of a guest might well be pleased with the likeness of dishes.

It was believed that at funeral feasts the Manes of ancestors came to sit among the guests and enjoyed with them the abundance of the food and wines. Lucian tells of repasts of this kind, which he witnessed in Egypt, at which the dried mummy was invited to eat and drink at the table of his kin.[126] In Greece, even in the Roman period, those present at the feast used to summon the dead to it by name. An epitaph of Narbonne jokingly expresses the vulgar idea as to the participation of the deceased in the banquet: “I drink and drink again, in this monument,” says the dead man, “the more eagerly because I am obliged to sleep and to dwell here.”[127]

Nothing is further from our spiritual ideas as to the holiness of graveyards than the conviviality occasioned by the cult of the departed, `among the guests crowned with flowers, the drinks went round (circumpotatio) and soon produced a noisy intoxication. Do not think this was an abuse due to a relaxation of morals and which came into being in later times. The character of these funeral banquets was such from the beginning, and such it has remained down to modern times in many countries. You all know the practice of the Irish “wake” which has been preserved even in the United States.

For it was long believed that the dead had their part in the merriness and inebriation of the companions at table and were thus consoled for the sadness of their lot. “Thou callest,” says Tertullian,[128] “the dead careless (securos) when thou goest to the tombs with food and delicacies, but thy real purpose is to make offerings to thyself, and thou returnest home tipsy.” And indeed, as we shall see,[129] these feasts were no longer of profit to the dead only but to the living also, because there came to be a confusion between them and the Bacchic communions in which wine was a drink of immortality.

No religious ceremony was more universally performed in the most diverse regions of the Empire than this cult of the grave. At every hour of every day families met in some tomb to celebrate there an anniversary by eating the funeral meal. Peoples remained strongly attached to practices the omission of which would have seemed to them dangerous as well as impious, for the spirits of the dead were powerful and vindictive.

It is therefore not surprising that these practices persisted in the Christian era in spite of the efforts of the clergy to suppress them. St. Augustine reprimands those who, like pagans, “drink intemperately above the dead”—these are his words—“and who, while serving meals to 56corpses, bury themselves with these buried bodies, making a religion of their greed and their drunkenness.”[130]

In the East, however, ecclesiastical authority tolerated a custom which it could not uproot, contenting itself with forbidding the abuse of wine and recommending a moderation the absence of which might often be deplored. Ecclesiastical authority also insisted that a part of the feast should be given to the poor, thus giving a charitable character to the old pagan practice.[131] Therefore in many countries, and especially in Greece and in the Balkans, the habit has survived to this day, not only of placing food on tombs, but also of eating there on certain anniversaries, with the idea that the dead in some mysterious way share and enjoy the meal.

In Rome, in historical times, the funeral repast might be taken not at the tomb but in the house. Among the feasts celebrated by the confraternities in honor of some dead benefactor, on the dates fixed by his last will, many were held in the meeting-place of the guild. But the belief continued in the real presence of him whose “spirit was honored,”[132] and whose statue or picture often adorned the banqueting hall.

From the earliest period, the spirit of the dead was indeed not regarded as inseparable from his remains or as a recluse cloistered in the tomb. He dwelt there but could issue thence, although for long it was believed that he could not go far away but remained in the neighborhood of the burial place. He was brought back to it by the necessity of taking food, which was no less indispensable to him than to men. He returned, therefore, to it, as a dweller returns to his home, to repair his energies and to rest. This idea that the soul wandered around its “eternal house” often caused pains to be taken to surround this house with a garden. Sometimes such a garden was planted with a practical object: it was a vineyard, an orchard or a rose-garden which supplied the wine, fruit or flowers necessary for the offerings to the dead.[133] But elsewhere a mere pleasure-garden, with shady groves, bowers, pavilions and sparkling fountains, surrounded the burial place. The care which the living took to fix, by their will, its extent and its planting is a measure of the intensity of their conviction that their shade would take pleasure in refreshing itself in this quiet haunt. There, about the tomb, it would enjoy the delights which would afterwards be transported to the Elysian Fields, as we shall see later.

The cult of the grave has not ceased in these days; the ancient rites have not been discontinued. Tombstones are still surrounded with flowers; they are decked with wreaths; in Italy lamps are kept burning over them. But the reasons which established these customs have disappeared; for us they are no more than a way of betokening our care for the beloved, of piously showing our intimate feelings by outward signs and marking the duration of our regrets and our memories. They are survivals which have lost all the concrete and real meaning which they had in the far-off days when men believed that a being like themselves sojourned in the place in which bones or ashes were deposited.

The dead were not then cut off from the society of the living; the connection between them and their surroundings was not broken; the continuity between the hour which preceded and that which followed their decease was not interrupted. It has often been remarked that in this respect ancient ideas were profoundly different from ours. Those lost to sight did not then cease to partake of the life of their families; they remained in communication with their friends and their kin, who met together in their new dwelling, and an effort was made to render their isolation less hard to bear by bringing them into touch with many people. Our dead rest in peaceful and remote graveyards where no noise or din may trouble the tranquil mood of afflicted visitors. The Romans placed their dead along the great roads, near the gates of towns, where there was press of passers-by and the rolling of chariot-wheels. Their wish was not, when they buried them beside the most frequented highways, to recall their destiny to mortals, although philosophers have thus explained the custom.[134] On the contrary, they wanted to cause those who were no more to forget their own destiny. “I see,” says an epitaph,[135] “and I gaze upon all who go and come from and to the city.” “Lollius has been placed,” we read elsewhere,[136] “by the side of the road in order that all passers-by may say to him, ‘Good day, Lollius.’”

The inscriptions in which the dead speak, addressing those who stop before their monuments, are innumerable. They console such as continue to love them, thank those who are still busy on their behalf and express wishes for their happiness, or else they impart to their successors the wisdom acquired by experience of life. Often they take part with them in a dialogue, answering their greetings and wishes: “May the earth be light on thee!” “Fare thou well in the upper world”,[137] or else, “Hail Fabianus.” “May the gods grant you their benefits, my friends, and may the gods be propitious to you, travelers, and to you who stop by Fabianus! Go and come safe and sound! May you who crown me with garlands or throw me flowers, live for many years!”[138]

Thus throughout antiquity, in spite of the evolution of ideas as to the future life, the persuasion always remained invincible that the spirits of the dead moved about among men. These disincarnate intelligences, which were, however, provided with light and swift bodies, did not let themselves be imprisoned in the tomb. They fluttered unceasingly around living beings, causing them to feel the effects of their presence. There is here, mingled with the primitive idea that a mysterious being, like it in appearance, has its place in the ground beside the buried corpse, the other and equally ancient idea that the soul is a breath exhaled by the dead at the moment when they expire. To breathe is the first act which marks the life of a newly born infant and to cease to breathe is the first sign which betokens the extinction of life. Primitive people therefore naturally thought that the principle which animated the body was a breath, which entered it at birth and left it at death. The very name which denotes the vivifying essence is in most languages witness to the general predominance of this conception. Ψυχή in Greek is connected with ψύχω, “to blow”, the Latin animus or anima corresponds to ἄνεμος, “wind,” and in the Semitic languages nefeš̱ and ruaḥ have a similar meaning. At the moment in which man expired, his soul escaped through his mouth and floated in the ambient air. The Pythagoreans, when they taught that “the air is full of souls,”[139] were conforming to an old belief which is not Greek only but universal. When Virgil[140] shows us Dido’s sister, at the time of the queen’s suicide, receiving the last breath which floats on her dying lips, he is lending a Roman custom to the Carthaginians, the custom of the last kiss which, according to a widely held belief, could catch on its way the soul which was escaping into the atmosphere.

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 the aerial soul was combined with that of the spirit inhabiting the tomb. This shade or simulacrum of those who were no longer of this world, but who still existed, since they showed themselves to the living in their previous guise, was a body like the wind—intangible, invisible, save when it thickened like clouds or smoke. A multitude of these vaporous beings, innumerable as past generations, moved unceasingly on the earth’s surface, and, above all, roamed around the tombs, where they were retained by their attachment to their bodies. Whether, like the Greeks, men identified them with the “demons,” or, like the Romans, called them “Manes gods,” “genii” or “lemures,” or by other names, the unanimous opinion was that their power was superior to that of mankind and that they caused it to be felt by a constant intervention in the affairs of human society.

It was generally held that if the required cult were not rendered them, they would punish this neglect with wrath, but that they showed their benevolence to those who deserved it by zeal in serving them.[142] The dead were capable, like the living, of gratitude as well as of resentment. The greater had been their power in this world, the more considerable it remained in the other, and the more advantage there was in securing their protection or even their co-operation.

Servius reports the existence of the singular belief that souls had to swear to Pluto never to help those they had left behind them on earth to escape from their destiny.[143] Such was, then, the extent of their supposed power. But all the dead were not, like some of the heroes who had become the equals of the gods, capable of performing prodigious deeds. Many, gifted with less force, were concerned with lesser interests; they did no more than protect their family, the domestic hearth and the neighboring field, and render small daily services. “Farewell, Donata, thou who wast pious and just,” says an epitaph, “guard all thy kin.”[144]

The idea that the ancestors become the tutelary spirits of their descendants who were faithful to their duty to them, goes back to the remotest antiquity and probably lies at the foundation of the cult of the Lares.[145] But the field of action of these genii was multiple, since they were a multitude, and their functions underwent a further development when they were considered to be the equivalents of the demons of the Greeks. “The souls of the dead,” Maximus of Tyre[146] tells us, “mingle with all kinds of men, with every destiny, thought and pursuit of man; they support the good, succor the oppressed and punish the criminal.” Plotinus, recalling the universal custom of paying cult to those who have gone, adds: “Many souls which belonged to men do not cease to do good to men when they have left the body. They come to their aid especially in granting them revelations.”[147]

The wish is therefore entertained to see in dreams those who have left an empty place in the family dwelling or the marriage couch. A woman whom a murder has separated from her young husband prays the most holy Manes to be indulgent to him and to allow her to see him again during the hours of the night.[148] But it was not only in dreams that men hoped to descry again those who were lost to sight. “If tears are of any avail,” says another epitaph, “show thyself by apparitions (visis).”[149] Is it a question here also of nocturnal apparitions? Perhaps; but the belief that the spirits of the dead returned to the earth and made themselves visible to people who were wide awake met with very little incredulity among the ancients. It was not only the common man who accepted it; most thinkers upheld this opinion. Lucian[150] shows us a meeting of philosophers in which no one doubts “that there are demons and phantoms and that the souls of the dead do wander on earth and show themselves to whom they please.” A single fact will suffice to prove how general was this conviction. The sober historian Dio Cassius[151] relates that in his time, more precisely in the year 220 A. D., a demon (who was evidently a flesh and blood impostor) appeared in the Danubian countries in the form of Alexander the Great. He was followed by four hundred Bacchantes carrying the thyrsus and the nebris. This troop went through all Thracia without doing any harm to the inhabitants, who hastened to give them shelter and food, and not a single official dared oppose their passage. Arrived near Chalcedon, the pseudo-Alexander made a strange sacrifice one night, burying a wooden horse, and thereupon immediately disappeared.

Like modern spiritualists, the ancients saw in these apparitions an irrefutable proof of the after life. “Thou who doubtest the existence of the Manes,” we read on the tomb of two young girls, “invoke us after making a vow and thou wilt understand.”[152] Revelations were indeed to be expected of the wisdom of the disincarnate souls. In spite, therefore, of the laws forbidding magic, necromancy never ceased to be practiced. By a nocturnal sacrifice, analogous to that offered on tombs and by the virtue of their incantations, the wizards obliged the dead to appear before them and answer their questions. The poets and romancers liked to introduce in their works descriptions of the atrocious ceremonies which were intended to give momentary life even to a corpse and cause it to pronounce oracles.

The dead in these scenes often appear as restive and even hostile beings who were forced to such actions by the power of witchcraft. The dominant feeling among all peoples is indeed that the dead are unhappy and therefore malevolent. They were believed to be excessively sensitive. Great care must be taken to do nothing to offend them. If their rights were overlooked, if they were forgotten, they showed their wrath by sending illnesses and scourges to the guilty. This unpleasant and sometimes cruel, even ferocious character of the Manes is very marked in Rome, perhaps in consequence of the influence of the Etruscans or the beliefs concerning after life. A legend had it that the ceremonies of the Parentalia having on one occasion been omitted, the plaintive ghosts scattered about the town and the fields and caused many deaths.[153] What we know of the rites performed at the Lemuria and at funerals shows that they tended to protect the house against the spirits haunting it and to rid it of them. “The dead are welcome neither to the gods nor to men,” says an old Latin inscription.[154] To the family Lares who protected a household, the larvae were opposed, the wandering phantoms who spread terror and evil. “Spare thy mother, thy father and thy sister,” we read on a tomb, “in order that after me they may celebrate the traditional rites for thee.”[155] This hostile character attributed to inhabitants of the tombs explains the custom of placing in them leaden tablets on which curses were written calling down the most frightful ills on enemies. A large number of these tabellae defixionum in Greek and Latin have been found and they prove the frequency of this practice, which has perhaps an Oriental origin.[156] But the devotio to the Manes gods is an old Roman ceremony, which proceeds from the idea that they endeavour to tear the living from the earth and draw them to themselves.

There is one class of the dead which is peculiarly noxious, those namely who have not been buried. The ideas connected with them are so characteristic of the oldest conception of immortality that these ἄταφοι insepulti deserve to detain us for a few moments.

From the most ancient times the beliefs reigned among all the peoples of antiquity that the souls of those who are deprived of burial find no rest in the other life. If they have no “eternal house” they are like homeless vagabonds. But the fact that the dead had been buried did not suffice; their burial must also have been performed according to the traditional rites. Perhaps the liturgical formulas were supposed to have power to keep the shade in the tomb, as other incantations could summon it thence. Above all, however, it was believed, as we have already stated, that when the dead had not obtained the offerings to which they had the right, they suffered and that their unquiet spirits fluttered near the corpse and wandered upon the surface of the earth and the waters, taking vengeance on men for the ills men had inflicted on them.

The denial of interment was thought to be the source of infinite torment for the dead as for the living, and to throw earth on abandoned corpses was a pious duty. The pontiffs, who believed the sight of a corpse made them unclean, might not for all that leave it unburied if they happened to find one on their way. To bury the dead has remained a work of mercy in the Church, and in Rome a confraternity still exists which brings in from far away the dead found lying in the desert Campagna. The pain represented by lack of burial was the worst chastisement called down by imprecations on enemies on whom vengeance was desired. Among believers it gave rise to an anxiety comparable with that which the refusal of the last sacrament now causes to Roman Catholics. In the Greek cities, as in Rome, the law often condemned to it those who had committed suicide or had been executed, hoping thus to divert desperate and outrageous men from their fatal design by the apprehension of a wretched lot in the Beyond.[157] Sometimes the law merely laid down that the guilty must not be interred in the soil of their country, an almost equally terrible penalty, since it cut them off from the family cult, by which their descendants could give satisfaction to their Manes. When, therefore, through some accident, a traveler or soldier died abroad or was shipwrecked at sea, his body was, when possible, brought back to his country, or, if this could not be done, a cenotaph was raised to him, and his soul was summoned aloud to come and inhabit the dwelling prepared for it. When cremation became general in Rome, the old pontifical law invented another subterfuge which allowed the ancient rites to be accomplished: a finger was cut from the body before it was carried to the pyre, and earth was thrown three times on this “resected bone” (os resectum).

Against these ancient beliefs, which were the source of so much anguish and so many superstitions, the philosophers fought energetically. First the Cynics and then the Epicureans and the Stoics endeavoured to show their absurdity. They are fond of quoting the answer of Theodore the Atheist to Lysimachus who was threatening him with death without burial. “What matters it whether I rot on the earth or under it?” Since the corpse was unconscious and without any sensibility, it was indeed of no consequence whether it were burnt or buried, eaten by worms or by crows. Why should it be a misfortune to die abroad? Only the living had a country. The whole earth was the dwelling of the dead. If such cares troubled men they were the victims of the invincible illusion that the body retained capacity to feel even beyond the grave.

The very frequency with which these commonplaces of the school are repeated shows how tenacious were the prejudices which they attempted to eradicate. Here, as in other connections, the renewal of Pythagorism supervened at the end of the Republic to favor the persistence of the old beliefs. A doctrine, to which Plato alludes,[158] taught that souls which had not been appeased by funeral rites, had to wander for a hundred years, the normal term of a human life. Confined in the air near the earth, they remained subject to the power of magicians. Especially if the wizards had been able to obtain possession of some portion of the corpse, whence the soul could not entirely detach itself, they gained influence over it and could constrain its obedience. When this century of suffering had elapsed, these souls were admitted to a place of purification, where they sojourned ten times longer, and when these thousand years had passed they returned to reincarnate themselves in new bodies. We will see in another lecture[159] that the Pythagoreans enunciated analogous theories as to the lot of children swept off before their time and of men who died a violent death.

Virgil describing the descent of Aeneas into the infernal regions recalls these Pythagorean speculations when he shows us the miserable crowd of the unburied shades fluttering for a hundred years on the bank of the Styx before they obtained from Charon their passage to its other shore.[160]

Favored by these new tendencies of philosophy, the unreasoning apprehension inspired by omission of burial subsisted under the Empire, not only among the ignorant many, but also in the most enlightened classes. This fear explains why everyone took extreme care to have a tomb built for himself and to ensure, if he could, that funeral ceremonies were celebrated in it, why many epitaphs threaten with judicial penalties and divine punishments the sacrilegious offenders who should violate the grave, and why such a number of popular colleges were founded, of which the principal object was to secure decent obsequies to their members. The rules of the cultores of Diana and Antinoüs at Lanuvium stipulate that when a slave dies and his master maliciously refuses to deliver his body for burial, a “funus imaginarium” be made for him, that is, that the ceremony be celebrated over a figure representing the dead man and wearing his mask.[161] From this “imaginary” burial effects were expected as beneficent as those results are maleficent which a wizard anticipated when he fettered and pierced a waxen doll to work a charm.

From the stories of the gravest writers we perceive what lot was believed to threaten the unfortunate who were burnt or interred without the rites being observed. After Caligula’s murder his corpse was hastily shoveled into the ground in a garden on the Esquiline (horti Lamiani), but then the keepers of this park were terrified by apparitions until the imperial victim’s sisters caused his body to be exhumed, and buried it in accordance with the sacred rules.[162] Pliny the Younger in one of his letters seriously relates a story which seems to have been often repeated, for we find it, little changed, in Lucian.[163] There was in Athens a haunted house which remained empty, no one daring to live in it because several of its tenants had died of fright. In the silence of the night a noise was heard as of clanking iron; then a horrible specter moved forward in the shape of an emaciated old man, bearded and hairy, rattling the chains which were about his feet and legs. A philosopher dared to take this house, and he settled himself there one evening, resolved to keep himself awake by working. The ghost appeared to him, came towards him with its usual clatter, signed to him to follow and disappeared in the courtyard. When daylight came, a hole was dug in the place where the phantom had vanished, and a skeleton in fetters was found. The bones were taken up and burned according to the rites, and thereafter nothing troubled the quiet of the house. Lucian, in his version of this ghost story, specifies the philosopher as a Pythagorean and shows him repelling the apparition by the virtue of his spells. The Pythagoreans were indeed often necromancers, convinced defenders of spiritualism, in which, as we have said, they sought an immediate proof of the immortality of the soul, and by their doctrines they contributed to keeping alive the superstitious fear attached to omission of burial.

But they were no more than theorists as to a belief which was widespread and which the invasion of Oriental magic was to revive. The curse-tablets often evoke, together with other demons, “those who are deprived of a sacred tomb” (ἄποροι τῆς ἱερᾶς ταφῆς).[164] They associate them with those who have died before their time or by a violent death.[165] Heliodorus[166] the romancer, a priest of Emesa in Syria, who probably lived in the third century, pictures for us a very characteristic scene: a child has been killed; a wizard takes its body, places it between two fires, and performs a complicated operation over it, in order to restore it to life by his incantations and to obtain a prediction of the future. “Thou forcest me to rise again and to speak,” the child complains, “taking no thought for my funeral and thus preventing me from mingling with the other dead.” For the shades of the nether world rejected one who had been left unburied.[167]

These ancient beliefs, which the East shared with the West, were, more or less modified, to survive the downfall of paganism. If the Christians of the first centuries no longer feared that they would go to join the shades who wandered on the bank of the Styx, they were still pursued by the superstitious dread that they would have no part in the resurrection of the flesh if their bodies did not rest in the grave.[168] Nay, the terrors of former ages still haunt the Greeks of today. The people remain persuaded that those who have not had a religious funeral return to wander on the earth, and that, changed to bloody vampires, they punish men, and in particular their kin, for their neglect.[169] A nomocanon of the Byzantine Church orders that if the body of a ghost be found intact, when disinterred, its maleficent power thus being proved, it be burnt and a funeral service with an offering of meats be afterwards celebrated for its soul. This is exactly what was done in antiquity in order to appease the dead who had not been buried according to the rite, rite conditi.

FOOTNOTES

101. Cic., Tusc., I, 12, §27.

102. Lucretius, III, 890 ss.

103. Servius, Aen., III, 68.

104. Servius, ibid.

105. Propertius, IV, 5, 3: “Nec sedeant cineri Manes.” Cf. Lucan, IX, 2.

106. Pliny, H. N., XVI, 44, §234; cf. Livy, XXXVIII, 53.

107. Cf. my Oriental religions, p. 240.

108. CIL, I, 1108: “Domum aeternam ubi aevum degerent.”

109. Bücheler, Carm. epigr., 1555: “Haec certa est domus, haec est colenda nobis.”

110. Virg., Aen., III, 67: “Animam sepulcro condimus.” Cf. Pliny, Epist., III, 27, 12: “Rite conditis Manibus.”

111. See above, Introd., p. 10; Lecture VIII, p. 192.

112. Petronius, 71: “Valde enim falsum vivo quidem domos cultas esse, non curari eam ubi diutius nobis habitandum est.”

113. Lucian, Philopseudes, 27; cf. Dessau, Inscr. sel., 8379, l. 50 ss.

114. Kaibel, Epigr. Graeca, 646 = Dessau, Inscr. sel., 8156; cf. Lucian, De luctu, 19.

115. Bücheler, Carm. epigr., 838 = Dessau, op. cit., 8204.

116. Sueton., Aug., 15.

117. Cf. p. 52, n. 20, and Lecture IV, p. 118.

118. Servius, Aen., III, 67.

119. Cf. Comptes rendus Acad. des Inscr., 1918, p. 284 s.

120. Servius, Aen., V, 79: “Ad sanguinis imitationem, in quo est sedes animae.” Cf. II, 532.

121. See above, Introd., p. 35, and Lecture VIII, p. 204.

122. CIL, XI, 132 = Dessau, 7235.

123. CIL, XIV, 3323 = Dessau, 8090: “Hoc peto aego a bobis unibersis sodalibus ut sene bile refrigeretis.”

124. CIL, VI, 26554 = Dessau, 8139.

125. Dessau, 8379.

126. Lucian, De luctu, 37.

127. Dessau, 8154 = CIL, XII, 5102 = Bücheler, Carm. epigr., 788: “[Eo] cupidius perpoto in monumento meo, Quod dormiendum et permanendum heic est mihi.”

128. De testim. animae, 4.

129. See below, Lecture VIII, p. 203 s.

130. Augustine, De mor. eccles., 34: “Qui luxuriosissime super mortuos bibant et epulas cadaveribus exhibentes super sepultos se ipsos sepeliant et voracitates ebrietatesque suas deputent religioni.”

131. Constitutiones Apostol., VIII, 42.

132. Dessau, 8375: “Colant spiritum meum.”

133. Cf. Petronius, 71: “Omne genus poma volo sint circa cineres meos et vinearum largiter”; Dessau, 8342 ss.; below, Lecture VIII, p. 200.

134. Varro, Lingu. Lat., VI, 49 (45).

135. Arch. Epigr. Mitt. aus Oesterreich, X, 1886, p. 64.

136. Dessau, 6746.

137. Ibid., 8130.

138. Ibid., 1967; cf. 8139.

139. Diog. Laert., VIII, 32; cf. Servius, Aen., III, 63; Lecture VI, p. 160.

140. Virg., Aen., IV, 685.

141. See Lecture VI, p. 157.

142. Cf. Porph., De abstin., II, 37.

143. Servius, Georg., I, 277; cf. Dessau, 8006.

144. CIL, VIII, 2803a: “Donata, pia, iusta, vale, serva tuos omnes.”

145. Margaret Waites, American journ. of archaeol., 1920, 242 ss.

146. Maxim. Tyr., Diss., IX (XV), 6.

147. Plotinus, Enn., IV, 7, 20.

148. Dessau, Inscr. sel., 8006. “Manus mala” means probably a murder produced by witchcraft; cf. ibid., 8522; Lecture V, p. 135.

149. CIL, II, 4427: “Lacrimae si prosunt, visis te ostende videri.”

150. Lucian, Philopseudes, 29.

151. Dio Cassius, LXXIX, 18.

152. Dessau, Inscr. sel., 8201a: “Tu qui legis et dubitas Manes esse, sponsione facta invoca nos et intelleges.”

153. Ovid, Fast., II, 546.

154. CIL, I, 818 = VI, 10407e = Dessau, 8749: “Mortuus nec ad deos nec ad homines acceptus est.” Cf. CIL, X, 8249.

155. CIL, VI, 12072: “Parce matrem tuam et patrem et sororem tuam Marinam, ut possint tibi facere post me sollemnia.”

156. Audollent, Defixionum tabellae, 1904.

157. See below, Lecture V, pp. 143, 145.

158. Plato, Republ., X, 615 A B; cf. Norden, Aeneis Buch VI, p. 10.

159. See Lecture V, p. 134.

160. Virg., Aen., VI, 325 ss: “Inops inhumataque turba.... Centum errant annos volitantque haec litora circum.”

161. Dessau, Inscr. sel., 7213 = CIL, XIV, 2112, II, 4.

162. Sueton., Calig., 59; cf. Plautus, Mostell., III, 2.

163. Pliny, Epist., VII, 27; Lucian, Philopseudes, 31.

164. Audollent, Defixionum tabellae, 27, l. 18; cf. 22 ss.

165. See Lecture V, p. 135.

166. Heliodorus, Aeth., VI, 15.

167. See Lecture VIII, p. 193.

168. Leblant, Épigraphie chrétienne de la Gaule, 1890, 52 ss.

169. Lawson, Modern Greek folk-lore, 1910, p. 403.