Pagan Ideas of Immortality During the Early Roman Empire

THE invitation of the committee charged with the administration of the Ingersoll lectureship and my own inclination have agreed in indicating that aspect of the general subject of immortality, which I shall try to present tonight. I shall not venture on this occasion to advance arguments for or against belief in a life after death; my present task is a humbler one: I propose to ask you to review with me some of the more significant ideas concerning an existence beyond the grave, which were current in the Greco-Roman world in the time of Jesus and during the earlier Christian centuries, and to consider briefly the relation of these pagan beliefs to Christian ideas on the same subject. In dealing with a topic so vast as this in a single hour, we must select those elements which historically showed themselves to be fundamental and vital; but even then we cannot examine much detail. It may prove, however, that a rapid survey of those concepts of the future life, whose influence lasted long during the Christian centuries, and indeed has continued to the present day, may not be without profit.

The most important single religious document from the Augustan Age is the sixth book of Virgil’s Aeneid; for although the Aeneid was written primarily to glorify Roman imperial aims, the sixth book gives full expression to many philosophic and popular ideas of the other world and of the future life, which were current among both Greeks and Romans. It therefore makes a fitting point of departure for our considerations. In this book, as you will remember, the poet’s hero, having reached Italian soil at last, is led down to the lower world by the Cumaean Sybil. This descent to Hades belongs historically to that long series of apocalyptic writings which begins with the eleventh book of the Odyssey and closes with Dante’s Divine Comedy. Warde Fowler deserves credit for clearly pointing out that this visit of Aeneas to the world below is the final ordeal for him, a mystic initiation, in which he receives “enlightenment for the toil, peril, and triumph that await him in the accomplishment of his divine mission.” When the Trojan hero has learned from his father’s shade the mysteries of life and death, and has been taught the magnitude of the work which lies before him, and the great things that are to be, he casts off the timidity which he has hitherto shown and, strengthened by his experiences, advances to the perfect accomplishment of his task.

But we are not concerned so much with Virgil’s purpose in writing this apocalyptic book, as with its contents and with the evidence it gives as to the current ideas of the other world and the fate of the human soul. What then does the poet tell us of these great matters? We can hardly do better than to follow Aeneas and his guide on their journey. This side of Acheron they meet the souls of those whose bodies are unburied, and who therefore must tarry a hundred years—the maximum of human life—before they may be ferried over the river which bounds Hades. When Charon has set the earthly visitors across that stream, they find themselves in a place where are gathered spirits of many kinds, who have not yet been admitted to Tartarus or Elysium: first the souls of infants and those who met their end by violence—men condemned to death though innocent, suicides, those who died for love, and warriors—all of whom must here wait until the span of life allotted them has been completed. These spirits passed, the mortal visitors come to the walls of Tartarus, on whose torments Aeneas is not allowed to look, for

“The feet of innocence may never pass

Into this house of sin.”