II - The Nether World

Among most peoples the primitive idea of an after life in the grave was enlarged into the conception of a common existence of the dead in the depths of the earth. The dead man does not stay confined in the narrow dwelling in which he rests. He goes down into vast caverns which extend beneath the crust of the soil we tread. These immense hollows are peopled by a multitude of shades who have left the tomb. Thus the tomb becomes the antechamber of the true dwelling of the spirits who have departed. Its door is the gate of Hades itself. Through the tomb, the great company of the beings who have been plunged in the darkness of the infernal regions remains in communication with those who still sojourn in our upper world. The libations and offerings made by the survivors on the grave descend to this gloomy hypogeum and there feed and rejoice those for whom they are intended. Until the time of the Roman Empire, nay, to the end of antiquity, the common man believed in this wonder.[170] To attempt to define the means by which it was brought about would be vain. These were beliefs which went back so far and were so deeply rooted in the mind of the people that men accepted them without seeking to explain them.

In Rome, the idea that the spirits of the dead inhabit a common dwelling in the nether world existed from the time when the city had its beginnings. It kept in religion a coarsely naïve form which proves how archaic it was. According to a rite borrowed by the Romans from the Etruscans, a pit was dug in the center of the city, when the latter’s foundations were laid, in order to make the Inferi communicate with the upper world. First fruits and other gifts were thrown into the pit, as well as a clod of the earth of the settlers’ native country. Thus they restored their broken contact with the Manes of their ancestors. In all probability this hole was formed of a vertical pit ending in a chamber with an arched roof curved like the heaven, hence the name mundus given to it. The key of the vault of this lower cellar was formed of a stone, the lapis Manalis, which could be raised in order to let the spirits pass. Three times a year, on the twenty-fourth of August, the fifth of October and the eighth of November, this ceremony took place. The door of hell was opened and the dead had free access to the atmosphere. These days were therefore sacred, religiosi, and all business was suspended on them.

Recently the mundus of the ancient Roma Quadrata was believed to have been discovered during excavations of the Palatine, but the underground space in question is probably only a silo or a cistern. Other pits used for the cult of the dead existed elsewhere in the city. It has recently been suggested that the altar of the god Consus, which was hidden in a ditch in the middle of the Circus Maximus and uncovered during the races, was one of these mouths of hell and like that shown in representations of the funeral games of the Etruscans.[171]

But on certain days the souls of the dead rose to the earth’s surface of themselves, although nothing had been done to make their coming thither easier, and they then had to be appeased by sacrifices. This was what happened from the thirteenth to the twenty-first of February, during the Parentalia, when the souls of ancestors were honored, and on the ninth, the eleventh and the thirteenth of May, the dates of the Lemuria, on which, at midnight, according to a prescribed ceremonial, the father of the family nine times threw black beans to the Lemures to keep them away from the house.

Lemures and Manes are used only in the plural. These words stand for the vague conceptions formed of the shades of the dead who dwelt beneath the ground. These were a nameless crowd, hardly individualized, not distinguishable from the fleeting phantoms who fluttered about the tombs. The Romans were a people of little imagination, and their infernal mythology remained rudimentary until the time when they borrowed from the Greeks the picturesque stories about the adventures of travelers to Hades and the blessings and misfortunes which there awaited them.

Originally no idea of retribution was attached to this descent of the dead into the infernal regions. It was neither their merits nor their demerits which determined their condition. On the contrary, the inequalities of human society were perpetuated. A nobleman kept a higher rank than that of his servants. Each man in some sort continued his occupations, even preserved his tastes and his passions. Existence in the Beyond was conceived as a mere prolongation of earthly life. It is to this idea, which was generally entertained, that the old custom corresponds of placing in the grave the implements and other objects which a dead man was in the habit of using. We have already touched on this point in speaking of life in the tomb, but the things deposited beside the corpse were not only those which could be used by the dweller of the “eternal house.” If he were a powerful lord his chariot, his horses and his arms would be buried with him[172]. A hunter would be supplied in the other world with his spears and his nets[173]. A craftsman with the tools of his trade. A woman with the objects which enabled her to spin and to weave. These funeral customs were more than a tradition, followed without reference to the reasons inspiring it. Among the Greeks, as among the Romans, the idea survives persistently, in poetic descriptions of the Elysian Fields, that each man will there keep the character and retain the habits which distinguished him before his death. Virgil, taking his inspiration from Pindar, shows us the blessed occupied by the contests of the palestra, by song and poetry and by chariot races; for, he tells us, the passion which the dead had in life for arms and for horses still pursues them when they have been buried in the earth.[174] Ovid[175] sketches with rapid touches an analogous picture. “The shades,” he says, “wander bloodless, bodiless, boneless. Some gather in the forum, others follow their trades, imitating their former way of life.” And this is no fancy due to the poet’s imagination. An awkward epitaph of a young, probably Syrian, slave[176] tells us that he is glad still to be able to discharge his service zealously in the retired place where dwells the god of the infernal abode. In these instances we find, in spite of the transformation undergone by eschatological ideas as a whole, a survival of the old conception of the destiny of the dead.

We have not to seek far to discover how this transformation took place. It was provoked by the desire to subject souls to different treatment according to their deserts, and to distribute them in distinct compartments in which they would be rewarded or punished in accordance with their past works. It was much prior to the Roman period, going back to the distant age at which Orphic theology, with its sanctions beyond the grave, modified Homeric tradition and popular religion in Greece. In the West the doctrine which imposed itself with the Hellenic civilization on peoples of foreign race was ready-made. It spread through the south of Italy by way of the colonies of Greater Greece in which Pythagorism came to its full power. It is in this country that some of the Orphic tablets intended as guides to the dead in their journey through the infernal realm have been discovered in the tombs,[177] and the great amphorae of a later date, bearing representations of scenes of Hades, which were also found in southern Italy, show the importance which continued to be attached there to the idea of the future life. In Campania, Lake Avernus was even regarded as one of the entrances to the nether world, through which Ulysses and Aeneas had descended.

The Greek doctrines were also introduced among the Etruscans and combined with the beliefs of this people as to an underworld in which the Manes of the dead were threatened by horrible demons and protected by beneficent genii. This Greek influence and its alliance with the native traditions appear in Etruria in a great number of funeral monuments on which we find represented many figures which, according to mythology, peopled the kingdom of Pluto. One of the most significant is the fine sarcophagus, discovered a few years ago at Torre San Severo near Bolsena, which seems to date from the third century B. C.[178] The two long sides hold corresponding reliefs, the one showing Achilles’ sacrifice of the Trojan prisoners on the grave of Patroclus, the other the sacrifice of Polyxena, last of Priam’s daughters, on the tomb of Achilles. These scenes, borrowed from the Greek epic poetry, are placed between two Etruscan demons, winged figures which bear serpents and are male on one side and female on the other. The small sides are decorated by two scenes from the Odyssey, the myth of Circe changing the companions of Ulysses into animals, perhaps an allusion to metempsychosis and Tiresias’ evocation of the shades of the dead, the Elysian Fields being curiously indicated. This instance, and many others might be cited, shows how closely the Hellenic legends of Hades had been intermingled with Etruscan demonology.

This Greek conception of the infernal regions, which literature and art were to popularize and perpetuate even after credence had ceased to be given to it, remains familiar to us. Taken altogether and in the large, it is that of a kingdom imagined as an imitation of the cities of our world, in which, however, there reigns such a rigorous justice as is on our poor earth no more than a dream of minds morally disposed. This underground state, of which the frontier is defended by an unbridged river, the Styx, is governed by powerful rulers, Pluto and Proserpina. It has its judges, Minos, Aeacus and Rhadamanthus, its executioners, the Erinyes or Furies, and its prison, Tartarus, surrounded by high walls. This jail, in which the guilty, laden with chains, suffer the torments enacted in Greece by the penal laws or others more atrocious,[179] is distinctly contrasted with the abode of the good citizens who freely enjoy in delightful gardens all the pleasures which make the joy of human beings.

Books treating of the “Descent into Hades,” of which a considerable number were in circulation, and the poets’ descriptions embroidered various patterns around this central design. There was a whole mythological and theological efflorescence which peopled with more and more numerous figures the fantastic kingdom occupying the great cavern of the earth. Infinite variations were imagined on a traditional theme, of which, however, even certain details were preserved from age to age with a surprising fidelity. Lucian in his satirical description of Charon and his boat reproduces types fixed in the sixth century before our era, for, as has been observed, his picture is in exact agreement with the recently discovered fragment of a black-figured vase.[180]

Although in our sources infernal topography is occasionally somewhat confused, certain essential features, which we will here merely indicate, can be recognized in it. We will return to them one after the other, and speak of them in greater detail, in later lectures. When the souls, or rather the shades, descend to the depths of the earth, they reach first a provisional abode where they await a decision as to their lot, an intermediate region through which all of them pass but in which some are kept for a considerable time.[181] They then cross the Styx, and a road which is also common to all of them leads them to the court which determines their lot.[182] This judging of the dead is foreign to Homeric poetry. The idea of it was perhaps borrowed by Greece from Egypt, but from ancient Orphism onwards it was an essential element of infernal eschatology. Infallible judges, from whom no fault is hid, divide into two companies the multitude of the souls appearing before them. The guilty are constrained to take the road to the left which leads to dark Tartarus, crossing its surrounding river of fire, the Pyriphlegethon. There those who have committed inexpiable crimes are condemned to eternal chastisement.[183] But the road to the right leads the pious souls to the Elysian Fields where, among flowered meadows and wrapped in soft light, they obtain the reward of their virtues, whether, having attained to perfection, they are able to dwell for ever with the heroes, or whether, being less pure, they are obliged to return later to the earth in order to reincarnate themselves in new bodies after they have drunk the water of Lethe and lost the memory of their previous existence.

The philosophical criticism of the Greeks had early attacked these traditional beliefs, but such negative attitude became more definite among the thinkers of the surpassingly rationalistic period which came after Aristotle.[184] The Peripatetics, who admitted at most the survival of reason, rejected in consequence all the myths dealing with the descent of the shades into the kingdom of Pluto. The Epicureans were even more radical, for, as we have seen, they condemned the soul to dissolution at the moment of death, thus destroying the very foundation of the belief in Hades. Their campaign against stories in which they saw only the lugubrious inventions of priests and poets, was one of the capital points of their polemics against popular religion, and they flattered themselves that by destroying faith in the pains of Tartarus they freed mankind from vain terrors which obsessed its minds and poisoned its joys. The Stoics, we know, taught that the soul is a burning breath of the same nature as the ether and as the stars which shine in the sky. As to whether this ardent fluid was lost after death in the universal fire, or kept its individuality until the final conflagration of the world, the doctrine of the Porch varied. But one thing was certain. The fiery nature of the soul must prevent it from going down into the underground and impel it to rise to higher spheres. If it were weighed down by its contact with the body and laden with matter, it might float for some time in the dense air surrounding the earth but could never descend into its depths.[185] The impossibility of admitting literally the truth of the stories as to the infernal realm was thus proved.

The same psychological doctrine as to the soul’s kinship with the fire of the heavenly bodies was admitted in the Alexandrian age by the sect which paid one and the same veneration to Pythagoras and to Plato and was thus more attached than any other to belief in immortality. It gave in, to some extent, to contemporary rationalism and was brought to modify its ideas as to life beyond the grave. Ancient Pythagorism, the heir of Orphism, made much of the sufferings reserved for sinners in the infernal abysses. A book attributed to Periktione still shows the daughter who has despised her parents as condemned to suffer, beneath the earth and in the company of the impious, the eternal evil inflicted by “Dike and the gods of down below.”[186] But in the first century before our era the pseudo-Timaeus of Locri declares that such tales are fictions. Salutary, it is true, imagined by Homer in order to divert from evil those to whom truth alone was not a sufficient guide.[187] The only penalty which can overtake the sinning soul is, according to these Neo-Pythagoreans, metempsychosis, which forces it to reincarnate itself in a fleshly prison.[188]

This doctrine of transmigration claims to transport hell to earth and to explain, as moral allegories, all the fables which the poets had invented.[189] The Inferi are nothing else than the dwellings of our globe, which is the lowest of the nine circles of the world. The true Hades is the wicked man’s life in which he is tortured by his vices. The rivers of hell, Cocytus, Acheron, Pyriphlegethon, and Styx, are anger, remorse, sadness and hate, which cause man to suffer. The Furies are the passions, scourging him with whips and burning him with torches, and similarly an ingenious interpretation is given to each of the pains suffered by Tantalus, Sisyphus, the Danaïdes and the others.[190]

This exegesis led finally to an absolute denial of the existence of hell, but such radical skepticism was in too flagrant contradiction to the old beliefs to be willingly accepted by the minds which remained attached to them. Hence arose attempts to bring these beliefs into harmony with the psychology generally admitted.

A first theory, to which we will have to return when speaking of the nature of the surviving souls,[191] seems to have been invented in Alexandria and to have been inspired by Egyptian religion.[192] The authors who first allude to it, one Greek and one Roman, are contemporaries who wrote about the year 200 B. C., the critic Aristarchus and the poet Ennius, but the transmission of the doctrine can be traced through literary traditions down to the end of antiquity. It divides the human composite not into two but into three parts. The body, the soul, and the shade. The body is destroyed beneath the earth. The soul, which is a particle of the divine ether, rises after death towards its place of origin; but a form (εἴδωλον) of subtle matter detaches itself from the corpse, and it is this semblance (simulacrum) or shade (umbra) which goes down to the infernal regions. The existence of these regions could thus be maintained, but they were no longer held to receive the celestial principle which gave intelligence.

Others allowed that it was impossible that the earth should contain subterranean caverns large enough to hold Tartarus, the Elysian Fields, and the infinite multitude of the dead. But they explained that the word subterranean (ὑπόγειος) had been misunderstood, that it denoted not the bowels of the earth but the lower half of the terrestrial globe, the southern hemisphere, which was unknown to the ancients, or even the whole celestial hemisphere, curved below this globe which hung motionless in the center of the universe.[193] This hemisphere is always invisible, so the ancients might say, which is exactly the sense of the word Hades (= ἀειδής). The Axiochos, an apocryphal work attributed to Plato, was first to reveal this doctrine, claiming that it had been communicated to Socrates by the Mage Gobryes. It was in reality borrowed by the Greeks of the Alexandrian age from the astral theology of the Semitic peoples. According to this theology the world is divided into two halves by the line of the horizon. The upper hemisphere is the domain of the living and the higher gods, the lower that of the dead and the infernal gods. Descent to it and ascent from it are by way of two gates, situated west and east, where the sun appears and disappears. The marshes of the Acheron, the river Styx, and Charon and his boat are constellations which the souls cross when they have passed through the “gate of Hades.”

The ancient Greeks had placed the Islands of the Blessed, whither the heroes were borne by the favor of the gods, somewhere far away in the ocean. These islands were now supposed to lie in the Antipodes, in the unknown half of the earth. All the poets’ stories of the fragrant and melodious gardens of this abode of delights were applied to these marvelous countries which no sailor had ever reached.[194] On the other hand, Tartarus was placed at the bottom of the celestial abysses, near the lowest point of the lower hemisphere, that is, diametrically opposite to Olympus, the dwelling of the gods, who were throned on the summit of the starry vault. It was into this somber gulf that the wicked were flung. There yawned the bottomless pit in which the demons of the dusky world inflicted eternal torture on the guilty.

This theory claimed to bring the ancient Hellenic beliefs into agreement with the cosmography of astronomers, but this cosmography itself undermined the foundations of the system, in so far as it refuted the hypothesis of a physical opposition between the two halves of the universe. It was observed that a single sky revolved about our earth; that the same atmosphere, composed of the same elements, enveloped it entirely; that every part of it was, in turn, equally in the light and in the shade. Therefore physical phenomena must be identical over the whole surface of our globe. The climate of the Antipodes must be like that of our lands. If the Antipodes were peopled, it was by races like those of men and the beasts. Their inhabitants therefore were not the dead but living beings. The marvels of the Fortunate Isles did not exist and there was no reason for regarding the lower rather than the upper part of the heavens as the vast reservoir of souls.

The doctrine which placed the subterranean kingdom of Pluto and Proserpina on the other side of the earth and in the other celestial hemisphere, made a poor resistance to this criticism of the Alexandrian geographers. If it did not entirely disappear, if its transmission can be followed down to the end of antiquity and even to the Middle Ages, it never was so widespread nor so active as another doctrine claiming to reconcile the beliefs of the past with accepted science.

This bold doctrine transported the whole subterranean world above the earth’s surface. We shall see, in the next lecture, on celestial immortality, that the Pythagoreans conceived the idea of placing the Elysian Fields in the moon, and that the Fortunate Isles were similarly explained by them as being the sun and the moon bathed by the fluid of the ether. The Inferi were thus the lower space, that is, the space extending between the sphere of the moon, which was the limit of the world of the gods, and our globe, which was the center of the cosmic system. In the Inferi the souls which had to suffer the chastisement of their faults were kept prisoners. They could not win to the stars but wandered plaintively on the earth’s surface and especially about their own tombs, and then rose through the atmosphere in which, little by little, they were purified by the elements. Allegorical interpretations found a place for the infernal rivers in this new topography of the Beyond. Acheron was explained as being the air, the Pyriphlegethon as the zone of hail and fire, and the meanderings of the Styx became the circles of the universe. We shall have occasion to return to the passage of the soul through this aerial purgatory and its ascension to the Elysian Fields of the sky.[195]

This cosmological interpretation of the tales referring to Hades had a more powerful influence than the moral allegory which did too much violence to tradition in claiming to make our earthly life the mythological hell. The doctrine that the Inferi were in the atmosphere was adopted by Stoicism at least from the time of Posidonius and was therefore widely believed from the end of the Roman Republic onwards. Even the mysteries, which first kept alive the belief in a subterranean kingdom of the infernal gods, did not escape the influence of these new ideas and were brought to adapt their esoteric teaching to them.[196]

The transformation of ancestral beliefs by this theology cannot today be better apprehended than from the sixth book of the Aeneid. Virgil, when he relates the descent of Aeneas into the abode of the shades, is inspired by the Nekyia of the Odyssey and other poetic tales. He remains apparently faithful to mythological and literary tradition, retaining the conventional decoration, the unvarying geography of the infernal kingdom. But he does not admit the literal truth of these beliefs of an earlier time. He is aware of the figurative sense given by the philosophers to the old fables of Hades. At the risk of seeming to contradict himself, he recalls this learned eschatology—the purification, the ascension and the transmigration of souls in connection with what might have been no more than the story of a marvelous journey to the country of the dead. The unity of the conception and the composition is the less seriously compromised because it was believed that the ancient poets themselves had wished to indicate these truths in their verses under the veil of allegory. The descent to the nether world has therefore a much loftier bearing in Virgil than a mere embellishment. It is the expression of a conviction or at least a hope, not only a brilliant fiction based on an old poetic theme.

However, the symbolical interpretations of the pagan theologians who respected tradition and the purely negative criticism of the sceptics led finally to a common result, to the destruction, namely, of the ancient beliefs, even when it was claimed that they were being saved. Whether the souls were held captive in the other hemisphere or in the atmosphere, or whether they were condemned to reincarnation in a body, Hades was transformed either to the lower sky, the air, or the earth, and the early conception of a subterranean world, whither the dead who had been laid in the grave descended, was abolished. There are abundant texts to prove that from the end of the Roman Republic this belief had lost its grip on many minds. Cicero[197] claims that there was not an old woman left foolish enough to fear the deep dwellings of Orcus and the gloomy regions peopled by the livid dead. “No one is childish enough,” Seneca repeats,[198] “to fear Cerberus and the phantoms which appear in the form of skeletons.” “That there are Manes,” says Juvenal,[199] “a subterranean kingdom, a ferryman armed with a pole, and black frogs in the gulfs of the Styx, that so many thousands of men can cross the dark water in a single boat,” these are things in which everyone had ceased to believe except very young children. Pliny[200] brings forward a paradoxical argument, that, had there been infernal regions, the zeal of the miners who had dug deep galleries in the ground would have pierced their boundaries. And even the devout Plutarch, when he comes to speak of the punishments reserved by mythology for the wicked, sees in them only nurses’ tales to frighten babies.[201]

The multiplicity of this testimony and its precision allow no doubt that not only the educated classes but a large portion of the population rejected the fables as to the nether world. These fables were in any case a foreign importation in the Latin world. Moralists, while they ceased to believe in them for themselves, sometimes pretended to retain them in order to inspire the people with salutary fear, but Tartarus had lost much of its terror for those it should have kept from ill-doing.

Is this to say that these ideas no longer found credence anywhere? A faith which has long dominated minds disappears hardly and leaves persistent traces behind it in customs and feeling. Thus we find that, more or less everywhere, the practice was perpetuated of placing in the mouth of the corpse a piece of money which served, it was said, to pay Charon for the crossing of the Styx.[202] Excavators have found these coins in many Roman tombs. But they are doubtless evidence of no more than a traditional rite which men performed without attaching a definite meaning to it.

Moreover, the metrical epitaphs continue to speak of the Elysian Fields and of Tartarus, of Styx and of Acheron. They complain of the cruelty of Pluto who bears away mortals before their time, or of the Parcae or Fates who cut the thread of their days. They mention the avenging Furies, the sufferings of Tantalus, Sisyphus, and Ixion. But these are no more than ready-made formulas of poetical language, literary reminiscences or traditional metaphors. Yet sometimes this infernal mythology is curiously developed. Thus a long inscription on a Roman tomb describes a young man descending from the ether in order to announce to those near and dear to him that he has become a celestial hero and has not to go to Pluto’s kingdom. “I shall not wend mournfully to the floods of Tartarus; I shall not cross the waters of Acheron as a shade, nor shall I propel the dusky boat with my oar; I shall not fear Charon with his face of terror, nor shall old Minos pass sentence on me. I shall not wander in the abode of gloom nor be held prisoner on the bank of the fatal waters.”[203] This epitaph dates from the century of Augustus, but did its author, any more than the writers of that time, believe in the reality of the beings with which he peoples Hades? He decorates his language with a literary ornament which Christian poetry was later to inherit. This poetry did not hesitate to employ these pagan commonplaces, which had passed from hand to hand until they were so worn out that their first meaning had been effaced. The Renaissance and the age of modern classicism were again to use and to abuse them.

The sculpture of tombs continued in the same way often to reproduce the ancient models. Sarcophagi sometimes show us the dead man led by Hermes, guide of souls, and coming into the presence of Pluto and Proserpina.[204] We also see on funeral monuments Charon in his boat, the typical sufferings of Tantalus, whose eager lips cannot reach the flowing water, Ixion turning on his wheel, Sisyphus labouring under the weight of his rock and, above all, the Danaïdes eternally pouring water into a perforated vase.[205] But it is probable that these traditional figures were repeated without any very strong faith being held as to the real existence of the personages which they represented; indeed it was proposed only to show them as symbols which had to be interpreted allegorically.

If we had no other evidence than funeral poetry and art of the persistence of the beliefs of the past, the testimony would have to be accepted very cautiously. But other more convincing proofs assure us that popular faith clung, with characteristic tenacity, to the ancient conception of the Inferi. Without believing precisely in the strange tortures inflicted on the wicked heroes of mythology, the man in the street was still vaguely persuaded that the souls went down from the tomb to some deep places where they received rewards and punishments. Suetonius[206] relates that when the death of Tiberius became known in Rome the people “prayed Mother Earth and the Manes gods to give the dead man no other dwelling than that of the impious.” The Oriental slaves brought the same convictions from their countries like many other old beliefs which had faded away in the West. The romancer Heliodorus, a Syrian priest, shows us in his novel his heroine invoking “the demons who on the earth and under the earth watch over and punish unrighteous men,”[207] her prayer being that, after the iniquitous death which threatened her, they might receive her. The same conviction appears in the funeral inscriptions of the East. Thus an epitaph of Elaiousa in Cilicia[208] adjures “the heavenly god, the Sun, the Moon and the subterranean gods who receive us.” The common idea was that a dead man can be excluded from the dwelling of the shades and condemned to wander miserably on the earth. In the same way the thought is often expressed in the magic papyri of Egypt that the deceased were plunged into the dark gulfs underground and there became demons whom the wizard called up, when he summoned them by his incantations. Even in Greece, where rationalistic criticism had penetrated far deeper among the people, Plutarch, while he reports that few people were still really afraid of Cerberus, the lot of the Danaïdes, and other bugbears of Hades, adds, however, that for fear of such pains recourse was had to purifications and initiations.[209]

This belief in the existence of Hades, maintained in the lower strata of the population in spite of the inroads made on it and of its partial supersession by other doctrines, was to acquire new strength from the rebirth of Platonism, which looked upon the writings of the “divine” master as inspired. In several passages Plato spoke with so much precision of the dwelling of the souls in the bowels of the earth that even the subtlety of his later interpreters found difficulty in giving another meaning to his text, although the attempt was made by some of them. Therefore effort was directed to defending the doctrine of the infallible sage by refuting the objections raised against it by his adversaries. The Stoics had held, as we have seen, that the soul, being a “fiery breath,” had a natural tendency to rise in the air and could not sink into the ground. But Porphyry[210] objected that in lowering itself from heaven towards our world it had become impregnate with the atmospheric damp and thus had grown heavier, and that if during its passage in the body it became laden with the clay of a sensual life, if it wrapped itself in a material cloak, its density came to be such that it was dragged down into the dusky abysses of the earth. “It is true,” says Proclus,[211] “that the soul by force of its nature aspires to rise to the place which is its natural abode, but when passions have invaded it they weigh it down and the savage instincts which develop in it attract it to the place to which they properly belong, that is, the earth.” According to Proclus,[212] who claims to interpret Plato faithfully, the soul after death is judged somewhere between the sky and our globe; if it be declared worthy it enjoys a life of blessedness in the celestial spheres. If, on the other hand, it deserve penalties, it is sent to a place beneath the ground. Elsewhere, defining his thought,[213] he affirms that the various parts of Hades and the subterranean courts and the rivers of whose existence Homer and Plato appraise us, should not be regarded as vain imaginations or fabulous marvels. As the souls which go to heaven are distributed among several and different resting-places, so we must believe that for souls still in need of chastisement and purification underground dwellings, whither penetrate numerous effluvia of the super-terrestrial elements, are thrown open. It is these effluvia that are called “rivers” or “currents.” Here too various classes of demons hold empire, some of them avengers, some chastisers, some purifiers and some executioners. Into this abode, the farthest from that of the gods, the sun’s rays do not penetrate. It is filled with all the disorder of matter. Therein is the prison, guarded by demons who ensure justice, of the guilty souls hidden beneath the earth.

It is not by their faithfulness to Plato’s doctrine, which in truth they alter, but by the mere logic of their system that the last Greek philosophers are led to admit what their predecessors rejected. Sometimes, more or less unconsciously, they were under a religious influence. The Platonist Celsus believed in the eternal pains of hell but invoked only the authority of “mystagogues and theologians” in support of this article of faith.[214] The opposition between the obscure retreats of the Manes and the bright dwellings of Olympus is old, and naturally became prominent as the belief spread, first that heroes, and afterwards that all virtuous spirits, rose to the eternal spaces.[215] But the religion which formulated the strictly consequent doctrine of an absolute antithesis between the luminous kingdom where the divinities and the beneficent genii were seated, and the dark domain of the Spirit of Evil and his perverse demons, was Persian Mazdeism. The resplendent heights where the gods had their thrones were to be after death the abode of those who had served piously. On the other hand, those who had contributed to increase evil on the earth, were to be flung into the murky abysses in which Ahriman reigned. Iranian dualism imposed this eschatological conception on a section of Alexandrian Judaism; it was admitted by many Pythagoreans, then by the gnostic sects and later by Manicheism. But above all it was widely propagated under the Roman Empire by the mysteries of Mithras. We find then put forth the doctrine that the demons are divided into two armies, incessantly at war with each other, one good and one evil. The good army is subject to celestial powers and comes down to earth to give succor and support to the faithful. The evil army obeys an anti-god (ἀντίθεος) and issues from the bowels of the earth in order to scatter misery, sin and death among men.[216] The souls of the dead become like one or the other of these two opposing classes of demons. When they are virtuous and pure they rise to the luminous ether where dwell the divine spirits. If, on the contrary, they are vicious and defiled they go down into the underground depths where the Prince of Darkness commands. Like the maleficent demons who people this hell, they suffer and cause to suffer.

It was at this compromise that paganism stopped when it reached the term of its evolution. Oriental dualism imposed on it its final formula. It no longer admitted, like the ancients, that all the dead must go down from the grave into immense hollows dug in the bowels of the earth, and it no longer made the Elysian Fields and Tartarus two contiguous domains of the kingdom of Pluto. Nor did it transport them both, side by side, as the pagan theologians of the beginning of our era would have done, to the atmosphere and the starry spheres. It separated them radically, cutting the abode of the souls into two halves, of which it placed one in the luminous sky and the other in subterranean darkness. This was also the conception which, after some hesitation, became generally accepted by the Church, and which for long centuries was to remain the common faith of all Christendom.

FOOTNOTES

170. Lucian, De luctu, 9.

171. Piganiol, Revue d’histoire et de litt. religieuses, VI, 1920, p. 335 ss.

172. Cf. Lucian, De luctu, 14.

173. Cf. Dessau, 8379.

174. Aen., VI, 653 ss.

175. Ovid, Metam., IV, 443 ss.

176. Bücheler, Carm. epigr., 1186: “Sed in secessum numinis infernae domus Oficiosus tandem ministerio laetatur suo.”

177. See below, Lecture VI, p. 148.

178. Monumenti Antichi, XXIV, 1917, pp. 5–116.

179. See below, Lecture VII, p. 172 s.

180. Furtwängler, Archiv für Religionswissenschaft, VIII, 1905, p. 191 ss.

181. See Lecture I, p. 66.

182. See Lecture VI, p. 151.

183. See below, Lecture VII, p. 172 ss.

184. See Introd., p. 6.

185. See Introd., p. 29.

186. Mullach, Fragm. phil. Graec., II, p. 33.

187. Tim. Locr., De anim. mundi, 17, p. 104 D; cf. Schmekel, Mittlere Stoa, 1892, p. 435.

188. Cf. Lecture VII, p. 178 ss.

189. Cf. on this doctrine Revue de philologie, XLIV, 1920, p. 230 ss.

190. Cf. Lecture VII, p. 181.

191. See Lecture VI, p. 167.

192. Cf. Rev. philol., l. c., p. 237 ss.

193. On this doctrine see Comptes rendus Acad. Inscriptions, 1920, p. 272 ss.

194. Cf. Lecture VI, p. 155.

195. See Lecture VII, p. 185; cf. VI, p. 161 s.

196. See Introd., p. 38 s.

197. Cic., Tusc., I, 21, 48; cf. I, 6, 10; Nat. deor., II, 2, 5.

198. Sen., Epist., 24, 18.

199. Juvenal, Sat., II, 149 ss.

200. Pliny, H. N., II, 63, §158.

201. Plutarch, Non posse suaviter vivi sec. Epic., 27, p. 1105.

202. Cf. Lucian, De luctu, 10.

203. Bücheler, 1109, v. 19–24:

“Non ego Tartareas penetrabo tristis ad undas,

Non Acheronteis transvehar umbra vadis,

Non ego caeruleam remo pulsabo carinam,

Nec te terribilem fronte timebo Charon,

Nec Minos mihi iura dabit grandaevus et atris

Non errabo locis nec cohibebor aquis.”

204. See, for instance, Jahresh. Instit. Wien, XVII, 1914, p. 133 ss.; or Hermes, XXXVII, 1902, p. 121 ss.

205. Cf. Jahn, Darstellungen der Unterwelt auf Sarkophagen, in Ber. Gesellschaft Wiss. Leipsig, 1856, p. 267 ss.; Reinach, Répertoire des reliefs, III, 391; Berger, Revue archéol., 3e serie, XXVI, 1895, p. 71 ss.

206. Sueton., Tiberius, 75, 1: “Terram matrem deosque Manes orarent, ne mortuo sedem ullam nisi inter impios darent.”

207. Heliodorus, Aeth., VIII, 9, p. 231, 10, Bekker.

208. Jahresh. Instit. Wien, XVIII, 1915, Beiblatt., p. 45.

209. Plutarch, Non posse suaviter vivi sec. Epic., 27, p. 1105.

210. Porph., Sent., 29 (p. 13, Mommert).

211. Proclus, In Remp. Plat., II, p. 126, 10 ss., Kroll.

212. Proclus, ibid., II, p. 131, 20 ss.

213. Proclus, In Remp. Plat., I, 121, 23 ss., Kroll.

214. Orig., Contra Celsum, VIII, 48 s.

215. See Lecture IV, p. 113 ss.

216. Porph., De abstin., 38 ss.; cf. Bousset, Archiv für Religionswiss., XVIII, 1915, p. 134 ss., and Andres in Realencycl., Supplementband, III, 315.