5

Greek and Classical Views of Life After Death and Ascent to the Heavens

IN CONTRAST TO our investigations of previous cultures, there is no dearth of evidence about the Greek afterlife. Unlike our records of the fertile crescent, we have a vast body of extant Greek literature. There are, to be sure, important and nagging lacunae in our knowledge, especially at the beginnings, and there is a great deal more about ordinary life that we would like to know. But by comparison to the textual evidence of ancient Near Eastern cultures, we have ample amounts of information about Greek thinking on life after death as well as important information about customs and changes in Greek sensibilites over the centuries.

When it comes to Greek notions of the afterlife, we have whole categories of evidence: not the least of which are drama and epic, travel narratives, essays, philosophy, and religious writings, not to forget our considerable archeological remains. Any plan of attack in dealing with Greco-Roman evidence must be even more selective: to look briefly at the most important phenomena in Greek culture and then pick those things which most affect the citizens of Judea. Foremost among this will be Plato’s notions of the afterlife, which penetrated Jewish culture deeply. Other aspects of Greek culture are also important because they form part of the great multicultural Hellenistic syncretism in which Judaism lived.

Greek culture and the religious texts it produced continued over millennia and spread to many different lands. Greek views of life after death underwent considerable evolution and variation. But even from the beginning, the Greeks had several different and conflicting views of death and the final disposition of the soul. After the development of the philosophical schools, varied and often conflicting conceptions of life after death continued within the culture, forming a not altogether logical amalgamation of different views. These broad views have been surveyed by an imposing number of different scholars; their very good and thorough work does not have to be rehearsed here.¹ We need to emphasize that not all Greek views agreed with the notion that the immortal soul separates from the body, though that is the innovation normally attributed to Greek authorship. Then too, we have already seen that in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Canaan, and Israel there is a “shade” or “shadow” that separates from the body at death, sometimes several different formulations of that continuing identity. So the concept that the soul can survive death is not precisely an innovation of Greek thought. What is an innovation is a radical dualism in which the immortality of the soul was seen to be provable, beatific, and the natural goal of existence. That was an innovation of Plato’s philosophy.

It is an innovation with a history. Throughout Greek history there are reports of people of unusual religious talent, whom we might want to call shamans (after their counterparts in Central Asia) or sorcerers, who were able to leave their bodies while still alive and perform various services-like earthly or heavenly travel, healings, or divinations. Greeks who were supposed to have these talents included: Orpheus (mythical), Trophonius (mythical), Aristeas of Proconessus (early seventh century BCE), Hermotimus of Clazomenae (seventh century BCE?), Epimenides of Cnossus or Phaestus (ca. 600 BCE), Pythagoras of Samos (530s-520s BCE), Abaris the Hyperborean (sixth century BCE), Zalmoxis of the Thracian Getae (sixth century BCE), and Empedocles of Acragas (ca. 485-435 BCE).² The figures are legendary and often cannot be dated accurately. Furthermore, Greek myth also contains cautionary tales against heavenly journeys as the famous stories of Phaethon and Icarus demonstrate.

Here is the cautionary tale of Hermotimus of Clazomenae from the report of Apollonius’ Historiae Mirabiles 3:

They say his [Hermotimus’] soul would wander from his body and stay away for many years. Visiting places, it would predict what was going to happen-for example, torrential rains or droughts, and in addition earthquakes and pestilences and the suchlike. His body would just lie there, and after an interval his soul would return to it, as if to its shell, and arouse it. He did this frequently, and whenever he was about to go on his travels he gave his wife the order that no one, citizen or anyone, should touch his body. But some people came into the house, prevailed upon his wife and observed Hermotimus lying on the floor, naked and motionless. They brought fire and burned him, in the belief that, when the soul came back and no longer had anything to reenter, he would be completely deprived of life. This is exactly what happened. The people of Clazomenae honor Hermotimus even to this day and have [built] a temple to him. Women may not enter it for the reason above [i.e., the wife’s betrayal].³

The story is legendary, serving as the foundation story of a temple. But many Greeks believed that the soul could naturally depart from its body, not just in death, but also in life. This property of the soul, which could be exploited by religious entrepreneurs, demonstrated that the soul traveled to the afterlife at death. Eventually, these stories were taken as evidence for the immortality of the soul and the desirability of religiously altered states of consciousness.

Early Greek Beliefs and Burial Practices

WE MUST FOLLOW the story as chronologically as possible so we will begin with the Homeric epics. The texts of the Homeric Greeks and the archeological evidence of the earliest periods suggest that there was no strict reward for a heroic or moral life. The Isles of the Blessed (e.g., Hesiod ca. 730 BCE, Works and Days) and Elysian fields (Odyssey 4.561ff.) were occasionally open to the most valiant heroes in the ancient period. Menelaus is told that he will go to the Elysian Plain, as much because of the loss of honor he suffered in the rape of his wife Helen as for his stature as King of Sparta. Interestingly, neither “Elysion” nor “Radamanthys” (the ruler of the dead), appear to be native Greek terms.

As every student who still studies the traditional Western canon knows, the Iliad ends with the funeral games for the opposing dead heroes, Hector and Patroklus. The sworn enemies are united in a momentary fellowship of mourning. Achilles, who has killed Hector in single combat, counsels Priam to accept the death of his son:

Bear up, and do not unceasingly lament away your heart.

For you will not accomplish anything grieving for your son.

Nor will you raise him up, and sooner will you suffer another evil. (24.549-51)⁴

Achilles tells Priam that nothing will ever bring Hector back. We find an interesting comparison with Israel here: At approximately the same time in quite another corner of the globe, David legendarily says about his dead son that the living go to the dead, not the dead to the living: “Can I bring him back again? I shall go to him, but he will not return to me” (2 Sam 12:23). The dead, then, did not cease to exist in either culture. Rather they remained in a shadowy underworld, as insubstantial shades, without strength or pleasure. The dead head off to their final resting place although they can return to bring messages to the living:

• • •

and there appeared to him the ghost of unhappy Patroklus

all in his likeness for stature, and the lovely eyes, and voice,

and wore such clothing as Patroklus had worn on his body.

The ghost came and stood over his head and spoke a word

    to him:

’You sleep, Achilles, you have forgotten me; but you

    were not

careless of me when I lived, but only in death. Bury me

as quickly as may be, let me pass through the gates of Hades.

The souls, the images of dead men, hold me at a distance,

and will not let me cross the river and mingle among them,

but I wander as I am by Hades’ house of the wide gates.

    (23.65-74)

• • •

Oh wonder! Even in the house of Hades there is left

    something,

a soul and an image, but there is no real heart of life in it.

    (23.103-104)

Achilles is describing the appearance of his dead companion Patroklus. His phantasm, his image (eidolon) has appeared in a dream but Patroklus has not yet taken up eternal residence in Hades.⁵ First, as Patroklus reminds him, he needs proper burial. Not to complete the proper burial would be the highest of moral breaches. He then utters a dire prophecy, that Achilles himself will fall before the walls of Troy (lines 80-81).

As in all ancient cultures, dreams, visions, and other religiously interpreted states of consciousness both gave the power to foretell the future and confirmed the culture’s depiction of the afterlife. In The Epic of Gilgamesh, for instance, Enkidu foresaw his own death in a dream. In this case, the soul and image which Achilles dreams is a visible but not a tangible likeness of the dead warrior, his comrade Patroklus. Patroklus dissolves into mist, slipping through Achilles’ arms when he tries to embrace him (lines 99-100). It is this visible likeness that is the religious background for the later philosophical understanding of soul (psyche) or the Latin animus (literally: wind)-that is, cognate with the Greek word for “wind,” anemos . Indeed, the root meaning of psyche is derived from the idea of breathing (cf. psychō, “I breathe, blow”).⁶ In its early usage, there does not seem to be any relationship between psyche and thinking or feeling, but at this poignant moment we see that the emotional relationship between the heroic duo has survived Patroklus’ death.⁷

Besides the aforementioned psyche and anemos, primary words which could point to parts of the “self” in the ancient Greek tradition would be phrenes, noos, and thymos but there were several others as well.⁸ One of the most popular is the use of the word “shadows” or “shades” to refer to the dead: skiai, as that was expressed in Greek; but another would be eidolon, “image” or “phantom.” The latter two have the advantage of referring to a likeness of the departed, even though it is an imperfect one. A unified concept of “self” was apparently won after a long battle which led to a notion of consciousness, then, to Socrates’ notion of a transcendent self, and finally to the Aristotelian notion of a soul’s body of knowledge which survives death but leaves behind individuality. The achievement of a single conception of the soul is crucial to the notion of reason and moral theory, and it is the beginning of our modern understanding of the “self.”⁹ From here, it was further developed by Plotinus and Augustine (see chap. 14).

According to Bruno Snell, the first writer to talk systematically of a “soul” as anything recognizable to us was the philosopher Heraclitus, who called the soul “psyche,” distinguished it from the body, and said that the soul is endowed with a “logos,” a rational plan, which was common to humanity and amenable to education. These concepts, according to Snell and Rohde, Heraclitus got from the lyric poets, who described our mental states in much more detail than did Homer.

As in the other ancient cultures, the Greeks faced questions of personal identity not only directly but often obliquely by asking the question: “What will become of me?” The soul, the shade, the anemos, the thymos all helped Greeks understand not only what remained after death but who it was that was doing the thinking and speaking and how to describe these internal processes. The ancient Greeks were sure that the soul separated from the body in dreams and trances; it left the body behind at death. The sophisticated notion of a consistent self in Greek philosophy is the product of a long process of visualization of the next life as well as this one, a meditation on what is the lasting outcome of a life, what is its transcendent meaning.

In fact, like the ancient Egyptian documents, the most early Greek documents could envision a person in several different ways, without a necessary unified view of the “self.” What is different, however, is that through the early lyric poets, they also took an interest in how the self grew and progressed, emotionally and intellectually. They could discuss perception as “taking something in,” or “learning,” with the term daena, cognate to one of the Persian words for the moral self, the daena. There were several words to describe seeing and thinking. Also, forgetting (lanthanesthai) and remembering (mimneskesthai) were extremely important to notions of the “self.” Memory itself played a crucial part in Plato’s proof for the transcendent immortality of the soul.

The early Greeks burned their dead heroes near the battlefield. Perhaps this ritual too is congruent with the notion that the soul separates from the body. But, in more normal circumstances, as when someone died in peacetime, the dead might equally well be entombed or buried. What is unchangeable is that not to be properly cared for through funeral rites was a great disgrace, for soldier or civilian, as Patroklus reminds Achilles. Improper care could bring the ghost back to haunt the perpetrators, as an unburied person was not allowed to enter Hades.¹⁰ Sometimes the ghosts could actually become vampires.¹¹ The rite was just more difficult to perform in wartime, therefore more appreciated. Several epitaphs make clear that normally the Greeks assumed that proper rites were effective in keeping the ancestor well-behaved after death, and that proper commemoration at specific intervals kept the memory of the departed alive and socialized within the community and, simultaneously, vindictive ghosts at bay.

Burial Practices

THE FIRST OF these rites was the funeral. The funeral (kedeia) had three distinct phases. They were (1) laying out the body (prothesis), (2) its conveyance to the place of cremation or interment (ekphora), and (3) the disposition proper which was the deposition of the cremated or inhumated remains. Prayers were offered for the chthonic deities to receive the dead kindly; texts of them are sometimes found on tombstones. From the eighth to the fourth century BCE, inhumation and cremation were practiced concurrently, though the popularity of each waxed and waned.¹² In Rome, once the correct funeral rituals were performed, the deceased officially belonged to the Di Manes, the communal, sainted ancestors.¹³

Later in Greco-Roman culture, corpses were buried in tombs in a sarcophagos (literally: “flesh-eater”) until their flesh decayed. Then, the bones could be collected and placed in an ossuary, often of exquisite design. This process is called “secondary burial” and was practiced in Israel as well. Secondary burial in the form of disinterrment can still be found in England today, where charnel houses are used for depositing the collected bones of the dead. This makes possible the reuse of valuable churchyard plots. So too, in ancient Greece and in Hellenistic Israel, sarcophagi would be reused after the bones were gathered.

Personal depictions of the dead were quite frequent in affluent memorials, some with evocative poses of the person’s characteristic habits. For example, a girl could be pictured with her pet dove, as in the beautiful memorial stone on display at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City.

Some possible hints of more pleasures awaiting the dead can be found in sarcophagus art. In certain Mycenaean tombs one finds depictions of a judgment scene with a scale, a psychostasia (weighing of souls), as well as butterflies, a symbol of the goddess Psyche and who is, in turn, the emblem and namesake of the soul.¹⁴ But it is hard to know exactly how to evaluate these depictions since, in the Iliad, Zeus is represented as weighing the fates of Achilles and Hector at their earthly combat.¹⁵ The parallel between the two actions-judgment during life and after death-suggests that we grow to understand our roles in life not only directly but also indirectly, by considering our ultimate ends and what our lives will be like when continued beyond the grave.

Graves and tombs were also the location of offerings to the dead. Like those of the Mesopotamians and Canaanites, tombs and graves, especially in the Hellenistic period, could be fitted with sophisticated plumbing pipes for periodic libations delivered to the remains.¹⁶ When the bones or ashes were laid to rest in buried urns, the pipes conveyed the gifts into the urns.

Hades: The Location of the Dead

THE DOMINANT explanation for the location of the dead in the Homeric period was already the dark, underground kingdom of the god variously called Hades, Pluto, or Radamanthys. Later, the picture became more detailed: The dead were depicted as migrating, with Hermes as a guide, on a journey in which they encounter Cerberus the three-headed watchdog and pay their coins to Charon the ferryman to cross the river Styx. Small coins called obols were frequently placed in the corpse’s mouth before the funeral to cover the ferry costs. The Homeric view of Hades was less articulated than these later familiar portraits but it was certainly part of later Greek notions and, what is more, quite close to the many other ancient views of the abode of the dead that we have seen in the ancient Near East.

In Homer’s writing, Hades is merely where a soul (psychō) goes when its body dies. Besides the famous cases of Tantalus, Tityus, and Sisyphos and a handful of others, there are no real attempts to make Hades into a place of punishment or reward for a life deficient in happiness or virtue. Retributive justice was not the real function of Hades. Possibly, Hades was seen as punishment for all the dead for reckless behavior, as John Garland suggests.¹⁷ But the Greeks apparently concluded that since death comes to all, Hades was the final destination for all.

One sure thing is, except for the specially treated mythical characters like Tantalus and Sisyphus, the virtuous and the sinners all lead the same life in Hades. The dead are weak and very much in the dark. Hades is a gloomy and very remote place, even though the sun visits it at night. As Odysseus’ journey underground shows, souls need the living to provide blood libations in order to even materialize partially and, most of all, for information about the world of the living. Unlike Patroklus and the dead in the ancient Near East, who are prescient and can be consulted for divination, the Greek shades live in “that distant country,” receiving information in the same way that anyone would in a remote place, through the newly arrived journeyers. The prophecy of Patroklus that Achilles will die at Troy is an exception, not the rule. We do not know whether Samuel’s prophecies in the Bible were typical of Israelite visitations or not.

Fame Is Better than Immortality in the Odyssey

WHEN WE MEET Odysseus in the Odyssey Book 5, he is not the person we remember from the Iliad. He is weeping on the beach of the magical island of Ogygia, seemingly at his wits’ end. But he is hardly in dire straits. He is the guest of the tall, beautiful, blonde, goddess Calypso, who has granted him immortality, an ever-new wardrobe, and her considerable sexual favors.

Tempted as we might be by this invitation, it was not satisfactory to Odysseus, though he certainly enjoyed his temporary lodgings.¹⁸ We know from the first books of the Odyssey that his kingdom of Ithaca was in grave danger. The suitors were conspiring to murder his son Telemachus and force Penelope to marry one of them. We learn from this incident that, for an Achaian hero, even immortality, fabulous sex with a beautiful blonde goddess, and an ever new wardrobe is not worth the price of family honor and fame. The island was a trap for Odysseus, preventing him from reentering the world to gain fame by protecting his kingdom. Ogygia—like Calypso herself, whose name means “covered up”—was hidden from human life, an unmanly temptation, and thus beneath the dignity of a hero. This epic functions as a moral exhortation to the ancient Greek to stop dallying on raids and return home, just as the Iliad was equally a moral example towards heroism in battle.

The cost of Odysseus’s proper decision to eschew nameless, hidden immortality with Calypso is further emphasized by the Odyssey Book 11. Book 11 is a set-piece describing Odysseus’ most daring journey, into Hades itself. Known as a Nekyia (literally: a séance), this chapter also resembles a warrior’s raid into the underworld. After performing the expected libations, Odysseus set out on his journey, meeting the deceased among his crew, including Elpinor who cannot actually enter because he was not buried properly (11.50-54). As Odysseus enters, he finds many of his other dear departed ones there, beginning with his mother (11.84) Tiresius (i.fjoff.), and, most importantly for our purposes, the greatest hero of the Greeks, Achilles (11.46yff.).

Although some Greek concepts of the afterlife were eventually inimical both to personal and to bodily resurrection, this depiction of spirits again shows that they retained an image of their physical selves. Everyone was recognizable by his or her bodily features; indeed, recognition was a major honor to the dead. The recently dead even retained their death wounds.¹⁹ Although not physically embodied, they gain a modicum of physicality by drinking the blood of the sacrifice which Odysseus brings (e.g., n.94-95). Embodiment was therefore part of the “revivication” process which Odysseus had learned how to accomplish ritually. But the “shades of the dead” are still intangible, dispersing like mist when Odysseus tries to embrace them. This is certainly not a concept of resurrection of the body, which we find in later Hebrew thought. But it is not yet the mature Platonic concept of bodiless souls either. It is more like our conception of ghosts.

One point of this description is to underline the value of honor. Odysseus had given up considerable pleasures and benefits to rescue his name and his honor. Needless to say, this book tells us that being dead, which will be his ultimate fate as well, is no fun either. Achilles says that he would rather be the poorest migrant worker or hireling on earth (this) than be the king of the dead (lines 489-91):

Nay, seek not to speak soothingly to me of death, glorious Odysseus. I should choose, so I might live on earth, to serve as the hireling of another, of some portionless man whose livelihood was but small, rather than to be lord over all the dead that have perished.²⁰

The cost of heroism is evident in Achilles’ envy of the living. Even the greatest hero on earth, in the world of the Odyssey, becomes nothing more than an ephemeral shade after death. And so now we know the enormous price of Odysseus’ decision to return to Ithaca and understand fully for the first time in the epic the enormous value of an Homeric hero’s honor. Returning home means giving up any chance of immortality and subjects the hero to the challenges of homecoming (nostos). The dangers of homecoming are symbolized by the fate of Agamemnon, who was murdered by his wife and her lover (see 11.385; 24.15-204 and elsewhere). However homecoming means that he will have the fame of having successfully defeated the Trojans and then return his kingdom to health, after rescuing his wife and assuring his son’s succession.

Unlike The Epic of Gilgamesh, the Odyssey is not really about immortality, or even about not having it. Immortality is only used as a way to underline the real subjects: heroism and fame. The Odyssey begins with immortality refused rather than immortality sought (as in The Gilgamesh Epic) so it is the binary opposite of The Gilgamesh Epic. But binary oppositions eventually tell the same story. The Odyssey is about heroically battling against political and domestic disorder, which in some wider sense is the point of The Gilgamesh Epic as well, because Gilgamesh was not a good king until he had been made human by the knowledge of his own inevitable death. Both dramas are played out on a stage in which the hero’s various possibilities for mortality and immortality are set against fame and explored.

There were other stories that valorized immortality in Greek culture. From one perspective, the Odyssey may be viewed as the lay of Telemachus’ maturation or even the epic of Penelope’s trial of patient waiting. But, for the Greeks, the title role goes to Odysseus, the fighting man. Both the stories of Gilgamesh and Odysseus center on male behavior, involving the idealization of male heroic, warlike values.

Demeter and Persephone, the Eleusinian Mysteries

JUST AS IN Mesopotamia, there was another mythic pattern in the Homeric world, which we can see in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter. This hymn is written in the same heroic verse as the Iliad and the Odyssey but it tells another story: the familiar story of the rape of Persephone by the god of the underworld, Pluto. It serves the same purpose in Greek literature that the myth of “the Descent of Inanna” serves in ancient Sumerian literature. In some way, we keep coming upon the same naked narrative structures, each time newly dressed in the interests of a new culture.

Persephone is abducted by Pluto, the Lord of the underworld, while she is gathering spring flowers, which come with the rains. Persephone’s mother Demeter wanders the world looking for her daughter; while she looks she neglects her duties and the natural world languishes throughout the summer, growing no grains or wheat, of which Demeter is the patron goddess. After she locates Persephone, she appeals to her Olympian siblings to release her, for none can actually enter the kingdom of death except Hermes, the messenger. The gods prevail on Pluto to allow her to leave. However, they discover that Persephone has eaten six pomegranate seeds. Because of this lapse, Persephone is forced to return to Pluto every year for six months. Again and again, we find that what keeps humanity from immortality is lack of circumspection while eating in front of the gods. Alimentation is definitely part of our mortal natures. The gods eat too (they like to eat sacrifices and embrosia), although they do not need to eat. Conversely, divinity can be achieved in the ascetic refusal of the pleasures of eating and generation, or at least, this will be the response of Christian monastics (see ch. 14).

During Persephone’s forced annual sojourn underground, Demeter mourns again for her daughter, and the earth is not fertile. When Persephone is back above ground, Demeter is happy to be reunited with her daughter so she causes the grain to grow, probably the winter months when grain grows in Greece and the Near East, though the Homeric Hymn to Demeter sometimes uses ambiguous language. When the grain grows, the flowers return as well (lines 450-55; 471-3).²¹ The grain harvest is in the spring, at the height of the flowering of plants and trees. In this respect, it is quite close to the story of the Descent of Inanna, which links her descent, not only with the periodic setting of the planet Venus, but also with the hot summer, when no grain grows but fruits ripen.

On one level the message is obvious enough. The story explains the change of seasons and the yearly harvest of grain. It also demonstrates the ritual efficacy of grief, libations, and sacrifices for the dead. It states that eating and drinking while in the underworld is what keeps the dead there, which is where they belong and should be. Those who bring the proper sacrifices and libations for the dead, allowing them to eat, never have troublesome ghosts around to torment them. It enforces that notion by telling the story of its polar opposite-a live person who wants to leave but cannot because she has eaten while there.

In its current literary form, the story explains the change of seasons by referring to marriage customs of the Hellenic world. Since marriages were arranged and daughters of the aristocracy were married quite young, they faced a parallel situation to Persephone, being forced to live with their husband’s family. If, as was often true, the husband lived at some distance, it was quite normal for them to see their own mothers only at long intervals.²²

Even once the social custom had been forgotten, the emotions within were rendered so effectively as to still touch readers. Both gods and humans know what it is to suffer the loss of loved ones. The motherly feelings which Demeter shows for her daughter are described in great detail. Repetition of the terminology “whether for deathless gods or mortal men” throughout the hymn emphasizes that although the story concerns the gods, the same grief for those underground unites us with Demeter. In this way, the imagined heavenly realm is made directly relevant to the human predicament. Even though they are both gods, and hence immortal, Demeter’s loss of her daughter is poignant because it is the same grief humans feel at death, to whose kingdom Persephone is abducted.

In the ancient world, the story was not only charming but tremendously portentious. It not only told the story of the annual wheat crop, especially important to the farm lands in the areas around Athens and the small city of Eleusis on the other side of the Gulf. It was also the basis of a very significant, secret religious rite at Eleusis, the so-called Eleusinian mysteries, to which first the most noble Athenians and then the aristocracy of the Hellenistic-Roman world sought admission. The imagery of the cult was dominated by notes of immortalization and rebirth.²³

Linked with the story is a subplot of how Demeter is prevented from making the mortal child Demophoön (other versions call him Triptolemus, a grain god) immortal because the mother Metaneira interrupted her while she was immersing the boy in a purifying fire. The mother seeing the child immersed in the fire and, falsely concluding that Demeter was killing her son, screamed her protest until the rite was prevented. This story may have important parallels to the Near Eastern cults in which a child was passed through fire, presumably as a human sacrifice. Of course, Israelite thought was outraged by such practices. If there was any hint of human sacrifice in the story, Homer ignores it. He only relates the possibility of immortalization.²⁴ This myth also may obliquely refer to the immolation of a corpse on the funeral pyre, one of the alternative ancient Greek customs for laying the dead to rest, so perhaps both originally linked proper burial with proper planting of crops, with similar results.

The Greek story of Demophoön’s failed magic-fire rite of immortalization also supports a religious cult. It presumably took place at Eleusis, providing an etiology for the great mystery rites enacted there in the fall, which linked the continuity of the cycle of sowing and reaping with human mortality and immortality.²⁵ There were also lesser rites celebrated in the spring, when trees were tended for their fruits. The connections between the agricultural rites and the story are suggestive, allowing us to conclude that the stories which we have are somehow the script for rites of immortalization that are still largely mysterious to us.

Since the Eleusinian mysteries were held in express secrecy and also held in the highest regard, no ancient initiate openly spoke of them and, consequently, no one today knows exactly what happened in the Eleusinian temple. Of the external rites and the pilgrimage from Athens to Eleusis, we have a great many details. But the secret rites-which were enacted within the telesterion, a giant rectangular, windowless building near a cave thought to be an entrance to the underworld-have still remained what they were designed to be, a mystery.

We do know that the the temple was completely unlike any other Greek temple that we recognize. There were no graceful columned facades with friezes, triglyphs, metopes, or pediments, no forest of columns enclosing the god’s sacred room and cult statue. In fact, there was only one opening of note in the walled structure, its door. The telesterion was designed for a secret, dark show, with a floor plan that suggests nothing so much as a contemporary movie theater.

There is some evidence that the initiation was a kind of “rave,” complete with rampant drug experiences. As part of the evening’s service, the initiates drank a barley brew called the kykeon, which might have been ritually prepared in such a way as to deliver a controlled dose of ergot poisoning and hence a significant psychedelic experience.²⁶

Aristotle emphasized that the initate does not learn (mathein) anything but is made to experience (pathein) the mysteries that change his or her state of mind.²⁷ There was a representation of the myth in some form and also the details of the episode of Demeter’s attempt to immortalize Demophoön at Eleusis. But exactly how the yearly return of the wheat and human immortality were related by the rite is unknown. On the other hand, those who had been initiated felt that they had conquered death and been reborn in some way. The mysteries guaranteed a better life and a different and probably better fate after death.²⁸ The Hymn to Demeter asserts that initiates were fortunate (olbioi) but that non-initiates did not have the same lot after death (lines 480-82):

Happy is he among men upon earth who has seen these mysteries; but he who is unititate and who has no part in them never has a lot of good things once he is dead, down in the darkness and gloom.

Plutarch, drawing on the mysteries, describes the soul at the moment of death:

The soul suffers an experience similar to those who celebrate great initiations…. Wandering astray in the beginning, tiresome walkings in circles, some frightening paths in darkness that lead nowhere; then immediately before the end all the terrible things, panic and shivering and sweat, and amazement. And then some wonderful light comes to meet you, pure regions and meadows are there to greet you, with sounds and dances and solemn, sacred words and holy views; and there the initiate, perfect by now, set free and loose from all bondage, walks about, crowned with a wreath, celebrating the festival together with the other sacred and pure people, and he looks down on the uninitiated, unpurified crowd in this world in mud and fog beneath his feet.²⁹

For Plutarch, then, the mystery religions anticipated death itself, transforming the initiate and turning death into a kind of rebirth. The mystery religion presents the soul with the opportunity to train for the trip to the afterlife and hence to defeat death.

M. L. Lord points out some interesting relationships between The Hymn to Demeter and the epics of Homer.³⁰ The hero Odysseus and the goddess Demeter undertake a journey in which they must encounter the world of death, to which they are strangers. In some versions of the myth, Demeter actually descends to Hades. In both cases, an absence causes disruption and near disaster. Both major figures must disguise themselves. Both succeed in their goals but both must accommodate to new circumstances. Demeter must accept her inability to immortalize humans and the partial loss of her daughter, compensated by the new rites at Eleusis which somehow transcend death, just as Odysseus must give up immortality and lose his crew in order to regain his family and kingdom.

But there surely is also a major contrast between the two stories. Odysseus gives up immortality for fame. On the other hand, the story of Demeter is linked to a seasonal, repeating pattern, in which immortality of some sort inheres to the proper initiation into the natural cycle of seasonal variation. It is an immortality that comes from instruction, from agrarian rhythm, from householding, and from the Greeks’ traditionally female-gendered values of natural repetition and continuity. In the end, however, immorality is available to a much wider group of humans, men and women, than is the older heroic ideal represented by Odysseus. Only a few men could hope for the fame which Odysseus and his compatriots received. But a much wider group of people (men and women) could take advantage of the initiation into the Eleusinian mysteries.

It is worth digressing for a few moments to see how broad the pattern provided by Demeter and Persephone is. In Greek myth, Persephone’s plight helps explain the alternation of seasons in Greece. A number of divinities in other societies are said to die or revive for similar reasons.³¹ The Norse pantheon was viewed as immortal for a time until the “twilight of the gods” when they will all die. “The Green Knight” of English courtly romance survives decapitation by Sir Gawain. The story suggests that this resurrection represents the agricultural year itself, with its repeated patterns of growth and decay. It is worthwhile emphasizing that the Eleusinian mysteries were only the most famous of this kind of cult. There were several others of great antiquity in Greece, including Orphic and Bacchic mysteries. In the Hellenistic period, a number of national religions of non-Greek countries package themselves for diaspora and become popular mysteries throughout the Roman world-Isis, Mithras, the great mother Cybele, Adonis, and many others. The religion of Christianity starts in a Jewish milieu but picks up the language of mystery religions when it enters the Hellenistic and Roman world in the second and third centuries.

Other Myths of Heroes

AFTER THE Homeric period, many different notions of immortality coexisted with the older notions remembered in legend and epic. The Greeks told stories of heroes like Hercules, Perseus, or Castor and Pollux who, after dying, mounted to heaven. One other exception to the universal call of Hades was the cult of heroes. Every culture has its heroes but Greek culture listed them among the gods, not among humans. They were, in a sense, humans who had been apotheosized, deified, changed into gods. They were immortalized not just by fame and legend but also by ascent to the stars and memorialized, most of all, by their hero cult.

Great heroes had ascended to become astral constellations: Herakles, Orion, Perseus, and many of the other characters named in their dramas. But there were many, many more heroes in ancient Greece. Much like saints, the heroes each had their shrine (herōon), or at least their own altar (bomos). They were powerful enough to be rewarded with sacrifices (enagizein), begged for their benefices, and worshiped as patron saints by an entire locality. It is on the basis of the hero cults as much as on the basis of “oriental notions of divine kingship” that the Roman Emperors sought out the title divus.

The Greek world also boasted of a number of renowned characters who were revived from death. The noble Alcestis, a paradigm for self-sacrificing wives, died for her husband and was offered resurrection to finish out her natural life. She was the subject of Euripedes’s famous drama. The first Greek casuality of the Trojan War, Protesilaus, was revivified to give a good example both to soldiers and good hope for loyal soldiers’ wives. All of these are legends turned to literature and more like resuscitations than actual resurrections because they do not live longer than their natural lives.

Both in the Hellenistic and Roman world, rulers eventually began to identify themselves with the gods, in some sense saying that their lives would emulate those of the heroes and achieve transcendent importance. We see this in the architecture of the great tombs, which came more and more to be modelled on temples, devoted to narrating the great deeds of the deceased as a hero. The Mausoleum, which enclosed the body of King Maussollos (ruled Caria from 377-353 BCE) of Halicarnassus (near Bodrum) and was accounted one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, is the most famous of these structures. It may not be the clearest example of a tomb emulating the architecture of a temple, except in its size and prominence in the city; but it may serve as the parade example of an ordinary ruler claiming heroic honors in death by erecting a monumental building to his memory.

The Afterlife in Orphic Myth and Pythagorean Philosophy

ARISTOTLE tells us (De anima, 410b, 28) that the Orphics taught that the soul enters the body from “the whole or the all” (to holon) as one breathes. After one dies, the soul abides in the upper atmosphere, as we learn from an inscription concerning the Athenians who perished at Potidea in 432 BCE: “The aether has received their souls, but their bo[dies the earth.]”³² The Orphics are still a very complex, scholarly mystery. Some doubt that Orphism is a real religion, considering it something of an ancient fraud. Others say it was early and profoundly influential.³³ There are evidences of thiasoi, voluntary associations, which were devoted to Orphism. Still, that term may be misleading, as both Jewish synagogues and Christian churches were perceived as thiasoi in the Roman Empire because they neither met in temples nor sacrificed but instead met for instruction, discussion, and common meals. Evidently, Orphism could be construed as the latter, rather like Judaism and Christianity.

The Orphics took their cue from the famous story of Orpheus, the lyre player of Thrace, who went down to Hades to bring back his dead wife Eurydice. He lost her again because he turned to look at her just before he exited Hades, whereupon she vanished forever. Originally the story was about human being’s inability to defeat death, and so we must be satisfied with beautiful lamentation, perhaps yet again reminding us of the value of commemoration for the expression of grief and its conclusion. The Orphics appear to have believed that they were to live in the moral purities taught by the group, and that there were special techniques for climbing to heaven after death, even if it had to be after many reincarnations.

The Orphics apparently believed that human beings were punished for each life before being reincarnated.³⁴ They placed gold leaves in the graves of the departed to help them through the various parts of the process:

Out of the pure I come, pure queen of them below,

And Eukles and Eubouleus, and other Gods and Daemons:

For I also avow me that I am of your blessed race

And I have paid the penalty for deeds unrighteous,

Whether it be that fate laid me low or the Gods immortal

• • •

I have flown out of the sorrowful weary Wheel;

I have passed with eager feet to the circle desired;

I have sunk beneath the bosom of Despoina, Queen of the

    Underworld.

And now I come a suppliant of Holy Phersephoneia

That of her grace she receive me to the seats of the

    Hallowed-

Happy and Blessed One, thou shalt be God instead of

    mortal.³⁵

The end of the poem promises that the deceased will be deified. The progress of the apotheosis suggests that they ascended to heaven to claim their divine status, unlike the Eleusinian mystery which sought its victory in Hades.

The Pythagoreans were also a group said to have conquered death. Pythagoreanism was founded by Pythagoras, a figure who lived somewhere between 750-500 BCE in Samos, an Island off the coast of Turkey, and then in Croton, a Greek colony in Calabria. Though he is the author of the famous theorem about the right triangle, little is known of Pythagoras himself; those who followed his teachings were encouraged to become mystics, not mathematicians. Pythagoreans developed an advanced religious doctrine combining theories of music, mathematics, diet, and ascetic practices. They too believed in the reincarnation and transmigration of souls and are often cited as the source of the Platonic doctrines. In Late Antiquity reports of Orphism and Pythagoreanism tend to coalesce. Scholars speak of the phenomenon as Neo-Pythagoreanism.

Stoics and Epicureans

MANY PHILOSOPHERS, and particularly the Epicureans, eschewed the doctrines of immortality preached by the Orphics and Pythagoreans. Epicurus based his philosophy on the atomic theory of Democritus. There was only one substance in the universe, matter, which was composed of unbreakable primal units-atoms. The opposite of matter was the void, vacuum. This corresponds with modern physics in a remarkable way, but the effects of the doctrine for the Greeks were religious and ethical.

“Void” is literally asomatos, or incorporeal. The soul was an atomic body or it was nothing, which even fits the Homeric evidence as well as any other theory does. It cannot be incorporeal, says Epicurus, in obvious direct contradiction to Plato.³⁶ The direct consequence of such a theory is that the person’s body and soul both, like all other material bodies, are destroyed with death. So Epicurus could deny the Homeric depiction of the afterlife as truth but give it credence as an allegory. The same evaluation met any doctrine of immortality of the soul preached by Platonists. He suggests that the fear of death is fruitless:

The most terrifying of evils, death, is nothing to us, since when we exist, death is not present. But when death is present, then we do not exist. It is nothing, then, either to the living or to the dead, since concerning the former it does not exist, and concerning the latter, they no longer exist (10.125)

Thus, the whole Epicurean tradition eschewed immortality. Lucretius, the Roman Epicurean, could comfort his followers by repeating that “death is nothing to us”:³⁷

Therefore death is nothing to us, it matters not one bit, since the nature of souls (or minds, animi) is understood to be mortal; and as in time past we felt no distress … so, when we shall no longer be … nothing at all will be able to happen to us…. (de rerum natura, 3.830)

Although the notion of retribution was not prominent in Greek thought, evidently it had a following, enough for Lucretius to take the time to dispute it. There is no punishment after death, he says, in good Epicurean fashion, because there is no afterlife at all. We are not sentient beings after death, since we do not exist at all; therefore, we cannot suffer or be punished. He further says that funerary practice is absurd. There is no reason to take care of the corpse, he says, since there is no sensory perception of it. It does not matter whether it is buried or not. Or, running the argument the other way around: were there any “consciousness” left in the corpse, it would feel just as bad by being roasted on a pyre or being suffocated with burial or being embalmed with pitch. He obviously ignores the health problems avoided by disposing of the dead. What he was interested in was notoriety for the extremity of his opinion in a world that universally felt denial of funeral rites to be an unconscionable insult and humiliation both to the grieving family and the departed.

In the same vein, Cicero makes his character Scipio affirm: sic habeto non esse te mortalem sed corpus hoc—“hold this to be true, not you are mortal but [you are] this body” (de re publica, 6, 26). Seneca too was simply unconcerned with death: mors est aut finis aut transitus “death is either the end or a transition” [hence it is of no importance to us] (Ep., 24, 65). These higher philosophical notions must have existed side by side with the more popular notions which Cicero, Lucretius, and Seneca wanted to dispute.

The Epicurean perspective on life was popular enough to be copied onto gravestones. The following Epicurean epitaph was so popular that it was often abbreviated: non fui, fui, non sum, non curo (I was not, I was, I am not, I don’t care [or: suffer]; sometimes also non eram, eram, non sum, non curo) or in its Greek form: I was not, and I came into being; I am not, and I do not suffer.³⁸ This attitude only emphasized the Epicureans’ defiance of all conventions, breaking with all civilities. But what they preached was serious: Death was a total end, the cessation of all thinking or feeling, therefore not to be feared.

The Stoics broke only with the Academy-Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle-in rejecting the value of meditation. They often found positions at court and in the homes of the wealthy. Although they believed that humanity was rational, for them reason was purely practical, showing us what the good life is. A vicious person is ruled by his passions, but a wise and virtuous person lives by reason and, hence, is free of slavery of the passions, a doctrine which Plato also emphasized strongly. As for life after death, the Stoics took an intermediary position between the strong denial of afterlife among the Epicureans and the complete acceptance of it among the Platonists. The stoics based their notion of the material cosmos on a divine fire called logos. This material suffused the universe with a reasoning power. Diogenes Laertius says that the Stoics believed:

[the soul] is both corporeal and survives death; but it is perishable, while that of the universe is imperishable, of which the [souls] of living beings are parts…. Cleanthes [believes] that all [souls] exist until the Conflagration, but Crysippus that only the souls of the wise [remain]. (7.156-7)

The Stoics did not decide the question; those who also inclined toward Platonism tended to accept that all souls would eventually be redeemed while the others did not. They did believe that the universe would be consumed in a conflagration, called the ekpyrosis. Panaetius in the second century BCE seems to have denied any survival at all while Posidonius, strongly influenced by Plato, accepted the preexistence of the soul and a postmortem ascent into the aether.³⁹

Plato

PLATO STOOD with the aristocracy, though he never tired of caricaturing their hypocrisies in socratic dialogue. The writings of Plato (430?-347 BCE), which originated during the period that Greece was the arch-enemy of Persia, settled the issue of the immortality of the soul by philosophical demonstration for the Platonists and for an enormous number of admirers afterward. Plato’s is the most influential philosophical system for religion in the West until the modern period. After an inital and telling phase of rejection, Platonism became the cornerstone of the Christian doctrine of immortality of the soul. Those pagans who followed his philosophy accepted the immortality of the soul in one form or another, though not necessarily its personal or individual survival. The most important documents in this context are Plato’s Phaedo and Apology. In the Apology, we have Socrates’ final defense and, in the Phaedo, we witness Socrates’ execution. Plato uses his literary invention of the figure of Socrates, based on his real-life teacher, to speak Platonic philosophy. In the Symposium, Plato gives us a picture of Socrates standing still in a trance for a day and a night (220c). This kind of behavior-as well as his penetrating glance, his quick wit, his constant presence in the marketplace, and his incisive mind-help explain why Socrates had the effect that he did on his contemporaries. What Platonism provided was a theory by which the soul could soar free of the body by contemplation and thus demonstrate that the soul survives its life in the body. How closely Plato’s Socrates resembles the Socrates of history, we cannot entirely tell.

In the final section of the Apology, Socrates asks what death is. His answer is that it is either annihilation or transmigration. If the former, then it is not to be feared because it will be a dreamless sleep. If the latter, then we shall go on to another life. In this he seems at one with the Epicureans and Stoics, except that he adds reincarnation of Pythagoras and Orpheus to the mix. But implicit in this statement is the realization that life is struggle and difficulty; dreamless sleep is preferable to a life of troubles and pain. If accurate, this can hardly be called a healthy agnosticism; it is in fact an evasion, showing unwillingness to discuss the topic seriously.

Plato’s Socrates goes much further in his affirmation of the transmigration of souls. Both in the Apology and in the Crito, Socrates has deliberately refused several chances to escape (an escape route planned with the tacit approval of his captors) to a disgraced life in exile rather than drink poison hemlock, which is the sentence decreed upon him by the court. By refusing the invitation to save himself, he becomes a kind of philosophical martyr to his own truth. The dialogue, then, is not just a discourse on the issue of the immortality of the soul but a disquisition on martyrdom and justice. Socrates’ behavior demonstrates his confidence in the demonstration. In some ways, Plato has already conceded the battle for the preservation of his body by refusing the ignominious choice of escape and discredit; in the Apology, he argues that one should concentrate all one’s efforts on the improvement of the soul over against the body (Apol. 30a-b). Likewise, in the Laws, Socrates states that the soul is completely superior to the body because the soul is the principle of life while the body merely a resemblance of it. In the Symposium, Diotima gives a clear presentation of the way to achieve postmortem survival. The mortal body seeks the immortal by reproduction or imitation (mimesis), a vain and impossible effort, though a necessary one; but the soul is already immortal (Symp. 207d, 208a-b). To become immortal one only needs realize one’s soul’s divine potential for ascent.

In the Phaedo, Socrates undertakes to demonstrate that the soul is immortal so that his execution is but a momentary inconvenience that will allow him to soon join the company of superior humans and gods. In some ways, he is just trying to prove what many Greeks must have thought was self-evident. The proof is so important to the history of the afterlife in the West that it is worth reviewing in more detail. Socrates begins his conversation with the observation that opposites seem to be related-like the pain of his bonds and the pleasure of their removal. No one can have both at once (60b). (This seemingly casual observation becomes the assumption on which all further arguments are built.) This leads to further musings on the relationship between life and death, and that ordinary persons are afraid of death because they are going from life to an unknown end. Actually, continues Socrates, when viewed properly, a philosopher should not be afraid of death because it is the opportunity to live as a soul without a body:

They are not aware of the way true philosophers are nearly dead, nor of the way they deserve to be, nor of the sort of death they deserve. (64b-c)⁴⁰

Indeed, a great deal can be learned by thinking about death. Philosophers are encouraged to spend their lives doing it. For Socrates, death itself is the separation of the body from the soul:

Is it anything else than the separation of the soul from the body? Do we believe that death is this, namely, that the body comes to be separated by itself apart from the soul, and the soul comes to be separated by itself apart from the body? Is death anything else than that? (64c)

At the same time, philosophers should, in this life, seek something very similar to death: separation from the bondage of the body and passions. A philosopher’s life is a kind of preparation for death because it teaches us to separate our selves from the desires of the body. Death, therefore, is part of the goal of philosophy because it removes us from the biggest source of distraction to the philosophical enterprise. Furthermore, a good philosopher has in some way already achieved his death, by totally subordinating his body to his soul, and, therefore, will never fear death:

In fact, Simmias, he said, those who practise philosophy in the right way are in training for dying and they fear death least of all men. Consider it from this point of view: if they are altogether estranged from the body and desire to have their soul by itself, would it not be quite absurd for them to be afraid and resentful when this happens? If they did not gladly set out for a place, where, on arrival, they may hope to attain that for which they had yearned during their lifetime, that is wisdom, and where they would be rid of the presence of that from which they are estranged? (Phaed. 67e-68a)

For Platonic philosophy, asceticism-eschewing of the extremes of pleasure-among the aristocracy is what trains the mind to philosophy and to a noble death. Socrates then tries to demonstrate that these observations taken from experience are accurate to the truths of existence but that behind them are several a priori assumptions about the soul. Socrates tries to demonstrate that these assumptions are provable. But the proofs are interwoven with a number of arguments taken from religious tradition and observation. Throughout the centuries there has been a noticeable lack of consensus about what his argument actually is. I will try one way to unpack the arguments.

Socrates begins by setting up a series of forced decisions. Life and death are opposites, just as sleep and waking are opposites. Just as waking comes from sleep and vice versa; so life comes from death and vice versa. This takes us back to Socrates’ original observation that pain and pleasure are opposites that come from each other. It will also become important in his last argument that the soul is the very thing which defines life; therefore, it cannot be its opposite. Furthermore, as he has said previously, living comes from death in the way wakefulness comes from sleep. Socrates posits as a fact of life, observed closely, that opposites come one from another.

Since life comes from non-life, Plato tries to show that there is something more basic than either, a substance that underlies the change in status, a “person” as it were, who can come awake and go to sleep, a “soul” who can be alive or dead. He posits this “person” or “self” or “soul” existed previously to our birth by suggesting that we know things that we have not learned. To demonstrate that the soul preexists individual lives, Socrates uses our notion of recollection, suggesting that the basic categories of space, time, equality and inequality and other values are innate, not learned, so that the soul must precede the body.

Throughout the middle dialogues and particularly in the Meno (81d-86b), Plato talks about the importance of recollection. We all have had the experience of remembering something that we have previously learned and forgotten. This experience Plato closely identifies with learning. To reason something out is the same as recollecting it for Philo. In the Meno, Socrates asks a slave boy to reason out a problem and repeatedly insists that he is not teaching him. The learning process comes from within himself. For this reason, Plato seems to feel that all learning is closely akin to recollecting. Since it is recollecting, we must have known it before. Thus recollecting is a far broader intellectual process for Plato than it usually is for us. In the Phaedo, this statement is allowed to stand for itself.

Let us move on to the crucial religious (and usually unnoticed) aspect of this proof: Plato grounds the immortality of the soul on intellectual activity. Plato says that memory of the basic categories of comparison-qualities like: “more than,” “less than,” and “equal to”-demonstrates that we have knowledge before our births and thus our soul precedes our body. Memory, an aspect of thinking, proves the preexistence of the soul.

We may doubt the validity of the argument. Aristotle, Plato’s own pupil, did, proclaiming that our intelligence is at birth a tabula rasa, to use the familiar Medieval, Aristotelian technical term. After all, Jean Piaget shows that we learn these categories, and not all that very early in our lives.⁴¹ Piaget holds that there is an age at which children think that there is “more” milk in the tall, thin glass than in the short, fat glass, even after they have been explicitly shown the milk pouring from one to another, making it perfectly obvious to any adult that the glasses contain the same amount of milk. Then, after a certain age, children do realize that the milk is “the same.” So it looks as though this is a learned quality, not an innate one. And Aristotle would certainly have brought this up, had he been privy to Piaget’s experiments. Of course, Plato might object by claiming that younger children really did know that the milk in the two containers were equal, they just did not have the vocabulary yet to express it, using “more” when they meant “taller.”

The point is not whether Plato was correct in his logical steps or his epistemology. The point is that the proof of immortality of the soul depends, right at this crucial point very pregnantly, on an act of thinking. It is a particular mentition-“recollection,” anamnesis, in Greek-which indissolubly links immortality of the soul with our internal psychological “selves.” This has the effect of turning thinking into a transcendent act.

Why Plato included so many thinking processes under the topic of “recollection” is not entirely clear but he was followed in some ways by his brightest student, Aristotle. Perhaps it is because the Greek word anamimneskesthai, translated as “to recollect,” is the passive form of the verb “to remind” modified with the prepositional prefix ana-, meaning “again.” “To recollect,” anamimneskesthai, literally means “to be reminded again” in Greek, though neither “to remember” nor “to recollect” in English contain this connotation. Recollection, Plato says, involves “one thing putting you in mind of another” (Phaed. 73c-74d), which is understandable if the connotation of the verb is “to be reminded again” but relatively distant from the simple meaning of the English verbs “remember” or “recollect.”⁴²

Plato included many different mental faculties in his terminology for recollection. He was not just offering a proof of immortality. He was, at the same time, describing a whole new way to define the self, as a consistent, recollecting person with a personal history of memories. In the end, Plato essentially linked thinking with our selves and used it to demonstrate that the act of thinking is what grounds the immortality of the soul.

This is a quite different notion than any idea of immortality we have so far investigated. Immortality or the lack of it in myth was always linked to the performance of heroic, cultic, or ritual actions in society. It was sought or denied as part of a hero’s quest. Immortality was linked to the body by the Persians, as it is by apocalyptic Jews who articulate resurrection of the body. But this is the first time in history that it is explicitly linked with a mental act. What Plato called “recollection” includes a great many mental processes which we in English might call discovery, reasoning, and logical analysis.⁴³

Plato’s argument is even more striking when we realize that he surely knew the Greek myth that the soul forgets everything upon crossing the river Lethe on its way to be born. Indeed, the word for “truth” (alētheia) in Greek was frequently glossed as “without forgetting” (as a folk etymology). Plato did not feel that the soul forgot everything as that would destroy his demonstration of its preexistence of the body. Plato was essentially saying that it is our mentation which survives death, no matter how many other faculties the soul may be said to have.

Plato was not exactly saying that our consciousness (in the modern sense of the word) makes us immortal or even that consciousness itself is worth preserving. The focus on consciousness in the West is a peculiarly modern, philosophical issue. Plato himself was not so impressed with the ordinary sense of consciousness as a continuous mental monitoring, at least as compared with other kinds of mental actions. He thought of consciousness as just the background noise of our significant mental life, just the awareness that our souls are combined with matter, the awareness that we are “awake” or the monitor is “on,” so to speak. That was not a high-order process for Plato. Rather it is something everyone has with or without education or training or virtue, something to be left behind gladly when our souls escape from their bodily imprisonment. Plato rather connected rationality with meditation (both in the sense of concentration and in the sense of entering an altered state of consciousness) as well as with practical reason and suggested that there was a philosophical value in meditation and high-order mentation.

The act of “recollecting,” a necessary predecessor to abstract thinking, was part of the process of forming ideas and gaining knowledge according to Plato. That was a symptom of the soul’s immortality, the very process that underlined why the soul had to be immortal. Thus, the soul’s education was what made for personal completion; it needed to be developed to its most refined potential. We might think of the process of thinking as one of conceiving ideas. Of all the possible ideas, the idea of conceiving the self was the most important. In this sense we can define the goal of thinking, finally, to be critical “self-consciousness.” This is a high-order mentation both for Plato and for Aristotle. Indeed, it was Aristotle who first talked about the mind thinking itself and thinking of the Good, and the Good, in turn, as a mind thinking of all things, to which our own minds are analogous in their limited and passive way. Furthermore, Plato felt that personal deportment should be governed by what made the intellectual life easiest to accomplish.

This new definition of immortality is an enormous change from Greek tradition. Odysseus’ goal was to build fame for himself as a military hero and ruler. To this end, he could fight, lie, cheat, womanize, murder, and otherwise carry on-all for the purpose of achieving a good homecoming and a balanced state. But Plato’s immortality could be sought and won by anyone who developed his or her powers of thought, not just the heroic man of arms. In order to achieve the goal, the intellectual adventurer would have to promote moderation in behavior, deportment, and ethics-an enormous change from the life that Odysseus lived.

Plato’s immortality was open to all but it was not democratic in the sense that everyone had an equal right to achieve it. Plato’s notion was, in fact, elitist because it valorized intellectual life above every other kind of human activity as far as achieving the soul’s ultimate purpose. Not everyone could achieve an intellectual life; one needed leisure and long years of education to follow the philosophical life which Plato recommended. Yet, by comparison to the goals outlined by Homer, the life of the intellectual was available to many. Though Plato took the immortality of the soul seriously, we can turn his perception around and note that to make the higher faculties of the soul immortal was also to make an important claim about the intellectual elite in the society, to valorize intellectuality as transcendently important. It was certainly a first step in defining the “self” in Western philosophy and altogether necessary for understanding the orgy of self-consciousness that has dominated Western philosophy in the modern period.

Plato’s Forms

THE NEXT STEP in the proof of the immortality of the soul depends on Plato’s notion that there are entities called the “forms” or “ideas” of all the material bodies on earth:

If those realities we are always talking about exist, the Beautiful and the Good and all that kind of reality, and we refer all the things we perceive to that reality, discovering that it existed before and is ours, and we compare these things with it, then, just as they exist, so our soul must exist before we are born. If these realities do not exist, then this argument is altogether futile. Is this the position, that there is an equal necessity for those realities to exist, and for our souls to exist before we were born? If the former do not exist, neither do the latter? (Phaed. 77d-e)

Socrates does not try to demonstrate the forms here. He merely suggests that if the soul exists, it must be one of the forms or ideas. It would follow that what Socrates attempted to demonstrate for the soul would be true for all of the forms, though that is not explicitly discussed. But Socrates was not purposely excluding arguments. He attempted to address a further, plaguing issue: Perhaps souls do exist but although they preexist our bodies, they do not continue to exist after death or after a series of lives. It is also possible that the soul is a harmony, not a being in itself but a relationship between the parts, what we would today call an emergent property, which would die with the body and even devolve prior to demise. This latter possibility, refuted by Socrates, comes rather close to modern notions of the self.

Socrates still needed to demonstrate that the soul does not dissolve after death or, stranger yet, wear out after having inhabited several bodies. To demonstrate that the soul is indissoluble at death, just as he previously demonstrated that it preexists birth, Socrates again had to return to the issue of the forms-the good, the beautiful, and so forth (Phaed. 100b). Socrates distinguishes between the properties and the form of a thing by showing that “cold” is not the same as the “snow,” nor “heat” as the “fire.” He then defined the soul as the thing that brings life to a person, in total opposition of death (Phaed. 105d).

Socrates then took the next step, based on an observation accepted at the very beginning of the dialogue: He states that life and death come from the same thing and follow each other but cannot exist in the same object at the same time. He then suggested the solution to the conundrum: What makes something alive is the presence of a soul; what kills it is the departure of the soul. This is precisely analogous to claiming that snow is cold because it contains a substance called cold and fire is hot because it contains a substance called heat, and that these substances are separable from the objects that host them. Soul and life are different names for the same essence. The soul itself remains alive, indeed must remain alive by definition, because it is the life and has already been proven both to precede the body and outlive it.

This was not so much a logical proof as an analogy, the mental realization of a kind of symmetry. If Plato’s analysis of objects and attributes was wrong, then his proof fails. Following this logic, we wind up with a definition of soul as the form or idea of life, something which is immortal by definition and depends on the prior assumption that the forms or ideas of everything on earth are the immortal plans for producing them.

The Platonic soul that survives death is not a “personal” soul in our modern sense of the word. Aristotle seemed even less sure that the immortal aspects of the soul contain our “personality.” The personalization of the soul is a hypothesis for a later period-for Plotinus and especially Augustine (see ch. 14). Imperfect though the proof may be, it was on this demonstration that Plato’s Socrates staked his life. In a way, he was a martyr for the notion of the immortal soul. And, indeed, the Western notion of the soul, even as mediated by Christianity, eventually depended on this dialogue of Plato, with all its attendant strengths and weaknesses.

There are, however, some aspects of the proof, which Christianity has understandably repressed. Socrates suggested that we do not live but once; instead, we have several “incarnations” to learn how to behave in such a way as to perfect our mental processes. Only when we successfully learn how to perfect the faculties of the soul so that we understand the separation of the soul from the body are we granted rest from reincarnation-a notion that sounds very much like the ideas of karma, samsara, and moksha, religious insights of another great Indo-European civilization, India.

For Socrates, humans can even be reincarnated as animals: “Those, for example, who have carelessly practiced gluttony, violence, and drunkenness are likely to join the company of donkeys or of similar animals” (81e). Surely Apuleius’ Metamorphosis, which relates such a transformation in detail, was partly inspired by these lines. Almost all Church Fathers (excepting Origen and Gregory of Nyssa) denied that the soul has more than one earthly life to live because it seemed to blunt individual moral responsibility for any specific action.

The issue of justice is very much the central concern of the last part of the Phaedo. For Socrates, proper thinking and behavior creates its own reward; improper thinking and behavior creates its own punishment. Only by proper thinking can one gain the reward-which is stopping the chain of the soul’s continual rebirths into this world. In a sense, life was considered punishment, full of pain and suffering, compared eternally to living as a disembodied soul (which can suffer no pain) in the afterlife. So the process of self-perfection implies a justice that operates as a pure mechanism of nature-a moral universe, in which human reward and punishment are built in, very like karma. “Metempsychosis,” the doctrine of the transmigration of the soul from body to body, is obviously the result of penalties in past lives which must be reconciled for the soul to find rest in the Elysian fields. It does not imply suffering after death. Indeed, Plato appeared to be somewhat ambivalent on the notion of retribution. In the Republic, Plato represents a kind of Orphic doctrine of retribution by means of Adeimantus:

Musaeus and his son (Eumolpus) endow the just with gifts from heaven of an even more spirited sort. They take the righteous to another world and provide them with a banquet of the saints, where they sit for all time drinking with garlands on their heads, as if virtue could not be more nobly rewarded than by an eternity of intoxication…. When they have sung the praises of justice in that strain, with more to the same effect, they proceed to plunge the sinners and unrighteous men into a sort of mud-pool in the other world, and they set them to carry water in a sieve. (2.363 c-d)⁴⁴

Although this is a satire on the teaching of Musaeus and Eumolpus, who were the legendary teachers of Orphism, one must not think that Plato completely denied any rewards and punishments after death. To the contrary, he suggests that justice and retribution do exist, though he can not demonstrate it with the same self-assurance as he achieves in proving the immortality of the soul. The process of the soul’s perfection is itself a reward while reincarnation is punishment enough. Rather, the particularly graphic notion of being immersed in mud seems to be more like what Plato thought about life in this world.

At the end of the Phaedo, Socrates narrates his own understanding of how humans can come to this wider perspective on life, through a heavenly ascent to the outer limit of our world:

Our experience is the same: living in a certain hollow of the earth, we believe that we live upon its surface; the air we call the heaven, as if the stars made their way through it; this too is the same; because of our weakness and slowness we are not able to make our way to the upper limit of the air; if anyone got to this upper limit, if anyone came to it or reached it on wings and his head rose above it, then just as fish on rising from the sea see things in our region, he would see things there and, if his nature could endure to contemplate them, he would know that there is the true heaven, the true light and the true earth, for the earth here, these stones and the whole region, are spoiled and eaten away, just as things in the sea are by the salt water. (109d-e)

His description is more apt than he could possibly have imagined, as we would be like fish out of water if we were to but stick our heads above the tiny precious oxygenated atmosphere in which we live. We would see worlds that were until lately beyond our imaginings; but they would impress us with the value of our endangered, tiny environment in which we live our precarious existence, no bigger than a speck of dust when placed in astronomical distances that characterize our universe. This was not what Plato saw when he rose to these heights. From the perspective of the eternal heavens where the ideas reside, the corruptible earth is a puny failure and deserves nothing but our fond farewell. Indeed, the Hellenistic world was convinced that the hereafter would be far happier than the world we live in. In this, it was rather closer to what the mass of humanity has believed about our short and painful lives over the millennia.

Actually many Greeks came to believe that life was not worth the effort, a sentiment more poignant when we realize it was the aristocracy with their rare and exquisite leisure who said this, not the poor serf or slave whose life was constant drudgery. Only the privileged have privilege of being bored. Sophocles proclaimed that it is best never to have lived:

Never to have been born at all:

None can conceive a loftier thought!

And second-best is this: Once born,

Quickly to return to the dust. (Oedipus at Colonus, 1218ff.)

Though this was a cynical statement of a man whose life had been a terrible trial, it was not his final thoughts on mortality, it came to fit the mood of late antiquity more and more. Plato felt that the soul would be better off in the realm of the ideas than on this imperfect earth, with all its tribulation. In the Phaedrus, Plato suggested that humans are reincarnated for the purposes of discipline, askesis, in order to purify the soul by affliction. In the Symposium, Plato described the process of ascent as one of intellection, learning by progressive stages of abstraction, to appreciate abstract good, in and of itself. By this process of intellection, and the ascetic processes necessary to perfect it, the soul ascends to heaven again and, with luck, never has to be reincarnated again. All of this presumes that life is a vale of tears to be transcended. Even in the most comfortable life we are still confronted with death, separation from loved ones, un-happiness, and unfulfillment.

After Plato, the Greek world took the notion that the isles of the blessed are in the sky seriously. If the soul is immortal, it must return to the immortal realm. When Socrates says his famous last words: “Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius, make this offering to him and do not forget,” he was stating that he was healed from the sickness of life; he needed to give a thank-offering to the god of health for having been healed. True health lies in correctly grooming the deathless soul, not in overly coddling the hapless body. Physical education was important only to maintain a neat house for the soul.

According to Plato, there is a kind of judgment of the dead, as he relates in the Phaedrus. Souls are first incarnated, and:

… on the termination of their first life, brought to trial; and, according to their sentence, some go to the prison-houses beneath the earth, to suffer for their sins, while others, by virtue of their trial, are borne lightly upwards to some celestial spot, where they pass their days in the manner worthy of the life they have lived in their mortal form. But in the thousandth year both divisions come back again to share and choose their second life, and they select that which they severally please. And then it is that a human soul passes into the life of a beast, and from a beast who was once a man the soul comes back into a man again. For the soul which has never seen the truth at all can never enter into the human form; it being a necessary condition of a man that he should apprehend according to that which is called the generic form, which, proceeding from a variety of perceptions, is by reflection combined into unity. And this is nothing more or less than a recollection of those things which in time past our soul beheld when it travelled in the company of the gods, and looking high over what we now can see, lifted up its head into the region of eternal essence. (249)

Plato gives the notion of judgment after death an enormous boost. Evidently, Plato was more positively impressed with Orphism than he suggests in his satire in the Republic. But note how much the issue of theodicy underlies his imaginative reconstruction. Just as the Persians used dualism to moralize their social universe into a cosmic ethical struggle, so too Plato moralized the universe by coding matter and form as antithetical opposites. However, by valorizing the body as the principle of identity, the Persians were affirming that sexuality and other bodily pleasures were of primary importance in this world, as well as the next. The Platonists, for their part, took the converse perspective. They said that sexuality is something to be left behind in death and ignored as much as was prudent during life, as a way of perfecting the mind for its higher purposes. Perhaps Plato said this as a corrective to the immense sexuality in which Plato’s world was drenched, as if to say that Plato only stressed “the golden mean.” Later Platonists became sure that all contact with sexuality was bad for the meditative life. Sexuality’s negative effects on ethics became more and more palpable until asceticism was the only intelligent lifestyle. But that was long after Plato.

Plato was no democrat, but ironically the Platonic innovation on the conception of afterlife tended to democratize the afterlife even more. Instead of the rare heroic term of short mortal fame, followed by eternal exile in Hades, as was sought by Odysseus, each person has immortality in his grasp by intellectual development. Everyone’s soul is, by following the intellectual life, making progress toward the goal of remaining in elysium, and can take several lifetimes to do it if necessary. Each life contributes to that progress. As we have seen, certain philosophically enlightened individuals could reduce the cycle of rebirths by living well as philosophers. But we all must take the same road to arrive at the same heavenly bliss. This, no doubt, would have surprised Socrates somewhat, as he had nothing but contempt for Athenian democracy. Evidently, they were opposed to the educated elite that he favored. Ultimately, this opposition may have cost him his life, though it was something he donated willingly.

It is precisely the problem of theodicy that occupies first place in the story of Er, the Pamphylian, mentioned in the Republic. Er proves the truth of Socrates’ reasoning by personal experience because he returned alive after twelve days of death and reports on the fortunes of souls in the hereafter.

“It is not, let me tell you,” said I, “The tale to Alcinous told that I shall unfold, but the tale of a warrior bold, Er, the son of Armenius, by race a Pamphylian. He once upon a time was slain in battle and when the corpses were taken up on the tenth day already decayed, was found intact, and having been brought home, at the moment of his funeral, on the twelfth day, as he lay upon the pyre, revived, and after coming to life related what, he said he had seen in the world beyond.” (Resp. 10.614 Bff.)⁴⁵

Er then relates how he was chosen to be the messenger (angelos) to humanity to tell us what awaits in the other world. The story which he relates is one of punishments and rewards for those unrequited during their own life-those who had committed great wrongs were condemned to ten times the punishment in measures of one hundred years. The structure of this heavenly journey is clear. Those punished go into the earth. Those rewarded go to heaven, just as we have come to believe in the West. The central figure, Er, crossed from the lower realm to the higher one and returned to tell us that the universe conforms to just, equable rules. It is almost like an urban renewal project. Having been moved out of Hades and relocated in the heavens, the previous location of the afterlife is renovated as the abode of the sinful.

The story confirms that justice exists in the universe by claiming that the voyage is parallel to the one which the soul will take at death. Its purpose is to warn men of the implications of their actions upon the earth and exhort them to righteousness. One of the dominant motifs is that of the agōn, the athletic contest. The soul struggles in life as in athletic games and thereafter receives the trophy of astral afterlife as a reward for its victory. Plato seemingly had his doubts about the details of such tales but ended with this gentle correction:

But if we are guided by me we shall believe that the soul is immortal and capable of enduring all extremes of good and evil, and so we shall hold ever to the upward way and pursue righteousness with wisdom always and ever.” (Resp. 10.620e)

The soul’s salvation for Plato was quintessentially an individual process. The soul is on an individual mission to purify itself. It travels through many bodies and cleanses itself from the impurities it gathers in human society. The intellectual achievement of the redemption of the soul is an individual process, though it may find what little solace adheres to life in a community of like-minded individuals. This contrasts quite strongly with the communal and sectarian nature of resurrection of the body in its Iranian and Jewish versions.

Aristotle on the Afterlife

ALTHOUGH Aristotle accepted Plato’s valorization of nous, mind, he subjected Plato’s thought to the most penetrating criticism. For Aristotle all philosophical problems could be best understood from the point of view of epistemology, the science of thinking. “All men by nature desire to know” is the first sentence of Metaphysics; everything flows from this perception. Like Plato, Aristotle believed the real is the intelligble, the intelligible real. But he offered an important qualification. The rational soul, Aristotle noted, does not discover an alien world when it apprehends anything. Rather it comes into possession of itself. Knowledge comes to us, first of all, from our own observations, from our senses. The process of thinking (noesis), and even more so scientific thinking (epistēmē), is nothing more than perceiving the form of the object from the object itself.

The mind (nous), then, must be extracting the form of an object from the mind’s sense perceptions of the object. If that is so, there need not be a separate world of forms to explain our thinking. The form is the principle or underlying order that we perceive in something. For Aristotle, Plato had separated the forms from sensible things too sharply, giving rise to a dubious sense of a separate metaphysical world of ideas. Though our souls know (as opposed to perceive) only ideas, the world in which the ideas subsist is logically the mind. Aristotle therefore could say that the soul is a perfect receptivity; the later Latin is tabula rasa, an empty slate. If so, there is nothing in the soul originally to recollect.

It remains to speak about recollecting. First, then, one must take as being the case all that is true in the essays. For recollection is neither the recovery nor the acquisition of memory. For when someone first learns or experiences something, he does not recover any memory, since none has preceded. Nor does he acquire memory from the start, for once the state or affection has been produced within a person, then there is memory. (Mem. rem. 451a, 18)⁴⁶

Aristotelian philosophy, then, does not support Plato’s proof for the immortality of the soul.

Aristotle directly criticized the theory that “learning” is “recollection” in the Prior Analytics (67a, 8-27) and the Posterior Analytics (71a, 30-71b, 8). His understanding of recollection is confined to the special case of learning, namely relearning (Mem. rem.451a, 21-5). For Aristotle this mental operation is closer to associating one idea with another, as when one idea reminds us of another, which is exactly what we would expect, given the implication of the word in Greek.⁴⁷

To a certain extent Aristotle continued Plato’s dualism. In his De Anima, for example, Aristotle assents to a number of Plato’s notions. The body is to the mind as matter is to form. The soul is still the principle of life. It is, however, inseparable from the body as bodies are primary and their forms or ideas are secondary, to be perceived by us by our senses. The body provides a context for the intellect to develop. The mind has the potentiality of thought, and perception turns it to actuality. The nous, the intelligence, is therefore the process of turning the potentiality of the mind into actuality. Aristotle’s notion of potentiality and actuality is another innovation.

The object also has primary actuality in the world. This, for Aristotle, was the same as saying that the principle of the perceived thing comes to subsist in the person’s intellect because it existed elsewhere initially. The idea of the object is the same as the object as it resides in the mind; it is the same as the essence of the object, which only exists in the object itself. Since actuality is ranked higher than potentiality, actual knowledge must first subsist in an active intellect, which is a divine not a human quality.

As a result, Aristotle had a clearer idea of what individuality is but, by the same token, a healthier skepticism about what immortality could mean for any specific individual. We participate in divine processes when we think, so thinking demonstrates that there is intellect in the world. But that does not mean we are immortal. And thus, Aristotle’s philosophy is easier for demonstrating the existence of a God; but Plato is easier for demonstrating the immortality of the soul.

That virtually assures that later religious commentators would combine Aristotelian with Platonic thinking and come up with a system that was friendly to the notions of God and immortality. The meaning of “Active Intellect” puzzled Aristotelian commentators for a millennium. Aristotle did not offer a precise definition. Many commentators, such as Alexander of Aphrodisias (flor. ca. 220 CE), thought that the Active Intellect was God. If not God, it would have to be one of a series of God’s emanations. Other religious, medieval commentators—Al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, and Maimonides—thought that the Active Intellect was the angelic intelligence that governed the sublunar sphere from the moon, and that, therefore, it was the Active Intellect which also conveyed prophecy (now an intellectual process) to the true prophets. But, for Aristotle, the Unmoved Mover was named god. The nous remained divine in a more extended sense.

For one thing, how the extramental Active Intellect could relate to the active aspect of thinking is not clear. Aristotle, for instance, seems to have thought that memory and loving and hating perish at death. Although a person’s acquired intellect survives death, memory does not (it inheres to the body), and therefore the soul retains nothing personal of its existence in matter. Immortality is a property of the Active Intellect, mind (nous) itself, which is a transcendant value. Perhaps then, Aristotle regarded the Active Intellect as a principle which is identical in all humanity, an Intelligence that enters into an individual and functions within him or her, and that survives the death of the individual. The individual soul does not survive in personal form.⁴⁸

Nous had a kind of divinity for Aristotle and, perhaps, it is equivalent to the Unmoved Mover, as it is a perfect, active, actual intelligence, in contrast to our purely personal, receptive, imperfect one. While the soul and its intelligence are immortal and transcendent and while we can return to our divine source in the nous, personal immortality is even less possible in the Aristotelian system than in the Platonic one. It is probably this coldness with regard to our individual chances for a beatific afterlife that explains the relative unpopularity of the Aristotelian system in Hellenistic philosophy. It was hard for it to compete with the florid metaphysical world of middle and late Platonism, which found its way into a variety of religious systems in late Antiquity and to a considerable degree served as the basis of the philosophical account of religion in the West until the Enlightenment.

At first all the West knew of Aristotle was what had been absorbed into Middle and Neoplatonism. When finally, Western philosophy encountered Aristotelianism, it first took from it the intellectually more complete physics of Aristotle, with its geocentric view of the world. It was science (and as it turns out incorrect science), not religion, that could not do without Aristotle’s sharp powers of observation and his account of the thinking process. As the indigestible parts of Aristotelianism belatedly entered religion, religion itself had to find a way to adjust. But that adjustment did not actively begin until the ninth century with the great medieval philosophers: Al-Farabi (870-950 CE), Ibn Sina (980-1037 CE), followed by Ibn Rushd (1126-98 CE), Maimonides (1135-1204 CE), and Aquinas (1225-1274 CE).

From Ascent to Instrument of the State

IN THE DREAM OF SCIPIO,⁴⁹ Cicero reflects on the values of the Republic and its defenders. Scipio the Elder (Africanus) returns to tell his younger namesake the future and ultimate rewards of the state. In his dream, Scipio is lifted high above the earth, where he finds out about the cosmos and the ultimate disposition of souls. Just as Socrates suggested, the dead are surely alive. It is we on earth who are really dead (Resp. 6.14). Platonism had thoroughly penetrated the philosophy of late Antiquity. And so had patriotism for the Republic. Those who support the state have special rewards. The narration continues with a description of the organization of the universe in its spheres and constellations. The purpose of the heavenly trip was not merely the revelation of the structure of the universe, now clearly described as spheres within spheres, but the inculcation of values that preserved the Republic:

And the noblest concerns are those assumed for the safety of your country; a soul stirred and trained by these pursuits will have a quicker flight to this abode, its own home; and this will be the faster, if even now, while imprisoned in the body, it reaches out and by contemplating what is beyond itself, detaches itself as much as possible from the body. (6.26)

Even as Cicero strove to preserve the values and government that had made a Republic possible, so too, the ascension and heavenly journey motif was brought into the debate about the correct government of the empire.

Before the emperors could arrogate for themselves the complete trappings of divinity, the story of the ascension of Romulus, a lawgiver and sole ruler, had to be refashioned to serve as a model for Julius, the second founder of Rome-thus both honoring Caesar and forming the mythical basis of the emperor’s right to rule:

There, Romulus was giving his friendly laws to the citizens, and Mars caught Ilia’s son up. His mortal body became thin, dissolving in the air, as a lead pellet shot by a broad sling will melt in the sky. Suddenly a beautiful form more worthy of the high couches (of the gods), is the form of Quirinus, who is now wearing a sacred robe.⁵⁰

Livy discusses Romulus’ death and the rumors of it in terms reminiscent of the death of Julius Caesar:

Then at first a few, then all, joyfully declared Romulus, the king and father of the city of Rome, to be a god, the son of god. They asked him with prayers for peace; so that he would always be pleased to wish favor for his children. I believe there were some even then who argued secretly that the king had been torn apart by the hands of the senators. Indeed, this rumor spread also, but very obscurely; the other version was enchanced by men’s admiration for Romulus and their panic. (bk. 1, 16)⁵¹

This is a veiled reference to the assassination of Julius Caesar. But the rumors are calmed by the ascension story:

Further, the stratagem of one man is said to have added to the credibility of the story. For, when the citizens were disturbed by the loss of the king and were hostile toward the senators, Julius Proculus as it is told, a man of repute, (at least he was the author of this important thing) addressed the assembly. ‘Romulus, Quirites,’ he said, ‘the father of this city, at the first light of this day, descended from the sky and clearly showed himself to me. While I was awed with holy fright, I stood reverently before him asking in prayer that I might look at him without sin.’ ‘Go,’ he said, ‘announce to the Romans that Heaven wishes that my Rome shall be the capital of the earth; therefore, they shall cultivate the military; they and their descendants shall know that no human might can resist Roman arms.’ He said this and went on high. It is a great marvel what credence was generated by the man’s tale, and how the loss of Romulus, for which the common people and the army grieved, was assuaged by the belief in his immortality. (1.16)

Livy’s ironic attitude points out the value of the heavenly journey as a proof of immortality and as mythical underpinning of the developing Roman imperial system.

Vergil

VERGIL EXPLICITLY copies the form of the Odyssey, but it is a Platonic universe that he describes in his Nekyia, his séance to the underworld. In Book 6 of the Aeneid, pious Aeneas visits the dead, just as crafty Odysseus had before him in book 11 of the Odyssey.The major events of Odysseus’ journey are reenacted in Aeneas’ own journey. The readers were obviously familiar with what Odysseus saw in the land of the dead, but on the issue of life after death, and many other things, Vergil has made some revealing improvements on Homer.

Vergil’s depiction of the underworld is remarkable in that it involves the kind of reward and punishment characteristic of the Platonic worldview. Under the tutelage of the Cumean Sibyl, the equivalent of Odysseus’ Circe, Aeneas sets out on a guided tour of Hades. In front of him is the golden bough which Proserpine (Greek: Persephone) favors. Vergil’s reference to Proserpine is appropriate, given the topic which he intends to pursue: death and its transcendence.

In Vergil’s underworld, dead infants must stay outside the gates, constantly raising their shrill and plaintive cries; but they are not subject to any special torments. Inside the gates, by contrast, Minos presides over a court of the silent (silentum concilliumque vocat), ostensibly dispensing final justice (Aen. 6.432). Vergil’s version of the realms of Hades are divided by ethical categories and are completely missing from Homer.

Phoenician Dido, whom Aeneas had to abandon in order to fulfill his Roman destiny, is but one of the tragic horde of the indolent and unmanly whom unyielding love has consumed to cruel wasting (quos durus amor crudeli tabe peredit, 6.442). The parallel with Odysseus’ dalliance with Calypso and Circe is clearly the model for this incident. This is why Dante, literally as well as figuratively following the poet Vergil in his Divine Comedy, compassionately puts Paolo and Francesca at the highest rank of the “inferno.” But compassion is not necessarily why Vergil has placed Dido where she is. As the fate of Dido shows, not Plato’s transcendent love but stern Roman duty to the state is the highest good in this Roman vision of heaven. Dido represents both Rome’s ancient enemy, Carthage, and a more recent one, Egypt.

No doubt Vergil had Antony and Cleopatra’s recent bad example in mind when he wrote that Aeneas must forsake the beautiful African temptress to build the city of Rome. That is what Antony and Cleopatra’s enemy Octavius Augustus would have had Antony do. In Octavius’ estimation, Antony should have left his Egyptian whore and return to his rightful wife, Octavius’ own sister. After Octavius defeated Antony and Cleopatra to secure the Roman republic for himself in 31 BCE, he assumed the title Augustus and became Vergil’s patron. Likewise, in this Roman view of heaven, the heroes of the Roman state postpone present rewards to become the inhabitants of the Elysian fields (6.630ff.).

Cleopatra does not appear by name in Vergil’s Aeneid. On the other hand, Vergil’s benefactor Octavius Augustus Caesar, the most important person who opposed Cleopatra’s designs, can hardly have been more pleased at Vergil’s depiction of Dido’s fiery torture in the Aeneid. It neutralized Cleopatra’s victory by suicide over Octavius. Unlike Antony, after Aeneas enjoys the pleasures of Dido’s North African realm, he returns to his pious duties to help found Rome, leaving Dido to perish out of love: “and for you my honor is gone and that good name that once was mine, my only claim to reach the stars” (4.430-32; see also 620-25).⁵² The reference would have been clear as day to Vergil’s contemporaries: Dido is a stand-in for Cleopatra; Aeneas provides the good Roman example that Antony should have followed. Shakespeare follows suit, with his own twist, as we shall see.

Aeneas plants the golden bough in the Elysian Fields, having come through the underworld to a land of green pastures and brighter light: “Here an ampler ether clothes the meads with purple light, and they know their own sun and stars” (largior hic campos aether et lumine vestit purpureo, solemque suum, sua sidera norunt, 6.637) This is, first of all, an aristocratic place where the great soldiers of the Roman state continue their practice of arms, while the priests, bards, and others who ennobled Roman life are rewarded with eternal leisure. Just as in first-century Rome, it is service to the state more than good birth that brings with it ultimate felicity. Yet, we do not have strictly individual rewards and punishments; Romans, according to Vergil’s representation, spend eternity with their peers and fellow heroes. The social utility of this doctrine in an empire that more and more depended on a new class of common soldiers and bureaucrats does not need any further emphasis. The state can find proper motivation for service by imagining a more perfect heaven with greater access for industrious Romans, who need rewards for earthly service.

Earlier, we see what happens to the villains of Vergil’s world. Rhadamanthys holds sway over a particular part of hell in which the great sinners stay. Ranging from those who have put off atonement until the day of their death (6.565-70), a sin of omission, to perpetrators of much more serious sins of commission, Tartarus yawns twice as far down as Olympus is high (6.579). Entirely gone is the Homeric notion that the hero joins the common lot of shades underground, after a brief turn on earthly life, where everything depends on earthly fame.

Intellectually, Vergil’s justification for adding judgment to Homer’s Hades is Platonic thought. Once there is a self-conscious self who must achieve the beatific vision through its own actions, there can be a place of punishment as well as a place of reward. We have seen this pattern previously in Egyptian culture too. In Vergil’s Hades, no one speaks Homeric Achilles’ lines of envy for the living.

As in Plato’s world, Vergillian souls do return to earth to complete their rehabilitation. Thus, Aeneas is given a vision of the glorious future which will be Rome’s. Caesar is pointed out and then Augustus, his heir, scion of a god (Divigenus, 792). All that remains for us to recognize this as the familiar heaven of childhood’s religion today is for this realm to be transferred to the unchangeable stars from the realms under the earth. But for it to be the Christian heaven, we need to substitute the religious and ethical values of the Judeo-Christian heritage for the values of the Roman republic.

Plutarch’s Discussions of the Judgment of the Dead

THE SAME new-found function of enforcing justice can be seen in Plutarch’s Moralia, in his essay “On Those Who Are Punished by the Deity Late.” In Plutarch’s estimate, the abode of the souls had shifted to the heavens. Plutarch wanted to correct some details of the story while confirming the idea of the heavenly journey of the soul. After first making the point that the cruelest punishment is to see our loved ones and offspring suffering on account of our own misdeeds, Plutarch relates the story of one Aridaeus (renamed Thespesius after the adventure) who lived as a reprobate until one day he had a complete change of heart. The reason for his conversion to an ethical life was a heavenly journey that took the form of a New Death Experience.

Several mysteries are revealed to Thespesius, including the ultimate destination of souls and the well-deserved punishment of Nero. Whatever else the author may relate, the tale functions as a theodicy, precisely because it parallels the journey of the soul after death. The heavenly journey itself is the basis of a personal, religious conversion, a new phenomenon of late antiquity but certainly not the only example of it.⁵³

A complete ascent-descent myth can be found already in Vergil’s Fourth Ecologue. Apollo’s descent and return was not the self-conscious theme of the writer; rather, the birth of Augustus is viewed as the redemptive act in the cycle:

The last age of Sibyl’s poem is now come…. Now a new offspring is sent down from high heaven. Do thou, chaste Lucina, favour the birth of the child under whom the iron breed will first cease and a golden race arise throughout the world. Now shall thine own Apollo bear sway.⁵⁴

In the cult of the Emperor the ascension of the dead ruler was viewed in very literal terms. A quick look through the descriptions of the cult and the collections of iconography will verify that. The emperor could ascend in a chariot or on the back of an eagle. A shooting star signaled his demise.⁵⁵ The eagle was especially linked to the imperial cult. The practice arose of releasing a caged eagle from the top of the funeral pyre of the emperor.⁵⁶ Dio notes that centurions lit the pyre from below as an eagle was released, encouraging the belief that the soul was carried to heaven.⁵⁷ Beginning with Nero, coinage represents the motion of ascension with an eagle flying upwards.⁵⁸

A remarkable diptych in the British museum depicts various symbols of apotheosis, deification, which had become part of the cult.⁵⁹ There are several intricate scenes. But the most relevant is the funeral scene with a pyre in the center from which a quadriga(the conveyance of Apollo or Helios), a chariot with four horses, is about to take off for heaven. The chariot is driven by a youth (probably Helios) whose pose and garment suggest great speed. To the right of the funeral pyre are two soaring eagles, probably symbolizing the divinized Emperor and Empress together. The divus is represented at the top, being born aloft by two winged beings. Looking down are the previously divinized ancestors and the signs of the Zodiac.

The figure of the charioteer in his quadriga had already achieved a stable and conventional form in the depictions of the zodiac. The sun is in the center, depicted by Helios in his quadriga. That the charioteer and psychopomp is Helios is supported by other archeological evidence-this time a pyre recovered at Rome, which even bears the inscription: Sol me rapuit, “The Sun has seized me”.⁶⁰

On his death-bed the emperor Vespasian quipped that he was becoming a god.⁶¹ In the literary sources, the concept of the journey normally involved the soul of the deceased, while bodily ascension was limited to heroes, great men, and demigods like Romulus. Indeed, while Plato himself only suggested that souls come to live among the stars, the physics of the Romans insisted that the stars and souls were the same substance.⁶² Pliny attributed this discovery to Hipparchus:

Hipparchus will never receive all the praise he deserves since no one has better established the relation between man and the stars, or shown more clearly that our souls are particles of divine fire. (Nat. 2.26.95)

The use (and abuse) of divinization in the imperial cult is well known. A century after the Imperial system took hold, Hadrian decreed that the soul of his deceased lover, Antinous, had ascended to heaven and become a divinity.⁶³ But, by then, Caligula had made his horse a senator; the deification of the Emperor’s lover seemed reasonable by comparison.

If it is true that both Greek and Roman societies from Plato to Plutarch, practically from one end of Greco-Roman philosophy to the other, know of the journey to the heavens, it is also true that the Romans adapted the motif and structure to express some enduring and important thoughts about their government and their rule. It was during the Hellenistic and Roman periods that the fundamental shift of ultimate human reward took place. The shift was only partly based on the notion that the heavens contained the ultimate reward for the righteous, while the underworld contained the punishment for the evil. Along with this moralizing of the pagan afterlife came also a great deal of astronomy, astrology, and cosmology, all of which helped to make plausible a human destiny in the stars.

It is quite possible that Hebrew and oriental thought influenced this pagan synthesis. Eastern astronomy and astrology certainly influenced the cosmology. The earth became the center of an onion of heavenly spheres, usually seen as seven in number, corresponding to the number of respective powers. Whenever Platonic notions are emphasized, the ultimate home of humans can be seen as the realm where the stars and ideas dwell, in the unchanging heavens. So although earthly life is still valued as important for civic duty, some interest applies to the afterlife for the first time in pagan intellectual life. In some way, voyage to the unchanging stars can be seen as a viable alternative to earthly existence. The heavens become the realm of ultimate salvation (soteria, salvatio) in the later Roman world.⁶⁴