V - Untimely Death

In the last lecture we endeavoured to show that in the ancient world immortality was at first conceived as being precarious and conditional, and that only the heroes, the exceptional men, who were in truth gods on earth, obtained apotheosis after their death. We afterwards saw that the mysteries extended the promise of eternal salvation to all the initiate, who by virtue of the rites were made equal to the gods, and finally that the philosophers contested the necessity of sacred ceremonies and affirmed that human reason by its own unaided power could win union with God.

We will now consider in more detail what lot was reserved for a special class of the dead, those whose life had been interrupted by an untimely end, and how in their case philosophy modified the old traditional beliefs.

If we turn over collections of ancient inscriptions we find, as when we go through our own cemeteries, a number of epitaphs in which the grief caused by the early death of a friend or relative is expressed. But in antiquity this sorrow was called forth not alone by regret for a loved being, too soon lost to sight, and by painful disappointment because of the irreparable ruin of the hopes to which his youth had given rise. Along with these human feelings, which are of all time and all societies, there were mingled in antiquity ideas which caused the loss of those who died before their time to seem more fearful and bitter.

Virgil’s celebrated lines, in which he describes the descent of Aeneas to Hades, will be remembered:[296]

“Continuo auditae voces, vagitus et ingens,

Infantumque animae flentes in limine primo,

Quos dulcis vitae exsortes et ab ubere raptos

Abstulit atra dies et funere mersit acerbo.”

“Ever were heard, on the outermost threshold, voices, a great wailing, the weeping souls of infants bereft of sweet life and torn from the breast, whom the ill-omened day swept off and whelmed in bitter death.”

In an eschatological myth of Plutarch,[297] the traveller beyond the grave also sees a deep abyss, in which moan the plaintive voices of a multitude of children who had died at the moment of their birth and were unable to rise to heaven. It has been shown that the Latin poet and the Greek philosopher are here interpreters of an old Pythagorean belief, to which Plato alludes.[298] Cildren who died young, like persons who met with violent deaths, the ἄωροι καὶ βιαιοθάνατοι, found no rest in the other life, but their souls wandered on the earth for the number of years for which their life would normally have lasted. The souls of the shipwrecked who perished at sea roamed the surface of the waters, and sailors believed that they were incarnated in the seagulls.[299]

How did this belief in the miserable lot of innocent children arise? Its origin should probably be sought in that fear of death which haunts all primitive peoples, and it developed owing to the frequency in antiquity of infanticide by abandoning or “exposing” newly born infants. Remorse provoked terror. This conclusion is especially suggested because the fate of those who died prematurely was approximated to the lot of those who died violent deaths. Beings who had been prevented from completing the natural span of life were feared. Their shades were conceived as being unquiet and in pain, because it was believed that they could return to disquiet and pain the living. The idea was entertained that a spirit brutally separated from the body came to hold it in horror and did not consent to inhabit the tomb until a reconciliation had been disobtained by expiatory ceremonies. Being grievously disincarnated, the soul became harmful. Souls, said the ancients, whom a cruel and untimely end has violently or unjustly torn from their bodies, themselves tend to be violent and unjust in order that they may avenge the wrong they have suffered.[300] It is no rare thing to find evidence in the inscriptions of a suspicion that a person cut off in the flower of his years has been the victim of some foul play. The curse of Heaven is called down on the head of his assumed murderer. The Sun, who discovers hidden crimes, is often invoked in Roman epitaphs against this unknown offender.[301] “Towards the Most High god, who watches over everything, and Helios and Nemesis, Arsinoë, dead before her time, lifts up her hands; if any one prepared poison for her or rejoices in her end, pursue him,” says an inscription of Alexandria. But the victim was himself believed to be capable of vengeance. It seemed incredible that one still full of strength and life should be entirely blotted out and that the energy which had animated him should also have disappeared suddenly, and the reprisals of this mysterious power were apprehended. This spirit pursued above all the murderer and, more generally, those who had given it cause for complaint. It showed itself to them in the form of terrifying monsters which tormented them. “As soon as I shall have expired, doomed to death by you,” says the child in Horace whom the witches sacrificed, “I will haunt your nights like a Fury, I will tear your faces with my hooked nails, as the Manes gods can, and weighing on your unquiet hearts I will take sleep from your affrighted eyes.”[302] Suetonius[303] relates that after the death of Agrippina, Nero was, on his own confession, often troubled by the vision of her specter and attempted to calm her spirit by a sacrifice and an evocation which he caused his magicians to make. The same historian gravely recounts that the house in which Caligula was murdered was every night haunted by dreadful apparitions until the time when it was destroyed by fire.[304] A scholiast defines the lemures as “the wandering shades of men who died before their normal time and are hence redoubtable.”[305] Even today popular belief in many countries attributes a maleficent power to the spirits of those who have died a violent death.

These disquieting superstitions acquired new force through the teachings of astrology, which by incorporating them in its system gave them a doctrinal foundation. Astrology spread the belief, which was and is common to all ancient and modern peoples of the East, that each soul has a predetermined number of years to spend on earth. The mathematici multiplied calculations and methods in order to be able to predict the instant of death predetermined by the horoscope. “This is the great work of astrology, held by its adepts to be its most difficult and by its enemies to be its most dangerous and blameworthy operation.”[306] But by an internal contradiction this pseudo-science admitted that the natural end could be hastened by the intervention of a murderous star (ἀναιρέτης): Saturn and Mars can in certain positions call forth sudden death by accident, killing, execution. A fragment attributed to Aristotle asserts that a Syrian mage predicted to Socrates that he would meet such a fate.[307] Sometimes the maleficent planets tear a nursing child from its mother’s breast before a single revolution of the sun has been accomplished. All astrological treatises devote chapters to these “unfed” children (ἄτροφοι) and also to the biothanati whose life has been interrupted by misfortunes of any kind. Petosiris was even concerned to discover, Ptolemy declared such preoccupation to be ridiculous,[308] what the stars reserved until the end of their life for those who had gone through only a portion of it. The texts which have been preserved, and often expurgated, by the Byzantines give no more than a bare indication of astral influences on the lot of men. In antiquity other more religious and more mystical works doubtless existed in which the inauspicious action of the murderous star, still affecting after death the souls torn from their mortal wrappings, was shown.

Pythagorism, which was closely connected with astrology, took possession of these ideas and adapted them to its speculations. According to this philosophy one and the same harmony presided over all physical phenomena and was, like music, subject to laws of number. These laws therefore were at work during pregnancy, and a complicated arithmetic was employed to show by a multiplication of days that a child might be born after seven or nine months with power to live, but not after eight, for such was the strange doctrine of the sect. Thus gestation became a melody in which abortion was a false note.

Nature was said to be like an artist who sometimes breaks an instrument of which he overstretches the chords, and sometimes leaves them too slack and can produce no tune. Now, these harmonic laws necessarily determined not only the formation but also the end of man. “There is a fixed relation of determined numbers which unites souls to bodies,” says a philosopher, “and while it subsists, the body continues to be animate, but so soon as it fails, the hidden energy which maintained this union is dissolved, and this is what we call destiny and the fatal time of life.”[309] When the term fixed by nature is reached, the soul departs without effort from the body in which it can no longer exercise its office. But when the soul is violently ejected from the body and the link connecting them is broken by an external force, it is troubled and is afflicted by an ill which will cause it pain in the Beyond.

These ideas had sunk deep into the popular mind. The distinction between an end in conformity with nature and one unexpectedly provoked by extraneous intervention is often expressed in literature as well as in inscriptions. Thus the epitaph of a young woman of twenty-eight, who was believed to have been the victim of witchcraft, states that “her spirit was torn from her by violence rather than returned to nature,”[310] which had lent it to her; the Manes or the celestial gods will be the avengers of this crime. Still more frequently an opposition is found between an early death and Fatum. The hour of death is determined at the moment of birth.

“Nascentes morimur; finisque ab origine pendet.”[311]

“At the moment we are born, we die; and our end is fixed from our beginning.” 

He who reaches this term fixed for his life ends “on his day” (suo die); otherwise he dies “before his day” (ante diem).[312] The vulgar belief was that the intervention of a human or divine will could oppose the fated course of things and abridge the normal duration of existence. Often the expression occurs of a belief that a demon or, what is more remarkable, an evil god has carried off innocent children or young men whose life has thus been shortened.[313] But pagan theology undertook the task of re-establishing the order of nature thus disturbed by fortuitous accidents and by individual and unregulated interferences. The breaking of the laws of the universe was only apparent. A soul might by mischance or by a malevolent act be suddenly severed from its body, but, remaining obedient to Fate, it had thereafter to linger on earth until its appointed time was accomplished.

Its lot was supposed to be analogous to that of the unfortunate who had been deprived of burial (ἄταφοι, insepulti) of whom we spoke in our first lecture.[314] It circled about the corpse, which it could not abandon, or fluttered here and there near the place of burial or on the spot where the body which it had occupied had been assailed. Excluded from the abode of the shades these wandering souls flitted near the earth or on the surface of the waters, miserable and plaintive. The fear of never being able to penetrate into the kingdom of blessed shades seems to have inspired the following prayer, which occurs in a metrical epitaph of Capri.[315]

“You who dwell in the country of Styx, beneficent demons, receive me too into Hades, me the unfortunate who was not borne away in accordance with the judgment of the Fates, but by a hasty and violent death provoked by unjust anger.”

These brutally disincarnated souls became like the swift and harmful spirits with which the air was filled: like them they belonged to the train of Hecate, the goddess of enchantment, and like them were subject to the power of magicians. At Lesbos, Gello, a young virgin carried off before her time, became a phantom which killed children and caused premature deaths.[316] The leaden tablets, which were slipped into tombs in order to injure an enemy, and the magic papyri of Egypt bear a large number of incantations in which these mischievous demons are invoked. In the same way a series of conjurations, dating from the third century and found in the island of Cyprus, appeal to the spirits of the dead thrown in the common ditch, “who have met their death by violence, or before their time, or who have been deprived of burial.”[317] In general the sacrifice of newly born children, and the use of their vital organs and bones, was, and not without reason, a most frequent charge against sorcerers. Formulas preserved on papyrus recommend as powerful means to work a charm “a baby’s heart, the blood of a dead maiden, and the carrion of a dog.”[318] Witches were believed to steal children in order to use the entrails in their occult operations, a ritualistic murder analogous to that attributed by popular belief, in some countries, to the Jews. Cicero, Horace in an epode, Petronius in his romance,[319] and other authors bear witness to the extent to which this opinion was entertained. The epitaph of a young slave of Livia, wife of Drusus, relates his misfortune. Before he was four years old he was cut off by the cruel hand, the “black hand” of a witch, who practised her noxious art everywhere. “Guard well your children, ye parents,” adds the epitaph.[320]

Likewise the murder of adults and the use made of objects which had belonged to executed or murdered persons is frequently mentioned. The wonder-workers believed that by practising with the bodies of this class of the dead, or with objects they had used, they became masters of their wandering souls and made them serve their designs. The nails of a crucified criminal, the bloodsoaked linen of a gladiator, were efficacious amulets.[321] Faith is still kept nowadays in the rope which has hanged a man.[322] The books which circulated under the name of Hostanes the Persian, Nectabis the Egyptian, and other illustrious wizards dealt with evocations of ἄωροι and βιαιοθάνατοι.[323]

Thus a logical series of beliefs was pushed to its extreme consequence. At the moment of birth Fate fixed for each man the length of his career; if this were interrupted, the soul had to complete it in suffering, near the earth, and became a demon which lent its aid to diviners and sorcerers. This doctrine, supported by astrology and Oriental magic, imposed itself on many minds. Plato, who had found it among the Pythagoreans, alludes to it, and Posidonius seems to have dealt with it more at length in his treatise “On Divination” (περὶ μαντικῆς),[324] although we cannot tell in how far he supported it. But it encountered the objections of other Greek philosophers. The reproach made to this theory was that it left out of account morality and merited retribution, and brought together, as subject to the same misfortune, criminals condemned to capital punishment and children whose age had kept them from all sin. Feeling and reason at the same time protested against the cruel doctrine which vowed indifferently the innocent and the guilty to long torture. When accident or illness caused the death of a beloved son, could his parents make up their mind to believe that he would suffer undeserved chastisement? A distinction had to be made between categories of persons, and to this task the pagan theologians applied themselves. Let us follow them in their undertaking.

The ἄωροι are those who die “out of season,” that is to say, in the wide sense of the word, those whose existence ends abnormally, but more particularly those who die young, who die prematurely. They include the ἀνώνυμοι, those who have received no name, who have not, that is, reached the ninth or tenth day of life, the ἄτροφοι, non nutriti, or babes who are still being fed at the breast or, according to the astrologers, are not yet a year old, and the ἄγαμοι, the innupti, who have died before the age of marriage and have therefore left no posterity to render them funeral rites.

None of these children and adolescents deserved, in the opinion of the sages, any chastisement. The Pythagoreans placed the age of reason, at which man is capable of choosing between good and evil and may be made responsible for his faults, as late as sixteen, that is, the age of puberty. Until that age the “naked” soul, without virtue as without vice, was exempt from all merit and demerit which would later attach to it. We know the unhappy lot to which, according to these philosophers, they were doomed. But other theologians considered that these souls, which had not been weighted by a long contact with matter, should fly more easily to celestial heights. Unsullied by earthly pollution, their purity allowed them to rise without difficulty to a better life in a happier abiding-place.[325]

It is hard to determine to what degree these moral ideas had penetrated the popular mind. The reaction against a superstitious belief often led to pure negation. Those who held that death put an end to all sensibility, were content to affirm that the child they wept had gone down into everlasting night, and that nothing was left of him but dust and ashes. Certain epitaphs hope that, if his Manes still have some feeling, his bones may rest quietly in the tomb. But mother’s love was not to be satisfied with this negative assurance or to resign itself to anxious doubting. The people kept an unreasoning fear of the evils which awaited the ἄωροι, and of those which might be expected from them. Some also believed that an ancestral fault, such as was, according to the Orphic doctrine, the murder of Zagreus by the Titans, made all humanity guilty from birth, and that this hereditary sin had to be effaced by purifications.[326] Religion offered a remedy for the ill to which, to speak with Lucretius, it had itself lent persuasion. The custom of initiating children to the mysteries which was, at least at Eleusis, originally connected with the family or gentile cult, became a means of preserving them from the fatal lot which threatened them and of ensuring their happiness in the other life. Thus pueri and puellae are found admitted at the most tender age among the adepts of the secret cults, both Greek and Oriental, perhaps even consecrated from birth to the godhead. They are imagined as partaking in the Beyond of the joys which these cults promised to those whose salvation they ensured. A child who has taken part in a ceremony of Bacchus lives endowed with eternal youth in the Elysian Fields in the midst of Satyrs.[327] Others continue the games proper to their years in another life, or if they have reached the age of first love they still sport with young Eros. Above all, however, the influence of the astral cults, added to that of philosophy, brought about an admission that innocent creatures ascended to the starry heavens. An epitaph of Thasos[328] speaks of a virgin, flower-bearer (ἀνθοφόρος) probably of Demeter and Kora, who was carried off at the age of thirteen by the inexorable Fates, but who, “living among the stars, by the will of the immortals, has taken her place in the sacred abode of the blessed.” At Amorgos, a child of eight was, we are assured, led by Hermes to Olympus, shone in the ether, and would henceforth protect the young wrestlers who emulated him in the palaestra. Even the precise spot in which he twinkled was fixed, the horn of the constellation of the Goat, an appropriate place for this little fighter.[329] Curiously, an epitaph of Africa, which repeats Virgil’s very expression, states, in contradiction to the poet, that a baby, “cut off on the threshold of life,” has not gone to the Manes but to the stars of heaven,[330] and a relief of Copenhagen shows the bust of a little girl within a large crescent surrounded by seven stars, thus indicating that she has risen towards the moon, the abode of blessed souls.[331]

Examples of these premature apotheoses might be multiplied. I shall merely show, by a characteristic case, how it was possible for old popular beliefs to be combined with the new astral doctrine. The ancients attributed to the rustic nymphs the strange powers which the Greek peasant today recognises in beings which he still designates as the Nereids.[332] Sometimes these fantastical goddesses possess themselves of the spirit of men and change them into seers or maniacs νυμφόληπτοι. Sometimes their fancy is caught by handsome youths whom they carry off and oblige to live with them. But above all they love pretty children and steal them from their parents, not to harm them but in order that they may take part in their own divine pastimes. Doubtless it was at first to mountain caverns, near limpid springs, in the depths of tufted woods, that they bore him whom they made their little playfellow. Such were the archaic beliefs of the country folk. But the mysteries of Bacchus taught that an innocent child, thus rapt from the earth, mingled in the train of the Naiads in the flowery meadows of the Elysian Fields;[333] and when Paradise was transferred to the sky it was in the “immortal dwelling-place of the ether” that the nymphs, we are told, placed a little girl whose charm had seduced them.[334]

Transported thus to heaven, these loved beings were transformed by the tenderness of their relatives into protectors of the family in which their memory survived, or of the friends who shared regret for them. Whether they were called “heroes” in Greek, or as elsewhere “gods,”[335] they were always conceived as guardian powers who acknowledged by benefits the worship rendered them. Thus in the middle of the second century the familia of a proconsul of Asia, C. Julius Quadratus, honoured a child of eight years as a hero, at the prayer of his father and mother,[336] and at Smyrna the parents of a dearly loved child of four, raised to this baby as their tutelary god, a tomb on which an epitaph described in detail all his illnesses.[337]

These sentimental illusions are eternal. Nothing is more frequently seen on tombstones in our own Catholic cemeteries than such invocations as “Dear angel in heaven, pray for us,” or even a figure of a winged baby flying away among winged cherubs. This faith is perhaps touching, but its orthodoxy is doubtful. For the doctors of the Church, except Origen, have, I think, never adopted the doctrine of Philo the Jew that human souls can be transformed into angelic spirits. But in the oldest Christian epitaphs the conviction is already expressed that, since children are without sin, they will be transported by angels to the dwelling of the saints and there intercede for their parents. “Thou hast been received, my daughter, among the pious souls, because thy life was pure from all fault, for thy youth ever sought only innocent play,”[338] says a metrical epitaph, once under the portico of St. Peter’s. And another and older epitaph is as follows, “Eusebius, a child without sin because of his age, admitted to the abode of the saints, rests there in peace.”[339] Still others end with the words “Pray for us,” “Pete pro nobis.”

Thus little by little in antiquity the conviction gained strength and became predominant that, as Menander said with another meaning, whom the gods love die young.[340] As to individuals whose days were cut short by a violent blow, they were not uniformly in the same case. The theorists here distinguished among different categories of the biothanati.[341] The classification seems to have originated with the astrologists who claimed to enumerate, in accordance with the position of Mars and Saturn, all the kinds of death reserved for victims of these murderous planets, and to foretell whether these unfortunates were to be drowned, burnt, poisoned, hanged, beheaded, crucified, impaled, crushed to death, thrown to the beasts, or given over to yet more atrocious tortures. But the moralists here also made a point of separating the innocent from the guilty. Only the guilty were to suffer after death and only their souls were to become demons. For, side by side with those who had deserved capital punishment for their crimes, or who administered death to themselves, were others cut off by a fatal accident, perhaps even killed while performing a sacred duty.

Such was the case of soldiers slain in battle. Logic ordered the theologians to place them among the biothanati, and so they are, for instance, in Virgil’s sixth book of the Aeneid.[342] But death on the field of honor could not be a source of infinite ills for them, and it was generally admitted that, on the contrary, their courage opened for them the gates of heaven.

“Virtus recludens immeritis mor Caelum,” as Horace says.[343] The Greek theory of the divinity of the heroes here comes to temper the severity of an unreasonable and dangerous doctrine. According to Josephus,[344] Titus, when haranguing his soldiers, promised immortality to such as fell bravely, and condemned the others to destruction. “Who does not know,” he asked, “that valiant souls, delivered from the flesh by the sword in battle, will inhabit the purest of ethereal elements, and, fixed in the midst of the stars, will make themselves manifest to their descendants as good genii and benevolent heroes? On the other hand, souls which are extinguished when their body is sick, vanish, even if they are free from all stain and defilement, into subterranean darkness and are buried in deep oblivion.” In the military monarchies of the Hellenistic East, as in the Roman Empire, eternal life was certainly promised to those who had perished arms in hand, faithful to their military duty. We know that the same belief was transmitted to Islam. A Mussulman who dies in battle “in the way of Allah” is a martyr (shahîd) to whom the joys of Paradise are assured. The Jews, who had been reluctant to admit such ideas before, from the time of the Maccabees onwards associated with warriors those who sacrificed themselves in order to be faithful to their persecuted religion, and to these especially they promised a glorious immortality. Faith in this celestial reward was later to cause the Christians, who won the martyr’s crown, to face all sufferings.

The treatment which the gods reserved for another class of biothanati was more uncertain. In the Greek cities, as in Rome, moral reproof and posthumous penalties were anciently attached to suicide. The old pontifical law refused ritualistic burial to persons who had hanged themselves and instead of funeral sacrifices it prescribed for these dead merely the hanging up of small images (oscilla) consecrated to their Manes,[345] probably a magical, “sympathetic” rite, which was intended to purify their wandering souls by air, as other souls were purified by water and fire. The horrible appearance of men who died by strangulation had given rise to the belief that the breath of life had vainly sought to issue from their tightly closed throats.[346] A rich inhabitant of Sarsina in Umbria granted land for a graveyard to his fellow citizens, but excluded from the benefit of his gift those who had hired themselves as gladiators, had died by the rope by their own hand, or had followed an infamous calling.[347] This association shows how loathsome this kind of death was. Funeral colleges founded under the Empire introduced into their rules a clause stipulating that if anybody had for any motive whatsoever put himself to death, he should lose his right to burial.[348] This provision seems to have been inspired less by the fear that fraud would be practiced on this society of mutual insurance against supreme abandonment, than by the conviction that funeral honors cannot deflect the curse which weighs on the suicide and renders his company undesirable for other dead.

But there was against popular opinion and religion, which attached an idea of infamy to self-murder, a philosophical reaction which, among the Stoics, led to an entirely contrary moral judgment. The powerful sect of the Porch caused the doctrine to prevail that suicide was in certain cases commendable. It saw in this end the supreme guarantee of the wise man’s freedom, and praised those who by voluntary death had withdrawn from an intolerable life. Cato of Utica, who killed himself lest he should survive liberty, was held to be the wise man’s ideal, and as worthy of apotheosis as Hercules. He himself, who is shown to us by the historians as reading and rereading Plato’s Phaedo before he pierced himself with his sword,[349] certainly hoped for the immortality of heroic souls. Here, as on other points, the Neo-Pythagoreans, and the Neo-Platonists after them, brought the minds of men back to the old religious beliefs. Plotinus, yielding to the opinion which still prevailed in his time, still authorizes suicide in certain cases, but we know that his exhortations dissuaded his pupil Porphyry from putting an end to his days, when he was seized with a disgust for life. This latter philosopher afterwards resolutely opposed the Stoic doctrine. Although the soul, said the Pythagoreans and Platonists, is enclosed in the body as in a prison, in order to suffer chastisement, it is forbidden by God to escape therefrom by its own act. If it do so escape, it incurs from the masters of its fate infinitely harder penalties. It must await the hour willed by these masters, and then it can rejoice in the deliverance which it obtains at the term of old age. If it itself break the link which joins it to the body, far from ridding itself of servitude, it remains chained to the corpse, for necessarily it is subject to passion at the moment of death and thus contracts impure desires. The only liberation worthy of the wise man is that of the soul which still dwells in the body but succeeds in freeing itself from all fleshly leanings 145and in thus rising, by the force of reason, from earth to heaven.[350]

The prohibition of voluntary death anticipating the hour fixed by Providence for each man, was strengthened and enforced everywhere by the Christian Church.

With yet more cause did those who had been condemned to capital punishment seem to deserve posthumous torment and the pains reserved for the impious. These maleficent spirits, transformed to demons, continued to work harm to the human race. The odium which attached to the word biothanati ended by concentrating itself on these two classes, those who had committed suicide and those who had been executed. The horror which both inspired was marked by the withholding of honorable burial. Even in pagan times, sacred or civil law in many places denied funeral honors to children who died young, and to suicides, in order, says a text,[351] that those who had not feared death might fear something after death, and, above all, to criminals, whose corpses were not deposited in a tomb but were thrown without any ceremony into a common ditch (πολυάνδριον). In Rome persons executed in prison were dragged with a hook through the streets to the Tiber, where they were flung into the water. There was in the fact that they were deprived of funeral rites a second reason, besides their guilt, for their suffering in the Beyond.[352] Families and friends of the condemned endeavoured therefore to spare them this fearful penalty, and could obtain from the magistrates the surrender of their bodies to them. But the authorities often refused this supreme consolation to Christians who wished to pay this last duty to their martyred brothers. By scattering abroad the ashes of martyrs the pagans hoped to prevent their graves from becoming the sites of cults.

The denial of a religious funeral was also from the earliest time onwards ordered by Church discipline and sanctioned by the Councils in the case of suicides, and was similarly extended, in virtue of the law in force, to malefactors. In the Middle Ages the corpses of criminals were still to be seen carried to a shameful charnel-place in Byzantium. For instance, the chronologist Theophanes[353] relates indignantly that in 764 the iconoclastic Emperor Constantine Copronymus caused the arrest of a hermit of Bithynia, who supported the cult of the images. The emperor’s guards tied a cord round the monk’s foot and dragged him from the praetorium to the cemetery, where, after cutting him to pieces, they flung his remains into the ditch of the biothanati. Curiously this word, biothanati, was derisively applied to the Christians themselves, either because they adored a crucified Saviour, or in mockery of the martyrs, who believed that through death by execution they earned a glorious immortality. The poet Commodianus returns this insult by applying the term to the pagans, whose way of life condemned them to everlasting flames.[354] The opprobrious word remained in use until the Middle Ages, when it denoted all whose crimes deserved capital punishment, so that the final meaning of biothanatus was gallows-bird, gallows-food.[355]

If the meaning of the word biothanati was thus restricted in the Latin world, the old ideas which it called forth have had a singular vitality in folk-lore, especially among the Greeks. The Greeks believe even today that such as perish by a sudden and violent death became vrykolakes.[356] Their bodies can again be reanimated, can leave the grave, and can travel through space with extreme rapidity as vampires and become so maleficent that mere contact with them causes loss of life. Suicides and victims of unavenged murders are particularly fearful. It was the custom as late as the eighteenth century to open the grave of a dead man suspected of being a vrykolakas, and if his body had escaped corruption, thus proving his supposed character, it was cut into pieces or burnt in order to prevent it from doing further harm. So lively did the belief remain that the biothanatus could not detach himself from his body, and that his existence, which had been too soon interrupted, was prolonged in the tomb.

FOOTNOTES

296. Virg., Aen., VI, 426 ss.

297. Plut., De genio Socratis, 22, p. 590 F.

298. Plato, Republ., p. 615 C; cf. Norden, Aeneis Buch VI, 1903, pp. 11, 27.

299. Achill. Tat., V, 16.

300. Tertull., De anima, 57.

301. Dessau, Inscr. sel., 8497 ss.; cf. Recueil des inscriptions du Pont, 9, 258.

302. Horace, Epod., 5, 92; cf. Livy, III, 58, 11.

303. Sueton., Nero, 34, 4.

304. Sueton., Calig., 59.

305. Porph., Epist., II, 2, 209: “Nocturnas Lemures: umbras vagantes hominum ante diem mortuorum et ideo metuendas.”

306. Bouché-Leclercq, Astrologie grecque, p. 404.

307. Diog. Laert., II, 5, §45; cf. Lamprid., Heliog., 33, 2: “Praedictum eidem erat a sacerdotibus Syris biothanatum se futurum.”

308. Ptolem., Tetrabibl., III, 10 (p. 127, ed. 1553).

309. Macrob., Somn. Scip., I, 13, 1, probably after Numenius (Revue des études grecques, XXXII, 1921, p. 119 s.).

310. CIL, VIII, 2756 = Bücheler, Carm. epigr., 1604.

311. Manilius, IV, 16.

312. Cf. Schulze, Sitzungsb. Akad. Berlin, 1912, p. 691 ss.

313. Demon: Kaibel, Epigr. Gr., 566, 4; 569, 3, etc.—Evil god: Dessau, 8498; cf. 9093: “Cui (sic) dii nefandi parvulo contra votum genitorum vita privaverunt.”

314. See Lecture I, p. 66 ss.

315. Kaibel, Epigr. Graeca, 624.

316. Rohde, Psyche, II4, p. 411; cf. Perdrizet, Negotium perambulans, 1922, p. 19 ss.

317. Audollent, Defixionum tabellae, 1904, p. 40, nr, 22 ss.; see above, Lecture I, p. 68.

318. Wessely, Griech. Zauberpap. aus Paris in Denkschr. Akad. Wien, XXXVI, 1888, p. 85, l. 2577 ss., p. 86, l. 2645 ss.

319. Cic., In Vatin., 6, 14; Horace, Ep., 5; Petronius, 63, 8.

320. Bücheler, Carm. epigr., 987: “Eripuit me saga manus crudelis ubique, Cum manet in terris et nocet arte sua. Vos vestros natos concustodite, parentes.”

Cf. Petronius, l. c., and Lecture II, p. 61, n. 48.

321. Alex. Trall., I, 15, pp. 565, 567, Puschman.

322. Cf. Pliny, XXVIII, 12, § 49.

323. Tertull., De anima, 57.

324. Norden, Aeneis Buch VI, p. 41.

325. Sen., Dial., VI, 23, 1; Plut., Cons. ad uxorem, 11; cf. Dessau, 8481 ss.

326. See below, Lecture VII, p. 178.

327. Bücheler, Carm. epigr., 1233.

328. Kaibel, Epigr. Graeca, 324.

329. Haussoullier, Revue de philologie, XXIII, 1909, p. 6; see above, Lecture III, p. 105.

330. Bücheler, Carm. epigr., 569: “Vitaeque e limine raptus.... Non tamen ad Manes sed caeli ad sidera pergis.” Cf. ibid., 569, 611.

331. See Lecture III, p. 99.

332. Rohde, Psyche, II4, p. 374, n. 2; Lawson, Modern Greek folk-lore, 1910 p. 140 ss.; cf. Dessau, 8748.

333. Bücheler, Carm. epigr., 1233; cf. Statius, Silv., II, 6, 100.

334. Kaibel, Epigr. Graeca, 570, 571; cf. CIL, VI, 29195 = Dessau, 8482: “Ulpius Firmus, anima bona superis reddita, raptus a Nymphis.”

335. Cf. Anderson, Journ. hell. stud., XIX, 1899, p. 127, nr, 142, and below, note 42.

336. Cagnat, Inscr. Gr. ad res Rom. pertin., IV, 1377.

337. Kaibel, Epigr. Graeca, 314.

338. Bücheler, Carm. epigr., 1439; cf. 1400: “Vos equidem nati caelestia regna videtis Quos rapuit parvos praecipitata dies.”

339. Cabrol et Leclercq, Reliquiae liturgicae vetustissimae, I, 1912, nr, 2917; cf. 2974; 3153.

340. Menander’s verse, “Ὃν οἱ θεοὶ φιλοῦσιν ἀποθνήσκει νέος,” is indeed translated into Latin in a Roman epitaph (Dessau, 8481).

341. In Greek, βιοθάνατος is a popular form for βιαιοθάνατος. In Latin biaeothanatus is found only in Tertull., De Anima, 57, biothanatus everywhere else.

342. Aen., VI, 477 ss.

343. Horace, Od., III, 2, 21; cf. Introd., p. 13; Lecture IV, p. 113.

344. Joseph., Bell. Iud., VI, 5, § 47.

345. Servius, Aen., XII, 603.

346. Pliny, N. H., II, 63, § 156.

347. Dessau, Inscr. sel., 7846: “Extra auctorateis et quei sibei [la]queo manu attulissent et quei quaestum spurcum professi essent.”

348. Ibid., 7212, II, 5.

349. Plut., Cato, 68.

350. Cf. Revue des études grecques, XXXII, 1921, p. 113 ss.

351. Sen., Controv., VIII, 4, end.

352. See above, Lecture I, p. 64 ss.

353. Theophanes, Chronicon, p. 437, 3 ss., De Boor.

354. Commodianus, I, 14, 8.

355. Du Cange, Glossarium, s. v.

356. Lawson, Modern Greek folk-lore, 1910, p. 408 ss.